A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  14 Sylvia Drake, “Lillian Hellman As Herself,” in Jackson Bryer, ed., Conversations with Lillian Hellman (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 29.

  15 Mary McCarthy, Intellectual Memoir: New York, 1936–1938 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 60–61.

  16 “Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews,” Contemporary Jewish Record 7 (February, 1944): 15. Trilling’s position echoed that of his African-American contemporaries Ralph Ellison and Lorraine Hansberry, who also preferred not to be so identified with their race as to foster expectations that they could or would write only as black people. Thanks to Judith Smith for pointing this out to me.

  17 Lionel Trilling in ibid., 15–16. For more on Trilling’s Jewishness, see Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 22.

  18 Muriel Rukeyser in ibid., 6.

  19 Delmore Schwartz in ibid., 13.

  20 Muriel Rukeyser in ibid., 6.

  21 Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), 5.

  22 Lillian Hellman, “The Lyons Den,” New York Post (July 22, 1938).

  23 “Miss Hellman and Miss Ferber discuss Jewish Author’s Plight,” New York Herald Tribune (January 10, 1940): 19.

  24 Robert Kall, “Equality Magazine is True Crusader for Jewish Rights,” Jewish Examiner (April 28, 1939): 1.

  25 Judith Smith, private communication with author; and Smith, Visions of Belonging, 28–33.

  26 FBI confidential report NY 100-25858, undated, 16, 17.

  27 Lillian Hellman, The North Star: A Motion Picture About Some Russian People (New York: Viking Press, 1943), 75.

  28 Lillian Hellman, “Russian Diaries,” 4, Lillian Hellman Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

  29 Ibid., 6.

  30 Ibid., 9, 10, 12.

  31 Ibid., 12. (Also in the Russian Diaries she noted on January 26 on her way to Cairo, “BOAC manager resented Jews in Palestine,” 12.)

  32 These names are culled from the long lists that LH provided to her lawyer, Joseph Rauh, in 1952 just before her HUAC appearance. Untitled list, part 1, box 71, “Lillian Hellman, 1950–57” folder, Joseph Rauh Papers, Part I, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

  33 It does not excuse Hellman to say that she was not alone. Paul Robeson, who is said to have met Feffer in Moscow just before his death, also refused to condemn the Soviet regime.

  34 Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Knopf, 1978), 194.

  35 Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 155–56.

  36 Bloom, Prodigal Sons, 141, 143; Martin Peretz, interview by author, June 22, 2009.

  37 Norman Podhoretz, Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsburg, Lionel and Diana Trilling. Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer (New York: Free Press, 1999), 124.

  38 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

  39 Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Penguin, 1981), 109–11.

  40 Ibid., 109.

  41 Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope, 198.

  42 LH to William Alfred, February 19, 1959, box 20, Papers of William Alfred, Brooklyn College Archives & Special Collections, Brooklyn College Library.

  43 On the question of self-hatred among Jews, see Susan Glenn, “The Vogue of Jewish Self-Hatred in Post-World War II America,” Jewish Social Studies 12 (Spring 2006): 95–136.

  44 Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952). This interpretation follows Lawrence Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), ch. 1.

  45 Meyer Levin, The Obsession (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973) 35.

  46 Stephen J. Whitfield, In Search of Jewish American Culture (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 1999), 173.

  47 Saul Bellow, Letters, ed. Benjamin Taylor (New York: Viking, 2010), 196. Thanks to Eugene Goodheart for calling these letters to my attention.

  48 Levin, The Obsession, 73. See also 102.

  49 Ibid., 65

  50 Levin, The Obsession, 72–74. See also Ralph Melnick, The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank: Meyer Levin, Lillian Hellman, and the Staging of the Diary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).

  51 Levin, The Obsession, 72.

  52 This is the argument of, among others, Melnick, The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank.

  53 Kermit Bloomgarden to investors, May 16, 1958, box 53, folder 1, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC. Statement from Pinto, Winokur and Pagano, Accountants, June 30, 1970, box 53, folder 1, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC. See also box 52, folder 10. The $25,000 figure is my calculation based on the one half of one percent investment that LH made.

  54 LH to William Alfred, February 19, 1959, box 20, Papers of William Alfred, BCASC.

  55 Ibid.

  56 LH to “Dear Joe,” January 22, 1974, box 72, folder 10, William Miller Abrahams Papers, SUL.

  57 Quoted from American Masters, “The Lives of Lillian Hellman,” production of PBS, 1998.

  58 Martin Peretz, interview by author, June 22, 2009.

  59 Podhoretz, Ex-Friends, 124.

  60 Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 38–39

  61 Ibid., 83.

  62 Sidney Hook, “Lillian Hellman’s Scoundrel Time,” Encounter 48 (February 1977): 86.

  63 Christine Doudna, “A Still Unfinished Woman: A Conversation with Lillian Hellman,” Rolling Stone (February 24, 1977): 54.

