A Difficult Woman
Page 46
And yet it is precisely this extremely negative view of Hellman that illuminates her role in twentieth-century America. The Stalinist label undermined not only the personal integrity of the accused: it was meant to discredit her conception of virtue and decency as well. Her life and work proclaimed the benefits of certain kind of moral society, one that would care for its poor and excluded members, protect democracy against bullies in uniform or not, and provide the freedom to live by one’s own lights. Casual accusations of Stalinism incorporated these goals within the penumbra of deception that included lying and self-aggrandizing behavior. Hellman’s deep and continuing antagonism to anticommunist appeals suggests that she understood that they would engender cynicism of the entire progressive agenda. She feared—not wrongly, it turns out—that anti-communism could and would be used to unite disparate groups in opposition to the larger moral principles of a progressive politics. This, she insisted—when, for example, she pointed to the role of anticommunism in fostering the Vietnam War—would unleash American power on an unsettled world. It would foster a new morality rooted in a money ethic that would dominate all spheres of life. In the twenty-first century the retreat of social democracy, progressivism, and liberalism and the rise of neoliberalism and neoconservatism bring us to a new appreciation of Hellman’s strident and continuing outbursts.
Judgments about Hellman’s behavior still come out of the battles over who was right and who was wrong in that midcentury conflict. “We understand something about Lillian Hellman,” wrote Hunter College professor Alex Szogyi, “when we look at her life—but we understand as well what some of the salient cultural imaginings of the twentieth century were—and we see in the paradoxes of Lillian Hellman’s life—some of the tensions of a difficult century.” Those tensions reflected the competing moral claims of different world views as Hellman tried to sort out what was virtuous and how to behave. The woman who wanted to become a great playwright became a celebrity instead; the woman who aspired to the company of the century’s great intellectuals fought fierce battles with them; insecure, fearful, and politically naïve, she espoused particular political positions that fostered discord rather than consensus. Out of a desire to protect dissent, she dedicated much of her life to the cause of civil liberties; in return, she earned the Stalinist label. To become the beautiful, audacious, and courageous Julia of her imagination, she invented a world in which she did not live. That invention brought her castle tumbling down.
When we look back now, we notice the compromises that Hellman made in order to maintain moral consistency in a challenging world. We see in them the complicated circumstances in which many well-intentioned people found themselves caught. Hellman retreated from none of these issues. She wrote, she took positions, she acted on her beliefs as her conscience moved her. She was alternately damned and respected for her pronouncements, the variation less a function of her will and her choices than of the changing times in which she lived. The same sexual behavior that others emulated in the 1920s appeared predatory by the 1960s; the brave search for economic independence in the 1930s seemed, to radical feminists of the 1970s, to be insufficiently feminist. And the commitment to a better world that so many people shared in the Depression years seemed by the 1960s and ’70s to be sheer folly.
The divided world in which Lillian lived her adult life would disintegrate after 1990 when the Soviet Union collapsed and, some would say, the twentieth century ended. But the conflicts in which she became a lightning rod continue to attract attention and mold the political arena. There are still no easy answers to the questions that Hellman confronted around the meaning of traditional family life, the price of commitments to racial and ethnic egalitarianism, the corrupting power of money, and the precariousness of the search for political utopias. Nor are there solutions to women’s desire for economic independence or the hoary question of the relationship of art to politics. These lacunae make her life worth examining not for her sake, but for ours.
Acknowledgments
It gives me great pleasure to record, finally, my appreciation for the many favors that have come my way during the decade that I’ve been working on this book. The small and large kindnesses that have helped this project along have made researching and writing a genuine pleasure. They constitute a tribute to the community of scholars who I’ve come to love and value. The book began to take shape during a year spent at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. In Cambridge, Susan Ware prodded me into thinking about what historians might make of Hellman’s life, and a wonderful group of colleagues and friends pushed away the resistance I felt to taking on anything that resembled biography. To Nancy Chodorow, Lizabeth Cohen, Nancy Cott, Gish Jen, and Radcliffe Institute Director Judith Vichniac, thank you. At the National Humanities Center a few years later, I enjoyed the company and the criticism of a distinguished group of colleagues led by Geoffrey Harpham and Ken Mullikin and including Sheryl Kroen, Alex Rosenberg, Bill Sewell, Jan Goldstein, Mimi Kim, Sheryl Kroen, and Sarah Shields. I also benefited from the extraordinary services of a splendid staff.
The formidable collection of Lillian Hellman’s manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin yielded up its riches under the expert guidance of Richard Workman and with the efficient help of Patricia Fox. I am grateful for their kind assistance, as well as for the efforts of Andi Gustavson and Linda Briscoe Myers in finding and reproducing photographs. At the Tamiment Library Kevyne Baar helped me navigate swiftly through a range of materials. At Stanford University’s Cecil H. Green Library, Polly Armstrong and Sean Quimby were especially helpful. Ruth Milkman, Linda Gordon, and Allen Hunter facilitated visits to Los Angeles and Madison, Wisconsin, respectively. Sal Cline prompted a visit to Hardscrabble Farm and to Katonah, New York. Peter Feibleman provided generous encouragement and a range of introductions.
