The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  Much later she wrote in a letter that “in the fifties, I diverged from the dominant Partisan Review political-cultural viewpoint … on the Oppenheimer case—in a piece which several members of the Atomic Energy Commission (Conant, Rabi) felt to be the most accurate analysis of the case that ever appeared. I recognized the role of McCarthy in creating the climate of opinion in which Oppenheimer had his security clearance taken away from him, but I did not accept the single-minded idea that only McCarthyism lay behind the case.” James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, was an innovative chemist who served on the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission. Isidor Isaac Rabi, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1944, served as a member of the Science Advisory Committee of the International Atomic Energy Commission.

  She went on to say that Partisan Review then immediately published a stronger anti-McCarthy essay, which she suspected was meant to disassociate the magazine from her own point of view, which didn’t condemn McCarthy sufficiently. (But, she later wrote, “I was against both Communism and McCarthyism. They were enemies of each other, but I was the enemy of both.”)

  Over the years Diana became convinced that her star had begun to descend because of the more nuanced political-cultural opinions that her critique of Oppenheimer reflected and that because of these positions, she would never achieve the full recognition she deserved, the kind of recognition that she had begun to receive in the 1940s when she was writing for The Nation. She also came to believe that her piece on Oppenheimer was a watershed for Partisan Review. “I think that was the end of its principled life.… It was a Cold War period and the magazine didn’t want to be cold warriors. They wanted to be radicals.” Diana later wrote that the magazine was anti-Stalinist in its politics but radical in its culture.

  The writer Bernard Malamud happened to have published his short story “The Magic Barrel” in the same issue as Diana’s essay. After she read Malamud’s story, she was moved to write him a letter of praise. “It was one of the few fan letters I’ve ever written,” she said. Malamud wrote back that her letter meant a lot to him, adding that the reception of the story gave him “confidence to continue in my vein: people first (and with mercy); the tale wrought from an idea, not biography; theme pointing out inevitabilities of plot, not vice versa; style secondary; story over author.” He told her also that he was “laboring at a new novel (my first, The Natural, was, in a way, to test the power of my imagination and to make me not afraid of the day when I give up my ‘Jewish material’) and the magic, if any, comes hard. I almost wish that the barrel were not invented, because it sometimes makes my present performance seem inadequate.” He added that her Oppenheimer piece was being read at Oregon State College (where he was teaching) “with a good deal of interest. First for the drama of event, and that of personality created and revealed by your discerning analysis.” Later he worried that he might have offended her by saying she had “created” Oppenheimer’s personality, and he wrote her that “all I meant was that through your article you had ‘recreated’ him as a personality for me.” He emphasized that he went “along with your thesis concerning the liberals, except that I feel it was not only they who were lacking in morality and insight vis a vis the communists. That doesn’t excuse them, of course, but true morality is very hard to come by. I think we have to give credit to those who, even blindly, attempt to seek it.” He told her that Oppenheimer would be visiting the campus soon and that there had been controversy over the invitation. Later, Malamud wrote Diana a six-page letter describing the event, which included two formal lectures by Oppenheimer (one was moved from a site that could fill five thousand seats to a basketball stadium which held ten thousand), appearances at various classes, and meetings with select professors. He mentioned a lecture William Faulkner had given two weeks before Oppenheimer’s visit, which Malamud described as “sad” because the sound system failed and the audience of two thousand people could barely hear a word. Attempts were made to fix the problem, but nothing worked, and, as Malamud wrote, “Faulkner, controlled but uneasy, talked on, uncommunicating. Straining, I heard him speak of the loss of privacy in American life. He cited himself, Colonel Lindbergh, and J. Robert Oppenheimer.”

