Lillian Hellman Read online

  Except for the hapless Lavinia, who goes to colored churches all the time, the Hubbards, father and children, are venal, amoral, wicked. They will say and do anything to get what they want—Marcus to keep his wealth and power, his children to wrest it from him.

  It becomes clear that Marcus has made his money by profiteering on the sale of salt to a defeated and starving South. This is enough for his neighbors to hate him, but there is something worse. In consequence of his avarice, Marcus has inadvertently led Union soldiers to the hiding place of a group of Confederate soldiers. The Southern boys were massacred. The citizens of Bowden suspect that Marcus was responsible for the massacre, but they cannot prove it. Only Lavinia has the proof. She has kept Marcus’s secret for fifteen years. But now, desperate to leave her husband, she will betray him.

  Another Part of the Forest opened at Broadway’s Fulton Theatre, in November 1946. Hellman had a lot riding on the play. She had not only written it, but for the first time she had directed her own play, and she was not entirely happy about its reception. Some critics were enthusiastic. The New York Daily Mirror critic called the play “magnetic and lusty theatre.” Brooks Atkinson disagreed in the New York Times; he thought the Hubbards were “horrible” and called the play “demonic . . . a witch’s brew of blackmail, insanity, cruelty, theft, torture, insult, drunkenness, with a trace of incest thrown in for good measure.” Eric Bentley thought it was “a pretty good play” but hollow at its center: “At some of the most hideous moments in Miss Hellman’s play the audience laughs and is not entirely wrong in doing so . . . Another Part of the Forest is Grand Guignol in the guise of realism.”1

  Another Part of the Forest displays Hellman’s essential talent: Her dialogue is venomous and clever, there is not a dull or wasted moment in the play. At the end, every strand of the plot is tied up tightly. The action seems inevitable, no element of plot or character could be otherwise. It is only when the curtain comes down, and there is a moment to take a breath, that a viewer may find some room in the tightly constructed story to wonder what it was all about.

  What does Hellman want us to understand about these venomous, rapacious Hubbards? Are they southerners? If so, they behave quite differently from the other southerners in the play, who are nothing if not genteel and honorable even in their poverty and defeat. And if the Hubbards are outsiders, where did they come from?

  There is also something puzzling about the moral balance of Another Part of the Forest. The Civil War is little more than a plot device; the evil of slavery is barely mentioned. Hellman’s sympathy lies with the characters who were the backbone of the antebellum South. With Colonel Isham, who no doubt once owned slaves himself; he is a gentleman of principle. He despises Marcus Hubbard, but he comes to warn him of danger. Hellman is remarkably tender to Regina’s lover, John Bagtry, who fought with passionate idealism for the Old South’s “way of life.” Bagtry was happiest, he says, as a Confederate soldier; he is even planning to go to Brazil to join the slave owners there in their fight for the continuation of slavery. John’s cousin Birdie, made destitute by the destruction of slavery, has fine manners, a sweet nature, and a concern for the welfare of the people whom she once owned. Only the Hubbards are without a saving grace.

  Hellman made no claim that the Hubbards sprang to her imagination from thin air. She acknowledged that their origin lay with her own maternal relatives, the Marx-Newhouse family. As a girl she had listened intently to their dinner table conversations: intense, lively, competitive discussions about money and business deals. The family table talk provided her with the source material for the slashing, angry wit and rapaciousness of the Hubbards: Money—how it is made, how it is used, how the love of it is the root of social and personal evil is the idea that powered her play. It was surely no accident that when Hellman began work on Forest, she had recently returned from a ten-week stay in the Soviet Union, a country with which she and Hammett had long been in sympathy. And as Hellman, with Hammett’s guidance, worked on Forest, it is not far-fetched to think that she experienced an epiphany, finding in her family the source of her politics. For relations between the Hubbard family, as Hellman has rendered them, can be read as an almost direct translation of a passage from the Communist Manifesto:

  The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

  If she has dealt with the central theme of money in Another Part of the Forest, Hellman leaves some mystery around the matter of Marcus’s origins. He has lived in Bowden for forty years, half of that time before the Civil War, before he had the opportunity to amass his fortune at the expense of the southern cause. Yet we have the distinct impression that the Hubbards have always been pariahs.

