Observer 1981
Diana Trilling at Claremont Avenue
In New York, Diana Trilling is regarded with die suspicious awe customarily reserved for the city’s senior literary ladies. Whenever I announced my intention of going along to interview her, people looked at me with trepidation, a new respect, a certain holy dread. I felt I was about to enter the lion’s den — or the den of the literary lioness, which is often just as dangerous.
I had tangled with Mrs Trilling before, more than ten years ago, and had my own reasons for fearing her well-known asperity. Mr and Mrs Lionel Trilling were on a visit to London at the time, and, knowing of my admiration for Mr Trilling’s work, a common friend had arranged a meeting: tea at the Connaught, the London hotel where all distinguished Americans seem to put up. I remember Lionel as milky-haired, laconic and serene; I remember Diana as dark, foxy and fierce. At one point I made an incautious remark, illiberal in tendency — an undergraduate remark. Mrs Trilling cracked her teacup into its saucer and said: ‘Do you really mean that? Then what are we doing here? Why are we sitting here having tea with this person?’
Diana Trilling lives in Claremont Avenue, near Columbia University, where her husband taught: he was the first Jew to gain tenure there, incredible as that now seems. American cities appear to have a habit of surrounding their seats of learning with slums. In the foreword to her first collection of articles, Claremont Essays (1964), Mrs Trilling wrote about the exact sense of urban positioning that Columbia affords. The community is perched on its grassy hill, a fortress of intellection, with boiling Harlem just down the slope.
On the telephone Mrs Trilling had given me carefully, indeed grimly detailed instructions for the subway. One false move, I gathered, and I would find myself clambering out of a manhole on Duke Ellington Boulevard. In the end I took a cab — through the Upper West Side, along bending Broadway for the lawless Nineties, and up into the beleaguered castle of the University, and Claremont Avenue, a wide clean street with the solid, civic feel of old New York. Punctual to the second, I warily pressed the bell. Now, perhaps, the real perils would begin.
Mrs Trilling received me in her ground-floor apartment. I liked her immediately — actually, I had liked her the first time — and knew , that I was going to enjoy the afternoon. However, I quickly re-identified the kind of unease that a woman like Diana Trilling is always liable to provoke. You have to watch what you say when she’s around. I mean this in the best sense. Mrs Trilling is not touchy or snobbish or over-sensitive; she is just intellectually vigilant, snake-eyed. In her company you are obliged to move up a gear — you must weed out your lazier, sloppier thoughts (like the one that had briefly incensed her in the Connaught). No, she isn’t the most soothing of companions; but you end up chastened and braced, and there is much laughter and enlightenment to be had on the way.
The life of the American intellectual is qualitatively different from its British equivalent. In America, intellectuals are public figures (whereas over here they are taken rather less seriously than ordinary citizens — at most, they are licensed loudmouths). The intellectual life therefore has a dimension of political responsibility; the crises of modern liberalism — the race question, McCarthyism, feminism, Vietnam, Israel – are magnified but also taken personally, vitally. Spats between writers are transformed, willy-nilly, into unshirkable crusades. The Trillings lived this life together and experienced all its triumphs and wounds. Lillian Hellman, Martha’s Vineyard, 1952, 1968, Little Brown, UnAmerican Activities, the New York Review … it is a ceaseless, swirling litany. These hatchets may look pretty rusty to the outsider, but they will never be buried. And maybe the positions are more fiercely held now that they are held alone.
It is all the more unexpected, then, that Diana Trilling suddenly finds herself the author of a bestseîling book about a tabloid homicide. The murder of Herman Tarnower and the trial of his mistress Jean Harris electrified America in a way that (I suspect) will never be fully comprehensible to the British public. It is hard work trying to dream up a home-grown equivalent of the crime – as if, say, the headmistress of Roedean had done away with Jimmy Saville. Diana Trilling’s original title, vetoed for legal reasons, was ‘A Respectable Murder’, which is doubly appropriate. To the public, the murder was all about class, and in America class tends to shade into race: Mrs Harris was a high-class Wasp, ‘Hi’ Tarnower a vulgar diet doc, a Jewish counter-jumper. And, as a rejected mistress, one spurned for a younger replacement, Mrs Harris’s case seemed to dramatise the universal female fear. It wasn’t just a respectable murder; it seemed, at first, almost to be a justifiable one.