A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  So off-target were the reviews that Harold Clurman, who directed it, intervened in the debate about it. Undoubtedly urged on by Hellman, he wrote a piece in which he defended The Autumn Garden as a quintessential moral statement. The play, he argued, expressed Hellman’s critical feelings about “most of us of the educated near-upper class. We are earnest, we yearn, but we are not serious, we have no clear purpose. We have no binding commitments to ourselves or to others; we are attached to nothing. We allow ourselves to be deviated because we do not know exactly where we want to go.”70 To no avail: it was the political, not the moral, lessons of Hellman’s work to which critics turned in the fifties.

  Hellman, tuned in to the politics of the moment, understood the criticism of The Autumn Garden as part of a climate of fear intended to discipline artists. This was a period in which rhetoric against the communist threat reached fever pitch; anticommunist campaigns, fraught with accusations of disloyalty, filled with hyperbole and outright lies, carried the threat of job loss and perhaps even death. The resulting anxiety led individuals who had (and had not) been close to the Communist Party, or in it, to distance themselves from former friends and from causes associated with sympathy for the Soviet Union. An atmosphere of fear and apprehension effectively curtailed the civil liberties of Americans, constraining freedom of spirit and of mind. In this topsy-turvy world, dissent was unpatriotic, refusing to betray one’s friends was tantamount to admission of communist affiliation, and calls for “peaceful coexistence” (which Hellman supported in The Searching Wind and again at the 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace) became declarations of Soviet sympathy. In a world painted in black and white, in which one form of government protected liberty while the other thrived on despotism, there was no room for compromise. If you were for liberty you must be an anticommunist; even mild criticism of capitalism signaled advocacy of communist slavery. Hellman, who never accepted this dichotomy, watched in horror as patterns of fear began to overwhelm the work of once-brave artists.

  In the several lectures and talks that she delivered to young people during the early 1950s, as socialist ideas came to be perceived as unpatriotic and attacks against the Soviet Union escalated, she repeatedly noted that playwrights wrote in the light of “the social and economic forces of their day.”71 To hammer home her point, she returned to her own roots as a child and as a creature of a particular historical moment: “My generation,” she would begin, and then go on to describe values inspired by FDR’s humane efforts to deal with poverty, unemployment, and insecurity. She urged her students not to be silenced, and puzzled over how many musical comedies in contrast to serious dramas were produced in the early 1950s, when life was “hard and insecure and frightening.” Surely, she thought, this was because “any play that comes along to show life as such makes people more uncomfortable and more unhappy.”72 Fear, she thought, was the real enemy of the writer. Addressing a group of students at Swarthmore College in April 1950, she told them that “because of the political and moral and ethical forces that surround us, we have entered an age in which it is becoming downright dangerous not to conform.” She continued her warning, telling the students that “we are—or are being unnaturally made into—a fearful people, and fearful people will stand for very little deviation.”73 She repeated this theme in and around the time of her own 1952 HUAC testimony and the Hollywood blacklist, as she tried to alert students to the debilitating consequences of the silences induced by “fear of other countries, fear of ourselves and our neighbors, and the discomforts and shame that come with fears and the displacement of ordinary middle-class values.”74 This, she scrawled in a lecture note to herself, was “not first time fear has led to persecution and injustice.” But now fear was “leading to thought control.”75

  We can watch Hellman squirm (along with many others of her generation) as her plays were increasingly viewed through anticommunist lenses and the shadow of Joe McCarthy hung ominously over the entertainment community and the intellectual world. She was caught now in a moral dilemma fostered by a political witch hunt. What seemed to Hellman to be issues of good and evil or right and wrong appeared to audiences and critics to be political rather than moral statements. Hellman understood the dilemma and chose her stance. If she ceased to be an out-spoken advocate of communism, she would nevertheless continue to vigorously oppose the anticommunist crusade. She would acknowledge the temper of the times without succumbing to it. She continued to defend The Little Foxes as satire, for example, but she refused to revive it in the decade of the fifties for fear that the “warm acceptance” it received in 1939 would not be repeated. American society in the fifties, she told a group of students at the end of the decade, preferred a “gentle picture of itself, togetherness and goodness, normality or decency.” This was not her picture of America at the time, but it influenced the acceptance of her work. She consoled herself by adding that even if the reception of a play changed, “the worth of a play is not altered by time.”76

