“In the 40s,” Diana said, Lionel “was feeling his oats. Nobody wanted him for anything in the 1930s. Now suddenly, everybody wanted him, and I had a place, too. I wasn’t that failed opera singer. I was a successful book critic.”
Between reviews Diana continued to think of writing projects. For inspiration she often listened to Puccini as she wrote. In 1944, with the blessing of Pat Covici, who was very interested in luring Lionel to Viking Press, she considered organizing “an anthology of childhood.” She told Covici that she had discovered that there was “almost no correlation between an interesting adult life and an interesting childhood—or rather between an interesting childhood and the ability to capture its import in maturity.” She said that as far as she was concerned there were only two people who could combine childhood recollections with great insight and great literary skill—Stendhal and Henry James. Others to be included in her proposed book were Tolstoy, Yeats, Goethe, Edith Wharton, Helen Keller, and, curiously, P. T. Barnum. Despite her research and serious interest in the project, it never was completed; however, a warm relationship developed between Covici and both Trillings, and they often socialized.
In the following year, 1945, Diana wrote an article titled “The Psychology of Plenty,” about an idea that Reinhold Niebuhr had heard during a recent tour of wartime Europe, that rationing should continue after the war. Diana wholeheartedly agreed and wrote that it was “a healthy idea,” saying that Americans “take our abundant supplies of food for granted.” She wondered “how many Americans have thought of the relation between the word ration and the word rational,” and she went on to write that “we ration food so that everyone will have his fair share. This is the rational approach to the problem of distributing our food.”
She did not find a publisher for her essay.
Every now and then Diana experimented by sending out work under the pseudonym Margaret Sayles. One short story, “The Marriage of Elsie and John,” was about a wedding reception (not unlike her own) and irritable relatives who had not been invited to the actual ceremony. The story mentioned a browbeaten sister, enormous amounts of uneaten food, a mother and father who no longer slept in the same room, and an abandoned puppy. It was a depressing four-page tale that barely mentioned the bride and groom, although it somehow managed to shout that the wedding should never have taken place. The story was never published.
But Diana persevered. After she had published her long essay on Alice James, Edmund Wilson told her she must not write reviews anymore but should continue to write long essays. Diana, ten years younger than Wilson, was flattered by this advice and by the fact that he was helping a new writer with that kind of encouragement.
In 1945 Diana received high praise from William Maxwell of The New Yorker, who wrote her that “all practicing novelists must feel as I do that if there is any help to be got from reviews it will be from yours.” But Diana’s greatest wish was to be published in his magazine.
Two years after publishing the book on Forster, Lionel published a short story, “The Lesson and the Secret,” about a writing class full of rich women and run by a young male teacher. The story was actually a chapter in an unfinished novel. (Lionel, of course, had taught such a class.) The story was published in Harper’s Bazaar after its literary editor praised his story “Of This Time, of That Place,” about a poet-professor and two of his students, which had been published in Partisan Review. The editor, Mary Louise Aswell, told Lionel that “our audience isn’t as select as Partisan Review’s, but it’s larger, and I covet the quality of your writing for us.” Diana, who said that she “didn’t think” she “changed a word of any of the stories he wrote after we were married,” liked the idea that her husband was branching out to all kinds of magazines.
In fact, a year later, in May 1946, Diana began a monthly column, “About Books,” for Junior Bazaar, a short-lived spin-off of Harper’s Bazaar meant to appeal to teenage girls. Just as the PR crowd was starting to respect Diana’s reviews in the Nation, they turned against her (but not Lionel) for slumming by publishing in Harper’s Bazaar. Only Diana, who said she “hated the idea of the intellectual elite and the fact that serious writing can’t be available to the general public,” was accused of selling out. This type of accusation would become a pattern in her life. A scapegoat in her private life, she would become one in her public life as well.
Diana’s pride was always that she could write with the same seriousness for Junior Bazaar or Vogue (as she did later on) as for Partisan Review or The Saturday Review of Literature. Once when discussing with William Phillips that someone should write about third-rate movies and their attraction to serious people, he turned on her, saying “That’s the kind of thing you talk about with your mother; you don’t write about it for Partisan Review.”
