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An Evening with Lillian HellmanSource: Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 7 (Apr., 1974),pp. 11-35Published by: American Academy of Arts & SciencesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3823703Accessed: 23/02/2010 04:41

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An Evening with Lillian Hellman

Lillian Hellmanbegan

her career as aplay-wright in 1934 with The Children's Hour. She

has twice been awarded the New York DramaCritics' Circle Prize for the best play of the year- in 1941 for Watch on the Rhine and in 196o

for Toys in the Attic. In recent years, she hasbeen a

visiting professorat the

University ofCalifornia in Berkeley, Harvard University, Yale

University and Hunter College.At the December Stated Meeting of the Acad-

emy, Miss Hellman read excerpts from the"Theatre" section of her new book, Pentimento,

anzd hen responded to questions from AcademyFellows and their guests.

It is strange to me that so many people like tolisten to so many other people talk about the theatre.There are those who talk for large fees or give itaway at small dinner parties and often their storiesare charming and funny, but they are seldom peoplewho have done much solid work. You are there, youare good in the theatre, you have written or directedor acted or designed just because you have andthere is little that you can or should be certain aboutbecause almost everything in the theatre contradicts

something else. People have come together, as muchby accident as by design, done the best they canand sometimes the worst, profited or not, gone theirway vowing to see each other the next week, meanit, and wave across a room a few years later.

The manuscript, he words on the page, was whatyou started with and what you have left. The pro-duction is of great importance, has given the playthe only life it will know, but it is gone in the endand the pages are the only wall against which tothrow the future or measure he past.

How the pages got there, in their form, in theirorder, is more of a mystery than reason would hope

for. That is why I have never wanted to write aboutthe theatre and find the teaching of English litera-

From "Theatre" in Pentimento: A Book of Portraits byLillian Hellman (Boston, I973). Reprinted by permissionof Little, Brown and Company. Copyright ? 1973 byLillian Hellman.

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ture more rewarding than teaching drama. (Dramausually means "the theatre," the stories about it,chatter of failure and

success.)You are

goodin

boats not alone from knowledge, but because wateris a part of you, you are easy on it, fear it, and likeit in such equal parts that you work well in a boatwithout thinking about it and may be even saferbecause you don't need to think too much. That iswhat we mean by instinct and there is no way toexplain an instinct for the theatre, although thosewho have it recognize each other and a bond isformed between them. The need of theatre instinctmay be why so many good writers have been suchinferior playwrights - the light that a natural dra-matist can see on a dark road is simply not there.

There are, of course, other reasons why I havenot written about the theatre: I have known formany years that part of me struggled too hardwithin it, and the reasons for that I do not knowand they could not, in any case, be of interest toanybody but me. I always knew that I was seldomcomfortable with theatre people although I am com-pletely comfortable n a theatre; and I am now at anage when the cutting up of old touches must becarefully watched and any sentence that begins "Iremember" asts too long for my taste, even when Imyself say it.

But I have certain pictures, portraits, mementos

of my plays. They are what I have left of the longyears, the pleasure n the work and the pains.

The Children's Hour was my first play. I don'tremember very much about the writing or the cast-ing, but I remember Lee Shubert, who owned thetheatre, as he did many other theatres n New York,coming down the aisle to stare at me during a re-hearsal day. I was sitting mid-theatre with my feeton the top of the chair in front of me. He camearound to stand directly before me and said, "Takeyour dirty shoes off my chair."

I said, "My shoes aren't touching the chair, Mr.

Shubert," but, after a pause, he pushed my rightleg to the floor.

I said, "I don't like strange men fooling aroundwith my right leg so don't do it again."

Mr. Shubert called out to Herman Shumlin, whowas directing the play from the front row. Theymet in the aisle and I heard Herman say, "That girl,as you call her, is the author of the play," and went

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back to directing. About half an hour later, Mr.

Shubert, who had been standing in the back watch-

ingthe

playfor which he had

put upthe

money,came down and sat behind me."This play," he said to the back of my head,

"could land us all in jail." He had been watchingthe confession scene, the recognition of the love ofone woman for another.

I said, "I am eating a frankfurter and I don't want

to think about jail. Would you like a piece of it?""I forbid you to get mustard on my chairs," he

said and I was never to see him again until the playhad been running for about six months and then Iheard him ask the doorman who I was.

I've always told myself that I was so drunk on the

opening nightof The Children's Hour because I

had begun to drink two nights before. I had goneto have dinner with my mother and father, who hadnot read the play, had not seen the rehearsals, hadasked no questions, but, obviously, had talked toeach other when they were alone. Both of themwere proud of me, but in my family you didn't show

such things, and both of them, I think, were fright-ened for me in a world they didn't know.

