—Lionel Trilling, preface to Matthew Arnold
When Lionel’s book on Arnold was finally published in 1939 (the manuscript had been finished the year before), it contained a gushing tribute to Diana. Her “creative editing”! Her husband’s “conscience”! Her “collaboration”! Whatever reason he had for throwing out the drafts of his wife’s editing didn’t mean he wasn’t very grateful for her help; it more likely meant he was made uncomfortable by his first drafts, as well as feeling ashamed of needing so much help.
And he hoped Diana’s role could remain his secret despite the book’s dedication, which in general is recognized by knowledgeable readers to be a place for hyperbole and thus not always to be taken that seriously.
Lionel also kept his depression—“his emotional darkness,” as Diana called it—a secret from others. “It was well-hidden from public view,” she said, “and it predated our marriage.”
“He had his secrets and his cunning with which to subvert his upbringing and devise a tolerable destiny,” Diana explained. “Which of us was sicker?” she asked herself. “I would have to leave it to the doctors to say, but my symptoms were certainly more colorful.… Every marriage is a conspiracy of health and ill health. Ours was both.” But Diana was now part of Lionel’s present destiny, one he could control, so he could toss out those embarrassing early drafts.
A friend who had gone to library school told Diana that the drafts of a manuscript that go to the publisher or to the printer are probably the most valuable versions and that perhaps Lionel was saving only those copies. But Diana would have nothing to do with that explanation; she knew that he just didn’t want the world to know of her extensive editing. Despite her disappointment in not being part of a lasting paper legacy, she firmly believed that her husband “was unique in his lack of resentment for the work I did for him.” Clearly, his enthusiastic dedication attests to that conviction.
Matthew Arnold was published by W. W. Norton, and Lionel was asked to contribute $250 toward its production, a sum he had to borrow from friends. (The book was published also in England by George Allen and Unwin.) “You couldn’t get a PhD without publishing,” Diana said. “You had to publish first. You had to have a professional publication of your thesis, and you had to deposit a hundred copies or seventy-five copies in the library. You had not only to write the damn book, you had to go through all the torture of finding a publisher for it.” (The first reader at Norton who recommended the book for publication happened to have been the writer Eleanor Clark, once briefly married to one of Trotsky’s secretaries and later to Robert Penn Warren.)
Publication gained Lionel an assistant professorship at Columbia and a small raise. The book was highly praised by none other than the university’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler. (The often controversial leader had once been an admirer of Mussolini and Hitler, and he had complex feelings about Jews.) Yet when the time came for Lionel to gain permanent status, he became the first tenured Jew in Columbia’s English department.
The Trillings were invited to a lavish white-tie dinner party at the president’s residence on Morningside Drive, and Diana saw the invitation as “marking the end of [a] decade of despair.” After a formal dinner there was dancing, and Mrs. Butler took Diana aside and whispered to her, “You must go and dance, dear. You mustn’t be so serious.” Naturally, she obeyed. She was not going to spoil a grand and entertaining evening.
The book on Arnold had been their life for nearly ten years, and Diana believed her husband’s “wonderful study of the 19th Century” was a “triumph.” There were criticisms, but in general the reviews were very positive. Edmund Wilson wrote in The New Republic that the book was “probably too long” and found the summing up of Arnold’s poems and essays “occasionally a little dull.” (It had been Wilson who encouraged Lionel to write about Arnold in the first place.) F. R. Leavis called the book “disappointing” in Scrutiny, a literary periodical he had cofounded to help sustain rigorous intellectual values. Lionel Trilling’s book was “disappointing because its intention is clearly so admirable,” Leavis wrote. Still, Leavis agreed with Wilson’s overview that the book “is a credit both to [Trilling’s] generation and to American criticism in general.” Edward Sackville-West wrote in the Spectator that it was “the most brilliant work” of English language criticism in the 1930s. William Phillips, soon to become a close friend of the Trillings, wrote in Partisan Review that the book is “one of the best works of historical criticism produced in this country.”