  She chose, in that difficult historical moment, to focus on the theme of justice she had captured in The Children’s Hour, hoping that in bringing it back to the stage, she could call attention to the larger consequences of unthinking acquiescence to an age of lies. With Kermit Bloomgarden’s help, The Children’s Hour opened once again on December 18, 1952, for a successful six-month run. Hellman cast Pat Neal in one of the starring roles and for the last time directed it. Audiences responded well, though, and once again critics chose to find in it a political message that they immediately skewered. The play, wrote Eric Bentley, “has nothing directly to do with communism, but it was written in the thirties, and is the product of the dubious idealism of that time.”77 Cleverly, Bentley turned the accusation of lesbianism leveled at the teachers into an allegory for communism. “Suppose it had been about teachers accused of communism,” he wrote, “that for two acts we had been asked to boil with indignation at the wrongness of the accusation, only to find towards the close of act three that one of the pair did harbor communist sympathies?” In his view, Hellman could not escape the conclusion. “Is it not in politics rather than the theatre that we have witnessed this drama before?” he asked with a flourish.

  Hellman would not be silenced. Between 1949 and the end of 1956, at the height of the Cold War and in the midst of the frenzy of McCarthyism, she mounted one original play (The Autumn Garden) and three stage adaptations (Emmanuel Robles’s Montserrat, Jean Anouilh’s The Lark, and Voltaire’s Candide). Consistently she described her efforts as reaching for moral rather than political truths. Appreciative audiences certainly understood them that way. Montserrat asks about the value of human life in the context of a larger struggle for liberty; The Autumn Garden explores the futility of trying to change oneself or the world. Candide satirizes the assumption that we can ever imagine, much less create, a world without pain. The Lark, from 1955 and based on the life of Joan of Arc, suggests willingness to sacrifice the corporeal body in order to save the soul. Each speaks in the political-moral voice that had by now become her trademark. But in a world where moral debates seemed to harbor embedded political dangers, Hellman’s voice remained suspect.

  The Lark carried the additional weight of taking a position on women’s issues. For Hellman, its appeal lay in a heroine whose martyrdom symbolically evoked women’s fate. The United States, just out of a war in which it called on women to sacrifice for their country, asked them, at war’s end, to leave their jobs and return to their homes. Hellman, who played a role in efforts to involve women in the war effort, ignored the injunction to women to return home. She saw Joan as “history’s first modern career girl, wise, unattractive in what she knew about the handling of men, straight out of a woman’s magazine.”78 The portrait she drew of Joan—which, as we shall see later, got her into some trouble with the original playwright, Jean Anouilh—centered on her womanly leadership. “It has remained for a woman dramatist to give us the first really tough minded Joan of Arc,” wrote one critic. �
��I have a strong suspicion that a great deal of the biting briskness, the cleaver-sharp determination, the haughty and hard-headed candor of this Joan comes from the pen of the lady.”79

  Hellman turned to editing the letters of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, perhaps because he most closely reflected her thinking at the time. She started to work on this volume as early as January 1950, and the notes in her files suggest that she saw in Chekhov both a reflection of herself and an allusion to her own time. She described him as a writer with whom she would not only have liked to share a dinner, but one with whose family she would have enjoyed spending a summer. She thought him “a pleasant man … witty and wise and tolerant and kind.”80 She admired his optimism, his warmth and gaiety; she appreciated his desire to surround himself with friends and to open his house to them. She wrote admiringly: “He was intelligent, he believed in intelligence, and intelligence for Chekhov meant that you called a spade a spade: laziness was simply not working; too much drink was drunkenness; whoring had nothing to do with love; health was when you felt good and brocaded words could not cover emptiness or pretensions or waste.”81

