DIANA TRILLING
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with obvious relish. Lionel would have replied that it was not the serious
people of the world. Seriousness was the desirable condition of man,
especially literary man. At best, the poet might be amiable, like Keats.
The standard to which Lionel held himself as a writer made it virtually in–
evitable that he should be disappointed by his own performance. Even
late in his career, in the face of incontestable achievement, he would feel
that he had accomplished little of what he had intended to do and that the
little he had done was of only dubious worth. He never kept a conven–
tional diary, but at irregular intervals he recorded his personal journey in a
series of untidy notebooks. In one of the notebooks for the year 1952
there is a revealing entry:
I hear on all sides of the extent of my reputation - which some even
call "fame." In England it seems to be very considerable, and even in
this country it is something, and in France there is some small trace,
etc. At Cambridge someone gave three lectures on me. I contemplate
this with astonishment. It is the thing I have most wanted from child–
hood on - although of course in much greater degree - and now that
I seem to have it I have no understanding whatever of its basis - of
what it is that makes people respond to what I say, for I think of it as
of a simplicity and of a naivete almost extreme.
The only time I knew him to receive a compliment with pleasure, as
conventionally one is expected to , was when, though he was himself of
course not a Nobel laureate, he was among the guests invited to President
Kennedy's Nobel Prize dinner at the White House and was greeted by
the President on the receiving line: "Oh, it's you." After the evening's
entertainment, we were asked to join a small party in the President and
Mrs.
Kennedy's quarters. Leaving the White House that night, Lionel was
unreservedly happy and for once allowed his assessment of his personal
situation to include the right to pleasure.
In the fall of 1930, after a year which would have threatened the
finnest self-confidence, there was no doubt that Lionel's circumstances
were problematic. He had settled on the topic for his dissertation, but he
had
scarcely begun the reading he would have to do for it, and he knew
that many years of hard work lay ahead of him before he would receive
his
degree - just how many years even he at his most disheartened would
not have predicted. His job in the evening session of Hunter was dull and
humiliating, and it offered no prospect of permanence. Even the neigh–
borhood in which we now lived contributed to his discouragement.
Upper Claremont Avenue was not then a dangerous neighborhood; as in
