A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  Hellman might have been perceived as a political playwright during the war, but she didn’t like the label very much and she claimed never to have really liked The Searching Wind.45 Before the film’s June 1946 release, she had already decided to shift gears and was working full tilt on the play that would become Another Part of the Forest. There she tried to deflect criticism by backing off current events and revisiting the themes of greed and human nature that had animated The Little Foxes. But the parallels between the southern world she created and the one in which she lived were unmistakable. World War II had now ended; America was busily retooling its industry to serve the needs of an expanding consumer culture. Setting the scene twenty years before The Little Foxes, Hellman placed the Hubbard siblings in small-town Alabama in 1880, just after the 1877 withdrawal of northern troops from the South. There, Hellman resurrected the two brothers, Ben and Oscar, and their sister, Regina, as they reached maturity and wrested control of their family’s fortune from their father. The father, much despised in the small town where he was the wealthiest man, had made huge profits during the Civil War by running salt through the southern blockade and then selling it at enormous prices. This was the kind of profiteering familiar to goods-deprived families in the Second World War. As if that were not enough, Marcus Hubbard betrayed a group of southern soldiers to the enemy, an event that towns-people suspected, but could not prove, and that led to the soldiers’ massacre. When Ben discovers that his mother has secreted evidence of his father’s guilt in the family Bible, he blackmails his father into giving up control of his wealth and, at the price of parental humiliation, starts on the path to capitalist success.

  There was no way to miss Hellman’s condemnation of the endless rapacity of capitalism, its ruthless destruction of everything that lay in its way, including the cherished traditions of family honor and southern solidarity. But postwar America had had enough of conflict with capitalism. It relied now on the entrepreneurial spirit to raise it from the despair of war, and Hellman had overstepped the limits. She had created, thought one reviewer, characters of sheer unredeemed wickedness, characters filled with “relentless hatred … cold hatred, Iago-hatred,” characters utterly lacking in human decency.46 These were characters so monstrous, so venal, so brimming with odium that they immediately raised the question of whether such evil had any relationship to real life.

  In the view of critics, her malevolence backfired. As Brooks Atkinson put it in the New York Times, “this time her hatred for malefactors of great wealth in post-war Alabama has driven her play straight over the line into old fashioned melodrama.” This play, he thought, was hokum.47 By trying to turn a serious effort to expose predatory capitalists into popular entertainment, noted another critic, Hellman had “deprived it of validity,” turned it into a play “as easy to enjoy as it was difficult to take seriously.”48 The new millionaires of the 1880s might have been villainous, argued another, but they were not unmitigated villains.49 And yet the criticism was muted by awe at Hellman’s accomplishment. Even as they disparaged her melodramatic style, even as they ridiculed it for its lack of verisimilitude, several critics praised the play as “expertly written, well acted, superbly directed.”50 As one wrote, “from a less practiced pen,” the play “might have been so overwrought as to be funny.” Only “a dramatist of extraordinary skill and strength,” he added, “could have managed” to pull this off.51

  Criticism of character and plot in Another Part of the Forest was balanced by admiration for the production, and this time Hellman could take credit for that too. Up until then, Herman Shumlin had produced and directed all of her original plays. He had also been her most enduring admirer, and often a lover as well. “Dear smart, gorgeous, lovely, darling Lillian,” he wrote to her after the opening of The Children’s Hour, and with unfailing loyalty continued for a decade to work with her on everything she wrote. For a long time Hellman appreciated the partnership, and shared with Shumlin the triumphs and hurts of his other successes and failures. “Herman would do just as well to stay away from comedy,” she wrote to Arthur Kober after one of Shumlin’s failures. “I feel very sorry about all the mess.”52 But in 1945 strains emerged in the relationship. Hellman’s decision to direct The Searching Wind while Shumlin produced it may well have created tensions. And Hellman’s deep involvement with John Melby surely exacerbated ill-feeling. In early 1946, she told Shumlin she could not work with him any longer. Lacking trust in any other partner, she asked Kermit Bloomgarden to produce the play and decided to direct Another Part of the Forest herself.

