Lillian Hellman Read online

  Imagination is the sun that illuminates both countries. But this leads us into temptation. A voice in your ear whispers . . . “look, just across the frontier there is that gorgeous flower—the one missing novelistic detail that will bring the whole story alive. Pop across and pick it. No one will notice.” I know this voice, I have heard it. But if we claim to write the literature of fact, it must be resisted.

  Why? For moral reasons, above all. Words written about the real world have consequences in the real world . . . moral reasons are sufficient; but there are artistic ones too. Writers often cross this frontier because they think their work will be enhanced as a result. Reportage or history will become Literature. Paragraph for paragraph that may be true. But as a whole, the work is diminished.34

  Hellman might have called her stories fiction and been judged on literary merit alone. Instead, she promised that she had not fooled with the facts of her life, all the while crossing and re-crossing the frontier without a by-your-leave. Like the man who comes courting without mentioning the wife and children at home, she wanted something for nothing.

  How can it not matter that Hellman refused the distinction between fact and fiction, when facts are life’s North Star? It is the one question we always ask of those who bring us news of the world: Did that really happen? Is that true?

  Hellman spent the last winter of her life, 1983–1984, in Los Angeles, where she lived in the house of Talli Wyler, the widow of her friend, the director, William Wyler. Hellman was very ill and very frail that winter. She had to be carried up and down the flight of stairs leading to her rooms at Wyler’s house. She needed round-the-clock nurses, at whom her temper often exploded. Still, with the help of nurses and friends, and a wheel-chair, she often went out to dinner. In the spring, Hellman returned to New York, and then, with nurses, to her beachfront house on Martha’s Vineyard.

  In early June, less than a month before she died, Hellman suffered another blow to her reputation. An article entitled “Julia and Other Fictions by Lillian Hellman,” commissioned by Hellman’s former friend Norman Podhoretz, appeared in Commentary magazine. The author of the piece, Samuel McCracken, applied himself with great attention to the details of Hellman’s memoirs, particularly those in “Julia.” He checked French timetables, ship schedules, locations of funeral homes in London. Was it possible that Hellman had traveled from Paris to Berlin to Moscow in 1937 in the way she said she did? Did the ship on which Hellman said she brought Julia’s body from London to the United States in 1938 actually make port in England? McCracken checked what could be checked in the chronology of Hellman’s travels, and he concluded that what she had written was at best implausible, at worst impossible. In short, McCracken showed that many of the details Hellman offered as fact, collapsed on scrutiny; on a literary level, they were so implausible they would have disgraced “a third-rate thriller.”

  Hellman, blind, had the McCracken piece read to her. How would she have dealt with this final assault on her honor had she but strength enough and time? She was out of both. She died in the early morning hours of the last day of June, with only a nurse to hear her last breath. Her lawsuit against McCarthy died with her.

  Hellman’s death was a disappointment to McCarthy who would have dearly liked to face Hellman in court. And maybe Hellman wanted that too, believing that she could prevail against legal arguments in court just as she prevailed at her own dinner table, just as she did in life, ending arguments disagreeable to her with a haughty, “Forgive me, but . . .” She was Lillian Hellman, after all.

  NOTES

  Prologue

  1. Deborah Martinson, Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2005), 356.

  2. Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1992), 611.

  3. Lillian Hellman, Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 258.

  4. Hellman, Three, 30–39.

  Chapter 1. The Hubbards of Bowden

  1. Eric Bentley, In Search of Theater (New York: Vintage, 1954), 9.

  2. Elizabeth Hardwick, “The Little Foxes Revived,” The New York Review of Books, December 21, 1967.

  Chapter 2. The Marxes of Demopolis

  Much of the material about the Marx family, and about Jewish life in Demopolis, Alabama, is based on research by Alan Goodman Koch, an independent scholar. Mr. Koch generously shared his documentary material with me, and discussed his knowledge of this area in which he was raised. He and his wife, Linda, also took me to Demopolis and served as my guides to the town and its residents.

  1. Hasia R. Diner, The Jews of the United States: 1654–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), passim.

  2. Jonathan D. Sarna, “American Judaism,” collected in From Haven to Home: 350 Years of Jewish Life in America, ed. Michael W. Grunberger (New York: George Braziller for the Library of Congress, 2004), passim.

  3. Diner, Jews of the United States.

  4. Winston Smith, The People’s City: The Glory and Grief of an Alabama Town, 1850–1874 (Demopolis, Alabama: Marengo County Historical Society, 2003), Epigraph to Part One: An Antebellum Society, 1850–1860.

  5. “Visualizing Slavery,” county map of 1861, New York Times, published December 10, 2010.

  6. Lillian Hellman, Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 15.

  7. Hellman, Three, 14–15.

  8. Jerry Z. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 84.

  9. Thomas McAdory Owen and Marie Bankhead Owen, History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography, Vol. 4 (Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1921), 1171.

