In the early 1940s she decided to write what she called a “simplified” version of Kenneth Grahame’s classic The Wind in the Willows. This never found a publisher in part because, for reasons known only to her, she took the drama out of the story by making one of the main characters, “Mr. Toad,” just a minor one.
Throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s Diana and Lionel remained in psychoanalysis. “The expense was frightful,” she said. Lionel’s salary was less than $4,000 a year. It was a stressful time for both Trillings, and Diana’s would-be writing career was going nowhere (even though most women during this period did not pursue careers).
Lionel’s journal indicates that after the publication of his book on Arnold, he began to have a new problem, a sexual problem. It was impotence. But at the time, Diana had troubles of her own she had to worry about. Lionel also continued to have problems with his back. He wrote in his journal that “there was mention made by L [his analyst, Dr. Rudolph Lowenstein], or me, I forget—of the beginning of my sexual difficulties at the point of my beginning to be successful [i.e., with the publication of Matthew Arnold].” (A decade later, Trilling would explain more in his journal about his ambivalence toward his achievements, noting his “intense disgust with my official and public self, my growing desire to repudiate it.… I used the phrase lese mageste—I felt that this crime had been committed against me and the use of the phrase seemed to carry great meaning, summing up that part of my childhood that was dealt with as if it were privileged, royal. There is the sense in which this was literally true—in which I was thought of as a prince.”)
Lionel’s impotence was disturbing and most likely only one reason for the couple’s not having had a child for nine years. It was also a reason for Diana’s sublimating her need for a child into verses. She was now thirty-four years old.
I WANT MY OWN NAME
If my name is Freddy and Dad’s name is Freddy
Now how can I tell us apart?
If Mother calls “Freddy” and I answer “ready”
Is that a mistake at the start?
TIPPY
When Tippy was a baby
Her head was almost bare
I’m told she had a little fluff,
You’d hardly call it hair;
She hadn’t pretty ringlets
To tie up with the pain
She had to wear a bonnet
That tied beneath her chin;
She never had a shampoo
Her mommy says “why bother?”
A little oil will do as well
For babies, as a lather.
Another poem about Tippy ends—
I’d like to have a birthday
A birthday now and here;
I’m much too in a hurry
To wait another year.
But “Tippy” and Diana would have to wait.
Her doctor after Dr. Ruth Brunswick was a William Dunn, her first non-Jewish psychoanalyst. As Diana wrote in The Beginning of the Journey, “He was not a conspicuously astute physician. He frequently reminded me that it was not necessary for an analyst to be as quick-witted as his patient. But he was gentle and kind and conscientious and, in wonderful contrast to his predecessor, he was unfailing in his attention—until he died of a heart attack.”
Some essential work had been started in dealing with what she referred to as her “pent-up unexplored passion of my infant love for my father” (Diana was serious in her use of psychoanalytic jargon), but there was not enough progress to suit her. Nonetheless, she would say that psychoanalysis did her “the greatest service,” even though she ultimately thought that Dr. Dunn evaded the real issue: that her love for her father, which gave her the “capacity for love,” also gave her a “lasting fear of rejected love.”
Diana often bristled at her husband’s criticizing what he called her lack of manners. She enjoyed the freedom of putting her feet up on a table or chair because she had not been allowed to do that as a child. But Lionel didn’t like it either. “Please put your feet down; don’t sit like that,” he would tell her. “That was not good for me,” Diana groused, although to win Lionel’s approval she always took notice.
“If you want to call my wish for Lionel’s approval a weakness, okay, it was a weakness,” Diana admitted. “Certainly as an aspect of my dependence on him it was an enormous weakness. In its very nature the dependence was pathological. But an ingredient of my desire for his approval was my loyalty to him and the feeling that he had something very special about him with which I wanted to ally myself and which I of course wanted to advance. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t think I was important or that I didn’t want a great deal for myself too—but I did feel secondary in the sense of putting his powers first.”
It had been much the same with her father—admiring, worshipping, really, even in the face of his barbs about her singing. Yet, as she wrote in an unpublished book, “Were I to choose someone with whom to work in the underground, someone to rely on to the death, who would never betray a trust, of all the men I have known in my life my father would be my first choice.”
Diana often thought about something the pitiful Dr. Brunswick had told her. In addition to the analyst’s peculiar behavior in the office, she sometimes spoke to Lionel on the phone, as a previous analyst had also done. Diana learned that during one conversation Dr. Brunswick mentioned some appointments Diana had broken, and Lionel had been so concerned that he told Dr. Brunswick Diana’s behavior “was an emergency with her neurosis.” At the next session with Diana, Dr. Brunswick told Diana what her husband had said. “What makes him think that you are anymore an emergency than he is?” she asked her patient. “You’re no more an emergency than he is.”
Diana was not happy with this statement. In fact, she said it shocked her. It shocked her not because an analyst had once again been unprofessional and spoken to her husband, or that Lionel had said what he did, but that “anybody dare say that Lionel was as much a neurotic emergency as I was.” It meant he “lacked the strength to protect me,” and she added, “the fact is that nobody was allowed to say a word in criticism of Lionel, least of all myself.”
