Diana told the writer Peter Manso (in his oral history of Norman Mailer) that “Lionel was Big Papa, and if you’re married to the Big Father, you’re the Big Mother.… If someone could win my friendship and respect, then he got some of the paternal blessing, if only at secondhand. That was true for so many younger people we knew.” She qualified that it “wasn’t true of our relation with Norman Mailer, though. For Norman, I was the primary person.… It was different with him.” They met at a dinner given by Lillian Hellman.
Diana said that Lionel had met Hellman briefly in the 1920s—they knew people in common—and then much later they met again at lectures and meetings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Lionel was elected to membership in 1952, Hellman in 1960, and Diana in 1976).
Lionel had warned his wife that their politics were in such disagreement that a friendship with Hellman couldn’t work. “What he meant,” Diana later explained, “was that she was a very well-known Communist fellow traveler. Nobody knew whether or not she was actually a Party member, but she was there for every Communist cause—every single one over a long period of time.” But eventually Lionel changed his mind and told Diana, “What’s the use? She’s a very entertaining woman and it would be fun to go visit her.” And they did.
Diana later commented: “Lillian makes a profession of friendship. She really works at it,” adding that whenever politics came up, Lillian would tell them, “We’re all just liberal democrats together.” But generally they avoided talking politics, and the friendship “thrived,” Diana said, not only because of “Lillian’s power over people and her social position, but because she knew everybody and she gave extraordinary parties.… You met a great variety of people of a kind whom I wasn’t likely to meet in the course of my life.”
Although Diana once claimed that the playwright was always more interested in Lionel, Hellman (who often forgot the names of the wives and referred to them all as “Madam”) soon focused primarily on Diana, and they became close friends. Diana had always wanted what she called “a large scale woman friend,” and she believed she had found her in Hellman—the most powerful personality she had ever known, she said. “Most of the women I knew were sort of second-class citizens, even within their own marriages, and I always wanted to know somebody who lived on a larger scale than that.”
When they met, Norman Mailer was working on his third novel, The Deer Park, and had already become celebrated in 1948 after he published his World War II novel The Naked and the Dead; Barbary Shore, about a wounded war veteran who wants to be a novelist, followed in 1951. Diana remembered that Mailer “had been paying total attention to the grand dame lady on the other side of him. He listened to every word she said, and spoke to her very, very directly. I was terribly impressed with that. He wasn’t being restless and looking for some pretty young girl he could go and talk to.… After all, he was a very, very good looking young man, very very good looking, slender, lively looking … and when the proper moment came, he turned—and I thought—now he’s going to give his attention to me. And the first words he said were, “How are you, smart cunt?” And I collapsed, absolutely collapsed. I got into such giggles. I just roared at that. And that’s how we got acquainted.… I had the reputation of being Lionel’s wife and somewhat formidable. I just loved his breaking through that. Very smart of him.” Later in the evening, or possibly on another evening, Diana said that Mailer
sat down next to me on the sofa and started to play that “I’ll stare you out game” of his; he loved all those things. It’s like arm wrestling with the eyes; it’s a form of wrestling. I put up my dollar and he put up his, and another guest, Glenway Westcott, joined us; he put a dollar on me. Bet on me, very gentlemanly. And I said to Norman, “Are you allowed to smile?” And he leaned over and took my dollar and took Glenway’s dollar. I said, “Hey, we hadn’t started to play yet. I was asking a question about the rules.” He said we had started to play. I said, “You’re a cheat.” I wasn’t kidding. I’ve never been so angry about the loss of one dollar.… I was furious. There had been no gong. I hadn’t gotten all the rules straight in my mind. I wasn’t ready to play. Well, I could see Glenway Westcott was completely in accord with me and just hoped I wouldn’t get myself too agitated about this, so I just sort of let it slide off, but I didn’t like it. But Norman and I did become friends despite that bad beginning.… Lionel and Mailer got along perfectly pleasantly, but they were never friends. The friendship was between Norman and me. Lionel liked him all right. Mailer, I think, was a little frightened of Lionel, a little intimidated by him. He felt more comfortable with me.
In a draft of her unpublished “The Education of a Woman,” Diana wrote, “I encouraged most of the men of my acquaintance, throughout my life, to regard me rather as if I were a member of the third world of humanity.”
But it was different with Norman Mailer.
“We were really very close in some way,” she said, revealing somewhat reluctantly that “he wanted to have an affair with me. His way of wanting to have an affair was not to ask you, because he would never be on record as having been refused. But he did go as far as [Diana doesn’t finish this thought but then continues]—there was no missing that that’s what he had in mind.” She told Peter Manso, “I’ve often wondered what Norman is like in bed. One thing is for sure: he doesn’t take any chances of rejection; he’s a very wary seducer. He puts out the smallest feeler.… He wants the woman to take the chances.” (Several years later, Mailer wrote in a letter to Diana “that what women never understand about men is that men, strong men, move in quiet fear, in some sadness, with pessimism—they succeed because they are unaware of their strength.”)
