HELLMAN, LILLIAN 1906-1984

Playwright, memoirist

Moralist

"I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion," wrote Lillian Hellman in 1952 in a letter addressed to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). She had been called before the HUAC, like so many before her, in order to name names, to admit fault, and to plead forgiveness. Some had done so. Others, like the Hollywood Ten, had gone to jail for pleading protection under the First and Fifth Amendments and being found in contempt of Congress. Hellman's tactic was to write a letter displaying a willingness to discuss her own beliefs but refuse to name names had been tried before, but she released her letter to the press and used public opinion as an ally. The tactic stumped the committee but still got her blacklisted for nearly ten years. Had the panel of congressmen been familiar with her plays, they would have expected no less. Hellman referred to herself as a "moralist" who used drama, on screen and stage, to illuminate the individual conscience in the face of social conformity.

Accidental Writer

Writing was not a calling for Hellman. Born on 20 June 1906 in New Orleans, Louisiana, she was raised as the only child of a shoe merchant of modest means. She spent her childhood shuttling between her mother's family home in New York and her father's sister's boardinghouse in New Orleans. In 1922 she began attending New York University but quit after three years. She began reading manuscripts for Boni and Liveright, a prestigious New York publisher. The publishing life introduced her to the bohemian New York crowd of the 1920s. In 1925 she married press agent Arthur Kober and began dabbling in book reviews and play reading. In Paris in the late 1920s she published two short stories in Paris Comet (edited by her husband) and traveled briefly to Germany. By 1930 she was in Hollywood, where Kober worked as a screenwriter for Paramount while Hellman read scenarios for M-G-M. She met Dashiell Hammett, who would become her lifelong companion after she divorced Kober in 1932.

First Success

In 1933 Hammett suggested a chapter of William Roughhead's book Bad Companions (1930) as the basis of a play. Hellman wrote it, and The Children's Hour opened at Maxine Elliot's Theater in New York in 1934. It ran for 691 performances. Hellman was immediately recognized for her ability to draw characters concisely and to cut lean the exposition in a play. The play, about how a single lie can destroy lives, had the social realist edge of the 1930s. It also had lesbian overtones and was banned in Boston, London, and Chicago. The Children's Hour brought Hellman fame and fortune and got her hired as a screenwriter by Sam Goldwyn. She wrote the film Dark Angelin 1935, adapted The Children's Hour for the screen in 1936 (altering it markedly, removing the lesbian theme and calling it These Three), and began her second play, Days To Come (1936). That play failed miserably and closed after seven performances.

Hitting Stride

She wrote another screenplay (Dead End, 1937 starring Humphrey Bogart) before returning to the stage. She hit stride in 1939 with The Little Foxes, a portrait of a southern family set in 1900. The play, an exposure of greed and rivalry within the Hubbard family, was explosive theater, called by some a chronicle of the rise of the industrial South. The Left saw it as an attack on capitalism, and Hellman was acclaimed by the Communist Party. Her next play, Watch on the Rhine, won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for 1941. In this openly anti-Fascist play, Hellman begins her exploration of personal complacency in the face of a rising tide of political danger. The play documents the confrontation of an anti-Nazi and a political opportunist, all against the backdrop of a comfortable Washington, D.C., home. The themes resonated in the prewar atmosphere as interventionists and isolationists were debating nationwide America's position on the war in Europe. Hammett wrote the screenplay for Watch on the Rhine in 1942, and the film was released in 1943, garnering an Oscar for Paul Lukas for best actor. Hellman followed up Watch on the Rhine with an original screenplay called The North Star (1943), set in the Soviet Union during the Nazi invasion. The movie industry was in a mood to portray America's ally in a favorable light, a stance that would cause trouble after the war. Hellman debuted another play in 1944, The Searching Wind, which again looked at individual passivity, this time in 1920s Germany, and followed that up with Another Part of the Forest (1947), in which she made her debut as a director.

