The orthodox ceremony was performed by Henry Rosenthal. It would be his first wedding. Before he became a rabbi, Rosenthal had seemed such a promising novelist that his Columbia University friends thought he would be an American James Joyce, although the novel they praised when he read aloud from it was never published (nor even finished).
A few moments before the vows were to be spoken, Joseph Rubin disappeared into a bathroom for a long time. Diana waited alone in her bedroom, as Henry had instructed her, holding the very special, new-to-the-marketplace bronze roses she was going to carry into the living room. Her father, it turned out, was sulking one last time, telling himself that perhaps a writer could make some sort of living after all. He meant his future son-in-law, not his daughter. For a wedding gift he gave the couple what he thought they needed most: a check for $5,000 (which would be more than their annual income for many years thereafter).
Lionel waited with Henry in another room for the ceremony to begin. He was wearing a custom-made suit chosen from a dark cloth that, unbeknownst to him, had been cut from a larger sample that contained red stripes undetectable in the small swatch he saw, so the finished suit incorporated oversized stripes that made him look like a barber pole. His new wife later called it his flag suit. He never wore it again. But that hardly mattered. In a diary entry he wrote, “I think of suits I will get, ways of getting them—tailor-made or at what store, price, color, etc. the same with shoes, raincoats.” Lionel Trilling liked to shop. Diana later reflected that it was a way of maintaining a connection to his father, who had what she called “artistic feeling about tailoring.” She said that her father-in-law once told her that he “often lay awake nights pondering a new method for cutting the collar of a jacket.”
Once married, the “grotesque” dinner (as Diana later described it) eaten, the young couple entertained a few close friends (who had not been at the immediate-family-only ceremony and multicolored dinner) with cake and champagne. The Fadimans were there, as were Diana’s playwriting friend Bettina Sinclair and her husband, David.
Diana and Lionel then spent their wedding night at the landmark Fifth Avenue Hotel, an ultraluxury hotel between Twenty-Third and Twenty-Fourth Streets built in the mid-1800s on a site that had once been a stagecoach stop. In the morning Joseph Rubin, well over his brief tantrum, had his car and driver pick the couple up and take them to Easton, Connecticut, sixty miles from New York, where they had rented a cabin for the entire summer, one that was quaint but unpainted. Diana continued to feel guilty about marrying before her sister, so as she and her new husband were driven up Fifth Avenue toward the road leading to Connecticut, she had the driver stop at Lord and Taylor’s department store so she could buy a thank you gift for her sister. Lionel also decided to get his seventeen-year-old sister, Harriet, a gift, even though she had hardly helped, except, as Diana later wrote, as “a nuisance, her mother’s humorless messenger”—both before and after the engagement and wedding.
“We launched our marriage in guilt,” Diana said. “Everyone had to be listened to, apologized to, thanked for giving us permission to live our lives. On our first day of marriage, starting our honeymoon, all we could think of was propitiation: how to win back our families, how to win their forgiveness for deserting them.”
The cabin the couple rented, at the suggestion of friends, belonged to Jim and Winifred Rorty; Jim was a poet and advertising writer, and later a political activist, as was his wife. The cabin, on a deserted dirt road, had no electricity, only kerosene lamps, and, of course, no refrigeration (there was a daily delivery of ice). The walls were made of beaverboard. There was a two-burner stove that used bottled gas. The property had a well, and Lionel strung up an outdoor shower for them to use; water from the well was also pumped into the kitchen. (There was a working toilet.) There was no telephone and no neighbor within earshot; their landlords were a quarter of a mile north of them, and another family a half mile below them. They had no car and used the Rortys’ phone to order groceries, which were delivered to the foot of the hill near their cabin. They stored milk and butter in a bucket lowered into the well. The Rortys let them pick all the vegetables they needed from their garden in exchange for weeding it.
