The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  New physical ailments—migraine headaches and a gall bladder problem—began to plague her. Diana explained that the headaches “would begin sometime around six or seven in the evening. By between seven and nine it would start to get more and more acute and with nausea. By nine I was gritting my teeth to keep from throwing up and by then I had to go to bed.… Eventually around midnight I would be so exhausted and fall asleep and wake up newborn the next morning, never felt better, I never felt better in my life than I did the mornings after these migraine attacks.”

  Toward the end of the 1960s she complained of “fuzziness” in her eyes, a symptom that would be the beginning of serious eye problems.

  And there was Lionel to deal with. He continued to blame Diana for everything that went wrong, and she said “his charges against me for being neurotic long outlasted most of my neurosis.… My undue dependency on him was all but cured.” Yet she strongly maintained that his rages did not carry over into the rest of his relationship with her. His rages “were just crazy talk that passed each time the words erupted,” she said resolutely. She concluded that it would take most of her life to realize that “it was a pretty even balance between us emotionally as in every other way. Our neuroses meshed. Yes, sure, Lionel suffered from my neurotic symptoms, but it didn’t ruin his life; in fact his life wasn’t ruined. And he similarly inflicted his neurotic symptoms on me. In the long run it evened out. Obviously if it hadn’t we wouldn’t have stayed together the way we did.”

  “We were a ritualistic pair, and as long as Lionel lived, we celebrated our wedding anniversary,” she wrote. “We did this even in years when we were little in the mood for celebration of any kind.” She believed that marriage “was the greatest invention of civilized man … but, to give up sexual experience, adventure, for the sake of your marriage is very sad. It’s a very big deprivation. I think very few people manage keeping a serious marriage going while being unfaithful. You have to be an awfully good liar and you have to have a husband who’s not home all the time the way mine was. You can’t be married to a writer or a teacher; you at least have to be married to a traveling salesman.”

  The last line of a letter Lionel wrote his wife when he was giving a lecture out of town speaks volumes about the complexity of their life together: “Do be happy, Sweet. I love being away from you to think about you. Lionel.”

  Diana never found the perfect man (as she had fantasized at Radcliffe) who tea-danced (or remained faithful), but as she wrote in an unpublished book, “Lionel would have been willing to dance had I encouraged him, but he danced badly. Even for a literary man he danced badly. But how could he not have liked to tea-dance at the Plaza? It would have been field work in F. Scott Fitzgerald.” But the Trillings did go to concerts and operas together, “always in the top balcony,” as Diana had envisioned while at college.

  In 1966 the Trillings were invited to Truman Capote’s Black and White masquerade Ball at the Plaza Hotel. They had met Capote in the early 1940s at one of Leo Lerman’s soirees. A few years later, Newton Arvin, who also knew the Trillings from Lerman’s parties, wrote Diana to ask if he could bring his new lover—Capote—to her dinner party. Gerald Clarke, Capote’s biographer, writes that Diana gave Arvin “a firm no,” adding that she “indignantly answered” that “when I want anybody to come to my house to dinner, I invite them.” Clarke goes on to write that “Newton angrily showed her reply to Truman who tore it up. ‘Of course you have to go anyway,’ Truman told him, and Newton did.”

  Lionel, at sixty-one, “discovered [at the Ball] there was another way of dancing rather than just holding a woman and guiding,” Diana told Thelma Anderson. He could basically dance by himself. “You could do something by yourself, which was very free and relaxed,” Diana wrote Thelma, adding that the partner “just moved back and forth while a woman spun around or didn’t or did things with her hands in the air or didn’t, and that all a man had to do was shuffle his feet a little bit. And Lionel was dancing perfectly adequately.”

  He did not stop dancing that night at the Plaza. “He danced with everyone in sight,” Diana told Thelma, and he later announced that because “I didn’t teach him the right kind of dancing … it was all my fault.” Once again, Diana was the wrongdoer. Diana was to blame. Even at the Plaza. Even after Lionel learned to dance on his own.

