Sharp

by Michelle Dean

  I remember that on her bare shriveled arms she had a great many bracelets, gold and silver, and that they began to tremble—in her fury and surprise, I assumed, at being caught red-handed in a brain-washing job.

  It seems neither Hellman nor McCarthy ever forgot the incident. Then suddenly, while doing publicity rounds for Cannibals and Missionaries, McCarthy decided to bring it up. First she told a French interviewer about it. Then, invited on The Dick Cavett Show, she was fatefully asked which writers she considered “overpraised”:

  McCarthy: The only one I can think of is a holdover like Lillian Hellman, who I think is tremendously overrated, a bad writer, and dishonest writer, but she really belongs to the past, to the Steinbeck past, not that she is a writer like Steinbeck.

  Cavett: What is dishonest about her?

  McCarthy: Everything. But I said once in some interview that every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the.”

  Many people later told McCarthy’s biographers they had found this “reckless,” her delivering such a pointed insult “with that smile of hers.” Apparently Hellman had been watching too: she called Dick Cavett in an absolute fury, as he later told the story:

  “I guess I never thought of you as defenseless, Lillian,” I managed.

  “That’s bullshit. I’m suing the whole damn bunch of you.” In that, at least, she proved a woman of her word.

  McCarthy thought she had simply been saying something everyone knew. Instead, she found herself staring at a lawsuit she could not really afford to defend herself against. The lawsuit asserted that McCarthy had known her statement was false and that she had made the accusation that Hellman was a liar with malice. Hellman named McCarthy, The Dick Cavett Show, and the PBS station on which it appeared as defendants and demanded 2.25 million dollars in damages. The New York Times called Hellman for comment on the suit, and she speculated about McCarthy’s reasons:

  I haven’t seen her in 10 years, and I never wrote anything about her. We have several mutual friends, but that would not serve as a cause for her remarks. I think she has always disliked me. It could go back to the Spanish Civil War days, in November or December of 1937, after I had returned from Spain.

  For her part, McCarthy told the Times:

  I barely knew her … My views are based on her books, especially Scoundrel Time, which I refused to buy, but borrowed. I did not like the role she had given herself in that book.

  Never one to avoid an opportunity for publicity, Norman Mailer took it upon himself to try to referee the dispute. “They are both splendid writers,” he offered. “They are, however, so different in their talents that it is natural for them to detest each other. Writers bear this much comparison to animals.” He called McCarthy’s remark “stupid” and “best left unsaid.” Coming from a man who considered pugilism an essential virtue, this was a remarkable position. No one listened to him.

  Martha Gellhorn, the pioneering female journalist and former wife of Ernest Hemingway, also came out of retirement to lob sixteen pages of attacks at Lillian Hellman in the Paris Review, pointing out that nearly every date in Hellman’s An Unfinished Woman had to be wrong. Gellhorn was particularly knowledgeable about Hemingway’s activities during the Spanish Civil War and more or less destroyed Hellman’s claims about them. “In my unspecialized study of apocryphism,” she concluded, “Miss Hellman ranks as sublime.”

  Privately, McCarthy was worried. Not so much about whether she would ultimately prevail in the suit, for she was quietly gathering materials that would show Hellman’s lies. She did learn of one concrete example, not then widely known, in Hellman’s memoir Pentimento, one section of which had been made into the Hollywood film Julia starring Jane Fonda. This “Julia,” according to Hellman, was a childhood friend who been a kind of Zelig of the early twentieth century, analyzed by Freud, heroically at the front in the Spanish Civil War, and then died during World War II.

  It did turn out that Julia was fiction, drawn in part from the life of a woman named Muriel Gardiner, who had written to Hellman of the similarities between her life and Julia’s and received no response. But none of this was public knowledge at the time McCarthy went on the Cavett show. Everyone had suspicions; in particular, Martha Gellhorn thought most of Hellman’s assertions complete lies.

