A Difficult Woman (49 page)

Hellman surely relived the experiences of the early fifties when she watched her friends choose how to behave under pressure of investigation. But the Kuznetsov episode reminded others more of 1938, when she had rationalized her support for what she should have seen as an evil regime. In attacking Kuznetsov for cowardice, she seemed to expose her own hypocrisy. Commentaries in the
New Yorker
and
Time
magazine noted that Hellman was “scarcely in a position to demand that a Soviet writer risk his liberty and perhaps his life, by making open protests on Soviet soil.”
²⁶
Hellman angrily accused William Shawn, editor of the
New Yorker
, of “misinterpretation presented under the covering banner of ‘fact.' “
²⁷
Her agent, Robby Lantz, objected that
Time
had returned to “the old pastime of witch-hunting and red-baiting.”
²⁸
And yet Hellman resisted the notion that her piece in any way defended the Soviet Union. “I didn't mean to ‘champion the USSR' or anything else,” she wrote to a sympathetic correspondent. “I meant only that I didn't like what Mr. Kuznetsov had to say about his friends.”
²⁹

For all of the renewed attention, Hellman remained in the late sixties unsure of how to situate herself. Her friend Anne Peretz and Catherine Kober Zeller both remember her as mildly depressed, though she continued to teach regularly and to lecture widely.
³⁰
Her plays and the film versions of
The Little Foxes
and
The Children's Hour
received renewed attention. But she was a playwright whose time had passed. She knew, she would say later, that she didn't want to write any more plays, but she also knew that she “wanted to go on being a writer … I had to find some other form to write in.”
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That form turned out to be the memoir.

In 1966, she persuaded Bennett Cerf (Hammett's old editor at Random House) to publish a collection of Hammett's fiction for which she would write an introduction. The effort proved transformative. Hellman refused the temptation to write biographically about her “closest … most beloved friend,” trying instead to capture some of the feeling of the man she had both loved and fought with for “thirty-one on and off years.”
³²
Moving from memory to memory, she produced a remarkable essay infused with love and affection, with pride in Hammett's idiosyncrasies, and with pleasure at her own capacity to cope with them. But it was an essay that, critics argued, placed her too centrally in Hammett's life and claimed too much for the importance of their relationship. It revealed
more about her than about him. The piece proved to be a model for the memoirs to which she would soon turn.

Hellman came reluctantly, and with great insecurity, to the idea of writing a memoir. She didn't like the idea of writing about herself; she feared writing about others. Besides, she didn't know who might publish it. Relationships had soured with Random House, which had put most of her plays into print, and she wasn't getting along with Alfred Knopf over the Hammett stories. Stanley Hart, an editor at Little, Brown, was at the time actively pursuing her. But she was uncomfortable. That company had, in 1951, parted with Angus Cameron, then a young editor of left-wing proclivities. It had also, unforgivably, apologized for publishing politically “dangerous” authors and named Lillian Hellman among them. Cameron recalled that Hellman came to him before she signed with Little, Brown and the two agreed that “it was many years ago and people are all different there.”
³³
After she overcame her doubts and signed the book up, Hellman worried that she “wouldn't like it when I finished it,” and insisted on a clause that allowed her to return the advance without penalty if she didn't like the final product.
³⁴
Even after she sent the manuscript in, she lingered over the details. William Abrahams, who served as her editor and became her friend, was in near despair at the end. “Lillian telephoned to say that she was uncertain about one passage,” he wrote to his boss. She wanted lawyers to check whether the words in a particular film had been spoken by actors or written as subtitles. Abrahams thought she had “a case of jitters brought on by giving up the manuscript to the printer.”
³⁵

The final product,
An Unfinished Woman
, proved to be an intriguing mix of incisive commentary on herself and others punctuated by reflective and emotive anecdotes. About one third of it is a roughly chronological account of her growing-up years. Another chunk replicates heavily edited diary entries of her trips to Spain in 1937 and to Moscow in 1944–45. The rest consists of three character sketches. “Hammett” reproduces much of her introduction to
The Big Knockover.
“Dorothy Parker” depicts the “tangled fishnet of contradictions” that represented her own sense of herself. The final story, of her longtime housekeeper Helen, is, in the words of one critic, “a subtle study in race relations and the liberal conscience, shaped like a story.”
³⁶
Hellman's parents, relatives, and friends emerge from behind curtains of memory, each starring in a story of love or disappointment or hope. As a memoir must,
An Unfinished Woman
reveals less of the lives it puts forward than of an inner Hellman.

