A Difficult Woman (30 page)

Given the weight of Hammett's comments, we are tempted to wonder if Hellman was being disingenuous when, later, she observed that she meant, in
The Searching Wind
, “only to write about nice, well born people who, with good intentions, helped to sell out a world.”
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There is something unsatisfying in her refusal to claim the play for what it was: a pointed condemnation of rich liberals whose refusals to “see,” whose denials and silences around world-shaking historical events, finally led the world into war. Sam, the son whose leg will soon be sacrificed to the silence of his grandfather and the denials of his parents, makes the point directly. He recalls conversations with his fellow soldiers as they sat in the mud of the trenches fulminating against the “old tripe who just live in our country now and pretend they are on the right side.” He repeats to his parents his desire to get away from the people who “believe they're all for everything good” despite the fact that they “made the shit we're sitting in.”
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The rage speaks for itself, forecasting feelings Hellman would express thirty years later in
Scoundrel Time
when she would direct her venom at the same liberals who, in her view, had continued to betray the world. In
The Searching Wind
, Sam asserts only shame at the behavior of his parents. He won't mind the loss of the leg, he tells them, “as long as it means a little something and helps to bring us out someplace.”
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The next generation, he seems to be saying, would speak up. Hellman soon learned that they would not.

Insofar as
The Searching Wind
called to account those who refused to stand up to Hitler and the fascists, the play affirmed Hellman's position as a moralist whose finger pointed blame. When Sam hurled at his parents and his grandfather a painful assessment of their responsibility, Hellman indicted an entire generation. History, Sam told the audience, was “made by the masses of people” not by “one man or ten men.” But, he continued, that was no “excuse to just sit back and watch,” to act as if “nothing anybody can do makes any difference, so why do it?”
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This was the moral issue that Addie had posed in
The Little Foxes
when she deplored those who ate the vines just like locusts eating the earth, and then asked if it was right for others “to stand and watch them do it?”
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Many critics judged
The Searching Wind
as the best, the most impelling
play of the season. Hellman was, wrote one admiring critic, “the least reluctant [of contemporary playwrights] to admit to being alive and thoughtful in a parlous time.”
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The Searching Wind
, wrote another, “brought back a full measure of dignity, perception and beauty to the theater.” He then went on to praise Hellman's “bitter and lucid” indictment “of supposed men of good will who brought us to this terrible moment of the present.”
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Hellman was at her best, thought a third, when she was dealing with the politics of the world. She left the audience “wishing for more politics and less emotional triangle.” “To get an audience thinking in this day and age probably is a matter of the sheerest genius.”
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Other critics found Hellman's effort to grapple with the politics of her time mystifying. The play, wrote one reviewer, might be “superb theater,” but Hellman's political aim remained unclear to him. She had not, he mourned, solved the problem of how to keep Europe from going periodically to war … a problem that has defied solution for at least 2,000 years.”
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Others were even more critical. They appreciated her efforts to turn a mirror to her times but at the same time fulminated that Hellman had pretended to a social omniscience that nobody could have had in the twenties or even the late thirties; they accused her of exhibiting “a general impatience with, or contempt for, people less elaborately informed than herself.”
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Why, they asked, did
The Searching Wind
not include a fourth flashback that condemned the 1939 Soviet-German pact? Why not denounce Stalin's efforts to make peace with Hitler as no more than appeasement? Hellman, they argued, was preaching the lessons of collective security to a nation that doubted it could ever fully trust a communist regime. She was accused of being a political playwright.

But the most vehement protests came from those on the left who wondered why Hellman had failed “to link the appeasers of yesterday with the defeatists, the ‘nationalists' and ‘isolationists' of today.”
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The play, argued the
Daily Worker
's Ralph Warner, was strongest when it recalled “the support democracy gave to its mortal enemy, fascism.” But it fell short in many ways, most pointedly by refusing to acknowledge “the unwavering anti-fascist position taken by the Soviet Union” and failing to see “that many Americans worked and are still working to perpetuate the policies of appeasement” that continue to support fascism.
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So pointed were these critiques that several nonparty publications commented that “the rich and famous Miss Hellman, hitherto one of the most ardent of the Communist fellow travelers,” may well have fallen out of favor with the party.
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Inevitably, perhaps, Hellman's ambiguous political stance inserted itself into judgments of the play itself and resulted in ad hominem attacks. Had her talent deserted her? As one skeptic wondered, could it be that this latest play was merely a “shallow meretricious piece of reactionary claptrap?”
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With barely disguised irony, critics complained that the play reflected her status as an “advanced or indignant woman.” In one remarkable assessment, the
New Republic
's reviewer let loose a diatribe on Hellman's writing—the subject of almost universal admiration—calling it “pseudo-analytical-psychological, head-in-the-box-office-feet-in-the-clouds, feministic, novelistic rubbish.”
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Hellman, as she tended to do, publicly shrugged off the criticism, insisting that this was a play about well-intentioned people who had simply let their opportunities pass and attributing the personal attacks to narrow political disagreements. For all its relevance in 1944, when
The Searching Wind
appeared as a film two years later—Hellman adapted the script for the screen herself—it fell completely flat. By 1946, nobody was interested in analyzing whether American appeasement of fascists had brought on the war.

