A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  I discovered this early on when I began to speak publicly about this book. The events routinely attracted large and lively audiences and produced open and helpful discussions. But their aftermath provided unexpected insights. On one occasion, after I addressed a forum of academics, a participant went home to tell her partner about the talk. An e-mail message the next day described to me how “he laced into Hellman attacking her for being an apologist for Stalin and never repenting, for her self-righteousness, for her lies and self-aggrandizements.” On another, I gave a talk to a small seminar of women biographers in which I averred that part of what I wanted to do was to examine the meaning of calling Hellman a liar, of labeling her as “ugly.” Hearing of my effort, a young person—not present at the seminar—protested that I was being too kind to Hellman. In a message to a colleague, he asked, “Did anyone say, at any point, in these agreeable proceedings, ‘hold on, Hellman WAS a liar? … Whether or not (as a good friend once observed) she had a face that looked as if a mouse had died on it, she lied about her Party membership, she lied about Communist infiltration in the Wallace campaign, and she lied about anticommunist liberals and the magazines Partisan Review and Commentary, saying that they never attacked McCarthy.”

  The palpable anger embedded in these assertions emerges in the distortions they reaffirm. Hellman did, several times before 1976 and three times in Scoundrel Time, oppose the actions of Soviet dictators and admit that she had been wrong about Stalin; she was criticized for not saying so apologetically enough and with sufficient force. She did lie about her party membership, a necessary maneuver in the fifties when the economic consequences of admitting party membership could be dire. She continued to deny that she’d ever been in the party, as did many others who only after the fall of the Soviet Union admitted membership.8 She informed Wallace that communists were involved in his campaign: that wasn’t illegal in 1948, just unpalatable. She did not accuse those magazines of failing to attack McCarthy: she accused them of not standing by the victims. In words infused with a passionate abhorrence of a long-dead woman, the critics repeated crude gossip, introduced irrelevant connections between Hellman’s appearance and her politics, and repeated charges no more accurate than Hellman’s defenses.

  I puzzled over whether these rifts could have been due to fallout surrounding the Communist Party, of which she, like many of her peers, was briefly a part. But others had long been forgiven party membership and honored to boot. Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, and Pete Seeger come immediately to mind. And, as this book demonstrates, neither in the period of her membership from 1939 to late 1941 nor afterward did she follow the party line. Robert Newman, who has studied the subject more carefully than anyone else, counts her as, at best, a bit player.9 She was and remained what has come to be called a “fellow traveler.” She never gave up her vision of a society with a greater measure of social and racial justice, and she clung longer and more naïvely than many to the hope that the Soviet Union might mend itself and prove to be a reasonable model. Many of her friends, including Arthur Miller, Aaron Copland, and Marc Blitzstein, did as much.

  To what, then, was Hellman’s capacity to elicit vituperation and anger due? Certainly her self-righteous stance, her continuing moral certainty, and her willingness to fight back played a role. Her continuing belief that she had “done no harm” irked many. To those who recognized the horrors of Soviet Communism early on, she and others who continued to believe in the possibilities of socialism in any form seemed willfully blind or complicit. Hellman’s publicly acclaimed refusal to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952 fueled the anger of anticommunists who seethed at her unwillingness to acknowledge her sins and her escape from the punishments others experienced. Coming from a woman, the finger-pointing proved especially galling. But her greatest offense, and the one that called forth the most scathing denunciation, was her insistence on holding to account those who had failed to defend the victims of McCarthyism. Then and afterward she became, to anti-communists on the right and left, a kind of lightning rod, attracting public disapproval and criticism not because of her failures but because of her strengths. She had, after all, positioned herself as a truth teller, as a patriot acting in defense of American values.

  Hellman’s moralism (her insistence that she stood for truth, loyalty, antagonism to corruption, commitment to social justice, and racial egalitarianism) may have been her undoing, placing her, as it did, at the fulcrum of ideological disagreement. That she could not live up to her moral claims makes her merely human. But that she insisted on pointing fingers at those who did not live up to theirs turned her into a pariah. Her refusal to bend, her insistence on claiming the moral high ground, reignited a battle that some might have thought over. In Scoundrel Time, published in 1976, a quarter century after the events they described, Hellman argued that during the McCarthy period she and others had acted in the best traditions of American dissent. Others had flunked the moral test, failed to stand up to the bullies. In turn, accusations of Stalinism—rigid adherence to a particular line and intolerance for any who rejected it; unquestioning commitment to the politics of the Soviet Union—surfaced once again. The accusations came to implicate both her ideas and her personality. She was dismissed as strident and rude, her persona identified with cruelty and evil. Once a minor player on the political stage, she became the epitome of factionalization on the left. Long after the specific meaning of Stalinism has been lost to most American adults, when the word itself evokes a naïve commitment to brutal totalitarianism, Lillian Hellman remains a symbol of heightened ideological dispute, of malevolent and unreasoning thought and behavior.

