A Difficult Woman (2 page)

At first, Hellman insisted that she wanted no biography written about her. “I am not sure that anybody's life shows us much about their work,” she wrote, as she refused to cooperate with those who wanted to write about Dorothy Parker or Dashiell Hammett or herself. An early effort by
Stephen Marcus to undertake a biography of Hammett, her longtime lover, ended in discord and the threat of lawsuits. When she finally acquiesced to Diane Johnson's biography of Hammett, she monitored the sources and tried to control their interpretation, telling Johnson that she did not believe in “fictionalized biography” and hoped she would not write one.
⁴
When it became clear that biographers would write about her with or without her permission, she wrote to her friends asking them not to talk to them. The result, of course, was that, as William Wright confessed, he interviewed her enemies and produced a biography bent toward their derisive interpretations. At the end of her life, she appointed her friend and editor William Abrahams as her official biographer. She requested that the archive close all her papers to other researchers for an unspecified period of time. The archive complied. Abrahams gamely started the project, only to be interrupted by death.

Under these circumstances it would be folly to try to capture the “real” Lillian, whoever that is. Her story has emerged in bifurcated form. There is, first of all, the story as she remembered and wanted it. This perhaps was not deliberate manipulation so much as an artifact of the effort at self-representation. The writer Carol Kolmerten once noted that only when Kolmerten reread letters to her mother written during her first marriage did she notice that she had “constructed a fictional narrative of my life that I perceived my female relatives wanted to hear.”
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Hellman would have been sympathetic. She described
An Unfinished Woman
as a memory book. She never said that
Pentimento
was a memoir; indeed she begged the editor of
Esquire
(which republished a piece of the book) to “not use the words ‘memoir' or ‘autobiography' in connection with the pieces.”
⁶
She did not want these pieces, she wrote, to be thought of as a sequel to
An Unfinished Woman.
These were her stories. She was the heroine of her own play.

Because we cannot take at face value anything she says about herself, we are led to ask about the meaning of her self-representation. Hellman wrote extensively about issues of honesty, decency, and integrity. All her life she worried about the meaning of memory, sharply distinguishing the truth of memory from other forms of truth. She tells us in a dozen different ways that she does not believe there is any absolute standard of truth, that her memory is poor and that she writes “as she remembers” rather than what is true, that she despises those who live by pretense and sham. As if to confirm her self-evaluation, she clearly tells large and small lies, expands and contracts the truth, mixes up the events, misremembers years, times, and dates, and omits salient details about her life. None of this
should surprise us. In the larger frame of history, questions of truth and lies permeate the past. And the historian, as the great Russianist E. H. Carr once said, is no hanging judge. He or she asks what the writer reveals about the dialogue between the individual and history rather than whether it is factual. The genre of memoir, where low standards of veracity prevail, is a particularly useful vehicle for understanding what a subject wants us to know. Freud tells us we all remember things that never happened and misremember things that did. That is an invitation to the historian to fit together the jigsaw puzzle in order to place what is forgotten or misremembered into a pattern of explanation.

Hellman's memoirs, published between 1969 and 1980, situated her in the midst of the twentieth century's great conflicts. Filled with invention, written with verve and style, her books described a risky and exciting life and turned her into a bestselling author. But they also led readers to probe her image of herself as a reliable reporter, to produce their own stories about Lillian Hellman. Hellman's deliberate fudging of detail provoked these examinations. She shortened the number of weeks she spent in Finland on her way home from the Soviet Union in 1937 to make it appear that she had time for another (probably fictional) excursion that she wanted to relate. She sometimes stretched the number of months she spent in Moscow during the war from two to four and even six in order to make a point about her familiarity with the scene. And she routinely adopted writing tics like “most certainly” and “absolutely” that signaled what was least certain, least reliable.

At first these misrepresentations served Hellman well, dramatizing her perceptions, place, and politics even as they rode roughshod over literal truth. Exaggeration and elision are the prerogatives of the memoirist, who, unlike the autobiographer, does not promise to write with unvarnished fidelity. And Hellman is very good at telling stories that extract her readers' sympathies. Did bombs really fall in Valencia while she was there? Was she shoved under a bench by a policeman? Did Hemingway give her the manuscript of
To Have and Have Not
to read and critique in Paris or anywhere else? The stories effectively display Hellman's memories of panic, her self-doubt, her need for courage, and, finally, they speak to one woman's capacity to overcome terror and prevail. They are not the first or only occasions when she tells us how fear immobilized her but that she did the right thing in the end. Some stories seem to stretch credibility and to back-fire. In
Pentimento
, Hellman tells us that she delivered $50,000 to a friend in the Austrian resistance, Julia. This story was made into a film starring
Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave. At first “Julia” served Lillian's purposes well. It positioned Hellman as a courageous anti-fascist, a person of principle. But when a woman whose story resembled that of Julia came forward, Hellman was accused not merely of enhancement, exaggeration, and self-aggrandizement, but of theft: of appropriating someone else's life. That cast a light on Hellman's character that ultimately reflected on everything she touched.

Lillian Hellman was, if nothing else, a controversial figure. During her life and after, she was the object of adulation and anger, love and hate. When I started work on this book my friends and colleagues told me that this was a subject that had no rewards. They attached adjectives such as
evil, cruel
, and
vindictive
to Hellman's name. She was, I was told, a Stalinist, a liar, a self-hating Jew, at best a second-rate playwright, already forgotten. She was said to be a polarizing and dishonest person. There would be nothing but misery in tackling the life of this hateful person. Besides, there were already several accounts of her life, most of them negative.
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Why write another? I took all of these comments seriously, thinking at first to avoid this python's nest and to go on to another, less controversial, project. But I am one of that generation of 1970s historians who have taken it upon themselves to examine gender as an ideological force, and Hellman appealed too strongly.

