A Difficult Woman (15 page)

Hellman thought she had written a more complicated play, one about a financially and emotionally troubled family unable to resolve problems not of their own making. As she put it, “they lived in a place and time where old convictions, a way of life, clashed sharply with unexpected new problems.”
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The Depression, source of these problems, serves as a background that allows Hellman to sympathize with the weak-willed and good-hearted Rodman and with workers who rely on a rising trade unionism to protect their jobs. The only true measure of evil lies in the strike breakers, whose appearance signals the victory of the sister and the lawyer, both more interested in profits than in the well-being of the workers. But the play's message was too obscure for its audience. Hellman's sharp arrows directed against the selfish search for individual wealth missed their target. Instead of wounding the greedy sister and manipulative lawyer, they pierced an unfaithful wife and a labor-organizer lover whose passion for love and justice compete with each other. The play, which opened on December 15, 1936, closed after only seven performances.

The failure of
Days to Come
tells us something about the tormented choices of the 1930s. On its face, as the critic Joseph Wood Krutch noted,
Days to Come
promoted “a definite Marxian moral—namely, that men are sundered from one another by a difference in class interests between which no personal good-will can adjudicate.”
²⁸
But Hellman described the play as something else altogether. “It's the family I'm interested in principally,” she told an interviewer just a few days before the play opened, “the strike and social manifestations are just backgrounds. It's a story of innocent people on both sides who are drawn into conflict and events far beyond their comprehension.”
²⁹
The outcome of
Days to Come
rested, after all, on the twists and turns of a plot in which a dependent wife drives her husband into debt; a greedy sister persuades her brother to disappoint desperate workers rather than risk her own profits; a lawyer's affair with a factory owner's wife leads him to place self-interest above duty to his client. More than forty years later, when the play was revived for the
first time, critic Terry Curtis Fox commented on its complex amalgamation of moral and political subjects. To him,
Days to Come
seemed to open up Hellman's “great continuing theme … that there is no line between private morality and public policy, that political choices are moral choices.”
³⁰
In the thirties, Hellman chose to see in the play a different dimension: she focused on the willingness of individuals to put their own interests before those of community. To her, its moral lay in its condemnation of the ease with which one person could betray another to protect himself.

Years later, when her celebrity was assured, she would remember the pain that failure caused her, calling “the failure of a second work … more damaging than failure ever will be again” because it made the success of the first seem like an accident.
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“Failure in the theater,” she wrote to Arthur Kober after the play closed, “is more dramatic and uglier than in any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.”
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It was to be two years “before I could write another play,
The Little Foxes
,” she later commented, “and when I did get to it I was so scared that I wrote it nine times.”
³³
Yet for all her agony, Hellman never gave up on
Days to Come
. To her it seemed “a good report of rich liberals in the 1930's, of a labor leader who saw through them, of a modern lost lady, and has in it a correct prediction of how conservative the American labor movement was to become.”
³⁴
Four decades after its debut the play was, for the first time, revived for a twelve-day limited run in a small theater. Hellman took the opportunity to explain it once again to an interviewer: for her, the divisions incited by class may have been present, but they were not central. Rather, the idea that some people remain simple and undemanding while others pursue self-gratification, that the honorable may become victims of injustice while justice eludes the principled, that one's own integrity is, in the end, all there is constituted the fundamental values and themes that would underline her life's work in the theater and beyond. “Justice and injustice, integrity and dishonor, principle and self-gratification,” to paraphrase one critic, were the themes around which both her life and her work evolved.
³⁵

Emerging as a playwright in the depths of the deepest economic depression the United States had ever known, Hellman might have taken a different route. She had, after all, first thought of herself as a writer of fiction, and particularly of short stories. But with little recognition for her stories, the
theater seemed a logical choice. Hellman found there “a place for the expression and exchange of ideas,” a location where she could “present an idea for the consideration of intelligent audiences.”
³⁶

