The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  Diana goes on in awkward detail in her notes to say that Jackie Kennedy’s behind “sticks out a little bit like a shelf” and that “in evening clothes you don’t notice the bow legs,” but in the published piece she writes only that Jackie Kennedy has “a charming figure rather than a perfect one.”

  Commenting on the after-dinner reading from one of Hemingway’s works, Diana noted, “I saw the President do the one human thing I saw him do the entire evening.” But in the published piece she wrote not that the president had done only “one human thing” but that she simply saw him “do something so nice. He squeezed [Mrs. Hemingway’s] arm comfortingly.” Many of her narrative decisions were intuitive and didn’t follow any obvious sense of reasoning, but it is clear that in the case of the president of the United States she was not going to be derogatory.

  In 1964 Lionel received one of the world’s most esteemed visiting professorships—he became the George Eastman Visiting Professor of Balliol College, the oldest of Oxford’s colleges. It was a one-year appointment. The professorship was established in 1929 from an endowment created by George Eastman of the Eastman Kodak Company in New York and New Jersey.

  The Trillings were welcomed in England with flowers and a reception and assigned a “comfortable and familiar—but more luxurious than Claremont Avenue” house in Jowett Walk, which was in the central part of the city, “a town that didn’t charm me as I had expected,” Diana wrote Elinor Hays. Other things about Oxford didn’t charm her either. “We haven’t any of us stopped shaking with cold since arrival,” she wrote to Elsa Grossman, later commenting in another letter to Elinor Hays that the house “was over decorated—out of House and Garden.” But the women were decidedly not, “dressed in boring tweeds and shapeless knits.… They have very poor figures—wide seats and bow legs.”

  Diana the cook was also not happy about the food situation. She complained to Elsa that “the simplest things taste absolutely awful and cook even worse.” Exasperated, Diana explained, “for instance I boiled a tongue—inedible, and the potatoes falling apart on the outside were hard as brick inside. As for the vegetables, of fresh there are almost none except the cabbage family, of canned, familiarity ends with the brand names.” She soon begged Elsa to help her and asked for a care package of Vita herring snacks, Vita red caviar, eggplant appetizer, two cans of smoked oysters or mussels, two packages of Wild’s light sliced pumpernickel, and some Anacin. Perhaps to distribute the burden more equally, she turned to Elinor to send her Jell-O, commenting that “I have a desperate need of easy desserts—one can easily buy, inexpensively, dark pitted cherries.” A few weeks later Diana asked Elinor for eight more packages of Jell-O, saying two of the earlier packets had broken in transit. She even suggested that Elinor add additional cardboard to the package in the future. Diana felt secure in asking for these favors, telling Elinor (who had recently asked Diana to be her literary executor) that she “and the Grossmans are my sole dependables.” It never occurred to Diana that she might be overstepping the boundaries of friendship with these mundane requests. After several months, Diana asked Elinor even to buy her some new bras and girdles at a special shop in New York because the water in England seemed to be rotting the elastic on the ones she had brought. When Diana realized that Elinor’s knee might be bothering her for this kind of errand (the Jell-O jaunt seemed to be within limits), she went so far as to ask her to see if Gertrude Himmelfarb could get the items, although she was embarrassed to ask her herself because Gertrude, a working historian, also had small children and “a very taxing mother.” Himmelfarb agreed to do the task, later writing Diana she “was happy to oblige,” adding that when she and Irving (Kristol) were in England, “it was not bras that were a problem but shoes.” She explained no further.

  Eventually, one of the college wives drove Diana to a shopping center where there was, as she wrote Elinor, “a true supermarket—what a boon!” Diana could browse, and pick and choose, and buy what she needed.

  Meanwhile, the Grossmans continued to help Diana and Lionel financially, and midway through their stay in England Diana asked Elsa to deposit $1,000 in their New York bank account, which she would pay back on their return to New York. Diana needed the sense of security the loan would give her, and she hoped the request wasn’t “an embarrassment.” One time the Grossman’s even paid a bill for the Trillings that Diana was mystified about when Elsa brought it up, but the Grossmans always seemed to understand the Trillings’ confusing money woes.