It was rustic living to be sure, and while Diana had once delighted in the relatively primitive life at her summer camp, she did not particularly relish it with just two people, even though the cabin’s interior held some surprises. Crisp white organdy curtains hung at every window, and the Early American–style bed had white organdy ruffles surrounding it. There was a fancy dressing table in the bedroom, and the Rortys had left several jars of expensive creams and perfumes on it. The bathroom was papered with bright pink wallpaper. Still, the place was a bit of a letdown because Diana had once fantasized a European honeymoon. But Lionel objected to such a trip, saying he had to study for his PhD exam (which was not until many months later, in January 1930). Diana saw his reluctance to travel as an excuse to remain close to his family, as well as justification for him to forgo pleasure. She maintained that the decision not to travel on their honeymoon “laid a pattern of nonpleasure in his life.”
She explained that they were “too close together, too alike, in emotional insecurity.” She meant their emotional dependence on family. But she also “felt I was being betrayed for something I couldn’t put my finger on—Lionel was acting on behalf of something other than his or my best interests.” Whatever it was, Diana said she had no adequate language for it and believed she never would. For her entire life she would search for the words so she could unravel her long and lingering sense of betrayal that focused on Lionel’s actions.
In an unpublished book, she recalled that she “was not brought up to expect life to be easy.” This was conveyed to her “wordlessly,” she said, adding that “to be reared in the belief that there is little that you have the right to look for in this world other than what comes to you by happy accident, to be conditioned from earliest memory in such an all-embracing minimalism of expectation, is subtly and permanently disabling. Fight as you may for more than comes to you by chance, your weapons have no edge.”
Diana and Lionel both wrote short stories that honeymoon summer. Diana didn’t think of herself as a writer, or if she did, it was strictly as an amateur one; yet she felt comfortable writing, as when she easily won a literary prize at her summer camp. Diana’s honeymoon story, “Mornings in Florence,” was about a young Jewish American woman living in Florence who picks up a young man in the Uffizi and shares a summer of romance with him. She liked the story well enough to send it at the end of the summer to Elliot Cohen (“a fantastically powerful person,” she later described him), the editor of The Menorah Journal. A few weeks later, he invited her to come to his office to discuss the story. Diana was thrilled. They had a long talk about many things, but Cohen, who was very close to Lionel, never once brought up the story. Neither did Diana. She later found out from a mutual friend that Cohen had admired it, especially the ending, yet he never published the story, and never explained why. His lack of encouragement stung bitterly, and Diana always felt that the publication of that story would have made an incomparable difference in her life. (Cohen, a brilliant but troubled man, ended up killing himself in the late 1950s.)
When not studying and reading, Lionel, who would become a part-time editor at The Menorah Journal later in the year, also wrote a short story. It was based on a snake that lived under their Easton cabin, although he never told his wife about the actual snake until they were safely back in New York.
The snake was a copperhead, and Lionel took to holding a long stick whenever he walked across the meadow to the well house; he was shielding himself from other snakes by whacking the stick back and forth in the tall weeds as a farmer might do. He would not allow Diana to sit on a blanket in front of the cabin, and because he didn’t tell her why, an atmosphere of fear soon invaded their honeymoon.
The isolation of their cabin bothered Diana. Its atmosphere reminded her of the stories Mary,
her family’s Polish maid, had told her and her siblings, stories that became, Diana said, her “language of terror,” when every creak of the furniture or floor became a possible death trap. Diana also thought of the bizarre neighbor who lived next door to her in New Rochelle. Diana would later describe this woman, Mrs. Raffael—called “Bobolinka” by her mother—as looking “as if she had been made up for the part of a deranged old lady in a play: skinny, beak-nosed, unkempt, her dirty white hair falling thinly to her shoulders in a cruel parody of girlishness. She was living out her old age irremediably alone.”
