Many friends had encouraged Diana to write about her failing eyesight, and she did so in a piece entitled “Reading by Ear,” which appeared in the magazine Civilization. Thoughtful and literary, Diana noted that she “was at first puzzled that it is so much more time-consuming to be read to than to read to oneself,” so she asked, “Is the voice, then, so much slower than the eye?” Her answer was yes. What’s more, she understood that “it is impossible to guess what might suddenly catch another person’s eye and fire his imagination.” Was her reader emphasizing his or her own word preferences? Was he or she skipping? If so, did that alter the listener’s critical judgment of what was being read?
One of Diana’s major complaints about being read to was how often words were mispronounced. Her readers, she said, not naming any of them, “have varied between mispronouncing one word in every hundred and one word in every ten!” She called out a “young woman who pronounced “Iago” as if it were spelled “Ee-ajo,” noting unbelievably that the reader (unnamed) “had a master’s degree from a major eastern university and planned a career in college teaching. She had not heard of Othello. She had never read a play of Shakespeare.”
In the early 1990s Diana had been given a computer by Catherine Park, but as Diana wrote in a letter, “I am careful not to come near it because I am a mechanical idiot, and I am afraid that I would destroy all my work of the last year if I so much as touched a button.” “Actually,” she added, “I haven’t enough vision to be able to use it.” Park used it though—it was a Dell word processor that she and Diana called “Della”—and it sped up their work together.
Diana’s health was worsening. As she wrote Bill Jovanovich, she now had emphysema and had had a pacemaker installed because of atrial fibrillation.
But she continued her work, and contributed to Newsweek’s January 11, 1993, special series called So Long, Soldier: The World War II Generation and How It Changed America. Diana’s essay, “How McCarthy Gave Anti-Communism a Bad Name,” was an excerpt from The Beginning of the Journey, which HBJ was to publish in November of 1993.
Jonathan Alter, a columnist and senior editor, and Alexis Gelber, also an editor, who, at the time, specialized in politics and social issues and eventually became the managing editor of Newsweek International, both worked with Diana on the piece. Gelber remembers it was “very disorganized” and “all over the place.” Because of Diana’s failing eyesight, Gelber edited the piece with Diana in person, at Claremont Avenue. Although Diana had been “quite crotchety” on the phone, once they were together, Diana complimented Gelber on how well she had reorganized the essay. Jonathan Alter remarked that Diana “would mix stubbornness with compliments.”
In 1992 Alter had commissioned a piece from Diana on the 1950s. “It was a really good piece,” he says, and he recalls that Diana later asked for a column in Newsweek, telling him, “I don’t know why I spent all these years writing for magazines people don’t read.” Alter couldn’t believe “that at the end of her life she wanted a column!” Like Gelber, he had edited the 1950s essay in person. “Her stamina impressed me,” he said, adding that Diana “made scorching assessments” of people, “basically about how they didn’t treat her well.”
Diana was not happy with the way HBJ published The Beginning of the Journey, although she was pleased with a piece about her life and work in The New Yorker that created a lot of prepublication interest. The book, for the most part, was reviewed favorably, but Diana was not happy at all. She even wished that she had left HBJ. She said that her “supposed editor, Cork [Corlies] Smith, never liked the book—or perhaps it is me he has never liked.” There was no imminent paperback sale. There was no movie sale. In desperation she approached an agent, Georges Borchardt, to help her, but he wrote that although he thought her book was “marvelous,” it was too late for him to step in. (She had approached Borchardt a year or two earlier, and he had agreed to represent her, but Diana never signed a formal agreement.) Both Trillings had unpleasant feelings about agents, although in her late eighties Diana would sign on with Andrew Wylie. But many years earlier Lionel had approached an agent, Lynn Nesbit, who, according to Diana, was disrespectful and made her husband feel like an inconsequential person. He decided then and there not to have anything to do with any agent ever again, and he didn’t.
