At one point Diana and her brother’s wife began an interior decorating business—The Sutton Company—that didn’t do very well, mostly because Diana and her sister-in-law had clashing tastes. What’s more, Diana did not particularly like to shop for home goods. Clothes, yes, as her husband did, although once to Lionel’s horror—after all, it was almost his entire week’s wages—she bought a $35 hat at the upscale Bonwit Teller, where she had bought most of her clothes as a young girl. (But Lionel could be a big spender, too, and shortly after they were married bought them box seats at the opera.)
Diana would not indulge herself extravagantly for many years to come; when the shopping urge hit her again as a young bride, she bought two dresses for less than $5 apiece at the more affordable Macy’s. “I counted on having those dresses for a long time,” she said. But she loaned one of them to a friend—“not a close friend”—who wanted to wear something nice for a job interview, and the acquaintance’s nervousness caused her to perspire so much that the dress was ruined. “My heart was broken,” Diana remembered.
She continued singing, mostly for her intended career but sometimes just for entertainment. In moments of playfulness she would don a Japanese kimono she had received as a gift once and in a squeaky voice sing Madame Butterfly to her husband. They would giggle and laugh. Living in the Village brought out the most amusing frolicking, she liked to say.
But in October—on “Black Tuesday”—the stock market crashed. The Great Depression hit America hard. Most industries were affected. There was loss of revenue and, of course, unemployment. Within a year Joseph Rubin was wiped out. He had put up all his personal savings as collateral for a bank loan to expand his hosiery factory, and after the crash his securities became worthless. The bank took over the business and put Diana’s brother, Sam, in charge. But he did not command the respect that his father had—the employees disliked him—and, most important, he broke the union; still, the factory limped along until “the whole business disappeared,” as Diana later reported. She also said that her brother just didn’t use his mind “adequately,” and he wasted the “power he had—much the same kind of mind that I and my father have.”
Joseph Rubin, with Cecilia to care for him, had very little money left and could not afford to live the way he was accustomed to, and he and Cecilia moved to a small apartment on the East Side. Despite his grave financial condition, he did his best to give Diana and Lionel $10 a week toward their food allowance. Once he even stopped by their apartment with bagfuls of groceries he could ill afford. “He bought us everything luxurious in sight,” Diana said, “strawberries and asparagus, all the out of season foods my mother used to buy when money didn’t have to be counted.”
Joseph Rubin soon developed a heart condition, which Diana believed was caused by stress, although he had had rheumatic fever as a boy. He died in 1932, after which Cecilia somehow managed to give her sister and brother-in-law $85 a month from the small inheritance left to the siblings. Cecilia had a big heart, after all.
Eventually Lionel, with his meager earnings, had to help his parents, whose savings were used up. The elder Trillings moved several times, finally settling in a small apartment on 113th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. Lionel broke off relations with his extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins shortly afterward. “They were increasingly hostile as Lionel grew up,” Diana explained. “They made trouble through Lionel’s mother. They put pressure on Lionel’s mother that she couldn’t withstand, and then she would bring these pressures to bear on us.” Diana never explained further; still, she said she wanted to try to make things right, and she invited Lionel’s unmarried aunts to Bank Street for lunch. “When they came to the door, I said, ‘Do you want to take off your hats?’—I said this as a courtesy but—apparently I was supposed to say ‘Take off your hats,’ which showed I was welcoming them into my house.” They were beyond insulted. And they later told Lionel’s mother they never wanted to speak to Diana again. Diana gave up trying to be friendly, and relations deteriorated, with Lionel even telling his wealthy Uncle Hymie he didn’t care if he ever saw him again. The family turmoil was never clarified further nor, in fact, discussed again. Lionel’s father had long ago severed ties with his brother, Harry, and that break was never mentioned in the family. It was as if David Trilling was always an only child.
Diana had observed that Lionel’s father was kicked around by his wife’s family, and she said, “I felt sorry for him.” Diana had become quite fond of her father-in-law. One late afternoon he stopped by their Bank Street apartment as Diana was preparing dinner, and she invited him to stay. David Trilling asked his daughter-in-law what she was cooking, and she told him chicken soufflé, although it was really tuna soufflé. “He ate it with great appetite,” Diana recalled, “and he went home and told Lionel’s mother what a great cook I was. She called me and said, ‘What did you give father that he’s talking about?’ ” But Fannie Trilling somehow instinctively knew Diana hadn’t made the soufflé out of chicken and said so, but also agreed that if Diana had told him it was tuna, he wouldn’t have eaten it. Diana liked this particular “naughty” quality in her mother-in-law, “even when I didn’t like her.” Her dealings with Fannie Trilling steadily improved over the years. In fact, Diana wrote in an unpublished book that “in a moment of pained reflection” Fannie Trilling once told her that if psychoanalysis had been available when she was young, it would have made all the difference in the world to her marriage.
