The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  Diana even felt betrayed that the owner of the grocery store from which she was banned considered her “high handed.” After all, when it came to food, Diana knew what went with what, and why, and how to cook it properly. (For instance, corn was put in a pot with cold water, heated to boiling, then the flame or heat was turned off immediately, and the corn was done. There were to be no seasonings in her carrot soup—just four or five “sizable” carrots, a stalk of celery—four cents a pound at the off-limits market—and chicken broth.)

  Diana once said, “I really can’t tell you which gives me more pleasure, cooking something people like to eat or writing something which someone may enjoy reading. I need both like mad, and that really is too much to ask of oneself. I suppose it derives from an uncertainty about myself as a female person. The cook is the feminine side and the critic, the masculine, and I don’t know which one to turn to.” But she always embraced one or the other without trepidation. She soon found a new market a short distance away.

  “Di” and “Li” were now in their early fifties and had been married almost thirty years. Lionel was a renowned public intellectual; students packed his classes, and Diana, despite her growing reputation for haughtiness—words remained her bullets—was emerging from his shadow once again (as she had in the 1940s) with new essays and reviews. But it wasn’t enough for her growing ambition.

  Still, in the spring of 1959 she enjoyed being honored at the Harvard Club as a “Distinguished New York Alumna of Radcliffe College,” along with thirty-two other women, including historian Barbara Tuchman, novelist Rona Jaffee, and Margaret Kahn Gresser, “the best woman chess player in the U.S.” But there was no book by Diana on the horizon, no full-length original book of her own. An article called “Whatever Became of Romantic Love,” which she wrote for Look magazine, elicited a letter from Evan Thomas of Norton to expand it into a short book. But Diana wasn’t interested. The truth was there was no time because Lionel’s work continued to be Diana’s main work, even though she had managed to find the time to edit The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence.

  Lionel had his own troublesome issues; even the very fabric of his marriage to Diana seemed at one point ready to fray. In a notation in his journal, written in 1961, Lionel recorded that “it is four years since the summer of the Great Instauration and its collapse—that was the summer of the threat of cancer—of the birthday letter that did not come from S.”

  The summer he was referring to in his entry was 1957, two years after he published Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture and The Opposing Self, and the year after he published A Gathering of Fugitives. In 1958 he published his essay about Lolita—concluding that the story “was not about sex, but about love” and also deciding that in general, “marital infidelity is not thought of as necessarily destructive of marriage, and indeed, the word ‘unfaithful,’ which once had so terrible a charge of meaning, begins to sound quaint, seeming to be inappropriate to our modern code.” Diana, when guiding that prose into greater clarity and balance, surely, if somewhat bitterly, now agreed with him. Years later she would tell the writer Kathleen Hill that “fidelity in marriage was not easily defined, that she thought it a strenuous and lifelong enterprise—but that she considered it dirty-minded … to make fidelity a matter of whether you slept with someone other than your spouse.”

  “The Great Instauration” was Sir Francis Bacon’s term for his proposal to revitalize the world to its original energy and force. But Lionel used the phrase in his journal in a more personal way; he intended to revive his potency that summer of 1957. (Jim Trilling later commented that he had never heard anyone use the word instauration before and says he thinks it was his father “being profound and deliberately using obscure language because he doesn’t want anyone to know what he is saying.”)

  There is no evidence that either Diana or Lionel had cancer symptoms in 1957. It’s possible that Diana, approaching or already into menopause, was experiencing spotting from irregular menstrual periods brought about by hormonal changes, and she was concerned that this might be a precursor of cancer. Erratic cycles are common right before menopause, and periods can skip altogether, followed by ones with heavy flow, until finally, after a year, the process ends, and the fertile phase of a woman’s life is over.

  The mysterious “S” in Lionel’s journal entry apparently refers to Steven Marcus.*

  Marcus had graduated from Columbia in 1948 and began teaching there in 1956, after a three-year stint in the army. (He had received his master’s degree in 1949, then taught for a year in Indiana and two years at City College in New York, studied under F. R. Leavis at Cambridge, remained in England from 1952 to 1954, and received his PhD from Columbia in 1961.)

  A course with Lionel in 1947 had convinced him he had a chance at a career in literature, and he abandoned a plan to attend medical school. Marcus described Trilling’s teaching style as a “planned improvisation.… He was ironic, he was reticent. If he used the word ‘virtue,’ he would refer to the Greek sense, which meant manliness and power.” Marcus was hooked.

  Diana said that Steven Marcus and Norman Podhoretz spoke of Lionel “as someone who had taught them repression. The diminution of impulses and the suppression of pleasure in favor of beauty.” Indeed, they were all—the students and their professor—dealing with matters that might—or might not—require repression.

  Diana went on to say that Lionel was “ a super-ego person essentially. He believed that one gave up commitment.… This was very deeply a part of Lionel.… I’m a super-ego person, too.”†

  Marcus became so close to his teacher that when he went out to Indiana in 1949, Lionel felt comfortable enough to tell his student to “look out for your accent. You have too strong a New York accent.” Marcus later told Diana it was “a hard piece of advice” and that he had never told anyone about the remark before. He also asked his teacher if he thought he would succeed, and Lionel told him, “ ‘I’ve given up predicting on my students a long time ago.’… He wasn’t going to butter up my ego,” Marcus recalled.

