Late in life: “I will never learn discretion.”
He is often linked with T. S. Eliot, but in some ways he makes more sense in company with Henry Ford and W. C. Fields.
Perhaps he’s a cross between Dante Alighieri and Rush Limbaugh.
But I learned from him. I learned.
On Lillian Hellman
Ellen McLaughlin
I WAS FIFTEEN WHEN I first read Pentimento and An Unfinished Woman and fell in love with the Lillian Hellman Lillian Hellman made up for us—that hard-bitten, no-nonsense, tough-talking dame, incandescent with anger and helpless candor. I was pleased to read the books, because, try though I did, I could never work up much enthusiasm for her plays, which still seem wooden, ideologically simplistic and, most importantly, not much fun to act, because the characters lack any psychological complexity. I suspected at the time that I’d end up being not just a writer but a playwright and there weren’t many female playwrights to study when I was growing up. It boiled down to Hellman and Hansbury and, in a pinch, Shelagh Delaney. So I read the books with interest and relief. There is much to admire in the Hellman of the memoirs, her careless nobility and hectic bravery, her keen-eyed assessment of the whole rotten world. She is unsentimental about those she loves and charmingly self-denigrating to just the right degree—never veering too far toward either coyness or self-flagellation. At least I thought so then, back in the early seventies, when I was searching high and low for a female voice with pith and grit and passion.
Last week I got both books out of the library (I was shocked to realize that those books, which caused such a stir and were bestsellers in the 1970s, were out of print in the 1990s) and reread them for the first time since I was a teenager, but not before remembering and writing down the images that had stuck with me (a remarkably large number) since 1973.
One from An Unfinished Woman strikes me in particular: It is a description of Hellman sailing toward a dock, upon which stands Hammett, white haired, wearing a white shirt and white pants. She thinks: That’s the handsomest sight I’ve ever seen. She drops the sheet and the sail billows. I remembered her description of him as being “like a knife thrown into the dock, glinting in the setting sun,” and was so sure of that image as being Hellman’s that, years later when something similar came up in my own work, I excised it, “remembering” the Hellman. Here’s how the passage actually goes:
I was returning from the mainland in a catboat filled with marketing and Hammett had come down to the dock to tie me up. He had been sick that summer—the first of the sicknesses—and he was even thinner than usual. The white hair, the white pants, the white shirt made a straight, flat surface in the late sun. I thought: Maybe that’s the handsomest sight I ever saw, that line of a man, the knife for a nose, and the sheet went out of my hand and the wind went out of the sail. Hammett laughed as I struggled to get back the sail. I don’t know why, but I yelled angrily, “So you’re a Dostoevsky sinner-saint. So you are.” The laughter stopped, and when I finally came in to the dock we didn’t speak as we carried up the packages and didn’t speak through dinner.
Later that night, he said, “What did you say that for? What does it mean?”
I said I didn’t know why I had said it and I didn’t know what it meant.
Years later, when his life had changed, I did know what I had meant that day: I had seen the sinner—whatever is a sinner—and sensed the change before it came. When I told him that, Hammett said he didn’t know what I was talking about, it was all too religious for him.
Well, I’m with Hammett about the Dostoevsky, but the description of the sight of him and how it causes her to drop the line is quite fine stuff, I still think. Most importantly, it has the feel of a true recollection, as the shouted reference to Dostoevsky and the implied hours of subsequent silence just do not. Perhaps she felt it was important to wrest the narrative away from the woozily romantic and remind us that, after all, this was a relationship between intellectual equals, writers, who might plausibly call references to Russian authors across the water to each other and spend an evening ruminating upon such things. But then of course my attitude toward the memoirs is different than it was when I was reading them as a teenager. Now it is safe to say that large portions of the memoirs, specifically and particularly the “Julia” section, are wholesale fabrications posing as fact. (The “Julia” section in Pentimento was Hellman’s description of what is in retrospect a hilariously complicated money-smuggling gambit supposedly performed in 1937 for a beloved and suspiciously perfect friend—played by Vanessa Redgrave in the subsequent movie.) The deeply unfortunate thing about the exposure of Hellman’s lapses into fabrication is that it casts into doubt every sentence of the memoirs, or, to borrow Mary McCarthy’s famous hyperbolic statement: “every word, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” And there are many fine passages in the books. Much of it is gloriously lean prose in which the voice is far more unforced and authentic than it is for any of the dialogue in her plays. The memoir voice might be said to be her finest creation—assured and vital and steeped in the barroom rigor and laconic irony of her day. But now you can’t read any of it without smirking a bit, and that is a shame. I don’t believe her anymore. And when a writer loses the trust of her readers, she is in a sorry state indeed, no matter how tough and taut she talks.