7
THE NATION CALLS
I did not speak [to his psychoanalyst] of the accusation that D had made a few years ago of my assumption of a role of superiority, of haughtiness, of indifference or condescension to her.…
—Lionel Trilling, journal entry, June 1952
Out-and-out frustration had caused the newlywed Lionel to throw his favorite pipe out the window of their Bank Street apartment after the unpleasant aftermath to his criticism of Diana and Bettina’s play, Snitkin. Diana always thought that her husband had been excessive in his expressed hatred of the play she and Bettina had written just for fun. Why had he also resorted to a tantrum and wrecked his pipe? Every now and then Diana thought of something that her mother-in-law had told her in what she assumed was jest but that, she later came to understand, was said in utter seriousness. Fannie Trilling had warned her that if Lionel ever got into a rage with her, Diana “was to take a bottle and hit him on the head.” Diana later learned that Lionel’s father, David (“who was too narcissistic in his later years to have a relation with anybody except himself and his health”) had “furies.” In fact, in one outburst he had reached over and torn his wife’s blouse almost to shreds.
Diana said Lionel had an obsession that was crucial to some of his “emotional difficulties,” and this was “his belief that all of his problems had been created by me.”
Soon after the pipe episode, a pattern of outbursts began. Diana said that Lionel exploded at her “sometimes for an hour, sometimes many hours, days, even weeks.… His face would be all contorted and gray and he’d just be at me.” And she later admitted that “this kind of anger that Lionel directed at me lasted the whole of his life, really, although he never tore or broke things, or even screamed. But he could be fiercely angry and verbally cruel to me, very cruel.… He’d keep working at it, tormenting me with
accusations.… And for a long long time, far longer than it should have, it absolutely undid me.”
Lionel would tell his wife that she was ruining his life and that his marriage was terrible. She called such talk “his encapsulated madness.”
“As soon as he had me in a complete state of collapse,” she said, “he would come over and want to make up. I was pulp and he was purged.… It made him suffer, and it made me suffer,” she added poignantly. “There was a terrible misuse of me,” she said.
Even though she and Lionel were never “in love”—in storybook love—she said candidly, they loved each other, yet it wasn’t a “romantic marriage.” “But we were deeply, deeply devoted to each other’s interest and well-being,” she said. “We never thought anything was being taken away from us by being married to each other; it was only something being added to.”
Still, she said that “when Lionel and I were angry at each other and feeling we couldn’t stand to be married to each other any longer, which happened frequently, we would have the feeling ‘Let’s get divorced. Come on. Let’s get rid of this marriage. Enough already.’ And we were very sincere when we’d say that. But you know, there was no more chance of our having done that than fly—we were so terribly married to each other.”
Yet over time she realized that her husband “really did have a thing going about women. He hated women at certain moments and in certain situations.… I suppose every marriage has something in it that people don’t talk about.”
In their case it was three “elephants” in the room. The “furies,” the impotence, and Diana’s major contribution to Lionel’s work.
When not in a rage, Lionel often gave his wife the silent treatment, the tactic Diana’s father had sporadically used on her. Even at meals Lionel sometimes refused to talk, and as Diana wrote in The Beginning of the Journey, he often seemed “angry at his food. He pushed a potato away from him on his plate as if it were his contemptible enemy—I had seen [Lionel’s father] make the same gesture.” Diana later commented that, paradoxically, David Trilling was always a negative image for Lionel and that “the whole of his life was not to be like his father … who had no sense of obligation to his household.” She added, “The moment David Trilling stopped being the main and only support of the family, he stopped being any support and could only think of his private requirements. He would come to wheedle money out of Lionel for his drugstore bills.… He gave me the creeps.” And, Diana said, by the time she came on the scene, David and Fannie mostly communicated through their children.
With his outbursts well-hidden from public view, Lionel “lived his life and could be very charming,” Diana said. It was why she had once called him deceptive. No one knew what was going on in his head and in his home, and Diana continued to contribute to their life in ways that enabled her husband to write. “There were days and days when Lionel sat in front of his typewriter unable to produce a word,” she said. “He never gave up, and eventually he’d break through the barrier,” with her help. She knew that she did more for Lionel than other wives of writer husbands did. It was the right thing to do and what she knew was expected of her. It wasn’t exactly giving in to the total sacrifice she had learned as a child, but it was close to it.
Diana sometimes thought of Lionel’s “furies” as his aiming his “depression at me.” She said that she considered his three different analyses “largely unsuccessful”; nonetheless, he “indeed wanted to be cured of his depression.… It was extremely painful. He wanted to be rid of it. He wanted to be cured of his writing block. He had great difficulty writing through most of his life, but he never subscribed to that modern idea that neurosis is health and a validation of one’s creative gifts.” And, she emphasized, “he did not let his own clinical experience color his assessment of Freud’s contribution to thought.” (Years later, Diana said that he even acknowledged “grudgingly” that his mother’s excessive coddling that caused him “miseries,” as well as her obsessive dreams for his literary success, might have spurred him on, and “in all his dealings with women, certainly in his dealings with me, his unadmitted early love for his mother was, I think, a stronger factor than his reasonable complaints against her.”)
