Lionel, she said, “never talked to anyone about his own analysis, not even to his closest friends.” She said that everyone simply took it for granted that the reason her husband knew so much about psychoanalysis was “because he had a neurotic wife.” But, she said, Lionel “was in analysis over just as an extended period of time as I was. The difference was that his symptoms weren’t of a kind to show in public, like mine.” She meant her phobias that couldn’t be hidden—especially her fear of heights. Diana agreed that “in an important sense Lionel was right to keep his analysis secret, at least at first. He was making his career in the university, and in the period when he first went into treatment, analysis was very suspect in the universities; it was thought to be some kind of dark science.”
Before Lionel had become an instructor at Columbia, in the fall of 1932, he continued to teach in the evenings at Hunter College to make more money; he taught both an undergraduate and a graduate course. He was paid by the hour, and if he missed a class, there was no income, which the couple desperately needed since they were always in debt, despite borrowing from friends. After Diana’s father had died in December of 1932, they had also received a small inheritance of $5,000 from his nearly depleted estate, but in addition to everything else, they now had psychoanalysis bills. They stretched and stretched their income—Lionel’s salary at Columbia was $1,800—as far as it could go. It was time for Diana to try to help out in some way.
Diana later wrote in a letter, “There came the evening when Lionel had the flu and couldn’t manage to get up from bed. In our desperation we decided I’d take the sessions at Hunter for him, though I had had no training.” Still, she’d try to be a substitute teacher. She said that she read aloud a story of Katherine Mansfield for the undergraduate course and then led a discussion, which went well. “But,” she said, “the graduate assignment that evening was Ruskin. I had never read the essays and I wasn’t allowed to fake: there were three girls in the class, one of whom not only had an acute intuition of my ignorance but also of the fact that I was married to her handsome teacher and obviously didn’t deserve to be.” And one particular student, Diana emphasized, “gave me a very bad time and made me a permanently honest reviewer afraid to skip a sentence.”
Later, Diana spoke much more freely about the evening at Hunter, where despite everything, she said she had her first experience in literary criticism. Lionel had encouraged her and had told her she would do just fine, and he liked her idea of reading Katherine Mansfield to his students. But Diana confessed how “Lionel’s face had darkened because he was worried about the graduate course. So he said, ‘Quick, read it on the bus going down.’ And he picked out an essay by Ruskin and he said, ‘Teach it.’ So I said, ‘Yes.’ Like an idiot I got on the bus and hadn’t gone two blocks before somebody got on whom I hadn’t seen for ages, and we talked all the way downtown.”
As for the student who gave Diana a bad time: “I had known all year,” she said, “that this girl had a crush on Lionel. I could tell from the way the stories he brought home to me about this girl in class.… She was smart. And she knew more than I did. A feeble-minded graduate student knew more than I did. I knew nothing. Zero.… There I was. I started to dither.… She undertook to make me suffer … and succeeded perfectly. I mean, I have never been put through such a wringer. It was a nightmare.… I was so miserable and so scared.”
Diana wanted never to teach again. The experience also brought to light her jealousy, unfounded, but fueled by her sense of inferiority; she was just someone who “didn’t deserve to be married to the handsome teacher.”
She began to have bad dreams, worse than she had ever experienced, and they all had the same theme. She dreamed she was supposed to be in an opera performance, but had never practiced for it on the stage or even with the orchestra, or that she was taking an exam for which she had never studied, or that she was trying to get to a railroad station, or a restaurant, and kept getting lost. Anywhere, everywhere, Diana continued to feel alone and abandoned. Having Lionel around so much lessened these feelings most of the time, and she rationalized that at least it kept her husband at his desk and his books. “He didn’t waste himself on running around,” she said.
