She said that she would look at Lionel’s work and say, “ ‘What is it that has produced this effect of masterliness?’ which is the word I would use to myself. It had nothing actually to do with how to write, because I am afraid it will become public knowledge once his manuscripts are available, that there was scarcely a sentence he ever wrote that I didn’t rewrite.” (Of course, at the time Diana said this, she didn’t know that the drafts with her editing on them would be destroyed by her husband. Jim Trilling later said that “it’s probably the only thing she kept coming back to with sorrow and anger—‘How could he do this to me?’ ”)
Diana never had much to say about her life to the other mothers in the park because they were young enough to be her daughters. Why would they be interested in her? She was generally amused by their youth, and even by their stares, but she never tried to reach out to any of these women to ask about their lives.
In a draft of an unpublished book she says bluntly that “I blame my own belated maternity on my professional ambitions,” adding that “a myriad subtle fear of life can hide behind a devotion to one’s work, and must hide behind the refusal of parenthood, whether by men or women and whatever the authority the culture of one’s group may give to one’s rationalizations.” It was certainly true that both Trillings hid their “refusal of parenthood” in socially acceptable ways that concealed their real reasons, whether it was work, lack of work, ambition, anxiety, depression, impotence, or other physical or psychological factors. Diana wasn’t about to risk letting any of the mothers in the park discover the reasons for her late parenthood.
She also said that because her mother was not a very articulate person, she never heard her “state the theory that lay behind her maternal practices,” except once while Diana was recuperating from her appendix operation while at Radcliffe. She and her mother overheard some young mothers arguing in favor of telling their children the truth of where babies came from as soon as they asked. Diana didn’t expect what happened next. Her mother intervened and told the young women she didn’t agree, because she believed “children should keep their illusions as long as they can.”
Diana’s theory behind her own “maternal practices” was clear. Her Freudian leanings structured her life and were the reason her husband and close friends often told her to take down her shingle. Freud was always next to her every step of the way. Would the young women in the park understand this?
When Jim became afraid of a picture of a mole in a children’s book, Diana was concerned. What was he trying to say to her? What had she done wrong? When Jim became afraid of elevators, she knew it had to be, as she wrote, his “fear of male genitalia being lost on the endless chasm of female genitalia.” (Jim later commented that because the elevators were so small, he was genuinely afraid that the cables could break. Also, the elevator was noisy; any machine that made a loud noise frightened him. This was a typical preschooler’s fear. Jim said that he was told that he was also afraid of policemen, black raincoats, blimps, and giant meteors.) Lionel wrote in his journal that Jim “abhors the stethoscope.” But what baby or toddler likes a (usually) cold instrument placed on his chest?
Diana told Thelma Anderson that “the paternal instinct in Lionel was extraordinary. He could wake at night if Jim let out the faintest peep. He was wide-awake. Other times I could shake him and throw cold water in his face and couldn’t wake him.” She said that there were certain things Lionel could do “only when Jim was small.… He could fix toys … but all that kind of mechanical genius left him the minute Jim was not making demands, just as it had arrived with Jim’s arrival on earth.”
After Diana read Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society, his innovative study of childhood (which he believed had eight stages of development), she wrote him a letter about Jim’s fear of elevators. She received no answer, so she wrote again. He answered that he hadn’t received her first letter and offered her an appointment. An appointment? Diana didn’t want an appointment; she wanted therapy by mail. Furthermore, in his reply Erikson seemed to mock her story about elevators, and she felt snubbed when he told her that obviously she had a problem with mechanical conveyances because she seemed reluctant to drive to see him. There was no further correspondence.