In any case, my mother, who frequently madesentences that had nothing to do with what wentbefore, said, in space, "Well, all I know is that youwere considered the sweetest-smelling baby in New

Orleans."She had, through my life, told me this severaltimes before, describing how two strange ladies had

paused in front of our house to stare at me in the

baby carriage and then to lean down and sniff me.One of them had said, "That's the sweetest-smellingbaby in town." The other had said, "In all New

Orleans," and when my mother told our neighborabout her pleasure in this exchange, the neighborhad said of course it was true, famously true, I al-ways smelled fresh as a flower. I didn't know that

my mother had never until that night told my fatheror, if she had, he was less nervous than he was two

nights before the opening. Now, when she repeatedit, he said, "Who was the sweetest-smelling baby inNew Orleans?"

"Lillian," said my mother."Lillian? Lillian?" said my father. "I was the

sweetest-smelling baby in New Orleans and you gotthat information from my mother and sisters and

have stolen it."I3

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"Stolen it?" said my shocked mother. "I neverstole anything in my life and you know it. Lillianwas the sweetest-smelling baby in New Orleans and

I can prove it.""It's disgraceful," said my father, "what you are

doing. You have taken what people said about me,always said about me, and given it to your ownchild."

"Your child, too," said my mother.

"That's no reason for lyingand

stealing,"said

myfather. "I must ask you now to take it back and notto repeat t again."

My mother was a gentle woman and would doalmost anything to avoid a fight, but now she wasaroused as I had never before seen her.

"I will take nothing back. You are depriving yourown child of her rightful honor and I think it dis-graceful."

My father rose from the table. "I will telephoneJenny and prove it to you," he said.

He was giving the phone operator the number ofhis sisters' house in New Orleans when my mother

yelled, "Jenny and Hannah will say anything youtell them to. I won't have it. Lillian was the sweetest-smelling baby in New Orleans and that's that." Shebegan to cry.

I said, "I think maybe you're both crazy." I wentto the sideboard and poured myself a large straightwhiskey. My father, holding the phone, said to me.

"Sweet-smelling, are you? You've been drinking toomuch for years."

"Don't pay him any mind, baby," said my mother,"any man who would deny his own child."

I left before my father spoke to his sisters and onlyfound out months later that although my mother

and father came to the opening night together, andboth of them kissed me, they didn't speak to eachother for several days.

On the afternoon of the opening night of The Chil-dren's Hour I drowned the hangover with brandy.I think I saw the play from the back of the theatre,holding to the rail, but I am not sure: I do remem-ber the final curtain and an audience yelling, "Au-thor, author." It was not all modesty that kept mefrom the curtain call - I couldn't have made back-stage without falling. I wish I had understood andbeen happy in all the excited noise that comes onlywhen the author is unknown and will never come

again in quite so generous a fashion.

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The failure of a second work is, I think, more

damaging to a writer than failure ever will be

again. It is then that the success of the first workseems an accident and, if the fears you had as youwrote it were dissipated by the praise, now youremember that the praise did not always come fromthe best minds and even when it did it could havebeen that they were not telling the truth or that

youhad

played goodtricks. And

youare

probablytoo young, too young at writing, to have found outthat you really only care what a few people think;only they, with the change in names that time bringsabout, will stand behind your chair for good or bad,forever. But failure in the theatre is more public,more brilliant, more unreal than in any other field.

The praise is usually out of bounds: the photo-graphs, interviews, "appearances," arty invitationsare so swift and dazzling that you go into the secondwork with confidence you will never have again ifyou have any sense....

It is hard for me to believe these many years laterin the

guiltI felt for the failure of

Daysto

Come;the threads of those threads have lasted to this day.Guilt is often an excuse for not thinking and maybethat's what happened to me. In any case, it was tobe two years before I could write another play, TheLittle Foxes, and when I did get to it I was so scaredthat I wrote it nine times.

Soon after The Children's Hour I had had anoffer to write movies for Samuel Goldwyn. I thinkMr. Goldwyn was in his early fifties when we firstmet, but he was so vigorous and springy that I wasnot conscious of his

agefor

many years.He

was,as

were many of the bright, rough, tough lot that firstsaw the potential of the motion picture camera, aman of great power. Often the power would riseto an inexplicable pitch of panic anger when he wascrossed or disappointed, and could then declinewithin minutes to the whispered, pained moral talk

of a loony clergyman whimpering that God hadbetrayed him. What I liked best were not Mr. Gold-wyn's changes of English speech, although some ofthem were mighty nice and often better than theoriginal. Certainly "I took it all with a dose of salts"is just as good as a grain; the more famous "a verbalcontract isn't worth the

paperit is written on"

makes sense; he meant to be courteous the day heI5

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called down "Bon voyage to all of you" to those ofus on the dock, as he, a passenger, sailed away; and

when, soon after the war, he was asked to make atoast to Field Marshal Montgomery, and rose, liftedhis glass, and said, "A long life to Marshall FieldMontgomery Ward," one knew exactly why. But Iliked best his calculated eccentricities. When heneeded a favor or had to make a difficult bargainand knew a first move was not the best positionfrom which to deal, he was brilliant. I was in hisoffice when he wanted an actor under contract toDarryl Zanuck and demanded that Zanuck's secre-tary call him out of a meeting. After a long wait,Mr. Goldwyn said into the phone, "Yes, Darryl?What can I do for you today?" And a few years

after the McCarthy period, during which I was ban-ned in Hollywood, my phone rang in Martha's Vine-yard. Mr. Goldwyn's secretary and I had a pleasantreunion, she said he had been trying to reach mefor two days to ask if I wanted to write Porgy andBess. After a long wait Mr. Goldwyn's voice said,"Hello, Lillian, hello. Nice of you to call me afterall these years. How can I help you?"

