Diana said that Lionel also had a peculiarity his mother had, of “going into a daze and not receiving things.” His brain seemed to just cut off certain information, not take it in, and he’d seem to be in a trance.
Both Trillings eventually took Dexamil to help with their multiple “horrors.” (Diana had stopped the Luminal.) Dexamil, first marketed in the United States in 1950 for “everyday mental and emotional distress,” contained both an amphetamine element to lift the patient’s mood and a barbiturate component (a sedative) meant to counter the amphetamine effect of agitation, or feeling high.
In 1947 Diana edited The Portable D. H. Lawrence, a collection of the writer’s short stories, novellas, and parts of two novels, poetry, letters, and critical writing. She received the standard fee of $1,000 for her work from her publisher, Viking Press. Her editor was Pat Covici.
Kirkus Reviews wrote of the book that “the introduction, in this newest of the Portables, is concerned more with the revolutionary note in his work and reasons for his hostility than with the events of his short life. Some emphasis is given to the relation of religion to his personal, social and political thinking. Passing comment is given to the sexual sphere, which the editor considers has been overstressed.”
In the introduction Diana mentioned that there was not much interest in Lawrence anymore, and she later received a stern letter from his widow, Frieda Lawrence. Although she liked the foreword, Mrs. Lawrence asked the publisher to tell Diana that “she is mistaken that there is no interest in Lawrence.” She continued, “Also she has not understood that Lawrence’s writing was called forth by sheer love for his fellowmen, not sentimentality or some cheap sympathy, but a violent desire to change them, so that they would get more out of life. The people who have suffered much know that or feel it instinctively. He is read all over the world.” Pat Covici told Diana not to be too bothered by the letter, so Diana never answered it.
Diana’s close friends Quentin and Thelma Anderson wrote her that the book “is your first explicitly complementary role and hence the first that is quite completely your own.” They were pleased Diana had taken on a writer who was so well suited to her very special nature in terms of versatility and earnestness.
That same year, Lionel published a novel, The Middle of the Journey, which he dedicated to Diana. The novel revolves around a young, wealthy couple—Arthur and Nancy Crooms—who live in the fictitious town of Crannock (think Westport), Connecticut, and are fellow travelers. The Crooms have been hosting their friend John Laskell as he recuperates from a serious illness, as well as from the death of his lover, Elizabeth Fuess. Enter a member of the Communist Underground named Gifford Maxim, who had dropped in unexpectedly on Laskell in New York City right before he had left for Connecticut. Maxim now tells Laskell he has quit the Communist Party and fears for his life. The Crooms, too, know Maxim.
There’s much deception in Crannock: political disagreements, treachery, betrayal, the sudden death of a very young girl, and a love affair after Laskell meets Emily Caldwell, the wife of the Croomses’ alcoholic handyman.
The dedicatee and others described the book as “a novel of ideas.” Diana also said that “I think it’s one of the best novels of ideas that have ever been written, but it is a category that isn’t finally as satisfying as a novel that’s conceived under the aspect of feeling. But within this novel of ideas, Lionel was technically extraordinarily adroit, extraordinarily fluent.… In a way he was a born novelist.”
Diana has said that Mary McCarthy was Lionel’s model for Nancy Crooms and that her fellow-traveling husband, Arthur Crooms, was based on Dwight McDonald. Gifford Maxim was modeled on Whittaker Chambers, with whom Lionel had a passing acquaintance at Columbia. The serious illness that John Laskell is recovering from was taken from Lionel’s own bout with scarlet fever as a young man.
Lionel once told Diana that The Middle of the Journey was “only a brief interruption to some big novel that he was working on.” Actually, Diana had more trouble than she admitted accepting a novel of ideas and thought Lionel could do more with the genre. For decades she worried that she might have interfered too much at times. (Indeed, decades later in a letter to Norman Mailer she wrote, “I once told Lionel to throw away the beginning, maybe some sixty or seventy pages of a novel—curiously, it was set in ancient Greece. He tore it up, and I still have worrisome moments about it. Maybe even he, who had more claim on me for courage and honesty than anyone else in the world, shouldn’t have invited me to assume this much authority in his professional life.”)
