A Difficult Woman (33 page)

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
My
Mother, 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