A Difficult Woman (24 page)

After Harry Hopkins intervened on Hellman's behalf, it took a while to arrange transportation, but at last in early October she set off. All the while, the FBI tracked her.
⁷¹
Arriving first in Los Angeles, she stayed for several days with her ex-husband, Arthur Kober, and his wife, Maggie. The FBI carefully noted that she was staying with her mother-in law, though agents must have known she was unmarried. It also noted that she spent most of her time conferring with Hal Wallis. She was then working with him on a film production of
The Searching Wind
. She took a train to Seattle, stopping overnight in San Francisco. In Seattle, the FBI held her luggage overnight while she flew on to Anchorage, Alaska. Agents duly reported that their search of her baggage “indicates Hellman has contract with Collier Magazine for short stories. No derogatory information developed.”
⁷²
Hellman stayed in Anchorage for two days while the Soviets cleared her visa, and finally, on October 19, embarked on an arduous two-week journey via Murmansk to Moscow, where she arrived in early November.

1944, In L.A. on the way to Moscow, she spent most of her time conferring with Hal Wallis. (Photofest)

For all the fuss that the passport office made about her trip, and for all that the FBI followed her travels with keen interest, Hellman herself seems to have treated the trip as an opportunity to get to know the Russian people, and even then her contacts were limited. If her diaries are to be trusted, Hellman judged the Soviet Union in terms of how well it observed her comfort and how tenderly she was cared for. At every stop we learn whether the room is clean or dirty, warm or cold, large or small; we find out about the inadequacy of toilets and read a litany of comments about the freezing outhouses; we know whether and if she had a “fine” dinner. Central in these diaries are comments about the people she met along the way. She writes about those who greeted her, escorted her, and entertained her; she offers generous judgments about the character of the men—most of them in uniform—she encountered. Day after day she comments that “Russian men are nice to women, very kind and tender,” or writes, “They have all been so kind and so nice and so warm,” and concludes, “These people have a real kind of Christianity.”
⁷³
These judgments
mingle with her sense of herself, for, as always, she cares about what people think of her. “I do alright with these people,” she comments after a few days of traveling. And then again, “I am a little pleased with myself because they like me and yesterday said so.”
⁷⁴

Because she was ill and tired when she finally arrived in Moscow, Ambassador Averell Harriman invited her to stay in the American compound for the duration of her visit. There, comfortably housed and well fed, she wandered about Moscow with her interpreter, Raisa Orlova. Her diary records where she went and her impressions, almost all favorable, of those she met. Over and over again she repeats phrases such as “these are warm, strong men … They are men who know they are men and like all such act with simplicity and tenderness … I think maybe Russians have the best natural manners in the world … All Russians have a sense of humor.”
⁷⁵
She writes that “the Russian soldiers treated Poles courteously” and comments that she witnessed “the deep reverence and respect that even intellectuals have for Stalin.”
⁷⁶
Such remarks evoke the reader's skepticism about Hellman's judgment. And yet Orlova remembers a Lillian Hellman who had little admiration for the Soviet system as a whole. When she tried to convince Hellman of the virtues of living under socialism, she writes, Hellman replied acerbically that she would “start listening to the victories of socialism after you've built the kind of toilets that don't make you want to retch at all the airports from Vladivostok to Moscow.”
⁷⁷

1944: Moscow. “I do alright with these people.” (Ransom Center)

A rare invitation to visit the front lines as the Russians moved west affirmed Hellman's positive impressions of Russian men and perhaps convinced her to characterize them favorably while ignoring issues of power and leadership. Forbidden to ask questions, Hellman absorbed the experience of war with her soul, noticing the devastating destruction, first in Leningrad and then in the villages and towns she encountered as she moved toward Warsaw. After she returned home, she wrote about the bravery and nobility of Russian soldiers in the line of fire, continuing the positive assessments her diary records. Her first article for
Collier
'
s
magazine hardly mentions Stalin's name. Instead it romanticizes the soldiers she met on the way. They are, she writes, open and informed about “political issues at home and abroad.”
⁷⁸
They speak “without self consciousness and without fake toughness; they speak simply, like healthy people who have never, fortunately, learned to be ashamed of emotion.” They engage with her in rituals of mutual admiration. Hellman does not forget to tell us that on leaving the front, she received a tribute from the veterans of Leningrad—an inscribed cigarette case given to her by the “men, officers and generals of the First White Russian Army on the Warsaw front.”
⁷⁹

The story of Hellman's wartime visit to the Soviet Union ends with a flummoxed FBI. On January 2, 1945, while she was still at the front, the ever-watchful FBI noted that she was likely to return to the United States soon and asked its agents to make arrangements to have her baggage searched. Hellman didn't leave Russia until early February, and then she flew to London via an arduous route that took her through Iran, Egypt, and France. She stayed in London for several weeks and then flew to Baltimore on February 27, 1945. She seems not to have been aware of the Keystone Cops ritual that accompanied her return to the States. On February 9, the director of the St. Paul office sent a memo to “Director, FBI” indicating they did not know where she was.

