A Difficult Woman (31 page)

Then, too,
Another Part of the Forest
offered a view of history with which many (including some of her former friends) disagreed. Based in the South like
The Little Foxes
,
Another Part of the Forest
imagined its corrupt protagonists bent on the destruction of a pastoral and paternalistic land that had never existed. Hellman's South overlooked the legacy of slavery and racism to display a latent admiration for the cultured and gracious lives lived by its ruling elite. In defense of this oversimplified and idyllic South, Hellman took proponents of a new industrialism to task. One sympathetic critic concluded that “Miss Hellman is, among other things, becoming a social historian of provocative gifts.”
⁵⁸
But those less inclined to romanticize the old South could reasonably dissent. The portrait raised questions about Hellman's identification with the South and led some to wonder if her capacity to draw on a fund of negative materials about that changing region, and even to throw off southern ties in her work, might negate the label of a southern writer in her case.
⁵⁹
Hellman was herself ambivalent on this point. Asked late in life if she considered herself southern, she replied, “Well, I have no right to, because the New York years now far outweigh the Southern years, but I suppose most Southerners, people who grew up in the South, still consider themselves Southern.”
⁶⁰

In the context of the times,
Another Part of the Forest
, itself seemingly without a relevant politics, created something of a stir. Hellman had followed
The Searching Wind
—a play that blamed American isolationism for bringing on the Second World War and that advocated collective security in a period of deep suspicions against the Soviet Union—with one that offered yet another dose of criticism. Even as the nation turned to anticommunism and Hellman herself turned away from communist activities,
Another Part of the Forest
condemned capitalists as unmitigated villains and romanticized traditional community values. In turning the
Hubbards into an evil family, wrote a
Commonweal
reviewer who had also disliked Hellman's portrayal of the events leading up to World War II, Hellman had drawn a portrait that was “Americanly wrong.”
⁶¹
Later, other critics would associate these two plays with the kind of simplistic social-realist writing characteristic of the 1930s left, and which Hellman disliked.
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There was the rub. In the postwar period, vast divisions emerged about what was “American” and what was not. As the country settled into the era and its leaders tried to sort out how to live with a Soviet Union perceived as increasingly threatening, Hellman's views diverged from those of an apprehensive mainstream America. During the Depression thirties, the idea of communism served as a beacon of light to radicals who sought to change the world. As long as the Americans and the Soviets were allied, the light lasted. Then it faded. The brave Soviet citizens who had resisted Hitler during the war years and driven him back remained confined and silenced in a nation desperate to spread Communist influence and ideas over the world. Revelations about Stalin's atrocities against anybody who threatened his power reached the West. The Soviets were known to be searching for the secret of the Atom bomb, and close to achieving it. A tense and fearful U.S. searched for spies in every nook and cranny. And an aggressive United States Congress attacked those it deemed guilty of spreading un-American ideas. Hellman resisted the onslaught of fear and hostility, clinging, as many did, to the hope that some mechanism for peaceful coexistence could be found, and insisting that the search for enemies within the United States would surely destroy the freedoms its citizens most valued. After
Another Part of the Forest
, her writing, long in tune with a wartime desire for cohesion, seemed flat and out of harmony, even perilously dangerous. She turned increasingly to contemporary issues and especially to the defense of artistic freedom.

