Zinn and Diana grew very close, and she eventually made him the Trilling literary executor, until he failed to turn in a book review! In 1986, University of Chicago professor Mark Krupnick published Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism. Zinn was scheduled to review it (at Diana’s suggestion) for Partisan Review. But the review never appeared. Diana wrote Zinn: “I am removing your name as a literary executor … as a response to your recent actions or lack of action, as most dramatically demonstrated in your conduct about the Krupnick review for PR.” She concluded, “For one reason or another, you were unable to produce that review; let’s put it that you were blocked. Everyone knows that writers get into trouble but you made no explanation of your delays.”
Four years earlier, in 1982, after Krupnick had published an essay about Lionel, Diana had been quick to write him a letter pointing out his multiple errors, ranging from Lionel’s position on the Columbia student uprising to his attitude toward Judaism. Basically, Diana didn’t like acknowledging anyone not sharing her precise views on her late husband. In any case Krupnick was planning an “intellectual” biography, not a personal one, mostly because Diana had already refused him access to Lionel’s papers. “Krupnick is an indefatigable researcher; this must be said for him,” she wrote to Lionel’s cousin Bernard Cohen. She went on: “He will do not merely an unperceptive biography of Lionel’s mind but a slanted one, slanted to his own long-standing hostility to Li’s kind of thought.” (Diana considered Krupnick a “hatchet man” for Philip Rahv’s magazine Modern Occasions, which she reminded Cohen had done a “character assassination on Li.”) “Trilling’s career is an object lesson in the glories and difficulties of being an intellectual in America,” Krupnick later wrote in his book. (A decade later he would review Diana’s memoir, The Beginning of the Journey, saying it was her “best book” even though it was “self-serving” about her husband.)
Lionel’s death changed Diana’s approach not only to friendship but also to her extended family. The book by Krupnick caused a permanent rift between Lionel’s sister, Harriet, and Diana. Things had been fine enough between them until Lionel’s death—and the Krupnick biography. Harriet had given Krupnick information about Lionel’s early life, and Diana was angry that she hadn’t first checked with her about whether to do this. Diana wrote a scathing letter accusing Harriet of a longtime hostility toward her, to which Harriet replied in a letter to her sister-in-law that Diana’s “self-righteousness is monumental.… I think I’ve had enough castigation and pain for a lifetime.” Behind Harriet’s indignation was not really the Krupnick book but rather the fact that Diana did not “press” Harriet to come to Lionel’s hospital room, “as we agreed.” Harriet continued, “I waited for a sign to come. It never came. I knew then and now accept that our family was truly destroyed. Goodbye.”
Diana initiated another good-bye—and meant it—to Lillian Hellman. In January of 1980 Mary McCarthy said on the Dick Cavett Show that Hellman was “a dishonest writer.… Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and,’ and ‘the.’ ” Naturally, Diana was asked to comment on the controversy that soon developed—Hellman wanting to sue McCarthy and Hellman refusing to acknowledge her own public-figure status. Was their feud based on an ancient jealousy between the two women, or was it a continuation of the political battle between the anti-Stalinists (McCarthy) and the Stalinists (Hellman)? It is not clear what Diana was asked about the controversy to elicit this answer: “Anyone who entertains me on Martha’s Vineyard is never again invited to Lillian Hellman’s house,” Diana told a reporter. The comment appeared in an article in The New York Times and a mention in The New York Post’s “Page Six.” Still, Diana did not want to enter “a cat fight,” which she emphatically said is named as such “because we are all women—nothing is given any substance, nothing is given any intellectual content that any serious person need respect. It’s just made out to be bad-tempered shrewishness. I resent it profoundly.” Later she added, “Actually I did less provocation than Mary McCarthy did. Mary McCarthy took the first step against Lillian; I never took any first step.” (Hellman died before her lawsuit with McCarthy had its day in court, and the matter was dropped by Hellman’s executors.)