Lillian Hellman. Circa 1941. The Granger Collection, New York.
The other passage I remembered vividly from the memoirs was the memory about the spectacularly successful opening night for The Children’s Hour on Broadway: Hammett is out in Hollywood and she calls him, very drunk, at some point during the night. A woman answers the phone and says that she is Mr. Hammett’s secretary and can she take a message? Later, Hellman wakes up with a stupendous hangover, does the math on the phone call to Hollywood and realizes that she called at 3:00 A.M. California time and that the phone must have been answered by some chippie Hammett was seeing. Thereupon, Hellman hies herself out to the airport, takes a plane to L.A., goes to Hammett’s house, smashes the soda fountain he is fond of in the basement of his house and, having seen no one, neither chippie nor Hammett, she immediately goes back to the airport and heads home to New York that very night. The memoir is remarkably similar to this in all important details. I suppose the reason I remembered this was that I was at an age when I was interested to know how a woman of spirit might handle jealousy and humiliation—emotions that I was right to assume were coming my way at about the speed of an oncoming freight train with every waking second of adolescence. The incident thrilled me as an example of a sublimely vengeful fantasy that, amazingly, didn’t end the relationship with the extraordinary Hammett, who, one is led to believe, admired Hellman’s spunk rather than eschewing her (and who could have blamed him?) as a seriously deranged harpy with too much time on her hands. Back in the days when looking for lies in the Hellman memoirs became a popular and tremendously rewarding sport among the literati, this story was also challenged, just on the basis of logic. Hellman asks us to believe that she flew all the way across the country, went to Hammett’s house and, what? broke in? found a, what? sledgehammer? smashed the bar, brushed the glass from her dress, turned on her heel and, what? called a taxi? and went back to the airport to catch a, what? red-eye? (which didn’t exist) back to New York? Uh huh. And why on earth would a woman answer Hammett’s phone at 3:00 A.M. anyway, much less think that she could “cover” at that hour by pronouncing herself a secretary? The whole thing, like so much of the memoirs, falls to pieces if you think about it for two minutes, yet there was hardly a murmur of skepticism when it first appeared, which says much for the force of Hellman’s prose.
But, you see, it’s too bad. Because I rather liked that story. It was important to me, a somewhat timid girl who tended to keep her mouth shut about the wounding things done to her by men. I needed to hear about an unattractive writer who, nearly forty years earlier, had risked a relationship (and how) by punishing a desirable and powerful man for betraying her. And here I must admit th
at I really wish Lillian Hellman had smuggled money through Nazi lines to the Resistance in a big fur hat. Because if Lillian Hellman could do it, it gave me hope that someone as ordinary and flawed as I might be able to do such a thing, might have the courage to do something risky for people she would never meet, in the name of a principle and for the love of a friend.
