12 MEMOIRS & BIOGRAPHY

TLS MAY 19 2017

Karl Miller died in 2014. His obituariesdescribe an outstanding portfolio ofliterary, journalistic and academic

achievements. He was literary editor of the Spectator and the New Statesman, Editor ofthe Listener and the London Review of Books, which he co-founded, and Lord Northcliffe Pro-fessor of Modern English Literature at Univers-ity College London. It is too early for the first biography to appear, but not too early to hopethat someone somewhere is already at work ona Life of the critic and man of letters who was (inhis friend Andrew O’Hagan’s words) “our con-nection to the 19th century”. In the meantime, Miller’s son Sam has written Fathers, a book that began as a funeral address and became “atherapy of sorts”.

Sam provides a moving account of the cir-cumstances in which Karl wrote the last of his many thousands of book reviews. Early in 2014,he had agreed to review Hugo Williams’s col-lection of poems, I Knew the Bride for the Spec-tator, but illness prevented him. Mark Amory called from the magazine in August to say thathe wanted a piece by every previous Spectatorliterary editor (Miller held the post from 1958 to61) for his valedictory issue: please could Karl

RUTH SCURR

oblige? Karl and Sam read Williams’s poems aloud and Sam took notes at the bedside, imag-ining that this might be their first literary col-laboration, “a ghost-written book review”. Butwhen he suggested this, Karl looked troubled, got out of bed and wrote his own review, whichwas published with “not a word altered” four days before he died.

Sam presents his father as a born critic,describing a working-class Scottish schoolboywho noted down the title of everything he readin his journal and awarded marks out of 100: Hamlet came top with 95; Point Counter Pointgot 85, narrowly beaten by Sons and Lovers, with 86. Looking through Karl’s juvenile mar-ginalia, Sam is amused to find Edgar Allan Poe’s “To Helen” described as a “surprisingly fine poem”. But from his filial point of view, theevolution of his father’s literary sensibility is

S a m M i l l e r

F A T H E R S256pp. Cape. £14.99.

978 1 911214 32 8

Two-and-a-half parentsA memoir of a literary family that represents ‘a therapy of sorts’

overshadowed by other interests: women and football. These two, unusually combined, are atthe heart of Sam’s portrait of Karl.

In his memoirs, Rebecca’s Vest (1993) andDark Horses (1998), Karl describes some of theadventures of “Carnal Miller”, which beganwhen he took a job as an extra in Verdi’s Mac-beth during the first Edinburgh Festival in 1947.There he became friends with Ernest Berk, achoreographer, and his wife Lotte, who were refugees from Nazi Germany. Lotte was eigh-teen years older than Karl, and when they trav-elled to Cambridge together, so that Karl couldmeet his future tutor F. R. Leavis, they becamelovers. In a hospital waiting room, nearly sev-enty years later, Sam asks whether or not Karlwas simultaneously the lover of the Berks’ teen-age daughter, Esther: “Just at that moment, theman sitting across from us, whose most dis-tinctive feature was a transparent tube which emerged from his nose and disappeared behindhis back, stood up abruptly and moved toanother part of the waiting room. My fathernodded at the empty chair”. But there was no further discussion. Sam notes that after writinghis memoirs in the 1990s, Karl destroyed his early diaries:

The empty covers survive, as a frustratingreminder of something I will never be able to read.I suppose I should not mind – and yet I feel theywould have provided me with clues as I soughtto unravel my father’s complex attitude towardssexual fidelity, and towards what might be seen asconventional monogamous relationships.While he accepts that “few parents want to

talk about their sex lives with their children,and even fewer children want to hear”, Samhas a special reason for wanting to understandKarl’s. When Sam was fifteen, helping hismother, Jane Miller, paint his bedroom, sheturned to him and said: “Your real father is. . . was Tony White”. White was a familyfriend, known to Karl and Jane since their stu-dent days in Cambridge in the early 1950s,who had recently died in his forties. After thisrevelation, “a great deal went unsaid, formany decades”. His mother’s words set off “a

slow-motion cascade of feelings and reac-tions and consequences”. Karl knew that Samknew he was not his biological father, butthey did not discuss the matter directly formany years. Sam’s older brother and youngersister were not told until they were adults inthe 1980s. At first, Sam’s attitude was “thischanges nothing”, but in the wake of Karl’sdeath he has decided to talk and write moreopenly about his own origins. His book iscleverly structured as a meditation onmemory and secrecy, dedicated to hisparents, “all two-and-a-half of them”.