  More poignantly, Hellman seems to have imagined herself in a parallel moment in time: a moment when the demeanor and stance of intellectuals had become unclear. She describes Chekhov as living in a place where “the scenery had gone hog wild,” where “men lay preaching gibberish to each other in the mud” or “screamed men down in Moscow and St. Petersburg with anti-Orthodox reason that sounded very like Orthodox prayers.”82 Under these circumstances, she admired his ability to keep his head, to act on principle. Despite the chaos, she thought of Chekhov as “a man of sense, of common sense,” as someone who “tried to see things as they were and to deal with them as he saw them.”83

  The words capture an aching sense of how she wished intellectuals might behave in her own time. In her notes, she commented that Chekhov “was not a political man, or a radical,” but he was “a social man, and a deeply responsible one.”84 Though his friends took more active revolutionary roles than he did, she cautioned that judgment “depends on where you’re standing. For our conservative, frightened days, he did remarkable and daring things.” He visited a prison camp in Siberia; sheltered Gorky, who was then under police surveillance; broke with his best friend over the Dreyfus affair; “and over and over again he gave money and shelter to men of revolutionary activity.” And then the telltale identification: “One has a difficult time today trying to think of writers who would do any one of these dangerous deeds, and who would not be considered dangerous by doing so.” Here was the pain at the betrayals, the anger at the weak-minded, the longing for support that she did not again articulate until she wrote about her Cold War experience in Scoundrel Time.

  Hellman’s struggles tell us something about the problem of continuing to write serious plays (or do serious art) in an ideologically divided world. Her 1956 stage adaptation of Voltaire’s Candide is a case in point. Before she took on Candide, she toyed with the idea of adapting Emile Zola’s Germinal to the stage. She was attracted by the story of a failed strike among coal miners in a small French village, and its horrendous consequences in terms of human life and family relationships. In some respects Zola’s chronicling of the effects of capitalism on the family history of the Second French Empire is not dissimilar to Hellman’s much narrower look at the South in the period of Another Part of the Forest. As one critic noted, for the 1950s, Germinal was perhaps too direct a statement about “the conflict between the forces of modern Capitalism and the interests of human beings necessary to its advance.”85

  Hellman dropped the idea of Germinal when the rising young composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein agreed to work with her on the more universally critical Candide. The project excited Lillian in a way that nothing had for a while, but ever after she regretted her involvement. A satire on efforts to construct an ideal world and a parody on the folly of optimism in the face of malevolent self-interest, Candide seemed especially germane at the height of the McCarthy period. Hellman at first imagined that Bernstein would do no more than compose incidental and transitional music. But Bernstein had other thoughts. He wanted to write the music for an operetta based on her adaptation, and Hellman wanted so much to please that, for one of the few times in her life, she gave way to every demand to add, reshape, and rewrite the story she had conceived. Unfamiliar with the genre of musical theater and awed by Bernstein’s musical creativity, she responded with unusual alacrity to requests for changes in the script and in the direction of the plot. The process, and the final production, turned into a mess and confused audiences who sat through its three-and-a-half-hour duration.

  Voltaire’s bitter satire on optimism—his critique of the possibilities posed by imagining that one lived in the best of all possible worlds, and his insistence that greed and bigotry were part of human character—constituted a perfect foil in an America convinced that its particular view of freedom had no parallel, immersed in the contest to prove capitalism the best possible economic system. Hellman said as much just a few years later when she told an interviewer, “I think this is a great period of self-deception. We’ve wanted to think of ourselves as the best and kindest and most generous and most moral and most middle-class and most split-level and most wall-to-wall-carpeting people that ever existed, and anything that intruded on that tranquil self-regard was castigated or ignored.”86 Hellman’s Candide is the story of a young man, ousted from a home that he imagines the best of all possible places, who sets off on a journey to find the perfect place to live. Alas, there are no perfect worlds, Hellman tells us, insisting that we must turn to our own soil, make the place we live as good as we can. Along the way, the play declared skepticism of faith in any form and repeatedly revealed her disillusionment with 1950s America. Her version revealed the seamy side behind every image of perfection, emphasizing the stupidity, corruption, venality, and ideological blinders that Candide encountered at every turn. In a memorable scene, removed from the final text, Hellman parodied the hearings in which Joseph McCarthy and others were then engaged. “Were you ever,” asked inquisitors dressed like churchmen, “or have you ever been, or intend to be, or once were, or even thought of being a member, participant, or affiliate of any group, bund, klan, club or scout troop that advocated the violent overthrow of the earth’s crust?”87