I’ve relied on a comfortingly large range of student help over the years, much of it from Columbia’s wonderful undergraduates who brought an astonishing array of computer skills and enthusiasm to their tasks. I’ve benefited as well from sterling graduate students who tracked down crucial pieces of information and helped me think through problems large and small. In alphabetical order, I want to say thank you to Leah Aden, Jessica Adler, Zeina Alhendi, Sarah Brafman, Sarah Dunitz, Nell Geiser, Stephanie Harrell, Emma Curran Hulse, Suzanne Kahn, Cristina Kim, and Sarah Kirshen.
Many people became engaged in this project in ways I could not have anticipated. Their kindnesses have surprised me and energized my work. Some sent programs from new productions of Hellman’s plays, forwarded comments on contemporary efforts to write memoirs, took photographs of her various homes, and recalled fleeting meetings with her. Others offered contacts with her friends and colleagues, allowed me to read chapters of their own work prior to publication, shared anecdotes and insights, and corrected mistaken notions. Most of all, they provided a level of enthusiasm that kept me going through the rough spots. I wish I could say thank you to each of them personally. In lieu of that I send warm affection to Brooke Allen, Uri and Michal Alon, Rosalyn Baxandall, Louise Bernikow, Barbara Black, Zoe Caldwell Whitehead, Anita Chapman, Mary Marshall Clark, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Claire Coss, Michael David-Fox, Eric Foner, Lynn Garafola, Linda Gordon, Allen Hunter, Andrew Kessler, Lucy Knight, Julia Mickenberg, Ruth Milkman, Dinitia Smith, Kitty Stalberg, Peter Stansky, Richard Stern, Ray Stollerman, Carole Turbin, and Michael Wrezsin. I owe special thanks to Norman Dorsen, Stephen Gillers, and Leon Friedman, who helped me to understand the Committee for Public Justice, and to Annabel Davis-Goff for her incomparable insights. I am especially grateful to Peter Feibleman for sharing his memories and his thoughts so graciously.
To Lila Abu Lughod, Susan Crane, Victoria de Grazia, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Martha Howell, Dorothy Ko, Sharon Marcus, Carol Sanger, and Pamela Smith—feminist scholars at Columbia who have generously critiqued my ideas over the years—I owe a special debt of gratitude. I didn’t always love their sharp criticism, but I
continue to value their commitment to making our work better. I’ve tried out various parts of the book on audiences at Russell Sage College, Northwestern University, the University of North Carolina, and the Columbia University School of Law, where I delivered a Barbara Black lecture. I have learned much from seminars sponsored by the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, the workshop in Twentieth-Century Politics and History at Columbia, the Women Writing Women’s Lives biography group at the City University of New York, and the National History Center series at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.
To those who read the entire manuscript and provided the trenchant criticism that drove me back to the drawing boards, I bow my head in appreciation. Rachel Brownstein, Doris Friedensohn, Eugene Goodheart, Judith Smith, and Amy Swedlow deserve far more than a simple thank you, and I hope they will know how heartfelt this one is. Peter Ginna has encouraged this project from the start. It has been a privilege to be able to work with a skilled and caring editor whose enthusiasm never flagged. Thanks, too, to the helpful staff at Bloomsbury, including Pete Beatty, Laura Phillips, and Sara Mercurio.
Bert Silverman read the pages of each chapter as they came out of the printer, and then read the entire manuscript again and again and again. I could not have completed this book—indeed I probably would never have started it—without his critical eye and his impassioned intellectual challenges. Nor could I have completed it without his warm and caring partnership at home. I dedicate this book to the grandchildren we share together in the hope that they will grow up to be just like him.
Notes
Abbreviations
BCASC
Brooklyn College Archives & Special Collection, Brooklyn College Library
CCOH
Columbia University Center for Oral History Collection
HRC
Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin
LOC
Library of Congress
RBML
Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University, NY
SML
Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton University
SUL
M1125, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries
TM
Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University Libraries
TTP-CLS: 11–0-8–108
Telford Taylor Papers, Arthur W. Diamond Law Library, Columbia University, NY
VCU
Vassar College Library
WHS
Wisconsin Historical Society
Introduction
1 Carl Rollyson, Lillian Hellman, Her Legend and Her Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); Deborah Martinson, Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels (New York: Counterpoint, 2005).
2 This information has been assembled with the generous help of Richard Workman, archivist at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
3 Annabel Davis-Goff, interview by author, September 2, 2010.
4 LH to Diane Johnson, September 13, 1978, box 62, folder 4, Lillian Hellman Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TK.
5 Carol Kolmerten, “Writing Modern Women’s Lives,” American Quarterly 50:4 (1998): 849–59.
6 LH to Donald Erickson, May 23, 1973, box 124, folder 1, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.
7 See especially William Wright, Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986) and Joan Mellen, Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett (New York: Harper Collins, 1996).
