Introducing the Facts of Life

It's always tempting to try to find a connection between the artist's life and work, between the raw material and the finished product. Like any kind of analysis, this can easily be carried to dangerous extremes, but applied cautiously and selectively, it can add new dimensions to both the fiction and the reality. A dull life can be suddenly transformed through the prism of fine words and sensitive observations, or a Technicolor-surreal tale reduced to believable black and white when it is seen as a reflection of an actual incident.

Some people say that bringing in the facts of an artist's life to add authenticity to his work is cheating--that a work of art should stand on its own as a finite whole, and any additional information is extraneous. Once when I wrote a short story for a creative writing class, no one in the class found it realistic. When I protested that it was all true, my teacher said, "That doesn't make any difference. Even if something is true, it shouldn't be put in a story if it sounds unbelievable."

If you apply the same sort of reasoning to the life and work of Lillian Hellman, you might be inclined to think that her play Another Part of the Forest, which is playing at the Loeb tonight through Saturday, lacks the ring of truth. Who can believe a family in which the father is an utterly heartless tyrant, artfully manipulated by his sinister Southern belle of a daughter but so resented by his sons that one of them ends up robbing him at gunpoint? This is not to say that Hellman has drawn the dialogue verbatim from her own family dinner table or that each incident in the plot can be documented. But if you're familiar with Hellman's own background through her autobiographical writing--An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento--you may see the story in a slightly different light.

Another Part of the Forest, like Hellman's earlier play The Little Foxes, concerns the Hubbard family of Alabama, a nouveau riche, money-hungry bunch in which the strong make a practice of destroying the weak. In choosing the subject, Hellman has gone beyond her immediate roots--divided between New York and New Orleans--to the more remote history of her mother's clan, the New houses, an Alabama banking family who had moved to New Orleans and whose squabbles Hellman witnessed as a child at Sunday dinner.

It's not hard to discern the parallels here, almost to see the play as a kind of roman a clef. The weak, frightened character who appears both as the mother of the Hubbard family. Lavinia, and as a neighbor named Birdie Bag try, a young flower wilting on the broken vine of old Southern aristocracy, seems to be drawn from Hellman's own mother, the former Julia Newhouse. Like Living, whose one fixed idea throughout the play is to embark on her "mission" to teach "the little colored children." Julia constantly took refuge in religion, mouthing the words to prayers or ducking into the nearest church of whatever denomination, despite the fact that her own affiliation was ostensibly Jewish. Like Birdie, she had a sad, gentle dignity, a refined fragility that set her apart from the rather sordid affairs of her family. Laving floats in this play like a premonition of the woman Birdie will become--in The Little Foxes we see her twenty years later, trembling and broken after her uneven war of attrition with the Hubbard family, which she marries into--and both characters reflect aspects of Julia.

The central relationship in the play is a vaguely sexual one between the strong, cruel father. Marcus, and his even stronger, even crueler daughter, Regina--who twenty years later will have taken over his role as the major destructive force in the family. Perhaps Hellman was thinking of her own close relationship with her father--it's easy to get Freudian here--whom she knew to be unfaithful to her mother, a fact which may have repelled her and attracted her at the same time. But a more obvious parallel to the Regina-Marcus affair would be the relationship Hellman had with her uncle, her first love. When she was fourteen or fifteen he whisked her off impulsively on a fishing trip to the bayou, where he was conducting an affair with a Cajun girl, and when they met again for the first time five years later he tried to convince Hellman to run away with him to South America, which she almost did. In both instances Hellman felt an attraction for a man who could be portrayed as unattractive, even cruel, and she probably could see herself as unattractive for feeling the way she did. Hellman would most likely admit the streak of Regina in her--a selfish, belligerent streak that finds strength seductive and weakness distasteful.

