Chapter 6
I am a moral writer, often too moral a writer, and I cannot avoid, it seems, that last summing up.
—from the introduction to Four Plays by Lillian Hellman
Like every other writer, I use myself and the time I live in.
—Lillian Hellman, 1965
Hellman’s great plays of the thirties, The Children’s Hour and The Little Foxes—with their broad-brush commentaries on malicious wrongdoing, on greed and immorality—stamped her not only as a playwright prone to melodrama but as an angry playwright. Hellman thought of them as fundamentally moral plays, as plays that flailed at injustice. In that sense they reflected the core of her being. She described herself as “bewildered by all injustice, at first certain that it cannot be, then shocked into rigidity, then obsessed, and finally as certain as a Grand Inquisitor that God wishes me to move ahead, correct and holy.”1 Nobody, she tells us in Pentimento, “has ever been able to control me when I feel that I have been treated unjustly.”2 More and more certain of what was right and wrong in the world and with human nature, she began in the early forties to point her material toward contemporary themes, producing work that she thought of as embodying moral lessons but that were, nevertheless, overtly political.
For most of the twentieth century, definitions of good and evil, though never as clear as Hellman would have liked, attached themselves to political ideologies. The world divided between fascists and communists, she could see only good in communism and in fascism only evil. The wartime plays—Watch on the Rhine (1941) and The Searching Wind (1944), along with the film script for the 1943 film North Star—shied away from explicitly naming Nazis and Soviet communists as the respective champions of the evil and the good. But her fierce anger against an unnamed fascism resonated with the beliefs of her audiences, infusing her plays with a political voice that contributed to her fame and honor. She was on the side of the angels. Yet Hellman did not imagine herself as a political writer. “I’ve never been interested in political messages so it is hard for me to believe I wrote them,” she would say later.3 After the war, the political scene shifted, and though Hellman’s sense of right and wrong remained consistent and her voice strong and forceful, the politics embedded in her work seemed less relevant, even out of touch.
Watch on the Rhine took a theme dear to her heart—the defense of human liberty in the face of powerful forces (she called them bullies)—and translated it into an award-winning story rooted in the efforts of one family to speak and act against fascism. This was clearly an issue after her heart, but when she approached the subject as drama, she was at first stymied: “I wanted to say that we had little understanding of Europeans and little understanding of the conflicts among them.”4 Ultimately the play she wrote made a powerful appeal for ordinary people simply to pay attention.
Once again, she used the family—this time a well-informed and affluent family, loving and respectful of each other—as the vehicle through which to play out a larger struggle. On the eve of war, the American-born daughter of a former diplomat’s family comes home from Europe with her three children and her German resistance-fighter husband in tow. Her large and graceful childhood home harbors a guest, a Romanian count sympathetic to the Nazis, who threatens to betray the resistance fighter to German officials. In order to return once again to Europe where he can continue the fight, the husband murders the guest and draws the entire family into active support for the antifascist cause. As he makes his escape from the scene, he tells his children, “In every town and every village and every mud hut in the world, there is a man who might fight to make a good world.”5 Silence in the face of evil, Hellman says, the cowardly refusal to act when inaction will promote injustice, is the real sin.
Watch on the Rhine opened on April 1, 1941, two months before Hitler broke his peace pact with the Soviet Union and at a time when American communists had committed themselves to silence about German aggressions. It drew its share of criticism for the awkwardness of some of the plot line and a somewhat contrived final scene. And it drew as well the predictable accusations. “The play as it stands is, of course, essentially a melodrama,” wrote the New Republic’s critic, who followed with a comment that “artificial contrivance” in this play was more conspicuous than in some of her earlier plays.6 But others confronted Hellman’s message. “It is hard to say what our children will make of it,” wrote New Yorker columnist Wolcott Gibbs, “this story of a political refugee who murders a guest in a peaceful American household with everybody’s complete moral approbation and even their connivance.”7
Widely understood as an indictment of Nazism (though the word Nazi was never mentioned), the play was received as an effort to rally good, but apathetic, citizens to the fight against tyranny. Calling it “infinitely better than the propaganda plays we are used to in the theatre,” one critic noted that “it is the story and characters that really carry us along, however much or little the anti-Nazi connotations may stick in our minds.”8 Watch on the Rhine, wrote critic Brooks Atkinson, not always a fan of Hellman’s work, translated “the death struggle between ideas in familiar terms we are bound to understand.”9 It did so, he added, without beating “the drum in favor of any cause.”10 Critic George Jean Nathan called it “the best anti-Nazi play we have so far had, whether from a man or a woman.”11 Hellman’s plea for engagement did not go unheeded by ordinary folk. She saved one of the many fan letters she got—this one from an unknown man who wrote that he had seen the play many times and from it drew the lesson “that a man and wife must have an abiding faith and willingness to participate side by side in the same liberating struggle without any limitations.”12 This “moving and beautiful play, filled with eloquence and a heroic spirit,” as one critic described it, won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and ran for almost a year.13
On the left, Communist Party critics expressed more doubt. With Germany and the Soviet Union still tied together in a problematic peace pact, party loyalists wondered if Hellman had not undermined the Soviet cause. Artists, like all others—so went the party line—should subject themselves to political constraints; good art could be measured by its political rather than aesthetic effect. In this instance, the Daily Worker grumbled, a “fabric of omissions” hung like a veil between the play and its audience. Hellman had failed to note “that a land of socialism has already established the permanent new life of peace and freedom, morality and comradeship and is the greatest guarantee that the ultimate struggle will be won.”14 Protagonist Kurt Müller described himself as an antifascist but would not reply when asked if he was a radical, and never admitted to being “a member of a Communist group fighting for German freedom.” It was not, the Daily Worker reviewer hastened to add, that he believed “that a play stands or falls because it does or does not include a certain few lines. But, oh, how this play needs such added explanation.”15
1941: Hellman with Joseph Wood Krutch receiving the Drama Critics Circle Award. (Ransom Center)
Two months later, in June 1941, Germany launched a direct attack on Soviet territory, breaking its pact with the Soviet Union. Two years after that, Warner Bros. released a film version of the play, its script partly written by Dashiell Hammett. The timing was right. The play attacked by the communist press in early 1941 became a critical favorite as a 1943 movie. The different receptions became something of an issue in the party, setting off a debate over the meaning of party loyalty. Albert Maltz, writing in the Communist Party publication the New Masses, asked why the change of heart and answered his own question. “Events had transpired in the two years calling for a different political program.”16 Watch on the Rhine, he argued, should be measured by aesthetic rather than political standards. Hellman could not have agreed more. Her integrity rested on her sense that art had its own voice. As she would put it later, “perhaps nothing in literature turns so quickly shoddy as those works which use the cloth of fashion to make the cloak of success.”17
Hellman had a chance to stand by this principle when it came to the production of North Star, a 1943 film designed to familiarize American audiences with the Soviet war effort. She had not yet fulfilled a three-year contract, signed in 1936 with Sam Goldwyn, when Goldwyn proposed the film to her. The offer came as a relief. For more than three years theirs had been a tense relationship as Goldwyn offered her a series of books to adapt to the screen that Hellman routinely labeled “junk” or insulting. But in 1942 the Roosevelt administration called for film studios to provide a positive image of the Soviets “to counter the negative Soviet image that dominated mass media before the war.”18 Goldwyn saw a chance to make peace with Hellman. Her friend William Wyler agreed to direct the film, and everyone hoped that Hellman could persuade the Russians to give her a visa for Moscow, where she and Wyler might do some research. When Goldwyn balked at spending studio money on such a trip and Wyler accepted a commission in the air force, Hellman was left hanging.
