A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  The piece that finally emerged, called “Sophronia’s Grandson goes to Washington,” used the device of her beloved nurse Sophronia (whose viewpoint was that of the old paternal order) to imagine what it would have been like for a young black man to be speaking up for himself. In it she mocked the positions of traditional racist southerners and told stories about the way protesting blacks faced beatings, dogs, and electric cow prodders. Graphic descriptions of Sheriff Dewey Colvard of Etowah County, Alabama, “putting a cow prodder to the breast of a girl” and later to the testicles of a boy provoked a denial and demand for retraction, to which the Ladies’ Home Journal acceded.10 Though Hellman did not deny having falsely named the sheriff, she insisted that she had accurately depicted the spirit of the events. “My article in all important matters tells the truth,” she wrote brashly. “What is true should not be obscured by the fear of lawsuits.”11 Years later she would reject this logic when she was the victim of a similar rationale. But at the time, she hid behind her heritage “as a white woman born in the South” to insist on the veracity of her interpretation.11 Some of her southern readers respectfully disagreed. They dismissed her efforts to excuse what one called her “slanderous defamation of Mr. Colvard’s character” and insisted that “Lillian Hellman’s birth was a geographical accident; she is not a Southerner.”12 And yet many saw this small confrontation as a courageous intercession in a much larger struggle. “I know that your experience will not keep you from speaking out against injustice wherever you see it,” wrote her lawyer when, somewhat apologetically, he sent her his bill at the conclusion of the case, “and that your stand will ultimately be vindicated and approved.”13

  For all of her sympathy with the purposes of the march and her anger at the methods of those who resisted black protest, for all of her insistence that “the argument for States’ rights was now reduced to the argument for the right of each police department to act as they saw fit,” she could not restrain her impatience with the slow pace of change.14 White people shared the blame for this, she thought. “What is interesting now,” she reminded herself, recalling her frequent injunctions against silence, is “where the white man had been all those years—very few of us will protest unless the victim makes us.”15 She gave no quarter even to her friends. Folk singer Pete Seeger remembered her dismissing the words of “We Shall Overcome,” the song that became the anthem of the movement. “She didn’t like the song,” he recalled. “She said, ‘someday, someday … That’s been said for too long.’ “16

  The same mixture of sympathy, relief, and impatience pervaded Hellman’s attitude toward antiwar movements of the sixties. Between 1961 and his death in 1963, President Kennedy slowly escalated American military commitments to Vietnam. Hellman remained uninvolved during this period. She was, after all, a friend of McGeorge Bundy, now a Kennedy adviser, and she still enjoyed fishing with Richard Goodwin. But in 1964 and 1965, as President Lyndon Baines Johnson stepped up American troop presence, Hellman’s anger mounted; her old desire for peace rose. She could not bear an acquiescent silence in the face of policies that she abhorred. But what could she do? In 1965, her former Harvard student and now good friend Fred Gardner came up with an idea to establish coffeehouses outside army bases where GIs uncomfortable with the war could talk with like-minded souls. Hellman loved the idea. She offered Gardner $5,000 and the use of her Peugeot for a year to get the project off the ground. The idea worked, and Gardner, along with his partner, Donna Mickelson, established a GI coffeehouse network that provided neutral territory for conversation. After they were taken over by more ideological antiwar activists, the role of the coffeehouses diminished.17

  Later, Hellman translated her opposition to the war into support for Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential candidacy. The campaign, headed up by her good friend Blair Clark, included old friends and new ones, all of them opponents of the war. She joined them and McCarthy on countless platforms and at rallies to articulate the moral stance that was her trademark. There she chose to remind audiences of the importance of articulate leadership in the service of just causes. At a huge Madison Square Garden event organized by Hannah Weinstein, she noted how easily Joseph McCarthy prevailed “often unopposed by those who had not been so frightened of liars and bullies when Roosevelt was there to give them the courage evidently lost on the day he died.” Not to protest in the face of a war cloaked in democratic words, she told that audience, was to share the sin of hypocrisy. “We have allowed our government to kill an innocent people, as they explained that their death was for their own good.”18 When she received the 1969 National Book Award for An Unfinished Woman, she asked her audience why they were not disturbed “by the death of young men they have in majority, silently agreed to send across the world against a people who never harmed them, into a war they do not understand.”19