  But that summer of 1957—“The Great Instauration”—Lionel had expected the usual birthday letter from the person everyone on campus considered his protégé, and he was disappointed enough that none had arrived from Marcus to mention it in his journal.

  Steve Marcus had married in 1950 (to Algene Ballif, known as “Gene”), and only Lionel, not Diana, was invited to the wedding, although he had been unable to attend. But the couples soon became so close that they often vacationed together. “Steve Marcus was always around,” Jim Trilling said. “He was the younger older man I idolized. He played a big role in my life at the time.” Indeed, Gene and Steve Marcus, the Trillings, and the Beichmans—Arnold and Carroll—became what Carroll Beichman referred to as “a very interesting, entertaining and affectionate little group,” and “we saw a lot of each other.” And as Diana later said, “Lionel and I began to recreate a youth which we hadn’t had, doing youthful things like picnics.”

  After many decades of silence, Carroll Beichman decided to speak about the “little group.” It was time, she said. At first she talked about her husband and Diana. “Arnold and Diana were on the same wavelength.… Both were very direct. Neither took prisoners. She and my husband had wonderful battles—intellectual squabbles—about the American Committee for Cultural Affairs and student revolutions, although they didn’t differ a whole lot.” And then she spoke of Lionel, who she loved talking to at parties. “We took great pleasure in one another’s company.… I was an intellectual groupie of some kind—he was more than twenty years older than me, and I thought he was the most intelligent thing that crossed my path. Our minds worked along the same lines.”

  As for Diana, Carroll said that “she was a very impressive woman and she over-awed me. She was a difficult woman to be a friend of, somewhat domineering, so it would have been a strenuous relationship, although we were always polite when we met in groups. But she wasn’t a woman friend of mine, and we never had lunch o
r anything like that together.” Still, Diana once gave her a man’s sweater she had bought and thought would suit Carroll, and as Lionel remarked in his journal about it: “How well it looked on her.”

  Carroll particularly remembered one evening at Thirty-Five Claremont Avenue “when Diana asked why I liked to ride horses in Central Park. ‘For joy,’ I told her. ‘How wonderful to be able to say it so simply,’ Diana said to me.” Carroll remarked that “Diana and Lionel were an amazing pair, although it was a slightly mixed-up marriage.”

  In a journal entry written on October 19, 1959, Lionel noted “C’s glances” and said that after experiencing them, he had the “the sense that I wanted nothing but gravity and impersonality.” Carroll Beichman recalled that he always had “a detached way of looking at things, in contrast to the shrill things going on around him. He wanted to detach himself.”

  Right after mentioning Carroll’s glances, glances he had been aware of and enjoyed for several years, Lionel wrote in his journal about “the ugliness of adultery (or at least adultery allowed to be publicly attempted).”

  It was his strong feelings for “C” that Lionel was attempting to dismiss and hide. (He later noted obliquely that “a feeling for C and a feeling for politics have the same root.”)

  His analyst had warned him that his feelings for Carroll, while they brought him “pleasure, also caused annoyance and defiance—an ensuing sense of bondage—depression.”

  “He was much attached to me,” Carroll Beichman said. “For him, it sort of hit him, as it does men of certain years.… In many ways it was a courtly love thing.… He always said he was a nineteenth-century man, and I was sort of a nineteenth-century woman.… Also, my background was not New York Intellectual. It was one of the things he liked.” Lionel also liked that Carroll didn’t think of him as a professor and that she was enthusiastic about his wish to eventually leave university life.

  And, she added softly, “I loved him very much. It bent my marriage to Arnold.”

  Lionel Trilling, conscience-stricken but revitalized, had fallen in love also.

  Carroll Beichman (she was born Harriet Childe Atkins but, not seeing herself as a “Harriet,” changed her name to Carroll, her father’s given name) was just thirty when she met Lionel Trilling in the mid-1950s. She had interests ranging from horseback riding to arduous ranch work and was a teacher at the Brearley School, in Manhattan, for many years, as well as at Milton Academy in Massachusetts. “She was flamboyant in a Beryl Markham way,” Jim Trilling remembered. (Markham, a British-born Kenyan writer and adventurer, was part of the imposing and often scandalous “Happy Valley set” in Africa.)

  “I was the anti-Diana,” Carroll Beichman said, although she also said that she probably represented youth to Lionel. She had been just twenty-one when she met Arnold Beichman, who was thirty-six and recently divorced, and they married soon after, dividing their time between New York, Boston, and Naramata, British Columbia, where she was born and raised. Her father served on the Supreme Court of Canada. She had met Arnold at a party at the British Information Service in New York, where she worked when she first came to America in 1950.

