47. Diana Trilling

 “The criterion of bad taste is, I know, no longer permitted the socially conscientious.” – Diana Trilling

The man is, above all, vulgar. The son of Jewish immigrants, Herman Tarnower ended up living the middle-class dream—and doing it in unimpeachable bad taste. After several decades as a successful cardiologist in Scarsdale, New York, he achieved (modest) fame and (presumably less modest) fortune in 1978, when he published The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet, an expansion of his locally famous dietary and weight loss program. A lifelong bachelor, Tarnower enjoyed expensive travel jaunts and the company of many different women—most of them, notably, gentiles. And in a sure sign of having made it, he secured membership in Westchester’s most exclusive German-Jewish country club, a rare honor for a man of Eastern European Jewish extraction.

Subtle—and not so subtle—social distinctions define the life of both Dr. Tarnower and the woman who ended his life late one evening in March 1980. Jean Harris, the headmistress of a private girl’s high school in Virginia, had been Tarnower’s lover and chief companion for 14 years and enjoyed both his company and the privileges that came with that company, including no small measure of social prestige and a considerable amount of world travel. In recent years, though, she had been replaced in the doctor’s affections by a new, younger woman, Tarnower’s secretary, Lynne Tryforos. Stressed out by her precarious professional position and her equally precarious position in the Tarnower household, Jean drove up from Virginia to the doctor’s Purchase, NY home on March 10, 1980, intending, she claims, to kill herself after a final conversation with the doctor. Instead, four shots were fired, Tarnower was killed, and the task of figuring out what happened fell to a jury in what became a highly publicized trial.

Diana Trilling, New York Intellectual, widow of legendary critic Lionel, and fierce analyst of literature and culture in her own right, was on the scene and she didn’t like what she saw. In her exhaustive 1981 chronicle and analysis of the trial, Mrs. Harris, Trilling is especially put off by what she learns about the not-so-good doctor. “Tarnower’s was a meagre soul, a spirit without generosity,” she writes, referring to his shabby and rather heartless treatment of his lovers, particularly Jean. “He was a small-time emotional imperialist, a respectable middle-class bullyboy of sex.” In addition to his romantic cruelties, Trilling finds fault with his famed diet, both in its particularities, which she discusses in some detail, and in its consumerist approach to body-shaping; his house, which, when she finally gets an opportunity to visit, she finds to be charmless and, for all its size, surprisingly cramped; and his general vulgarity. This vulgarity, which is one of both inner spirit and outward style, is ultimately emblematic of what Trilling finds so revolting about the doctor’s particular social world. “While [Tarnower’s] style of life and being did indeed represent a personal choice,” she writes, “it went beyond personal preference to provide a substantial portrait of present-day American middle-class establishment.”

This suburban haute bourgeoisie is instinctually distasteful to Trilling, both on a surface, stylistic level and on a deeper moral level. In fact, for Trilling, the two are identical. Throughout her long career, Trilling had often taken on unpopular positions, while at the same time retaining a restrained, mild liberalism. After a brief, youthful flirtation with Marxism, she became a staunch anti-Communist. She was turned off by women’s liberation, but embraced a more measured conception of feminism. Above all, she privledged moderation and a somewhat stuffy morality. As critic Tobi Haslett wrote, she “cut an odd figure in literary-bohemian New York: a queenly Cold Warrior with a temperamental aversion to revolt.”

In considering the case of Jean Harris and Herman Tarnower, Trilling puts forth another opinion that is “no longer permitted”: specifically the intrinsic link between taste and morality, which, she feels, can’t be asserted without attracting charges of snobbery. In a striking formulation, Harris writes:

But surely the way in which taste is exercised—every kind of taste: in art and architecture and decoration, dress, food, manners, speech—is the firmest clue we have to how someone pursues his life in culture and therefore to the style of moral being he would legislate for us, if he had the power.

What this means in the case of Herman Tarnower is that the doctor’s mode of living is in execrable taste—and that it reveals an execrable character. His house is a “small monument to cultural inflatedness”—an outward symbol of the vulgar strivings of the middle class—and his diet book a sign of his status as “one of the hidden tyrants of culture.” The setting he has created for himself exposes a small-minded man whose relationship with others is marked by carelessness and a will to domination. What these observations reveal about Trilling—a middle-class Jew of the same generation as Tarnower who split her childhood between Westchester, the Bronx, and Brooklyn—is, perhaps, another matter. At the heart of her condemnation is surely the urban sophisticate’s horror at the suburban grotesque.

This horror, though, permits of a certain ambivalent sympathy for Jean Harris. Trilling initially takes on the assignment expecting to be fully on Harris’ side—in a sort of vein of sisterly solidarity—but throughout the lengthy trial, she finds her sympathies shifting. Turned off by Harris’ lack of any kind of reaction to details of her former lover’s death during the trial and her constant need to be the center of attention, Trilling’s sense of fellow feeling is severely tested as she comes to find Harris’ selfishness and neediness more than a little vulgar in themselves. In the book’s final section, “After the Verdict,” however, Trilling offers up a deeply considered psychological analysis of her subject in which she works her way back towards a more sympathetic understanding of Harris’ situation.

For Trilling, the two facts that define Harris’ relationship with Tarnower are that she was considerably more intelligent than him and that she’s the hopeless product of Midwestern provincialism, with all its attendant uptight morality. Because of these two facts, her time with the doctor is doomed to disaster. In Trilling’s telling, Harris is a socially ambitious woman who doesn’t quite fit in with the more well-connected people at The Madeira School. Her involvement with the affluent Tarnower is thus a fulfillment of her social ambitions, but it’s contingent on her making endless excuses not only for the doctor’s ill-treatment of her but for his taste. “Mrs. Harris was in the wrong company,” Trilling writes. “She should never have been in this society; it didn’t fit her personal style or her moral style. Or, rather, it shouldn’t have fit her style as well as it turned out to.” Her midwestern intelligence and prim morality are a poor match for Tarnower’s world, the association with which lowers her both by causing her to assume the position of a mistress (which clearly makes her uncomfortable) and because Tarnower’s brand of upscale lifestyle is simply beneath her taste.

During the trial, Harris is clearly horrified that her lover, the esteemed cardiologist, will go down in history as something so common as a “diet doctor.” She is always trying to play up his sophistication—he’s the kind of man who “read Herodotus for fun” she enjoys reminding people—and can never acknowledge what she must secretly realize: that he’s an anti-intellectual vulgarian. She can also never admit to herself that there’s nothing particularly special about the role she played in the doctor’s life. When she is replaced in his affections by the more common-minded Lynne Tryforos, what hurts is not so much that she has been superseded, but that the fact that the doctor picked so unimpressive a specimen meant that there was never anything extraordinary about her own former position as his chief companion.

Clearly this was too much to take. After mailing him an angry letter—the so-called Scarsdale Letter whose presence loomed so large over the trial—in which she finally let loose her years of frustration, she drove up and ended his life. Whatever the exact circumstances of Tarnower’s death (Harris was found guilty of second-degree murder, but Trilling isn’t fully convinced), it was the result of years of self-delusion on the part of his one-time lover. And according to Trilling’s exacting judgment, Harris ultimately had no one but herself to blame for the whole situation. “So far as her best interests went as a professional person and as a woman,” she admonishes, “[Harris] should no more have allowed herself to be tempted into this expensive life than she should have allowed herself to be implicated in the petty squalors of the Tarnower household.” To have done so discloses something far more damning than a mere display of bad judgment; it reveals an unforgivable lapse of taste.