By the time I started to work on this project in 2001 Hellman had become deeply embedded in negative mythology. Those who had already come to damaging conclusions about her had done so less out of knowledge about the woman than from commitment to particular ideologies. Their own sense of themselves as liberals, Zionists, or feminists infused what they “knew.” Several biographies about her reinforced the negative images, each slipping into, and confirming, the already-existing descriptions of a wicked and evil woman. If the biographer dared to provide a more empathetic view of Hellman and her politics, she was taken to task by reviewers whose imaginations could not transcend an accepted public picture. Minds were made up. And yet this too tells us something about a century in which what was remembered was often conditioned by which side you were on.

I discovered this early on when I began to speak publicly about this book. The events routinely attracted large and lively audiences and produced open and helpful discussions. But their aftermath provided unexpected insights. On one occasion, after I addressed a forum of academics, a participant went home to tell her partner about the talk. An e-mail
message the next day described to me how “he laced into Hellman attacking her for being an apologist for Stalin and never repenting, for her self-righteousness, for her lies and self-aggrandizements.” On another, I gave a talk to a small seminar of women biographers in which I averred that part of what I wanted to do was to examine the meaning of calling Hellman a liar, of labeling her as “ugly.” Hearing of my effort, a young person—not present at the seminar—protested that I was being too kind to Hellman. In a message to a colleague, he asked, “Did anyone say, at any point, in these agreeable proceedings, ‘hold on, Hellman WAS a liar? … Whether or not (as a good friend once observed) she had a face that looked as if a mouse had died on it, she lied about her Party membership, she lied about Communist infiltration in the Wallace campaign, and she lied about anticommunist liberals and the magazines
Partisan Review
and
Commentary
, saying that they never attacked McCarthy.”

The palpable anger embedded in these assertions emerges in the distortions they reaffirm. Hellman did, several times before 1976 and three times in
Scoundrel Time
, oppose the actions of Soviet dictators and admit that she had been wrong about Stalin; she was criticized for not saying so apologetically enough and with sufficient force. She did lie about her party membership, a necessary maneuver in the fifties when the economic consequences of admitting party membership could be dire. She continued to deny that she'd ever been in the party, as did many others who only after the fall of the Soviet Union admitted membership.
⁸
She informed Wallace that communists were involved in his campaign: that wasn't illegal in 1948, just unpalatable. She did not accuse those magazines of failing to attack McCarthy: she accused them of not standing by the victims. In words infused with a passionate abhorrence of a long-dead woman, the critics repeated crude gossip, introduced irrelevant connections between Hellman's appearance and her politics, and repeated charges no more accurate than Hellman's defenses.

I puzzled over whether these rifts could have been due to fallout surrounding the Communist Party, of which she, like many of her peers, was briefly a part. But others had long been forgiven party membership and honored to boot. Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, and Pete Seeger come immediately to mind. And, as this book demonstrates, neither in the period of her membership from 1939 to late 1941 nor afterward did she follow the party line. Robert Newman, who has studied the subject more carefully than anyone else, counts her as, at best, a bit player.
⁹
She was and remained what has come to be called a “fellow traveler.” She never gave up her vision
of a society with a greater measure of social and racial justice, and she clung longer and more naïvely than many to the hope that the Soviet Union might mend itself and prove to be a reasonable model. Many of her friends, including Arthur Miller, Aaron Copland, and Marc Blitzstein, did as much.

To what, then, was Hellman's capacity to elicit vituperation and anger due? Certainly her self-righteous stance, her continuing moral certainty, and her willingness to fight back played a role. Her continuing belief that she had “done no harm” irked many. To those who recognized the horrors of Soviet Communism early on, she and others who continued to believe in the possibilities of socialism in any form seemed willfully blind or complicit. Hellman's publicly acclaimed refusal to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952 fueled the anger of anticommunists who seethed at her unwillingness to acknowledge her sins and her escape from the punishments others experienced. Coming from a woman, the finger-pointing proved especially galling. But her greatest offense, and the one that called forth the most scathing denunciation, was her insistence on holding to account those who had failed to defend the victims of McCarthyism. Then and afterward she became, to anti-communists on the right and left, a kind of lightning rod, attracting public disapproval and criticism not because of her failures but because of her strengths. She had, after all, positioned herself as a truth teller, as a patriot acting in defense of American values.

Hellman's moralism (her insistence that she stood for truth, loyalty, antagonism to corruption, commitment to social justice, and racial egalitarianism) may have been her undoing, placing her, as it did, at the fulcrum of ideological disagreement. That she could not live up to her moral claims makes her merely human. But that she insisted on pointing fingers at those who did not live up to theirs turned her into a pariah. Her refusal to bend, her insistence on claiming the moral high ground, reignited a battle that some might have thought over. In
Scoundrel Time
, published in 1976, a quarter century after the events they described, Hellman argued that during the McCarthy period she and others had acted in the best traditions of American dissent. Others had flunked the moral test, failed to stand up to the bullies. In turn, accusations of Stalinism—rigid adherence to a particular line and intolerance for any who rejected it; unquestioning commitment to the politics of the Soviet Union—surfaced once again. The accusations came to implicate both her ideas and her personality. She was dismissed as strident and rude, her persona identified with cruelty and evil. Once a minor player on the political stage, she became
the epitome of factionalization on the left. Long after the specific meaning of Stalinism has been lost to most American adults, when the word itself evokes a naïve commitment to brutal totalitarianism, Lillian Hellman remains a symbol of heightened ideological dispute, of malevolent and unreasoning thought and behavior.