The first mention of Tony White in Fatherscomes in a quotation from Karl’s memoirs, in which he refers to Cambridge friends he has already outlived: “The painter Rory McEwan was to develop cancer. Tony White died of apulmonary embolism, after a football injury.Nick Tomalin, serving as a war correspondent,was killed by a heat-seeking missile in theMiddle East”. Throughout the first section of Fathers, White is a peripheral figure: co-founder with Karl of the Battersea Park foot-ball team and a regular visitor to the Millers’family home, where Sam remembers growing up amid a continuous party of literati and foot-ball enthusiasts. He describes walking in on hisparents sobbing and comforting each other justafter they had received the news of White’s death: “I felt like an intruder, and said how sorryI was and retreated from the room”. White’s funeral on January 20, 1976, was Sam’s first: “Iwas more intrigued than desolate – thoughdesolation could be seen on the faces of almosteveryone there”. Constructed from family memories and anecdotes, this section is shot through with heavy hints about the reveal that comes as no surprise at the beginning of sectiontwo. When Sam turns his attention from the lifeof Karl Miller to that of Tony White, he isimmediately aware of an “equality issue”:

Do I need to treat these two fathers of mine withsome level of equality? My easy, instinctiveanswer is a simple “No”. I am less interested inTony himself – and more interested in what hemeant to my parents, and (this is secondary)

Karl Miller and Tony White, Christmas 1960; from Fathers

MEMOIRS & BIOGRAPHY 13

TLS MAY 19 2017

Columbia and, by 1939, the first tenured Jew-ish professor in the English department.Before long, the couple were at the centre ofwhat was to be called the Partisan Review gang– the journal was founded by William Phillipsand Phillip Rahv in 1934 – although they neverquite shared the Trotskyite sentiments of theircompatriots. They declared themselves “liber-als”, by which they meant persons on the Leftdevoted to working-class causes and someform of “radical change” but opposed to “anyform of despotism”, which inevitably includedcommunism. In The Liberal Imagination(1950), which contains such classic essays as“Manners, Morals, and the Novel” and “Freudand Literature”, Lionel tried to forge a middleway between the “engaged” literature of theNew Masses and the strictly literary analysis ofthe New Critics. Throughout her life, Dianawas a vocal anti-communist.

Approaching thirty without a career, Dianadiscovered that literature interested her morethan did art and that her ambition was to be a

after graduation and wait to get married. Onthe blind date on which she met the twenty-two-year-old Lionel, in a speakeasy, sherecalls their drinking Bullfrogs and Alexan-ders, the latter “a cocktail of gin, crème decacao, and whipped cream”. Lionel was still aPhD student at Columbia and his father, whosold furs, was less affluent than Diana’s, butthey were soon engaged. With a little financialhelp from the Rubins, they married in 1929.

The Trillings settled in a series of UpperWest Side apartments, mostly in MorningsideHeights. Lionel soon became an instructor at

MARJORIE PERLOFF

N a t a l i e R o b i n s

T H E U N T O L D J O U R N E YThe life of Diana Trilling

448pp. Columbia University Press. £27.95 (US $32.95).

978 0 231 18208 9

Diana Trilling née Rubin (right) at Camp Lenore

Had Diana Trilling (1905–96) lived tosee this biography, she would no doubtbe contacting reviewers and editors

with complaints about Natalie Robins’s ver-sion of her “untold journey”. Not that Robins,whose earlier books were on such topicalissues as homoeopathy, the “hidden hazards”of hospitals and the FBI’s “war on freedom ofexpression”, hasn’t done her best to present apositive image of Trilling. But Robins’s know-ledge of the context within which her subjectoperated seems at best sketchy. Beyond drop-ping numerous names, she has little to sayabout the illustrious “New York Intellectuals”of the Lionel and Diana Trilling circle, substi-tuting for any serious consideration of theirwritings or their ideological positions a stringof anecdotes and reminiscences drawn prima-rily from the “sixty hefty boxes” of Diana’sown papers available in the Columbia Uni-versity archive: letters, diaries, interviews,drafts of short stories, and even rejection notesfrom various editors.