  Proof or no proof, the legal costs were worrisome. McCarthy had not had a bestseller since The Group, back in 1963. Meanwhile, Hellman was unqualifiedly rich, and far more determined to see the thing through to the end. She even won the first couple of skirmishes, getting a judge to rule against McCarthy’s initial motion to dismiss the case.

  It was sheer luck that before she could see her vendetta through to its end Hellman died, in late June 1984. A dead person can’t be slandered or libeled, so the damages became largely academic. By August the suit was gone entirely. But the spectacle had become legendary; today it is often the only thing the public remembers about Mary McCarthy at all. Late in her life, still obsessed with the subject, Nora Ephron wrote an entire play about the enmity, which she titled Imaginary Friends. She had been, for a while, befriended by Hellman:

  It was quite a while before I began to suspect that the fabulous stories she entertained her friends with were, to be polite about it, stories. When she sued McCarthy years afterward, I wasn’t surprised. She was sick by then, and legally blind. And her anger—the anger that was her favorite accessory—had turned wearisome, even to those who were loyal to her.

  Ephron’s play went up on Broadway in 2002. It was not successful, running for only seventy-six performances over three months. But for Ephron, at the time living in what she called movie jail after a string of flops, it was a passion project, a kind of relief, a return to form. “I could write about a subject that has interested me since my days as a magazine journalist: women and what they do to each other.” But she didn’t quite manage to pass her passion along; the play was totally forgotten by the time she died in 2012.

  13

  Adler

  Nineteen eighty was a year of fighting, as it happened, because Renata Adler, already in her forties, saw a ripe target in an elder. Pauline Kael had only just returned to the New Yorker after a brief stint in Hollywood as a producer with Warren Beatty, a stint that had barely lasted a year. It had gone badly, the job responsibilities disintegrating almost immediately upon her arrival in Los Angeles. She’d gone to LA to work on a particular film, James Toback’s Love and Money, and when that didn’t work out, she ended up working in a studio proper as a production executive.

  Suffice it to say it was not a good fit. She’d later say that Hollywood executives thought she was a spy. And when she went back to the New Yorker, William Shawn had to be talked into taking her back. As another editor told Vanity Fair, “Mr. Shawn felt Pauline had sullied herself.” But he took her back anyway.

  In the summer of that year, a new collection of Kael’s criticism, When the Lights Go Down, was published to mostly glowing reviews. The arguments over the Citizen Kane debacle were by then ten years old. So, failed Hollywood experience notwithstanding, Kael was still very much considered at the top of her craft. She had fans.

  Renata Adler, on the other hand, numbered herself among the dissenters. In the New York Review of Books, she tore into Kael’s book with a ferocity unusual even among celebrated critics:

  Now, When the Lights Go Down, a collection of her reviews over the past five years, is out; and it is, to my surprise and without Kael- or [John] Simon-like exaggeration, not simply, jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.

  This judgment appears halfway through the review, after a long discussion of the pieces of Kael’s writing Adler preferred. Adler attributed the decline in Kael’s style not so much to personal faults of Kael’s—in fact very little about Kael as a person is said in this work—but rather to the repetitiveness of a staff critic’s job, which requires churning out so many pieces and seeing so many movies that their reviews naturally suffer from exh
austion and repetition. But it didn’t matter how many qualifications Adler laid out ahead of that savage statement. She had clearly declared war on Kael. And she made a decent case.

  Adler’s surgical work was mostly directed at Kael’s prose style rather than her critical acumen. The thing that bothered her about Kael’s work was the way it was written, which she felt was almost pure bombast, devoid of ideas:

  She has an underlying vocabulary of about nine favorite words, which occur several hundred times, and often several times per page, in this book of nearly six hundred pages: “whore” (and its derivatives “whorey,” “whorish,” “whoriness”), applied in many contexts, but almost never to actual prostitution; “myth,” “emblem” (also “mythic,” “emblematic”), used with apparent intellectual intent, but without ascertainable meaning; “pop,” “comicstrip,” “trash” (“trashy”), “pulp” (“pulpy”), all used judgmentally (usually approvingly) but otherwise apparently interchangeable with “mythic”; “urban poetic,” meaning marginally more violent than “pulpy”; “soft” (pejorative); “tension,” meaning, apparently, any desirable state; “rhythm,” used often as a verb, but meaning harmony or speed; “visceral”; and “level.”

