The debate about Hellman's place as a playwright would go
on for the rest of her life and well after it. Any attempt at evalua-
tion, however, must start with an acknowledgment of how few
prominent playwrights outlive their own period. Of the hundreds
of authors of successful plays in the 350 years since Shakespeare,
only a relatively small number are recognizable to us today and
even fewer of their plays are ever performed. From the last one
hundred years alone, there are scores of poets and novelists who
are known and read today, but only a few playwrights who are
regularly revived: Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Wilde, Shaw-and
even those turn up only sporadically. Of all the literary forms,
playwriting seems to be the most rooted in its own period, the
most transitory.
During Hellman's years of greatest strength, the 1930s, she was highly
regarded but by no means preeminent. She was certainly outranked by
Eugene O'Neill, as well as Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sherwood, Clifford
Odets, Elmer Rice, William Sa royan and Thornton Wilder.
Except for O'Neill, these playwrights
have all but disappeared from American stages, and Hellman,
while never considered in O'Neill's class as an artist, can approach
his record for revivals.
It is perhaps Hellman's refusal to go the way of a good second-
rate playwright that irks her critics more than anything else. A
partial explanation of her staying power may be found in the
formidable personality of the woman herself, a possibility that
became stronger after the publication of her highly successful
memoirs with their resounding evocations of her battles, adven-
tures and brushes with history. But the advent of the television
talk show obviated interesting personality as a motive for explor-
ing an author's work when, by switching the dial, you could have
the personality itself. The reason for the modest endurance of
Hellman's plays must lie in the work.
When he was drama critic for The New York Times, Clive
Barnes had an interesting theory about why Hellman incites a
number of critics to mayhem. He felt that the well-madeness of
her plays was its own worst enemy in that it tempted the audi-
ence of a Hellman play to "accept and analyze it on the highest
level." But the plays do not reward such an effort, which, Barnes
inferred, left playgoers feeling duped and therefore hostile. His
subtle analysis seems off in one respect: it can't be the well-
madeness of Hellman's plays that invites criticism at the highest
level-Blithe Spirit and Angel Street are well made-it is more
likely her unrelenting seriousness. What Hellman stumbled on-
as Edward Albee did in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-was
that the dark side of the human condition, if presented with en-
ergy, intelligence and brio, can be entertainment of a high order.
We are excruciated by such plays, and we are exhilarated as
on a drive in a fast car. To a large degree we are made to reflect,
in part to satisfy ourselves that some lofty and recondite message
is not at hand, and in part on the nature and origins of the human
foibles that are being so vividly portrayed. But once aroused to
reflection, we are reluctant to settle for pat conclusions like "the
world has villains," so we burrow on to find more specific mean-
ings, such as "the Hubbards are an indictment of the capitalist
system." After being so brilliantly stimulated, we refuse to accept
the absence of a brilliant message.
In a 1960 interview with The New York Times's Seymour
Peck, Hellman said, "I don't know that I was ever very much con-
cerned, in a literary sense, with the world. I don't think play-
wrights should write about society ... I've always written about
people." Assuming that Hellman was honest in disclaiming po-
lemical motives in writing The Little Foxes, or any of her plays
except Watch on the Rhine (and even that play, she says, did not
start out as an antifascist tract), it is still no coincidence that
those who imposed a message on her came up with a political
conclusion-the rottenness of the capitalist system-that was in-
deed a belief of Hellman's.
If the immediate drama that has captured the author is pre-
sented honestly and unequivocally, it is not surprising that the
author's larger vision will emerge, whether or not it is reduced to
a motto and pinned over his or her typewriter. (Once asked if a
certain play was political, critic Kenneth Tynan replied, "When
one character asks another for a cigarette, there are political im-
plications.") A case could be made for Hellman's approach: Let
the big themes shift for themselves, and concentrate instead on
the theatricality, the logic and the sense of pacing of the story in
order to grasp the audience's attention and emotions, and hold
those emotions until the final curtain., If it turns out that the
larger themes generated by a play are indeed unconscious on the
author's part, how many demerits should he or she be docked as
a creative artist? And will such docking make any difference to
the people who decide what plays are revived? Probably not. It
is an unfair game, since we do not always have a Seymour Peck
around to extract confessions on the absence of creative premedi-
tation from our most eminent writers.
