The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  Diana said that Lionel had never liked his name and that he “longed to be Jim, a John, a Mike, Bill.” Now, at last, he had a Jim. “How the boy glows for me,” he wrote in his journal, later also observing, “saw my face in the mirror—it was the face my son has—smiled at it affectionately and forgivingly.” Whom and what was he forgiving? He doesn’t say.

  Diana was overjoyed to be a mother at long last, and she was determined to try to remain a working writer as well. Her star was not going to dim. “It is very easy to use a baby as an excuse for not doing one’s work: one must be very alert to one’s own motives,” she wrote in a letter to a friend.

  In late January of 1948, when she was four months pregnant, Diana had published a review in The Nation of Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms. Although she basically praised the novel—she wrote that it had a “striking literary virtuosity” and that so “much writing skill in one so young [Capote was twenty-three] represents a kind of genius”—she faulted the author for not only being “the latest chic example of Southern gothic” but for not being sound enough in his explanation of “the source of homosexuality.” (Diana believed that although there was a psychological component to homosexuality, one more complex than just having to do with the type of parenting received by the individual, something about “modern society”—she wrote this in 1987—“accounts for the vast increase in male homosexuality.”)

  A few months before her son’s birth, Diana had reviewed Virginia Woolf’s posthumous collection of essays, The Moment, and the republication of Woolf’s The Common Reader, in The New York Times Book Review. Diana began her review in a very unusual way: by describing the well-known photograph of Woolf by Man Ray (it would accompany the review). She commented on “the long, tense face,” “the large, too-precisely socketed eyes,” “the aristocratic nose and the surely troublesome hair dressed in such defiance of fashion.” She pointed out that Woolf was always handled carefully during her lifetime and since her death and that she generally received preferential treatment from “the literary community” because of her insistence that she not be considered a “mere woman.” Still, Diana argued that Woolf “always takes ultimate refuge in her female sensibility.” When writing about Woolf’s previously uncollected essays on “little-known figures of the past whom she could re-create out of scraps of letters and journals,” Diana scornfully pronounced them “lady’s art.” When Woolf wrote on major literary personalities such as Montaigne or George Eliot, Diana said, “we face the fact that Mrs. Woolf’s hand lacks the strength to grip at essential truth.” Every now and then words of praise were tucked in and around her review: “unique gifts of grace and appreciation,” “beautifully educated imagination,” and “lapidary precision of language.” But generally, Diana pounced on her, later saying that Lionel “didn’t care for her that much,” either. “I think he held her in slight male contempt. And he didn’t like sensibility; he liked the hard irony of Jane Austen very much.… In fact, I don’t think he liked Bloomsbury very much. I don’t think he liked that phenomenon.… I think he tried to rescue Forster from the bad influence of Bloomsbury.”

  There were many reactions—most were unfavorable—to Diana’s words on Woolf, but none was as succinct as the letter she received from the poet May Sarton, who did not agree at all with Diana’s analysis. “What shocked me in your article was that the limitations seemed entirely to overshadow the achievement,” Sarton wrote, and she emphasized that Diana had overlooked Woolf’s genius. Moreover, Sarton said that she had met Woolf several times in the mid-1930s and found her certainly not “in defiance of fashion.” Woolf was “completely in command of any situation, where her wit overbalanced her sensitivity.” In a second letter, written two weeks later (it is not known if this was a reply to one of Diana’s), Sarton decided that perhaps, after all, Diana’s criticism “makes us all think and for that blessings on you.… Stir us up again! We shall consider ourselves only your more devoted (if argumentative) readers.” There was no further correspondence.

  Diana continued to review for the Book Review for years, most of her pieces appearing on the front page. “Stir us up” effectively became her mantra and was one of the reasons she became such a sought-after reviewer. It was also one of the reasons she began to attract dissenters. She was not afraid to express her opinions, whether they were popular or not. The Nation had given her a platform, a longed-for one, and her psychoanalysts had helped her suitably frame her ambitions. Her experiences from childhood had reinforced her belief that honesty at any cost was the path to take.

