Lillian Hellman by Doris V. Falk, and: Lillian Hellman by Katherine Lederer, and: Rachel Crothers by Lois C. Gottlieb (review)

Book Reviews OORIS V. FALK. Lillian Hellman. New York: Frederick Ungar 1978. pp. 180. KATHERINE LEDERER. Lillian Hellman. Boston: Twayne/G.K. Hall 1979. Pp. 159. LOIS C. GOTTLIEB. Rachel Crothers. Boston: Twayne/G.K. Hall 1979. pp. 170. Rachel Crothers (1878-1958) and Lillian Hellman (1906- ) represent two different generations in the American theatre. Crothers's last play to reach Broadway, Susan and God (1937), was produced only three years after The Children's Hour, Hellman's first. Neither Doris Falk nor Katherine Lederer mentions Crothers as a possible influence on Hellman; Lois Gottlieb never cites Hellman as the inheritor of Crothers's Most Famous/Successful American Woman Playwright mantle. In fact, their plays differ markedly in tone and implication. Crothers shied quickly away from issues of war and the Depression; Hellman was obsessed by them. Crothers was sentimental and optimistic in her embrace of traditional American values. Hellman was corrosive and unforgiving in her societal attacks. But remarkable similarities between the two careers emerge from their comparison, revealing in the process a striking thread of critical condescension toward both of them, even as their work was being praised. Crothers was attacked for appealing to populartastes, fur being basically unserious. So, in her play-writing days, was Hellman. Crothers was applauded for her intelligent grasp of dialogue; so was Hellman. Crothers was both damned and praised for her dependence on well-made plots and coincidences. So - repeatedly and mistakenly - was Hellman. Both women directed some oftheirown plays. Both wrote film scripts in Hollywood. Both, though widely divergent in attitude toward the place ofpolitics in the theatre and in the politics themselves, led private lives as feisty, truly independent women. Both were dogged throughout their play-writing careers by the "woman playwright" label. Both are in the process of being reinterpreted as "feminist" playwrights, though such labeling may be inappropriate for each ofthem. Lillian Hellman's life and work contain rich material, but until publication ofthe Falk and Lederer volumes only three book-length studies had seen print: Richard Moody's Lillian Hellman, Playwright (1972), informative about her play manuscripts and productions but unoriginal and unscholarly; The Lillian Hellman Collection at the Book Reviews University of Texas (1966), in which Manfred Triesch catalogues versions of the manuscripts; and Lorena Ross Holmin's The Dramatic Works of Lillian Hellman (1973), a plot-laden Ph.D. dissertation published in Uppsala University's English Studies series. Doris Falk's Lillian Hellman, an Ungar modem literature monograph, offers a rapid overview of the plays and the memoirs. It conveys a good sense of Hellman's moral concerns and, in the last section, the persona that emerges from the three memoirs. Falk makes intelligent connections between the memoirs and the plays, and is particularly adroit at untangling the confusing charges and countercharges which followed publication of Scoundrel Time in 1976. She makes gallant if arguable attempts to relate Hellman to other American writers: the young Hellman of An Unfinished Woman is compared to Huck Finn and to Hawthorne's Robin of "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"; her black characters are said to resemble Melville's Queequeg, all servants who "see the truth under appearances" (p. 93). More irritating are attempts to render the narrative of her memoirs into dramatic or cinematic form. Professor Falk is on especially risky ground in her cinematic allusions as she appears to know virtually nothing about film. In one of her fabricated scenarios, she cites a "deep, slow pull-away shot" (p. 126), whatever that is. (A reverse tracking shot perhaps?) She casually disregards Hellman's own impressive work in films with generalities: "One can still see These Three [the 1936 film version of The Children's Hour] on the late show on television, but the movie called The Children's Hour [1962] seems to have disappeared. And probably for good reason, since most of the critics found it clumsy and embarrassing" (pp. 41 -42); "In 1941, [The Little Foxes] was made into a movie, with Bette Davis in the role ofRegina, and can still be seen occasionally on television" (pp. 55-56). Professor Falk evidently takes great stock in televised movies. Even watching a film on television would give a...