  64 Hellman, “East and West: The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South,” New York Times Book Review (November 11, 1973): 421.

  65 Hellman, Pentimento, 196.

  66 Glenn, “The Vogue of Jewish Self-Hatred,” 95–136.

  6. The Writer as Moralist

  1 “An Evening with Lillian Hellman,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 27 (April 1974): 19.

  2 Lillian Hellman, Pentimento (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 152.

  3 Hellman, “The Art of the Theater I,” Paris Review 33 (Winter/Spring, 1965): 84.

  4 Lillian Hellman, “Typescript Prepared for Circle in the Square Talk,” February 8, 1953, box 43, folder 2, 7, Lillian Hellman Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

  5 Lillian Hellman, The Collected Plays (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 275.

  6 Stark Young, “Watch on the Rhine,” New Republic (April 14, 1941): 499.

  7 Wolcott Gibbs, “This Is It,” New Yorker (April 12, 1941): 32.

  8 Young, “Watch on the Rhine,” 499.

  9 Brooks Atkinson, “Lillian Hellman’s ‘Watch on the Rhine’ Acted with Paul Lukas in the Leading Part,” New York Times (April 2, 1941): 26.

  10 Brooks Atkinson, “Hellman’s ‘Watch on the Rhine,’” New York Times (April 13, 1941): sec. 9, 1.

  11 George Jean Nathan, “Playwrights in Petticoats,” American Mercury (June, 1941): 752.

  12 Morris Frumin to LH, April 5, 1942, box 91, “Watch on the Rhine/Business Correspondence,” folder, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

  13 Richard Watts Jr., “The Theaters,” New York Herald Tribune (April 2, 1941): 20.

  14 Ralph Warner, “ ‘Watch on the Rhine’ Poignant Drama of Anti Fascist Struggle,” Daily Worker (April 4, 1941): 7; Walter Bernstein, Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2000), 138–39.

  15 Warner, “Watch on the Rhine,” 7.

  16 Albert Maltz, “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” New Masses (February 1946), 19. See also the discussion of this issue in Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, Inc., 1961), 387.

  17 Lillian Hellman, “Typescript: Swarthmore,” April 6, 1950, box 43, folder 1, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

  18 Dan Georgakas, “The Revisionist Releases of North Star,” Cineas
te 22 (April 1996): 46.

  19 Lillian Hellman, “Russian Diaries,” box 103, folders 1 and 2, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

  20 Theodore Strauss, “Of Lillian Hellman: A Lady of Principle,” New York Times (August 29, 1943): X5.

  21 Theodore Strauss, “The Author’s Case: Post Premiere Cogitation of Lillian Hellman on ‘The North Star,’” New York Times (December 19, 1943): X5.

  22 Mary McCarthy, “A Filmy Vision of the War,” Town and Country (January 1944): 72.

  23 Ted Strauss, “The Author’s Case,” New York Times (December 19, 1943): X5.

  24 Hellman, “The Art of the Theater I,” 84.

  25 Dashiell Hammett to LH, March 21, 1944, and February 9, 1944, box 77, folder 8, William Miller Abrahams Papers, M1125, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA.

  26 Dashiell Hammett to LH, March 10, 1944, box 77, folder 7, William Miller Abrahams Papers, SUL.

  27 Ibid.

  28 Dashiell Hammett to LH, March 15, 1944, box 77, folder 7, William Miller Abrahams Papers, SUL.

  29 Dashiell Hammett to LH, April 17, 1944, box 77, folder 8, William Miller Abrahams Papers, SUL.

  30 Hellman, “The Art of the Theater I,” 84.

  31 Hellman, The Searching Wind, in Collected Plays, 337.

  32 Ibid.

  33 Ibid., 334–35.

  34 Hellman, The Little Foxes, in Collected Plays, 188.

  35 Kappo Phelan, “The Searching Wind,” Commonweal 40 (April 28, 1944): 40.

  36 Howard Barnes, “The Searching Wind,” New York Herald Tribune (April 13, 1944): 16.

  37 Lewis Nichols, “ ‘The Searching Wind’” New York Times (April 23, 1944): sec. 2, 1.

  38 “Hellman’s New Play,” Washington Times Herald (April 21, 1944): 27.