8 Pete Seeger is a case in point. See Daniel Wakin, “This Just In: Pete Seeger Denounced Stalin over a Decade Ago,” New York Times (September 1, 2007).
9 Robert Newman, The Cold War Romance of Lillian Hellman and John Melby (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), Appendix I.
10 Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1975), 306, 309.
11 David Denby, “Escape Artist: The Case for Joan Crawford,” New Yorker (January 3, 2011), 65.
12 Charles McGrath, “Muriel Spark: Playing God” New York Times Book Review (April 25, 2010).
1. Old-Fashioned American Traditions
1 U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1900 Census of Population and Housing, Cincinnati Ward 2, Hamilton, Ohio, roll T623 1274, p. 3A.
2 Wedding guestbook, box 119, Folder 4, Lillian Hellman Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
3 Zoe Caldwell, interview by author, September 24, 2010.
4 LH to Diane Johnson, September 13, 1982, box 62, folder 4, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.
5 Bertram Wallace Korn, The Early Jews of New Orleans (Waltham, MA: American Jewish Historical Society, 1969), 22.
6 Julian Beck Feibelman, “A Social and Economic Study of the New Orleans Jewish Community” (doctoral thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1941), 134.
7 Ibid., 3. See also Leo Shpall, The Jews in Louisiana (New Orleans: Steeg Printing and Publishing Co., 1936), and Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir, 1st Back Bay paperback ed. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1999).
8 Feibelman, “A Social and Economic Study,” 134, 3.
9 Korn, The Early Jews of New Orleans, 228.
10 James Kern Feibleman, The Way of a Man: An Autobiography (New York: Horizon Press, 1969), 66.
11 Christine Doudna, “A Still Unfinished Woman: A Conversation with Lillian Hellman,” Rolling Stone (February 24, 1977): 54.
12 Leonard Reissman, “The New Orleans Jewish Community,” in Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson, eds., Jews in the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 288.
13 Alfred O. Hero Jr., The Southerner and World Affairs (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965), 481.
14 Eli Evans, The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)
15 Ronald Bern, The Legacy (New York: Mason Charter, 1975), ch. 8.
16 W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941; repr., New York: Vintage, 1991), 332–33.
17 Feibelman, “A Social and Economic Study,” 134.
18 Lillian Hellman, “East and West: The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South by Eli Evans,” New York Times Book Review (November 11, 1973), 421.
19 Ibid.
20 Lillian Hellman, “Typescript: Harvard Lecture No. 2,” Spring 1961, box 44, folder 6, p. 5, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.
21 Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), 12.
22 Lillian Hellman, “Typescript: Harvard Lecture No. 1,” Spring 1961, box 44, folder 6, p. 5, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.
23 Hellman, An Unfinished Woman, 15.
24 Zoe Caldwell, interview by author, September 24, 2010.
25 Lillian Hellman, The Little Foxes, in The Collected Plays (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 145.
26 Ibid., 188.
27 Hellman, An Unfinished Woman, 32. See also Peter Adam, “Unfinished Woman,” in Jackson Bryer, ed., Conversations with Lillian Hellman (Jackson, University of Mississippi Press, 1986), 230.
28 Hellman, An Unfinished Woman, 15.
29 Ibid., 13.
30 Ibid., 3–4.
31 Ibid., 5.
32 Lillian Hellman, diary, c. 1923, box 97, folder 1, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.
2. A Tough Broad
1 Lillian Hellman, untitled and unpaginated typescript in response to an advertising agency’s request to prepare five one-hundred-word comments on women’s dress and style, spring 1963, box 40, folder 5, Lillian Hellman Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
2 Ann Scott, “After Suffrage: Southern Women in the Twenties,” The Journal of Southern History 30 (August 1943): 298–318.
3 Lillian Hellman, Pentimento (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 46–47.
4 Susan Ware, “Unlocking the Porter-Dewson Partnership
,” in Sarah Alpern et al., The Challenge of Feminist Biography (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 63
5 Ibid. See also Susan Cahn, Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
6 Otto Weininger, Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005).
7 Lillian Hellman, diaries, November 28, 1922, box 97, folder 1, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.
8 Lillian Hellman Kober, “Perberty in Los Angeles,” American Spectator 3 (January 1934): 4.
9 Lillian Hellman Kober, “I Call Her Mama,” American Spectator 2 (September 1933): 2.
10 Lillian Hellman, diaries, April 22, 1924, box 97, folder 1, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.
11 An Unfinished Woman, 33. “I have often asked myself whether I understood the damage that so loveless an arrangement made on my future,” she wrote in An Unfinished Woman, 32. These questions are raised as well in Maybe (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), the last of her autobiographical volumes.
12 Ibid., 36.
13 Ibid., 41
14 Muriel Gardiner, Code Name “Mary”: Memoirs of an American Woman in the Austrian Underground (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 33.