The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  Diana said that she and Lionel just never “accepted the aesthetic of the party,” and she added that they also “didn’t like to think of those opposed to Communism as enemies.” Nonetheless, she had many a fight with Bettina Sinclair, her college and playwriting friend, who was an early anti-Communist. Bettina and her husband, David, both socialists, had lived in the Soviet Union for a year (supporting themselves primarily with rubles that had accrued and not been allowed out of the country from Upton Sinclair’s book royalties, which they had permission to collect). The young Sinclairs were appalled by the squalor and the abysmal class distinctions they saw in the Soviet Union, plus the lack of fairness they witnessed, and the scarcity of every necessary household product. Diana said she “took every word Bettina said to be a vile, vicious slander” and at first didn’t believe a word of her stories. She decided Bettina was a reactionary. Then in 1933 the poet E. E. Cummings published his prose poem EIMI, which dealt with his visit to the Soviet Union in 1931, and Diana said that they were all “delighted to have literary proof” of their opinion about Bettina, because “Cummings’ book had a portrait of a young American couple based on Bettina and David,” and he “was making fun of them because they were so naive and wide-eyed.” She therefore “took great pleasure in that as confirmation that David and Bettina were ludicrous characters; their reports not to be credited.” But in truth the poet, in a book described as impenetrable and incomprehensible by one reviewer, was writing about his disappointment with the Soviet Union, especially its lack of artistic and intellectual freedom. Cummings actually agreed with the Sinclairs’ assessment of life in the Soviet Union.

  The Trillings had also occasionally attended New York chapter meetings of the John Reed Club, a cultural organization that had been started in 1929 by members of the New Masses magazine and was controlled by the Communist Party. (The club was named after the controversial activist and journalist who had written the celebrated firsthand account of the Bolshevik revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World.) In 1934 the Partisan Review, founded by William Phillips and Phillip Rahv, was begun as a publication of the John Reed Club, but the magazine “quickly freed itself from Communist control,” as Diana later described its evolution, and “began to function as an independent Marxist publication.” She went on to comment that “with the wide general disillusionment with the revolutionary ideal, the magazine considerably altered its radical position, moving from orthodox Marxism to a more congenial left-liberalism.”

  Liberal—in a particularly special sense opposed to both nineteenth-century libertarianism (maximizing individual rights and minimizing the role of the state) and left-wing liberalism that favored radical change—became Diana’s chosen term. And years later she said that a confusion “grew up from the early thirties between fellow-traveling Communists and Liberals” and that she came to her anti-Communism “on the basis of my liberalism. I feel that the first tenet of liberalism has to be that it is opposed to any form of despotism; therefore, it had to be opposed to Communism as soon as Communism showed itself to be a despotism.”

  By 1933 the Trillings, along with their mentor, Sidney Hook, were thoroughly appalled by Joseph Stalin’s abuse of power and had become anti-Communists. “We didn’t see the working class around us very much,” Diana said. “What we saw was a lot of middle-class young people who were speaking on behalf of a class that wasn’t represented very much in our view. Who was this working class in whose name we were making this revolution? What we began to see,” she said, “was the effort [by the Communists] to woo and rule the opinion-forming class … the people in the public eye: the people of the theater, the people of the movies, the people in publishing houses, the people on newspapers, the opinion-forming university people, people who were in a position to influence opinion.… The middle-class intellectuals were being mobilized to make a revolution in which they invoked the name of the proletariat.”

  Shortly before Diana quit the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (which she had joined in 1931) and she and Lionel left front groups behind them forever, she unwittingly almost became part of a political conspiracy that formed an intriguing chapter in American history.

  Whittaker Chambers, who had been an acquaintance of Lionel’s when they were students at Columbia, approached Diana and asked her to be a courier (or in espionage-talk, a “Dead Drop”) in his work as a Soviet spy. He wanted Diana to accept and hold on to secret documents for him. As she later wrote in her memoir, The Beginning of the Journey, “I was enormously flattered that he thought me capable of such an assignment, and I was ashamed to refuse him.” But, as she explained, “by the time [he] called me for my decision, we had broken with the Communists. It was a very, very strange period. So Whittaker said, ‘I know your answer,’ and I said, ‘I would like to tell you my reason,’ and what I wanted to tell him was I didn’t want to betray my country. He thought it was because I was mad at the Communist Party.” Diana had heard from one of her friends that Chambers also needed, for reasons she didn’t know, information about Columbia’s large-scale tunnel system—some of the underground passageways dated from 1885—and Diana certainly didn’t want to have anything to do “with something like that,” she said. “Maybe he would have maps of fortifications or military information.” Her mind went wild with speculation about any covert attack plans he might have had in mind.

  According to Diana, Sidney Hook maintained that it was Lionel who had been asked to be the clandestine courier. In a letter to Diana, Hook even reminded her that she had once told him that “Lionel was naively agreeable to the proposal but you decidedly not,” he wrote. “Your language about Lionel’s good will and naiveté was rather emphatic.” But Diana said that Sidney Hook was entirely mistaken and that she was the one Chambers asked, but, most important, no Trilling was ever a spy.

