A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  Peter Feibleman

  Leon Friedman

  Fred Gardner

  Stephen Gillers

  Bobbie Handman

  Maureen Howard

  Catherine (Shirah) Kober Zeller

  Richard Locke

  Peter London

  Arien Mack

  Victor Navasky

  Patricia Neal

  Wendy Nicholson

  Austin Pendleton

  Maurice Peress

  Martin Peretz

  Anne Peretz

  Richard Poirier

  Daniel Pollitt

  Robert Silvers

  Rose Styron

  Susan Styron

  Nancy Wechsler

  The transcribed oral histories conducted over the years with Hellman’s friends and acquaintances have supplied additional stores of memory. Among those I found most useful are those on deposit in the Columbia Center for Oral History, Columbia University Library:

  Leonard Boudin

  Donald Angus Cameron

  Harold Clurman

  Virginia Durr

  Thomas Emerson

  Albert Hackett

  Helen Van dernoot Rosen

  Michael Straight

  Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library: Phillip Dunne

  Sam Jaffe

  Regenstein Library, University of Chicago: Richard Stern

  New York Public Library, Berg Collection: Joan Mellen tapes

  General Bibliography

  There is no shortage of commentaries on Lillian Hellman as a dramatist, a memoirist, a celebrity, and a litigious person. I’ve noted many of these in the endnotes that accompany each chapter. Here I focus on some of the sources that illuminate various phases of her life story and help us to understand how she participated in, and shaped, the twentieth century. What follows is not an attempt at a comprehensive list, but a few of the volumes that I found most helpful as I tried to unravel the many choices that Hellman made throughout her life.

  On the question of writing the biography of a difficult woman, several volumes stirred my imagination. These included the essays in Sara Alpern et al., The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Modern American Women (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Catherine N. Parke, Biography: Writing Lives (New York: Routledge, 2002); and Teresa Iles, All Sides of the Subject: Women and Biography (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992). Linda Wagner-Martin, Telling Women’s Lives: The New Biography (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), remains among the most stimulating of such sources. Timothy Dow Adams, Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990) provoked much thought into the question of whether lying is inevitably part of the presentation of self. Alan Ackerman, Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011) came out while this book was in press, but its thoughtful analysis of Hellman’s language sheds light on the culture that nurtured her.

  The best way into Hellman’s life is through her own work. The Collected Plays (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972) provides an essential beginning point and a view of thirty years of her dramatic imagination. Three memoirs: An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), Pentimento (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), and Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976) elucidate Hellman’s sense of herself and her stance toward the world she lived in. Maybe: A Story (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980) offers a sometimes painful view from the end of her life. And some of Hellman’s unique perspectives can be garnered from the extraordinary collection of interviews assembled by Jackson Bryer in Conversations with Lillian Hellman (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1986).

  Hellman’s life has been examined by many people, but by far the most valuable single source is Peter S. Feibleman. Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman (New York: Morrow, 1988) presents a not uncritical but loving assessment of a forty-five-year relationship. Of the several biographies, the most informative are those by Carl E. Rollyson, Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988) and Deborah Martinson, Lillian Hellman: Life with Foxes and Scoundrels (New York: Counterpoint, 2005). The former provides a comprehensive account of her daily life and a stern view of the political Lillian; Martinson provides a more empathetic perspective. On the major relationships in Hellman’s life, see Richard Layman, Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981); Diane Johnson, Hammett: A Life (New York: Random House, 1983); and Robert P. Newman, The Cold War Romance of Lillian Hellman and John Melby (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

  I gained insight into Hellman’s identification as a southerner and thought about the impact of her New Orleans Jewish childhood after reading the classic W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage, 1991). To find out more about growing up as a white woman in the South I turned to Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), and to Susan K. Cahn, Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). For a sense of Jewish life in the extended South, I drew on Eli N. Evans, The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South (New York: Atheneum, 1980), and Ronald Lawrence Bern, The Legacy: A Novel (New York: Mason/Charter, 1975). Several essays in Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson, eds., Jews in the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973) proved useful as well.

  Hellman’s Jewish identity and her relationship to the Jewish community formed a continuing piece of her struggle with the American left. On issues of cultural connections see David A. Hollinger, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States, Studies in American Thought and Culture (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006) and Judith E. Smith, Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). For the specifically contentious relationships of Jews to each other, see Stephen J. Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 1999). On Hellman’s relationship to the Anne Frank case, it is worth beginning with the accusations made by Meyer Levin, The Obsession (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973). A more measured account of Levin’s obsession can be found in Lawrence Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Hellman was roundly condemned for failing to acknowledge Stalin’s persecution of Jews. This issue is illuminated by Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov, eds., Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

  The culture that Hellman entered in the early twentieth century and the 1930s, especially as it relates to women, is explored in Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000). The world of literary culture is the subject of Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995). Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York: Norton, 2009) is the essential source on the impact of the depression on 1930s popular and highbrow culture. For the relationship of popular culture to the labor movement see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996). For the rise of the Screenwriters’ Guild see Nancy Lynn Schwartz and Sheila Schwartz, The Hollywood Writers’ Wars (New York: Knopf, 1982). Larry Ceplair, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1980) carries the story into the 1950s. Dan Georgakas and Lenny Rubenstein, The Cineaste Interviews: On the Art and Politics of the Cinema (Chicago: Lake View Press, 1983) provides a fount of insider information.

