A Difficult Woman (48 page)

In the politics of the sixties, the largely nonideological choices of activist students (and the New Left into which they merged) appealed to Hellman. She liked the fact that young people were standing up for something: they had what she called “spine.” At a 1968 political rally, she declared with pleasure, “Our children black and white have caught up with our hypocrisies, and whatever our doubts about their actions or their methods, they have a right to sneer at us.”
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She would later describe their protests “as a mixed bag of the good and the foolish.” The good part, she thought, was “the insistence upon examination of what they had been told, taught, and read.” The bad consisted of “the taking over of college offices, damaging of files, bullying of teachers, and so on.” But she did not condone the sending in of police to quell the protests of “good-natured young men and women with much to complain about that needed complaint.”
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Nor, on the other side, did she have much patience for the youth movement that questioned parental, political, and corporate authority, promoted sexual liberation, and suspected that anyone over thirty was already part of an unredeemable establishment. She considered this emerging counterculture (dropping out, turning on, communal living, flower power) mere foolishness. She later applied the same label to the cultural expressions of the women's movement.

The rise of grassroots efforts by southern blacks to stand up for themselves stirred Hellman deeply. The civil rights movement, she noted in her journal,
was “the first deeply felt movement since the Spanish Civil War,” an indication that people could not “live long on non-something” without belief. Recalling her own political epiphany, she scrawled notes in her own hand: “suddenly something like 1930s has appeared again and man is once more angry that other men don't eat very well, get snubbed and insulted, haven't proper rights.”
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Hellman never participated in the ongoing strategy sessions and debate as she had with efforts to eliminate Jim Crow from the army in the forties. This time around, she found a way to support the cause of civil rights by doing what she did best: raising money and writing.

In the summer of 1963 Hellman persuaded
Ladies' Home Journal
to send her as a journalist to report on the August 28, 1963, March on Washington organized by Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a coalition of labor union and civil rights groups. To prepare the article, she did her usual job of research, clipping pieces from several newspapers and familiarizing herself with the Civil Rights Act then before Congress. She interviewed protest organizer Bayard Rustin along with a range of young southerners, many of them marchers in previous demonstrations. Among her contacts were two virulent southern opponents of civil rights, Louisana's senator Allen Ellender and Alabama's John Sparkman. She scrawled notes from her informants in a three-by-five notebook—to which she also included references to hair appointments, lists of expenses, and instructions she wanted to convey to her secretary at home. The notes reflect something of her feelings. Of a jail in Alabama, she noted “toilet facilities—toilet in room they slept” and “food was 2 times 5AM & 6PM. Grits & gravy & bread & no sugar for coffee.” On another occasion, she recorded: “Treated girls as bad as boys. Electric prodders used on private parts … Police came in during night and used electric prodders. 24 girls to a cell—3 beds or 4 beds … Struck some of girls on breast.”
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The piece that finally emerged, called “Sophronia's Grandson goes to Washington,” used the device of her beloved nurse Sophronia (whose viewpoint was that of the old paternal order) to imagine what it would have been like for a young black man to be speaking up for himself. In it she mocked the positions of traditional racist southerners and told stories about the way protesting blacks faced beatings, dogs, and electric cow prodders. Graphic descriptions of Sheriff Dewey Colvard of Etowah County, Alabama, “putting a cow prodder to the breast of a girl” and later to the testicles of a boy provoked a denial and demand for retraction, to which the
Ladies' Home Journal
acceded.
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Though Hellman did not deny having falsely named the sheriff, she insisted that she had accurately
depicted the spirit of the events. “My article in all important matters tells the truth,” she wrote brashly. “What is true should not be obscured by the fear of lawsuits.”
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Years later she would reject this logic when she was the victim of a similar rationale. But at the time, she hid behind her heritage “as a white woman born in the South” to insist on the veracity of her interpretation.
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Some of her southern readers respectfully disagreed. They dismissed her efforts to excuse what one called her “slanderous defamation of Mr. Colvard's character” and insisted that “Lillian Hellman's birth was a geographical accident; she is not a Southerner.”
