The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  Other members of the family were also gossiping, picking up signals that all was not as it seemed in the Trilling marriage. “Lionel once told me he had an encounter that worked,” Carroll Beichman said. “I have no clue who or what it was, but it wasn’t with a prostitute.” She said also that sometimes she wondered if Lionel “had a proclivity for picking up women like me.”

  After a party at Edna and William Phillips’s that Diana had attended alone because Lionel had gone trout fishing that weekend, Lionel wrote in his journal about his wife’s physical fear of a sexual encounter. He had also once noted in his journal that Diana tended to become “horny” when she was ill, which was often. In such entries, was Lionel thinking about past incidents involving his wife? Their discussions about her flirting with Norman Mailer? Or was he musing about current circumstances she had overcome? Perhaps with Arnold Beichman? Had Diana also had a “Great Instauration”—some sort of revitalization?

  During that period of time, Diana also developed an intense friendship with Steven Marcus despite the nearly thirty years between them—perhaps born of Diana’s initial resentment of Marcus’s claim on Lionel’s time. Lina Vlavianos, Jim’s babysitter, remembers the three summers in Westport beginning in 1957 and particularly the summer of 1960, when Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus were working on the abridged volume of Ernest Jones’s The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. “I was with Jim morning, noon and night,” she said. “Diana worked from 9:30 a.m. until lunchtime.” Marcus told Diana that he and Lionel “would work together for months, steadily and easily. We came to structural agreements about changes with no difficulty at all. The work proceeded literally without a hitch. Lionel would write sometimes transitional sentences, I would write sometimes transitional sentences.… So the working relationship was all that anybody could desire, and I’m sure that we were both surprised that it went with such ease.”

  Vlavianos said that Diana “was a difficult person, but we never got into any quarrels. I looked up to both Lionel and Diana.” And she recalled that Diana and Steve Marcus “would disappear by the pool,” where they could talk in confidence. “I knew they were talking about Diana’s problems or Steve’s problems.… Diana had difficulty with his wife.” Diana later told a friend that Gene “wouldn’t entertain anybody, so I would say to Steve, ‘If you’d like I’ll make sandwiches. If you have people in I’ll make the sandwiches for you and send them over.’ Steven felt bad he couldn’t have people in his house because Gene wouldn’t entertain them.” (Despite everything, Diana remained friends with Gene throughout her life.)

  Vlavianos went on to recall that “Steve was a partner in writing with Lionel, and there was no question he looked up to Lionel, but he somehow felt more comfortable with Diana. She was more approachable.”

  Many years later, Diana said that “an intimate friend, a man,” told her he had “made the wrong choice in marrying his wife.” He said, “I could have done better if I had married a more intellectual woman. This was a way of flirting with me because I was more intellectual, but it was serious, too.”

  Was this intimate friend Arnold Beichman? Or perhaps Steven Marcus? Someone else? And what kind of closeness was Diana referring to? Carroll Beichman would not comment on her husband but said, of Marcus, that it “was entirely possible no one knew of an affair, but it was unlikely. For heaven’s sake she could be his mother!” Jim Trilling said that “if there were an affair between Steven and my mother, it would be truly bizarre.” “Yet,” he added, “it would be reciprocal—my father and Carroll and Steve and my mother—in a mathematical sense.” Gray Foy recalled that he had always heard there was “somebody” Diana was interested in, and that she had “a girlish quality about men, and was coquettish.” There is no explicit evidence, however, that Diana ever had an affair with anyone.

  Marcus told Diana that the summer of Freud “had a bad influence on me. It raised my expectations,” and Diana replied that it had “lowered hers for the rest of her life. I knew I could expect to be nothing but a drudge.” In addition to her own writing—she was working on a long essay about Norman Mailer—she was responsible for preparing three meals a day, keeping Jim content with friends and activities, and was being paid to tutor a young neighborhood boy in reading and writing.