But the book worked. Admiring reviewers described it as “a record of personal discovery” that captures “the deepest of feelings, coming plain, and meant to be that, enlarged nonetheless by its clarity and infectious in its precision.”
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A British reviewer suggested that Hellman had taken “the very personal fragments” of her life and merged them to reveal a “personality of real beauty.”
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Another complimented the writing as “lucid, flinty, vulnerable,” and averred that “the compressed prose is diamond hard and sometimes brilliant and the dialogue is like one pithy speech after another out of a Hellman play.”
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If reviewers complained about the silences—“the omission of any discussion about her political passions, her life in the theater, her sexual appetites”—they interpreted them generously, seeing in them confessions of vulnerability, measures of her continuing effort to find herself. They appreciated her modesty, her search for integrity, her need for solitary moments. “She has given us a detailed portrait of a person who doesn't want to be portrayed,” wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the
New York Times
.
⁴⁰
Critics almost universally complimented
An Unfinished Woman
for its “rare imagination and literary skill,” at least one noting that it revealed “with an almost sad reluctance” the unexpected personal story of a great American playwright. Hellman, one concluded, had drawn a portrait of a complex woman, at once shrewd and difficult. The self of
An Unfinished Woman
was simultaneously shy and frightened and “an adventurous rebel.” This was a book in which everyone could find “a mirror, and an image,” concluded
Life
magazine.
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Released at the end of June 1969,
An Unfinished Woman
climbed to eighth on the
New York Times
bestseller list within a month. It stayed on top for three full months, winning the National Book Award for 1969 and launching Hellman on her new career as memoirist. She was excited and delighted. She signed a new contract with Little, Brown, with the proviso that she continue to work with her editor, William Abrahams, who had now relocated to California. Again the honors poured in: visiting professorships at MIT and Berkeley in the spring of 1971, and then a distinguished professorship at Hunter College for the spring of 1973. Hellman, by all accounts, loved to teach and took students seriously. She thought carefully about what she wanted to convey to them and commented copiously on her students' work. They, in turn, often wrote to tell her how meaningful her classes were. Elected to the Theater Hall of Fame in 1973, she won a woman-of-the-year award from New York University's alumnae club the same year.

The book could not have been better timed, appearing just as a new
young generation of women's movement activists cohered into a political force. The women's liberation movement had built rapidly in the sixties, emerging from women's growing discontent with limited roles in the home and rampant discrimination in the workplace. It was fueled as well by a powerful civil rights movement that involved black and white women in the struggle for freedom, and nurtured by a search to end the war in Vietnam that encouraged women as well as men to challenge the twin gods of manliness and wartime bravado.
An Unfinished Woman
caught the crest of the moment. It followed on a year of rapid and almost invisible organizing that included the emergence of radical women's groups like Red Stockings and the increasing success of a three-year-old National Organization of Women. It paralleled the spread of small consciousness-raising groups designed to allow women to “speak bitterness” and to confront a growing sense that private life was lived in the context of public decisions as well as shaped by them. The year 1969 followed on a widely publicized August 1968 protest action against the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, which demanded an end to the fetishizing of women's bodies. It was the year that young women began to understand and to repeat the mantra “The personal is political.” And it preceded an August 1970 mass march by women who celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of women's suffrage with banners that read WOMEN STRIKE FOR PEACE AND EQUALITY.