Jim’s early introduction to the countryside had encouraged his inquisitiveness. He was never afraid of snakes or worms and was always full of scientific curiosity as a toddler and young boy. He was a very bright and enthusiastic child. Lionel observed in his journal that when Jim was nine months old, while crawling around the apartment, he accidentally touched a hot pipe, which he later always avoided. “Some weeks later,” Lionel noted, “I held him up to the trunk of a tree, he refused to touch it but at last he did so, tentatively, then boldly; when he came back to the house he went at once to the stream riser [pipe] saying, ‘ot’ ” (hot). Lionel was enthralled. Touching the tree had made Jim understand and articulate something essential about the physical world.
Diana was a protective mother but also at times an unusually progressive one. When Jim, at eight, showed an interest in weapons, she encouraged a collection of knives, swords, even bayonets. This trust was especially surprising because as Jim later said, “I was unpredictable throughout my childhood, had rages, and yelled and screamed.… I was subject to outbursts at my parents all my life—any frustration would set me off.”
When Jim was seven, he began child analysis, the use of psychoanalytic principles in play therapy or in conversations with the analyst. It was what knowing parents did with “hyperactive,” “difficult” children at the time. The year before, the Trillings had bought Jim two kittens for his birthday, pets the family named “Paws” and “Lemhi” (after the Pass bordering Montana and Idaho that Lewis and Clarke explored). Many of the Trilling friends believed Jim was indulged too much—two kittens at age six?—and they “openly and subtly disapproved of Jim’s rearing,” Lionel wrote in his journal.
Norman Podhoretz, one of Lionel’s star pupils in 1949—he took just one course with him in his senior year—became a close friend of both Trillings (and then, later, an ex-friend), along with his wife, the writer Midge Decter. (Decter once told Diana that the Trilling of whom she had been aware of before 1950 was not Lionel but Diana: “I was the literary editor of my St. Paul Minnesota high school newspaper, and for years I plagiarized your reviews.”)
Podhoretz, who visited the Trillings often in the summer, and commented that he spoke to Diana “probably a million hours,” has written that he always believed that she had a “skewed sense of reality,” whereas Lionel “understood exactly what I was trying to say.” He said that “I always found myself in a slightly false position trying to be polite in responding to things Diana said; she just seemed to be on a different wave length.… I had trouble communicating with her.” As for Lionel, Decter said, “he was preternaturally sensitive, so if you sat in a room with him and there was a conversation, if you paid attention to him, you saw that he was seeing everything that was going on. He wouldn’t necessarily comment on it but you could tell he saw everything. Diana was not like that. First of all, she was not preternaturally sensitive. She was something else. So you could tell he was seeing everything and she saw whatever she saw.”
Decter also commented that Diana was a figure of sometimes nasty humor and sometimes of hostility in their literary community and was not considered a particularly good mother. “She was sneered at a lot.” For years the Columbia faculty crowd mocked that she “didn’t know the depth of her ignorance,” and they belittled her with the title “Queen of Claremont Avenue” because she “put on airs that were tiresome,” Elisabeth Sifton remembered. (Sifton, who said Lionel “never put on airs,” knew the Trillings since her childhood. Her parents were Ursula and Reinhold Niebuhr.) “Diana often had court-like intrigues about social things,” Sifton went on to say.
Norman Podhoretz said that he thought the Trillings “really didn’t know what they were doing” as parents. Ann Fadiman, Kip’s daughter with his s
econd wife, Annalee Jacoby, thought the Trillings “were devoted but peculiar parents.” Midge Decter said that “in those days having a baby at that age was very unusual.… They were so full of consciousness. I mean there is one thing you can’t do if you have a little kid and that is to live without a sense of humor. And with this terrible focus and they [Lionel and Diana] were both Freudians, that added to it and so the boy was a mess.” Both Decter and Podhoretz thought that Jim, although he was “incredibly intelligent and perceptive,” was a wreck. He also had violence problems. “And,” Podhoretz added, “the more of a mess he was, the less capable they seemed dealing with it, and this included Lionel.”
Another former student of Lionel’s said that when Jim was an infant and wasn’t kicking as Diana had expected him to, “She pulled on his legs.” “Oh, dear,” the student recalled; “I felt so sorry for her.”
