Diana wanted to find a lasting memorial for Lionel. A year after his death, a series of seminars had been inaugurated in his name. Columbia University subsidized the early seminars, which included talks by Jacques Barzun, Isaiah Berlin, and Gertrude Himmelfarb. Eventually outside funding was sought, and Diana helped draft the letter to potential benefactors, which over time would include The Heyman Center for Humanities at Columbia; Professor William Theodore de Bary (provost emeritus at Columbia and an award-winning professor) and his wife, Fanny; Daniel and Joanna Rose (prominent philanthropists); and William H. Janeway (an economist and venture capitalist), who, along with his wife, Weslie R. Janeway, began the Cambridge Endowment for Research in Finance.
Diana remained “the powerhouse” (as one participant described her) behind the seminars for years. “She was so powerful because she had qualities that frightened her colleagues,” this person said. Elisabeth Sifton said that Diana “seemed to take advantage of [Lionel’s] position and she began to throw her weight around.” Sifton further remarked that her father (Reinhold Niebuhr) was often “exasperated” by Diana and found some of her behavior “embarrassingly funny.” Another editor who knew both Trillings said that “I love Diana and want her to live a long life … but fast.” Even Bill Jovanovich had misgivings. He told one of his editors that “Diana’s always gaveling people out of society.”
During the spring of 1978 Diana had given a lecture at Columbia based on her essay “The Liberated Heroine,” the one in which she gave birth to the idea of a “spirited heroine … whose first concern is the exploration and realization of female selfhood.” She received a long “burst of enthusiasm” fan letter from a graduate student in English at Columbia. This student had already published book reviews in Commentary, The New Leader, The New Republic, and The New York Times Book Review. She told Diana that she was impressed “by the vigor and adherence to what I can only call classical premises with which you examined the hysteria-inducing subject of selfhood.” She went on: “it seems to me that it is a subject increasingly and unfortunately treated as though it existed in a void, suspended from consideration of history and imperatives of history, and that your refusal to do so indicated greater respect for its potentialities than the rantings of so-called radical feminists.”
Diana took notice.
The student, Daphne Merkin, would become one of the first of several young women writers Diana would mentor, a role she fashioned for herself after Lionel’s death. These writers could benefit from her editing skills. Once again she would have a worthy person that could profit from her expertise. She would feel useful and fulfilled again in a way that only such a symbiotic interaction could achieve. Diana particularly respected Brom Anderson, son of Quentin and Thelma, and offered him advice and once even a job as a copy editor on the uniform edition of Lionel’s books.
Diana would eventually write Bill Jovanovich that Daphne Merkin “was one of the most intelligent people I have ever known,” and their friendship would be long and complicated, until it wasn’t anymore. Merkin later remarked that Diana “was in general comfortable with people who obeyed.”
When Diana and Lionel had been at Oxford in 1965, she had briefly met and enjoyed the company of a young writer and editor, John Gross, who was working at The Times Literary Supplement. Diana’s relationship with Gross soon became a chummy one—she enjoyed gossiping with him—and she admired his subdued expression of ambition. They corresponded often. Diana liked being attached to smart people, even more so after she became a widow. She communicated her good feelings to the lucky few (more that she was lucky to know them) and was richly rewarded with devotion, companionship, and sometimes disappointment. Once or twice she felt “stabbed in the back” by a budding friendship that took an unexpected downward turn, often the result of a demand not satisfactorily met.
Diana wrote Bill Jovanovich in May 1978 that John Gross, “at 43, is, of course, the best editor in the world—in the world, that is, of serious literature.” She added, “He is also a man of unimpeachable honor and integrity, tough but wholly civilized and gentle.” At the time Diana wrote this she was trying to convince Gross to leave London, and Diana desperately wanted him to become an HBJ editor. “No matchmaker ever prayed so hard that her match would take,” Diana wrote Jovanovich. Diana felt as if she were offering a treasure to her dearly loved publisher.
