Lillian Hellman Read online

  I hope you do not find this letter an intrusion. There is no need to answer it. I often thought of writing you before, but did not want to bother you. Now, however, several more recent friends have again asked “Are you Julia?”1

  Hellman did not answer this letter. When it became publicly known that Gardiner had written it, Hellman said that she had no memory of having received it.

  Although Hellman always publicly denied it, we know now that from at least 1938 through 1940—the period in which Hellman set Julia, and during which she wrote Watch on the Rhine—Hellman was a member of the Communist Party.2 It hardly matters whether she was an actual member or a fellow traveler. Anyone might have deduced her sympathies from hearing her speak from public platforms, from the groups she belonged to, from the petitions she signed; all of which ardently supported and defended the policies of the Soviet Union as the American Communist Party understood them.

  But those particular years, encompassing as they did the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact, were a litmus test of Party loyalty. There were Communists who could not stomach the sight of the Swastika flying over Moscow airport on the day the Pact was signed; Communists who could not fathom the Party’s sudden lack of interest in the anti-Fascist groups in which Communists had been encouraged to be active; who could not join the Party’s applause of Stalin’s strategic cleverness in signing the Pact. Many Communists left the Party at that moment. Hellman remained, as did Hammett.

  When Hellman sat down to write “Julia,” thirty years had passed since the events she was recounting. Memories had faded with the decades: there were new wars, new political movements. In describing Julia as a Socialist, Hellman may simply have wanted to present Julia as a person with generic leftist sympathies, assuming that her readers would not know about the deep schisms between Socialists and Communists in the 1930s. But Hellman, herself, would have known that a Socialist or a Social Democrat, would not have shared her own commitment to Stalin and his policies. And since Julia’s work was saving the lives of those threatened by Nazism, we can assume that she would have been appalled and frightened by the Nazi-Soviet Pact. She would have been appalled, that is, had Hellman allowed her to live long enough. Unfortunately, or conveniently, as far as Hellman’s story goes, Julia was killed off by her author in 1938, before the Pact was signed.

  As it happens, however, we do know what Julia’s avatar, Muriel Gardiner, thought about Stalin and the Soviet Union. In her own memoir, published the year before Hellman died, Gardiner reflects on the state of the world in 1937: “Nazi power was growing, Nazi threats were increasing. . . . In Russia, Stalin had long since destroyed early hopes that anything resembling socialism could ever be achieved there.”3

  Gardiner knew war was coming. In 1939, she took her family to Paris. While they waited for the ship that would get them out of Europe and back to the United States, “The Hitler- Stalin nonaggression pact was signed,” Gardiner wrote. “Joe and I, alone at home, heard it on the radio. It was something I had never foreseen or imagined. I wept. I had believed myself free of any illusions about the Soviet Union, but I must still have had some lingering belief that Communism was not so appalling as Nazism. Now the two had practically become one.”4

  In the spring of 1939, before the Pact was signed, Hellman had completed a first draft of her unequivocally anti-Nazi play, Watch on the Rhine.5 In April 1941, while the Pact was still in force, the play was staged: an act of literary dissent from the Party line; and predictably, the play was attacked by The Daily Worker. Even Hammett told Hellman that she had ruined a great play by “anti-Fascist sentimentalism.”6 On the other hand, despite having a play running on Broadway that exhorted Americans not to be passive in the face of Nazi aggression, Hellman attended the Fourth National Congress of the League of American Writers in early June of that year. She and Hammett, in accord with the program of the Congress, urged America to stay out of the war. It was, then, surely something of a relief to Hellman when, on June 22nd, Hitler turned his armies on the Soviet Union. “The Motherland has been attacked!” she dramatically announced to her friends Sidney and Beatrice Buchman.7

  If Hellman had never known the woman on whom she modeled Julia, the character of Kurt Muller was based on a man whom Hellman knew quite well. This was Otto Katz, the Czech-born Jew who had urged Hellman to go to Spain. In Spain, she and Katz had an encounter, which she recorded in a diary entry for October 28, 1937:

  “You don’t look well, Otto. Is something the matter?”