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And yet many saw this small confrontation as a courageous intercession in a much larger struggle. “I know that your experience will not keep you from speaking out against injustice wherever you see it,” wrote her lawyer when, somewhat apologetically, he sent her his bill at the conclusion of the case, “and that your stand will ultimately be vindicated and approved.”
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For all of her sympathy with the purposes of the march and her anger at the methods of those who resisted black protest, for all of her insistence that “the argument for States' rights was now reduced to the argument for the right of each police department to act as they saw fit,” she could not restrain her impatience with the slow pace of change.
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White people shared the blame for this, she thought. “What is interesting now,” she reminded herself, recalling her frequent injunctions against silence, is “where the white man had been all those years—very few of us will protest unless the victim makes us.”
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She gave no quarter even to her friends. Folk singer Pete Seeger remembered her dismissing the words of “We Shall Overcome,” the song that became the anthem of the movement. “She didn't like the song,” he recalled. “She said, ‘someday, someday … That's been said for too long.' “
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The same mixture of sympathy, relief, and impatience pervaded Hellman's attitude toward antiwar movements of the sixties. Between 1961 and his death in 1963, President Kennedy slowly escalated American military commitments to Vietnam. Hellman remained uninvolved during this period. She was, after all, a friend of McGeorge Bundy, now a Kennedy adviser, and she still enjoyed fishing with Richard Goodwin. But in 1964 and 1965, as President Lyndon Baines Johnson stepped up American troop presence, Hellman's anger mounted; her old desire for peace rose. She could not bear an acquiescent silence in the face of policies that she abhorred. But what could she do? In 1965, her former Harvard student and now good friend Fred Gardner came up with an idea to establish coffeehouses outside army bases where GIs uncomfortable with the war could
talk with like-minded souls. Hellman loved the idea. She offered Gardner $5,000 and the use of her Peugeot for a year to get the project off the ground. The idea worked, and Gardner, along with his partner, Donna Mickelson, established a GI coffeehouse network that provided neutral territory for conversation. After they were taken over by more ideological antiwar activists, the role of the coffeehouses diminished.
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Later, Hellman translated her opposition to the war into support for Eugene McCarthy's 1968 presidential candidacy. The campaign, headed up by her good friend Blair Clark, included old friends and new ones, all of them opponents of the war. She joined them and McCarthy on countless platforms and at rallies to articulate the moral stance that was her trademark. There she chose to remind audiences of the importance of articulate leadership in the service of just causes. At a huge Madison Square Garden event organized by Hannah Weinstein, she noted how easily Joseph McCarthy prevailed “often unopposed by those who had not been so frightened of liars and bullies when Roosevelt was there to give them the courage evidently lost on the day he died.” Not to protest in the face of a war cloaked in democratic words, she told that audience, was to share the sin of hypocrisy. “We have allowed our government to kill an innocent people, as they explained that their death was for their own good.”
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When she received the 1969 National Book Award for
An Unfinished Woman
, she asked her audience why they were not disturbed “by the death of young men they have in majority, silently agreed to send across the world against a people who never harmed them, into a war they do not understand.”
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In light of the war in Vietnam, politics took on a new dimension. Hellman's resonant moral pleas suggest that she closely identified her own Cold War experiences with those of the young people who challenged a war they opposed. They too risked castigation and exclusion for their opinions. Her messages begged audiences to overcome the fears she still shared with them and to get out and do something. “So many of us climbed into that bed of pain in those years,” she reminded her own generation, “and have stayed there ever since.”
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Her stance brought her closer to elements of the left and New Deal coalitions—who now defined their politics as liberal and social democratic—and especially to the New York intellectuals. Their shared opposition to the war in Vietnam, their common desire to expose America's malfeasances around the globe in the name of democracy and freedom, temporarily obscured deeply rooted disagreements over the Soviet Union. To this group, Hellman brought
her luster as a “moral beacon,” her reputation as a brave opponent of McCarthyism.
