The Trillings had bought their first television set in the mid-1950s, and Diana said that she “would watch television with Jim in the late afternoon and also over the weekends.” She would “watch all sorts of things: cowboy movies and baseball games.… There was a period in which I knew quite a lot about baseball because I used to watch.” As Jim got older, she “began to watch things she wanted to see, like Hawaii Five-O.… And Lionel would come into the room and sit down and watch, sometimes for five minutes sometimes for fifteen, but he would never feel the need to watch out a full film the way I did. He would then get up and go to his room and do whatever he was doing.”
She wrote in a letter that she eventually became “a TV addict”—and her favorite shows were detective and medical dramas, from The Nurses, a series that ended in 1967, to Starsky and Hutch, which began in 1972, and Hill Street Blues, which began in 1981.
Diana began her TV article by saying that “it always comes as startling news to the British that an American visitor can find their television so vastly superior to our own.” That opening contained the whole premise of her twenty-six-page appraisal, although British TV didn’t score all the points—America had more channels, and more technical virtuosity. But British TV had very few commercials, since it was primarily government-owned, and Diana was particularly impressed that “there is no British TV aimed at the bored housewife—no soap operas, no shopping quizzes.” She also praised British TV for instilling a feeling of intimacy in its programming, especially in its political news, which “is reported on the air as if it were an immediate family matter.” Certain programs dispensed with objectivity, and Diana liked that the broadcaster of a story about a brutal headmaster did not hide his feelings of revulsion. It was the same about programs dealing with sexual matters, which were treated with “unsensational frankness.” American TV evades reality, she said, while British TV never did. The series she enjoyed the most during her stay in Oxford was Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, which was so popular that “all classes” clamored to it. “Everywhere I went in England the latest episode was the topic of talk, as how could it not be—the series represented a new high in the adaptation of fiction to the popular screen.”
Diana also praised the “concreteness” of British television—in fact, of all of England, from its shops to its buses, lanes, and streets.
Writing about British television emboldened Diana. In February of 1968 she wrote a letter to Bill Beutel of WABC-TV News castigating the station for an appearance the journalist Jimmy Breslin made on the eleven o’clock news in which he commented on the ongoing New York City sanitation strike and did so in a way that she believed showed contempt for the audience. Breslin sometimes used language that was offensive to just about everyone. It was considered by many his trademark, in fact. His presentation was “grotesque,” Diana said, and insulting to the audience. She wanted her letter passed on to the executives in charge. Mr. Beutel took three months to reply and then told Diana he had indeed passed along her letter but knew of no action taken “one way or another.” But he, himself, he wrote her, was moving to London in ten days to become the London correspondent for ABC News and was planning to read her article on British TV in preparation for his new job. Jimmy Breslin, as far as it is known of the incident, just went on being Jimmy Breslin, never evading the reality that Diana in fact thought American TV should show more of.
Diana wanted to continue writing at length about issues and events that had social significance. She had not paid much attention to the 1960s counterculture—the social pressures involving authority, warfare, women’s rights, and the unfolding of the New Left. Antiestablishment events were widespread in the United States and Britain, with much of the dissent centered in London, New York, and Berkeley, California, where the Free Speech Movement was conceived.
Diana decided to look in her own backyard, especially after her return from Oxford. The Columbia University protests of 1968, in which students occupied five buildings to protest the Vietnam War—specifically the university’s affiliation with an armaments research think tank—were ripe for Trilling’s pen. The students also opposed the university’s plans for a new gymnasium that they argued would be segregated by limiting its access to Harlem’s African American residents, even though it was to be built on public land.
The Columbia Spectator’s editorial page announced on the second day of the student demonstrations, “The bedraggled and apparently bewildered administrators seem to make a wrong decision every time an opportunity presents itself.” The student paper reported that there was not even “a glimmer of intelligent action.” Diana was appalled by the events. By day three, the paper reported, plainclothes police hiding billy clubs under their clothing charged a line of faculty members, but by the following day a preliminary panel of faculty members had been formed to help deal with the growing crisis.
Lionel, at the time the George Edward Woodberry Professor of Literature and Criticism (in 1970 he would become a University Professor, Columbia’s highest honor), was one of twelve faculty members hoping to find a basis for a speedy settlement with the students. Diana remembered that “nobody looked to anybody on this committee as a moral leader except for one person: Lionel.” No faculty member could walk through the streets without a police escort. “Lionel resented being brought home by the police,” Diana said, adding that “I’ve never seen Lionel so exhilarated as he was—that’s from the very first morning after he came home after being up all night.… He slept for two hours, got up and went back and was up for the next twenty-four hours. And he wasn’t the least bit tired.” She commented that “everybody was having a good time if you want to put it uglily. I mean a university was being destroyed; many careers were destroyed in those weeks.… Even someone as serious as Lionel was having a good time. It was exciting. It was like being on the barricades.… It was like being in the army.… And Lionel admitted this to me all the time. He never used the words ‘having a good time,’ but he really got a kick out of it.… They had a sense of living intensely and of living in a critical situation in which important decisions had to be made on the spot.” But the mildly conciliatory solutions of his—and another larger—committee were not accepted by the administration, and a thousand police were called in to oust the students by force.
