Beichman wrote Diana also that what really seemed to worry her most was that she was being accused of spreading rumors and that she resented being implicated like that. But, Diana countered, “It is you who are spreading this rumor about yourself, and in doing so, maliciously impugning me. I now call on you to stop involving me in this fashion in your efforts. Do what you will to clear yourself of whatever charges against you but leave me out of this enterprise which continues to absorb you.”
Diana seemed to be using the full force of a free-floating anger against everyone who had ever angered her in her life; it was an unpleasant outburst and an assault Beichman could not forgive. He knew their correspondence needed to end. But he also knew that his memories would not be so easily terminated—“my sweet and warm memories that I have about the Trillings and about you, particularly.”
“Goodbye, Diana,” he ended his final letter to her.
But another old friendship did not end. HBJ’s publication of We Must March My Darlings, and later, in 1978, a collection of some of her Nation reviews, gave Diana the opportunity to stay in constant touch with Bill Jovanovich. She wrote him dozens and dozens of letters about everything, including such minutiae as her purchase of a fur hat. She wrote him about her travails with her sister, telling him in great detail “that there’s no one to take care of her but me.” Cecilia, who was living in a nursing home in Riverdale in the Bronx, had recently married a fellow patient, and Diana mentioned that a Channel 7 news team, along with the residence, “had secretly contrived to put the ceremony on television to elicit popular support in their fight for more Medicaid funds.” Diana managed to stop the filming from ever happening, without spelling out exactly how she did this, although she did tell Jovanovich that “I myself hid in a closet.” She later learned that the nursing home would be closing, and she would have to find a home for two people, she said, “which makes it that much harder.”
HBJ celebrated We Must March My Darlings in what Diana considered a regal manner. She thanked Jovanovich profusely, not only for the publication dinner but for “the lovely flowers and beautiful necklace,” and she said, “I have no place to hang my necklace to look at it all the time, but I keep taking it out of its splendid box to try it on with various dresses.”
In the same letter as her effusive “thank you” she included some editorial notes he had asked for on his novel-in-progress. “I hope you are happy with what you have wrought. You should be,” she noted at the end of her comments. (In his memoir, The Temper of the West, Jovanovich praised her editorial advice, especially about titles. It’s best to use “literary ones,” Diana had told him.)
She wrote Jovanovich also about her trepidation over reviews, some already out (“some ambiguous, some scurrilous”) and some still to come. She wrote Jacques Barzun that the “strange” reviews she got “have put her quite high on the dung heap.” Yet she was not going to give up and told him, “Let’s form a club: Workaholics self-proclaimed!” (She wrote Norman Podhoretz that “the criticism is to me as interesting as the praise.”)
Publisher’s Weekly had been cheeky, she commented; her interpretation of what they said was “she write a good English.” Time magazine’s review, she noted, was “smashing,” so was The New Leader’s, and she guessed The New Republic would have a favorable one, given that Irving Howe was writing it. Still, she accused HBJ of sabotaging her for not “promoting me in its own voice” (an advertisement, of course). She even wondered if the advertising department “harbors Lillian’s friends,” or else, she suggested, the department had “a lack of respect for my work” because of her “small sales potential.”
In actuality, she was genuinely respected—to the point of being given editorial control of ads—that is, she could veto those she did not like. She would eventually gain almost total control over all publication details and point out everything that was wrong, even that the crease in one of her stockings in an author photo needed to be retouched. Still, in her letter to Jovanovich she threw in: “If I’m going to have to go through this same mumbo-jumbo about the publication of Lionel’s work, I[’d] just as soon call the whole thing off.”
And then there was The New York Times. She decided to focus all her grievances into a battle plan with that newspaper. She told Jovanovich that the people at the Book Review “don’t love me; what guides their conduct is not the wish to do me harm but the desire to protect Lillian.” She suspected that Richard Locke, the deputy editor, was “the engineer of this defense system, and that the editor, Harvey Shapiro, was his willing comrade. Locke later commented, “I’m sorry to learn that Diana thought that, but she was mistaken.”