From the moment she had met Lionel, Diana was fascinated by the literary profession; in fact, she soon realized that the intellectual atmosphere of Lionel’s “kind of writer,” as she characterized it, was just the sort of orbit in which she wanted to move. But she stood, she said, “at the borders of the literary community” and felt as if she was way off course. Once at a faculty club dinner a member of Lionel’s department came up to her to ask if she had been her husband’s typist on his Arnold book, adding, “How could a wife do more than that?” She thought he was just being “mischievous” since he had a “twinkle in his eye,” but she could also tell he was curious if she had really done—and been—what Lionel wrote about her in his dedication. “The idea that a woman had really worked on every single word and phrase in a man’s book is really very unattractive to men,” she said.
In 1934, two years before his crisis at Columbia, Lionel, still an instructor, had begun teaching a joint colloquium with Jacques Barzun every Wednesday evening. The Barzun-Trilling colloquium was intended for upper-classmen and involved reading some of the great literary works of Western civilization—Plato’s Republic, Homer’s Iliad, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Barzun, a historian who was called “a man of letters of the people,” had entered Columbia when he was sixteen years old, and he graduated in 1927, two years after Lionel. Barzun and Trilling weren’t great friends while undergraduates—Barzun thought that Lionel had “affected a sort of Bohemianism” and was “ stand-offish.” (Lore Dickstein, the literary critic, said that her husband, Morris, a historian and literary critic, as well as a former Trilling student, told her that many of the undergraduates considered Lionel “a very icy person.”)
Barzun later told Diana that the book on Arnold was “a masterpiece of intellectual biography.” He later wrote that “whoever is willing to let the long roll and retreat and fresh surge of Trilling’s thought carry him from outset to destination will find it is clear, firm, undeviating despite its wave-like movements, and unambiguous in its delivery of the particular complication it proposes to establish.”
Barzun developed a lifelong friendship with both Trillings and said that in his relationship with Lionel he did not remember a single moment of irritation at anything said or done despite being the more impatient of the two. Lionel once asked Barzun to help him create a contest to be conducted by the New York Evening Post that required readers to identify selections from some of the great books. Barzun would receive $200 for his efforts (he needed the money) out of the $1,000 Lionel asked for and received from the newspaper. Diana said that “the two of them became a pair of maniacs let loose among our bookshelves. They had knives, scissors.… They’d grab books off the shelves and start ripping the pages out. For a while, until we replaced these sources, you couldn’t pick up a book in our house that hadn’t been mangled. (There is no record of when, or if, the contest was ever printed.)
Barzun and Trilling helped to bring the practice of cultural criticism to America. It was “a genre making its way, cuckoo-like into the nest of scholarship,” Barzun wrote. In England F. R. Leavis had stressed in his book, For Continuity, published in 1933, the importance of having well-trained, university-based intellectual leaders to help uphold culture and literature. Diana said that “Lionel’s Columbia generation taught each other, and they worked it all out. It was the birth of criticism in this country. They were the founding fathers,” just as Leavis was the founding father of a new rigorous literary criticism in Britain.
/> In 1934 Barzun said, “It was still risky for the young to write and publish ‘outside’ [the university] say a book review in a weekly journal of opinion” (as they both did). He said that Lionel, “without trying, made disciples, and of the best kind—not expounders of a system or repeaters of catchwords, but scholars, critics, teachers, who were awakened from dogma by Lionel’s ‘Word,’ or who were caught on the wing of an idea, perhaps casually thrown off, and nurtured the germ into a free-standing plant.… His teaching was, by the nature of his thought, a reshaping of the mind, not an indoctrination.”
Both men were greatly influenced by the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and critic Mark Van Doren, who began teaching at Columbia in 1920 (following his older brother Carl, a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, who became a member of the faculty after he earned his doctorate there in 1911). As Diana wrote, “For years any Columbia undergraduate with literary ambitions brought his poems and stories to Mark Van Doren for criticism. Lionel did; all his hungry friends did.” She said that Van Doren set an example for academics who wanted to write, showing that they could bridge both worlds.
