The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  There was one other matter—her name. Diana Rubin? Or Diana Trilling?

  While married, she had once or twice signed her name to documents as Diana Rubin, but she felt more comfortable with Trilling. Lionel agreed that if she got the job (and she did), she should use Trilling. But some of the “PR Boys” had something to say to him privately: wouldn’t she be an embarrassment to Lionel? Diana’s insecurities had already translated into a haughtiness they disapproved of. They were dead serious about their objections. Lionel dismissed their warning and looked the other way, as he always did in such cases.

  So at the age of thirty-six Diana began a career that seemed at first a whim but would become the “sustaining,” she said, focus of her life.

  And by 1942, the same year that her hostile acquaintance Mary McCarthy published her first novel, The Company She Keeps, Diana would have her own signed column, which, as a matter of fact, she had asked for, and Margaret Marshall had immediately agreed to.

  Diana continued with her own writing, but now did mostly short sketches. She tried The New Yorker again, with a piece about eccentric bus conductors. She was told in February 1941 that “it is hardly substantial enough a piece” and that, anyway, they “try to steer somewhat clear of [that type of] piece.” A year earlier she had tried to get an agent, Nanine Joseph, to handle a novella she called “We Must March My Darlings” (which in 1977 would become the title of a book of her essays). Joseph wrote her that although she was “desperately sorry” that she couldn’t take on the work, she believed that Diana had “a real idea here that is lost under words, many more words than necessary, so that nobody comes alive.… I think part of the difficulty is, as I said, you can’t see the forest for the trees.… There’s too much in it that you have put in to clarify things for yourself, but which in the end, obscured the reader.”

  Diana’s need to map out every step of any argument—the kind of logic that gave her strength (and that annoyed the “PR Boys”—and some of the “Girls”—in conversations with her when she used “many more words than necessary”) would stand her in good stead for book reviewing. But it was also stopping her from successfully writing fiction. (“I’m much too over-conscious, I suppose. I can’t draw on some stream of unconscious feeling and let it go at that. I think that’s how the novelist works,” she later said.) Nonetheless, she went on trying and wrote a short story called “The Sale of a Work of Art,” about a painter attending a Washington cocktail party, “the kind of person who does things instead of talking about them.” The painter meets a very rich woman who wants to buy one of his works and appears very excited to do so, but the next day at the time when they are to meet at his studio, the buyer insultingly sends her ten-year-old daughter to choose any painting of her choice. The story was never published.

  Diana decided to concentrate on her column, “Fiction in Review.” It appeared in the “back of the book,” as the Arts section was called, and was regarded as being anti-Communist, while the front section of the magazine was judged pro-Communist. “I was part of the spirit and politics of the back,” Diana said. James Agee, who in 1941 had published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, wrote about movies for the “back” after he left his position as the film critic for Time magazine; Clement Greenberg, an editor at Partisan Review, became The Nation’s art critic in 1941. F. W. Dupee and Delmore Schwartz wrote about poetry. From time to time Mary McCarthy contributed theater pieces. David Riesman, Eric Bentley, C. Wright Mills, and Reinhold Niebuhr reviewed nonfiction.

  The novels—four to eight at a time—were sent to Diana’s apartment (she never went to the magazine’s office on lower Broadway), and she would go through every one of them and then decide which ones to write about. When she chose the books to review, she sat down and read every single word of each novel; sometimes she read them twice. At first she was a very slow reader, and then gradually she sped up. She worried constantly that she might overlook a very good book by an unknown writer.

  Her first full-length review was of H. G. Wells’s novel You Can’t Be Too Careful. Wells was already famous for his scientific romances—The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, as well as his nonfiction on world history and sociology. Of You Can’t Be Too Careful, which would be his last novel, Diana wrote, it is “announced as a return to story-telling but actually it is a reformer’s field day in which the story of Edward Albert Tewler is only a pretext for Wells to range the whole of modern English life, scolding, satirizing, waving the banner for science and education.” Although she said the novel added nothing new to what Wells had said in the past, she applauded his desire to have “wise men settle the ills of society.”