  39 Wolcott Gibbs, “Miss Hellman Nods,” New Yorker (April 22, 1944): 42.

  40 Ralph Warner, “The New Lillian Hellman Play,” Daily Worker (April 17, 1944).

  41 Ralph Warner, “On Broadway,” Daily Worker (April 27, 1944): 8.

  42 Burton Rascoe, “Has Miss Hellman Disappointed the Party?” New York World-Telegram (April 22, 1944): 27.

  43 Ibid.

  44 Stark Young, “Behind the Beyond,” New Republic (May 1, 1944): 604.

  45 Hellman, “The Art of the Theater I,” 85

  46 Sam Sillen, “Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest,” Daily Worker (November 25, 1946): 11.

  47 Brooks Atkinson, “The Play in Review,” New York Times (November 21, 1946): 42.

  48 John Mason Brown, “And Cauldron Bubble,” Saturday Review 29 (December 14, 1946): 21, 23

  49 Kappo Phelan, “Another Part of the Forest,” Commonweal 45 (December 6, 1946): 202.

  50 Joseph Wood Krutch, “Drama,” Nation 163 (December 7, 1946): 671.

  51 John Chapman, “Another Part of the Forest Makes The Little Foxes a Mere Warmup,” New York Daily News (November 21, 1946): 67.

  52 LH to Arthur Kober, c. 1935, box 1, folder 2, Arthur Kober Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WI.

  53 Fred Gardner, “An Interview with Lillian Hellman,” in Jackson Bryer, ed., Conversations with Lillian Hellman (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 119.

  54 Richard Watts Jr., “Miss Hellman’s New Play is Fascinating Drama,” New York Post (November 21, 1946): 40.

  55 Joseph Wood Krutch, “Drama,” Nation (December 7, 1946): 671.

  56 John Chapman, “Another Part of the Forest,” 67.

  57 Jacob Adler, Lillian Hellman (Austin, TX: Steck-Vaughn Company, 1969), 42

  58 Richard Watts, “Lillian Hellman’s New Play is Fascinating Drama,” 40.

  59 Millie Barringer, “Lillian Hellman Standing in the Minefields,” New Orleans Review (Spring 1988): 64.

  60 Stephanie de Pue, “Lillian Hellman: She Never Turns Down an Adventure,” in Bryer, ed., Conversations, 186.

  61 Kappo Phelan, “Another Part of the Forest,” 201–2.

  62 Hardwick, “The Little Foxes Revived,” New York Review of Books (December 21, 1967): 4.

  63 Lillian Hellman, “An Interview with Tito,” New York Star (November 8, 1948): 1, 8. Additional pieces in this series appeared on November 4, 5, 7, 9, and 10, 1948.

  64 “The Theater: New Play in Manhattan,” Time (November 7, 1949): 37; “‘Mont-serrat’” Adapted from the French of Emmanuel Robles by Lillian Hellman,” New York Times (October 31, 1949): 25; Howard Taubman, “Lillian Hellman Play Revived at the Gate,” New York Times (January 9, 1961): 17.

  65 Hellman, Pentimento, 198.

  66 “The Autumn Garden,” Commonweal 53 (April 6, 1951): 645.

  67 Robert Coleman, “Autumn Garden Harps on Depressing Theme,” Daily Mirror (March 8, 1951): 32.

  68 “The First Team Takes Over,” New Yorker (March 17, 1971): 52.

  69 John Beaufort, “Openings on Broadway,” Christian Science Monitor (March 17, 1951): 6.

  70 Harold Clurman, “Lillian Hellman’s Garden,” New Republic (March 26, 1951): 21–22.

  71 Lillian Hellman, “Typescript: Connecticut College,” January 9, 1952, box 43, folder 1, 1, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

  72 Ibid., 2.

  73 Hellman, “Typescript: Swarthmore.”

  74 Lillian Hellman, “Typescript: Smith/MIT,” April 15, 18, 1955, box 43, folder 1, 1, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

  75 Lillian Hellman, handwritten note on notecard, box 43, folder 2, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

  76 Lillian Hellman, “Typescript: Harvard Lecture No 2,” 4.

  77 Eric Bentley, “Hellman’s Indignation,” New Republic (January 5, 1953): 31.

  78 Hellman, Pentimento, 202.

  79 Quoted in Stewart H. Benedict, “Anouilh in America,” Modern Language Journal 45 (December 1961): 342.

  80 Lillian Hellman, undated/untitled typescript (probably an early draft of her introduction to The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov), box 43, folder 7, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

  81 Lillian Hellman, ed., The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov (New York Farrar, Straus and Company, 1955), ix.

