Standing at Lillian Hellman’s graveside at her 1984 funeral, one of Hellman’s closest friends remarked, “She was awful, but she was worth it.” It’s not an especially surprising eulogy for one of the 20th century’s most controversial playwrights. Hellman (1905-1984) was an energetic, tempestuous figure, given to fierce loyalties and sudden back-stabbings, high political idealism and head-in-the-sand denials, all fueled by alcohol, cigarettes, adulteries, and fascinating, non-stop, highly-literate conversation.

Born in New Orleans in 1905, Lillian Hellman spent her childhood bouncing between the eccentric, charming, down-at-heel Southern relatives of her father’s family and the condescending, intimidating, well-to-do New York branch of her mother’s. She did a few semesters at NYU and Columbia, then went to work in publishing as a manuscript reader and married young to Arthur Kobler, whom she would divorce amicably in 1932. The great shaping relationship of her life was with Dashiell Hammett, the talented hard-boiled detective mystery writer, screenwriter, and left-wing political activist. From their meeting in 1931 to Hammett’s death in 1961, he was variously her lover, her staunch friend, and her most important mentor. He encouraged her to write, in 1934, her first important, socially challenging play, The Children’s Hour, wherein the malicious accusation of lesbianism destroys the lives and careers of two women. The stage works that followed were long-running hits, often made into films, and won her awards and renown.

When, decades later in 1952, Hellman was interrogated before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), she claimed that she was “not a political person.” But anyone hearing that claim in the 1930s and ‘40s would have laughed in disbelief. Hellman was an intimate of the Hollywood set that included Nathaniel West, S.J. Perelman, and Hammett, himself a member of the Communist Party. She served on the writers’ “Keep America Out of the War” committee at the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. She traveled to Spain in 1937, supporting the International Brigade with Ernest Hemingway and others. She worked on a documentary about the Spanish Civil War with Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, and film director Joris Ivens. Her ferocious hatred of Facism is reflected in her play, Watch on the Rhine (1940).

She held a different set of standards for the Stalinists, however, refusing to acknowledge that the tyranny of Fascist governments and of Communist governments was in any way similar. She publicly applauded the bloody Moscow Trials in which Stalin purged dissident Party members, opposed granting political asylum to Trotsky, and, as late as 1969, castigated the American publisher of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s exposé of the Soviet Gulag system.

In 1952, when she was forced to testify before HUAC, she reacted with idealistic fervor, declaring, To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group. Hellman was blacklisted from working in Hollywood until 1960.

So, while her plays are set in domestic interiors and focus on the relationships between individuals in realistic 19th and 20th century environments, they are animated from inside by mighty political currents and the wrangling for power among individual characters.

Although it’s certainly a stand-alone piece, Another Part of the Forest was written as a kind of “prequel” to her highly successful 1939, Pulitzer-winning play, The Little Foxes. Both plays draw on Hellman’s understanding of social and economic transformations in Southern culture and both plays focus on the rapacious, mendacious Hubbards, a family of cold-hearted climbers whose only moral compass is money and control. These Hubbards are thinly veiled versions of Hellman’s mother’s family, the Newhouses. Both plays are savage portraits of characters who reshape what could pass for reality through constant lying, constant hypocrisy, and the opportunistic shifting of alliances for power’s sake. It is international politicking writ small in the ugliness of one family’s relationships.

But Foxes, in 1939, is written straight out of Hellman’s time of Socialist activism and is awash with issues of industrialization, capitalism, and the question of who will control the engines of economy. Forest is a post-World War II play, written as the fervent idealism of the war years began to curdle into a new political cynicism.

Patriarch Marcus Hubbard holds all the power as the play begins. Coming from nothing, his wealth is the result of shameless war profiteering and hidden crimes against his neighbors during the Civil War. As he has risen socially, he has appropriated the mythology and genteel trappings of the legendary “Old South” by quoting Greek philosophy and offering musicales in a house built by old southerners. This fictional past is a trap. While Marcus’s children deliberately play roles that flatter their father as a way of annexing his power, his son Ben will supplant him by using this past against him. The true heir of the Old South, Regina’s lover John Bagtry, proves too beglamoured by the memories of glory in the war and the lost ideals of his cause. Believing these lies, he will lose his patrimony to the carpetbagger Hubbards. And while everyone heaps contempt on Laurette, the unabashed prostitute of Oscar’s hopes, Regina and Birdie are equally whores, just as capable of selling themselves, their bodies, and their honor for gain and ascendancy as the more honest Laurette. Everything that in another family would be called “relationship” is here reduced to an economic transaction.

And the “good” characters? There are none, really. One of the themes running through all Hellman’s plays is the empowering of active villainy by characters who are passively complicit. The truly amoral and evil people can only accomplish their ends because the passive, better-natured ones allow them to get away with it. As Addie puts it in The Little Foxes, our society is divided between “people who eat the earth . . . [and] other people who stand around and watch them eat it.” So, in Another Part of the Forest, we watch Lavinia Hubbard sinking into madness, wracked with shame and remorse over her silent, direct witness of her husband’s crimes, hatching hare-brained schemes to expiate her sense of responsibility over the subjugation of black people, and blindly yielding her long-suppressed evidence at a time when it will fuel a new wave of damage.

Hellman remains a contradiction. The bleak vision of hypocrisy and power-hunger in Another Part of the Forest and Hellman’s other plays is actually the obverse of the unshakable idealism that perks through her brilliant memoirs (An Unfinished Woman, 1969, Pentimento, 1973, and Scoundrel Time, 1976). Everything she wrote is shaped by the combination of Hellman’s political idealism and her disappointment that human nature can’t or won’t achieve that vision.

© 2008 by Eileen Warburton

Suggestions for further reading:
“Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy”, by Carl Rollyson. (NY. St. Martin’s, 1988).
“Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett” by Joan Mellen. (NY. HarperCollins, 1996).


DISCUSSION SUNDAY at 2ND STORY THEATRE:
Discussion Sunday puts on your thinking cap.
First Sunday of each production.
Pre-show: 2pm and post-show: 5pm.

Ed Shea, Artistic Director, and Eileen Warburton, PhD, Humanities Scholar-in-Residence, take a look at the humanity themes roused by the plays. Essays written by Dr. Warburton are available online and at the performance. Humanities discussions are free and open to the public.

RHODE ISLAND COUNCIL FOR THE HUMANITIES

Discussion Sunday at 2nd Story Theatre is made possible through major funding support from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, an independent state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Discussion Sunday do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.