The portrait that emerges from this papertrail is of a difficult, at times unpleasantwoman – self-absorbed, arrogant, catty andcompetitive – who managed, sooner or later, toalienate just about everyone she knew. Robinshas consulted such colleagues and acquaintan-ces as are still alive and willing to be inter-viewed, but their accounts do little to endearus to the subject. She has also had access to thepapers of Diana’s famous husband, the criticand Columbia professor Lionel Trilling. Buteven Lionel’s words don’t help much: in ajournal entry shortly after their first meeting in1927, he wrote, “Tonite met Diana. Dislikedher at first but even in dislike I felt attracted”.It’s not clear that this complex of feelings everwholly changed. Attraction soon gave way toperiods of sexual impotence, which causedfriction between husband and wife. Lionelremained devoted to Diana throughout theirmarried life, but he never did seem to like hervery much.

Diana Rubin was born in New York to anaffluent, secularized family of Polish Jewishimmigrants. Her father was in the women’shosiery business: until the stock market crashof 1929, the family had a chauffeur and full-time household help. Diana attended RadcliffeCollege in Cambridge, Massachusetts, major-ing in Art History. The custom for middle-class women in those days was to return home

Attracted in dislikeA soap-opera account of a ‘New York Intellectual’

writer, like her husband. In the meantime,she had become intrigued by the latest importfrom Europe: psychoanalysis. Both Diana andLionel were in analysis most of their adultlives. Diana herself went through seven differ-ent analysts (two died along the way), includ-ing Marianne Kris – the wife of the prominentart historian-cum-lay analyst Ernst Kris – whohappened to be Marilyn Monroe’s analyst notlong before her suicide.

It is all but impossible for readers today tounderstand the pivotal role psychoanalysisplayed in mid-century Manhattan, especiallyamong non-observant Jews like the Trillings.Most of the New York analysts were culturedEuropean refugees from Hitler’s Vienna;many of them had personally known Freud. (Imyself went to school with the Kris childrenAnna and Tony, both of whom were also tobecome prominent analysts.) When DianaTrilling finally gave birth, at the age of forty-three, to their only child Jim, it was understoodthat as soon as feasible, the boy would undergothe “play therapy” that constituted child ana-lysis (Jim’s initiation took place when he wasseven). All three Trillings felt themselves to besuffering from multiple neuroses – Lionel andJim from fits of rage, Diana from acrophobia(fear of heights) and panic attacks. No one everexpected to be “cured” – for Lionel, Freudiantheory became primarily a literary tool, centralto his cultural readings of the nineteenth-century novel – but in Diana’s case, satisfac-tion of any kind remained elusive. Neverthe-less – and this too was characteristic of theTrilling milieu – despite little flirtations and avague belief in “free love”, Diana never seri-ously considered divorce. The Trillings were ateam.

As Robins tells it, Diana’s break camein 1941 when she overheard a telephone callbetween Lionel and Margaret Marshall, the lit-erary editor of the Nation, who was looking forfreelancers to contribute unsigned reviews ofnovels. Diana immediately volunteered andLionel agreed that she would be perfect for thejob. Within the year, she had her own signedcolumn at the Nation and was beginning to con-tribute articles and sketches to other journals.

How did success come so easily? One of thegreat ironies of Diana’s career (although Rob-ins has little to say on the subject) is that shewas hardly a literary intellectual. While Lionelwas writing on Matthew Arnold, Henry James

whether he might tell me anything about myself.I have never felt for Tony what I feel for myfather.Sam’s parenthetical “this is secondary”

captures the struggle at the centre of his book.He is wrestling with the complexity of theprevious generation’s stories, trying tounderstand the adult lives that shaped his,and searching for signs of his own importancein the drama. While he is respectful of thefriends who keep “The Ballad of TonyWhite” alive, and retrospectively wry about“the medium-sized troop of secret and half-secret lovers” that attended White’s funeral,his primary interest is not in the mysteriousthespian, translator and would-be authorwho died young, with so much promise unful-filled. Instead, Sam scans White’s journalsand correspondence for references to himselfand finds only two: a simple mention at theend of a “humdrum” postcard, and this sen-tence: “A long-drawn out affair with Jane

ended when she found she was pregnant,possibly by me”. Poignantly and self-know-ingly, Sam remarks: “I think I would havebeen pleased if there was more than that”.

