Diana Trilling on Manners and Morals

...Despite the most conscientious effort to illuminate the life of another person-or perhaps because of it-often the life we really learn about is the author's own...

...The discovery and use of a New York Times article lauding the house built by the couple's Palm Beach hostess produces such gems as the "perfectionist" Mrs...

...And she was a distinguished educator...

...But what enrages her most is his esthetic pretentiousness...

...The apostrophic contractions, sometimes following each other in quick succession, have the effect on her prose of a tic on a handsome face: "She'd not been feeling out the possibility of a party...

...Bayley s masterful study without a shudder about the journalistic cop-outs that contributed to making the nightmare called McCarthyism" - Daniel Schorr Joe McCarthy and the Press Edwin R. Bayley $16.50 at your bookstore, or write University of Wisconsin Press 114 N. Murray St., Madison, Wl 5371S [Wis...

...After such a long residence on the moral and intellectual heights of Morningside, Trilling has had to do some explaining of her sensational undertaking...

...My daughter's headmistress wept aloud before her assembled pupils over the dishonor brought on the school by two girls who had chatted out their window with a telephone lineman on a pole...

...Here was a man who could break his engagement to Mrs...

...Frequently the author's purpose seems to be to avoid using the American 'would' where the English say 'should,' which in America might be ambiguous, possibly meaning "ought to...

...made his public connection with a non-Jewish woman...

...How much that says to anyone who has read Romain Gary's fierce elephant-saving novel, Roots of Heaven...

...Harris had been subtly snubbed in the real "society" of Grosse Point, Michigan...

...Whoever had known sexual jealousy...

...She'd never put the shawl near the sliding glass doors...

...And she with her faithful lesbian partner did not have the excuse of unrequited love...

...At one point Mrs...

...All these people, as the book shows them, seem to be politically and socially insensitive or totally unaware...

...The case "forced upon us a fresh realization that behind the contained and orderly lives we lead as members of the respectable middle class there's a terrible capacity that may one day overwhelm any of us...

...The scathing description of Dr...

...residents add 4% sales tax} Gentiles ("less energy, less color, less brains, less sex [how does she know], less life itself,"), but her social diagrams are too clearcut to hold human beings...

...In another of her many epigrams she comments: "Little wonder he became a diet doctor: he was a glutton for other people's vulnerabilities...

...When published in Commentary the article drew furious letters to the editor...

...Tarnower is pictured as climbing upward through a rigid class structure that divides Jew from Jew, finally getting into the German-Jewish Century Country Club of Purchase...

...There was the "unspoken assumption...

...Harris" star quality," yet is able to have it both ways:" I put her in the company of large persons in literature, but it would be wrong to leave her without emphasizing the ordinariness in which her extraordinariness begins...

...In a corridor conversation with an obviously partisan expert witness she asks a question implying (and it gives him pause) that his acceptance of a fee belies his claim to following his conscience...

...The poem is an endless listing of female names, suggesting the insatiability of Tarnower's ever-ready libido...

...The book is full of other unexpected bonuses...

...Harris up to a stature worthy of that word, so strictly used by academics, dropping Dr...

...She accepted the proof of Hiss' guilt brought by Ralph DeToledano and Victor Lasky in their Seeds of Treason, but was revolted by the reactionary assumptions that motivated them and most other anti-Hiss partisans...

...Still, the assumptions underlying some of her statements are astounding...

...Long-married couples balance their checkbooks as a substitute for love-making, or they refuse each other love by protesting one another's financial error or excess...

...Harris described herself as the occupant of an empty chair...

...By joining him, Mrs...

...had known madness and had now to know sympathy for someone who had been carried by jealousy this one terrible step too far, to murder...

...Trilling, practiced and sure, knows what she is doing...

...1 wanted to know what went on between these two people...

...Not that we should have been surprised about a high charge of emotion building up in a girls' boarding school...

...Harris wrote for "Hi" and their Palm Beach holiday hosts, the mention of switches was not, Trilling is sure, either accidental or innocent...

...adds to one's vulnerability...

...In a frenzy of boredom a young reporter " begins to pluck her golden hairs from her head, one at a time, and distribute them on the collars of the men within her reach...

...Speaking of Mrs...

...It was not an ordinary shooting...

...Yet Trilling herself in this book for the first time has adopted a mannerism, so intrusive it hardly can be ignored, that seems distinctly Anglophile...

...The materials she has to work with are too coarse...

...When Diana Trilling first heard of the bloody killing of Herman Tarnow-er in his Westchester bedroom her "initial reaction was one of unqualified sympathy" for his accused murderer, the headmistress of Miss Madeira's School in Virginia...