In 1937, two years before his book on Arnold was published, Lionel began writing for the new, Communist-free Partisan Review, a magazine whose strong intellectual and cultural influence would last for decades. It was edited by William Phillips and Philip Rahv, two men who had first met at meetings of the John Reed Club. Both men, and their wives, would become close friends of the Trillings.
Diana, gratified by her husband’s accomplishments, nonetheless began to feel very uncomfortable at the Partisan Review parties they attended. Her views were overlooked in discussions by and large because she was not a writer, at least not a published one. “If you went in as a wife, which I did in the early years of my married life, they [the parties] were hell,” she later told the writer Patricia Bosworth. Mary McCarthy, who was listed on the masthead of the first issue of Partisan Review, wrote an occasional theater column for it, and at the time was living with Rahv, especially snubbed Diana. McCarthy focused all her attention on Lionel. But Lionel did not enjoy being in her spotlight. “What makes an intelligent woman suppose that the way to attract a man is to be rude to his wife?” Lionel asked Diana, as she reported in The Beginning of the Journey. She later made clear that despite everything, “Lionel never got upset about anything that happened to himself the way he got upset if something went wrong for me, and I felt that way about him.” This was because of “their extraordinary mutuality,” and “extraordinary alikeness.” They had fierce and spirited minds and a powerful sense of loyalty that transcended their acute emotional difficulties.
Mary McCarthy, along with the political theorist (as she liked to be known) Hannah Arendt, and later on, the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick, and the historian Bea Kristol, writing under her birth name Gertrude Himmelfarb, all had “honorary membership” in Partisan Review, Diana told Bosworth. And “they all weren’t friendly at all,” even though Himmelfarb and Diana would, for a long while, become pretty good pals. But in general, in the late 1930s, and for several decades after, there was no sisterhood. As for Arendt, Diana said that she “never said hello to me in her whole life. I guess she wanted to go to bed with Lionel. That was usually the reason when women weren’t pleasant to me.”
The parties “were primarily political,” Diana told Bosworth, although intense flirting, the initiation of affairs, and heavy drinking all tied for first place. “Every time you went to a party you were flirting, flirting, flirting,” Diana later elaborated. “Whether you did anything about it or not, that was what you were there for. Parties were for sex. They were for exploration,” although she and Lionel considered themselves part of “the famous puritanical group.” She did not name the other members.
The men were dubbed “The PR Boys,” the women “The PR Girls.” The “Boys”—Rahv, Phillips, Elliot Cohen, Meyer Schapiro (the art historian), and the writers Max Eastman, F. W. Dupee, and later Alfred Kazin and Delmore Schwartz—always led, while the “Girls,” even if published writers, always took a secondary role. There was very little loyalty or patience among them all and a great deal of competitiveness and envy. The gatherings could be exhausting, and if the party included dinner, afterward the men usually retreated to another room for cigars and brandy while the women stayed behind, gossiping, sharing political news, dabbing at their lipstick, or sometimes helping to clean up.
One late afternoon in January 1941, the phone rang in the ground floor apartment at 620 West 116th Street. The drapes were already closed, although the apartment was always dark and gloomy-looking. Lionel, just home from his class, picked up the phone, which was on a table in the hallway leading to the back of the apartment. Diana listened to her husband’s end of the conversation from the entrance to the kitchen, where she was standing. She understood at once that he was talking to Margaret Marshall, the literary editor of The
Nation. She quickly surmised that Marshall was asking her husband if he had any candidates who might be interested in writing unsigned reviews of novels for the magazine. As soon as Lionel hung up the receiver, she walked over to him, smiled, and surprised herself by asking if she would be a suitable candidate. She wanted to be in the running. Lionel immediately agreed that it was a very good idea, though he mentioned that Marshall had a graduate student in mind for the job. He said he would speak to her but insisted that if Diana didn’t work out for some reason, she should receive “no preferential treatment.”
Diana liked the fact that the reviews would be unsigned so she could still cling to her father’s ever-haunting proscription “against any form of self-display” (excluding family concerts with her siblings, and her aborted singing career, which her father had once callously proclaimed belonged in the toilet.)
At her next psychoanalytic hour Diana mentioned the potential Nation job, emphasizing her pleasure and relief at having unsigned reviews. There would be no fear of showing off. She was safe from harm. Dr. Ruth Brunswick, listening carefully for a change, suggested that perhaps Diana was hiding behind her father in an attempt to cover up her real objective, which was to have her name all over the magazine. Diana very quickly recognized the truth presented to her. “I always felt secure about my intelligence,” she said, “much more secure than I felt about my exhibitionism … and I didn’t have any doubt in my ability to do the work for The Nation.”
The Untold Journey Page 12
