Lillian Hellman: the Image, the Woman (1986) 2

A better sleep last night than yesterday's, if that makes sense, since last night's sleep began at 11pm, making yesterday's sleep and last night's sleep, etc. When I awoke at 4:50am yesterday (I'd forgotten to take the before-bed gummy that makes me think I can't sleep without it), my unmedicated mind went straight to work, sifting through the written and image rubble of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and trauma fantasy of trauma fantasies: the potential of a Russia-China Non-Agression Pact, like the one Soviet Russia signed with Nazi Germany in August, 1939, a week before Germany and Russia invaded Poland and Russia did the same to Finland, the latter an event that ruined the friendship of "fellow travellers" Lillian Hellman and Tallulah Bankhead, when the former refused to grant permission for a Finnish fundraising staging of her play The Little Foxes (1939) that had, by then, made the latter the star she was destined to become. On the topic of the Russian invasion, Hellman was reported as saying, "I don't believe in the fine, lovable Republic of Finland that everyone gets so weepy about. I've been there and it looks like a pro-Nazi little republic to me." Some people say the same of Ukraine, though our disgust with a post-Show Trial Stalinist Russia is nothing compared to how many of us feel about Putin and his Maldivian armada of oligarchs.

William Wright's Lillian Hellman: the Image, the Woman (1986) is turning out to be a great read. He writes precisely on the historical events paralleling Hellman's rise (particularly those she aligned herself with, such as the Loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War), and is most thorough in pointing out the facts of Hellman's life versus her fiction-as-fact insistences, which include the impossibility of her alleged visit to Finland. Further to that, we hear a great deal about Hellman's general disposition; not just in Wright's words, but from Hellman's great friend Dorothy Parker, who is quoted as saying, "When Lillian gets angry, I regret to say she screams," and there was much screaming on the topic of Bankhead. On the topic of Parker, a soft-pedal personification of Twitter if ever there was one, Wright provides this paragraph:

"Parker was a small, dark-haired woman, given to such girlish grooming flourishes as bangs and bows on her shoes. She was soft-spoken, quick to create a confidential intimacy with anyone with whom she was conversing, and while sweetly demolishing with her razor tongue whomever offended her -- and often fame or importance was sufficient provocation -- she never lost what Margaret Case Harriman called 'an overpowering air of dulcet femininity.'" (67)

And on Parker, Wright writes:

"Not long after their meeting [Hellman and Parker first met in NYC], Parker went to Hollywood [where Hellman was with her longtime lover Dashiell Hammett], and the friendship would not be ratified until Hellman herself return to Hollywood as a famous playwright. At that reunion they became lifelong friends despite Hammett's antipathy to Parker, which increased until eventually her appearance would send him running. He was once asked why. Although Parker was as radical as Hammett, they would often find themselves on the opposite side of a position. Hammett said he didn't want to be around Parker because he couldn't argue with her. "She cries," he explained. (68)