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Sketch by Anne Hollander.

 

Miss Hellman spends her summers in a comfortable white house at the bottom of a sandbank in the town of Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. There is none of old Cape Cod about it; a modern house, newly built with lots of big windows and a wooden deck facing on the harbor. Miss Hellman observes the ferries of Woods Hole—Martha’s Vineyard—Nantucket Steamship Authority, weighted down with passengers and automobiles, push through the harbor on their midsummer schedule and disgorge ever more visitors upon this teeming, heterogeneous resort. It is a measure of Miss Hellman’s dedication to her work that she achieves so much in her exposed situation, not half a mile from the ferry dock. Here she stays with her maid and a big barking poodle that discourages few of the peak-of-the-season visitors who troop through her parlor.

Behind this new house and out of view on top of the sandbank is the old one, which Miss Hellman sold after Dashiell Hammett died. A frame house with yellow painted shingles and climbing roses, plainer and more regional in its architecture, like a Yankee farmhouse of the last century, it had a complex of boxlike rooms where Miss Hellman’s guests thronged. Removed from these, on the far east wing of the house, stood a tower formed by the shell of an old Cape Cod windmill. Up in this windmill tower was the room where Dashiell Hammett lived; he always escaped there when company came. He had been an invalid since the war; he became a recluse, and at the end of his life talked to almost nobody. Hammett was a thin, finely built man and very tall—when he was seen walking in delicate silence, in the cruel wasting of his illness, down a crowded sidewalk on his way to the library, unrecognized, unknown, forgotten, the proudness of his bearing set him off from the summer people.

Occasionally, a stranger would come in the house uninvited and catch Dashiell Hammett off guard. He might be reading in an easy chair. Miss Hellman would introduce him, and he would elegantly rise and shake hands. Like many a famous writer who detests being disturbed in his private self, a million miles from any social confrontation, he had learned to scare off the intruder with his smile. Here he was luckier than most, for rather than looking pained and fraudulent, rather than a predictable Sam Spade/Humphrey Bogart hard-guy leer, the smile Dashiell Hammett produced on his clear-eyed, lean, aristocratic face was so nearly beatific that it disarmed the intruder long enough for Dashiell Hammett, with no more than a how-do-you-do, to vanish from the room. The armchair or the book gave his only evidence. Even the invited dinner guest coming punctually into the room would know the same ectoplasmic presence, when Miss Hellman, the laughter mingled in her greeting, would immediately explain what Dash had said—what his joking exit line had been on, it seemed, the instant of your entrance. He was elusive but never aloof. Through the medium of Miss Hellman it was possible to carry on a running extrasensory conversation. A question to him, put through to her, on one evening (as how to clean a meerschaum pipe) or a request for an opinion (on somebody’s writing, on something President Eisenhower did) was sure to be answered on another. And five years before the meeting with Miss Hellman, a request had been put in writing for a Paris Review interview. He was by then at the end of his tether, often too weak to take his meals at the table. An answer came: “Sorry. Don’t think it would work. Lilly will explain.” Which she does, though neither by design nor by coincidence, in this interview. On a table in the parlor where she talked was a framed snapshot of Dashiell Hammett as he looked in World War II as a corporal in the Army Service Forces. He is lighting his cigarette on a PX Zippo lighter and looking every inch a soldier in his impeccably creased suntans and overseas cap tilted toward the right of his head of white hair.

Miss Hellman’s voice has a quality, not to be captured on the page, of being at once angry, funny, slyly feminine, sad, affectionate, and harsh. While talking here she often allowed her laughter, like an antidote to bitterness, to break into her thoughts and give a more generous dimension to her comments, which, in print, may seem at first glance merely captious. These pages are compiled from three afternoon conversations in the more than usually harrying conditions of the Labor Day weekend on Martha’s Vineyard, while Miss Hellman was driving herself to finish a movie script for Sam Spiegel. There were many interruptions—telephone calls and people coming and going in the room. Such circumstances cannot excuse but may in part explain some of the interviewers’ unrehearsed and too eagerly “literary” questions.

 

INTERVIEWER

Before you wrote plays, did you write anything else?  