Diana always held that “it is not where you work that matters, but how you work,” so she wrote what she wanted, and what she wanted to do for Junior Bazaar was the same range of books she might consider for The Nation. She even chastised her husband’s publisher, James Laughlin of New Directions, when he was reluctant to send her books for review. She told him somewhat cryptically that while her “critical method is not very thick, I find a real pleasure in trying to form a style of literary criticism for such a youthful audience.” Her message must have gotten through to him because New Directions books began coming to her for review.
Many of her selections were by writers who would not be heard from again but who she believed held promise: Gladys Schmitt (whose second novel sold more than a million copies, yet she never became hugely sought-after), Marianne Roane (whose work was considered too experimental), Peggy Bennett (who wrote short stories only until 1950, although she lived for several more decades), and Denton Welch, who died in 1948.
Diana’s columns were often flowery (“very few literary roses are born to blush unseen these days”) and sometimes too wordy, but she never spoke down to her readers. She told them to buy The Partisan Reader, an anthology of writers who appeared in the magazine. (Lionel wrote the introduction to the book.) “The volume is not always easy reading,” Diana warned, “but it contains some of the best thinking and writing that has been done in the last decade.”
She recommended Jim Corbett’s Man-Eaters of Kumaon, a best seller about the hunting and killing of man-eating tigers in India, and she later explained in a letter why: “because such discriminating readers as Lionel and myself found it exciting.” She dismissed Somerset Maugham’s Then and Now as “junk.” She recommended F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notebooks, The Crack-Up, as “profoundly moving,” pointing out to her young audience that Fitzgerald’s letters to his daughter were particularly instructive. She offered political lessons when reviewing George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “more parable than satire.” She wrote at length that the book “simply reproduces the historical situation in Russia without the addition of any new moral or political insights” and concluded that it is “not, I think, a very important book.” World War II preoccupied Diana in many of her reviews at this time.
Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men was “swift and readable,” although his “characters are finally such stock types that they quite waste his great gifts of pictorialization.” Even though she was always thinking of her audience and never wrote down to them, Diana sometimes got close to doing so, as when she wrote at the end of a column, “I can promise that there is no pedagogical self-torture hidden in these recommendations.” What would a teenager have thought of such a sentence?
In one of her Nation columns Diana worried that “work that calls itself important is often only pretentious,” and such a pretentious writer “comes to feel that he has only to pamper his stylistic or thematic solemnities to achieve literary stature, while the more modest writer, rejected out of hand by the intellectual world, is encouraged to out-and-out commercialism.” The point of this unusual (“self-tortuous”) rant was to chastise herself for holding off reviewing a “very interesting book” (she doesn’t name it) bec
ause it was a Literary Guild selection. (The Literary Guild had been founded in 1927 to compete with the Book of the Month Club, founded a year earlier.) Diana’s disdain for book clubs didn’t last long because in 1951 Lionel and a former student, Gilman Kraft, along with Jacques Barzun and W. H. Auden, would found The Readers’ Subscription Book Club. Diana proudly gave the club its name. (In 1959, after the Readers’ Subscription Book Club disbanded, Lionel Trilling, Barzun, and Auden founded the Mid-Century Book Club, which lasted until 1962.)
Diana got praise she secretly coveted when she was told by a Nation reader that “like the psychoanalyst, you can see the shadow behind the shadow. The result is that every review you write is at once a challenge and a warning to a would-be writer.”
One of Diana’s analysts once asked her, “Everything you perceive is accurate, but why do you have to see it?” She acknowledged it was “a haunting question.” Her friend Bettina once reminded Diana that Lionel had some time ago told Diana that she didn’t simply get mad at him; she threw him back into his infancy and psychoanalyzed him.
But Diana’s way of seeing, and her seeing the shadow behind the shadow, was often at the bottom of the PR crowd’s hostility toward her. They didn’t mind psychoanalysis, but they didn’t want it done by an amateur.
