[In the following review, Maloff faults what he considers Trilling's psychoanalytic misreading of the Scarsdale murder, finding that her interpretation of the case is closer to pulp fiction than great literature.]

For Diana Trilling to evoke the immortal ghosts of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina in her book of meditations on Jean Harris¹ is not only natural, it is inevitable. Suicide conferred on the fictional characters—what?—stature, significance, dignity, transcendent reality, splendor even, a kind of magnificence which neither possesses in the imagined “life” of the great novels and both acquired only through death. Otherwise, both would have died of ennui and inanition, and we along with them: we are unable to imagine an interesting ongoing life for them.

And so it is with Jean Harris: she came to our attention through the passionate murder she committed, and immediately we transformed her into a version of that figure out of melodrama or tabloid—the wronged woman betrayed finally beyond endurance by her wanton lover, one time too many. The cast of characters seemed almost contrived, so perfectly typed were they: the rich, powerful lover (in dull actuality, the fickle bounder Dr. Herman Tarnover, a cardiologist in the wonderfully named gold-coast town of Purchase in Westchester, rich as carriage-trade “specialists” are rich, and suddenly fallen upon a fortune as nominal author of the then-fashionable “Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet”); Mrs. Harris, the aging mistress of fast-fading prettiness; Lynne Tryforos, the “younger woman” and triumphant rival. Alive they were nothing—the headmistress of an expensive horsey boarding school for expensive horsey girls; a pricey physician of vulgar social pretensions living far beyond his intellectual and moral means; the “other” woman, something of a looker with, one surmises, designs of her own, venal as well as amatory. The death in Purchase that night in 1980 lifted them from the obscurity of a depressing suburban triangle into, if not exactly a state of grace, then at least the territory over which the imagination is sovereign: the provinces of fiction.

Did Mrs. Harris murder Hi Tarnower? Did she set out on that fatal day from her house at the Madeira School in Virginia and drive six hours through the gathering darkness armed with an automatic and enough rounds to kill most of the cardiologists in Westchester County for the premeditated purpose of shooting dead the heartless trifler she had come to hate? Or did she drive all that distance in order to punish him by killing herself in his presence? Or, failing that, induce him somehow to do it for her? Or was it all an accident—a suicide attempt gone afoul? Did she, struggling for possession of the gun with the man for whom she protested undiminished love to the bitter end, after she'd been tried, convicted, sentenced—did she “accidentally” riddle him with bullets and flee into the night in quest of help, so she said, thinking him only superficially injured as he lay bleeding to death?

Frankie and Johnnie are already embalmed in folklore; by now yet another crime of passion, another Saturday night shooting, scarcely arouses more than passing interest if any; we are connoisseurs of slaughter, we are surfeited with death, our jaded appetites require blood-baths, mass murder, something special in the way of delicious horror—Atlanta, the Los Angeles Freeway, the subterranean necropolises in Chicago, Texas, the California citrus groves. But these were only careless children or migrant workers or fools or homosexuals, black, drifters, shiftless, a worthless or at best a readily replaceable lot. And here we had something big, clearly worth a running front page story and prime-time television: a lordly doctor and world-traveler, who though nearing seventy played tennis and golf, fished for trout and salmon, hunted big game on African safari, “wrote” a (the magical word) bestselling, world-famous guide to the taming of carnal appetite toward the end of physical beauty and eternal youth; and his lady of many years, a stylish Wasp of impeccable middleclass background, Midwestern, “good” private schools, then Smith College (magna cum laude in Economics, 1946), schoolmistressing in expensive private schools in the imperial Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe and mothering two sons before divorcing her husband and going on to more splendid prospects. Such people may otherwise despoil life but they do not kill, and they are not killed; on the whole unremarkable in life, they mesmerized us in consequence of the lethal act. Death—the notable artist death—made “characters” of them. Or potential ones: in the glare of notoriety they began to stir toward the focus, the concentration and magnitudes of art, he in death, she in her sudden, surprising celebrity, though the “other woman,” largely because she never appeared in court nor did she in any direct way participate in the trial, remains a shadowy figure (yet we feel from what we know of her that we know her well enough). Jean Harris—as “Mrs. Harris,” the titular heroine of her own life—drifts through the grim and melancholy tale like some ghost seeking embodiment—in fact like a character in search of an author.

Diana Trilling is a novelist manquée who found what she was looking for as she sat in the Westchester courtroom day after day of the long and (until Mrs. Harris took the stand in order to justify herself and confound her adversaries; attained instant “stardom”; assured her own conviction-as-charged) mostly tedious trial having to do with trajectories of bullets, the anatomical origin of bits of skin (Tarnower's), ballistics, arcane legalisms, and other piffling attractions.

Whodunit was never at issue; what actually happened was of minor interest; intent seemed perfectly apparent; motive—the wellspring of action—was sufficient to the bursting point, torrential and universally known since the expulsion from the Garden or soon after.