Hellman might have been perceived as a political playwright during the war, but she didn't like the label very much and she claimed never to have really liked
The Searching Wind.
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Before the film's June 1946 release, she had already decided to shift gears and was working full tilt on the play that would become
Another Part of the Forest
. There she tried to deflect criticism by backing off current events and revisiting the themes of greed and human nature that had animated
The Little Foxes
. But the parallels between the southern world she created and the one in which she lived were unmistakable. World War II had now ended; America was busily retooling its industry to serve the needs of an expanding consumer culture. Setting the scene twenty years before
The Little Foxes
, Hellman placed the Hubbard siblings in small-town Alabama in 1880, just after the 1877 withdrawal of northern troops from the South. There, Hellman resurrected the two brothers, Ben and Oscar, and their sister, Regina, as they reached maturity and wrested control of their family's fortune from their father. The father, much despised in the small town where he was the wealthiest man, had made huge profits during the Civil War by running salt through the southern blockade and then selling it at enormous prices. This was the kind of profiteering familiar to goods-deprived families in the Second World War. As if that were not enough, Marcus Hubbard
betrayed a group of southern soldiers to the enemy, an event that towns-people suspected, but could not prove, and that led to the soldiers' massacre. When Ben discovers that his mother has secreted evidence of his father's guilt in the family Bible, he blackmails his father into giving up control of his wealth and, at the price of parental humiliation, starts on the path to capitalist success.

There was no way to miss Hellman's condemnation of the endless rapacity of capitalism, its ruthless destruction of everything that lay in its way, including the cherished traditions of family honor and southern solidarity. But postwar America had had enough of conflict with capitalism. It relied now on the entrepreneurial spirit to raise it from the despair of war, and Hellman had overstepped the limits. She had created, thought one reviewer, characters of sheer unredeemed wickedness, characters filled with “relentless hatred … cold hatred, Iago-hatred,” characters utterly lacking in human decency.
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These were characters so monstrous, so venal, so brimming with odium that they immediately raised the question of whether such evil had any relationship to real life.

In the view of critics, her malevolence backfired. As Brooks Atkinson put it in the
New York Times
, “this time her hatred for malefactors of great wealth in post-war Alabama has driven her play straight over the line into old fashioned melodrama.” This play, he thought, was hokum.
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By trying to turn a serious effort to expose predatory capitalists into popular entertainment, noted another critic, Hellman had “deprived it of validity,” turned it into a play “as easy to enjoy as it was difficult to take seriously.”
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The new millionaires of the 1880s might have been villainous, argued another, but they were not unmitigated villains.
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And yet the criticism was muted by awe at Hellman's accomplishment. Even as they disparaged her melodramatic style, even as they ridiculed it for its lack of verisimilitude, several critics praised the play as “expertly written, well acted, superbly directed.”
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As one wrote, “from a less practiced pen,” the play “might have been so overwrought as to be funny.” Only “a dramatist of extraordinary skill and strength,” he added, “could have managed” to pull this off.
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Criticism of character and plot in
Another Part of the Forest
was balanced by admiration for the production, and this time Hellman could take credit for that too. Up until then, Herman Shumlin had produced and directed all of her original plays. He had also been her most enduring admirer, and often a lover as well. “Dear smart, gorgeous, lovely, darling Lillian,” he wrote to her after the opening of
The Children's Hour
,
and with unfailing loyalty continued for a decade to work with her on everything she wrote. For a long time Hellman appreciated the partnership, and shared with Shumlin the triumphs and hurts of his other successes and failures. “Herman would do just as well to stay away from comedy,” she wrote to Arthur Kober after one of Shumlin's failures. “I feel very sorry about all the mess.”
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But in 1945 strains emerged in the relationship. Hellman's decision to direct
The Searching Wind
while Shumlin produced it may well have created tensions. And Hellman's deep involvement with John Melby surely exacerbated ill-feeling. In early 1946, she told Shumlin she could not work with him any longer. Lacking trust in any other partner, she asked Kermit Bloomgarden to produce the play and decided to direct
Another Part of the Forest
herself.

She was, by her own account, poor at the job: not adequately clear, impulsive, and often quick to change her mind. She thought she could simply “explain something and that was that.” Her penchant for treating actors as “normal, logical people” backfired when she discovered that people in the theater were neither normal nor logical.
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Remarkably, none of this showed onstage. She received universal accolades for her selection of actors (particularly the young Patricia Neal as the teenaged Regina, and Mildred Dunnock as the mother driven crazy by her husband's machinations), her staging, and the overall sense of the direction. The play, not a smash hit, nevertheless ran from late November to late April, a respectable five months.

Two themes run through the controversy about
Another Part of the Forest
, both worth our attention. The wickedness that permeated the play rubbed off on Hellman as a person. Richard Watts, who briefly compared Hellman to Ibsen in terms of plot structure and directness of language, chose on second thought to associate her with Clare Boothe. They shared, Watts thought, a “malice toward the human race … distaste for mankind … venom and their bitterness.”
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Joseph Wood Krutch concurred: “Miss Hellman's ability to imagine dirty tricks and nasty speeches is unrivaled in the contemporary theater,” he opined. “There can be no question of the theatrical virtuosity which enables her to extract from each all the ugliness it can possibly yield.”
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To some, Hellman became the personification of the evil that she was describing. As Sam Sillen put it in the
Daily Worker
, a communist newspaper typically sympathetic to the broad outlines of her work, “In the sheer projection of wickedness in human
beings, Miss Hellman has no competitors in the American theater.” She had written a play so depraved and mean-spirited that it could not be taken seriously. John Chapman concurred. The theater, he argued, needed “a good stiff dose of pure hellishness. Miss Hellman … is just the girl to give it to us.”
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From then on, Hellman would be identified with the ugliness of her characters, her persona vested with their cruel and malevolent behaviors. The critic Jacob Adler would conclude his assessment of her work a few years later by suggesting that “what sustains her is a concentrated presentation of sheer, almost supernatural evil, to be matched in almost no other modern playwright anywhere.”
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