With or without the big themes and elusive messages, Hell-
man's "fast drives" through human greed, ruthlessness and self-
delusion prove that seriousness and unpleasantness don't have to
be profound to justify themselves. The people who like her plays
can always Hnd in them the deeper themes, and those who dis-
like them will continue to insist they are about nothing.
The knack of commanding involvement was, perhaps more
than anything else, Hellman's strength as a playwright. There is
clearly a mystery to that talent because such giants as Thomas
Wolfe, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway and T. S. Eliot tried for
it and failed. It surely is connected with the ability to create clear-
cut characters who engage our emotions-positive or negative-
economy of dialogue and a relatively quick (by the end of the
first act) establishment of the plot: who wants what and what the
obstacles are.
Elizabeth Hardwick's complaint that Hellman in The Little
Faxes missed the opportunities for nuance and intellectual delving
that are offered by the character of Horace is perhaps a serviceable
paradigm for a major difference between a play and a novel.
(Hardwick admits her interest in the theater is primarily liter-
ary.) Unlike a play, a novel is not working against the clock; it
can be read for a while, then considered for a while, perhaps with
passages reread. The playwright must deal with audiences squirm-
ing in uncomfortable seats who can only be asked to take in so
much in one evening, identify with only so many characters, fol-
low only so many plot twists, weigh only so many moral dilem-
mas. If all of a play's characters are given dimension, hard choices,
vacillating personalities, the result would be the intellectual equiv-
alent of a Busby Berkeley finale-too much happening onstage for
the eye to take in.
Hardwick's complaint may also provide a valuable clue to
what makes a dramatist. By passing up whatever literary tempta-
tions Horace presents, Hellman may have been exercising her tal-
ent for writing plays that work. Once again it is difficult to know
whether she did this consciously or instinctively, and on that
point she offers no help. From her manuscripts at the University
of Texas it is clear that she had a compelling urge, no doubt
abetted by Hammett, to get on with the business at hand cleanly
and quickly, Every revision cuts out "fat"-excess dialogue, ex-
cess background, excess characters, excess plot complications.
There is no reason why the ability of a playwright to recog-
nize enervating superfluities must be intellectualized. In Hell-
man's case, clearly it was not. In a 1942 interview she said that
she came to feel that she had one character too many in Watch
on the Rhine-just as she had in Days to Come-but she was un-
able to figure out which character was unnecessary. Such a no-
tional approach to creation raises (or lowers) the fashioning of a
play to the mystical; it certainly takes it out of the realm of hard
analysis.
Hellman is proof that playwrights must possess, in addition
to whatever other talents they may have, a certain noncerebral
instinct that tells them when an element is "wrong," "doesn't
work," "slows down the action" -or any of the many cliches that
conceal a bafHement about why something hurts rather than helps
a creative work. The important thing is that this ruthless editorial
sense be there. Whatever it is, Hellman had that sense to a degree
shared by few others.
The business of economy and pacing that are so essential in
the theater points to another Hellman strength, rarely cited: her
dialogue. Few dramatists have shown her ability to move the ac-
tion ahead with such speed and logical thrust without seeming
forced and unnatural. Repeatedly in Hellman plays there are
scenes in which the lines do not move the action ahead in steps
but in leaps, yet never do the characters seem to be leaping-they
are merely talking.