  “Ach. I’ve been sick for years. In my forties I am an old man.”

  “It must be hard to be a Communist.”

  “Yes. Particularly here.”

  “How long have you been [a Communist]?”

  “I can’t remember, it’s so long ago. A young boy, almost a child.”

  He got up and took my arm and pressed it hard. “Don’t misunderstand. I owe it more than it owes me. It has given me what happiness I have had. Whatever happens I am grateful for that.”8

  This is a remarkable dialogue, virtually bereft of information, yet heavy with meaning; and, as it turned out, strangely prescient.

  For one thing, what did Katz mean by saying that he found it particularly hard to be a Communist in Spain? Hellman seems to understand him, but keeps her reader in the dark. Perhaps it was the fact that Katz, as a Comintern agent, would surely have known that the purges then taking place in Moscow had spread to Spain. Pravda had recently reported that “the purging of the Trotskyists and the Anarcho-Syndicalists has begun; it will be conducted with the same energy with which it was conducted in the U.S.S.R.”9

  And the prescient part of Katz’s conversation—his gratitude for the happiness “it” had given him: Whatever happens I am grateful for that . . . Did he actually anticipate what was to happen? Or was that Hellman’s flourish to her diary entry?

  By the time Hellman wrote An Unfinished Woman thirty years later, she knew what had happened to Otto Katz. She knew that after the Second World War he had returned to Czechoslovakia, and that in 1952 he was arrested, along with thirteen other high-ranking members of the Czech Party and government, most of them Jews. He was tortured, as they all were. At the trial, known to history as the Slansky trial, named for Rudolf Slansky, General Secretary of the Czech Party, Katz confessed: “For thirty years I defended bourgeois ideology, disrupted the unity of the working class.” He admitted to charges of Trotskyism, Titoism, and particularly Zionism and to being a saboteur and a traitor to his country.10 Eleven of the fourteen defendants were Jewish; a distinct point was made in their indictments of their “Jewish origin.” Eleven of the fourteen, Katz among them, were executed.11

  We do not know what Hellman thought or said in 1952 when she heard of Katz’s arrest and execution. However, in 1968, she added a note to her diary entry of their 1937 conversation: “[1968 When I read of his execution in Prague . . . I remembered the passion with which he spoke that night and hoped that it carried him through his time in jail, his day of death].”

  For a woman ordinarily moved to outrage by the smallest injustice, this seems a very cool reflection. And it does seem too much for even irony to bear that in the end it wasn’t the Nazis that Hellman’s Kurt Muller had to fear.

  9

  The Incurious Tourist

  IN THE spring of 1944, Hellman’s fifth play, The Searching Wind, opened on Broadway. In ten years as a playwright, Hellman had produced five plays, four of them successful. Hellman was not yet forty, audiences waited for her next play, she was a singular force in the American theater, and she had friends in high places. In January 1942, little more than a month after Pearl Harbor, Watch on the Rhine was selected for a “command performance” at the White House. Hellman chatted at dinner with Franklin Roosevelt. Two years later, in the third year of the war, Hellman’s stature as a cultural figure, and her well-known political sympathies, resulted in an invitation to the Soviet Union where Stalin offered to see her, she said.

  Lillian Hellman landed in Mosco
w on November 5, 1944, and would remain in the country for two-and-a-half months. She felt herself to be an unofficial cultural ambassador to our wartime ally. It is not clear exactly who sanctioned her trip, but given wartime travel restrictions, there was certainly some governmental sanction, the president, himself, perhaps, or his close advisor Harry Hopkins.

  What was Hellman expected to do for the war effort? The Second Front had been launched; although military victory was still six months off, it was clear at that moment that the Allies would win the war in Europe. Diplomatic relations between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin were tense: Stalin was suspicious as ever of his temporary allies; and the Western leaders, while deeply concerned about Stalin’s territorial ambitions in Europe, were aware that they could do little to prevent Stalin’s eventual control of the Balkans, Poland, and the Eastern European states.