  “It is hard to think of Regina and her brothers as Southern,” Elizabeth Hardwick, herself a southerner, wrote after seeing a production of the earlier Hubbard play, The Little Foxes, in 1967. “There is little of the rural in their nature or in their cunning.”2

  Hellman leaves it to Laurette, the prostitute whom Oscar wants to marry, to reveal Marcus’s origin:

  “Pretend?” says Laurette to Oscar, “Pretend I’m as good as anybody called Hubbard. . . . I’m as good as piney wood crooks.”

  There is no town called Bowden, of course, but Demopolis is at the edge of a large area of the country, which stretches from southeast Texas to Florida, and is called the Piney Woods. On October 31, 1865, when the Civil War had just ended, a Special Correspondent to theNew York Times filed a story about his visit to the Piney Woods. He describes a benighted place, grimly destitute, where the people are illiterate, where they have never heard of, much less seen, a newspaper or a book:

  Throughout the Southern portion of Alabama, upon both sides of the river, is what is known as the “piney-woods” country. It is one of the most barren sections I have ever seen. Neither corn nor cotton will grow to any extent. Sweet potatoes are the chief product, and this vegetable, and bacon, with a little corn bread, form the bill of fare morning, noon, night, all the year round. These people are scattered all through these “piney-woods,” and live in log huts which in a way protect them from the . . . violent storms of wind and rain which howl through this barren waste during certain periods of the year. Oh, how I pity these poor beings who have been the recipients of untold woes and unheard of sufferings during the long, long years of African slavery . . . let us not in our endeavors to elevate the black man, forget these poor whites who have suffered more and enjoyed less, than their colored brethren in bondage.

  So Marcus is poor white trash from the backwoods. Hellman gives him one speech to make a bid for the sympathy of the audience:

  At nine years old I was carrying water for two bits a week. I took the first dollar I ever had and went to the paying library to buy a card. When I was twelve I was working out in the fields, and that same year I taught myself Latin and French. At fourteen I was driving mules all day and most of the night, but that was the year I learned my Greek, read my classics, taught myself.

  The world is full of autodidacts, and no doubt some have emerged from the Piney Woods. But how often does it happen that an illiterate boy, a boy from an environment where hunger and ignorance are the constant conditions of life, where there are no books or talk of books, or of ancient civilizations; how often does it happen that such a young boy steps out of the piney woods, and uses his first saved dollar to buy a library card? Wherever did he get the idea that books and music and ancient languages were valuable things?

  Marcus’s speech might come more believably from someone of another origin. Someone who, for instance, comes from people with a centuries-long history of being outsiders wherever they happen to settle. Those who have learned, from lack of other opportunities, to live by buying, selling, and lending, the methods by which Marcus has, even if pitilessly, amassed his fortune. These are people who prize literacy even when they are barely literate, who know quite a lot about the long arc of history even as the
y have been confined to ghettos, been oppressed, exiled, and persecuted. These people, when social restrictions loosen, are known to strive for education for themselves, but especially for their children.

  Isaac Marx, who died five years before Hellman’s birth, was a Jew who had emigrated from Bavaria in 1840 and had settled in small-town Demopolis, Alabama. Among his many children born in Demopolis were Hellman’s grandmother, Sophie, and her daughter, Julia, who became Hellman’s mother.

  It was not in Hellman’s gift to create a Shylock of the South. Nor was she inclined, as Clifford Odets was, to write empathetically about New York Jews in their poverty and striving. Hellman preferred to write for a wide Broadway audience. And unlike Odets, she felt neither empathy nor sympathy for her Hubbards. Quite the opposite. It was her antagonism to her characters that gives her play its power. And, then, of course, if you have written a play about people who are manipulative money-grubbers, whose gains are ill-gotten, it was not possible, certainly not in 1946, to identify them as Jews.