Goldwyn and Hellman finally worked out an uneasy compromise. Hellman agreed to write the script for a film that Lewis Milestone would direct. Through the spring and summer of 1942, Hellman worked on North Star. Following her usual pattern, she read extensively, keeping thick notebooks of research notes on the nature of collective farm villages and typewritten summaries of stories from the Moscow News, Anna Louise Strong’s recently published The Soviets Expected It, and Alvah Bessie’s The Soviet People at War. She followed the progress of the war in Cyrus Sulzberger’s August–September 1942 series in the Herald Tribune, and she kept track of German atrocities, noting especially German massacres of Jews in Kiev.19 Most of what she read was uncritical—even of the collective farms that had drawn such antagonism from the Ukrainian and Russian peasantry. Still, she made note of the occasional cynical comment. Along with notes about the extensive legal rights accorded to women, she recorded the telling Russian proverb: “What are you doing? Nothing. And him? He’s helping me!”
By December 1942, the script was complete. Hammett had enlisted in the army that fall and was doing his basic training in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Despite his occasional weekends at Hardscrabble, she was more or less on her own. The script she turned over to Goldwyn and Milestone was a hard-hitting story about a prosperous collective farm village in the Ukraine, peopled by brave young men and women committed to socialist ideals. The village comes under attack by Germans who commit such atrocities as draining the blood of children to trans-fuse into wounded soldiers, leaving the children at the point of death. The heroic peasants of the village rebel; the German officer who has ordered the bleeding is shot; the peasants burn their own village to the ground and flee, vowing to return as an armed resistance to fascism.
Hellman thought she had written a film that called attention to the courage of unarmed and peaceful people struggling against a fascist menace. Her script juxtaposed caring socialist values against fascist cruelty in a struggle for the human soul. Romantic though it was, the script did not satisfy either Goldwyn or director Milestone. Though it idealized the collective spirit and reified Soviet prosperity, Hellman had written a complex portrait of real people and their fight to defend themselves. Goldwyn and Milestone quickly moved to eliminate the ideological thread of the story, rewriting huge portions of the script and providing the film with a saccharine musical background that gave it an American idiom and flavor. “Mother dear, do not fear, we’re the younger generation,” sang the collective’s bright young sparks. In an effort to turn the village into “anywhere,” Milestone and Goldwyn removed everything distinctively Russian and socialist about the village, noting only once that this village was a collective and eliminating the words socialism, communism, and comrade wherever possible. In the process, they turned characters Hellman had drawn as angry and resistant peasants into a posse of cowboys intent on wiping the Germans out.
This was the first time that Hellman had experienced what she called a betrayal. She had written a script; Milestone rewrote first fifty pages, and then another fifty, removing its core points. She did not immediately walk away. Under contract to Goldwyn, she gamely tried to link the new parts of the film together. But she was incensed that the possibility of producing an honest film had been sabotaged and, even before its release, she gave a long interview to New York Times reporter Theodore Strauss in which she deplored the diminishing power of writers in the face of an industry wedded to “a lovely dollar.”20 A few months later, Hellman once again reiterated her commitment to the struggles of the Screen Writers Guild to achieve some respect for writers and their craft. She vented to Strauss about the writers’ helplessness in the face of the studios and averred that “an author’s final security probably can come only in finding craftsmen with whom he can work harmoniously and, if need be, join in an independent unit as so many craftsmen in Hollywood are beginning to do.”21
Goldwyn produced a picture admired by most of the critical reviewers, a box-office success that won six Oscar nominations—one of them for best original screenplay. Some critics noted the elements of political unreality introduced by Milestone. Mary McCarthy wrote a particularly vituperative account of the film. In a survey of wartime films, she mercilessly attacked North Star as “political indoctrination,” noting that it represented the Soviet Union as “a peace loving country; an idyllic hamlet” instead of depicting “the terror which held the country in domestic siege long before the first German company moved across the frontier.” McCarthy, then a young novelist who identified with the Trotskyist faction on the left, insisted that “the Soviet Union had never been innocent.” “Here,” she wrote, “was where liberals parted company with communists.” She described the film, in language to which she would return more than thirty-five years later, as “a tissue of falsehoods woven of every variety of untruth.”22
Hellman might, on this occasion, have agreed with McCarthy. She hated the film, describing it as an “extended opera bouffe peopled not by peasants, real and alive, but by musical comedy characters without a thought or care in the world.” But while she complained bitterly about Milestone’s version, she did not entirely abandon it. It had, she thought, “said some true things about fascism” and “had been useful in promoting the united front.”23 Of her own romanticization of the farm and its peasants she said nothing. She had, after all, chosen to ignore Ukrainians’ massive resistance to collectivization and to depict them as a gentle and quiet people. When Goldwyn and Milestone turned peasants into actors in a musical comedy, she experienced their disagreements as artistic rather than political. She had lost a battle with Goldwyn that she had always previously won—the battle to retain the integrity of the writer’s voice. She left her name on the film. But she dug deep into her pockets to buy back her contract with Goldwyn for $30,000. She vowed never to work with Goldwyn again, and she never did. Ironically, perhaps, the screenplays of the film version of Watch on the Rhine (written by Hammett and revised by Hellman), and North Star were both nominated for Academy Awards in 1943. Both films lost to Casablanca. Still, North Star became the most commercially successful wartime propaganda film.
Though she consistently denied interest in “political messages,” Hellman thought her next play, The Searching Wind, “the nearest thing to a political play” she had ever written. The Searching Wind opened on April 12, 1944, to mixed reviews—some of them praising Hellman’s courage in confronting the problems of the day, others attacking the confusion that ensued from trying to follow the story of a love triangle through the complex interwar years. The Searching Wind condemns as cowardly the misguided attempts of the Western powers to appease Mussolini and Hitler before the war, creating a wounded hero to pay the price for the failures of that policy. As in her earlier dramas, the family serves as the pivot around which Hellman constructs two confrontations, one a love triangle and the second the refusal of a diplomat and his father-in-law to speak up against fascism. And as in her earlier plays, Hellman leaves room for ambiguity about her political stance.
The play is set in 1944 with the world engaged in a war Hellman thought “could have been avoided if Fascism had been recognized early enough.”24 Through flashbacks, the action recalls moments when Americans chose to overlook the potential dangers of fascism or to appease fascists. As a young diplomat stationed in Italy in 1923, Alex Hazen trivialized the rise of Mussolini. As a consul in Germany in the late 1920s, Hazen minimized the dangers of German inflation and ignored rising anti-Semitism. As an ambassador in 1938, he advised supporting the strategy of appeasement that led to Munich. Along the way he is challenged briefly by his father-in-law, a liberal newspaperman, who chooses to retire rather than to fight against the tide. Repeatedly his perceptive former sweetheart alerts him to the coming dangers, but he spurns her affections rather than heed her warnings. Refusing to see, Hazen buries himself in the arms of his rich and ignorant wife, who supports his diplomatic silences. The price of denial and cowardice is paid for by the next generation. Their son Sam enlists in the war that America enters in 1941, and at the time of the play is in danger of losing his leg to wounds suffered in Italy.
