The Untold Journey, by Natalie Robins (chapter 12)

The

UNTOLD

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

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him in a letter that “old relationships have a life of their own which is impervious to disruption; one fights, one makes up; one attacks and is forgiven; one is attacked and forgives; one criticizes, one wounds, but there is always a reservoir of faith and affection.” He later wrote in a memoir that Diana “seemed more interested in people’s lives and was usually available for help or advice.” High praise in her estimation.

So she continued to write for Partisan Review and in 1958 published a piece there called “The Other Night at Columbia: A Report from the Academy,” an account of a poetry reading by Allen Ginsberg and two other Beat poets—his longtime lover Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso.

All hell broke loose—on Claremont Avenue—on the campus—in Columbia’s English department—even at Partisan Review. Diana, who never really liked being a faculty wife, was, of course, accused of being condescending to everyone, and worse, being too wordy about it.

“All the fellow travelers rallied around the Beats,” she said, “and said I was being snobby to them.” Jason Epstein, Lionel’s former student, said that the students were always in awe of both Trillings, although he, personally “considered Diana too judgmental.”

In a letter Diana wrote that “in many conversations with William [Phillips] about why Partisan Review did not like my piece about the beat poets, William has spoken about its wrong tone. . . . I think that what he means is that he dislikes the literary expression of my personal, emotional and cultural attitudes. Someone writing to me recently about my beat piece,” she went on, “said of it that ‘its judgments are its feelings.’ . . . The judgments I express in my writing are inseparable from the feelings I express; the judgments are the feelings—and Partisan Review recognizes this integral relation. When the editors speak of my wrong tone, what they are actually saying is that the quality of feeling in my work is alien to them, and that the ideas which generate, or are generated by, this quality of feeling are also alien to them.”

Complaints about Diana the Writer and Diana the Faculty Wife were no longer just whispered. Diana! Diana! What had she done or said that was so horrible? Had she threatened Western civilization? Some faculty members and their spouses were always made nervous in her

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presence, fearing they’d say the wrong thing. One former student of Lionel’s said (only half-jokingly) that “if you weren’t on her wave length, she thought you were a Communist.”

The Partisan Review piece had been considered contentious because of Diana’s snobbish views on the Beats in general (“It was of some note that the auditorium smelled fresh. . . . I took one look at the crowd and was certain it would smell bad, but I was mistaken.”) and on Ginsberg, himself (he was “clean and Corso was clean and Orlovsky was clean”).

Diana had attended the reading with two other faculty wives, Mrs. F. W. Dupee, whose husband was the evening’s moderator, and one other woman she doesn’t mention by name.

Diana had a history with Ginsberg, she explained in her piece, going back to his being a student in one of Lionel’s classes in the mid-1940s and then much later, when Lionel and Mark Van Doren helped him avoid jail (he was sent to a psychiatric hospital instead) after getting arrested for, as it turned out, being a passenger in a car that held stolen goods. (Ginsberg had also been suspended—and then reinstated— from Columbia his senior year after he wrote “Fuck the Jews” and “Butler [Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler] has no balls” in the dust and grime of his dormitory window.)

Diana wove history and more into her piece: a description of several visits Ginsberg made to Thirty-Five Claremont Avenue, references to the range of literary traditions, comments on differences in style in America, references to middle-class life, life in the 1930s, emotions (especially pity), children’s cries, the personalities of poets, the nature of fathers and mothers. She created a tapestry that could both enrage and enrich her readers. This approach would eventually become her trademark and attract not only devoted followers but also critics, including Columbia faculty and spouses. But not her own spouse. Lionel thought “The Other Night at Columbia” was one of her very best essays and often reread it, she said.

In the essay Diana related that when she got home, a meeting of the Readers’ Subscription Book Club was taking place in the living room.

She announced to the assembled and her husband in particular: “Allen

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Ginsberg read a love poem to you, Lionel. I liked it very much.” W. H. Auden, who had been at the meeting, later “chided” her, Diana said, telling her that “I’m ashamed of you.”

Ginsberg had told the audience that a poem called “Lion in the Room” was addressed to and dedicated to Lionel. “It was about a lion in the room with the poet, a lion who was hungry but refused to eat him,” Diana wrote. “I heard it as a passionate love poem. I can’t say whether it was a good or bad poem, but I was much moved by it. It was also a decent poem, and I am willing to admit this surprised me; there were no obscenities in it as there had been in much of the poetry the ‘beats’ read.”

Ginsberg later told writer Lis Harris that it was not a poem about Lionel. “The poem I read that night was one I’d written in Paris about a mystical vision I had about a lion in my living room. It’s called ‘The Lion for Real,’ and begins with a quote from the nineteenth-century French poet Tristan Corbiere: ‘Soyez muette pour moi, Idole contemplative.’

I guess she misheard it. I visited them for years afterward, but I never brought it up; I thought it was better to just let it go.”

Diana’s reaction to Harris when told about the poem was to “shrug” and say “dryly” to her, “Ah was I wrong? He should have told me I was wrong. But in any case, the fact is that that night I was trying to throw a bombshell into the respectability of my home. I was writing from the point of view of somebody who was trying to live in two different worlds—the imaginative world of bad children and the ruling world of good, ordinary grownups.”

All the same, Ginsberg’s father, Louis, also a poet, who was in the audience the night of the reading, wrote Diana that her piece “reveals a wise woman” and that the poem his son read “was indeed a sort of love poem to your husband, whose sympathy and understanding Allen really desires.” He also wrote that “Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren have been household words with Allen and me.”

At a later date, in conversation with her friend Thelma Anderson, Diana talked about Ginsberg’s visit after her piece on the reading was published in Partisan Review. Lionel was either not home or working in a back room, she told Thelma, and as she let Ginsberg into the living room,

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he said very sweetly, “I’ve come to talk to you about the piece you wrote about me in Partisan Review. It hurt my feelings.” And I thought this was very endearing, and I said, “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. In what way did I hurt your feelings?” He said, “Well, you said we were in jeans and that we were dirty.” I said, “Oh, no, no, no, no, I said you were in blue jeans, but I didn’t say you were dirty. I said you were very clean.

I said you were absolutely clean despite the fact that Orlovsky had read a poem about ‘if I shave, the bugs will fly out of my beard.’ Do you remember? I said, ‘Despite this, you were all as clean as you could be and very well-behaved and obviously very happy to be in the academy.’ ” So he said, “I couldn’t afford any clothes but jeans. I had bought these in an army and navy store.” It was as he said that—the talk must have gone on before that maybe ten or fi fteen minutes—that Lionel came into the room, greeted him and said, “Oh come off it, Allen. You know that you could afford to buy a suit in Brooks and why don’t you?” And poor Allen was terribly disconcerted, because he knew he had stolen suits from Brooks.

And then, speaking of her essay, Diana told Thelma, “I had written that [jeans] were standard nursery school attire and they had appeared in proper costume. I got letters and all kinds of attacks: how dared I condescend from my middle-class life to these poets? That was the whole point: that I lived this great upper-middle-class, millionaire middleclass life, and that here I was condescending to Bohemians.” Irony refused. It often became the case with Diana Trilling.

She received several letters from people who had been at the reading and had also read her report on it. One correspondent said that although he was “against” her, and “for” Allen, he “felt that [she] had, in some way, ‘gone naked’ as Allen has challenged people to do. . . . I was touched by your self-exposure . . . even taking us to your house after [the reading].”

In a speech called “The Self as Subject,” which she would deliver decades later, Diana reminisced that the mid-1950s were a time when personal and social facts would have been admired for their truth “if only it had been presented as fiction.” After all, she told her audience,