  Not long before Hellman arrived in Moscow, Vice President Henry Wallace had been sent on a tour of Siberia. Whether from diplomatic tact, or the efficiency of his guides, Wallace never noticed that he was in the middle of the Gulag. He told his hosts that the landscape reminded him of our great Wild West.1 In Hellman’s case, it was perhaps thought that another visitor friendly to the Soviet Union might help allay Stalin’s suspicions of the West. And, indeed, Hellman proved to be a benign presence in Moscow. She lived, primarily, at Spaso House, the Ambassadorial residence then occupied by W. Averell Harriman. Harriman liked Hellman; he found her entertaining. He knew that she had a particular interest in the Soviet Union and assumed that she would be a lively participant in dinner table discussions, where he, George Kennan, and others at Spaso House who were deeply knowledgeable about Soviet Russia argued Stalin’s policies and their implications for post-war Europe. But Hellman could not be drawn into serious conversations, although she often endured “baiting” for her views: “It tended to become Miss Hellman vs. the field,” said her lover, John Melby, “and I know she was often personally and deeply offended.”2 For her part, Hellman wrote that she found the atmosphere of Spaso heavy and gloomy. She preferred the more informal atmosphere of the Metropole Hotel, and the rowdier company of foreign journalists and international riff-raff.

  Hellman was an admired writer in Russia. The Soviet Foreign Office offered her the extraordinary privilege of relative freedom of movement. In fact, officials insisted on sending her to places she did not really want to go—to Leningrad, and to the front lines—while Hellman’s preference was to remain in Moscow where her days and nights were full. She began her intense love affair with John Melby. She made friends with Kathleen Harriman, the Ambassador’s daughter, who found her “great fun” to have around, and “very enthusiastic about Russia.”3 She fulfilled her cultural responsibilities by making friends with Russian cultural figures, especially the great film maker, Sergei Eisenstein, whom she would see three or four times a week. She did agree to go to the recently besieged, starved city of Leningrad. She spoke with Russian writers, and became good friends with her young guide and translator, Raya Orlova, with whom she would keep in touch after she left the country. At the Metro-pole Hotel, she met Time reporter John Hersey, who became a lifelong friend and, to whose chagrin, Hellman, alone, of all the foreign journalists in Moscow, was given permission, indeed almost forced, to go to the Russian-Polish front.

  When Orlova informed her of this exciting development, Hellman was not pleased. “It was not good news to me,” she wrote. “I saw no point to the trip. I was not a journalist and didn’t wish to report on the war. I was uncertain I could take the hardships with any grace, I was frightened.”4 But on December 27, she and Orlova were on a train, headed for Lublin.

  Hellman made extensive notes during her 1944 stay in Soviet Russia. In one entry she mentions the antisemitism she encountered, which made her feel “like the Jewish shopkeeper during a pogrom rumor”; another entry notes “the deep reverence & respect that even intellectuals have for Stalin,” and further elaborates on the theme of Russian intellectuals, as she understood their position:5

  The Russian intellectual has had a hard life. . . . The 1930’s were the first promise of something better, but the promise was soon followed by the hurricane of the 1937–38 purges that sent him whirling. . . . The accusations against his friends or his heroes were only half understood. . . . Great honor must and will be paid those who did protest the criminal purges. It is hard to judge those who tossed about in silent doubt and despair, but it is even harder to believe that they did not understand what was happening.6

  On the simplest level, Hellman is mistaken; she often tells us that she has a bad memory for dates, so perhaps she was confused between the 1920s, and 1930s. Hellman’s friend Sergei Eisenstein could have told her, as he told Isaiah Berlin when they met in Moscow a few months after Hellman’s visit, that the early 1920s was the time of relative freedom in the arts: “We were young and did marvelous things in the theatre. . . . It was terrific. Goodness how we enjoyed ourselves!”7

