The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  She named “herself” Deborah Wagnell, a widow of sixty-seven, and made her an admired, but not best-selling, novelist. Bill Jovanovich became Stuart Winton, who was in charge of a publishing empire’s many television stations, although some of Jovanovich was also in the character of the publisher, Mike Brennan. Deborah’s late husband, John Wagnell, was a poet, classicist, and an expert in cryptography, who worked with the OSS during World War II. He kept a journal.

  “Deborah,” or “Deb,” was in love with, and had a long affair with, “Stuart,” who broke it off when he fell in love with a younger employee. “I went to Stuart but came home to John,” Diana wrote, and she later had Deb wondering if she went to Stuart after she found out that John had had an affair, which he wrote about extensively in his journal. “I don’t mind the friendship, I don’t mind the affair,” Diana wrote in her book, “but why did he have to go on and on in writing … his filling up his notebooks with her.… That’s what diminishes me in the eyes of posterity; certainly everybody I know is going to think of it as a diminution of me.” Deborah also worries that Stuart loves her only for her relationship to John, a poet he admires and envies. “He hadn’t the ability to write John’s poetry, only the ability to make a billion dollars,” Deb writes in her journal. “Wasn’t there triumph for you in getting John’s wife away from him if only by the hour?” she exclaims to Stuart in a letter she marked as never sent. She adds in that letter that “fidelity or infidelity means very little to me. I think monogamy is against nature, but loyalty means a great deal, and if I indeed helped you feel triumphant over John, that’s a disloyalty of which I shall always feel guilty as I shall never feel guilty because I am unfaithful.” Deb’s journal notes that “I never kidded myself that John’s literary prestige wasn’t central to our relationship.”

  Diana eventually wrote Jovanovich that she was a little embarrassed by “the emotional truth and seriousness” of what she was writing in her novel. Her fictional John had left behind thirty-five notebooks, and Diana said that “giving Deborah the decision of whether or not to publish them added considerable ‘plot’ and texture to the book.” Yet at the same time, Diana was “troubled by the Stuart-Deborah relation, which seems to be contrived, emotionally inadequate, untrue to Deborah’s character.” Diana added, “After all, she is the vehicle of my best ideas. I don’t like her to be involved in a relationship which is somehow unsuited to the ideas and feelings with which I entrust her.” Jovanovich told Diana that she “has created a truly interesting woman who is trying to be fair to herself but isn’t sure she will be. She’s intricate and she’s likeable.”

  Diana often used the letters in her novel as she had used them in real life, to let off steam and get across her protagonist’s ideas in a direct and public manner. Deb believes that “the existence of fiction is what leads us to believe in the existence of its opposite, truth, but fiction is in a curious way more truthful.” Deb thinks that “maybe the only people who can feel they have wholly accomplished their lives are actors and actresses—with every performance they give, they complete the life they were meant to portray and thus fully discharge its burdens and their own.”

  Deb believes that “only with widowhood has she begun to address herself strenuously in her career” and says that “no biography is to be trusted as anything except an interesting speculation.” Deb keeps every scrap of paper of her drafts in case one could contain something lost but necessary to her story—“our poorest scraps are treasure.” As a widow, Deb “loathed coming home by herself.… Neighbors are the only solution for a widow—neighbors who are also friends, people who are there for you.” Of Stu’s new love interest, a woman named Celeste, Deb writes that perhaps she, Deb, envies Celeste because “she dared make such a male [independent] life for herself.” Deb says that she herself is secretly “full of frustration at the choices she has made … but it’s not that we hate men because we envy them, the way so many women do who turn to women’s liberation. It’s both better and worse than that, more hopeless: we want to be men.” At the same time Deb declares herself a committed Freudian and writes that “nothing on earth could convince me I don’t want to be the sex I am. Maybe I just want everything, both worlds, the androgynous best of both sexes.”

