The play she wrote featured a businessman husband who flirted daily with bankruptcy as he tried to control a spendthrift wife. Their twenty-six-year-old son lacks external or internal constraints. When the wife’s elderly immigrant mother briefly joins the family, she exposes their inauthentic feelings about the importance of kin. As she treads on the toes of the African-American helper, she also challenges the shallow liberal ideals of those for whom status and comfort are final goals. Retreating to a nursing home, the grandmother cashes in her funeral policy to support the youth’s effort to find himself. Hellman skewers his search in a final scene where, masquerading in Indian costume, he is shown selling doodads to tourists. Filled with black humor and rife with casual racism, the play offered such a barren and hopeless portrait of Jewish family life that it closed after only seventeen performances. Its lead player, Walter Matthau, himself a Jew, told Hellman the play was anti-Semitic.57
As American Jewish identity shaped itself around nostalgia for the Eastern European past and pinned its hopes on Israel, so it also encompassed a growing antagonism to the Soviet communism that now added anti-Semitism to its other sins. In the Cold War years, intellectuals rushed to join the ranks of anticommunism, claiming fervent opposition to the Soviet Union while insisting that they had not abandoned the humane values of their younger days. But the vortex of anticommunism allowed little space for maneuvering. Hellman, still committed to the larger values of social justice, egalitarianism, and antiracism, seemed to give comfort to Soviet-style communism, to aid and abet enemies of democracy and the free market. Hellman’s decision to remain loyal to values that had seemed self-evident before the war negated the new Americanism of the postwar period. To be pro-American meant signing on to free-market democracy. For Jews, this meant a movement away from the goals of shared responsibility and economic security that characterized the Roosevelt period; it meant a pull toward the new liberalism of individualism, consumption, and philanthropy. The old values, so consistent with the Americanism of the 1930s, became, in the context of the fifties, outdated. Hellman was out of step, her claims to decency, honesty, and loyalty to friends now confronted by the animus of a newly influential group of Jewish intellectuals.
There was a repressed tension in this debate about what it meant to be a Jew. Martin Peretz, then still a graduate student at Harvard and soon to become editor of the New Republic, described himself as “Jewish Jewish” in the years when he and his wife befriended and remained close to Hellman. Commenting to her on his relief that blacklisted writers began writing again for the movies less than fifteen years after the blacklists, he noted to her, “It wasn’t like the Soviet Yiddish writers who were all shot.” He remembers Hellman replying, “Always, always the Jews, Marty.”58
Years later, Norman Podhoretz confirmed the tension between himself and Hellman on the subject. Recalling their relationship in the sixties—when Podhoretz was the newly appointed editor of Commentary magazine—he declared himself to have been disturbed by “Lillian’s attitude toward Jews in general and toward Israel in particular. She never denied being Jewish herself … But she also had a streak of Jewish anti-Semitism which came out … in cracks or sardonic comments about the vulgarity or the tastelessness of some ‘kike’ or other.”59 He attributed this to her German-Jewish background and to her “radicalism.” In the end, he tells us, it was her “blind and blinding hatred of America” that led to the end of the relationship. What Podhoretz described as a blinding hatred of America seemed just the opposite to Hellman. When the students of the 1960s began to organize and become political, Hellman applauded their efforts. What she described as spunky, Commentary called “Anti-American.” Hellman’s strenuous objection to the use of this vocabulary—she said it reminded her of “un-American”—led to a final break. At the core of the tension between her and Podhoretz lay their very different perceptions of what it meant to be a Jew in America. Hellman’s identity as a Jew melded into a larger cultural commitment to Americanism that most definitely included the capacity to dissent. Podhoretz placed a Jewish identity in the forefront of his value system.
