The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  The doctor had said to expect either a very long operation or a very short one, in which the surgeon would take a look and then close the patient up right away. Lionel had a short operation, one in which, Diana said, “there had been no traumatization of his body.” In fact, the very next morning Lionel got himself out of bed before the nurse even knew what he was doing, which was shaving in the bathroom. Lionel was “as pleased as punch with himself,” Diana said, that he could move around like that after abdominal surgery.

  But still he asked no questions. No questions about whether or not he had cancer. Diana, who had recently recovered from a bout of bronchitis, wore a surgical mask, not because of any germs she might pass on to her husband but to hide any facial expression that might give away the diagnosis that he had pancreatic cancer and probably had only weeks to live. The mask-wearing went on for three days, until Diana said, Lionel looked at her and said, “I know now, and you can take off the mask.”

  Lionel had been told he would have a year or more, which Diana knew was not the case. She was sorry that the doctor had not been more honest with Lionel, yet she said that he faced his impending death “with absolute dignity, with absolute quiet, and with great fortitude.” Still, Diana said that Lionel, thinking he had at least a year, “wanted to get a year’s work done. He wanted to write a memoir.”

  The doctors agreed with Diana and Jim’s wish that Lionel be allowed to die at home. Lionel, she said, thought he would “get stronger each day.” She didn’t tell him, she said, “I’m now taking you home to die in your own home,” but she did say to him at one point, “ ‘Think how much you’ve done in life,’ and he said, ‘What have I done?’ which was terribly sad to me.”

  Contrary to his hope, Lionel “felt weaker every day,” Diana said, “and he would try to sit up and he couldn’t sit up any better than the day before. Or he’d try to come into the living room, and he couldn’t sit up, and he’d have to be [helped] back to bed … and you could see this puzzlement that was overcoming him.” Eventually Lionel told Diana that he had stowed away in his Columbia office all the sleeping pills that she had once cleaned out of their medicine cabinet and thought had been thrown out. He said he was saving them for a time he might need them. Diana told Lionel she wouldn’t get the pills or allow anyone else to get them. “But,” she told him,” I will promise you that you will not be allowed to suffer. You have my word for this.”

  But Lionel did not have an easy death.

  “He wasn’t allowed to die as he would have wanted to die,” Diana said, “and I was absolutely unable to control the medical situation, try as I would.” She expected that he would “be dying unconscious, but it never happened that way. He was very conscious to the very, very last moment. He was psychotic but he was conscious.” Diana later wrote to one of his doctors that Lionel’s “last ten or twelve days were an agony of psychosis, terrible beyond belief not only for him but for us who loved him so dearly. His mind by which he lived was destroyed.” The letter was not a scolding of the doctor, who, Diana said, took exceptionally good care of Lionel, but rather it was meant to “raise the intellectual, though emotionally highly charged question about the use of psychological drugs at all until more is known of their possible effects.”

  She recalled “one of his last decent days, when he wasn’t yet doped up but was in pain. He reached out his hand and he took Jim’s hand and mine and just held on and squeezed very hard, keeping his full consciousness but squeezing very hard because the pain was so great. And I think that either he should have been killed right away or should have been allowed to commit suicide right away or he should have been allowed to die that way with great courage.”

  Diana wrote to her friends Evey and David Riesman that right before he became crazed from the cocktail of drugs he was given, Lionel was still able to talk about his memoir: “It was going to be such a good book,” he told Diana.

  A year later, Diana reminisced with Steven Marcus when interviewing him for a book she was planning to write:

  Lionel’s father had died in 1943, and his mother and father were very alienated from each other for long long years.… But when his mother went to the funeral and looked into the coffin, she said very quietly, “He doesn’t have to be afraid anymore.” Lionel’s father was afraid of death all the time and didn’t live his life because of it. And I think that if Lionel had lived to write his memoir, he would have had to say a great deal about why he was so concerned with death as he was throughout his work. What he was trying to do is say that there is no life without the acceptance of death because my father was always staying alive just in order not to be dead. That was no life.

