A Difficult Woman (63 page)

Like a cat with nine lives, Lillian Hellman survived this criticism. Her work continued to reach the stage, repeatedly revived into the turn of the new century. Regional theaters turned to
The Autumn Garden
and
The Children's Hour
in the 1990s. The decade after the new century began, New York theaters mounted major productions of
Another Part of the Forest
,
Toys in the Attic
, and
The Little Foxes.
In London in 2011, a new production of
The Children's Hour
drew packed audiences. Late-night television regularly showed the films into which Hellman had poured her heart:
Dead End Kids
,
Dark Angel
,
The Little Foxes
, and
The Children's Hour
all became staples. And Hellman herself continued to inspire public attention. Nearly twenty years after Hellman's death, Nora Ephron's
Imaginary Friends
(a reflection on the relationship of Mary McCarthy to Hellman) hit the boards. The play, which opened in New York in December 2002, was described by one reviewer as “an uncomfortable cross between vaudeville and conventional musical comedy.”
⁵³
Another called its story that of “a feud between two politically engaged, exceptionally feisty women within a literary world of men.”
⁵⁴
In what may well be the supreme irony, in 2010 the Committee for Recognizing Women in Theater established its “Lilly Award” in honor of Lillian Hellman, the playwright who never wanted to be placed in the company of “women playwrights.” Gloria Steinem offered the invocation at the first award ceremony.

If we can attribute to Hellman's persona some of the virulence of the charges against her and her continuing hold on the American imagination, much of the explanation for her continuing presence surely lies in the twentieth-century moment. During her lifetime, Hellman's political positions remained remarkably consistent, taking on different colors as the political climate changed. Critic Richard Bernstein has noted that “the posthumous reexamination has to do with the playing out of old battles between American liberals and conservatives, or to put this another way, between anti-Communists and those who felt that American anti-Communism was more dangerous than Communism itself.”
⁵⁵
Hellman belonged in the latter camp, along with a goodly number of the intellectuals of her generation. But in the late twentieth century, victory went to those who defined communism as the enemy of national security. Each new revelation of espionage, every document that revealed a close relationship between the Comintern and the CPUSA, strengthened the hand of anticommunists. Though most American radicals, like Hellman, never involved themselves in party activities, the idea that government investigatory committees had been right to demand retraction, apology, and information took hold. Even after the communist threat had passed, her critics remained furious that Hellman had never been called to task for failing to acknowledge its seriousness. Hellman was forever viewed through the lens of a persistent communist threat.

Patterns of association that seemed ordinary or benign to observers of the forties and even of the fifties turned, by the late seventies, into evidence of guilt. In Hellman's case, the unbroken pattern stemmed from her fateful 1930s decisions with respect to the Spanish Civil War, the Moscow trials
of 1937, and her refusal to denounce the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. In the eyes of detractors, these demonstrated her commitment not only to communism but to Stalin. She committed further sin, in the eyes of detractors, when she remained silent about that commitment in her appearance before HUAC. That made her a liar and justified unsubstantiated assertions of “fealty to a foreign power.” All the while, so the story went, she never wavered in her sympathy for Stalin. That made her an irredeemably evil person. Worse, instead of silently suffering the slings and arrows of persecution, she rewrote the story, turning her escape from a jail sentence into a moral claim to courage and heroism. This tendency to self-aggrandizement, most readily confirmed by what was seen as the theft of the Julia story from an innocent woman, was in this context simple confirmation of Hellman's evil nature. To those who saw the world through the schisms of the twentieth century, Hellman's effort to redeem her good name from Mary McCarthy constituted “the mark of high Stalinism.”
⁵⁶

