The Untold Journey, by Natalie Robins (excerpt from chapter 15)

The

UNTOLD

JOURNEY The Life of Diana g n i l l i r T

N AT A L I E R O B I N S

The

UNTOLD

JOURNEY

BOOKS BY NATALIE ROBINS Savage Grace (coauthored with Steven M. L. Aronson) Alien Ink: The FBI’s War on Freedom of Expression The Girl Who Died Twice: The Libby Zion Case and the Hidden Hazards of Hospitals Living in the Lightning: A Cancer Journal Copeland’s Cure: Homeopathy and the War Between Conventional and Alternative Medicine

Poetry Wild Lace My Father Spoke of His Riches The Peas Belong on the Eye Level Eclipse

The

UNTOLD

JOURNEY The Life

of Diana g n i l l i r T

N AT A L I E R O B I N S

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2017 Natalie Robins All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Robins, Natalie S. Title: The untold journey : the life of Diana Trilling / Natalie Robins.

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016040242 (print) | LCCN 2017000065 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231182089 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231544016 (electronic) Subjects: LCSH: Trilling, Diana. | Authors, American—20th century—Biography.

Classification: LCC PS3539.R55 Z85 2017 (print) | LCC PS3539.R55 (ebook) | DDC 818/.5409 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040242

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky Cover photograph: Thomas Victor

For my son, Noah Lehmann-Haupt For my daughter, Rachel Lehmann-Haupt For my grandson, Alexander Louis Lehmann-Haupt

}

CONTENTS

Preface

ix

1. E S C A P E I N T O F I C T I O N

1

2. U N D E RTA K I N G S

19

3. P R O L E G O M E N O N

37

4. I S O L AT I O N

AND

5. T H E R E S T

D E S P E R AT I O N

55

OUR LIVES

71

6. T H E G R E AT E S T S E RV I C E

85

OF

7. T H E N AT I O N C A L L S 8. N O T M E R E LY

A

99

CRITIC’S WIFE

9. G L O W I N G

129

113

C O N TE N TS

VI I I

10. O H B E B R AV E

147

11. G U I LT M A K E S U S H U M A N 12. W E AV I N G

179

13. S U B V E R S I V E S E X 14. A L I M I T E D K I N D 15. A T

A

OF

161

197

CELEBRITY

TABLE

245

16. J U S T C L O S E Y O U R E Y E S 17. N O T G I V I N G

A

DAMN

18. H ER O WN P LACE 19. R E - C R E AT I O N

AND

263 283

303

I M A G I N AT I O N

EPILOGUE: ARCADIA

345

Acknowledgments 357 Source Notes 363 Selected Bibliography 381 Index 385

217

325

AT

A

T ABLE

253

audience. She wanted her letter passed on to the executives in charge.

Mr. Beutel took three months to reply and then told Diana he had indeed passed along her letter but knew of no action taken “one way or another.” But he, himself, he wrote her, was moving to London in ten days to become the London correspondent for ABC News and was planning to read her article on British TV in preparation for his new job.

Jimmy Breslin, as far as it is known of the incident, just went on being Jimmy Breslin, never evading the reality that Diana in fact thought American TV should show more of.

Diana wanted to continue writing at length about issues and events that had social significance. She had not paid much attention to the 1960s counterculture—the social pressures involving authority, warfare, women’s rights, and the unfolding of the New Left. Antiestablishment events were widespread in the United States and Britain, with much of the dissent centered in London, New York, and Berkeley, California, where the Free Speech Movement was conceived.

Diana decided to look in her own backyard, especially after her return from Oxford. The Columbia University protests of 1968, in which students occupied five buildings to protest the Vietnam War—specifically the university’s affi liation with an armaments research think tank— were ripe for Trilling’s pen. The students also opposed the university’s plans for a new gymnasium that they argued would be segregated by limiting its access to Harlem’s African American residents, even though it was to be built on public land.

The Columbia Spectator’s editorial page announced on the second day of the student demonstrations, “The bedraggled and apparently bewildered administrators seem to make a wrong decision every time an opportunity presents itself.” The student paper reported that there was not even “a glimmer of intelligent action.” Diana was appalled by the events. By day three, the paper reported, plainclothes police hiding billy clubs under their clothing charged a line of faculty members, but by the following day a preliminary panel of faculty members had been formed to help deal with the growing crisis.

Lionel, at the time the George Edward Woodberry Professor of Literature and Criticism (in 1970 he would become a University Professor,

254

AT

A

T ABLE

Columbia’s highest honor), was one of twelve faculty members hoping to find a basis for a speedy settlement with the students. Diana remembered that “nobody looked to anybody on this committee as a moral leader except for one person: Lionel.” No faculty member could walk through the streets without a police escort. “Lionel resented being brought home by the police,” Diana said, adding that “I’ve never seen Lionel so exhilarated as he was—that’s from the very first morning after he came home after being up all night. . . . He slept for two hours, got up and went back and was up for the next twenty-four hours. And he wasn’t the least bit tired.” She commented that “everybody was having a good time if you want to put it uglily. I mean a university was being destroyed; many careers were destroyed in those weeks. . . . Even someone as serious as Lionel was having a good time. It was exciting. It was like being on the barricades. . . . It was like being in the army. . . . And Lionel admitted this to me all the time. He never used the words ‘having a good time,’ but he really got a kick out of it. . . . They had a sense of living intensely and of living in a critical situation in which important decisions had to be made on the spot.” But the mildly conciliatory solutions of his—and another larger—committee were not accepted by the administration, and a thousand police were called in to oust the students by force.