  2

  The Marxes of Demopolis

  DEMOPOLIS IS a pretty river town deep in Alabama, about 140 miles north of Mobile, and not very far from the Mississippi border. Tourists come to these parts to admire three local plantation houses—Gaineswood, Lyon Hall, and Bluff Hall—which have been beautifully preserved and restored. Visitors are charmed, also, by the nineteenth-century downtown buildings, which have also been preserved and are in commercial use, and by the setting of Demopolis, itself, built on a chalk cliff high above the junction of two rivers, the Tombigbee and the Black Warrior, which meet to flow down to the Gulf of Mexico.

  Should you ever visit Demopolis and express an interest in Lillian Hellman, you will be introduced to a woman who will show you an old white linen tablecloth. After more than a century of use the cloth is threadbare and torn in places; in angled bright light you can barely make out the central design of an eagle’s head. The owner of the cloth will tell you that it has been in her family since the 1840s, when it was given to her great-grandmother, Dorothy Stewart, by Lillian Hell-man’s great-grandfather, the peddler boy, Isaac Marx; it was a trade for a meal and a night’s lodging in Mrs. Stewart’s house several miles out on the Jefferson Road. This little story, and the decrepit cloth, is the only tangible evidence of Isaac Marx’s peddling days. The cloth should have seen the rag bin years ago, but this is the South, and antebellum artifacts carry a lot of weight.

  Isaac Marx, Lillian Hellman’s great-grandfather, was born in Bavaria. The year of his birth was 1825, or 1824, depending on which census you look at. He gave the name of his small town in the Rhine Pfalz region of Bavaria that first records the presence of Jews in 906. The records of subsequent centuries are filled with the long, often dark, history of the Jews of central Europe, but Isaac was born in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a relatively benign time, when, in many parts of Germany, Jewish children were allowed to attend general schools, and when Jews were granted citizenship, if a special class of citizenship, distinguished by a “Jew tax.” In many towns authorities controlled their Jewish demographics by allowing only the eldest son of a Jewish family to marry, and then only if the family could pay a large marriage tax. In some regions, a boy grown to manhood in a particular town was allowed to remain in his hometown only if he replaced a Jew who had recently died.

  We know almost nothing about Isaac Marx’s family. We don’t know how long the Marxes had lived in this part of the world, not how they made a living, not how many siblings Isaac had, although they seem to have been numerous. We can assume that the family was poor, as most Jews living in the German countryside were in the nineteenth century. But by the early and mid-1800s Jews could more readily leave Europe, and especially once steamship technology shrunk the Atlantic. Those families who could raise the fare began to send their sons away. Between 1820 and 1880, a quarter of a million young Jews, most of them from Germany, made the voyage to America. In some unrecorded month in 1840, fifteen-year-old Isaac Marx stepped off a ship in a port city on the Gulf of Mexico. He had relatives in Mobile, and Mobile would be a constant reference point in his life, the city where he would marry, where he would live for a time, and where, in 1900, he was buried.

  Not long after his arrival in Mobile, Isaac bought a peddler’s pack. He would have had no experience in farming; Jews in Europe had not been allowed to own land. They might be skilled as tailors, or as tanners; more likely the immigrants knew trading, buying, and selling, the basic tools of capitalism. In Europe, the Jewish economy “rode on the backs of peddlers,” as one historian has put it. In parts of Europe, in the nineteenth century, Jews were allowed to sell no more merchandise than they could carry. The skills required for peddling—buy cheap, sell at a small profit—were transferable to any part of the world.1 If Jewish merchants had once traveled the Silk Road in caravans of camels, they could manage on the roads of the rural South.

  Peddling offered the poor immigrant an entry into the economic life of the new country.2 When Isaac arrived in Mobile in 1840, a community of Jewish merchants was already established, many of whom would supply a peddler on credit. In the pre-industrial antebellum South, with farms, plantations, and settlements set far apart, with few stores, primitive roads, and railroads that extended to few places, and river systems where steam boats took you just so far, a woman who longed to curtain her windows against the dark might travel a half day to reach a store that sold cloth. But along comes Isaac Marx, walking through the sparsely settled nineteenth-century country side, with notions and curtains and tablecloths in his pack.