Diana also prized a letter she received from a US Army corporal who wrote: “Since The Nation is forbidden bookshelf-space in the army area in which I am stationed, I do not often see the magazine except when I buy it, and I never buy it except when it contains your criticism.” Diana was part of the forbidden, and she enjoyed it.
Sometime in late 1943, Leo Lerman, a flamboyant, witty, and prolific young contributing editor at Vogue, interviewed Diana for his May 1, 1944, column “Before Bandwagons,” which was about up-and-coming artists and writers. With the dramatic flair and mischievousness he was known for, he wrote:
Two years ago, Manhattan-born, Radcliffe-educated Diana Trilling was merely a critic’s wife. Her husband, Lionel, wrote for several of the more advanced weeklies. One day his telephone rang. The Nation needed someone to write brief fiction notices, did Mr Trilling have any suggestions? “Why don’t you suggest me?” queried wife, Diana. “Why?” questioned husband Lionel, “I hate trash.” Today Diana Trilling’s weekly, “Fiction in Review” in The Nation, has an appreciative audience. With a devastating phrase, she lampoons publishers’ hortatory blurbs, pinks inflated literary reputations. The body of her work is slender, but stamped with her own strength, validity and logical good taste.
Lerman—who would also write for Mademoiselle, Dance Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, House and Garden, The Atlantic Monthly, and many other magazines, journals, and arts organizations—introduced both Lionel and Diana to a world beyond their academic and literary one at his famous weekly Sunday parties at his small apartment on Lexington Avenue, and then in his much larger, nine-room residence at The Osborne, on Fifty-Seventh Street, across from Carnegie Hall. The grander apartment was stuffed with art and artifacts: seashells, wings of butterflies, Victorian lamps, chairs and sofas from the stage sets of various plays, paintings of volcanoes, silver boxes, and a giant iron dragonfly. One could meet Judy Garland, Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, or Maria Callas there, as well as Evelyn Waugh, Truman Capote, Lillian Hellman, Rebecca West, and Anais Nin, who wrote in her journal that Lerman’s conversation put one in mind of “a magician’s tour de force.” It was at Lerman’s that the Trillings first met W. H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, Noel Coward, Christopher Isherwood, the English writer and editor John Lehmann, his sister, the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, the novelist and critic Glenway Wescott, Anais Nin, Newton Arvin (the literary critic once the lover of Truman Capote), and Pearl Kazin (the editor/book review sister of Alfred), whom Leo called “The Cultured Pearl.” Lerman had met Katherine Anne Porter and Carson McCullers when he was in residence at Yaddo the summer of 1947, and whenever they were in New York, they dropped in to his parties. Marianne Moore was there once and later praised Diana in a letter for her “sanely feminine insights.”
Both Trillings became good friends of Lerman’s, although Diana alone had frequent gossipy phone conversations with him (“on the blower,” as Lerman called the telephone). In his journal Lionel wrote of “Leo Lerman’s infallible sense of people. Strange that he should seem one of the best people in the world.”
Diana continued to review also for other magazines. She reviewed Gentleman’s Agreement by Laura Z. Hobson for Commentary, making a sociological point in her first paragraph that it is interesting that this novel about anti-Semitism should be published “by the same house [Simon and Schuster] that a few years ago voluntarily suppressed a book by Jerome Weidman on the grounds that its unattractive Jewish characters would increase anti-Jewish feeling in the country.” She went on to say that “if it is nothing else, the novel [about a journalist who goes undercover as a Jew] is a strong appeal for Gentiles to bring the Jewish issue full into the light and fight it.” And while she applauded its “purpose,” in the end she said the novel is “poor—dull—non-dimensional, without atmosphere,” adding “of course thesis novels usually are poor.” (The film adapted from the book, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Gregory Peck and Celeste Holm, won three Oscars: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Director.)
