Lillian Hellman: Life

by William Wright

Vintage biography

480 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published March 12, 1988

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

This is William Wright (1930-2016).

Reviews

[Tom Schulte · Rating 3 out of 5]

Remember Lillian Hellman shilling for mink coats? Well, that was not her only controversy.

There was controversy over her play play The Children's Hour, which was unfairly passed over for accolade due to slight homosexual content. The play was in serious consideration for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for 1934–35. The award was presented instead to Zoë Akins' play The Old Maid. Accused of rejecting Hellman's play because of its controversial subject—one of the Pulitzer judges had refused to see it. Angered by the Pulitzer Prize decision, the New York Drama Critics' Circle began awarding its own annual prize for drama the following year, indignant over the injustice to Hellman's play and to the implication of artistic censorship. Members of the circle made no secret that their motive was to protest the outdated standards of the Pulitzer judges and to establish awards based on more enlightened criteria

My draw to the biography was because of "Commies!" Hellman was active in her support of Stalin, the USSR, and communism and general. She found a fellow traveler in Dashiell Hammett.

On several occasions Faulkner spoke to the press of his dislike of "literary circles" and told one reporter he "never associated with other writers." It was not the only instance of Faulkner's striking a pose. The fact is, he spent many long evenings with Hellman and Hammett-just the three of them sitting up all night talking and drinking. Faulkner was intrigued by Hammett, recognizing at once his unaffected honesty. He also identified with Hammett's roustabout background and especially envied his years as a Pinkerton agent. One area of potential discord was politics. Hammett was then beginning his long involvement with Marxism. Although his opinions were unformulated and unorthodox, they were sufficiently communistic to upset Faulkner, who abhorred any form of radicalism.

Hammett's influence by transference went possibly even into co-writing Hellman's best output, it seems.

former self, became a model of purposefulness and decisiveness. Although the purposes and decisions were markedly colored by Hammett's own, they were still hers. Hammett was genuinely fascinated by the person he saw behind the confusions and contradictions of Hellman. Energized by his love for her, he set to work to bring that person into being. Hammett is frequently given credit for Hellman's emergence as a playwright-which is certainly true, but not in the collaborative way that is often implied; his contribution was far broader. He was a collaborator in the creation not so much of the plays as of Lillian Hellman herself.

Hellman wrote a famous letter to HUAC where before testifying she tried unsuccessfully to negotiate away any obligation to speak about others.

I am prepared to waive the privilege against self-incrimination and to tell you anything you wish to know about my views or actions if your Committee will agree to refrain from asking me to name other people. If the Committee is un-willing to give me this assurance, I will be forced to plead the privilege of the Fifth Amendment at the hearing.
[...]
The committee's response was terse. It would not enter into negotiations with witnesses about what they would and would not testify to.

There is a subtlety to the Fifth Amendment that lay behind this exchange and determined Hellman's eventual course-as it did for many other witnesses. Once you have answered a question that could in any way be considered incriminating, you have waived your right to plead the Fifth Amendment on lesser matters relating to this admission. That is, if you admitted to having been a communist, which was a crime at that time, you couldn't then plead the Fifth when asked the names of other communists you might have known. The Fifth Amendment protects against self-incrimination, not against incriminating others. The Supreme Court had not yet ruled on the constitutionality of the Smith Act and was vague about what was "incriminating." So witnesses before HUAC had to walk gingerly around any questions that could be so construed, even about actions they didn't mind admitting to, if they wanted to keep the Fifth Amendment in their arsenal.

It appears along the way in a fierce life, she felt obligated to lean into mendacity. In 1962, Signoret translated Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes into French for a production in Paris that ran for six months. Hellman in print lied saying earlier than the day before opening night she raised questions, wanting changes. But, she wasn't there or communicating until opening night.

Then, she made false promises to Hammett's daughters on their father's literary estate.

In order to buy the rights, Hellman still had to obtain written consent from Hammett's daughters. She wrote them several letters, persuading them of the wisdom of her offer. Her main argument was that if they were to retain the rights, they would be liable for their father's considerable debts. This was not true, as the Government had acquiesced to the sale of the rights in order to close the Hammett account.

She was also apparently just generally disagreeable to work with.

Dorothy Samuels, while admiring Hellman, found her an extremely difficult boss. "She was always making dramas out of nothing. She would take things people had said and twist them around until they became dramas of some sort. Orville Schell finally resigned as her co-chairman. He couldn't take the bickering that Lillian thrived on. She got very down on Ray Calamaro, an executive director who preceded me. She was so nasty to him, we all thought he must have turned her down. Whatever it was that set her against him, he finally quit and went to work at the Justice Department.

It is interesting how from the radical left perspective, she cast Nixon as an outcome of McCarthyist anti-Communism.

...accusing the intellectuals of failing to speak out against McCarthy, she wrote: "None of them, as far as I know, has yet found it a part of conscience to admit their Cold War anti-Communism was perverted, possibly against their wishes, into the Vietnam War and then into the reign of Nixon, their unwanted but inevitable leader."

Also, interesting to me is the description of an "anticommunist left".

... the man who saved Hellman at the time of her HUAC ordeal was Joe Rauh, a pillar of the anticommunist left, of which she and Garry Wills are so scornful. (Rauh himself says, "Not just me, everybody who helped her, Abe Fortas, Stanley Isaacs-we were all of the anticommunist left.") Howe had numerous other complaints, and he ended his piece with an answer to one of Hellman's main Scoundrel Time themes: while having been mistaken in "taking too long to see what was going on in the Soviet Union, I do not believe we did our country any harm" (and the McCarthyites did). Howe wrote:

DEAR LILLIAN HELLMAN,

You could not be more mistaken. Those who supported Stalinism and its political enterprises, either here or abroad, helped befoul the cultural atmosphere, helped bring totalitarian methods into trade unions, helped perpetrate one of the great lies of the century, helped destroy whatever possibilities there might have been for a resurgence of serious radicalism in America. Isn't that harm enough?

Hellman appears to have long held Stalin in high regard.
"...Hellman was a systematic supporter of Stalinism, in spite of its mass horrors, for many, many years, and a savage critic of American liberals who opposed both McCarthy and American communists..."

The mendacity, false history had one of its peak expressions in the film Julia (1977) .