Lillian Hellman | Encyclopedia.com (2024)

Born 20 June 1905, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 30 June 1984, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts

Daughter of Max B. and Julia Newhouse Hellman; married Arthur Kober, 1925 (divorced), lived with Dashiell Hammett

Lillian Hellman, an only child, was both repelled and fascinated by the vital obsession with money of her mother's family, who had become wealthy through shrewd and often unscrupulous business dealings; she had warmer feelings for her father's family, particularly his two sisters. Hellman spent her childhood in New York City and New Orleans. After two years at New York University from 1922 to 1924 and a brief stint at Columbia University, she accepted a position as manuscript reader for Horace Liveright, Inc., a New York publisher. She worked as a theatrical playreader in New York from 1927 to 1930 and a scenario reader for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1930 to 1931 before returning to New York in 1932.

Hellman met her future husband, press agent Arthur Kober, and became acquainted with the literary world while working in New York. Kober and Hellman also lived in Paris and Germany for several months, and Hellman later made extensive visits to Spain and the Soviet Union. Hellman's observations of the political situation in Europe, coupled with her own Jewish faith, contributed to the dislike of fascism and anti-Semitism apparent in her later political works.

After she and Kober got an amicable divorce, Hellman lived with Dashiell Hammett, the detective-fiction writer. An honest and severe critic, he read all Hellman's work in progress and kept after her to rewrite it until it met his exacting standards. With the profits from her early plays, Hellman bought a large working farm in New York, where she spent her happiest years with Hammett. After both she and Hammett were investigated in the 1950s by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and were blacklisted, they lost their major sources of income and had to sell their farm.

Hammett guided her to the source for her first produced play, The Children's Hour (1934), an account of an actual libel suit in 19th-century Scotland. It tells the story of Karen Wright and Martha Dobie, owners of a successful girls' school, who are ruined by a charge of lesbianism. Extremely successful, partly because of its then shocking theme, the play ran for 691 performances on Broadway. The Children's Hour is a skillfully wrought melodrama deepened by psychological penetration and moral significance.

The Children's Hour was one of a number of Hellman's plays made into highly successful films in the 1930s and 1940s. She received Academy Award nominations for her adaptation of The Little Foxes in 1941 and her original screenplay The North Star in 1943. Her other filmed plays include The Searching Wind, filmed in 1946. Among Hellman's theatrical awards are the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1941 and 1960, a Gold Medal from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1964 for Distinguished Achievement in the Theatre, and election to the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1973.

The Little Foxes (1939) is a gripping drama about the Hubbards of Alabama, who display the greed and driving egotism Hellman saw in her mother's family. Ben and Oscar Hubbard and their sister, Regina Giddens, form a partnership with a Northern industrialist to set up a profitable cotton factory in their town, but they cannot secure a controlling interest without obtaining money from Regina's husband, Horace, which he refuses to advance because he is disgusted by the Hubbards' ruthless greed. Throughout the play, mastery shifts between the brothers and their sister, depending upon who seems more likely to get control of Horace's money. In the end, Regina gains control by deliberately provoking him into a fatal heart attack. The Little Foxes is even better constructed than The Children's Hour. Throughout the play, every speech advances the action; the climactic scene in which Regina drives Horace into heart failure is both psychologically prepared for and superbly effective theatrically.

Because the Hubbards are intended to be human beings as well as monsters of selfishness, Hellman decided to "look into their family background and find out what it was that made them the nasty people they were." In Another Part of the Forest (1947), she went back 20 years to show Ben, Oscar, and Regina as young people dominated by their father, Marcus. Hellman found humor as well as evil in people like the Hubbards, and made this more obvious in her second play about them.

In Watch on the Rhine (1941), Hellman turned to the current political situation in order to awaken Americans to the growing menace of fascism. The play is set in 1940, just before this country entered World War II. Its title, from a German marching song, suggests Nazism must be watched and fought not only in Europe but in the United States. Accordingly, Hellman brings the antifascist struggle into an upper-class American home. Her moral point overshadows artistic interest and realism, but her rather simplistic message was eagerly welcomed by a nation on the brink of war. Like Watch on the Rhine, The Searching Wind (1944) focused on the innocence of Americans and their inability to comprehend the growing power of fascism and anti-Semitism in the 1930s.

The Autumn Garden (1951) is unlike Hellman's earlier plays in emphasizing character over plot. In a handsome but shabby Southern resort hotel, she gathers 10 people who lack purpose, joy, and love. Hellman's characterization here shows a notable advance in subtlety, as she views her people with more sympathy and less simple judgement. General Griggs, who wants a divorce from the wife with whom he is desperately bored, is a touching portrait of a decent, intelligent man trapped with a woman who cannot grow. The artist Nick Denery is no simple villain, despite his irresponsibility to others. He does not mean to hurt people; he just cannot resist the temptation to win their affection by charming compliments and well-intentioned but ill-considered interference. Since his own life is empty—his wife despises him, and he has not finished a portrait for 12 years—he has to fill it by establishing intimacy with others, yet he is too shallow and selfish for emotional commitment. Despite inadequate plotting, Hellman has powerfully developed her theme of people stalemated in middle age.

Perhaps the most obvious characteristic of Hellman's writing is her first-rate craftsmanship: the neat plotting of the Hubbard plays, where thrilling melodramatic climaxes are meticulously prepared for, as hints are dropped in the beginning, every one to be picked up by the end; the relief from this suspenseful melodrama through pathos or comedy; the sharp characterization and vividly authentic speeches, which at the same time economically move the plot along.

