A Difficult Woman (7 page)

It's a question of what dignity is about.

—Lillian Hellman, American Scholar Forum, “Women on Women”

You are above all entirely and impressively a lady; yet also a great gentleman, honorable to a fault, truthful and courageous, immensely and movingly straight.

—Literary agent Robby Lantz to Lillian Hellman

In her late forties, Lillian Hellman constructed an anecdote about her first party dress. “I was sixteen, too thin, too awkward and I had a long, sad face,” she wrote. “I was not the girl for the pale orange tulle with appliquéd rosebuds and ribbons that my mother thought so right for me. I knew that day what my mother had wanted in a daughter and I felt sad.” As if to affirm her desire to become a different kind of woman, Lillian concluded the anecdote with the dramatic flair that would become her signature. “A week later, at the party,” she wrote, “somebody dropped a match and the tulle dress burned slowly and surely and it seemed to me proper that my mother's dream of a daughter went with it.”
¹

But if Lillian could not live her mother's dream, neither could she entirely abandon it. She could not be the “beautiful, gentle, efficient woman” who participates in southern legend. Nor could she “accept without question the doctrine of male superiority and authority.”
²
Born to be a charming, solicitous, and nurturing southern belle, as her husband Arthur Kober once put it, she reached beyond southern tradition and turned into a misfit, becoming in the eyes of all around her a difficult woman. As a child, she escaped from her family's expectations to read in the fig tree of her memories, to run away to the arms of her nurse Sophronia when things got difficult. She was, in that sense, always defiant, in rebellion against emulating her mother's place as an obedient and submissive creature bred for a lifestyle that her father could not afford. We learn something about how hard it must have been for a woman of the twenties and thirties to be serious about her work and at the same time to hang on to whatever womanliness meant to her when we watch Hellman maneuver through the obstacles. She became outspoken and direct, some would even say rude. To protect herself, she developed a quick wit and a biting sense of humor. These qualities placed her at the cutting edge of changing twentieth-century gender norms, a leading symbol of the new independent woman. Yet even as she challenged traditionally appropriate roles for women, she cultivated deeply feminine qualities of warmth and generosity.

“I was sixteen, too thin, too awkward and I had a long, sad face.” (Lillian Hellman Estate)

In
Pentimento
, Hellman provides us with a clue to the tension between her desire and her destiny. There, she draws a portrait of her distant cousin Bethe, who remained ever after a symbol of the teenager's wish to be able
to act on one's feelings without shame. Hellman described her first (clearly invented) view of Bethe hanging clothes from a line. “She was naked and I stopped to admire the proportions of the figure: the large hips, the great breasts, the tumbled auburn hair that came from the beautiful side of my father's family.”
³
As in so much of Hellman's writing, we can't tell what part of Bethe reflects the life of a living cousin and what part Lillian's own sense of how she imagined her own life. The Bethe remembered by Lillian emigrated from Germany as a young woman, briefly lived with aunts Jenny and Hannah, and then fulfilled the terms of a prearranged but bad marriage. She left it after a few years to live, unmarried, with an Italian mobster. That act led her kin to cut off their relations with her. The teenage Lillian describes herself as deliberately tracking down her cousin and trying to bring Bethe back to the bosom of the family. But in Lillian's story, Bethe would have none of it. She had willingly paid the price demanded of a woman who followed her heart and knowingly offended her relatives. She remained, in Lillian's fantasy life, the courageous young woman who had chosen her own path.

Lillian matured into a generation blessed or cursed with such choices, an “in-between” generation. Twelve-year-old Lillian watched women win the right to vote in New York State in 1917. She was fifteen when the ratification of the nineteenth amendment enabled women nationwide to cast ballots. But the young Lillian was not inspired by the social reform movements that transformed the political environment of her youth. She was too late for the activist feminism of the early 1900s that had won the vote for women, achieved a measure of property rights, and acquired legal access to divorce and custody of their children. Nor did she identify with the generation of college-educated women that continued, after suffrage, to carve out paths toward social justice as well as political participation. The well-off and the married belonged to one or more of the burgeoning women's clubs that by 1920 boasted some five million members united under the banner of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. These groups committed themselves to a variety of social causes that stretched beyond political campaigns for women's equality to a quest for freedom in other spheres. They wanted to assure justice for the poor, to reform corrupt municipal politics, and especially to guarantee the health of mothers and their children. But for Lillian's generation, as historian Susan Ware has pointed out, women's rights were not so much at issue.
⁴

Instead, Lillian joined a cohort of young women who sought to achieve
personal freedom by taking advantage of the rights won for them by “the shock troops,” as she later called them, of the earlier generation. Before the First World War, working-class and poor women, black and white, married and single, generally earned their own livings or contributed to family support by doing domestic work, going off to factories, or taking in boarders, doing laundry, or sewing at home. But in the early 1920s, increasing numbers of young single women who, like Lillian, came from respectable families aspired to enter the world of work. Moving into new office jobs or training as semiprofessionals in teaching, nursing, and the new field of social work, they carved out permanent places for themselves outside the home. They were the women who grasped modernity and rode it full throttle into the twentieth century. “By their widely publicized accomplishments and non-traditional lifestyles,” Ware notes, “such popular heroines suggested that women could be autonomous human beings, could live life on their own terms and could overcome conventional barriers.”
⁵

In popular parlance, they were the flappers: a cohort of young women who lived for pleasure, disdaining ideals of self-sacrifice and service held by the Victorian generations of women. Flappers disdained the authority of parents and social custom, danced the night away in jazz clubs, consumed alcohol in speakeasies in the face of legal prohibition, smoked, acted brashly, and followed their sexual inclinations. Among many young women of this generation, including Lillian, the powerful drive to transcend the limits of their mothers' generation pushed them beyond the search for pleasure to make something of themselves, to be their own persons, to earn their way in the world.

