The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  Around this time, Diana got the idea for a new magazine to be called “Op-Ed.” In a proposal she said that she was offering it “as a new vehicle of opinion for the educated American public … a magazine which will be entirely written by the people who read it.” But, she warned, “the world is full of would-be ‘writers’ and people who, though they have nothing useful to say, want nothing in the world so much as to see themselves in print. Op-Ed cannot be allowed to become a refuge of cranks.” For more than half her life Diana had waged near war against those who did not, could not, would not pay contributors, yet for her proposed magazine she decided it would be better if contributors were not paid, although she said it would be “a matter for editorial determination.”

  Diana was working also on two new essays. One was about her friend Goronwy Rees, and the period in the early 1930s when he “was in the service of the Soviet Union,” and the other was about the summer camp she had attended as a teenager. Diana hoped that both pieces could eventually be part of a volume of recollections, later saying that “this late in life, I begin to explore a kind of writing which I can best describe as semi-fictionalized reminiscence.” She said she would devote herself to remembrances of people and events she had known, “sometimes with, sometimes without fictional elaboration.” Her model was Harold Nicholson’s Some People, first published in 1927. (Virginia Woolf had said that Nicholson “has devised a method of writing about people and about himself as though they were at once real and imaginary … and he has succeeded remarkably, if not entirely, in making the best of both worlds.”) Diana wrote a short essay arguing that she no longer “perceived life critically, as a canvas of issues, but as narrative. This constitutes a profound alteration in my approach to both my experience and my profession, and it astonishes me,” she said. “How is it that this has happened at this late point in my career? Throughout my writing life, the chief tools of my trade have been reason and argument. Today, they are re-creation and imagination.”

  She had actually begun using “re-creation and imagination” a decade earlier, in the 1980s. She wrote an essay about a crazy neighbor who lived next door to her family in Larchmont, New York. “Bobolinka’s Neighbor” was published in the May 1983 issue of Vanity Fair. The piece begins: “The emotion I remember best from childhood is fear,” and the last line reads, “We count on our children to confirm us in our illusions of progress.” She was making the point that her father “could not have been more American in his premise that the mistakes and weaknesses of the past would be wiped away by a new generation.” Diana, in the park one afternoon with young Jim, noticed that the mothers “looked for far more self-control and certainly a more delicate socialization” in their toddlers than they “required of themselves or their husbands or their grown children.” But this was only an illusion of progress, a point Diana was pleased to be making at long last.

  At ninety, Diana had changed her mind about many things she had once believed in regarding literature, but the years had not changed her image of old age. In the fall of 1995 Sally Jacobs of The Boston Globe had written a profile of Diana that sent shock waves through each and every one of Diana’s years. “Yes, Sally,” Diana wrote in a letter to her, “I am old as you will one day also be. Old age brings much pain and humiliation. Our bodies fail us and our pride is available to constant hurt. Did you need to add to a situation which I must inevitably suffer through the very passage of the years?”

  Diana, “thoroughly dismayed,” pointed out that her eyes “were far from being ‘so clouded’ ” and that, in fact, they appear to be so normal that people can’t quite believe she is almost blind. She hated that her ankles had been described as “bloated pink and painful over the straps of black sandals.” But, worst of all she lashed out, “You speak of my ‘tongue sharp as a torn tin can.’ In a long life in which I have been frequently interviewed and written about, I can think of nothing that has been as ugly as that image!”

  Diana’s essay on Goronwy Rees was set to be published in The New Yorker, and, in fact, an editor there wrote Diana that the magazine had put it in galleys as “a way of finding whether you think our proposed edit would work.”