Hellman wrote The Searching Wind while Hammett, who at age fortyeight had enlisted in the army, was stationed in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. Writing for the first time completely on her own, she fussed over the play and wondered whether she could get a copy of it through the army censors to him. Hellman’s letters to Hammett are lost, but Hammett’s replies to her reveal that even from a distance, he provided a remarkable level of support for a relatively high level of anxiety. He asked her not to worry about writing to him while she was deeply engaged in the play and reassured her that her anxiety was appropriate. “I’m sorry you’re going through one of those worry-worry spells about the play, but I guess that’s part of writing,” he wrote to her on February 9.25 As the play came closer to production her level of anxiety must have increased, because Hammett wrote to her, “You’re practically breaking my heart with your letters about the play. I think we’re going to have to make a rule that you’re not to tackle any work when I’m not around to spur, quiet, goad, pacify and ease you, according to what’s needed at the moment. It is obvious that you’re not capable of handling yourself.”26 And yet in the end he encouraged her to stand on her own feet: “What the hell,” he wrote, “you did your best and you’ll have to let it go at that no matter what you’d like to do.”27
From Pleasantville, Hellman sent Hammett a finished draft of the play that arrived at his Alaskan outpost just a month before the play was to open in New York. His comments were reassuring but not uncritical. He wished, he wrote, that she had told her story in chronological order so that the love triangle could follow the historical trajectory. He wondered if catching the characters “now here, now there” would do justice to any of them, or leave in the audience’s hands the task of rounding them out. And most of all, he argued that “the essential frivolity that fucked things up … isn’t shown. No answer is provided to the question, But what else could these people have done?”28 He closed with the needed reassurance: this was “in ways the most interesting play you’ve done, and it’s got swell stuff in it, and, as I said before, it’s defter than any of the others, and you are a cutie.” And then he added a final postscript that identified himself as one “who does not always know as much about everything as he acts like he does, and who hopes the play gets its points over in a manner that makes this letter sound like the work of a smart-aleck.” When the play did in fact turn out to be a box-office success, Hammett expressed genuine delight: “Let this be a lesson to you, my fine buxom cutie. You are a big girl now and you write your own plays the way you want them and you do not necessarily give a damn for the opinions of Tom, Dick or Dashie unless they happen to coincide with your own. No matter how close to you T, D or D may be and no matter how hard they try to think in terms of your play, you must always bear in mind that what they’re actually fooling around with is some slightly different idea of their own, which may be all right, but with which you have no business involving yourself.”29
Given the weight of Hammett’s comments, we are tempted to wonder if Hellman was being disingenuous when, later, she observed that she meant, in The Searching Wind, “only to write about nice, well born people who, with good intentions, helped to sell out a world.”30 There is something unsatisfying in her refusal to claim the play for what it was: a pointed condemnation of rich liberals whose refusals to “see,” whose denials and silences around world-shaking historical events, finally led the world into war. Sam, the son whose leg will soon be sacrificed to the silence of his grandfather and the denials of his parents, makes the point directly. He recalls conversations with his fellow soldiers as they sat in the mud of the trenches fulminating against the “old tripe who just live in our country now and pretend they are on the right side.” He repeats to his parents his desire to get away from the people who “believe they’re all for everything good” despite the fact that they “made the shit we’re sitting in.”31 The rage speaks for itself, forecasting feelings Hellman would express thirty years later in Scoundrel Time when she would direct her venom at the same liberals who, in her view, had continued to betray the world. In The Searching Wind, Sam asserts only shame at the behavior of his parents. He won’t mind the loss of the leg, he tells them, “as long as it means a little something and helps to bring us out someplace.”32 The next generation, he seems to be saying, would speak up. Hellman soon learned that they would not.
Insofar as The Searching Wind called to account those who refused to stand up to Hitler and the fascists, the play affirmed Hellman’s position as a moralist whose finger pointed blame. When Sam hurled at his parents and his grandfather a painful assessment of their responsibility, Hellman indicted an entire generation. History, Sam told the audience, was “made by the masses of people” not by “one man or ten men.” But, he continued, that was no “excuse to just sit back and watch,” to act as if “nothing anybody can do makes any difference, so why do it?”33 This was the moral issue that Addie had posed in The Little Foxes when she deplored those who ate the vines just like locusts eating the earth, and then asked if it was right for others “to stand and watch them do it?”34
Many critics judged The Searching Wind as the best, the most impelling play of the season. Hellman was, wrote one admiring critic, “the least reluctant [of contemporary playwrights] to admit to being alive and thoughtful in a parlous time.”35 The Searching Wind, wrote another, “brought back a full measure of dignity, perception and beauty to the theater.” He then went on to praise Hellman’s “bitter and lucid” indictment “of supposed men of good will who brought us to this terrible moment of the present.”36Hellman was at her best, thought a third, when she was dealing with the politics of the world. She left the audience “wishing for more politics and less emotional triangle.” “To get an audience thinking in this day and age probably is a matter of the sheerest genius.”37
Other critics found Hellman’s effort to grapple with the politics of her time mystifying. The play, wrote one reviewer, might be “superb theater,” but Hellman’s political aim remained unclear to him. She had not, he mourned, solved the problem of how to keep Europe from going periodically to war … a problem that has defied solution for at least 2,000 years.”38 Others were even more critical. They appreciated her efforts to turn a mirror to her times but at the same time fulminated that Hellman had pretended to a social omniscience that nobody could have had in the twenties or even the late thirties; they accused her of exhibiting “a general impatience with, or contempt for, people less elaborately informed than herself.”39 Why, they asked, did The Searching Wind not include a fourth flashback that condemned the 1939 Soviet-German pact? Why not denounce Stalin’s efforts to make peace with Hitler as no more than appeasement? Hellman, they argued, was preaching the lessons of collective security to a nation that doubted it could ever fully trust a communist regime. She was accused of being a political playwright.
But the most vehement protests came from those on the left who wondered why Hellman had failed “to link the appeasers of yesterday with the defeatists, the ‘nationalists’ and ‘isolationists’ of today.”40 The play, argued the Daily Worker’s Ralph Warner, was strongest when it recalled “the support democracy gave to its mortal enemy, fascism.” But it fell short in many ways, most pointedly by refusing to acknowledge “the unwavering anti-fascist position taken by the Soviet Union” and failing to see “that many Americans worked and are still working to perpetuate the policies of appeasement” that continue to support fascism.41 So pointed were these critiques that several nonparty publications commented that “the rich and famous Miss Hellman, hitherto one of the most ardent of the Communist fellow travelers,” may well have fallen out of favor with the party.42
Inevitably, perhaps, Hellman’s ambiguous political stance inserted itself into judgments of the play itself and resulted in ad hominem attacks. Had her talent deserted her? As one skeptic wondered, could it be that this latest play was merely a “shallow meretricious piece of reactionary claptrap?”43 With barely disguised irony, critics complained that the play reflected her status as an “advanced or indignant woman.” In one remarkable assessment, the New Republic’s reviewer let loose a diatribe on Hellman’s writing—the subject of almost universal admiration—calling it “pseudo-analytical-psychological, head-in-the-box-office-feet-in-the-clouds, feministic, novelistic rubbish.”44 Hellman, as she tended to do, publicly shrugged off the criticism, insisting that this was a play about well-intentioned people who had simply let their opportunities pass and attributing the personal attacks to narrow political disagreements. For all its relevance in 1944, when The Searching Wind appeared as a film two years later—Hellman adapted the script for the screen herself—it fell completely flat. By 1946, nobody was interested in analyzing whether American appeasement of fascists had brought on the war.
Hellman might have been perceived as a political playwright during the war, but she didn’t like the label very much and she claimed never to have really liked The Searching Wind.45 Before the film’s June 1946 release, she had already decided to shift gears and was working full tilt on the play that would become Another Part of the Forest. There she tried to deflect criticism by backing off current events and revisiting the themes of greed and human nature that had animated The Little Foxes. But the parallels between the southern world she created and the one in which she lived were unmistakable. World War II had now ended; America was busily retooling its industry to serve the needs of an expanding consumer culture. Setting the scene twenty years before The Little Foxes, Hellman placed the Hubbard siblings in small-town Alabama in 1880, just after the 1877 withdrawal of northern troops from the South. There, Hellman resurrected the two brothers, Ben and Oscar, and their sister, Regina, as they reached maturity and wrested control of their family’s fortune from their father. The father, much despised in the small town where he was the wealthiest man, had made huge profits during the Civil War by running salt through the southern blockade and then selling it at enormous prices. This was the kind of profiteering familiar to goods-deprived families in the Second World War. As if that were not enough, Marcus Hubbard betrayed a group of southern soldiers to the enemy, an event that towns-people suspected, but could not prove, and that led to the soldiers’ massacre. When Ben discovers that his mother has secreted evidence of his father’s guilt in the family Bible, he blackmails his father into giving up control of his wealth and, at the price of parental humiliation, starts on the path to capitalist success.
