Lillian Hellman

by Dorothy Gallagher

  In 1939 Hellman had been asked by an interviewer whether she thought literature should have social or economic implications. “No, I don’t,” she said first; then she contradicted herself: “I do feel that all good writing must, either implicitly, or explicitly, be propaganda for something . . . unless you are a pathological escapist there must be some sort of propaganda in everything you write.” But Hellman saw the danger in the word “propaganda”; she did not want to be thought of as a writer with a political agenda. She fumbled for a bit over the definition of the word, and decided to equate it with truth: So, “Some sort of truth . . .” she said, “truth must be the main objective of anyone who seeks a form of literary expression . . . If a person doesn’t want to involve himself with the truth he has no business trying to write at all.”13

  Hellman was a prolific writer, and when she stopped producing plays after almost thirty years she was naturally asked why. She had a variety of explanations: she said that she was tired of the theater, that it had never been her natural home, that people in the theater spoke of nothing but money. But it was also true she had begun in the theater with Hammett at her side, and she abandoned the theater when he left her. Her final play, an adaptation of a novel My Mother, My Father and Me, was produced a year after Hammett’s death and was a resounding flop.

  In the mid-1960s an article in the drama section of theNew York Times named Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee as the three major living American playwrights. Hellman had a fit. To Peter Feibleman, who was staying with her at her Martha’s Vineyard house, she said: “There are people who can stand to be forgotten and people who can’t.” In Feibleman’s telling it was on that very morning that Hellman made the decision to write a memoir.14

  An Unfinished Woman was published in 1969. The book went to the top of the best-seller list and won a National Book Award. Some reviewers noticed that Hellman was evasive about her personal and public life, but saw her reserve as a sign of personal strength: “Most readers,” Stanley Young wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “will respond to her book because it not only shows rare imagination and literary skill but reveals with an almost sad reluctance the unexpected personal story of a great American playwright.”

  Hellman’s reputation soared, and she continued writing memoirs—Pentimento, Scoundrel Time, Maybe—until the very end of her life. In 1984, the year she died, when she was blind and could not breathe without supplemental oxygen, Hellman collaborated with Feibleman, her late-life companion, to write Eating Together, a compilation of recipes and meals they had cooked and shared. She just missed seeing its publication.

  6

  Along Came a Spider

  WHEN HELLMAN took off for Europe in August 1937, she was in the company of her good friend Dorothy Parker, and Parker’s husband, Alan Campbell. By chance, Martha Gellhorn was also on board. Gellhorn was then at the beginning of her affair with Ernest Hemingway, and was on her way to spend several days with him in Paris before traveling with him to the war in Spain.

  After several weeks of a purely social time with Parker and Campbell in Paris, Hellman entrained for Moscow, where she had been invited to attend a theater festival. Whether she did, or did not, break her journey in Berlin to give her friend Julia money for the anti-Nazi underground would become a matter of dispute in Hellman’s later years. Nevertheless, she was certainly in Moscow in 1937, where she saw a number of plays that she says she did not much enjoy. Naturally, she spoke with the English-speaking people she met in Moscow, most of them diplomats, foreign journalists, and other invited visitors. In later years Hellman puzzled over her ignorance of events then occurring in Moscow: “I did not even know,” she wrote, “I was there in the middle of the ugliest purge period, and I have often asked myself how that could be.”1

  This is a good question; and although Hellman raises it herself, she lets it dangle, unanswered. In 1979, when the three volumes of her memoirs were published under one cover, Hellman elaborated on her ignorance, implying that not only she, but Hammett, too, had been unaware of the purges until she, herself, brought him the news: “Later, when I knew about the purges, I bought a history of the Moscow trials and Hammett and I read aloud from it, saying things like ‘lawyers are lawyers wherever their training,’ and about Vishinsky, the prosecuting attorney, ‘what a tricky old bastard.’”2

  When Hellman wrote those words, Hammett was dead and unable to confirm his disdain of the legal profession. But that aside, since Hellman twice insists on her ignorance of the purges, it seems fair to press her on the matter. How could it have been that she knew nothing of them?