Mrs. Trilling's interest in Mrs. Harris is not lawyerly and it isn't journalistic. It is novelistic and is closely related to the procedures of literary criticism. At the outset, she felt, as most women (and I daresay men) felt, a sisterly (and fraternal) feeling for the woman; but Mrs. Harris, she found, wasn't easy to love, did not invite affection and sympathy, indeed could be offputting, harsh, arrogant, contemptuous. In any event, Mrs. Trilling's feelings toward her subject grew, as the imagined “novel” developed in the dull, suffocating world of the courthouse in White Plains, steadily more complicated, complex, filled with ambiguity.

As for the events themselves, whoever doubted their general structure? Matters of due process and the subtleties of law aside, who among us does not know as surely and despairingly as we know the darker recesses of our own hearts and minds, always excepting the angelic among us who know nothing of rage, loathing, and kindred ancestral passion. Mrs. Harris, as she saw and suffered it, had given the scoundrel the best years of her life and what did she get in return? Scorn. Abuse. Neglect. Humiliation. Insult heaped on indignity. Public ridicule. Discarded as trash for trash, garbage—her kindest word for the other woman. That rank womanizer had lain about once too often, she told the police in a careless moment on the night of the murder, before she began to build her improbable and certainly implausible defense. Over a long time, perhaps for years, perhaps since the beginning of their fated union, or near it, the venom gathered in dank pools, drop by drop by drop, until it poisoned her. And so, feeling, as she was to say, “old,” “bitter,” “sick,” “ugly,” she got her gun and enough rounds to fire as often as she had no doubt done in her murderous fantasies and got into her car and set out to kill the sonofabitch. Where's the mystery? Who can fail to understand her in her (and his) blood and bones? And he was a sonofabitch most foul; and if we can for a moment or two desist from proclaiming ringingly the supreme value of all human life, we might even imagine it possible for persons not utterly depraved to think his departure a good riddance or at least not to feel inconsolable grief. One can imagine such emotion effortlessly; the point is we do not respond to the event as “real” but rather as fiction, not as life but as art even if bad art, a lurid paperback novel, and at that distance we are certainly not displeased when the villain gets his. In the life of the imagination we are bloodyminded hangmen, implacable in meting out just desserts and taking some pleasure in doing so.

But that of course is not the book Mrs. Trilling wants to write. The fiction she aspires to is Flaubertian and Tolstoyan; the analytic instruments she wields are Freudian and Jamesean; she deals in nothing but the best. She is interested in manners, taste, values, tones of voice, and shades of meaning, the hum and buzz of implication. Having seen—or peered through windows at—the brassy vulgarity of Tarnower's Westchester “estate” with its bad statuary and trite “gardens” and the house with its mean interiors and (this is scarcely credible but so little about gold coasts anywhere is) “trophy room” with the mounted heads of slaughtered beasts actually staring down at the guests assembled for their host's little “gourmet” dinners—having seen the kitsch and showy display of his life, Mrs. Trilling is ready to dismiss the diet doctor summarily as a noisome, flat, monochromatic character in the drama. And when you add to his atrocious bad taste and vile sexual manners, what is even worse, his repellent bestseller, swollen to book proportions by a professional hack with some considerable assistance from Mrs. Harris, from the original two-page digest prepared for his patients, well, on aesthetic grounds alone he deserved nothing less than the guillotine. For the sin of committing stylistic solecisms and other barbarisms of taste, to the gallows! For pandering to the lewd popular appetite for dietbooks, let him be dismembered! (My own sentiments exactly, let me confess.) Having disposed of him, Mrs. Trilling makes no serious attempt at posthumous reconstruction of the man who, say what you will, gave his life so that Mrs. Harris might live forever in the annals of literature.

It is upon her and no one else that the focus narrows. But Mrs. Trilling's interest is so special, so selective, so narrow, so unremitting within the self-imposed limits, that she did not see the need as a mere journalist would surely have done, to go out there to the uncharted West and have a look at little Jean Struven's Shaker Heights, Ohio; to inquire a little more closely into her family of origin, about whom we learn next to nothing; certainly to have a long look at Grosse Pointe, the scene of her marriage, the first phase of her career as an educator (of the children of the automobile moguls), or the years following her divorce from James Harris. We learn nothing about her college years, nothing about Harris, what it must have been like for a woman of her vitality, intelligence, ambition—of her contemptuous arrogance and overwhelming pride—to have spent so many years as an upper servant (that is, as teacher and indeed as headmistress) to the presumptive heiresses of the very rich. Much of this can be translated into hard, factual information of the sort a biographer and psychobiographer would require, as would the kind of novelist Mrs. Trilling pays homage to. Ibsen once said that though no reference or allusion to the antecedent life of a character need be made in the drama itself, he himself knew every day and every event of it, internal and external, and in fact made a point of writing out detailed sketches in his notebooks as a way of filling his mind for the work about to be undertaken. This density of knowledge, this direct, intimate relation to the detritus of life, which is one of the chief jobs of the “traditional” novel, is almost wholly absent from Mrs. Trilling's meditations: it is as though Mrs. Harris had been born that night in Purchase and burst into the repleteness of her being only at the time of her trial and especially when she at last occupied the center of her world's attention on the witness stand—when she attained at long last what had eluded her until then: “star quality,” as her chronicler says.

