A View From the Heights: Talking With Diana Trilling

DIANA TRILLING reflects on the human condition from a capacious living room with golden shades and plush antique furniture suggesting the Czars' Winter Palace, not the campus informality of the Morningside Heights neighborhood.

Just as Mrs. Trilling's ornate apartment might be unexceptional for many parts of Manhattan, her well-upholstered, rather conservative social views would fit well in many other settings. Yet since the 1940s, Mrs. Trilling has been enunciating this sort of traditional values--that are now called "neoconservative"--in the least likely of places. As a literary critic at the left-leaning Nation magazine in the 1940s, as a member of the New York intellectual community joining ranks against McCarthy in the 1950s, and as the wife of literary critic Lionel Trilling, a professor at Columbia when the university was beseiged by student protesters in the 1960s, Mrs. Trilling's views have continually been set off by the more leftist company she has kept.

Diana Trilling has become something of an intellectual institution. A consistent voice for moderation, Mrs. Trilling is not a neoconservative not only because there is nothing "neo" about her conservative views, but also because she refuses to cede the term "liberal" to those to her left. "I am understood by people who know my work to be a traditional nineteenth-century political liberal," she says. "Liberalism has all too frequently been defined in its century by one's toleration of Soviet Communism."

Hers, howver, is not a political conservatism of B-1 bombers and trickle-down theories. More accurately, it is a social conservatism, calling for a moral trickling down to the socially brutish. In her emphasis on people's "moral style," Mrs. Trilling defends a moral basis for all manner of social interaction. She relates a parable of dining etiquette, of once mentioning table manners while eating as a guest in one of the Harvard Houses. "It was very sweet," she says, "because when I said this to a group of students, they all became very self-conscious. One got up to get himself a glass of water, and stopped and looked around and said, `Can I get you a glass of water?' and I thought it is so touching because why hasn't somebody brought him up to do this? Why hasn't at some point somebody said to him, if you say it to other people, they're alive for you, for that tiny moment they exist."

Given such a formal view of dining, Mrs. Trilling's view of young people who actually took over college buildings in the 1960s in understandably unsympathetic. But even if her essay "On the Steps of Low Library," from her book We Must March My Darlings accords little credit to the student radicals, her paramount concern never ventures from the anarchic, antisocial nature of their protest. Indeed, today she seems almost wistful that no constructive, socially beneficial protests have occurred on the campuses. "The students don't protest anything," she says. "I was told that the students were agitated by cuts in student loans. Did they really organize any demonstrations, marches, or anything? Not that I know of."

Her greatest criticism of the younger generation seems not so much their rejecting the legacy of generations previous. It is their apathy that sets her off. In "We Must March My Darlings," an essay from the book by that name, Mrs. Trilling recounts her experience on her return to Harvard in 1971, 46 years after her graduation from Radcliffe, while her late husband spent a term at Harvard as a visiting professor. What struck her most about the students she spoke with was their complete lack of historical knowledge. She recounts her unsuccessful attempts to solicit the approximate dates of Louis XIV's reign from a large group of students, having a music major place Beethoven somewhere in the 16th century, and to her greatest chagrin, an almost universal ignorance of the major issues of the Spanish Civil War, an event of great importance to intellectuals of her generation. "Of course, now they'll all see Reds," she laments, "and they'll all know there was a Russian revolution, but they'll think it was made by Diane Keaton."

THIS RESPECT for history is perhaps at the root of her highly celebrated feud with Lillian Hellman, the playwright and author. "The fact is that I think people have become increasingly concerned with the factual basis of Miss Hellman's recreation of history," she says. The dispute is a long-standing one, dating back to the publication of Miss Hellman's Scoundrel Time, which singles out Lionel and Diana Trilling as too sympathetic with the "scoundrels" of the McCarthy era. The Trillings, however, maintained that it was possible to oppose the red baiting tactics of the '50s without explicitly endorsing the views of the leftists then being prosecuted.

She says initially there is "no point" in talking about Miss Hellman, but nevertheless commences a stream of pointed criticisms. "Scoundrel Time? Listen to the title of the book. My book is called Mrs. Harris. Her book is called Scoundrel Time. I'm called judgmental," she says, laughing. "The whole book is an indictment.... Why doesn't somebody say, `You can't go around calling people scoundrels; that is not the way you deal with history.' And writing a whole book in order to prove that you are the most virtuous person..."

Her greatest concern in the disagreement with Miss Hellman, Mrs. Trilling maintains, is historical accuracy in our knowledge of the McCarthy period. "I don't think that in Miss Hellman's lifetime most people are going to be able to deal with it. Perhaps we'll just have to wait. And then people will go to the records and they'll see what's true and what isn't true."

She takes exception to the Hellman memoir. "A very great accomplishment of fictionalization," she calls it. In particular, she points to Miss Hellman's great distinction between taking the First and Fifth Amendments before the House Un-American Activities Committee, finding the First preferable because it rejects the very right of the committee to ask its questions. Mrs. Trilling says that from reading Miss Hellman's book, it sounds as if she actually pled the First Amendment. In fact, what she did was offer to plead the First, Trilling says, and when the committee refused to accept it, pled the Fifth, while circulating press releases about her innovative attempt to plead the First. "When I used to say to people that she took the Fifth Amendment, they thought I was making it up," Mrs. Trilling says. "Her book made such a point of her special courage in facing down McCarthy that people couldn't believe she herself took the Fifth Amendment, just like anyone who didn't want to go to jail."

Today, though, Mrs. Trilling has found by far her largest audience with the publication of Mrs Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor. She says that the account of the murder conviction of Jean Harris is not as great a departure as it might at first seem. "I have always been interested in where the personal life and the larger life of society meet." The narrative is full of the social observation that has marked her earlier work. Both Jean Harris and Dr. Tarnower are, she says, "social advancement, to put it simply. It's crude way to put it, but we may as well say it... This is a steady climb to richer and more famous people." Throughout the narrative, she maintains an active antipathy for Dr. Tarnower, describing him at one point as "reptillian." After finding fault with his diet and his home, among other things, Mrs. Trilling asserts outright, "The bad aesthetics of a society matter, and so do the bad aesthetics of individuals within that society; Tarnower's house matters, the pretensions of his diet book matter--style is a moral mode, a mode in morality."

Mrs. Trilling has little patience with critics who claim a higher objectivity. Of one particularly savage review that called her to task for the book's constant passing of judgment, she just shrugs and says, "If I'm held to account by that kind of mind, I say it is a deficient mind, that there is somebody not capable of making adequate observations and reaching adequate conclusions. I just think it's a comment on that poor reviewer." In the end, it is the same judgmental quality that she brings to her essays and conversations that makes Mrs. Harris unmistakably Trilling.

Mrs. Trilling is proud of the judgments she makes in the book, and her defense of the book's style might well serve as a defense of her entire life in letters. "This is something a lot of people have found offensive in the book. They say, `You passed judgment,'" she says. "To which my answer is, we all pass judgment, so let's be honest about it. We are all passing judgment every minute of the day. The reason people say I'm being judgmental is that they don't like the judgments, apparently." As ever, Mrs. Trilling does not seem terribly concerned at the prospect.