Another Part of the Forest (with inserted original playbill).
The Dedication Copy
Hellman, Lillian. Another Part of the Forest: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Viking Press, 1947.
8vo.; grey cloth, lightly soiled; purple, white, and black pictorial dust-jacket; light shelfwear; pink topstain; annotated printed matter loosely inserted. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition of this sequel to The Little Foxes. Triesch A6. The dedication copy, inscribed beneath the printed dedication to her psychiatrist (For My Good Friend Gregory Zilboorg): and for Peg, with much love. Lillian, March, 1947. With Zilboorg’s bookplate on the front pastedown, and with annotated printed matter loosely inserted.
Hellman began psychoanalysis with Gregory Zilboorg in 1939. A wild-looking Freudian with a walrus mustache, Zilboorg was known for his celebrity patients such as George Gershwin and various members of the Warburg banking dynasty. Indeed, Life magazine dubbed him “the foreign guru of left-wing writers and the radical rich” (Lillian Hellman, by Carl Rollyson, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988, p. 157). Hellman’s analysis quickly bled into a friendship with Zilboorg, who with his wife Margaret spent many weekends at Hardscrabble, the 130 acre Mount Pleasant estate Hellman shared with long-time lover Dashiell Hammett. After the war, along with Ralph Ingersoll, Marshall Field (also patients of Zilboorg) and Hammett, Hellman and Zilboorg became enmeshed in the short, volatile life of PM, the wildly liberal New York newspaper.
Hellman arrived at many of the themes that make up Another Part of the Forest (including the father-daughter relation and the problem of identity) through her sessions with Zilboorg. Hellman’s biographer contends that the play was Hellman’s artful channeling of the knowledge she gained about herself during analysis:
There is no question that Hellman benefited as a person and as an artist from her years of analysis with Zilboorg. For one thing, he helped her become much more aware of the kind of personality she had...It is doubtful, however, that she really knew what her analysis was about until near the end of it, when she wrote Another Part of the Forest, the play she dedicated to Zilboorg. (Rollyson, p. 158)
Hellman herself wrote of Another Part of the Forest: “…it was worth while to look into [the Hubbard] family background and find out what it was that made them the nasty people they were” (quoted by Triesch, p. 40). The influence of psychoanalysis is clear.
Provenance: acquired from Margaret Zilboorg in 1994 soon after she sold the Zilboorg home on Georgica Pond in East Hampton, New York.
(#6973)
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