About finances (which were always on her mind) she said that Oxford was “perhaps the only place I’ve ever known where you can live on what to an American is no money,” adding that she had “allotted $600 a month of Li’s salary to cover living cost in England—but that she finds it covers much more—certain household equipment plus ‘jaunts’ to London.” Nonetheless, she told Elinor, who handled many chores for the Trillings at their apartment on Claremont Avenue, that they would have to cut the cleaning woman down to just three mornings a week because “this will be the last year of full salary for Lionel, and I must begin to pull in on all fronts.” Despite such worries, Diana confessed to Elinor, they were seriously thinking of retiring in Oxford. “To be old is inevitably to be lonely but I do think it better being lonely in pretty rather than sordid surroundings. I read here, hungrily, which I never do in New York, though I know not why not.” But the pull of Columbia, New York, and America was stronger than England’s, and they returned home for good after their second stay at Oxford.
Not everything had been agreeable in England; one person the Trillings did not revisit was E. M Forster. After a warm visit from him in New York when Jim was an infant, they had gone to see him in Cambridge when they were in Oxford in 1965 because Diana thought Forster would enjoy seeing Jim as a young student. “Well, it wasn’t the way one had dreamed such a visit would be. Forster didn’t really cotton very much to Jim … anyway; he begrudgingly gave us our tea … and some fruitcake. And he cut a very, very small piece for each of us, including this hulking sixteen year old, Jim, in a state of acute starvation all the time. Whenever he came down to Oxford, he ate his way through Oxford.… Forster didn’t offer any more cake, and Jim said, ‘Could I take another piece of cake?’ very polite—and Jim had really good manners, everyone commented on them—and Forster said ‘You’ll have it when I offer it to you,’ like that in a very unpleasant voice. Lionel and I were revolted by that. It soured the end of the relationship.”
At home the cultural wars continued: in May 1973 Arnold Beichman wrote both Trillings that he was going to take their names out of his acknowledgments in his book, Nine Lies About America, to spare them embarrassment, and he said he remembered how Diana had removed Norman Podhoretz’s name in her D. H. Lawrence letters when it appeared in paperback. There is no record of Diana—or Lionel’s—reply. But their names did not appear in the book.
With their affaires de cœur behind them, or perhaps still beside them, Diana and Lionel resumed what she called their usual life of closeness. Lionel’s life was always the connective tissue of her life, even when she was working on her own. She said that despite everything, “it was the most natural thing in the world for us to take hands. We would walk swinging hands. It wasn’t a gesture of people in love but rather of people who loved each other and had lived their lives in that kind of intimacy.” They had walked around Oxford and held hands. “It was automatic,” she said, even though “I often thought how can I stay married to this man—he’s a monster, because we fought all the time.… He was still angry at me all the time … but the marriage was bigger than both of us.” And it remained that until the end.
But the “usual life of closeness” did not have the same significance for Lionel. He noted in his journal a few years later, “it has come to me how little I enjoyed the Oxford year 1972–1973. I was not conscious of this at the time or for as much as a year later.”
Diana said that Lionel rarely mentioned writing fiction anymore. She repeated what she said often now: “It’s silly to say he could have been or should have been.… If a person doesn’t do it, then he hasn’t done it, that’s all. It’s silly to sit around saying that Lionel’s friend Henry Rosenthal could have been our American Joyce.… And it was the same with Lionel: He didn’t do it. He told me he just couldn’t be as much of a lunatic as Hemingway was.”
Diana tried to keep up with her salty letter writing. She told an editor of The Harvard Advocate she could not contribute to a publication that used such phrases in a letter as “in the last jot” or “’cliffe loyalty.” What was happening to language?! She would not stand for such expressions, ever. Except perhaps, for the English Oh.
* Published in 1967, this was Norman Podhoretz’s frank, controversial autobiography of ambition and opportunity. Although not asked to read the manuscript, Diana did (with Lionel’s consent) and agreed with her husband that Norman’s “central polemical point, that success was the dirty secret in our society, not sex, was a perfectly sound point … [but] for this point to be properly presented it shouldn’t be couched in journalism. Lionel just realized this as an inferior kind of literary work and he felt that it would be harmful to Norman’s career.”
16
JUST CLOSE YOUR EYES
Going to be so nice to be dead.
—Lionel Trilling, journal entry, c. 1971–1974
Sometime in the early 1970s, Diana told Thelma Anderson that before women’s liberation she was not conscious that her helping Lionel “behind-the-scenes” and his occasionally doing the same for her, especially with household tasks, could be considered a problem. But Diana was learning that men and women needed to consider sharing all responsibilities and said that Lionel didn’t want to give in to the pressures that society was now putting on him to do his share. “This,” she said proudly, “is exactly the opposite of Jim, who insists that men take their full share and is really doctrinaire about it.” But Lionel, old-fashioned and set in his ways, would not fall into step with the second wave of the women’s movement, which had begun in the early 1960s. (First-wave feminism had been mainly concerned with giving women the right to vote.)