One of the techniques Hellman uses to achieve such a rapid
pace is the elimination of the niceties and obfuscations that clut-
ter most conversations. It is not so much the economical use of
language, although that too is symptomatic, it is the speed of can-
dor. Her characters say precisely what they feel, and it is often
the sort of assertion for which an ordinary talker would require
five buildup lines. Hellman skips the buildup lines, leaving only
the hard sinew of the most direct sort of communication. The ef-
fect is exhilarating when it is achieved to the degree that Hellman
regularly achieved it, and it is an aspect of her better plays, as
much as their deft construction, that has earned them respect and
that keeps an audience, as more than one critic has observed,
holding its breath.
In reply to the most frequently made charge against Hell-
man's plays, other than their being melodramas-that they were
"well-made," with the pejorative implication of contrivance-the
critic Allan Lewis in a discussion of The Little Faxes came to her
defense by picking up on Hellman's own defense that fictional
writing by its very nature is contrived. "All writers rearrange life
and impose their own will on the chaos of reality," Lewis wrote.
"The test in the realistic theater is whether the characters seem
to be self-propelled. as they. do in The Little Faxes." In defending
Hellman against this familiar charge, Lewis also called attention
to another of her strengths: her characters are not just Hellman in
different disguises, but believable individuals with a life and mo-
tivational system of their Own.
In her introduction to the Chekhov letters, Hellman writes
that it still seems to surprise some people that authors inevitably
come to like all of their characters. Whether or not that is the
commonplace Hellman suggests, it loses its commonness when
coming from the mouth of the creator of such nasty pieces of
work as Regina Giddens, Ben Hubbard and Mary Tilford, among
others. But it certainly is a strong clue as to why Hellman's vil-
lains are so arresting: she betrays an underlying sympathy for
them, an ability to see things through their eyes.
As for the accusation that her plays are not about anything,
one is tempted to have recourse to the many favorable Hellman
critics who say that her plays are about "the problem of good and
evil" -but that empty analysis is tantamount to saying her plays
are about "the problem of human beings" and would tend rather
to substantiate the charge of their being devoid of subject.
There is no doubt, however, that a strong moral current runs
through all Hellman's work, as it did through so much of the seri-
ous American drama of the thirties, forties and fifties. It is the
making of charges-something is wrong here-and then spending
two or three acts finding out who or what is to blame. Talking
about the playwrights of the thirties, Malcolm Goldstein in The
Political Stage wrote: "They wished to analyze the social forces
that created killers, perjurers, slanderers and other antisocial be-
ings." In the following decades, the playwrights' list of culprits
would be broadened to include the family nexus and American
values. But the ever-present assumption was the basic assumption
of liberalism: whatever the particular horror, a cause could be
rooted out, condemned, then changed or eliminated.
The notion that the seeking out of guilt is the dominant
theme of so much contemporary theater was developed by Robert
Brustein in his brilliant essay "The Crack in the Chimney." Bru-
stein expanded the judgmental nature of mainstream American
theater to include the forties, fifties and sixties, citing in partic~-
lar such playwrights as Arthur Miller and David Rabe: Brustein
wrote about their dramas: "The event to be excavated IS still the
guilt of the (generally older generation) protagonis:s; and. the
drama retains the air of the courtroom, complete WIth arraign-
ments, investigations, condemnations, indictments, and punish-
ments."
Brustein then relegated such fault-finding plays to a second-
ary rank in the artistic hierarchy. His essay convincingly argued
that Ibsen, who is thought to be the prototype of the social-
realist dramatists like Hellman and Arthur Miller whom Brustem
finds so accusatory, had made quite the opposite point: that the
sources of guilt are not readily accessible to the inquiring mind.
Brustein said, "Great artists have traditionally understood that the
true explanations are beyond concepts of blame."
(When he wrote this essay, Brustein had already become
friends with Hellman on Martha's Vineyard, saying with pride
that he was one of few theater people admitted to her circle. His
disdain for the judgmental drama that she epitomizes may explain
why she never, according to Brustein, solicited discussions with
him about her plays, while frequently asking his opinions and ad-
vice about her prose. )
When looking over the critical evaluation of Hellman's the-
ater work as a whole, the tendency for even the most kindly tabu-
lator is to pass over the admirers, whose existence can be assured,
and get to the denigrators who are chipping away at the edifice.