  They sublet their Claremont Avenue apartment to save money on rent while in Oxford. This was hard for Diana because she was meticulous about her belongings and did not like the idea of other people in her house. But she disliked money woes even more. As it turned out, at the end of the year in England Diana was not pleased with the way the renters left the apartment and wrote them a detailed, point-by-point letter, accusing them of breaking or chipping many of her dishes and glasses, damaging some lighting fixtures, staining the furniture, bleaching the color out of her Saks Fifth Avenue deep beige towels and bathmats, removing all the contact paper in her cabinet, and damaging her seventeenth-century desk by somehow taking a chunk out of it. The renters, a doctor and his wife from San Francisco, were so outraged by Diana’s accusations—especially her charge that they had gossiped about the “filth” they found in the apartment—that the doctor resorted to an undignified attack in response: “We are proud of the way we took care of your place. We are outraged at your attitude.… As to the gossip I am amazed that you would bring it up again, and if you want gossip I can tell you plenty that was said about you by your help, your friends, in the building and out. I am ashamed to have to write this last but you went too far.”

  Nonetheless, Diana may have been justified. Jim Trilling remembers them as “the sub-tenants from Hell” who went through his mother’s “private stuff,” and he thinks even one of the Trillings’ cats died under their care.

  Other than the purchasing of food, Diana and Lionel had no other considerable expenses in Oxford. Balliol College provided two caretakers—a husband and wife—for the house, but because they were seventy-five years old, Diana was asked not to overburden them with work but also not to make them feel useless. They agreed on light housekeeping duties for the pair, and the college would also hire someone for an hour or two each day to do heavier work. The college would also bring in waiters whenever the Trillings entertained at home. When Diana asked about table linens, she was told there were some, but in the three years the house had been in use none of the other occupants ever had guests to dinner. Diana, of course, liked to entertain, and when things were difficult around her, cooking always helped make things seem better, especially after she figured out the British food shopping situation.

  Of course, her biggest issue was her role at Oxford. “For a very long time I had resisted going to England because I had been told that the life in English university towns was very difficult for women. They were excluded; it was a man’s world, and the women were not welcome,” Diana said. But what a surprise, she admitted, “Far from being unwelcome, I’ve never been so warmly received and never had a better time anywhere under any circumstance.” She was even told that “no American visitor had ever adapted to Oxford as I did.” The single unpleasantness was a visit from her brother and his wife. She wrote Elinor that Sam greeted her “with the expectable remark that Li looked great but I was fat,” and said that neither Sam nor his wife, Bettye, asked one question about their life in England.” A few months later she wrote Elsa that Bettye had proudly written “the biggest most important news “that Sam had been made a deacon of their church.” What an “improbable” development, she told Elsa, and so worthy of a “marvelous transatlantic giggle.” Sam, who never liked being a Jew, was finally no longer one.

  Diana had a chance to share some of her feminist views when she and Lionel entertained or were entertained. Sometime in the spring before they had left for England, she had been asked by the Inter-University Committee on
the Superior Student, a group funded by the Carnegie Corporation consisting primarily of college deans, to address their conference on “Talented Women and the American College,” which was going to be held at Columbia; they were offering a $500 honorarium. Diana accepted and suggested she speak about the image of women in contemporary literature. (Besides a woman from CBS television, she was the only nonacademic participant.) Her talk gave her an opportunity to dig into the roots of her “family feminist” views, which she had begun to talk about in her 1959 article in Look magazine. She told her audience that

  the woman in advanced present day fiction, in short, is no longer recognizably related to the “ball and chain” of American folklore, a goddess knocked off the pedestal of romantic courtship to become that most dismal of folk figures, a wife who saddles her poor husband with a home whose mortgage he cannot meet, with children who squabble and brawl, with a furnace to stoke and a lawn to mow. Feminism and technology have transformed the harassed shrew of a few decades ago [in]to someone who is man’s equal, even his superior, in the ability to meet the requirements of daily living.*

  As for Lionel’s experience at Oxford, Diana said that Fannie Trilling had always wanted Lionel to get a PhD at Oxford, so his year in England “was a sort of fulfillment of his childhood upbringing and rearing.… I think that probably one of the major disappointments of Lionel’s life was the fact that he was not given an honorary degree by Oxford. I suppose I’m the only person in the world who knew this; he wouldn’t have let anybody know that he wanted it.”