  It did not, and Diana, who said that the editor wanted the piece cut in half, asked for it to be returned to her. She then offered it to the Partisan Review, which published it in the winter of 1996. (Diana wrote Gene Marcus that Harper’s and The Atlantic had refused it.) Diana wrote Gene also that the essay was “pretty generally approved and even admired by its American readers,” although various English readers did not like it very much. Rees had denounced Guy Burgess of the group of spies at Cambridge University in a series of articles, as well as denouncing him to MI5, and Rees was seen more as a spy out to save himself than his country. Diana wrote that Jenny Rees determined that her father had been a Soviet agent but not “a fully fledged agent in the sense in which his Cambridge associates had been spies.” Diana later wrote an introduction to Jenny Rees’s memoir of her father, of which John Gross wrote in The Sunday Telegraph that the book “deserves nothing but praise.”

  In early April 1996 Diana was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a lumpectomy and then a series of radiation treatments. She wrote a former helper that “I find myself in a bad temper most of the time, annoyed at this sudden interference with the accustomed pattern of my days, worried by the interruption of my work.” She requested also that her cancer not be mentioned in publishing circles. She asked her oncologist to give her two more years so she could finish a book, and he told her he could give her more. “I don’t want more,” she answered.

  In May of that year her summer camp story was bought by The New Yorker, and once again cuts were requested; this time, however, Diana asked if she could do the editing herself, and it was agreed that she could. Diana wrote Gene Marcus that “probably it was only because Tina Brown was startled out of her mind by my request that she yielded to it.” The self-edited essay was published in the August 12, 1996, issue but not without a letter of complaint from its author, who objected to its “new and inappropriate title, ‘The Girls of Camp Lenore.’ ” Diana had called her story “A Camp in the Berkshires.” (At one point she had named it “Auntie Ella Go to Hell,” but that bewildering title didn’t last long.) Diana wrote Tina Brown, asking, “Is not the title of a story as important as a comma? If I could be called so repeatedly for alterations in punctuation, and you now wanted a change in the title, why could I not have been called one more time? The title of a story is an important part of a writer’s intention.” Indeed, Diana explained that “in the middle of my recollection comes an intense almost melodramatic narrative dealing with life—presumably the ‘normal’ sexual life—of one of the senior counselors, and the reader suddenly realizes that this is essentially a sexual story, a story of many kinds of sexual hazards. Why was this ignored?” Diana went on: “Why was the change made behind my back when I was so easily reachable? As to the cover flap in which the public is asked ‘what did I do at camp?’ it becomes almost obscene in this sexual context.”

  Despite her letter (it is not known if it was ever actually sent) Diana’s essay appeared in the magazine with the new title and the cover flap asking, “What did I do at camp?”

  The publication of “The Girls of Camp Lenore” coincided with depressing health news. Diana had been diagnosed a few weeks earlier with a new cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, in her case, an aggressive form of the lymph system cancer. Once again she would undergo radiation treatments. But this time she was treated rudely, she said, and ignored when she told the technicians that the bun and hairpins in her hair were causing her discomfort because of the position of her body on the table. But she carried on, of course, because she said, radiation “gives her a fighting chance. I don’t like taking death without fighting a little.” She decided not to tell her son and daughter-in-law of the new diagnosis.

  She wrote her longtime internist, Dr. Arnold Lisio, that “it has been a very bad time for me, close to unend
urable.… I am no longer able to rise from bed but have to be lifted. My legs have lost so much strength that they can’t lift by themselves over the rim of the bathtub; I must lift them across. My body is so off-balance that I virtually fall across the room and have to hang on to anything I can reach. When I try to stand up from bed or from my shower I am so breathless that I can’t talk.” She concluded to “her devoted, wonderful doctor”: “I have had days in which I ached in almost every inch of my body and in which I was certain that I had to have been invaded by my lymphoma.” But when Lionel’s cousin, Dr. Franny Cohen, married to Stephen Koch, came for a visit, she wrote Dr. Lisio, and said Diana “was a classical example of someone who was being taken off Prednisone too quickly.” Dr. Lisio had prescribed the medication. The dosage was raised, and Diana wrote, “At this moment I feel okay and am up at my desk. The one thing that seems still normal in my life is my ability to work. Once I get to my desk I am able to work better than ever before in my life—I’ve never produced more, or more to my satisfaction in such a brief period. Work is my great distraction from pain.” Diana was working on a piece about the dinner at the White House she and Lionel had attended in 1962.