If her rank as an artist is arguable, her prestige and eminence are
facts. Even before the memoirs, she was honored by as many lead-
ing universities as any American playwright; her plays are per-
formed regularly and around the world, and her position as dra-
matist is debated periodically in intellectual Journals, which IS
remarkable. Who in recent decades has argued about the work of
Sherwood or Odets?
while never considered in O'Neill's class as an artist, can approach
his record for revivals.
It is perhaps Hellman's refusal to go the way of a good second-
rate playwright that irks her critics more than anything else. A
partial explanation of her staying power may be found in the
formidable personality of the woman herself, a possibility that
became stronger after the publication of her highly successful
memoirs with their resounding evocations of her battles, adven-
tures and brushes with history. But the advent of the television
talk show obviated interesting personality as a motive for explor-
ing an author's work when, by switching the dial, you could have
the personality itself. The reason for the modest endurance of
Hellman's plays must lie in the work.
When he was drama critic for The New York Times, Clive
Barnes had an interesting theory about why Hellman incites a
number of critics to mayhem. He felt that the well-madeness of
her plays was its own worst enemy in that it tempted the audi-
ence of a Hellman play to "accept and analyze it on the highest
level." But the plays do not reward such an effort, which, Barnes
inferred, left playgoers feeling duped and therefore hostile. His
subtle analysis seems off in one respect: it can't be the well-
madeness of Hellman's plays that invites criticism at the highest
level-Blithe Spirit and Angel Street are well made-it is more
likely her unrelenting seriousness. What Hellman stumbled on-
as Edward Albee did in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-was
that the dark side of the human condition, if presented with en-
ergy, intelligence and brio, can be entertainment of a high order.
We are excruciated by such plays, and we are exhilarated as
on a drive in a fast car. To a large degree we are made to reflect,
in part to satisfy ourselves that some lofty and recondite message
is not at hand, and in part on the nature and origins of the human
foibles that are being so vividly portrayed. But once aroused to
reflection, we are reluctant to settle for pat conclusions like "the
world has villains," so we burrow on to find more specific mean-
ings, such as "the Hubbards are an indictment of the capitalist
system." After being so brilliantly stimulated, we refuse to accept
the absence of a brilliant message.
In a 1960 interview with The New York Times's Seymour
Peck, Hellman said, "I don't know that I was ever very much con-
cerned, in a literary sense, with the world. I don't think play-
wrights should write about society ... I've always written about
people." Assuming that Hellman was honest in disclaiming po-
lemical motives in writing The Little Foxes, or any of her plays
except Watch on the Rhine (and even that play, she says, did not
start out as an antifascist tract), it is still no coincidence that
those who imposed a message on her came up with a political
conclusion-the rottenness of the capitalist system-that was in-
deed a belief of Hellman's.
If the immediate drama that has captured the author is pre-
sented honestly and unequivocally, it is not surprising that the
author's larger vision will emerge, whether or not it is reduced to
a motto and pinned over his or her typewriter. (Once asked if a
certain play was political, critic Kenneth Tynan replied, "When
one character asks another for a cigarette, there are political im-
plications.") A case could be made for Hellman's approach: Let
the big themes shift for themselves, and concentrate instead on
the theatricality, the logic and the sense of pacing of the story in
order to grasp the audience's attention and emotions, and hold
those emotions until the final curtain., If it turns out that the
larger themes generated by a play are indeed unconscious on the
author's part, how many demerits should he or she be docked as
a creative artist? And will such docking make any difference to
the people who decide what plays are revived? Probably not. It
is an unfair game, since we do not always have a Seymour Peck
around to extract confessions on the absence of creative premedi-
tation from our most eminent writers.