Diana said that whatever approach HBJ takes with the Book Review, it must be “innocent—its point that both my book and I are eminently suited to the kind of exploitation that they go in for—I am good interview material, the book has excellent possibilities for excerpting … and they need to keep entirely off the subject of politics.” She wanted the Radcliffe section of the book emphasized (especially the section on sex) to entice young readers. Diana was getting more and more sure of herself as she progressed with her plan.
She let her near obsession with Lillian Hellman enter the picture. Another approach she had in mind with her publisher involved the bringing up of “the censorship issue,” and she suggested in a letter that someone should say that “Mr. Jovanovich (mentioning you by name) dislikes any kind of censorship, overt or covert, and that he plans to promote my book in such a way as to counter the unfair treatment I received from Lillian’s publishers.” Diana was discovering a new kind of inner voice that she used to promote herself.
At the end of her letter to Jovanovich she reminded him that she, herself, was working on a piece for the Book Review on The Auden Generation, by Samuel Hynes, a review she was told would appear on the front page. She needed to tread carefully to avoid losing the weekly as an outlet for her own criticism. (Still, so sensitive was she about Hellman, she later wondered if the Book Review’s asking her to do the Hynes book was a way “to get my own book off the front page.”)
A year later, when Alfred Kazin published A New York Jew, which she said contained “malice and envy” toward Lionel, Diana once again put on battle gear with The New York Times. She wrote her friend David Riesman that “the reviewer was chosen as one who could be hoped to praise the book and confirm the malice just as, in the instance of We Must March My Darlings, the reviewer was chosen to line up on the side of Lillian against me.” She stormed again against deputy editor Richard Locke for not making the reviewer, Mordecai Richler, revise his appraisal so he was not “a conduit for Kazin’s malice,” although she never talked directly to Locke about it. Still, she felt that something had to be done, so she lined up her good friend Quentin Anderson to write a protest letter to the Book Review, and, as she wrote Riesman, “twenty diverse persons of high standing in the intellectual community from Leslie Fiedler to Howard Mumford have now put The New York Times on notice that its Book Review editors are in certain instances not making even a primary effort of disinterestedness.” She concluded somewhat cockily, “What fruit this will bear we don’t know, but it seems to me that the protest can only be useful and that indeed it was mandatory.”
Diana wrote David Riesman: “There has already been one sizable return on Quentin’s investment of time and energy: Kazin was interviewed by Dick Cavett the other night and not a single word was said about a single individual mentioned in the book. It is hard to suppose that Cavett wasn’t told by Kazin that they would have to stay off personalities, personalities being Cavett’s chief stock in trade.” But Cavett, unlike most other talk-show hosts, did read his interviewees’ books, and no doubt shrewdly “stayed off personalities” in order to present a more balanced—and even more stimulating—show.
In an outrageous moment Diana told Leo Lerman that “the real truth is that Alfred had deep homosexual feelings for Lionel. Anybody who reads the book should be able to feel that, but who will?” Lerman,
enjoying the moment, said that Diana told him all this “unhysterically, with plateaus of laughter, scaling successfully whole ranges of emotion.”
Diana was invited to appear on William F. Buckley Jr.’s Firing Line television program to discuss We Must March My Darlings. She told an interviewer for The Saturday Review she agreed to appear if the questions were given to her in advance. But ultimately she declined the invitation, telling Bill Jovanovich that she was offended by the magazine’s publishing on its cover a photo of Lillian Hellman in the black mink coat she famously wore for a Blackglama fur advertisement. (Others who had posed included Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, and Ray Charles.) The cover line had been “& Who Is the Ugliest of Them All?,” the headline for Buckley’s review of Scoundrel Time in the issue. Diana wrote Jovanovich: “It’s the first time I’ve ever known Buckley to be ungentlemanly: he’s been all courtesy to me even when I’ve attacked him in the most direct way.” (She told The Saturday Review that “Mr. Buckley had reduced political polemic to personal insult.”) But the photo excuse turned out to be a smoke screen. She later confessed to Buckley, whom she liked and trusted (she kept a photograph of the two of them in her dining room), that the real reason was that she sometimes had stage fright. “Actually, I’ve never been on television,” she admitted, also revealing that she was afraid he would “rattle” her. As she put it somewhat over-flatteringly, “Just because I’m capable of thought, why should I have to stand up to the challenge of your mind?” Diana knew when to surrender. (Nonetheless, in 1981 she agreed to stand up to Buckley, appearing on Firing Line to promote her book Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor.)
