A Difficult Woman
Authors: Alice Kessler-Harris
The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman
ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS
For Emma and Molly and Jake
and
For Daniel and Eddie and Callie
With hope and joy and love
Chapter 1. Old-Fashioned American Traditions
Chapter 3. A Serious Playwright
Chapter 4. Politics Without Fear
Chapter 6. The Writer as Moralist
Chapter 9. The Most Dangerous Hours
If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written; for a great deal is known of men of which proof cannot be brought.
â
John Boswell,
The Life of Samuel Johnson
In 1976, aged seventy-one, playwright and memoirist Lillian Hellman posed in a mink coat for a resonant advertisement. Cigarette in hand, gazing insouciantly at the camera, Hellman claimed the legendary status she craved. Her flirtatious stance, self-confident amid the wrinkled features, her posture at once brazen and enticing, Hellman gazed directly at the viewer. The advertisement did not reveal the name of its model. It did not have to. Everyone who read
Vogue
and the
New Yorker
and the other magazines in which the advertisement appeared would know that this was Lillian Hellman. She was at the peak of celebrity. In addition to a fistful of plays whose names were well known, she was a heroine to young women who adored her two bestselling memoirs. A star-studded celebration of her seventieth birthday had recently been covered in all the society pages. Just months before the advertisement appeared, Hellman published her third volume of nonfiction,
Scoundrel Time
. So controversial was that volume, and so divisive, that when the mink coat advertisements hit the stands, Hellman had already begun her long decline from the pinnacle of fame to the depths of notoriety.
1976: Everyone would know that this was Lillian Hellman. (Image courtesy of The Advertising Archives)
What was it, I wondered as I started on this book, that made Hellman's life matter so much to so many? To be sure, it traversed most of what historian Eric Hobsbawm has labeled the short twentieth century, the period that saw the rise and demise of the communist Soviet Union. Her life reveals the multiple tensions within which every politically engaged American juggled options and choices during that challenging period. Hellman was born in 1905, came to maturity with the flapper generation of the 1920s, learned her politics in the Depression-era thirties, became a celebrity playwright and movie scriptwriter during World War II, when America needed heroes, and earned her stripes in the struggle against McCarthyism in the early fifties. She survived blacklisting to become an idol of the New Left and the second wave of the women's movement, only to succumb to red-baiting and character assassination at the end of her days. She was, and is still, dragged from the grave to serve as an example of the perils of mendacity. But her words are still quoted, her plays are regularly revived, and her example still inspires.
It was hard to believe that this complicated and forthright woman had come to such a bad end in the popular imagination. Like many of my contemporaries, I readâdevoured would be more accurateâLillian Hellman's autobiographical work as it appeared in the late sixties and early seventies:
An Unfinished Woman
in 1969,
Pentimento
in 1973, and then
Scoundrel Time
in 1976. These memoirs, which deeply moved me at the time, drifted into obscurity in the wake of continuing accusations that they reflected more fiction than fact. More than a quarter century after her death her name still evokes bitter feelings. How had it happened, I wondered, that Lillian Hellman, once so honored and famous, admired for her blunt and plainspoken style, had become the archetype of hypocrisy, the quintessential liar, the embodiment of ugliness? How was it that she was so widely remembered as a rigid Stalinist, an angry woman, a greedy, self-aggrandizing individual in a world where so many others had committed many of the same sins? Why had these characterizations, this negative reputation and the controversy that swirled around her, so long survived her death in 1984? This book tries to answer these questions not by reassessing her character but by thinking through her relationship to the twentieth century. The questions that trouble me are not so much about her psychic dimensionsâthe traditional subject of the literary biographerâor even about the soil from which she grew, the question most often raised by the historical biographer. Rather, I wonder about what is to be learned from the surviving images of Lillian Hellman, from the sharp disjuncture between the glamorous and celebrated playwright and the “ugly” woman of popular memory.