  Shortly afterward, she reviewed Marling Hall, a novel by the once wildly popular Angela Thurkill, who wrote about the English upper class. Diana wrote that, while “advertised as a pleasant bundle of froth, Angela Thurkill is in fact a grim little person. For all her gentle voice, she is one of the great haters on the contemporary fictional scene. She hates sex, the movies and the lower class, except an occasional half wit [sic] mechanic.” Margaret Marshall cut the review extensively, telling Diana that “Angela isn’t worth so much space.” Marshall had also asked Diana to make her comments “lighter and sharper, with more scorn and less anger.” The revised review drew praise from the poet Louise Bogan (the poetry editor of The New Yorker, who would become the country’s Consultant in Poetry in 1945). Bogan asked Marshall to “congratulate D. Trilling for me for the job she did on Angela Thirkel [sic]. Someone once gave me an AT to read on a train, and to my horror I found myself involved with a beady-eyed (spiritually!) English upper class vixen with venom in every pore. A ‘grim little person’ is wonderful.”

  Generally, Marshall edited Diana only lightly but often tried out theories and new ideas on her. At one point Marshall decided the magazine reviewed too much fiction and thought about just having a listing of relevant new novels. She also wondered if it was possible “to see, in general, more textual criticism of novels. One gets it only in reviews of poetry, and even only occasionally, and of course, it can be overdone.” Diana was bewildered and hurt that Marshall thought she neglected “matters of style” and was asking her to change her “way of writing.” In fact, Diana believed that she was being fired, especially since earlier Marshall had wondered if Diana “was being too sociological and insufficiently literary.” (It would turn out that Randall Jarrell was the person who believed Diana was too sociological, and he had said so to Marshall.) But Marshall, herself, was specifically concerned that in Diana’s review of Edmund Wilson’s story collection Memoirs of Hecate County, although the review was “very good,” Diana “hadn’t said anything about the writing.” Marshall accepted that Diana had explained that because Wilson’s writing “varied so much in quality” she couldn’t “get into it.” But Marshall persisted, telling Diana that “the fact that the writing varied so much in quality was a principal and pertinent matter for discussion particularly in a review of a book by Wilson.” But almost immediately the entire matter was laid to rest because Marshall decided that her “reservation was unjustified” because she fully understood that Diana’s “main emphasis has been on the ideas—social and moral—in the novels you have reviewed, and that ideas are your primary interest.” In fact, she was sorry she had brought the whole issue up because Diana had “her way of writing about fiction, [and] it’s a good way and a distinctive way, and I like it.” (Inked in next to this sentence were the words “Will you please believe me?”) She continued to reassure Diana that she had not been trying to “eliminate” her; “that’s the last thing I want to do.”

  Diana said that she always considered herself “a reporter with critical ideas rather than as a critic.” And though her honesty often stabbed, and her praise seemed like a tickle, she continued “her way of writing about fiction.”

  She called Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited “incoherent” and boring, causing one of her readers to comment that her review shows “the most violent prejudice” and th
at “undoubtedly Miss Trilling disapproves of Proust who mirrored a completely decadent society or Dostoyevsky whose characters are hopelessly enmeshed in a dying social order.”

  Diana wrote that she had never considered Sinclair Lewis a great novelist, and in reviewing his Gideon Planish, she found it “unimportant, sloppy, and even dull.” However, she praised his “sweetness of temper” and his “boyish idealism,” adding, “of which he is so boyishly ashamed.”

  Although she wrote that she is “antipathetic to historical novels,” nonetheless, she could “heartily recommend the historical novels of Howard Fast,” who had “taste and talent.” (Two decades later his publisher would ask her to read a new novel by Fast, Power, for a fee of fifty dollars. She agreed to do this, providing her opinion was not quoted. There is no record of what she thought of the book or why the publisher needed an outside opinion.)