  As Diana later made plain, “We were closest to the workings of the Communist Party in this country at the moment when two things were happening simultaneously. These two things were that Roosevelt had been elected, and Roosevelt was beginning to pull the country together. We’re talking about 1932–33, that we were going to have the beginning of something that would be a rescue operation.… There was an election in November, and by March of the next year we were totally disillusioned by the [Communist] party.… We stayed very close, of course, to all the activities of the Stalinists for the rest of the decade of the thirties. We were aware of every move they were making and of how damaging it was to everything we valued in world affairs—how damaging it was to the cause of democracy and freedom and human life in Europe, and how the Communist Party was really influencing our own American administration, not in American policy but in foreign policy.”

  Diana said that after the innocents’ clubs were out of their lives, she wholeheartedly agreed with what Elinor Hayes said to her: “ ‘Never again is anybody going to lead me by the nose into any political position.’ ” And Diana went on: “I remember saying Amen to this. Never was anybody going to manipulate me that way.… It was like a set of Russian dolls: you have this manipulation within another manipulation within another manipulation.”

  * Quentin Anderson, the son of playwright Maxwell Anderson, would become an important Columbia University cultural historian and literary critic, and Thelma Ehrlich Anderson was a social researcher who worked for various government agencies, as well as for private research companies.

  † The Scottsboro case, in which nine black teenagers were falsely accused of raping two white women—their accusers were men who appeared to have blatantly racist motives and no evidence that the teens had committed the crime—was one of the causes célèbres of the 1930s. The case not only involved extreme lies but had a history-making number of trials, convictions, retrials, and reversals. Five of the young men had charges against them dropped in 1937, and one was pardoned in 1976. On November 22, 2013, The New York Times reported that the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously to pardon the last three men—
“closing one of the most notorious chapters of the South’s racial history.”

  5

  THE REST OF OUR LIVES

  Two people within three days told me I am aloof, restrained, removed, coldly at ease, snooty, high-hat, proud-seeming, confident, superior. This is really amusing when I think of the shy puppy-dog constantly within me.

  —Lionel Trilling, journal entry, sometime between Sept. 1926 and spring 1929

  In the late spring of 1933 Diana and Lionel moved from 160 Claremont Avenue to a two-room garden apartment—it was actually two steps below street level—in a brownstone at 15 East Seventy-Seventh Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues. It was more expensive but cheerier for Diana than Claremont Avenue, and Lionel had privacy to work in what Diana described as a “cell-like extension of the kitchen.”

  Diana had hoped her new surroundings would raise her spirits, but every so often Lionel’s sister, Harriet, would come to visit at lunchtime and find her sister-in-law still in bed. Diana sometimes tried to fill up her days by writing short stories, but she could never rid them of what she called her “intrusive supervision.” The stories were stilted, and she had too little faith in her intuition.

  Diana had written a poem at Yaddo and liked it enough to send to her new acquaintance Malcolm Cowley. He wrote her that he would give it to The New Republic’s poetry “czar” but that “the chances are exactly seventeen to one that he will reject it, even with the note of intercession I wrote, but I want to say for the record that I enjoyed it immensely.” (The poem was rejected a few weeks later.)

  The Trillings stayed on Seventy-Seventh Street for just eighteen months (the neighborhood was just too expensive) before moving back to the more affordable and manageable Columbia area. They found an apartment on 114th Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive, where they remained until 1936, when they moved yet again—this time to a dark and confining first-floor apartment at 620 West 116th Street. But it was close to Riverside Drive, so in warm seasons they could sit on the grass in Riverside Park across the street and look at the lights flickering in New Jersey and boats gliding up and down the Hudson River. “It was cool there,” Diana remembered; “a breeze coming off the water made it [a] little cooler. Sometimes we sat there for hours.”

  Diana hadn’t enjoyed the outdoors so much since her tranquil days at Camp Lenore as both a camper and a counselor (she taught archery, basketball, and drama). One of her greatest pleasures as a camper had been the dancing classes held on the sweeping lawn in front of the director’s house. Diana loved leaping around in the open air with the sun beaming down on her body, knowing her mother would probably disapprove. Despite getting lice one summer, for which her hair had to be covered in a black salve thick as tar, she had only good memories of being outdoors so much. But the freedom she felt at the camp had once led to an urban accident at home: she had wanted to show off that she could ride a bicycle with her feet on the handlebars and her arms spread out like a bird’s wings, and the result was that she fell and knocked herself unconscious. And she had revealed to her father, who was “utterly incompetent in all physical things,” she said, that after all, she was no better than he.

  In 1934, as the Trillings approached the age of thirty, life had hardly any joy for the couple. “We were funny; we laughed a great deal because we were funny people,” Diana said. “Lionel was an extraordinarily witty man … so we clowned, we laughed, we had parties, we went to parties … but we [weren’t] having pleasure or adventure.”

