A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  Hellman later ascribed the incident to her parents’ commitment to individual liberty. It was, she thought, about “two people who believed in the right to go unmolested.” Max Hellman, she later claimed, had a “genuine feeling for Negroes, and real pity.” To her parents’ example, she attributed her deeply rooted commitment to civil liberties and individual freedom. But the image of two perhaps drunken white men harassing an innocent black girl also illuminated the changes going on around her. For the benign images of paternalism that constituted her child’s view of the South, she substituted the brutality of a new South focused on personal gratification and the accumulation of wealth rather than on mutual responsibility. She never reconciled her childhood memories of a safe and comfortable New Orleans with the abused and exploited population of the new South.

  Lillian moved with her parents to New York in 1910, at the age of five. For the next eight or nine years, the family seems to have spent several months of every year in New Orleans. We know about these years mainly from Lillian, who clung to an image of herself as a child of the South despite the fact that most of her schooling occurred in New York. Hellman tells us that as a child she went to school both in New York and in New Orleans and experienced discomfort in both places. In the North, she could not keep up with her smart urban classmates; in the South, she found herself bored to tears and frequently playing hooky. She probably moved about until she was eleven. After that, southern summers spent in New Orleans and in her mother’s family compound in Mississippi mingled with school years in New York City. In all that time, Hellman maintained a distant though still loving relationship with her old nurse Sophronia, who continued to exercise moral authority in a world in which her parents proved more capricious and less predictable.

  In New Orleans, the family generally lived in a boardinghouse run by her father’s two older sisters, Jenny and Hannah. Set on the shabby, genteel end of Prytania Street for a while and then relocated to a somewhat seedier neighborhood, the boardinghouse provided Lillian with endless entertainment and immersion in the eccentricities of New Orleans family life.

  There she learned to prepare crayfish, to make turtle soup, and to command such domestic arts as knitting, sewing, and embroidery. She admired her aunts’ strong sense of themselves as independent women, acknowledged their love for her and her father, and noted the way they cherished and protected her mother. Warm, funny, and kind, Jenny and Hannah introduced Lillian to a tradition of generous hospitality that she would practice all of her life. Perhaps inadvertently, they also fostered Lillian’s strong need to construct around herself a “family” of people who cared for her and looked after her needs. Coming from a South where she was pampered by aunts and where a tradition of service prevailed, she readily equated deference with love. This characteristic lasted all of her life, perhaps accounting for much of the bad temper and irritability that her associates observed when she failed to get the help she needed and wanted, or when her friends let her down.

  The South too is the location of the fig tree where Lillian satisfied her “stubborn, relentless driving desire to be alone as it came into conflict with the desire not to be alone when I wanted not to be.”21 She hid herself in its branches to read and to educate herself, later recalling the delicious sense of freedom to read as widely as she liked. There, she shed her school clothes and her temper as she allowed the environment to comfort her and hold her safe, “nobody there to tell you what to read, or give advice, or interpret; no interest in whether the book is good or bad … You are just there reading anything you can put your hands on, all hot and sticky with excitement, and maybe fudge …”22 The fig tree appears in several locations in Hellman’s later work, and undoubtedly in her mind, providing a haven and a hiding place for a restless young girl. Generally, Hellman locates it in the front yard of her aunts’ boardinghouse on Prytania Street, though occasionally it appears at “Pass Christian,” the Mississippi resort frequented by the Marx-Newhouse clan, where she and her family spent a week or two every summer of her early teenage years.

  An Unfinished Woman proudly recalls childhood moments when Hellman demonstrated courage and spirit, often flouting advice in favor of making her own decisions. Some of these seem, in retrospect, to have been trivial incidents, more reflective of her efforts to define her character than important as anecdote. She tells us that she often chose to skip school in order to spend time in the fig tree. She describes efforts to defy her mother’s wealthy family by trading an expensive ring given her by Uncle Jake for books. Instead of punishment, she was rewarded by being told that she had spirit after all.

