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DI A N A TR I LLI NG
own kind . A corollary - - or perhaps it is causal - - of the English
emphasis on privacy is the extraordinary inwardness of the English
people, what David Riesman might have called their inner-directedness
were its origin not so clearly "other," arising from the old well-defined
class structure of English society and perhaps primarily from an imperial–
ism which demanded that one have the inner strength, principle, convic–
tion, resource to maintain power among strangers. No American reader
can fail to remark in
Portrait of a Marriage
what to the English reader is
probably as unnoteworthy as Mr. Nicolson's comfortable use of his own
language : his cool detachment from these parents whom he professes to
have loved very much and whom he no doubt did love sincerely. In
America, at any rate until recently, love as detached, as seemingly
impersonal and remote as this would at once be spotted for an emotional
insufficiency; it would be isolated as a symptom, blamed on Mr. Nicol–
son's upbringing, on the distance at which he had been kept from his
parents, his reliance upon nannies for his early education in responsive–
ness, even upon his traumatic discovery of his parents' unsanctified
sexual tastes. The English have no such diagnostic fervor nor do they
prize, as Americans do, a life of expressed feeling, of emotion always on
the boil. But they have a not negligib le alternative for easily accessible
personal emotion: a sense of self, a definition of self, which Americans
do not casually come by.
The point perhaps needs to be made: there is considerable differ–
ence between self-definition and self-love. Anyone so masochistic as to
wish to pursue the distinction is recommended to turn from Mr. Nicol–
son's book about how his parents lived together to another current story
of a real-life marriage, Hannah Tillich's account of her own and her dead
husband's psychoerotic personal histories -- the presence in the pages
of
From Time to Time
of a second, rather better-known Tillich than its
author does nothing to save it from being as narcissistic a document as
has come from the pen of woman in this century and I include in my
grim survey such notable efforts in self-adulation and self-aggrandize–
ment as the diaries of Anais Nin, the autobiography of Isadora Duncan,
Frieda Lawrence's
Not I, But the Wind,
and the multivolumed memories
of Mabel Dodge Luhan . The conjunction of these literary productions
with that of Mrs. Tillich should not, I hasten to make plain, be taken to
imply that
From Time to Time
in any degree approximates any of them
even in personal interest let alone in cultural-historical usefulness. One of
the amazing achievements of Mrs. Tillich's book is the ability of its
author to have reached maturity in her native Germany during the
extraordinary years between World War I and the triumph of Nazism and