  Jovanovich sometimes worried that Diana would never get the novel written or that it would, as she put it in a letter, “assault you with all the embarrassments.” She wrote an acquaintance that she was “inundated by doubt and fear” and that she planned “to cop out any minute.” She said that writing a novel was the “most unsettling enterprise she had ever embarked on” and that she had no sense of command, as she did when writing criticism.

  Diana told Jovanovich that “I cling to the reassurances you give me that our friendship is forever” and that she hopes nothing she writes will hurt him. Later she told him that “nothing is so revealing as the nature of our fantasies. I find myself depressingly shy about such self-exposure. I’d a thousand times rather tell the world what actually was or is in my life than where my imagination leads me.”

  Although her novel went through several drafts, Diana finally abandoned it. Jim Trilling said that his mother had been “very very pleased with it until she saw it wasn’t working as a novel.” He also said that his mother decided that “people were not going to take much interest in it … and that the image she created of her stand-in wasn’t sufficiently varied—rich—for people to overcome their shrug of boredom.” No doubt Diana was also extremely self-conscious about her fantasies becoming so public.

  In the winter of 1977 Diana wrote a friend that her eyes “are kicking up.” It had been a little over seven years since she had complained to an eye doctor in New York that she had a feeling of discomfort and “fuzziness” in her eyes. She was told that eventually she would need cataract surgery and that, meanwhile, she would receive a prescription for new glasses, ones that would be “a little different” from her current ones. But the new glasses seemed wrong to Diana; in fact, she was told by her doctor that the optician must have used the wrong prescription. But as it turned out, that wasn’t what had happened. The doctor had made a mistake and had given Diana the wrong glasses—twice. Diana let him have it, writing him that “I have a great tolerance for human error but I draw the line at being held responsible for serious errors made by someone else for which I have to suffer.” And as livid as she was, her curiosity got the best of her, and she wanted to understand what had caused the confusion. But she never heard from the doctor again.

  Over the next decade Diana continued to have eye problems, first enduring two retinal hemorrhages in her left eye, for which she received laser therapy, and then a cataract operation on her right eye, which improved her vision somewhat. She would eventually be diagnosed with low-pressure glaucoma, which was accompanied by some vision loss, and then with traditional glaucoma, a more serious condition that can cause optic nerve damage and macular degeneration, or the loss of sight.

  After 1977 she would describe her circumstances to Bill Jovanovich: “I can’t read except through one or another form of illuminated magnification. Using magnification to read makes me seasick, so I no longer read a whole book.” Over time she would have friends and acquaintances read to her, and she would eventually write by dictation. In the winter of 1977 Diana wrote a friend that she “managed to forget my troublesome eyes” and was able to attend an evening session of the Modern Language Association devoted to Lionel’s achievements. She said that all of the papers, except for Quentin Anderson’s, “were fairly thoroughly off the mark, and all sounded to me as if ultimately motivated by the desire to kill off the father so that the sons would thereby flourish.” As if to fight back, she added, “but no son lives by killing off the father, blood or cultural, and how extraordinary that grown people should not know this.” She often thought of the letter Howard Mumford Jones had written her, telling her how Lionel always seemed to him “an institution like the Washington Monument or the Presidency of the United States.…
He had a kind of agelessness, a vast serenity … a kind of communion with the gods.”

  Despite such a tribute, Diana felt it was time for her to step in once again, although it would take two more years for her to write and publish in Commentary an encomium, “Lionel Trilling: A Jew at Columbia.” She described Lionel’s early life with great tenderness and sincerity, writing that “unlike others of his intellectual generation, Lionel had no need to make for himself the strategic leap into the American middle class, with what this so often involves in defensiveness. Also, unlike many first-generation Jewish intellectuals, he had not been taught to think of himself as ‘smart.’ It was not his sense that life was a contest of minds or that intellect was a weapon; it was more an instrument of conscience.” She went on to comment that “his parents had made him feel unusually valuable, or certainly much valued by them. While he had no belief that he possessed outstanding skills—on the contrary, throughout his life he thought that virtually everyone with whom he associated had read more than he had, had a better memory, and was better trained in the use of the basic tools of the intellectual trade—he had grown up with an undefined feeling of personal worth, some secret quality of being to which he could give no name but on which he could ultimately rely.”

