A Difficult Woman (3 page)

“Would any of this have happened in the same way,” sociologist Cynthia Epstein asked me, “if Hellman were not a woman?” I tend to think not. Hellman's life as a woman contains, as Patricia Meyer Spacks has pointed out, a crucial contradiction around the issue of freedom. Hellman sought freedom not only in the world but for herself. That search, as Spacks notes, is illusory, perhaps in general, but certainly for women.
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And yet, Hellman was a spirited and independent soul who never gave up her search for love even as her anger and frustration worked against ever achieving it. Smart and straightforward, filled with wit and humor, she was by turns generous and judgmental. And she was breathtakingly courageous in her defense of civil liberties at a time when to stand up for what was right could exact a tremendous personal price. She wrote about herself with both pride and self-mockery, worrying about her sexual attractiveness and her looks even as she articulated an idealistic political morality.

Hellman's position as a woman among men confuses the situation further. And here, once again, she illuminates the tensions embedded in the twentieth-century transformation of women's lives and gendered power relationships. Arguably, she became the economically successful playwright and celebrity she was by blurring gender boundaries. In her role as a playwright in the 1930s and '40s, she ignored her place “as a woman,” behaving “like a man” in the sense that she simply did as she pleased without apparent attention to prevailing gender norms. She did not, in her plays, turn romance and domesticity into plot lines. Feminine as she certainly was in her private life and private moments, Hellman never made any effort to craft a public feminine self, putting forward instead a transgressive persona. She insisted on writing serious plays about serious subjects and on presenting them in first-class venues. She was ambitious, quick to anger, and often rude and dismissive. She smoked like a chimney and used offensive language.

Her willingness to transgress drew fire while she was alive and continues to do so. Critics still compare her unfavorably to tough, sexy women of the thirties like Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo.
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Of this insistence on placing her among women, Hellman is not the only victim. Poet and
novelist Muriel Spark, a recent reviewer noted, behaved “like any number of male writers, including ones much less talented than she, but as a woman, so ruthlessly and coldheartedly in pursuit of her art she was a little ahead of her time.”
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Small wonder, then, that Hellman quickly earned an unenviable reputation for being demanding, greedy, ambitious, loud, and bad-tempered. The evidence suggests that she was, at times, all of these things. Yet her quick and angry style, her sexual energy, might have drawn less critical attention in a similarly situated male.

Hellman positioned herself as a southerner, a Jew, and a playwright before she ever identified herself as a woman. Yet she could not escape the pigeonhole of what a woman was supposed to be. In the eyes of many, she remained a woman first, forever assessed as a woman playwright, a daughter of the South, a renegade Jewish woman. So it was with her sexuality. Hellman's autonomous and vigorous pursuit of sexual satisfaction reflected the risky goals of young women of her class in the 1920s. Nor did Hellman change these behaviors as she matured. Unlike other women of her generation (Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Mary McCarthy come to mind), she did not atone for her past promiscuity by settling down with a partner. On the contrary, she walked away from an early marriage with no hard feelings and the recognition that marriage was not for her. Critics in the 1930s sometimes described Hellman as a “she Hammett.”

One suspects that her lack of conventional beauty multiplied the offense given by Hellman's want of decorous behavior. Still, she continued to be sexually active throughout her life and sexually attractive into her old age, when her magnetism drew comment. Look at her in that mink coat, sexy, knowing, ironic, plainly the picture of a woman thoroughly enjoying herself into her seventy-second year. Late in life, her sometimes salacious pursuit of young men attracted sneers and jokes that increased as she became sick and feeble. It was then that she became known to her enemies as a “sexual predator.” The combination of wrinkled and leathery skin and sexual aggressiveness drew bitter comments like “she had a face that looked as if a mouse died on it.”

Once again Hellman illuminates the historical moment. The twentieth century was, after all, a time of volatile gender relationships. Modernity, Depression, war, and suburbanization all challenged traditional gender norms; new habits of consumption and political protest led women in particular to seek new paths. The young Lillian who in the twenties enjoyed the sexual and lifestyle freedom of the flapper generation lived through the
more traditional, family-oriented fifties, insistently committed to her own brand of independent womanliness. When the second wave of feminism came along, she dismissed the young women who participated in the new movement as lacking in seriousness. She refused to call herself a feminist, denied that she experienced obstacles to success as a woman, was reportedly fiercely combative with female subordinates. Small wonder, then, that a new generation of young women who adored her also felt a touch of ambivalence. They admired her explicit acknowledgment of sexual desire and appreciated her iteration of a free and self-made life. But they were disappointed at the lack of emotional autonomy it demonstrated—at the failure of women like Hellman to refuse dependence on men, or to identify with women.

In her search for economic independence, too, Hellman transgressed the idea of a woman's place. Unlike the lives of many early-twentieth-century women, whose stories rotate around courtship, marriage, and family even when their achievements are substantial, Hellman's tale is better captured by following a typically male trajectory. Her life tells a story of mounting attainment. At one level, she exemplifies the Horatio Alger myth that promises success to those who (with the aid of luck and pluck) pull themselves up by their bootstraps. At another, it manifests the courage and assertion it took for a woman to pursue a course generally closed to her sex. For a woman to achieve the economic resources that allowed her to function independently at a time when such independence was largely seen as the prerogative of men defied nature. Characteristically, an achieving woman, instead of accruing admiration, became known as greedy and self-serving. She met a more hostile world, fended off challenges with a sharp tongue and prickly temper, built a potent set of defenses. Being a self-made woman was not at all like being a self-made man.