There was no way to miss Hellman’s condemnation of the endless rapacity of capitalism, its ruthless destruction of everything that lay in its way, including the cherished traditions of family honor and southern solidarity. But postwar America had had enough of conflict with capitalism. It relied now on the entrepreneurial spirit to raise it from the despair of war, and Hellman had overstepped the limits. She had created, thought one reviewer, characters of sheer unredeemed wickedness, characters filled with “relentless hatred … cold hatred, Iago-hatred,” characters utterly lacking in human decency.46 These were characters so monstrous, so venal, so brimming with odium that they immediately raised the question of whether such evil had any relationship to real life.
In the view of critics, her malevolence backfired. As Brooks Atkinson put it in the New York Times, “this time her hatred for malefactors of great wealth in post-war Alabama has driven her play straight over the line into old fashioned melodrama.” This play, he thought, was hokum.47 By trying to turn a serious effort to expose predatory capitalists into popular entertainment, noted another critic, Hellman had “deprived it of validity,” turned it into a play “as easy to enjoy as it was difficult to take seriously.”48 The new millionaires of the 1880s might have been villainous, argued another, but they were not unmitigated villains.49 And yet the criticism was muted by awe at Hellman’s accomplishment. Even as they disparaged her melodramatic style, even as they ridiculed it for its lack of verisimilitude, several critics praised the play as “expertly written, well acted, superbly directed.”50 As one wrote, “from a less practiced pen,” the play “might have been so overwrought as to be funny.” Only “a dramatist of extraordinary skill and strength,” he added, “could have managed” to pull this off.51
Criticism of character and plot in Another Part of the Forest was balanced by admiration for the production, and this time Hellman could take credit for that too. Up until then, Herman Shumlin had produced and directed all of her original plays. He had also been her most enduring admirer, and often a lover as well. “Dear smart, gorgeous, lovely, darling Lillian,” he wrote to her after the opening of The Children’s Hour, and with unfailing loyalty continued for a decade to work with her on everything she wrote. For a long time Hellman appreciated the partnership, and shared with Shumlin the triumphs and hurts of his other successes and failures. “Herman would do just as well to stay away from comedy,” she wrote to Arthur Kober after one of Shumlin’s failures. “I feel very sorry about all the mess.”52 But in 1945 strains emerged in the relationship. Hellman’s decision to direct The Searching Wind while Shumlin produced it may well have created tensions. And Hellman’s deep involvement with John Melby surely exacerbated ill-feeling. In early 1946, she told Shumlin she could not work with him any longer. Lacking trust in any other partner, she asked Kermit Bloomgarden to produce the play and decided to direct Another Part of the Forest herself.
She was, by her own account, poor at the job: not adequately clear, impulsive, and often quick to change her mind. She thought she could simply “explain something and that was that.” Her penchant for treating actors as “normal, logical people” backfired when she discovered that people in the theater were neither normal nor logical.53 Remarkably, none of this showed onstage. She received universal accolades for her selection of actors (particularly the young Patricia Neal as the teenaged Regina, and Mildred Dunnock as the mother driven crazy by her husband’s machinations), her staging, and the overall sense of the direction. The play, not a smash hit, nevertheless ran from late November to late April, a respectable five months.
Two themes run through the controversy about Another Part of the Forest, both worth our attention. The wickedness that permeated the play rubbed off on Hellman as a person. Richard Watts, who briefly compared Hellman to Ibsen in terms of plot structure and directness of language, chose on second thought to associate her with Clare Boothe. They shared, Watts thought, a “malice toward the human race … distaste for mankind … venom and their bitterness.”54 Joseph Wood Krutch concurred: “Miss Hellman’s ability to imagine dirty tricks and nasty speeches is unrivaled in the contemporary theater,” he opined. “There can be no question of the theatrical virtuosity which enables her to extract from each all the ugliness it can possibly yield.”55 To some, Hellman became the personification of the evil that she was describing. As Sam Sillen put it in the Daily Worker, a communist newspaper typically sympathetic to the broad outlines of her work, “In the sheer projection of wickedness in human beings, Miss Hellman has no competitors in the American theater.” She had written a play so depraved and mean-spirited that it could not be taken seriously. John Chapman concurred. The theater, he argued, needed “a good stiff dose of pure hellishness. Miss Hellman … is just the girl to give it to us.”56 From then on, Hellman would be identified with the ugliness of her characters, her persona vested with their cruel and malevolent behaviors. The critic Jacob Adler would conclude his assessment of her work a few years later by suggesting that “what sustains her is a concentrated presentation of sheer, almost supernatural evil, to be matched in almost no other modern playwright anywhere.”57
Then, too, Another Part of the Forest offered a view of history with which many (including some of her former friends) disagreed. Based in the South like The Little Foxes, Another Part of the Forest imagined its corrupt protagonists bent on the destruction of a pastoral and paternalistic land that had never existed. Hellman’s South overlooked the legacy of slavery and racism to display a latent admiration for the cultured and gracious lives lived by its ruling elite. In defense of this oversimplified and idyllic South, Hellman took proponents of a new industrialism to task. One sympathetic critic concluded that “Miss Hellman is, among other things, becoming a social historian of provocative gifts.”58 But those less inclined to romanticize the old South could reasonably dissent. The portrait raised questions about Hellman’s identification with the South and led some to wonder if her capacity to draw on a fund of negative materials about that changing region, and even to throw off southern ties in her work, might negate the label of a southern writer in her case.59 Hellman was herself ambivalent on this point. Asked late in life if she considered herself southern, she replied, “Well, I have no right to, because the New York years now far outweigh the Southern years, but I suppose most Southerners, people who grew up in the South, still consider themselves Southern.”60
In the context of the times, Another Part of the Forest, itself seemingly without a relevant politics, created something of a stir. Hellman had followed The Searching Wind—a play that blamed American isolationism for bringing on the Second World War and that advocated collective security in a period of deep suspicions against the Soviet Union—with one that offered yet another dose of criticism. Even as the nation turned to anticommunism and Hellman herself turned away from communist activities, Another Part of the Forest condemned capitalists as unmitigated villains and romanticized traditional community values. In turning the Hubbards into an evil family, wrote a Commonweal reviewer who had also disliked Hellman’s portrayal of the events leading up to World War II, Hellman had drawn a portrait that was “Americanly wrong.”61 Later, other critics would associate these two plays with the kind of simplistic social-realist writing characteristic of the 1930s left, and which Hellman disliked.62
There was the rub. In the postwar period, vast divisions emerged about what was “American” and what was not. As the country settled into the era and its leaders tried to sort out how to live with a Soviet Union perceived as increasingly threatening, Hellman’s views diverged from those of an apprehensive mainstream America. During the Depression thirties, the idea of communism served as a beacon of light to radicals who sought to change the world. As long as the Americans and the Soviets were allied, the light lasted. Then it faded. The brave Soviet citizens who had resisted Hitler during the war years and driven him back remained confined and silenced in a nation desperate to spread Communist influence and ideas over the world. Revelations about Stalin’s atrocities against anybody who threatened his power reached the West. The Soviets were known to be searching for the secret of the Atom bomb, and close to achieving it. A tense and fearful U.S. searched for spies in every nook and cranny. And an aggressive United States Congress attacked those it deemed guilty of spreading un-American ideas. Hellman resisted the onslaught of fear and hostility, clinging, as many did, to the hope that some mechanism for peaceful coexistence could be found, and insisting that the search for enemies within the United States would surely destroy the freedoms its citizens most valued. After Another Part of the Forest, her writing, long in tune with a wartime desire for cohesion, seemed flat and out of harmony, even perilously dangerous. She turned increasingly to contemporary issues and especially to the defense of artistic freedom.
