The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  When Diana had returned from her lengthy South American trip, a package was waiting for her at the dock. It had arrived too late to be given to her before she and her family set sail. It was a bon voyage present (an established custom at the time whenever a friend or relative was leaving on a trip) from Lionel: Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma. She later wrote about the gift: “Lionel had begun my literary education.” In fact, before 1927 she had never heard of Stendhal, not even at Radcliffe.

  As his parents had done for each other, Lionel would sometimes read poetry to Diana. One evening he read her T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which Diana said she didn’t understand in a way she could explain. Her logic failed her. But because Lionel read the poem so well, its meaning came through to her. He had an extraordinary ability to illuminate words and ideas by his very demeanor. “I loved Lionel’s seriousness and I wanted to be serious, too,” she later wrote. Aside from her father, she had never met anyone with a mind as bright and creative as Lionel’s—she was sure he possessed genius. And because of his guidance, she was learning to believe in her intuition, as well as in a future with Lionel.

  Lionel was not as confident at first. Despite observing that Diana “had the mechanical trick of being able to talk about anything,” he later wrote in his journal: “Note on D after seeing her at dinner: she is still desirable, simply, and a splendid woman; also I suppose is a more or less educated and sophisticated woman, idiosyncratic etc. But evidently not much beyond that. Her body is lovely to touch but her laugh and her voice irritate me and her talk does not stimulate but rather represses, although I do not think her stupid but rather lazy.”

  Lionel’s family of avid readers, especially his doting mother, Fannie Cohen Trilling, always had considerable literary aspirations for him. When he was just six years old, his mother told him he would go to Oxford for his PhD, and she made sure he would remain healthy until that time—every single day he had the same lunch: a lamb chop and a baked potato served with milk at just the right warm temperature. When Lionel went off to summer camp for the first time, his mother and her two spinster sisters, Deborah and Della—a third sister, Maude, did not join them—moved to a nearby boardinghouse to keep an eye on him. Fannie Trilling, born in London, used to part her young son’s hair on the right side so he would look like the Prince of Wales. Lionel wore a coat made of squirrel fur his father made specially for him. He would never be cold. As a child he read compulsively, while dressing and undressing, at meals when he was alone, and in bed at night with a flashlight. He was always treated as an only child, although he had a sister, Harriet, who was seven years younger. (While Diana’s relationship with Harriet would often be very rocky, she later wrote that her sister-in-law was “more intelligent than anyone she knew in the academic world.”)

  Fannie Trilling was not pleased that her son had gone off for a year to a teaching fellowship in Wisconsin; she had wanted him to stay in New York, where they lived on Central Park West and 108th street. Five years earlier, in 1921, even though Lionel had preferred Yale over Columbia, his mother had gone to the dean at Columbia to beg for her son’s acceptance because his record in math at DeWitt Clinton High School did not point toward the bright future she knew was before him.

  “He had a fierce mind, a fierce intelligence,” Diana said. “He pressed hard, hard, hard on any idea that he dealt with, trying to force it to yield up its meaning.” She was thrilled with his mind’s complexity, even awed by it. Fannie Cohen Trilling once told her daughter-in-law, “the one thing I’ll never forgive you for, Diana, is if you do anything to interfere with Lionel’s career.” Diana knew that would never happen. She’d see to it.

  Radcliffe tamped down any early feminist stirrings in most of its students—women could talk all they wanted, as long as they remembered their place. Women were to be wives first. Men needed to put their careers first, even when the women in their lives were more competent. Diana later said that “the women in my father’s family … had their fates made for them by men who had nothing but their sex to recommend them as providers” and that this had been communicated to her when she was very young through “weary contempt” by her female relatives “for the husbands to whom they were bound.” Observing this “contempt,” she concluded, would be “the roots of such feminism as I would always profess.”

  Diana’s 1927 and 1928 engagement books, which she religiously maintained and stored away safely (especially after her sister burned her first collection of scrapbooks and vouchers), record many dates with Lionel: “Lionel here”; “Lionel at Polly’s house”; “Theatre with Lionel—formal clothes”; “Tea with Lionel”; “Lionel here to lunch and tea”; “all afternoon and eve with Lionel.” She documented the life-threatening scarlet fever Lionel contracted shortly after her return from South America.

  The engagement books also record her schedule for singing lessons, for which she said her father refused to pay. Her father—despite everything—had always encouraged his girls to earn a living in case the men in their lives failed them. Nonetheless, Joseph Rubin did give Diana a generous weekly allowance. But soon after returning from South America, Diana found a job through a Radcliffe friend with the National Broadcasting Company as an assistant to a writer-producer of a radio program called The Gold Spot Pals. The “pals” were a group of children who, along with a singing policeman and an organ grinder with a monkey, went on walking adventures all around New York City, from Coney Island to the tip of the Bronx, to advertise their durable “Gold Spot” leather shoe soles. Diana babysat the child actors, and the job paid enough for her to have two singing lessons a week, as well as to have some fun. She said that she “met some of the men that were around the radio station and that I’d go out to parties with them—these were pretty much drinking parties.”