But I think our early days together worked wellbecause I was a difficult young woman who didn'tcare as much about money as the people around meand so, by accident, I took a right step within thefirst months of working for Mr. Goldwyn. I had

been hired to rewrite an old silly, hoping I couldmake it O.K., to be directed by Sidney Franklin, afamous man who had done many of the NormaShearer pictures. It was then, and often still is, thecustom to talk for weeks and months before thewriter is allowed to touch the typewriter. Such con-ferences were called

breakingthe back of the

storyand that is, indeed, an accurate description. We, anice English playwright called Mordaunt Shairp andI, would arrive at Franklin's house each morningat ten, have a refined health lunch a few hours later,and leave at five. The next day whatever we haddecided would sometimes be altered and sometimes

be scrapped because Franklin had consulted a friendthe night before or discussed our decisions with hisbridge parmers. After six or seven weeks of this,Franklin said it was rude of me to lie all day on hiscouch with my back turned to him, napping. I lefthis house saying I was sorry, it was rude, but Icouldn't

goon that

way.I took the

night planeto

New York, locked myself in with some books, andI6

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the first telephone call I answered two days laterwas from Mr. Goldwyn, who said if I came back

immediately I could go to a room by myself, startwriting, and he'd give me a raise. I said I'd thinkabout it, didn't, and left for Paris. When he foundme there a week later he offered a long-term con-tract with fine clauses about doing nothing butstories I liked and doing them where and when Iliked. I had become valuable to Mr. Goldwyn be-cause I had left him for reasons he didn't under-stand. For many years that made me an unattainablewoman, as desirable as such women are, in anothercontext, for men who like them that way.

They were good years and most of the time I en-

joyed Mr. Goldwyn. The extraordinary conflicts in

a man who wished to make "fine pictures" and climbinto an educated or social world while grappling atthe same time with a nature made rough by earlypoverty and tough by later big money amused me,and made him far more interesting than more "civ-ilized" men like Irving Thalberg.

Ten of the twelve plays I have written are con-nected to Dashiell Hammett - he was in the Armyin the Aleutian Islands during the Second WorldWar for one of them, and he was dead when I

wrote the last-

but The Little Foxes was the onethat was most dependent on him. We were livingtogether in the same house, he was not doing anywork of his own, but after his death, when muchbecame clear to me that had not been before, Iknew that he was working so hard for me becauseDays to Come had scared me and scared him formy future....

The Little Foxes was the most difficult play I everwrote. I was clumsy in the first drafts, putting inand taking out characters, ornamenting, decorating,growing more and more weary as the versions ofscenes and then acts and then three whole plays had

to be thrown away.Some of the trouble came because the play has adistant connection to my mother's family and every-thing that I had heard or seen or imagined hadformed a giant tangled time-jungle in which I couldfind no space to walk without tripping over oldroots, hearing old voices speak about histories madelong before my day.

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In the first three versions of the play, because ithad been true in life, Horace Giddens had syphilis.

When Regina, his wife, who had long refused himher bed, found out about it she put fresh paint ona miserable building that had once been used asslave quarters and kept him there for the rest of hislife because, she said, he might infect his children.I had been told that the real Regina would speakwith outrage of her betrayal by a man she hadnever liked and then would burst out laughing atwhat she said. On the day he died, she droppedthe moral complaints forever and went horsebackriding during his funeral. All that seemed fine forthe play. But it wasn't: life had been too big, toomuddled for writing. So the syphilis became heart

trouble. I cut out the slave cabin and the long ex-planations of Regina and Horace's early life to-gether.

I was on the eighth version of the play beforeHammett gave a nod of approval and said he thoughtmaybe everything would be O.K. if only I'd cut outthe "blackamoor chitchat." Even then I knew thatthe toughness of his criticism, the coldness of hispraise, gave him a certain pleasure. But even thenI, who am not a good-tempered woman, admiredhis refusal with me, or with anybody else, to dec-orate or apologize or placate. It came from the mostcarefully guarded honesty I have ever known, as if

one lie would muck up his world. If the honestywas mixed with harshness, I didn't much care, itdidn't seem to me my business. The desire to takean occasional swipe is there in most of us, but mostof us have no reason for it, it is as aimless as thepleasure of a piece of candy. When it is controlledby sense and balance, it is still not pretty, but it isnot dangerous and often it is useful. It was usefulto me and I knew it.