  Though Hellman loved the possibility of enhancing Candide’s satirical thrust by framing it as an operetta from Bernstein’s talented pen, she quickly learned that the music also defused the satire: the show lacked the power that she had written into her treatment. Working on Candide affirmed Hellman’s skepticism about artistic collaboration. Indeed, she came to hold collaboration responsible for undermining the integrity of not only this play but of playwrights in general. Affirming her early convictions about the need to stick to her own instincts, she insisted that collaboration on Candide led to a weak plot structure. John La Touche, the original lyricist, died before he could finish the job. Hellman called on her friends, Dorothy Parker among others, to produce lyrics to accompany the still unfinished score. She herself wrote the lyrics to one tune. But the music, which Hellman had originally imagined as merely interstitial, drove the narrative.

  Eager to find a lyricist who could convey her sensibilities, Hellman turned to the poet Richard Wilbur, with whom she worked closely through 1955 and into 1956. It was not enough. Wilbur entered the scene too late to do more than seal the disjunctures exposed by brilliant music that did not carry Hellman’s meaning. Hellman, called on again and again to alter a line or a word in order to meet the musical demand, found herself desperately patching things up. In the end, she believed that “the deep collaboration being practiced today robs a play of individual force. Three or four people cannot collaboratively make a serious piece of writing. There’s no such thing as art by democratic majority.”88 Much later she admitted the pain that she felt at the compromises she made. “It took me a year or two after the failure of Candide to under
stand that it was truly not my nature, that I must never go through it again.”89

  When the operetta opened on December 1, 1956, its satire seemed tame, the story without punch. Candide’s search seemed silly, his optimism unquenchable, his decision to cultivate his own garden conveying defeat rather than the informed engagement that Voltaire advocated and Hellman hoped to capture. Mary McCarthy, then writing theater criticism for the New Republic, called the operetta a failure of nerve in which “anything in the original … that could give offense to anyone has been removed.”90 Hellman might have agreed. Overshadowed by the biting wit of the successful off-Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera that had opened just months before, Candide seemed no more than an evening’s entertainment and not serious theater at all. When Bernstein’s West Side Story opened just a few months later, Candide was eclipsed.

  Hellman shifted gears with Toys in the Attic, which opened in February 1960, and to some extent she succeeded. The play returned her to a familiar setting in New Orleans around 1912; this time it echoed her father’s family history. It features two sisters eager to maintain their attachment to a newly married, beloved younger brother who has long been dependent on them but is now on the verge of a shadowy success. Written in a Chekhovian style, it explores the relationships among the three siblings without attributing villainy to any of them. And it offers, unusually for Hellman, compassionate empathy toward those caught in the turmoil of change. Its most famous line has the ring of a universal truth: “I guess most of us make up things we want, don’t get them, and get too old, or too lazy to make up new ones.”91 But in the end Hellman could not resist resolving the action with an act of violence that brought the drama to a head. The play judged by some to be her best—“her first play to combine all her earlier virtues with compassion, truth, detachment, and tremendous dramatic power,” said critic Jacob Adler—was seen by others as mediocre.92 It felt imitative of O’Neill, whose ability to capture irrational family dynamics far exceeded hers. It did not capture the languid feel of the south as Tennessee Williams did, nor its subterranean and sporadic violence. And it was not innovative in the mode of the newly popular Beckett and Pinter. Critics accused her of returning to her melodramatic roots in order to appeal to audiences.