The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  The National Public Radio’s All Things Considered called Diana arrogant for titling her book Mrs. Harris and damned her for daring to “catch the literary tone … of Mrs. Dalloway, and even Madame Bovary.” Later, the commentator said that if you “push aside arrogance, which Mrs. Trilling has accumulated after many decades of practice … she has plenty to say,” even though the book seemed rushed into print to beat the competition. New York magazine called Diana “Lady Di” and faulted her for “accepting a great deal of money to do something that she had never done before, and should not have attempted.” The reviewer, George V. Higgins, the popular crime novelist, went on to say that since the book was just a report on Diana’s reactions to the trial, the book’s title should have been “Mrs. Trilling, because all she knows about is Diana, and Diana isn’t very interesting.”

  Even the Columbia magazine had mean things to say, beginning with a first paragraph stating that it would be embarrassing for anyone to be seen in public with a copy of the book. Michael Sovern was pained by the review and told Diana he found her book “to be simply splendid.”

  The Nation’s reviewer, Elizabeth Pochoda, expressed admiration for Diana’s “mellow wisdom,” but there ended her easygoing praise. Pochoda decided that Diana was not only attacking the diet doctor for his style and taste but for his Jewishness. Pochoda wrote, “One senses her [Diana’s] disapproval of his having become the wrong sort of Jew with the right sort of money, doctor’s money. The Trillings, both Diana and her late husband, Lionel, have set rigorously Jamesian standards for Jewishness in our time.” It is an “affront” to Diana, the review concludes, “that Herman Tarnower … fails so publicly to be a Matthew Arnold.”

  Anatole Broyard, one of The New York Times daily book reviewers, mentioned Diana favorably in one of the occasional personal essays he wrote for The Sunday Book Review, and she wrote him a fan letter, despite revealing to him that she “used to hate it when authors wrote to thank me for something I’d said about a book—it made the situation too personal and interested, like a bribe after the fact, and I’d almost feel guilty.” She had met Broyard socially a few times and felt free to gossip with him, asking him, “Do you remember when we met last summer and I was worried about [Christopher] Lehmann-Haupt [the other daily book reviewer] reviewing my book? Thus do we misread our fates: his review and the one in Time were the best I got.”

  R. Z. Sheppard wrote in Time that Mrs. Harris not only has “resonance—the rich tone that even a tabloid subject causes when drawn across a perceptive and deeply cultured intelligence” but that “in the court of literature, Trilling’s Jean Harris is a great portrait of an American aberration.”

  The New York Times’s Christopher Lehmann-Haupt understood the book’s structure and force, and why Diana tackled a subject “off her usual line,” as she had put it. He told his readers that with “sharp analysis” she conveyed “precisely the atmospheric details of the trial,” and what impressed him the most was her “multi-shaded treatment of the case” and the degree to which she made it seem significant to American culture. Lehmann-Haupt concluded that the book moved seamlessly “from psychology to sociology and back again.”

  The New York Times Book Review had not been as laudatory, and Diana, ever conspiratorial, wrote a friend that it was because “the top ownership of the Times … were Tarnower’s closest friends.”

  In England, Diana’s friend Rebecca West, in a somewhat rambling review focusing on the meaning of “taste,” nonetheless, called the book “heartening” and “brilliant.” Anita Brookner noted in The London Review of Books that Diana seemed “the only enlightened witness” at the trial, yet Brookner bemoaned the fact that Diana “enshrines her observations in a genre which has been turned to sensational advantage by Truman Capote and Norman Mailer.… As a specimen of that genre it is superb, but it has to be said that it is an unsatisfactory, even a morally dubious genre.”

  Diana indeed had succeeded in making her book read like a novel, despite the reviews that disputed this idea. Some people now considered her a “crime writer,” a distinction she could not accept, although she told an interviewer that “it’s up to you if you want to give me this label … although it’s cases I am notably concerned with.”

