The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  Diana believed that “child analysis was more successful because the analyst sees his patient in the context of the family, which is the total context of the child’s life, or the most important part of the child’s life, and one can therefore gauge the truthfulness of the child’s report on reality. With an adult patient, the analyst has no way of making this kind of check.… An analyst is like a loving spouse, believing it all.” Overall, she thought of analysis “in terms of conquering illness, conquering handicaps, making people better.”

  When she and Lionel would talk about these issues, and she would ask probing questions such as if he thought an analyst could ever be “enough analyzed” out of his or her own problems, “Lionel would sit there,” she remembered. “I could see his mind was wandering. I don’t know what he was thinking.” She explained that when a psychoanalytic conversation got “too immediate, too human in a personal way, he backs away from it … yet far less than most literary intellectuals,” she also admitted.

  She said that “if problems came up in relation to me or later in relation to Jim that required some understanding of the role that the unconscious might be playing in producing a certain attitude or behavior, you could get very little help from Lionel. I used to be furious because for all his intelligence and knowledge he was of so little help, especially in trying to figure out what was upsetting Jim.”

  And, as always, Lionel’s rages at her (never at their son or anyone else), while intermittent, continued. Brom Anderson, the son of Thelma and Quentin (he is six years younger than Jim Trilling) remembers Diana coming to his mother weeping and saying that Lionel had told her she was a monster. Jim, at ten, remembered a time when his father would pick a fight with his mother every single day. “He would sit down with a drink, and would find a pretext to rail at her; then we would all sit down at dinner and very ostentatiously pick at the food; sometime[s] my mother would leave the table, and then later things got better.”

  Jim recalled that around this time, he wanted Jacques Barzun to be his guardian in case of his parents’ death, “because he sees things the way my father does.” Jim naturally favored his father, despite Lionel’s behavior toward Diana, but he also must have observed Barzun’s quiet defense of his mother in certain situations. In fact, Jim said that he never had any flare-ups in front of Barzun because, he believes, he “represented an ideal of control and dignity.” Barzun’s very presence allowed Jim to remain composed.

  As Jim got older, the Trillings vowed to curtail what Lionel called in his journal a “violence beyond what anybody might guess.” The journal describes the nature of Diana and Lionel’s parenting style, which could be described as remotely enlightened, with more than a touch of self-absorption. They decided, Lionel wrote, to “discipline ourselves to express no anger toward Jim and also that he should see no anger between us, the domesticated habitual anger especially. In this conversation there were expectable [sic], some notes of bitterness and recrimination as [sic] between us, but not many, all things considered.… I was therefore able to speak simply about the old feeling, that resentment so central to our marriage, against being judged and blamed.” In the same entry, written between 1952 and 1955 (probably closer to 1955), Lionel commented that Jim had not bought an anniversary gift for his parents. He was also concerned that Jim would be “troubled” if he didn’t see his parents giving each other a gift. In 1955 Jim was only seven years old. What child of that age is expected to buy his parents a gift? But the Trillings sent Jim out with a babysitter to get one, and Lionel wrote that

  through that day and the next I found myself able to deal with J’s troubles with extraordinary ease—it was as if pride had been excised from all parts of my feeling—I did not feel affronted or humiliated by his bad conduct. On the morning of the 12th he woke us at six in order to give us his present—was wonderfully sweet and charming about it (a double cruet, salad forks and spoon, funnel, rack, Japanese version of French peasant ware). He went back to bed and allowed us to sleep or rather D, for I got up. He had found 2 “read-it yourself” books and undertook to read the first, which he did without difficulty, thus proving what I knew, though his teachers did not, that he could read. He was very proud of his achievement in a nice, strong way. In the evening a terrible tantrum, the result of his injured pride because D had told him a story of the Greeks and Romans; she knew so much and “on the day I read my first book and was so proud.” The tantrum went on for one and a half hours and was extremely violent and yet I was never moved to anger—I felt only pity for his trouble and what I later realized was a profound admiration of his passion and innocence.

  Diana kept in touch with Jim’s psychoanalyst, Dr. Marjorie Harley, with frequent phone calls and letters and once asked how she should explain certain of his behaviors to her son. Dr. Harley said that it would not be helpful for her to try to do this because Jim “knows that you took him to me so that he could have an analyst and because mothers are mothers and not analysts; therefore, I feel that comforting and reassurance is the most appropriate and ultimately the best method for you to employ.” But just offering reassurance was sometimes difficult for Diana—and Lionel; they longed for a more prescribed plan.

  Lionel wrote in his journal that they left for the country the day after their anniversary and that Jim “was in an especially ugly mood.… After arrival, in the course of the afternoon he drenched me with the hose because I had told him not to cut up the lawn with the stream. But with momentary near-lapses I kept my equanimity.… Dexamyl perhaps helped, was needed at any rate.” (Both Trillings continued to use this drug daily.)

  Earlier in his journal, Lionel had written of his “feeling of disgust with my public ‘noble’ character,” and now he brought this characterization up again in an entry about Diana calling him an “angel” for the way he was behaving with her and Jim. Lionel believed that what “was operating was the repudiation of the public character, the character of prestige that must not be assailed and questioned.”

