When Mary McCarthy said on the Dick Cavett Show in 1979 that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the,’” Lillian Hellman initiated a When Mary McCarthy said on the Dick Cavett Show in 1979 that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the,’” Lillian Hellman initiated a legal battle that remain unresolved at the time of her death five years later. Ever since then, the name and legacy of Lillian Hellman have been in considerable need of reclamation.
Beginning in the 1920s, she quickly gained a reputation as a talented screenwriter and playwright who wrote some of the best-received American plays of her day, including “The Little Foxes” and “The Children’s Hour.” She is perhaps even better known for standing up to Senator Joseph McCarthy in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952. At the end of her life, she published a memoir in three parts, each of which pulled no punches and earned her a place in literary history as an angry, resentful, avaricious woman who loved nothing more than burning bridges.
The biographical approach that Kessler-Harris uses here is unorthodox to say the least. She makes no attempt at telling a cradle-to-grave story of Hellman’s life. Instead, she focuses on certain themes that appear and re-appear in both her life and work: feminism and her identity as a woman, her religion (she was Jewish and happened to spent much of her girlhood in the South), and leftist politics, especially her failure to rebuke Stalinism in the 1930s. Also prominent are the themes of sex and sexuality. She was apparently enjoying men half her age well into her seventies. To which I say, go on with your bad self, Lillian.
This approach can have several dizzying effects. One is that some of her most serious relationships are almost completely sidelined; her three-decade relationship with Dashiell Hammett gets negligible attention. You get to see Hellman from all individual angles, but she’s never allowed to come into full relief. She was chosen by Kessler-Harris, it seems, more to communicate a set of object-lessons and less to write a biography (i.e., “write a life”).
Kessler-Harris is at her best when she is describing the political or cultural history around Hellman’s life to give context: the battling segments of the American left in the 1950s, the rise o Falangism in Spain, and Hellman’s own set of complicated negotiations with major Hollywood figureheads. Because the book is taken up thematically instead of chronologically, much of this material ends up getting covered more than once, and no more thoroughly or satisfyingly the second time around.
To be quite honest, the cumulative reading experience leaves the reader (at least it left this particular one asking): why? What was the point? Kessler-Harris admits out of the gate in the introduction that she is trying something new, but her success in achieving it is dubious. This makes me wonder if the more traditional approaches to her life, like the Deborah Martinson’s biography or “Carl Rollyson’s “Lillian Hellman: Her Life and Legend” might be altogether more successful. ...more
Helen, whose husband’s death has caused her to stave off various bouts of depression and battles with, to use her word, “darkness,” has recently re-diHelen, whose husband’s death has caused her to stave off various bouts of depression and battles with, to use her word, “darkness,” has recently re-discovered her gift for sculpture. Her back yard – which Helen calls her Mecca - is full of bright, colorful, life-sized figures of biblical wise men, birds, and anything else her imagination encourages her to make. One of Helen’s only remaining friends, Elsa, pays her a surprise visit from Cape Town. During their discussion, Helen mentions that the dominee at her local Church, Byleveld, has taken it upon himself to suggest to her that she should consider moving into a convalescent home. Byleveld claims to express concern for the Church, but also for others in New Bethesda who think that Helen has become a mad eccentric, tottering on senility. Even though Helen is unable to do some things for herself, she has a local woman come to her house a few times a week, and seems very capable of living alone. Elsa vehemently urges Helen to resist Byleveld’s “help,” and refuse his offer. He’s even gone so far as to fill out the paperwork for the home; all he needs is her signature.
The play consists of only three characters, but the balance, dynamism, and tension between them is beautiful and subtle. While Byleveld could easily come off as patriarchal and overbearing, Fugard leaves plenty of room for the reader to believe that he’s really doing what he thinks is in Helen’s best interests, even though we are not to mistake his interruption as anything other than heavy-handedness. He’s not the easy-to-hate bigot that would have been caricatural. In a number of ways, Elsa is more of a caricature, with her youthful idealism and cosmopolitan, rigorous rejection of Afrikaner tradition.
As all great drama does, this resonates on a number of levels. It’s a comment on aging and how sometimes we see aging as a necessary loss of personal volition and independence. The disagreements between Byleveld and Elsa embody many of the dualisms that South Africans were dealing with thirty years ago, and to some extent continue to deal with: the rural versus the urban, the religious versus the secular, and a conscious effort to crush artistic openness and personal freedom versus a volitional effort to let that openness, or eccentricity as Byleveld calls it, flourish and prosper.