On April 30, 1971, Diana had participated in a panel held at Town Hall in New York on women’s liberation, in which Norman Mailer, who had recently published The Prisoner of Sex, faced four outspoken women—along with Diana Trilling were Germaine Greer, author of The Female Eunuch (according to Diana, Greer had announced earlier it was her wish to sleep with Mailer); Jill Johnston, a journalist and lesbian spokesperson (who later disrupted the proceedings, Diana said, when two female friends came onstage, and they “rolled on the floor, hugging and kissing”); and Jacqueline Ceballos, the president of the National Organization of Women. Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex closely examined feminism and was greatly concerned about man’s loss of power as women acquired control over reproduction, and he concluded that the second wave had turned into “scientific vanity, destroying every act of nature.”
In a lecture later in the year, Diana described the Town Hall event as raucous and disorderly, not only because of the irate audience participants but because of the harsh attacks on her friend Mailer. Lionel was not in attendance but would have been pleased with the critics of the evening, who said Diana had held an “aggressively anti-feminist” position. As Diana later said about Mailer: “from the moment the curtain went up he was under the most intemperate assault from the women in the audience. He gave, of course, as good as he got in the way of insult, and I found myself glad he was able to: when I had consented to join the panel I had not contracted to be present at the ritual slaughter of an exemplary male.” It was the “family feminist” speaking up, receiving no applause for her unconventional position that year or any other. (“I think of feminism as both firmer and gentler, less competitive than women’s lib,” she would tell an interviewer a decade later, adding that “doing the best I could had nothing to do with being competitive with men.”)
At some point during the evening Mailer had referred to Diana either as a “lady writer” or “ a lady critic.” She said she hadn’t noticed. During a question period a member of the audience asked her if she objected to what Mailer had called her. “I replied that perhaps I ought to object,” Diana said, “but actually I did not.” She went on to say that her answer “was off the top of my head, in the mood of the moment, in my mood of the moment.” She explained that
at a meeting in which all sexual differences were being dismissed out of hand,
not only on behalf of equality for women under law and in the world of work but for all purposes of life itself; in the context of an evening in which one half of the human race, man, was being treated as expendable, I felt the need to separate my position from that of the other women panelists and much of the audience and put myself on the side of sexual duality—in writing as in life there were two sexes—there were men writers and there were lady writers, and I was a lady writer; the denomination did not trouble me.
But it made trouble for her with the other women, even though she said that “throughout my adult life I have thought of myself as a feminist, alert to discriminations against my sex,” and by 1972 had decided that Freud was dead wrong about women. Diana, like many other intellectuals, scholars, and writers, began to understand that he was mistaken about women having penis envy or being sexually passive and that he had in essence collaborated with the wide-ranging sexism of his time.
Diana deeply understood that just as “no man is a man writer—Mailer is not a male writer, he is a writer,” and of course no woman is a woman writer, so she was “a writer,” plain and simple. Some of her views were expressed in an unpublished essay she wrote sometime in the early 1970s. “America has long been able to afford the luxury of letting its women be women,” she said. “Even in pioneer days, when the American wife and mother moved alongside her man in the heroic conquest of new territories, she was never propagandized into denying her femininity. On the contrary, her special virtues lay in the fact that, despite her competence and courage, she remained first and always a female. And this was the tradition into which feminism arrived in America—a tradition of great competence plus great womanliness.” She concluded: “It was the purpose of feminism to increase the range of female competence and give women a more secure legal and economic base from which to develop their large capacities—but without sacrifice of their distinctively female emotions and preoccupations.”
Diana hoped to summarize once and for all her family feminist position, but she was unable to find a publisher for the essay. Undeterred, she decided to expand on the subject and write a series of articles on the American female. She drafted an exhaustive eight-page “tentative outline,” as she called it, and planned to analyze “the various myths of American womanhood created by advertising, merchandising, and the popular arts.” She posed such questions as “What is the advertising image of the American male? How does it relate to the female image?” She noted as particularly important that “good wifehood and motherhood” are “the basis of good family life, and good marketing [is] proof of good wifehood and motherhood.” She spread her wings beyond her main subject to discuss “democratic progressivism as an approximation of aristocracy,” because she had decided that the American middle class borrowed the old aristocratic images, and it was now easy for everyone to be an aristocrat “by following certain laws for living, regardless of birth.” What exactly were these “laws”? Diana said they had to do with “appearance, attitudes toward age, leisure, luxuries (with an emphasis on outdoor living), taste (everyone’s duty), and social responsibility (noblesse oblige).”