In 1948, Hellman agreed to adapt Norman Mailer’s bestselling novel The Naked and the Dead for the theater, drawn by its critique of conflict within the American military and its dissection of the inner lives of American soldiers. She interrupted her work on the script—as it happened never to resume it—to attend a premiere of The Little Foxes in Belgrade and to write some short pieces on Yugoslavia for the New York Star. Writing in early November 1948 as Henry Wallace was winding up a campaign for the presidency that Harry Truman would win, Hellman took time in these pieces to educate her readers about the recent expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Communist bloc of nations led by the Soviet Union. Tito, who did not believe that the Soviets had sufficiently aided Yugoslav partisans in their wartime struggle, chose to chart his own path toward communism, independent of Soviet influence. This was a conversation that Hellman could have stayed out of. But she chose to enter it on Tito’s side—averring at every opportunity that, although she knew nothing about the quarrel, she was happy to learn that communists sometimes disagreed with each other and insisting that Tito’s strength, candor, and charm would prevent a face-off between them.63
Before she returned to the United States, Hellman stopped in Paris, where she saw Emmanuel Robles’s play Montserrat, a piece that appealed to her so much that she abandoned Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead to adapt it to an American audience. Robles’s play spoke powerfully to one of Hellman’s favorite themes: the price of human liberty. Set in Venezuela in 1812, the plot revolved around the rebellion led by Simon Bolívar. To persuade one man, Montserrat, to speak the secret of Bolívar’s hiding place, a Spanish officer rounds up six innocent Venezuelan villagers (men and women) and tells them they will be shot in an hour if they do not convince Montserrat to reveal the hiding place. Alone with the prisoners, Montserrat listens as each pleads a case. Wives and children will be without support, argue the captives; nursing babies will be motherless; young people at the threshold of life will never contribute their might. Montserrat counters by trying to persuade the six that their individual lives are worth nothing as against the millions for whom Bolívar’s escape will bring liberty. Their sacrifice is for the larger human freedom that Bolívar represents. But the six are not convinced, and each dies pleading with Montserrat to speak. Finally, when the Spanish threaten to round up six more innocents, Montserrat relents. But by now Bolívar has escaped, and in retribution Montserrat is sent to his death.
As she worked at the adaptation—a much harder task than she had imagined—Hellman tinkered with the Robles play, in the process facing some of the moral problems confronting a tense world. She neither drew explicit political lessons nor preached revolt against oppression. And yet the historical moment enveloped the play. With Berlin under blockade for most of the spring and the Chinese communists racing through Beijing and then Nanking toward victory, the world seemed headed for an indefinite conflict. At home, the hunt to identify and curtail communist activity intensified. In March, the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in which Hellman participated endured sharp protests for issuing invitations to “approved” Soviet writers. In June, the attack struck close to home when an FBI report named Hellman’s close friend Dorothy Parker a communist. Could liberty prevail in the face of a large and spreading fear? The noose around communists and fear of them tightened that August when the Russians tested their first atomic weapon.
Kermit Bloomgarden agreed to produce Montserrat, but Hellman chose to direct it herself, her second effort at directing. This time she did not succeed so well. Though critics appreciated Hellman’s usual “sharpness and bite” and praised “the fervor of her hatred for injustice and her belief in man’s right to shape his own destiny,” they missed her usual directness. The production, they agreed, lacked the verve and intensity of her earlier work.64 Hellman stood by her play, though she later confessed that she directed it in “a fumbling, frightened way,” intimidated by the powerful acting of Emlyn Williams.65 It might not have mattered.
The timing of the production was all wrong, and to make matters worse, just a few days after Montserrat opened, Marc Blitzstein’s Regina, an operatic adaptation of The Little Foxes, hit the boards. Except for insisting that the story line of the opera remain faithful to her original play, Hellman pretty much stayed out of the work on Regina. Blitzstein, an old friend, took the opportunity to blunt the edges of The Little Foxes by creating a chorus of black folk whose musical instruments and voices underlined the play’s antiracist themes and suggested that a new day was coming. With Blitzstein already identified as a communist, critics took aim at both message and music. Inevitably, musical and play together opened up questions about just what political side Hellman was on.
As if to avoid the taint of writing political plays, and in the midst of the spreading attacks against communism, Hellman turned in the spring of 1951 to The Autumn Garden, a play she sometimes described as her favorite. Shunning the overtly political, she avoided the carefully constructed plots that had sustained her for many years. She turned, instead, to Chekhov, whose plays she much admired and whose letters she had begun to assemble in preparation for a book. For a setting, she provided a summer guest house on the Gulf Coast near New Orleans, run by a refined, down-on-her-fortune woman. There she brought together ten middle-aged people for their annual summer holidays. These were characters, as a Commonweal reviewer put it, trapped “in the half life they have been living while waiting for the full life” of a dream that would never come to be.66 The play, Chekhovian in the sense that it portrays the illusion of hope and promise that fuels human activity—and records the ultimate futility of the human condition—ends in predictable stalemate. Neither particularly unpleasant nor evil, each character learns, in the weeks they are all together, just how little he or she has taken hold of life. All of them return to the separate locations from which they came neither better nor worse than when the summer began. As the play ends, we know that they will return home unable and unwilling to salvage meaningless lives.
The sense of despondency that infused The Autumn Garden captured Hellman’s frustration with a nation caught in the vise of its own fear. One by one, she took to task each of her characters for their lack of courage, their aimlessness. Collectively the players created an allegory for America. Middle-aged, self-absorbed, and unable to see purpose in their lives, the summer visitors passed through their experiences unwilling to do more than acknowledge their gloomy circumstances. America, Hellman seemed to be saying, had abandoned faith in change and progress.
Critics tended to see something else. To them, the world of the fifties called for an aggressive commitment to secure the prosperity and might of a newly powerful United States. They responded to The Autumn Garden by rising to the defense of the America they loved. Hellman takes on “the South as her pet whipping boy,” wrote one critic, who added, “We think Miss Hellman might do well to pay a visit to the new South which boasts a good many happy, prosperous and moral people.”67 Another dismissed the play as the work of “an undefeated and untied misanthrope.”68Still a third took her to task for failing in her political loyalties. The Autumn Garden, wrote Christian Science Monitor reviewer John Beaufort, is “an unfairly slanted representation of American life.” If produced abroad, he continued, “it may handily serve the Kremlin’s determined campaign to convince Europe that life in the United States is preponderantly decadent.”69 Beaufort went on to lecture Hellman on her responsibilities as a citizen of a free democracy: “Aware that the drama can be a powerful weapon in the war of ideas, playwrights who enjoy the freedoms of a democracy may usefully reflect to what extent they intend contributing to Moscow’s propaganda arsenal.”
So off-target were the reviews that Harold Clurman, who directed it, intervened in the debate about it. Undoubtedly urged on by Hellman, he wrote a piece in which he defended The Autumn Garden as a quintessential moral statement. The play, he argued, expressed Hellman’s critical feelings about “most of us of the educated near-upper class. We are earnest, we yearn, but we are not serious, we have no clear purpose. We have no binding commitments to ourselves or to others; we are attached to nothing. We allow ourselves to be deviated because we do not know exactly where we want to go.”70 To no avail: it was the political, not the moral, lessons of Hellman’s work to which critics turned in the fifties.
Hellman, tuned in to the politics of the moment, understood the criticism of The Autumn Garden as part of a climate of fear intended to discipline artists. This was a period in which rhetoric against the communist threat reached fever pitch; anticommunist campaigns, fraught with accusations of disloyalty, filled with hyperbole and outright lies, carried the threat of job loss and perhaps even death. The resulting anxiety led individuals who had (and had not) been close to the Communist Party, or in it, to distance themselves from former friends and from causes associated with sympathy for the Soviet Union. An atmosphere of fear and apprehension effectively curtailed the civil liberties of Americans, constraining freedom of spirit and of mind. In this topsy-turvy world, dissent was unpatriotic, refusing to betray one’s friends was tantamount to admission of communist affiliation, and calls for “peaceful coexistence” (which Hellman supported in The Searching Wind and again at the 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace) became declarations of Soviet sympathy. In a world painted in black and white, in which one form of government protected liberty while the other thrived on despotism, there was no room for compromise. If you were for liberty you must be an anticommunist; even mild criticism of capitalism signaled advocacy of communist slavery. Hellman, who never accepted this dichotomy, watched in horror as patterns of fear began to overwhelm the work of once-brave artists.