  Diana told Patricia Bosworth that Lionel did not like any of the qualities in himself for which he was most admired. “He did not want to be thought of as that moderate, sweet-tempered, well-mannered person. He felt that part of his character was what had kept him from being a novelist.” Yet at certain times when he was free to be “himself” and not some “public ‘noble’ character,” he could let his indignations evaporate in a less pressured manner that allowed him be thought of as an “angel.”

  A former babysitter, Lina Vlavianos, remembered that Diana always thought she needed to support Lionel and never resented having to do so. Vlavianos also recalled that the reverse was true, as well, and vividly remembered a time when Lionel helped Diana with one of her essays. “It dealt with love and I heard him tell her ‘this needs to be corrected.’ ” Shortly afterward, Diana told Lina that she was going to have to rewrite the whole article.

  “The Case for the American Woman” appeared in Look magazine, which had solicited the article from Diana and paid her $3,000 for it. The article was at times personal, as when she wrote that “the modern woman is made to fend for herself emotionally and is even required to sustain her mate. In such circumstances it should be no surprise that female pride has become tinged with self-pity and bitterness. What else except acerbity is ever the response of a group or individual that feels unloved?” She also explained that the modern woman wanted “private reassurance that despite her new ‘masculine’ skills, she has not lost her womanly grace and charm.” But her main point was that she wanted society to stop telling women they are destroying men, and while she asked for women’s “freedom,” it was not to be had at the expense of putting men in bondage, and, she stated bluntly, “The male sex is as guilty as the female.” Diana later reported that Viking, Lionel’s publisher at the time, protested that she was demeaning his stature.

  Nonetheless, the essay marked the beginning of Diana’s becoming what could be coined “a family feminist,” that is, a woman who believed that women i
n concert with men and their families will transform modern life. She became a pioneering feminist, although she was rarely acknowledged as such.

  Motherhood, while at times demanding, had led her to a new independence and boldness, yet Jim Trilling said that his mother “believed that the desire for women to be equal in the workplace would cause hopeless conflict in families.… She always refused to take an actual feminist stance.” Still, he said it was “fair” to call her a family feminist. Diana was not going to go where others necessarily went before her. Indeed, the book editor Elisabeth Sifton once remarked that Diana “was a freelance soul.”

  On October 3, 1956, in her role as chair of the Board of Directors of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, Diana had written a letter to novelist James T. Farrell, of Studs Lonigan fame, which chastised him for the way he had resigned from the committee, when he was its national chairman. As well as she could, Diana refuted his many charges against the committee, ranging from cultural elitism to the neglect of fighting for civil liberties, including not sufficiently combating censorship. She also admonished Farrell for the way he resigned—too quickly, almost secretly, and most important, drunkenly. She was clear and persuasive in her letter—showing not a sign of timidity. Diana reveled in writing such letters.

  Matters were so complicated in the committee that Diana often had a hard time describing them—from the intricacies of the various political strategies to the details of the personalities involved in suggesting the strategies. She tried to explain to the sociologist David Riesman—he had published the best-selling and landmark book The Lonely Crowd in 1950, and he and his wife, Evey, were good friends of both Trillings for many years—that the committee was so full of “tangles” she could write a book. But, she went on, “it would be the kind of book one would feel one had to revise virtually every time the phone rang with a new report or a new point of view announcing itself.” Diana was filling Riesman in about the committee’s inner workings because his name had been proposed as a possible member of the National Advisory Council, along with nearly sixty others, among them Lionel, Jacques Barzun, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren, Bruno Bettelheim, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Whitaker Chambers.

  Diana often turned to the Riesmans—especially David—for advice about personal matters involving her career and motherhood. Diana had been an enthusiastic reader of Evey Riesman’s novel-in-progress and offered sound encouragement, even though ultimately the book never found a publisher.

  Diana appreciated that the Riesmans were nonjudgmental and particularly sensitive to her worries. After a dinner in New York, when Jim was still an infant, Diana had written that their advice was always so sound but that she “felt rather guilty having absorbed so much of the conversation with my personal problems. Except, of course, that—as it turned out—problems like these are so much more general than we are likely to recognize.” She was referring to society’s making women feel as if their professional work was finished after they had a baby. David Riesman reminded her in his reply that “before James arrived, you made yourself into an interesting woman” and that “this ‘capital’ will not depreciate.” Those were words Diana needed to hear, for bringing up a child, while joyous, had also begun to leave her with an unfamiliar instability. Jim was an assertive, precocious toddler. She hardly ever doubted herself when it came to handling political matters, writing book reviews, articles, and letters to the editor, or revising and reworking Lionel’s writing. She instinctively knew when she was on the right track. But mothering was different. Was she doing everything right? Lionel wrote in his journal that at a party one of the guests asked him if Diana was “still being ruled by Jim.” Yet Diana never shied away from asking the right people for guidance, even though over time she preferred to be the one dispensing advice. And as David Riesman also wrote her, “You are very sure of yourself and you admire others who are sure of themselves (even if you disagree with them).”

