The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  The Trillings frequently went to parties, not only to serious Partisan Review gatherings but also to more glamorous parties given by Leo Lerman. Their circle of acquaintances widened. As Steven Pascal wrote in his introduction to Lerman’s letters and journals, at Leo’s parties “friends beget friends.” It was sometimes hard to know who had met whom where, when, or why. Many years later, according to Lerman, the writer Harold Brodkey, who had met the Trillings at one of his parties, and took a dislike to Diana, once impertinently told her “she had no taste [and] lived with ‘mail order’ furniture and a collection of ‘cheap’ third-rate drawings and Japanese woodcuts typical of academe house furnishing.” Understandably, no friendship ensued.

  Jim had different rooms at different times on Claremont Avenue. The largest bedroom in the back, painted a dark army green because his mother thought the color “neutral but masculine,” was his until he was sixteen or seventeen, when it became his parents’ bedroom. Jim then moved to a smaller center room. He remembered returning from Exeter’s summer school to find that his mother had painted the entire room red because she thought he’d like it, which, as a matter of fact, he said he did. Everything, everything, was red—the chair, lamps, even the design on the bedspread. He also recalled once wanting fancy wallpaper in his room on 116th Street in order to cheer things up. He asked for a big all-over pattern—but his mother said he’d get tired of anything elaborate, so she chose a simple repetitive pattern—“something very bland with sprigs of cherries.” Jim said this experience—the knowing what was needed even though he didn’t get his way—was the beginning of his interest in the history of ornaments, which has led to his distinguished career in the field.

  When Jim was five, he spent a year at Tompkins Hall Nursery School, which had been founded in the 1930s by a group of Columbia professors. In his first quarter report a teacher told the Trillings that like all only children Jim was “experimenting with social techniques.” She went on to say that “consequently, Jim, in his eagerness to draw children to him, often used physical force as an overture to friendship.” But the teacher assured the Trillings that Jim was trying to find better approaches, although he “has difficulty staying with one activity for very long because his primary interest is the children and what they do.” The teacher also said that Jim didn’t like getting his hands messy with mixing materials, although he “never hesitates to sail boats or blow bubbles in tubs of soapy water, and he has also helped with planting seeds carefully and watching them grow.” She praised his curiosity and energy.

  By the time Jim was seven he had been in five different schools. “I was unpredictable throughout my childhood,” he said; “I had rages and screamed.”

  After Tompkins he was enrolled in Dalton but left after a week “because of tantrums; I couldn’t control myself at all.” He then went to the Birch Wathen School (later Birch Wathen Lenox) for another two or three weeks and left once again because of his outbursts. Next was the Boardman School (later acquired by the New Lincoln School, which eventually merged with the Walden School, and was closed altogether in 1991). Jim stayed at Boardman and New Lincoln for a couple of months until he went to a special education school, the Reece School, in 1955, when he was seven.

  There were several months between New Lincoln and Reece when he was not in school at all, but as Diana wrote in a May 12, 1955, letter to his pediatrician, Dr. Morris Greenberg, “both Lionel and I are deeply pleased by the progress Jim has made in the last year toward emotional maturity. His overt aggressions have surely been reduced by 75 per cent, if not more, and he has learned a great deal of self-control, although the control is naturally not yet entirely operative under conditions of strain, which is why he can’t yet be in school.” He was seeing his analyst regularly.