  Without her father knowing, Diana could have used her allowance for some of her lessons, but she acknowledged that the real reasons she went to work (aside from following his work ethic dictate) were to force herself out of the apartment, to get away from her sister, and to prove that she was not emotionally dependent on her family. The latter would be the hardest of all for her to do, although she succeeded in making her sister think she had. But in truth the only real independence she showed was in her diary or in some of the other writing—stories and poems—with which she toyed halfheartedly, where she could be as brave as she dared. She was even able to overcome her father’s latest way of expressing disapproval—silence. And when not silent, he sometimes spoke too much. His arrogance had become worse than ever since his wife’s death. If Diana asked what he thought of a particular dress she was wearing to work, he might shout, “You look dreadful.” Diana began to rationalize that such insults were her father’s way of expressing love, and as she later wrote, “The communication of love by insult is a very Jewish trait.”

  The page in Diana’s engagement book for Tuesday, December 4, 1928, just one year after she met Lionel, notes: “Lionel calling for me at studio.”

  She had invited him to hear her sing.

  When she first began her lessons, her teacher suggested that she concentrate only on opera. Despite her certainty in switching careers to singing, Diana wasn’t certain about this direction; however, after she learned that Lionel loved opera, her choice became clear. She practiced every day until sweat covered her whole body. She worked harder than she ever had in her life. Her teacher told her she got goose pimples up and down her spine just listening to Diana’s voice and that her talent was extraordinarily strong and sensitive. Soon Diana even risked showing off, as her parents had called it (although inexplicably, as a young girl, they liked her to perform—singing as well as playing piano or violin—in front of relatives). All three siblings took piano and violin lessons. Diana was the only one who sang.

  Diana discovered she liked an audience, even an audience of one or two. At her summer camp she had often serenaded her bunkmates with Russian folk songs, and at Radcliffe she would frequently sing for her dormmates.
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  Lionel was thoroughly pleased—and a little surprised—by his girlfriend’s talent. She was not just a run-of-the-mill entertainer for her family—a nineteenth-century-style social entertainer. She had professional skill. (Lionel’s sister had a good voice, too, but not on Diana’s level.) Diana was exhilarated by his response, and when she later told her teacher what he had said, the reaction was not what she expected to hear. Her teacher was very put out. She finally calmed down enough to ask Diana why in the world she needed the approval of a boyfriend. Diana burst into tears, because she knew her teacher had recognized her pupil’s “indefensible dependency,” as Diana later called it.

  How would that dependency affect a future with Lionel? Would she be able to curb the tendency, even though she did her best to hide it with a determined—often gritty—attitude?

  She would meet his family and he hers. Joseph Rubin had met Lionel casually when he came to pick up Diana on West End Avenue or came to tea. But they had not had a long or meaningful encounter.

  A year after their first date at Mario’s, Lionel invited Diana to his family’s Passover Seder. She later said that she could remember every detail of that evening, including what she wore—“a lovely, lovely dress”—although its description went no further.

  As she entered the Trilling apartment and walked into the living room, she was introduced to all the maternal aunts and uncles by Lionel’s mother, who seemed ill at ease. Diana walked silently past the relatives, all of whom turned their backs on her. “I traveled the room without one person holding out a hand to me,” she later said. What had she done wrong?

  Lionel said nothing, so Diana followed suit, and they sat quietly at the Seder table, although not next to each other. The Seder service went on and on, with no one looking at or addressing her. She was not asked to read any passages from the Passover Hagaddah. She did not yet exist for them.

  But once Fannie Trilling realized her son was serious about “the bold-featured” (as she called her) young woman she believed might be a potential heiress, and even before the couple announced their engagement, she started to plan their wedding. Actually she had her fifteen-year-old daughter, Harriet, do some of her early bidding. If Fannie Trilling couldn’t put a halt to her son’s relationship, at least she’d try to control it. So there were arguments about the guest list, and eventually it was decided that only the immediate family would be present. She hectored Diana even about her trousseau; her son must sleep on only pure linen sheets, and Diana, with unusual bravado, told her she planned to buy the cheapest sheets she could find. By now Diana had learned that Lionel’s father had always liked her and had in fact been taken with her at first sight but had been shy in expressing his feelings at the Seder. Diana found out also that the Trillings rarely spoke to each other anymore. There was no more poetry between them.

  Diana’s introduction to Lionel’s family was similar to her introduction to his Menorah Journal friends. “I’d never known people who were educated but had such bad manners,” she said. “They treated me like dirt.” In fact they thought Lionel’s choice of a wife looked too well-to-do because she was wearing such striking clothes, including a fur coat.

  As for Lionel’s more thorough introduction to her family, Diana said that from the very beginning her father hadn’t “liked or disliked Lionel.” She later said they just could never reach each other. “Two dammed fools can’t get married,” he exclaimed at one point. Joseph Rubin would have preferred that his daughter marry someone like Kip, who was involved with books and made a decent living. But an English instructor who wanted to write novels? And in what Diana referred to as his “most fatherly remark,” her father told his daughter that her intended needed to have his kidneys checked because he went to the bathroom far too often. Diana did not reveal that Lionel did so to escape conversations with his future father-in-law. Diana found it impossible to describe Lionel’s qualities to her father—“his power of person and mind”—so she stopped trying. She always felt that in their early years, she alone had recognized Lionel’s promising future.

