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Lillian Hellman: A Lying Legend in Her Own Time
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12918 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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5 / 1987 |
1,627 Words |
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Cynthia Grenier
Cynthia Grenier is contributing editor to the Arts section of
The World & I. |
LILLIAN HELLMAN
The Image, The Woman
William Wright
Simon and Schuster
507 pp., $18.95
There can be no doubt about it. Lillian Hellman was a truly dreadful woman. Objectively speaking. Leaving ideology out of the question, although this is not that easy with a woman such as Hellman, given how she managed to establish herself as a saint of the Left in her own time for not having taken the Fifth before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Nonetheless, consider the woman that biographer William Wright presents to us. Heaven knows, seldom has a biographer struggled more manfully to persuade his readers that he is trying to be evenhanded, examining all points of view with infinite respect. In his preface, after acknowledging having talked to more than 150 people in the two years spent researching this book, Wright sums up the Hellman whose life he is going to lay before us.
Funny, tough, courageous - but also temperamental, obstinate, dogmatic and, at times, unscrupulous. She abounded in contradictions: fierce loves and fiercer hatreds; grand gestures and petty acts of vindictiveness, dogged adherence to principle and underhanded maneuvers, rock-hard strength and frightened vulnerability.
Weigh the positive words against the negative ones carefully. Although Wright valiantly records loyal friends recollecting her "funny, tough, and courageous" moments, somehow what comes through powerfully in the book are those "fiercer hatreds, petty acts of vindictiveness, and her underhanded maneuvers." Examples of Hellman being "obstinate, dogmatic...and unscrupulous" abound.
A Quintessential Groupie
Physically an exceedingly plain woman, Hellman always seems to have had a powerful ego, and a will to dominate. A college dropout from New York University at nineteen, she met a top editor of Boni and Liveright at a party, then New York's liveliest publishing house, and talked herself into a job as an editorial assistant. Once there, she became what she was to remain - a groupie avant la lettre - until she wrote her first play, The Children's Hour, at thirty.
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