Lillian Hellman has been a literary institution for nearly 50 years–long enough, as she put it, to undergo a revival within her own lifetime. She was 27 when her play The Children’s Hour was proclaimed a smash success in 1934, and she almost immediately acquired the label “America’s foremost woman playwright.” (Her reaction to that honor was typical: she was quick to point out the discrimination of the phrase.)
She survived the failure of her second play, Days to Come, and went on to write such major dramas as The Little Foxes, Another Part of the Forest, Watch on the Rhine, Toys in the Attic and The Autumn Garden.
She has relished her many successes (after The Little Foxes opened, she carried some mink skins for a coat she had just ordered to a co*cktail party in her honor to prove she had made it; last year she modeled a fur for a Blackglama ad which has appeared in several magazines and which is reproduced on page 54.)
A woman of fierce temper and fiercer loyalties (the most remarkable thing about her stormy 30-year relationship with writer Dashiell Hammett seems to be that it endured), she dared to lecture Joe McCarthy and his cronies about the immorality of their actions when the most likely consequence was her own imprisonment. As Hemingway once told her, she had “cojones.”
Perhaps most impressive, she started a new career at the age of 62 and wrote a string of memoirs–An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento and Scoundrel Time–that became instant classics. Lillian Hellman has become, in short, an icon in an age of iconuclasm. But she resists becoming a standard-bearer for any movement.
When I asked her how it felt to be adopted as a matron saint by the women’s movement, she laughed and said she wasn’t sure she was, but if she was she guessed it was fine. At times she has been more caustic: in a recent article she referred to “the new army of lady journalists who have chosen to interpret women’s liberation as the freedom to attack other women.”
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She’s a self-proclaimed rebel (“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” were her now famous words to the House Committee on Un-American Activities). It’s a role that she obviously enjoys, but one that’s given her the reputation of being a “difficult woman”
So it was with a mixture of fear and admiration that I first approached her. We had a series of rather ill-fated phone conversations over a period of a couple months trying to arrange a time for the interview. Some of these calls left me feeling I had been through an intense sparring match and would never reach the main event. It seemed I was never able to satisfy her–I either called at the wrong hour, or at the right hour on the wrong day, and once made the mistake of addressing her in a letter as “Ms.” rather than “Miss.”
But we finally met over last July 4th weekend at her summer home on Martha’s Vineyard. The house faces the harbor of Vineyard Haven, and next door is the Revolutionary War-era house where she and Hammett spent several summers before his death in 1961. Hellman was watering her rose garden when I walked up.
We shook hands and she greeted me warmly in her inimitable wire-rake-on-gravel voice. She’s smaller than I expected–about 5’2″, energetic, tough. Her face is deeply lined with age; her eyes are intelligent and engaging. We talked for several hours that afternoon on the patio overlooking the harbor, then later over dinner. The furniture in the house–mostly antiques, including the early-Victorian sofa from the original set of The Little Foxes – came from her beloved farm in Pleasantville, New York, which she was forced to sell when she was blacklisted.
She loves the island (“I’m crazy for salt water and boats”) but her doctor won’t let her spend more than summers there because the dampness is bad for her emphysema. Nonetheless she chain-smoked during the entire interview, interrupted only by coughing spasms.
Throughout our conversation she projected the sense of control that comes across in her writing. There were certain topics she adamantly refused to discuss, and gossipy anecdotes were not forthcoming (doubtless a matter of instinct to a writer whose own life is her best material). At a certain moment she announced that our conversation was over for that day (“I get bored talking about myself”). The next day, as we finished up our conversation, she was impatiently waiting to go for a boat ride with her old friend and neighbor John Hersey, and once his boat came into view I knew the interview would be terminated.
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Typically, the grande dame had arranged a proper exit. When I spoke to her in Los Angeles last week, Hellman said she had no current plans or projects–but that’s what she said last summer. Since then she’s traveled around the country with Rosalynn Carter for a magazine piece, taken a trip down the Nile and negotiated for various film projects based on her memoirs. And the day we spoke, CBS was about to film an interview with her for their program Who’s Who. At 69, Lillian Hellman stubbornly refuses to act her age. Clearly, she is still an unfinished woman.
Why did you turn to memoir writing after a long and very successful career as a playwright and screenwriter?
I don’t know. I decided I didn’t want to do another play for a while. I’d been thinking about this kind of writing for a long time, wondering whether I could do it. I had started off as a short-story writer but never liked the stories very much. I had to find some other form to write in.
Did you find it very difficult to shift gears at a late point in your professional career?