I remember distinctly the frisson of shame I felt when the Julia story was uncovered as a lie. This had partly to do with the disorientation of having believed a fiction to be the truth, and certainly I was upset to learn about the dishonesty of a writer I had looked upon as a worthy role model. But there was more going on in the horror I felt than mere confusion and disappointment—what I felt was the awful guilt of recognition and relief when one thinks: that could have been me. I felt the shame of liars everywhere when one of our league is unmasked. Because I am a liar too. Oh, the stories I have told and retold about “my life” that have all the suspect smoothness and satisfying roundness of polished stones handled too many times to be trustworthy objects. For me, the worst of it was that she lied as only a woman would feel a need to lie—she kept putting herself in an effective and central position in relationship to events she was, in fact, powerless to be a real part of, precisely because she was a woman. For instance, she describes herself as being under bombardment in her fleeting visit to Spain during the civil war and heroically making her way through such fire to tape a radio broadcast one evening, when there is historical record of neither the bombardment she describes nor the broadcast. (Incidentally, her brave sojourn across town to the radio station provokes no less a personage than Hemingway himself to say to her, as he certainly did not, “So you have cohones after all.”) It’s embarrassing. But I’m not so different from Hellman in my desire for a nobler life story in which I play less of a supporting role and in which I’ve led a less equivocal and passive existence. Perhaps this is the nature of the writer’s life, which is only possible because of a kind of quietude and stability which does not, in general, make for thrilling memoirs. Perhaps, too, there is a terrible secret here about what it is to be a certain kind of woman. The kinship I felt with Hellman when I first read her is all the more apparent to me now after her painfully compromised last years.
When I first read her work I could not have anticipated the ways in which our lives would differ and what we would ultimately have in common. I did end up becoming a playwright, though I am not nearly so famous as she was, nor am I likely to be. My politics have remained, like hers, distinctly leftist and, like hers, rather muddied by a lack of discipline of mind and an overly emotional and moralistic means of making sense of the world. We, both of us, tend to like clean edges, good guys and bad guys. For me, I believe this has to do with a fairly cool assessment of where my talents lie and a desire to use my reading time accordingly. For her, I suspect her political failings have more to do with an intolerance for nuance and mystery where morality is concerned. We have neither of us made the mark on the world that we would have liked, in our overwrought dreams of moral justice, to have made, although she was certainly more of an effectively political animal than I have ever been. Though Scoundrel Time, her dubious “memoir” of the McCarthy era, is marred by a scattershot viciousness, questionable chronology and her usual self-aggrandizement, the letter she wrote to the House Un-American Activities Committee on the eve of her hearing is her most widely quoted piece of work and probably the best writing she ever did. In it she managed to mine the rich vein of American political oratory, veering between the cannily colloquial “I do not wish to bring bad trouble onto other people” and the bluntly modest zinger “I will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashion.” She was lucky. Her fame protected her as much as it provided a means for her voice to dominate the proceedings that afternoon. Others in that era risked more, lost more and had to back up their beliefs with jail time, but here was a singular instance in which Hellman’s skills as a writer and her particular brand of stylized bravery were precisely what were needed and at last and for once there was a moment when she stood in the center of an event. I can’t imagine that anything else, the great success of her plays and her books included, could have ever come close to the triumph of that moment in her professional life.
She and I are both childless women and perhaps it is because of that that we both have taken friendship seriously and have written about it as a central experience in our lives. The “Julia” story is, finally, a compelling and moving account of a woman she would like to have been and a woman she would like to have known and been loved by.
Much as I’d like to, I can’t turn away from Lillian Hellman any more than I can turn away from the girl I was at fifteen and what I needed in a heroine. She served that purpose remarkably well and is still something of a spur to me now. I like her passion, her dedication to craft, her fierce independence and prickly nature. If she was only half as brave and difficult as she says she was, she was quite something, and she is still a force to be reckoned with. I will always like her for having responded to being called “one of America’s foremost female playwrights” by saying, “I am a playwright. You wouldn’t refer to Eugene O’Neill as one of America’s foremost male playwrights.” For all her dislike of most women, and her incessant use of “lady” as a pejorative term in her memoirs, she was a feminist of a sort and there were few enough in my childhood that she mattered deeply to me. Hellman is my colleague and my forebear. Her reasons for writing are not so different from my own, nor are the mistakes she makes as she puts her plays together. Her reasons for loving her friends and lovers are like my own and her reasons for lying are mine as well. I know her better than I would care to admit. And though she would certainly not have liked me, she would have recognized me. It is women and writers like us who will make the women writers who come after us cannier, wiser and stronger. They will look upon us and say, that is where I do not need to go again, that has been done, those mistakes, those triumphs are past. Let me seek a different ground.
