She revealed that during one intermission when they went out to have a cigarette, they returned to their seats and saw “a totally different set of characters on the stage.” She said that they “had actually walked back into the wrong theater” and that “that was the kind of thing that was constantly happening the first year we were married.”
She confided to the Andersons that Lionel was “not practical in some ways even though he was generally terribly attentive to all the details around us.” Nonetheless he had allowed them to mistake one Broadway theater for another in the area.
Before they were married, Diana said, Lionel had ordered opera tickets and then discovered he had no money to pay for them. She came to the rescue and paid out of the allowance from her father she had luckily set aside.
Lionel could be a little deceptive. Diana described a time during the Depression when she and Lionel had been out for a walk, “and then we took the crosstown bus. Lionel was carrying a walking stick and the bus was very crowded. A great big workman obviously, [sic] he was wearing work clothes—got up very kindly, gently took Lionel’s arm and offered his seat. Lionel very quickly saw what the man had thought, since he was carrying a stick, that he might be a little lame. Lionel accepted this. He didn’t say, ‘No, you sit down.’ He sat down right away and thanked the man and then when we got off the bus, he limped off the bus. And then never carried the stick again.”
Several months after being prescribed the sedative, Diana was able to take the 183-mile train trip to Saratoga Springs, New York, where she and Lionel were to be in residence at Yaddo, a four-hundred-acre artist retreat founded in 1900 by philanthropists Spencer and Katrina Trask. Kip had recommended them for the residence. Both Trillings thought that getting away from New York would be therapeutic. Diana could sense acutely the isolation that people felt as a result of the Great Depression, and she would later say that the 1930s were so awful because of both the isolation and the desperation. And although unspoken, she felt those two aspects in herself, as well.
Because they were short of money, they had sublet their apartment and hoped to be able to stay at the all-expenses-paid Yaddo for the entire summer. Lionel expected to work in earnest on his PhD dissertation on Matthew Arnold. (He had received his master’s in 1926 for a thesis on the minor romantic poet Theodore Edward Hook.) In New York he had worked on the Arnold thesis in fits and starts but was often blocked. “When he was supposed to be off working in the library, he was at the movies, watching double features,” Diana later discovered, adding, “that was an escape in a period of great depression.” He had a novel in mind also. Diana told the Andersons that Lionel had told her that “a novel is a different thing than it used to be” and that “a novel, now, is the novel of ideas.” And, she went on, “he meant Thomas Mann,” adding that “he was a great admirer of Proust, and as a human being he is very like a Proustian.” Quentin agreed.
But at Yaddo Lionel “was like a well-recommended graduate student,” Diana remarked; “this professionalism of the artist class or the writing class hadn’t dawned yet.” Yaddo “was run like a house party.”
Diana thought of herself as just a tagalong, although she still hoped to slowly build up her voice over the course of the long summer despite the medical obstacles she faced. It turned out that the quirky director of Yaddo, Elizabeth Ames, had not promised the Trillings residence for the entire summer but just for June and July. She told Lionel she would keep them in mind for August. Mrs. Ames also seemed taken aback by Diana’s wish for “intensive studying” of her voice and said she could only offer her a place to sing in an old farmhouse three blocks from the mansion, mentioning that a new highway was being built along that road, and the noise might be a problem for Diana. Mrs. Ames asked Lionel to have Diana write her directly, which she did a few days later. Mrs. Ames replied immediately that she had now found a place on the estate for Diana to sing as long she practiced after 4:00 p.m. She also unexpectedly offered Diana a writer’s studio, which was a piece of good fortune because Diana decided that if she couldn’t make operatic singing a career, she’d use the summer as an experiment to see if some form of writing could become a “substitute” career.
