[Lillian Hellman's eight] original plays fall into two principal groups, based on Hellman's view of human action and motivation—a highly moral view, interpreting both action and the failure to act in terms of good and evil.

The first two plays became signposts, marking the directions to be taken by the later plays. The Children's Hour concerned active evil…. The drama pointed the way toward the three plays whose chief characters are despoilers—those who exploit or destroy others for their own purposes. Hellman's second play, Days to Come, was not so much about the despoilers—the evildoers themselves—as about those characters who, well-meaning or not, stand by and allow the despoilers to accomplish their destructive aims. Often these bystanders may be the victims of their own naiveté or lack of self-knowledge.

The despoiler plays are The Little Foxes, Another Part of the Forest, and Watch on the Rhine. Each is a tightly constructed drama, leading to a violent climax that is the result of evildoing. Most of the characters are clearly defined as evil or good, harmful or harmless. But the so-called bystander plays—The Searching Wind, The Autumn Garden, and Toys in the Attic—are as different from the despoilers in structure as they are in theme. The action is slower, the plot more discursive and low-keyed, moving more within the characters and the events that befall them, than through their actions. For most of these people are unable to act positively or with conviction. They let things happen and they become the passive victims of the despoilers and themselves. Despoilers and bystanders appear in some form in all the plays, but Hellman clearly differentiates between evil as a positive, rapacious force in the first group, and evil as the negative failure of good in the second. (pp. 29-30)

Characterization in all Hellman's plays is trenchant, and her characters are looked at, objectively, from the outside; the playwright sees them but does not identify with them. Unlike many playwrights—O'Neill is the most obvious example—she does not use the stage to express her innermost, personal conflicts or sufferings; she is singularly intolerant of self-pity wherever she sees it. With a few exceptions, her compassion and empathy were to be saved for the memoirs, and there, too, it is highly selective. Even the persona of herself—the "I" who remembers and the "Lillian" who acts—is sometimes mocked in the memoirs and the plays. (p. 42)

The Children's Hour and, possibly, Watch on the Rhine are the only plays that approach the definition of tragedy, in the Aristotelian sense. Miss Hellman's customary detachment from her characters is related to the genre in which she writes—not tragedy, but "serious drama" or melodrama. For tragedy requires a protagonist whose fall—partly through his own fault, partly through circumstances beyond his control—can excite pity or terror in the spectator. Detachment, objectivity, or simple dislike or hatred rule out such emotional involvement. (pp. 43-4)

Melodrama, as Hellman used the term, was a logical outcome of realism in drama…. [Realism] assumes that life is seldom mysterious, seldom predetermined. When, in most of Hellman's plays, human beings fail or are destroyed, the powers of destruction are in human hands; they are not functions of a higher necessity or fate, or of naturalistic forces. (pp. 44-5)

The Children's Hour has many of the qualities of Hellman's later plays. Its mode and setting are realistic; its characters, strongly etched; its theme, serious; and its tone, indignant. The object of that indignation was both social and individual—a society made up of a group of individuals so bound by their own mores and conventions as to feel compelled, for the preservation of that society, to punish those who deviated from it. (p. 45)

In her later work, Hellman was to be drawn to causes only indirectly related to labor or the proletariat: the ruthless decadence of the southern capitalist in The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest, and the atrocities of fascism in Watch on the Rhine and The Searching Wind…. Days to Come, however, took Hellman's characteristic form—realistic melodrama. The play was a failure, partly because as Hellman said, she tried to say too much about the people in it. The labor cause was not enough to unify the action; Hellman had to explore the individual characters who were themselves often confused about their own motives. There were plot confusions, too—"accidental judgments, casual slaughters … purposes mistook" that did not necessarily, as in Hamlet, fall on "the inventors' heads," but on everybody's. (pp. 46-7)

As Hellman grew older, the more her misanthropy became like that of the preacher in Ecclesiastes, cynical and sad, rather than angry and rebellious. The anger that she had turned against the Tilfords of this world—Mary and her grandmother in The Children's Hour—rages through The Little Foxes and Watch on the Rhine, and flares up again, but almost as parody, in Another Part of the Forest. But in The Searching Wind, The Autumn Garden, and Toys in the Attic, Hellman is looking at … the ineffectual ones who let evil and decay attack and destroy the lives of others, as it consumes their own vitality. (p. 49)

In looking back at Hellman's work as a playwright, it is tempting to try to reduce all her plots and characters to repeated formulas and types. Such an exercise can be performed, of course, on any writer's body of work, but the demands of the stage and of her favorite genre, the realistic well-made melodrama, make Hellman's plays particularly vulnerable to this kind of analysis…. More interesting [than the similarities in structure and characterization in the plays] is the moral point of view that unifies both the plays and the memoirs. This is her concept of both active and passive evil, the sins produced by both commission and omission. (p. 92)

An Unfinished Woman is subtitled "a memoir" and Pentimento "a book of portraits." But the differences in mechanical structure are more apparent than real. The first book is built as a narrative, not strictly chronological, but still chiefly linear in movement from past to present and back again, relating events and persons to time and to each other. The second, Pentimento, is constructed as a series of portraits, each a unit, including group portraits and landscapes. But An Unfinished Woman also contains portraits…. And the portraits in Pentimento are strung together in a loose chronological sequence, over the same time span as An Unfinished Woman. (p. 98)

More interesting than the way Hellman organizes her materials is the way she sees them. The books are memoirs, rather than autobiographies, because their concentration seems, at least, to be upon the ambience of the writer rather than upon the writer herself. True, they reveal the author, but in carefully selected times, places, and company. Even in the anecdotes and diaries she is both narrator and protagonist, in a series of short, self-contained dramas.