In her memoir, The Beginning of the Journey, Diana writes that not only was Lionel’s novel “written without my having any knowledge of its inception; it was virtually completed before I knew what it was about.” Yet in a series of taped interviews Diana revealed that she knew exactly what the novel was about and, in fact, talked a great deal to Lionel about it, further explaining that “I was reading it as chapters, although I can’t say I was interfering or having much to do with it at all until the ending.… That is where my editing came in; otherwise, I had very little to do with the writing of that, very little, much less than I did with any of Lionel’s writing.” Diana also said that “it seemed easier for [Lionel] to write The Middle of the Journey than any critical piece.” He wrote it in six to eight months, she said, while he was on sabbatical from Columbia. (In his journal he complained that people ask him, “How is the novel going? One knows what they hope. They ask, ‘What is the novel about?’ An unbelievable question.”)
Another unbelievable question: Why would Diana not want to reveal in The Beginning of the Journey that not only did she know what the novel was about but that she had actually read it chapter by chapter? It is conceivable that the plot revealed too much about certain aspects of their lives for her to go public with—things that either threatened or frightened her, or both. Things like the true nature of their relationship—the rages, the depression, the disappointments, the fears. (Diana later said that Lionel’s difficulties with fiction were perhaps because “he was afraid being a novelist would give away his secrets.”) Or perhaps she just didn’t want to acknowledge her real feelings about the book, despite proclaiming it one of the best novels of ideas that has ever been written. It is possible that Diana was actually disappointed—even embarrassed—by aspects of its structure and themes.
In fact, Diana disclosed that “after the scene [in which] Laskell and Emily Caldwell make love beside the pond where she’s been swimming and washing her hair, then I think it’s the next day or a few days later and Laskell is about to leave Connecticut when he meets her on the road.” She went on, “Well, Lionel wrote that scene, the scene of their meeting on the road, and it was totally incomprehensible.”
Diana, who would be misleading in her memoir about knowing the details of her husband’s novel, actually knew a lot about the details, details that troubled her and were perhaps too close to home. Diana said Lionel “had Laskell act absolutely hateful to Emily, as if he despised her.” She continued: “I read this and I said, ‘But why? What had happened except that they’d made love?’ I told Lionel that it just doesn’t make any sense in terms of his narrative, although it makes plenty of unconscious sense to me. So Lionel went back and wrote it again and then he came back and wrote it again. And again. And again.… But it was never enough.… And each time the same thing happened. Laskell was ugly without cause.”
In the end Diana told her husband, “You cannot send in that book until you get this right.” She said, “It’s my impression that Lionel must have done it over six or eight times before Laskell got over being nasty to Emily. But I couldn’t let it stand. The whole end of the book would have been ruined. Now I’m never sure that it was right, but it was changed and finally he did it, and I said it was fine, and it went to press that way.” (Diana also said that like his criticism, “all those versions of the novel seem to have disappeared. I’m sorry about that. It would have been very interesting to trace the stages of Laskell’s
regeneration.”)
Diana added that “Lionel’s hatred of women at certain moments and in certain situations” was what was going on in his writing of “that scene” with Emily and Laskell. “I think this is the male neurosis of our time. Some men are afraid of women, and I think it’s because they want extraordinarily to be treated and see that lovely Edenic situation of being an infant in the mother’s arms.” Diana went on to say that “I think it’s very, very seductive and that they are constantly fighting it. The ones who fight it cognitively get this kind of neurosis like Lionel’s, and the ones who accept it become passive and put themselves totally in the hands of some women, usually their wives and take all the direction of their lives from the women they’re married to. I think men are enthralled to [sic] their infancies in a way that women cannot be because women have not been nurtured by their fathers the way men have been nurtured by their mother.”
