The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  Around this time she managed to hire a professional archivist to help her organize all of Lionel’s papers, and she wrote in a letter to a friend that she was also beginning “to put the first bit of order into her own papers.” Diana’s future archive mattered, too.

  Diana was involved in some bitter feuds in the decade of Lionel’s death, starting with Lillian Hellman. Diana and Lionel had continued to see the playwright over the years, and Hellman remained, in many ways, Diana’s best “large-scale friend.” They spoke on the telephone often, wrote letters, and shared dinners and parties together, usually at Hellman’s apartment.

  “We’re all just liberal democrats together,” Hellman had once told Diana. Indeed, Diana had written Hellman a long and strong letter after Hellman’s testimony in 1952 before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where she had delivered her well-known line: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” Diana had written her friend:

  As I told you on the phone, Lionel and I had great respect for the position you took in Washington, the willingness to answer all queries about yourself but not to incriminate your friends. The copy of your statement, however, gives us pause on several points. The most important is arriving at one’s decision to speak or not to speak against this one or that one. It is your blanket whitewash of all your political associates on the ground that they were all loyal citizens, which makes—I believe—your position an unsound one. By your statement, you would feel it your duty to report anyone whom you thought disloyal. The whole weight, then, of your position rests on the soundness of your political intelligence … and here, frankly, I do not concede your competence.

  Although their correspondence, phoning, and socializing would go on for two more decades, including the swapping of recipes (“I think Lionel would like this: it’s a famous New Orleans dish,” Hellman scribbled on one for cassoulet with duck), she never forgot what Diana had once written her: I do not concede your competence. She did reply to Diana’s letter, telling her, “I like you, I respect you and I have a good time with you. That is almost always enough for me. I did think that time between us would, or could, take care of things. But I can’t offer to discuss myself. I had a long analysis and I know the difficulty in telling, and in listening to, the truth. Anything else is now for me rather unpleasant comedy.”

  Little, Brown was also Lillian Hellman’s publisher, and her new book, Scoundrel Time, was being published in 1976, the year before Diana’s book of essays, We Must March My Darlings. When Diana learned that Hellman was going to use as “the springboard for an assessment of Lionel,” as Diana phrased it, the new introduction that he had written to The Middle of the Journey, in which he referred to Chambers as “a man of honor,” she asked Roger Donald, her editor at Little, Brown if she could add some material about Hellmann’s new book to an essay in her collection. It was agreed that she could.

  In Diana’s essay, “Liberal Anti-Communism Revisited,” she said that she had “written a very, very few sentences about Lillian and Scoundrel Time. (Actually she wrote four detailed “passages,” as she called them in the paperback edition, where she also added a very long footnote.) As The New York Times later reported, one of the passages appears at the beginning of “an expanded version of an article [written in 1967] about a symposium by Mrs. Trilling in 1976.” The newspaper quoted Diana: “The issues … have continued to divide the intellectual community with ever-increasing acuteness, albeit with always-diminishing intellectual force. The most recent document of this division is … Scoundrel Time.” The paper went on to report that “Mrs. Trilling says the words Little, Brown wanted deleted were ‘albeit with always-diminishing intellectual force’ ” and went on to quote Roger Donald as saying that he “objected to the fact that Lillian Hellman is an example of ‘diminishing intellectual force.’ ”

  Diana felt that Hellman had implied—actually more than implied—that she and Lionel were among the “scoundrels” of her title because the three of them differed politically, specifically about Whittaker Chambers. Diana went on to say that Hellman had completely missed Lionel’s point in calling Chambers “a man of honor” and that her old friend “knew precisely what she was doing” and that she “intended to tar Lionel with the brush of McCarthyism.” She said that if he were still alive, there would have been grounds for a suit.

