DIANA TRILLING
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needed when we saw no other means of rescue. Lionel became bitterly
angry at me, as if I were crediting my father with the support which he,
Lionel - and Lionel alone - had provided. But I was not slighting him; he
was slighting my father. For all Lionel's efforts, we would have sunk un–
der the weight of our indebtedness if it had not been for the money my
father left me.
On my return from Boston I had resumed my singing lessons, and I
practiced every day, or tried to. But the machine had run down; there
were days when it refused even to start. I have no recordings of my voice.
Recordings could at that time be made only in a professional studio. With
Lionel dead, there is now no one who heard me sing when I was singing
at my best, and I sometimes ask myself: Did I have enough of a voice to
justify my ambition for a professional career in music, or was I pursuing
an idle dream? The question is pointless. A voice which cannot be put to
professional use is not a professional instrument. I stopped my lessons and
have never sung again. In the spring of 1933 we moved into a garden
apartment in the East Seventies where I saw my teacher for the last time: I
had invited her and the sister with whom she lived to tea. People occa–
sionally know more about the lives of their friends than it is useful for
them to know, but perhaps more frequently they know too little. My
singing teacher knew nothing of the neurotic problems which were now
besetting me and which put an end to any possible career I might have
had as a singer. She blinded herself even to the physical threat which had
been posed by my illness and operations. Having counted on me to justify
her own career as a teacher of voice, she now fitted me into what must
have been a heavy history of failed promises and even of professional be–
trayals. To confirm her belief that when I stopped studying with her I set
myself up as a teacher of singing, she asked me slyly that day whether I
had many pupils. I replied that I did not teach, but I doubt that she be–
lieved me. I am never able to make myself believable where I am not al–
ready believed.
Today, I casually use the words "neurotic" and "neurosis" as if they
had always had a place in my vocabulary. In 1931 when I experienced my
first panic, not only was the language of psychological disorder altogether
foreign to me, but I had no idea of what was clinically meant by panic. I
had had premonitions of emotional disturbance during the summer of my
marriage when we were living in the Rortys' cabin in Westport. I had
been on the verge of panic the day that Lionel went with Jim Rorty to
fight a neighborhood fire, and there had been forebodings of phobia in
my uneasiness when for any reason I was left alone on our Westport hill.
But I had not recognized these as signals of trouble to come.
It
was not
until two years later, in the spring of 1931, that I had my first full-blown