  She told another person who wrote her that she agreed that Jean Harris “had star quality” and the story contained “all the ingredient[s] of a suspense story in the movies” but that her book “never even attempted properly to explain this phenomenon—star quality.” Diana went on to recommend that her correspondent read her essay on Marilyn Monroe, which had been published in Redbook in 1962. “It bears on Mrs. Harris,” Diana wrote her correspondent, “if only in my statement that when I heard of Marilyn Monroe’s death and how lonely she had been, I desperately wished that I had been able to offer her friendship.”

  Travel to and from the trial had exhausted Diana, even though Bill Jovanovich lent her his car, which her assistant drove from Manhattan to Westchester every day. (During the trial the car was stolen, and although it must have been insured, Diana insisted on sending Jovanovich a check for $3,500 to cover “the theft of the car.”)

  In an interview in The New York Times Diana said that many people asked her “how is it that I have to have had my husband die to do this much work—they don’t ask in that rude way, but that indeed is what they are asking—and the answer is quite simple. I am of a generation and of a temperament in which my work was secondary to my home. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t very serious about my work.” But once again, she doesn’t say quite yet—she dare not say—that Lionel’s work was her work throughout his life. There simply was no time for her own.

  “Growing old is hard,” Diana told Martin Amis in an interview about Mrs. Harris that appeared in The Observer. She continued: “Growing old alone is harder. You become more sensitive with your friends. You wonder if you are being asked out because of pity. There is an increased dependence on routine. I won’t leave the bed unmade in the morning.… I won’t stand by the refrigerator and eat a boiled egg. I want to, but I don’t.” In speaking of Lionel, she told Amis in a dramatic flourish: “I feel the usual things.… I wish now I had worshipped him a bit more.”

  * The Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library eventually bought the papers of both Trillings for $127,000.

  † A biography by Steven J. Zipperstein, a professor of history at Stanford, would eventually be written in 2009, published by Yale University Press.

  19

  RE-CREATION AND IMAGINATION

  I never realized how much I wrote with my eyes.

  —Diana Trilling to Stephen Koch, 1989

  Diana continued to need more and more helpers as she aged—in 1990 she was eighty-five—and she continued to grumble about them. “They’re what James meant when he spoke of Americans (I think it was Americans) failing to rise to the level of appearance,” she wrote Bill Jovanovich. Paradoxically, her eyesight was now “almost non-existent,” she also told him.

  Jerome Gentes remained a helper she always got along with. “I really loved Diana,” he said. “I told her so.” Diana shared his feelings, telling him, “I love you, too.” They had only two “relatively minor” quarrels over the summers Gentes was in her employ. Once he had lingered too long saying good-bye to someone, and Diana had been annoyed by what she considered a too-lengthy absence, and another time she became angry after overhearing him talking about her health to someone. But he said, “I always appreciated Diana’s directness.” Catherine Park did, too. “I learned discipline from her,” Park said. “She worked very hard every day, and I learned about stepping back and then going over things. It was a layering process.” Park also said that Diana was “easy to set off” because she was so “intense,” adding that she often yelled on the phone to people who had sent her what she considered incorrect bills. She said that Diana had a very strict routine when they read the newspaper together. “She needed to [first] hear the headlines, so it was always the front page,
the book review, and the obituaries.”

  Diana had left Martha’s Vineyard and Lillian Hellman behind and had begun to spend her summers in Wellfleet on the lower Cape. Jim, who had married in 1980, visited her there with his wife, Dore Levy, whenever they could—especially on Diana’s birthday, July 27. The celebration often included “an enormous blueberry pie,” Levy remembered; “she did enjoy my baking, and regaled us with [stories of] meals from her past, and how fruit tasted.”

  The young couple lived in Providence, Rhode Island, where Dore Levy was teaching at Brown. (Before moving to Providence, Jim had commuted as often as he could from Washington, DC, where he had been the curator of old world textiles at the Textile Museum.) Catherine Park said that it seemed to her that Diana “didn’t get along with Dore” or, for that matter, with Jim, either. “They had a volatile, difficult and complicated relationship,” she recalled.