Diana reached into literature and said that “Lawrence’s phrase comes to me: ‘the lapsing back.’ … [Lawrence] is always talking about lapsing back.… He knew it.… He lapsed back into the infant relation with his mother. And I think Lionel was lapsing back when he could not in fantasy free Laskell from the seduction of Emily. In other words, his harshness to Emily was an inversion of his capitulation to her.”
Quentin Anderson later told Diana that Lionel’s mother, who wanted her son to be a critic and not a novelist, was not at all pleased that he had published a novel and that when Lionel presented her with a copy, Anderson said, “She never cracked a smile of appreciation.” Diana later explained to Anderson that Fannie Trilling wanted Lionel “to use the non-erotic gift, the cerebral rather than the erotic, which a novelist uses.”
Diana soon realized that Lionel, who had “lapsed back,” was now completely dependent on her, a circumstance she had once feared would happen.
9
GLOWING
I find myself thinking I want Diana to myself.
—Lionel Trilling, journal entry, Sept. 1948
On July 22, 1948, 286 days, or nine months and thirteen days, after the publication of Lionel’s novel, James Lionel Trilling was born. Both parents were forty-three. Was Lionel energized into potency by the publication of The Middle of the Journey? Did he embrace his dependency on Diana? Did his depression lessen and his sense of self-worth heighten? Edward Mendelson, the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia, suggests that Lionel “felt like Hemingway, whom he always envied and admired for his uninhibited masculinity. Trilling associated creativity with masculinity, and to publish a novel made him feel masculine—especially a novel where his stand-in has extramarital sex on a riverbank with a beautiful woman.”
Diana, by the time her son was born, had been in therapy for nearly twenty years. She wrote in a draft of a book she titled “The Education of a Woman,” which was to be a childhood memoir (some of the material found its way into The Beginning of the Journey), that most of their friends “greeted the news of my pregnancy with such disquiet wonder as might have been warranted by the news that we were transplanting to Alaska—did we really feel this much confidence in our power of renewal and endurance? Was I prepared to give up my work, and could I do this lightly?”
The answer was yes.
Both Trillings wanted very much to become parents. Yet even their cleaning woman was suspicious. Lionel wrote in his journal that she laughed at and mocked Diana, saying, “You? How do you know? You ever had one before?” And Cecilia had some words for her sister: “I’ve always told you that you’re very clever, Diana, but you’re not fit to have a child.”
In 1930 Diana had thought she was pregnant and reluctantly had considered an abortion because she and Lionel were too poor to afford a child. As it turned out, she was not pregnant, much to Fannie Trilling’s relief—a baby would have interfered with her son’s rise in the academic world.
Diana’s thyroid problem—hyperthyroidism, or an overactive thyroid—for which she had been operated on early in their marriage, sometimes makes conception problematic; there can be a lack of ovulation, cysts on the ovaries, or irregular menstrual cycles. But it’s an underactive thyroid, or hypothyroidism, that more often causes trouble. In any case Diana’s weak physical condition was no doubt a factor in her childlessness, although one of her psychoanalysts believed she chose to have “panics instead of babies.” A gynecologist she consulted thought that perhaps she was too old to have a child.
He was wrong.
Her pregnancy, which was announced in Walter Winchell’s gossip column (via Leo Lerman), was not without its complications. At one point during her fourth month Diana began bleeding and thought she might be having a miscarriage. Her friend Bettina (now married to Charles Hartenbach, a lawyer) had arrived at the Trillings’ apartment at 620 West 116th Street to celebrate New Year’s Eve and reported that she saw that “all hell had broken loose.” Fannie Trilling, who had been visiting, was unusually composed and “behaved magnificently,” Bettina said, adding that it was a great blessing that she was there when Diana needed just the comfort and reassurance that she was able to give.” Diana’s sister-in-law, Harriet, also helped out.