The profile of Diana in The New Yorker was written by the journalist Lis Harris. It was a wise and enlightening essay, and it included an exchange between Harris and Jim Trilling, in which Jim said, “I was aware most of all that my parents talked constantly to each other and they were always on the same wavelength. Very rarely have I had the impression from another couple that the whole strength of their marriage was right there in the way they talked.”
Harris dug deep into the poem Diana thought Allen Ginsberg wrote for her husband in the 1960s and discovered it was not so. The profile was accompanied by a Richard Avedon photograph, and Diana wrote a friend that she was “ambivalent” about the picture, although she agreed that “it definitely captures something in my expression but I don’t like the general effect of this much unbounded splash of face.” However, Avedon, an artist known for his unforgiving pictures of old age, had gone out of his way—shooting Diana through a window at The Colony in Wellfleet—to soften her image.
During Harris’s final interview with Diana, her subject was celebrating her eighty-eighth birthday. She was far from finished with her work, Diana told Harris, and she had, in fact, started a new book of “recollections of people and places.” Harris ended her profile: “A mighty warrior does not tarry in her tent.” The writer James Atlas commented in his profile in The New York Times celebrating the publication of The Beginning of the Journey that Diana “doesn’t seem frail, doesn’t even seem old.”
The review in Partisan Review began with acclaim for Diana’s “commanding memory and intelligence” and went on to applaud her strong prose and “tonal variety.” In the third paragraph the reviewer, Frank Kermode, said that “of all the autobiographies I know, it is the one that can accurately be described as comic.” Still, he said, it “is a quite exceptional book.” He went on to say that “she is by nature, and among other things, a comedian. I also know that even in her own city and among her more casual acquaintances this characterization might be greeted with astonishment.” He cited Diana’s story about her wedding as “a masterpiece of comic detail.” Kermode ended his review by saying the book “is a tribute to the power and integrity with which [Diana] remade herself in middle life, and triumphantly, in old age.”
Old age, it seems, had brought a new kind of light into Diana’s life, even though her eyes were no longer processing it.
Although in Newsweek Richard Eder called Diana “a ferocious lasher-back,” and said that “she can verge on McCarthyism herself,” he conceded that her portrait of her marriage “with a power of loyalty and endurance … elevates her final pages into a purely moving lyricism.” The Wall Street Journal called the book “a remarkable blend of cultural criticism and private reminiscences.”
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, in the daily New York Times, referred to the book as an “utterly absorbing memoir” and said that Diana was “seamless in her political outlook.” She was, he concluded, also “a long way from the end of the road.” Indeed, in a short profile Patricia Bosworth later wrote in that paper, she recalled how Diana “would grow irritated if I arrived too early. ‘I’m not finished yet!’ she’d cry,” reminding Bosworth she hadn’t written her first book until she was in her seventies, “so I’m a bit frantic about time.” Although Diana had long ago become a rarity among critics, and had learned to use both her logic and intuition to create an original and enduring voice, it wasn’t enough. She wanted more. She thought of a follow-up to The Beginning of the Journey but knew she needed help. She asked the writer Peter Manso to work with her, telling him, “I know my time is limited,” and she suggested that they work together on a question-and-answer format, insisting that “it would have to be my book. I wo
uld direct the book.” But such a book never happened.
One of the reactions to The Beginning of the Journey that meant the most to Diana came from Jacques Barzun, who because of his health problems had to read the book in “small doses.” He wrote Diana that he “savored its remarkable qualities all the more” and “relished the prose like a gourmet who takes the smallest bites to make the pleasure last longer.… It is a virtuoso feat.” He also mentioned that there were some details about Lionel’s character he wished he had never learned. “But, I can see that as you defined your task you could not leave those facts untold.” He also disagreed with Diana’s reason for why the joint seminar with Lionel ended: “I do not remember resisting the idea of using modern works for the readings. What I do remember is our common weariness with the old list and especially with the chore of editing the term papers.”
