Lillian Hellman Read online

  In the mid-1960s, Hellman began to think about writing her memoirs. She told an interviewer: “I was feeling bad about doing nothing and not knowing where to turn . . . And I’d done a great deal of magazine work and pieces through the years . . . I got out those pieces to see what I thought of them, and maybe I could make a collection of them. And I began to use those pieces and the diaries. . . .”2 Hellman re-read her diary entries from wartime Moscow and was moved to make a trip to the Soviet Union.

  In 1945, Hellman had left a Soviet Union still firmly ruled by Stalin. When she arrived in Moscow in October 1966, more than twenty years had passed since Stalin’s death, ten years since he had been denounced by Khrushchev. During the Khrushchev decade the strictures on cultural life had been relaxed to such an extent that in 1962, Alexander Solzhenitsyn had been able to publish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. With Khrushchev’s removal, the arrest, trial, and conviction of two Soviet writers, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, who had published their work in the West, under pseudonyms, signaled that the thaw had come to an end. Sinyavsky and Daniel were sent to the camps, but the result was not what it had been in the Soviet past. Now, in the 1960s, not all Russian writers and intellectuals were frightened into silence; a dissident movement formed which could not be entirely crushed. Nor, any longer, could Soviet leaders count on the unwavering support of Communists and sympathizers in the West.

  Hellman did not quite know what to make of this new Soviet Union. On the one hand she signed an open letter protesting the conviction of Sinyavsky and Daniel.3 And, as she proudly wrote in her memoirs, her “oldest and best friends” in Russia “were now among the leading dissidents.”4

  Indeed, when she went to Moscow in 1966, she met Lev Kopelev, now the husband of Raya Orlova, her friend and translator from the old days. Kopelev had been imprisoned for ten years in Soviet camps for “fostering bourgeois humanism and compassion toward the enemy.” In 1945, as a major in the Red Army, Kopelev had protested atrocities Russian soldiers were committing against German civilians. Raya and Kopelev introduced Hellman to their friend Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom Kopelev had met in the camps. “I was impressed, of course, with Solzhenitsyn, but I cannot say I was attracted to the silent, strange figure. There was something out of order, too odd for my taste.”5

  There was some constraint between Orlova and Hellman as well. Their exchange of letters had ended not long after Hellman left Moscow in 1945. No matter that Orlova had been a lifelong and loyal Party member, her relationship with Hellman had made her suspect, and she had been summoned to the Lubyanka and interrogated over the course of an entire night: “They shouted at me, stamped their feet and humiliated me in every possible way,” Orlova wrote in her memoirs. “They even asked: ‘Is it true your father owned a Jewish shop?’ I was afraid of them. . . . I came out onto Dzerzhinsky Square at daybreak. . . . I had gotten off lightly.”6 After that, Orlova knew better than to answer Hellman’s letters and she remained silent for twenty years.

  The two women met again when Hellman arrived in Moscow in 1966. They were glad to see each other, but their understanding was not perfect. Orlova tried to speak with Hellman about Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Congress in 1956; she asked how Hammett had reacted to the revelation of Stalin’s crimes. Hellman was curtly dismissive: “Raya, you always think that the world is revolving around your country. Nobody gives a damn about your Congress.”7

  For her own part, Hellman seemed to see a moral equivalence in their lives. She tried to talk to Orlova about the McCarthy period, “which had changed my life. . . . but that was tough going with a foreigner . . . and so I gave up, saying finally that I guessed you could survive if you felt like it, but you only knew that after you had survived.”8

  Hellman spent an evening with Orlova and Kopelev and their friends. There was talk of Kopelev’s protest against wartime Red Army atrocities, which Hellman found “odd for a Jew who fought with the Russian armies all the way to Berlin,” and so she told the company a little story that had been passed on to her by Averell Harriman: It seemed that in 1945, when Harriman had relayed Roosevelt’s request to Stalin that he order his soldiers in Germany to behave with decorum, “Stalin had laughed and said he would so instruct the Russian armies, but he didn’t believe that men who had been fighting for years could be kept from rape and loot.” Orlova’s friends greeted Hellman’s anecdote with silence. It occurred to Hellman then, perhaps for the first time, that “Stalin is not a good man to quote these days.”9

