The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  ADD runs in families, Jim discovered; “I have it, my father almost certainly had it and in all likelihood his father had it, too.” One expert in the field says that “it isn’t the kind of disease where you can test your blood and say, ‘Oh you have it, like cancer or diabetes’; it’s something that is based on a person’s history, both family history and personal history and something that is based on behavior. So there’s a collection of gestalts.”

  Jim never told his mother about his own ADD (diagnosed when he was in his late thirties) because he is not sure she would have understood. “It was a very difficult decision not to tell her,” he said. “I was afraid she would be furious that I was reducing the whole drama to a chemical imbalance,” and “I would have had to tell her about my father, which is more than she could have accepted.” In his article he added that telling her “would have made me as alien and degraded in her eyes as if I had joined a cult.”

  The American Psychiatric Association’s “DSM-IV,” or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, lists a multitude of symptoms for ADHD, ranging from difficulty sustaining attention and difficulty organizing tasks to acting as if “driven by a motor” and often losing one’s temper, while blaming others for one’s own mistakes or misbehaviors. “The symptoms are almost as diverse as the demands of life itself,” Jim Trilling remarked in his article, “and it is easy to see why many people see the individual symptoms as no more than weaknesses of character, and ‘attention deficit disorder’ as a product of our collective self-indulgence, invented to disguise our failure to discipline ourselves, and our children.”

  His own symptoms, Jim said, began when he was four, with daydreaming, disorganization, and ferocious outbursts. “Any frustration would set me off,” he said. But ADD was not an available explanation for what Diana and Lionel always called “The Problem” with their son. He was either “hyperactive” or “difficult.” Jim noted that drugs for ADD have been available since 1930 (although the disorder wasn’t named as such until the 1970s) and that Diana and Lionel had often taken Dexamyl, which contained barbiturate and amphetamine components and was actually one of the early ADD remedies. His parents had used the drugs for anxiety and depression, and Jim wishes his father had remained on the drug, but he didn’t. (Instead, Lionel self-medicated with a drink every night.)

  When Jim was an adult, he was prescribed a relatively new ADD drug—Ritalin—“with spectacular success.”

  He recognizes that whether or not his father had ADD “has become both academic and technically insoluble,” and Jim acknowledges that “there is always a risk of vulgarity in diagnosing the famous dead.” But he judges it “a risk worth taking.… I showed that my father succeeded in spite of ADD.”

  Among Lionel Trilling’s symptoms were his frequent rages at Diana, his blaming her for a host of sins, his reckless body movements, and his not being careful about his surroundings, as when he swam without lifting his head out of the water to see where he was heading. Among others were his frenzied tennis playing; his careless driving, frequently shifting between lanes for no reason; and his sometimes not taking in information. Paramount was his trouble getting down to writing.

  As soon as Jim recognized ADD in himself, he also saw it in his father, as well as his grandfather, David Trilling. Jim writes of “the scanty but compelling” evidence of his grandfather “botching the reading at his Bar Mitzvah.”

  Two other well-known symptoms of ADD are a sense of underachievement, which Lionel Trilling, in his journal, often wrote about experiencing, and depression, which can and could have contributed to sexual problems. In fact a symptom of ADD in adults is often said to be impotence, although not all experts agree, and most of the evidence is anecdotal, often found in blog posts. Natalie Weder, MD, of the Child Mind Institute, the leading group in child mental health research, reports that there is “no evidence of this that is worth noting.” But the idea of ADD and impotence persists and will continue until more research is completed.

  Sarah Gray Gund, a leading clinician with forty years’ experience teaching children with learning difficulties and problems with attention, as well as supervising teachers, says that after reading Jim Trilling’s article, she believes that there is little doubt that Lionel Trilling had attention deficit disorder.