It was treacherous and violent. Blood had been shed. There was a faculty strike. Classes were cancelled. But within days the president of Columbia, Grayson Kirk, ordered all police off the campus, and over time, the university began to consider restructuring. A university Senate—one including faculty, administrators, and students—was created. Some of the student demands were met—the gym was never built—and the students were promised better communication with the administration. The relationship between the university and Harlem improved. The university severed all ties to the military. Peace, of a sort, prevailed, although the university’s reputation (and fund-raising efforts) plummeted for a long while afterward.
Did the university become too liberal as a result of the highly publicized student disturbances? Did it lose its center as a place of intellectual debate? These were two of the questions that Diana decided to tackle in an essay about the Columbia protests. She cited John Dewey’s definition of manners as “small morals” and went on to say that “a significant part of my opposition to the uprising derives from my translation of its manners into morals.” She said that her goal was “to generate some serious discussion on the problem of the future of liberalism in democracies.”
She wanted The New Yorker to be her publisher, although she admitted to editor William Shawn that she had an arrangement with The Atlantic, but they wanted a piece drastically shorter than the one she had in mind. But Shawn passed, even though the essay was not yet finished. She hoped then that the completed piece could be published in Harper’s, but Midge Decter, an editor there, told her that as “splendid and full of spine and care” as it was, the magazine would not be able to use it. And despite her telling Diana that she didn’t t
hink Commentary would be able to use it either, because they had already commissioned such an article, the magazine (edited by her husband, Norman Podhoretz) did indeed publish Diana’s essay.
Diana began her essay, which she titled “On the Steps of Low Library,” by explaining why she borrowed Norman Mailer’s title for his piece in Harper’s called “The Steps of the Pentagon” (later published in book form as The Armies of the Night). Diana said that “the two events, Mailer’s and the university’s, were continuous with each other in political and moral style.” She concluded that the revolution at Columbia “was no more a liberal than a Marxist revolution and that, indeed, it was a revolution against liberalism, which in actual effect polarized the University between the radical position … and a conservative position.” She wondered whether liberalism still mattered or had gone as far as it could. She explained no further.
Norman Mailer’s name is a leitmotif throughout Trilling’s sweeping, detailed examination of the uprising. Very few people found fault with the essay, except for its exceptional length, and one person, she said, criticized her for never joining the March on the Pentagon in the fall of 1967. In a letter she explained that although she was against the war, “I cannot make a united front with the anti-Americanism which provides the overarching principle of all ‘active’ protest of our Vietnam engagement, nor adopt its strategies.… Most important of all, I will not march under the flag of the Viet Cong.”
Her essay elicited several harsh letters from Robert Lowell, who thought Diana was “not too much on target” and that “all’s twisted in the current of ignorant, unseeing didacticism, in the rattled sentences.” In a follow-up letter he told her that her article was “haunted with apprehension,” as well as “bristling with the professional logic of prosecution.” He ended by telling Diana that “controversy is bad for the mind and worse for the heart.” Naturally, she did not agree.
In a letter she wrote to The New York Review of Books, about an essay by F. W. Dupee on the uprisings, she faulted Dupee for not announcing in his “first person account” that “he had decided to leave the campus and the city at that time because of his disgust with the behavior of the revolutionary students.” She knew this because he had phoned her to tell her that he was leaving town for a few days. She said that anyone reading the piece would not have guessed its author had any doubts about the conduct of the students. He should have included his reservations in his essay and mentioned that he was so disgusted by what was happening at Columbia that he left the city for a while. But in the end, she decided not to send the letter.
In 1969 Diana and Lionel moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a year when Lionel became the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, which required that he deliver a series of lectures. Once again, as in Oxford five years earlier, they had excellent housing, staying in one of the three or four oldest houses in Cambridge. Their residence the first semester belonged to Mason Hammond, a well-known Harvard professor of Latin and the history of Rome. Diana loved the house, especially that every room had a fireplace, and she did her best to keep the rooms filled with guests and comforting fires. “To have a fireplace in New York demanded either more bohemianism or more wealth than Lionel and I could ever attain,” she wrote in an unpublished book. On trips out of Manhattan she always liked looking at houses in the country and often secretly remodeled them in her mind. She knew that she and Lionel would never be homeowners. Lionel noted in his journal, “My first sense of being poor came the year I spent at Harvard—so many instances of inherited wealth. At Columbia this is very rare.”
Lionel delivered his six Norton lectures, which were published in 1972 as Sincerity and Authenticity. He noted in his journal that “not one of my friends showed the least interest in my Norton lectures to which the response of strangers was so strong.”
Diana said, “The composition of that book was different from anything else Lionel wrote.… He didn’t write them in advance. He was under awful pressure on the deadlines.” She explained how they collaborated:
On the last one he still didn’t have the pages finished, and he got very overwrought and I had to tell him to put the paper in the typewriter and we’d work out the rest of the lecture together. He’d sit next to me and I’d say, “Now what would you want to say about that?” Then he’d say something, and I’d go on: “And what would you say about that?” He’d look desperate and he’d say, “Nothing.” But I’d keep nagging—“You have to say something,” and eventually something would come out which I’d elaborate, with his amending or correcting my suggestions.… He’d say, “No, that isn’t what I’m saying,” and I’d say, “Well, what’s wrong with it?” Then he’d say it, and I’d say, “Well, right, why don’t you say just that?” It was a tortuous procedure, but the lecture got done.