With legal proceedings on her mind, Diana told Patricia Bosworth, “I’ve always been interested in covering trials. As you may know, I wrote at some length about Hiss-Chambers, as well as the Robert Oppenheimer security hearing.” In 1971 Diana had been asked by Sargent Shriver of The Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation to participate in a panel to discuss a medical case at Johns Hopkins Hospital in which the parents of a premature baby with Down syndrome decided not to correct their infant’s congenital intestinal obstruction; the infant died after eleven days. Diana at first accepted the invitation to be on the panel, then changed her mind, seeing the issues involved as too complicated because it was “more than the general problem of biological technology.” She was not ready to parse medical morality. (The ethical questions the case raised continued to be debated for many years.)
Diana was slightly embarrassed about leaving her novel behind, and she wrote John Gross that she had merely “broken it off” to do another book. This book, she wrote him, was going to be titled A Respectable Murder (the title would change two more times—Love, Here Is My Heart, from a First World War song with the refrain “Something to kiss or kill”—to the final, Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor). Diana enthusiastically wrote Gross that the book would be about “our famous author of the Scarsdale diet [who] was recently shot by his longtime mistress, head of the exclusive Madeira School for Girls in Virginia.… The upcoming trial commands great interest here and so I’m afraid does the prospect of my writing about it.”
Diana had found a story—a story that stirred her: Jean Harris, a proper headmistress of a fancy southern private school, discovers that Herman Tarnower, her longtime famous doctor lover, author of the best-seller The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet, has a new and much younger love. Harris confronts him about it on the evening of March 10, 1980, and ends up killing him with a .32 caliber revolver she said she meant to use on herself; only the gun went off accidentally as her lover grabbed for it. The riveting story could evolve into a full-length book—unlike her novel, which was full-length but with no narrative to speak of.
Diana’s years of editing her own essays, reviews, and collections of both her and others’ letters and/or writings, and of editing Lionel—more than just editing him—were about to be over. She was free now as she had never been before to become what she always had wanted to become. All the energy behind her frustrations, angers, resentments, boredoms—even haughtinesses—would at long last find an appropriate outlet. She would later tell Patricia Bosworth, “Finally, in the long run, my emphasis on the moral aspect of life may well be the result of the pull in the opposite direction. Otherwise, why did I write as frequently as I did about people who were adversaries to our society?”
Even with the aid of analysis, it would take Diana until the middle of her seventies to attempt what she wished she had undertaken decades earlier. As Peter Pouncey, a former Columbia dean and former president of Amherst College, remarked, “You could see hunger in the poor woman to get her own place,” and with Lionel alive “she could only get half a place.”
On May 4, 1980, the Washington Post Book World announced that Harcourt Brace Jovanovich had signed Diana on April 17 to write a book about a murder that had captured headlines across America. “Everyone is interested in crime stories, but they’re usually located on the edge of life as we’re familiar with it,” Diana wrote in a note to herself, “whereas the Harris case exploded in the center of the respectable middle class.” Diana was pleased the announcement came soon after the contract was signed because, as she told Bill Jovanovich, “I’m scared someone will steal my title.” (She meant A Respectable Murder.) Two other writers would also write about the murder: Lally Weymouth, an editor and journalist (Summit Books) and Shana Alexander, also a journalist
and the first woman to write a column for Life magazine (Little, Brown). Diana, whose book would be published first, would tell a reporter that she “ was not doing a reportorial book at all. I want to write about the society in which this took place.… Facts aren’t truth. They approximate truth.” She told another reporter that she was “free-associating” about the case.
Diana received a substantial advance, $67,500, from HBJ. (Bill Jovanovich, in a spirit of hubris, told Time magazine she received a solid $125,000.) The industrialist and philanthropist Norton Simon and his second wife, actor Jennifer Jones, bought the dramatic rights for $1 million, with $50,000 on signing, and after six months, there was to be $100,000 more, with further hefty payments in the months to come. Diana almost couldn’t believe her good fortune. It had come late in life, but it had come—and, moreover, her book would soon be a major Hollywood film starring Jennifer Jones as Jean Harris. Diana worried she might need Jean Harris’s agreement, and she was also worried that the Simon-Jones team would not like her book after reading it in its entirety (they had only seen sections of it). In any case, several months later Jones decided she didn’t want the role after all, and her husband dropped the option (although Diana did get to keep the $50,000 she received on signing).