  Working with Lionel had no doubt made Marcus, still a graduate student, feel as if he and his former teacher were equals and that he had reached literary heights he could only dream about, and he had done it faster and easier than he had ever expected.. Lionel would write in his journal:

  As I walked to my office it occurred to me that S’s relation to me made the most primitive situation of my mature life—that this young man, who so much wishes for power and eminence, wanted especially my power and eminence … that a way of getting them was by his willing me to have them, and that this was efficacious—that my knowing this diminished my sense of power and eminence, meant realizing and immobilizing me.… In this [theory I thought of] Midge’s [Decter] speech to me of two years ago, that she was sick of hearing about S’s talents etc., and how long was I going to put up with this man who felt it necessary to want my mind, my style, my job, my reputation, my wife, my son!

  Jim Trilling said that his father “would have seen everything in as complex a way as possible. If it could be complex and tormented, all the better!” (Decades later Diana wrote in a letter to the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb that “Steve has long been in the business of patricide.” In response, Jim Trilling speculated that “Steve’s induction [as Jim’s father’s heir] could have extended into the personal as well. You don’t have to be a Freudian about this—you kill the King and you get to be King, and the Queen comes with the deal. My mother could have been lured into a Folie a deux.”)

  Diana sometimes saw Steven Marcus as a rival for her husband’s attention—in both their private and public life. She, not Steve Marcus, was her husband’s editor. She was the person who knew what her husband could and could not do. And certainly she felt she was a better writer than both men. But she knew Marcus was important to Lionel, and she did not want to make her husband’s disciple her rival, her enemy. So she sought to make him an indispensable friend, whatever the cost, one aspect of which would be her husband feeling threatened by their devoted relationship. After all, Lionel had admitted that after Jim’s birth he worried that he’d never have Diana to himself again. Perhaps close friendship or even a flirtation with Steven Marcus could bring a frisson to her marriage.

  Diana soon became so attached to Marcus that she could ask him with ease to do even the most mundane of favors. Carroll Beichman recalls that the relationship was an “intense friendship—there was enormous intensity there. An intense affection.” One time during the summer, when Lionel had to return to New York for a funeral, Diana asked Marcus, who came for four or five days at a time, to arrive earlier than usual so she wouldn’t be stranded without a car. Marcus told her that Gene had to do laundry and they couldn’t arrive any earlier. “I had worse than a conniption fit,” Diana later admitted. She was furious and let Marcus know how angry she was. After all, she had been working hard over the summer, and she was only asking for a small thing. A small thing to make her feel less trapped, less isolated, less alone. A small thing that any dear friend would do for another.

  “Yesterday after my conversation with D, after her grieved letter from S,” Lionel wrote in his journal,

  I begin to feel more as I would wish to be than ever before. The infantile and passive state—very bland it was in its hopelessness and helplessness … seemed suddenly to have gone and with no particular sense of heroism. I felt free and poised. Some show of jealousy there was but chiefly that D—and I!—had to be protected from her impulse to negation—I do not want to go into details about this but I do want to note the part played in these feelings by D’s expressed awareness of the difficulty of my situation (at the same time she spoke of the diminution of her love for S in the degree that his for her had grown).… It was as if this rescued
me from the humiliating sense that I was dealing with fantasies. At the same time it gave me a clear and simple awareness of the intensity of d’s feeling for me.

  The summer of the Great Instauration made Lionel “feel more as he would wish to be.” He felt free. Diana understood his love and need for Carroll.

  Diana had told her husband that “S” loved her even more than ever, although her feelings for him were less. Diana’s willingness and need for Steve had seemingly not only lessened Lionel’s guilt and worry over his inadequacy but had made him understand how deep her love was for him. And that Diana could be so honest about her feelings—no matter how unexpected they were—made Lionel feel more loved than ever by her. It was, of course, complex, especially since she had once told him that “no one is in love with a person, only with a moral situation.”

