American Lives and Letters/Life With Lionel

...As a veteran of decades and decades of psychoanalysis, the octogenarian memoirist clearly believes that this was so...

...Son," he said at last, "don't you think that a man in your position owes it to himself to have a tailor-made suit...

...Lionel's mother was "strikingly selfish and self-concerned in her rearing of her son, cruelly insensitive to his young pride...

...Yet he wished with all his heart that fate had dealt him a different hand to play...

...How much he existed in my mind—as a reproach...

...I wanted him to be the chaperon my father had been...

...Any kind of action," Mrs...

...In 1950, three years after the appearance of Trilling's one and only novel, The Middle of the Journey, the New Yorker published Lillian Ross's profile of Hemingway's recent visit to New York...

...Lionel's sister, Harriet, would bring her breakfast in bed around nine or ten, and sometimes Lionel would...

...She begins by quoting the despairing words he set down in his journal in 1933, at age 28, after his friend Clifton Fadiman had shown him a letter he had received from Ernest Hemingway: A crazy letter, written when he was drunk—self-revealing, arrogant, scared, trivial, absurd: yet felt from reading it how right such a man is compared to the "good minds" of my university life—how he will produce and mean something to the world...

...Is it any wonder that in some of his most compelling essays he wrote about literary heroes—Huck Finn was one of them and the "dingy little London bookbinder" in Henry James's The Princess Casamassima was another—who also were torn apart by the morally critical decisions with which they were faced...

...T rilling lived, in short, in a world of ideas...

...Medical and psychiatric bills massively compounded their financial problems...

...The prospect of foreign travel—of being removed, that is, from familiar surroundings—likewise filled Lionel with dread...

...More royalist than the king, the author of The Beginning of the Journey declares on page two that "I am reality-bound," as she sets out to destroy the image of Lionel Trilling as someone immune to profanation...

...Mark's...

...Trilling demonstrates in her account of their treatment of Norman Podhoretz and his success-oriented autobiographical volume Making It...

...Trilling portrays her husband's acute unhappiness at not being able to break away from academia and make a career as a novelist...

...Even though he finally managed to acknowledge that she played an important part in encouraging him as a writer, "there remained a hard primitive core of hostility in his relation to her...

...When for any reason she was left alone, she felt strangely uneasy...

...Following the second of two major operations for this life-threatening condition, she The American Spectator February 1994 67 steadily regained her strength, but never wholly regained her health...

...She made great difficulty for us in the early crucial years of our marriage...

...In a voice that was tense with bitterness he exclaimed, "And you expect me to be a novelist...

...Nevertheless, there was much to love and respect in her, in Diana's opinion...

...yet he had to support his parents and his sister, as well as his wife, who was chronically ill...

...War, politics, business, finance: all of these were for Lionel the 'real' world...

...Although it was usually directed at his wife, Lionel grew up in its "savage orbit...

...If it had not been for the money Diana's father left her, "we would have sunk under the weight of our indebtedness...

...In his middle years, he had a drinking problem, in the sense that the negligible amounts of alcohol that he consumed were sufficient to alter his behavior in unfortunate ways...

...In the early days of his editorship of Commentary, Podhoretz was on the left...

...Trilling remembers...

...Political congeniality, however, did not deter his circle of liberal friends and I Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling...

...H er own emotional problems sur- faced in the summer of 1929...

...Trilling's choices in these matters led to an important life, but left him with a devastating awareness of a lack of inner freedom...

...had a day in which I felt wholly well...

...Trilling declaring that grace, moderation, and good• manners are not the qualities for which herhusband would have most wished to be remembered, for they had "little bearing" on his thought and they spoke "not at all" to his essentially tragic view of life...

...1 n light of this widespread agreement about Trilling's nature, it comes as a shock to find Mrs...

...Creative writing versus criticism...

...how his life which he could expose without dignity and which is anarchic and "childish" is a better life than anyone I know could live, and right for his job...

...Consequently, "I had nothing to fill my days and, like an unhappy adolescent, I stayed in bed half the mOrning...

...As she lay in bed waiting for sleep, she was overwhelmed by terror...

...In dealing with the politics of the left, he repeatedly rejected its constructs of the contemporary social world and its dreams of achievable social perfection as denials of the complexity and variousness of life...

...I respected him in his most foolish postures and in his worst work (except The Old Man and the Sea...

...And how farfar-far I am going from being a writer—and how less and less I have the material and the mind and the will...