  Hellman wrote, “Facts are facts—and one of them is that a pumpkin, in which Chambers claimed to have hidden the damaging evidence against Hiss, deteriorates—and there had never been a chance that, as [Lionel] Trilling continues to claim, Chambers was a man of honor.” What Hellman appears to have meant in a somewhat confusing statement is that pumpkins decompose over time and that if Chambers had placed the papers in one, they also would have decomposed, so this indicates that he never had any intention of producing evidence to back up his accusations—thus, Chambers was in no way a man of honor. In answer to Hellman’s statement, Diana wrote that “facts are indeed facts—and the papers which helped to convict Hiss were never near the pumpkin. There were no pumpkins among the so-called pumpkin papers, and no one acquainted with the facts had ever, as Lillian Hellman’s report in Scoundrel Time might be taken to suggest, proposed that there were. There was a handful of microfilms, some undeveloped, and even uncapped, which Chambers hurriedly took from documents he had hidden elsewhere. And these microfilms stayed in the pumpkin only a single day, outdoors, before being turned over to the authorities.” (In The Beginning of the Journey Diana returned to the controversy, making clear that Hellman always thought the so-called “pumpkin papers” were literally composed of paper and were not microfilms, and thus would have rotted along with the pumpkins.)

  Diana’s passages—thoughts, opinions, ideas, sentences, whatever one wishes to call them—about Hellman had caused Little, Brown to ask Diana to remove them, but Diana had refused, and her contract was terminated. She wrote a friend that it took three martinis for her editor, Roger Donald, to give her the news. Jim Trilling said his mother felt a “terrible betrayal that he chose Lillian Hellman over her, all the more so because she found him terribly attractive.”

  Diana had also written that Hellman’s book, an autobiography, “is being read as a political revelation innocent of bias,” and Diana, in essence, damned Hellman’s lack of objectivity, which Hellman later told The New York Times was actually “a hysterical personal attack on me.”

  Diana wrote in a letter to Aline and Isaiah Berlin that “from then on life became a kind of gleeful hell [The New York Times ran several news stories on the quarrel] in which the telephone never stopped ringing and in which Little, Brown cum L. H. never stopped acting stupider and stupider.” Diana had hoped Hellman would object to the censorship and ask for Little, Brown to continue to publish Diana, but Hellman did no such thing. Diana didn’t understand that Hellman was never going to forget “I do not concede your competence,” despite immediately writing several letters that Diana described as “wild alternations between seduction and threats of legal action,” and in fact even continuing with the semblance of a relationship for decades. The clash highlighted Diana’s conviction that, as she later wrote, Lillian Hellman “was one of the most ardent of fellow travelers. She never had a position that disagreed with them [the Communist Party] and they knew her as one of their best, most trustworthy friends, of very very great service to them.”

  Lionel had once written in his journal about Hellman: “She is an impossible person, stupid and disloyal, but she has the great and curious virtue of making life seem interesting, ordered, valuable, like life represented in some plays.” He also once quipped in his journal that she was “a greatly underdepreciated woman.”

  The drama went on for weeks. It was also full of mystery. Diana wrote the Berlins that a snake—nonpoisonous, she was told—was put next to the front door to her apartment, and that the snake disappeared “under my floor where it lived for five weeks until it was caught and decapitated.”

  Friendships w
ere put on the block: a person was either for Hellman or for Trilling. “Lillian began to get busy on both the professional and social fronts,” Diana wrote in a letter. Diana said she invited Richard Poirier to dinner, and he declined, saying that Lillian “was nervous, and he didn’t want to upset her.” Diana also said that at a dinner party in New York where she was present, a close friend of Hellman’s “retreated to the bathroom and didn’t again emerge until there was no risk that he would have to speak to me.”

  And then there was the blurb.

  Norman Mailer had promised one to Diana for We Must March My Darlings, and confusion about it arose on several fronts. After a friend of Diana’s told her it was “undignified” for someone as established as she was to have blurbs, she told HBJ to cancel any blurbs. But Mailer had already sent in his and had, in fact, even sent in a revision of it, one that Diana described as “disheartening” and “very, very down” from the original version. When Diana saw the new version, she was sure that Hellman had made him change it to a less enthusiastic one, even though the original one had been, according to Diana, also quite “unusable” because of its “ambiguousness” about Mailer’s “political sympathy” with the Trillings. Diana told Mailer that the new blurb, “while better written than its predecessor, is an even firmer disclaimer of approval of me.” She said that she had heard from “many sources” that he had altered the blurb at Hellman’s “insistence.”