The difference between Hellman and the group of Jewish intellectuals who lived in an uneasy truce with her came to a head in 1976 when Hellman published her account of her painful experience before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The book attributed the silence of intellectuals at the time to nineteenth-century immigration. “The children of 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,” she wrote in Scoundrel Time.60 To make her meaning absolutely clear, she singled out the Partisan Review, Commentary, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Irving Kristol, and others for having “made no protest when people in this country were jailed or ruined.”61
Hellman spoke out of a sense of betrayal that she could not shake. These were her people who had not spoken up, her people—as intellectuals and as Jews—who had abandoned her. “I had no right to think that American intellectuals were people who would fight for anything if doing so would injure them,” she wrote in Scoundrel Time. To the outside world this sounded like, and was, an attack on liberals writ large. But the now-disintegrated New York intellectuals heard in the words the recriminations of the German Jew. Children of immigrants, long uncomfortable with Hellman’s outsider stance, they took her to task for many things, among them her effort to label them as the frightened children of immigrants. They accused her of snobbishness, of using her privileged German-Jewish background to obscure political differences. As Sidney Hook noted, caustically, her attack on “anti-Communist liberals … betrays the priggishness of the unconsciously would-be assimilated 100% American whose ancestors had reached American shores a few boatloads ahead of other immigrants.”62
Hellman insisted that she “meant nothing snobbish” by the statement. “My family were immigrants once upon a time, too. We all were,” she told an interviewer.63 But her defenses made things worse. In the seventies, as in the thirties and the fifties, she found herself in a different camp from many of her fellow Jews. Then as earlier, the notion that “Jews” constituted a coherent political or identity group appalled her. She thought of them as neither particularly liberal nor radical. Southern Jews, in particular, had a wide variety of political opinions: “I find no solid liberal strain in the Southern Jew, East or German, or in the Southern goy, French, Scottish, or English,” she wrote. And she added, “The South made for many good things—maybe the best writers of our time—but it made very few rebels or reformers, then or now, Jew or non-Jew.”64 Self-interest, she was convinced, played as great a role in the racially egalitarian commitments of Jews as did humane inclinations. She once described herself as a “toilet-trained Jew,” and therefore acceptable to some who despised “just plain Jew.”65
Sadly for Hellman, this stance turned out to fan the flames of a defensive and torn post–World War II American Jewry. In a period when claims to Jewish nationalism and particularism vied with assertions of the representative and universal nature of Jewish suffering, Hellman found herself on one side of a struggle whose meaning she never fully understood. Except under the threat of fascism, she had never flaunted or announced her Jewish identity. But the 1950s witnessed the emergence, as key players in the intellectual and political life of the nation, of Jews who identified strongly with a particular Jewish heritage and with Israel. When she maintained her prewar stance, insisting that her Jewish identity was merely part of a larger, more universal humanism, Hellman turned into the perfect lightning rod, attracting widespread criticism among Jews who believed that universalism was merely a cover for continuing loyalty to the Soviet Union. She was neither the first nor the only Jew to be accused of being an anti-Semitic and self-hating Jew. Influential art critic Clement Greenberg, novelist Philip Roth in the early sixties, and philosopher Hannah Arendt, a little later, all came under scrutiny.66 But in Hellman’s case, her continuing refusal to denounce the Soviet Union—
the growing public sense that she remained a fellow traveler—lent fuel to the fire. From another perspective, Hellman’s stance suggests that her world remained that of the southern Jew, for whom religion was a peripheral part of her life and her identity. Her live-and-let-live attitude—the attitude she had absorbed as a child in New Orleans—turned her into a vehicle for channeling the frustrations of those who demanded a different standard. It also affirmed a political stance that Hellman understood as quintessentially American.
Chapter 6
The Writer as Moralist
I am a moral writer, often too moral a writer, and I cannot avoid, it seems, that last summing up.
—from the introduction to Four Plays by Lillian Hellman
Like every other writer, I use myself and the time I live in.
—Lillian Hellman, 1965
Hellman’s great plays of the thirties, The Children’s Hour and The Little Foxes—with their broad-brush commentaries on malicious wrongdoing, on greed and immorality—stamped her not only as a playwright prone to melodrama but as an angry playwright. Hellman thought of them as fundamentally moral plays, as plays that flailed at injustice. In that sense they reflected the core of her being. She described herself as “bewildered by all injustice, at first certain that it cannot be, then shocked into rigidity, then obsessed, and finally as certain as a Grand Inquisitor that God wishes me to move ahead, correct and holy.”1 Nobody, she tells us in Pentimento, “has ever been able to control me when I feel that I have been treated unjustly.”2 More and more certain of what was right and wrong in the world and with human nature, she began in the early forties to point her material toward contemporary themes, producing work that she thought of as embodying moral lessons but that were, nevertheless, overtly political.
For most of the twentieth century, definitions of good and evil, though never as clear as Hellman would have liked, attached themselves to political ideologies. The world divided between fascists and communists, she could see only good in communism and in fascism only evil. The wartime plays—Watch on the Rhine (1941) and The Searching Wind (1944), along with the film script for the 1943 film North Star—shied away from explicitly naming Nazis and Soviet communists as the respective champions of the evil and the good. But her fierce anger against an unnamed fascism resonated with the beliefs of her audiences, infusing her plays with a political voice that contributed to her fame and honor. She was on the side of the angels. Yet Hellman did not imagine herself as a political writer. “I’ve never been interested in political messages so it is hard for me to believe I wrote them,” she would say later.3 After the war, the political scene shifted, and though Hellman’s sense of right and wrong remained consistent and her voice strong and forceful, the politics embedded in her work seemed less relevant, even out of touch.