  Anne Fadiman,* the editor of The American Scholar who bought Jim’s “quite convincing” article, said that many people thought it was an insult to his father. But, she said, the “notion that Jim had knocked his august father off some pedestal is ridiculous.” He got “completely slammed,” she said, adding that it was also “the most controversial event in her own career.” In fact, Paul R. McHugh, MD, the psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, quit the journal’s board over Jim’s article, saying that “it is a clumsily written, meanly written article about a defenseless father” and that it was full of “sophisticated name-calling.” Dr. McHugh added that Jim Trilling “uses psychiatric principles to settle personal scores.” Two decades earlier, in 1978, Diana Trilling herself left The American Scholar’s board in protest over an article by William Chace about Lionel she thought unfair in the way it characterized her husband—as “besieged by doubts,” among other things having to do with both literature and his peers. Criticism of Jim’s article poured in. Leon Wieseltier, in The New Republic, called the article “banal and low” and an “exercise in filio-porn.” Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in Commentary that she deplored everything about the article and accused Jim of using “a pseudo-medical” diagnosis on his famous father.

  Sarah Gund says that “the hard part about [Jim’s] article is the way in which he talks about his father in their relationship, and I can see why that got him into trouble with this beloved name in literary criticism—that he had all these problems that nobody on the outside perceived.” She continued: “But I think that just shows how well socialized he was. You can handle it—you learn to handle it—by covering it up—by not putting yourself in interactions—by the kind of life you choose to lead.” And she stressed:

  I thought it was fascinating the way he talked about his father not creating anything new but always being able to see ambiguity and nuance of difference in other people’s critique. And I think that was incredibly perceptive of Jim, the son, and perhaps quite true of some ADD people, and the kind of mind they have. I mean you also have the whole spectrum of intelligence—some people are exceedingly bright and have it and some people are average or below … and then you’re just in trouble all the time. You’re not doing anything that’s very creative intellectually.

  Gund said she thought it was also “fascinating the way the mother-in-law told Diana to be careful of these rages.… And blaming other people is another big characteristic [of ADD].… Temper is one of the primary characteristics.… You do blame it on other things because you’re not really doing it willfully,” she said. “You just can’t hold it in anymore. And so if you are well socialized you hold it in at work and when you get home you have to let it out somehow, and you can trust that environment at home.” So Lionel blamed Diana for everything he felt wrong with his life.

  Lionel was always able to make his ADD work to his advantage. He rarely let any of the symptoms be seen by anyone outside his family, masking them with his well-known reserve and aloofness. Diana always understood that her husband, like her father, had the power of mind over body. As Gund explained, “One learns to handle ADD by covering it up, by not putting oneself in interactions.” Diana always protected him. Diana did for her husband what he could not do for himself. His work was always her work.

  Speaking of writing in general, as well as getting rid of all the drafts with Diana’s editing on them, Sarah Gund said that it could be that he was uncomfortable about needing so much help, “and maybe he didn’t want to destroy a facade which he had created for himself by showing how much help he needed, from his wife, in this case. Most people would get help from their editor—is that more honorable than having your wife do it?�
� she asked.

  She added that “another aspect of ADD is … you can certainly have an idea and have trouble putting that idea into words. So that could be a very subtle feature of his particular ADD.” Diana understood Lionel’s mind like no one else and was able to put his ideas into words that were very much his own.

  Jim writes about his father’s “extravagant contempt for his colleagues,” and Lionel’s journal often complains about having to deal with graduate students. Gund says that “it’s interesting that [Lionel] worked alone a lot. And that he didn’t [really understand] his relationship with graduate students, how fundamentally wrong that was [to be remote]. But I think that’s something that’s often true of ADD people.…They have inter-personal relationships—they don’t necessarily show it in an extreme way, but every once in a while they cross a line that is absolutely obvious to everyone else.”