After the death of Diana’s second analyst, a friend helped her find a new doctor through Dr. Bertram Lewin, the president of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, who told her, as she wrote in The Beginning of the Journey, that she “was as innocent of analysis as the day [she] was born.” So was Dr. Lewin, it would seem, since the analyst he recommended—a Dr. Ruth Brunswick—turned out to be a morphine addict, albeit one who had studied with Freud himself. But as Diana pointed out, “Freud had himself been addicted to cocaine … for the better part of a decade,… [so] to put Dr. Brunswick’s reliability to question because of her drug habit would be tantamount to questioning Freud’s reliability.”
Dr. Brunswick exhibited peculiar behavior. As Diana described it, “she broke as many appointments as she kept, often at the last minute when I was about to leave the house. When we did meet on schedule, she could squander my whole hour in silly chatter or in doing her shopping on the telephone. ‘No, of course my slacks don’t have to have a fly front! Why does a woman need a fly front?’ she burbled on the phone to a salesgirl at Saks Fifth Avenue while I waited on the couch for her return to business.” Dr. Brunswick told Diana that she was the only patient she behaved this way with, and she did so to try to break through Diana’s hardened emotions. Often Dr. Brunswick would spend the time lecturing on psychoanalytic theory, as if they were in a classroom; in fact, one such lecture helped Diana to discover, on her own, she said, the source of one of her phobias. (Oddly, she never mentions which one.) Diana stayed as Dr. Brunswick’s patient for five years, at least getting, she says, “a first glimpse of psychoanalysis.”
And always, Diana and Lionel talked. “We never stopped talking,” she said, “except at breakfast. Lionel couldn’t stand the sight of me because I was talking. I started talking the minute I got out of bed. Lionel did not.” Also, Lionel did not like Diana talking about him to others. She often tried to defend him during testy discussions with friends. “I can take care of myself,” he would tell Diana. “I do not have to have my wife intervene to protect me.”
With her political activities behind her, or about to be, Diana tried to figure out what else to do with her life. Singing was no longer an option. Nor was writing plays, short stories, and poetry. Lionel’s career wasn’t going anywhere, either. She felt as if they had thrown away the early years of marriage to “illness and responsibility, and dreariness and neurosis.” She was angry that because of her relationship with her parents and siblings, she had learned “total sacrifice” but had not figured out any “strategies of living and working with others.” She knew bullying, and that was one reason she jumped into arguments—to protect Lionel from what she had suffered. She felt compelled to look after him, often as a pretense of demonstrating to him how to protect her.
Lionel had developed some physical problems when they were first married. He had back trouble. “He had it in some measure all his life,” Diana later said. “He always had a ‘back’ as they called it. We don’t say we have ‘a stomach’ or ‘a heart,’ but you have a ‘back.’ He sometimes wore a heavy leather and metal girdle. When we were in our first year of marriage, this was terribly, terribly difficult … and sometimes he had digestive problems.”
Still, Lionel continued teaching and struggling with his Matthew Arnold dissertation, which was overdue. “He was writing badly, limping along … floundering, and his adviser, Emery Neff, rejected each draft,” Diana said. “All his life Lionel worried that he was an insufficient scholar. He worried that he didn’t know Greek; he worried that he hadn’t been properly trained in philosophy; he worried that he didn’t have enough skill in modern languages. This was a great burden to him when he was working on the Matthew Arnold.”
In 1936 Lionel underwent a crisis at Columbia. Diana almost couldn’t bel
ieve what happened to her husband. As she described the events, “he was told he was being let go, that he would be happier elsewhere. He said, ‘No.’ He wouldn’t be happier elsewhere, but they said yes he would, and so he came home with this terrible report, and it just climaxed all our expectations for ourselves.” Diana was stunned. “That’s what life was like,” she said. “It was just horrid.… Lionel thought he ‘was the very model of failure, the very model of defeat.’ ” How could she properly reassure him when she felt the same way about herself?