Diana had written that Lionel taught her how to think and she taught him how to write. It was the closest she came to declaring publicly her major role in his writing life. Fritz Stern, University Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia, as well as the university provost from 1980 to 1983, later commented that he “couldn’t quite accept that Diana taught Lionel how to write. It didn’t ring true.”
In The Beginning of the Journey Diana wrote that Bea (Gertrude Himmelfarb) and Irving Kristol were involved in “the politics of self-interest,” that they had become “right-wing Republicans” who wanted Diana and Lionel to sign a petition for Richard Nixon. Himmelfarb wrote Diana that she never asked Diana or Lionel to sign such a petition, and furthermore, her characterization of their politics was “personal and demeaning.” “In fact,” she continued in her letter, “your quarrel … was far more with the Podhoretzes.” Diana replied that she understood Himmelfarb’s “surprise that I focus the whole of my criticism of neo-conservatism on the two of you [the Kristols] rather than the Podhoretzes who have been so untruthful and ugly about Lionel and so vicious about me.” She said that she has now begun to wonder “whether it was a sound decision to ignore them in my memoir. The source of this decision was my contempt for both Midge and Norman.”
Decter seems to have gotten in the last word by means of a review of Diana’s book in Commentary. She faulted Diana for a multitude of sins: stopping her memoir in 1950, saying that a future biographer might find that writing about Diana and Lionel together would be more interesting, denying that being Jewish “had any significance for either of them,” employing “spin control,” creating out-and-out “obtuseness,” and being “revisionist.”
It was the end of any sliver of a relationship between Diana and Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz.
A few years later Diana wrote in a letter to a professor of English at Michigan State University that “Gertrude Himmelfarb was and is a great admirer of Lionel Trilling’s work and that, purposively or not, she has made him out to be the father of present-day neo-conservatism.” She went on to say that Himmelfarb’s “present-day politics and those of my husband have in common only their opposition to a general soft-mindedness in dealing with the affairs of the world.”
In the winter of 1993 Diana was the subject of a Paris Review interview, conducted by Patricia Bosworth. It was clear-sighted, covering many topics, from the quality of chocolate (Diana told Bosworth that “Hershey’s Kisses are the best”) to love, marriage, writing, book reviewing, politics, justice, feminism, celebrity, fame. “Are there certain things that you do not want to talk about in your book [The Beginning of the Journey]?” Bosworth asks Diana at one point. “Oh, surely,” Diana answers. “Like what?” Bosworth asks. Diana replies, “How can I say if they are so private that I don’t want to talk about them?” But then Diana goes on to admit that “I would not want to be graphic about my sexual life.” Later in the interview, speaking about friendship, Diana tells Bosworth that “by and large the worst things that have happened to me have been done to me by women.… It was some kind of jealousy or envy,” she explained. “It may be that they wanted to sleep with Lionel, or it might have something to do with prestige, social situation or something of that kind. Women do this to each other all the time. They make up stories. And they are very clever about it. They destroy other women. I mean what is this nonsense about sisterhood? There’s much more brotherhood than there is sisterhood.” She also tells Bosworth she worried about men being “emasculated” or frequently being accused of sexual harassment. “I think that a large number of men are going to become impotent if this keeps up.”
Diana continued wanting to bring accolades to Lionel. In addition to the Lionel Trilling Seminars, which Fritz Stern recalled as “fun, good occasions,” the Columbia undergraduates had started an annual book award in Lionel’s honor. Edward Said, the Palestinian American cultural critic, had won the first book award for his book Beginnings. (Stern won the book award the following year, in 1977, for his study of Germany through the lives of Otto von Bismarck and Gerson Bleichröder, Gold and Iron.)