As it happened, the singing practice did not go well because Diana was so afraid of destroying her voice altogether. She began to work on a second play about marital infidelity, which developed out of all the “obsessive” talk on the subject among their friends in New York. Surprisingly, Diana said that she had “determined” that it “was clearly the male of the species who would preserve the monogamous institution.” She later decided that after three revisions, although she had a gift for dialogue, she didn’t know anything about a play’s construction. The Young Wives Tale was as unsuccessful as Snitkin had been.
But what had caused such a turnaround in Elizabeth Ames, causing her to offer Diana two studios? Diana would contend it was no turnaround at all, just the second act of an “intrusive, selfish woman of little heart driven by jealousy of any young woman who had a husband.” Mrs. Ames, she said, had a “bitter resentment toward those whom she considered more fortunate than herself.” Indeed, several weeks into the residency, Diana felt the full brunt of Mrs. Ames’s biting displeasure. A photographer in residence at Yaddo asked Diana to come to his studio at eleven in the morning so that he could take her picture in the proper light, but this request violated Yaddo’s rule of no visits to other studios until after 4:00 p.m. Mrs. Ames found out about Diana’s infraction and told her she would have to leave Yaddo immediately. She was to pack up and go and not return for a month. Lionel was allowed to remain, which he did because he was desperate to get work done on his Arnold thesis.
Diana reluctantly returned to New York and lived with her father and sister for two weeks and then with the Fadimans for another two weeks until her suspension from Yaddo was over. She returned to Yaddo with great trepidation, and her fearfulness became stronger than ever, especially when a now mustached Lionel greeted her at the train station. As she later wrote, “in the next months and years any change in my familiar circumstances, even a sudden shadow across a window or an unanticipated sound, filled me with terror.… Lionel could shave off the offending mustache but he could not keep the world unchanged for me.”
And the world did change quite suddenly for both Trillings when they met Sidney Hook, who had studied under John Dewey while getting his PhD at Columbia and who was also staying at Yaddo that summer. At the time, he taught philosophy at New York University (where he would remain for decades) and had recently become a Marxist, believing that capitalism needed to be replaced first by socialism and then by Communism. At Yaddo he introduced Diana and Lionel and quite a few other guests to Marxism and its vision of a workers’ state, then to Communism. “He was a fantastic debater,” Diana said. But no one joined the party; rather, they were just sympathizers, or fellow travelers, which many writers, artists, and intellectuals became as a result of the financial crisis around the world. “By 1931, we were ripe for conversion,” Diana said. “You walked on the street and you saw lines of people waiting for milk for their children … people picking over the garbage in garbage cans trying to find something to eat … so you thought, this is what happens under Capitalism. It has failed.”
She said that almost all of the writers at Yaddo that summer—Malcolm Cowley (then an assistant editor at The New Republic), Max Lerner (then an editor at the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences), Marc Blitzstein (who was working at Yaddo on his soon-to-be-world-famous pro-union musical The Cradle Will Rock)—“joined the proletariat in asserting its claims to the product of its industry. The working class was going to own the means of production, and they would have the benefit of what was produced, and so in that sense there was always the positive, a working class.”
Diana said that because she and Lionel were teenagers at the time of the Sacco-Vanzetti case in 1920 (in which two suspected anarchists were accused of murder), they were only bystanders during an investigation that “had mobi
lized a great part of the intellectual community, and was probably the first time anybody [in that community] had taken a stand on any public issue in this country.” But at Yaddo they were more than ready to take an active political stand, and the years 1931 to 1933 were crucial in their political education.
They joined a front group, the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, which had been founded in June of 1931. Theodore Dreiser was a leader, and other writers who eventually joined included Lincoln Steffens, John Dos Passos, Josephine Herbst, Sherwood Anderson, Malcolm Cowley, and Edmund Wilson. Eventually the group came to blows over Hitler’s rise. Some members followed Trotsky’s view that Hitler had to be stopped. Trotsky, a revolutionist and major figure in the Communist Party, who founded the Red Army, would be assassinated in 1940 on Stalin’s orders because of his belief in internationalism and his long-lasting opposition to Stalin’s ruthless policies. Other members of the Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners followed the strict Communist Party line that the chief danger was not Hitler or Stalin but the rise of a democratic socialism that would achieve its goals through gradual reforms. “They had been absolutely certain that Hitler was going to be defeated and that there was going to be a rising of the German proletariat,” Diana told her new friend Elinor Rice Hayes, a novelist and biographer. She added that “they were indoctrinated up to the teeth with the idea that it was worse to make a united front with social democracy than to have Hitler come to power.”