  Malamud described Oppenheimer talking to a colleague’s philosophy class, “where he appeared very nervous. Later, at a smaller group of twenty people … he smoked nonstop, so that there was almost always a smoke haze around him.… His crew cut is entirely gray; he is thin, almost gaunt. His brown suits softened by something like heather hung loosely on him.” Malamud continued, telling Diana that Oppenheimer told the group about a recent experiment in brainwashing at McGill University that involved “enforced solitude.” After three days of seeing only light (they were wearing thick glasses), the participants forgot how to multiply and divide. Oppenheimer, Malamud wrote, “had stressed the importance of this attack against intelligence.”

  Malamud, a New Yorker no doubt lonely in Oregon despite the presence of his wife and two children, had picked the right correspondent and somehow knew instinctively that Diana would be a generous audience. Her keen reception of his story had told him she would be a good listener, too, and she was. Lionel’s Columbia colleagues and most PR people often didn’t give her a chance to be heard; they frequently spoke over her. But Diana’s acute sense of logic was more and more merging with a strong intuitiveness, creating just the right degree of effectiveness in conversations.

  During the spring of 1956, two years after writing her Oppenheimer essay, Diana and Lionel were asked by the Carnegie Corporation to evaluate a group of books that, as the requesting letter stated, were to be “sent abroad” in a venture called “American Shelf.” Diana took the job very seriously, although sometimes her brief reviews—called blurbs by the Carnegie Corporation—were criticized, and she was told that such blurbs were “a difficult art form, at best,” and that perhaps the organization was “asking too much of it.”

  She often compared books she was vetting to ones not on the Shelf’s list, which was confusing. She was once told that she had “strained” to place Edna Ferber’s Showboat in terms of its reputation rather than what it was, “so that you seem to be approving its popularity while disparaging its merit.” (The novel, first published in 1926, was the basis for a Broadway musical, three films, and two more musicals, one in 1936 and another in 1951.)

  Elmer Davis’s book of essays But We Are Born Free was also on Diana’s list. Davis, a distinguished newspaper and radio commentator, and the director of the Office of War Information during World War II, was fiercely anti-McCarthy and wrote in his book that Americans currently live in “a perilous night” and that he was convinced that the night was not yet over. He said that McCarthyism was continuing to invade the minds of all Americans, that fake patriots wanted to tear the country apart, and that Americans needed clearer thinking and more optimism. Although the book was praised by the cultural critic Gilbert Seldes as “the most concise, witty, informed, and impersonal account of recent attacks on the freedom of the mind I have yet read,” Diana wanted it excluded from the American Shelf. She objected to the book because Davis made McCarthyism sound as if it was a unique political phenomenon in America, which she didn’t think it was; it was just another chapter in America’s political history. The country was not in a reign of terror, “a perilous night,” Diana said. McCarthyism should not be treated as the end of America—that was going overboard. Furthermore, as she wrote to the Carnegie Corporation,” there is nothing in Mr. Davis’s volume to suggest that McCarthy’s powers might shortly be curtailed.” (He was censured by the Senate on December 2, 1954.)

  The book remained on the list, with Diana writing a blurb that she said “made an effort to correct whatever untruthful impression I think it conveys.” She strongly believed in her political position (she had joined the board of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, an anti-Communism and antitotalitarianism group) around the time of the publication of her essay on Oppenhe
imer), and she wrote in a letter about the Davis book: “Undoubtedly I am particularly concerned about this kind of thing because I spend so large a part of my time, as Chairman of the Board of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom combating the attacks upon our free institutions from both the McCarthyites and the Communist side and trying to keep the American picture straight in people’s minds.” She went on to affirm that “no more than I feel that anti-Communism is served by the excessive emotions which speak in its name can I feel that the cause of civil liberties is served by the excessive emotions which speak in its name.”

  At the end of the letter she mentioned that she had another matter on her mind. “I have your note about the elimination of Plainsville, U.S.A. from the list,” she said, not yet letting on what else she had to say. (This book was a study of a small midwestern rural community, by James West—a pseudonym used by Carl Withers, a poetry and folklore anthologist—that had been published in 1945 by Columbia University Press.) Diana continued, writing that “this book was my husband’s job, not mine, and I am afraid he had already read [it] although he had not yet written about it. In such a circumstance I should suppose that half payment [to him] would be a sufficient compensation.” Money was on her agenda, and because finances always remained a priority, Diana could mix a literary/political matter with a plea for payment.

