The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  William Phillips wrote Diana, stalling with four paragraphs of gossip and news before he could tell her: “I had to walk a tightrope when I wrote to Fraser. I told him that of course we could not censor his review … but that I personally felt it was quite harsh.” Phillips told Diana, “I’ve also asked a couple of people to write letters. I should add that not all the editors know that I’ve done this.”

  Diana, who now, more than ever, enjoyed throwing her weight around, did not want to appear vulnerable to Phillips and told him she was not really upset with Fraser’s review. It was important to her to remain tough in his mind, although she told him it was “sweet” of him to have worried on her behalf—and that she was grateful for the added paragraph, which she found “soothing.”

  After much back-and-forthing Diana decided not to reply to the review, and she wanted also to stop Elinor Hays from writing a letter of protest. Elinor was beside herself for such statements as “Mrs. Trilling’s own concept of civilization is, it seems to me, not only Freudian, but typically both Jewish and Puritan” and for Fraser’s blunt name calling: Diana was “smug, ungracious, contemptuous, condescending, judgmental, incoherent.” Additionally, Fraser wrote that Diana (in her essay on the Hiss case) “did not consider what seems to me the most interesting possibility, that Hiss really was a fellow-traveller, and that Chambers knew it (and a new fanaticism being just as unscrupulous as an old one) had no hesitation in framing him.”

  But in the end Diana decided that, after all, she absolutely needed to write a letter (as did Elinor, although her letter was never printed), so Diana asked Phillips to give her “a good bit of space” in the next issue, and she told Phillips she could not promise to be “impersonal.” Indeed, Diana said that on rereading the review, she thought it was beneath PR’s standards to print it and that the magazine would have been “entirely” justified in refusing to print it. In addition, before it was determined that Elinor’s letter would not be printed, Diana did a little fine-tuning of it—she changed “pomposity” to “complacency,” as when Elinor wrote, “Literary malice can have its charm, but when, as here, it is combined with a lack of critical perception which mistakes self-irony for ‘complacency,’ it hardly deserves to be in your pages.” Diana told Elinor that “nobody (yet) has used the word ‘pomposity” of my Ginsberg essay … so your use of the word would be adding to the vocabulary of invective.”

  Diana eventually composed a detailed ten-page letter addressing each and every one of Fraser’s criticisms. Fraser replied to each of her points, and name-calling went on. He wrote that he was not, as she said of him, “a sort of improvising existentialist. In fact, I am very much of a traditionalist,” adding that “like Arnold,” I believe in the “free play of mind.” He further wrote that he had no “covert motives as a spokesman of some political or literary group for my attitude to your book. Have you never met anybody who—without any ‘material interests’—in Conrad’s sense, being involved—disliked you freely, spontaneously, and disinterestedly?” And, he concluded, Diana Trilling just would not—could not—take any responsibility for what he—Fraser!—was saying.

  Putting aside her disappointment with many of her reviews in America, Diana wrote Elsa from her Oxford typing table that “the highlight of our current life is that Lionel got off the ms. of a new volume of essays,” and she asked Elsa if she liked the title. (She did.) Lionel’s book, Beyond Culture, would be published in 1965 by Viking. Diana was more excited about his publication than hers.

  She wrote Elsa that “at the moment he struggles to revise and strengthen the last essay which is the lecture he gave … at Cambridge, and he still must do a tiny preface.” Although Lionel still grappled with his writing, Diana said, she did just moderate editing on that book, a great deal of it before they actually left for Oxford. The rest she completed at Oxford. Some sensitive critics of Lionel’s work believe that a certain “sludginess” exists in a number of the essays. This is most likely attributable to Diana’s not helping him enough; after all, she was working on her own collection. “He needed me in his criticism,” Diana said firmly, “and he knew he had problems.” Analysis had “taken the edge off his writing difficulties” and had helped somewhat with his depression, “but not enough.”

