Lillian Hellman, Playwright by Richard Moody (review)

344 BOOK REVIEWS referential summary. But its editorial interpolations are beautifully written; its "Structure & Plot in the Manuscript Versions" is a particularly lucid summary; and it achieves occasionally acute critical illumination, as when in the discussion of "Manuscripts 1899" - one finds, "In both the birds and the tree we see taking place that process of finding natural symbolism to replace the overtly occult which is an overall development in Yeats's work." Further, it presents a healthy commentary on the "Kiltartan"-tainted "Acting Version." (The fact that, faced by the achievement of the 1906 poem, one may not share editorial regret over the loss of some of the miasma of the occult and the idealism characterizing early "drafts," is neither here nor there.) One result of examining the manuscript material here assembled is of course renewed realization that Yeats's almost incredible achievement in verse was surprisingly often a confirmation of his confession in Adam's Curse: one wonders how many other poets have labored comparably through prose argument and experimental phrasing to reach what finally suggests flashing crystallization. But one need hardly regret on aesthetic grounds the previous general inaccessibility of most of this material. Yeats had a sound instinct for both discarding and transforming. Ultimately, is one unkind to wonder what this record of the tortured genesis of The Shadowy Waters can mean to the mere lovers and readers of poetry who are an author's real concern? After all, is the finished cabinet more beautiful or meaningful considered amid the clutter of materials discarded by its builder? Perhaps - or perhaps only to the scholar concerned with pondering and arguing every known item considered for, rejected, or used in the final structure. But the record in question is certainly a well-mortised monument of its kind and a testimonial to exacting labor. GEORGE BRANDON SAUL University of Connecticut LILLIAN HELLMAN, PLAYWRIGHT, by Richard Moody. Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill Co. (Pegasus American Authors series), 1972. 372 pp. illus. $6.95. "I do regret that I have spent too much of my life trying to find what I called 'truth,' trying to find what I called 'sense.' I never knew what I meant by truth, never made the sense I hoped for. All I mean is that I left too much of me unfinished because I wasted too much time. However." These selfquestioning lines from the conclusion of Lillian Hellman's remarkable autobiography An Unfinished Woman, which won the National Book Award in 1970, reflect the intense moral vigor which pervades her writing, but they tend to underplay the formidable success attained by one of the modern American theatre's outstanding dramatists. During a career that extends from The Children's Hour in 1934 through My Mother, My Father and Me, her last play to date, to the star-studded revival of The Little Foxes at Lincoln Center in 1967, the majority of her dozen plays and adaptations have gained critical BOOK REVIEWS 345 and popular acclaim. Her achievement as a playwright richly deserves fuller study (An Unfinished Woman almost completely ignores her professional life in the theatre), and Richard Moody's new book is a readable and useful introduction to that achievement. Lillian Hellman, Playwright provides a chronological, factual-anecdotal account of Miss Hellman's career and its major accomplishments. {"There are almost more personal facts about Lillian Hellman in Richard Moody's book than in her memoirs," writes Harold Clurman in his lucid introduction (p. xi), and the reader, expecting a critical or literary analysis of Hellman's dramaturgy, is thereby forewarned.) The opening three chapters take us through the playwright's early life, from her birth in New Orleans in 1906 through her colorful literary apprenticeship in New York and Hollywood during the twenties and early thirties, her brief marriage to the producer Arthur Kober, and her meeting with the detective writer Dashiell Hammett, with whom she established a life-long relationship. Turning then to the plays in chronological order, the fourth chapter (incorrectly marked V in the text) treats her first stage success, The Children's Hour, inspired by a nineteenthcentury Scottish law case suggested to her by Hammett. Professor Moody's approach to each major play is basically...