  And Diana added, “Lionel wasn’t at all a morbid person. What he was talking about was the tragedy of life in the life.” Steve Marcus replied that one of Lionel’s favorite quotations from Montaigne was “to philosophize is to learn how to die.”

  Toward the end, Diana said, Lionel wouldn’t close his eyes. “All the last day I lay on the bed next to him saying, ‘Close your eyes and rest,’ and I could not get him to. I said, ‘Don’t be afraid—just close your eyes and rest.’ And he didn’t close his eyes.”

  Lionel died on November 5, 1975, just a few months after his diagnosis.

  The funeral was held five days later at St. Paul’s Chapel of Columbia University. A mixture of Italian Renaissance and Byzantine styles, it was built between 1904 and 1907 as a nondenominational religious space and was a gift to the university from Olivia Egleston Phelps Stokes and Caroline Phelps Stokes, the daughters of a very wealthy, ardently religious New York family.

  Lionel’s funeral “was very quiet, very beautiful,” Diana wrote in a letter to a woman who had once worked for the family. “The prayers and psalms were of our own choice; the Cantor sang like an angel, there was no eulogy. Everything was as Lionel would have wished.” Diana told Leo Lerman that “Li and I wrote that service out a year ago. He found the texts; I wrote it.”

  Diana reported to another correspondent unable to attend the funeral that “the service consisted wholly of prayers from The Book of Common Prayer, some Psalms, a long passage from Ecclesiastes, and a prayer of thanksgiving, which was especially written by the chaplain of the university, who read the prayers both in Hebrew and in English.”

  Jim remembered that he said Kaddish at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York, where his father was cremated. Nonetheless, Norman Podhoretz wrote in his book Ex-Friends that Diana, after asking him to teach Kaddish to Jim, “changed her mind about giving Lionel even a watered-down Jewish funeral,” adding that there was no Kaddish either at “the Christian building” or the “crematorium” and that he was “positively offended” by Diana’s decision to omit even a eulogy from the funeral service. Midge Decter recalled that “it was not only not a Jewish funeral, but it was like a high church funeral.”

  Memory can be a strange thing. In fact, Jim Trilling recalled, Norman Podhoretz had actually written out a phonetic version of Kaddish for him, and had coached him in reciting it. Jim stated further that Podhoretz “was most obliging and helpful, and the recitation went well enough given the circumstances.” He added:

  Kaddish aside, Midge Decter is probably more right than not. I don’t know if it’s quite fair to say that my mother wrote the service herself, the way young couples do their own weddings (a practice she detested, by the way), but she certainly edited and recombined to her heart’s content. And [she] shopped around for a rabbi who would accommodate these interventions. The Columbia rabbi, I remember, was rejected over some point of religious observance.… My mother was a functional atheist with a strong aesthetic attraction to Roman Catholicism, and my father, though far more serious about his Jewish heritage, was never (in my lifetime at least) anything but a secular Jew.

  In a letter to Diana written more than a decade after Lionel’s funeral, the literary critic (and professor emeritus of English at Columbia) Robert Gorham Davis said he “had always thought of Lionel as a humanist, whose v
iews were consistent with his use of Freud as a cultural critic. I was surprised at the dominantly religious character of his memorial service. As I remember it, both a rabbi and a protestant clergyman took part, and the substance was largely biblical.”

  Diana replied at great length. “About the religious nature of Lionel’s funeral service: you mustn’t read too much about his own religious character into it, perhaps only something about the connection between the religious emotions and the aesthetic emotions in certain personal circumstances.” She continued: “Both Lionel and I, perhaps I even more than Lionel, have always been appalled by the lack of dignity in the funeral services of atheists and agnostics. The speeches that are made by loving friends are inadequate. Whatever the degree of praise, they are bound to seem reductive because what one is looking for is something that will transcend the immediately pressing fact of personal loss.” She then related a particular story: “My brother died a few months before Lionel. He had been converted to Presbyterianism, and his funeral took place at the Brick Presbyterian Church. It was wholly religious in character; I don’t think his name was even mentioned. I freshly realized that day that religion, as an undertaking in transcendence, was the only thing that met the ‘aesthetic’ requirements of a death ceremony, and I went home and quickly wrote a ‘service’ that could be used for Lionel’s funeral and my own.” Diana noted to Davis:

  Because we are Jews, the readings that I chose make no mention of Jesus. I also wanted them read by a rabbi. Because I love a good cantor and good music also has its part in transcending the moment, I decided we should use one if a good one was available—it turned out that one of the best was at Temple Emmanuel in New York. When I had got this amount of instruction on paper, I showed it to Lionel, who shrugged his shoulders as his way of saying it was okay with him, no more, no less, than that. It was in deference to the university that, at Lionel’s funeral, I asked the Protestant chaplain to say a prayer.

  And then she ended her long reply to Davis with a reprimand: “By the way, you refer to it as Lionel’s ‘memorial service.’ It was not a memorial but a funeral service. The coffin was there, the plain wooden box that Lionel had always hoped he would be buried—or cremated—in.”

  Diana later revealed more details to her friends Jack and Susan Thompson; Jack was a poet who taught English at Stony Brook, and Susan taught at Columbia’s School of Library Service after working briefly for the CIA. Jack was also often part of the Lionel–Quentin Anderson trout-fishing trips. Diana told the Thompsons that she “could control the service at the Chapel” but that “it never occurred to me that there was going to be anything but a Kaddish said out at the cemetery, so it didn’t occur to me to try to control what the rabbi would do or say there. And so he stood up and he talked a lot of poetic stuff, which I found awful.… Later I said to Jim, ‘If I had known he wanted to say a poem, I would have asked him to say ‘Dover Beach.’ And Jim said, ‘Oh, thank God he didn’t or we would have all collapsed.’ He said, ‘We could not have sustained that.’ And I suppose that’s true. But that’s my favorite poem in the world.”

  Diana was able to control the seating at the funeral and made a list of thirty-eight friends (individuals and couples) who would be given reserved seating in the chapel. She noted in ink at the top of the typed list that the “English department will be seated, with wives or husbands, in a separate section.” There was nothing surprising about the friends list—the Barzuns; Elinor Hays and her husband, Paul; Mrs. Eliot Cohen; Leo Lerman (who recorded in his journal that “much of the service [was] in Hebrew, a cantor singing beautifully …”); Gray Foy; the Kristols; the Podhoretzes; her psychiatrist, Dr. Marianne Kris; and Carroll and Arnold Beichman. (Diana would later give Carroll Lionel’s copy of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads.)

  Diana wrote her friend Goronwy Rees several months after Lionel’s death that she “still wakes up each morning with something she must say to [Lionel] unable to believe that I won’t see his head there on the pillow next to mine, and just in these last few days it is as if all the resistance I had built up to shield myself against his loss has broken down: he seems so active a presence—that his death seems to me to be an hallucination, not a reality.” She continued: “I go out, I see people, I have my hair done, I make jokes, I buy new clothes, and no one need be reminded of what is constantly on my own mind. Work is of course the most important thing. I don’t know what I would have done without it.”

  And she meant not only her own work.

  “The desire to do an autobiographical but essentially impersonal memoir, an education, had, I think been with Lionel for some while,” Diana said. In an unpublished book she wrote that Lionel’s memoir was to be “an intellectual memoir. It was in these terms that he always referred to it: it was an intellectual memoir, never an autobiography. I took his emphasis on the word intellectual to mean that walking in the broad footpath of Henry Adams, he intended to bypass his private life, not dwell upon it in details or delve into it deeply but concentrate on the development of his thought as this might throw light on the history of his intellectual times.” She also said that she hoped someone would one day write about Lionel as a figure in the twentieth century as Lionel had written about Arnold as a figure in the nineteenth century. “Lionel always saw Arnold as a figure in his time,” she said; “it was always a huge canvas he planned, which is why it was such a mad project for him to have undertaken as a doctoral dissertation.… Lionel’s sense of history was acute: it’s an important endowment for a critic.”