  10. The United States Census of 1860; Smith, The People’s City, 11–14.

  11. Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1962), review of Sholem Aleichem, 266.

  12. Robert Rosen, “Jewish Confederates,” in Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History, ed. Marcie Ferris and Mark I. Greenberg (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press), 110.

  13. Rosen, “Jewish Confederates,” 113.

  14. Rosen, “Jewish Confederates,” 109, 118.

  15. Charles S. Watson, The History of Southern Drama (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997).

  16. Alabama Civil War Database, Alabama Department of Archives and History.

  17. Owen and Owen, History of Alabama, 1171; also 1870 Census.

  18. Historic American Building Survey, Archeology and Historic Preservation, National Park Service, Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C.

  19. Smith, The People’s City, 237.

  20. Owen and Owen, History of Alabama,1171.

  21. Deborah Martinson, Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2005), 29.

  Chapter 3. Two Jewish Girls

  1. Brenda Wineapple, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996). See also Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 35.

  2. Jackson R. Bryer, ed., Conversations with Lillian Hellman ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 63; William Wright, Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 106–7.

  3. Hemingway quoted in Michael S. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 173. See also Malcolm, Two Lives.

  4. Lillian Hellman, Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 90.

  5. Joan Mellen, Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett (New York: HarperPerennial, 1997), 127.

  6. Wineapple, Sister Brother,14.

  7. Elizabeth Hardwick, American Fictions (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 92–93.

  8. Malcolm, Two Lives, 27–28.

  9. Mellen, Hellman and Hammett, 12.

/>   10. Malcolm, Two Lives, 79.

  11. New York Times, May 6, 1934; The Journal of Historical Review, September–October 1977, p. 22.

  12. Robert Warshow, “Gerty and the G.I.’s” in The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1962), 281.

  13. James Laughlin, The Way It Wasn’t: From the Files of James Laughlin (New York: New Directions, 2006), 90.

  14. Malcolm, Two Lives, passim.

  15. Maurice Grosser, “Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas,” in The Company They Kept: Writers and Their Unforgettable Friendships, ed. Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein (New York: New York Review of Books, 2006), 159.

  16. Quoted from Mellen, Hellman and Hammett, 142.

  17. Carl E. Rollyson, Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 415.

  18. Rollyson, Lillian Hellman, 413.

  19. Sylvie Drake, in Bryer, ed., Conversations with Lillian Hellman, 291.

  20. Lillian Hellman, The Collected Plays (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 239 (emphasis added).

  21. Mellen, Hellman and Hammett, 172.

  Chapter 4. Marriage

  1. Deborah Martinson, Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2005), 40–42.

  2. Lillian Hellman, Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 54.

  3. Hellman, Three, 6.

  4. Carl E. Rollyson, Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 47.

  5. Hellman, Three, 64.

  6. Joan Mellen, Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett (New York: HarperPerennial, 1997), 17.

  7. Martinson, Lillian Hellman, 79.

  8. Martinson, Lillian Hellman, 54.

  9. Rollyson, Lillian Hellman,167.

  10. Mellen, Hellman and Hammett,16.

  11. “Arthur Kober: No Regella Yankee,” Wendell Howard, Polish American Historical Association newsletter, Vol. 40, No. 1, Spring 1993.

  12. Mellen, Hellman and Hammett,36.

  13. Hellman, Three, 62–63.

  14. Diane Johnson, The Life of Dashiell Hammett (London: Picador, 1985), 13–14.

  15. Johnson, Dashiell Hammett, 13.

  16. Dashiell Hammett, Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett, ed. Richard Layman and Julie Rivett (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001).

  17. Johnson, Dashiell Hammett, 56–57.

  18. Johnson, Dashiell Hammett, 87.

  19. Johnson, Dashiell Hammett, 57.

  20. Johnson, Dashiell Hammett, 78.

  21. Mellen, Hellman and Hammett, 34.

  22. Johnson,Dashiell Hammett, 96.

  23. William Wright, Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 70.

  24. Rollyson, Lillian Hellman,97.

  25. Mellen, Hellman and Hammett,40.

  26. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned (Rockville, MD: Serenity Publishers, 2009), 207.

  27. Mellen, Hellman and Hammett, from Kober’s archive in Wisconsin, 49–50.

  28. Martinson, Lillian Hellman, 82.

  29. Mellen, Hellman and Hammett, 50.

  Chapter 5.The Writing Life: 1933–1984

  1. Diane Johnson, Dashiell Hammett: A Life (New York: Random House, 1983), 101–2.

  2. Richard Layman and Julie Rivett, eds., Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001).

  3. Joan Mellen,Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett (New York: Harper-Perennial, 1997), 198.

  4. Layman and Rivett, eds., Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett, 277.

  5. Deborah Martinson, Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2005), 117.

  6. Mellen, Hellman and Hammett,124.

  7. Jackson R. Bryer, ed., Conversations with Lillian Hellman (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 126.

  8. Bryer, ed., Conversations with Lillian Hellman,13.

  9. Lillian Hellman, Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 454.

  10. Hellman, Three, 472.

  11. Hellman, Three, 474–75.

  12. Hellman, Three, 495.

  13. Bryer, ed., Conversations with Lillian Hellman, 9.

  14. Peter S. Feibleman, Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman (New York: Morrow, 1988), 33–34.

  Chapter 6. Along Came a Spider

  1. Lillian Hellman, Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 91.

  2. Hellman, Three, 205.

  3. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 465.