The transgressive woman typically provides a troubling subject. To write about her empathetically is to display her temper, her anger, her rudeness. To explain these away does her an injustice; it denies the difficulties she faced in achieving her goals. Observers frequently describe Hellman as simply unliked and unlikeable by many, especially many women. I see another side of her, one much loved and cared for by a succession of friends who accepted or ignored the difficult parts of her persona because they so enjoyed the benefits of her warmth and wit and friendship. Her legendary anger and bad temper constituted part of a personality that was also generous, caring, hospitable, and womanly. The tension between the two parts tells us something about how twentieth-century women coped, how
they repeatedly compromised their private lives and reframed their public personas as necessity demanded and opportunity allowed. Hellman's dual stance, simultaneously furious and nurturing, loving and dismissive, insecure and insistent, may well illuminate elements of gender that women have often feared to show.

Lillian Hellman is a juicy character: her life is filled with sex and scandal, with spirited advocacy and victimhood. She might be the subject of one of the melodramas she wrote so well. If we delve into the context in which she lived we might discover something more. For Hellman illuminates the interplay between the historical moment and individual responses. She earned her laurels and she brought her troubles on herself. But she did so within a shifting and changing political, social, and cultural environment that constituted the century's challenge. The persona and her reactions took on different colors as Hellman enacted them in changing contexts. Her capacity to contain (and to reveal) so many contradictory elements turned her into the perfect lightning rod, and thus the perfect subject for the historian.

Literary scholar Rachel Brownstein points out that literary biography poses the problem of finding out how the character imagined herself. It allows great play for the biographer's imagination—allowing the biographer to make the subject what she wants her to be. Political or historical biography shifts the emphasis to ask how the character related to the world around her—how she faced the world. In searching for the relational self, the historical biographer uses the individual as a window into a moment, a lens, a mirror. Inevitably that lens is clouded. But peering through Hellman, trying to experience the world in which she made political and personal choices and searched for a place, promises to provide a sense of how myriad ordinary folk made difficult choices under circumstances not of their own choosing. What can Hellman tell us, I ask, about the hope and anxiety that infused the war-torn and Stalinist worlds of fear in which she lived? What can she teach us about how any of us might react if we were faced with a choice between giving up a utopian dream and clinging to a false god? How would we behave if to achieve our goals we needed to abandon the rewards of constraint and appear rebellious? Would we, given the option, betray a friend or betray ourselves? These questions lead me to worry whether I do Hellman a disservice by using her life to access not only particular events but the larger cultural and social and even political processes of a moment in time. I do not know whether Lillian Hellman would approve of that, but I like to think she
might find it more useful than the biographies she never wanted written about her.

And here, of course, I face my own motives. The distinguished British historian E. P. Thompson once justified a biographical study of William Blake by remarking that while many microstudies of Blake had appeared, and each had added significant particulars to the sum of knowledge about him, it would take a historian to put the parts together, to reveal the sum total. Yet the historian's is a flawed lens, pretending to an unachievable objectivity. He or she chooses which pieces to use and which to leave aside. Too much has been written about Lillian Hellman to pretend that all the parts can be neatly fitted together. Too much has been shaved and shaded and refigured to know what answers will emerge when the pieces are reconfigured. For the challenge of Lillian Hellman is to see how the female, southern, Jewish, heterosexual playwright—the communist celebrity who modeled mink coats—lived in one body. Our challenge is to understand the relationship between the flesh-and-blood Lillian and the templates made of her. How else to account for her persistent hold on the American imagination?

In recent years Lillian Hellman has become a Rorschach test for a generation of women and men who lived through some of the most challenging days of America's history, a lightning rod for the anger, fear, and passion that divided American intellectuals and activists from each other. Perhaps, just perhaps, a new look will enable us to make sense of the obsession with her that will, I suspect, last until the issues she touched have disappeared into historical memory. Let us, then, follow Lillian Hellman through the minefields of the twentieth century. Let us explore how one woman survived its challenges.

I was raised in an old fashioned American tradition, and there were certain homely things that were taught to me: to try to tell the truth, not to bear false witness, not to harm my neighbor, to be loyal to my country …

—
Lillian Hellman,
Scoundrel Time

Beautiful Julia Newhouse, daughter of a wealthy southern family, married Max Hellman—who had nothing to recommend him but charm—in 1904. A year later, Julia gave birth to a child they called Lillian Florence Hellman. Baby Lillian grew up to be a precocious and rebellious child. She spent her early years in New Orleans before the family moved north to New York City. But she returned to New Orleans and the South for months at a time throughout her youth. Geography, class, and gender all added up to life on the fringes.

Lillian belonged to no traditional world, but she lived on the outskirts of several. She was born and nurtured in southern soil although she grew up mostly in New York City; she lived in the shadow of her mother's wealthy family, reacting to it with both envy and contempt; she was Jewish by birth, embraced African-American lore and love as a child, and attended Catholic and Baptist churches as the spirit moved her. In the 1930s she wanted to change the world and to live in harmony with the great love of her life, Dashiell Hammett. She became a famous playwright and memoirist, a winner of many awards and honors, yet she never escaped the taint of communism nor suspicions that she lied about her past. She died cherished by a few good friends, despised and misunderstood by many.