LILLIAN HELLMAN

Yes, short stories, a few poems. A couple of the stories were printed in a long-dead magazine called The Paris Comet for which Arthur Kober worked. Arthur and I were married and living in Paris. Let’s see, about 1928, 1929, somewhere in there. They were very lady-writer stories. I reread them a few years ago. The kind of stories where the man puts his fork down and the woman knows it’s all over. You know.  

INTERVIEWER

Was it Dashiell Hammett who encouraged you to write plays?  

HELLMAN

No. He disliked the theater. He always wanted me to write a novel. I wrote a play before The Children’s Hour with Louis Kronenberger called The Dear Queen. It was about a royal family. A royal family who wanted to be bourgeois. They kept running away to be middle class, and Dash used to say the play was no good because Louis would laugh only at his lines and I would laugh only at mine.  

INTERVIEWER

Which of your plays do you like best?  

HELLMAN

I don’t like that question. You always like best the last thing you did. You like to think that you got better with time. But you know it isn’t always true. I very seldom reread the plays. The few times I have, I have been pleasantly surprised by things that were better than I had remembered and horrified by other things I had thought were good. But I suppose Autumn Garden. I suppose I think it is the best play, if that is what you mean by “like.”  

INTERVIEWER

Somebody who saw you watch the opening night in Paris of Simone Signoret’s adaptation of The Little Foxes said that through the performance you kept leaving your seat and pacing the vestibule.  

HELLMAN

I jump up and down through most performances. But that particular night I was shaken by what I was seeing. I like Little Foxes, but I’m tired of it. I don’t think many writers like best their best-known piece of work, particularly when it was written a long time ago.  

INTERVIEWER

What prompted you to go back to the theme and the characters of The Little Foxes? Only seven years later you wrote Another Part of the Forest.  

HELLMAN

I always intended to do The Little Foxes as a trilogy. Regina in The Little Foxes is about thirty-eight years old, and the year is 1900. I had meant to take up with her again in about 1920 or 1925, in Europe. And her daughter, Alexandra, was to have become maybe a spinsterish social worker, disappointed, a rather angry woman.  

INTERVIEWER

In the third act of The Little Foxes is a speech which carries the burden of the play. It says there are people who eat the earth and all the people on it, like the locusts in the Bible. And there are the people who let them do it. “Sometimes I think it ain’t right to stand by and watch them do it.” At the end of this play, Alexandra decides that she is not going to be one of those passive people. She is going to leave her mother.  

HELLMAN

Yes, I meant her to leave. But to my great surprise, the ending of the play was taken to be a statement of faith in Alexandra, in her denial of her family. I never meant it that way. She did have courage enough to leave, but she would never have the force or vigor of her mother’s family. That’s what I meant. Or maybe I made it up afterward.  

INTERVIEWER

These wheelers and dealers in your plays—the gouging, avaricious Hubbards. Had you known many people like that?  

HELLMAN

Lots of people thought it was my mother’s family.  

INTERVIEWER

Might you ever write that third play?  

HELLMAN

I’m tired of the people in The Little Foxes.  

INTERVIEWER

In Regina, the opera Marc Blitzstein based on The Little Foxes, the badness of Regina is most emphatic.  

HELLMAN

Marc and I were close friends, but we never collaborated. I had nothing to do with the opera. I never saw Regina that way. You have no right to see your characters as good or bad. Such words have nothing to do with people you write about. Other people see them that way.  

INTERVIEWER

You say in your introduction that The Children’s Hour is about goodness and badness.  

HELLMAN

Goodness and badness is different from good and bad people, isn’t it? The Children’s Hour—I was pleased with the results—was a kind of exercise. I didn’t know how to write a play and I was teaching myself. I chose, or Dashiell Hammett chose for me, an actual law case, on the theory that I would do better with something that was there, had a foundation in fact. I didn’t want to write about myself at the age of twenty-six. The play was based on a law case in a book by William Roughead. I changed it, of course, completely, by the time I finished. The case took place in Edinburgh in the nineteenth century and was about two old-maid schoolteachers who ran a sort of second-rate private school. A little Indian girl—an India Indian—had been enrolled by her grandmother in the school. She brought charges of lesbianism against the two teachers. The two poor middle-aged ladies spent the rest of their lives suing, sometimes losing, sometimes winning, until they no longer had any money and no school.