National Review’s treatment of We Must March My Darlings “couldn’t have been sounder,” she wrote Buckley, also reminding him that her new book, to be called Reviewing the Forties, would be coming out soon.
On the new book Diana had been working more with Drenka Willen than Jovanovich, and she managed to convey her grave disappointment over this in a way that was insulting to Willen. Diana told people that she had no editor at all, since that’s how she felt without Jovanovich at her side all the time. Willen recognized that Diana was unhappy, and she eventually asked to be relieved of her duties on the book. Diana took no responsibility for her part in the situation. She had also been upset that The New York Times had been on strike, so her book was not going to be reviewed; she blamed Willen for not being aggressive enough. Ultimately, Diana made a mistake in complaining about Willen to Jovanovich; he admired Willen’s talents enormously and was convinced she could do no wrong. “Diana was her own worst enemy,” Willen commented later, adding that “there was also something sweet about her.” But Diana was truly frightened that Willen might “put her in a bad light” with Jovanovich. In fact, Diana appeared just plain jealous that Jovanovich respected Drenka as much as he did. Diana felt under siege and eventually wrote Jovanovich that she “could no longer really sustain the kind of attacks that were being directed at her.” Somehow, as always, he managed to calm her down.
Publicity—and all its trappings—was now on Diana’s mind a great deal of the time. She even asked acquaintances to help her reach the fame she thought she deserved. She felt at liberty to tell Jovanovich that HBJ was selling her new collection short. “It has a cultural-historical interest beyond my expectations for it,” she lectured him.
Lionel’s death had given her a new freedom to say more than ever what was on her mind. It translated in many ways to an arrogance that some of her husband’s colleagues—and her own—said was destructive—to his reputation. She was becoming flinty.
She told Jacques Barzun that she was criticized “because I am elitist (usually from my lofty perch on Morningside). I am absolutist, I am humorless, I lack compassion for the young.”
In another letter to Jovanovich, Diana announced that “I guess you realized I can’t really afford many more bad things done by people around me. I don’t know if it has anything to do with widowhood in general, or my widowhood in particular, but it’s been so increasingly so since Li died that it frightens me. Sure, Kazin is a shit and Lillian is a she-shit. But I’m thinking of people I’ve deeply cared about and looked up to: Why am I suddenly a target for them?” She decided the answer was that she “simultaneously asserts too much power and not enough,” she told Jovanovich. “That’s dangerous,” she added, because “it leaves space to set up quite a shooting field. It also has to do with my being a woman, my kind—I mean—very smart, all too smart, but always deferring to Lionel—not in any immediate way, but always finally—and because my family always came first; I thought of myself as only accidentally a writer though I did my work professionally.”
Surely and substantially, she had found one answer for why she had become a target. Her family would always come first. Jim made her so proud she wrote an acquaintance. “He’s a born literary critic—Lionel and I saw that very early,” she asserted. “That he had to move into a different field [he became an art historian, specializing in Byzantine art and the history of ornaments], one in which his father and I weren’t even acquainted with, is understandable.” Diana and Jim’s relationship, while difficult during his early years, was, in his adulthood, a devoted one.
“I have always adored letter writing,” Diana wrote Jovanovich in the summer of 1977. She told him, “They roll from my fingers.” She enjoyed entertaining through her correspondence, and wrote at length about an encounter she had had with Henry Kissinger at the Morgan Library’s award ceremony in honor of Joseph Lash and his Churchill-Roosevelt book:
Me. Who’s your publisher, Mr. Kissinger?