In the several lectures and talks that she delivered to young people during the early 1950s, as socialist ideas came to be perceived as unpatriotic and attacks against the Soviet Union escalated, she repeatedly noted that playwrights wrote in the light of “the social and economic forces of their day.”71 To hammer home her point, she returned to her own roots as a child and as a creature of a particular historical moment: “My generation,” she would begin, and then go on to describe values inspired by FDR’s humane efforts to deal with poverty, unemployment, and insecurity. She urged her students not to be silenced, and puzzled over how many musical comedies in contrast to serious dramas were produced in the early 1950s, when life was “hard and insecure and frightening.” Surely, she thought, this was because “any play that comes along to show life as such makes people more uncomfortable and more unhappy.”72 Fear, she thought, was the real enemy of the writer. Addressing a group of students at Swarthmore College in April 1950, she told them that “because of the political and moral and ethical forces that surround us, we have entered an age in which it is becoming downright dangerous not to conform.” She continued her warning, telling the students that “we are—or are being unnaturally made into—a fearful people, and fearful people will stand for very little deviation.”73 She repeated this theme in and around the time of her own 1952 HUAC testimony and the Hollywood blacklist, as she tried to alert students to the debilitating consequences of the silences induced by “fear of other countries, fear of ourselves and our neighbors, and the discomforts and shame that come with fears and the displacement of ordinary middle-class values.”74 This, she scrawled in a lecture note to herself, was “not first time fear has led to persecution and injustice.” But now fear was “leading to thought control.”75
We can watch Hellman squirm (along with many others of her generation) as her plays were increasingly viewed through anticommunist lenses and the shadow of Joe McCarthy hung ominously over the entertainment community and the intellectual world. She was caught now in a moral dilemma fostered by a political witch hunt. What seemed to Hellman to be issues of good and evil or right and wrong appeared to audiences and critics to be political rather than moral statements. Hellman understood the dilemma and chose her stance. If she ceased to be an out-spoken advocate of communism, she would nevertheless continue to vigorously oppose the anticommunist crusade. She would acknowledge the temper of the times without succumbing to it. She continued to defend The Little Foxes as satire, for example, but she refused to revive it in the decade of the fifties for fear that the “warm acceptance” it received in 1939 would not be repeated. American society in the fifties, she told a group of students at the end of the decade, preferred a “gentle picture of itself, togetherness and goodness, normality or decency.” This was not her picture of America at the time, but it influenced the acceptance of her work. She consoled herself by adding that even if the reception of a play changed, “the worth of a play is not altered by time.”76
She chose, in that difficult historical moment, to focus on the theme of justice she had captured in The Children’s Hour, hoping that in bringing it back to the stage, she could call attention to the larger consequences of unthinking acquiescence to an age of lies. With Kermit Bloomgarden’s help, The Children’s Hour opened once again on December 18, 1952, for a successful six-month run. Hellman cast Pat Neal in one of the starring roles and for the last time directed it. Audiences responded well, though, and once again critics chose to find in it a political message that they immediately skewered. The play, wrote Eric Bentley, “has nothing directly to do with communism, but it was written in the thirties, and is the product of the dubious idealism of that time.”77 Cleverly, Bentley turned the accusation of lesbianism leveled at the teachers into an allegory for communism. “Suppose it had been about teachers accused of communism,” he wrote, “that for two acts we had been asked to boil with indignation at the wrongness of the accusation, only to find towards the close of act three that one of the pair did harbor communist sympathies?” In his view, Hellman could not escape the conclusion. “Is it not in politics rather than the theatre that we have witnessed this drama before?” he asked with a flourish.
Hellman would not be silenced. Between 1949 and the end of 1956, at the height of the Cold War and in the midst of the frenzy of McCarthyism, she mounted one original play (The Autumn Garden) and three stage adaptations (Emmanuel Robles’s Montserrat, Jean Anouilh’s The Lark, and Voltaire’s Candide). Consistently she described her efforts as reaching for moral rather than political truths. Appreciative audiences certainly understood them that way. Montserrat asks about the value of human life in the context of a larger struggle for liberty; The Autumn Garden explores the futility of trying to change oneself or the world. Candide satirizes the assumption that we can ever imagine, much less create, a world without pain. The Lark, from 1955 and based on the life of Joan of Arc, suggests willingness to sacrifice the corporeal body in order to save the soul. Each speaks in the political-moral voice that had by now become her trademark. But in a world where moral debates seemed to harbor embedded political dangers, Hellman’s voice remained suspect.
The Lark carried the additional weight of taking a position on women’s issues. For Hellman, its appeal lay in a heroine whose martyrdom symbolically evoked women’s fate. The United States, just out of a war in which it called on women to sacrifice for their country, asked them, at war’s end, to leave their jobs and return to their homes. Hellman, who played a role in efforts to involve women in the war effort, ignored the injunction to women to return home. She saw Joan as “history’s first modern career girl, wise, unattractive in what she knew about the handling of men, straight out of a woman’s magazine.”78 The portrait she drew of Joan—which, as we shall see later, got her into some trouble with the original playwright, Jean Anouilh—centered on her womanly leadership. “It has remained for a woman dramatist to give us the first really tough minded Joan of Arc,” wrote one critic. “I have a strong suspicion that a great deal of the biting briskness, the cleaver-sharp determination, the haughty and hard-headed candor of this Joan comes from the pen of the lady.”79
Hellman turned to editing the letters of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, perhaps because he most closely reflected her thinking at the time. She started to work on this volume as early as January 1950, and the notes in her files suggest that she saw in Chekhov both a reflection of herself and an allusion to her own time. She described him as a writer with whom she would not only have liked to share a dinner, but one with whose family she would have enjoyed spending a summer. She thought him “a pleasant man … witty and wise and tolerant and kind.”80 She admired his optimism, his warmth and gaiety; she appreciated his desire to surround himself with friends and to open his house to them. She wrote admiringly: “He was intelligent, he believed in intelligence, and intelligence for Chekhov meant that you called a spade a spade: laziness was simply not working; too much drink was drunkenness; whoring had nothing to do with love; health was when you felt good and brocaded words could not cover emptiness or pretensions or waste.”81
More poignantly, Hellman seems to have imagined herself in a parallel moment in time: a moment when the demeanor and stance of intellectuals had become unclear. She describes Chekhov as living in a place where “the scenery had gone hog wild,” where “men lay preaching gibberish to each other in the mud” or “screamed men down in Moscow and St. Petersburg with anti-Orthodox reason that sounded very like Orthodox prayers.”82 Under these circumstances, she admired his ability to keep his head, to act on principle. Despite the chaos, she thought of Chekhov as “a man of sense, of common sense,” as someone who “tried to see things as they were and to deal with them as he saw them.”83
The words capture an aching sense of how she wished intellectuals might behave in her own time. In her notes, she commented that Chekhov “was not a political man, or a radical,” but he was “a social man, and a deeply responsible one.”84 Though his friends took more active revolutionary roles than he did, she cautioned that judgment “depends on where you’re standing. For our conservative, frightened days, he did remarkable and daring things.” He visited a prison camp in Siberia; sheltered Gorky, who was then under police surveillance; broke with his best friend over the Dreyfus affair; “and over and over again he gave money and shelter to men of revolutionary activity.” And then the telltale identification: “One has a difficult time today trying to think of writers who would do any one of these dangerous deeds, and who would not be considered dangerous by doing so.” Here was the pain at the betrayals, the anger at the weak-minded, the longing for support that she did not again articulate until she wrote about her Cold War experience in Scoundrel Time.