Barzun said that he and Lionel “read and discussed all of each other’s writing in first draft.” He “had some hint” of Diana’s important work on the manuscripts but nothing more than that. It was never discussed. He knew, of course, that both he and Diana believed in Lionel’s extraordinary gifts.
“It’s like an echoing chamber,” Diana explained about her husband’s prose; “he can stay with an idea and let it resonate and reverberate,” while in her own tentative writing attempts she believed she moved too fast and didn’t give her ideas “their full day.” She said that “Lionel always had the gift for the work. What he didn’t have was the ability to use his gift.” She said that she had discovered that she could “preserve the individual quality of another person’s writing yet make it better.”
Barzun had been recently divorced when Diana first met him. He moved to the Trillings’ apartment building on 114th Street and “was in our house more than he was in his own,” Diana said. She recalled that for a time he wanted to work in the same room with Lionel; “he loved companionship, and he said why couldn’t they set up their desks next to each other. This was a great problem for Lionel because he didn’t like that close a companionship while he was working, and he didn’t want to hurt Jacques’s feelings. This was a little bit difficult to handle, but he handled it. But they were together a great deal.”
And most important, Diana said, “I didn’t get any ‘What are you doing moving in on your husband’s literary life?’ from Jacques, not at all.”
She said that when Barzun married his second wife, Mariana, which he did while living on 114th Street, “it was a little more difficult. Mariana was a difficult woman to get on with; she was a person of very limited intelligence and very, very odd Boston ideas. I mean, the century had moved on without taking Mariana with it.” Diana went on to say that Mariana “was a leftover of the Boston I had known when I had been at Radcliffe, a Boston in which it meant something to be a Lowell. She was a Lowell … and she was constantly walking on eggs with me because she was always meaning not to say something anti-Semitic and so something was always blurting out. She was a most awkward, blurting out kind of woman for all her breeding.… One time she said to me, ‘The difference between you and me is that you have really good manners.’ I thought it was the most endearing thing she ever said.… She had a kind of openness of that sort.” (In later years they became very good friends; “I was devoted to her,” Diana said.)
A year after Lionel began coteaching the colloquium, even though he was still an instructor, his schedule became crowded with meetings with students and members of his department. Five years later, after Lionel was promoted, his schedule almost burst at the seams. “Everybody wanted him to write for them,” Diana said—Partisan Review, The New Republic, The Nation.
In a chatty letter, Diana’s college friend, Bettina Sinclair, wrote Diana: “Have you given any thought (tons of it, no doubt) to how you are going to spend your time while Li is out bread winning?” Diana couldn’t tell Bettina, as close as they were, about her main occupation as Lionel’s editor or how much confidence that role had given her. She did mention she was trying to do some writing and was sending her work to magazines. But she did not mention she was trying to overcome her childhood admonition that writing held danger.
Cleanth Brooks Jr., the cofounder of The Southern Review, rejected a story called “The Namesake,” but he praised its “good writing” and asked to see more of her work. Kip Fadiman, who became the book editor of The New Yorker in 1933, passed along “a little sketch” called “Eight to Nine” to an editorial assistant, after telling Diana, “It’s touching and so woebegone—as who isn’t.” The sketch was rejected as “a little too slight,” although the assistant asked: “Won’t you please try us soon with something else?” The three-page sketch, told from the point of view of an eight-year-old girl who mimics her mother’s clothes and flirtations, starts with her stretching out her small sweater to create a long and stylish “hobble skirt,” a kind of skirt so narrow it causes a woman to totter, and ends with her succumbing to a schoolgirl crush on a fellow ocean liner passenger during a family trip to Europe. As Diana wrote, “With the sweater around my legs and a Spanish shawl draped over my ferris waist [a corset garment created in the 1900s by the Ferris Bros. Company] revealing only my bare shoulders and arms I could easily be mother in an evening dress. Mr. Briggs was very tall, much bigger than father, and even mother whisked her hair into place when he came up on deck.” But alas, at the end of the voyage Mr. Briggs never says good-bye. Still, Diana wrote, “I am sure Mr. Briggs loved me, too.” After the family was safely home, the girl still hoped he would show up. But only a bicycle did—a gift from her parents. Quickly switching her allegiance from Mr. Briggs to a new boy on the block, the girl decides to race him, and instead of getting him to fall in love with her expertise, as is her plan, she falls off her bike, as Diana had done in real life decades ago. In her story “the nice little boy had carried me into the house all by himself,” whereas back in Brooklyn no one had come to Diana’s rescue. The woebegone story was never published anywhere.
