Carroll Beichman died on January 8, 2013, in Palm Springs, California, when a van struck her as she was crossing a darkly lit street.
* This assumption is supported by a notation in Diana Trilling’s handwriting. After Lionel’s death she went over many of his journal entries, adding and deleting names. Much earlier, some journal pages were removed by Lionel himself.
† Freud claimed that there were three components to a person’s psyche: the id, ego, and super-ego. The id follows instinct; the ego is the realistic mediator between the id and the super-ego, that part which acts as a conscience and moralizer.
14
A LIMITED KIND OF CELEBRITY
Should the Oxford possibility again begin to seem attractive, [the Trillings had been at Balliol College, Oxford, for a year beginning in 1964] one thing must make against it—that in England D is much more insecure than in America. During the summer in London, the Athenaeum and the London Library were the only 2 places where I could go without her being anxious.
—Lionel Trilling, journal entry, c. 1967
In 1962 Diana published the piece she had been writing in Westport the summer Lionel and Steve Marcus worked together. “The Moral Radicalism of Norman Mailer” appeared in Encounter, a magazine she would later learn had definitely received CIA funding, as had been rumored for several years. “If I could honorably write for Encounter when I suspected it had CIA funds, I cannot consider it less honorable to write for it now that my suspicions are confirmed,” she wrote in a letter to its editor, Melvin Lasky. (The New York Times later reported that Lionel stopped writing for the magazine after the disclosures.) But very early on, Diana had a hunch about the CIA, and she had once written Arnold Beichman that she didn’t think accepting the support of the government in the cause of Cold War anticommunism was a “dishonorable act.”
Diana continued to be on courteous but edgy terms with Partisan Review (which also had received CIA funding). She said that William Phillips once told her that it was “her literary judgment that made her work unwanted, not her political views.” He was, of course, thinking of her essay on Ginsberg, which had caused such a ruckus. But Diana chose not to take his criticism too seriously—deciding William was just being mischievous. For his part, Phillips wanted mainly to remain on cordial terms with Lionel. He mattered more than Diana. Some members of the PR “family” speculated that pleasing Lionel was the real reason Partisan Review had published her peculiar journal in the first place.
Diana felt that of all the PR “Girls,” she was the only one “in the shadow of her husband,” as she put it, despite the fact she was often criticized as “a very dominating woman,” dominating because at parties and other gatherings she often openly argued with Lionel. “I interrupted him, I contradicted him … [and] this upset people,” she said. They would never understand the importance she placed on her razor-sharp tongue.
Jacques Barzun always came to her defense (having long since forgiven her for the reference to him in her published journal), and Diana said that he once told a group of Columbia professors, “There’s only one faculty wife I’ve ever known whose advice you could listen to,” and, she added, “everybody knew it was me.” She said that “Jacques would always be asking my advice as Lionel was always asking my advice. I received a kind of regard and respect that most women did not have, and yet I was still the wife whom you discuss in a negative way.” She decided later that perhaps envy was behind it all, envy of her “good fortune in being married to someone as attractive and agreeable and distinguished as Lionel.”
Diana usually let such unpleasant matters rest, saying that if she “had made more of an issue with this,” she and Lionel “would have had a very, very bad time.” So she lived with it. Still, it rankled when a reviewer once pointed out that she was “first of all, the wife of Lionel Trilling, and secondly, a matron of feminism, embroidering samplers for liberalism.” Another reviewer once said her style was one “associated in America with faculty wives’ clubs.” She would even be compared to a clerk, someone who worked for a powerful person pushing pencils and shuffling papers. (In response to an essay she would write in 1969 about the student uprisings at Columbia, Robert Lowell would offer “his ultimate courtly insult,” Diana said, by calling her “a housekeeping goddess of reason.”)