It was treacherous and violent. Blood had been shed. There was a faculty strike. Classes were cancelled. But within days the president of Columbia, Grayson Kirk, ordered all police off the campus, and over time, the university began to consider restructuring. A university Senate—one including faculty, administrators, and students—was created.

Some of the student demands were met—the gym was never built—and the students were promised better communication with the administration. The relationship between the university and Harlem improved.

The university severed all ties to the military. Peace, of a sort, prevailed, although the university’s reputation (and fund-raising efforts) plummeted for a long while afterward.

Did the university become too liberal as a result of the highly publicized student disturbances? Did it lose its center as a place of intellectual debate? These were two of the questions that Diana decided to tackle in an essay about the Columbia protests. She cited John Dewey’s definition

AT

A

T ABLE

255

of manners as “small morals” and went on to say that “a significant part of my opposition to the uprising derives from my translation of its manners into morals.” She said that her goal was “to generate some serious discussion on the problem of the future of liberalism in democracies.”

She wanted The New Yorker to be her publisher, although she admitted to editor William Shawn that she had an arrangement with The Atlantic, but they wanted a piece drastically shorter than the one she had in mind. But Shawn passed, even though the essay was not yet finished.

She hoped then that the completed piece could be published in Harper’s, but Midge Decter, an editor there, told her that as “splendid and full of spine and care” as it was, the magazine would not be able to use it. And despite her telling Diana that she didn’t think Commentary would be able to use it either, because they had already commissioned such an article, the magazine (edited by her husband, Norman Podhoretz) did indeed publish Diana’s essay.

Diana began her essay, which she titled “On the Steps of Low Library,” by explaining why she borrowed Norman Mailer’s title for his piece in Harper’s called “The Steps of the Pentagon” (later published in book form as The Armies of the Night). Diana said that “the two events, Mailer’s and the university’s, were continuous with each other in political and moral style.” She concluded that the revolution at Columbia “was no more a liberal than a Marxist revolution and that, indeed, it was a revolution against liberalism, which in actual effect polarized the University between the radical position . . . and a conservative position.” She wondered whether liberalism still mattered or had gone as far as it could. She explained no further.

Norman Mailer’s name is a leitmotif throughout Trilling’s sweeping, detailed examination of the uprising. Very few people found fault with the essay, except for its exceptional length, and one person, she said, criticized her for never joining the March on the Pentagon in the fall of 1967. In a letter she explained that although she was against the war, “I cannot make a united front with the anti-Americanism which provides the overarching principle of all ‘active’ protest of our Vietnam engagement, nor adopt its strategies. . . . Most important of all, I will not march under the flag of the Viet Cong.”

256

AT

A

T ABLE

Her essay elicited several harsh letters from Robert Lowell, who thought Diana was “not too much on target” and that “all’s twisted in the current of ignorant, unseeing didacticism, in the rattled sentences.”

In a follow-up letter he told her that her article was “haunted with apprehension,” as well as “bristling with the professional logic of prosecution.” He ended by telling Diana that “controversy is bad for the mind and worse for the heart.” Naturally, she did not agree.

In a letter she wrote to The New York Review of Books, about an essay

by F. W. Dupee on the uprisings, she faulted Dupee for not announcing in his “first person account” that “he had decided to leave the campus and the city at that time because of his disgust with the behavior of the revolutionary students.” She knew this because he had phoned her to tell her that he was leaving town for a few days. She said that anyone reading the piece would not have guessed its author had any doubts about the conduct of the students. He should have included his reservations in his essay and mentioned that he was so disgusted by what was happening at Columbia that he left the city for a while. But in the end, she decided not to send the letter.

In 1969 Diana and Lionel moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a year when Lionel became the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, which required that he deliver a series of lectures. Once again, as in Oxford five years earlier, they had excellent housing, staying in one of the three or four oldest houses in Cambridge. Their residence the first semester belonged to Mason Hammond, a well-known Harvard professor of Latin and the history of Rome. Diana loved the house, especially that every room had a fireplace, and she did her best to keep the rooms fi lled with guests and comforting fires. “To have a fireplace in New York demanded either more bohemianism or more wealth than Lionel and I could ever attain,” she wrote in an unpublished book. On trips out of Manhattan she always liked looking at houses in the country and often secretly remodeled them in her mind. She knew that she and Lionel would never be homeowners. Lionel noted in his journal, “My first sense of being poor came the year I spent at Harvard— so many instances of inherited wealth. At Columbia this is very rare.”