She tried The New Yorker again with a six-page story called “Only Emma.” The opening line reads, “We had always had someone to do Miss Emma Twickham’s job at Camp Sansouci and I don’t think it was because she was to be the camp disciplinarian that we all took such an immediate dislike to her.” Diana was escaping into fiction again, this time to the camp where she said she first began to understand that she was more intelligent and had greater perception than any of the other members of her family. (“Only Emma” was rejected, but sixty years later, Diana would immortalize the real place, Camp Lenore, in a long nonfiction piece published in The New Yorker the summer of 1996, a few months before her death.)
She continued to write poems, although none were published. All of them spoke of a passion awaiting release:
OH BE BRAVE
Summon the wind with your whistle
Bend the tall tree at your touch
Much that is loud is pretending
Much that you fear is defending
SAD PORTRAITS OF LADIES
She stands upon the fading grass
All regal in her I-ness
She scatters love like autumn seed
Largesses-ness suits a Highness:
The Queenly eye and you-ly touch
However, do not get her much.
Diana tried to use her wit in a poem written sometime before 1933 that she sent to Malcolm Cowley at The New Republic. It was rejected:
LITERARY WIFE
Which dress will you wear tonight
When you come to my house to sit and talk of
Edmund Wilson?
Of D. H. Lawrence and significance
Virginia Woolf’s relations, insignificance?
Or shall it be the coming revolution?
The unemployed apples are rotten with the worms of discontent
This country’s ripe for juicy murder
—The juice of conversation’s dry, completely dried;
We need cafés, liqueurs,
—More sexual exhibition. Without sex
Conversation dies at birth:
The American woman dies at marriage.
—What kind of house shall it be?
In Brittany—in Italy?
O sun of Guggenheim, shine down upon us three:
We try so hard to save; my father always said
I should have studied economics.
—Oh, for God’s sake, take Polly:
Polly has a part-time maid
A part French maid has she
Who prepares escallopine
(avec marrone purees)
And goes to Toscanini
Every other Thursday.
Only the early Beethoven does not pall.
Let’s search the soul of gaiety for awhile
Let’s spawn a Mozart, forget our counterpointed Freuds
Our art has overboiled.
Let’s talk of gastronomics.
In 1939, after ten years of marriage and no children, she decided to write a series of more than twenty children’s poems. All were rejected by the McCall Corporation, which published McCall’s magazine, as well as two short story magazines, Blue Book and Red Book:
I AM TWO
When I was under two years old
The question what to wear
Was very simply answered:
I didn’t really care.
ANIMAL LESSON
Kangaroos and owls
Don’t wipe their hands on kitchen
Towels
Camels are most suspicious
Of people who eat out of dishes
But an owl hoots
A kangaroo jumps
And whoever heard of a camel with
Mumps?
Diana also wrote a children’s book called Beppo, about a canary who “had a big chest and wore boots” and didn’t tweet-tweet but only sang “muh-muh-muh-muh.” This, too, never found a home. Sometime in the late 1930s Diana tried her hand at a short memoir called The Prodigious Trip, about a time when she and her sister and brother gave a concert to celebrate their parents’ fifteenth wedding anniversary. Diana and Cecilia alternately played the piano, and Sam played the violin. “It was a mad idea,” Diana wrote, and they played and played until their grandfather insisted they stop. The memoir was left unfinished.
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