>   Personal accounts of the years from the 1930s into the postwar period are numerous, as are biographies of some of the participants in the causes that Hellman cared about. Illuminating and helpful recollections that touch on Hellman’s experiences include Edmund Wilson and Leon Edel, The Thirties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980). Among the biographies, Marion Meade, Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2010) and A. Scott Berg, Goldwyn: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1989) are most useful for the 1930s. Other biographies in which Hellman makes more than a casual appearance include Martin B. Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Knopf, 1988); Dorothy Herrman, S. J. Perelman: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986); and Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (New York: Penguin Books, 1987). Hellman also enters into the stories told by Elia Kazan, Elia Kazan: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1988), and Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (New York: Grove Press, 1987).

  The most useful assessment of Hellman’s life in the theater and in the world of entertainment is still Jacob H. Adler, Lillian Hellman (Austin, TX: Steck-Vaughn Company, 1969), though it is worth examining as well Richard Moody, Lillian Hellman, Playwright (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1972). More general assessments of Hellman as a playwright in context can be found in Joseph Wood Krutch, The American Drama Since 1918 (New York: George Braziller, 1957) and John Gassner, The Theatre in Our Times: A Survey of the Men, Materials and Movements in the Modern Theatre (New York: Crown, 1954).

  Hellman spent much of her political life on the fringes of New York’s powerful intellectual culture. On this subject there are many good volumes in which Hellman scarcely appears but which illuminate the world that she confronted on a daily basis. Readers might want to begin with Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Harper & Row, 1985) and then move to Terry A. Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, 1934–45 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); and Neil Jumonville, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Several memoirs come from individuals who crossed swords with Hellman over political issues. They include Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), and William Phillips, A Partisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life (New York: Stein and Day, 1983). Michael Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight MacDonald (New York: Basic Books, 1994), is a masterful account of one individual who intersected with Hellman’s life from the late 1930s until her death.

  The spirit of American communists and the divided attitudes toward Joseph Stalin make painful reading. A contemporary view of the communist threat in the 1930s can be found in Eugene Lyons, The Red Decade (New York: Arlington House, 1941). William O’Neill, A Better World: The Great Schism: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982) provides a more measured sense of the meaning of Stalinism to communist partisans, and Joseph Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972) suggests some of the internal struggles of the CPUSA. Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987) explores the transition from the old left to the new. European perspectives on the political struggle can be found in Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (New York: Random House, 2009) and Jonathan Miles, The Dangerous Otto Katz: The Many Lives of a Soviet Spy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009). Katz’s life overlapped with Hellman’s in intriguing ways.

  The McCarthyism of the late forties and early fifties is well captured by three books: David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979); Stanley Kutler, The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); and David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: Free Press, 1983). For the evolution of HUAC, see Walter Goodman, The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968). Stefan Kanfer, A Journal of the Plague Years (New York: Atheneum, 1973) provides a sense of the tangled web in which Hellman was caught and Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking Books, 1980) suggests the price of conscience. Some of the most remarkable accounts of those years come from memoirs. See especially Ring Lardner, I’d Hate Myself in the Morning: A Memoir (New York: Nation Books, 2000); Dalton Trumbo, The Time of the Toad: A Study of Inquisition in America by One of the Hollywood Ten (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); and the revelatory discussion by Bud Schultz and Ruth Schultz, It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

  For the impact of the Cold War on families during the McCarthy period, Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988) provides a great introduction. Carl Bernstein, Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), is a moving account of the long-lasting effects of the Cold War mentality. Lary May, ed., Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) suggests some of the permanent change that resulted from McCarthyism.

  Culture and politics in the sixties fuse with one another as they did in Hellman’s experience. Edmund Wilson, The Sixties, ed. Lewis M. Dabney (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990) provides some sense of the tension implicit in this experience. Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (New York: Basic Books, 1977) suggests the changes in popular and highbrow culture that resulted. Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967) characterizes some of the opportunities the decade provided. The relationship between cultural tensions and politics is well captured in Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). There is a huge and exciting literature on race relations in the 1960s, but for a glimpse of how the Cold War impacted on activists like Hellman, see Martin Bauml Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Knopf, 1988). Thomas Borstelman, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) provides a broad overview. For the student movement in the same period, James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987) is a good start.

  By the 1970s, politics had begun to take a new form. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) is perhaps the best summary of the ideas that began to take shape and David Greenberg’s Nixon’s Shadow (New York: Norton, 2003) an intriguing look at the political consequences that haunted Hellman in the 1970s. The impact of de-industrialization is evident in Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010) as it is in Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010). Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007) offers an incisive interpretation of the spirit of the times as it affected personal life.

  Lillian Hellman, caught up in accusations of lying and Stalinism during her last years, faced the venom of opponents. It would be remiss to avoid mentioning some of the literature in which she was attacked implicitly and explicitly, and yet such a list would be lengthy. Good beginnings can be made by
perusing Sidney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1987); Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Knopf, 1978); Diana Trilling, We Must March, My Darlings: A Critical Decade (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978); Norman Podhoretz, Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer (New York, NY: Free Press, 1999); and Muriel Gardiner, Code Name “Mary”: Memoirs of an American Woman in the Austrian Underground (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983).

  A Note on the Author

  Alice Kessler-Harris is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History at Columbia University. She is one of America’s most renowned scholars, known for her work on labor and gender history. She is the author of the classic history of working women Out to Work. Her In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America won the Joan Kelly, Philip Taft, Herbert Hoover, and Bancroft prizes. In 2011–2012, she served as president of the Organization of American Historians.

  By the Same Author

  Gendering Labor History

  In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America

  A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences

  Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States

  Women Have Always Worked: An Historical Overview

  Copyright © 2012 by Alice Kessler-Harris

  Electronic edition published in April 2012

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  Bloomsbury Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.