  Lillian retreated to the branches of the fig tree to lick her wounds over her first great disillusionment. She had witnessed her father meeting another woman outside a restaurant, then getting into a taxi with her. Lillian tells us that in a blind rage she threw herself from the fig tree, breaking her nose. When she ran, for comfort, to Sophronia and told her the story, that wise woman instructed her to remain silent about her father’s affairs, giving her the message that would resonate down the years: “Don’t go through life making trouble for people.”23 The broken nose accompanied her for the rest of her life, unmended, despite Hellman’s vanity about her clothes and her looks, and marking her exit from the safety of the South, the security of her parental home, and an implausible vision of herself as a curly-headed beauty. Zoe Caldwell, who played Lillian onstage shortly after her death, thought of the broken nose as a mark of courage, a reminder of the need for discretion.24

  In the aftermath of the fall, Hellman ran repeatedly to Sophronia and the black community for help and solace. In one episode, she tells us that at fourteen she ran away from home after an argument with her parents and stayed away for two nights, making her way, finally, to what she calls the Negro part of town. She knew this area because it housed her family’s dressmaker and she had often been brought there by Sophronia. She remembered it as peopled by cheerful souls and remarkable houses with welcoming doors. There, after invoking Sophronia’s name, she was taken in by a suspicious black family that nevertheless protected her and arranged for her to be collected by her father. Did Lillian really run away from home at fourteen and manage to stay away for two nights, discovering that she had her first menses just as her father came to fetch her? That’s doubtful. Yet whether this story recalls an event that happened or one that she constructed to capture her feelings of despair at the time, it reflects a sense of what racial relations meant to her, revealing something about Lillian’s sense of the New Orleans black community as a place of comfort rather than one of terror.

  Much that Hellman tells us about her experience of southern childhood is clearly romanticized, the exaggerated and wishful memories of a child who recalls moments of pain and joy in the light of lessons learned and rewards received. Her identity as a southerner remained, all her life, firmly rooted in a mythical South where paternalism, gentility, culture, and self-respect trumped the quest for money in the battle for survival. The grown-up Lillian’s reflections on these southern roots reveal a surprising nostalgia for the gentle past of her imagination, producing a bitter rage against those who threatened to destroy sweet memories. Her mother’s family, especially her great-uncle Jake, is among those against whom her venom is directed.

  Hellman held the uncontrolled search for wealth represented by Jake responsible for exacerbating the poverty and racial tension that would become characteristic of a new South. In the unnamed small southern town in which her most famous play, The Little Foxes, is set in 1900, Hellman locates a predatory family intent upon becoming rich by learning “new ways” and learning “how to make them pay.” The family echoes that of her mother. As brother Ben says, the plantation built on fine crops and Negro labor “now belongs to us … twenty years ago, we took over their land, their cotton and their daughter.”25 But the unhappy daughter whose marriage into the family provided it with the land and credibility to destroy the life she loved wants only to retreat into drink where she c
an shut out the present to revel in the beautiful past of memory. Her mother, she recalls, sold off everything out of need, never letting go of her anger at a “people who killed animals they couldn’t use and who made their money charging awful interest to ignorant niggers and cheating them on what they bought.”26 The price of greed, Hellman tells us, is the loss of culture, civility, and humane values, especially toward poor people.

  Lillian eventually learned to emulate the warmth and grace of the old South, but she would not, in any event, have been positioned to take advantage of the new. There she was merely an ugly duckling, lacking traditional good looks and without the kind of family wealth that might have compensated for them. She could not expect to marry into the world of romance and charm, nor could she have brought resources to a marriage or a business partnership. To be sure, she dreamed of being a beauty, but after her first boyfriend told her she looked like “a prow head on a whaling ship,” she gave up on that dream.27 Eventually, she created the head of blonde curls that she wished for, and she earned enough to live the lifestyle of her grandmother. But she never stopped envying good-looking women, nor did she transcend the feeling that she was a poor relative in an extended family where wealth not only mattered but was what chiefly counted.