Hellman’s struggles tell us something about the problem of continuing to write serious plays (or do serious art) in an ideologically divided world. Her 1956 stage adaptation of Voltaire’s Candide is a case in point. Before she took on Candide, she toyed with the idea of adapting Emile Zola’s Germinal to the stage. She was attracted by the story of a failed strike among coal miners in a small French village, and its horrendous consequences in terms of human life and family relationships. In some respects Zola’s chronicling of the effects of capitalism on the family history of the Second French Empire is not dissimilar to Hellman’s much narrower look at the South in the period of Another Part of the Forest. As one critic noted, for the 1950s, Germinal was perhaps too direct a statement about “the conflict between the forces of modern Capitalism and the interests of human beings necessary to its advance.”85
Hellman dropped the idea of Germinal when the rising young composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein agreed to work with her on the more universally critical Candide. The project excited Lillian in a way that nothing had for a while, but ever after she regretted her involvement. A satire on efforts to construct an ideal world and a parody on the folly of optimism in the face of malevolent self-interest, Candide seemed especially germane at the height of the McCarthy period. Hellman at first imagined that Bernstein would do no more than compose incidental and transitional music. But Bernstein had other thoughts. He wanted to write the music for an operetta based on her adaptation, and Hellman wanted so much to please that, for one of the few times in her life, she gave way to every demand to add, reshape, and rewrite the story she had conceived. Unfamiliar with the genre of musical theater and awed by Bernstein’s musical creativity, she responded with unusual alacrity to requests for changes in the script and in the direction of the plot. The process, and the final production, turned into a mess and confused audiences who sat through its three-and-a-half-hour duration.
Voltaire’s bitter satire on optimism—his critique of the possibilities posed by imagining that one lived in the best of all possible worlds, and his insistence that greed and bigotry were part of human character—constituted a perfect foil in an America convinced that its particular view of freedom had no parallel, immersed in the contest to prove capitalism the best possible economic system. Hellman said as much just a few years later when she told an interviewer, “I think this is a great period of self-deception. We’ve wanted to think of ourselves as the best and kindest and most generous and most moral and most middle-class and most split-level and most wall-to-wall-carpeting people that ever existed, and anything that intruded on that tranquil self-regard was castigated or ignored.”86 Hellman’s Candide is the story of a young man, ousted from a home that he imagines the best of all possible places, who sets off on a journey to find the perfect place to live. Alas, there are no perfect worlds, Hellman tells us, insisting that we must turn to our own soil, make the place we live as good as we can. Along the way, the play declared skepticism of faith in any form and repeatedly revealed her disillusionment with 1950s America. Her version revealed the seamy side behind every image of perfection, emphasizing the stupidity, corruption, venality, and ideological blinders that Candide encountered at every turn. In a memorable scene, removed from the final text, Hellman parodied the hearings in which Joseph McCarthy and others were then engaged. “Were you ever,” asked inquisitors dressed like churchmen, “or have you ever been, or intend to be, or once were, or even thought of being a member, participant, or affiliate of any group, bund, klan, club or scout troop that advocated the violent overthrow of the earth’s crust?”87
Though Hellman loved the possibility of enhancing Candide’s satirical thrust by framing it as an operetta from Bernstein’s talented pen, she quickly learned that the music also defused the satire: the show lacked the power that she had written into her treatment. Working on Candide affirmed Hellman’s skepticism about artistic collaboration. Indeed, she came to hold collaboration responsible for undermining the integrity of not only this play but of playwrights in general. Affirming her early convictions about the need to stick to her own instincts, she insisted that collaboration on Candide led to a weak plot structure. John La Touche, the original lyricist, died before he could finish the job. Hellman called on her friends, Dorothy Parker among others, to produce lyrics to accompany the still unfinished score. She herself wrote the lyrics to one tune. But the music, which Hellman had originally imagined as merely interstitial, drove the narrative.
Eager to find a lyricist who could convey her sensibilities, Hellman turned to the poet Richard Wilbur, with whom she worked closely through 1955 and into 1956. It was not enough. Wilbur entered the scene too late to do more than seal the disjunctures exposed by brilliant music that did not carry Hellman’s meaning. Hellman, called on again and again to alter a line or a word in order to meet the musical demand, found herself desperately patching things up. In the end, she believed that “the deep collaboration being practiced today robs a play of individual force. Three or four people cannot collaboratively make a serious piece of writing. There’s no such thing as art by democratic majority.”88 Much later she admitted the pain that she felt at the compromises she made. “It took me a year or two after the failure of Candide to understand that it was truly not my nature, that I must never go through it again.”89
When the operetta opened on December 1, 1956, its satire seemed tame, the story without punch. Candide’s search seemed silly, his optimism unquenchable, his decision to cultivate his own garden conveying defeat rather than the informed engagement that Voltaire advocated and Hellman hoped to capture. Mary McCarthy, then writing theater criticism for the New Republic, called the operetta a failure of nerve in which “anything in the original … that could give offense to anyone has been removed.”90 Hellman might have agreed. Overshadowed by the biting wit of the successful off-Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera that had opened just months before, Candide seemed no more than an evening’s entertainment and not serious theater at all. When Bernstein’s West Side Story opened just a few months later, Candide was eclipsed.
Hellman shifted gears with Toys in the Attic, which opened in February 1960, and to some extent she succeeded. The play returned her to a familiar setting in New Orleans around 1912; this time it echoed her father’s family history. It features two sisters eager to maintain their attachment to a newly married, beloved younger brother who has long been dependent on them but is now on the verge of a shadowy success. Written in a Chekhovian style, it explores the relationships among the three siblings without attributing villainy to any of them. And it offers, unusually for Hellman, compassionate empathy toward those caught in the turmoil of change. Its most famous line has the ring of a universal truth: “I guess most of us make up things we want, don’t get them, and get too old, or too lazy to make up new ones.”91 But in the end Hellman could not resist resolving the action with an act of violence that brought the drama to a head. The play judged by some to be her best—“her first play to combine all her earlier virtues with compassion, truth, detachment, and tremendous dramatic power,” said critic Jacob Adler—was seen by others as mediocre.92 It felt imitative of O’Neill, whose ability to capture irrational family dynamics far exceeded hers. It did not capture the languid feel of the south as Tennessee Williams did, nor its subterranean and sporadic violence. And it was not innovative in the mode of the newly popular Beckett and Pinter. Critics accused her of returning to her melodramatic roots in order to appeal to audiences.
1960: Hellman with Kermit Bloomgarden and Arthur Penn, watching a rehearsal of Toys in the Attic. (Photofest)
Hellman was now in her mid-fifties, talking repeatedly not about her own failures but about the failures of the theater to live up to its promise and her expectations. She turned to a novel by Burt Blechman, which focused on the transformations within the Eastern European Jewish family as it moved into middle-class America. Blechman, whose family had more or less followed this path, captured the movement with sardonic humor and empathetic prose. But Hellman had little insight into that process. She turned her characters into caricatures, each of them a foil for her anger. The weak and distant father, the overconsuming and silly mother, the visionary grandmother, the teenage son who had no spark of purpose in his life—all of them became a mockery of a community striving to become American. The play fell far short of her other work. My Mother, My Father and Me opened on March 23, 1963; it closed after seventeen performances. Hellman blamed a New York newspaper strike and the consequent lack of publicity for its failure. But even sympathetic critics thought otherwise. “Every playwright earns the right to a lapse of the typewriter,” wrote Walter Kerr, who thought the play failed “because she was trying something new.”93 Hellman put down her play-writing pen.