Jack Kerouac. Circa 1958. UPI/Corbiss-Bettman.
Language, Voice, Beat, Energy in the Poetry:
Jack Kerouac
Anne Waldman
—Dedicated to the memory of Allen Ginsberg
WHAT SPOKE TO ME initially reading Mexico City Blues was passionate cry & heartbreak, sensitive, goofy, energetic lines popping open, antennae raw & in the wind, and the constantly shifting exchange of earth & sky. Down to earth, down to his own rhythm, then out with the spin of an infinite mind riff. And up, way up, to revelation like “The Victor is not Self” or “(ripping of paper indicates/ helplessness anyway)” or “We die with same/ unconcern we lie.” Philosophical. And stoned. And details. And naming things. And naming people. And naming heroes, writers, musicians, Buddhist saints & Boddhisattvas & deities. So everybody’s included. People’s names are pure sound & sacred because they exist & are therefore holy. It’s like the “sacred conversation” you see in Italian Paintings where all the saints are smiling beatifically and conversing in gentle tones on profound subjects. Nothing’s excluded, and yet Mexico City Blues is a very discriminating sequential poem. It has an amazing clarity, honesty, aspiration. Nothing is unnecessary inside it. And friendly, too. A real experiment in original mind living in conditioned mind wanting to “blow” free. Pop through on other side which is sound, energy, shape on page of ear & eye. If you can’t sustain the images, if you don’t “get” his logopoeia right off, try staying with the sound and the persona and sheer energy. I also appreciate in here the idea of choruses. Reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints. One thinks of angels & saints singing, choirs of kids in church, of resounding classical pieces singing out the sufferings of Christ or man. And in a particular vernacular mode. And the exhilaration too of salvation, redemption, life, life, life! It’s always pounding like that. See, I’m alive I’m thinking! And everything around me has got life too. And these are sounds also made in heaven. And I write because it’s all fleeting & we’re all going to die & m
y poetic duty is to make this experiment holy. This is certainly the sense you get when you hear Kerouac’s voice reading aloud on the discs & tapes.
Punk! says Iron Pot Lid
Tup! says finger toilet
Tuck! says dime on Ice
Ferwut! says Beard Bird.
And improvising on a thought, a word, an increment of a word, a phone or phoneme and responding. So fast. A “perfect explication of mind” said the Tibetan meditation teacher Chogyam Trungpa after Allen Ginsberg read parts of the poem to him. Allen & I named a poetics school after Jack Kerouac at the Buddhist-inspired Naropa Institute in Colorado because he had the most spontaneously lucid sound. And he’d also realized the first Buddhist Noble Truth which is the Truth of Suffering. It wafts through all his work: deep pain & empathy. Sometimes it’s as if he’s just whistling in the dark in Mexico City Blues. And so hip for a quasi-white guy. And mixed-breed American being interesting ethnic Quebecois origin, and macho even, but a secret scaredy cat. But this funny Buddhist twist keeps coming around into everything. Because, I think, he was always thinking, following his mind, checking things out & reading sacred scripture (see his explicit massive journal/ poetics collage Some of the Dharma, Penguin 1997) which are subtle & spontaneous & illuminating insights into the very nature of mind. So what you have is the literal practice inherent in his mind-work. Each chorus is an examination & delight in language-mind.
Starspangled Kingdoms bedecked
in dewy joint
DON’T IGNORE OTHER PARTS
OF YOUR MIND, I think,
And my clever brain sends
ripples of amusement
Through my leg nerve halls
And I remember the Zigzag
Original
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