The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  But such clots and twists in language were not why his name was removed at his request in later editions of the book. Although Podhoretz acknowledged that her use of his name was “a loving gesture,” he later explained:

  What caused the trouble was the merciless teasing to which I was subjected by other friends of mine, and even some of hers, who thought Diana was announcing that I was her “baby,” and what made things worse was that so public an identification with her, even on a literary issue that did not directly impinge on politics, created the impression that I was still clinging to the hard anti-Communist position of which in those days she was one of the most uninhibited spokesmen. In fact, however, I was already moving away from it and toward the ant-anti-Communist camp, whose members while retaining their high regard for Lionel considered Diana a fanatic and ragged me endlessly for allowing her to make free with my name. Deeply humiliated, I decided, young fool that I was, that I was honor bound to tell Diana that she had embarrassed me, and of course she felt hurt and betrayed.

  His name was removed from all future editions.

  Two years later, in 1960, Podhoretz became the editor of Commentary, turning it, Diana said, into an anti-anti-Communist magazine.

  Diana soon resigned from the Executive Committee of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, which had taken over sponsorship of Partisan Review. “There developed,” Diana said, “a very great rift in the intellectual and literary community with [the magazine] really falling, essentially, into the anti-anti-communist camp.” She explained that “the committee had broken up” and didn’t have any funds, and to keep its tax exemption, “it provided a tax shelter for the magazine.… It was really just a pro forma thing.”

  But she was also enraged that in the early 1960s, Partisan Review published a piece called “An End to Anti-Communism.” In her lengthy letter of resignation she said, “I don’t see why I should help publish a magazine which opposes my political point of view and dislikes my feelings.” The committee ultimately voted that the magazine should find a new sponsor, but Diana did not budge on her position or withdraw her resignation, telling the board that “not a single ideological issue was raised in support of their action.” Her strong sense of logic once again came into play. “Apparently,” she said, “I gave you a wide skirt behind which to hide your criticism of a magazine which none of you has criticized but of which you nevertheless moved to be rid.”

  Later, Diana said that Sidney Hook, after encouraging her “to destroy” Partisan Review, and she refused, then went behind her back and accused her of destroying the magazine. (They stopped speaking for a long while. Hook told Diana, “You never did have any political sense,” to which she replied, “You never did have any literary sensibility.”)

  “The story [about PR] spread not only to America but to England, and I heard the story from all sides for a very long time, when I had undertaken to do nothing but to slip away [from the committee] quietly.” But, in saying in her resignation that she didn’t “see why [she] should help publish a magazine which opposes [her] political point of view and dislikes [her] feelings,” she was basically participating in a call for the magazine’s end.

  Still, in a letter Diana told Arnold Beichman (with whom she always remained on warm terms, despite his eventual swing to the right of her politics, and who took over her leadership role on the committee) that she hoped the magazine would continue to exist, “whatever my present differences with it, and even hope that I will again be able to appear in its pages.”

  There were always big differences between Diana and Beichman concerning the CIA’s involvement in the committee—Beichman had been opposed to taking the money, “not so much for moral reasons as because I felt that someday the whole tawdry business would be exposed,” while Diana said, “I did not believe that to take the support of my government was a dishonorable act.… I never liked the secrecy but was willing to live with it because I thought we [the committee] were doing useful work.”

  Beichman and Diana wrote frequent letters to each other, and he often addressed her as “My Dear Provincial Lady from Morningside Heights.” He was always respectful of her morning writing schedule, once beginning a letter, “I write timidly after reading your plea with friends to stop phoning you during your morning hours of work and study. After all, this letter might be such an intrusion but, at least, you can read it a paragraph a day.”

  They enjoyed debating and gossiping about such familiar but endlessly fascinating things as “the sharpness of the rift between the anti-anti-Communists and the anti-anti-McCarthities [sic],” which, Diana wrote, left her “lonely in my own central position.… I consider both camps worthy of having a mild plague visited upon them. In my view, there is only one decent position a liberal can take and that is plumb in the middle shooting in both directions.” But finally Diana told Beichman that “debate by letter, private or public, is not very satisfactory,” although the letters kept coming, some addressed to both Diana and Lionel.

