Customer Reviews

Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
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2 star:		(1)
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After wading through the seas of calumny that have swamped all previous biographies of Lillian Hellman, it is refreshing to dig through Debroah Martinson's ably researched 2005 book and find that, in her opinion, Lillian Hellman never did anything wrong, but on the other hand eventually one tires a bit of 359 pages worth of cheerleading.

I wondered how Dr. Martinson was planning to deal with the "Julia" controversy, as from multiple sources Hellman was assailed by accusers who basically said she was a liar and that either there was no Julia or that Hellman never met her if she existed at all. Martinson has a disarming defense. How do we know that there wasn't really a Julia? After all, Lillian Hellman knew plenty of people back in the 1930s. I have to agree partially with this one, although it is strange that she never gave any more details about the elusive "Julia" even after people began pooh-poohing her honesty. She was certainly backed into a corner at the end, wasn't she, like a rat in the trap of her own integrity.

The best part of the book details Hellman's earliest Hollywood years with Sam Goldwyn and William Wyler. Sam Jaffe said, "Goldwyn had class with a capital K." It's interesting to note that Hellman was unable to collaborate with Hemingway on the narration to Joris Ivens' THE SPANISH EARTH because she was laid up due to complications from an abortion. Other commentators have been sure that Hellman wrote parts of it, but Dr. Martinson's research proves them 100 percent wrong. It would be great to have published versions of all the Hammett novels he began and which Martinson mentions here, even if each of them amounted only to a chapter or so, and it would be also great to read the screenplay Hellman wrote for Arthur Penn's THE CHASE (1966) before Horton Foote revised it to make it more linear.

LILLIAN HELLMAN: A LIFE WITH FOXES AND SCOUNDRELS provides new insights into the many controversies which have surrounded her life, but it's even more special because it's the first to write about Hellman with full cooperation of Hellman's literary executors and others who tell the truth about the robust woman's life. Hellman's sharp wit and comments often made for a radical approach to the stage: her affairs with high profile men and her volatile professional and personal relationships generated many myths and inconsistent images about her life. Fans of Hellman will relish a biography which brings reality back into the picture --from the mouths and memories of those who knew her best.

In a project where five million puzzle pieces, each differing in significance and subjectivity, can be assembled in an infinite amount of ways, Martinson has done so with a rhythm and candor that, I believe, reflects Hellman's colorful and fluid life. Each section of Martinson's book - in some cases, each paragraph - carefully constructs a masonry of Hellman's life, only to crumble upon itself and build anew, illustrating Hellman's own complexity and unwillingness (inability?) to be understood and encapsulated completely. Martinson's skillful rhythmic pacing of Lillian's life accurately conjures the Ouroboros, in which Lillian, in an attempt to discover who she is, must first absorb and understand her past in order to create an authentic future (although Lillian herself might scoff at such a notion!).

This riveting new biography of Lillian Hellman benefits greatly from the author's access to previously unavailable documents and the candid recollections any number of Ms. Hellman's closest acquaintances. Professor Martinson ably captures Hellman's difficult, larger-than-life personality, and her equally large theatrical, literary, and political legacies to present a rounded portrait of an amazing life and career - one marked by achievement and controversy, and by innumerable affairs, including Hellman's legendary, multi-decade pairing with the writer, Dashiel Hammett of Thin Man fame.
In all, Ms. Martinson has delivered a first-rate biography and cultural history - no small achievement.

Dr. Martinson renders an eloquent and fascinating portrait of the always intriguing, if not nearly as infamous, Lillian Hellman. Writer, dramatist, activist, lover, Hellman emerges as a prolific and unabashed spokeswoman of her time - dedicating her life to the arts and advocating American as well as global civil liberties during McCarthy's reign of House Committee hearings. Martinson curates a tremendous collection of research into a sophisticated and thoughtful read that is as playful as it is thorough and scintillating. In Martinson's resonant style, we see the ash at the tip of Hellman's cigarette as she directs a play with one hand, ruefully raising a toast with the other. Regardless of circumstance or mood, Hellman's biting quips are never far behind. Martinson is masterful in offering her craft to the subject and scope of this massive project, revealing Hellman's tenderness and passions in ways that simultaneously inform and endear the reader - not only to Hellman and her sometimes brash eccentricities, but to Martinson's literary gifts as well - and they are many. I raise a toast to A Life of Foxes and Scoundrels. Cheers

I am in the middle of this book just because I hate to start something and not finish it and although it appears to be exhaustively researched and written I have come across some glaring errors that throw the whole book into question for me: in the photo section she captions a photo of Lillian with Hollywood producer Hal B. WALLACE - shouldn't it be Wallis? And in the section about Lillian's first stay in Hollywood she lists Mae West as a "Kansas City runaway who starred in Hell's Angels" - doesn't she mean Jean Harlow? These are such simple facts to get right it makes me wonder about the rest of the author's research and fact checking skills . . . So I am giving it two stars for now . . .

This is a fantastic book. It shows off Martinson's impressive research and attention to detail without losing its flow--the punchy prose manages to get in all the detail of the many stories to tell about Hellman's life without dragging. Using anecdotes (sometimes hilarious, sometimes brutal, but always gripping) and providing important context, Martinson manages to put the reader right in the action--you can almost smell Hellman's cigarettes and hear her raspy voice. This is a great effort, an important contribution, and a wonderful read.

Readers will respond well to this glimpse of Lillian Hellman as a Southern Jewish writer. We have all become acquainted with Lillian Hellman as the significant other of writer Dashiell Hammett (_The Maltese Falcon_) and as a writer for stage and screen. Martinson covers these aspects of Hellman's life and career admirably. But the true strength of this treatment of Hellman is the addition of the connection to the south as a sort of outsider-observer that largely accounts for Hellman's unique vantage point. Think Flannery O'Connor as another outsider-observer!

There was never anyone quite like her, sometimes even she had trouble doing it. But do it she did, writing one Broadway hit after another, shining in the Hollywood writers' scene, at ease among the New York literary intelligensia, sexually active all her life, spokesperson for the political Left, author of three best selling memoirs and believe it or not, lot's more. Deborah Martinson has done a bang up job using the Hellman papers to which she had full access. It's an admiring bio, but it's far from hagiography. Miss Hellman took a fanciful view of things, including her own life, and her biographer calls attention to it firmly but lovingly. If you're interested in theater, movies, politics, history, or show biz dish bring this one with you on a long flight.