  The main reason Diana put her thoughts in a letter, she told “Morris”—they were on a first-name basis—was that she could think better that way. She had two concerns: she didn’t want Jim’s not being in a school to be a cause for his not receiving a polio vaccination (the Salk vaccine became available in April 1955), and she was concerned that Jim had not received a thorough enough examination after she said that he had stomach pains that she believed were caused by his eating too fast and “often too much.” Dr. Greenberg replied in a lengthy handwritten letter, explaining first that there was only enough vaccine available for first- and second-grade children, and even that supply was short. He suggested that Diana wait until the fall or winter term for Jim’s shots. As for her second concern, he reminded Diana that “Jim is an unusually bright child.… Consciously or unconsciously you have been sharpening his mind. His intellectual keenness is sometimes startling. But emotionally he is still a child. He still wants continuous and exclusive attention. He gets it by asking questions, by creating scenes, by pretending to be exquisitely hurt and in a thousand other ways that little children learn to torture their parents.” Dr. Greenberg went on to say that his examination of Jim (in which he used his “experienced intuition”) “was sufficiently thorough to satisfy him beyond a shadow of doubt” that Jim had “exaggerated bellyaches which most children have now and then.” He ended the letter by telling Diana, “You may be a bright woman but your son is bright enough to take you in. You needn’t worry about his physical health.” In a follow-up letter a few weeks later in reply to Diana’s phoned concern that despite everything he said, she still felt he had shortchanged Jim, Dr. Greenberg countered that he had treated Jim as he would any other child, “without giving him extra comfort,” which he understood Diana and “the psychiatrist” recommended he should have offered. He knew that she and Lionel read a lot in the psychoanalytic field (he even praised Lionel’s essay on Freud in The Liberal Imagination), but he was still not convinced that psychiatrists “know precisely what they are doing.” Although he wrote that “Freud’s greatest contribution has been toward making psychoanalysis a dynamic rather than a static discipline and to encourage people to look without fear into the dark corners of individual cases,” he believed that “Freud’s contribution to therapy of individual cases has not yet, to my mind, been proved.” Diana read the letter with skepticism, accepting, as she did, that most psychoanalysts knew what they were doing, despite her flawed early encounters with a few.

  Still, in The Beginning of the Journey Diana revealed that her analyst, Dr. Kris, “said of my literary criticism that I must ‘neutralize’ it, by which she meant that in my writing as in my life, I must be more accepting, less given to the making of judgments; as a critic, I was to be less critical.” Diana said that Dr. Kris reminded her that “it was a time when Freudian doctrine identified female normality with ‘passivity,’ a counter to the ‘activity’ of the male … but in commenting on my work in these terms,” Diana wrote, “Dr. Kris was not just expressing a biased sexual view; she was moving into an area in which she had little competence—psychoanalytical training is not a preparation for literary judgment.”

  But it was the 1950s: a time when pediatricians functioned as parents, psychiatrists, and book critics; when psychoanalysts functioned as judges; and when most mothers and fathers were considered slightly off course, even though their children could grow up to be remarkable in spite of the obstacles. And mothers, just about all mothers everywhere, continued to know what was best, and as Diana wrote in her unpublished poem, they also continued to “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 …

  The year the Trillings moved to Claremont Avenue, Lionel published two books, Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture, a fifty-nine page volume that contained the talk he gave at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and Society as their fifth annual Freud Anniversary Lecture, and The Opposing Self, a collection of nine essays on such subjects as Keats’s letters, Anna Karenina, and The Bostonians. In his preface he wrote that most of the essays were written as introductions to bo
oks, “and all of them were written for occasions which were not of my own devising.” The idea of self is what joins all the essays, and he noted that most of them were revised after their original publication, “but none has been radically revised.” In 1956 he published A Gathering of Fugitives, essays about such figures as Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, and Robert Graves; some of the essays first appeared in The New Yorker, Partisan Review, The New York Times Book Review, and the London Review. A number of them also appeared in the Reader’s Subscription Book Club’s monthly magazine, The Griffin. As with the other books, Lionel revised some of the essays, added material to others, and “corrected some infelicities of prose,” as he put it.

  Although Diana did little work on these essays at the actual time of their publication in book form, she once complained to Thelma Anderson that she “could work on a manuscript of [Lionel’s] for hours and hours and days and days, and he would scarcely say thank you. In the most cursory way, he would say, ‘Oh thanks, dear, that’s awfully nice. Thanks a lot. That’s wonderful.’ Then he’d come in later and say, ‘Marvelous job you did. Marvelous job.’ And that was it.”