  When Diana liked the company of a person, she usually let politics slide. But with Sidney Hook it was different. Earlier, in 1955, he had responded to an Indonesian resolution by committee member Sol Stein in a manner that Diana could not forgive. Stein, a writer, editor, and publisher, had wanted the committee to intervene in Indonesia against the Communist-backed president Sukarno, but Hook believed it would be “an open foray into politics” that was outside the purview of the committee. Diana said that Hook’s reaction was “one of the most shocking experiences of my intellectual career.” In a letter she told him his stance was “intimidation,” and “terrorization.”

  Two decades later she again berated him for writing in a memoir that Lionel had “instituted” a luncheon party between Hook and Whittaker Chambers (she insisted Hook had confused Lionel with someone else) and for saying that this supposed lunch took place in a vegetarian restaurant. “Lionel loathed vegetarian restaurants,” she wrote. Hook stuck to his story.

  Diana remained on good—if feisty—terms with William Phillips throughout the Partisan Review episode and beyond. (After all, he had agreed to publish her journal, even if somewhat reluctantly.) She wrote him in a letter that “old relationships have a life of their own which is impervious to disruption; one fights, one makes up; one attacks and is forgiven; one is attacked and forgives; one criticizes, one wounds, but there is always a reservoir of faith and affection.” He later wrote in a memoir that Diana “seemed more interested in people’s lives and was usually available for help or advice.” High praise in her estimation.

  So she continued to write for Partisan Review and in 1958 published a piece there called “The Other Night at Columbia: A Report from the Academy,” an account of a poetry reading by Allen Ginsberg and two other Beat poets—his longtime lover Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso.

  All hell broke loose—on Claremont Avenue—on the campus—in Columbia’s English department—even at Partisan Review. Diana, who never really liked being a faculty wife, was, of course, accused of being condescending to everyone, and worse, being too wordy about it.

  “All the fellow travelers rallied around the Beats,” she said, “and said I was being snobby to them.” Jason Epstein, Lionel’s former student, said that the students were always in awe of both Trillings, although he, personally “considered Diana too judgmental.”

  In a letter Diana wrote that “in many conversations with William [Phillips] about why Partisan Review did not like my piece about the beat poets, William has spoken about its wrong tone.… I think that what he means is that he dislikes the literary expression of my personal, emotional and cultural attitudes. Someone writing to me recently about my beat piece,” she went on, “said of it that ‘its judgments are its feelings.’ … The judgments I express in my writing are inseparable from the feelings I express; the judgments are the feelings—and Partisan Review recognizes this integral relation. When the editors speak of my wrong tone, what they are actually saying is that the quality of feeling i
n my work is alien to them, and that the ideas which generate, or are generated by, this quality of feeling are also alien to them.”

  Complaints about Diana the Writer and Diana the Faculty Wife were no longer just whispered. Diana! Diana! What had she done or said that was so horrible? Had she threatened Western civilization? Some faculty members and their spouses were always made nervous in her presence, fearing they’d say the wrong thing. One former student of Lionel’s said (only half-jokingly) that “if you weren’t on her wave length, she thought you were a Communist.”

  The Partisan Review piece had been considered contentious because of Diana’s snobbish views on the Beats in general (“It was of some note that the auditorium smelled fresh.… I took one look at the crowd and was certain it would smell bad, but I was mistaken.”) and on Ginsberg, himself (he was “clean and Corso was clean and Orlovsky was clean”). Diana had attended the reading with two other faculty wives, Mrs. F. W. Dupee, whose husband was the evening’s moderator, and one other woman she doesn’t mention by name.

  Diana had a history with Ginsberg, she explained in her piece, going back to his being a student in one of Lionel’s classes in the mid-1940s and then much later, when Lionel and Mark Van Doren helped him avoid jail (he was sent to a psychiatric hospital instead) after getting arrested for, as it turned out, being a passenger in a car that held stolen goods. (Ginsberg had also been suspended—and then reinstated—from Columbia his senior year after he wrote “Fuck the Jews” and “Butler [Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler] has no balls” in the dust and grime of his dormitory window.)