  Lionel’s mother died while Diana and Lionel were in Oxford. Fannie had been living with Lionel’s sister, Harriet, and her husband under what Diana called “very, very peculiar circumstances” that involved staying in her room whenever Harriet’s husband was home. Lionel received word of her death by a telegram on November 25 that arrived seven hours before the funeral, which meant he had no time to return to America. Diana believes that Lionel’s descent into illness a few months later—double pneumonia and pleurisy—began with his not being able to properly mourn his mother, even though some Orthodox Jewish students came to the house to pray for her. “It was all very unsatisfactory because they spoke perfect Hebrew and Lionel was barely able to stumble through the prayers;… he was humiliated,” she said.

  In the beginning of their Oxford year Diana complained to both Elsa and Elinor of homesickness, going so far as to enumerate the people who had or had not written her and Lionel; Edna Phillips and Gertrude Himmelfarb had written only once, as had Arnold Beichman “incoherently,” Diana added wickedly. Jacques Barzun and Steve Marcus had not written at all. Yet as the weeks went by, there were many lunches and dinners to fill up her calendar—lunch, tea, or dinner with Elizabeth Bowen; John Bayley and Iris Murdoch; Goronwy and Margaret Rees; Pamela Hansford Johnson Snow and C. P. Snow; John Osborne and his wife at the time, actor Mary Ure; Isaiah and Aline Berlin. After listening to a series of lectures Isaiah Berlin had given at Columbia, and getting to know him and his wife well, Diana said that “he is, without question, personally, the most successful human being I have ever known.” But, she added, in her customarily blunt way, “he has never really done good original work by his standards or by the standards of the people he most admires.… He’s a fine historian of ideas, but he isn’t an original thinker at all, and nobody can say he is.… He’s a wonderful explicator of other people’s work and a marvelous teacher.”

  Diana did her own work while in England, though she complained to Elinor that she had no typewriter table and that “the British have never heard of them!” She soon improvised and told Elinor that she was typing on “a very wobbly antique table of almost suitable height.”

  A year or so before leaving for Oxford, she had completed a short story she decided to submit to Byron Dobell at Esquire, who forwarded it to his managing editor, who wrote that “the story has a tendency to ramble along pretty slowly at times and could probably be tightened … but that it is surely smooth and competent enough for her to try some slicks—by slicks I mean of course, the ladies magazines, not us.” Dobell suggested that Diana send other things to him, and he ended his letter by saying, “If I’m not being presumptuous, I would certainly welcome any suggestions from Mr. Trilling.” None came from his former professor, and Diana eventually also abandoned the story, as well as any further submissions to Dobell. Two rejections were enough for her.

  At her makeshift typing table in Oxford, Diana was working on an essay commemorating the first anniversary of President Kennedy’s death, a piece that would remain unpublished until she made it the opening essay of Claremont Essays, published in New York by Harcourt, Brace and World in 1964, and in England by Secker and Warburg the following year, 1965. Both editions came out while the Trillings were in Oxford.

  In 1963 Diana had been selecting the essays to be printed in the anthology, one she was pleased to be putting together, although it didn’t wholly satisfy her need for an original book. A decade earlier Lionel had been under contract to Harcourt for a book to be called “Memorable Essays,” so the publishing house was familiar and homey to Diana (even though Harcourt wouldn’t become Lionel’s publisher until after his death, when it published uniform editions of his work). But Diana had met publisher William Jovanovich at various Columbia gatherings, and they had hit it off right away, and he thought that a collection of her essays was a terrific idea. He loved literary women.