  Mailer replied to Diana that when he saw in the newspaper that Little, Brown had broken Diana’s contract, he said to his secretary, “I’m going to lose the friendship of both women.” He couldn’t believe, he told Diana, that she listened to idle gossip over his word. He then documented how “Lillian and I went into the back room at her place and had it out.” He continued, “I can assure you a rough ten minutes with Lillian back and forth is not, to my mind, a terrifying experience to endure, and you ought to know I’d lose anyone’s friendship before I would alter a quote at ‘their insistence.’ ” Peter Manso, who became “a late in life good friend” of Diana’s, and who credited her with displaying a “directness and healthiness” toward the literary scene so that it “no longer [became] an unreachable mantle” for him, says emphatically, “That’s a lie,” adding that Mailer told him that he was “intellectually compelled to change the quote.”

  Manso quotes Lillian Hellman in his biography of Mailer as saying to Mailer that she was “shocked that you would endorse a book that attacked me.” Hellman said that Mailer replied that he had “read half of it and liked it. But I shouldn’t have endorsed that book or any book that is against you.” She went on to say that Mailer confessed that he “didn’t write very much of a blurb in any case, but I will certainly take care of it. And I wish to apologize.”

  Whatever the truth, Diana hung on with Mailer and wrote him that his letter was “a sweet and loving intention, and it quite transcends any detail of how we do or do not, did or did not, understand each other. Politics did not divide [the two of] them, as it did so many other friends.” Still, Diana said that a lot of friendships do disappear, and she told Mailer, “I read about the great poems to friendship of the 19th century and I think, ‘What has happened to friendship?’ ” Diana and Mailer managed to make theirs a lasting one and in the ensuing years met often at the homes of mutual friends.

  17

  NOT GIVING A DAMN

  The biggest challenge of my widowhood is whether I’ll manage to read John’s journal without desecrating his memory: will I be able to keep him intact? Not make him a symbol of scarred love? I pray for that.… Anything that was bad was part of everything that was wonderful and good—is this not true in any important relationship? The marriage of the good and the bad: this is what I must work to preserve in the memory of our life together.

  —Diana Trilling, excerpt from “I Was in Acadia Too” (unpublished novel)

  Widowhood prompted Diana, now seventy, to think hard about all her friendships. She could always count on Thelma Anderson, Elinor Hays, and Elsa Grossman, of course, and she had other friends and acquaintances, too, but in Lionel, she had lost her best friend—“anything that was bad was part of everything that was wonderful and good.”

  In the aftermath of Lionel’s death Diana had dozens and dozens of condolence letters to answer, and she sometimes used the occasion to branch out beyond speaking of Lionel and say a variety of things she couldn’t reveal to Thelma, Elinor, or Elsa. She told one correspondent that most of her friendships had seldom been an experience of love and that instead she found them filled with envy and a layer of ill will.

  For instance, Diana said that her ever-devoted Arnold Beichman showed some animus toward her in the fallout with Little, Brown, even though he had written a review of Scoundrel Time that, as she had told him, she considered very well done and effective. But in a casual letter to Diana—not a condolence letter—he expressed worry that historians would look upon Hellman’s book as the truth, and he cautioned his friend that “history is being rewritten right under our noses.” Diana chose to see his reasonable qualms as a murderous indictment of herself. She wrote back with all the pent-up feelings she could muster, that how dare he call her “to moral account,” and tell her that she had “a defective relation to history.” She told him she knew what she was doing, and he must stop lecturing her. After all, she wrote, “I am already launched on a great big study of these last decades of our common political experience—I shall give, no doubt, the remainder of my working life to it.” (She finally accepted a small $7,500 grant from The National Endowment for the Humanities to help pay for her taping equipment.)