...acquaintances from setting upon him, once Making It appeared, like a pack of wild dogs in a Jack London story...

...Throughout this entire period of psychological crisis, she also was afflicted by physical problems, of which the worst was a severe hyperthyroidism...

...Alas, he never again earned a reliable living...

...I have, in fact, never since...

...66 The American Spectator February 1994 F or starters, she tells us that he was "maddened by his father's unreality...

...Dictates of impulse versus calls of conscience...

...Kenneth S. Lynn is the author of Hemingway and is currently at work on a book on the life and times of Charlie Chaplin...

...I wanted him," she finally blurts out, "to be more like my father...

...As her infuriated husband raised his arm to chastise his questioner, she restrained him—"perhaps mistakenly," she adds, for neither old age nor blindness has dimmed the proverbial intransigence of her spirit...

...Trilling's memoir, I believe, is that her husband's willingness to take issue with the left's incorrigible wish for an unconditioned universe began at home, so to speak...

...She wanted Lionel to be with her always...

...Further panics attacked her thereafter with demoralizing frequency, and her fear of being alone entrenched itself...

...Lionel all but flung the magazine at me," Mrs...

...As for Diana's relationship with Dave, she "disliked almost everything about him"—his pieties, his hypochondria, his self-absorption, his trivial conceits, and most of all, his self-pity...

...Trilling's arguments about the extent to which cultural Stalinism had dominated supposedly enlightened thinking in America in the years before the Second World War...

...He was the only writer of our time I envied...

...Yet she leaves no doubt of her distaste for the insensate nature of the assaults on Podhoretz...

...At table, the parents communicated through the children...

...Bizarrely enough, he "enjoyed" the clamorous student rebellion at Columbia in the late sixties, for as a member of a three-man faculty committee to deal with the emergency, he was on campus around the clock for three days, returning home to sleep for only an hour or two...

...Harcourt Brace & Company, 442 pp., $24.95...

...Only a reader of his journal could have known of the professor's anguished belief that the booze-haunted, arrogant, scared life of the author of In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises was a "better life than anyone I know could live...

...Not until 1970—when they were in their mid-sixties!—did they pay off the last of their loans...

...Reality was the watchword of his writing and the test by which he measured the intellectual soundness of the life-view that engaged him above all others: the liberal imagination...

...The first thing we are supposed to understand about Mrs...

...As a young man who came of age in the high noon of the speakeasy era, 1926, Trilling, too, was "frequently...

...Professor Lionel Trilling, after all, had a reputation for grace, moderation, and good manners to maintain...

...Trilling's view, he took pains to conceal from his worshipful admirers the human fallibilities that ultimately drove him into psychoanalysis and kept him there for the rest of his days...

...Not for nothing had the grace, moderation, and good manners of Professor Trilling become a perennial topic of conversation in Morningside Heights cafeterias...

...Behind Kazin's rudeness, it would appear, lay a resentment of Mrs...

...Trilling knows, he never wrote a letter to someone while under the influence, certainly not to a stranger, as Fadiman was a stranger to Hemingway...

...In her financial dependence upon us, she was more than selfish, greedy...

...Trilling writes, "had a special charm for him...

...Because he and Diana "were af,raid to be fully grown up and to be in command of ourselves and others," they put off having a child (who is all but totally ignored in this memoir) until the twentieth year of their marriage...

...Toward the end of his life, she sneeringly reports, he "thought himself surrounded by murderous enemies...

...The spring of 1933 was a particularly bad time...

...They both lacked "good sense," Mrs...

...Her father had died a few months before, and she was politically bereft as well...

...drunk," according to The Beginning of the Journey...

...Over the years they constantly borrowed money to stay afloat...

...But so far as Mrs...

...One day, he bought himself a much-needed suit, at Macy's, for $29.95...

...71 68 The American Spectator February 1994...

...Once, in Venice, she exasperatedly handed him a stack of guidebooks and demanded that he arrange their schedule for the day, only to hear him propose at the end of half an hour that they might visit St...

...Were his "unprovoked rages" at Diana circuitously connected to his feelings about his mother...

...From the reviews," she writes, "one might have supposed that he had written Mein Kampf" That Lionel Trilling also distanced himself from the piling on was not merely because Podhoretz had been one of his most brilliant students at Columbia...

...Similar attacks of paralysis occurred whenever he dined in a restaurant...

...Trilling admits, as she recalls the three-rib roasts of beef that they served to friends in the depths of the Depression...