  In June 1967, soon after Hellman returned from the Soviet Union, Dorothy Parker died. Hellman and Parker had been friends for some thirty years. Theirs had been an important friendship. They had laughed together, traveled together, been drunk together; they had liked and mocked the same people, were often guests at the same parties, guests at each other’s houses. Hellman had disliked Parker’s husband, and Hammett may have disliked Parker, but these antagonisms did not interfere with the friendship. Nothing came between them until Parker, twelve years older than Hellman, sank into decrepit old age, a lonely widow, out of the literary limelight, without money, and often drunk. Then Hellman pulled away.

  Hellman is frank about her distaste for Parker at this stage of her life. She writes that she “did not want the burdens that Dottie, maybe by never asking for anything, always put on her friends. I was tired of trouble and wanted to be around people who walked faster than I and might pull me along with them. . . . And so, for the next five years of her life, I was not the good friend I had been. True, I was there in emergencies, but I was out the door immediately they were over.”10

  The emergencies were usually financial—Parker’s medical bills, or the rent on her small apartment at the Volney Hotel, maybe even veterinarian bills for her poodle, Troy. Hellman was one of several friends called upon to supply the money needed, and when asked, she did, for old time’s sake, and not without some expectation of return. There was, apparently, some understanding, or misunderstanding, between Hellman and Parker. Hellman assumed that she would be named as Parker’s literary executor and have lifetime rights to Parker’s copyrights.11

  Parker did name Hellman as her literary executor, but she left her copyrights and royalties to Martin Luther King, Jr., along with what money she had, about $20,000. At King’s death, everything was to pass to the NAACP. A year after Park-er’s death, King was assassinated. Contrary to Hellman’s belief, the NAACP believed Parker’s copyrights belonged to the organization. The dispute went to court, and in 1972 the court ruled against Hellman.

  During the few years when she controlled Parker’s work, Hellman, as she had with Hammett and his writings, thwarted Parker’s potential biographers, and refused requests to quote from Parker’s work. If Parker had left any papers, they were never found.12

  “That goddamn bitch Dorothy Parker,” Hellman said to her friend, the playwright Howard Teichmann. “I paid her hotel bill at the Volney for years, kept her in booze . . . all on the promise that when she died, she would leave me the rights to her writing.”13 A few years later Hellman explained to an interviewer that she had contested the NAACP to save her friend from her own worst impulses. Parker’s understanding of black people had been incorrect: “It’s one thing,” Hellman said to Nora Ephron, “to have real feeling for black people, but to have the kind of blind sentimentality about the NAACP, a group so conservative that even many blacks now don’t have any respect for it, is something else. [Parker] must have been drunk when she did it . . . Poor Dottie.”14 Nor did Hellman think much of Martin Luther King, Jr., who seemed to her just another of the “many Negro preachers from my childhood.”15

  By the late 1960s Hellman’s political world view was out of fashion, viewed by a new generation as quaint, at best. But she was far from ready to be irrelevant. She had lived much of her life in public view, and much of her fame depended on her moral authority. In 1970 she organized the Committee for Public Justice, an organization designed to voice concern about a new period of politic
al repression. At a news conference announcing the CPJ, Hellman said that “some of us thought we heard the voice of Joe McCarthy coming from the grave.”16

  The Committee denounced FBI abuses, investigated prison conditions, gave gala benefits to raise money, and published a newsletter called Justice Department Watch. For a decade Hellman was at the center of the Committee, enlisting new members, running meetings, raising funds, organizing events. The Committee did valuable work. With the star power of famous members, it was able to bring publicity to abuses of power under the Nixon Administration and to sponsor legislation. But for all her good work, Hellman was also a polarizing force on the Committee. Dorothy Samuels, for a time the executive director of the Committee, began making notes of Hellman’s remarks at meetings, so that she could not later deny what she had said: “She was always making dramas out of nothing,” Samuels said. “She would take things people had said and twist them around until they became dramas of some sort.”17 People who couldn’t deal with the quarrels Hellman initiated—her rudeness to members and staff, especially to the younger women; her whimsical changes in policy direction; her baseless accusations of disloyalty, of lying, even of spying—quit. But Hellman kept the Committee in existence for more than ten years, until what energy remained to her was absorbed by her lawsuit against Mary McCarthy.