Trotsky had promoted socialism and Communism globally, while Stalin favored its expansion only in the Soviet Union. Brute force was his main weapon. Trotsky’s main “weapon” had been his intellect. “We were all seduced by Trotsky because he was such an intellectual,” Diana told Elinor; “he wrote such good history, he wrote such good prose; and he made fun of Jewish dentists in the Bronx.”
She told Elinor that Lionel had wanted to write a play about Trotsky’s secretary, who had betrayed him. “He thought that in writing a play like that, he would be able to say what he came slowly but surely to feel, that between Lenin [the premier of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1924] and Trotsky and Stalin, who was to choose? Stalin was a maniac, and Trotsky was the architect of large murderous plots.”
Elinor answered that Trotsky didn’t have the paranoid character that Stalin had, although all three of them “were just as much for violent revolution and just as committed to anything that justified their ends. Lenin was a violent, and in my terms, an evil man. I think Trotsky was, too. But I think one has to discriminate in the quality of the men.”
The Trillings and their friends debated day and night and went to meetings. Diana said that she and Lionel, and Elinor and her husband, George Novak, would sit in a row together at meetings on Sixteenth Street and Irving Place and “stand up and sing the International with clenched fists raised in the air.” Diana and Elinor liked to think of themselves as revolutionaries, although Diana admitted they never actually felt like ones—they felt more like “masqueraders” because there were no “clenched fists” at the end of meetings, which was not true. Diana was ashamed of her fists and quickly forgot that she had once declared: “This is unforgettable for me, the four of us with our fists held in the air … and I often think, suppose this had been my child, I’d have found it unendurable.”
The two friends decided to work together in service to their—but more Elinor’s—political beliefs. “I wanted something to do,” Diana said. “I hadn’t been well … [and] I needed something to occupy me.”
With the help of Luminal, Diana was able—and, more important, motivated—to work as a secretary for the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, in its office off Fifteenth Street, near Union Square. “I got myself deeply involved in political activity on the basis of a nonpolitical drive. I did have a political conviction, but what drove me downtown was the drive to have an occupation.” She said she thought of the committee “as an instrument, a helpful tool in my life.”
But the work wasn’t exactly what she had in mind. Elliot Cohen, who had left The Menorah Journal, supervised the office, and he didn’t take the women seriously. According to Diana, even though Cohen was “in a high theoretical position, he was planning strategies; he was the real politico.… He was also just a fellow traveler, so what it really comes down to in some odd way was male chauvinism. I mean, they took this kind of lead over us because they were men, and they knew about the theoretical aspects, and we only knew about licking stamps.” She meant herself and Elinor, who also worked in the office.
Lionel, who was very glad his wife’s phobias were under enough control to allow her to leave the neighborhood, had very little time to be politically active. In 1932 he became an instructor in Columbia’s English department; his salary was $2,400 a year. In his journal he wrote that political activity could be an impediment “to my getting to write. The question, would I engage in these activities if I had not the friends I have? No. I think not.” Yet his introduction to Communism fueled the idea for the novel he conceived (but never wrote) at Yaddo. He noted its political implications in his journal: “In the Yaddo novel: the two older women, the lady Communist and the lady romantic and the aspirations of the two younger women.” He also wrote in his journal: “How little the Marxist literature dealt with the idea of class. For that we have to go to Forster, Arnold, James!”