...On television Trilling has said she was drawn by simple curiosity...

...And in a complementary analysis of Mrs...

...Dr...

...Before Hitler raised consciousness, "The East European Tarnower might never have...

...As a fellow faculty wife with Trilling for 20 years at Columbia University, I knew she was a forceful woman...

...Harris is its flashes of humor...

...Robert Lowell's vivid flights of sarcasm, along with her eloquent answers, are reprinted in We Must March My Darlings...

...She took her lumps from both sides...

...Perhaps the sums she was receiving made her uneasy...

...What erotic magic gave such holding power to a 69-year-old "creature" for whom a new word, "vulpine," was added to the Westchester vocabulary...

...To me, this just doesn't seem true as I look back on my history and my friends...

...Snobbery turns out to explain a great deal, from the original need of the two leading players for each other to the lawyer Joel Aurnou's misconceived defense that depended on his client's status as a "lady...

...I worked for the old Life, whose "humor," before my era, depended heavily on ridiculing Jews, along with doctors and other easy objects of derision...

...Harris with the explanation: "I didn't want to worry about the retirement home your mother was in I didn't want to watch you die of cancer...

...At a time when, as Alfred Ka-zin puts it in New York Jew, "the lies of Stalinists and the blood lust of super-Americans, yelled down everything else," she dared to write "A Memorandum on the Hiss Case...

...Facts must bend to our needs, and a fact once bent has the consoling shape of permanence...

...Upon at last gaining access to the scene of the murder (she lacked the daily reporters experienced brashness in pushing through closed doors), Trilling is scornful of Tarnower's taste...

...She sees in Mrs...

...Not that she concedes true superiority to the No one who cares about liberty will read Mr...

...By virtue of his sexual unreliability," Trilling tells us, "he became the moral equivalent of an artist...

...By the end of the trial, Trilling has such mixed feelings that we can almost take seriously her prefatory confession of a tendency to the "belief that whoever spoke last spoke best...

...Trilling also has written about the women's liberation movement with an objectivity that could hardly satisfy any faction, pro or anti...

...Harris had been able to live with triangles...

...For he, it seems, having actually published a book, had laid claim to the lifestyle he thought of as Bohemian...

...Though in writing Mrs...

...let the refractions fall where they may...

...In addition to her skill in fine discrimination, Trilling brings an intense empathy to the painful account of how Mrs...

...It was the unlikeliness of the case that attracted her attention, and ours too, of course...

...She tries to build Mrs...

...A delightful new development in Mrs...

...Even if by now, on television, Trilling is able to give ready, understandable reasons for covering the trial, the book suggests considerable worry over whether the task was "ghoulish," "an exploitation of a terrible personal tragedy...

...About Jean Harris's material longings she reflects: "In extended love affairs, as in marriage, money readily becomes the repository of exhausted or unrealized desires...

...He'd in recent years firmed up an alliance with Lynne Tryforos...

...Courage is a way of life for Diana Trilling...

...for Jean Harris to be regarded as embattled female spirit...

...Probably, it is Trilling's effort to make the book itself the answer to any lingering question-especially her own- as to the job's validity that impels her to deep and extensive analysis of the motivations of all the characters in the courtroom drama...

...Schulte finding "just the right plastic plants for her husband's favorite elephant's foot...

...An old-line feminist...

...She pronounces often on money...

...Ultimately, Diana Trilling's best talents, her fine discriminations, are largely wasted here...

...she had not let her own personality and talent be submerged in the career of her husband Lionel, whose fame she ardently promoted...

...What needs had he taught this smart, pretty, accomplished woman that would make her abase herself so dismally, beg to come crawling back to him, as Mrs...

...Harris' ability to fool herself: "She avoids an untruth until it has reached her consciousness as truth...

...Trilling, alas, never learned the sexual secrets she say s make up " the untold story of almost all lives...

...After all evidence Trilling has presented, it appears that her quotation from Anthony Powell sums up the case: "When I read about crimes passionels in the papers, I am struck not by the richness of the emotions, but by their desperate poverty Underneath, is an abject egotism and lack of imagination...

...What this should have taught us??and would have been well for Trilling to consider-was the abysmal lack of security that lies deep in everyone not just teachers in Grosse Pointe or Jews in Scarsdale...

...Harris could hobnob with the rich and neatly solve her own problems of inferiority...

...Many writers reveal themselves unintentionally...

...Tarnower's diet is a joyful interlude...

...Or, "Mrs...

...There is a sense in which these two," says Trilling, "are beneficiaries of Nazism...