  She was, by her own account, poor at the job: not adequately clear, impulsive, and often quick to change her mind. She thought she could simply “explain something and that was that.” Her penchant for treating actors as “normal, logical people” backfired when she discovered that people in the theater were neither normal nor logical.53 Remarkably, none of this showed onstage. She received universal accolades for her selection of actors (particularly the young Patricia Neal as the teenaged Regina, and Mildred Dunnock as the mother driven crazy by her husband’s machinations), her staging, and the overall sense of the direction. The play, not a smash hit, nevertheless ran from late November to late April, a respectable five months.

  Two themes run through the controversy about Another Part of the Forest, both worth our attention. The wickedness that permeated the play rubbed off on Hellman as a person. Richard Watts, who briefly compared Hellman to Ibsen in terms of plot structure and directness of language, chose on second thought to associate her with Clare Boothe. They shared, Watts thought, a “malice toward the human race … distaste for mankind … venom and their bitterness.”54 Joseph Wood Krutch concurred: “Miss Hellman’s ability to imagine dirty tricks and nasty speeches is unrivaled in the contemporary theater,” he opined. “There can be no question of the theatrical virtuosity which enables her to extract from each all the ugliness it can possibly yield.”55 To some, Hellman became the personification of the evil that she was describing. As Sam Sillen put it in the Daily Worker, a communist newspaper typically sympathetic to the broad outlines of her work, “In the sheer projection of wickedness in human beings, Miss Hellman has no competitors in the American theater.” She had written a play so depraved and mean-spirited that it could not be taken seriously. John Chapman concurred. The theater, he argued, needed “a good stiff dose of pure hellishness. Miss Hellman … is just the girl to give it to us.”56 From then on, Hellman would be identified with the ugliness of her characters, her persona vested with their cruel and malevolent behaviors. The critic Jacob Adler would conclude his assessment of her work a few years later by suggesting that “what sustains her is a concentrated presentation of sheer, almost supernatural evil, to be matched in almost no other modern playwright anywhere.”57

  Then, too, Another Part of the Forest offered a view of history with which many (including some of her former friends) disagreed. Based in the South like The Little Foxes, Another Part of the Forest imagined its corrupt protagonists bent on the destruction of a pastoral and paternalistic land that had never existed. Hellman’s South overlooked the legacy of slavery and racism to display a latent admiration for the cultured and gracious lives lived by its ruling elite. In defense of this oversimplified and idyllic South, Hellman took proponents of a new industrialism to task. One sympathetic critic concluded that “Miss Hellman is, among other things, becoming a social historian of provocative gifts.”58 But those less inclined to romanticize the old South could reasonably dissent. The portrait raised questions about Hellman’s identification with the South and led some to wonder if her capacity to draw on a fund of negative materials about that changing region, and even to throw off southern ties in her work, might negate the label of a southern writer in her case.59 Hellman was herself ambivalent on this point. Asked late in life if she considered herself southern, she replied, “Well, I have no right to, because the New York years now far outweigh the Southern years, but I suppose most Southerners, people who gre
w up in the South, still consider themselves Southern.”60

  In the context of the times, Another Part of the Forest, itself seemingly without a relevant politics, created something of a stir. Hellman had followed The Searching Wind—a play that blamed American isolationism for bringing on the Second World War and that advocated collective security in a period of deep suspicions against the Soviet Union—with one that offered yet another dose of criticism. Even as the nation turned to anticommunism and Hellman herself turned away from communist activities, Another Part of the Forest condemned capitalists as unmitigated villains and romanticized traditional community values. In turning the Hubbards into an evil family, wrote a Commonweal reviewer who had also disliked Hellman’s portrayal of the events leading up to World War II, Hellman had drawn a portrait that was “Americanly wrong.”61 Later, other critics would associate these two plays with the kind of simplistic social-realist writing characteristic of the 1930s left, and which Hellman disliked.62