  When Diana shared a work-in-progress with Riesman—a journal on motherhood—he was very supportive. He wrote her, “The very format is inventive, a challenge and stimulation to others—a statement that fleeting thoughts, reactions, and so on need only the courage of one’s free association to become literature and amateur sociology.” He continued: “Reflecting on the journal, my memory of it is of a sunny piece, full of wit and esprit, even when it touched on the most serious concerns of a mother and citizen. To read it, as I did in bits, meant having to put down something which lured me on; I was as sorry when it stopped as a child whose mother ends a fairy tale. I couldn’t wait for Evey to read it.… Diana, dear, for Heaven’s sake, do go on.”

  The journal was published in Partisan Review to much disapproval, even from Jacques Barzun (He was “J” in the journal), who objected to Diana’s saying she played “Berlioz which is my favorite sexual music” after a visit from him. People asked whose marriage Diana was complaining about in the journal, a few of the letter writers thought readers would think it was their marriage.

  On March 20, 1955, Diana had reviewed Rebecca West’s A Train of Powder for The New York Times Book Review. The book, she wrote, “is about trials. Or to put it more precisely, each of the pieces finds the occasion in a moment when moral society calls immoral man to account for grievous infringement of its laws.” West reported on four trials—an unsolved murder, a spy case, a lynching in North Carolina, and the Nuremberg Trials. The review was essentially praising, although Diana faulted West’s “endemic ascendancy of her intellection over her feelings.”

  But the review caused friction between Diana and the Book Review. As she wrote Francis Brown, the editor, she had been accused by “some people” of being “high-handed” and “arrogant” in the review, and why? It was because Brown had broken their agreement that no changes would be made in her work without first consulting her, and in the West review “disturbing” changes and “drastic cuts” had been made without contacting her. Brown replied politely two days later that he knew of no such agreement between them and that he had asked for eight hundred words, but she had turned in more than thirteen hundred, and he had compromised by printing a review of a thousand words. He ended his letter by saying, “It may be ungallant to say so, but I’m afraid I feel that the cutting improved the review, but that may be because I’ve always suspected that everything except the Lord’s Prayer would be improved by judicious pruning.” A week later Diana wrote another letter saying that she strongly disagreed with him about the alterations made. “Apart from the relatively minor fact that you removed the one explicit compliment which appeared in my opening sentence, there is the very significant fact that you excised the quotation from Miss West on which I based my analysis of her motives in devoting herself to trials.” She went on to mention that in the past, when asked, she had been allowed to shorten the reviews on her own. She also couldn’t resist telling Brown that she might be considered arrogant, but that many writers, including her own husband, lack the ability to edit themselves or others, but she “is very good at it.” And she ended the letter, “I should certainly want to further our connection rather than put this barrier of editorial controversy between us.” Brown agreed in his deferential reply and promised to “be in touch whenever the [editorial] problem is more than minor.”

  In any case, a year later, Rebecca West wrote Diana “in a state of nervous humility” to thank her for the review. It was the sort of chatty letter one might write to a dear friend, full of asides on her recent travels that had caused such a long delay in writing. West also chastised Diana for not being “sufficiently interested in the facts about Germany she had presented” and said that she “only seemed interested in the book as a manifestation of my moral nature.” Still, she told Diana that she and her husband, Henry Andrews, would be coming to New York soon, and they’d like to meet Diana and Lionel “for I admire you both so much, and I’ve had my curiosity aroused by your review of my book.”

  Candor on both sides prevailed, and the two spirited
writers met. Diana later said that “of all the people I know, Rebecca West is the largest size mind I’ve known in a woman—the best intellect I’ve ever known, but I don’t think she had the largest possible spirit.”

  Diana was always on West’s side regarding the trials and tribulations in her tumultuous relationship with her son, Anthony, by her lover H. G. Wells. In March 1959 Diana chastised Anthony West in a letter to The New Yorker for his insensitive review of Harry Moore’s biography of D. H. Lawrence. (Diana’s friendship with Rebecca West lasted until West’s death in 1983. However, Diana’s friendship with Lillian Hellman, “the most powerful personality I have ever known,” as she once said, would not last.)

  In 1958 Diana edited and published The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence. All of the letters in Diana’s compilation had been previously published elsewhere, and as she wrote in her preface, she made “no effort to investigate the still-unpublished material in libraries and private collections.”

  In an introduction, which she called “Letter to a Young Critic,” Diana wrote in an elaborate opening paragraph:

  Although you have never written about Lawrence, we have often talked about him and I know how large a figure he is in your experience of literature. But am I mistaken in believing that while he is so much there for you, he is also the one major writer of our century whom you and your whole critical generation—all of you who came out of college in these last ten or twelve years—can’t finally settle with, who exists not as a fixed point in the recent literary past but as a continuing disturbance, rather like a contemporary whose genius you wouldn’t wish to deny but to whose ultimate disposition you are not ready to commit yourselves?

  The young addressee was none other than Lionel’s former student Norman Podhoretz, who later observed that Diana’s “writing often suffered from the same fault as her conversation, and the problem was exacerbated by the tendency of her prose to grow clotted and twisted in making its points.”