SOURCE: “Diana Trilling,” in Publishers Weekly, November 1, 1993, pp. 53-54.

[In the following interview, Trilling discusses reviews ofThe Beginning of the Journey, as well as her relationships with her publisher and editor and her writing method.]

Diana Trilling, at 88, is not exactly slowing down. She is almost blind now and moves a little stiffly, but her mind is razor-sharp as ever, her opinions are firmly held and often crusty, and her writing style—as anyone who has read The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling will recognize—remains a model of balanced lucidity.

She receives PW in the spacious ground-floor apartment near Columbia University in New York, where she has lived for nearly 40 years and which she shared for nearly half of that time with her husband Lionel. He was, of course, a noted critic, one of Columbia's most celebrated professors, and her book is partly an account of his life, partly of hers, but mostly of their life together; it is a riveting story of a marriage at the heart of New York literary and intellectual life, a relationship that also had extraordinary personal and financial strains.

Although many of the reviews, frustratingly to her, have concentrated on the political and literary reflections that are certainly part of the book, Trilling is anxious that it be seen as much more than that. “It's not just a book for intellectuals,” she declares firmly, in her clear, implacable tone. “It's a real story of two people and their struggles with family, with money, with career. It's the story of how Lionel was fired and then fought back to become Columbia's most famous professor. And it's also a slice of cultural and social history.

“So many reviews have called ours a sad story. I'd say it was a hard life, but not a sad one. It was filled with incidents, friends. It's just that there wasn't much self-gratification in it, which is what people seem to seek mostly nowadays. Perhaps,” she muses, “everyone's life is much harder than they would want the world to know. In any case, what I wish the critics would talk about more is the writing. It isn't just our story, or a piece of social history, it's also a piece of craft.”

PW's review, she was delighted to note, was one of the few that praised that aspect of the book, and she brightened when told it had just been chosen as one of the best nonfiction books of the year. As a figure whose liberal but strongly anti-communist views tend to discomfit those on at least two sides of the political fence, Mrs. Trilling inspires strong reactions, among leftists and neoconservatives alike. With that in mind, what were the most surprising reviews she had seen so far—both good and bad? “The best was Carolyn Heilbrun in the Boston Globe—a very generous-spirited piece. The most inexplicably angry was Hilton Kramer's in the New Criterion, which goes beyond mere politics to attack me personally as a nasty woman.”

But generally the reviews had not been as political as she feared: “I always expect a lot of attacks from neoconservatives. One of the things that interests me is how political much reviewing is,” adds Trilling, who was for many years a book review editor herself (at the Nation in the 1940s). “Magazines and newspapers define themselves, after all, by their point of view, and they don't want the reviews they publish to go against their position. But the poor people who read the reviews don't know what's behind them—what friendships and enmities inspire them.”

Whatever the vagaries of reviewing, Trilling's publishing history, until very recently, has been a remarkably blessed one, thanks to William Jovanovich, who became her publisher in the 1970s. “He's been so supportive, so trusting,” she says. “I'm only sorry Lionel never enjoyed such a relationship with a publisher”—though, ironically, it is thanks to Jovanovich that Lionel Trilling's major works, edited by Mrs. Trilling, are now out in a uniform Harcourt collected edition.

“Neither of us ever used an agent,” Trilling says. “When we were very young we tried to get one, but no one would handle us. Then later it didn't seem to be necessary. I've seen young friends trying to get one, and it seems sometimes more trouble than trying to find a publisher; I wonder why they should bother.” She adds with some asperity: “I've also seen several people become agents who it seemed to me had very little training, or literary ability. It seems very unsound that they should be advising someone on how to handle a literary career.”

Her association with Jovanovich began unforgettably. “I was publishing my first book, Claremont Essays , with what was then Harcourt Brace & World, and had a very strong discord with my editor there. But I was committed to the publisher. I heard that the new head of the company was William Jovanovich, so I wrote him, asking if he would please release me from the contract. He wrote back immediately. In the first paragraph he released me from the contract. In the second he invited me to become a Harcourt Brace Jovanovich author, and invited me to Lutèce to celebrate. There, he told me he would be glad to publish, sight unseen, anything Lionel or I wrote.”

The promise came in handy when a political quarrel interrupted the publishing progress of Mrs. Trilling's next book, We Must March My Darlings, which was about a return to Radcliffe nearly 50 years after she had been a student there; it developed into a series of essays examining issues of the time. One of them involved a skeptical discussion of Lillian Hellman and her book Scoundrel Time—and unfortunately, Trilling's publisher, Little, Brown, was also Hellman's, and there was little doubt which author had more commercial clout. Trilling insists that she had pointed out the passage to her LB editor at the time, and had been assured there was no problem. “It was only four sentences, but I knew Hellman would have been so enraged she would have broken off with Little, Brown.” In fact LB ultimately came to the same conclusion, and asked Trilling to delete the offending passage. When she refused, they voided the contract and she took the manuscript to Jovanovich.