Hamish Hamilton Limited bought the book for publication in England. (“I have long admired your husband’s writing,” the editor told her in the second sentence of his introductory letter.) The Book of The Month Club bought syndication rights, as did the Quality Paperback Book Club. Penguin Books bought the soft-cover rights. Second serial rights were sold to New Woman magazine and US Magazine. On her own Diana had contacted The New York Times Magazine to offer first serial rights, and she said it was “settled” almost immediately. Her two excerpts were rejected, however, because, as she wrote in a letter,” The book as written is indeed different from the book I first planned to write.” She insisted on a $2,000 kill fee, which she received.
Despite the promise of success with Mrs. Harris, Diana managed to find some faults with HBJ early in the publishing process. Although Penguin Books ultimately published the paperback edition, she had thought she had an agreement with Bantam Books, and she accused HBJ of undermining this arrangement behind her back. “I can’t begin to understand how this could have been done to me,” she wailed, and then insisted she be “apprised of everything of which I am by contract supposed to be informed.” She felt abused, just as, she later told a reporter, Jean Harris had been; “she needed to be abused,” Diana exclaimed. “Now we can all understand that can’t we? Haven’t we all some touch of this somewhere in us? I think we do.” Later, more than one of her readers would be struck by the thought that the book was Diana’s unconscious fantasy of murdering Lionel, a fantasy that Jean Harris had had the nerve and anger to make real.
In fact, Diana said that from the very beginning of her interest and early research into the case, she “came to the shooting of Dr. Tarnower with a bias in Mrs. Harris’s favor, which meant prejudice against the man who was now dead; indeed, I could put it that before I had ever heard of Mrs. Harris, I was prepared to be on the other side from the Scarsdale doctor’s.” Thus, at first it was “a respectable murder” in her mind. (Lawyers changed her mind quickly about that notion being expressed in a book title.) But in another note to herself, Diana wrote, “I keep thinking of these two—Jean Harris and Dr. Herman Tarnower, and they seem so extraordinarily well-matched: both ugly, mean-tempered, selfish, dutiful, compulsive people.” Still another note stated, “Mrs. Harris is the first public victim of women’s liberation. It gave her the foundation for her self-pity which in turn gave her the foundation for vengeance against the mistreatment from Tarnower. It also promised her freedom from punishment.”
Before the trial began, on November 21, 1980, Diana had written a draft of the book in complete sympathy with Jean Harris. During the trial—Diana hired an assistant to attend the trial with her and take extensive notes—she completely changed her mind and tore up what she had already written. She told The New York Times that “until the Harris book, I had worked off in another world, venturing out only to check a fact in the library, but now I know how difficult it is to report on what’s happening in the real world.”
Many things changed Diana’s mind, she noted, even acknowledging that facts can hold the truth. First on her list was that Jean Harris had brought fifty rounds of ammunition with her in the car, and had brought ten rounds into Tarnower’s house, and also that upon her arrival she had the presence of mind to ask one of his two live-in housekeepers what guests had been at dinner that night. Diana was also struck by the fact—which she learned in the courtroom—that Harris “had stopped to look at her mouth in the mirror” before facing Tarnower (“with his dry strivings and worldly salvations,” as Diana wrote of him), who was in the bedroom they had so often shared. Diana, who disliked just about everything about the diet doctor (a face “more reptilian than foxy”) was struck over and over again by Jean Harris’s tone of superiority and emotional detachment. Tarnower, Diana wrote, was “cruelly self-engrossed.”
After a trial that lasted sixty-four days, on February 24, 1981, Jean Harris was found guilty of second-degree murder, that is, according to the first two of five New York State statutes: “(1) with the intent to cause the death of another person, he or she causes the death of such person or a third person; (2) under circumstances demonstrating a ‘depraved indifference to human life,’ the defendant ‘recklessly engages in conduct which creates a grave risk of death to another person, and thereby causes the death of another person.’ ” She was sentenced to a minimum of fifteen years (and a maximum of life) in prison. Diana said that Jean Harris bore a murderous rage but not premeditation and that she did not consciously lie about wanting to kill her lover—it was just that this truth was locked away in her subconscious.