  4. Conquest, The Great Terror, 102.

  5. Conquest, The Great Terror, 464.

  6. I. F. Stone, The War Years, 1939–1945 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 4.

  7. Peggy Dennis, The Autobiography of an American Communist: A Personal View of a Political Life (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1977).

  8. New Masses, May 3, 1938.

  9. Phyllis Jacobson, New Politics, Summer, 1997.

  10. Hellman, Three, 92.

  11. Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (New York: Random House, 2009), 105.

  12. Deborah Martinson, Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2005), 170.

  13. Lillian Hellman papers, FBI, cited in Robert P. Newman, The Cold War Romance of Lillian Hellman and John Melby (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 297.

  14. Carl E. Rollyson, Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 432.

  15. John Dos Passos, The Theme Is Freedom (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1956), 115.

  16. Elinor Langer, Josephine Herbst (Little, Brown, 1984), 233.

  17. Hellman, Three, 98.

  18. Tony Judt, The New York Review of Books, September 21, 2006.

  19. Judt, quoting Leszek Kołakowski, The New York Review of Books, September 21, 2006.

  20. Hellman, Three, 131–32.

  21. Rollyson, Lillian Hellman,91, ca. 1935.

  22. Joan Mellen, Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett (New York: HarperPerennial, 1997), 113.

  23. Kober diary, January, 7, 1938, quoted in Mellen, Hellman and Hammett, 128.

  24. Hellman, Three, 203.

  25. The New Review, May 1974.

  26. Interview with Peter Feibleman, in Mellen, Hellman and Hammett, 371.

  Chapter 7. Eros

  1. Lillian Hellman, Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 210.

  2. Joan Mellen, Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett (New York: HarperPerennial, 1997), 365.

  3. Mellen, Hellman and Hammett, 369.

  4. Hellman, Three, 42, 45.

  5. Hellman, Three, 151.

  6. Hellman, Three, 383–84.

  7. Hellman, Three, 48.

  8. Mellen, Hellman and Hammett,197.

  9. Mellen, Hellman and Hammett, 253.

  10. Diane Johnson, Vanity Fair, “Obsessed,” May 1985.

  11. Johnson, Vanity Fair, quoted in Mellen,Hellman and Hammett, 141.

  12. Peter S. Feibleman, Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman (New York: Morrow, 1988), 168.

  13. Mellen, Hellman and Hammett,154.

  14. Robert P. Newman, The Cold War Romance of Lillian Hellman and John Melby (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 38.

  15. Mellen, Hellman and Hammett,245.

  16. Newman, Cold War Romance, 117, 112.

  17. Newman, Cold War Romance, 122.

  18. Newman, Cold War Romance, 175, 179, 215.

  19. Diary quoted in Deborah Martinson, Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels (Berkel
ey: Counterpoint Press, 2005), 232.

  20. Martinson, Lillian Hellman, 232.

  21. Elia Kazan, Elia Kazan: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1988), 441–42.

  22. Kazan, Elia Kazan, 382.

  23. Hellman, Three, 515.

  24. Hellman, Three, 537.

  25. Feibleman, Lilly, 53.

  26. Feibleman, Lilly, 126.

  27. Feibleman, Lilly, 143.

  28. Feibleman, Lilly, 339.

  Chapter 8. Counterparts

  1. Mary McCarthy papers, Box 259, Vassar College Archives and Special Collections.

  2. Carl E. Rollyson, Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 319, citing Joseph Rauh papers.

  3. Muriel Gardiner, Code Name Mary: Memoirs of an American Woman in the Austrian Underground (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 83–84.

  4. Gardiner, Code Name Mary, 150.

  5. Joan Mellen, Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett (New York: HarperPerennial, 1997), 172.

  6. Mellen, Hellman and Hammett, 174.

  7. Mellen, Hellman and Hammett, 169.

  8. Lillian Hellman, Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 114.

  9. Pravda, December 17, 1936, cited by Dorothy Gallagher, All the Right Enemies: The Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 153.

  10. David Caute, The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 142.

  11. Jonathan Miles, The Dangerous Otto Katz: The Many Lives of a Soviet Spy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 295; Heda Kovaly, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague (Cambridge, Mass.: Plunkett Lake Press, 1986).

  Chapter 9. The Incurious Tourist

  1. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 441.

  2. William Wright, Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 198; Robert P. Newman, The Cold War Romance of Lillian Hellman and John Melby (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 39.