Conversations with Lillian Hellman ed. by Jackson R. Bryer (review)

Book Reviews 441 Meier and P. Betts are in Gennan, so that the reader would have to be familiar with that language to benefit fully from this book. SUSAN L. COCALIS, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, AMHERST JACKSON R. BRYER , ed. Conversations with Lilliall Hellman . Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi 1986. pp. xxvi, 298. $19.95; $9.95 (PB). Jackson Bryer has done a fine job ofassembling these Hellman interviews. Beginning in 1936, two years after the opening of The Children's Hour, and ending only three years before her death, the twenty-seven interviews Bryer chose (out of some hundred fifty he located) cover just about all possible aspects of Hellman's attitudes toward her life and work and world. One encounters, of course, some of the same questions, answers, and opinions more than once, but it is interesting to see how Hellman's views Change and how they don't change. In his introduction, Bryer gives example of both: on the one hand, HeUman's viewing The Autumn Garden as her best play cominued from its opening to the end of her life; and on the other, in an early interview about The Little Foxes she said that ideas are (and by implication should be) central to drama, while in later interviews she declared repeatedly that characters were central and ideas were not. Bryer's incisive introduction also indicates how the pattern ofthe interviews changed, from the early shorter interviews concentrating on the latest play or film, to the longer middle-life interviews centering on her attitude toward American theatre and its practitioners and on her personal life, to the later interviews, after the memoirs began appearing, concentrating almost wholly on her personal and political life and ideas to the near-exclusion of her work as a dramatist. In spite of their relative brevity, the earlier interviews offer much of interest. It is hard to believe, for example, that setting The Little Foxes in the South was , as Hellman says, "incidental and fortuitous," choosing the South only because it fitted the historical period (1900) she wanted to use and because the atmosphere of the South was familiar to her. Probably at the time she did not want to acknowledge, even by indirection, that the Hubbards partially represent her mother's own family. who were from small-town Alabama where the play is laid - especially since, as she says ina later interview, some family members were threatening to sue her for libel. Similarly, it is interesting that she originally intended to Jay Watch 011 the Rhine in a small town in the Middle West instead of, as it turns out, the much more useful and pertinent environs of Washington. Since from The Little Foxes on, all of Hellman'5 original plays are set below the Mason-Dixon line, one wonders indeed why she chose to set her two earlier plays (The Children's Hour and Days to Come) respectively in New England and Ohio and why she had originally intended to lay not only Rhine but also, she says, Foxes, in the Middle West. Hellman seems to have had little or no direct knowledge of the Middle West, and hence one might further wonder why, ifshe were going to use an area other than the South, she did not choose the area with which she was most familiar, New York City and State, 442 Book Reviews especially in view of the need she apparently felt for thorough research when dealing with the unfamiliar (for example, reading and making digests of twenty-five books on recent German history and politics, resulting in notebooks of more than a hundred thousand words, before writing Rhine, and then, as she says, using all that research in only two speeches), In later interviews, Hellman's opinions of other playwrights are interesting, for example, in 1951. "Now that Mr. Shaw is dead, nobody is next to O'Casey for my money." In a 1962 interview, she said that the American theatre had had a group of "most remarkable ... extraordinarily talented" playwrights in the Twenties: O'Neill, Kel1y, Howard, Kaufman, Rice. In the same interview she said that she considered Beckett the only important dramatist to...