In 1948, Hellman agreed to adapt Norman Mailer's bestselling novel
The Naked and the Dead
for the theater, drawn by its critique of conflict within the American military and its dissection of the inner lives of American soldiers. She interrupted her work on the script—as it happened never to resume it—to attend a premiere of
The Little Foxes
in Belgrade and to write some short pieces on Yugoslavia for the
New York Star
. Writing in early November 1948 as Henry Wallace was winding up a campaign for the presidency that Harry Truman would win, Hellman
took time in these pieces to educate her readers about the recent expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Communist bloc of nations led by the Soviet Union. Tito, who did not believe that the Soviets had sufficiently aided Yugoslav partisans in their wartime struggle, chose to chart his own path toward communism, independent of Soviet influence. This was a conversation that Hellman could have stayed out of. But she chose to enter it on Tito's side—averring at every opportunity that, although she knew nothing about the quarrel, she was happy to learn that communists sometimes disagreed with each other and insisting that Tito's strength, candor, and charm would prevent a face-off between them.
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Before she returned to the United States, Hellman stopped in Paris, where she saw Emmanuel Robles's play
Montserrat
, a piece that appealed to her so much that she abandoned Mailer's
The Naked and the Dead
to adapt it to an American audience. Robles's play spoke powerfully to one of Hellman's favorite themes: the price of human liberty. Set in Venezuela in 1812, the plot revolved around the rebellion led by Simon Bolívar. To persuade one man, Montserrat, to speak the secret of Bolívar's hiding place, a Spanish officer rounds up six innocent Venezuelan villagers (men and women) and tells them they will be shot in an hour if they do not convince Montserrat to reveal the hiding place. Alone with the prisoners, Montserrat listens as each pleads a case. Wives and children will be without support, argue the captives; nursing babies will be motherless; young people at the threshold of life will never contribute their might. Montserrat counters by trying to persuade the six that their individual lives are worth nothing as against the millions for whom Bolívar's escape will bring liberty. Their sacrifice is for the larger human freedom that Bolívar represents. But the six are not convinced, and each dies pleading with Montserrat to speak. Finally, when the Spanish threaten to round up six more innocents, Montserrat relents. But by now Bolívar has escaped, and in retribution Montserrat is sent to his death.

As she worked at the adaptation—a much harder task than she had imagined—Hellman tinkered with the Robles play, in the process facing some of the moral problems confronting a tense world. She neither drew explicit political lessons nor preached revolt against oppression. And yet the historical moment enveloped the play. With Berlin under blockade for most of the spring and the Chinese communists racing through Beijing and then Nanking toward victory, the world seemed headed for an indefinite conflict. At home, the hunt to identify and curtail communist activity intensified. In March, the Cultural and Scientific Conference for
World Peace in which Hellman participated endured sharp protests for issuing invitations to “approved” Soviet writers. In June, the attack struck close to home when an FBI report named Hellman's close friend Dorothy Parker a communist. Could liberty prevail in the face of a large and spreading fear? The noose around communists and fear of them tightened that August when the Russians tested their first atomic weapon.

Kermit Bloomgarden agreed to produce
Montserrat
, but Hellman chose to direct it herself, her second effort at directing. This time she did not succeed so well. Though critics appreciated Hellman's usual “sharpness and bite” and praised “the fervor of her hatred for injustice and her belief in man's right to shape his own destiny,” they missed her usual directness. The production, they agreed, lacked the verve and intensity of her earlier work.
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Hellman stood by her play, though she later confessed that she directed it in “a fumbling, frightened way,” intimidated by the powerful acting of Emlyn Williams.
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It might not have mattered.

The timing of the production was all wrong, and to make matters worse, just a few days after
Montserrat
opened, Marc Blitzstein's
Regina
, an operatic adaptation of
The Little Foxes
, hit the boards. Except for insisting that the story line of the opera remain faithful to her original play, Hellman pretty much stayed out of the work on
Regina
. Blitzstein, an old friend, took the opportunity to blunt the edges of
The Little Foxes
by creating a chorus of black folk whose musical instruments and voices underlined the play's antiracist themes and suggested that a new day was coming. With Blitzstein already identified as a communist, critics took aim at both message and music. Inevitably, musical and play together opened up questions about just what political side Hellman was on.