Mrs. Trilling, as one would expect of her, is very good at noticing a hundred details of which novels are made: dress, carriage, countenance, hair, clothes, voice, accent, modulation, tics and gestures, range of expression facial and verbal; but although they are essential to the “novel” of which Mrs. Harris is the central figure, they are not sufficient to give us the author of the long, seething letter to Tarnower (the central, decisive document in the case, and the rope by which she hanged herself). Written to Tarnower on the eve of her last trip, mailed but never received, filled with a palpable hatred and fury which she persisted in denying, whether disingenuously or deviously we cannot know. At this level of observation Mrs. Trilling also misses some golden opportunities, surprisingly: failing to notice, for example, that Mrs. Harris's sense of T. S. Eliot was of the shallow, anthology sort when it wasn't simply foolish and overreaching, an unearned claim to high culture; or her failure to see for what it was her subject's wide-eyed, breathless pronouncement that the diet doctor read Herodotus “for fun” (whether in Greek or English we are not told): a crude joke which neither she nor Tarnower could possibly have understood.

But Mrs. Trilling is really interested not so much in Mrs. Harris's actual lived life as in her unconscious fantasies. Like her late husband, Lionel Trilling, whose work in this area, as in others, was justly celebrated, she is a Freudian; but she is also an unreconstructed, not to say primitive, Freudian of the kind not always very different from a formidably bright undergraduate afire from a first reading of The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life—and this, bewilderingly, directly alongside subtle, wonderfully deft psychological and moral analysis, truly illuminating seeing into her elusive, complex subject. At times, Mrs. Trilling reduces the modes and procedures of clinical analysis to farce—a parody of a parody.

A brief scattering of examples must suffice. Mrs. Harris, we are told, was revolted by the night she spent in the (superbly named) Valhalla Jail, mainly because she'd been cast among whores who littered the cell-floor with “bloody sanitary pads” although, Mrs. Trilling immediately remarks, “this may have been a cover memory for a suppressed recollection of the blood that had been spilled in Dr. Tarnower's bedroom. …” Why, yes; but on the other hand it may not have been a “cover memory” at all, or certainly not for an event which she almost certainly would not have cast beyond consciousness into the abyss, if she cast it anywhere at all. A bloody pad is a bloody pad; and even for those of us who do not shrink from the sight, bloody pads do not necessarily compose a delightful and edifying spectacle, especially on jailhouse floors. If it must be a “cover memory,” why not for the ordeal of parturition (her own as preternaturally mature newborn infant of prodigious memory, or as mother)? Or for the (conceivably) traumatic onset of her own menstrual rites of passage? Or for the crisis, if it was that, of her own menopause? The possibilities are psychologically, emotionally reverberant, and (so it seems to me) the least likely and certainly the least interesting of them is the one Mrs. Trilling proposes.

Or take another example. Unless it is immutably true that a phallic symbol, as a distinguished American poet and wit once despairingly remarked, is anything that's longer than it is wide, then surely, surely, we can leave some figurative equations to writers of trashy fiction, if we can't, out of respect for the First Amendment, simply outlaw them; and surely the first of these is the smoking phallic gun so famous among sophomores by means of which Mrs. Harris “too, poor insufficient woman, became capable of assault. She was supplied with what she'd been deprived of by biology.” Tarnower's being a Jew was important to Mrs. Harris (I think) but not (I think) because she endowed him with mythic “sexual exoticism” promising “meta-sexual fulfillment,” as Mrs. Trilling believes, supplanting truly interesting possibilities for the fiction-making imagination with banal ones. But it is drearily consistent with a posited “female castration anxiety” gnawing at the lady's innards, if I may so speak. Author and subject never met to speak in the courtroom and never outside it (actually, Mrs. Harris, once spotting the author in the press section, complimented her for a review she'd seen somewhere); so unless all women are so afflicted as a matter of biological fate, the analyst must deduce that exotic anxiety from the character's gait, arch of eyebrow, turn of phrase—how else? Or from metaphor, as when Mrs. Harris, attempting to capture in language her sense of utter void, spoke of herself as sitting in an empty chair—a sense that overpowers me at this moment as I sit reflecting upon Mrs. Trilling's strange, willful, mischievous reading of a striking image. Rather like charging Nietzsche with voyeurism when he spoke of “gazing into the abyss” (until it gazed back at him). Freudian fundamentalism of this order will not do.

Better to throw up one's hands. “People,” Mrs. Trilling finally concedes, “aren't solved.” Exactly. Only in bad novels.

Notes

1. Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor. By Diana Trilling. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $14.95, 352 pp.