Diana had managed to get John Gross to believe that it was all Jovanovich’s idea, and that she was “merely lending her services as a kind of intermediary.” Gross told Diana that he would consider coming to New York if the salary met his requirements, and, in time, he and Bill Jovanovich had a warm and easy interview. Everything was looking good. They saw eye to eye. Jovanovich was impressed. So was John Gross.
Before the meeting, Diana mentioned to Gross, who had been staying with her on Claremont Avenue, that “any public knowledge that I had been involved in the arrangements would be good for none of us.” It’s not clear why she thought she had to say this because although she didn’t want to blast forth the news of her seeming to be John’s agent, she actually wouldn’t have minded whispers of it. She liked being in the position of helping people she admired, and just knowing she had put two brilliant souls together was enough for her.
But her attitude changed significantly after she learned that at the successful HBJ meeting both men had decided that Diana’s name “must never be mentioned as having a part in [the job offer].” Never be mentioned? Was she some sort of villain? She wondered.
It was just too, too much for Diana, who knew only too well, that despite everything, the literary community would put two and two together—after all, she had just given John Gross a large cocktail party. It was one thing for her to decide to stay silent, but it was completely unacceptable to have the men conspiring, and why would they?
She wrote Jovanovich “how hurtful it is to be informed that, however affectionately, the two of you decided on my elimination. I’m not even sure it quite meets my definition of affectionateness.” She wondered if a man had played the same role as she, would he have been eliminated? She doubted it. “I have been left feeling bleak and heavy-hearted where I should have hoped to be only happy,” she wrote Jovanovich. “I asked nothing of either of you except my own private pleasure of accomplishment.”
Diana “felt ill,” she wrote in her letter to Jovanovich. Speaking of Gross, she asked, “How can one be friends with someone for whom the connection is a public embarrassment? … What a big price to pay for allowing myself to be concerned with the well-being of HBJ: I ask myself if I’ll never learn,” she wrote in sorrow to Jovanovich. How had she so misjudged John Gross?
But she would eventually forgive him; in fact, by the following year, 1979, she was writing him once again as “Dearest John.” Although he didn’t accept a job at HBJ, he did move to New York in 1983 to become an editor on The New York Times Book Review and then to serve as one of the newspaper’s daily book reviewers. (He also wrote a column, “About the Arts,” for the paper before he left New York five years later, in 1989, to return to London, where he became the drama critic for The Sunday Telegraph.)
Diana sought Gross’s help when she wanted to sell Lionel’s archives—he was a friend of Charles Ryskamp, the director of the Pierpont Morgan Library. But she soon realized, she wrote Gross, that “the T’s are wrong” for the Morgan, and she told him she had offered the archive to Columbia “at an appraised price, low that I take that to be, but I have warned [Columbia] that my own papers, which they seem to want as a companion property, will cost them more for reasons quite extrinsic to literary value.*
Although Diana didn’t bring Jovanovich the prize from England she had hoped to, several years later she would successfully bring him Daphne Merkin. “Introducing me to Jovanovich was unusual for her and very unbelievably generous,” Merkin said. She eventually became the associate publisher of HBJ. So successful was her relationship with Jovanovich, Merkin added, that over the years Diana became very jeal
ous.
At one point Diana decided to act informally as an acquiring editor, and she sent Jovanovich a series of book ideas she thought might interest him. She suggested that Brian Urquhart, the undersecretary general of the United Nations, should write a history of various UN officials he worked with. In 1972 he had written a book about Dag Hammarskjold and would later write six other books concerning the UN, as well as a biography of the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche. He didn’t need Diana to urge him on to even more projects. But it turns out that what Diana was really interested in hearing about from Urquhart, and was embarrassed to say so at first to Jovanovich, was his experience in the early 1960s as a captive of some cannibals in the Congo who were threatening to eat him. But she was sure he would never write such a book, she wrote Jovanovich; still, she enticed her friend and publisher with the idea. She also suggested a book to be called “Those Good Old Days at the Met,” which would be an anecdotal reconstruction of great days and great stars. She said that the ideal person beside herself to do such a book would be the theater critic of The New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann, “but I fear he has too many other projects.” Diana told Jovanovich someone should write a biography of Isaac Rosenfeld, who “was infinitely more gifted than Delmore Schwartz, not as crazy but wild enough.”†
Diana included several more ideas in her letter, adding at the end a personal, handwritten postscript: “Isn’t the jacket for Reviewing the Forties smashing? I’m mad for it.”