Diana said that William Phillips told her that Mailer’s second wife, Adele (whom he married in 1954), told him that Norman had fallen in love with an intellectual. Diana also said that Phillips later remarked to Mailer in some other context she no longer recalled that, “Well, of course, you’re in love with Diana Trilling, aren’t you? And Mailer said, ‘No, I love her, but I’m not in love with her.’ ”
“The Mailer complex,” Lionel later wrote in his journal, “my growing sense of the man’s intellectual and ideological power—his moral energy—interesting how little respect he has from the intellectuals—my own awareness of him, comes, of course, from Diana—her sense of her having failed him, which she did—my wry sense that this was the first man she could not comprehend—encompass—understand—or in any way influence or control.”
What did Lionel mean by saying his wife had failed Norman Mailer? Did he mean in a literary way? A sexual way? In another journal entry Lionel wrote, “It was on the basis of her response to [Mailer] [at a party] that I made the observation to D that meant much to her—her physical fear of a sexual encounter, her fear that harm will be done to her.”
Was Diana still concerned about the dangers that Dr. Kellogg’s sex book warned her of so many decades ago? In her unpublished “Biography of a Marriage” she wrote that after she and Lionel had premarital sex, she “suffered a sense of sin, which she differentiated from guilt, with which I was also burdened.” Had the sexual assault by her family’s friend left haunting, indelible memories that bubbled up into her consciousness every now and then? Did any possible sexual encounter stir up not only old memories and fears but perhaps desires? Desires she might not be able to control?
Diana once confided to the Andersons her interest in the sex industry, and partly as a joke they sent her a number of advertisements for massage parlors and adult entertainment nightspots. And the one and only pornographic movie she ever saw—she described it in a letter as “a sociological evening”—had also been viewed by Mailer, who was in the audience. “We left together, with Norman lightly commenting to me that the movie should perhaps be suppressed because it was anti-sexual in its effect. I agreed,” Diana wrote.
In their extensive correspondence over the decades, Diana would often pass judgment on Mailer’s work and life. She became his mother con
fessor, of sorts, and a scolder, when required. Mailer respected her enormously.
There was never a love affair.
In the summer of 1959 Mailer sent her a copy of his sexually explicit short story “The Time of Her Time,” not exactly for her literary opinion but rather for her support in averting possible censorship trouble with the US Postal Service. (The story, in which the Irish American protagonist attempts to bring his Jewish American lover to orgasm without success until he penetrates her anally and calls her “a dirty little Jew,” was shocking at the time. It would eventually be published in Advertisements for Myself yet was still so controversial that Mailer’s English publisher refused to include it in its edition of the book.)
Not able to resist being a tough, sophisticated critic, Diana started off her letter by telling him precisely why she so much disliked the story. She said that if she were the editor of a magazine, she’d reject it but not because it is pornographic. “I don’t find the story pornographic,” she wrote Mailer:
I find it anti-pornographic—peculiarly chilling in its sexual effect because it is so clinical.… I of course realize that you intended the story to express your own revulsion from this kind of clinical tyranny. But despite this intention you were somehow yourself tyrannized, in reverse. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that nowhere in the story is there a voice to say that this mastery-submission struggle with which you are dealing, although true to life, has been made in our society an object of the wrong kind of consciousness, which is merely the same old Puritanism in new dress. Your hero is clearly the victim of this culture. But the author is, too. At least I don’t see anything in the story to separate hero and author—no irony, no detachment. Thus the whole story is as anti-sexual as the situation in which the hero is involved, which is why I find it unpornographic and don’t care for it.
Having made her somewhat labyrinthine feelings known, Diana said that she didn’t want the Post Office to suppress the story in any way whatsoever. She would “wholly oppose” such censorship. Censorship was an important, separate matter, not connected to whether or not she liked the story. (In 1957 she had protested by telegram the banning by the Detroit police of John O’Hara’s National Book Award–winning Ten North Frederick, which was considered obscene. The ban was eventually lifted after all the protests.)
In his reply Mailer, bypassing her literary judgments, warmly thanked her for a letter that “was more than adequate to my needs. I think there’s a fair chance of getting the story printed now.”
And he asked, “I wonder if Lionel could send a short paragraph, if he feels the story is not pornographic. Indeed, even if he does, by the ethic of this matter, it might be best to hear from him.”
But Lionel never responded, and it is not known if Diana told her husband about Mailer’s request.
This sort of moral-intellectual sparring went on with the members of the family—that is, “the Family,” as in New York Intellectual Family, of which Mailer was a young member, along with older members like Diana and Lionel, Sidney Hook, William Phillips, Philip Rahv, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, and Delmore Schwartz.