In Connecticut Diana began to hear strange thumping noises at night or before dawn, and not until the end of summer did she find out that deer sharpened their horns on their well house and that the heavy scratching was the ominous sound that had been troubling her sleep. Lionel was troubled, too—by the snake—but Diana later said that he always hid his fears better than she did. (During their honeymoon he went into Manhattan specifically to buy an antivenom, although he told his bride the trip was for another reason.) He had a “deceptive exterior,” Diana later explained, although “neither of them went around complaining.” They went about their living without a fuss. So Lionel continued his reading and studying as if he hadn’t a care in the world. He slept like a baby. And he wrote the snake story, which he showed to Diana when their honeymoon was over. She later wrote that the story, which he never published, was not exactly about the snake but instead was used as a symbol of evil. “It was a story of sexual jealousy, and Lionel’s jealousy of anybody I knew before I knew him, and had originally been generated by a snapshot Lionel came across of me with a friend in South America,” she said. “I remember it as the most brilliant writing Lionel ever did, but it was morbid to a pathological degree: there had been nothing in that South American relationship to justify his extravagant feeling. A prolegomenon to depression, the story greatly worried me for our future.”
The story was often revised, but not enough to satisfy its author. Two years later, in 1931, he gave his wife a copy on her birthday inscribed: “To Diana—for her birthday—again—after a long time with more love.”
What had changed in the story that it could now be a birthday gift?
Not the beginning. “It was impossible. Impossible. It was impossible. It could not go on. Every moment was an orgasm of defeat and he awoke from sleep weary.”
Nor the ending, when the snake makes its very first appearance.
The story explored ideas—even perplexing concepts like “orgasm of defeat”—more than it did characters. It would move Diana to ask her husband that if he planned to become a novelist—and he did—then why did he need to pursue a PhD? And she also meant, why did his studying have to interfere with their honeymoon? Lionel told her that a novelist could no longer be only a man of feeling but that he also had to be a man of the mind. He would teach and write—and would probably not be as financially successful as Kip, but he’d try. “No one can give me anything anymore,” he wrote in his journal in late 1929. “Essentially, I think, I am settled in sad stability and what I most want is fact and explanation.”
For a few weeks that summer, Polly and Kip rented a house about eight miles from the Trillings’ honeymoon cabin. They had no car either, and the four friends occasionally walked the distance to visit. Diana was distressed to learn that one weekday when the Fadimans were at their apartment in Manhattan, upon their return to Connecticut they discovered that a trespasser had been in their house. They discovered the intrusion after Polly opened her underwear drawer and found that the contents of a can of spaghetti and tomato sauce had been dumped into it. Upon hearing of this incident, Diana’s sense of isolation and unease intensified.
There was no piano in the cabin, of course, so Diana practiced scales and sang familiar folk songs. She noticed during the summer that her voice was occasionally strained and frequently cracked, and she became concerned. One afternoon in the middle of the summer Jim Rorty came by to say there was a fire in a pasture a few miles away—would Lionel join him in helping to put it out? Lionel went with the landlord, and Diana, left behind, said she began trembling. Fiercely trembling. Her heart was racing, and in an instant she realized she was in dread of being left alone. Such trembling had never happened to her before. She was frantic. She ran out the door to a boulder not too far away from the cabin and climbed up it to see if she could see any hint of smoke, but she saw nothing; the fire was too far away. Her trembling continued. Slowly, she began to sing the Valkyrie from Wagner’s Ring Cycle in the loudest possible voice, “as if to fill the countryside and dispel my loneliness,” she wrote years later. She sang and sang, and her voice did not break. It was as smooth as ever, and she gradually began to feel better.
Singing would be her refuge and comfort.
Before leaving for Connecticut, the Trillings had signed a lease for a two-room apartment in a new building on Bank Street, in Greenwich Village. The Trillings were among “Number 1’s” first tenants, and neither Diana nor Lionel thought the small, tan structure was attractive or especially desirable. But they liked its prime location and offbeat ambience; indeed, the building was constructed on the site of Willa Cather’s third Village home. Edmund Wilson lived right across the street. He was then an editor at The New Republic and would not publish the first of his important books, Axel’s Castle, until 1931.
As a Radcliffe student, Diana had always loved to visit the Village with her friends and act and dress as if she belonged there. Her mother would strenuously object to her daughter’s colorful dresses and big heavy silver jewelry. Diana was happy that she and Lionel could begin their life together in a place where so many artists and writers lived.