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Hellman's moral credibility increased when she began to speak out with respect to the intellectual dissent that boiled up in the Soviet Union in the late fifties. Censorship remained rigid behind the iron curtain, but underground (samizdat) publication of stories and novels enabled writers to circulate their work privately and to smuggle it out of the Soviet Union for publication abroad, often under false names. Writers and printers caught circulating work in this way, rather than subjecting it to official censored channels, risked long jail sentences and confiscation of their possessions. In the winter of 1965–66, the Soviet authorities tried two writers, Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, for criticizing the regime in articles smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in the foreign press. After a well-publicized show trial, the court found them guilty and leveled sentences of hard labor—seven years for Daniel and five for Sinyavksy. But in contrast to earlier years, when Russian intellectuals remained silent and communists abroad supported the regime, in 1966 the dissidents attracted vocal support inside and outside the Soviet Union. Hellman joined the public outcry against the regime's intolerance. In 1938 she had done exactly the opposite, signing a statement in support of the Moscow trials that condemned several writers to death. She had not spoken up when actor and director Solomon Mikhoels was executed in 1948. Nor did she utter a word when the poet Itzik Feffer, whom she met during a 1943 visit to the United States, died in a Soviet prison in 1952. Her voice now signaled misgivings about her previous rationalizations of Soviet repression. Catherine Kober Zeller, her goddaughter, remembers her around this time “as standing up, or pacing, furious at herself, with all the intensity of her fury, for not having seen through what was going on in Russia.” Kober Zeller adds, “I felt, at that moment, that she hated herself for it.”
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Hellman visited the Soviet Union the following spring to attend a theater festival. She was warmly received by a regime that still recalled her wartime expedition. Her old friend and interpreter Raisa Orlova, now married to Lev Kopelev, one of the country's leading dissenters, took her under her wing. This put her in an awkward position when she received an invitation to address the fourth national congress of the Union of Russian Writers in the spring of 1967. She accepted reluctantly, not wanting to offend the regime. Still, she had to decide whether to support the regime's refusal to tolerate dissent or cast her lot with the dissenters. She chose to
do the latter, offering the group a sharply worded message urging them to remain true to their values regardless of state pressure to follow a particular line. “Intellectuals—and by intellectuals I mean men who believe in the power of reason—can continue in the hopes they once had only if they come together to speak honestly of past mistakes and present problems.” Intellectuals, she insisted, “almost never wish to imprison men for speaking words they do not like … all intellectuals believe in freedom and many of them have an honorable record of fighting for it. No medals need be given for that fight: freedom is the essence of thought, the blood on the paper. Without freedom the intellectual will choke to death and his country will gasp for air. Thus the demand for it is the measure of true patriotism.”
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She might have been speaking of the United States just fifteen years earlier. Back in the United States, she found herself publicly proclaimed as a champion of Soviet dissent. Not yet comfortable as an opponent of the regime, Hellman hedged. She had not meant to imply that writers opposed the Soviet system; she said only that they wanted to be able to express themselves freely within it.
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She clung more persuasively to that argument when she lashed out at novelist Anatoly Kuznetsov, who fled the Soviet Union for England in the spring of 1969. Unlike Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who preferred to suppress his work rather than see it censored, Kuznetsov published censored editions that conformed to bureaucratic demands. His compliant behavior (which included denouncing novelists Andrei Sakharov and Yevgeny Yevtushenko for failing to cooperate with the Soviet authorities) earned him a trip to Britain, where he immediately sought asylum. Once safely out of Soviet reach, the forty-year-old Kuznetsov published an incendiary attack on what he remembered of the Soviet Union in his youth. The Western press and literati welcomed Kuznetsov as a friend and ally. Lillian refused the consensus. She knew, she wrote in a
New York Times
piece, that intellectuals in the Soviet Union were in turmoil; and she knew as well the disgusting pressure exerted by “the semi-literate bureaucrats, who suppress and alter manuscripts, who dictate who can and cannot be published.” But Kuznetsov, she argued, protested only when it was safe to do so. Palpably bitter, she concluded her piece: “I'd like to bet that he'll soon pay us a visit and the dinner party lists are already being drawn up. After dinner in a chair by the fireside—the favorite position of Whittaker Chambers once upon a time—he will speak to the guests of freedom but somebody should tell Kuznetsov that freedom earned by betraying innocent friends is a contradiction of terms.”
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