  Diana wove history and more into her piece: a description of several visits Ginsberg made to Thirty-Five Claremont Avenue, references to the range of literary traditions, comments on differences in style in America, references to middle-class life, life in the 1930s, emotions (especially pity), children’s cries, the personalities of poets, the nature of fathers and mothers. She created a tapestry that could both enrage and enrich her readers. This approach would eventually become her trademark and attract not only devoted followers but also critics, including Columbia faculty and spouses. But not her own spouse. Lionel thought “The Other Night at Columbia” was one of her very best essays and often reread it, she said.

  In the essay Diana related that when she got home, a meeting of the Readers’ Subscription Book Club was taking place in the living room. She announced to the assembled and her husband in particular: “Allen Ginsberg read a love poem to you, Lionel. I liked it very much.” W. H. Auden, who had been at the meeting, later “chided” her, Diana said, telling her that “I’m ashamed of you.”

  Ginsberg had told the audience that a poem called “Lion in the Room” was addressed to and dedicated to Lionel. “It was about a lion in the room with the poet, a lion who was hungry but refused to eat him,” Diana wrote. “I heard it as a passionate love poem. I can’t say whether it was a good or bad poem, but I was much moved by it. It was also a decent poem, and I am willing to admit this surprised me; there were no obscenities in it as there had been in much of the poetry the ‘beats’ read.”

  Ginsberg later told writer Lis Harris that it was not a poem about Lionel. “The poem I read that night was one I’d written in Paris about a mystical vision I had about a lion in my living room. It’s called ‘The Lion for Real,’ and begins with a quote from the nineteenth-century French poet Tristan Corbiere: ‘Soyez muette pour moi, Idole contemplative.’ I guess she misheard it. I visited them for years afterward, but I never brought it up; I thought it was better to just let it go.”

  Diana’s reaction to Harris when told about the poem was to “shrug” and say “dryly” to her, “Ah was I wrong? He should have told me I was wrong. But in any case, the fact is that that night I was trying to throw a bombshell into the respectability of my home. I was writing from the point of view of somebody who was trying to live in two different worlds—the imaginative world of bad children and the ruling world of good, ordinary grownups.”

  All the same, Ginsberg’s father, Louis, also a poet, who was in the audience the night of the reading, wrote Diana that her piece “reveals a wise woman” and that the poem his son read “was indeed a sort of love poem to your husband, whose sympathy and understanding Allen really desires.” He also wrote that “Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren have been household words with Allen and me.”

  At a later date, in conversation with her friend Thelma Anderson, Diana talked about Ginsberg’s visit after her piece on the reading was published in Partisan Review. Lionel was either not home or working in a back room, she told Thelma, and as she let Ginsberg into the living room,

  he said very sweetly, “I’ve come to talk to you about the piece you wrote about me in Partisan Review. It hurt my feelings.” And I thought this was very endearing, and I said, “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. In what way did I hurt your feelings?” He said, “Well, you said we were in jeans and that we were dirty.” I said, “Oh, no, no, no, no, I said you were in blue jeans, but I didn’t say you were dirty. I said you were very clean. I said you were absolutely clean despite the fact that Orlovsky had read a poem about ‘if I shave, the bugs will fly out of my beard.’ Do you remember? I said, ‘Despite this, you were all as clean as you could be and very well-behaved and obviously very happy to be in the academy.’ ” So he said, “I couldn’t afford any clothes but jeans. I had bought these in an army and navy store.” It was as he said that—the talk must have gone on before that maybe ten or fifteen minutes—that Lionel came into the room, greeted him and said, “Oh come off it, Allen. You know that you could afford to buy a suit in Brooks and why don’t you?” And poor Allen was terribly disconcerted, because he knew he had stolen suits from Brooks.

  And then, speaking of her essay, Diana told Thelma, “I had written that [jeans] were standard nursery school attire and they had appeared in proper costume. I got letters and all kinds of attacks: how dared I condescend from my middle-class life to these poets? That was the whole point: that I lived this great upper-middle-class, millionaire middle-class life, and that here I was condescending to Bohemians.” Irony refused. It often became the case with Diana Trilling.