She was also “mad” for finding a new book idea for herself. In the meantime, until she had one, Diana continued to review books whenever she was asked. In June of 1979 Emily Hancock of Harvard Educational Review “invited “ her to review Reinventing Womanhood, by Carolyn G. Heilbrun. Diana was given specific instructions on the number and form of the pages to be submitted and was even told exactly what details to include in her review. Additionally, her review would have to be approved by the entire editorial board. Furthermore, there would be no commitment to publish the review, and no fee would be paid. The letter ended by acknowledging that “our solicitation is a statement of strong interest in your review of the book, and of our commitment to try to work with you to bring it into print.”
Diana went to work, but not on the book review. Starting with an announcement that “I have never been addressed … as if I were a beginning student in a correspondence course in book-reviewing”; her reply went on to remind Miss Hancock that “no established writer is invited to review on a speculative basis.” Diana ended by noting that since there was no mention of a fee, she assumed that the invitation alone was supposed to be “enough compensation for a week or two of difficult work! That would indeed account for the lack of professional regard in your letter.” Emily Hancock had been hit with a brick and could only manage a weak response: “Like all academic journals, we do not offer a fee to our authors. The letter we sent you was entirely consistent with all of our book review solicitations. We deeply regret that its contents felt personal to you in ways that were distressing.”
In the same spirit of indignation, Diana couldn’t resist correcting errors in an already published essay about her husband that had appeared in The Jewish Week in the spring of 1977. How she wished she had been contacted before publication, to correct such errors, as she noted in her letter: “Trilling did not, I think, take on the style of the ‘tweedy gentleman scholars’ of England.” She said that “Freud was not so much ‘pessimistic’ as tragic. At any rate, it was the tragic element in Freud that my husband so much admired.” She berated the essayist for using the word critiques. “It’s unprofessional,” she said bluntly. And finally, she told the writer that “there is no such thing as a ‘Jewish-American aristocracy.’ Here again there intrudes into your statement some kind of class-inspired defensive aggressiveness. I am particularly alert to this unwarranted but frequent intrusion of class feeling into criticism of my husband’s work.… For my husband, as for me, class and its consequences are a reality not to be denied, and especially not in the name of political social virtues, announced or hidden.” There was one bit of praise from Diana. “ ‘Strained mobile face’ and ‘intriguing inner demons’ [both about Lionel] is [sic] good and accurate,” she commented.
Ever the guardian of her husband, in the fall of 1976, after the writer Phillip Lopate published an essay about Lionel in American Review, Diana wrote Ted Solotaroff, the editor of the magazine, that she found the piece “vile and disgusting.” Lopate later published a slightly revised version of the essay in his book Bachelorhood, and he called Trilling “the protector of my youth.” But he also described his classroom presence as reminding him “of someone who had suffered a stroke, and whose struggle to employ his full vocabulary was painful to watch.” Diana told Lopate he was showing “unconscious masked hostility” toward her husband, but she nonetheless granted him permission to quote from Lionel’s letters. Lopate wrote Diana that given her views on the essay, he found her “granting of permission all the more gracious and large-souled.”
Between such diatribes and other work, Diana needed diversion—relief from her demons—so she continued to enjoy watching television, even with her vision problems, and especially liked detective and medical shows like Starsky and Hutch, M.A.S.H, and later, in 1986, L.A. Law. She also played a lot of Solitaire, using cards with large-print numbers on them.