  The New York Review of Books attacked Beyond Culture in what was considered by many a patronizing review. In a reply to several letters to the editor, the reviewer, Robert Mazzocco, a poet, said that Lionel Trilling is a splendid literary critic and literary historian, but as a “thinker” Mazzocco had his doubts. Diana was told that as a personal favor to Lionel, one letter in his defense was printed without asking for the reviewer to respond.

  Diana would do much more extensive editing on the book Lionel would publish seven years later, Sincerity and Authenticity, his six Norton lectures, delivered while he was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. However, she said that during their year in Oxford Lionel “lectured vaguely on the themes of sincerity and authenticity, playing with this book in some way, but he hadn’t really written the lectures at all; he had to do this while he was in residence at Harvard [1969–70].”

  Diana understood that in England she was a celebrity “of a very limited kind,” doing her “quiet, serious work,” and she was pleased that she was rarely excluded from events. “I was invited with Lionel all the time.” Thelma gushed in a letter that “we love the clear sound of your lives.” Diana wrote Elinor that when Lionel was toasted at a male-only event, the master of ceremonies “talked all about his distinguished wife, whom they were glad to have in Oxford with him.” She had also earlier confessed to Elinor that he “went to his first do on Saturday night and came home two hours later than he had said, reeling drunk. I hope my response to that Initiation will protect me against repetition!!! He had another [party] tonite.”

  A newspaper in Edinburgh asked Diana to write an essay comparing Oxford and Columbia cultures. She was also asked by the Oxford Critical Society to give a talk on Edward Albee, and she used a lecture on Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? she had first delivered to the Radcliffe Club of Princeton in the spring of 1963. She told her audience she was not an expert in the theater but would talk about the play “as a document of contemporary society” and that she was certain that playgoers said what they thought of any given performance right off the bat, while readers of novels waited for critics to help them decide what they thought. She argued that “the message of Mr. Albee’s play couldn’t be more terrible: life is nothing, and we must have the courage to face our emptiness without fear. Yet his play is a spectacular success.… Why?” She said that Albee’s view of the world confirms the audience’s sense of victimization and that Albee tells us we have nothing to be ashamed of in terms of our transgressions. Diana went straight to the point: “It is not our fault.”

  She wrote Elsa that her talk “was successful in the sense of my having held my respectable own against their concerted wish to preserve Albee against attack. It was a hot question period, but you would have been satisfied with my performance.” Later, under the auspices of the State Department, she was invited to give the same lecture in Amsterdam, and she wrote Elinor that “Holland’s leading literary critic [Diana does not name the person] addressed not a word to me, only to Lionel—I felt I was back in America!”

  Diana wrote Elinor that the women of Oxford “don’t rebel against the male supremacy,” as they do in America, and under certain circumstances neither did Diana. Because in England she felt secure about her literary position, she liked the after-dinner tradition of the women departing upstairs for the hostess’s bedroom and the men departing to drink their port. This ritual did not offend her as it often did in New York because she said she got to know the other women and then later got to talk to the men whom she hadn’t met at dinner, a dinner where her partners on either side “had the responsibility to entertain her throughout the dinner.” She told Elinor that “all the men at these gatherings pay far more attention to m
e than I ever was used to in New York.” England had some sort of sorcerer’s charm for her. (She later told Elsa that she thought “there was a kind of polarization of sexual feeling in the [American] community as a result of women’s liberation.”)

  Diana was particularly impressed that the husbands helped during the dinner. At one very fancy party hosted by a headmaster, the husband and his grown son did all the serving. “That made me laugh,” Diana said, “because they thought they were following the American pattern, and I was trying to remember when I had ever seen a husband get up from a table in America.” She said that Lionel helped more than other husbands, but he did so “behind the scenes until the company came. He would help me clean the vegetables, clean the house and set the table, polish the silver,” but once the guests arrived, he sat, not wanting his friends to see him helping in any way. And despite her father seeming to be forward-thinking about his daughters always being self-sufficient, she eventually admitted that he “would have thought it the most humiliating thing in the world to get himself a glass of water; and he didn’t know how to make himself a cup of tea.” But Diana later told Elsa that while they were in Oxford Lionel did not help her as he used to, even behind the scenes, and that from the time they returned to New York from Oxford “there was a steady diminution of any participation in the household. It was as if he felt that he had to conserve his energies for work as he got older.”