  Several years later, Lionel wrote in his journal:

  Today it came over me with fuller force than on the previous occasion how bad an effect on me the relation with S has had, how it has diminished my sense of myself, very pleasurably to be sure, how it has led me to think of myself as being quieter and with less force, how it has lessened tension in myself and in relation to D (even though at times it seemed to make tension in her, it did not). Lobotomized was the word I used. And after thinking this, I had occasion to read some of the essays in The Liberal Imagination and thought what genius I had then! And how I had submerged my sense of my own powers won at such cost to put myself on a happy equality with S—

  Edward Mendelson, Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia, suspects that Lionel Trilling took pleasure in fantasizing about Steven Marcus and Diana together, that it “pleasurably” diminished his sense of himself. Jim Trilling, thinking of his father’s snake story, written years earlier during his parents’ honeymoon, quoted what his father noted in a journal entry that “perhaps men cannot hate—but rather love—the lovers of their wives.” In an introduction to that story, when it was later published in the Kenyon Review, Jim wrote, “What is a man to do when he realizes that he is forever excluded from some aspect of his wife’s sexuality? My father seems to equate the exclusion with a fundamental lack of masculine force for which the palliative is masochistic pleasure with overtones of homosexual submission.” Diana told Patricia Bosworth, when they were discussing a story about Walker Evans making love to James Agee’s wife, that “if you ask your friend to make love to your wife that is not a simple act. It’s not an innocent request.… There’s a great homosexual incentive to making love to your best friend’s wife.”

  Lionel Trilling possibly had some homoerotic feeling for Steven Marcus, or perhaps he was just experiencing his own complicated sexual psychology, while Diana felt “depersonalized” by all the dramas. Around this time Lionel, who believed that if sex wasn’t subversive, it wasn’t fun, noted in his journal his “growing interest in the idea of orgy.” He didn’t elaborate.

  After working on the Freud with Lionel, and then a book about Charles Dickens, Steve Marcus began a study of sexuality and pornography in mid-nineteenth-century England. In his acknowledgments (The Other Victorians was published in 1966) he included “a special note of thanks” to the Trillings, saying that “discussions with them during the earliest phase of my research were of great value to me.” Both Trillings no doubt had many insights to offer.

  In Lionel’s snake story, which Diana called “brilliant” but “morbid to a pathological degree”—adding that “it worried her for their future together”—Lionel wrote of his female protagonist “that she held to a strict logic of emotion.… There was a division between their love and sensuality, which made it possible to find sensuality elsewhere without danger. One might have several loves at once; their own love was so great that nothing, not even another, could touch it.” The story was written nearly thirty years before his “Great Instauration.”

  Diana once referred to her husband’s nature as “mysterious.” She herself had a mysterious side: she was never openly jealous of Carroll Beichman. Lionel had remarked in his journal that his wife and Thelma Anderson “with unobtrusive tact” once gave him a moment alone with Carroll after a party when they were all in the bedroom together collecting their coats, and indeed at that party he noted not only that he and Carroll had a kiss in the kitchen (later changing it in his notebook to read that they had simply “touched”) but that Diana also gave Carroll the man’s sweater she had bought last year. In previous years Diana had been unduly concerned over the attention other women paid her husband at parties. She was sure Hannah Arendt wanted to seduce Lionel, and she was concerned that Muriel Spark did, too. But Diana “never had any resentment against Carroll,” Jim Trilling said, “possibly because she was so terrific.” He went on to say that his mother knew that his father “was always dissatisfied—not sexually—he craved adventure—to be an artist like Hemingway.… If it would take an affair to make him happy my mother would put up with it she said many times—my mother minded less than some wives in comparable circumstances—but it doesn’t mean she wouldn’t have felt pain.” Diana herself wrote in The Beginning of the Journey that she “could have wished [Lionel] to have a thousand mistresses were this to have released him from the constraints upon him as a writer of fiction.” And, Jim said, his father “wanted things to be complicated because intense feelings would happen and he would feel he was living life a little more aggressively. My father liked drama.” Diana later said that she “always thought that monogamy was against nature. I don’t see how you can go to bed with the same person and not want to change after a while.”

