A Difficult Woman Read Free Page B

That she could not live up to her moral claims makes her merely human. But that she insisted on pointing fingers at those who did not live up to theirs turned her into a pariah. Her refusal to bend, her insistence on claiming the moral high ground, reignited a battle that some might have thought over. In
Scoundrel Time
, published in 1976, a quarter century after the events they described, Hellman argued that during the McCarthy period she and others had acted in the best traditions of American dissent. Others had flunked the moral test, failed to stand up to the bullies. In turn, accusations of Stalinism—rigid adherence to a particular line and intolerance for any who rejected it; unquestioning commitment to the politics of the Soviet Union—surfaced once again. The accusations came to implicate both her ideas and her personality. She was dismissed as strident and rude, her persona identified with cruelty and evil. Once a minor player on the political stage, she becamethe epitome of factionalization on the left. Long after the specific meaning of Stalinism has been lost to most American adults, when the word itself evokes a naïve commitment to brutal totalitarianism, Lillian Hellman remains a symbol of heightened ideological dispute, of malevolent and unreasoning thought and behavior.
    â€œWould any of this have happened in the same way,” sociologist Cynthia Epstein asked me, “if Hellman were not a woman?” I tend to think not. Hellman’s life as a woman contains, as Patricia Meyer Spacks has pointed out, a crucial contradiction around the issue of freedom. Hellman sought freedom not only in the world but for herself. That search, as Spacks notes, is illusory, perhaps in general, but certainly for women. 10 And yet, Hellman was a spirited and independent soul who never gave up her search for love even as her anger and frustration worked against ever achieving it. Smart and straightforward, filled with wit and humor, she was by turns generous and judgmental. And she was breathtakingly courageous in her defense of civil liberties at a time when to stand up for what was right could exact a tremendous personal price. She wrote about herself with both pride and self-mockery, worrying about her sexual attractiveness and her looks even as she articulated an idealistic political morality.
    Hellman’s position as a woman among men confuses the situation further. And here, once again, she illuminates the tensions embedded in the twentieth-century transformation of women’s lives and gendered power relationships. Arguably, she became the economically successful playwright and celebrity she was by blurring gender boundaries. In her role as a playwright in the 1930s and ’40s, she ignored her place “as a woman,” behaving “like a man” in the sense that she simply did as she pleased without apparent attention to prevailing gender norms. She did not, in her plays, turn romance and domesticity into plot lines. Feminine as she certainly was in her private life and private moments, Hellman never made any effort to craft a public feminine self, putting forward instead a transgressive persona. She insisted on writing serious plays about serious subjects and on presenting them in first-class venues. She was ambitious, quick to anger, and often rude and dismissive. She smoked like a chimney and used offensive language.
    Her willingness to transgress drew fire while she was alive and continues to do so. Critics still compare her unfavorably to tough, sexy women of the thirties like Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo. 11 Of this insistence on placing her among women, Hellman is not the only victim. Poet andnovelist Muriel Spark, a recent reviewer noted, behaved “like any number of male writers, including ones much less talented than she, but as a woman, so ruthlessly and coldheartedly in pursuit of her art she was a little ahead of her time.” 12 Small wonder, then, that Hellman