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Hellman was always a bit shifty about her own politics and Gallagher systematically goes about uncovering a trail of intellectual dishonesty. On a visit to Moscow in 1944, Hellman seems wilfully to have ignored evidence that artists and writers were being killed off. Years later she stood by the Russian government’s cover stories and even made up some of her own. She was given rare access to the front lines when the Russian army was camped outside Warsaw, and never described what she saw there. Odder still, she claimed she had had an invitation to meet Stalin, but had turned it down as she didn’t think they’d have anything to say to each other. Gallagher doesn’t buy it:
When it would be appropriate to mention a significant historical event, she omits; when it is unavoidable, she refuses to engage. She dissembles when approaching politically sensitive material, hedges, misleads.
This book isn’t all moral disapproval, and at times Gallagher enjoys her protagonist’s barefaced misinformation campaign. When Hellman appeared before the Un-American Activities Committee, she refused to name names. In her account of it, someone from the gallery cheered, ‘Thank God someone finally had the guts to do it.’ As she wasn’t the first to refuse to talk, this was a rather strange thing to say, and as her biographer drily remarks, ‘No one else in the crowded committee room that day could recall hearing it.’
Some of Gallagher’s other lines of inquiry don’t yield as much and can seem a little harsh. There’s a weird chapter about the similarities and differences between Hellman and Gertrude Stein, even though they only met once, very briefly and didn’t have much in common. The case for Hellman the anti-Semite is circumstantial at best, and perhaps there’s a little too much emphasis on Dashiell Hammett’s influence on her work.
Hammett was appalling. Viciously drunk, manipulative and controlling, he once punched Hellman in the face so hard she fell to the floor at a party; he enjoyed laughing about how he’d done the crossword over a woman’s shoulder while having sex with her. He wrote to Hellman:
If you had any memory… you’d know that your present dithers over the play are only the normal bellyaching of La Hellman at work. You still think you dashed those plays off without a fear, a groan or a sigh; but you didn’t, Sister: I haven’t had a dry shoulder since your career began.
If Hellman had written something like that, Gallagher wouldn’t have believed a word of it. It’s clear that Hellmann and Hammett did work closely together, but the latter is practically given a co-writer credit for most of the Broadway successes.
Still, Gallagher has had to wade through a lot of Hellman’s nonsense to get anywhere close to an accurate picture of what actually happened. This snappy biography is full of piquant details and entertaining quotations, and it’s perhaps understandable that its author was ready to stick the knife in.
Because you read about book review
Also by Molly Guinness
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