  It was this belief in what Lionel wanted as his legacy—an impersonal memoir—that partially fueled Diana’s near obsession with getting all his books published in uniform editions. But the most crucial reason for her obsession and eventual need to control his work was a far simpler one: she considered his work all but her work. She had molded it, made it what it became.

  William Jovanovich had always wanted to publish Lionel, and because Diana had kept the door open for a possible future relationship, he now felt secure in proposing that he be the one to publish a uniform edition of all of Lionel’s work. A former editor at HBJ said that Jovanovich, who was “movie star handsome,” liked especially to give advice to his select group of “glamorous and intellectual” widows and “would advise them of everything.” He had a knack for making these women (Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and later, Anne Morrow Lindbergh and the actor Paulette Goddard) feel important. “He always had to have a glamorous or intellectual woman to be the savior of,” the former editor commented. Jim Trilling said that his mother’s “professional relationship with Bill Jovanovich was stormy, not the least because she had an intense and lasting crush on him.”

  Finances remained a concern. Diana said that Lionel was still worrying about money when he died and that they only paid off the last of their loans in 1970. At one point, years earlier, Diana and Lionel had loaned money to her brother, although it is not clear why Sam needed it or where the money came from that Diana and Lionel gave him. But a year after Lionel’s death, Diana wrote her sister-in-law that there was still $2,500 due on the loan, also acknowledging that her sister-in-law had been “thoughtful enough to send me a $500 payment after Lionel’s death when you rightfully guessed that I was under pressure of large expenses.”

  Diana had applied for a National Endowment/Rockefeller Foundation joint grant to write an intellectual history of the past five decades, but she told Bill Jovanovich that, although she was given one, “It was so lousy I refused it.” She had asked for $160,000 over two years, then “had pared it down” to $130,000, but finally was offered only $50,000, which she told Jovanovich was not enough for a secretary and a salary for herself over two years.

  But many different projects were brewing in the year or two after Lionel’s death. There was, of course, the long and exacting preparation of what would be a twelve-volume set of all of Lionel’s books. Diana was involved in every aspect and demanded absolute control, although she asked for an “Edite
d by Diana Trilling in the smallest possible type.”

  Drenka Willen, a longtime editor at HBJ (in her distinguished career she has edited four Nobel Prize winners), said that Jovanovich “could be very very charming, and of course he took Diana to restaurants, a car was available to bring her to the office and take her home—she didn’t come to the office because I don’t think she ever stepped into an elevator.” This was, of course, because of her fear of heights. (During the time when Diana was working on Lionel’s books, a problem occurred with his gravesite, and Diana felt comfortable enough to ask Bill Jovanovich to intervene with the cemetery officials, which he did. Her savior.)

  Willen first met Diana when she accompanied a book designer to Princeton the summer of 1977 to show Diana sample designs for Lionel’s books. “Drenka is all that you promised me,” Diana gushed in a letter to Jovanovich. “I can’t begin to tell you what a relief it is to deal with someone this conscientious who is also this respectful of books that may not sell a million copies! And she’s so charming, too! I’m sure it will be the greatest pleasure to work with her; we’re off to a great start.” Diana told Jovanovich she had a suggestion for a new title for Lionel’s books—she thought that “The Uniform Edition of the Works of Lionel Trilling” should be changed to “The Works of Lionel Trilling Uniform Edition.”

  The uniform editions caused some friction with Jacques Barzun, who, Diana said, wanted to be involved with the publication, but Diana didn’t like the way he was planning to organize the essays by subject matter, and so she broke with him. “Jacques and I have never been the same,” Diana said, “never been as close as we were as a result, but I know that I was right.”

  In 1976 Columbia University initiated “The Lionel Trilling Seminars.” One of the first speakers, despite everything, was Jacques Barzun, who spoke on the death of modernism. “It was a sweet and dignified and well-attended occasion,” Diana wrote in a letter, adding that “Jim and I felt good about it.”