  82 Ibid., xi.

  83 Ibid., x.

  84 Lillian Hellman, undated early typescript of notes toward an introduction to the letters of Anton Chekhov, box 43, folder 6, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

  85 Robert Lethbridge, “Introduction,” Emile Zola, Germinal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1943), vii.

  86 Richard G. Stern, “Lillian Hellman on Her Plays,” Contact 3 (1959): 119.

  87 Lillian Hellman, typescript: draft of Candide: “The Inquisition, Part One,” box 9, folder 5, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

  88 Quoted in Arthur Gelb, “Lillian Hellman Has Play Ready,” New York Times (November 9, 1959): 35.

  89 Weidman, “Lillian Hellman Reflects upon the Changing Theater,” Dramatists Guild Quarterly 7 (Winter 1970): 22.

  90 Mary McCarthy, “The Reform of Dr. Pangloss,” New Republic (December 17, 1956): 30.

  91 Hellman, Toys in the Attic in Collected Plays, 758.

  92 Jacob Adler, “Miss Hellman’s Two Sisters,” Educational Theatre Journal 15 (May 1963): 117; Austin Pendleton, interview by author, December 12, 2009, confirms this judgment.

  93 Walter Kerr, “It’s Gone About as Far as It Can Go,” Los Angeles Times (April 21, 1963): N29.

  94 Hellman, “Typescript: Harvard Lecture No. 1,” 2.

  95 Hellman, “Typescript: Connecticut College,” 1.

  96 Irving Drutman, “Hellman: A Stranger in the Theater?” New York Times (February 27, 1966): 11.

  97 Lillian Hellman, undated note in preparation of publication of The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov.

  98 Transcript from interviews by Gary Waldhorn and Robert Murray, “Yale Reports,” June 5, 1966, box 30, folder 10, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

  99 Gelb, “Lillian Hellman Has Play Ready,” 35.

  100 Gretchen Cryer, “Where Are the Women Playwrights?” New York Times (May 20, 1973):
129.

  101 Lillian Hellman, typescript with handwritten corrections of work that later appeared in Pentimento, no date, box 31, folder 16, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC.

  102 Marilyn Berger, “Profile, Lillian Hellman,” in Bryer, ed., Conversations, 267.

  103 Waldhorn and Murray, “Yale Reports.”

  104 Thomas Meehan, “Q: Miss Hellman, What’s Wrong with Broadway? A: It’s a Bore,” in Bryer, ed., Conversations, 45–46.

  105 Lillian Hellman. “Typescript: Swarthmore.”

  106 Gardner, “An Interview with Lillian Hellman,” 115.

  107 Stern, “Lillian Hellman on Her Plays,” 119.

  108 Adler, “Miss Hellman’s Two Sisters,” 117

  109 Walter Kerr, “The Theater of Say It! Show It! What Is It?” New York Times (September 1, 1968): 10.

  110 Lillian Hellman, “Scotch on the Rocks,” New York Review of Books (October 17, 1963): 6.

  111 Drutman, “Hellman: A Stranger in the Theater?” 11.

  112 Hardwick, “The Little Foxes Revived,” 4.

  113 “Preserve us all, when friendship tires like this,” wrote Penelope Gilliatt in response. See Penelope Gilliatt, “Lark Pie,” New York Review of Books (February 1, 1968): 9. For other examples of this exchange, see Edmund Wilson, “An open letter to Mike Nichols,” New York Review of Books (January 4, 1968); Richard Poirier, “To the Editor,” New York Review of Books (January 18, 1968); Felicia Montealegre, “Raising Hellman,” New York Review of Books (January 18, 1968).

  7. A Self-Made Woman

  1 Peter Feibleman, interview by author, August 4, 2002.

  2 Ibid.

  3 Morris and Lore Dickstein, interview by author, March 24, 2005.

  4 Lillian Hellman, Pentimento (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 164–65.

  5 Lucius Beebe, “An Adult’s Hour is Miss Hellman’s Next Effort,” New York Herald Tribune (December 13, 1936): 2.

  6 LH to Arthur Kober, no date, box 73, folder 2, William Miller Abrahams Papers, M1125, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA.

  7 She paid off the mortgage in January 1942.

  8 Stanley Isaacs to LH, March 2, 1945, box 66, folder 6, Lillian Hellman Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. The initial rent on the apartment was $4,000 a month, a hefty sum in 1945 and one that the Office of Price Administration initially contested (Irving Schwartzkopf to Office of Price Administration, September 11, 1945, box 66 folder 7, Lillian Hellman Collection, HRC).