EDITH KURZWEIL
13
body, give me the correct word." Usually, she'd find it herself.
Diana's formidable intellect and accomplishments were matched by
her voracious appetite for gossip, not maliciously, but to better grasp her
friends' foibles. She was truly concerned about them, and speculated about
what might be motivating their behavior. Yet she did not simply divert
with a juicy anecdote, which she often announced in a phone conversa–
tion - to be told during the following visi t. At the same time, Diana
refrained from divulging secrets that might end up hurting someone. She
sympathized with every jilted lover, with everyone who'd been treated
unjustly, even with those she had stopped talking to - on both the right
and the left - and who no longer shared her politics. Underneath all of
her swagger and bravado, her pronouncements and postures, she was
exceedingly vulnerable, occasionally suppressing hurtful tears at being mis–
read or misunderstood.
We got close during our many dinners and get-togethers, first in
Wellfleet and then in New York. That was when 1 learned about the ins
and outs of the early days around
Partisan Review,
as William Phillips and
Diana reconstructed specific events, sometimes disagreeing on who said
what, and at what moment, but doing so in order to "get it right" rather
than just to be right.
One evening last July, while making changes on her last essay for
The
New Yorker,
Diana told me how pleased she was to have been able to sup–
port herself after having been widowed at the age of seventy. "Mter this
bout with cancer," she added matter-of-factly, "I may live for another six
years or die in six weeks, but whatever happens, 1 feel freer than 1 ever have
before." At her funeral, which Diana apparently had wished to be stark and
impersonal, it was clear that her numerous friends, many of them much
younger than she, felt her death as a deep personal loss. 1 miss Diana's peals
of laughter, her instant sympathy, and her friendship. Summers will not be
the same without her.
E. K.
DIANA TRILLING
1905-1996
An Early Friend and Contributor