K. Little-Brown.
Me, reprovingly. Uh-uh.
Bystander. Don’t you remember they broke Diana’s contract because she wrote four sentences in criticism of Scoundrel Time?
K., wide blue-eyed. Oh, I remembered the incident but not the publisher.
Me, all graciousness. It’s a big firm and you have a different editor. There’s no reason for you to have it in mind.
(Pause of maybe five seconds while my unconscious rallies)
Me. Just before you came over we were wondering what Morgan would have thought about this ceremony taking place in his beautiful house.
K. He’d have loved it, wouldn’t he?
Me. No, I don’t think so. I think he’d have hated it.
K. Why?
Me. A Jew presenting an award to another Jew? In his library?
K. King Faisal said I was neither a Jew nor a non-Jew, but a diplomat.
Me, in my dearest sweetest voice. But you see, Mr. Kissinger, I’m not King Faisal. To me you’re always a Jew.
End of Scene
Sometime during that summer of 1977 Diana got a new idea, which she proposed to Bill Jovanovich. “I think I want to write a novel.… It will be a book about Sex, Power, and Fantasy.… Here’s what I have in mind, a whole book done by means of letters … and I don’t mean that I want to do a novel in which a character is obsessed with letter writing.” She went on, “fictional letter writing, though it presents its own technical problems, would take care of what I told you were my reasons for always backing away from doing a novel: my inability to get people in and out of rooms, in and out of chairs, streets, station wagons.… I’m thinking of a whole book done by means of letters.… I haven’t yet worked out the whole line of action but the main line is beginning to take shape.” She decided also the letters would alternate with excerpts from her female protagonist’s journals.
Diana would be that protagonist. Jovanovich would be the male protagonist.
She told Jovanovich she still had to figure out “how to protect myself from over-exposure—maybe I’ll have to use a pseudonym. Or maybe just learn not to give a damn: that takes a little longer.”
She said she hoped to write the novel in six to eight weeks, although she worried that she might be “flipping onto a manic side.” But while she was “going crazy,” she might as well say this: she’d outdo even Herzo
g and Mr. Sammler’s Planet—and “do what they together should have been.”
Saul Bellow, an acquaintance, had written a warmhearted condolence note, telling Diana that he hoped that Lionel “understood that I was a friendly nuisance, not a hostile one.” Diana replied that Lionel “found it astonishing that someone like yourself could have misread him to such an extent … but that this did not create any hostility.” But it had. Lionel had, in fact, ended communication between them after he strongly objected to the way Bellow had characterized him in a 1974 essay in Harper’s magazine. Diana also recalled that in the 1960s Bellow had once taken Lionel to an unsavory part of Chicago just to shake him up, and even earlier, in the 1950s, she had accused Bellow of imitating Lionel’s voice in a crank phone call. Bellow, who enjoyed mocking Diana (he did not like any literary critics) had written to a friend about Diana’s sleuthing that she “will never replace Agatha Christie.” Still, Diana ended her reply to Bellow’s condolence letter on a poignant note: “It’s hell without him. I keep enormously busy like a mechanical woman, which is the only way I know how to manage.”
As for her novel, Diana decided “not to give a damn,” so she sublimated all her romantic feelings about Jovanovich in the book. She told Jovanovich she was always cannibalizing their conversations “for the sake of literature” and doing so “day and night.” She told him that instead of writing certain feelings in her letters to him she put them aside in her notes to add to the novel. Jim Trilling said that his mother seemed to be writing the novel “as she was living it.… I think she understood that she was writing a journal of her relationship with Bill Jovanovich.” In fact, after Jovanovich sent Diana flowers on her birthday, she enthusiastically told him, “You’ll be amused. My book starts with my protagonist’s birthday and a gift of flowers.”
The Untold Journey Page 33