Inasmuch as an Agent of this office recently read in a Washington D.C. newspaper that Lillian Hellman had returned to this
country, the Bureau is being requested to check its files in order to ascertain whether Lillian Hellman has in fact recently reentered the United States. The Bureau may wish to advise the St. Paul Office and other offices … of the whereabouts of Lillian Hellman.

On March 27, after Hellman had been back in the States for a month, J. Edgar Hoover's office sent out another memo inquiring whether anyone knew if Hellman had returned to the United States and asking whether her baggage had been examined. Not until mid-May did agent Fred Hallford inform his boss that “the subject had arrived at Baltimore 11 weeks earlier.” “She was not interviewed at great length,” he wrote. “She stated that during this trip she was a guest of the Soviet and British Governments. She described her tour as a cultural tour.” Hallford noted that “no baggage or body search of the subject was conducted upon her entry at the Port of Baltimore.” And then he added: “For your confidential information, Miss Hellman displayed at the time of the interview some indignation that a person of her prominence should be subjected to any questioning upon entrance into the United States.”
⁸⁰

Perhaps Hellman was right to be indignant. On March 21, 1947, the New York Field Division of the FBI told Hoover's office that they were about to delete Hellman's name from their “key figure” list. Her name was in fact removed two years later. “No further investigation of this subject is contemplated at this time,” the New York Bureau director wrote, “and the case is being placed in a closed status.”
⁸¹
Little did he then suspect that Hellman's code of loyalty and her moral compass would soon face its severest test.

I've asked myself many times what I would have liked to have been born and decided a long time ago that I was very glad I was born a Jew. Whether brought up as one or not, somewhere in the background there was a gift of being born a Jew.

—Lillian Hellman, 1981

As Hellman resisted being thought of as a
woman
playwright, so she resisted the idea that her Jewish birth and family origins shaped her view of the world. Jewish-born and southern-identified, she occupied complicated positions in both communities, but especially in the bifurcated world of twentieth-century Jews. She was not a Jew in the Yiddish-speaking, upwardly mobile, immigrant sense of the word. Nor was she a member of a close-knit southern community of Jews whose isolation lent itself to creating a public face of assimilation and cooperation. Rather, she imagined herself committed to a set of overarching values that included racial egalitarianism and political and social justice. These provided the framework within which she measured human dignity and judged what she called “decent” behavior.

But the twentieth century—notable for pogroms, migrations, the destruction of most Eastern European Jewry, and the creation of the state of Israel—placed enormous stress on the meaning of Jewish identity, twisting
and shaping it in response to historical and personal circumstances.
¹
For prominent cultural figures like Hellman, the times demanded more than a passive acquiescence to one's roots. As the political climate changed, she sometimes found herself at odds with a divided Jewish community, struggling to reconcile her commitment to larger values with her sense of herself as a Jew, often unable to see why they should be in disagreement. She was, in this sense, an American Jew, her identity woven into the fabric of political debate.

Hellman took her first journey abroad in 1929, when she went with her husband to Paris. Bored, she traveled alone to Germany that summer. There she watched brown-shirted Nazis march and experienced her first taste of outright anti-Semitism. For the first time she felt herself part of a larger, specifically Jewish, identity. After she returned home, she followed Kober to Hollywood, where he found her a job as a studio script reader. There, as she had in New York, Hellman found herself among Jews of Eastern European descent, many of whom had already risen to prominence in the movie industry. These were not the Jews of her southern heritage, eager to assimilate into southern soil. Rather, they were the transplanted Jews of her New York acquaintance, proudly spreading the cultures and traditions of their parents to the American west while they discarded the spiritual impetus of the old religion. Lillian found their relationship to religion all too familiar. To the Hollywood moguls, as to the writer friends she was coming to know in her bicoastal life, Jewishness did not then, as author and critic Irving Howe would later recall, “form part of a conscious commitment; it was not regarded as a major component of the culture … It was simply
there
.”
²
Howe, in the thirties a young radical and later to become a chronicler of the Jewish tradition, did not imagine Jewishness as a religious impulse. It was “inherited, a given to be acknowledged, like being born white or male or poor,” something that “could be regarded with affection since after all it had helped shape one's early years.”

In these years of the 1930s, when Jewish identity seemed more a matter of culture and style than of religious practice, Hellman adopted the manners and politics of her peers. She adapted her voice and her persona to the fractious and argumentative mode of her East Coast friends, and she grew into the opinionated and self-dramatizing self that persisted for the rest of her life. Though she was a southern Jew, a German Jew, she
reveled in the vibrancy of the Eastern European literary and entertainment worlds of which she formed a part, and she enjoyed the freedom provided by the rich cosmopolitan lifestyles in which her friends participated. In that world, the success of Jews in the competition for upward mobility could be readily tied to attaining the American dream, and Jewish commitment to social justice could take many political forms, including the adulation of Roosevelt and adherence to communist ideals. In Hellman's world of the 1930s and early '40s, Jews tended to gravitate toward the political left, expecting to bury religious differences in campaigns for justice and fairness for all. Though the friends with whom she argued about left-wing politics and whom she enlisted in social causes tended to be Jews, she donned, like them, a cloak of religious invisibility. For all of them, the freedom to argue, the liberty to choose one's political and social causes, seemed part and parcel of American life, as much a fulfillment of the dream as economic success.