Diana went on to live her “double life as a wife and a writer,” and it made her “very vulnerable,” she admitted. She sometimes wished she had continued to use her birth name, but Lionel liked her using Trilling. “They’ll think I’m your daughter,” she used to tease him, and he’d retort, “No, they’ll think you are my mother.” She later said that there really was a rumor going around literary and academic circles that she was his daughter.
Lionel also experienced a dual perception of their marriage, although of a different sort, telling Diana that after every party they attended together, he “looked across the room and said, ‘Hey I want to go and talk to that woman,’ and it turned out to be you.” Diana treasured this declaration, which carried a great deal of truth even in the face of his love for Carroll Beichman.
Someone who did not patronize her was Norman Mailer. Diana’s essay on Mailer, whom she knew well by the time the piece appeared, stressed his duality. She wrote that he has “so much moral affirmation coupled with so much moral anarchism; so much innocence yet so much guile; so much defensive caution but such headlong recklessness; so much despair together with so imperious a demand for salvation; so strong a charismatic charge but also so much that offends, even repels; so much intellection but such a frequency of unsound thinking; such a grand and manly impulse to heroism but so inadequate a capacity for self-discipline; so much sensitiveness and so little sensibility; so much imagination and such insufficient art.”
She told Peter Manso that she didn’t discuss her essay with Mailer when she was writing it, although he knew she was writing about him, but he knew nothing about her approach or framework. At one point Mailer said she should talk to his father if she wanted any biographical material (she didn’t), and when she was finished, she asked Mailer if he wanted to see it. “He came to the house to read it,” Diana told Manso,
and I could feel something strange was happening. He finished reading and then sort of made a move as if he’d had a lot of air stored in his lungs. He asked me if I would mind if he went for a walk, so I told him to go ahead. I was troubled too. Before he went out he said, “I didn’t expect such a formal piece.” I acknowledged that it was formal literary criticism. But what had he expected—some kind of “My friend Norman piece”? He said, “No, I don’t know what I thought, but I wasn’t prepared for this.” It was obvious that he was disconcerted, and while he was gone I thought, I’ve treated him the way I would treat a major writer, he ought to love the piece. If he’s not smart enough to know what I’m doing with it, then that’s too bad. I’m not going to let myself be upset. So when he came back I wasn’t all a flutter: “Oh, dear Norman, have I not written a good piece? Do you not like it?” Precisely what he said I don’t remember. If it had been memorable I’d have remembered it. He never mentioned it to me again. His word about it was “formal.” I suppose by that he meant I had written a masculine essay—probably that wasn’t the part of me he cottoned to. On the other hand, it should have been nice for him to feel that I was putting my best force of intelligence so largely on his side. Not that at the time I was aware that he particularly needed legitimization. Thank God I didn’t think about that one way or another or I could never have written the essay to begin with.
(Robert Silvers, then an editor at Harper’s, had heard through the grapevine about the essay and had written Diana about publishing it, but by then it had already been promised to Encounter.)
Diana and Mailer always exchanged letters more than they saw each other socially, and he often used Diana as a sounding board for his ideas. The summer after her Encounter piece was published, he did write her about it (or at least her impressions of his talents) in a letter that
she obviously forgot about when talking to Peter Manso. Mailer said that Diana basically thought he was a very good and talented writer but that he could be a great writer if only he would stop posturing. (She had written that he has “obstructed the development that might once have followed the early flowering of so much talent” and that “increasingly, he has offered the public the myth of the man rather than the work of the writer.”) Mailer told Diana that for years he was “aghast at the peculiar vision of the critic. You, all of you, are forever ascribing powers to us we don’t have, and misreading our strengths as our cripplings. Faulkner’s long breath, Hemingway’s command of the short sentence, Proust’s cocoon.… Faulkner writes his long sentences because he never really touches what he is about to say and so he keeps chasing it; Hemingway writes short because he strangles in a dependent clause.… Proust spins his wrappings because a fag gets slapped if he says what he thinks.… These men … became great writers because of their infirmities.” And then Mailer wrote emphatically that he “was able to write The Naked and the Dead because I was one of the first who could dispense comfortably with roots; my infirmity was my strength.… The answer is not for me to go back to an earlier, simpler, healthier and less self-conscious way of working, but to learn how to strip the fats of unliterary indulgence, save myself for the work (which may still involve certain kinds of stunts) and let the work take care of itself.” On and on he vented to Diana in a four-page single spaced letter.