Lionel told her, she said, that “ ‘they weren’t firing me because I was a Jew or a Marxist or a Freudian. They were groping for things to say because they thought I was nothing. They just thought I didn’t add up to anything.… I had the stamp of failure on me, and I invited their cruelty. I invited their aggression; also I gave them no promise. They had to find language in which to express it, and it had some significance that they chose Freud, Marx, and Jewishness as things that discredited me, but that is not why they fired me.’ ” (Diana later explained that Lionel had been told that his appointment had been “put through without the democratic consent of the department,” that actually there “was no fault in his teaching,” and that Emery Neff had told Lionel that his “sociological tendencies had hidden his literary gifts in the thesis as in the classroom.”)
Soon, Diana said, Lionel did something totally out of character. He roared into Columbia, and as Diana proudly recounted, told them, “ ‘You can’t fire me. I’m going to be the best person you’ve ever had in this department.’ ” She said, “It was like madness … going from one office to another. Lionel yelled and swore in Emery Neff’s office, and Neff said, ‘Shhhhhh,’ and jumped and closed the transom so that it couldn’t be heard outside.” Diana said that Neff was very shocked that Lionel was talking that way. “It must have been very, very much of a surprise to them that Lionel was taking this view of himself,” she said, “because it was just the opposite of the view they all had of him. And they all fell for it. They all said, ‘Well, look, he’s got a lot of skills, maybe he has something going for us.’ That’s the way he interpreted it to me, to himself. Lionel said, ‘You know, I’ve destroyed this image of me as the passive person who is just going to sit here and fail, and they bought my new picture of myself, just as they had bought my earlier picture of myself.’ ”
After the Columbia crisis Diana said her husband “was an absolutely changed man.… He told this story to everybody. Lionel didn’t keep this a secret once it happened.… He had had this amazing showdown at Columbia.”
Lionel was even able to get back to work on his Arnold dissertation. Sidney Hook, the Trillings’ Yaddo mentor, later insisted he had been the person who had encouraged Lionel to fight back at Columbia. Diana disputes this: “Lionel was incapable of acting on other people’s impulses.”
This would not always prove to be the case.
Diana said that Lionel “got right into the heart of the book and wrote. He wrote one chapter; he wrote the next; he knew where he was going … and then every single day proved him to be more and more a different person.”
This happened because of more than just what Lionel had been able to achieve with his “amazing showdown.”
It happened because Diana, too, had been changing, and had discovered a new gift—that she was a very capable judge of writing.
Diana became her husband’s editor. “I was always working on the Arnold manuscript, from the first bad versions right on to when he was really on the final haul,” she said. “It got to be my joke that what Lionel was writing over and over again was that England had had an industrial revolution yet the roads were bad, because what he was doing was not writing about Arnold but about the political and social conditions of England in Arnold’s time.… Lionel hadn’t yet integrated all this material with the work of Arnold himself,” and that’s why, she said, all the early drafts were rejected by his adviser. “There were days when he sat in front of his typewriter unable to produce a word. He never gave up and eventually he’d break through the barrier.”
Diana went over the Arnold manuscript so many times, she said, “that by the time the final version went to press,” she knew the book by heart. She said that she “had gone over and over and over [it], saying insane things like ‘this paragraph has to have two more sentences. Somehow it’s not full enough. This paragraph needs to have something lopped off it.’ ” She knew it was “a rather odd way to talk to a writer. But the material was there,” she said. And she knew what to do with the material. “I’m not saying I wrote the book. I’m not claiming credit for the thought,” she said, “just for its presentation. I made the thought, Lionel’s thought, clearer, more understandable, more graceful, better balanced. I made the book go forward at a proper pace.”
Diana said she never changed the fundamental character of Lionel’s writing in editing him as much as she did. She “just pulled the ideas out of him.” And while she said he was grateful for her help, nonetheless, “sometimes he would go into despair at her criticisms and say he couldn’t do it.” Once Lionel showed her “with amusement how she had rewritten a page of Arnold.” He was entertained, she said, and quipped that ‘I couldn’t keep my hands off anything, could I?’ ”
But always, Diana emphasized that the ideas were there in the thesis, and “I never contributed the ideas.” She only made them more coherent and better organized.