  New York City proved to be something of a haven for such a young girl. The family settled into a comfortable apartment at 330 West 95th Street. Lillian used the phrase “shabby-genteel” to describe the apartment; census records reveal it to have been solidly middle-class. The neighbors included a dermatologist, an interior designer, a musical director, and an art dealer, occupations that measured well against that of Lillian’s father, who earned his living as a traveling salesman with a line of clothing. The family employed a daily housekeeper and, often, a cook. Both parents had a lively interest in all things literary and especially in the theater. They attended regularly, and afterward revisited the plays and actors’ performances in the presence of their daughter. Though Lillian attended public schools, she took dancing and music lessons, and, as a teenager, had more freedom to explore the city than most of her peers.

  Lillian adored her father, a genial host, a great entertainer, a man of quick wit and charming style. She admired his vitality and resolution, and she forgave him, perhaps even came to admire, his persistent attractions to other women. For Max was a philanderer who did not hide his affairs from his wife and family. True to southern tradition, Lillian’s mother ignored her husband’s long absences and his unfaithful ways. The small Lillian adapted to this behavior reluctantly, following the precepts of her beloved nurse Sophronia not to go through life making trouble for people.28 Hellman remembers her mother as “small, delicately made, and charming” but also as flighty, timid, and impractical.29 As the child turned into a young woman, she grew to despise her mother’s acquiescence, only later coming to see it as a courageous and brave response to her father’s misbehavior.

  The models presented by her relatives offered a different perspective on life. Lillian’s Newhouse grandmother had moved to New York around 1907, settling into a life of ostentatious wealth in a Park Avenue apartment where she lived with two unmarried daughters and a large staff of servants. Lillian remembered the “lovely oval rooms filled with the upper middle-class trappings that never managed to be truly stylish.”30 She recalled the glamorous parties that she watched as a peeping child from the servants’ hall. Lillian and her mother visited often, but she experienced these visits in sharp contrast to her own life, which seemed shabby by comparison. From the discomfort she felt in the presence of her forceful grandmother and from the extended family’s never-ending discussions of money and finances, she perceived her own family as economically marginal. The dissonance produced in her an unquenchable anger and at the same time “a wild extravagance mixed with respect for money and those who have it.”31

  Did consciousness of class enter her picture of the world as a result of the family dynamics? By her own account, Lillian claims to have learned in her teenage years to despise those who sought only wealth and power. She tells us that she did not want either money, or the lack of it, to control her own life. And yet her sense of injury is palpable: she felt cheated of the wealth that was her mother’s due and that she always believed was rightfully hers. The perceived injustice of it all fed a sense of entitlement that led her then and after to claim (even aggressively demand) what she believed to be hers, inside and outside the family. Unwittingly she inherited the pattern her grandmother modeled. She expected and wanted the creature comforts of wealth. One day she might inherit some of them. Until then, she would carve out her own path, earn economic success by her own efforts, or gravitate toward the rich, benefiting from their largesse. Insecure about her place in the world, the teenaged Lillian became impatient, bad-tempered, sharp-tongued, and rebellious. Forever after, even when she became well off, she imagined herself as poor, feared losing her money, and insisted on the comforts that wealth could bring.

  Marks of identity mattered in perverse ways in the New York City to which Lillian moved as a child, for once again she was outside. Hers was not the culture of recently arrived Yiddish-speaking immigrants. She experienced neither the poverty of the Lower East Side nor the community spirit of the working-class neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the Bronx. She did not belong to the immigrant community of legend where parents sacrificed to provide education for children who expected to climb the ladder of social mobility. But neither did she belong among the wealthy German Jews whom the East Siders contemptuously labeled “Jeckes”—for jacketed, prosperous Jews.