Nineteen sixty-nine was also the year that tensions emerged between the political and cultural strands of the women's movement. Radical feminists urged women to focus on changing the organization of personal life and familial relationships. If women eliminated the demeaning attributes of language and lifestyle, thought radical feminists, if they controlled their own reproductive choices, if they resisted limited gender roles, they could win equality between the sexes. These changes would require overturning a patriarchal power structure whose insidious effects materialized in the everyday actions of men and women. To radical feminists, questions of chivalry—who opened car doors or held coats or walked nearest the sidewalk—mattered as symbols of the larger patriarchy. Liberal feminists, to whose ideas Hellman's came close, believed, in contrast, that economic opportunity held the key to gender equality. The first step, they thought, should be to drop the barriers to women's education, occupational choices, and career aims by fighting for legislative and policy changes that would provide access to job training and professional education, make available credit and financial resources, and ensure fair treatment in the workplace for women regardless of their family status.

Hellman was already in her mid-sixties when women's liberation became a movement, and she was approaching her seventies by the time the conflict between liberal and radical feminists became apparent. Ironically, perhaps, her own remarkable successes as a playwright drew attention at the time because she had achieved them as a woman. Hellman, who had never wanted to be identified as a “woman playwright,” now found herself a heroine to women who admired her achievements because of her identity, not her politics. Her readers focused as well on the unorthodox lifestyle she celebrated in
An Unfinished Woman
. The long-term relationship with Dashiell Hammett, the several abortions of which she made no secret, the sexual liaisons in which she continued to indulge even as she grew older: all these turned her into a model for the new women's movement.

Yet the Lillian Hellman dramatized in her memoir bore little resemblance to the Hellman her friends and lovers knew. The strident and outspoken persona that Hellman memorialized presented another side in private. She could, says Feibleman, “walk into a room very quietly and sit down, and the room would turn to her, and people wanted to get to know her or wanted to be in her good graces. She was very electric, electrifying, magnetic.” Nor was she, in real life, sexually adventurous or aggressive. Peter Feibleman describes her as shy sexually, a description that affirms the femininity that others noticed in private moments. She was, says Feibleman, “very passive, very unaggressive, very feminine—one of the most feminine women I've ever known. The bark and the bite were political or emotional. Never sexual, never sexual.”
⁴²

This second Lillian, this woman who, to paraphrase Feibleman once again, both lived her life and performed it, made no secret of her contempt for issues of cultural change. She believed she had become successful as a result of her own talents and efforts, not as the result of her sexually liberated lifestyle. She had earned her way to the top, and her success had given her access to political culture that promised to shape the world. She had deployed her fame to espouse political causes that could address issues of racial and gender equality. She had used her visibility to help organize screenwriters in the 1930s; she had relied on her talent to raise her voice in the fight against fascism and on her celebrity to raise funds for causes she cared about in the forties. Hellman had done all this without particularly focusing on women's issues, though always with an eye to the collective strengths of politically mobilized women.

To Hellman, women's equality was never a goal in itself. Rather, she believed in equality as a vehicle for achieving national and worldwide political progress and the good society she imagined. From early on, women's failures to help each other had systematically disappointed her. While political emancipation had led to advances for individual women, in her early forties she wrote, “it has nowhere gone in quite the most desirable direction.” She expected that since women had always been underdogs, they “would become the most advanced, the most liberal.” She hoped that because women “suffered from the deprivation of certain basic human rights” she would be “in the forefront of the fight for others' human rights,” and she anticipated that “because she is the giver of human life, she would be also the most zealous guardian of it—instead she is often the most bloodthirsty.”
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These lessons stuck with her. At a Women for Wallace luncheon during Henry Wallace's 1948 presidential campaign, she accused her female audience of being “remarkably indifferent to the problems of our time … Another generation gave us the vote and either we have not used it at all or we have too often used it for the wrong issues and the wrong men … another generation worked hard to establish us as equal people, capable of doing more than giggling at dinner tables, or scrubbing floors for those who did. We responded with little enough gratitude, little true interest, in the affairs of our country or the state of the world.”
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