A Difficult Woman by Alice Kessler-Harris

Introduction
    If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written; for a great deal is known of men of which proof cannot be brought.
    â€”
John Boswell,
The Life of Samuel Johnson
    In 1976, aged seventy-one, playwright and memoirist Lillian Hellman posed in a mink coat for a resonant advertisement. Cigarette in hand, gazing insouciantly at the camera, Hellman claimed the legendary status she craved. Her flirtatious stance, self-confident amid the wrinkled features, her posture at once brazen and enticing, Hellman gazed directly at the viewer. The advertisement did not reveal the name of its model. It did not have to. Everyone who read
Vogue
and the
New Yorker
and the other magazines in which the advertisement appeared would know that this was Lillian Hellman. She was at the peak of celebrity. In addition to a fistful of plays whose names were well known, she was a heroine to young women who adored her two bestselling memoirs. A star-studded celebration of her seventieth birthday had recently been covered in all the society pages. Just months before the advertisement appeared, Hellman published her third volume of nonfiction,
Scoundrel Time
. So controversial was that volume, and so divisive, that when the mink coat advertisements hit the stands, Hellman had already begun her long decline from the pinnacle of fame to the depths of notoriety.

    1976: Everyone would know that this was Lillian Hellman. (Image courtesy of The Advertising Archives)
    What was it, I wondered as I started on this book, that made Hellman’s life matter so much to so many? To be sure, it traversed most of what historian Eric Hobsbawm has labeled the short twentieth century, the period that saw the rise and demise of the communist Soviet Union. Her life reveals the multiple tensions within which every politically engaged American juggled options and choices during that challenging period. Hellman was born in 1905, came to maturity with the flapper generation of the 1920s, learned her politics in the Depression-era thirties, became a celebrity playwright and movie scriptwriter during World War II, when America needed heroes, and earned her stripes in the struggle against McCarthyism in the early fifties. She survived blacklisting to become an idol of the New Left and the second wave of the women’s movement, only to succumb to red-baiting and character assassination at the end of her days. She was, and is still, dragged from the grave to serve as an example of the perils of mendacity. But her words are still quoted, her plays are regularly revived, and her example still inspires.
    It was hard to believe that this complicated and forthright woman had come to such a bad end in the popular imagination. Like many of my contemporaries, I read—devoured would be more accurate—Lillian Hellman’s autobiographical work as it appeared in the late sixties and early seventies:
An Unfinished Woman
in 1969,
Pentimento
in 1973, and then
Scoundrel Time
in 1976. These memoirs, which deeply moved me at the time, drifted into obscurity in the wake of continuing accusations that they reflected more fiction than fact. More than a quarter century after her death her name still evokes bitter feelings. How had it happened, I wondered, that Lillian Hellman, once so honored and famous, admired for her blunt and plainspoken style, had become the archetype of hypocrisy, the quintessential liar, the embodiment of ugliness? How was it that she was so widely remembered as a rigid Stalinist, an angry woman, a greedy, self-aggrandizing individual in a world where so many others had committed many of the same sins? Why had these characterizations, this negative reputation and the controversy that swirled around her, so long survived her death in 1984? This book tries to answer these questions not by reassessing her character but by thinking through her relationship to the twentieth century. The questions that trouble me