Sex played an important role for this group of women, signaling not merely a flouting of convention but the desire to live on their own terms, to be free. In Europe, before the war, men and women avidly read Otto Weininger, whose
Sex and Character
proposed that only male character (active, productive, logical, and moral) could produce genius and posited that the passive and amoral female would destroy male creativity.
⁶
Weininger's dire warnings about female sexuality took second place in the United States to those of Havelock Ellis, the originator of the science of sexology. His work stimulated public discussions of previously forbidden subjects like homosexuality, then called “sexual inversion” or deviance. At the same time, Margaret Mead began to publicize her studies of Pacific islands where men and women seemed to reverse roles, the men caring for children even as the women exercised clout within the community. Popular culture, including films, stimulated sexual appetites; the growing use of automobiles created new possibilities for unchaperoned interaction between the sexes.

1935: A powerful drive pushed her to be her own person. (Ransom Center)

But it was Sigmund Freud whose ideas inspired the generation of the twenties in the United States to seek sexual liberation. Freud's notions about sexuality in infancy freed women to accept sexual expression as a normal part of human behavior and to acknowledge sexual desire. Lillian paid no attention to the flip side of Freudian theory, which equated female maturity with the quest for motherhood, ultimately reinforcing ideals of female submission. Like other women of her generation, she eagerly rejected old notions of chastity and sexual purity, convinced that the practice of free love provided healthier alternatives for women. Hellman's diaries from the early 1920s describe something of how a young woman then might have fantasized about sex and male relationships as well as how torn she might have felt. Self-consciously, with a sense of audience in mind, the seventeen-year-old Hellman records her feelings about boys and young men who court her and whom she views largely without interest. Slowly
she begins to accept the possibility that a physical relationship might be satisfying—even without mental challenge. Sex, she finally concludes—still at the tender age of seventeen—“is like eating a meal. I try to make it like eating a banquet. But I am rather glad. This entails no heartaches or hurts—it leaves you satisfied if not breathing.”
⁷

The idea that girls and women, like men, derived pleasure from sex as part of normal daily life appears in some of Hellman's early short stories. In what is perhaps quintessential wish fulfillment, “Perberty in Los Angeles”—written in 1933 and featuring a fourteen-year-old protagonist—describes a mother, aunt, and uncle who try to encourage the teenager to welcome sex into her life. “Have you felt no yearnings to embrace the boys in the field … and to lie in the dells and crannies,” asks her fictional aunt Minnie. The teenager, more interested in ancient Greek grammar than in sexual experience, responds by trying to change the subject, leading her mother to beg and plead with her to think about sex because “it is normal … and of course we will forgive you and assist you.”
⁸
“I Call her Mama,” published just a few months earlier, also features a fourteen-year-old female protagonist whose mother had prematurely pressed sexual freedom on her. Resisting sex instruction, the teenager tells her mother not to make such a fuss about sex. “It's not good to make my attitude toward sex any more beautiful,” she tells her, and then concludes a long tirade against her mother's reification of sexual freedom with the simple assertion that “I want an old fashioned home.”
⁹

New understandings of relationships that involved sexual satisfaction and multiple partners for women as well as men produced a range of controversial but widely tolerated lifestyle options. This was especially true for bright urban young women like Lillian who were of undistinguished education and no great wealth. Their choices included careers without marriage, “Boston” (same-sex) marriages, companionate marriages without benefit of license until the couple decided whether they were compatible, and “marriage under two roofs” for those who, though legally joined, desired to live apart and could afford to do so. For the educated middle-class, unmarried, white woman, a loss of virginity or a discreet sexual relationship outside marriage no longer consigned her to shame. Rather, it marked access to freedom.

Hellman took advantage of these options as she became aware of them. The summer she turned nineteen, she engaged in a full-scale sexual affair, parts of which she recorded in her diaries. When her first love ends and
Jerry (the name she gives to her lover) disappears, leaving her in pain, she concludes that it is a “terrible and unwise thing … to become so engrossed with one being” in a way that shuts off all else.
¹⁰
The young Lillian, her diaries suggest, does not dismiss love lightly—but she does wonder how often it will come to her, how often she will attract it. As if anticipating the future by trying to control it, she places her first real love affair into the category of something perhaps deeply felt and genuine, but not worth continuing anguish. Later, she recalls it with distaste as a loveless encounter that lasted only a few months: “I suppose that the cool currency of the time carried me past the pain of finding nastiness in what I had hoped would be a moving adventure,” she wrote.
¹¹