  In light of the war in Vietnam, politics took on a new dimension. Hellman’s resonant moral pleas suggest that she closely identified her own Cold War experiences with those of the young people who challenged a war they opposed. They too risked castigation and exclusion for their opinions. Her messages begged audiences to overcome the fears she still shared with them and to get out and do something. “So many of us climbed into that bed of pain in those years,” she reminded her own generation, “and have stayed there ever since.”20 Her stance brought her closer to elements of the left and New Deal coalitions—who now defined their politics as liberal and social democratic—and especially to the New York intellectuals. Their shared opposition to the war in Vietnam, their common desire to expose America’s malfeasances around the globe in the name of democracy and freedom, temporarily obscured deeply rooted disagreements over the Soviet Union. To this group, Hellman brought her luster as a “moral beacon,” her reputation as a brave opponent of McCarthyism.21

  Hellman’s moral credibility increased when she began to speak out with respect to the intellectual dissent that boiled up in the Soviet Union in the late fifties. Censorship remained rigid behind the iron curtain, but underground (samizdat) publication of stories and novels enabled writers to circulate their work privately and to smuggle it out of the Soviet Union for publication abroad, often under false names. Writers and printers caught circulating work in this way, rather than subjecting it to official censored channels, risked long jail sentences and confiscation of their possessions. In the winter of 1965–66, the Soviet authorities tried two writers, Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, for criticizing the regime in articles smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in the foreign press. After a well-publicized show trial, the court found them guilty and leveled sentences of hard labor—seven years for Daniel and five for Sinyavksy. But in contrast to earlier years, when Russian intellectuals remained silent and communists abroad supported the regime, in 1966 the dissidents attracted vocal support inside and outside the Soviet Union. Hellman joined the public outcry against the regime’s intolerance. In 1938 she had done exactly the opposite, signing a statement in support of the Moscow trials that condemned several writers to death. She had not spoken up when actor and director Solomon Mikhoels was executed in 1948. Nor did she utter a word when the poet Itzik Feffer, whom she met during a 1943 visit to the United States, died in a Soviet prison in 1952. Her voice now signaled misgivings about her previous rationalizations of Soviet repression. Catherine Kober Zeller, her goddaughter, remembers her around this time “as standing up, or pacing, furious at herself, with all the intensity of her fury, for not having seen through what was going on in Russia.” Kober Zeller adds, “I felt, at that moment, that she hated herself for it.”22

  Hellman visited the Soviet Union the following spring to attend a theater festival. She was warmly received by a regime that still recalled her wartime expedition. Her old friend and interpreter Raisa Orlova, now married to Lev Kopelev, one of the country’s leading dissenters, took her under her wing. This put her in an awkward position when she received an invitation to address the fourth national congress of the Union of Russ
ian Writers in the spring of 1967. She accepted reluctantly, not wanting to offend the regime. Still, she had to decide whether to support the regime’s refusal to tolerate dissent or cast her lot with the dissenters. She chose to do the latter, offering the group a sharply worded message urging them to remain true to their values regardless of state pressure to follow a particular line. “Intellectuals—and by intellectuals I mean men who believe in the power of reason—can continue in the hopes they once had only if they come together to speak honestly of past mistakes and present problems.” Intellectuals, she insisted, “almost never wish to imprison men for speaking words they do not like … all intellectuals believe in freedom and many of them have an honorable record of fighting for it. No medals need be given for that fight: freedom is the essence of thought, the blood on the paper. Without freedom the intellectual will choke to death and his country will gasp for air. Thus the demand for it is the measure of true patriotism.”23 She might have been speaking of the United States just fifteen years earlier. Back in the United States, she found herself publicly proclaimed as a champion of Soviet dissent. Not yet comfortable as an opponent of the regime, Hellman hedged. She had not meant to imply that writers opposed the Soviet system; she said only that they wanted to be able to express themselves freely within it.24