  * The speech was later published in The Woman in America, edited by Robert J. Lifton and published by Houghton Mifflin.

  15

  AT A TABLE

  Perhaps this was the act of courage he was facing all his life, and Diana replied: “Perhaps the act of courage he was facing all his life was to stay alive.”

  —Lionel Trilling, journal entry, 1961 (re: Hemingway’s suicide)

  In 1967 the Trillings, under the auspices of the Ford Foundation and a German organization called Atlantik-Brucke [Atlantic-Bridge], went on a two-week mission to promote German-American goodwill. The delegation was made up of Irving Kristol (who was in charge); Midge Decter; her husband, Norman Podhoretz; Dwight MacDonald; Stanley Kauffman, then the film critic of The New Republic; Richard Rovere, a critic for The New Yorker; his wife, Eleanor; the writer Harvey Swados; the writer and critic George P. Elliott; and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who would become a US senator for New York a decade later. (Gertrude Himmelfarb, Kristol’s wife, was not on the trip.)

  Although Decter, along with her husband, Norman Podhoretz, was part of the group, as was Eleanor Rovere, Diana wrote Elsa Grossman that she was the only female member. She wondered if she’d be regarded as a writer or a wife and told Elsa that “the American officials are in a tizzy trying to resolve the dilemma.” (Diana later said that Decter and Eleanor Rovere, who, she said, “was totally self-effacing and expected to be paid no attention to whatsoever,” came along at their own expense and were not official members of the delegation.)

  Diana was not prone to out-and-out lying, only to the occasional dramatic exaggeration to make a point. What point was she making to Elsa about the trip, that she needed to say she was the only woman? Did she mean the only official one? Did it galvanize her to appear to be the lone woman in a sea of men? Was she anxious to be counted equal to the men? After all, she once said that “most of the men I know in the intellectual community are much better read, much better informed,” than she was and that she “was brought up to be deferential to men and to think that men knew all kinds of things that women couldn’t possibly know, and that their minds worked better.”

  Was she challenging her sense of self-worth? Was she simply expressing how alone she felt despite having Lionel by her side? Or was there a veiled agenda?

  At the time, the Trillings and the Podhoretzes were “very, very close,” Podhoretz later said, and there was no reason for Diana to feel abandoned or left out. Decter said that despite Diana’s intelligence and sensitivity she “always stood at an odd angle” to the literary community. “She was not given a fair shake,” Decter pointed out, “and at the same time she responded by not giving a fair shake to many people who no doubt deserved it. But it put a funny color on her relations with the world in which she lived.”

  Diana once explained: “When I talk, I talk very sharply and very decisively. I don’t mumble around. I come to the point. And rather fast. That is my manner. And since I’m already usually irritated because the men in the room aren’t getting to the point fast enough, I will sound even faster, and a little fiercer than I actually am.” She was always trying to push away her instinctive submissiveness.

  Decter concluded that Diana was “too complicated for me to ever be sure I understood what she was up to—or that she ever did.” She added that “ultimately I joined the ever-growing army of people with whom Diana had a falling-out (in my case, in defense of my husband).”

  Diana had once told Podhoretz he wasn’t interested in literature; that what interested him the most was power. “This could not have endeared me to him,” she admitted. “I have a way of saying things like that and expecting people to
never think about it again.” She also remembered “this was at the height of Norman Podhoretz’s radical days, and it was right after he had sent Making It* to Lionel, and Lionel had told him to put it aside. Now here we were traveling together, and this was sort of hanging over us, not to be referred to.” On the goodwill mission, Diana would find it hard to consider Podhoretz’s wife an official delegate, although she really was, so Diana, at least in her correspondence, excluded her.