In her last two original plays—The Autumn Garden and Toys in the Attic (1960), which also present middle-aged people who come to recognize the bleakness of their lives but find they cannot change them—Hellman's artistry appears more in character development. Instead of presenting lively sketches of villainy or pathos, she probes the motivation of a shallow charmer like Nick Denery. Instead of presenting straightforward relationships of love or domination, she examines ambivalent ones of mutual dependency. She sacrifices neatness to subtlety: dialogue no longer proceeds so briskly, but it expresses more precisely the feelings between people. She relaxes her tight plotting to give her characters more room to develop, though she unfortunately retains some jarring melodramatic elements. Hellman is surely right in considering The Autumn Garden her finest play.

Well made and popular as her plays have been, they are all redeemed from commercialism by their strong moral commitment. Hellman constantly makes the point, equally applicable to private and public affairs, that it is immoral to remain passive when evil is being done. She believes that a clear moral message "is only a mistake when it fails to achieve its purpose, and I would rather make the attempt, and fail, than fail to make the attempt." Only in a few cases, such as the anticlimactic discussion after Martha's death in The Children's Hour and the antifascist plays, does the moral message become obtrusive. Generally, it is organically part of her artistic structure and characterization. Hellman's works consistently demonstrated responsibility, courage, and integrity.

Hellman turned from writing plays to teaching at various New England and New York universities in the 1960s. She taught and conducted seminars in literature and writing at Yale University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Hunter College, and the City University of New York. In the 1970s, Hellman gained considerable fame through the publication of her memoirs, the first of which was released in 1969 as An Unfinished Woman, and won a National Book Award. This vivid autobiography runs from her childhood in New Orleans to the death of Hammett in 1961. The whole book is characterized by painstaking honesty, as Hellman analyzes her rebellions and conflicts, her ambivalent attitudes toward money and the theater,and the tensions of her relationship with Hammett. Often she renders her experience in dramatic dialogues. The second volume of her memoirs, Pentimento (1973) is Hellman's reconsideration of certain themes in her life not developed in An Unfinished Woman. It consists mostly of portraits, of which the most memorable is that of her beloved girlhood friend, "Julia," a passionate anti-Nazi who involved Hellman in the mission (especially perilous for a Jew) of carrying $50,000 into Berlin to ransom political prisoners. Hellman's innocence, played against the elaborate subterfuges undertaken to safeguard her mission, makes for taut suspense. Scoundrel Time (1976) describes Hellman's experience of political persecution in the 1950s. These three memoirs were republished together as Three in 1979 with new commentary by Hellman. Her last volume of memoirs, Maybe: A Story, was published in 1980.

With the publication of Three and Maybe came controversy, when Hellman was called a liar by Mary McCarthy in a televised interview (Hellman later sued her), while Martha Gellhorn asserted that Hellman had fictionalized parts of An Unfinished Woman. In addition, another woman, psychoanalyst Muriel Gariner, who wrote Code Name Mary (1983), said Hellman appropriated her past as the basis of her "Julia" recollections in Penitmento. None of the charges or allegations were ever settled and Hellman died before her libel suit against McCarthy went to court. A film based on the relationship of Hellman and Hammett was produced by the Arts & Entertainment (A & E) network in 1999, appropriately titled Dash and Lil.

Other Works:

Dear Queen (with L. Kronenberger, unpublished and unproduced play, 1931). Days to Come (1936). The North Star: A Motion Picture About Some Russian People (1943). Candide by Voltaire (dramatization by Hellman, with music by L. Bernstein and lyrics by R. Wilbur, J. LaTouche, and D. Parker, 1957). Four Plays (1942). Six Plays (1960). Collected Plays (1972). Eating Together: Recollections and Recipes (with P. S. Feibleman, 1984).

The Lillian Hellman Collection is housed in the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin.

Bibliography:

Bryer, J. R., ed., Conversations with Lillian Hellman (1986). Dick, B. F., Hellman in Hollywood (1982). Estrin, M., Lillian Hellman: Plays, Films, Memoirs—A Reference Guide (1980). Estrin, M. W., ed., Critical Essays on Lillian Hellman (1989). Falk, D. V., Lillian Hellman (1978). Feibleman, P., Lilly (1988). Feibleman, P., Cakewalk (1993). Foster, K., "Detangling the Web: Mother-Daughter Relationships in the Plays of Marsha Norman, Lillian Hellman, Tina Howe, and Ntozake Shange" (thesis, 1994). Heilman, R. B., The Iceman, the Arsonist, and the Troubled Agent (1973). Heilman, R. B., Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience (1968). Holmin, L. R., The Dramatic Works of Lillian Hellman (1973). Lederer, K. Lillian Hellman (1979). Luce, W., Lillian (1986). Moody, R., Lillian Hellman: Playwright (1972). Nelson, R., Sensibility and Sense (1989). Riordan, M. M., Lillian Hellman: A Bibliography: 1926-1978 (1980). Rollyson, C., Lillian Hellman, Her Legend and Her Legacy (1988). Shannon, D. D., "Mothers and Daughters: The Quest for Psychological Wholeness in the Plays of Lillian Hellman and Marsha Norman" (thesis, 1994). Triesch, M., The Lillian Hellman Collection at the University of Texas (1968). Wright, W., Lillian Hellman: The Image, The Woman (1986).

Reference works:

American National Biography (1999). Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature (1991). CANR (1991). CB (May 1941, June 1960). Encyclopedia of World Biography (1998). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995). TCA (1942).

Other references:

Contact (1959). Modern Drama (1960). Paris Review (1965, Spring 1981). Lillian Hellman: The Great Playwright Candidly Reflects on a Long, Rich Life (recording, 1977).

—KATHARINE M. ROGERS,

UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS

AND NELSON RHODES