  She clung more persuasively to that argument when she lashed out at novelist Anatoly Kuznetsov, who fled the Soviet Union for England in the spring of 1969. Unlike Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who preferred to suppress his work rather than see it censored, Kuznetsov published censored editions that conformed to bureaucratic demands. His compliant behavior (which included denouncing novelists Andrei Sakharov and Yevgeny Yevtushenko for failing to cooperate with the Soviet authorities) earned him a trip to Britain, where he immediately sought asylum. Once safely out of Soviet reach, the forty-year-old Kuznetsov published an incendiary attack on what he remembered of the Soviet Union in his youth. The Western press and literati welcomed Kuznetsov as a friend and ally. Lillian refused the consensus. She knew, she wrote in a New York Times piece, that intellectuals in the Soviet Union were in turmoil; and she knew as well the disgusting pressure exerted by “the semi-literate bureaucrats, who suppress and alter manuscripts, who dictate who can and cannot be published.” But Kuznetsov, she argued, protested only when it was safe to do so. Palpably bitter, she concluded her piece: “I’d like to bet that he’ll soon pay us a visit and the dinner party lists are already being drawn up. After dinner in a chair by the fireside—the favorite position of Whittaker Chambers once upon a time—he will speak to the guests of freedom but somebody should tell Kuznetsov that freedom earned by betraying innocent friends is a contradiction of terms.”25

  Hellman surely relived the experiences of the early fifties when she watched her friends choose how to behave under pressure of investigation. But the Kuznetsov episode reminded others more of 1938, when she had rationalized her support for what she should have seen as an evil regime. In attacking Kuznetsov for cowardice, she seemed to expose her own hypocrisy. Commentaries in the New Yorker and Time magazine noted that Hellman was “scarcely in a position to demand that a Soviet writer risk his liberty and perhaps his life, by making open protests on Soviet soil.”26 Hellman angrily accused William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker, of “misinterpretation presented under the covering banner of ‘fact.’ “27 Her agent, Robby Lantz, objected that Time had returned to “the old pastime of witch-hunting and red-baiting.”28 And yet Hellman resisted the notion that her piece in any way defended the Soviet Union. “I didn’t mean to ‘champion the USSR’ or anything else,” she wrote to a sympathetic correspondent. “I meant only that I didn’t like what Mr. Kuznetsov had to say about his friends.”29

  For all of the renewed attention, Hellman remained in the late sixties unsure of how to situate herself. Her friend Anne Peretz and Catherine Kober Zeller both remember her as mildly depressed, though she continued to teach regularly and to lecture widely.30 Her plays and the film versions of The Little Foxes and The Children’s Hour received renewed attention. But she was a playwright whose time had passed. She knew, she would say later, that she didn’t want to write any more plays, but she also knew that she “wanted to go on being a writer … I had to find some other form to write in.”31 That form turned out to be the memoir.

  In 1966, she persuaded Bennett Cerf (Hammett’s old editor at Random House) to publish a collection of Hammett’s fiction for which she would write an introduction. The effort proved transformative. Hellman refused the temptation to write biographically about her “closest … most beloved friend,” trying instead to capture some of the feeling of the man she had both loved and fought with for “thirty-one on and off years.”32 Moving from memory to memory, she produced a remarkable essay infused with love and affection, with pride in Hammett’s idiosyncrasies, and with pleasure at her own capacity to cope with them. But it was an essay that, critics argued, placed her too centrally in Hammett’s life and claimed too much for the importance of their relationship. It revealed more about her than about him. The piece proved to be a model for the memoirs to which she would soon turn.