  The group started out in Hamburg, staying in one of that city’s most attractive hotels. (“A dream of old-fashioned elegance,” Diana said.) They then traveled to Berlin, Düsseldorf, Bonn, and Munich. “We’re always on the go,” Diana wrote Elsa, “meeting with the Mayors, big shot publishers, and bankers.” The group was given tickets to the opera, theater, movies, and concerts. They visited many museums, and even a Night Club in Berlin.

  Diana later described the trip as “one of the most sexually invidious experiences of my life where I was simply excluded from what was my professional right to be involved in. I never saw anything like that in Oxford.” She complained that at a dinner with an industrialist from the Ruhr region, she was kept away from the after-dinner discussion, with the host telling her, “But Madam, we do it this way in Germany. We keep the wives away from our business.” Diana was hurt and frustrated that “no male member of the company protested my exclusion,” not even her husband. “He was upset for me but his public behavior was no different than the others.… I guess I’ve never had any situation as a Jew which equals this for humiliation. I’ve never had any anti-Semitism directed to me which is the equivalent of the anti-femalism [sic] that was directed to me on that occasion, and throughout the trip but especially on that occasion. It is the most painful experience of being discriminated against that I’ve ever had in my life.” She later said even though she always “deferred a great deal to the men around me, she came to wonder whether any of them are quite as smart as I am,” despite their being better informed.

  After the dinner with the industrialist, when Diana was excluded, she, Midge Decter, and Eleanor Rovere were eventually allowed to sit in a balcony overlooking the library where the men were congregated. She noticed that Lionel was not sitting at the table with the men but on the steps. “This was his way of trying to show that he was trying to make a bridge between us,” she said. “But it wasn’t a very effective means of action.” Eventually, the host looked up at the balcony and asked the women if perhaps they had any “childcare” or “health” questions. Diana, wanting revenge, decided to ask a tough question about trade unions, “which threw the whole place into a commotion.” The host (“a Nazi at heart whatever he was politically”) blushed and stammered and finally said, “I’m afraid I can’t answer that at the moment.” Diana later wrote, “It was the most politically indiscreet thing I could have asked, and I did it purposely. It was a very quiet revenge; half the people didn’t know what was going on.” But Diana’s “quiet” rebellious conduct did bring about a small change when the group had an interview in Bonn with the chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger. Before the meeting, while the group was waiting in an anteroom, an aide walked up to Diana and told her that because of her age—she was sixty-two—she would be asked to sit at the right of the chancellor. Even though Diana realized that the government used her age as an excuse to place a woman nearby, she was pleased that the person she considered the only legitimate female delegate—herself—was placed at the table.

  Diana grumbled to Elsa about the amount of food they had to eat out of politeness everywhere they went. “Each of us in turn had now been violently ill, but manfully, and womanfully, we continue doing our duty. And when we are not eating, we have to talk, talk, talk.” She wrote about the student demonstrations against the “recrudescence of Nazism” they saw in Berlin and about how the arrival of their group “meant a great deal, and in fact, we seem to have had a considerable political influence” in terms of newspaper coverage. The group understood a new Nazism could be forming, and demonstrations like those in Berlin were necessary to stop any possibility of its reemergence. She added in a postscript that she thought Berlin was a “terribly ugly city. As for the wall, it must be seen to be believed—no pictures can give you any sense of its actual horror.”

  In the essay she wrote on the mission for The Atlantic’s April 1967 cover story, Diana said that “however disparate our temperaments or our political emphases, we were plainly a group made coherent by our shared suspicions of Germany’s capacity for political health.… We had not forgotten, nor could we forget, that we were in the country which had been able to devise, and implement, Nazism.” She described the German personality as “a kind of layer cake—plausibility on top of denial (in the psychoanalytical meaning) on top of guilt on top of carefully masked anger.” She said the cities she visited seemed “not to breathe.” The modern architecture “rises, in my view, like a monument to extinction: denying the past, it already memorializes the future.” She underlined that only in Bonn was she “able to re-create for myself any sense of a pre-Hitler Germany.” She later said that the whole time she was in Germany, she felt she was in “an alien world,” and the country looked nothing like the one she had visited with her parents and siblings when she was a child.