Diana put all her strength and intelligence into the writing of a book that would become a best seller. Kip Fadiman told her the book was surely a classic, and he praised the use of her “own” voice “and what it reveals of the magnificent use you are making of your own life of thought and experience.” He had in mind such determined paragraphs as “The role of witness on her own behalf suits Jean Harris the way ecstasy suited St. Theresa. I’ve never seen aggression so thoroughly transformed into moral superiority: it combines an eagerness to speak, eagerness to shine and contemptuous anger at the process which has ensnared her. She’s so queenly in her scorn, you’d think the law was trampling on the royal preserves. Does it not enter this woman’s mind that we are all of us here in this court because Dr. Tarnower is dead and that she’s on trial for his murder?”
Norman Mailer wrote Diana that he “loved your instinctive analysis of the situation” and thought “no one could have done it better.” Jacques Barzun told Diana that she has written “one of the great trial accounts of our time.” Diana heard that the book was going to be nominated for a Pulitzer, but she later told Brom Anderson that someone at The Wall Street Journal undermined her chances for winning. “The public doesn’t know what goes on in book reviewing,” she said. The WSJ’s review was exceptionally brutal, but Michael Sovern, president of Columbia, later wrote her that she was “among the [Pulitzer] jury’s nominees [for General Nonfiction], a rare distinction. I offer my warm congratulations on your achievement” (meaning the nomination).
In an unusual marketing move, Penguin had used two different jackets. As Publishers Weekly reported, “a purple-beige and white cover is aimed at those who view the murder case in terms of social history and commentary; a grey-silver one is for those interested in the case’s more sensational aspects.” A sales manager commented, “There are Trilling fans who want to read her observations on anything, and then there are those who are dying to know about the case but have no idea who Diana Trilling is.”
Diana wrote in a note to herself that she didn’t know what Lionel’s reaction to the book would have been and that she found herself continuing to dwell on his “d
iscouraging behavior” in response to her play Snitkin, written with Bettina Sinclair so long ago. It was a hurt she somehow could not let go of—especially that he had thrown his very favorite pipe out the window in disgust over the play. And with every negative review she received for Mrs. Harris, she couldn’t help but see Lionel’s “ungenerousness reflected now in the intellectual culture’s reaction.” Dorothy Rabinowitz, of The Wall Street Journal, had said Mrs. Harris “echoes the sensibility of the ‘Me Decade’ ” and that Diana’s “assumptions about the middle class are extraordinarily coarse.” Calling Diana “tone deaf” and the book “tedious,” the reviewer decided that Diana’s conclusions were invented “to accord with a programmed sociological vision.”
The Rabinowitz review would not be the most savage one—that distinction would belong to the assessment in Commentary. Diana said that it ran “the most vulgar and ugly review of any book other than Norman’s [Podhoretz] own Making It. She went on to say that the review “was a made to order [negative] review.” The reviewer, Joseph Adelson, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, said Diana lacked spirit in a book that was full of “cultural arrogance,” that she was “too self-absorbed” and that “she has little use for anyone. There is scarcely a kind word for another human being to be found in this book.” She was accused of doing no investigation: “what Mrs. Trilling does not know, she imagines or invents. The book is finally vulgar, without generosity of spirit, and pretentious.”
Diana said that Partisan Review never reviewed it because William Phillips was “really afraid that a popular subject can’t be treated” in his magazine. She later learned that the scholar Peter Shaw (he wrote a biography of John Adams, among other books) had written a review for the magazine dissecting the trial more than the book, but had asked that it be returned to him unpublished. His final paragraph had summed up the book as follows: “And yet in the final analysis the dynamic of this book has to do with ideas—chiefly those of contemporary feminism. Its literary contribution is to the wide ranging cultural essay—a form at least as much in need of rejuvenation as the novel.”
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