DIANA TRILLING
The Beginning of the Journey
We were in our first year on upper Claremont Avenue near 122nd Street
when Lionel began to lie to me and say that he was going to the library
when, in fact, he was going to the movies. I am unsure how I found
this
out; perhaps he eventually confessed it to me. He had frequent recourse
to this refuge: like someone unemployed and homeless, he sat through
long blinding hours of double features in the movie theaters of Times
Square. He was not unemployed; he no longer worked at the
Menorah
Journal,
but he had a part-time teaching position in the evening session of
Hunter College. Yet in a career which had scarcely begun, he felt de–
feated, robbed of expectation. His experience of working in the company
of Elliot Cohen and Herbert Solow at the
Menorah Journal,
followed by
my illness and operations at the hospital in Boston and by his lonely
weeks in Cambridge, had taken its toll in confidence. He also had before
him, as did his other college friends with literary aspirations, the discour–
aging example of Kip Fadiman's quick rise to reputation: on the basis of
but a small handful of pieces for the
Nation,
Fadiman had already become
a known figure, the most enviously noticed critic of his generation.
Lionel could have no hope of success such as his. All his life Lionel would
suffer from depression. Although as psychological pathologies go, his de–
pression was mild, it was a clinical symptom, a far more troubling phe–
nomenon than mere dejection or downheartedness. For no perceptible
reason he would suddenly fall into an extreme bleakness of mood and
be
unable to function with appropriate spirit. At these times he regarded me
as an enemy and acted toward me as if it were I who were the cause of
his misery - at the heart of his depression there lay a deep unrecognized
anger. No one of his acquaintance and no one with whom he worked
outside the home would ever be aware that he suffered these alternations
of mood. Except when he was alone with me, he never allowed his de–
pression to show. But even apart from these shifts of mood, he was not to
be described as a happy person. Indeed, he thought poorly of happiness
and of people who claimed to be happy or desired happiness above other
of life's gratifications. He often repeated the question which Philip
Rahv
would put to one with such gusto. Born in Russia, Rahv had trouble
pronouncing the letter
h.
"Oo's 'appy?" he would inquire rhetorically and