I was to get my first taste during The Little Foxesof the red-baiting that later turned my life into

disorder and financial disaster.The Spanish Civil War - I had been in Spainduring the war - had reached the sad day ofFranco's victory and many Republicans were trap-ped on what was known as the International Bridge.Some of them were my friends, some of them Ionly knew about. Their lives were at stake.

Manyof us sent all the money we could give or collectI8

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and looked around to find other money fast. HermanShumlin and I decided to ask the cast of The Little

Foxes if they would do a benefit for the Spanishrefugees. Tallulah Bankhead and the rest of the castwere courteous but well within their rights whenthey refused, and nothing more was said about bene-fits until the week after Russia moved into Finland.

I had been in Helsinki in I937 for two weeks andhad turned my head each day from the giant postersof Hitler pasted to the side wall of my hotel. Onenight a member of our Olympic team, a man of Fin-nish descent, had taken me to a large rally of Hitlersympathizers and translated for me their admiringspeeches. I needed no translator or the raised arms,the cheers, the Wessel song.

Finland's ambassador o Washington was a hand-some and charming man who met Tallulah at adinner party. The day following Tallulah's meetingwith the ambassador he announced that The LittleFoxes would give a benefit for the Finnish refugees.The day following that Shumlin and I announcedthat The Little Foxes would not give a benefit. Ican't remember now whether we explained that wehad been refused a benefit for Spain, but I do re-member that suddenly what had been no morethan a theatre fight turned into a political attack:it was made to seem that we agreed with the in-vasion of Finland, refused aid to true democrats,

were, ourselves, dangerous Communists. It was myfirst experience of such goings-on and I didn't havesense enough to know that Tallulah's press state-ments, so much better than ours, or more in tunewith the times, were being guided by the expertambassador. Her anger - she often had the right-eousness that belongs to a certain kind of aging sin-ner - once aroused needed no guidance and stoodup well against all reason. And nobody has ever beenable to control me when I feel that I have beentreated unjustly. I am, in fact, bewildered by allinjustice, at first certain that it cannot be, thenshocked into rigidity, then obsessed, and finally as

certain as a Grand Inquisitor that God wishes meto move ahead, correct and holy. Through thosedays Tallulah and I were, indeed, a pair.

And so we never spoke again for almost thirtyyears. Then I met her at a party and heard myselfsay, "Maybe it's time we said hello." The face thatlooked up from years of physical and spiritual beat-ings was blank. I said, "I'm Lillian Hellman," and

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Tallulah flew toward me in a scream of good-natured greetings and a holiday of kisses. I was

pleased for the first half-hour. But reconciliationscan be as noisy as the fights that caused them.

Only two diaries written at the end of 1938 couldconvince me now that Watch on the Rhine cameout of Henry James, although, of course, seeds inthe wind, the long journey they make, their crossesand mutations, is not a new story for writers andeven make you hope that your seeds may scatterfor those to come.

I was driving back to the farm trying not to listento the noise that came from two crates of Pekin

ducks when I began to think of James's The Amer-ican and The Europeans. In the short time sinceJames, the United States had become the dominantcountry not alone in money and power, but in im-posing on other people a morality which was de-signed in part to hide its self-interest. Was that anew American game or had we learned it from theEnglish who invented it to hold down their lowerclasses? We still spoke as nineteenth-century Crom-wellians in church, home, and university, but in-creasingly, the more we recognized disorder andcorruption at home the more insistent we grewabout national purity.

Many Europeans had moved here with the triumphof Hitler in the 1930's. Few of us asked questionsabout their past or present convictions because wetook for granted that they had left either in fear ofpersecution or to make a brave protest. They wereour kind of folks. It took me a long time to findout that

manyof them had

strangehistories and

that their hosts, or the people who vouched forthem, knew all about their past. Two of the per-haps eight or nine that I met turned out to haveunexpected reasons for emigration: both had beenNazi sympathizers; in one case, the grandfatherwanted to preserve his remarkable art collection

from the threatening sounds the "new barbarians"made about modern painting; in the other, bribemoney had not been able to suppress a nineteenth-century conversion from Judaism to Luther. I wasvaguely related to that family, and when I askedabout the truth of the rumor, the son of the familynever

spoketo me

again.But a few weeks later I

had a note from his mother saying that she was20

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surprised to find that certain Jews in Americaclaimed a blood connection to her family, when, in

fact, they had "no legal or moral right" to do so.

