A Difficult Woman (76 page)

The main source for this book has been the marvelous Lillian Hellman Collection at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. The papers there are rich in manuscript materials and contain as well a plethora of records having to do with Hellman's business and financial interests, and some very good correspondence from Dashiell Hammett and to John Melby. To supplement these papers I have drawn extensively on a variety of other archival collections. The most important of these is the William M. Abrahams Collection in the Cecil Green Library at Stanford University. Hellman designated Abrahams, her friend and editor for many years, her official biographer. To fill this mandate, he collected a great deal of information that has now been made available to researchers. I made good use as well of additional collections, which in alphabetical order include the papers of:

William Alfred, Brooklyn College Archives and Special Collections

Leonard Bernstein, Library of Congress

Millen Brand, Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Blair Clark, Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton University

Samuel Goldwyn, Margaret Herrick Library of the American Motion Picture Academy

Sidney Hook, Hoover Institution Archives

Arthur Kober, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin

Dwight MacDonald, Beinecke Library, Yale University

Mary McCarthy, Vassar College

Eve Merriam, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College

Joseph Rauh, Library of Congress

Arthur Schlesinger, New York Public Library

Harlow Shapley, Houghton Library, Harvard University

Herman Shumlin, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin

Telford Taylor, Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Arthur Thornhill, Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton University

Lionel Trilling, Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Additional papers include:

Counterattack Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University

House of Representatives, Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), Name Files, National Archives

Little, Brown papers, Widener Library, Harvard University

Harold Matson Papers, Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Spanish Refugee Aid Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University

Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Tamiment Library, New York University

Hellman had an enormous number of friends and acquaintances. I benefited from speaking with a few, some at length and others more briefly. Crucial insights and information came from:

Robert Brustein

Zoe Caldwell-Whitehead

Annabel Davis-Goff

Morris and Lore Dickstein

Norman Dorsen

Peter Feibleman

Leon Friedman

Fred Gardner

Stephen Gillers

Bobbie Handman

Maureen Howard

Catherine (Shirah) Kober Zeller

Richard Locke

Peter London

Arien Mack

Victor Navasky

Patricia Neal

Wendy Nicholson

Austin Pendleton

Maurice Peress

Martin Peretz

Anne Peretz

Richard Poirier

Daniel Pollitt

Robert Silvers

Rose Styron

Susan Styron

Nancy Wechsler

The transcribed oral histories conducted over the years with Hellman's friends and acquaintances have supplied additional stores of memory. Among those I found most useful are those on deposit in the Columbia Center for Oral History, Columbia University Library:

Leonard Boudin

Donald Angus Cameron

Harold Clurman

Virginia Durr

Thomas Emerson

Albert Hackett

Helen Van dernoot Rosen

Michael Straight

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library: Phillip Dunne

Sam Jaffe

Regenstein Library, University of Chicago: Richard Stern

New York Public Library, Berg Collection: Joan Mellen tapes

There is no shortage of commentaries on Lillian Hellman as a dramatist, a memoirist, a celebrity, and a litigious person. I've noted many of these in the endnotes that accompany each chapter. Here I focus on some of the sources that illuminate various phases of her life story and help us to understand how she participated in, and shaped, the twentieth century. What follows is not an attempt at a comprehensive list, but a few of the volumes that I found most helpful as I tried to unravel the many choices that Hellman made throughout her life.

On the question of writing the biography of a difficult woman, several volumes stirred my imagination. These included the essays in Sara Alpern et al.,
The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Modern American Women
(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Catherine N. Parke,
Biography: Writing Lives
(New York: Routledge, 2002); and Teresa Iles,
All Sides of the Subject: Women and Biography
(New York: Teachers College Press, 1992). Linda Wagner-Martin,
Telling Women's Lives: The New Biography
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), remains among the most stimulating of such sources. Timothy Dow Adams,
Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990) provoked much thought into the question of whether lying is inevitably part of the presentation of self. Alan Ackerman,
Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011) came out while this book was in press, but its thoughtful analysis of Hellman's language sheds light on the culture that nurtured her.

The best way into Hellman's life is through her own work.
The Collected Plays
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1972) provides an essential beginning point and a view of thirty years of her dramatic imagination. Three memoirs:
An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1969),
Pentimento
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), and
Scoundrel Time
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1976) elucidate Hellman's sense of herself and her stance toward the world she lived in.
Maybe
:
A Story
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1980) offers a sometimes painful view from the end of her life. And some of Hellman's unique perspectives can be garnered from the extraordinary collection of interviews assembled by Jackson Bryer in
Conversations with Lillian Hellman
(Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1986).