  Before Diana had joined the American Committee for Cultural Freedom board, Lionel’s name was the one that appeared on the masthead as a member of the American Committee “in formation” in 1951, a year after its actual founding. One of the honorary chairmen was Bertrand Russell. Stephen Spender was a member of the executive committee. Sidney Hook was chairman of the American Committee, and others on the list were Jacques Barzun, William Phillips, Philip Rahv, W. H. Auden, and Upton Sinclair. Only two women appeared among more than one hundred names: Dorothy Canfield Fisher, the social activist and writer who brought the Montessori child-rearing method to America and also served as a member of the Book of the Month Club Selection Committee for nearly twenty-five years, and Sylvia Marlowe, the harpsichordist, also well-known for her Leo Lerman–like parties, which Lionel and Diana attended frequently. The committee’s executive secretary, Pearl Kluger, was also listed. Kluger was a political activist who had once worked with the committee defending Trotsky.

  A five-page draft of the committee’s mandate stated that the “nonpolitical” group, while hospitable to diverse points of view, was “intractably opposed to totalitarianism of whatever kind” and that “of the many threats to cultural freedom that exist in the world today, that of Communist totalitarianism is by far the gravest.” Even Communist sympathizers were to be included (as threats), the mandate said, as are “certain men and groups who represent themselves as militant opponents of Communism.” Furthermore, calling anything “un-American” or “Communist-inspired,” demanding loyalty oaths, or attempting to intimidate magazines and radio programs is “wholly inappropriate to democracy.” Additionally, such practices “obscure the fact that a Communist conspiracy actually exists and they interfere with the devising of means to counter it.”

  They had a difficult task ahead, the document concluded.

  Diana signed on. This was the group she had been waiting for, the one that mirrored her own nonconformist views; this was where she belonged.

  Another committee directive made clear that “a prerequisite for an authentic struggle against Communist influence is scrupulous attention to fact. Reckless accusations and gross distortions are as self-defeating as they are immoral.” (Not yet acknowledged publicly was that the committee’s parent organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, was backed by the CIA. The congress had branches in more than thirty countries and had received funding from the Ford Foundation (in cooperation with the CIA).

  The committee became enraged that Senator McCarthy had accused Senator William Benton of Connecticut of sending “obscene literature which followed the Communist line” to England, including Edmund Wilson’s short story collection Memoirs of Hecate County. “The idea that this book is obscene is preposterous,” the committee held. “As for the book following the Communist party line—the idea is as preposterous as it is malicious. Mr. Wilson has for the past fifteen years or more vigorously fought to expose the intellectual deceits of Communism. His book, To the Finland Station, published in 1940, is one of the significant intellectual efforts of our age to explore the ideological roots of Stalinism.”

  At a planning meeting on March 1, 1952, at which Diana was not present (although she was sent the minutes), members decided that the main job in the country was to fight McCarthyism. Participants in the planning meeting said that the non-Communist Left needed to isolate the McCarthyites “at one end of the line and the Communists at the other.… The fellow travelers are still very well-organized and are able, by concentrating on specific issues, to spread a line quite easily.” The members also believed that as Stalin’s crimes (he died the following year, 1953) involving secret police raids and slave labor camps became more widespread, the influence of his Marxist-Leninist ideas on intellectuals would decline.

  Most Americans did not really know how to distinguish between Communists and fellow travelers, participants said, so they suggested that the committee needed to provide lectures and pamphlets. They recommended also that the committee “discover new problems and issues.” (For instance, the committee was suspicious of anti-Stalinists who continued to hope for some form of socialism.)