It was a pleasant experience, Watch on the Rhine.There are plays that, whatever their worth, come

along at the right time, and the right time is the

essence of the theatre and the cinema. From the firstday of rehearsal things went well. It was a hard-

working cast of nice people, with the exception ofPaul Lukas, the best actor among them; but his

capers were open and comic. (He told me that hehad been a trusted follower of the Hungarian Com-munist Bela Kun, but that the week before Kunfell he had joined Kun's enemies. He saw nothingcontradictory in now playing a self-sacrificing anti-

Fascist.) But not everybody thought Paul was funny.John Lodge, then an actor and later to be our am-bassador to Spain - when Dorothy Parker heardabout his diplomatic appointment she said, "Lilly,

let us, as patriots, join hands and walk into thewater" - was shocked when Paul cheated him attennis, and Eric Roberts, who played Paul's twelve-

year-old son, disliked him so much that some nightshe ate garlic before he climbed into Paul's lap andother nights he rubbed his hair with foul-smellingwhale oil. I remember all that with pleasure, al-

though a diary tells me that Herman Shumlin andI were having our usual fights....

Watch on the Rhine is the only play I have everwritten that came out in one piece, as if I had seena landscape and never altered the trees or the sea-sons of their colors. All other work for me had

been fragmented, hunting in an open field with shotfrom several guns, following the course but unableto see clearly, recovering the shot hands full, thenhands empty from stumbling and spilling. But here,for the first and last time, the work I did, the actors,the rehearsals, the success of the play, even thetroubles that I have

forgotten,make a

pleasantone-

ness and have been lost to the past.

It is possible that because the war so drasticallychanged the world, the small, less observed thingschanged without being recognized. Now, lookingback, I think that after Watch on the Rhine much

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of the pleasant high-jinks of the theatre were neverto be seen again because the theatre, like the rest of

the country, became expensive, earnest and con-servative. The Tallulahs and the Lukases were noteasy to take, but they belonged to a time I likedbetter. Whatever the reason, the theatre picturesbehind my eyes for the period after that are frag-mented and it would be useless and untruthful forme to order them up from scrapbooks or otherpeople's memories. About the plays that followedthat period, the pictures are there, but not many aremuch more than a camera angle that was part of awhole, of course, but is now seen only by itself.

Many writers work best in time of trouble: nomoney, the cold outside and in, even sickness andthe end in view. But I have always known that whentrouble comes I must face it fast and move withspeed, even though the speed is thoughtless andsometimes damaging. For such impatient people,calm is necessary for hard work - long days,months of fiddling is the best way of life.

I wrote The Autumn Garden in such a period. Iwas at a good age; I lived on a farm that was, finally,running fine and I knew I had found the right placeto live for the rest of my life. Hammett and I wereboth making a lot of money, and not caring about

where it went was fun. We had been together al-most twenty years, some of them bad, a few ofthem shabby, but now we had both stopped drink-ing and the early excited years together had settledinto a passionate affection so unexpected to both ofus that we were as shy and careful with each otheras courting children. Without words, we knew thatwe had survived for the best of all reasons, thepleasure of each other....

I have many times written about Dash's pleasurein The Autumn Garden. Now, this minute, I canhear myself laugh at the fierce, angry manner inwhich he spoke his praise, as if he hated the words,

was embarrassed by them. He was forever afterdefensive - he had never been about my work orhis - if anybody had any reservations about theplay. A short time after the play opened, I camehome very pleased to tell him that Norman Mailerhad told me how good he thought the play. Normanhad said it was very good, could have been great,but I had lost my nerve.

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zine. The wonderful story lay, as Shaw had seenit, in the miraculous self-confidence that carrieddefeated men into battle against all sense and reason,forced a pious girl into a refusal of her church,caused the terrible death that still has to do withthe rest of us, forever, wherever her name is heard.

Some kind of confidence, even fake, is needed for

any work, but itis

particularly requiredin the

theatre, where ordinary timidity and stumbling seemlike disintegration, and are infectious and corruptiveto other frightened people. I think now that I beganto leave the theatre with the production of Candide,an operetta with music by Leonard Bernstein, lyricsby Richard Wilbur. (I was not to leave for another

two plays, but I am slow at leaving anything.)I can account for the deterioration of my script

from what I think was good to what I know is not

good, but any such account would be confused, fullof those miserable, small complaints and blames thatmean nothing except to the person making them. I

was not used to collaboration, I had become, withtime, too anxious to stay out of fights, and becauseI was working with people who knew more aboutthe musical theatre than I did, I took suggestions andmade changes that I didn't believe in, tried makingthem with speed I cannot manage.

All that, I could and did put aside. The confidencewent for another reason: I knew we were in badtrouble the day the cast first read and sang the play.I knew it, I said it, and yet I sat scared, inwardlyraging, outwardly petty passive before the great tal-ents of Leonard Bernstein, who knew about music,and Tyrone Guthrie, the director, who knew about

the theatre. The lady producer knew nothing abouteither.All of it, after the nice, hopeful period of work

with Lennie and Richard Wilbur, through rehearsalsto the closing night of Candide - and again, yearslater, the 1972 Kennedy Center revival with whichI refused any connection - was sad and wastefuland did not need to be.