One time Fannie Trilling visited Diana late in the afternoon, and when Lionel arrived home and found his mother there, he seemed flustered. After she left, he told Diana, “Look, I’m going to have to ask you not to have your mother-in-law here quite so often.” Diana later recalled that his response made her very uneasy, and she worried that Lionel would soon get very angry with her. How could she resolve this? Suddenly she realized he had said “your mother-in-law!” She “did a double take” and the episode became what she called “a weighted joke” between them, especially after she realized that Lionel was, in fact, jealous of her growing rapport with his mother.
Lionel began teaching at Hunter College in the evenings, and he somehow managed to give his parents $100 each month. Diana tried to persuade her mother-in-law to start a business with the tasty jams and marmalades she made for family members, but Fannie Trilling refused and “took to her bed.” Somehow the elder Trillings found the money to pay for Harriet’s tuition at NYU, and even to pay for a part-time maid—all with their son’s contribution—and to make matters worse, Fannie Trilling hoarded her mother’s diamonds and refused to sell them to ease Lionel’s great burden, although Diana later learned the diamonds were used to pay for Harriet’s education.
Lionel also tutored rich boys who wanted to learn to write novels. But in the end Diana and Lionel left Greenwich Village and moved to a cheaper apartment at 160 Claremont Avenue, where the rent was $50 a month. The neighborhood was dreary, and miles away from their precious free-spirited Village, but at least they weren’t living in a Shantyville or selling fruit on street corners, like so many other New Yorkers. “Every day you read in the paper about people jumping out of windows and this was really true; they did,” Diana said. “Or you saw … in Riverside Park, little sheet metal huts that people were trying to live in [during] the bitter winter weather. They’d try to warm themselves over fires in little tin cans.”
In the spring of 1930 Diana’s health began to break down. Shortly before her condition worsened, Fannie Trilling, trying hard to be on good terms with her daughter-in-law, became concerned that Diana looked pasty-faced and wan, so she would sneak her into her kosher kitchen and insist she eat a specially buttered roll before their regular Friday evening meal. Diana was deeply touched at her willingness to break the food laws by offering her butter but did not have much of an appetite.
Diana went to see more than one doctor, each of whom told her she was basically healthy despite her symptoms—no appetite, weight loss, no s
trength in her arms and legs, clammy and shaking hands. “And my heart was beating wildly all the time,” she said. She was simply adjusting to marriage, she was told, and she needed to rest more and refrain from too much sexual activity. Joseph Rubin, thoroughly mystified by an illness that involved no germs, sent Sam to tell Lionel that perhaps Diana was suffering from sexual excess and that perhaps Lionel’s own health was also at risk.
Finally Diana, who firmly believed that the early negative treatment from the extended Trilling family “took its toll on her health,” went to the doctor who had treated her mother. The doctor diagnosed hyperthyroidism, an overactive thyroid condition that could be successfully treated with iodine, which caused the thyroid—the butterfly-shaped gland in the lower neck that regulates the body’s metabolism—to shrink. Lionel asked this doctor about Sam’s sexual concerns, and the doctor wisely told him to tell his brother-in-law to mind his own business. (All the same, Lionel later told his wife that “in his whole life” he “had never known anyone with a better mental mechanism than her brother.”)
Diana went to the New England Baptist Hospital in Boston for several weeks to have the iodine treatment, and then afterward to the nearby Lahey Clinic, world famous for its thyroid care. She had a private room and a private nurse because she couldn’t bear to think of herself as a ward patient. (The Trillings would spend decades trying to pay off the bills until finally the hospital forgave the debt.) Lionel rented a cheap room in Cambridge and had only a dollar a day left over for meals. He lived on bananas and the food from Diana’s hospital tray. (She still didn’t—couldn’t—eat.) The iodine treatment was not successful, so she was operated on at Lahey for the partial removal of her thyroid gland. There were, in fact, two operations because the surgeon believed his patient was not strong enough to continue the first time, so he stopped the operation. A nurse told Diana she almost died.
No one from either the Rubin or Trilling family was able to afford travel to Boston, which the young couple understood. But Diana was lonely—and felt betrayed again—even with Lionel right there. She was also miffed that Lionel’s young sister, Harriet, who was a junior counselor at a summer camp, seemed completely oblivious to Diana’s dangerous condition and her brother’s precarious situation. Harriet, very unhappy at camp, would call her big brother incessantly for advice and never ask about Diana. Lionel was patient and always listened to his sister’s woes.
Diana quickly understood what was behind her loneliness and sense of being abandoned. She did not feel as protected by Lionel as she wanted, needed, or expected to. She wanted to be his only concern. Was he not strong enough to tell his sister that Diana was now his number-one responsibility and that he had to preserve his energy to care for her?
She feared she knew the answer.
After a lengthy hospital stay Diana’s vulnerability lessened, and her strength returned, but not her total health. She convinced herself that she was going to die young. She often thought of her childhood illnesses, when wearing a camphor bag inside her blouse was all that was needed to ward off germs. But she was now far from such folklore. She and Lionel went back to Connecticut to recuperate, although they didn’t stay in their honeymoon cabin but instead in another, even smaller, one.