  At thirteen, she entered Wadleigh High School for Girls. Founded in 1903, Wadleigh was the first college-preparatory public high school for girls in a city where there were already several elite public boys’ schools meant to train the children of immigrants for college. By the time Lillian enrolled in 1918, Wadleigh boasted nearly three thousand smart female students from all over the city. Lillian was an indifferent scholar in a rather large class of bright schoolmates, and she remembered these years as unhappy. Still, when she graduated in 1922 at the age of seventeen, she had already begun her career as a writer: she wrote a weekly gossip column for the school newspaper entitled “It Seems to Me, Jr.,” and served as an editor of the senior yearbook. In her last year of school she kept a diary that at first she thought of as private, but which she then allowed her boyfriend to read. She recognized, as she did so, that the meaning of what she wrote would change when her words became public.32 This early effort to grapple with whether “truth” would flow from her pen would remain with her for the rest of her life.

  A seventeen-year-old bright female high school graduate from a middle-class family in 1922 might reasonably expect to choose college as an option. Fewer than 10 percent of the young women in her age cohort would make this choice, but Lillian had little doubt about it. She wanted to go to Smith College—a destination favored by bright northern young women. Her mother proposed her own alma mater, Sophie New-comb, which didn’t suit Lillian’s taste for clever and well-read schoolmates. They compromised on Goucher College in Baltimore. Goucher was southern enough for her mother and committed to serious education for women. Lillian applied and was accepted. In the end she enrolled in none of these, telling everyone that her mother was ill and would need her at home. The likelihood is that financial constraints, rather than loyalty to her mother, determined the choice. At any rate, when the fall came, she registered at Washington Square College of New York University.

  The college was then a small affair, less than a decade old, and housing a few hundred undergraduate students. Though it was located in the heart of Greenwich Village, its students mingled neither with the literati who frequented the neighborhood nor with the local Italian families. There she encountered some great minds whose efforts to discipline her reading she resisted. College seemed to her to serve no useful purpose. Restless and bored, she quit after two years. An extended trip with her mother through the Midwest and the South followed. In
the fall of 1924, just nineteen, she took a job in the publishing industry as a manuscript reader.

  This time she chose well. Boni and Liveright, the firm for which she went to work, was a vibrant and exciting young publishing house that avidly represented itself as the perfect outlet for a city of speakeasies, automobiles, and creative intellectual ferment. Its head, Horace Live-right, founder of the Modern Library—which had introduced Americans to inexpensive editions of great European authors—remained committed to publishing new fiction in uncensored form. Liveright attracted to his lists such authors as Hemingway, Dreiser, E. E. Cummings, and T. S. Eliot. And he published the first novels of William Faulkner, Hart Crane, Bertrand Russell, and S. J. Perelman. If Lillian did not work directly with these authors or on their manuscripts, she found herself in a world exactly suited to her ambitions and her tastes and surrounded by creative and talented writers and cultural pundits, young and old. There she encountered Eastern European Jews who aspired to take their places in the thriving cultural communities of the twenties. This was a world where talent and intellect mattered more than money or religion or family background.

  The job introduced Lillian to a world that she would thereafter make her home. At Boni and Liveright, she revealed the sharp critical skills honed by many years of reading in the fig tree, making good use of her quick wit and acerbic tongue. Her employers appreciated the speed with which she read and judged manuscripts and deplored the sloppiness and lack of discipline with which she approached her work. By Lillian’s account at least, they valued most her standing as a representative of a younger, freer generation of women—the flapper generation—whose personal style they desperately tried to understand. Among the perquisites of the job were endless parties and gatherings to honor one book and one writer or another. Shy though she was at the time, Lillian did well at these, drinking in a time of prohibition, dressing in the short skirts and clinging fabrics that signified greater personal freedom for women, dancing and flirting in ways that violated contemporary rules about exhibiting sexual availability. No longer isolated, she found a community of people like her, eager to express themselves as consumers, happily declaring their creative ambition, and unafraid to live by their own standards. Disillusionment might follow, but in the middle of the prosperous and free-spirited 1920s, surrounded by the cultural ferment of New York, Lillian found a niche.