Several months after the play closed in New York,Tony Guthrie said, "Lennie, Wilbur, Oliver Smith,Irene Sharaff, Miss Hellman and Mr. Guthrie weretoo much talent for a good brew." That is hard forme to believe. Vanity, which I think is what he

meant, can be of great use: it was dangerous duringCandide because it was on a blind rampage.24

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I think now that Guthrie was as frightened as Iwas. I should have recognized that the night of the

Boston dress rehearsal when Marc Blitzstein, an oldfriend of Lennie's and mine, walked me back to thehotel. We were depressed, neither of us talked thelong way across the Boston Common. At the doorof my room Marc said, "You're cooked, kid, and sois the show. I was sitting near Guthrie. He grinnedat me once, his mouth full of sandwich and wine,and said, 'Well, Marc, that's that. Lillian is oftenright, but Lennie is so charming.'"

Guthrie was an imaginative man, bold in a timidbusiness, uncaring about money in a world that caredabout little else. It is true that the imagination ledto tinkering: he reinterpreted almost every play he

directed, but he did it with brilliance....In the years after Candide, we sometimes saw each

other, more often wrote letters. In one letter, I toldhim that Candide had done bad things to me, Iwasn't working. He did not answer that letter, buta few months later he was in New York and we

metfor lunch. As I

camein the restaurant

door,a

voice on my right side said, "Stop the nonsense. Geton with new work, get on with it today."

It was a valuable accident that a few days afterthat, or so I thought until a week ago, I spent theevening with Elena and Edmund Wilson. Duringthe evening we talked of a man we both knew andEdmund asked why he didn't write anymore. Imumbled something about writing blocks, I had onemyself, all of us, and so on.

Edmund said, "Foolishness. A writer writes. That'sall there is to it."

For anybody of my generation, so eager for the

neurosis, yours if you could manage it, if desperatesomebody else's, the hardheaded sense of that wasgood stuff. But it did not happen a few days after Isaw Guthrie. Last week I came back from Edmund'sfuneral and sat thinking about him most of the night.The next morning I went through old diaries of the

many times I had spent with the Wilsons and foundthat "A writer writes. That's all there is to it,"came almost two years after my lunch with Guthrie.But it is true that the next day after Edmund said itI went to work on Toys in the Attic....

Toys in the Attic, with a splendid cast, was a suc-cess. The money came at the right time, because fora year I had known that death was on Hammett's

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face and I had worried about how we could managewhat I thought would be the long last days.

It had been my habit to set the alarm clock forevery two hours of the night: I would stumble downthe hall to sit with him for a few minutes becausehe could sleep so little as he panted to breathe. Nowit was possible to have a nurse and I looked forwardto a whole night's sleep. But it didn't work that way:I didn't like a stranger in his room, I didn't wantthe night's sleep.

In I962 I began an adaptation of Bert Blechman'snovel How Much. The play was called My Mother,My Father and Me and, by the time I finished, was

half Blechman, half me. I thought, I think now, thatit is a funny play, but we did not produce it welland it was not well directed. More important, Ifound that I had made some of the same mistakesI had made with Candide: I changed the tone mid-way from farce to drama and that, for reasons Istill do not understand, annot be done in the theatre.

The play waited in Boston for the New Yorknewspaper strike to end. Once again I sat bewilderedin a hotel room, making changes I did not believein, this time under the pressure of how much moneywas about to go down the drain.

The playwright is almost always held accountable

for failure and that is almost always a just verdict.But this time I told myself that justice doesn't havemuch to do with writing and that I didn't want tofeel that way again. For most people in the theatrewhatever happens is worth it for the fun, the ex-citement, the possible rewards. It was once that wayfor me and

maybeit will be

again.But I don't think

so.

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Following the communication, Miss Hellmanwas joined by Harry Levin, Irving Babbitt Pro-

fessor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, andby William Alfred, Professor of English at Har-vard. The discussion dealt with various aspectsof Miss Hellman's ife in and outside the theatre,focusing in particular on the state of the theatretoday.

MR. ALFRED: Perhaps I can open the discussionwith a question that is always asked of anyonewho writes for the theatre or who attempts toteach playwriting. What has happened to the

theatre since the 1930's? What has happened tothe scripts, to the patience of the audience, to the

experience of seeing a live play that has made thetheatre less and less popular?Miss HELLMAN: That is an enormous questionand the explanation is very complex. I don't be-

lieve that television is the only reason for thedecline in the quality and appeal of the theatre.

Things go in circles in writing, as we all know.There have been few good writers in the theatrein recent years and few good young writers have

appeared. The theatre has grown much too ex-

pensive and much too uncomfortable; it is ac-cessible largely to those with expense accountsand has little to offer young people.

MR. LEVIN: Until this moment, I have foughtback the temptation to say something about "gild-ing the lily" because it would be a pun as wellas a cliche, but it does express my own sense of

superfluousness at being on the platform now.This is not exactly a confrontation. No one woulddare to confront Lillian Hellman after what hap-pened to Senator Joseph McCarthy. However, Ido have a question.