Watch on the Rhine took a theme dear to her heart—the defense of human liberty in the face of powerful forces (she called them bullies)—and translated it into an award-winning story rooted in the efforts of one family to speak and act against fascism. This was clearly an issue after her heart, but when she approached the subject as drama, she was at first stymied: “I wanted to say that we had little understanding of Europeans and little understanding of the conflicts among them.”4 Ultimately the play she wrote made a powerful appeal for ordinary people simply to pay attention.
Once again, she used the family—this time a well-informed and affluent family, loving and respectful of each other—as the vehicle through which to play out a larger struggle. On the eve of war, the American-born daughter of a former diplomat’s family comes home from Europe with her three children and her German resistance-fighter husband in tow. Her large and graceful childhood home harbors a guest, a Romanian count sympathetic to the Nazis, who threatens to betray the resistance fighter to German officials. In order to return once again to Europe where he can continue the fight, the husband murders the guest and draws the entire family into active support for the antifascist cause. As he makes his escape from the scene, he tells his children, “In every town and every village and every mud hut in the world, there is a man who might fight to make a good world.”5 Silence in the face of evil, Hellman says, the cowardly refusal to act when inaction will promote injustice, is the real sin.
Watch on the Rhine opened on April 1, 1941, two months before Hitler broke his peace pact with the Soviet Union and at a time when American communists had committed themselves to silence about German aggressions. It drew its share of criticism for the awkwardness of some of the plot line and a somewhat contrived final scene. And it drew as well the predictable accusations. “The play as it stands is, of course, essentially a melodrama,” wrote the New Republic’s critic, who followed with a comment that “artificial contrivance” in this play was more conspicuous than in some of her earlier plays.6 But others confronted Hellman’s message. “It is hard to say what our children will make of it,” wrote New Yorker columnist Wolcott Gibbs, “this story of a political refugee who murders a guest in a peaceful American household with everybody’s complete moral approbation and even their connivance.”7
Widely understood as an indictment of Nazism (though the word Nazi was never mentioned), the play was received as an effort to rally good, but apathetic, citizens to the fight against tyranny. Calling it “infinitely better than the propaganda plays we are used to in the theatre,” one critic noted that “it is the story and characters that really carry us along, however much or little the anti-Nazi connotations may stick in our minds.”8 Watch on the Rhine, wrote critic Brooks Atkinson, not always a fan of Hellman’s work, translated “the death struggle between ideas in familiar terms we are bound to understand.”9 It did so, he added, without beating “the drum in favor of any cause.”10 Critic George Jean Nathan called it “the best anti-Nazi play we have so far had, whether from a man or a woman.”11 Hellman’s plea for engagement did not go unheeded by ordinary folk. She saved one of the many fan letters she got—this one from an unknown man who wrote that he had seen the play many times and from it drew the lesson “that a man and wife must have an abiding faith and willingness to participate side by side in the same liberating struggle without any limitations.”12 This “moving and beautiful play, filled with eloquence and a heroic spirit,” as one critic described it, won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and ran for almost a year.13
On the left, Communist Party critics expressed more doubt. With Germany and the Soviet Union still tied together in a problematic peace pact, party loyalists wondered if Hellman had not undermined the Soviet cause. Artists, like all others—so went the party line—should subject themselves to political constraints; good art could be measured by its political rather than aesthetic effect. In this instance, the Daily Worker grumbled, a “fabric of omissions” hung like a veil between the play and its audience. Hellman had failed to note “that a land of socialism has already established the permanent new life of peace and freedom, morality and comradeship and is the greatest guarantee that the ultimate struggle will be won.”14 Protagonist Kurt Müller described himself as an antifascist but would not reply when asked if he was a radical, and never admitted to being “a member of a Communist group fighting for German freedom.” It was not, the Daily Worker reviewer hastened to add, that he believed “that a play stands or falls because it does or does not include a certain few lines. But, oh, how this play needs such added explanation.”15
1941: Hellman with Joseph Wood Krutch receiving the Drama Critics Circle Award. (Ransom Center)
Two months later, in June 1941, Germany launched a direct attack on Soviet territory, breaking its pact with the Soviet Union. Two years after that, Warner Bros. released a film version of the play, its script partly written by Dashiell Hammett. The timing was right. The play attacked by the communist press in early 1941 became a critical favorite as a 1943 movie. The different receptions became something of an issue in the party, setting off a debate over the meaning of party loyalty. Albert Maltz, writing in the Communist Party publica
tion the New Masses, asked why the change of heart and answered his own question. “Events had transpired in the two years calling for a different political program.”16 Watch on the Rhine, he argued, should be measured by aesthetic rather than political standards. Hellman could not have agreed more. Her integrity rested on her sense that art had its own voice. As she would put it later, “perhaps nothing in literature turns so quickly shoddy as those works which use the cloth of fashion to make the cloak of success.”17
A Difficult Woman Page 20