Diana soon learned that her voice was in jeopardy. The two surgeries had affected the nerves to her larynx, as well as her vocal chords’ ability to produce high notes. The result was that the quality of her singing voice changed considerably. Her singing career might come to a halt before it even had a chance to begin. Lionel, trying to reassure her, told her she could always write about singing, its technical characteristics, and the challenges in balancing strength and delicacy. He told her there was a similarity between singing and prose style, without explaining further what exactly he meant. But Diana wanted to sing, not write about theories or her inability to sing; moreover, Lionel was the critic-in-training. She was not. But she put all these thoughts aside—even her newest one in which she admitted to herself that while she craved dependence on Lionel, she feared that he was going to become dependent on her.
Later, she jotted down a note to herself about her operations: “came through w/a few phobias, but lived.” She also developed bulging eyes, an abnormality in her appearance that she learned to ignore over time.
4
ISOLATION AND DESPERATION
In Diana the dominant quality is justice. It motivates, unconsciously, all her life and from it comes all her sweetness.
—Lionel Trilling, journal entry, unspecified month in 1930
One year after her surgeries, Diana said that despite everything that had happened to her and everything she worried about, she felt completely understood. This mattered more than anything else in her life. Lionel had recognized early on that her need for righteousness and a fairness organized around an underlying logic was connected to a sense of self that had been formed in her childhood. Furthermore, that she and he were alike in this respect made their union solid in a way that could enable both to endure whatever life brought them, even though logic sometimes eluded Lionel. “I wanted everything wonderful for Lionel far more than for myself,” Diana said, “and Lionel was precisely the same: he wanted everything for me too before he wanted it for himself.… There was absolutely literally nothing that I couldn’t talk about with Lionel and have a completely understanding response, and I think he felt the same way whether it had to do with the way we gossiped or the way we thought about the most serious issues in life. We talked the same language, and that was from the day we met.”
Lionel used the word sweetness as Matthew Arnold, the subject of his first book, used it in the phrase “sweetness and light”—for the intelligence and beauty that art and culture bring to one’s life. Lionel, who told Diana early in their relationship that she was more confident than she knew, understood that for better or worse Diana was the partner he needed in life to bring him his own sweetness and light.
But first, things deteriorated.
Diana began having panic attacks. She would wake up at night in terror, and Lionel would hold her close. She later said that even though he preferred not to talk about things when he was upset—which was the opposite of how she was, “he was really one of the strong people of this world … in his quiet way.” He would tell Diana, “Don’t let’s formulate things too much. Let’s not articulate things too much. It fixes them.”
But very soon her fears escalated, and Diana became afraid even to leave her Upper West Side neighborhood. At one point she thought her panics were from something she had eaten, but she quickly saw what a foolish notion that was. She sometimes felt that if only Lionel had agreed to a European honeymoon, her travel phobia, as she soon called it, might not have developed the way it had. But most of the time she blamed her thyroid operations for bringing on multiple phobias, which ranged from a fear of strangers to a fear of flashing lights.
In time Diana was unable even to stay home alone. “I was always trying to arrange to have someone with me in order to free Lionel,” she said, “but if there was no one with me, Lionel couldn’t go up the street for a pack of cigarettes without my getting in[to] a panic.” She later confessed that “even when he was right there with me, I’d often have panics.”
She decided to see a neurologist, who first asked if she had normal sexual desire (she thought the question “silly”) and then eventually prescribed Luminal, or Phenobarbital, a barbiturate that had been manufactured in America by Bayer since 1912. (The drug was originally a remedy for seizures but later began to be used as a sedative.)
Singing practice failed to calm her down because she was wary of straining her now delicate vocal chords. Lionel did his best to stay by her side when he could, but he had to teach and earn a living for them. In 1930 he began writing book reviews for The New Republic and The Nation, as well as continuing to write for the literary section of the New York Evening Post, where he had appeared since 1927. He also taught a course at the New York Junior League, the women�
��s group founded in 1901 to encourage volunteerism.
Diana, not depressed, just deeply troubled, wanted—needed—to do something useful. But what could that be? she asked. She could not assert herself in a way she thought she should, even though, with the help of Luminal, she managed to plan inexpensive tea parties on Sunday afternoons for their close friends, although she said that “we didn’t have that much of a circle with whom we felt close.” But she found that despite her gloom, she could still take some pleasure in cooking and planning. “It’s always been my recourse when life gets too bad for me; I start cooking,” she said years later. “I always feel that if I can get people to come and eat, then I’ll have some company.”
At a market on Broadway she’d buy a chunk of liverwurst and mix it with a big slab of cream cheese and have a spread that cost fifteen cents. And she’d make a big tuna salad—because most fish was cheap—and also serve red caviar, which cost next to nothing because people believed it was not suitable to be eaten. Shrimp was inexpensive, too, so she’d make a large casserole of curried shrimp, which she would serve with coconut. “People always had a good time at our house,” she said, “better times than they ever realized.”
Despite their precarious financial situation, Lionel and Diana occasionally splurged. Diana later told some devoted friends and neighbors, Thelma Ehrlich Anderson and Quentin Anderson,* that once in a while she and Lionel would go to a Broadway show.
The Untold Journey Page 7