  Four months after Jim’s birth, Diana received a letter from Mademoiselle magazine asking her to contribute to an article on freelance article writing. The magazine wanted her and a few other writers not mentioned to participate in a survey to prove its theory that “it is difficult to get started, almost impossible to make a large income by writing articles, and that anyone attempting writing as a career should be well-prepared for it.” There was irony here: there was to be no payment to the contributors. Diana was beside herself. Should she be grateful she was being recognized to perform a public service for a magazine that was, as she described it, “a highly profitable commercial enterprise” and for which she was to receive no fee at all? No. Writing without any payment at all was not in the cards. She said so in a reply to the magazine but received no answer and, of course, no further assignments from the magazine, either.

  She began thinking of writing about her experience with her baby nurses. According to Lionel’s journal entry at the time, one of the first nurses, a Miss Nichols, seemed indifferent toward Jim in the beginning. But this soon changed: “D has seen her fondling him and lavishing the most tender language on him.”

  Diana was breast-feeding, but with some difficulty, and quickly discovered that Miss Nichols was sneaking bottles to Jim every so often. Outraged, Diana fired her on the spot, but Lionel rehired her. During the time when Diana was interviewing applicants, she was told by one agency that “no proper baby-nurse would dream of working for a mother who nurses her own child.”

  Many years later, Jim Trilling observed that “it was a little diabolical” on his father’s part to rehire his baby nurse, but it was “done secretly,” he learned, because his father wanted his mother’s prepregnancy body back. (Lionel thought that breast-feeding would delay the process.) Jim also remembers being told by his mother that his father would not help with a special corset she had to wear during her pregnancy, and Jim remarked that his father “basically refused to touch her during her pregnancy.” In a draft of the unpublished book Diana called “A Biography of a Marriage,” she wrote that one of Lionel’s “worst sufferings was being dragged along to the corsetiere by his mother and aunts.” Perhaps this experience contributed to his horror of corsets. Nevertheless, Diana wrote in The Beginning of the Journey that she “had an unshared pregnancy because Lionel could not let it be real for him.” She also wrote that her husband might have been trying to “conceal from himself the memory of his mother’s pregnancy with Harriet: for seven years he had been an only child, alone in his mother’s affection. I suspect that he never forgave her (or any woman) the injury of having been betrayed by his mother’s having another child. Throughout his life he was prone to the kind of jealousy which a child feels at the birth of a younger sibling.”

  Lionel also commented in his journal that Miss Nichols shows “deep animosity toward Diana, possibly unconscious, [but it] suddenly abated.” He also remarked on “her expressions of admiration for my wisdom.”

  Nurse Nichols believed Father Knows Best.

  Diana often worked while Jim was in a playpen next to her desk. As she wrote a friend, “I am writing very rapidly, and, I fear, not as coherently as I would wish. My child is in his playpen at my elbow and protests every time I stop to think. He loves the clatter of the typewriter.” Diana tried to write three hours a day, often not meeting that goal, because Jim “was a very demanding child.” Still, she later agreed that “I would
never have traded the experience of motherhood for another book. Never.… There was no question in my mind that my family came first. My responsibilities as a wife and mother came first. Before I had a child, my responsibilities as a wife and homemaker were absolutely first.”

  In January of 1949, when Jim was six months old, Diana was asked by the college department of Farrar, Straus and Company to edit “The Selected Letters of Jane Walsh Carlyle.” Mrs. Carlyle, a poet who had once written a novel when she was just thirteen, was the wife of the essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle and was considered largely responsible for her husband’s wealth and eminence. She was best known for her legendary letters to such correspondents as her own husband, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Alfred Tennyson. The publishing house agreed to pay Diana an advance of $500, but she never signed a contract, and the book was never done. Around the same time Diana considered writing about Freud’s friend and student Lou Andreas-Salomé, one of the first female psychoanalysts, but she decided not to pursue the idea. In 1949 motherhood came first for her.