  She detailed his troubles at Columbia: “How much, then, had anti-Semitism actually been a factor in Lionel’s dismissal in 1936? Who can say? Certainly it was by [President] Butler’s intervention, by fiat of the top authority of the University, that a Jew was first given a post teaching English at Columbia, which in those days implied permanence.” She continued, “Everyone was easy with him; Lionel felt no hidden tensions. Indeed, the generosity that he met from this point forward in his Columbia career has, for me, a legendary quality—his departmental colleagues could not have taken more pleasure in his academic or critical successes if they had been their own.” She included surprising facts, such as the following incident:

  One day,… very soon after his promotion, Lionel had a call from Emery Neff [his thesis adviser]: he wished to come to the house and he hoped that I would be at home too. Although we were mildly on visiting terms with Neff and his wife, a call of this kind was unprecedented. What Emery Neff came to say was that now that Lionel was a member of the department, he hoped that he would not use it as a wedge to open the English department to more Jews. He made his statement economically and straightforwardly, ungarnished; it must have taken some courage. And he seemed to be speaking for himself alone; he cited no other departmental opinion. Lionel and I just sat and stared. Neither of us spoke. Emery turned to other subjects and soon left.

  Diana had triumphed. She wrote Bill Jovanovich that “everybody seems to love [the new essay]. I’ve never had such unanimous praise for anything I’ve written … and people stress their admiration for the way it’s composed, its simplicity of style. And this was so easy for me to write; it went so fast.” She told a friend that she considered it “unmotivated” memoir.

  Kip Fadiman had written Diana in a condolence note that Lionel was his “hero and life-model.” He later wrote again to praise her new essay, and Diana told him that “Commentary wanted to print it or, more precisely, they didn’t want to give it up, but they felt that they owed it to me to tell me that they really didn’t like it very much. Why didn’t it deal with Lionel’s ideas about being a Jew?” In a letter to Fadiman years later, Diana said people are concerned about Lionel’s “conduct as a Jew” because of their feelings of envy that he “did not look or talk like a Jew.”

  In an unpublished book Diana wrote that “one’s world as a Jew had more points of reference and connection than the world of gentiles. It was cozier, more family-like. This warming emotion of Jewishness required no support of religion or ritual; it was essentially a domestic sentiment.” She and Lionel had always agreed on this.

  In late 1977 Diana confessed to Bill Jovanovich that she saw getting all of Lionel’s books ready for publication as a “distraction from her own projects.” She was now thinking of a book that was “not conventional autobiography” although it would be “wholly autobiographical.” She thought it would take up two volumes. “It is episodic and speculative in a way that eludes easy classification,” she told Jovanovich; “you’ll have to trust me that it is more than conventionally interesting.”

  Meanwhile, Reviewing the Forties garnered some excellent reviews, despite The New York Times’ nearly four-month multiunion strike. Drenka Willen recalled how angry Diana was over the book’s not getting reviewed because of the enormous backlog resulting from the shutdown. Willen also said that Diana had unrealistic expectations for the book: “to expect essays from the forties to sell better than something less historical was not realistic, but you know when you work hard on something it should just sell.”

  Still, Diana got impressive praise. Elizabeth Janeway wrote in The Los Angeles Times Book Review that “to the extent that America has an intellectual conscience, Diana Trilling is it.” Janeway went on to write that Diana knew that “literature can’t be understood apart from its context in social, cultural and political life. [Diana Trilling] has been disagreed with, but no one has ever thought her opinions shabby, easily come by or uninteresting.” The Nation’s reviewer, Emile Capouya, began his review by mentioning an essay he remembered from her tenure at the magazine but which was not in the collection. The essay in question had announced that Diana “had not come across a new novel that was worth reading.” Capouya commented that “for me, that announcement killed literary journalism as I had known it, the unpaid arm of book publishers’ advertising and promotion efforts.” He went on to call Reviewing the Forties “remarkable” and wrote that Diana “understands that literature is a dramatization of values, and that all its other attractions are at the service of that central preoccupation.”