Her next book was a decided departure. Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor was a combination of true-crime reportage, courtroom drama and reflections on the role of women in a male-dominated society. Trilling was fascinated by the case: Jean Harris, headmistress of an exclusive Virginia girls' school, was accused of murdering her lover, Herman Tarnower, author of a phenomenally successful diet book. She had written most of the book before Harris even came to trial, examining its many social, psychological and sexual aspects. The verdict, in which Harris was convicted and jailed, was so unexpected that Trilling had to rewrite the book almost entirely. It became her first, and so far only, bestseller.

There then followed years of editing her husband's papers, in the course of which Trilling grew wary of two possible eventualities: the first was that Lionel, with his grace, fluency and apparent affability, might easily be misjudged by posterity, and she wished to remind people of the many contradictions in his personality, including his depressions and his “essentially tragic view of life”; the second was that she felt sure that “in our current spate of biographical writing,” someone might hit upon their marriage as a possible subject, so she wanted, in effect, to launch a pre-emptive strike, and ensure that “the undertaking was more solidly rooted in truth than was likely were the biographers dependent on existing sources.” After all, she notes in the foreword to The Beginning of the Journey, “There are now few people alive with even a partially reliable knowledge of our lives as they really were.”

Now that she has delivered her own version of those lives, she says, she will open the archive of Trilling papers at Columbia in the New Year. “I haven't necessarily had the last word. Anyone can look into it now, and form their own impression.”

Since she began to lose her sight several years ago, and now has only limited peripheral vision—she can read only very large print—work on the book taxed her severely. Once again, Jovanovich came through. “When my eyesight failed, he said I should get a good secretary, pay a good salary, and he would pay half.” And that's how she wrote the book, dictating largely from memory, since “I can't do research now, I have to do things that come out of my head.”

She found writing by dictation a strange experience. “We use our eyes so much when we write, looking back at the last sentence unconsciously as we think of the next, seeing how far we have come, where we are on the page. Not to be able to see where you are is annihilating—you have to have a personal intermediary.” And though she couldn't brook commentary or criticism from her amanuensis, “what you write inevitably gets filtered through the consciousness of whoever is writing it down. You instinctively seek the approval of the person to whom you're dictating, and it changes the way you phrase things.”

How does she manage? “I find my sense of touch vastly developed after my eyes started to go. I choose things by their texture—for instance, I chose these black stockings this morning because I knew how they felt. And I can still cook for myself, and for friends sometimes, though I used to be a very good cook, and I don't think it's so good now.”

When the manuscript was delivered, what she calls “the new Harcourt” instantly stopped paying for its share of her secretary's time, “so I can now have her only for the time I can afford to pay for.” Jovanovich's departure from the company affected her in other ways as well. “With Bill gone, I felt my book was homeless. I had a clause in my contract saying that if he was no longer my editor I could take the book elsewhere, and I wrote saying I wanted to leave, but he assured me he was still the editor, though I was never clear whether he really was or not. They assigned someone to the book, but he didn't do any work on it, and I just don't know how it was presented at the sales conference.”

About this ritual, she is quite clear-sighted. “I think the fate of every book is determined by how its editor or publisher presents it to the salesmen at the sales meeting. I'm afraid this may have been presented as just an intellectual memoir.” About the publicity department, headed by Leigh Haber, which has certainly been stirring up a great deal of review and interview attention, she says, “They've been wonderful, but it's not the same as having someone you can talk to about the book.” She says she has had no word for six months from Jovanovich, who is said to be quite ill in retirement in San Diego, “and I'm very worried about him.”

Now that she's working her way into what she hopes will be a new book, “I very much miss having him around.” She plans this as “a series of episodes from my life, beginning in kindergarten. I hope I can sell individual installments to magazines, then bring them together as a book.” The first piece she has completed, she says, centers around a time she spent at Oxford in the '60s. “It's about Goronwy Rees, and the women he was involved with then: Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen and that circle—a fascinating group.”

She listens a great deal to recorded books, with a particular fondness for biographies (virtually nonexistent in audio) and elegant crime fiction. “But it's very difficult to keep up.” In any case, viewing what she knows of the current literary scene, “we are all being buried by celebrity and the cult of it. So much of the search for celebrity takes you well down the ladder, for the sake of quick self-gratification.”

But hers does not seem a lonely life. The phone and the doorbell ring frequently, the latter with deliveries, including an elegant box of chocolates in tribute to “a stunning book.” “My friends think my life is one long soap opera,” she declares. Her only son James, born late to the Trillings, is a 45-year-old Byzantine scholar in Providence, R.I., with two small daughters, ages six and three—who are pictured, holding a copy of their grandmother's latest book, in a prominent place on an end table. The book is dedicated to them.

And despite a lifetime of health problems, devastatingly described in her book, and what she calls “a very unhealthy way of life now—I hardly ever leave the house,” she cannot refrain from a certain sardonic flourish: “And look how long I've lived!”