  Dore Levy, a professor of comparative literature and East Asian studies, comments that Diana “was not an easy mother-in-law, and while I did my very best to please her, there were certain lines that Diana could not be allowed to cross.” She went on: “Diana took umbrage at my career, and mocked anything to do with my work on China—except when I cooked a Chinese banquet for her guests, and then she remarked how satisfactory it was to have the kitchen properly staffed by Jim and me.” She added about Diana that “China did her more good than she knew, because Jim and I early decided that we would follow Confucian principles in our relations with her, honor the parent, and try to stay just out of reach.”

  Diana entertained friends often in Wellfleet, “one person at a time,” Jerome Gentes said. She didn’t always put people together during the summer, so from time to time visitors were unaware of a number of her friendships and were taken aback that she knew certain people well enough to invite them to lunch or dinner.

  Diana arranged for her helpers to drive her to the Cape, not only because it was a fairly easy trip but also because after Lionel’s death, she was afraid to fly. She wasn’t sure why this new phobia arose but speculated that despite everything, Lionel made her feel safe. “It had to be a very symbolic role that he played,” she decided, “and not the reality.”

  Diana described her quarters in Wellfleet—a group of Bauhaus-style cottages called The Colony—as “a kind of elevated motel: I have a little cottage of two rooms, two baths, some terraces, a kitchenette.” Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy stayed on the property in the 1940s, as did Bernard and Ann Malamud later on. Diana always stayed in Number 6, and a sign reading “Diana Trilling Cottage” was put up whenever she was in residence. She was the only guest allowed her own telephone line; all others had to use a pay phone.

  The Colony was situated in the woods, and as Dore Levy recalled, “there were ticks. Everywhere. Crawling madly to find fresh blood.” The young Trillings spent a lot of time “checking, picking, and drowning in alcohol,” and Levy remembers, “Diana was at first convinced that they were fleas,” but finally Levy had to tell her they were really ticks, not fleas. “Why did you bring them here?” was her rejoinder to her daughter-in-law.

  Diana did a lot of work in Wellfleet on a book that was first called “Biography of a Marriage” but was later changed to The Beginning of the Journey. “This book is beginning to wear heavily on me,” she confessed. “I wish I was through with it and could go back to writing about my childhood. Maybe I could manage that by dictation better than I manage the grown-up memoir.” She wrote Bill Jovanovich that “dictation requires endlessly readings-back to me. It’s very tiring.” Words just didn’t come to her as rapidly as they had when she was decades younger. Daphne Merkin worried about more than just her memory. “If there ever was someone who was literal about psychoanalytic concepts, it was Diana,” she said. “She would literalize everything psychoanalytic. Metaphor would get lost. I always thought she was in some way an unreachable psychoanalytic patient—because she had the defenses of a walrus.” Merkin said that in The Beginning of the Journey, which she read in early drafts, “there was some aberration—some resentment” when talking about Lionel. “She told Diana even “that it was as if she was describing someone who was castrated.” Such frankness marked their friendship, and Merkin, deeply devoted for a long while, dedicated her first novel to Diana. “I don’t think most people spoke to her so openly,” Merkin observed; “there was a lot of sort of hierarchy in dealing with Diana.”

  With the help of a secretary Diana managed to continue her correspondences, especially with Bill Jovanovich. Diana couldn’t get over, however, that Jovanovich never invited her to his retreat in Canada—after all, Daphne Merkin went there often. Why hadn’t she been invited? “Diana was very hurt by that,” Merkin said, adding that Jovanovich was an “incredible caretaker” but “also mercurial.” Still, Diana continued to take pleasure in her correspondence with him. “I’m not so blind that I can’t live alone,” she wrote him, “but someone has to find the spices for me on the shelf, and I fear to venture out of the house alone.” She wrote Kip Fadiman that she still managed to cook for herself, “although badly. I burn things because I can’t see if there is liquid in the pot; that sort of dilemma.”