No, I didn’t find it too difficult. I had no plans. I knew that I didn’t want to write a play, but I knew that I wanted to go on being a writer. I had no intention of publishing. I didn’t make a contract for An Unfinished Woman until the book was a third finished. And then I made the contract with a clause that I could give back the advance if I chose to, and have no further ties. I was worried that I wouldn’t like it when I finished it.
You seem to use a lot of the principles of fiction in your memoirs.
Yes, I wouldn’t have chosen the people I chose without a feeling for fiction, some belief that what I was writing about was interesting or dramatic. The structure was difficult because I didn’t want to alter facts, and since in none of the portraits did I go steadily through a life, then it became a way of finding out how to tell it. In no portrait except Hammett’s and Dorothy Parker’s did I know any of these people over many years. So there were long gaps: I had to make use somewhere of the gaps and had to find some method of doing it. Julia was particularly hard. But nothing on God’s earth could have shaken my memory about her. I did finally look at whatever notes I had left, but I didn’t need to.
Is there any particular pattern to what you find you remember easily and things you have a bad memory for?
I remember what people say fairly accurately, but I don’t remember where they said it or when they said it.
How much of the dialogue in your memoirs is reconstructed?
Well, much was reconstructed but I have a good memory for the way people talk. That was my job for many years, that’s what the theater is. If you sit through enough rehearsals, you get trained. I remember most rooms I’ve seen. But I very often can’t place what city the room is in. Everybody’s memory is tricky and mine’s a little trickier than most, I guess.
What kind of research do you do when you’re writing? Do you call up friends and acquaintances to help you remember?
Sometimes. Very seldom. When I was doing the piece about Hammett which I used in An Unfinished Woman, I wrote to 11 people about his stay in the Aleutians and I got back eight answers. Seven had him in places he could never have been, and the years were all wrong. I’m sure something remained in their head of the truth, but it was checkably inaccurate. I heard last night someone repeat the Henry Wallace story in Scoundrel Time and do it completely wrong, completely wrong. And he said he’d read the book only last week.
The critics of Scoundrel Time have argued that the issue of who cooperated with the House Committee on Un-American Activities was a lot more complicated than you allow in your book, particularly for disillusioned former members or sympathizers of the Communist party.
If you were a member of the party, you could have had good reason for leaving the party. That certainly must have been a complicated situation. But that doesn’t have anything to do with supplying people like HUAC with information. No sane person can doubt what HUAC was out to do. It’s comedy even to discuss it. It’s there on the record.
Nathan Glazer suggests that if people like you had spoken out at the time about the evils of Communism there might have been no McCarthy.
Oh, nonsense. McCarthyism came from powerful places; the famous China lobby and the anti-Red scares had nothing to do with people like me–nothing whatever. McCarthy is a very inaccurate name for a shameless period. McCarthy only summed up the angers and fears of a great many people.
Several reviewers, including Rolling Stone‘s, have taken exception to the tone of the passage in which you talk about American intellectuals finding in the “sins of Stalin Communism” an “excuse to join those who should have been their hereditary enemies.” The passage continues: “Perhaps that, in part, was the penalty of 19th-century immigration. The children of timid immigrants are often remarkable people: energetic, intelligent, hardworking; and often they make it so good that they are determined to keep it at any cost.”
I meant nothing snobbish. My family were immigrants once upon a time, too; everybody’s were. I didn’t mean that the oldest Wasp wouldn’t have acted just as badly, but not so many of them were involved. And because Jews have always been persecuted, it is my belief they should fight it anytime, anywhere.
So you were referring primarily to Jewish immigrants?
No. I’m a Jew and I don’t know how they could have thought a Jew could be snobbish about other Jews. Perhaps I worded it badly. I don’t know.
You’ve never really dealt specifically in your writing with what it was like to be Jewish in the South.
I’m sorry I had no religious upbringing. Maybe it would not have mattered but it might have been interesting to have it. Southern Jews, particularly New Orleans Jews, had different histories than Northern Jews. New Orleans Jews, just as New Orleans people, were a breed apart. They had a pleasant community of their own and in turn the community allowed them to have it, although they never accepted them into their own circles. No Jew has ever been allowed in the best Carnival balls, as far as I know, to this day. But it never seemed to worry them. I heard about one Jewish family–they used to be a joke–who left town during Carnival balls. But everbody laughed at that.
Are you very conscious of being Jewish now; is that a part of your identity?
Oh yes, sure. I don’t clearly know what it means to me, I just know that I would rather be a Jew than not be. I think Nazism had a great deal to do with that. It suddenly became very important to me. New Orleans had a live-and-let-live quality about it. That was rare in the South.
