A Difficult Woman by Alice Kessler-Harris Page A

are not so much about her psychic dimensions—the traditional subject of the literary biographer—or even about the soil from which she grew, the question most often raised by the historical biographer. Rather, I wonder about what is to be learned from the surviving images of Lillian Hellman, from the sharp disjuncture between the glamorous and celebrated playwright and the “ugly” woman of popular memory.
    The answers to these questions seem to me to lie in the historical drama within which Hellman acted her part: in the multifaceted and politically splintered America in which she spent her days. In Hellman’s lifetime, America fought several wars for democracy and freedom abroad, yet engaged in extended episodes of political repression at home. Her life engaged a century during which women strode toward economic and political equality, yet remained constrained by popular images of beauty and models of traditional family relationships. This was a century when celebrity conferred fame, money, and standing, of which Hellman had her full share, yet it placed its recipients in the glare of constant publicity, turning them into public property. At the century’s start, the nation challenged immigrants to assimilate by eliminating differences of language and culture; by its end, it encouraged pride in multiculturalism and unique qualities of ethnicity and identity. During the twentieth century, efforts to achievethe good life for every citizen yielded remarkable success, but they also produced an arrogant stance in the world. The twentieth century pitted two competing ideological systems against each other, fostering intense conflicts about the meaning of loyalty and the definition of virtue.
    Lillian Hellman, as a historical figure who faced difficult choices, lived in a century sharply divided by ideology and morality. Repeatedly she made decisions about where to locate her political allegiance; how to construct her life as a woman in a world that limited women’s aspirations; what it meant to live as a Jew, a southerner, a writer at a time when these identities all carried gender, economic, and political connotations that she only half understood and sometimes explicitly rejected. These issues could not be neatly separated. Her identity, her friendships, her sexuality, her writing, and her politics sustained and infected each other, producing an amalgam that was at once idiosyncratic and complicated and very American.
    My task has been to see how the life of a single woman can help us to understand some of the salient contradictions of a challenging century by highlighting the thorny situations that Hellman faced. Fortunately, my job has been made easier by the spate of more traditional biographies that have already appeared. These (especially two very good ones by Carl Rollyson and Deborah Martinson) offer thoroughly researched accounts of Hellman’s daily life. 1 I gratefully refer readers who wish to follow Hellman “cradle to grave” to them. Here I choose another path, one to which the historian is perhaps particularly attuned. I seek not only to explore how the world in which Hellman lived shaped the choices she made, but to ask how the life she lived illuminates the world she confronted. There is yet a third layer. Because Hellman’s life seems to me to so deeply encapsulate many of the twentieth century’s challenges, I ask as well how a changing political environment influences popular perceptions of her life. Hellman’s actions alone, I argue, cannot account for the transformation in her reputation. Rather, over time, critics, reviewers, political friends and enemies collectively formulated a life that reshaped Lillian Hellman, turning her into something of a Rorschach test. Critics and friends alike viewed her through their own eyes and their own ideological biases. They helped to construct the Lillian Hellman whose work and reputation persists. That Lillian Hellman