  Diana requested that Dr. Lisio (“I love and honor you,” she told him) find someone who could guide him about the correct use of prednisone. She had been “in the grip of what was surely a psychotic nightmare,” she said.

  HBJ, despite her admiration for Bill Jovanovich, also continued to bring on nightmares, although not of a psychotic nature. The previous January, she had written the marketing director of Harvest Books that in a brochure advertising the paperback edition of The Beginning of the Journey she was “dismayed” by “the discriminatory terms in which you describe my husband and myself, referring to him as a critic and to me as a reviewer.” How could her own publisher who had published several volumes of her criticism deal with her so “pejoratively”? Diana added that “I cannot but wonder, however, whether it would have occurred to you to make this invidious distinction in reverse; that is, to describe the male partner in a literary marriage as the reviewer and the female partner as the critic?”

  Feisty to the end. Nine months later, at 7 p.m. on October 23, 1996, Diana Trilling died.

  She had worried, she once told Stephen Koch, that her obituary was going to read: “Diana Trilling dies at 150. Widow of distinguished professor and literary critic Lionel Trilling. Engaged in Controversy with Lillian Hellman.”

  But, in fact, the first line of her obituary in The New York Times reads: “Diana Trilling, an uncompromising cultural and social critic and a member of the circle of writers, thinkers, and polemicists of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, known as the New York Intellectuals, died Wednesday at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.”

  She was no longer, as she had once feared, at the borders of the literary community.

  EPILOGUE

  ARCADIA

  At Diana’s funeral, held on October 29, 1996, in St. Paul’s Chapel on the Columbia University campus, a one-line entry in the program read, “At Mrs. Trilling’s request, there will be no reception after the service.” There were also no eulogies.

  In a document entitled “Dreary Details About My Funeral” Diana had left for her son, she had emphasized not only no speeches but “no social gathering after my funeral! And no thanking people for attending. They can sign a book.”

  Daphne Merkin, in a reminiscence she wrote a month later about her friend, suggested whimsically that “perhaps [Diana] preferred not to be the subject of a conversation she could not preside over,” adding in a more serious note that “the evident sorrow of her two granddaughters was a testament to the warmth and charm she exuded when she knew she was loved.” Diana had dedicated The Beginning of the Journey to them. She adored being a grandmother and cherished her granddaughters, Gabriel and Julian. They had, in fact, brought to the funeral from their home in Princeton, where the family was living, two white bouquets they placed on her plain pine coffin. Jim was a Visitor at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, and Dore Levy—on sabbatical from Brown—was the first sinologist elected as a Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute.

  A rabbi, a cantor, and the university’s Protestant chaplain read psalms and Bible passages. In her “Dreary Details” document Diana had noted that “if the Rabbi wants the paid notice in The Times [she requested one in addition to ‘any extended one The Times would run’] to refer to the ‘Columbia University Chapel’ instead of ‘St. Paul’s Chapel,’ this wish should be deferred to. Also, I loathe chapels in the round. I want the pews at St. Paul’s to be straight across.”

  Mostly Bach and (one) Mendelssohn melody filled the chapel. Guests left wet-eyed but frustrated. They needed more. But of what? The service felt unfinished, incomplete as some attendees murmured as they made their way to the university’s main gates on Broadway. But there was nothing left to do but to go home and mourn Diana in private.

  Jim Trilling and Dore Levy and their two daughters did not go right home. They had felt humiliated that Diana did not want a reception. “Who will believe that they come from far and away and we can’t even give them a sandwich,” Dore said. “Where I come from—Galveston, Texas—the funeral baked meats are a serious matter, although they tend toward crayfish and whiskey rather than small sandwiches and cold wine. And there has to be plenty! People in grief need to be fed! How could we face her friends, how could we explain?”