Diana had seemingly slipped into a rabbit’s hole, and she fell deeper and deeper into it with another section called “Man, Women and Sex.” Despite trying to either lead the reader down her rabbit hole or pull herself out of it, she could do neither. She buried herself in too many concepts. She was in overdrive. She itemized: “Sex in the service of society—mental health—‘adjustment’—as the first criterion of sound character,” she suggested. “Adjustment as a social goal. One’s social duty to be well-adjusted sexually; sexual adjustment as evidence of one’s good citizenship.” She created an unintended pool of tears for her readers by overwhelming them. It was far from vaporous fantasy because so many of her ideas were concretely intriguing: “The goal of a ‘good’ sexuality is happy family life, not personal pleasure,” she wrote. She discussed “the small part actually played by sex in the choice of a husband or wife and in our expectation of marriage” and “the disappearance of the concept of feminine ‘charm.’ ” But it was, in the end, too much of a “Mad Tea-Party,” and she left no breathing room for the reader to absorb her thoughts. She herself hadn’t absorbed the lesson pointed out to her by an editor after the rejection of a novella in 1940 that “there’s too much in it that you have put in to clarify things for yourself, but which in the end obscures it for the reader.”
Diana eventually decided to stay only with those ideas connected to a literary theme, and she wrote a long piece called “The Liberated Heroine,” in which she held forth that “our response to the heroine, unlike our response to the hero, is subjective, involved with our feelings of personal affection and identification.” She pointed to Tolstoy’s Natasha in War and Peace, and Henry James’s Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady, as what she called “spirited heroines.” (She commented that Jo in Little Women “represented my own first encounter with a heroine of spirit.”)
The New Yorker’s William Shawn passed on the new essay, writing Diana a frustrating letter: “This is a fine, original piece. I don’t think anyone else has said what you are saying. However, we do not think that this falls within our range.” Many of Diana’s ideas were worth exploring and were indeed original, as when she wrote that “heroic action has always been associated with war, which has excluded women. Of the many social changes that had contributed to the disappearance of the hero from the literature of recent decades and his replacement with the non- or un-hero of our present advanced literary culture, probably the most crucial are the closing of the frontier and the growth of the anti-war sentiment. And these are central as well in the development of our fiction of female liberation.” But Shawn did not suggest working with her on the essay to tighten it or strengthen its sometimes disjointed approach, which made her conclusions hard to follow. Still, the piece was eventually published in Partisan Review and, in England, in The Times Literary Supplement.
Diana needed a tenacious editor. She was still mourning the loss of William Jovanovich of Harcourt as the editor she thought would make a difference in her life. She could not make herself erase him from her life altogether, despite her profound disappointment over the rejection of what she now referred to as “the education-of-Diana-Trilling book”—the one about her years at Radcliffe.
But after she wrote Harcourt in December 1974 and asked for a formal release from “further contractual obligations,” Bill Jovanovich would not let her go easily. He blamed what he called “the series of errors” and “mistaken zeal … to protect him from too much detail” that caused Harcourt “to lose you as a distinguished author.” He invited both Trillings (it was Lionel he really wanted to publish) to join him and Bill Goodman for a dinner at Lutèce in February of that year. Diana replied that she now had plans with another publisher; at the suggestion of Richard Poirier, then an editor of Partisan Review, Little, Brown had signed her for a book of essays to be titled We Must March My Darlings. Diana wrote Jovanovich that she would like to hold his dinner invitation “in abeyance.… Perhaps it will turn out that I shall be signing a contract with HBJ all over again one of these days, and that, it seems to me, would make a splendidly celebrative occasion for all of us.” She meant possibly contracts for both herself and Lionel.
Diana told Thelma Anderson that from the time she and Lionel had returned to New York from Oxford in 1974, she felt he was conserving his energy and that “she often wondered whether he was responding to something deeper in his own body.” Jim, who had been in the Middle East while his parents were at Oxford, told his mother he saw a great change in his father.
Diana told Thelma also that Lionel, who had lost weight and was having back pain, “kept complaining about his chair being wrong, his desk chair, and I said, ‘Well why don’t you have the people come and see if they can readjust it,’ and he’d reply, ‘No that’s all right.’ ” She “asked him to try other chairs. ‘No no, no,’ none of them was right. He wasn’t feeling well, but he’d w
alk the street briskly and hold himself well.” Diana added that he fought hard against the undue fatigue he was experiencing and also the fact that his stomach didn’t feel quite right.
At first the doctors could find nothing physically wrong with Lionel and suggested that perhaps he was suffering from depression. Diana insisted more diagnostic tests be made. Lionel was not merely depressed; there was much more going on.
Diana agreed with what Steven Marcus had once told her years earlier, that “Lionel had a secret—again, a small bit of secret perversity. Against all empirical evidence he agreed with Freud about the death instinct. He said, ‘I believe it exists.’ And he would say that with a smile on his face, but he believed that it exists. And I think he believed that it exists because he felt it in himself. He felt deathward forces in himself, as any honest man I think at one point has to admit that he does feel in himself.”
Two days after the last of the tests, Lionel was informed, Diana said, that he had “a pancreatic disorder and that there would be an exploratory operation to see what it was. It never entered his head that this was a cancer of the pancreas.” But both she and Jim knew at once that it was cancer. The doctor told them, Diana said, that he supposed Lionel “was the kind of person who would want to be told.” But Diana cautioned the doctor to tell Lionel only if he asked about his condition.
Lionel did not ask, Diana said, and he “went through the operation in very good spirits.” And she said, “I already knew that he was going to die. Perhaps on the operating table or very shortly afterwards.”
The Untold Journey Page 30