  Diana once asked Iris Murdoch why she had been told to expect nothing but rejection while they were in England. Surprisingly, Murdoch answered that Oxford “is a wonderful place for women like us, women who are professionally established in their own right.” The English had heard of Diana’s work, that was the main thing, and she later concluded that it “was absolutely a wonderful year for me. I think I enjoyed it more than Lionel did.” There was mischief, too, as when one of the Fellows from another college asked her to dinner alone.” Diana wrote Elinor that he told her “that’ll show ’em how to treat women!” At another dinner she met the only female Fellow, who also asked her to dinner, telling Diana that “the rule is that a woman can be invited only if she is asked ‘in her own professional right.’ Therefore if she asked Lionel there might be the question whether I was there in my own right or as his wife.”

  Jim, now sixteen, had come to England with his parents. While the family was still in New York, C. P. Snow had advised Diana on all the suitable schools and said he thought Westminster was his personal preference, especially since Jim “would be within easy taxi reach of us and other friends, which might be useful. Westminster ‘boys’ are often free for a couple of hours around tea time.” As it turned out, Jim loved Westminster, but the school was in London, and an hour and a half from Oxford, so not an easy taxi ride.

  After Diana’s lecture in Holland, when Jim was on a school break, the three Trillings traveled to Paris, where, Diana wrote Elinor, “Li and Jim were strangely resistant, and a nuisance in the early days.… I’m afraid we are not as a family very avid travelers. Lionel, especially, is very restless and muted, sort of turned inward on himself in strange surroundings.” Diana said that both Jim and Lionel were “overwhelmed with anxiety,” and all they wanted to do was read in the hotel room.

  A few years earlier, Jim, an avid cello player, had given up playing it, to his mother’s great disappointment, because although he played well, he couldn’t seem to tune the instrument himself. Diana later discussed the situation with Leo Lerman in one of their almost daily phone chats. Lerman recorded in his diary that Diana told him that Jim “could have had a brilliant musical career, not as a soloist, but as a member of a quartet,” and that this never happened because Jim found it “unbearable” to have his mother, “with her perfect pitch,” tune it for him. Lerman also noted that Diana told him that Jim refused to give the cello away and then wrote, “So the instrument remains a permanent monument of this son’s hatred of his mother. ‘There’s something in me he really loathes,’ Di told me months ago; ‘we’re friends, but he hates me.’ ” (Jim Trilling later commented that this statement is an example of why he began to be at odds with his mother. “I hated practicing; part of it was I wasn’t given pieces I liked. And how could I explain I had talent but didn’t have an ear? The problem was impatience and frustration. But why did my mother have to make it personal? ‘He hates me’? She often did that.”)

  Jim was doing well at Westminster, away from his parents, although Diana often wrote her friends that there remained much pushing and pulling between them. Still, she said, Jim was beginning to grow out of his difficult, sometimes out-of-control, behavior. Lionel noted in his journal that he thought his and Diana’s sometimes “joint derogatory remarks about their closest friends,” as well as years of “expressed exasperation” toward his [Lionel’s] mother had had a bad effect on Jim, “leading him to disrespect.”

