Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels - Hardcover

Martinson, Deborah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582433151 ISBN 13: 9781582433158

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2005

Synopsis

Presents the first biography of the playwright written with the full cooperation of her family, friends, and inner circle, and discusses the life and career of the controversial writer.

About this title

About the Author:

Deborah Martinson is an associate professor and Chair of English Writing at Occidental College. She is the author of In the Presence of Audience: The Self in Diaries and Fiction. In 1999 she was researcher for the PBS biography "The Lives of Lillian Hellman," directed by Phillip Schopper. Martinson lives in Burbank, California.

From The Washington Post:

"Miss Hell" was the shorthand moniker given to Lillian Hellman during a 1944 tour of the Soviet Union. Let's presume her guide meant it as an endearment, but wouldn't it have made a fine title for Deborah Martinson's biography? Giving hell was, after all, Hellman's raison d'etre and maybe her primary source of income. As playwright and memoirist, activist and polemicist, she specialized in unbridled outrage. You can see it in Irving Penn's postwar photograph of her: the basilisk eye and the bellicose chin. It's the melodrama of conviction, inseparable from the melodrama of her work.

"There is something about Lillian Hellman," one observer said, "that makes many men, and some women, want to throw whisky at her." Or worse. That little trip to Russia ultimately led to Hellman's being summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee, then at the height of its witch-hunting glory. Many of us can recite from memory her defiant words: "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." It comes as a surprise, then, to learn she didn't actually speak those words. They were part of a letter she had already written to the committee's chair, and they were read out loud by HUAC counsel. It's startling, too, to find her Zolaesque cry undercut by a mollifying clause: "I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group."

"Not a political person"? Who was she kidding? Scanning her statement, we find still more anomalies: a professed puzzlement with constitutional law, wheedling allusions to "old-fashioned American tradition" and "ideals of Christian honor," strange in a New Orleans-born Jew who had little use for tradition or religion. None of this ex post facto parsing is meant to deny Hellman her fortitude in refusing to name names. It's only to suggest there were more cracks in the monolith of her righteousness than she ever cared to admit.

Exploring these fissures was altogether dangerous work while Hellman was alive. Those biographers who actually met her, especially in her winter years, when she was savaging nurses and screaming at lawyers, tend to spit her vitriol back at her. Deborah Martinson has the advantage not just of distance but of access: Hellman's executors gave her free run of the lioness's den, and while her findings don't quite soften Hellman's edges -- what could? -- they complicate her in useful ways.

Useful, that is, because each of her biographers must, at some cost of titillation, confront Hellman's libido. Like George Sand, she understood that a homely face need not bar a woman from Eros's gates. "Whether drinking scotch neat out of wine glasses or showing her profile with her cigarette prop, she presented her sexuality as a force," Martinson writes. "She acted and moved like she was a sexy woman, and so she was." Norman Mailer remembers her flashing him "a truly formidable bare breast," and while he declined the invitation, plenty of others accepted, chief among them a detective-story writer named Dashiell Hammett, who met her in 1930 at a Hollywood Boulevard grill and, without much effort, seduced her away from her first (and only) husband.

To call Hammett the love of her life is to challenge the very idea of "love." He drank the way the rest of us breathe. He squandered money, patronized whores, contracted STDs, carefully informed Hellman of his many conquests (she was a match for him) and on at least one occasion socked her. "That she hated him at times, left him often, and loved others with great passion," writes Martinson, "is beyond dispute." Equally indisputable: He was her most invaluable mentor, patiently guiding her through multiple drafts of her succès de scandale "The Children's Hour," as well as such later hits as "The Little Foxes" and "Watch on the Rhine."

In the way of lovers, Hammett brought out all Hellman's contradictions: her bohemian domesticity, her gorgonish sensuality, her serious wit. These polarities make an already full life seem even fuller, and we can understand why Martinson, a professor at Occidental College, should devote so many years of research to it. What won't pass is Martinson's gratingly clumsy and numbingly repetitive prose. Sentence after memory-dumped sentence is strung together with no concern for flow or consistency. Anecdotes lie flat on the page, modifiers are dangled, syntax mangled, names misspelled, facts botched. (For example, the "blonde bombshell" star of "Hell's Angels" was not Mae West (!) but Jean Harlow.) Most irritating of all, the author insists on including quotes without attribution, forcing you to burrow through her voluminous footnotes to find the speakers in question.

No one, at least, can deny Martinson's work ethic. She has covered Hellman from sunup to sundown, mapping her interactions with virtually every public figure of the 20th century: Janet Flanner, Jane Fonda and everyone in between. She has provided sympathetic, if orthodox, takes on Hellman's work (reserving a special place of honor for the little-known Chekhovian play "The Autumn Garden"). She has shown, too, how this work was inflected, and sometimes infected, by Hellman's politics. And so, from this welter of raw material, we do finally get the chance to assess Hellman's achievement. We can see now that her activism consisted mainly of forming committees and then more committees. (The suggestion that she helped bring down Nixon is pure grandiosity.) As a public intellectual, she was more public than intellectual: appallingly slow, like many of her peers on the left, to acknowledge the horrors of Stalinism and less interested in the Soviet people's martyrdom than her own.

Only through her art does she still command our attention, though it's become fashionable to sneer at her sturdily built dramas. Her most enduring, and most fraught, accomplishment was to midwife the modern-day memoir. In An Unfinished Woman, Scoundrel Time and Pentimento (her best, most polished work), Hellman very deliberately applied the techniques of fiction to the tangled events of her past. They were, as Martinson writes, "a new form of memoir" founded on the principle that "memory creates every person's myths of life." Hellman's myths didn't always stack up so well. She was bad with dates, and her embroidery often tipped into invention. It now seems incontestable that the "Julia" of Pentimento (later immortalized by Vanessa Redgrave in the movie) was based on a woman Hellman didn't even know -- a woman who, unlike Julia, survived to write a memoir of her own.

Incidents like these inspired the literary sniper Mary McCarthy to deliver her famous 1979 takedown of Hellman on "The Dick Cavett Show": "Every word she writes is a lie," McCarthy declared, "including 'a' and 'the.' " Hellman immediately sued but succeeded only in extending McCarthy's gibe beyond the span of both women's lives. I'm not sure the accusation would have galled so much or stuck so long if Hellman hadn't made such a peep show of her own integrity. I well remember the red carpet of piety she laid out for herself at the 1978 Academy Awards, disparaging the studio chiefs who had "confronted the wild charges of Joe McCarthy with the force and courage of a bowl of mashed potatoes." And boy, did she make a meal of those potatoes. "Forgiveness is God's job," she once told Dalton Trumbo, "not mine." Trumbo, a blacklisted screenwriter who had suffered far worse privations than Hellman, answered: "Well, so is vengeance, you know."

She would have done well to take that to heart, but she was busy dragging Mary McCarthy to court, warring with the Trillings and, decades after the fact, denouncing friendly witnesses -- denying them all the license she had granted herself in her memoirs: the freedom to be fallible, conflicted, plain wrong. Human.

Reviewed by Louis Bayard
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1582433151
• ISBN 13: 9781582433158
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480