Public Politics

Though she claimed she never joined a political party, Hellman was public with her political opinions, which were expressed in more personal than ideological terms. She had seen fascism firsthand in Germany. She had written political plays. Her playwriting declined after the war, but she remained a public figure. She was a supporter of Henry Wallace, an internationalist who spoke against the Cold War. She traveled to the Soviet Union for five months in 1944 and met Serge Eisenstein. She visited a concentration camp in Poland, In 1948 she visited Belgrade for the opening of The Little Foxes, met Marshal Tito, and praised him in an interview. She remained liberal in the face of the McCarthy years, continuing to write or adapt plays dealing with political conscience and private morality (Montserrat [1949], from a French play by Emmanuel Robles, The Lark [1955], based on Jean Anouilh's Joan of Arc story L'Alouette). Her Chekhovian play The Autumn Garden (1949) is among her finest, and her 1960 play Toys in the Attic won her another New York Drama Critics' Circle Award.

Her Craft

She was not a prolific writer. She is not easily categorized. Lillian Hellman spans the bridge of social realists in the 1930s through the middle-class conformity of the 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s she wrote memoirs of her extraordinary life (An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento: A Book of Portraits, and Scoundrel Time, about the McCarthy years). Above all else, she was a craftswoman. Her plays are marked by character portraits; straightforward, unpoetic dialogue; and plots that rise to inevitable and explosive confrontations. "I am a moral writer, often too moral a writer, and I cannot avoid, it seems, the summing up," she claimed, though at the end of her life she was brought to task for self-serving lapses of memory in her accounts, notably by Mary McCarthy and Dianna Trilling.

Sources:

Carol MacNicholas, "Lillian Hellman," in Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, Part 1: A-J, volume 7 of Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark, 1981);

William Wright, Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986).

Hellman, Lillian (1905–84), playwright. The New Orleans–born writer studied at New York University and Columbia, then took employment as a manuscript reader for Herman Shumlin and book reviewer before Shumlin produced her first play, the controversial The Children's Hour (1934), about two school teachers falsely accused of lesbianism. Hellman's labor drama, Days to Come (1936), was a quick failure, but her third play, The Little Foxes (1939), was a huge hit and is generally acknowledged to be her finest work. With the coming of World War II Hellman turned to current affairs, writing two timely (and popular) dramas, Watch on the Rhine (1941) and The Searching Wind (1944). Another Part of the Forest (1946) was a prequel to The Little Foxes and her Montserrat (1949) an adaptation of Emmanuel Robles's French drama about hostages who gave their lives to protect Simon Bolívar. Perhaps Hellman's most subtle, even Chekhovian, work was The Autumn Garden (1951), about some idlers at a summer resort who are forced to face the reality of their failures. Her translation of Jean Anouilh's version of the Joan of Arc story The Lark (1955) was a success, but her libretto for Candide (1956) was not. Hellman's final theatre efforts were the popular Toys in the Attic (1960) and the short‐lived My Mother, My Father and Me (1963). Her best writing has been characterized by a superb sense of theatre, taut construction, and acute personal observation of human behavior, often coupled with an attempt to probe major moral and political issues. Often a political activist, Hellman also wrote three controversial memoirs: An Unfinished Woman (1969), Pentimento (1973), and Scoundrel Time (1976). Biography: Lillian Hellman: The Image, The Woman, William Wright, 1986.

Hellman, Lillian (1905–84), American dramatist, screenwriter, librettist, and writer of memoirs, born in New Orleans. She and Dashiell Hammett, her partner for many years, were accused of un-American activities during the McCarthy period. Her plays include The Children's Hour (1934); The Little Foxes (1939), a family melodrama set in 1900 in the deep South; and Watch on the Rhine (1941), an anti-Nazi war drama set near Washington. Other works include Pentimento: A Book of Portraits (1973), an account of friendships with various people, including ‘Julia’, filmed as Julia (1977), with Vanessa Redgrave.

Hellman, Lillian (1905–84) US dramatist and writer. Her debut play, The Children's Hour (1934), set the tone for her enduring interest in Marxist theory. She received acclaim for her memoirs, beginning with An Unfinished Woman (1969), and concluding with Maybe (1980).