Sam acknowledges his debt to Jane Millerwho has, somewhat “tremulously”, given himaccess to her diaries, letters and unpublishednovel, “Tales of an Adulteress”. Informationfrom Jane is more vivid than anything Samfinds in his fathers’ archives. She describesvisiting a psychiatrist in order to obtain thenecessary medical opinion that terminatingher pregnancy would be in the interests ofher mental health. After Jane explained to thepsychiatrist what had happened and that thetwo possible fathers were on friendly termsand played football together, he remarked:“I think you’re the football here”. At whichpoint she decided against abortion. When shewas giving birth to Sam at home, Karl andTony White were downstairs relaxing after aday at the football: “My mother thinks only

my father came up to see me. I was muchlarger and had more hair at birth than my olderbrother, and my skin was darker. My motherhad no doubt that I was Tony’s son”. Samnever says whether in adult life he has soughtscientific certainty, unavailable in 1961, onthis point. Instead he dwells on his physicalresemblance to White, and marvels that hisparents’ friends did not remark on it.

At the beginning of her memoir, Relations(2003), Jane Miller describes visiting her elderly mother:

She tells me that being in love is a cure for depres-sion, even when it is unrequited. She would likeme to divulge secrets, love affairs. I have been agreat disappointment to her in this respect and inothers. Her three daughters belong in her categoryof “ordinary people”, non-artists, fitters-in, goodat unimportant things like driving cars, usingcomputers and tidying up. She knows and regretsthat there are no secrets to be prised out of me.Perhaps Jane Miller’s mother already knew,

and for some reason did not count, the big secretat the centre of her daughter’s family life; maybe Jane’s deliberate insistence that she is anon-bohemian “ordinary” person is more nec-essary to her understanding of herself than anynumber of biographical truths. Memoir is a self-revelatory genre: selective and crafted. While Sam’s Fathers focuses on questions of pater-nity, it overlaps in theme with his mother’s Relations. Both books are about acknowledg-ing the power of parents and their stories whilebreaking free of them. When researching Fathers, Sam Miller discovered that his lastmemory of Tony White, visiting the Millerhousehold with his leg in a plaster cast after hisfootball accident and kindly praising a bouilla-baisse Sam had curdled, was a false, or partiallyfalse, memory: “A post-mortem invention, or aconflation of what I remember and what I wastold”. Biographers might try to disentangle thiskind of conflation, but in memoirs confusion can be an indirect route to a deeper truth.

14 BIOGRAPHY

TLS MAY 19 2017

and the nineteenth-century novel of manners,Diana was dismissive of much of the new liter-ature that came across her desk: Animal Farm,she declared, “simply reproduces the histori-cal situation in Russia without the addition ofany new moral or political insights”; Brides-head Revisited was “incoherent” and “bor-ing”. She complained that the Virginia Woolfof The Common Reader “always takes refugein her female sensibility”.

Her preference was for popular writerssuch as Angela Thirkell, whom she praises as“one of the great haters on the contemporaryscene”. She admired Jim Corbett’s Man Eat-ers of Kumaon, a bestseller about the huntingand killing of tigers in India. She wrote shortstories under the pseudonym Margaret Say-les. One such story (never published), “TheMarriage of Elsie and John”, was about awedding reception spoiled by irritable rela-tives (not unlike her own). Diana’s “greatestwish”, Robins notes, was to be published inthe New Yorker. Her pride was “that she couldwrite with the same seriousness for JuniorBazaar” – for which she was writing amonthly column in 1946–7 – “or Vogue as forPartisan Review”. Such statements are madewithout the slightest touch of irony, Robinsseemingly not connecting Diana’s philistin-ism to her difficulties with the “Partisangirls”. Hannah Arendt, she cites Diana ascomplaining, “never said hello to me in herwhole life. I guess she wanted to go to bedwith Lionel. That was usually the reasonwhen women weren’t pleasant to me”. The

same accusation was made against MaryMcCarthy, though there is no evidence thateither woman had designs on Lionel. Theproblem was not sexual but intellectual:Midge Decter, the wife of Norman Podho-retz, once referred to Diana as “an outcast”,unfit for “a serious community where peoplespeak seriously to one another”.