  Adler would come back to this technique again and again in her career, counting the number of words and turning them back on a subject to make them look foolish. Against Kael, who had so much copy available to analyze—all of it written in the structure of movie reviews—it was devastating. It was so devastating, in fact, that many felt moved to stick up for Kael. The New York Review of Books letter pages filled with, among others, a defense from thirteen-year-old Matthew Wilder, who called Adler’s essay a “depressing, vengeful, ceaseless tirade.” The New York Times’ John Leonard chided her too: “To be sure, the staff critics I know are as hard on themselves as Miss Adler is on Miss Kael. They worry about their adjectives. They speak of their ‘800-word minds.’” Kael’s other friends, including James Wolcott, also stepped up to defend her in print. But the damage was done. Adler’s words about Kael’s work would appear in every obituary when Kael died in 2001.

  A younger Kael, the Kael of the “Circles and Squares” era, might have offered a withering response. But she wrote nothing and gave no interviews about the incident, other than telling a reporter: “I’m sorry that Ms. Adler doesn’t respond to my writing. What else can I say?” William Shawn, contacted by the papers, simply said it was how Adler always wrote. He should know. Adler had, by that time, been writing for the New Yorker on and off for seventeen years. She had spent many of those years on the attack. Adler is a relentlessly analytical writer, who can be a bit like a dog with a bone when she senses logical fallacy. Anyone who’d read about her prior career knew two things: that she was, mostly, smarter than those who surrounded her, and that she liked to show it off in print.

  For someone who often argues in black-and-white, Adler’s biography is full of strange contradictions. A New York profile once called her “as assertively and publicly ‘private’ as Woody Allen,” a comparison that now seems odd given how much we know about Allen. But it is true that Adler has lived a life both very visible and very invisible. Of her childhood we know little, except that she is the daughter of German refugees, and was born in Milan in 1937. Her parents arrived in Connecticut sometime during World War II, with her in tow.

  From the time she was a child, anxiety dominated her life. At first, she had trouble learning English, she told a magazine interviewer. But when her parents tried to put her in boarding school to help, it only made her more nervous. Her anxieties followed her to Bryn Mawr, a women’s college in Pennsylvania, where she became the sort of person who reported herself for honor code violations like smoking. It got so bad she claimed that she’d had to consult psychiatrists, and have her brother write papers for her. She thought of going to law school when she graduated, but eventually she ended up in graduate school at Harvard instead, studying philosophy like Sontag before her. Also like Sontag, she never finished that degree, though she spent a year in Paris on a Fulbright, studying with the famous anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.

  Adler didn’t want to stay in academia, though she claims to have fallen out of the academic track almost by accident. At Harvard, she met the now-forgotten New Yorker writer S. N. Behrman and translated one of his plays. He was the one who suggested she interview for the New Yorker, and it was almost by accident that she came to be employed there. Writing still did not come very easily to Adler. Later she would say that her first pieces were written, primarily, to impress her fiancé, Reuel Wilson, the now-grown-up son of Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy.

  When McCarthy met Adler in Italy one summer, she described her as though she were a character in a novel: Reuel’s “thin, rather Biblical-looking Jewish girl friend … who is either quite homely, or a beauty, according to taste.” If there was any hostility between them, any rivalry of strong intellects as there had been between McCarthy and Sontag, it went wholly unrecorded. Adler later said she hadn’t read McCarthy before she met her. “I was shy in those days, and she was extraordinarily kind to me,” she said. “Later, when I read her writing and recognized that critical intelligence to be feared, I was surprised.” That sort of disconnect would come to define Adler. Few who met Adler as she was in person—anxious and soft-spoken—would relate that image to the ferocious way she could grab the page.