As speaker and actress, Hellman is the principal unifier of the memoirs, but recurrent settings and characters also help to unify the books as they did her life. (pp. 98-9)

[Lillian Hellman] is a playwright: a maker of tightly constructed theater pieces, and the best of her memoirs are tales told by a playwright—with plot, character, and carefully paced suspense. Her biography provides a narrative line on which to hang the separate, loosely related episodes; and if some of these owe their mechanical structure to the well-made play and the film script, they owe their thematic, or symbolic structure (when it is there) to a combination of sources—including nineteenth-century American fiction, psychoanalysis, and Christianity. (p. 100)

[Hellman] seems to believe as Melville did, that ambiguity often presents a truer version of our perceptions than could clarity or sharp distinction…. [She] is influenced by her knowledge of the methods of literary symbolism and by her own predilection toward the religious mythic interpretations of experience, and not least, by her own experience of psychoanalysis, with strong religious associations.

The language of the memoirs is what Hellman would call "pretend cool." It is casual, slangy, objective, humorous, self-deprecatory. But these qualities are often deceptive. Sometimes they are masked, restrained expressions of intense and often irrational angers, fears, conflicts. (p. 101)

The most important difference between the two long books is in their thematic emphasis. An Unfinished Woman questions and explores the occasions and rites of initiation, the expiation of guilts, the meaning of suffering and survival—all of these in the context of a deepening insight into self. Pentimento seems to be thematically unified around the shapes of love; exploration takes the form of what Richard Poirier [in a review of Pentimento] has called "emotional range-finding." In the portrait chapters of Pentimento, Hellman ponders the nature of her deepest relationships to others. Of course, the two books combine or interchange themes at times: the last two chapters of Pentimento raise questions about suffering, guilt, and survival posed earlier in An Unfinished Woman. But this is an appropriate ending for the second book and brings the wheel full circle. (p. 104)

[In] An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento, Hellman faces the fact that moral indignation may at times be only a mask for personal pique, for irritability at an insult or an invasion of privacy….

The saving grace from either diatribe or sentimentality is the wry, often rueful humor with which Hellman looks at herself. (p. 111)

Compared to the other memoirs, Scoundrel Time (1976), is a minor literary performance that elicited a major political controversy. The book is a slight one…. The narrative itself is brief, with remembered sidelights and flashbacks. (p. 147)

The elliptical and often ambiguous style of the other memoirs was, in those books, a legitimate medium for describing the author's personal reactions to life. Most of the characters in those books were dead; names and identities could be changed and shifted to protect the living. Moreover, those memoirs were intended as artifact, not history; accuracy was not the point. But many of the people accused in Scoundrel Time of being bystanders to villainy are still alive, and Hellman attacked them by name. They fought—and are still fighting—back. Their charges are based on alleged inaccuracies and omissions in Hellman's facts, and on her stance as the lonely truth-speaker.

As a literary performance, the book has a certain understated charm. It is discursive and anecdotal, less tightly constructed than the memoir chapters I have called dramatic tales. The tone is less that of anger than of disappointment and weariness that Hellman's "old, respected friends" could have been parties to injustice. But she still constructs a series of dramatic confrontations—somewhat episodic now, and sliding forward and backward in time—to build toward the climax, her appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in May of 1952. And in spite of her sad or wry disillusionment, the old cantankerous, hot-tempered Lillian is still the protagonist—the Southern kid now grown up…. (p. 148)

Hellman has always been a bit dogmatic in her value judgements—especially if she has been personally offended—and sometimes is carried away by the opportunity to air an old grudge. So she let fly in Scoundrel Time—sometimes masking her anger under the tone, as I have said, of sorrowful disillusionment with old friends who belonged to the intellectual anticommunist left. (p. 152)

Hellman herself has not answered [the many critical attacks against her position in Scoundrel Time] … in any cogent, credible way. She claims that she was writing her personal story, not history. Some of her hostile critics have called the book "self-serving;" the character of "Lillian" too heroic, too put-upon and almost martyred, considering the comparative extent of her financial losses and persecution. But the readers who made the book a best-seller thought it was a modest understatement of heroism; that the portrait she presents is of a woman who, in evil times, stuck to her own values against odds and under pressure, and own. (p. 155)

Such a value system as Hellman's, whether in the plays or the memoirs, with its clearcut criteria of good and evil, has a reassuring emotional appeal; it makes us nostalgic for a child's world (where the worst crime is to tattle on your friends) and for the make-believe world of fiction and drama, of despoilers and bystanders, where such a system flourishes. But the adult realm of politics and history demands complexities of knowledge and fact, in which value judgments are painfully arrived at. (p. 156)

Lillian Hellman's insight is sharpest when it is most personal and specific. If some of her plays seem dated now it is probably because of their "well-made," realistic mode and their two-dimensional, good-or-evil characterizations. But three plays (and perhaps others) have had current repertory revivals—The Autumn Garden, Toys in the Attic, and The Children's Hour. These are the less structured ones, more concerned with psychology than plot, and with moral ambiguity rather than moral definition.

As a memoirist, Hellman was able to present her materials dramatically, without the limitations imposed by the stage. The memoir form allowed, too, for subtlety in the exploration of character; for unanswered questions, and for a certain mysterious quality that evoked a response from readers who knew that mystery for their own.

The personal, the ambiguous, were not appropriate, however, to the politics of Scoundrel Time, and Hellman has taken some punishment for that mistake. But she formulated her philosophy of survival when she was fourteen: "If you are willing to take the punishment, you are halfway through the battle."

Lillian Hellman is still producing, still battling, still surviving, still performing. Whatever we may think of her politics or temperament, we must rejoice in the energy, ingenuity, and skill of the performance. (pp. 156-57)

Doris V. Falk, in her Lillian Hellman (copyright © 1978 by Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.), Ungar, 1978, 180 p.