It was after Lionel’s death in 1975 that shecame into her own. For one thing, the feministrevolution was on her side even though sheherself was critical of feminism, making vitu-perative comments about Germaine Greerand Jill Johnston. But the larger public nowsaw her – as does her biographer – as a womanwriter too long eclipsed by her famous hus-band. It was now, feminists felt, her turn.Diana’s one full-length book (the others wereessay collections or memoirs) was Mrs Har-ris: The death of the Scarsdale diet doctor(1981), the story of the headmistress of theexclusive Madeira School for Girls in Vir-ginia, who killed her unfaithful physician-lover Herman Tarnower. With this luridtabloid story turned courtroom melodrama,Diana seems to have finally found her métieras a journalist. She received for the first timea large advance from Harcourt and the pub-lisher sold film rights to Norton Simon,whose wife Jennifer Jones wanted to play thepart of Jean Harris. In the end, the film projectcame to nothing, and the book got many nega-tive reviews, but old friends like Clifton Fadi-man (the one-time president of the Book ofthe Month Club) called Mrs Harris “a clas-

sic”, and Jacques Barzun told Diana that shehad written “one of the great trial accounts ofour time”.

Meanwhile, Diana remained embattled: ascathing reference to Lillian Hellman’s“diminishing intellectual force” in an essayfor her forthcoming Little, Brown bookcaused the publisher to break her contract.The issue between the two women was poli-tics, but professional jealousy of Hellman, acelebrated dramatist, probably played agreater role. “Friendships were put on theblock”, Robins reports. “Diana said sheinvited Richard Poirier to dinner, and hedeclined, saying that Lillian ‘was nervousand he didn’t want to upset her’.”

Diana’s best essays, to my mind, were twoabout campus events. “The Other Night atColumbia: A report from the academy” forPartisan Review (Spring 1959, although Rob-ins erroneously lists it as 1958) is a droll narra-tive about the famous Beat reading, whenthose one-time Columbia students Jack Ker-ouac and Allen Ginsberg (the latter wasexpelled in 1945) charmed the crowd, even asolder audience members like Diana (who wentout of curiosity because Lionel had been Gins-berg’s mentor) remained sceptical. W. H.Auden scolded her for even attending. “On theSteps of Low Library”, published in 1968, wasmore significant. Here she tried to give aneven-handed account of the great Columbiariots of that year, their causes and their cost tothe university. The essay is too long but itrespects the complexity of the events and is a

serious piece of scholarship. Again, however,it received harsh criticism in many quarters,for example from Robert Lowell, who com-plained that “all’s twisted in the current ofignorant, unseeing didacticism, in the rattledsentences”.

So it went for the rest of Diana’s long but notalways happy life (she died in 1996). The lowpoint, to my mind, comes less in the continuingbattles with writers and editors than in thestrange behaviour of both Trillings during theSecond World War. Second-generation PolishJewish immigrants, they seem to have experi-enced the years between 1939 and 1945 prima-rily as a period of success. It was then thatDiana got her big break with the Nation, andLionel produced several admired publications,including his book on E. M. Forster. In theseyears, the Jewish refugee intellectuals werearriving from Europe in New York daily, manyon special visas to become professors at theUniversity in Exile founded by Alvin Johnson,the President of the New School of SocialResearch (who was not Jewish). On the evi-dence of Robins’s book, Diana had nothing tosay on such subjects, though it may be the biog-rapher’s omission. Sticking mainly to gossip,Natalie Robins begins each chapter with anepigraph from Lionel, for example (Chapter13): “D’s anger at my ‘betrayal’ of our past –‘for you it’s research’. The next morning shespeaks bitterly of my ‘depersonalization’ ofher, of myself”. Of such epigraphs, this soap-opera story is made. Diana Trilling, problem-atic as she was, deserves better.