The answers to these questions seem to me to lie in the historical drama within which Hellman acted her part: in the multifaceted and politically splintered America in which she spent her days. In Hellman's lifetime, America fought several wars for democracy and freedom abroad, yet engaged in extended episodes of political repression at home. Her life engaged a century during which women strode toward economic and political equality, yet remained constrained by popular images of beauty and models of traditional family relationships. This was a century when celebrity conferred fame, money, and standing, of which Hellman had her full share, yet it placed its recipients in the glare of constant publicity, turning them into public property. At the century's start, the nation challenged immigrants to assimilate by eliminating differences of language and culture; by its end, it encouraged pride in multiculturalism and unique qualities of ethnicity and identity. During the twentieth century, efforts to achieve
the good life for every citizen yielded remarkable success, but they also produced an arrogant stance in the world. The twentieth century pitted two competing ideological systems against each other, fostering intense conflicts about the meaning of loyalty and the definition of virtue.
Lillian Hellman, as a historical figure who faced difficult choices, lived in a century sharply divided by ideology and morality. Repeatedly she made decisions about where to locate her political allegiance; how to construct her life as a woman in a world that limited women's aspirations; what it meant to live as a Jew, a southerner, a writer at a time when these identities all carried gender, economic, and political connotations that she only half understood and sometimes explicitly rejected. These issues could not be neatly separated. Her identity, her friendships, her sexuality, her writing, and her politics sustained and infected each other, producing an amalgam that was at once idiosyncratic and complicated and very American.
My task has been to see how the life of a single woman can help us to understand some of the salient contradictions of a challenging century by highlighting the thorny situations that Hellman faced. Fortunately, my job has been made easier by the spate of more traditional biographies that have already appeared. These (especially two very good ones by Carl Rollyson and Deborah Martinson) offer thoroughly researched accounts of Hellman's daily life.
1
I gratefully refer readers who wish to follow Hellman “cradle to grave” to them. Here I choose another path, one to which the historian is perhaps particularly attuned. I seek not only to explore how the world in which Hellman lived shaped the choices she made, but to ask how the life she lived illuminates the world she confronted. There is yet a third layer. Because Hellman's life seems to me to so deeply encapsulate many of the twentieth century's challenges, I ask as well how a changing political environment influences popular perceptions of her life. Hellman's actions alone, I argue, cannot account for the transformation in her reputation. Rather, over time, critics, reviewers, political friends and enemies collectively formulated a life that reshaped Lillian Hellman, turning her into something of a Rorschach test. Critics and friends alike viewed her through their own eyes and their own ideological biases. They helped to construct the Lillian Hellman whose work and reputation persists. That Lillian Hellman is an amalgam of the person and of our image of the person; of the good and the bad that she did and was thought to have done. This then is a book (a biography if you will)
about a woman, about the idea of a woman, and about the world that formed and shaped her.
Hellman, living and dead, is a most uncooperative source. She was committed to controlling her own legacy and savvy enough to try to do so. In 1961, Hellman contracted to sell her early manuscripts to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which also owns the papers of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and many other major writers.
2
She was pleased that they wanted the manuscripts, and she settled for a generous initial purchase price along with an arrangement that would allow the library to accession some of the manuscripts immediately and to release others annually. As was then general practice, the library evaluated the additional accessions as it opened them to public use, recording them as gifts for which Hellman would receive tax deductions. Thereafter, she carefully adhered to her obligation to send future drafts of plays and published material to the library. But she rigorously excluded personal papers from the collection. In the seventies, she included provisions to donate her remaining manuscripts to the Harry Ransom Center in the several versions of her will. All of them instructed that personal papers be withheld as they “could be of no possible interest to anyone.”
Because she wanted to remain the subject of her own imagination, Hellman tried, sometimes deliberately, to shape her image to her liking. In the diaries and appointment books that she kept sporadically all of her life, she often disguised the identities of lovers and friends. Recognizing herself as the butt of anger and misunderstanding, she frequently made up stories about herself, her childhood, and her family that illustrated who she wanted to be. With her friend Hannah Weinstein, she invented a fictional Mr. Schwartz who might or might not appear to marry her.
3
She narrated her stories in letters to friends, dinner-table conversations, and in four books of memoir and reminiscence that presented herself as she wished to be remembered. She destroyed, insofar as she could, anything that might allow another judgment or correction of the record. She asked her friends to return her letters to them. With a few exceptions (her first husband, Arthur Kober, didn't return her letters, nor did John Melby), they complied. Hellman then destroyed many of these and other letters.