It was not fear but something else that drove Hellman out of the theater. Perhaps it was her slowly increasing sense of marginality as the fifties gave way to the sixties. In 1961, when she was asked to speak about her work or to lecture on theater, she was already saying that “the drama as such is not truly my subject.”94 She would repeat that refrain on many lecture platforms, sometimes expanding it to insist that she had always felt uncomfortable in the theater, or, “I don’t think my nature ever fit too well with it.” Occasionally she would respond to questions about drama with “That’s not my subject but that won’t stop me from speaking.”95 There was a wall between her and the theater, she told one interviewer, “which has always been there, which I cannot explain and which has widened with time.” It’s a nice world, “full of charming and gay and witty and generous people,” she continued, “but like all small worlds, it’s a very small one, and it’s a vain one.”96 She had felt this for many years, aligning herself with Chekhov in that respect. She had, after all, written about him that he had no illusions about the theater, and “neither did Shaw or Ibsen—no sentimental stuff about its glamour.”97
Then there was the question of money. She believed that the commercial theater had pushed writers to orient their work toward subjects that promised high earnings. The 1960s emphasis on “aloneness,” was, she thought, “the surest buck of all.”98 After Watch on the Rhine, she would say, “the theatre, like the rest of the country, became expensive, earnest and conservative.” She came to believe that to meet the needs of the commercial theater, the writer had to sacrifice too much. “It’s a case of wanting, at the same time, a large sounding thing called integrity, and a large amount of money,” she told an interviewer. “Sometimes they go together, thank God, but sometimes they don’t.”99 She blamed the endemic problem of resources, not her own pen, for the final failure of MyMother, My Father and Me. It was a good play, she thought, that ultimately might have found its audience had not a New York newspaper strike kept the play in Boston until the producers ran out of money. This was a line that she continued to tout: “I left the theatre,” she told an interviewer, “because the fun ran out and the raw-money stuff came in.”100 The Broadway audience today, she added at another point, “is mainly an expense account audience for something somebody tells them is stylish. There’s very little place for straight drama now, very few of them can succeed, and then it’s make it fast or fail overnight.”101
Hellman never attributed her success in the theater, or her withdrawal from it, to her position as a woman in a man’s world. She refused to imagine that she had made it in the theater either because of or despite her sex. And yet her success, along with the negative commentary that followed her, depended in part on her willingness, as a woman, to express her anger, throw tantrums, use forceful language, eschew sentimentality. The sense that she was being treated as a woman—her work measured by its author’s gender as much as her skill—could not have escaped Hellman, yet she would not acknowledge that she had ever been subject to discrimination. Nor did she concede that being a woman who wrote for the theater posed any particular structural difficulties. While other female playwrights, in the thirties and later, cited the demands of family and children as hindrances, and some spoke wistfully of needing to choose between love and writing, Hellman publicly proclaimed the theater to be fair to women.102 Asked why there had been so few women playwrights, she replied, “I just don’t know … I don’t know since women make quite good writers in other fields and certainly write a great deal in other fields. There’s certainly no barrier to women in the theater.”103
But the principal source of Hellman’s alienation from the theater surely arose from a change in the subject matter and staging of plays. Fifties audiences turned away from the sometimes painful realism of the first half of the century to embrace more abstract approaches that explored the human condition. By the sixties, she declared “a sense of sadness about my not understanding the theatre anymore.” She could not shake the conviction that drama was no longer directed at saying what was “right.” Rather, she thought that writers had turned toward two themes for which she had little but contempt: aloneness and love. “The great answer of our time,” she said of these words dismissively. “The idiot word nobody bothers to define.” She thought they came straight out of “ten-cent store Freud” and laughed that “the discovery that all of us are, finally, alone, must have been made by the first ape as he stood up to look over his shoulder.”104
Hellman’s style of playwriting, as she was the first to acknowledge, had passed by. “Ibsen goes and Ionesco comes. Ionesco goes and Ibsen returns,” she wrote somewhat cynically, at the same time admiring the work of Brecht, Beckett, and Harold Pinter, who held the day with their disorderly social commentary, their refusal to plot.105 She was, she tells us, “caught between a so-called realistic theater and a so-called new theater coming after the Second World War, the theater of the absurd, the theater of the imagination, whatever words one has for it.”106 After seeing Beckett’s Endgame, she reported that “The play is too consciously odd for me.” But then she added that it had qualities she admired: “it was sharp, and hard-hitting, and funny, and gay.”107 By comparison, Hellman’s work, as critic Jacob Adler concluded, seemed “too limited in theme and attitude for general or permanent value.”108 She lacked Arthur Miller’s capacity to place contemporary disagreements in a universal context, or to adapt the social-realist vocabulary to a looser and less didactic frame.
The well-made play had gone out of fashion, become a phrase of disparagement. If such plays had earlier attracted a modicum of respect, as Ibsen’s did, for example, to describe a play as well-made in the sixties bordered on insult, implying the limited competence of its author, a lack of creativity. “In our new state of mind,” wrote critic Walter Kerr, who admired Hellman enormously, “we distrust what is orderly because we are now sharply aware that in everything ordered there is something extremely arbitrary. To have an order of any kind—political, religious, social, domestic—some of the things embraced must be arbitrarily embraced, whether they quite suit us or not.”109 Kerr offered a laudatory assessment of a 1967 revival of The Little Foxes, arguing that it “reminded us very, very clearly of what it was like to have material fully organized for us. Miss Hellman had known exactly what she was doing every step of the way as she slipped into place just those character traits, just those lines, just those decisive gestures that would build a trim dramatic house.” But even as Kerr wrote in 1968, he understood that those days were gone.
So did Hellman. At the invitation of the organizers, she went to Edinburgh in 1963 to participate in a four-day conference on the state of drama. One boring afternoon she encountered Mary McCarthy returning from a session, and, as if foreseeing the future, begged her agent to find a way “to relieve her from the stunning smile of Miss McCarthy.” Returning to New York, she wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books tellingly called “Scotch on the Rocks” in which she let out her feelings not only about the conference but about the state of the theater. The conference itself was “timid and dull,” she wrote: “People who might have talked seriously among themselves” played to the cameras.110 Others spent time explaining themselves—an exercise she thought pretty useless. Finally, she concluded with a stab at “that fashionable disease which caused the conference to come out in a rash—the need of the well established to be anti-established, the belief that to question the work of the avant garde is to be square … I think the same thing has become true of the theater as in painting—the avant garde has met and embraced the Establishment. Now it’s all just fashions.”111
But if Hellman recognized that something new was happening in the theater, she did not know how to address it. Instead, in the changing political climate of the 1960s, she found new audiences and new popularity among young people committed to challenging authority, supporting civil rights for African-Americans, and opposing an escalating war in Vietnam. In 1967, Mike Nichols undertook a major new production of The Little Foxes that burnished Hellman’s reputation and revivified her image. But the production regenerated questions of art and politics. This time the attack came from some of Hellman’s former friends in New York literary circles and signaled a reignited warfare between left-wing anticommunists and the remnants of the old left.
Elizabeth Hardwick, once close to Hellman and herself a southerner, led the charge, condemning Hellman for failing to do justice to the complicated questions of who might benefit from industrializing the South. This, wrote Hardwick, “is an idea of great interest, and in Lillian Hellman’s failure to do justice to its complications so much about our theater and our left-wing popular writers of the Thirties is revealed.” Hardwick then went on to damn Hellman’s plays in general. They included lines reminiscent of popular movies written by leftists of the thirties and designed to articulate the author’s political beliefs rather than illuminate difficult issues. They resorted to a “craftsmanship of climaxes and curtain lines and discoveries” designed to ensure commercial success rather than intellectual profit. In a ringing conclusion, Hardwick condemned Hellman for squeezing her characters to death between “the iron of an American version of Socialist Realism and the gold of a reigning commercialism.”112 A flurry of accusations and denials about the personal nature of the argument ensued. But Hardwick’s dagger struck deep, damaging Hellman’s reputation as a writer with something serious to say. In the world of the literati, a wounded Hellman appeared as merely middlebrow—a woman with a “torn spirit” who vacillated between “the bright stuffs of expensive productions and the hair-shirt of didacticism.”113