  Stephen Koch said that he and his wife, Franny Cohen (her father was Lionel’s cousin), “were among the minority who believed what Jim was saying.” He went on to acknowledge that “I did not know Lionel; I never even met him. I cannot say anything from personal observation. But as a sufferer from ADD myself, I found Jim’s arguments plausible.” He said that after his wife read Jim’s article, “she immediately knew, intuitively, that it was true … and even though at the time she had never observed symptoms in Lionel, nonetheless, she said, ‘Jim’s account is consistent with her memories.’ ” Koch also said that he “thinks that if and when the literary public learns that Lionel Trilling himself had ADD, the revelation can only be a force for the good.”

  Koch says that “Diana always knew something was wrong with Lionel but didn’t know what. She pulled the words out of him.” Moreover, Koch, who says his ADD “is an issue I deal with every day” (he takes Ritalin)—has been able to find success as a writer in spite of the disorder and says that “every syllable of Jim’s piece about it was correct.”

  Lionel could successfully work around his ADD, not only because of Diana but because of his strong will and sense of responsibility and his need to do “right.” He knew instinctively that he needed to find a woman who could safeguard him. Persons with ADD are often exceptionally intelligent, perceptive, charismatic, and verbally advanced; after all, ADD is a neurobiological syndrome affecting the wiring of the brain and is not anything abnormal, just something different. Trilling’s hero Ernest Hemingway is suspected by some people to have had ADD/ADHD, as did perhaps Leo Tolstoy, Edgar Allen Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Robert Frost.

  Sarah Gund speculates that ADD could have been a factor in keeping Lionel from writing the novels he wanted to write and Diana wished him to write. She wrote in a draft of The Beginning of the Journey that “why he turned as fully as he did from fiction to criticism is finally as difficult to explain—reliably explain—as his choice of me as a wife. The clues are many but the mystery will always remain.”

  The chances Diana would have accepted an ADD diagnosis are small—neurosis was her verdict of choice. After all, as Gund says, “Freud was sweeping the world. Everyone thought everything was psychological.… So we had to live through that and get to now where everything is mostly physiological and it’s almost that [the] psychological has taken a backseat.”

  Lynn Weiss writes in her book about adult ADD that “the family of an unrecognized ADD person suffers most, perhaps. Marital conflict, seemingly constant disruption in the household, and spouse or child abuse are all fallouts from trying to maintain relationships with an adult with unrecognized ADD. Codependency problems run rampant. The human heartache is enormous.”

  Diana, as Deborah Wagnell, a character full of heartache and conflict, writes in her unpublished novel, “I Was in Arcadia Too,” that “the existence of fiction is what leads us to believe in the existence of its opposite, truth, but fiction is in a curious way more truthful; certainly it gives more of an appearance of truth, than does real life.” Diana had worlds opened to her when she was the fiction reviewer for The Nation. The job changed the course of her life and offered her a coping stratagem for “the constant disruption” in her household. Writing criticism was never the “sorcerer’s art” her father had said it was.

  Diana, still as Deborah, writes in her journal:

  I’ve made a career for myself, successful enough. I’ve had a successful marriage, successful motherhood. I’m even being a successful widow … and I burden no one. I’m to be envied. As myself, not merely as John’s wife. But were I asked to what extent I had used my energies in the living of my life, all the energies at my disposal, all that had been given me by nature, I’d have to say—what, fifty percent? Forty percent? Less? … I’m not talking about laziness. But suppose I’d been endowed as Balzac, say, was endowed: would I have been able to give myself the permission to use my talent to its fullest, as he did? I’m not complaining about anything I did put on paper; it’s what I didn’t put on paper, but might have, that matters, the truth I didn’t feel permitted to tell, the force I didn’t feel permitted to assert—and not alone as a writer but as a person—that stands to the discredit of the culture which bred me, or perhaps only to my personal discredit because I lacked courage.