  Diana also told Thelma that every now and then Lionel would thrust at her a shirt that needed a button sewed on, and he would look with wonder at her when she said that it would only take her a second to fix it. Diana said that Lionel “went overboard in his thank yous. I was never thanked for anything I did the way I was thanked for sewing a button.” Diana asked Lionel why he made so much of it, but she reported that “he never answered me. I never knew. I don’t know the answer.”

  Diana was proud of being her husband’s lifeboat, even explaining to Thelma that Lionel “didn’t have the intellectual, inventive genius of a Freud certainly, and he didn’t have the literary gifts of a Dickens, but his critical gifts were developed to the degree they were by the same forces that were impelling Freud—that he was the golden son who was going to do something distinguished—something special.” Yet, she said, even when Lionel was on a good path with his work, he still always “had difficulties in composition.”

  Although Diana never changed any of Lionel’s ideas, she did try now and then to influence his thoughts. “I remember how often he did say to me, ‘You cannot feed an emotion into me and expect me then to make it my emotion. I cannot do that. I have to operate on my own emotions or not at all.’ ”

  Diana said that although Lionel “lived a rather close, domestic life,” he also “saw life from a grand moral and social perspective. I’ve never known anybody else quite like that. He didn’t see himself as somebody who had a right to transcend the demands of ordinary life. “She went on to say that “he behaved like a very everyday sort of person like anybody else.… After Jim was born, it was a pleasure for him to walk in our neighborhood and be greeted by all the kids as Jim’s daddy. ‘Hello Jim’s daddy.’ And this tells you something about his lack of egoism. He wasn’t so much retiring or recessive as genuinely modest.”

  But sometimes it backfired, or, more accurately, he needed to protect his real self from exposure. Diana was mystified and embarrassed after one of Lionel’s former students, who at the time was on the Columbia faculty, sought advice about having a child, and Lionel refused to become engaged with him. The young professor told Lionel he himself was only “bits and pieces,” while Lionel was “a whole person.” The young instructor was desperate for guidance. As Diana later remembered, “Lionel just sat there quietly and let him think this way as if it were indeed an accurate description of the difference between them.… I got into a boiling rage.… Why did Lionel insist on this unbroken front of self-possession? … Maybe he couldn’t risk that much licensing of feeling, feeling so akin to impulse. Or maybe it was a necessary condition of his work, to make the assumption that he was this kind of whole man in order to speak with authority and be rid of self-pity.” Diana never knew the reason. She said that every now and then they’d argue about “letting people think that he was in such entire command of his life” and that “it was often in the air between us.”

  Debt continued to haunt the Trillings’ lives, and they continued to borrow from friends, especially from their neighbors, Elsa and Jim Grossman. Lionel had met Elsa as a teenager when she was a mother’s helper at a camp near Saranac Lake, and Jim, at the time the family lawyer, and later a lawyer for various publishing houses, was a friend from Lionel’s student days at Columbia. In one of her thank you notes, Diana wrote the Grossmans, “Lionel, immersed in The Great Work Push, asks me to write on both our behalfs (behalves?) to thank you most affectionately and sincerely for your lovely prompt response to our perennial cry for help.” Diana’s brother often helped, too, once writing her in a note with a check for $800 that “I sort of mildly resent your instructions not to go to too much trouble to help you. I think a little trouble is in order if it is the means of assisting you.”

  Although Lionel’s university salary was not adequate for their expenses, once, on a whim, Lionel had bought Diana an elaborate silvery brocade hostess gown as a gift. She was not pleased. “It was his extravagance that angered me,” she said, “his intent on deceiving himself [about] how we lived.” Diana said that such gift-buying was a legacy from his father, “who had filial love but not personal love” for Lionel. David Trilling “would always decide the pile of presents on Christmas Eve was never enough, and he would run out and buy more,” in compensation for feelings he couldn’t express any other way to his son.

  Some of the money the Trillings borrowed went for childcare and medical expenses, and some often went toward the rent for summer houses. It was more crucial than ever to her to be away from New York City in June through August, and she said that she completely took it for granted that this would be possible, no matter what their financial circumstances.