  Diana was no longer able to read, although a large magnifying glass sometimes seemed to help (she could “puzzle out an inch or two of print” she wrote Fadiman), but she said using the magnifier made her feel “seasick.” She soon assembled a group of people who were happy to spend time with her and become her readers, although she told Jovanovich that “the great trouble with being read aloud to is that it’s so slow. Also, you can’t skim, which is an enormous handicap—do you realize how [time-]consuming it is to have to hear every word on the page or, if not, perhaps the wrong words?” she wrote. Later she told him more jocularly that her “worst deprivation is being unable to read in bed. I am seldom tempted to curl up in bed with a good tape recorder.”

  The poet Richard Howard had met her briefly when he was a student at Columbia, although his strongest tie was to Lionel, as part of “the band of people that cared for him,” he recalled. Lionel was interested in him, Howard said, “as a kind of midwestern Jew of a certain class and circumstance, and I was something that he understood perfectly … and he was very proud of talking to me about that.” Long after Lionel’s death Howard spotted Diana at a restaurant, and they chatted, and after she told him her eyesight was failing, he offered to read to her. “I enjoyed her writing,” Howard said. “I was very taken with her and surprised some people weren’t, because I think she had just the right temperament and tone.” He said that they “read some William Dean Howells and other books.… She liked to read books that would have interested Lionel, too. But we didn’t ever get through anything easily because we would stop and talk about things that were sort of suggested by the material.… But on the whole the reading material was just an excuse to begin chattering, and she really loved to talk and she liked to talk to me.… We gossiped about everyone we knew.”

  Oliver Conant, an actor, director, and dramaturge who had known both the Trillings, as well as Quentin and Thelma Anderson since his teenage years, often read to Diana. “I read things I liked—Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers.” Diana also listened to Bob Dylan music with Conant, which, he said, she came to enjoy, especially after he defended Dylan as a poet.

  The writer Kathleen Hill was another reader, and she wrote a poignant essay about her experience doing so. The two talked as much as they read together—particularly In Search of Lost Time. Hill wrote that “when we reached [the chapter called] ‘Swann in Love,’ Diana confessed she had never been subject to obsessive love, the kind Swann felt for Odette, what she supposed was called romantic love. It was not part of her makeup and she never quite understood what people meant when they talked about it.”

  Another writer, Patricia O’Toole, also read to Diana from time to time. Diana particularly wanted to hear the biography of Proust by George Painter, and O’Toole also made tapes of books, includin
g her own much admired portrait of Henry Adams and his circle of friends, Five of Hearts. Diana sometimes asked O’Toole to read various drafts of The Beginning of the Journey “so she could listen to what she had written.” Diana wrote Kip Fadiman that “continuing my work is what has made this limited life which I now live endurable, no, better than that—and perhaps as useful as it would have been had I kept my eyesight.”

  In 1991 Diana won her second Guggenheim fellowship for The Beginning of the Journey. (Her first grant had been in 1950.) She received $30,000 and used most of the money for secretarial services. She did not attend the welcoming party for the winners, writing in a letter to the foundation that her “bad vision prohibits [her] moving in large groups: I usually end up failing to greet my best friend.” (Among other writers who won a grant that year were Lorrie Moore, Madison Smart Bell, and Francine Prose.)

  Two years before she won her second Guggenheim, Stephen Koch interviewed Diana for a profile that appeared in the arts section of The New York Times. She told Koch that “the beginning of our lives are likely to be the most interesting part,” so she had decided to end her memoir in the year 1950. She also confessed that at her age “language is not at one’s service as it once was.… One can be neither as inventive nor as precise as one would wish.” She told him also that she was “finding it extraordinarily difficult” to sound like herself. “It’s paralyzing to have to formulate each sentence out loud. It’s so public and official,” she continued. “How do you brood your way into a sentence that you have to spell out for someone else?”