  There was the rub. In the postwar period, vast divisions emerged about what was “American” and what was not. As the country settled into the era and its leaders tried to sort out how to live with a Soviet Union perceived as increasingly threatening, Hellman’s views diverged from those of an apprehensive mainstream America. During the Depression thirties, the idea of communism served as a beacon of light to radicals who sought to change the world. As long as the Americans and the Soviets were allied, the light lasted. Then it faded. The brave Soviet citizens who had resisted Hitler during the war years and driven him back remained confined and silenced in a nation desperate to spread Communist influence and ideas over the world. Revelations about Stalin’s atrocities against anybody who threatened his power reached the West. The Soviets were known to be searching for the secret of the Atom bomb, and close to achieving it. A tense and fearful U.S. searched for spies in every nook and cranny. And an aggressive United States Congress attacked those it deemed guilty of spreading un-American ideas. Hellman resisted the onslaught of fear and hostility, clinging, as many did, to the hope that some mechanism for peaceful coexistence could be found, and insisting that the search for enemies within the United States would surely destroy the freedoms its citizens most valued. After Another Part of the Forest, her writing, long in tune with a wartime desire for cohesion, seemed flat and out of harmony, even perilously dangerous. She turned increasingly to contemporary issues and especially to the defense of artistic freedom.

  In 1948, Hellman agreed to adapt Norman Mailer’s bestselling novel The Naked and the Dead for the theater, drawn by its critique of conflict within the American military and its dissection of the inner lives of American soldiers. She interrupted her work on the script—as it happened never to resume it—to attend a premiere of The Little Foxes in Belgrade and to write some short pieces on Yugoslavia for the New York Star. Writing in early November 1948 as Henry Wallace was winding up a campaign for the presidency that Harry Truman would win, Hellman took time in these pieces to educate her readers about the recent expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Communist bloc of nations led by the Soviet Union. Tito, who did not believe that the Soviets had sufficiently aided Yugoslav partisans in their wartime struggle, chose to chart his own path toward communism, independent of Soviet influence. This was a conversation that Hellman could have stayed out of. But she chose to enter it on Tito’s side—averring at every opportunity that, although she knew nothing about the quarrel, she was happy to learn that communists sometimes disagreed with each other and insisting that Tito’s strength, candor, and charm would prevent a face-off between them.63

  Before she returned to the United States, Hellman stopped in Paris, where she saw Emmanuel Robles’s play Montserrat, a piece that appealed to her so much that she abandoned Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead to adapt it to an American audience. Robles’s play spoke powerfully to one of Hellman’s favorite themes: the price of human liberty. Set in Venezuela in 1812, the plot revolved around the rebellion led by Simon Bolívar. To persuade one man, Montserrat, to speak the secret of Bolívar’s hiding place, a Spanish officer rounds up six innocent Venezuelan villagers (men and women) and tells them they will be shot in an hour if they do not convince Montserrat to reveal the hiding place. Alone with the prisoners, Montserrat listens as each pleads a case. Wives and children will be without support, argue the captives; nursing babies will be motherless; young people at the threshold of life will never contribute their might. Montserrat counters by trying to persuade the six that their individual lives are worth nothing as against the millions for whom Bolívar’s escape will bring liberty. Their sacrifice is for the larger human freedom that Bolívar represents. But the six are not convinced, and each dies pleading with Montserrat to speak. Finally, when the Spanish threaten to round up six more innocents, Montserrat relents. But by now Bolívar has escaped, and in retribution Montserrat is sent to his death.

  As she worked at the adaptation—a much harder task than she had imagined—Hellman tinkered with the Robles play, in the process facing some of the moral problems confronting a tense world. She neither drew explicit political lessons nor preached revolt against oppression. And yet the historical moment enveloped the play. With Berlin under blockade for most of the spring and the Chinese communists racing through Beijing and then Nanking toward victory, the world seemed headed for an indefinite conflict. At home, the hunt to identify and curtail communist activity intensified. In March, the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in which Hellman participated endured sharp protests for issuing invitations to “approved” Soviet writers. In June, the attack struck close to home when an FBI report named Hellman’s close friend Dorothy Parker a communist. Could liberty prevail in the face of a large and spreading fear? The noose around communists and fear of them tightened that August when the Russians tested their first atomic weapon.