  18

  HER OWN PLACE

  Writers are what they write, also what they fail to write.

  —Diana Trilling

  At one point after Lionel’s death, Diana had thought of trying to write the memoir he himself had had in mind to write. For background she decided to ask various people such as Jacques Barzun, Eric Bentley, Kip Fadiman, and Lewis Mumford, as well as some of Lionel’s former students, for their recollections. She would record their responses on tape. Some candidates turned her down. Norman Mailer was one, telling her the strain of preparing for such an interview was too much, later explaining that the amount of time such interviews would take was too costly in his own economic terms. But Mailer felt bad about not fulfilling Diana’s “needs,” as he put it, and finally agreed “to come in toward the end” in one three-hour session. “Remember, I talk twice as fast as anyone else,” he reminded his friend. (But this interview never took place.)

  As Diana told Morris Dickstein, who was also reluctant to participate, “I have been trying very hard, and succeeding a little better each day, to persuade those who record their recollections of Lionel to think of this project not as anecdotal or celebrative—how Lionel would have hated the latter!—but as an effort to re-create by whatever means, including the anecdotal, the social and political atmosphere in which he was doing his writing.” Dickstein said: “As I recall, Diana asked me more than once but I put her off. I guessed she might disagree strongly with what I had to say, not so much about Lionel as about the ’50s and ’60s in general, and I hesitated to get into the ring with her. Later, I got to know and like her more, and when I read some of her interviews (with Virgil Thomson, for example), I was mildly sorry I hadn’t taken her up on it, since the interviews were very good.” (Dickstein wrote Diana a letter in 1981 congratulating her on the success of a new book, Mrs. Harris, and reminded her that he owed her an interview, but Diana replied that she hadn’t worked on the project because of a lack of funding.)

  Jules Feiffer recalls being interviewed by Diana about the 1960s, and as he was explaining his point of view, Diana began arguing with him. “In the guise of finding out what I thought,” Feiffer said, “she was t
elling me everything I thought was wrong!” Diana’s aggressiveness was front and center. It did not win her new friends.

  She wrote in a letter that “it began to be apparent that I was engaged more in an act of mourning than in a work of generally useful historical reconstruction,” so she decided to expand her project beyond Lionel and his time and to focus on their joint cultural histories and more. In fact, this expanded project was the very one that won for her and caused her to turn down a Rockefeller Foundation grant because she felt not enough money had been offered for such an important undertaking. Nonetheless, she continued making tapes into the mid-1980s and deposited them with Columbia University’s Oral History office (which had offered to transcribe them).

  In the winter of 1980 Diana went on the warpath with Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz. Diana said that in his book Making It, “Norman had a very, very personally motivated attack on Lionel, saying that his career had been a falling away after his The Liberal Imagination.” She raged, “He accuses Lionel of dishonesty. He accuses Lionel of a lack of character. He accuses him of things that [amount to] very dirty talk for somebody who was treated as he was treated by Lionel.” That same winter, Midge Decter asked to have her oral history interview withdrawn. (Decades later Diana and Lionel would be two examples in Norman Podhoretz’s 1999 book Ex-Friends.) But in that winter of 1980 Decter wrote Diana that “in a community where people speak seriously to one another about serious matters, there are no censors, no gauleiters, and hopefully no preadolescents lining up gangs in the neighborhood. In my opinion you have made yourself an outcast from that community. And I shudder to imagine what sort of ‘history’ will be put into the archives.” (Despite this letter, Decter’s interview was never removed from the archives.)