  “I have no apologies to make for myself on the score of my political record, ever,” Diana wrote Beichman. “I know no one [other than myself] whose politics have been more on the open record and more consistent. I also have no apologies to make for the standards on which I have constructed my particular brand of liberalism, of which I am proud.” (But Diana chose not to send the letter, perhaps because she detected a whisper of paranoia in her response.) The contentiousness between them went on in future correspondence, with one or the other being accused of writing an “ugly” or “sick” letter. Yet Beichman kept writing his friend, and he often included news of Carroll’s doings—“Carroll, wonderful as ever. She’s bored with teaching.” Beichman had by that time made peace with his wife’s affair with Lionel, but perhaps Diana had not yet done so to the same degree.

  Diana created a major fuss over a letter Beichman wrote to Commentary—“a totally innocent letter that was not about Lionel,” Beichman said, “but really about Nicholas Murray Butler.” But Diana felt the letter was so full of biographical errors about Lionel that it needed to be suppressed. For instance, President Butler did not know of Lionel until after his Arnold book, Diana told Beichman; “You were making him out to be already celebrated many years earlier.” And Beichman had said that Lionel taught the colloquium in 1934 with Kip Fadiman, not Jacques Barzun. “Don’t put that one on the record, Arnold,” Diana snapped at him. “It’s one of the sorrows of Fadiman’s life that he never taught at Columbia.” She accused Beichman of trying to make her own writing about Lionel seem false and wanting to put her “in the wrong, to undermine my point, or was this merely an accident of ineptness?” (Beichman’s letter to Commentary was never published, and Diana later told him that she had no part in its censoring, which he subsequently learned was actually the truth.)

  In one letter Diana berated Beichman for trying to read correspondence that was left open on her living-room desk during his visit for tea on Claremont Avenue. He denied ever doing such a thing, and she countered that when he went to use the bathroom in the back of the apartment, she was sure he had also tried to poke around papers left on Lionel’s desk, which he would have had to walk past en route to the bathroom.

  On a more serious note she accused him of being an active CIA agent when he worked with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), which Diana said was a CIA “ope
ration.” How could he have kept this a secret from her? Beichman admitted that he had recently learned that he had “once been used by them” when he unknowingly passed on phony quotes from a Soviet defector diplomat. But Diana’s accusation was absurd, he told her; “What in heavens name would I have been doing? Spying on fellow Board members on the American Committee for Cultural Freedom?” Beichman wondered who in the world had told Diana he had been a real spy—“whoever he/she [is] is a villain, an assassin of reputations.”

  He was more forlorn than angry. “It now seems obvious that whatever we were to each other, we were not friends,” he wrote Diana, adding, “It’s also sad, so long ago and so dusty.” She replied that he simply doesn’t seem to understand that she is able to “hold two different judgments … in my mind at the same time,” and this is why she will always continue to think of him as a friend. Perhaps, she added, he should “read me more as you might read about a character in a novel.” Beichman, ever a literalist, replied that she was decidedly not a character in a novel, and that he still found it difficult “to understand how you can say the most awful things about someone to me on the phone or over a teacup and then be at that person’s house for dinner or cocktails.” He went on: “I never understood how you could remain friends with, say, [William] Phillips after telling me some of the awful things about him, his rumors about you, stabs-in-the-back criticisms and how PR did awful things.” But most important, how in the world did she live with “a cloud over our friendship?” (meaning the CIA agent accusation). “You must be, after all, a most extraordinary person to accept a ‘shadowed’ relationship,” Beichman told her, acknowledging that the politics of the 1950s and 1960s “were a lot dirtier than he had suspected.”

  The CIA charge had deeply wounded Beichman, and he brooded about its ramifications for years, writing Diana in 1982 that he knew there was no proof of his innocence that would change her mind, since his “simple word of honor that he had never worked for the CIA” made no difference to her. Even a letter to him from Arthur Goldberg, the former Supreme Court justice and US ambassador to the United Nations and one of the founders of the ICFTU, did not strike her as important proof of his innocence.