Diana continued to cope with Lionel’s rages, always reminding herself that “it seems to be a Trilling thing,” even though Lionel’s anger “was much more contained” than his father’s. Still, she said, “most people couldn’t know Lionel for long without being aware of something seething beneath the surface.” (She once stated melodramatically that instead of his pipe being tossed into the gutter on Bank Street, “it might have been me.”) “There was something off-base about him,” Diana said. “I think he was visibly paranoid. But who could have suspected any kind of ferocity in Lionel? This thing he had with me was truly a little pocket of madness. But how it played on my guilt!” She meant her guilt over putting Lionel through all her own neurotic symptoms—her multiple phobias, fears, and extreme dependence; guilt over her own unexpressed, even unidentified, anger over the sexual assault from her father’s friend that had occurred when she was just out of college; guilt over not yet conceiving a child. “I went into psychoanalysis for didactic reasons,” Diana said. “It was mandatory, made necessary by intense emotional strain,” she wrote in a draft of an unpublished book. She had first written “emotional upset,” then changed it to “emotional strain.” The strain of not being fully aware of what her body knew took its toll. The body was full of danger, she had learned from her childhood.
Lionel had a similar burden. Under certain circumstances he moved his body recklessly, not looking around him, not seeming to care where he was. During one summer in the 1930s when they had rented a house in Babylon, Long Island, Diana said that Lionel would go swimming in the canal in the late afternoon and would swim never lifting his head out of the water “right into the path of returning boats, with everybody standing on the shore screaming, ‘Lookout, Lionel, lookout,’ because the boats wouldn’t see him; his face was buried. He would go plunk right into them.” Diana said that “you could never get him to understand that it’s useful to take your face out of the water once in a while.… He was a good, strong swimmer, but he had no sense of the reality of this at all.… Strangers on the beach would start screaming, ‘What’s the matter with him?’ ” Diana said that she “remembered that a graduate student at Columbia once said he had bumped heads with Lionel in the university pool” and had been sure Lionel must have seen him coming toward him. But he probably hadn’t.
At one point Lionel wanted to learn how to play better tennis. “His idea about learning to play any sport was to read a book about it,” Diana said. “Well, he played what I would call just below fair tennis, but with great eagerness.” She went on: “He didn’t know how to get to the ball! So he was running constantly, and he hopped all the time he was waiting to receive his serve.… His face would begin to get red, then a
deeper red, almost a black red and pretty soon it was getting to be a deep purple because he had been running, running, running, sometimes for a couple of hours.”
But he also had great physical grace at times, Diana insisted. He walked with elegance. As for his tennis and swimming she even contended that “he was very, very charming actually doing these things, except that it was maddeningly awful at the same time.” She recalled a time Lionel was asked to referee a game during a tournament among some friends, and “he went out there and he called every shot mistakenly. He just couldn’t keep it in mind. He couldn’t do it anymore than he could tell people what direction to go.… This brilliant man couldn’t keep track of the score of a game of tennis.” Lionel would get into “ugly” situations, with one player once insisting he leave the court, Diana said. She even once saw him “in a murderous rage” on the court, threatening to hit his opponent with a racket (though he never did). Diana said quite seriously that matters “got to the point where I said I wouldn’t stay married to him if he didn’t stop playing tennis. I knew our marriage could not sustain this because he made such a spectacle of himself on the tennis court.”
And then there was Lionel’s driving. Diana said that “when he drove a car, there was nothing in the world I wanted except for him to stop driving the car.” She said that he took lessons and passed all his tests and at first seemed to do well. But then “it went downhill all the way. He could never learn how to park. He never learned how to back the car. He could never stay in one lane; he drifted from lane to lane, willfully; he’d say, ‘That’s a nicer lane.’ He couldn’t measure the distance between the side of the car and the shoulder of the road so that the sides of his tires were likely to graze whatever little curb there was, and you’d feel the car spinning away in a rather dangerous way since he was going faster usually than he should have [been]. He could never keep his speed down. It was exactly like his swimming into the face of those oncoming boats; he wanted to live dangerously.… Driving with him got to be one of the major horrors in life.”
The Untold Journey Page 14