For her.
“Happiness is nothing, achievement is everything,” Diana once said to another of her husband’s students. In 1948 it would become her maxim.
10
OH BE BRAVE
By most people the “sense of reality” is understood to be the submission to events and indeed illusion is often salvation.
—Lionel Trilling, journal entry, 1951
Caring for Jim and coordinating the care of him by others, making sure the household was always in good order, managing the finances, keeping numerous doctor appointments (now including a pediatrician), and, of course, editing Lionel—all this took up much of Diana’s time, but proceeding with her own writing was becoming more and more essential to her existence.
As she wrote in The Beginning of the Journey: “a woman writer is of course better situated than other working mothers for bringing up children. She can be home and keep an eye on things, and she has the flexibility to meet emergencies. By the same token, her working life is exposed to constant interruption.” So at one point Diana rented a room in the apartment next door, but Jim made too much of a protest when she came and went, so she gave the room up. “I learned to work at my living room desk, whatever might be going on around me,” she said.
After “The Baby-Nurses” was rejected by The New Yorker, Diana remained determined to find the right tone for such an essay. It didn’t take long.
Just a year after she left The Nation, Diana published a lengthy essay in Partisan Review on the anthropologist Margaret Mead’s new book on gender roles and their evolving implications, Male and Female. The book consisted of Mead’s further exploration of the South Sea that she first wrote about in Coming of Age in Samoa. Mead argued that culture, not biology, was the principal drive in shaping a person’s behavior. “Talking about our bodies is a complex and difficult matter,” Mead wrote in Male and Female, explaining that “the differences between the two sexes is one of the important conditions upon which we have built the many varieties of human culture that give human beings dignity and stature.” She now said, however, that women should be able to take part in more activities usually associated with men; she was evolving into what could be called a scientific-based feminist, except that Diana didn’t think she really was.
She wrote that Mead’s two main points are, first, to demonstrate that “the attitudes which define the adult sexual behavior of both men and women are established in their earliest instruction in their sex membership” and, second, that “apart from the single sexual difference given by biology—the difference between the male and female roles in procreation—sexual character is entirely determined by the needs of the social group.” But Diana charged, despite Mead’s concern “with [the] most primary of sexual material—the knowledge of our bodies in relation to their sex differentiation”—the book (“a strikingly comprehensive document”) “is as remote from actual erotic activity as if our differing sexual organs had been given us merely to distinguish the different jobs we would do in society.” Diana went on to write that Mead “says no word for sex as a pleasure, for sex as a physical urgency, or sex as an act or aspect of the imagination”: these were matters to which Diana was beginning to give serious thought, and she emphasized, “although Mead seems to understand Freudian theory, nonetheless, she bends or discards Freudian principles at will.”
As for sexual pleasure, imagined or real, Diana, at forty-five, was beginning to explore her own destiny. She concluded her review by reminding her readers that the “sexuality of Male and Female is the sexuality of ego, never of libido. It is directed toward achieving, not toward being.” Diana did not want to live in Mead’s world, “where the whole of our sexual motive would seem to be social motive.” Where did pleasure lie? she asked. She was looking for answers.
Diana received a lively letter about her essay from the well-known psychiatrist Karl Menninger, who commended her for exposing Mead’s “Horneyism” (referring to psychoanalyst Karen Horney, who questioned Freud’s theories) and for disparaging what he called Mead’s “diaperology” theories, “which also irritate me and most of our group here.” After Diana wrote that she didn’t understand the term, he spelled out what he meant in a second letter: “Diaperology is a disparaging word applied to the theory that you find out how the people of some country or community treat their babies for the first six months, and then you know exactly whether they are going to be Republicans, Democrats, Dixiecrats, Titocrats, or Communists.” Not amused, Diana did not pursue a correspondence.