...Wickedness versus decency...

...they lacked magnanimity and often they lacked common courtesy," Diana Trilling recalls in her startling memoir of her marriage to the celebrated literary critic Lionel Trilling.' Once at a Partisan Review party, she came up behind her husband just in time to block his physically violent response to the critic Alfred Kazin's intolerably insulting demand, "When are you going to dissociate yourself from that wife of yours...

...At times, the combativeness of the intellectuals crossed the line into viciousness, as Mrs...

...Out of painful grapplings with his own complexity and variousness in a context of excruciatingly difficult family relationships, he developed his sense of life as a tragedy...

...In another heartless sentence, she lets us know that en route by ambulance to the nursing home where he would die, he wept and screamed the whole way...

...For when he went to college, his parents had never required him, despite their straitened circumstances, to contribute in any way to the cost of his education...

...Here at last was "real" life...

...Yet she at least was willing to face up to the responsibility of paying bills at the end of the month and verifying bank balances, whereas Lionel took no interest in such matters...

...Whether or not he would ultimately have welcomed the compliment, a good many of his judgments were pioneering expressions of neoconservative criticism...

...Moreover, she wanted him to be more commanding, more in charge ofher...

...Except Lawrence's death 32 years ago, no writer's death has moved me as much—who would suppose how much he haunted me...

...Lionel, ask your father if he wants another piece of chicken...

...Trilling concedes...

...That night, his father looked it over...

...n a journal entry of 1949 or thereabouts, Trilling referred to his "continuing sense that wickedness—or is it my notion of courage—is essential for creation...

...His financial innocence was symbolic of other disconnections from life...

...I tried to be grateful for his kindness," she writes, "but in my heart I accused him, as I accused Harriet, of invaliding me...

...As a consequence of Lionel's birth, Dave Trilling had relinquished his tailoring business to become a manufacturer of men's fur-lined coats because he didn't wish his son to have to say that his father was a tailor...

...There were "many contradictions" in his character, she insists, even though they may not have been visible in the classroom or in casual social encounters...

...It was a pitilessly accurate portrait of a magnificent wreck of a man who talked in pseudo-Indianchief English in between heroic intakes of champagne and whiskey...

...Upon being presented with a menu, he would infallibly order something he didn't want...

...In a self-pitying elaboration of her marital woes, she declares that her sensitive-looking husband, whom their close friends thought of as the most peaceable of men and most devoted of husbands, indulged in "annihilating verbal assaults" on her...

...But not in Lionel's...

...It was the summer of their marriage, and she and Lionel were living in a hilltop cabin in Westport, Connecticut...

...Unfortunately, in Mrs...

...Trilling's wonderfully endowed mind had led him into a life of intellectual dedication, but "in the dark recesses of his heart where unhappiness was so often his companion," he was "contemptuous" of his achievements, his widow assures us...

...Did Lionel, one wonders, sense how she felt, even as he was waiting on her...

...These qualities of his personality and even of his work were noted not only by the colleagues who revered him and the students who turned him into a father figure, but by hostile critics like the poet Delmore Schwartz, who regarded gentility as indicative of a wish to evade the harsher realities of social experience...

...Trilling's obsession with Hemingway surfaced again in his journal on July 3, 1961: Death of Ernest Hemingway...

...For after an enthralling involvement in the Communist movement—to which she and Lionel had been converted two years earlier by the redoubtable Sidney Hook—they had both become disillusioned...

...In the most arresting pages of The Beginning of the Journey, Mrs...

...When in later years he and Diana went together, she had to make all the arrangements, from hotel and restaurant reservations to sightseeing plans...

...He accused her of being the worst person he had ever met and of having ruined his life, while she in turn was sure that whenever he fell for no perceptible reason into an extreme bleakness of mood he acted toward her as though she were the cause of all his descents into despondency...

...In part, their own improvidence, especially about expenditures for food, was to blame for their need for deficit financing...

...A few—very few—more years and the chance will be gone...

...Making It "was a crudely boastful book," Mrs...

...On the trips to Europe that he finally began to make in his forties, he went alone and did next to no sightseeing, preferring instead to visit English literary acquaintances...

...In the early days of the Great Depression, Lionel was a lowly college instructor on annual appointment...

...Two years later, she experienced her first full-blown panic...

...Another of Dave's charms was his violent temper...

...And never had, she further states...

...But they have their place, she implacably concludes, in "our understanding of why he wrote as he did...