  “Would any of this have happened in the same way,” sociologist Cynthia Epstein asked me, “if Hellman were not a woman?” I tend to think not. Hellman’s life as a woman contains, as Patricia Meyer Spacks has pointed out, a crucial contradiction around the issue of freedom. Hellman sought freedom not only in the world but for herself. That search, as Spacks notes, is illusory, perhaps in general, but certainly for women.10 And yet, Hellman was a spirited and independent soul who never gave up her search for love even as her anger and frustration worked against ever achieving it. Smart and straightforward, filled with wit and humor, she was by turns generous and judgmental. And she was breathtakingly courageous in her defense of civil liberties at a time when to stand up for what was right could exact a tremendous personal price. She wrote about herself with both pride and self-mockery, worrying about her sexual attractiveness and her looks even as she articulated an idealistic political morality.

  Hellman’s position as a woman among men confuses the situation further. And here, once again, she illuminates the tensions embedded in the twentieth-century transformation of women’s lives and gendered power relationships. Arguably, she became the economically successful playwright and celebrity she was by blurring gender boundaries. In her role as a playwright in the 1930s and ’40s, she ignored her place “as a woman,” behaving “like a man” in the sense that she simply did as she pleased without apparent attention to prevailing gender norms. She did not, in her plays, turn romance and domesticity into plot lines. Feminine as she certainly was in her private life and private moments, Hellman never made any effort to craft a public feminine self, putting forward instead a transgressive persona. She insisted on writing serious plays about serious subjects and on presenting them in first-class venues. She was ambitious, quick to anger, and often rude and dismissive. She smoked like a chimney and used offensive language.

  Her willingness to transgress drew fire while she was alive and continues to do so. Critics still compare her unfavorably to tough, sexy women of the thirties like Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo.11 Of this insistence on placing her among women, Hellman is not the only victim. Poet and novelist Muriel Spark, a recent reviewer noted, behaved “like any number of male writers, including ones much less talented than she, but as a woman, so ruthlessly and coldheartedly in pursuit of her art she was a little ahead
of her time.”12 Small wonder, then, that Hellman quickly earned an unenviable reputation for being demanding, greedy, ambitious, loud, and bad-tempered. The evidence suggests that she was, at times, all of these things. Yet her quick and angry style, her sexual energy, might have drawn less critical attention in a similarly situated male.

  Hellman positioned herself as a southerner, a Jew, and a playwright before she ever identified herself as a woman. Yet she could not escape the pigeonhole of what a woman was supposed to be. In the eyes of many, she remained a woman first, forever assessed as a woman playwright, a daughter of the South, a renegade Jewish woman. So it was with her sexuality. Hellman’s autonomous and vigorous pursuit of sexual satisfaction reflected the risky goals of young women of her class in the 1920s. Nor did Hellman change these behaviors as she matured. Unlike other women of her generation (Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Mary McCarthy come to mind), she did not atone for her past promiscuity by settling down with a partner. On the contrary, she walked away from an early marriage with no hard feelings and the recognition that marriage was not for her. Critics in the 1930s sometimes described Hellman as a “she Hammett.”

  One suspects that her lack of conventional beauty multiplied the offense given by Hellman’s want of decorous behavior. Still, she continued to be sexually active throughout her life and sexually attractive into her old age, when her magnetism drew comment. Look at her in that mink coat, sexy, knowing, ironic, plainly the picture of a woman thoroughly enjoying herself into her seventy-second year. Late in life, her sometimes salacious pursuit of young men attracted sneers and jokes that increased as she became sick and feeble. It was then that she became known to her enemies as a “sexual predator.” The combination of wrinkled and leathery skin and sexual aggressiveness drew bitter comments like “she had a face that looked as if a mouse died on it.”

  Once again Hellman illuminates the historical moment. The twentieth century was, after all, a time of volatile gender relationships. Modernity, Depression, war, and suburbanization all challenged traditional gender norms; new habits of consumption and political protest led women in particular to seek new paths. The young Lillian who in the twenties enjoyed the sexual and lifestyle freedom of the flapper generation lived through the more traditional, family-oriented fifties, insistently committed to her own brand of independent womanliness. When the second wave of feminism came along, she dismissed the young women who participated in the new movement as lacking in seriousness. She refused to call herself a feminist, denied that she experienced obstacles to success as a woman, was reportedly fiercely combative with female subordinates. Small wonder, then, that a new generation of young women who adored her also felt a touch of ambivalence. They admired her explicit acknowledgment of sexual desire and appreciated her iteration of a free and self-made life. But they were disappointed at the lack of emotional autonomy it demonstrated—at the failure of women like Hellman to refuse dependence on men, or to identify with women.

  In her search for economic independence, too, Hellman transgressed the idea of a woman’s place. Unlike the lives of many early-twentieth-century women, whose stories rotate around courtship, marriage, and family even when their achievements are substantial, Hellman’s tale is better captured by following a typically male trajectory. Her life tells a story of mounting attainment. At one level, she exemplifies the Horatio Alger myth that promises success to those who (with the aid of luck and pluck) pull themselves up by their bootstraps. At another, it manifests the courage and assertion it took for a woman to pursue a course generally closed to her sex. For a woman to achieve the economic resources that allowed her to function independently at a time when such independence was largely seen as the prerogative of men defied nature. Characteristically, an achieving woman, instead of accruing admiration, became known as greedy and self-serving. She met a more hostile world, fended off challenges with a sharp tongue and prickly temper, built a potent set of defenses. Being a self-made woman was not at all like being a self-made man.