Elinor pointed out to Diana that they were “two bourgeois girls who insisted on keeping records of everything.” They were just doing the housekeeping, or as Diana put it, “we house kept.” It was a painstaking task that the men didn’t appreciate. “They just thought we had brought our ugly, foolish, time-wasting, motion-wasting middle-class habits into their paradise,” Diana said.
But Diana and Elinor insisted on keeping records, and as Diana explained to Elliot Cohen, “you can’t just collect the money; you have to have cards and records of who sent the money, their addresses, the date the money was received, the amount.” She said that he and the other men “looked at us as if we were out of our minds,” but in the long run they saw that because of the new methodical system, the office was actually running more efficiently, and it became clear that “they were raking in the money” because they kept careful track of all the amounts.
The men really took notice when the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners got involved in working for the Scottsboro case.† Diana said that “we really got started on keeping good records and creating a Prisoner’s Relief Fund.” Indeed, Diana also remembered that trouble began with the Communist Party when she and Elinor studiously followed the trail of the money. Elinor said that the committee “took the money we collected and used it to send people out to a Communist Party meeting in the Middle West somewhere. They did not use the money for the specific purpose it had been intended.” Diana recalled that “the families of the Scottsboro Boys were being denied this relief money and food because they were black, because these boys had been arrested and accused of rape. Everything was being done to harass their starving families, and so I sat down and wrote a most moving letter on the basis of these facts … and sent it to a list of people whose cards I had in my middle-class way collected.” But, she said, “one day a letter came from the state attorney’s office in Alabama … saying that I had used the mails to defraud. The letter said I was wrong and that food had been sent to the families—that so many bags of flour, so many bags of sugar-dried egg powder and so on—had been given to the families of the Scottsboro Boys.”
Diana didn’t know who or what to believe. “I was terrified,” she recalled. “But the only thing that I was more than scared was furious. I was in a blind rage.… I had signed a letter saying they didn’t get any flour or sugar.” So she asked some party officials and was told, she said, “what difference does it make, Comrade? Essentially you were telling the truth. It doesn’t make any difference, a bag of flour, a bag of sugar. These people were being persecuted.” But Diana couldn’t toler
ate such reasoning or her role in writing the original letter about the families not receiving any relief, so, she said, she “marched out of the office and went downstairs, took out the file, wrote a very careful letter in which I said, ‘Every fact that I put in my previous letter was a lie. I didn’t tell these lies purposely.’ ” Diana offered to give everyone his or her donations back, because they had not gone to the Scottsboro families but to other party activities, but she said no one asked for any money back because she had been honest about what happened, and “some people included more money. That was for me a turning point,” Diana told Elinor, “because I said, ‘For what purpose do you tell your lies, when your lies have even no practical usefulness—when you lie just to lie?’ ” Diana realized that “if you had to lie in order to make a revolution, then I think I didn’t want to have a revolution. It was more important to me to tell the truth.”
But for a while, in working for the Scottsboro cause, Diana enjoyed her trips to Harlem, where she rang lots of doorbells and solicited contributions (although Lionel worried about her being out in the evenings). “We got W. C. Handy to do a great big benefit performance, also Cab Calloway. The [concert] was one of the greatest evenings of my life,” she said, adding that Handy told her, “If the Scottsboro Boys are found guilty I will write a blues that nobody can dance to.”
Diana later explained how politically disillusioned she and Lionel had become and how Communist-front groups or “innocents’ clubs” existed all over the world. The two of them had begun to see “how the rule from the top [of the Communist Party] was passed down to underlings … the innocents … the used ones … the idea that you have to break eggs to make an omelet, which was commonly the excuse being offered for all the criticisms that one might raise of the Communist Party, was not finally satisfying to us.… My politics have never been radical—I have an intellectual position.… I wouldn’t want a violent revolution for anything in the world.” She had come a long way from her strong words about the need for revolution written in her diary when she was a young woman in South America with her father and sister.
The Untold Journey Page 8