  For three straight summers the Trillings rented a large house in Fairfield, Connecticut, from Robert Penn Warren and his second wife, Eleanor Clark (who early in her career had been the first reader at Norton for Lionel’s book on Arnold and who later won a National Book Award for her nonfiction book The Oysters of Locmariaquer). The Robert Penn Warrens were not friends, just acquaintances, although Lionel wrote an undated and enigmatic entry in his journal that “William Phillips informed D of the affairs I am supposed to have had—with Eleanor Clark—rather revoltingly I was somehow conned into that one!” There are no further—or known—explanations for the comment.

  Diana had heard the house in Fairfield was often available for rent, and she wrote the Robert Penn Warrens about it. Jim Trilling remembers the house as a “daring architectural venture made from barns put together. It had a pool and an extensive rock garden.” As a young boy he collected toads and recalls once deciding to place some on a large tin, which he covered with Saran Wrap, the clear food covering that came on the market several years earlier in 1949. But the toads naturally managed to escape from under the wrap and were found all over the house, even on his parents’ bed. Diana was extremely upset. “I took unfair advantage of my mother’s squeamishness,” he admitted.

  The Warren house was the most expansive and expensive one the Trillings ever rented. Diana wrote in a draft of a book she later discarded that “Lionel had to be well into middle age before he developed any sense of himself as an earner, and even then his economic identity seemed to elude him.… He couldn’t at any moment have told you whether our bank balance was $100 or $1,000—it was my job always to keep the family ledgers and to announce to Lionel our periodic crises when we confronted a stack of unpaid bills and an overdrawn bank account.”

  Diana also did their income tax and “all the things that were done in private that the world didn’t have to know about,” she told Lionel’s former student and colleague Stephen Donadio. Diana went on to tell Donadio that Lionel “couldn’t keep a checkbook. Half the time he couldn’t remember to write down the check … yet he was efficient enough with his college affairs, and he answered his mail, and he did all the things that had to be done to keep the l
iterary life going except on a business level. On a business level he could not manage it.”

  By the 1950s, both Trillings were far, far away from the time when Diana’s main worry was that Jack the Ripper would come to New York and strangle her. Now the couple’s choking money concerns were often on her mind. Yet she always felt in control, despite their constant debt, because she knew what was or wasn’t in the bank and was in charge of figuring out what to do. And Lionel, whose greatest childhood fear had been a fragment of peeling wallpaper in his bedroom, had only to worry about his flourishing literary life.

  11

  GUILT MAKES US HUMAN

  Of sexual activity, one motive may be said to be the desire for sin—what afflicts married couples is that with time their relationship no longer has any touch of sin in it. Sin in the sense of St. Augustine’s pears. The other, D says is the desire to have a new side of the personality brought into the light.

  —Lionel Trilling, journal entry, sometime between 1938 and 1943

  In November of 1954 Diana, approaching fifty, published another long essay in Partisan Review, which had been welcoming her as a contributor for quite a few years. Her piece was on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the celebrated physicist often called “the father of the atomic bomb,” whose security clearance was canceled in 1954 because of his outspoken belief in international control of nuclear power, his opposition to the H-bomb, and his alleged association with Communist Party members. His censure was a defining moment in American security policy. Diana considered her essay a defining moment in her career.

  She had torn up her initial Oppenheimer essay, or rather she told Partisan Review to destroy it after she submitted it. She explained that “when the Oppenheimer hearings took place, I thought I smelled guilt.” She thought he somehow must have betrayed his country. “But, then,” she said, “I couldn’t sleep at night; I felt I had done something wrong. I’d read all the evidence. I felt very unhappy.” So she read through all the testimony. “I spent weeks and weeks doing that … a million words.” The new piece that she wrote, which didn’t take the strict anti-Communist line, followed her conscience, she said. She knew some people would be outraged by her less-popular liberal anti-Communist views. Diana subsequently commented that she always “swam against the cultural tide.”