  One particularly outspoken member had suggested that the committee needed a “greater concentration on college campuses.” This was Arnold Beichman, a Columbia-educated journalist, the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, who worked nationally and internationally for the New York Herald Tribune, PM, and Newsweek.* Beichman had suggested at the March 1, 1952, meeting that the committee support Partisan Review, The New Leader, and Commentary, which, he told the other members, “have an essential political sophistication.” Diana had particularly perked up when reading this in the minutes; she liked his ideas very much, especially that they could be embraced by magazines she respected. Later, when she met Beichman, she found him to be an appealing, if often uncompromising, personality. The two took an immediate liking to each other; Beichman appreciated Diana’s shrewd, quirky mind, and she liked his animated spirit. He was an enthusiastic storyteller about his days as a labor reporter and a foreign correspondent, and he always filled the room with wonderful accounts of his work and his colleagues. He and his wife, Carroll, a well-to-do Canadian aristocrat from British Columbia, became friends of both Trillings, and the couples socialized often in the 1950s and 1960s. “The Beichmans were at our house a lot,” Jim Trilling recalled. Many of the parties also took place at the Beichmans’ large but sparsely decorated apartment on Central Park West.

  Diana usually planned their social activities. Lionel did not socialize with any of his students, and Diana preferred it that way, although occasionally there were exceptions, as with Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Diana told the poet and editor Alan Kaufman in an interview in Jewish Frontier magazine that “we were all four of us friendly—but the major relation was theirs to Lionel, who instructed Podhoretz and his other students of the late forties in the meaning of Stalinism, both in politics and culture. He was probably the first person who alerted them to the vital connection between politics and culture.” But, Diana went on, “there was also another much more subtle and persuasive influence that he seems to have exerted on these students. His rigor of thought proposed, not without logic, that they exercise a similar rigor in the realm of moral behavior; and this, in particular, made him into a father person.”

  In a draft of her unpublished “Biography of a Marriage” Diana wrote that “it was only the second or third time that I had met Podhoretz, he was still very young, when I remember telling him rather unkindly that I was surprised that he was studying literature instead of law because, excellent student of literature though he was, he seemed to me to be primarily
interested in power.”

  Diana’s sharp tongue was often at the ready; using it was, for her, an extension of the rigorous form of reasoning that had already enveloped her life. This gave her an edge over people that she had not had as a child and young woman. Later, an anonymous reviewer would comment that Diana “has a gangster’s memory for insult, a taste for vendetta.”

  Diana’s long friendship with her college friend Bettina Sinclair Hartenbach would not survive her lashings. Although their bond had almost been broken during Diana’s pregnancy, when there was fear of a miscarriage and Diana’s panic caused her to turn on Bettina, the friendship had managed to continue. But three years later, in 1951, the relationship worsened. Their letters at this time don’t explain the direct cause of the rupture, although they hint at unresolved issues over Diana’s refusal “to take down her shingle” with her friend. Bettina was plain tired of Diana telling her that her anger stemmed from her own weakness and that Diana will “hereby explain it” all to Bettina. She was finally weary of Diana sending the arrows right back and blaming her for their trajectories and, most important, acting as if Bettina were a madwoman. (Years later, Jim Trilling remarked that during disagreements his mother “treated people as if they were sick. She did this to everyone.… She was hair-trigger sensitive to anyone saying she was wrong.”)

  Yet the Trillings and Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz remained friends for a long time—until politics moved them apart—Diana remaining an anti-Communist liberal and the Podhoretzes becoming anti-anti-Communists, and then neoconservatives. But at one point the couples were so close that Diana would particularly recall one raucous New Year’s Eve party, when everyone was drinking heavily, and Norman made a pass at her. (He vehemently denies ever having done any such thing, recalling that “not only did I never make a pass at her, but never in a million years would I even have dreamed of doing so.”) But Diana remembered it differently and said that Podhoretz even taunted her after she turned him down. “He told me I was incapable of a kind of disgusting lying—he didn’t use the word ‘disgusting,’ he had disgust in his voice—but didn’t use that word, and he said, ‘You’re incapable of the lying and cheating that are involved in leading this kind of free sexual life.… He was trying to shock me. I was Mama and he was going to shock me.”