  She later told Thelma Anderson that they “were a very unpositive couple.” Still, every now and then she and Lionel managed to cobble enough money together to rent houses for a month in the summer, first in Babylon and then in Amityville, Long Island. The house in Amityville was so primitive it had only an outhouse, yet there were nearby posh tennis courts that they used so often they developed what Diana called “tennis fever.” She had managed to overcome the trembling she had once had when she served to her brother. Lionel rediscovered fishing, a sport he had enjoyed as a boy with his Uncle Hymie. “He really loved that,” Diana said, “and it was an occupation in which he didn’t have me to take into account.” (Later, under the guidance of Quentin Anderson, Lionel became a fairly accomplished flycaster, and they frequently went on trout-fishing weekends together.)

  “We were living our lives in preparation for a serious place in life,” Diana said. “I was, of course, one of the lost young women of my generation.” She had no career. And in the beginning Lionel was also adrift. “Some people thought he just wasn’t going to make it, despite the determination that he communicated to people.… Some people thought that he was too mild to be a force in the world.… But I was the only person who knew he would make the most impact as a writer.” Diana wanted to share in that “impact”—participate somehow in its development—but she could not see how this could ever happen.

  The neurologist who had prescribed Luminal to Diana also suggested she try hypnosis, and as she later wrote in The Beginning of the Journey, “the doctor to whom he sent me was youthful, agreeable, and attractive. He wanted to make me well. But he knew little about the dark art.” Not only did his attempts to hypnotize Diana fail, but so did his attempt at psychoanalysis, because, as she wrote, “a hint of the illicit was entering our relationship. This frightened and excited me.” The hypnotist-doctor actually asked her out on a date—a date—which Diana improbably accepted. They met in a speakeasy (not Mario’s, where Diana and Lionel first met). “The date was a disaster,” she nonchalantly went on, saying no more about him but making clear the so-called treatment ended, but not before he “fixed me up with other men.” These dates were not for analysis. They were plain and simple trysts.

  In the early 1930s, psychoanalysis was not exactly a mainstream medical therapy, although it had gained many followers among writers and intellectuals. It had grown up in the 1910s and 1920s, when the first person to translate Sigmund Freud’s work into English was Abraham Brill, a 1903 graduate of Columbia University’s medical school. He was also the first practicing psychoanalyst in America; he founded the New York Psychoanalytic Society in 1911 and later the American Psychoanalytic Association.

  Psychoanalysis in the United States was thus launched.

  Diana first heard about the new “talking therapy,” as most people called it, from a Radcliffe friend and was intrigued. Her unfortunate encounter with the hypnotist-doctor did not stop her from trying again, this time with a classmate of Lionel’s. There was no sordid dating involved. But the young doctor, Nat Ross, also proved to be unconventional, to say the least; he invited Diana to stay with his family in their brownstone in Greenwich Village, while Lionel was in class. And then, in 1934, Lionel also became his patient. Neither Diana, Lionel, nor Dr. Ross recognized at first how reckless this was, and the treatments ended only because the doctor decided to return to school for more training, which he clearly needed.

  Diana moved on to a Dr. Paul Schilder, who she later learned had received no formal psychoanalytic training. But she remained in treatment with him for five years—until he died in a car accident—later confessing that she had followed his orders, as well as the hypnotist’s, because she felt like a powerless child—so much so that she let herself go on dates with other men despite the fact that she was a new bride. Even though Diana acknowledged that she and her women friends were “all for sexual variety,” she understood that they were “only half-joking.” The men,” she said, “were furious at us” for the way we talked.

  Diana concluded that Lionel assumed she was at a doctor’s appointment when she went off on her outings.

  At Dr. Ross’s house, when Diana stayed there in the afternoons, she witnessed bedlam: food left on tables, chairs, and rugs; pets urinating and defecating any place they chose to; and the doctor’s infant daughter crawling right through the mess. Freud himself had warned a colleague that he worried that he was bringing a plague to the United States. Could Americans handle psychoanalysis?


  Dr. Schilder forced Diana to face her fears by making her roam around Manhattan alone and to confront her fear of heights by spending time in a penthouse. She somehow found the courage to go along with these instructions because it was as if her father, in his role as intimidator, was controlling her. Dr. Schilder also discussed Diana freely with Lionel, telling him she was making great progress. But most radically of all, he invited Diana and Lionel to accompany him and his family on a trip to Canada, which they accepted. Diana reported that just being in her analyst’s company (his wife was also a psychiatrist—as well as an alcoholic) lessened her fear of travel.

  In the 1930s Lionel read all of Freud’s works, which Diana did not, although she eventually read his seminal book, Civilization and Its Discontents. She applied what she read—and had previously known about—to real life, which, she said, Lionel never did, except his “concurrence in Freud’s tragic view of life,” which for her husband didn’t derive from recognition of death—but “perhaps it started with sex—the need to sacrifice the unrestricted pursuit of desire in order to maintain the family.” She explained that “Lionel’s interest in analysis wasn’t so much clinical as literary. He didn’t think of analysis as a field of medicine but as a study of human behavior, even perhaps a study of civilization, a study in culture. He never applied the insights of analysis to the people he knew, as I do.” And she added, with amusement, that they eventually “protected each of their Freuds from the other.”