In 1950 Diana had applied for and won a $3,000 Guggenheim fellowship for a book “on certain aspects of contemporary American culture,” which she never finished. (She won a second Guggenheim in 1991 for The Beginning of the Journey.)
She also wrote in 1950 an essay for the Partisan Review on Ralph de Toledano’s and Victor Lasky’s book, Seeds of Treason, about the Alger Hiss/Whittaker Chambers case. She let her readers know upfront that she believed that Chambers told the truth and that Hiss lied. She later said that Lionel “had little liking for Chambers, but he didn’t believe him capable of bearing false witness; and this continued to be his judgment.” She continued: “Lionel had known Chambers for some time, enough to say that he would not have accused somebody falsely—that was his opinion. He might have been wrong with that, but it was his opinion, reached seriously on the basis of some knowledge of Chambers. It is considered very damaging to feel that way about Chambers, which means that you think Hiss was innocent and Chambers guilty—it’s as simple as that. It’s prejudicial thinking—it’s not thinking.”
Diana agreed with her husband completely. Jason Epstein, the writer and publisher, recalled (a little mischievously) how he took Lionel’s class on Wordsworth, but “all Trilling wanted to talk about was Hiss, so I stopped going to class.”
Monroe Engel, a novelist and Harvard professor, wrote Diana that the essay on Seeds of Treason “is one of the few examples we have had in recent years of the ‘liberal imagination’ engaged in politics.” Diana had used the review to explain her liberal anti-Communist beliefs, which grew out of her anti-Trotskyism, her anti-Stalinism, and her anti-McCarthyism. She wrote that “the anti-communist liberal maintains, that is, a very delicate position. He firmly opposes McCarthy. But he doesn’t automatically defend anyone McCarthy attacks. He demands that there be no public accusations without proper legal evidence. And even where this evidence is presented, he calls as much attention to the political motive of the accuser as of the accused. But he does not make the mistake of believing that just because the wrong people are looking for Soviet agents in the American government, there are none.”
Her political position would stir controversy in her life, and that of Lionel’s, ever after. (Norman Podhoretz says that they—especially Lionel—were what years later he would call premature neoconservatives, a label that Diana repeatedly denied. Still, Podhoretz asserts that even though Lionel himself “resisted classification,… it didn’t bother him to be called a conservative. More than once he said to me, ‘I quite like being called a conservative.’ ”)
But that didn’t mean he—or she—was
one. “Lionel wouldn’t have called himself a radical in politics,” Diana said, “but he certainly wouldn’t have called himself a conservative. He was a liberal, an old-fashioned nineteenth-century liberal. Like me, just a real old-fashioned liberal.… There was a conserving spirit, without question, but he was not a radical in his political thought.”
Years later, Diana was accused by the writer A. Alvarez of being “a disillusioned radical, or an adjusted liberal. She represents a generation that has been psychoanalyzed out of politics.” But Diana’s detractors often went out of their way to be outlandish and obscure at the same time. It was sometimes impossible for them to hold two (seemingly) conflicting ideas in their heads at the same time. But Diana always could.
In 1955, when Jim was seven, the Trillings moved from 620 West 116th Street to another ground-floor, dark apartment—a larger one with six rooms—which was just around the corner, on Claremont Avenue. Thirty-Five Claremont was an eleven-story building constructed in 1910 and owned by Columbia University; the Trillings would live there for the rest of their lives. The apartment faced the street, although the curtains were often closed. But when they weren’t, sights and noises from the street—students walking past, chatting; people with dogs on leashes; women and men carrying groceries from the markets on Broadway—could be heard and seen.
One entered the apartment directly into the living room, which was outfitted with rugs, two rose-colored silk brocade sofas, a coffee table usually covered with books, a couple of comfortable chairs, a few lamps, and various prints and photographs on the walls. It was from the very beginning what one guest called “a ladylike apartment.” Lionel was always slightly uncomfortable over there being no entrance foyer and that guests were immediately confronted with the living room.
The Untold Journey Page 17