  Surprisingly, Diana’s brother, Sam, and his new wife made no comments about Lionel. But Cecilia did. She took Lionel aside to warn him that her baby sister had a big appendix scar. Indeed, while at Radcliffe Diana had had an emergency operation, and her mother, in her one and only visit to the college, had come to minister to her daughter when she was recuperating. Diana’s main memory of this unusual visit was that her mother wore an exquisite hand-pleated black chiffon dress, one of the most striking dresses she had ever seen in Boston or Cambridge.

  On another occasion, while Lionel was waiting in the Rubin living room for a date with Diana that didn’t involve drinking (once they decided to marry they resolved to cut back on their consumption because marriage was a solemn business), Cecilia had even more to say to her future brother-in-law. When Diana appeared after ten minutes or so, and Lionel told her she looked beautiful, Cecilia told him, “My sister is not beautiful; she has an interesting face.”

  Everyone in the Rubin family was on the whole pleased that Diana was to be married, although Diana herself halfheartedly wished that her older sister could have been married before her. (This was not to be, until Cecilia was in her seventies and married a fellow resident at her nursing home. Diana was not elated.)

  When Lionel finally told his mother that he and Diana had set a date—June 12, 1929—for their wedding, Fannie Trilling had a noteworthy reaction, despite all her scheming and preplanning.

  She fainted dead away on the living room floor.

  * Diana later said that Uncle Hymie’s art collection (if it actually existed) was so secret that no one knew about it, and none of it was ever shown in galleries or museums. She said also that because he didn’t buy most of the pieces from dealers, there are no records pertaining to them.

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  PROLEGOMENON

  For me this marriage is, without sentimentality, gush or woman-worship, the expectation of the completest fulfillment. I want it to be not the completion or augmentation of a life but the pattern in which my life is to be shaped—and a starting place, a foundation, a great tool: it contains—[or may] or should—the greatest part of my emotional, moral, and spiritual-religious actually—activity. I want it to carry it along with me. I want indubitable permanence for it—accepting its changes and variations as they come. I place so much in it: all beauty and excitement. It has absorbed all my desire for glamour and sexual adventure. Already it has cleared away from my sight so much that had obscured it.

  —Lionel Trilling, journal entry, Spring 1929

  More than a handful of people invited the young couple to dinner to celebrate their engagement—“their expectation of the completest fulfillment,” Diana called it. It was asparagus season, so there was asparagus—too much of it, as it turned out—at every meal. It was everywhere they went. Asparagus, asparagus. Diana said that her husband-to-be joked that “the minute you got married, you get asparagus” and that he later commented, “We’ve made a capitulation to society and this is the price we pay for it; we become social beings and have to accept all these dull invitations.” She said that “he wasn’t being funny. He was saying something serious about social membership as opposed to the wishes of the individual.”

  And the wishes of the individual went mostly unheard. Diana later realized that “the wedding had not been mine, nor had it really been Lionel’s.” Because of her guilt over marrying first, Diana allowed her sister to be in charge of planning the menu for the dinner to be held in the apartment on West End Avenue after the late-afternoon wedding ceremony. Diana said that Cecilia was such a bad judge of food that when she volunteered to plan meals at a camp for underfed children, the campers went on a hunger strike. And then there were the guests they hadn’t planned on inviting. The chuppah, or canopy, under which the couple would say their vows needed to be held by two nonblood kin, so to perform the job, Diana had to invite a friend of her father’s she barely knew, as well as the
man who seemed to be Cecilia’s latest boyfriend, basically strangers at her wedding. But it had to be that way, and Diana reluctantly went along.

  The food “arrived in disguise,” Diana later wrote. “The melon wedges had become battleships with smokestacks contrived of maraschino cherries and with little American flags waving at their prows. The carrots, pared and molded, sat in baskets like brightly colored Easter eggs. The dessert was a dramatic bombe. Above a wide billow of ice cream and spun sugar appeared the face of a doll bride. This confection was passed from guest to guest; one served oneself by shoving the spoon under the skirt of the bride.” Diana was appalled by this final indulgence. It called to mind the image of a doll she was given on her fifth or sixth birthday, a doll that was as tall as she was and, in fact, was presented to her dressed up in one of her own favorite dresses. The doll had a rosebud mouth (the kind that Lionel’s mother wished her new daughter-in-law possessed) and had longer eye lashes than the birthday girl had. “Her thighs and knees and ankles were jointed like mine; so was her head jointed to her neck—she could be made to sleep and wake, lie or sit, maybe she said mama … and reach out for an invisible love. I hated her,” Diana later wrote, continuing with a final insult: “My mother said I was not to play with her because she was not any ordinary doll—she was not to be broken.” But at least the wedding bombe had no cruel rules attached to it and melted over time.