  She received several letters from people who had been at the reading and had also read her report on it. One correspondent said that although he was “against” her, and “for” Allen, he “felt that [she] had, in some way, ‘gone naked’ as Allen has challenged people to do.… I was touched by your self-exposure … even taking us to your house after [the reading].”

  In a speech called “The Self as Subject,” which she would deliver decades later, Diana reminisced that the mid-1950s were a time when personal and social facts would have been admired for their truth “if only it had been presented as fiction.” After all, she told her audience, “wasn’t society itself a fiction?” Diana sometimes wished it were. She received a letter of praise from Byron Dobell, another of Lionel’s former students, and an editor at Esquire. He wanted her to write something for the magazine. Diana answered promptly that she wondered if he’d be interested in a regular monthly column about politics, books, even television. “And the tone would always be informal—light but yet serious in intention,” she wrote Dobell, offering some ideas that just “popped into my head”: writing about “a gallery opening in which the guests were given guns with which to shoot at balloons full of different colored paints, by which method they were to produce their own abstractions,… or if you could permit the sacrilege, I’d like to write about the total unreality of Mrs. Roosevelt’s autobiographical volumes.” She explained no further.

  No column was ever offered to her.

  * George Calingaert was a chemist, not a writer. He died in 1960. LT, a longtime friend, gave a eulogy in which he said “George Calingaert’s mind was modern, but owed its particular virtues to the vision of the 18th century.” Calingaert’s “real” wife, Dorothy, was a friend of Diana’s from Radcliffe.

  13

  SUBVERSIVE SEX

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nbsp; D’s anger at my “betrayal” of our past—“For you it’s research.” The next morning she speaks bitterly of my “depersonalization” of her, of myself.

  —Lionel Trilling, journal entry, Oct. 19, 1958

  The years leading up to 1958, and a few years afterward, were exceptionally transforming ones for the Trillings. What Diana Trilling once suggested to her husband as a motive for adultery—“the desire to have a new side of the personality brought into the light”—would generate mystery and intrigue for them, and their lives would become more and more complicated.

  Diana, more than ever, began to voice her displeasures (really frustrations, whether sexual or not) everywhere she turned, even at a food market on Broadway around the corner from Claremont Avenue. In time the owner would bar her from even entering because of her “demeaning” and “imperious” behavior toward him.

  Jim remembers that at times his mother indeed did have “a temper and a temperament.” Gray Foy, Leo Lerman’s companion for over fifty years, called Diana “fierce and not elegant at all.” Still, he and Leo were always “very cozy with Diana and Lionel,” mentioning affectionately that “if she liked you, she liked you forever.” In fact, if a so-called sworn enemy of hers was a friend of someone she loved, she usually found a way to forgive such a transgression. People with difficult mothers (more often it was women) were drawn to Diana because her sharpness never ran deep enough to pierce a devotion born of a mutual admiration.

  Diana’s dissatisfaction was over the lack of focus in her own writing, as well as over her marriage, specifically Lionel’s rages. Even though Thelma Anderson often comforted her friend, without knowing the full extent of Diana’s grievances, she also felt Diana “didn’t respect her enough later in life,” according to her youngest son, Brom, who, from an early age, “was always part of the conversations.” When the Andersons moved to Twenty-Nine Claremont Avenue, they chose a fourth-floor apartment so Diana would be able to visit, instead of a higher-up apartment around the corner on Riverside Drive, which had a wonderful view. Thelma was always “the understanding one” when it came to Diana. The families remained very close, and Brom saw a lot of the Trillings, both in New York and in his parents’ Rockland County house. He said that he was one of the few people who recognized and enjoyed Diana’s sense of humor. He also said, however, that she “could be extremely egocentric,” remembering as an example a time when his father was ill and couldn’t go to the Trillings’ for dinner; Diana later wrote his mother a letter about feeling “betrayed” by his absence. Indeed, it was murmured by others that in many ways she acted like a three-year-old, with unconcealed egotism and a sense of helplessness, and, moreover, that she took it for granted that anything that happened in her orbit was the result of people acting to help or hinder her.