  Diana continued to wield her logic. Elizabeth Hardwick’s The Ghostly Lover earned “a poor score; it lacks drama and even a coherent story direction; many of the characters are not given their narrative due; there is no unity of prose rhythm; a large part of the book is dull reading.” (Years later Hardwick remarked that she had never thought much of any of Diana’s reviews.)

  Marshall gave Diana a chance to write an occasional long essay, and on one occasion she chose to write about Alice James, the sister of Henry and William, who died at forty-four. Alice, an invalid all of her life, possessed an “extraordinary intensity of her will,” Henry wrote of his sister and the journal she kept, also commenting later, in a letter from which Diana quoted, that Alice might have been a “feminine ‘political force,’ if her health had permitted.” Diana described Alice James’s journal as the “record of a life from which the elements of equality and reciprocity have so long been absent.” She said that “Alice, too, can write that wonderful educated James prose with its incandescent accuracy and then its sudden flight of homeliness.” Diana brought in a favorite subject—psychiatry—when she wrote, “by what miracles of accident or strength the two older brothers were able to rescue themselves as they did still remains an investigation for psychiatry.” By this she meant the depression that the elder James had had, as did his five children. Trilling wondered if the birth order is a clue to the “fierce range of private symptoms.” She was looking in literature for clues to Lionel’s depression.

  In reviewing The Way Some People Live, John Cheever’s first collection of stories, Diana said they “are even more talented than the average stories” printed in The New Yorker, and she managed to write a treatise on the short story in general. She said that reading Cheever’s stories “is a bit like holding a conversation in a language in which one has been well-schooled but in which one is still not fluent.… The best … are strongly-worded hints rather than completely communicated statements.” She went on to lecture that “even more than our novelists, our present-day writers of short fiction not only choose inarticulate characters to write about but refuse to be articulate for them. It is an artificial limitation and wholly self-imposed, of a piece with the time-limitation in the contemporary short story. The sooner it is got rid of, the better for this branch of fiction.”

  Continuing to write about short stories, she reviewed a collection of Latin American stories and novelettes (they were all “promising”) that included an introduction by Katherine Anne Porter. This time Diana included a discourse on artists in her review: “Good artists lie less than other people—bad artists probably lie rather more than less,” she wrote. In a letter Porter told Diana that she herself did not “recognize the existence of the ‘bad’ artist. If he is ‘bad,’ that is, unserious, untruthful, sentimental, he shouldn’t be called [an] artist.” Diana relished such exchanges; she saw them as keeping her “critical ideas” in circulation.

  She did not like to review books by people she knew, although she praised (in another magazine) Elinor Rice Hays’s novel Mirror, Mirror for its “uncommon approach” to “problem women” and Philip Rahv’s Discovery of Europe for being “as instructive as it is entertaining” and said his prefaces were “models of lucid condensation.”

  After she began her full-length column in The Nation, she worried that Mark Van Doren (who had recently written her that “you are doing not only valiantly in your fiction reviews but brilliantly”) would think it peculiar that his novel Tilda was done in a brief, and not in a full-length, column. Diana wrote in a note to Marshall: “Won’t he think that I did it, if he knows that I used to do the fiction briefs, and suppose that it was some sort of purposeful distinction.… I’d be very grateful if you’d explain it to him when you see him, or drop him a card or even send him this note if you want to.” Diana knew how important Van Doren was to Lionel. She need not have worried, not only because Van Doren understood the situation but the review he received from her was an excellent one. The novel was called “a warm, simple, tender love story,” and “the characters are completely natural, so natural that they seem capable of walking out of the pages of the book and continuing where their author left off. And the nicest thing about it is the way the reader becomes gradually involved in the un-folding of the plot.”

  Diana’s reviews gathered as much criticism as praise. She was accused of making “sweeping and untrue indictments of the democratic writers of the left” and then “of flirting with fascism,” and sometimes of showing too much personality and not using artistic standards. One reader accused her of attacking Catholicism; then another, the Rector of the Grace Episcopal Church in Anderson, South Carolina, said he considered her reviews “to be absolutely within and true to Christian categories. They are almost theological.” She decided she must be doing something right.