It might strike some as interesting that, for a play written in apartheid South Africa, I haven’t mentioned race. It’s not a major theme, but its presence is as insidious as Byleveld’s. Elsa is worried about her privilege, especially how it might impinge upon the lives of others, in compelling and sincere ways. On the way to visit Helen, Elsa gave a ride to a young black woman with a child, and she is haunted by what might have happened to her after they parted. By the end of the play, Elsa and Helen have rebuilt the trust that was compromised by Helen being ambivalent about standing up to Byleveld.
Athol Fugard is South Africa’s most well-known playwright, perhaps best known for “Master Harold … and the Boys.” I’d never read anything by him when I found “The Road to Mecca” last weekend at a library book sale for fifty cents. And after reading this, I’m even more eager to read more by him than I was before.
Incidentally, Helen's character is based on the historical Helen Martins whose story is similar. Her former home, "The Owl House," is now a museum. Here are some photographs of it:
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One of the interior rooms with crushed glass on the walls
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Sculptures in the garden, most of which are facing East (toward Mecca)
Published in 1983, this is the sixth play of August Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle,” and by far the best known, winning the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.Published in 1983, this is the sixth play of August Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle,” and by far the best known, winning the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. All the plays in the cycle take up various aspects of the American-American experience during the first part of the twentieth century. “Fences,” as the namely subtly hints at, looks at the differing ways of life and cultural assumptions that Americans – black and white – of two generations as they find themselves growing further and further apart.
The action revolves around Troy Maxson, the dictatorial, autocratic patriarch who rules over the play with a brooding, constant, suffocating presence. Everyone slavishly concedes to his authoritarian, overbearing personality – his wife Rose, his best friend Bono, and his two grown children, Lyons and Cory. Troy, now a garbage man, was once an aspiring baseball player when he was younger, but was unable to break into the game because of the color barrier. When his son shows similar athletic promise, he shuts down any opportunity for him to pursue it, demanding that he get a job at the local store instead. Whether it is out of spite or not is unclear, but his negation of his son’s dreams comes across as mean-spirited and petty. At another point, his son Cory asks his father “How come you ain’t never liked me?” to which Troy responds “Liked you? Who the hell said I gotta like you?”
Much of the play revolves around the ways Troy exerts his power over his wife and children. His son, Lyons, occasionally asks him for money, which always makes Troy bristle with resentment and sends him into a seething tirade about how Lyons shouldn’t feel entitled and should stop coming by just to borrow money. Troy has an affair with Alberta (whom we never see) and conceives a child with her, Raynell, whom we only see in the last scene at Troy’s funeral.
The title refers to the fence that Troy and his son try to build throughout the play, yet Troy always seems to be castigating him for doing something else, but it preforms other functions, too. Troy has an (extreme) aversion toward death and loss; the fence is, one supposes, there to militate against death. The fence had another, much more resonant meaning for me: it stands for the wall that separates black Americans raised in the 1930s and 1940s from their children raised in the 1960s, with all the social, cultural, and political baggage that comes along with that chasmal divide.
At the end of the play, Wilson has certainly made a hell of a character out of Troy – a character who begs for the readers’ sympathy. But as great of a playwright as he is, he just couldn’t bring me there; I could never see Troy as anything other than a tyrannical despot. I felt sorry for his children, and wondered why his wife suffered his presence. I tried to find virtues in him, but the fact that he is a soi-disant hard-drinking Lothario really doesn’t help his case. I have to admit, however, that I am biased: Troy reminds me of someone in my own family whose very presence I cannot bear, yet who I grew up around, and whose philistinism I occasionally still have to bear. Much of what he said in the play, his motivations, his attitudes, are exactly like those of said relative. I know it is precisely this fearful symmetry which caused such a visceral reaction toward the play itself. As much as I disliked Troy, the play itself is superb. To capture the psychology of a man like Troy, as well as his long-suffering wife and children, takes a superb craftsman, which Wilson definitely is. ...more
I read this in preparation for going to see an upcoming production of this play put on by “Shakespeare in the Park” that’s going to be playing June 1sI read this in preparation for going to see an upcoming production of this play put on by “Shakespeare in the Park” that’s going to be playing June 1st through the 4th of this year in the Botanical Gardens. Considering the myriad summaries and expositions of this play, I won’t recapitulate those here. What I will do, both for my personal use and for the remote possibility that someone else might find some use in them, is post my own thoughts and notes I took as I read it. Hopefully they’ll serve as an aide memoire if I ever need one.