  Yet her ability to offer an opinion with godlike certainty was her gift from the start. The first piece of writing Adler published under her own name (one early effort was hidden under a pseudonym after an editor ripped it apart) was a review of a book by a New Yorker writer: the reporter John Hersey. Hersey, most famous as the author of the long study Hiroshima, had collected his magazine pieces under the somewhat self-important title Here to Stay: Studies in Human Tenacity. It’s safe to say that Adler did not like Hersey’s writing:

  His book begins with the statement: “The great themes are love and death; their synthesis is the will to live, and that is what this book is about”—which perfectly illustrates the kind of folksy, meaningless rhetoric that characterizes the entire book.

  By then, Adler was also a full-time staffer at the New Yorker proper. She was mostly restricted to writing unsigned “Talk of the Town”s. But her primary subject, even there, was books and the world of publishing, which she found unspeakably silly. In one unsigned piece, she went after the bestseller lists, which she noted had recently:

  included a coloring book for adults, a journal kept by a child, a pamphlet of newspaper photographs with humorous captions, the autobiography of a baseball manager, the reminiscences of a lawyer who had appeared for the defense in a sensational Hollywood trial, a discussion of dieting, and a study of the sexual activities of unmarried women.

  Plainly, under these conditions, Adler would go on to say, there was no reason to rely on a bestseller list. It was merely “a helpful guide to the anxious semi-literate.” She suggested the Times stop publishing it altogether. Eventually, these commentaries on the literary scene allowed Adler to write a few proper books columns of her own for the New Yorker. In 1964, at age twenty-seven, she took up the perennial subject of the weakness of book reviews. Like her foremothers, Adler couldn’t stand the bad reasoning skills of contemporary book reviewers. But she also didn’t exactly love the “New Reviewing,” which had appeared to replace them, a genre she felt was overly determined by polemic:

  In literary criticism, polemic is short-lived, and no other essay becomes as quickly obsolete as the unfavorable review. If the work under attack is valuable, it survives adverse comment. If it is not, the polemic dies with its target.

  It was the first Adler polemic against polemic, something that would become a theme of her writing. Despite the fact that she would often be accused of a hyperbolic style, an excessive harshness of argument, this approach was something Adler continually criticized in others. (Her quarrel with Kael’s late-career reviews, too, was that they were overly polemical.) She also
was never much for staying in the traditional confines of a review. In this piece, Adler was in theory reviewing books by Irving Howe and Norman Podhoretz, but gradually her critique of them came to expand and cover most of the young intellectuals who had started up the Partisan Review. Adler argued that the whole movement of small magazines was now experiencing growing pains: “After the Second World War, old issues began to cloud, old protégés made good, and expository writers with a low tolerance for complexities were at a loss.” There was no place for an Irving Howe—a relic of that earlier age—anymore. And even with someone younger, like Norman Podhoretz, Hannah Arendt’s great foe, Adler had little patience.

  Arendt would become Adler’s mentor. When Eichmann came out and the opinion pages were in a furor, Adler even tried to convince William Shawn to run a response. She had been an Arendt acolyte for a while, after reading the Rahel Varnhagen biography. At first, Shawn did not want Adler to write anything at all, because typically the New Yorker ignored any controversy that might attach to one of its articles. But Adler insisted, and when the New York Times ran that very damaging review of Eichmann by Michael Musmanno, he relented. They had hoped the letters page of the New York Times would print Adler’s response, but it was rejected. The New Yorker ran the piece itself, which took a high-handed tone:

  To Miss Arendt’s quiet, moral, rational document [Musmanno] opposed such rhetorical exclamations as “Himmler!”, “Hitler!”, as though these were enlightening statements in the philosophy of history … The refusal to listen, the frightening breakdown of communication, is nothing new; we have grown accustomed to it in life and in the headlines. But the very essence of literature is communication, and to find such a breakdown in the literary section of a major newspaper is profoundly disappointing.