More and more Diana required help with many of the basic things in her life, and she sought it from Christopher Zinn, a graduate student who had first worked for Diana shortly after Lionel’s death as a secretary and research assistant (and would remain of assistance into the mid-1980s). She wrote Zinn that “now that I can’t read it’s like having sin licensed by the top authority—from 7 pm until midnight every night I sit mesmerized before that foolish box, which, incidentally grows dimmer and dimmer as my ‘good’ eye fails to conquer my most recent hemorrhage.” In later years she would be mesmerized by Court TV and be delighted when a friend introduced her to Beth Karas, a correspondent there. They became close friends and Karas even did some research for Diana when Diana became interested in an attempted murder in 1924 in which a businessman tried to poison his wife with arsenic.
Diana had many assistants over the years, and she complained bitterly about most of them, although sometimes exaggerated her objections. But she had a hard time giving up her need for control and often took her frustrations out on her helpers. She told the writer Stephen Koch, “It’s hard enough to be the controlled person that I am, so much controlled, I mean by logic and reason, without an addition of having a free flow of feeling and idea impeded by the cold presence of another person.” Koch had met Diana in the early 1980s (and later married Franny Cohen, a psychoanalyst who was the daughter of Lionel’s cousin, the prominent physicist I. Bernard Cohen.) He remembers when first meeting Diana that he praised her review of Capote’s In Cold Blood and even quoted the last two sentences of the review to her. But, Koch said, “She told me I was misquoting her. I was quite wrong. So my little tribute flopped.” But a friendship developed, especially after his marriage. He was working on his first book, Double Lives, “a study of the Soviet Secret services and the larger intellectual life of the West,” and he shared ideas about it with Diana. “She adored it,” he said, “and so we started meeting quite regularly,” despite, he said “her crazy corrections of grammar. Mispronunciation was intolerable to her,” Koch said. “ ‘Prestigious’ mispronounced was intolerable to her. She’d say, why do you use words you can’t even pronounce?”
Patricia Bosworth, whom Diana would mentor and become a close friend of, said that several students she knew became Diana’s assistants, and she would tell Diana she was so glad they were “working with you,” and Diana would correct her and say, “ ‘They are working for me.’ Diana really believed in various levels of society, so to speak.” She even once told a young friend that her nanny should not eat at the same table as the family. Diana, “who was like a task master,” told Bosworth that one particular a
ssistant wasn’t working hard enough. But Diana was very encouraging and supportive when Bosworth wrote the memoir of her father, Bartley Crum, of which she read parts to Diana. Crum was an influential lawyer who defended many targets of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Diana particularly criticized him for defending Paul Robeson. “Diana questioned everything my father did,” Bosworth said. “Of course Robson was a Communist, but that didn’t mean my father was a communist.” She and Diana finally decided not to talk politics—it was Diana’s suggestion—because, Bosworth said, “she was afraid our friendship would be destroyed.… She said I don’t want this to happen. I care about you. It’s happened too many times to me that friendships have been destroyed over politics.”
Like Bosworth, Koch, a former head of the creative writing program at Columbia, also found students to help Diana. “They always worked out to her great satisfaction,” Koch said. “When they weren’t from my class they were sociopaths,” he explained; “when she saw something a bit wrong, she turned it into something more than it should have been.”
Christopher Zinn, who went on to live and teach in Oregon, was probably one of the most successful of Diana’s helpers, along with Jerome Gentes, a young writer who worked for Diana for three summers. Gentes had a strong food connection with Diana and had worked in the food industry throughout college. They always shopped together, although Diana did most of the cooking. Diana also had a strong attachment to Catherine Park, another helper, who knew just how to handle matters when Diana “often went berserk.” Park was a calming influence.
Zinn not only edited some excerpts of Lionel’s journals in 1986 (agreeing with Diana that “Lionel’s endemic pessimism” should be edited out), but he also conducted an extensive series of taped interviews with Diana in 1983, for which he was paid $10,000 out of her advance from HBJ for a book to be called “Biography of a Marriage.” (This book was never published, although much of the material found its way into The Beginning of the Journey.)
The Untold Journey Page 35