And yet Hellman was not drawn to the lively ferment of the off-Broadway theater of the late twenties and early thirties. Her desire to develop and articulate ideas rather than to investigate form led her rather to follow the social realism of Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw. She was not attracted to theater companies like the Provincetown Players, which turned to direct social criticism in the late 1920s. Nor did she follow in the footsteps of the new experimental theater that emerged in the early years of the Depression and whose quintessential expression is in the Group Theatre. Founded in New York in 1931 by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford (both of whom Lillian admired), and Lee Strasberg, the Group Theatre created a community of actors, playwrights, and directors who pioneered ensemble acting and freely responded to play scripts by turning the production of a play into a collaborative project. Some of Lillian's soon-to-be-well-known contemporaries, including friends John Howard Lawson and Marc Blitzstein as well as Elmer Rice and Clifford Odets, found inspiration in the Group Theatre's effort to join political statements with acting methods that drew on real-life issues and characters. Just a year after
The Children's Hour
opened, New York's Group Theatre offered to the public two plays by Clifford Odets:
Waiting for Lefty
and
Awake and Sing
, which did not merely critique the American experience but called for political action. They suggested a newly assertive theatrical experience in which plays and playwrights called upon audiences to raise their voices, often in alignment with the dogma of a rising Communist Party.

Hellman took no part in this theater of protest, nor did she express much interest in the New Playwrights Theater or the WPA Theater project in which many famous playwrights and theater figures like Blitzstein and the young Carson McCullers made their names. Her work, Arthur Miller would later recall, was not angry enough. And yet the critics of the day had little doubt about her anger. “She is a specialist in hate and frustration, a student of helpless rage, an articulator of inarticulate loathings,” wrote one commentator after seeing
Days to Come
.
³⁷
The anger, in Miller's judgment, didn't seem to take political form. It didn't seem to him “to belong to these impassioned, challenging plays.”
³⁸
There was, remembered Miller, “a certain eloquence in her dialogue that set her apart from the theatre of protest which was so brash and exciting then.”
³⁹
Hellman, in Miller's view, was “preeminently Broadway.”

The artist of Hellman's mind's eye needed to involve herself not with immediate political questions but with the larger concerns of her generation. Her job was to make the world a better place to live by engaging with moral issues rather than problems of the day. With some exceptions, Hellman chose subjects engaged with everyday life: the tension between human feeling and the pursuit of wealth, the corruption of money, the perversity of extended family relationships, the unforeseen costs of human apathy. She wanted to underscore the behavior of bullies, to condemn racism, and to portray people who could resist both. She sought to illuminate pretense and vanity, and above all to focus attention on questions of justice.
⁴⁰
She did this by drawing lively portraits of individuals confronting the conundrums posed by these issues in their daily lives. Like Ibsen, she placed her characters in what the critic Jacob Adler has described as “clear and firm dramatic structures.”
⁴¹
And like Ibsen, she produced problem plays—plays that assumed, perhaps too optimistically, that “to reveal a problem is a step toward correcting it.” Adler called her “the single most important American Ibsenian outside of Arthur Miller.”
⁴²

To Hellman, a good society included one without poverty or racism, one built on principles of social justice. But she did not advocate for these by calling her audiences to arms or urging political action; nor did she turn to abstract questions about the human condition as her successors in the theater were apt to do. It was not, she told one interviewer, that “all literature must have social or economic implications.” And yet, she continued, “unless you are a pathological escapist there must be some sort of propaganda in everything you write.” For her, propaganda meant explicit advocacy of some cause. “The truth must be the main objective of any one who seeks a form of literary expression … If a person doesn't want to involve himself with the truth he has no business trying to write at all.”
⁴³