  By 1943 she had received offers to review books for other magazines, including The New Republic, the Kenyon Review, and the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review. In the summer of 1943 she was also asked to read some manuscripts (she received fifteen dollars for each) for Viking Press. Pascal “Pat” Covici wrote that her “reports are extremely intelligent and lively reading. If only the manuscripts you rejected were half as good. That two people, you and Lionel, should both wield so fine and sharp a pen is one of the modern miracles. And I still love miracles.”

  8

  NOT MERELY A CRITIC’S WIFE

  Most of the book was written, as I well remember, in a concentrated rush, and although much of the enthusiasm and pleasure of its composition is to be attributed to my liking for the subject, I have no doubt that I was benefited by the special energies that attend a polemical purpose.

  —Lionel Trilling, preface to E. M. Forster

  In November 1943 Diana received an unusual letter of praise from an editor at PM, the leftist daily newspaper published in New York. Anita Berenbach wrote that Diana’s reviews hit her “between the eyes, and were so profound, and so veracious, and so well put!” She added that a recent piece by Lionel of A Choice of Kipling’s Verses, edited by and with an introduction by T. S. Eliot, was confusing and that he “rather got himself into the woods.” Summing up, Berenbach commented that “I like the kind of criticism that navigates its point and then enlarges on it. Certainly a critic wants to be fair, but it is not fair for a critic to be confused. Do you think Mr. Trilling might borrow some acuity from you?”

  The Partisan Review Boys and Girls, had they known of the letter, would not have been pleased. Lionel Trilling lost in the woods? Diana herself was left perplexed—disturbed, really—by the remark. Even though her star was rising, and their “friends” now made her feel as if she was at least worth listening to and was no longer wasting their time, she was, after all, just the wife. Diana really wanted it that way.

  Or did she? Her analysis was taking her mind to new heights, even though her body, with its fear of heights, could not conquer them.

  Lionel’s book on E. M. Forster was published by New Directions in 1943. Amazingly, he wrote it in just six weeks. As Diana said, he “had such an uneven way of performing. He could spend weeks a
nd weeks at certain times in his life, just looking at a blank page and writing the same thing over and over again. But he could also do some of the most difficult things very fast indeed.… With New Directions … he felt sure of himself, felt sure of his audience.”

  Diana did very little editing directly on the pages; instead, they talked things out. “ ‘No, that isn’t what I’m saying,’ he’d tell me, and I’d answer, ‘What’s wrong with it?’ and he’d try again and finally I’d say, ‘Why don’t you just say that?’ And he would.”

  Diana continued, “Maybe I helped form his rhetorical style. I don’t know whether I did or didn’t. But there is no question in my mind that when I went over his work, the prose was improved.” She said that the Forster book revealed “the basic direction of his thought at the time, or, at least, one of its strands: his concern for the insufficiencies in the current practice of liberalism.” This, too, was the direction in which Diana steered her own literary criticism.

  Diana’s sister, Cecilia, had been staying with them while recuperating from an operation to have some toes amputated. (The sisters got along better as they got older, as Diana did also with Harriet Trilling.) Lionel gave up his study for his sister-in-law and rented a room from a widow in their building who had a large apartment. “He stayed there for long hours each day,” Diana said, “which was fortunate for him as he couldn’t stand being near my sister.” Diana said that she “tried to work at home in our living room as I always had, but my sister listened from down the hall, and if I stopped for even a moment, she would call me in coy admonition: ‘Diana, I don’t hear your typewriter.’ ”

  Sometimes, Lionel helped her the same way she helped him. Diana said that when she occasionally got stuck on a review, he would sit next to her when she was at the typewriter and ask what she wanted to say. Lionel would coax her, “ ‘Well, come on, suppose we say it this way,’ ” and then, Diana admitted, “I’d start screaming! ‘No, that isn’t what I want to say at all.’ ” But, she conceded, “Out of that might come something.”