  Although the world was full of unsettling developments, Diana hadn’t participated in anything political for years. She remained on the sidelines until the Communists seized control of power in Czechoslovakia, and Alger Hiss was accused of being a Soviet spy by Whittaker Chambers (and convicted of perjury in 1950). Those two events caught her eye.

  Soon, the Cold War began in earnest. And in March of 1949 the Waldorf Conference (named as such because it was held at New York City’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel) convened to promote peace with Stalin at any price; the group included well-known writers, musicians, academics, philosophers, social scientists, doctors, and actors. Present were such people as Thomas Mann, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets, Norman Mailer, Aaron Copeland, Marlon Brando, and Charlie Chaplin. A year later, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, an anti-Communist organization, was formed by Waldorf dissenters, and Diana eventually became a major player in the group.

  Being an older mother in 1948 came with its problems. Diana was often ostracized by other mothers who were wary of her. Diana thought it was perhaps because she had a baby nurse for Jim’s first two years. The nurse took him on walks and to the park as often as—if not more than—Diana or Lionel did. There was also tension between the Columbia faculty mothers and the neighborhood mothers. But the strife, not ever major, was resolved when Diana decided to bring Jim to the park herself every afternoon; she would write only in the mornings.

  She began working in earnest on a piece she called “The Baby-Nurses.” Names were changed, personality quirks were conflated, and some of the incidents were altered, for nowhere in the twenty-seven-page piece does Diana mention that any of the baby nurses were not in favor of her breast-feeding. Furthermore, she writes that her pediatrician had, in fact, ordered supplementary bottles of formula, a common practice at the time. She even worried that the nurse, who was seventy years old, would not have enough eyesight to make the formula properly, and she worried the nurse might drop Jim. But Diana’s invented “Miss Purvis” handled everything just fine, although “she was quite mad,” Diana wrote.

  The piece was especially long, and it was hard to figure out its point of view. Was it satire? Comedy? The New Yorker’s William Shawn was puzzled, too. In his rejection letter he told Diana that “mainly it was thought that your strong feelings on the subject (undoubtedly justified) would stand in the way of your making the piece objective enough, or simply ‘funny’ enough for our purposes.” He suggested she try a magazine where “the feelings and the very personal treatment would be more acceptable.” But Diana didn’t try other places (she knew that Shawn meant she should try a woman’s magazine, which just didn’t interest her at the time.) She was determined to be published in The New Yorker. So she decided she needed to work harder; she wanted to learn the right approach and emphasis for long essays. She would teach and train herself. At the same time, she also realized that she was getting tired of the grind of producing her Nation column. She had to make certain choices, so in 1949 she resigned her position as its book reviewer. “It has become very much of a blind alley,” she wrote in a letter to some friends; “space is curtailed, [and] the magazine is too dead. I think I have got as much out of this fiction subject as I now can.”

  She could concentrate on her own work, because at the moment Lionel “had his own prose going well,” she later said. Still, she wrote in the same letter to friends that she was finishing up an editing job “to which I am committed”—without mentioning that it was for Lionel.

  Although Diana’s father had barely anything left in his estate when he died in 1932, six years before his death he had managed on the quiet to create insurance trust funds for his children, with the money to be delivered to them when they reached the age of thirty-five. The trust remained intact throughout the years. In 1940 Diana turned thirty-five, and she received $12,890.68 after taxes. The money was, of course, a very welcome gift, with most of it going to their general household income, which always included hefty medical bills, although some was used to rent summer houses.