Diana sometimes vented to him. She wanted to write about Hemingway, but Lionel was discouraging her from doing so. “I think you should write about him,” Mailer told her; “I was certainly struck by the similarities and differences you saw in his way of going at it and mine.”
Diana continued also to vent in “Letters to the Editor” and to well-known people. In 1961 she had proposed to Edward R. Morrow, the broadcaster/journalist who had become the head of the United States Information Service earlier that year, that the government should create a new agency to deal with “significant errors in American public sentiment.” She had been “dramatically struck,” she wrote in her letter, by the similarity of Fidel Castro’s offering in 1961 to trade a thousand prisoners for five hundred bulldozers to Hitler’s offer in 1944 to trade Jews for trucks, and she believed “this parallel could be put to use in combating the kind of public opinion which has never faltered in its opposition to Hitlerism but which can see no similar offense to its humanitarian principles in Castroism.” She was not suggesting to do away with free discussion, but she felt many such ideas now “weakened the democratic effort.” The letter was signed “Diana Trilling (Mrs. Lionel Trilling) formerly Chairman, The American Committee for Cultural Freedom.” She invoked Lionel’s name, as she seldom did in correspondence, but there was still no known response from Mr. Morrow.
In 1962 Diana published a long essay in Redbook on the death of Marilyn Monroe, an essay that one critic called “so perceptive as to be a masterpiece of analysis.” However, the Kirkus Review later reported (when the piece was in Diana’s first collection, Claremont Essays) that it was full of “unchic ideas,” and another review called it “over-important for the occasion.”
Diana was generally faulted for her style of combining personal observations with meticulous facts about whatever it was she was discussing. But she was, in truth, an unacknowledged member of the “new journalism”—a term for an unconventional form of news reporting that began to be used in the mid-1960s and was applied to such writers as Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and, of course, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer. These writers—as well as Diana Trilling—wanted to make nonfiction as creative and imaginative in style and scope as the novel.
Sometimes Diana got to her point in a somewhat convoluted, yet always engaging, manner, and the rationale of her approach was not always immediately clear, but the result was more often than not a well-designed essay that showed her subject’s significance to American culture, whether she highlighted Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Alger Hiss, or Marilyn Monroe. It had taken her until late middle age to find her destination, but at fifty-seven she was sure she had found her voice at last.
That same year, Diana was asked by Collier Books to write an introduction to its edition of Tom Sawyer. She did write one, later reprinted in her first collection of essays, but its publication was not without drama. She complained to the editor that “extraordinary changes were made without [her] knowledge or permission” and that in her twenty-year writing career her copy had never been altered so “arrogantly” and “illiterately.” Her rhythms and “turns of speech which define an individual style” had been distorted, and “extreme violence was done to the English language!” She threatened to stop the distribution of the book unless her essay was printed exactly as she wrote it. She also let the editor know that Steven Marcus had also had his copy “mishandled” by Collier Books and was ashamed of the final result but was so busy he hadn’t had time to complain but “authorizes” Diana to speak in his name.
Diana’s introduction was printed as she wrote it.
By 1962, the Trillings had achieved such prominence that they were invited to the White House for President John F. Kennedy’s dinner in honor of the Nobel Prize winners from the Western Hemisphere. On the day of the dinner Dr. Oppenheimer was on the same train to Washington as the Trillings, and Diana reported that as he walked by them, he stopped briefly to greet Lionel, whom he had met before, “but just stared, stared, stared very hard at me for just that moment.” She added that the dinner was really an occasion for the president “to reinstate Oppenheimer officially.… It was very clever of him.”