  In 1958, a year after the summer of the Great Instauration, Lionel wrote a mystifying entry in his journal: “D, S, and Victor Rosen—S puts off his visit because he cannot bring himself to speak of D. D’s speculation about this is the same as mine—that S is ambiguous [i.e., ambivalent]—that he wants to tell, to shock, to brag. Bad effects of this.”

  Jim Trilling said that Rosen, a psychoanalyst connected to the New York Psychoanalytic Institute who was also once president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, was a family friend from their summers in Westport and that neither of his parents were ever his patient. “But he was someone who my parents trusted. He had been at the house when my [paternal] grandmother had a mild heart attack, and he kept my mother reassured until the ambulance came. He displayed great calm and authority.” (In her later years Diana made peace with her mother-in-law. Diana said that she always believed that Lionel’s “unadmitted early love for his mother was a stronger factor in his dealings with women than his reasonable complaint against her.”)

  Jim called a purported visit with Dr. Rosen “truly strange” and wonders if what was going on was simply “psychic games—mind games.” What could Steven Marcus “brag” about to Dr. Rosen that would also shock him? It is not even known if such a meeting actually took place. Jim went on to say that his parents “wanted badly to be bad because not being bad was being bourgeois. They wanted to be interesting—mind games, seduction, being jealous and enjoying it.” (Dr. Rosen himself was considered a bad boy in psychoanalytic circles—he caused a scandal by falling in love with a patient, later marrying her.)

  Diana’s complicated friendship with Steven Marcus hobbled along, although in Diana’s last years they were no longer close. Michael Rosenthal, a writer, a former dean of Columbia, and a professor in the English department, said that Marcus and Diana had “a terrible parting of the ways” after Lionel’s death, explaining that at a Lionel Trilling seminar where Diana was not an invited speaker, she, nonetheless got up to speak, and Marcus sharply told her, “Mrs. Trilling, will you please sit down.” Rosenthal said that Lionel “was abusive to Steve Marcus and that he was the only person who Lionel thought less of as a person.”

  Brom Anderson reminisced that a poet friend once saw his parents, the Trillings, and Steve Marcus and Gertrud Lenzer (his second wife) together in the country. “She looked at the three couples and said she felt something between the Trill
ings—a relationship that was very delicate but real—and between his parents something very solid,” he said; “but between the Marcuses she didn’t really see anything.” (Decades later, Anderson remarked that Steve and Gertrud certainly stuck together, despite that impression.)

  Lionel’s affair with Carroll Beichman ended by the summer of 1961. “I told him I wasn’t going to see him again. He took me to tea somewhere. I said I wasn’t going to be part of his therapy. We occasionally saw one another that winter, it might even have been on and off, and we all continued to be perfectly civil.… Civil was our middle name.”

  Diana and Arnold kept up whatever it was they had together.

  After the Beichmans moved to Boston, Carroll and Lionel had dinner in the area two times, and once the four of them had a picnic at Bronson Alcott Farm. “Lionel walked me to the car and said he thought of me every day of his life. He said that people change but some things are permanent. He meant his feelings for me.”

  “Last terrible party of the year at the Beichmans,” Lionel had noted in his journal in 1960—“only D, S and I find anything wrong. Quarrel with D on way home—over what—my sense, which has controlled all my summer, that I did not ever again want to see people in groups of more than 4!”

  By 1961 the threesome Lionel indicated—Diana, Steven Marcus, and himself—could once again—assuming they needed to—hide any so-called antibourgeois wickedness of their lives. Fifty years later, Carroll Beichman, long away from the “very interesting, entertaining, and affectionate little group,” stressed that any earlier affair between Diana and Steve Marcus was “improbable” and that one should “stay clear of the Marcus angle with Diana.” As for those earlier years in her own life, she said, “Arnold and I survived this. My marriage settled down and lasted close to sixty years.”

  “I am one of the last living witnesses,” she said wistfully, adding that she “sometimes felt as if I was in an Edith Wharton novel.”