...She must even have taken a veiled pleasure in them??after all, no woman alternates her bed with another woman out of a generous heart...

...No one wants to step out of the parade long enough to wonder why females for centuries have accepted an inferior status, even in cultures where they were the warriors, armed with power...

...But nothing had prepared me for the revelations of these statements and such others as, "refusal to face the facts may be the best guardian of marriage provided us by nature...

...For the "vain, inflated, self-important" doctor had mainly British publications in his waiting room...

...Harris' weakness: "Narcissism doesn't replenish the selfhood of a grown person, it empties it...

...nor might it have been possible for Jean Harris to have attached herself as she did to a Jewish man-the choice wasn't available before the forties...

...Our hostess spoke in horror of the notorious wedding, asking us, two humble scene painters, to share her shock at this social disaster...

...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" Oh, what a risk an honest writer takes...

...I had read some of her literary and political essays...

...Quibbles about "distinguished" aside, moredetailsof this'Mong-time adult relationship"-as it was termed by general courtroom agreement-might well have been useful...

...In an imaginary monologue by the mother of a Madeira student, advising her daughter on what to wear for her court appearance, Trilling shows a gift for biting social satire...

...Harris at his side, his continued social advance must have been assured...

...I am not trying to negate prewar anti-Semitism...

...When the Madeira School board members testify with "steady-voiced understanding" in defense of their headmistress, Trilling responds with possibly overdetermined intensity, " I find this kind of tolerance an annihilation...

...After days of technical testimony from pathologists another neighbor remarks, "Those who do not remember histology are condemned to repeat it...

...As we sat bemused she sighed, "We feel so sorry for the McKays...

...Harris she would see the' 80s as a period in our culture when " violence was achieving a new legitimacy as a form of public assertion," Trilling at that time criticized Mailer (who supported the students) for "supposing that a higher reasonableness will be reached by acts of unreason...

...Tarnower along the way...

...Published originally in Partisan Review and reprinted in her 1964 collection, Claremont Essays, her article rejected the easy reasoning that made Hiss a good guy because his accusers were bad guys...

...Earlier, at the time of Irving Berlin's marriage to Postal Telegraph heiress Ellin McKay, I was in Portland, Maine, the young bride of the set designer for the local repertory company...

...She was saying more than she knew, according to Trilling, who may or not mean the pun when she goes on to explain that her heroine was really talking about "the female body, her body, and explicitly telling us that at bottom it is only unfilled space...

...While believing the testimony of Whittaker Chambers, whom she knew, she declined to see him as a hero, for he had done the same spying he accused Hiss of doing...

...Granted that Trilling knows better than most about anti-Semitism, having been the wife of the first Jew to be permitted-grudgingly, on trial-to join the English faculty of Columbia...

...that she was not to be thought of as a criminal since she had acted rightly and on behalf of all women.'" It was not just ideology, Trilling is quick to admit...

...But, she says, "I think it is fair to guess that it has its sado-masochistic aspects...

...From then on, "with a charming Gentile like Mrs...

...In the long, perversely self-punishing parody of '"Twas the Night Before Christmas" that Mrs...

...On the Steps of Low Library" (echoing the report she admired by Norman Mailer of the march on the Pentagon) describes the 1968 student riots at Columbia...

...It's transfer,' she explains...

...Harris did in the rambling, banal, obscene letter which, when read aloud in court, lost her case...

...If she couldn't make her way among the wasps of the Middle West, she made it beautifully among the Jews of Westchester...

...Although Trilling takes us dutifully through the weeks of the interminable trial (noting unexpected, unsolved mysteries along the way), she lightens the dull stretches with glimpses of her daily newspaper colleagues, who have gradually adopted her into their camaraderie...

...Clearly she has determined she will shine the unsparing light of her intelligence into every dark crevice of human motivation she can reach...

...But her rationalizations may have been haunting her when she described the situation of the prosecuting attorney: "So here we are, the slaves of our commitments, professional no less than emotional...

...Does that mean she never had, or never would...

...We had been asked to create a children's theater on the third floor of one of the town's great houses, and on Sunday were invited to lunch...

...A talented fiction writer has been lost to the world-so far...

...In defense of her project Trilling goes so far as to say, "There was a sense, indeed, in which even the recreation of history was exploitation: to write about the Holocaust was to exploit six million tragedies...

...Her feeling was "widely shared," she says, because, "it had only to be known that Tarnower had replaced his mistress of fourteen years with a woman twenty years his junior...

...Tarnower was a very modern character- famous for writing a book on diet...