  In America Claremont Essays was received as “a welcome event.… We are in her debt for a moving and often profound book.” The reviews were generally favorable, calling her prose “faultless” and saying she was “a superb arguer.” But some critics used the opportunity to attack her politics, calling her “a rather hysterical anti-communist.” Another said she had borrowed all her ideas on liberalism from her husband and that whereas his interests were always on the highest level of artistry, hers were “concretely … the embarrassments of recent history.” Diana, who was reading these reviews while in Oxford, was reassured by C. P. Snow, who told her, “We suffer from a great deal of this.… Some people suggest that I am the Svengali behind Pamela’s books.” He told Diana that he was “always astonished that people can be so insensitive … [but] obviously in your marriage and ours we can laugh these things off.”

  Another reviewer said that male critics are always more sure of their ground and can safely toss out ideas, while the females, “like Mrs. Trilling,” need to build an “elaborate framework” that is so academic it leaves no room for humor or playfulness. She is “over-anxious” another reviewer announced. The appraisal in National Review was especially nasty, the reviewer wondering if Lionel accepted the book’s dedication to him just to keep “the family harmony.” Diana wrote Elsa that Lionel considered the remarks concerning him “actionable,” although a lawyer was never engaged.

  Ever loyal and devoted Arnold Beichman raved about the book in the Christian Science Monitor: “To read Mrs. Trilling’s essays is to feel oneself in the presence of George Orwell. Not that she derives from Orwell. Rather both derive from the society and the politics which engaged them.” Stanley Edgar Hyman’s review in The New York Review of Books was positive but so confusing that a letter to the editor in the next issue asked “if it was intended to be a parody, either an intentional parody, definitely not a parody, or an unconscious parody.” Several months earlier, The New York Review of Books had asked Diana to review High School English Textbooks, by James J. Lynch and Bertrand Evans, but her “excellent” review (the only one she would write for the publication) was postponed because Robert Silvers, the editor, told her the next issue was running a review of Claremont Essays. In general, Diana was not happy with The New York Review of Books over her essay about Timothy Leary’s use of LSD, which it had rejected (but was subsequently published by Encounter). Diana wrote a seething letter to Robert Silvers, telling him, among many other things, that he should not have interpreted a previous letter from her as “kind and forbearing,” because “in the firs
t place this is not at all my style.”

  The review of her book that bothered Diana the most was the one by G. S. Fraser, which appeared in Partisan Review. Diana first learned about the review from Steven Marcus, who was on the magazine’s editorial board. Marcus wrote her that Fraser “tried to be fair to you and your work but didn’t succeed, in my opinion.” Marcus explained that “he deals with you harshly for being harsh to others. There did not, however, appear to be grounds for turning the review down.… William did the most he could; he wrote Fraser a note saying something general about the quality of the review. Fraser replied by writing an additional last paragraph, which has the intention of mollifying what he has said before. I am not at all certain that he succeeds in this intention.” (Fraser added to his review: “I should certainly have said two things which I omitted to say: what an excellent ‘straight’ literary critic Mrs. Trilling is, when she devotes herself, too rarely in this volume, to that discipline: and what clear, plain, and vigorous prose she writes, a model for any writer attempting the genre.”) Marcus concluded, “As your friends, both William and I felt in impossible positions, and I can speak for myself when I say that such incidents are the worst part of being an editor.”

  Diana wrote Quentin Anderson that she was not at all pleased with Steve’s “conduct,” and she faulted what she called his belief that “he is the purest of spirits and one’s loyal friend.” She added, “There was a time when I tried to make him see that he was working both sides of the street, but I had, finally, to give up the effort as hopeless.” She had been disappointed in his reaction to her essay on Ginsberg (first admiring it and then remaining silent over the storm) and said that, ever since, their relationship had been “precarious and necessarily attenuated.” Anderson had been harsh with Marcus, telling him to put up or shut up—resign from Partisan Review or “take a stand in print.” Marcus replied “that no intellectual issue of gravity was involved.” (Several years later, when Marcus asked Lionel for his opinion of an article he had written, one Lionel thought was “very pretentious,” Lionel, in a vindictive tone, wrote in his journal that he had lied about his judgment of the article and noted how Marcus had “leaped for the lie.”)