Telling It Like It Wasn't

Lillian Hellman: the Image, the Woman. I'm not kidding, that's the full title of William Wright's so far engaging 1986 bio of one of America's most important 20th century writers. Why Wright put "Image" before "Woman" is alluded to at every opportunity, for Hellman had an odd relationship to reality, and some recall that much of what she said happened, didn't (recall Mary McCarthy's 1969 indictment of Hellman on the Dick Cavett Show, where she called Hellman a "liar"). 

Biographies can act as a palette cleanser after bouts of fiction, history and theory, and I try to choose those that remind us of a world outside the life of its subject. Peter Manso's 1994 biography of Marlon Brando (1924-2004) had its subject living in a world devoid of national and global events, a decision that irritated me until I realized Brando wasn't interested in the world the media told him to be interested in, but in issues of his own choosing -- more fundamental issues, like Indigenous rights to land, language and custom -- issues that no one in the media was talking about. For Brando, acting in a play or a film was a means of making money to fund such causes (and perhaps atone for his profligate lifestyle), and the best way to convey that was to bring down those trying to make the films where Brando's presence was enough to ensure their financial success.

Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) also had her causes, most notably labour politics and her work towards a Screen Writers' Guild, which studio heads like Samuel Goldwyn pushed back at with the ferocity of an Alabama cotton boss. Throughout the first 100 pages (I am currently on page 113), Wright reminds us of the influence a no-bullshit paternal aunt had on Hellman's earliest years in New Orleans, where this aunt ran a boarding house that Hellman and her parents sometimes called home. But Hellman had a quieter, interior side too. Here's a passage drawn from one of Hellman's three celebrated memoirs:

"At times Hellman also gives us enough information to construct our own pictures, some of them lovely indeed. For instance, she writes of outfitting her fig tree bower with various comforts and conveniences, among them a nail in the tree trunk on which she hug her dress. Putting it all together we get the following scene: young Lillian cradled in the arms of a fig tree, above the street life of 1914 New Orleans, intently reading a book too old for her while she sipped a bottle of red soda pop, dressed only in her underwear." (17)