  “In the West the facts were readily available. Hundreds of articles and books were published,” Robert Conquest wrote in The Great Terror, his definitive book on the purges.3 By the time Hellman got to Moscow in late September 1937, two of the three public trials had already been held. The names of the defendants were well known to anyone with the least interest in the Bolshevik revolution. The defendants were, in fact, a large part of the founding leadership of the Soviet Union, the Old Bolsheviks who had stood with Lenin and Trotsky in October 1917. Now, twenty years later, they were on trial as traitors. One after another they confessed to the most incredible plots against Stalin and the Soviet Union. Invariably these plots involved them in conspiracies with Leon Trotsky, denounced as an agent of the Nazis, and various other capitalist governments. “These mad dogs of capitalism,” as the prosecutor, Andrei Vishinksy, described the defendants, were bent on assassinating Stalin and tearing the Soviet Union “limb from limb.”4

  When warned that the purges might turn sympathetic opinion in the West against him, Stalin knew better: “Never mind,” he said. “They’ll swallow it.”5

  Walter Duranty was one of the journalists with whom Hellman spoke in Moscow. He was bureau chief for the New York Times, and well-known as an “unofficial spokesman for the Kremlin.”6 In the early 1930s Duranty had denied what was clearly true—the existence of a deliberately created famine in the Ukraine in which millions died of starvation. In 1936, after the first purge trial, he wrote: “It is inconceivable that a public trial of such men would be held unless the authorities had full proofs of their guilt.” In January 1937, after the second trial, Duranty lamented the lack of any documentary evidence of the defendants’ guilt, but he thought that taken all in all the trial did stand up.

  In the same paragraph of an Unfinished Woman, in which Hellman wonders about her ignorance of the purges, she writes, “I saw a number of diplomats and journalists [in Moscow] but they talked such gobbledygook [about the purges] with the exception of Walter Duranty.”

  It would not be a leap from this sentence to infer that Hellman already knew what Duranty had written, and that he confirmed her already formed opinion. In any case, the trials had caused a great deal of consternation and discussion in Hell-man’s circles; she could not have escaped being aware of them. Her claim to have come to Moscow in ignorance is clumsily made, and simply unbelievable. Why did she bother to deny knowing what the whole world knew? Knowing what every Communist knew and believed: “We cannot claim we did not know what was happening,” Peggy Dennis, wife of the post-war General Secretary of the American Communist Party wrote. “We read of the public trials. . . . We saw it as part of the brutal realities of making revolution, of building an oasis of socialism in a sea of enemies. We accepted the belief of infallibility of our leaders, the wisdom of our Party.”7

  By the time Hellman returned home from her adventures in Europe, she evidently felt well-enough informed about the purges to take a public position. Along with Dashiell Hammett and other luminaries, she signed a petition headed: “Leading Artists, Educators Support Soviet Trial Verdict.” The signers accused the Soviet defendants of “duplicity and conspiracy,” of having “allied themselves with long standing enemies of the Soviet Union . . . even with former czarist agents provocateurs.”

  The petition used the brutal language that did not come naturally to the American sign
ers, but was in common usage in Soviet Russia: “Degeneration . . . eradication of spies and wreckers.”8

  Two years later, in 1939, in an “Open Letter to American Liberals,” Hellman and Hammett would warn their countrymen of the danger of offering Leon Trotsky asylum in the United States, “which would give support to fascist forces.”9 The timing was unfortunate; only a week later the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed, and Communists and their sympathizers all over the world decided that fascism was not really so bad after all, simply a matter of taste. Except for Trotsky, in whose case it was still a criminal activity. The death sentence imposed on him in absentia in Moscow was carried out in 1940 in his Mexican exile.