  In Midge Decter’s essay in The Atlantic she said that she found the Germans “obsessed with Nazism,” and when the subject came up, which was often, they responded with “extreme irritation, self-pity, claims of innocence, attacks on the sins of others, references to their sufferings during the war, and the young, of course, by announcing the year of their birth.” Decter also described in moving detail a visit to Dachau concentration camp. “My rage at the Germans was now direct,” she wrote, “and in an answering way, of human proportion.”

  Decter later said that she couldn’t “remember whether the Trillings were with us or not on the trip to Dachau; everybody else in the group was.” Diana never mentioned Dachau anywhere. Her essay made only one reference to a concentration camp. When describing a Catholic church she visited in Berlin, she wrote that “its courtyard reproduces the approach to a concentration camp; its interior is stark and terrible in its modernity, the eternal Church symbolized to a single piece of traditional sculpture, a fourteenth century wooden Virgin standing quietly at peace near the bare altar.” Diana was trying desperately to accept a reality she could not fully comprehend. She concluded: “Here, because there was no attempt to disguise, only the wish to confront, the full awful truth of the recent past, one might indeed feel fortified for the future.” Diana relied on her secret desire to be a Catholic (as well as her fascination with the Virgin Mary) to help her understand—as well as to conceal—the horror she was confronting on the trip, and a visit to Dachau would have been more than she could bear of “the full awful truth of the recent past.”

  Diana had once written a letter to The New York Times criticizing an editorial about the death of Dorothy Thompson, the celebrated journalist who had been expelled from Germany in 1934. Diana felt that the newspaper “failed to memorialize her as she deserves.” She said that Thompson “did more than any other individual, or group of individuals, in this country to alert the public to the menace of Nazism in a period when isolationism and inertia might otherwise have had their way with us.” The savagery of the Nazis was often on Diana’s mind, and she wrote about it in her own special manner and form, even though her letter was never published.

  Midge Decter said that “the whole journey to Germany was a very special thing for Diana, who up to that point had hardly been able to venture above the ground floor of a New York apartment building, let alone fly in the sky, and thus we were all both encouraging of and attentive to her.” But evidently not encouraging enough, or attentive enough. Diana felt forlorn on the trip, disheartened. The fib to Elsa Grossman served to take the edge off what was really troubling her. It was not necessarily being in Germany—although that was hard enough for her—or being in the company of so many distinguished men. D
espite her attempt to be always outspoken, inwardly she was still the girl who was warned not to be a smarty-pants. During the trip to Germany she felt her debating skills had diminished somewhat even though she could continue to see “the logical flaws in the positions that people are taking.”

  The real reason Diana was troubled during the trip—the hidden agenda—was that she was basically jealous. “In no time at all Midge had established herself as one of the prominent members of the group and had edged me out,” Diana said. She tried to get used to the situation but said that “she had found no way to cope with it.… When we sat at long tables I discovered that of course Midge was sitting near all the important people, and I was virtually sitting by myself.” The important exception had been the meeting with the chancellor, and Diana had been more than pleased that she had edged Midge out on that one, even if it took her age to do the job.

  Another thing rankled her: one of the literary people the group met (she doesn’t say who) had only heard of Norman Podhoretz, and was thrilled to meet him, but “had never heard of Lionel or me.… Norman Podhoretz was the big cultural news.” How could this be? Diana wondered. Who were these people that had suddenly sidelined her and Lionel? What did this say about their reputations, their reputations?

  She wouldn’t allow herself to dwell on it. She’d remember the best of times in Oxford, feelings that had sustained her after their return to New York in late 1965.

  After her own book publication in America and then in England, and after Lionel’s publication of Beyond Culture, she worked on and off on an article comparing British and American television. It was published in The Atlantic in 1967, the same year as the reports on the trip to Germany. Her ideas mattered.