  Kermit Bloomgarden agreed to produce Montserrat, but Hellman chose to direct it herself, her second effort at directing. This time she did not succeed so well. Though critics appreciated Hellman’s usual “sharpness and bite” and praised “the fervor of her hatred for injustice and her belief in man’s right to shape his own destiny,” they missed her usual directness. The production, they agreed, lacked the verve and intensity of her earlier work.64 Hellman stood by her play, though she later confessed that she directed it in “a fumbling, frightened way,” intimidated by the powerful acting of Emlyn Williams.65 It might not have mattered.

  The timing of the production was all wrong, and to make matters worse, just a few days after Montserrat opened, Marc Blitzstein’s Regina, an operatic adaptation of The Little Foxes, hit the boards. Except for insisting that the story line of the opera remain faithful to her original play, Hellman pretty much stayed out of the work on Regina. Blitzstein, an old friend, took the opportunity to blunt the edges of The Little Foxes by creating a chorus of black folk whose musical instruments and voices underlined the play’s antiracist themes and suggested that a new day was coming. With Blitzstein already identified as a communist, critics took aim at both message and music. Inevitably, musical and play together opened up questions about just what political side Hellman was on.

  As if to avoid the taint of writing political plays, and in the midst of the spreading attacks against communism, Hellman turned in the spring of 1951 to The Autumn Garden, a play she sometimes described as her favorite. Shunning the overtly political, she avoided the carefully constructed plots that had sustained her for many years. She turned, instead, to Chekhov, whose plays she much admired and whose letters she had begun to assemble in preparation for a book. For a setting, she provided a summer guest house on the Gulf Coast near New Orleans, run by a refined, down-on-her-fortune woman. There she brought together ten middle-aged people for their annual summer holidays. These were characters, as a Commonweal reviewer put it, trapped “in the half life they have been living while waiting for the full life” of a dream that would never come to be.66 The play, Chekhovian in the sense that it portrays
the illusion of hope and promise that fuels human activity—and records the ultimate futility of the human condition—ends in predictable stalemate. Neither particularly unpleasant nor evil, each character learns, in the weeks they are all together, just how little he or she has taken hold of life. All of them return to the separate locations from which they came neither better nor worse than when the summer began. As the play ends, we know that they will return home unable and unwilling to salvage meaningless lives.

  The sense of despondency that infused The Autumn Garden captured Hellman’s frustration with a nation caught in the vise of its own fear. One by one, she took to task each of her characters for their lack of courage, their aimlessness. Collectively the players created an allegory for America. Middle-aged, self-absorbed, and unable to see purpose in their lives, the summer visitors passed through their experiences unwilling to do more than acknowledge their gloomy circumstances. America, Hellman seemed to be saying, had abandoned faith in change and progress.

  Critics tended to see something else. To them, the world of the fifties called for an aggressive commitment to secure the prosperity and might of a newly powerful United States. They responded to The Autumn Garden by rising to the defense of the America they loved. Hellman takes on “the South as her pet whipping boy,” wrote one critic, who added, “We think Miss Hellman might do well to pay a visit to the new South which boasts a good many happy, prosperous and moral people.”67 Another dismissed the play as the work of “an undefeated and untied misanthrope.”68 Still a third took her to task for failing in her political loyalties. The Autumn Garden, wrote Christian Science Monitor reviewer John Beaufort, is “an unfairly slanted representation of American life.” If produced abroad, he continued, “it may handily serve the Kremlin’s determined campaign to convince Europe that life in the United States is preponderantly decadent.”69 Beaufort went on to lecture Hellman on her responsibilities as a citizen of a free democracy: “Aware that the drama can be a powerful weapon in the war of ideas, playwrights who enjoy the freedoms of a democracy may usefully reflect to what extent they intend contributing to Moscow’s propaganda arsenal.”