  But before she returned to the United States in 1937, and some weeks after leaving Moscow, Hellman was back in Paris. There, one night, she had dinner with Otto Katz. Hellman knew Katz as “a Communist who, the year I met him, was a kind of press chief for the Spanish Republican Government. . . . he persuaded me that I must go to Spain. It didn’t take much persuasion; I had strong convictions about the Spanish war, about Fascism-Nazism, strong enough to push just below the surface my fear of the danger of war.”10

  Katz, who went by many names, including André Simone, Otto Simon, and Rudolph Breda, was well known as “a propagandist of genius.”11 He was, by all accounts a charming man, a ladies’ man, attractive, and an “unconscionable flatter,” according to Arthur Koestler, who knew him well. He may well have been Hellman’s lover. She admired him so highly that she took Katz as her model for the heroic character of Kurt Muller in her play, Watch on the Rhine.12 Like so many other loyal Communists who spent their lives in aid of the cause, Katz would later pay with his life when he was convicted and hanged for treason in the Czechoslovakian show trial of 1952. Meanwhile, in 1937, he urged Hellman to go to Spain.

  Many writers had congregated in Spain to bear witness and to write about the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway was in Spain with Martha Gellhorn, as was Josephine Herbst and John Dos Passos. Dorothy Parker and her husband Alan Campbell were there, quite possibly traveling with Hellman.

  A reader of Hellman’s memoirs would infer that she had endured the dangers of wartime Spain on her own. But a letter in Hellman’s FBI files suggests otherwise. Steve Nelson, a prominent leader of the American Communist Party, and for many years a Comintern agent, wrote to Hellman in August 1943, reminding her of their meeting in Spain: “Anyway we met in Valencia in 1937 with Dorothy Parker, Allen [sic] Campbell, Lasser and Louis Fischer.”13

  For Hellman the issues of the Spanish Civil War were simple—a democratically elected government, supported only by the Soviet Union, was fighting for its existence against a Fascist coup supported by Hitler and Mussolini.

  For others on the Left, on close inspection the issues became more complicated. George Orwell noticed that the Soviets had their own agenda in Spain; he wrote about Soviet intrigues and motives in his classic book on the war, Homage to Catalonia (which, as late as the 1970s, Hellman called “a load of crap”).14 John Dos Passos noticed problems in Spain when he searched for his Spanish friend, Jose Robles, and learned that Robles had been killed by the Soviets. “Fascists and communists alike shot the best men first,” Dos Passos wrote.15 As even the novelist and journalist Josephine Herbst, for all her sympathy with the Soviet Union, acknowledged when, in April 1938, she wrote to her friend Katherine Anne Porter: “What I know is that Russia should not have let Spain down, not for anything.”16

  In Spain as in Moscow, Hellman heard what she wanted to hear: “[A] great many people have told me a great many things . . . [about] nuns and priests torn by the limbs in Republican villages . . . why what government fell when; the fights among the Anarchists and Communists and Socialists; who is on one side today who wasn’t yesterday—but this is not the way I learn things and so I have only half-listened.”17

  If Hellman did not learn by reading, if she dismissed views that contradicted her own as “gobbledygook,” how then did she learn? Perhaps we can say that she did not learn, she simply knew: she knew that she was, as Tony Judt once wrote of the Communists of her generation, that she was part of “an idea and a movement uncompromisingly attached to representing and defending the interests of the wretched of the earth.”18 Not only was Communism a powerful idea, it could be reduced to slogans. “One of the causes of the popularity of Marxism among educated people was the fact that in its simple form it was very easy,” the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, wrote. “It is an instrument that made it possible to master all of history and economics, without actually having to study either.” The Marxist system “simply solves all of the problems of mankind at one stroke.”19

  And indeed, Hellman was not much interested in mustering arguments for her ideas. Her response to opposition was usually anger. Stopping in London on her way from Spain to New York, Hellman went to a dinner party at the home of an old friend who announced to the table that Lillian had just returned from the war in Spain: “Which side did you choose to visit, Miss Hellman?” a guest asked her. “Each has an argument I dare say.”