  By the time Jim was born, Diana’s psychoanalyst was a well-known New York doctor, Marianne Kris (who treated Marilyn Monroe in the 1960s). Her husband, Ernst Kris, was also an analyst, as well as an art historian, and both were part of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, although Ernst Kris was not a medical doctor like his wife. Lionel was in treatment with Dr. Rudolph Lowenstein, a close associate of Ernst Kris, and as Diana wrote in The Beginning of the Journey, Dr. Marianne Kris thought he was not the right doctor for Lionel. She recommended that Lionel switch to Dr. Grace Addabte, which he did. (Diana believed that Dr. Lowenstein did harm to their marriage by “colluding” in Lionel’s ambivalence toward her. Dr. Kris agreed.)

  For two months in the summer of 1949 the Trillings rented a small house—actually a cottage that had been converted from a garage—one block from the beach, in Westport, Connecticut, near where they had honeymooned. Although Jim was taken to Riverside Park every day, Diana wanted him to experience the real countryside. Westport, a coastal town on Long Island Sound, had areas of abundant woodlands full of oak, sugar maple, and elm trees. A state park was also nearby. As she wrote in a draft of an unpublished book:

  From the day of our arrival, I have been able to record the increasing ecstasy with which he has discovered the variety of outdoor life.… A new yellow flower has appeared at the edge of the lawn. He sees it well before either his nurse or I, stops, frowns as he studies it, delicately probes it with his finger, cautiously puts forward his cheek against it to learn its texture, wrinkles his nose in a vast, joyous parody of savoring its odor; the flower meets his approval. The nurse complies with his demand that she capture it for him. She says, “Give the pretty flower to your mom,” and he lurches across the lawn to make his presentation, his whole being suffused with the delight of his possession.

  Diana then reminisced about her own childhood and how her parents always said they loved nature (although only her mother had). She continued in intense, sprawling prose (one reason the book was not ever published) that most Jews feel removed from “the world of outdoors” because they are “a people sired in ghettos.” Furthermore, she wrote, “Jewish farmers, except in Palestine, will still strike most other Jews as an anomaly.… The Jew represents a racial choice of the mental over the physical way of living, a Puritanical preference for the dominion of the mind rather than of the body and senses.” Despite her parents’ efforts and her camp experiences, Diana said she “grew up with a deeply ingrained though unformulated aloofness from nature.… I was not only left untaught about the world of nature but made fearful of it.” (Dr. Kellogg’s book certainly hadn’t helped when it came to the nature of sex.)

  Her son would not be afraid of nature, and as a one-year-old he was already bold. If young Diana had dared to roll in the grass in view of her parents, she had sinned. “Nature is seduction to sin, temptation to abandonment
,” she wrote, and then completely crossed out in a draft of her unpublished book. Diana was learning to be bold from her infant son.

  When Jim was two years old, Lionel, who became a full professor at Columbia in 1948, published The Liberal Imagination, the collection of essays that most people would consider his most significant book. Quentin Anderson wrote that it “enforces the demand Trilling made in all his work that we should look at the imaginative consequences of our politics and the political consequences of our use of the imagination.” The book, which was dedicated to Jacques Barzun, sold seventy thousand copies in hardcover and one hundred thousand in paperback.

  Diana gave the sixteen essays in the book the lightest of polishing (she had already done more rigorous editing on them when they were published individually in magazines), and as she always emphasized, she never modified his ideas but, when required, only clarified them. And, as Lionel himself explained in the preface, many of the essays were written from 1940 to 1950, but the majority from 1946 on, and although he “substantially revised almost all of them, I have not changed the original intent of any.”

  Diana described Lionel’s work as having to

  do with the way he thought. And he thought with so much space around every sentence that I could not put in or take out. That was the quality of the way he thought. I always thought of it as being like the concept in painting. If I paint this room, there is space between the chair and the table. It will only be space on the canvas, but it’s space into which four or five people might fit. And that used to be called negative space. There was this negative space around everything that Lionel wrote—negative in the sense that it hadn’t been filled in positively. But there it was and it existed in a very positive sense, and that was where the thought was. He was thinking all those people between that chair and this table.