The melodrama in the play seems less high-flown when you have the melodrama of the author's own life and background to refer to. When you know that Hellman had an elegant aunt who was actually a morphine addict and the lover of her black chauffeur, who so resented the large loans she had made to her husband--the one who was having an affair with a Cajun girl--that she would never communicate with him except through the medium of her son Honey (a slightly off-beat character himself, who tried to rape Hellman when she was fourteen and after several more attempts on various women finally ended up in a Mobile sanitarium): when you know all this, you tend to think that Hellman exercised admirable restraint in her writing.

But in order to really understand what the author meant by this play, you have to know more than the facts of her life--you have to know the perspective from which she wrote it. This was the perspective of the wise adolescent who had begun to see the black humor in the greed and the cheating and the family quarreling at the Sunday dinner table.

I was about eighteen when my great uncle Jake took the dinner hours to describe how he and a new partner had bought a street of slum houses in downtown New York He. Jake, during a lunch break in the signing of the partnership, removed all the toilet seats from the buildings and sold them for fifty dollars. But, asked my mother's cousin, what will the poor people who live there do without toilet seats? "Let us," said Jake, "approach your question in a practical manner. I ask you to accompany me now to the bathroom, where I will explode my bowels in the manner of the impoverished and you will see for yourself how it is done." As he reached for her hand my constantly ailing cousin began to cry in long, high sounds. Her mother said to her, "Go immediately with your Uncle Jake. You are being disrespectful to him."

I guess all that was the angry comedy I wanted to mix with the drama.

The angry comedy is what seems to have been overlooked by most critics and audiences of Hellman's plays. The Little Foxes, which was written in 1939 as the first play in a Hubbard family trilogy, was a great success, but Hellman felt it had been misinterpreted, taken too seriously. In 1946, Hellman writes in Pentimento. "I believed that I could now make clear that I had meant the first play as a kind of satire. I tried to do that in Another Part of the Forest, but what I thought was funny or outrageous the critics thought straight stuff: what I thought was bite they thought sad, touching or plotty and melodramatic. Perhaps, as one critic said, I blow a stage to pieces without knowing it." The third part of the planned trilogy was never written.

The Loeb's production of Another Part of the Forest has its moments of outrageous humor and black comedy. There is, for example, a very funny scene in which Oscar Hubbard (Peter Aylward) brings home his intended, the town whore Laurette (Melanie Jones), with whom he is "deeply and sincerely in love," as he declares repeatedly in a voice of hurt pride. Laureate makes a miserable attempt to impress the self-consciously cultured Marcus Hubbard (she tells him that her uncle taught her to love Mozart, but in answer to a question reveals that the instrument he played on was a little drum"), but her irrepressible earthiness finally leads her to puncture the melodrama directly. Indignant at the way Marcus is treating Oscar, she tells him off the way no other character would dare to: "A Papa talking about his own son! No animal would talk about their own son that way... You old bastard."

But when Laurette is not on stage giving the audience its cue to laugh at all this--which is most of the time--the humor tends to get lost in the melodrama. It isn't fair to blame the actors or the production entirely for what is, at least in Hellman's eyes, the failure of the play. The play is intended to be uneven, in the sense that it veers from comedy to tragedy, and it is often difficult for both the audience and the actors to keep up with it. As far as the acting, it calls for deft switches from mocking subtlety to intense passion. Ann Marie Beigel, who plays Regina, remains at a level of intense passion, posturing so much that she becomes a caricature: Steven Gilborn, who plays Ben Hubbard, the sly son who plots his father's destruction, settles for mocking subtlety, so it comes as something of a shock when he threatens his father with a gun.

So the Loeb's production, too, is uneven, but its unevenness is not in synch with Hellman's unevenness. Passion drowns the humor, subtlety mocks the tragedy. The mixture of farce and drama that appears with a clear, sharp brilliance in Hellman's restrained prose looks gaudy on stage. Perhaps there are some things that, even if they are true, should not be put in plays, or short stories, or any kind of fiction. In this case at least, the raw material has a compelling directness, an understated honesty that has been lost in the transition to finished product.