  At this point it is unlikely that Isaac spoke much English. Not that a peddler needs many words. When he spreads his goods before the lady of the house, it is sufficient to say: Lady buy? And when night falls, Can I sleep here? More important to a successful enterprise is the ability to achieve profit, limit loss, and calculate credit and interest.

  Peddling requires youth and health. A peddler walks all day in all weathers, carrying a heavy pack. Persistence and courage are important qualities. He has to face the occasional slammed door, the ferocious dog, insults, boys who throw stones. Then he has to return to those places. And he has to keep his goal in mind, which is not to peddle forever, but to make enough profit from his efforts so that, first, he can pay off his supplier and buy new goods; beyond that, to save enough money to bring family from Europe, then to find a place to settle and open a business, to meet a suitable girl, marry, and have children.

  Isaac may have been the first Jew his customers had ever seen. In the South, this was not the liability it would have been in other parts of the country. Southerners already had their Other. Isaac was white. True, he was a foreigner with a strange accent, but this could work to his advantage. He was not expected to understand local customs. If he took his goods into slave quarters, he knew no better. He could go into the grand houses of plantation owners to sell second-hand clothes for their slaves and into the shacks of poor white farmers. He could sleep wherever he was allowed, even with slaves. If he was respectful to his customers, if his goods were not shoddy, if he offered credit on reasonable terms, he would be given special orders to fill, and welcomed on his return.3

  It is simply astonishing to think of the great fortunes that were built on the nickel-and-dime profits of peddling. Great banking fortunes and mercantile fortunes—the Lehman brothers, the Seligman brothers, the Rich brothers—German Jewish immigrants all, who began by peddling in the antebellum South.

  Having brothers seems to have been a predicate for success. There was an understanding among Jewish families who sent a son to America that the boy who arrived first would prepare the ground for the next one. Two brothers worked together and profits doubled; a third brother was sent for. Isaac seems to have been the third brother. His brother Henry, eight years his senior, was already in Mobile when he arrived; and his brother Lehman, three years his elder, was also in the area.

  Marengo County, of which Demopolis is the principal to
wn, is the heart of the black belt, that wide swath of dark, fertile soil in which cotton grew so well. Inevitably, the term black belt also came to refer to the County’s population of slaves. By 1850, at the height of the County’s prosperity, the ratio of slaves to whites was almost three to one. In 1853 a local editor wrote about the basis of his County’s prosperity: “Marvelous accounts had gone forth of the fertility of [Marengo County’s] virgin lands. . . . The productions of the soil were commanding a price remunerating to slave labor as it had never been remunerated before.”4 By 1860, the ratio of black to white had risen to seventy-eight percent of the County’s population.5

  As Marengo County prospered, so did Demopolis, which was perfectly situated to serve a cotton economy. From Demopolis, cotton grown in the black belt could be stored in the town’s riverbank warehouses, then shipped downriver to arrive in Mobile thirty hours later; and from Mobile, shipped on to the garment centers of New York and London. From Mobile, all manner of goods and people came upriver to Demopolis.

  Isaac Marx was the first Jew to settle in Demopolis. By the 1850s, a number of others had opened businesses in town, and by 1858 there were enough Jews to form a congregation, although Demopolis would never have a permanent rabbi, and a temple was not built until 1893.

  Isaac set up his first dry goods store in 1844, a small wooden structure in which he probably also lived. The store did well enough so that he was able to buy property on the more central corner of Market and Capitol Streets. There, he built a larger general merchandise store. This building no longer exists, but on the corner of Washington and Walnut Streets, you can still see the original Marx Brothers Banking Company, built in 1885, and still functioning as a bank. Just around the corner from the bank is a livery stable (now a law office) built in 1898; in very faded black paint the building is identified as “Marx Mules and Wagons.” Both the bank and livery stable were established for, and run by, Isaac’s sons. The Marxes, father and sons, were enterprising men, alert to economic opportunity, ready to seize the main chance.