Hellman attributed her moral positions not to any particular event, such as the New Deal, but to her moment in time. She belonged to a particular generation, she told an audience of Harvard students in 1961, a “little bracket … too old to be depression children, too young to have known the fun and brilliance of the 1920s.” As a writer, she was part of this “between-times group.” Unlike her literary predecessors who had emerged in “the hurricane winds of the early 1920s … who were ten or fifteen years older than my generation … more brilliant and frequently more talented than mine,” she saw herself as having missed out. “We were born later than Faulkner, or Fitzgerald or Hart Crane or Hemingway or O'Neill,” she
ruminated, “and by the time we might have been ready the depression had appeared and the world, and literature took a sharp turn.”
⁴⁴
Her group was “bright and lively, but not as good.” They represented “a bracket of ten years between the wonderful fresh wind that blew so good between the First World War and the days when what we called a depression … turned later into a world storm, the ugliest war of history.”
⁴⁵
Hers was a generation tasked with sorting out the meaning of social justice, racism, and fascism, of good and evil in a dangerous and insecure world.

This sense of herself as a creature of her time permeated her work and obligated her to speak to the moment. Neither she nor any writer could accurately account for the influences on her work, she would say, but like the best playwrights of her moment, she found herself caught in the “combination of economic fear and spiritual uplift” of the Depression years, admiring of “the new and daring and remarkable things that were happening in the country.”
⁴⁶
A good play, she thought, must be based on real life; writers could write only about the “world that was made for them … they reflect their origins.” She would not identify her own location in space and time as “influence.” Most writers, she would say when asked, invented influences for interviewers: clarity about a work's origins in “influences, people, events, comes much later, and sounds good, but very often hasn't much to do with the facts.”
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The best writers, of whom she hoped she was one, would “bring new light” to the world from which they had come. In that respect, she thought of the theater as “the clearest mirror of its time.”
⁴⁸
For her, the issue of why a writer wrote was less important than the product. The writer, she thought, had to have something to say: her job was to “use it right. Right? Right for what? Right to have something to say and to say it well.”
⁴⁹
But there was no point in speaking if nobody listened. To achieve her goal of addressing broad questions that extended beyond the political-economic crisis of the 1930s, Hellman would have to find larger audiences than the relatively narrow world of experimental theater allowed. Her ambition was to write “serious plays for the commercial theater.” To this end, she sought “first class” productions in good theaters whenever possible. She wanted the attention of major reviewers in the leading media. And she wanted the monetary rewards of successful Broadway production.

The theater proved to be a curious choice for Hellman, exacting compromises from her that she did not enjoy and to which she sometimes could
not acquiesce. To attract the audiences she wanted, she chose to resort to plot devices and melodrama that often drew criticism; these earned her the reputation of a middlebrow rather than a highbrow writer. To acquire first-class productions for her plays—equity actors and a professional stage to show off her work—she would need to cultivate the acquaintance of producers and actors whom she claimed to despise. She denied that she craved the glamour of the theater, insisting that to her it was mostly hard work, but she found that she relished center stage and enjoyed consorting with leading actors, actresses, producers, directors, and eventually the movie moguls who would employ her in Hollywood. She dropped their names in conversation until, eventually, her name became one of those that others dropped.

Hellman worked hard at her writing, disciplining herself to put in long hours and to work to deadlines. In her plays, as in her short essays and later in her memoirs, she relied on careful research and thoughtful preparation, keeping notebooks for each of her projects and recording in them ideas as well as incidents. Sometimes research involved, as it did for
Days to Come
, visits to unfamiliar sites; other times her subjects demanded investigations of particular personas, like that of the labor militant. She wanted to get every detail right. For
Watch on the Rhine
, she claimed to have made digests of more than twenty-five books, to have read widely in the memoirs and the history of the period, and to have kept notebooks that ran to a thousand pages or more.
⁵⁰
All her life she explored, or had assistants explore, such things as the appropriateness of particular locations, the dates of key events, the attributes of period garments. Her concern for accuracy persisted throughout her life—a particular irony in light of accusations of lying that hounded her at the end of her life.