Word: hellman
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Seldom has an anthology of critical essays aroused so much prepublication anxiety as Diana Trilling's We Must March My Darlings. Playwright Lillian Hellman told the New York Times last year she had heard the manuscript contained "a hysterical personal attack on me." Little, Brown, the publisher for both writers, requested the deletion of four passages about Hellman from the Trilling text. When the author refused, the publisher terminated the contract, precipitating a ruckus whose reverberations can still be heard...
Unwavering Opponents. Though the book quickly found its present publisher, Trilling's admirers feared that her work would be devalued by the brouhaha. They need not have worried. The critiques of Hellman's politics are appendices to a masterwork of social and literary criticism. Like Hellman, Trilling came of political age in the '30s, when, as she writes, "partisanship with or opposition to Communism made the great intellectual rift in this country." In those days people like Hellman were called Stalinists, though it was a term they would not have chosen for themselves. Hellman publicly supported Stalin...
Excerpted from her forthcoming book--which received a fair amount of publicity last year when Little Brown refused to publish Trilling's charges against Lillian Hellman, forcing the author to seek another publisher--Trilling's essay is rather more thought-provoking than Aldrich's piece, which merely decried the decline of the Harvard tradition and the old-boy network. Trilling compares the Radcliffe undergraduates she met here in 1971, when she spent several months in Briggs Hall, to thz women she went to school with in the '20s, and concludes that, despite their obvious external differences, the two groups...
...giant envelope from a hairy Kongian hand. Marty Feldman smashed a statuette to smithereens. Richard Pryor yelled, "Hey, everybody in Peoria, it's me." But basically, to the chagrin of camp followers everywhere, they played it straight, even to the point of inviting Norman Mailer and Lillian Hellman to give awards. Missing were Bob Hope, John Wayne and most of Old Hollywood; New Hollywood (whose spokesperson increasingly seems to be Jane Fonda) was so in evidence that even onetime McGovernite Warren Beatty observed that somebody ought to put in a good word for Ronald Reagan. All this earnestness...
...when he reaches the podium (to do the first lap in the night's relay of guest hosts) is: "I'm here to tell you why no blacks are going to be nominated tonight, for anything." None were. Jane Fonda is another guest host. Hanoi Jane announces Lillian Hellman, who praises this younger generation for inviting her after all the years she was blacklisted. The audience gives Hellman a standing ovation; we could not help thinking of all the stalwarts in the theater who probably played strong supporting roles in Hellman's feeding to the lions--but, as we have...