  Hellman’s almost life-long physical and mental energy was a gift from whatever good fairy attended her birth. She had done the hard work of running Hardscrabble Farm, had managed staff at her houses, had traveled and entertained extensively, had maintained an elaborate social and sexual life. She had written twelve plays and was fully involved in their production; she produced three volumes of memoirs. Finally, however, she was not immune from the effects of age and excess. The three or four packs of cigarettes Hellman had smoked daily for most of her life affected her heart and lungs. She drank, often more than was good for her. She began to have frequent falls, which may have been the consequence of small strokes—transient ischemic attacks. When she was sixtynine, a small stroke was diagnosed, and it seems likely that more followed. TIAs are known to cause brain damage which often lead to personality changes and mood swings. In Hellman’s case, friends noticed an intensification of her characteristic irritability and anger.18 Enraged, she might now physically strike out with her umbrella or cane.19 In the late 1970s, she developed glaucoma, which, in time, virtually blinded her. She saw a number of different doctors who prescribed medications that proved to be incompatible. In 1979, she spent a month in the hospital being detoxified. She had a pacemaker installed in 1981.

  Peter Feibleman, Hellman’s closest companion in her last years, noticed something more: “Some kind of change is going on in Lilly. Don’t know what. Something about the way she walks and turns her head and the rhythm of her speech sometimes. . . . Something’s screwing up her judgement. Feels as if a gear had slipped inside and she was reaching out for help.” This was in 1976, the year Scoundrel Time was published.20

  By 1979, anyone looking for signs of a problem with Hell-man’s mental state might have found it in the disjointed commentary Hellman wrote to accompany the republication of “Julia,” in Three:

  I had expected to hear from Anne-Marie. But that has not happened, although last year a friend told me that Anne-Marie says she never really knew Julia, but that I was in love with her husband when we were all so very, very young. . . . I had a letter from a Dr. Smith, as I will name him here. He said he had been born in the house to which the wounded or already dead Julia had been brought, that his father was still living and why had I wanted to involve his father by claiming that he had issued a false death certificate? . . . Then Dr. Smith said his father had forbidden him to come to see me because of the younger Smith’s “attitude.” . . . I looked him up in the present London phone directory and no such name was listed as a doctor, although I guess he could be a research man in an institute. 21

  In 1980, Hellman published a small book called Maybe, which she calls a “story,” although the narrator is named Lillian Hellman, and a man named Dashiell Hammett wanders through it. Some critics thought it was “a remarkable, intricate story . . . as carefully put together as a poem.”22 Others, that it was a book “about the erosion of certainty and the unknowability of truth.”23

  Maybe is certainly a strange book, which Hellman should have been saved from publishing, for it is so consistently confusing that the reader wonders whether it is Lillian Hellman the narrator, who is exploring the uncertainty of memory and the unknowability of truth, or Lillian Hellman the author, who is confused, and not in control of her own story:

  Certainly I know the so-called details of the story, but I am no longer sure whether all of them came from Sarah herself. I don’t know how much was mishmash as told me, or if I half forgot and didn’t even get it straight in the first place.24

  Peter Feibleman speaks of Maybe’s creation as “a book written under the harshest kind of circumstances since an hour a day was the most [Hellman] could use her eyes.”25 Blindness and lack of mental focus certainly contributed to the problems of Maybe. Everything that was once solid for Hellman—her tight grip on her prose, on her characters, on her narrative—was slipping from her grasp. She must have felt it, but she could no more stop writing than she could stop smoking, and both activities, so defining to her life, had turned deadly:

  “The kindest interpretation one can put on ‘Maybe,’” Anatole Broyard wrote in the New York Times, . . . “is that it is a parody of contemporary fiction. . . . It is anybody’s guess why Miss Hellman wrote ‘Maybe.’ It isn’t fiction and as a memoir it reads like a disjointed hangover that lasted 40 years.”26

  15

  Mere Facts

  “WHAT A word is truth,” Lillian Hellman wrote in her introduction to her collected memoirs, “Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth. I did not fool with facts. But, of course, that is a shallow definition of the truth.” She told her students much the same sort of thing—that “truth is larger than the truth of fact.”1

  Despite Hellman’s assurance that she did not fool with facts, she did seem to think them secondary matters, mere facts, rather than hard facts, cold facts, stubborn, naked, brutal, inescapable facts. No doubt, for example, it felt true to her that she had been in wartime Russia for six months rather than ten weeks; it also happened to strengthen her argument, and so she used the higher figure in writing a piece for the New York Times.2 What seems most peculiar in Hellman’s casual misuse of factual truth is her comfort with what might be so easily shown to be untrue.

  In October 1979, Mary McCarthy appeared on the Dick Cavett show to promote her new novel Cannibals and Missionaries. In answer to a question about overrated writers, McCarthy said that she could think of only one: “Lillian Hellman, who I think is terribly overrated, a bad writer, and a dishonest writer.”

  “What is dishonest about her?” Cavett asked.

  “Everything . . . every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”

  The recorded program was not shown until the night of January, 24, 1980, when Hellman saw it. She later told Peter Feibleman that she had “laughed out loud” when she heard McCarthy’s words, but it could not have been a laugh of amusement for the next morning she called Ephraim London, her lawyer and her colleague on the Committee for Public Justice, and told him to sue McCarthy, Dick Cavett, and Channel Thirteen for $2,225,000. She claimed defamation: McCarthy had made a statement about her that was “false, made with ill-will, with malice, with knowledge of its falsity, with careless disregard of its truth, and with the intent to injure the plaintiff personally and professionally.”

  “I can’t let Mary’s poisonous nonsense go without taking a stand, can I?” she said to Feibleman. Feibleman was one of her friends who thought she should do that very thing.3

  Mary McCarthy was not casual with facts: “What often seems to be at stake in Mary’s writing and in her way of looking at things is a somewhat obses
sional concern for the integrity of sheer fact in matters both trivial and striking,” her friend Elizabeth Hardwick wrote.4 McCarthy, herself, was explicit about what she expected from writing, and not just non-fiction: “If we read a novel, say, about conditions in postwar Germany, we expect it to be an accurate report of conditions in postwar Germany; if we find out that it is not, the novel is discredited . . . if Tolstoy was all wrong about the Battle of Borodino or the character of Napoleon, War and Peace would suffer.”5 Nor did she think that truth was slippery or unreliable: “Yes,” she told Elizabeth Sifton who interviewed her for the Paris Review, “I believe there is a truth and that it’s knowable.”6

  “Mary McCarthy’s dislike for Lillian Hellman sprang . . . from the very center of her being,” one of McCarthy’s biographers wrote.7 McCarthy put it more bluntly to an interviewer in 1978: “I can’t stand her.”8

  As McCarthy recalled, she and Hellman first met in 1937, at a dinner party given by her then lover, Robert Misch.9 Hellman was thirty-two, already famous for her Broadway hit The Children’s Hour. She was a public supporter of the Moscow Trials, and she had recently returned from her visit to the war in Spain. McCarthy was twenty-five, and strikingly attractive, a fact which would not have been lost on Hellman. McCarthy was not yet famous as a writer, but she had a reputation in New York as a witty, fiercely opinionated reviewer of books and plays. She had recently joined the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky. In McCarthy’s recollection, she and Hellman had no conversation that night.