  The transgressive woman typically provides a troubling subject. To write about her empathetically is to display her temper, her anger, her rudeness. To explain these away does her an injustice; it denies the difficulties she faced in achieving her goals. Observers frequently describe Hellman as simply unliked and unlikeable by many, especially many women. I see another side of her, one much loved and cared for by a succession of friends who accepted or ignored the difficult parts of her persona because they so enjoyed the benefits of her warmth and wit and friendship. Her legendary anger and bad temper constituted part of a personality that was also generous, caring, hospitable, and womanly. The tension between the two parts tells us something about how twentieth-century women coped, how they repeatedly compromised their private lives and reframed their public personas as necessity demanded and opportunity allowed. Hellman’s dual stance, simultaneously furious and nurturing, loving and dismissive, insecure and insistent, may well illuminate elements of gender that women have often feared to show.

  Lillian Hellman is a juicy character: her life is filled with sex and scandal, with spirited advocacy and victimhood. She might be the subject of one of the melodramas she wrote so well. If we delve into the context in which she lived we might discover something more. For Hellman illuminates the interplay between the historical moment and individual responses. She earned her laurels and she brought her troubles on herself. But she did so within a shifting and changing political, social, and cultural environment that constituted the century’s challenge. The persona and her reactions took on different colors as Hellman enacted them in changing contexts. Her capacity to contain (and to reveal) so many contradictory elements turned her into the perfect lightning rod, and thus the perfect subject for the historian.

  Literary scholar Rachel Brownstein points out that literary biography poses the problem of finding out how the character imagined herself. It allows great play for the biographer’s imagination—allowing the biographer to make the subject what she wants her to be. Political or historical biography shifts the emphasis to ask how the character related to the world around her—how she faced the world. In searching for the relational self, the historical biographer uses the individual as a window into a moment, a lens, a mirror. Inevitably that lens is clouded. But peering through Hellman, trying to experience the world in which she made political and personal choices and searched for a place, promises to provide a sense of how myriad ordinary folk made difficult choices under circumstances not of their own choosing. What can Hellman tell us, I ask, about the hope and anxiety that infused the war-torn and Stalinist worlds of fear in which she lived? What can she teach us about how any of us might react if we were faced with a choice between giving up a utopian dream and clinging to a false god? How would we behave if to achieve our goals we needed to abandon the rewards of constraint and appear rebellious? Would we, given the option, betray a friend or betray ourselves? These questions lead me to worry whether I do Hellman a disservice by using her life to access not only particular events but the larger cultural and social and even political processes of a moment in time. I do not know whether Lillian Hellman would approve of that, but I like to think she might find it more useful than the biographies she never wanted written about her.

  And here, of course, I face my own motives. The distinguished British historian E. P. Thompson once justified a biographical study of William Blake by remarking that while many microstudies of Blake had appeared, and each had added significant particulars to the sum of knowledge about him, it would take a historian to put the parts together, to reveal the sum total. Yet the historian’s is a flawed lens, pretending to an unachievable objectivity. He or she chooses which pieces to use and which to leave aside. Too much has been written about Lillian Hellman to pretend that all the parts can be neatly fitted together. Too much has been shaved and shaded and refigured to know what answers will emerge when the pieces are reconfigured. For the challenge of Lillian Hellman is to see how the fema
le, southern, Jewish, heterosexual playwright—the communist celebrity who modeled mink coats—lived in one body. Our challenge is to understand the relationship between the flesh-and-blood Lillian and the templates made of her. How else to account for her persistent hold on the American imagination?

  In recent years Lillian Hellman has become a Rorschach test for a generation of women and men who lived through some of the most challenging days of America’s history, a lightning rod for the anger, fear, and passion that divided American intellectuals and activists from each other. Perhaps, just perhaps, a new look will enable us to make sense of the obsession with her that will, I suspect, last until the issues she touched have disappeared into historical memory. Let us, then, follow Lillian Hellman through the minefields of the twentieth century. Let us explore how one woman survived its challenges.

  Chapter 1

  Old-Fashioned American Traditions

  I was raised in an old fashioned American tradition, and there were certain homely things that were taught to me: to try to tell the truth, not to bear false witness, not to harm my neighbor, to be loyal to my country …

  —Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time

  Beautiful Julia Newhouse, daughter of a wealthy southern family, married Max Hellman—who had nothing to recommend him but charm—in 1904. A year later, Julia gave birth to a child they called Lillian Florence Hellman. Baby Lillian grew up to be a precocious and rebellious child. She spent her early years in New Orleans before the family moved north to New York City. But she returned to New Orleans and the South for months at a time throughout her youth. Geography, class, and gender all added up to life on the fringes.