ACT I: Overall themes: identity (masque?), rejection, and desire. It asks whether or not love is something real, or just another human artifice, much like the music that Count Orsino “feeds” on. Orsino’s switch of affection from Olivia to Viola is a hint that he loves the idea of love more than one of the women themselves. He’s a parody of the hopeless romantic. Viola’s wish to be transformed into a eunuch is indicative of gender liminality – or at least this seems to be a common argument, even though it’s readily known that men played all roles in Elizabethan and Jacobean theater (so I’m a little confused by the single-minded focus that much modern scholarship has put on gender in this play). Perhaps this gender ambiguity is a sort of defense mechanism to deal with the uncertainty inherent with being tossed on an unknown island. There has also been some focus on Orsino’s shift of affection toward Viola (Cesario) from a platonic friendship to a more romantic one. (Could our more modern emotional coldness associated with masculinity be coloring this reading, too?) Feste is obviously one of the cleverest people in the play. “Cucullus non facit monachum” indeed! As a critique of courtly love, this act accomplishes a lot, and Feste comes out being one of the least foolish people on the stage.
ACT II: Malvolio (literally, from the Latin, “ill will”), the only character who takes himself much too seriously, is tricked into the tomfoolery that he himself so deplores, ultimately proving Feste right: it’s not just the role of the fool to entertain folly.
ACT III: Even though, considering Malvolio’s transformation from joy-hating blowhard into romantic lover is a drastic one, that Olivia thinks him mad might be telling. Is there any room here for a sort of Foucauldian discussion of what constitutes “madness and civilization” in Elizabethan England? From the little that I’ve seen of the scholarly literature, I haven’t yet seen any discussions that run along these lines. ...more
That John Webster’s birth records were quite probably destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666 is a fitting biograpThis review contains spoilers.
That John Webster’s birth records were quite probably destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666 is a fitting biographical fact in light of reading “The Duchess of Malfi.” It perfectly highlights the senseless destruction, both physical and spiritual, that permeates this play. The duplicity, violence, and familial division rival anything that you can find in Shakespeare. While the poetry itself doesn’t quite reach the Shakespearean firmament in its baroque floridity, the language is wonderful, and just as full of double entendre and puns as the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays are.
The action is relatively straightforward. The Duchess of Malfi, whose overbearing brothers Ferdinand and the Cardinal insist that she never re-marry for fear that they might have to share her wealth with someone else, disobeys them and asks Antonio, one of her stewards, to marry her. Several years pass, during which the Duchess has two children by Antonio, while the brothers remain ignorant of the marriage, but they eventually find out. In an attempt to escape Ferdinand’s wrath, Antonio flees to Ancona. Bosola, the Cardinal’s goon, chases them in hot pursuit. The Duchess, her two younger sons, and her female servant are all killed on Bosola’s instruction. Bosola, long upset by the Cardinal’s venality, decides to revenge the Duchess and her children. The Cardinal, after murdering his mistress to keep her quiet, plans to kill Bosola, too, but instead kills Antonio who has since returned to Malfi. Just to drive home the idea of complete and utter wanton cruelty, the Cardinal, Ferdinand, and Bosola all die in a final melee. Just when you think all hope is lost, the Duchess’ oldest son appears on stage in the final scene to take charge of a court that has destroyed itself because of its singular bloodlust. However, Webster leaves little room for the reader to imagine matters getting any better.
While Bosola seems like he might be the least interesting character because he has the least qualms with murder, he shows some interesting moments of moral ambiguity and even clarity, which makes his development interesting to watch. Needless to say, by the end, you’re left feeling rent in two by the treachery, deceit, and duplicity of it all. The Duchess’ son does not provide the necessary Aristotelian catharsis, and instead of a court being wholly purged of bad seeds, you feel that that he will end up a young victim in further machinations, another courtly pawn.
While others seem to not have appreciated the introduction and editorial notes, I rather enjoyed them and thought they shed some light on the production, composition, and historical background (yes, this is based on historical events – can you imagine?) As the footnotes are located at the bottom of the page, you don’t have to flip back and forth between pages - one of my bête noirs when it comes to Penguin Classics editions. All in all, I look forward to reading more New Mermaids in the future, and I especially appreciate their effort at trying to revive Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. ...more
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