I was particularly intrigued when she recalledthat no less nervy a person than Norman Mailerhad told her she had lost her nerve in writingThe Autumn Garden. Now we know that Nor-man has nerve in the sense of gall or chutzpa but

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almost never succeeded without the approval ofthe Times; now even if a play gets a good review

from the Times it may not be a hit. But a badreview still means certain failure.

Harry is right that the Times has made a longcareer of selecting people from other fields as itstheatre critics. Some years ago, they did haveStark Young but he stayed only a short time. Of

course, Walter Kerr is a theatre person and Ithink he has turned out to be our most sensiblecritic but he now only reviews once a week. TheTimes might be excused if it at least made aneffort to select literary people to serve as review-ers.

QUESTION: I have a rather involved question aboutDashiell Hammett as a writer. I understand from

reading some of Raymond Chandler that he feltenslaved by Philip Marlowe, that he wanted to

be recognized as a writer beyond the detectivestory genre. In my view, Hammett wrote with

greater insight and precision than Chandler, mak-

ing Sam Spade far more "real" than Philip Mar-lowe. Given Hammett's extraordinary skill as awriter, did he share Chandler's feeling? What

did he think of his reputation as the creator of acelebrated detective and was he attracted to anyother forms of writing? His ability to composelean dialogue and tight plots, coupled with his

long association with you, lead me to wonderwhether he ever aspired to become a dramatist.Miss HELLMAN: Well, to the first part of yourquestion, I really wouldn't dare to have an answer.I suppose that every writer who ever lived hasfelt unfulfilled in one way or another. For manyyears, Hammett said that he would never writeanother detective story. He did, in fact, com-

plete about half of a nondetective novel which Ipublished in an anthology, but he never lived tofinish the book. I know that to his dying day hebelieved he would produce something new, dif-ferent, and better. Yet he had no complaints asa writer; he felt that complaints were undignified.

With regard to other forms of writing, he did29

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Miss HELLMAN: I'm not sure that "appreciate"is the right word but they do know my work.

There was a time - some fifteen years ago -when I couldn't say that. You know if you stayaround long enough, you come back into fashionlike an old dress. I'm temporarily back in fashionand, if I live long enough, I will go out again.

But young people as a whole pay very little

attention to the theatre today. They have a fewfavorite playwrights but their real interest is film.In fact, that interest has led universities to wastean enormous amount of money on teaching theso-called "cinema". Yet I don't blame the youngfor being more interested in movies than in the

theatre. I see more films than plays myself thesedays.

QUESTION: In my experience, the young do seemto be attending certain kinds of plays. In the pastyear, for example, I have noticed a considerablenumber of young people in the audience of such

productions as Sticks and Bones, When YouComin' Back, Red Ryder?, and The Hot L Balti-more. Is there anything you or other playwrightscan do to keep them coming and possibly pro-mote an even greater interest in the theatre?Miss HELLMAN: As I said, I don't attend manyplays and I may have the wrong impression aboutthe current attitude of the young toward thetheatre. I've only seen one of the plays you men-tioned and the night I was there, only a handfulof young people were in the audience. What canbe done? Everyone seems to be searching for ananswer. Joseph Papp has probably come closerto it than anyone in the last fifteen or twentyyears, but how long his success will last is an-other question.

I don't know if one can devise quick remediesfor this kind of problem. What the theatre reallyneeds is a revival; it will unquestionably come

someday, probably through the establishment ofstate theatres. The United States is virtually theonly civilized country in the world that does nothave government-funded theatres and that situa-

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tion can't go on much longer. People cannot be

expected to write for the theatre and starve at

the same time - and that isn't the worst of it.The financing of a Broadway production hasbecome a formidable undertaking. As I indicatedin the book, since the mid-i950's when I didCandide, money has been a major constrainingfactor in the theatre. Candide failed because we

didn't have the money to rehearse long enough;How Much failed because we had no money to

stay in Boston during the New York newspaperstrike and we couldn't open against the strike.

Young playwrights need not only some formof state support but also an appreciation of the

theatre of the past. How does any writer develophis skills without reading and seeing the worksof earlier writers? Most of today's college stu-dents have read good plays but they have almostnever had an opportunity to see a first-class pro-duction of a great theatre classic.

QUESTION: In teaching young people, can youtell us what approaches you use to bring themcloser to the theatre?Miss HELLMAN: I don't teach drama. I did once

for a semester many years ago but I found -and I think this is still true - that special classesin drama simply do not attract the best students.The teaching of drama should be part of the

teaching of English Literature.I don't even know how one would go about

teaching the drama. One can't tell students howto write; therefore why doesn't drama belong toliterature just as literature belongs to the drama?This is not to say that certain technical aspectsof the theatre such as stage designing and light-ing cannot be taught; it may even be possible toteach acting, although personally I'm very un-certain about that. Theatre writing, however, in

my mind, is unteachable. It seems much more

closely tied to instinct than do other forms ofliterature.