With or without the big themes and elusive messages, Hell-
man's "fast drives" through human greed, ruthlessness and self-
delusion prove that seriousness and unpleasantness don't have to
be profound to justify themselves. The people who like her plays
can always Hnd in them the deeper themes, and those who dis-
like them will continue to insist they are about nothing.
The knack of commanding involvement was, perhaps more
than anything else, Hellman's strength as a playwright. There is
clearly a mystery to that talent because such giants as Thomas
Wolfe, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway and T. S. Eliot tried for
it and failed. It surely is connected with the ability to create clear-
cut characters who engage our emotions-positive or negative-
economy of dialogue and a relatively quick (by the end of the
first act) establishment of the plot: who wants what and what the
obstacles are.
Elizabeth Hardwick's complaint that Hellman in The Little
Faxes missed the opportunities for nuance and intellectual delving
that are offered by the character of Horace is perhaps a serviceable
paradigm for a major difference between a play and a novel.
(Hardwick admits her interest in the theater is primarily liter-
ary.) Unlike a play, a novel is not working against the clock; it
can be read for a while, then considered for a while, perhaps with
passages reread. The playwright must deal with audiences squirm-
ing in uncomfortable seats who can only be asked to take in so
much in one evening, identify with only so many characters, fol-
low only so many plot twists, weigh only so many moral dilem-
mas. If all of a play's characters are given dimension, hard choices,
vacillating personalities, the result would be the intellectual equiv-
alent of a Busby Berkeley finale-too much happening onstage for
the eye to take in.
Hardwick's complaint may also provide a valuable clue to
what makes a dramatist. By passing up whatever literary tempta-
tions Horace presents, Hellman may have been exercising her tal-
ent for writing plays that work. Once again it is difficult to know
whether she did this consciously or instinctively, and on that
point she offers no help. From her manuscripts at the University
of Texas it is clear that she had a compelling urge, no doubt
abetted by Hammett, to get on with the business at hand cleanly
and quickly, Every revision cuts out "fat"-excess dialogue, ex-
cess background, excess characters, excess plot complications.
There is no reason why the ability of a playwright to recog-
nize enervating superfluities must be intellectualized. In Hell-
man's case, clearly it was not. In a 1942 interview she said that
she came to feel that she had one character too many in Watch
on the Rhine-just as she had in Days to Come-but she was un-
able to figure out which character was unnecessary. Such a no-
tional approach to creation raises (or lowers) the fashioning of a
play to the mystical; it certainly takes it out of the realm of hard
analysis.
Hellman is proof that playwrights must possess, in addition
to whatever other talents they may have, a certain noncerebral
instinct that tells them when an element is "wrong," "doesn't
work," "slows down the action" -or any of the many cliches that
conceal a bafHement about why something hurts rather than helps
a creative work. The important thing is that this ruthless editorial
sense be there. Whatever it is, Hellman had that sense to a degree
shared by few others.
The business of economy and pacing that are so essential in
the theater points to another Hellman strength, rarely cited: her
dialogue. Few dramatists have shown her ability to move the ac-
tion ahead with such speed and logical thrust without seeming
forced and unnatural. Repeatedly in Hellman plays there are
scenes in which the lines do not move the action ahead in steps
but in leaps, yet never do the characters seem to be leaping-they
are merely talking.
One of the techniques Hellman uses to achieve such a rapid
pace is the elimination of the niceties and obfuscations that clut-
ter most conversations. It is not so much the economical use of
language, although that too is symptomatic, it is the speed of can-
dor. Her characters say precisely what they feel, and it is often
the sort of assertion for which an ordinary talker would require
five buildup lines. Hellman skips the buildup lines, leaving only
the hard sinew of the most direct sort of communication. The ef-
fect is exhilarating when it is achieved to the degree that Hellman
regularly achieved it, and it is an aspect of her better plays, as
much as their deft construction, that has earned them respect and
that keeps an audience, as more than one critic has observed,
holding its breath.