  An entry in Lionel’s journal dated July 27, 1957, records a visit to Claremont Avenue by Arnold Beichman. Lionel remarks on “my new disturbed sense of him. D’s new disturbed sense of him. Sex. D’s (unspecified) shocking experience with him. What this says about C—the unhappiness in her life with him—but what made her marry him in the first place? D speaking of this. Speaks of the danger of my missionary zeal for a proud and delicate girl in that situation.”

  Certainly, Arnold Beichman and Diana were close friends, but was their relationship a sexual one also? Diana might have wished for it, yet she rebuffed Beichman’s advance in 1957. What was the nature of its “shocking” component, as Lionel mentioned in his journal? Had Arnold requested a rough, crude form of sex that Diana found revolting? After learning of Lionel’s journal entry, Carroll Beichman would only comment obliquely, saying that both Arnold and Lionel “could explode, although [she] never witnessed Lionel losing his temper.”

  Lionel’s journal does make one thing very clear: Diana knew that her husband was involved with Carroll, that she didn’t seem to mind, and that, in fact, she was concerned her husband really didn’t understand what he was getting into with this mission.

  Two summers later, in 1959, Lionel recorded in his journal:

  At the time that A had some attraction for D, he was much in love with C and spoke of her with great tenderness and delicacy. But as his feelings for D grew, he began to speak harshly of C and to behave with his curious brutality. At this, D lost any interest in him she had had. The situation was worsened by his response to my involvement with C, which led him to want to talk in a vulgar “conspiratorial” way with D about C and me. In that strange little flurry of emotion in his life—flurry of deep emotion, it should be said—he contrived to lose 2 women.

  “There’s a fair amount of truth in that entry,” Carroll said, acknowledging that her husband’s feelings for Diana included sexual ones and perhaps even an affair that didn’t end well. “There’s always a strain of truth in this stuff,” she added. She said she didn’t want to elaborate, except to comment that “Lionel did not find Arnold likeable,” and, she said, “Lionel was fastidious. But not Arnold. He was an outspoken man.”

  Had Diana been turned on and then off by a blunt (“shocking,” “brutal”) request for sex? Had she had enough of men with short tempers?

  According to a journal entry written by Lionel a few months later, on December 3, 1959, Diana told her husband: “ ‘In the last 3 years you have become for me so much more an object of Romantic interest when you walk into a room,’ etc. I ask why this is so and she replies that perhaps it is because I ceased to regard her in a symbolic way and treat her as a person.”

  Carroll had apparently enabled Lionel to begin to see and appreciate women in a new and honest way, and Diana was grateful. Maybe her husband’s lifelong anger at all women would be curbed. Maybe he could begin to look at himself in a less calculating manner that would transform into what they once had had when they first met in the Speakeasy. But, she added, even though her marriage wasn’t ever really “a romantic” one, perhaps now it had a chance to become that if Lionel’s sexual problems could be abated and his libido revived. Still, she had once said that she could never understand what a marriage built out of a love affair could be like.

  For years she had endured her husband’s “aggression against women.” And while she herself had perhaps not “betrayed their past,” the notion was occasionally on her mind. She certainly questioned whether she had made the right choice in marrying him. She later said that it took more than twenty years of analysis before she was ready to express her own form of aggression against her husband, and she admitted, “when it did come out it was stupendous.”

  Carroll said that Lionel never talked about his marriage at their “odd lunches and walks in the park, except to say that he owed an enormous debt to Diana in terms of his work.” She went on:

  I’m sure Diana was angry, but I think she gave him some rope. It’s possible she went along with it to help his creativity. She might have thought that my relationship with him was therapy for her. I thought she’d just ride it through. I don’t know if he ever wanted to leave Diana, he may have wanted to. Yet he also made it clear his marriage could not break up.… He told me there was no moment of the day that Diana didn’t know where he was.… I knew he was attached to me but not enough to write about it in his journal. I’m extremely flattered. Actually it’s stunning the degree he was obsessed with me.… He was a bit of a novelist.

  Then she added quietly, “Up to a certain point we were meant for one another.”

  But as with Diana, Lionel was impotent with Carroll the two times they went to a hotel. “It didn’t work,” she said. “I thought he was in analysis because of it.… His analysis went on forever.” She continued, “I don’t think it was a pe
rmanent condition.… Lionel might have been embarrassed but actually I think he was relieved. He did say he was worried about affecting his relationship with Diana; he couldn’t succeed with either of us.” Carroll remarked that “it was very frustrating and he kept quoting Montaigne … ‘There are some defeats more triumphant than victories’ or perhaps it was ‘in all things pleasure is increased by the very danger which ought to make us flee from them.’ ”

  At some point in 1959, Lionel had written in his journal about William Phillips telling Diana of Lionel’s supposed affair not only with Eleanor Clark but also “with Gene Marcus—whether or not D gave me a full account I do not know.”

  William Phillips particularly loved to gossip, and Diana told her husband that when they had had drinks, he had “pleasure” in learning about her “youthful homosexual experience.” (Lionel’s journal is the only place where mention is made of this. Diana never wrote or spoke about such an encounter.)