As if to avoid the taint of writing political plays, and in the midst of the spreading attacks against communism, Hellman turned in the spring of 1951 to
The Autumn Garden
, a play she sometimes described as her favorite. Shunning the overtly political, she avoided the carefully constructed plots that had sustained her for many years. She turned, instead, to Chekhov, whose plays she much admired and whose letters she had begun to assemble in preparation for a book. For a setting, she provided a summer guest house on the Gulf Coast near New Orleans, run by a refined, down-on-her-fortune woman. There she brought together ten middle-aged people for their annual summer holidays. These were characters, as a
Commonweal
reviewer put it, trapped “in the half life they have been living while waiting for the full life” of a dream that would never come to be.
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The play, Chekhovian in the sense that it portrays the
illusion of hope and promise that fuels human activity—and records the ultimate futility of the human condition—ends in predictable stalemate. Neither particularly unpleasant nor evil, each character learns, in the weeks they are all together, just how little he or she has taken hold of life. All of them return to the separate locations from which they came neither better nor worse than when the summer began. As the play ends, we know that they will return home unable and unwilling to salvage meaningless lives.

The sense of despondency that infused
The Autumn Garden
captured Hellman's frustration with a nation caught in the vise of its own fear. One by one, she took to task each of her characters for their lack of courage, their aimlessness. Collectively the players created an allegory for America. Middle-aged, self-absorbed, and unable to see purpose in their lives, the summer visitors passed through their experiences unwilling to do more than acknowledge their gloomy circumstances. America, Hellman seemed to be saying, had abandoned faith in change and progress.

Critics tended to see something else. To them, the world of the fifties called for an aggressive commitment to secure the prosperity and might of a newly powerful United States. They responded to
The Autumn Garden
by rising to the defense of the America they loved. Hellman takes on “the South as her pet whipping boy,” wrote one critic, who added, “We think Miss Hellman might do well to pay a visit to the new South which boasts a good many happy, prosperous and moral people.”
⁶⁷
Another dismissed the play as the work of “an undefeated and untied misanthrope.”
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Still a third took her to task for failing in her political loyalties.
The Autumn Garden
, wrote
Christian Science Monitor
reviewer John Beaufort, is “an unfairly slanted representation of American life.” If produced abroad, he continued, “it may handily serve the Kremlin's determined campaign to convince Europe that life in the United States is preponderantly decadent.”
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Beaufort went on to lecture Hellman on her responsibilities as a citizen of a free democracy: “Aware that the drama can be a powerful weapon in the war of ideas, playwrights who enjoy the freedoms of a democracy may usefully reflect to what extent they intend contributing to Moscow's propaganda arsenal.”

So off-target were the reviews that Harold Clurman, who directed it, intervened in the debate about it. Undoubtedly urged on by Hellman, he wrote a piece in which he defended
The Autumn Garden
as a quintessential moral statement. The play, he argued, expressed Hellman's critical feelings about “most of us of the educated near-upper class. We are earnest, we
yearn, but we are not serious, we have no clear purpose. We have no binding commitments to ourselves or to others; we are attached to nothing. We allow ourselves to be deviated because we do not know exactly where we want to go.”
⁷⁰
To no avail: it was the political, not the moral, lessons of Hellman's work to which critics turned in the fifties.

Hellman, tuned in to the politics of the moment, understood the criticism of
The Autumn Garden
as part of a climate of fear intended to discipline artists. This was a period in which rhetoric against the communist threat reached fever pitch; anticommunist campaigns, fraught with accusations of disloyalty, filled with hyperbole and outright lies, carried the threat of job loss and perhaps even death. The resulting anxiety led individuals who had (and had not) been close to the Communist Party, or in it, to distance themselves from former friends and from causes associated with sympathy for the Soviet Union. An atmosphere of fear and apprehension effectively curtailed the civil liberties of Americans, constraining freedom of spirit and of mind. In this topsy-turvy world, dissent was unpatriotic, refusing to betray one's friends was tantamount to admission of communist affiliation, and calls for “peaceful coexistence” (which Hellman supported in
The Searching Wind
and again at the 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace) became declarations of Soviet sympathy. In a world painted in black and white, in which one form of government protected liberty while the other thrived on despotism, there was no room for compromise. If you were for liberty you must be an anticommunist; even mild criticism of capitalism signaled advocacy of communist slavery. Hellman, who never accepted this dichotomy, watched in horror as patterns of fear began to overwhelm the work of once-brave artists.