  In the spring of 1965 Norman and Adele Mailer (his second wife) were scheduled to visit the Trillings in Oxford, and Diana wanted to impress him with a lavish dinner at the faculty dining room. But Norman wrote her: “Oh, Diana, I know you. You’re such a devil, fully aware of my wild British reputation, you will say, ‘Norman Mailer is coming to tea on April 20th,’ and your Oxford friends will say, ‘Are you out of your mind, Diana?’ ” Mailer requested a small party, and Diana agreed. One of the guests was Iris Murdoch, and Diana said Mailer wanted to discuss how to dramatize novels with her, but Murdoch found his questioning of her offensive. Diana said Mailer was completely confused by her attitude and was hurt by it. “She was really being very unpleasant with him, I had never seen her that way—she was always very pleasant with me.”

  Still, on the whole the party was a big success, and Diana wrote Mailer afterward that the guests “adored” him. She told him also she had felt slightly jealous that they had taken to him, and Mailer replied, “Bless you for your jealousy when they said nice things. How human you are, the very last one.” (But Diana was all too human; she later wrote Elinor that she hadn’t liked An American Dream—published in 1965—and thought it was the book of “an insane man.”)

  Diana awaited the English publication of Claremont Essays with some trepidation. As it would turn out, the reviews there also had an edge that was painful to her: she lacked originality. She was too romantic. She saw things “smudgily.” She used “too many manufactured portmanteau Americanisms,” one reviewer wrote, meaning words like self-reference, self-evaluation, self-discipline, self-delusion, self-definition, self-mythologizing, or self-pity. A reviewer for The Guardian called her vocabulary “too permissive,” saying it would “baffle British readers.”

  But the review that incensed her the most was one by the novelist, poet, and critic A. Alvarez, in The Observer, which stated up front that in comparison with Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Mary McCarthy, “Diana Trilling is less original.” Furthermore, he said, “she is a victim of cultural circumstances” in which “her writing is now settled into a comfortable, established, psychoanalyzed maturity.” This was certainly not flattery; Alvarez, whose parents tried to kill themselves when he was a child, never saw psychoanalysis as a harbinger of everlasting wisdom.

  Diana wrote a letter published in the paper a week later, saying that Alvarez had not only distorted her work but vulgarized it. That was the end of that—what else could she do? After all, “psychoanalyzed maturity” was what she had always wished for! Still, she wrote Elsa Grossman that she was certain “people are embarrassed seeing me—they hadn’t known I was such a monster.… If only, like Hannah Arendt, I had influential friends to protest on my behalf. But maybe here, as at home, when my friends protest, they’d not be printed.”

  She looked inside her own family and decided, as she wrote in The Beginning of the Journey, that she had a “simpler explanation of why my marriage may have detracted from my literary recognition.” She concluded that “people will celebrate one member of a household but not two.”

  Lionel didn’t leave enough room for Diana to be lionized.
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br />   Decades later, Alfred Kazin would describe Diana in a memoir cruelly as “a dogged woman and looked it,” and he would go on to attack her frequent letters to the editor, saying that “sometimes she wrote in to criticize an unfavorable review of a book for not being unfavorable enough.” He continued that with this seething sense of her “intellectual political righteousness,” Diana “always seemed more alert to the wrongdoings of other intellectuals than to the beauty of the creative art.” Diana said that Kazin’s dislike of her enraged Lionel, who almost punched him when Kazin said that Lionel should disassociate himself “from that wife of yours.” But Diana had to learn to live with such denigrations. In his book Ex-Friends Norman Podhoretz quoted from a letter Mary McCarthy wrote to Hannah Arendt about Diana, in which she called Diana a “fool” whose recent letter to the editor should have been thrown into the wastebasket, but it wasn’t—only because of her marriage to Lionel.

  Diana was almost sixty and had pretty much accepted life’s disappointments and obstructions. She had a good year in England but was glad to be back on American soil again. Fortunately, the only debilitating phobia that lingered was her fear of heights, which had not been a problem for her while she was in Oxford. Writer Stephen Koch remembers going to a party held on the ninth floor of a building in New York, and Diana was present “because the windows were covered with blankets so it was like a padded cell—but that’s how you got Diana to come up above the second floor.”