  But even in that comparatively free decade, by the later 1920s Osip Mandelstam was barred from publishing in the Moscow press.8 And by the early 1930s, when Stalin had worked himself into a position of unchallengeable power, Soviet artists were subjected to the strict orthodoxy of the Communist Party and to the policy of Socialist Realism in the arts. Even writers who had fled the Soviet Union in the 1920s could not imagine what was to come: “Could we at that time foresee the death of Mandelstam on a rubbish heap, the end of Babel . . . Party politics in literature aimed at destroying two if not three generations? Could we foresee twenty years of silence on Akhmatova’s part? The destruction of Pasternak?” Nina Berberova wrote in her memoirs.9

  In 1932, the Union of Soviet Writers was established, and all other writers’ organizations dissolved. This newly formed organization decided which writers were to be published, which not; which were to have the privileges of good apartments, dachas, good medical care, which not; which were to be ostracized for writing that did not serve Soviet political ends. And thus, when the purges came, which writers were most likely to live or to die.

  Hellman’s further reflections on the subject of Russian intellectuals and the purges are more difficult to understand. What did she mean when she wrote of the “great honor” that “must and will be paid” to protesters of the “criminal purges”? Did she mean that the generation of artists who perished in the purges would eventually be rehabilitated by history? Because, in the American understanding of the word “protest,” there were no Russian protesters, at least none who lived to tell about it. No citizens signed petitions against the purges, none demonstrated in Red Square, as protesters might in front of the White House in a liberal democracy. Nobody protested at all, except, as Isaac Babel said, in whispers, under the covers, in the dark.

  It is difficult, too, to parse the story Hellman tells about a woman who came to visit her in Moscow, a translator of French and English poetry who has a “tense and twitchy” face. As Hellman describes her, the woman seems half-mad:

  “Where is Akhmatova?” the woman demands of Hellman. She answers her own question: “Gone, gone, with so many others. What do you think of that? “What do you think of that?” (In fact, the great poet Anna Akhmatova had not gone to her death or to the camps as so many others of her generation did; she miraculously, if miserably, survived until her natural death in 1966.)

  Hellman replies to her interlocutor: “Is it so terrible? You told me only last week about the trouble Akhmatova has had—”10

  And there, at the dash, Hellman breaks off her diary entry, leaving her reader mystified: What happened to Anna Akhma tova? What were her troubles? Hellman’s visitor raves on, but Hellman leaves us none the wiser about the tragic life of Anna Akhmatova—her first husband shot by the Cheka, their son sent to the prison camps for years, her second husband sent to the camps, the poet herself silenced, not permitted to publish.

  Neither do we learn anything about Osip Mandelstam, who is also mentioned by Hellman’s half-mad visitor. Mandelstam,
of course, was dead by then, having given up the ghost in 1938 while in transit to a Siberian prison camp. About Isaac Babel, Hellman’s visitor is apparently silent, and Hellman does not mention him in her memoir. Many years later, however, she assured a friend that Babel had died of natural causes, a heart attack.

  How can you say that, Lillian? asked her friend, the playwright William Alfred, who knew that Babel had been shot in 1940, after his arrest and brutal interrogation.

  “Oh,” Hellman replied, “I know a very charming man in the Russian foreign service who told me that he died of a heart attack.”11

  When she wrote the addendum to her memoirs in 1979, Hellman, with the benefit of more than thirty years’ hindsight, returned to Anna Akhmatova’s story, but only to add to the mystification:

  True, that I could not understand the treatment of Akh matova and other intellectuals, but a woman writer who was a close friend of Akhmatova told me she wasn’t quite sure what the beloved poet had done, if anything, to deserve her punishment, but something strange, perhaps personal, must have taken place.12

  On the afternoon of December 27, 1944, Hellman and Orlova boarded a train headed west, through the Ukraine and then to Lublin and the front lines of the war. The Red Army was camped on the eastern bank of the Vistula River, about one hundred miles from Warsaw. If Hellman knew that the Warsaw Uprising had begun five months earlier, and was now in its death throes as she arrived at the Russian front, she didn’t mention it then, or later. It is most improbable that she knew what Averell Harriman and George Kennan knew: That the Red Army had been ordered to wait passively, as Kennan wrote, “on the other side of the river” watching “the slaughter by the Germans of the Polish heroes of the rebellion.”13