Bettina later wrote Diana that Lionel said that the doctor thought it possible that Diana had not been pregnant at all. But this proved quite untrue. She was indeed pregnant, and the slight bleeding was not anything to worry about. In fact, Bettina recalled that in the following days Lionel was more concerned about a cold he had recently caught. And Diana was more concerned about Lionel and the possibility that he might miss a Partisan Review dinner, so she had asked Bettina if she and Charles would stay with her so Lionel could leave the apartment. Although the crisis was over, Diana wanted someone to be with her in case she had to be rushed to the hospital. Bettina and Charles obliged. But for days afterward, various dramas with the Hartenbachs developed—missed phone calls, unclear arrangements, and disorganized meals. Once again Bettina begged her friend to “please take down your shingle for the duration of this emergency.” Bettina had had almost enough of Diana’s anxiety and super-sensitivity, as well as her “tone of a psychiatrist talking calmly to a lunatic,” yet she also said that “as friendships go, ours has been one hell of a good one.” She meant it. But when Diana called her friend “rigid” during the days of the emergency, Bettina countered that she was the one who had “been as flexible as a trapeze artist.” Bettina knew she had to be adaptable in order to remain Diana’s confidante, and besides, she adored Diana. Theirs was an enduring bond, and the near-fracture healed.
Bettina was thrilled for her friend: “For the baby is a triumph, and perhaps the most wonderful triumph of all,” she wrote in a letter. She also reminded Diana that “the focus of your pregnancy should be in the home, in you and Lionel, and not what relatives and friends thought about your pregnancy.” Bettina always knew how to bring back the balance in their friendship.
James Lionel Trilling, close to six pounds, was born at French Hospital on West Thirtieth Street in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, where Diana’s obstetrician was affiliated. James (soon to be called, more often than not, “Jim,” although Leo Lerman persisted in always calling him “James Lionel”) was both automatically baptized, because French Hospital was a Catholic institution run by the Sisters of the Holy Cross, and medically (not ritually) circumcised. There had been much hemming and hawing over whether or not to have the circumcision at all because both Trillings believed not only that there was not quite enough Jewishness in their present life to justify it but also because it was not the right, that is ethical, position to hold.
Diana liked giving birth at a Catholic hospital because she had always secretly admired Christian ritual. She had never revealed to Polly Fadiman just how much she had relished their visit to St. Patrick’s Cathedral the Christmas Eve she had been introduced to Lionel. At one point Diana had even wished she had been a Catholic and became a little obsessed with the Virgin Mary. A close friend believed it was because she wanted to find a mother figure
in world history, and the Virgin Mary was the perfect, idealized mother. Diana, this friend said, blamed mothers for everything. She certainly blamed Fannie Trilling for Lionel’s shortcomings.
French Hospital had some deficiencies. Diana thought that the maternity section was understaffed and not as clean as she would have wished. But, most important, she was made to feel, she later wrote, “as if the baby didn’t belong to me” because Jim was brought to her bedside only three times a day and then for only twelve minutes. She said that she could always identify his cry in the nursery down the hall from her room.
Mariana Barzun offered Diana a handcrafted wooden cradle, telling her that “all the Lowells have been cradled in it.” Jim was a loved and thoroughly cradled baby by both his parents and a long series of baby nurses. There were five in his first two years, ranging in age from eighteen to seventy. Sooner or later Diana found fault with all the nurses, and a few turned against Diana for what they considered her overbearing manner.
Diana often spoke of how helpful Jacques Barzun was when Jim was an infant. “In came Jacques into the midst of a squalling household,” she remarked, adding that “I mean, Jim crying with gas, terrible gas pains, a very colicky first few months.” Jacques was magic with Jim, especially after he told Diana that he was sure that the baby needed a “heavier” formula. And he comforted her by reminding her that she had to be in charge, that she must not always listen to the doctor. This was “a great man putting his mind to the most immediate,” Diana said. She also said that after she and Lionel met E. M. Forster, she wished she could have hired him as a baby nurse “because he was so marvelous with our small child, but with grown-ups he was rather too conscious of his own virtue.”
The Untold Journey Page 15