The rent was affordable: $90 a month. They used Joseph Rubin’s gift to buy many furnishings, and Lionel’s Aunt Blanche, the wife of his Uncle Izzy, knew some Spanish and Italian wholesale antique dealers and helped Diana with her purchase of a seventeenth-century dark oak table, high-backed dining chairs, a green velvet sofa, a cherry wood desk, a large satin-covered club chair, rugs, drapes, glasses and dishes, and of course, a bed—a studio bed. Joseph Rubin was outraged that his daughter had not bought a full bedroom set and told her so. In fact, they had a heated fight over the issue, and Diana later wrote that she had the feeling her father “was trying to promote the sexual life in some way. Or maybe just the opposite.” But the young couple wanted their two rooms to be interchangeable as either living rooms, dining rooms, or studies, and they wanted the bed always to look like a sofa. Deciding on the green velvet fabric took weeks and weeks, Diana said. “We were in a condition I later found out was called ‘compulsive doubt.’ ”
There was enough money also for a small grand piano, so Diana could continue her singing. They were in Bohemian paradise, but they continued to live as if they were on West End Avenue, and their friends noticed and spoke of it behind their backs. They were not careful with the little money they had. Diana, who had stopped working at NBC, no longer received an allowance from her father. She had saved $1,000 from her past earnings and hoped to use her art history background to buy some paintings by the young Peter Blume and Utagawa Kuniyoshi as investments, but Lionel did not approve of her plan. (Blume would later gain recognition for his meticulous portrayal of social themes, and Kuniyoshi would become one of the last great masters of woodblock prints and painting.)
Diana had plenty of clothes from before she was married and particularly loved a beige fur coat that had been made to order for her, although she “loathed” the gold-brown braid embroidered with her initials in the lining of the garment. “The coat became a great point of attack” among their writer and editor friends, she said; it announced her middle-class values in a “vulgar way.” She added that she also “loathed these people who made such a symbolic thing out of it, even though I partially shared their judgment.” But she understood that she and Lionel now lived in the Village and were expected to be less conventional, and eventually she saw the coat’s inappropriateness and g
ave it away.
Lionel made $45 a week in his job as a part-time editor. From time to time he made extra money by giving $10 talks to local women’s clubs about “Joyce, Proust, Wyndam Lewis and the Modern Spirit.” Diana later said that “the ladies always knitted while he was lecturing, and then they would serve coconut layer cake with hot chocolate or one time hot dogs with hot chocolate. It was always the most incredible experience. He said nobody knew what he was talking about.” Nonetheless, Diana said she urged Lionel to raise his fee from $10 to $15, because they really needed the money, but the ladies balked at the increase, and that was the end of the lectures. “He was terribly upset for having listened to me,” Diana said, because he was always “under a terrible strain to make more money, more money.” The same had been true when he was in college, when he worked as a genealogist. Diana said that Lionel “made up genealogies for people who paid large sums to some genealogical publisher.… He would go to the library and he would find out a little bit about their families, and then he would make up a beautiful story about their pasts because that was the only thing they wanted to buy.”
The Trillings were soon broke all the time and had to begin selling wedding gifts, starting with a set of silver demitasse cups and several ornate silver bowls and trays. Still, Diana later emphasized that “I never knew poverty, but by my middle class standards we were poor.” And she said, surprisingly, “I enjoyed very much the challenge of this.”
While Lionel read, studied, and wrote book reviews for The Menorah Journal, Diana busied herself with bookkeeping; she created separate envelopes to keep track of all their money. She also kept a daily expense book that noted every single purchase they made—$2.35 for two toothbrushes and tooth powder; ninety-five cents for a powder puff, compact, and cold cream; and seventy-five cents for a haircut. She experimented with cooking and became quite inventive, especially with curries and stews. She usually kept to a budget, although once or twice she used their entire week’s allotment for food to buy a rib roast. (All the same, Lionel’s mother believed that Diana was not feeding her son enough wholesome food.) But Diana usually watched for food specials—especially fish, which she could buy for eight or nine cents a pound. She found that she could feed the two of them and a guest now and then for $5 a week. She soon became an excellent cook and thoroughly enjoyed preparing food—from shopping to serving.
The Untold Journey Page 6