And yet it is precisely this extremely negative view of Hellman that illuminates her role in twentieth-century America. The Stalinist label undermined not only the personal integrity of the accused: it was meant to discredit her conception of virtue and decency as well. Her life and work proclaimed the benefits of certain kind of moral society, one that would care for its poor and excluded members, protect democracy against bullies in uniform or not, and provide the freedom to live by one's own lights. Casual accusations of Stalinism incorporated these goals within the penumbra of deception that included lying and self-aggrandizing behavior. Hellman's deep and continuing antagonism to anticommunist appeals suggests that she understood that they would engender cynicism of the entire progressive agenda. She feared—not wrongly, it turns out—that anti-communism could and would be used to unite disparate groups in opposition to the larger moral principles of a progressive politics. This, she insisted—when, for example, she pointed to the role of anticommunism in fostering the Vietnam War—would unleash American power on an unsettled world. It would foster a new morality rooted in a money ethic that would dominate all spheres of life. In the twenty-first century the retreat of social democracy, progressivism, and liberalism and the rise of neoliberalism and neoconservatism bring us to a new appreciation of Hellman's strident and continuing outbursts.

Judgments about Hellman's behavior still come out of the battles over who was right and who was wrong in that midcentury conflict. “We understand something about Lillian Hellman,” wrote Hunter College professor
Alex Szogyi, “when we look at her life—but we understand as well what some of the salient cultural imaginings of the twentieth century were—and we see in the paradoxes of Lillian Hellman's life—some of the tensions of a difficult century.” Those tensions reflected the competing moral claims of different world views as Hellman tried to sort out what was virtuous and how to behave. The woman who wanted to become a great playwright became a celebrity instead; the woman who aspired to the company of the century's great intellectuals fought fierce battles with them; insecure, fearful, and politically naïve, she espoused particular political positions that fostered discord rather than consensus. Out of a desire to protect dissent, she dedicated much of her life to the cause of civil liberties; in return, she earned the Stalinist label. To become the beautiful, audacious, and courageous Julia of her imagination, she invented a world in which she did not live. That invention brought her castle tumbling down.

When we look back now, we notice the compromises that Hellman made in order to maintain moral consistency in a challenging world. We see in them the complicated circumstances in which many well-intentioned people found themselves caught. Hellman retreated from none of these issues. She wrote, she took positions, she acted on her beliefs as her conscience moved her. She was alternately damned and respected for her pronouncements, the variation less a function of her will and her choices than of the changing times in which she lived. The same sexual behavior that others emulated in the 1920s appeared predatory by the 1960s; the brave search for economic independence in the 1930s seemed, to radical feminists of the 1970s, to be insufficiently feminist. And the commitment to a better world that so many people shared in the Depression years seemed by the 1960s and '70s to be sheer folly.

The divided world in which Lillian lived her adult life would disintegrate after 1990 when the Soviet Union collapsed and, some would say, the twentieth century ended. But the conflicts in which she became a lightning rod continue to attract attention and mold the political arena. There are still no easy answers to the questions that Hellman confronted around the meaning of traditional family life, the price of commitments to racial and ethnic egalitarianism, the corrupting power of money, and the precariousness of the search for political utopias. Nor are there solutions to women's desire for economic independence or the hoary question of the relationship of art to politics. These lacunae make her life worth examining not for her sake, but for ours.

It gives me great pleasure to record, finally, my appreciation for the many favors that have come my way during the decade that I've been working on this book. The small and large kindnesses that have helped this project along have made researching and writing a genuine pleasure. They constitute a tribute to the community of scholars who I've come to love and value. The book began to take shape during a year spent at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. In Cambridge, Susan Ware prodded me into thinking about what historians might make of Hellman's life, and a wonderful group of colleagues and friends pushed away the resistance I felt to taking on anything that resembled biography. To Nancy Chodorow, Lizabeth Cohen, Nancy Cott, Gish Jen, and Radcliffe Institute Director Judith Vichniac, thank you. At the National Humanities Center a few years later, I enjoyed the company and the criticism of a distinguished group of colleagues led by Geoffrey Harpham and Ken Mullikin and including Sheryl Kroen, Alex Rosenberg, Bill Sewell, Jan Goldstein, Mimi Kim, Sheryl Kroen, and Sarah Shields. I also benefited from the extraordinary services of a splendid staff.