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MR. LEVIN: Is what you are saying, Lillian, an

implicit condemnation of the "47 Workshop" of

George Pierce Baker? Some of his most famousalumni such as Thomas Wolfe never did learnhow to write plays, but do you think it was anaccident that Eugene O'Neill and a considerable

agglomeration of playwrights took the courseand at least attested that they had learned some-

thing from it?Miss HELLMAN: No, I didn't mean to condemnthe Baker Workshop. Obviously Baker was anunusual personality and a remarkable teacher. Idon't think many people could match his accom-

plishment. From what I have read and from what

others have said of him, he was evidently theatre-struck and he managed to convey a sense of ex-citement to his students. I don't like the theatremuch so I couldn't do that.

QUESTION: I am puzzled by the lack of crafts-manship of our newer playwrights, the meander-

ing plot lines that seem to characterize the workof those writers who imitate Pinter in particular.Miss HELLMAN: I suppose the answer to that

question lies in whether one feels that theatre

writing should follow strict rules. Personally Idon't believe in such rules. There is no reason

why a tight plot line, which is I suppose what Ihave always had, should be considered superiorto a loose line. The simple answer is that theloose line is more fashionable now.

Pinter himself, about whom I have some res-ervations, is actually a very skillful playwrightwith the ability to construct a tight line runningthrough seemingly loose form. But the tight lineof an Ibsen, for example, is certainly gone, atleast for the moment. It is a little like asking whymodern art has opened up in so many directions,sometimes producing junk and sometimes master-

pieces. In short, you can't blame a form for lackof content.

QUESTION: I am curious about your motivation33

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in writing a play. Does the plot itself carry youalong or is there some kind of interplay between

the shadows of your imagination and the possiblereaction of the audience? How does the plot, theaudience, and the setting come together to pro-duce success or failure in the theatre?Miss HELLMAN: I'm not sure I can give you aclear answer. I know that if you have any sense,

you won't try to judge what the audience willlike; therefore, you can only listen to yourself.As for how they all come together - the plot,the audience, and the setting - it is a matter of

your own personality, your ability and interest,and the particular time of your life. It is really a

mixed brew, a stew pot in which the meat is asimportant as any other ingredient.

I really don't know how it is done. Writing,all writing, is tied up with the unconscious. Youremember that Henry James spoke of the longpole that stirred the unconscious: the longer the

pole, the more you seemed to move away andthe shorter the pole, the closer you came. It isalmost as if you were asked which arm you usedto lift an object when, of course, you reallywouldn't know unless you were conscious ofhow and why you lifted it.

QUESTION: How do you feel about the use ofdrama as propaganda?Miss HELLMAN: dislike propaganda in any formof literature, although I think you can write prop-aganda without knowing it. If you mean delib-erate propaganda I think it seldom works. If youmean expressing your belief in something, thento me it is no longer propaganda.

There have been some interesting experimentsalong these lines, for example, the Living Theatreof the WPA was in a sense propaganda. But Idon't believe that creative artists as a group areconcerned with propaganda. Ibsen described the

degraded place of a woman in A Doll's House,but I don't think he meant to write propaganda;he was merely interested in Nora and the situa-tion of his time.

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MR. LEVIN: At this point would it be appropriateto ask your opinion of Brecht?Miss HELLMAN: don't like all of Brecht. Mother

Courage is an excellent play. Here again, I don'tthink that Brecht is writing propaganda; Mother

Courage is an antiwar play but it is not propa-ganda.MR. LEVIN: Unless one considers it to be propa-

gandafor the human race.

Miss HELLMAN: Yes, exactly.

QUESTION: Could you comment on the work ofSamuel Beckett?Miss HELLMAN: think Beckett is the finest play-

wrightwe have

today,I like almost

everythinghe has done. I must admit that as the years passand I reread him, I sometimes find myself in astate of depression - something that I don't think

good literature should bring about. Nonetheless

Waiting for Godot and Happy Times are won-derful

playsand

Krapp'sLast

Tapeis a

verymov-

ing work. For me anyway Beckett is far betterthan O'Neill - the best we've had in many, manyyears. I doubt if he is on a grand scale, but thatis something few writers attain.

QUESTION:To

changethe

subject,would

youcompare the McCarthy era with current eventsin the same arena?Miss HELLMAN: The McCarthy era was more

punishing to many individuals, more horrifyingin the personal sense of ruining lives and careers

but I don't think it was on the same scale as theevents we are now witnessing. If there were, say,5000 people harmed in the McCarthy days, per-haps 200 went to jail and 2000 were financiallyruined. [I was one of them.] Yet that doesn'tseem nearly as damaging as the present horror.

No matter how badly harmed some of us were,we always believed that McCarthy would pass.It was obvious that we wouldn't stand the in-creased clownishness, the black comedy of it all.The current situation seems to me far more wide-

spread and deeply dangerous but I don't think

you would want me to give a lecture on why. Ifeel f i ht d these d for all of us

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