She also created the index for the book, a task that greatly satisfied her bookkeeping inclinations. She discovered many changed words and punctuations in some of the quotations used in the book, which Lionel thought didn’t matter, but Diana was “stubborn” (her word) and insisted on checking every single quote. They hired a young man to find the many books from which all the quotations came, and, as Diana said, “Lionel had a great instinct for then finding [most of] the necessary quotes [from the trove of books]. He could open a book to the passage he was looking for—it was a most extraordinary gift.” She also said she “wouldn’t have dared to do the work if Lionel hadn’t been right there to consult,” yet “sometimes we’d spend the whole day searching for one sentence. We both were searching.… We were soaked with sweat.… There was not one quote that didn’t have an error in it.” She continued:
If anyone wanted to, they could have destroyed him with this. There would be the most inconsequential thing, and there was something wrong with every single quote. At the end of chapter 1, Lionel said, “Well, thank god that’s done, now we can stop.” I said, “That’s chapter 1 that’s done, but there’s the whole rest of the book,” and he said, “The rest is all fine.” And there we were right back in the beginning again. I yelled. I said I wouldn’t leave the office … and we got through chapter 2 in a few days. At the end of chapter 2, Lionel said, “Now it’s all right. Everything is fine.” Now it never bothered me that Lionel made these mistakes because, after all, when he took those notes, he didn’t know whether he was going to use them. They were notes for him to write from. He didn’t know he was going to quote them. But that once having shown that there were errors, not to be able to accept that—it was the largest act of literary denial in the technical, psychoanalytical that I’ve ever seen. With every chapter he denied that this was a reality. He never, to the end of his life, admitted this. Around once a year we fought about this. I think probably around once a year we came near [to] killing each other on this. Because I would say, “It’s just like what you did on the Arnold. I don’t care that you made mistakes. I care that you denied that you made the mistakes and that I had to fight like this to make you clean up your mistakes.” “Oh,” he would continue and say, “I didn’t make any mistakes. You’re just trying to make it out that I made mistakes.” And this went on like this for the rest of our lives.
Diana had found an occupation: “being Lionel’s helper this way,” as she put it. She was not surprised he respected her judgment as he did because on the most minor of scales he had been an admirer of the letters she wrote him befo
re their marriage (if not, afterward, of her play Snitkin), as well as the discussions they often had long into the night about books and politics. Lionel had once suggested, of course, that she could turn to writing if her singing career did not work out.
And despite all her insecurities, Diana understood—as did Lionel—that she had a very special gift as an editor of words—just as a musician knows he or she has a gift for chosen sounds. She had, she now knew, “a natural feeling for prose not her own—how to make it better.” And she also knew that Lionel deeply believed in her editing skills, even though he didn’t want the world to know of her revisions.
Diana lamented that Lionel destroyed the manuscripts she worked on so they wouldn’t be among his papers. She said that he “left earlier versions on which for one reason or another I hadn’t worked, [but] wherever there was a really notable amount of my handwriting, he destroyed the manuscripts.” And she further divulged that her “rewriting of Lionel’s manuscripts, not only the Arnold, but all his manuscripts, was most extensive.” (Years later, Lionel told the editor Elisabeth Sifton that Diana had taught him how to write and that “she knows when a paragraph should end.”)
Still, “whatever our unconsciouses were doing to us,” Diana explained, “every conscious commitment was honorable and trustworthy, on both sides. I’ve never been able to find in our relationship—and this is probably the most remarkable thing—a single instance of competitiveness with each other or putting the other’s welfare before our own.”
It was complicated, Diana and Lionel Trilling’s language and behavior, and complicated soon became one of their necessary words.
6
THE GREATEST SERVICE
My debt to my wife Diana Trilling is greatest of all; I cannot calculate its full sum, for it amounted to collaboration; at every stage of the book she was my conscience, and there was scarcely a paragraph that was not bettered by her unremitting criticism and her creative editing.
The Untold Journey Page 10