The formidable collection of Lillian Hellman's manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin yielded up its riches under the expert guidance of Richard Workman and with the efficient help of Patricia Fox. I am grateful for their kind assistance, as well as for the efforts of Andi Gustavson and Linda Briscoe Myers in finding and
reproducing photographs. At the Tamiment Library Kevyne Baar helped me navigate swiftly through a range of materials. At Stanford University's Cecil H. Green Library, Polly Armstrong and Sean Quimby were especially helpful. Ruth Milkman, Linda Gordon, and Allen Hunter facilitated visits to Los Angeles and Madison, Wisconsin, respectively. Sal Cline prompted a visit to Hardscrabble Farm and to Katonah, New York. Peter Feibleman provided generous encouragement and a range of introductions.

I've relied on a comfortingly large range of student help over the years, much of it from Columbia's wonderful undergraduates who brought an astonishing array of computer skills and enthusiasm to their tasks. I've benefited as well from sterling graduate students who tracked down crucial pieces of information and helped me think through problems large and small. In alphabetical order, I want to say thank you to Leah Aden, Jessica Adler, Zeina Alhendi, Sarah Brafman, Sarah Dunitz, Nell Geiser, Stephanie Harrell, Emma Curran Hulse, Suzanne Kahn, Cristina Kim, and Sarah Kirshen.

Many people became engaged in this project in ways I could not have anticipated. Their kindnesses have surprised me and energized my work. Some sent programs from new productions of Hellman's plays, forwarded comments on contemporary efforts to write memoirs, took photographs of her various homes, and recalled fleeting meetings with her. Others offered contacts with her friends and colleagues, allowed me to read chapters of their own work prior to publication, shared anecdotes and insights, and corrected mistaken notions. Most of all, they provided a level of enthusiasm that kept me going through the rough spots. I wish I could say thank you to each of them personally. In lieu of that I send warm affection to Brooke Allen, Uri and Michal Alon, Rosalyn Baxandall, Louise Bernikow, Barbara Black, Zoe Caldwell Whitehead, Anita Chapman, Mary Marshall Clark, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Claire Coss, Michael David-Fox, Eric Foner, Lynn Garafola, Linda Gordon, Allen Hunter, Andrew Kessler, Lucy Knight, Julia Mickenberg, Ruth Milkman, Dinitia Smith, Kitty Stalberg, Peter Stansky, Richard Stern, Ray Stollerman, Carole Turbin, and Michael Wrezsin. I owe special thanks to Norman Dorsen, Stephen Gillers, and Leon Friedman, who helped me to understand the Committee for Public Justice, and to Annabel Davis-Goff for her incomparable insights. I am especially grateful to Peter Feibleman for sharing his memories and his thoughts so graciously.

To Lila Abu Lughod, Susan Crane, Victoria de Grazia, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Martha Howell, Dorothy Ko, Sharon Marcus, Carol Sanger,
and Pamela Smith—feminist scholars at Columbia who have generously critiqued my ideas over the years—I owe a special debt of gratitude. I didn't always love their sharp criticism, but I continue to value their commitment to making our work better. I've tried out various parts of the book on audiences at Russell Sage College, Northwestern University, the University of North Carolina, and the Columbia University School of Law, where I delivered a Barbara Black lecture. I have learned much from seminars sponsored by the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, the workshop in Twentieth-Century Politics and History at Columbia, the Women Writing Women's Lives biography group at the City University of New York, and the National History Center series at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.

To those who read the entire manuscript and provided the trenchant criticism that drove me back to the drawing boards, I bow my head in appreciation. Rachel Brownstein, Doris Friedensohn, Eugene Goodheart, Judith Smith, and Amy Swedlow deserve far more than a simple thank you, and I hope they will know how heartfelt this one is. Peter Ginna has encouraged this project from the start. It has been a privilege to be able to work with a skilled and caring editor whose enthusiasm never flagged. Thanks, too, to the helpful staff at Bloomsbury, including Pete Beatty, Laura Phillips, and Sara Mercurio.

Bert Silverman read the pages of each chapter as they came out of the printer, and then read the entire manuscript again and again and again. I could not have completed this book—indeed I probably would never have started it—without his critical eye and his impassioned intellectual challenges. Nor could I have completed it without his warm and caring partnership at home. I dedicate this book to the grandchildren we share together in the hope that they will grow up to be just like him.