Three years after Said won, Diana gossiped about him in a letter to Bill Jovanovich. She was sure he wasn’t going “to Europe” for a trip, as he had told her guests at a recent dinner party, but was actually going to be present at a secret meeting in Beirut between Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein. “I ask myself what goes on with me,” she told Jovanovich. “What kind of friends have I got? What in my education makes me associate with terrorists, for God’s sake?” Seven years later, she accused Said of anti-Semitism in an article he wrote, and they had a heated exchange of letters. “While my primary instinct as a Jew is to be concerned with the safety of Israel,” she wrote him, “and your primary instinct as an Arab is to seek safety and justice for the Arabs, we are yet supposed to be intellectuals capable of transcending these natural partisanships at least to the extent of listening to the case for the other side and using our individual capacities, large or small, to reconcile our differences rather than to prolong or exacerbate them.” After Said was diagnosed with leukemia, Diana wrote him a warm note, and he replied in kind. Diana told Gene Marcus that “it pains me greatly to hear of his deteriorating health—it touches some deep chord of affection in me. It also greatly pains me to hear of his continuing attack upon the peace process in Israel. I don’t really understand the part of him which wants to keep that battle going!”
In 1994 Diana won the Lionel Trilling Book Award for her memoir, an honor that was characterized in the program as a “Special Award.” Edward Said won the regular award—his second—for his book Culture and Imperialism. Diana wrote Bill Jovanovich that the presentation speech for her book was supposed to be about her, but the person “spoke entirely about Lionel.” Still, she said, “it was the sweetest possible occasion.”
That same year, 1994, Diana, at eighty-nine, found the time and energy to compose a letter in solidarity with the residents of Claremont Avenue protesting the Transit Authority’s decision to reroute its M60 bus to pass right by Thirty-Five Claremont Avenue. Diana was outraged. “I feel now that our neighborhood is suffering a profound violation. We are no longer a treasured retreat from the noise of the city—we have become part of the noise of the city,” she wrote in her letter of support to have the route changed. “If my windows are open so much as a crack, it is impossible to hear my readers,” she added. (In due course the campaign was successful.)
Diana watched (or listened) to the O. J. Simpson trial (1994–95) with enormous fascination, telling Patricia Bosworth she wished she was strong enough to cover it in person in Los Angeles. (Simpson, the charismatic black athlete accused of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a waiter, Ronald Goldman—who were both white—was ultimately acquitted.) Diana decided to write an article about the trial for The New Yorker, but Tina Brown, the editor at the time, wanted it cut radically. Diana refused and eventually sold her piece to The New Republic, which printed it on October 30, 1995. Like most of the country, Diana was appalled at the verdict yet not really surprised. “Alert as we might be to the problems of race in present-day America, we
failed to realize that our racial discord has reached the point where it could announce itself this baldly and boldly,” she wrote, declaring the decision to be one that “sneered at our legal system.” She was appalled that students at the primarily black institution Howard University had jumped for joy at the verdict. With exacting detail Diana dissected the trial, asking questions, describing testimony, analyzing witnesses, providing historical details. (She wondered why no one had mentioned the Dreyfus case—the Jewish captain in the French army accused in 1894 of spying for the Germans—a trial that became an international cause célèbre.) Diana held that O. J. Simpson was in “the deepest denial” about his guilt and was thus “able to convince those who are close to him of his guiltlessness.” She said that “all of us employ this phenomenon of denial in our lives.… The mechanism comes into use without our conscious dictate.” As she watched Simpson smile when he tried on the gloves soaked with his wife’s blood, Diana thought of Jean Harris unhesitatingly, even casually, handling Tarnower’s bloody sheets. Psychiatrists label such “inappropriate emotional detachment” as “representing lack of affect,” Diana concluded in an essay that brought her many complimentary letters. She herself even wrote one to the magazine, but it was not commendatory. She complained that more than fifty changes were made without her permission, “most of them changes which were apparently intended to improve my prose.” She said it seemed that editors had a great need to tamper with their writers, and all her writer friends agreed with this assessment. She concluded her letter: “To our present-day concern for the rights of blacks, women, homosexuals, and furry animals must we now add a concern for a writer’s right to his—or her—own words?”
The Untold Journey Page 38