Jim Trilling commented that his mother “had the ability to turn messes into brilliant prose.”
Lionel, who was reluctant to hand out credit, wrote in his journal that “the work situation was, of course, most deplorable. All that resulted from daily repair to my study in the college was not one lecture—sheer hell to bring a semblance of creation with D’s help.”
Their very close collaboration was far from an isolated instance. Diana had done the same thing with his Prefaces to the Experience of Literature, which had been published in 1967. “Lionel had the worst time with them,” Diana said. “He didn’t really want to do the book; he put it off, lied to himself, lied to me about what he had to do. It was ten years late, and he would have made money if the book had been published on time. The essays were badly written. I virtually wrote the preface.”
Perhaps not paradoxically, she was having trouble with her own work. She wanted to have a new book of her own. She submitted a chapter of a book-in-progress about her Radcliffe days (which she eventually titled “The Education of a Woman”) to Harcourt, which had been her publisher for Claremont Essays. But William Goodman, the executive editor, told her in a blunt letter that it was his “sad duty to return your extraordinary preliminary draft chapter,” and the reason given was one often told to writers—there was not a sufficient market for such a book.
Diana was devastated, especially since she was under contract to Harcourt, and both Goodman and William Jovanovich, a friend as well as her publisher, had encouraged her and had liked the early pages she had shown them. She decided it was about money and that they thought she was going to demand more than a minimal advance. So she assured them she did not want a lot of money. The situation was further complicated by the fact that Lionel wanted Harcourt to be his publisher. He thought he could extricate himself from Viking, but it turned out not to be possible at the time. A further complication was, as Diana learned, that Jovanovich hadn’t ever authorized the rejection of her chapter. In a complete turnaround William Goodman wrote Diana on October 16, 1972, that “Mr. Jovanovich would like to see your book,” but because he, himself, had thought that Diana “felt the book had strong commercial possibilities and wanted the ultimate advance to reflect that view,” he had rejected the proposal. Diana told Elinor Hays that Harcourt’s renewed interest in her had made a “fantastic difference in her ability to work.” Nonetheless, the book was rejected again. Two years later Diana asked for a formal release from her contractual obligations in order to find a new publisher. Even though Diana felt betrayed by Jovanovich, she wanted to remain on some sort of cordial terms with him in case she thought of ever returning to him. Whatever the true explanation—business or friendship—his hold on her was enduring.
In 1972 Lionel decided to accept a second invitation to become a Visiting Fellow at Oxford, and the Trillings happily returned, this time to All Souls College. They stayed not in a house but in a comfortable apartment on Crick Road in North Oxford. Diana wrote Elinor Hays that her household routine was similar to the one at Claremont Avenue. Lionel again helped out occasionally, cleaning up the breakfast dishes and shopping for groceries when needed.
Diana felt at home in
England right away and told Elinor that she was working well. She was writing a review of a biography of Frieda Lawrence for the New Statesman. She was now fully aware that her start at The Nation three decades earlier had made her not an “accidental” (her term) writer but a sought-after reviewer whose strength was an ability to interpret literature in three distinct ways—psychologically, socially, and politically—all realized in a single essay.
“Have I told you how satisfying I find Oxford a place to live in this time?” she wrote Elsa Grossman. “And we’re not being given the Visiting Fireman treatment like the last time, but perhaps for that very reason I’m liking it even better.” She also liked the setting—“just the joy I feel at being able to see sky, grass, trees from every window here on the ground floor and my pleasure in walking around those pretty streets to shop.” She told Elinor she’d been the only woman in a short dress at dinner parties, so she went out and bought “a long black and white print dress and a bold black and white wool skirt and two cashmere sweaters.” Lionel did some shopping, too, and Diana wrote Elinor that he bought a “stunning” topcoat and rain hat—“he looks beautiful.” He bought some shirts and sweaters at Marks and Spencer’s department store. “He loved great bargains,” Diana told Thelma Anderson, adding the detail that “he loved cotton and wool, and hated synthetics.”
Diana felt so content in Oxford that she decided to cut her hair and to let it go gray. The English atmosphere encouraged a new free spirit in her. She liked the openness of the English about certain aspects of child-rearing, writing in a note that “the English talk about education and discuss their anxieties about their growing children even more, and far more openly, less self-protectingly, than we do. They never keep it a secret if their children are having psychiatric help as we do in America. Yet of course there is so much less Freudian ‘currency’ in conversation than at home. It may be that an English mother, while indeed feeling guilty for the inadequacies of her offspring, is not as guilty as an American mother.” She even liked the English use of the word Oh in conversations, that it was a way “of winning time to think of an answer, covering embarrassment, implying disapproval.”
The Untold Journey Page 29