  “I suddenly was in the kind of rampage anger that I have known all my life, still know, and certainly in those days was not able, perhaps did not wish, to control. I left the table so fast that I turned over my chair, left the house so fast that I forgot my coat and was not cold on a winter night, threw myself down so hard on the hotel bed that I slipped to the floor, had a painful ankle and didn’t care.”20

  Arthur Kober, to whom Hellman remained close all his life, kept track of her political progress in his diary: “Lil, who has just found the cause, speaks like expert & like all those eloquent dogmatists will not allow anyone else to think or listen to what is being said.”21 On May 6, 1935, Kober noted, “Lil talks revolution.”22 Soon after Hellman’s return from her visit to the Soviet Union and Spain, Kober noted that in Hellman’s opinion Russia was “the ideal democratic state.”23

  Political analysis was not Hellman’s strong suit; her mind was most comfortably at home with the absolute. Still, in the late 1960s, when she was beginning to work on her memoirs, she might have acknowledged the guiding idea to which she had held fast for so many years. Instead she brushed it away: “I could have answered some of those charges [of Stalinism] a long time ago,” Hellman wrote, “but it was a complex story and didn’t seem worth the try. And, like most people I don’t like explaining myself when I am under attack. . . . The truth is that I never thought about Stalin at all.”24

  Not exactly so. But nothing in Hellman’s nature would have permitted her to admit that she was not an independent thinker. She also had, as the critic Clive James noted, “pronounced tendencies towards that brand of aggressive humility, or claimed innocence, which finds itself helpless to explain the world at the very moment when the reader is well justified in requiring that a writer should give an apprehensible outline of what he deems to be going on.”25

  The numbers of those faithful to the Communist idea diminished with the years until Hellman stood virtually alone. In 1967 the lid of the Pandora’s Box where she kept her politics cracked open for a moment. On an evening of that year, while visiting Blair Clark, her love interest of the moment, Hellman said to him, “I can’t get it out of my head that Stalin was right.”26

  7

  Eros

  ON APRIL 24, 1967, Lillian Hellman made an entry in her diary. She was traveling in France with a man she calls “R” and she reflected on the nature of their relations: “The years we have known each other have made a pleasant summer fog of the strange, crippled relationship, often ripped, always mended, merging finally into comfort.” A moment later, as she and “R” are sipping liqueurs and chatting pleasantly in the garden of their hotel, “R” rips the relationship once again. He begins with an ominous sentence: “I must say something to you.” And what he says is that he has fallen passionately in love with a young woman, and feels that he “should get married again.” He throws Hellman a sop: “My feeling for you has kept me from marrying.”1<
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  Hellman was sixty-two years old at the time of this incident. “R,” whom she does not identify in her memoirs, was fifty, and his name was Blair Clark; he was handsome, rich, and socially prominent.2 During the five or six years of their distinctly strange half-love affair, half exercise in sadomasochism, which Hellman chronicled in her diaries, she has courted him assiduously. “I love you very much,” she wrote to him, “and I miss you so hard that I can see you come in the door.”3 For his part, Clark has broken her heart numberless times in affairs with many other women, and has never once consented to go to bed with her, excusing himself on the grounds that sex would spoil the special nature of their friendship.

  Hellman seemed to take that excuse at its face value, and to believe that in time she could change Clark’s mind. The situation is heartbreaking, awesome, and inexplicable: heartbreaking in the depth and desperation of Hellman’s need; awesome in her determination to prevail; and inexplicable in that for all her worldly experience, Hellman could not fathom that the laws of the sexual marketplace applied to her.

  By the time she reached middle-age, Hellman’s sexual history was densely populated. She had begun fairly early for her time, at nineteen. Of her first sexual experience, she wrote, “The few months it lasted did not mean much to me, but I have often asked myself whether I underestimated the damage that so loveless an arrangement made on my future. But my generation did not often deal with the idea of love . . . And we were suspicious of the words of love.”4 Her suspicion extended to the words that imply love: monogamy, fidelity, betrayal. On a visit to Moscow in 1944, she wrote that she found the Russians “romantic and dawn-fogged about sex” and their “talk about love and fidelity too high-minded for my history or my taste.”5