Hellman's life has been examined by many people, but by far the most
valuable single source is Peter S. Feibleman.
Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman
(New York: Morrow, 1988) presents a not uncritical but loving assessment of a forty-five-year relationship. Of the several biographies, the most informative are those by Carl E. Rollyson,
Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988) and Deborah Martinson,
Lillian Hellman: Life with Foxes and Scoundrels
(New York: Counterpoint, 2005). The former provides a comprehensive account of her daily life and a stern view of the political Lillian; Martinson provides a more empathetic perspective. On the major relationships in Hellman's life, see Richard Layman,
Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981); Diane Johnson,
Hammett: A Life
(New York: Random House, 1983); and Robert P. Newman,
The Cold War Romance of Lillian Hellman and John Melby
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

I gained insight into Hellman's identification as a southerner and thought about the impact of her New Orleans Jewish childhood after reading the classic W. J. Cash,
The Mind of the South
(New York: Vintage, 1991). To find out more about growing up as a white woman in the South I turned to Anne Firor Scott,
The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), and to Susan K. Cahn,
Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). For a sense of Jewish life in the extended South, I drew on Eli N. Evans,
The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South
(New York: Atheneum, 1980), and Ronald Lawrence Bern,
The Legacy: A Novel
(New York: Mason/Charter, 1975). Several essays in Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson, eds.,
Jews in the South
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973) proved useful as well.

Hellman's Jewish identity and her relationship to the Jewish community formed a continuing piece of her struggle with the American left. On issues of cultural connections see David A. Hollinger,
Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States,
Studies in American Thought and Culture (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006) and Judith E. Smith,
Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940–1960
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). For the specifically contentious relationships of Jews to each other, see Stephen J. Whitfield,
In Search of American Jewish Culture
(Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 1999). On Hellman's relationship to the Anne Frank case, it is worth beginning with the accusations made by Meyer Levin,
The Obsession
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973). A more measured account of Levin's obsession can be found in Lawrence Graver,
An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Hellman was roundly condemned for failing to acknowledge Stalin's persecution of Jews. This issue is illuminated by Joshua Rubenstein and
Vladimir P. Naumov, eds.,
Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

The culture that Hellman entered in the early twentieth century and the 1930s, especially as it relates to women, is explored in Christine Stansell,
American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000). The world of literary culture is the subject of Ann Douglas,
Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995). Morris Dickstein,
Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression
(New York: Norton, 2009) is the essential source on the impact of the depression on 1930s popular and highbrow culture. For the relationship of popular culture to the labor movement see Michael Denning,
The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century
(London: Verso, 1996). For the rise of the Screenwriters' Guild see Nancy Lynn Schwartz and Sheila Schwartz,
The Hollywood Writers' Wars
(New York: Knopf, 1982). Larry Ceplair,
The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1980) carries the story into the 1950s. Dan Georgakas and Lenny Rubenstein,
The Cineaste Interviews: On the Art and Politics of the Cinema
(Chicago: Lake View Press, 1983) provides a fount of insider information.

Personal accounts of the years from the 1930s into the postwar period are numerous, as are biographies of some of the participants in the causes that Hellman cared about. Illuminating and helpful recollections that touch on Hellman's experiences include Edmund Wilson and Leon Edel,
The Thirties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980). Among the biographies, Marion Meade,
Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2010) and A. Scott Berg,
Goldwyn: A Biography
(New York: Knopf, 1989) are most useful for the 1930s. Other biographies in which Hellman makes more than a casual appearance include Martin B. Duberman,
Paul Robeson
(New York: Knopf, 1988); Dorothy Herrman,
S. J. Perelman: A Life
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986); and Marion Meade,
Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?
(New York: Penguin Books, 1987). Hellman also enters into the stories told by Elia Kazan,
Elia Kazan: A Life
(New York: Knopf, 1988), and Arthur Miller,
Timebends: A Life
(New York: Grove Press, 1987).

The most useful assessment of Hellman's life in the theater and in the world of entertainment is still Jacob H. Adler,
Lillian Hellman
(Austin, TX: Steck-Vaughn Company, 1969), though it is worth examining as well Richard Moody,
Lillian Hellman, Playwright
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1972). More general assessments of Hellman as a playwright in context can be found in Joseph Wood Krutch,
The American Drama Since 1918
(New York: George Braziller, 1957) and John Gassner,
The Theatre in Our Times: A Survey of the Men, Materials and Movements in the Modern Theatre
(New York: Crown, 1954).

Hellman spent much of her political life on the fringes of New York's powerful intellectual culture. On this subject there are many good volumes in which Hellman scarcely appears but which illuminate the world that she confronted on a daily basis. Readers might want to begin with Richard H. Pells,
The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s
(New York: Harper & Row, 1985) and then move to Terry A. Cooney,
The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, 1934–45
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Alexander Bloom,
Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Alan M. Wald,
The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); and Neil Jumonville,
Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Several memoirs come from individuals who crossed swords with Hellman over political issues. They include Irving Howe,
A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), and William Phillips,
A Partisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life
(New York: Stein and Day, 1983). Michael Wreszin,
A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight MacDonald
(New York: Basic Books, 1994), is a masterful account of one individual who intersected with Hellman's life from the late 1930s until her death.