  She concludes: “Only in timidity—cowardice would be the more precise word—are my personal and professional lives tied like blood sisters, and this bears in on me more and more heavily since John’s death, or perhaps only as I grow older. I think of myself approaching the end of my life carrying a burden of undelivered ideas, undelivered tenderness, undelivered understanding, undelivered generosities, undelivered desire (yes, desire too can be undelivered), undelivered love.… I always wanted to be on the stage, maybe that’s why; it’s the only way I know which might have relieved me of my unlived life.”

  * She is the daughter of the Trillings’ good friend Kip (Clifton) Fadiman.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It probably isn’t possible to thank properly the person who has been at my side and on my side for fifty years. My husband, Christopher, has read draft after draft after draft of this book. Lucky, lucky, me.

  I am especially appreciative to Diana Trilling’s son, Jim, for his support, wisdom, and good humor throughout. Dore Levy, Jim’s wife, was a wonderful resource and provided me with many anecdotes. I thank her for greatly enhancing my narrative.

  The librarians, curators, and archivists at Columbia University’s Rare Books and Manuscript Library (as well as the Oral History Research Office) are a wonderful group of people! I will list many of them, although some I just never got to know, or they have left for other positions, or have retired.

  Thank you to:

  Gerald Cloud

  Tara Craig

  Jane Gorjevsky

  Susan G. Hamson

  Carrie Elise Hintz

  Christopher Laico

  Tom McCutchon

  Elizabeth Pope

  Cathy Ricciardi

  Michael Ryan

  Corie Trancho-Robie

  Eric Wakin

  Jocelyn Wilk

  And thank you, too, to the many student employees who dragged box after box over to the table where I was working.

  Thank you to Columbia University Press!

  I am especially grateful to:

  Jennifer Crewe, associate provost and director

  Jonathan Fiedler, assistant editor

  Julia Kushnirsky, art director

  Marisa Pagano, senior copywriter and catalog manager

  Leslie Kriesel, assistant managing editor

  Justine Evans, rights and permissions

  Derek Warker, publicity

  Joe Abbott, copy editor

  Heather Jones, indexer

  Also thanks to Joanna Summerscales and Linda Steinman

  I am also grateful to the following people who agreed to be interviewed for this book:

  Jonathan Alter

  Brom Anderson

  Jacques Barzun

  Marguerite Barzun

  Carroll Beichman

  Patricia Bosw
orth, with special thanks for allowing me to use a photograph of Diana Trilling taken by her late husband, Tom Palumbo

  Oliver Conant

  Midge Decter

  Morris Dickstein

  Lore Dickstein

  Jason Epstein

  Ann Fadiman

  Gray Foy

  Jules Feiffer

  Alexis Gelber

  Jerome Gentes

  Robert Gottlieb

  Sarah Gund

  Richard Howard

  Beth Karas

  Joel Kaye

  Stephen Koch

  Steven Kurtz

  Richard Locke

  Peter Manso

  Edward Mendelson

  Daphne Merkin

  Patricia O’Toole

  Catherine Park

  Norman Podhoretz

  Peter Pouncey

  Lucy Rosenthal

  Michael Rosenthal

  Elisabeth Sifton

  Fritz Stern

  Sam Tanenhaus

  Benjamin Taylor

  Phyllis Theroux

  Lina Skucas Vlavianos

  Natalie Weder

  Larry Weisman

  Mary Lou Weisman

  Drenka Willen

  Christopher Zinn

  Harriet Zuckerman.

  I thank the following people for listening to ideas, or digging up material, or offering suggestions, or sharing thoughts, or just providing encouragement:

  Randy Abreu

  Marcia Allina

  Steven Aronson

  Carolyn Baldwin

  Carole Baron

  Barbara Barrie

  Charles Beichman

  Amy Bendeca

  Joe Caldwell

  Lisa Chichelo

  Karen Clarke

  Denise Daly

  Liz Darhansoff

  Shelly Dattner

  Changchun Deng, MD

  Heather Dials

  Angela DiMango, MD

  Matthew Fink, MD

  Robin Goland, MD