  Hellman came reluctantly, and with great insecurity, to the idea of writing a memoir. She didn’t like the idea of writing about herself; she feared writing about others. Besides, she didn’t know who might publish it. Relationships had soured with Random House, which had put most of her plays into print, and she wasn’t getting along with Alfred Knopf over the Hammett stories. Stanley Hart, an editor at Little, Brown, was at the time actively pursuing her. But she was uncomfortable. That company had, in 1951, parted with Angus Cameron, then a young editor of left-wing proclivities. It had also, unforgivably, apologized for publishing politically “dangerous” authors and named Lillian Hellman among them. Cameron recalled that Hellman came to him before she signed with Little, Brown and the two agreed that “it was many years ago and people are all different there.”33 After she overcame her doubts and signed the book up, Hellman worried that she “wouldn’t like it when I finished it,” and insisted on a clause that allowed her to return the advance without penalty if she didn’t like the final product.34 Even after she sent the manuscript in, she lingered over the details. William Abrahams, who served as her editor and became her friend, was in near despair at the end. “Lillian telephoned to say that she was uncertain about one passage,” he wrote to his boss. She wanted lawyers to check whether the words in a particular film had been spoken by actors or written as subtitles. Abrahams thought she had “a case of jitters brought on by giving up the manuscript to the printer.”35

  The final product, An Unfinished Woman, proved to be an intriguing mix of incisive commentary on herself and others punctuated by reflective and emotive anecdotes. About one third of it is a roughly chronological account of her growing-up years. Another chunk replicates heavily edited diary entries of her trips to Spain in 1937 and to Moscow in 1944–45. The rest consists of three character sketches. “Hammett” reproduces much of her introduction to The Big Knockover. “Dorothy Parker” depicts the “tangled fishnet of contradictions” that represented her own sense of herself. The final story, of her longtime housekeeper Helen, is, in the words of one critic, “a subtle study in race relations and the liberal conscience, shaped like a story.”36 Hellman’s parents, relatives, and friends emerge from behind curtains of memory, each starring in a story of love or disappointment or hope. As a memoir must, An Unfinished Woman reveals less of the lives it puts forward than of an inner Hellman.

  But the book worked. Admiring reviewers described it as “a record of personal discovery” that captures “the deepest of feelings, coming plain, and meant to be that, enlarged nonetheless by its clarity and infectious in its precision.”37 A British reviewer suggested that Hellman had taken “the very personal fragments” of her life and merged them to reveal a “personality of real beauty.”38 Another complimented the writing as “lucid, flinty, vulnerable,” and averred that “the compressed prose is diamond hard and
sometimes brilliant and the dialogue is like one pithy speech after another out of a Hellman play.”39 If reviewers complained about the silences—“the omission of any discussion about her political passions, her life in the theater, her sexual appetites”—they interpreted them generously, seeing in them confessions of vulnerability, measures of her continuing effort to find herself. They appreciated her modesty, her search for integrity, her need for solitary moments. “She has given us a detailed portrait of a person who doesn’t want to be portrayed,” wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times.40 Critics almost universally complimented An Unfinished Woman for its “rare imagination and literary skill,” at least one noting that it revealed “with an almost sad reluctance” the unexpected personal story of a great American playwright. Hellman, one concluded, had drawn a portrait of a complex woman, at once shrewd and difficult. The self of An Unfinished Woman was simultaneously shy and frightened and “an adventurous rebel.” This was a book in which everyone could find “a mirror, and an image,” concluded Life magazine.41

  Released at the end of June 1969, An Unfinished Woman climbed to eighth on the New York Times bestseller list within a month. It stayed on top for three full months, winning the National Book Award for 1969 and launching Hellman on her new career as memoirist. She was excited and delighted. She signed a new contract with Little, Brown, with the proviso that she continue to work with her editor, William Abrahams, who had now relocated to California. Again the honors poured in: visiting professorships at MIT and Berkeley in the spring of 1971, and then a distinguished professorship at Hunter College for the spring of 1973. Hellman, by all accounts, loved to teach and took students seriously. She thought carefully about what she wanted to convey to them and commented copiously on her students’ work. They, in turn, often wrote to tell her how meaningful her classes were. Elected to the Theater Hall of Fame in 1973, she won a woman-of-the-year award from New York University’s alumnae club the same year.