  The family stayed at the door of the chapel shaking hands and tried to comfort the guests. “After the last one departed,” Dore recalled, “we stood there, the girls exhausted with weeping, the day grey and the Columbia Campus completely drained of color. Jim said, ‘Come on. We are going to have a wonderful lunch at the Plaza.’ ” Dore continued:

  Diana loved to go to lunch at the Plaza. She would have chicken salad and many cups of tea. Once when Jim was traveling and I went to New York for the weekend and took her to the Plaza, we had a ball, with Diana telling stories and arguing about films—Chinatown and Entre nous. If we couldn’t have a party in her honor, we could go to lunch at her favorite place. We tumbled into a cab and headed downtown. The girls ate macaroni and cheese and duck with lentils and ran around like Eloise. Jim and I ate I don’t remember what and went through two bottles of wine. We rode the bus home, snuggled up, finally somewhat comforted.

  Eight months after her death, “A Visit to Camelot” was published in the June 2, 1997, issue of The New Yorker. Although Diana was bedridden the summer before her death, she had insisted on going on living until the end, and that meant continuing to have people read to her—from her own work-in-progress and from books, articles, and reviews by others. She knew she was dying, but she also knew she had time to complete some important work. She would “give her ideas their full day.” She was going to get her Washington story finished and published, and she did.

  “A Visit to Camelot” was called “wildly entertaining”—not by a literary magazine—but by U.S. News and World Report. Another nonliterary publication noted that Diana observed “with grace and understatement the complex dynamics of the Kennedy marriage. Particularly endearing is her willingness to confess how even the literati are not immune to becoming star struck.” Diana’s essay was also one of twenty-five entries (the longest one, in fact) included in The Best American Essays 1998, guest-edited by Cynthia Ozick. (The anthology also had selections by Saul Bellow, Jamaica Kincaid, William Maxwell, Mary Oliver, and John McPhee.)

  Diana’s legacy continued to flourish. Decades later her 1962 essay on Marilyn Monroe was still remembered. In 2006 Gloria Steinem wrote in an article about the movie star’s death that “just after Monroe’s death, one of the few women to write with empathy was Diana Trilling, an author confident enough not to worry about being trivialized by association—and respected enough to get published. Trilling regretted the public’s ‘mockery of [Marilyn’s] wish to be educated,’ and her dependence on sexual artifice that must have left ‘a great emptiness where a t
rue sexuality would have supplied her with a sense of herself as a person,’ ” Steinem wrote. She went on to say that Diana “mourned Marilyn’s lack of friends, ‘especially women, to whose protectiveness her extreme vulnerability spoke so directly. But we were the friends,’ as Trilling said sadly, ‘of whom she knew nothing.’ ”

  In 1999 startling information about Lionel was brought to light, information that Diana had known nothing about. It was kept a secret from her. That year, her son published a detailed twenty-five-page article in The American Scholar called “My Father and the Weak-Eyed Devils.” (The reference is from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and two kinds of devils he describes. One is “the flabby, pretending weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.” This devil is so subtle it hides its nightmarish, foolish qualities and is quite unaware of what it is doing. The other devil is a strong, lusty, greedy one—a “red-eyed devil.”) The article, which had first been accepted by The New Yorker (which requested cuts Jim was unwilling to make), contained both contemporary and historical information that might have changed the course of Diana’s life—or certainly have lightened her burdens—had she been aware of what her son so carefully revealed. “My father’s worst problem was not neurosis,” Jim wrote; “it was a neurological condition, attention deficit disorder,” or ADD. (The term is considered out-of-date, and ADHD or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is the new description, but ADD is a subtype of the condition.)

  Jim went on to explain: “With hindsight, I can see that the failure to recognize medical problems was a recurring theme in my parents’ lives. Disorders of the mind cast a shadow over both of them, skewing their vision.… Above all, it was their allegiance to Freud that discouraged them from seeking medical answers when psychological ones, however tortuous, would serve.… They disliked the idea that mental states can have physical causes: it took individual behavior out of the control of the individual.” Jim further made clear that his parents did not reject neurology—but thought of it as a “last resort.”