In 1953 Rahv commissioned Delmore Schwartz, the poet and short story writer, to write an essay about Lionel. The essay, “The Duchess’s Red Shoes,” reproached Lionel for not being sufficiently supportive of modern writers and for being too enthralled with nineteenth-century writers like Jane Austen, Henry James, and E. M. Forster. He decried Lionel’s study of manners in fiction as a literary posture, as when he said that American writers have turned away from society. Schwartz wrote, “Mr. Trilling is often difficult to understand because he is so sensitive to all points of view, so conscious of others and of opposition.”
Diana later said that although she thought the essay was fundamentally unfair, Lionel felt the attack was a legitimate one. She said that he also felt “there was something going on there more than what was on the page.” He was right.
In a series of notes Diana made for a proposed memoir, she mentioned the sense of antagonism between Rahv and Phillips as a possible source for Rahv’s having solicited and published Schwartz’s criticism of Lionel. (It was well-known that Rahv and Phillips often clashed over content and strategy and that by 1953 Rahv’s anti-Communism was no longer as strict as Phillips’s.) Diana jotted down in her note that she and Lionel “continued to be friends with Phillips even once the antagonism became open in the mid-fifties,” but she explained no further, most likely because, as she already knew, political differences are often just a smoke screen for other disagreements.
But what might have been the source of Schwartz’s hostility toward Lionel? Hadn’t he hoped to teach at Columbia and been thwarted? Diana told a friend that “when Schwartz came to do a sample lecture, he couldn’t hold his class, couldn’t lecture for an hour because he was far gone [into mental illness].… Lionel would have been crazy himself to have given a job to that crazy man.” Delmore Schwartz always believed that Lionel was the one and only person who prevented his appointment.
In another note to herself Diana jotted down that Rahv was “more malicious in his judgments, and would let things appear to make trouble, [to be] more sensational than Phillips.” She went on to record that “William was never as given to malice and gossip as was Rahv.” But, she also wrote that “the personal motivation, the hate—the malicious personal motivations—of these people were phenomenal.”
Among the women, particularly, gossip was supreme. There seemed to be no sense of guilt—about anything, especially about their sex lives. This was new territory for Diana—new territory for her to talk about with Lionel, too. After all, she had confided in him about her flirtation with Mailer.
Her generation, she said, “learned late that women had the right to have sexual responses.… It wasn’t just men.… In my day it sometimes took years of induction to get a woman to be sexually responsive.… Women came into their own after the First World War, when women went to work.… They wore different clothes and took off their corsets; they got the vote.… There was a whole new moral code. An early prestatement of the later permissiveness.… I’m a post-Victorian,” she said, recalling that she once had an argument with Mary McCarthy about guilt. “Mary thought she was against guilt, and I said she shouldn’t be. I think guilt makes us human. And to be against guilt is to be very unimaginative.”
* He later wrote five books, including a biography of Herman Wouk. His best-known work, Nine Lies About America, dismissed 1960 New Left claims that the United States was a racist, materialistic, imperialist nation. He eventually became an aggressively anti-Communist political scientist at the Hoover Institution and the conservative-leaning Washington Times.
12
WEAVING
The only good husband I have ever known was George Calingaert. He lived in the 18th century, and he created his own wife.
—Lionel Trilling, journal entry, 1960*
After many years in analysis Diana decided that she “used a sense of reality in daily life as a defense against analytical reality.” She also began to understand how “undeeply” [sic] she “had penetrated in all her years of treatment,” even though she had made progress in keeping her phobias at bay.
Although Diana said that Lionel’s view of what analysis could accomplish was different from hers—he was more interested in Freud’s theoretical, historical, and cultural aspects—she “was the one who criticized the therapeutic aspect of psychoanalysis.” She began to acknowledge that “most of my interest in psychoanalysis is directed to where I think some of its therapeutic weaknesses may lie.”
Diana became a frequent contributor to the “Letters to the Editor” sections of various publications; these letters served as both a private—and, of course, public—outlet for the multitude of ideas, especially about analysis, that swirled in her head.
In a letter to Encounter magazine she wrote that her “chief quarrel with present-day psychoanalysis derives from the fact that its clinical investigations exist i
n total isolation from cultural speculation,” and she went on to write that when mentioning this to analysts of her acquaintance, she received either “bewildered looks or grimaces of irritation.” But she was deeply concerned that psychoanalysis was failing to understand that it “was working in a period of radical cultural change”—she meant on college campuses—and that it needed to accept this new reality of upheaval if it expected “to attract the best minds of a new student generation.” Diana wanted these students to be encouraged to use the “changing culture” to better the medical profession. She said that an eminent doctor, whom she does not name, told her, “We are not interested in cultural speculation; we are interested in doctors.” She agreed, she wrote in her letter, but also said, “I believe the analytical profession can no more be built on doctors alone than a university can be built on men and women whose sole commitment is to teaching.” Psychoanalysis must “take into account” cultural change “if it is to maintain its own authority in the intellectual community.”
The Untold Journey Page 20