In reply to the most frequently made charge against Hell-
man's plays, other than their being melodramas-that they were
"well-made," with the pejorative implication of contrivance-the
critic Allan Lewis in a discussion of The Little Faxes came to her
defense by picking up on Hellman's own defense that fictional
writing by its very nature is contrived. "All writers rearrange life
and impose their own will on the chaos of reality," Lewis wrote.
"The test in the realistic theater is whether the characters seem
to be self-propelled. as they. do in The Little Faxes." In defending
Hellman against this familiar charge, Lewis also called attention
to another of her strengths: her characters are not just Hellman in
different disguises, but believable individuals with a life and mo-
tivational system of their Own.
In her introduction to the Chekhov letters, Hellman writes
that it still seems to surprise some people that authors inevitably
come to like all of their characters. Whether or not that is the
commonplace Hellman suggests, it loses its commonness when
coming from the mouth of the creator of such nasty pieces of
work as Regina Giddens, Ben Hubbard and Mary Tilford, among
others. But it certainly is a strong clue as to why Hellman's vil-
lains are so arresting: she betrays an underlying sympathy for
them, an ability to see things through their eyes.
As for the accusation that her plays are not about anything,
one is tempted to have recourse to the many favorable Hellman
critics who say that her plays are about "the problem of good and
evil" -but that empty analysis is tantamount to saying her plays
are about "the problem of human beings" and would tend rather
to substantiate the charge of their being devoid of subject.
There is no doubt, however, that a strong moral current runs
through all Hellman's work, as it did through so much of the seri-
ous American drama of the thirties, forties and fifties. It is the
making of charges-something is wrong here-and then spending
two or three acts finding out who or what is to blame. Talking
about the playwrights of the thirties, Malcolm Goldstein in The
Political Stage wrote: "They wished to analyze the social forces
that created killers, perjurers, slanderers and other antisocial be-
ings." In the following decades, the playwrights' list of culprits
would be broadened to include the family nexus and American
values. But the ever-present assumption was the basic assumption
of liberalism: whatever the particular horror, a cause could be
rooted out, condemned, then changed or eliminated.
The notion that the seeking out of guilt is the dominant
theme of so much contemporary theater was developed by Robert
Brustein in his brilliant essay "The Crack in the Chimney." Bru-
stein expanded the judgmental nature of mainstream American
theater to include the forties, fifties and sixties, citing in partic~-
lar such playwrights as Arthur Miller and David Rabe: Brustein
wrote about their dramas: "The event to be excavated IS still the
guilt of the (generally older generation) protagonis:s; and. the
drama retains the air of the courtroom, complete WIth arraign-
ments, investigations, condemnations, indictments, and punish-
ments."
Brustein then relegated such fault-finding plays to a second-
ary rank in the artistic hierarchy. His essay convincingly argued
that Ibsen, who is thought to be the prototype of the social-
realist dramatists like Hellman and Arthur Miller whom Brustem
finds so accusatory, had made quite the opposite point: that the
sources of guilt are not readily accessible to the inquiring mind.
Brustein said, "Great artists have traditionally understood that the
true explanations are beyond concepts of blame."
(When he wrote this essay, Brustein had already become
friends with Hellman on Martha's Vineyard, saying with pride
that he was one of few theater people admitted to her circle. His
disdain for the judgmental drama that she epitomizes may explain
why she never, according to Brustein, solicited discussions with
him about her plays, while frequently asking his opinions and ad-
vice about her prose. )
When looking over the critical evaluation of Hellman's the-
ater work as a whole, the tendency for even the most kindly tabu-
lator is to pass over the admirers, whose existence can be assured,
and get to the denigrators who are chipping away at the edifice.
If her rank as an artist is arguable, her prestige and eminence are
facts. Even before the memoirs, she was honored by as many lead-
ing universities as any American playwright; her plays are per-
formed regularly and around the world, and her position as dra-
matist is debated periodically in intellectual Journals, which IS
remarkable. Who in recent decades has argued about the work of
Sherwood or Odets?