The writers present, besides Diana and Lionel, included Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Frost, John Dos Passos, Rose and William Styron, and James Farrell. Thirty-four years later, Diana would write an exquisitely detailed essay about the event that The New Yorker would publish eight months after her death in 1996.
She wrote about all the ceremonials surrounding the dinner before, during, and after—her search for the correct dress, which involved buying two since she later found out the first, a short one, was not appropriate because a long gown was required; a handbag she borrowed; Lionel drinking six martinis (“I’d been counting,” she commented); their sitting at separate tables; and Katherine Ann Porter’s “annoying” fidgeting during the after-dinner reading from the works of three Nobel Prize winners. She wrote also that “actually I’ve never been a less important feature in our shared social life. I had nothing to do with this occasion except as Lionel’s wife.… Neither Kennedy had ever heard of me.”
In the receiving line, when the Trillings were first introduced to the president and Mrs. Kennedy, Lionel, after some brief banter, had told Mrs. Kennedy, according to Diana, “ ‘Wait till I tell you what they said about you at Vassar!’ ” Jackie Kennedy laughed and then asked, “What?” and Lionel said mischievously, “Later I’ll tell you.” The president then joined the conversation and asked what they had said and Lionel repeated “later.” There actually was a later, and the Trillings were asked to the residence after the formal dinner was over. Lionel then had a chance to say to both Kennedys, about Jackie: “They said that you were a serious student. A very devoted student. And quite shy.” Diana then wrote that “Jackie repeated after him. ‘Shy. Yes. I am shy.’ Lionel said, ‘I’m shy, too.’ She looked at him and they both burst out laughing. She knew that he was teasing her, and she liked it.”
Diana’s lengthy notes before she wrote the piece, notes that she taped, are full of tedious and rambling facts that she didn’t, wouldn’t, or couldn’t use in the published piece. She begins: “I want to do this terribly, terribly much in detail, some of which may be boring about clothes and stuff like that.” Not a rousing beginning, even for notes. Yet notes are just that, and in this case they offer a glimpse into the way Diana thought about her subject and her research; she took everything down so she could later decide what were the most relevant and useful facts.
In the finished article she
mentions succinctly, “One morning when the mail arrived, Lionel asked me to come out to the hall.” In her notes she goes into great detail: mentioning that “Lionel always breaks his neck to get to the door first to get the mail,” that their accountant was in the living room doing their income tax, and that at the moment she and Lionel became aware that they were holding an invitation to the White House, she said to their accountant: “ ‘We’ve just gotten an invitation to the White House that will cost us a million dollars, is that a tax deduction?’ And he said it was. So I felt better about the whole thing. It’s a professional expense.”
The notes reveal her thought process and how she eventually created a frame that lifted the chosen details into an essay of broad significance and also how she applied what she learned about narrative skills.
Many of the notes, especially the lengthy ones about the dresses, stores, and the salespeople, are entertaining in themselves and might have made separate essays. At one point she takes Lionel to see one of the dresses: “And Lionel looked at [it] and said, ‘Oh, it’s much too theatrical with those long tight sleeves. I don’t think that’s the right thing at all.’ ”
There’s also a long reference to a phone call from her sister, who told her that she heard that Lionel was picketing the White House, and Diana’s description in her note reads like slapstick. She told Cecilia they were not yet in Washington but still in New York, but Cecilia was certain of what she heard on the radio. Diana finally called the station to protest and was told that what they reported was not that Lionel Trilling was picketing but Linus Pauling.
The notes also make many references to Diana’s “little pink pillbox.” She needs it because on the train to Washington she begins to get a migraine, wonders if she should take a pill that an English friend gave her, checks with her doctor in New York who knows what the pill is by its description, says to take two, and the migraine soon begins to fade. The pillbox does not make an appearance in the finished article.
The Untold Journey Page 25