A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  In the storm that followed, there was no halfway house, no resting place. In the view of critics, hypocrisy—rather than decency and honor—characterized Hellman’s behavior. Where, asked conservative columnist and editor Melvyn Lasky, was her “responsibility as a writer and intellectual, supposedly committed to the truth, in a ‘scoundrel time’ of Soviet slave labour camps and mass purges”?63 Sidney Hook eagerly offered his services as a book reviewer to Commentary magazine because she kept silent about the behavior of communists while excoriating the congressional committees whose excesses “do not begin to compare to genocidal Stalinist practices that Lillian Hellman staunchly defended up to a few years ago.”64 Conservative pundit William F. Buckley took her apart for claiming to be a champion of the “negro” people when her behavior, as she described it, was rude and dismissive: she had insulted the black employee who delivered the subpoena to her door, and she had tried to divert Dorothy Parker’s estate away from the NAACP toward more radical groups. And she expected people to lie while she herself claimed allegiance to truth.65 Why, asked William Phillips, an editor of Partisan Review, should one risk one’s honor to defend those who hid behind the Fifth Amendment because they didn’t want to reveal the truth about themselves? “Some were communists, and what we were asked to defend was their right to lie about it.”66 Hypocrisy, wrote Lasky, “was a bottomless well.”

  Additional questions revolved around Hellman’s veracity in a broader sense. Scoundrel Time proclaimed Hellman’s devotion to decency and honor. But her critics accused her of painting a “guileful” self-portrait, one that called into question her honesty, especially around political issues. The issue of how close she had been to the Communist Party once again reemerged. In Scoundrel Time, and in several interviews afterward, she denied ever having been a party member. Her own statements to Joseph Rauh suggest that this was in fact technically untrue—though it is almost certainly the case that her association was brief and not very active. National Review editor William Buckley, tongue in cheek, described her relations with the communist movement as “a marriage, but for the paperwork.”67 Nor did Hellman’s several confessions of past errors of belief redeem her in the eyes of critics. Her acknowledgments were too muted, too vague, insufficiently anti-Stalinist. Walter Goodman, author of a book about HUAC, asserted that her admissions were simply the work of “a skilled writer who knows that the best way to persuade readers of one’s honesty and right-thinkingness is to concede that one has made passing mistakes.”68

  These unfriendly critics and others concluded that she had crossed a line. She was not entitled to what Murray Kempton, who had admired her courageous 1952 performance before HUAC, described as the position of a “hanging judge.” “I have never quite understood,” wrote Kempton, “upon what altar Miss Hellman’s moral authority was consecrated.”69 William Buckley concurred, avowing that at best she was a conspirator who had lent the enemies of the United States a helping hand. “Those who wittingly helped [the communists], even if they paid no party dues, were morally as guilty in the deceptions they practiced. They were engaged in helping to destroy the open society whose benefits and freedoms they enjoyed.”70

  Just a few months after the release of Scoundrel Time, with its ringing attack against liberals for refusing to defend free thought, an episode involving Diana Trilling raised the moral issue to a different level. Just before he died in 1975, Lionel Trilling published a piece in the New York Review of Books in which he reaffirmed his long-standing belief in the honor and veracity of Whittaker Chambers. Trilling and Chambers were classmates at Columbia, where Trilling had since spent most of a distinguished career. His piece clearly implied the guilt of Alger Hiss, for if Chambers told the truth, then Hiss lied. Hellman took a few sentences in Scoundrel Time to lament that the Trillings could not see things her way. She did not understand, she wrote, how old and respected friends like the Trillings “could have come out of the same age and time with such different political and social views from my own.”71 Diana Trilling, just then preparing a new collection of essays for publication, included one that defended liberal anticommunism and introduced it by dismissing political attacks on her position as having “diminishing intellectual force.”72 Little, Brown—her publisher and Hellman’s—asked her to remove this oblique attack on one of its bestselling authors. Trilling refused and took the book elsewhere.

  The episode put Hellman in an impossible position. As far as we know, she never did bring pressure on her publishers to remove the offending lines, though most people who knew her describe Hellman as capable of doing so. Trilling herself wrote to Hellman shortly after the story broke to make clear that she had “never in conversation with the press assigned any responsibility whatsoever to you for the censorship of me. On the contrary, I have told reporters that you were far too intelligent to have done this.”73 The New York Times, which broke the story, suggests that Hellman first heard about the incident from its reporter and, when she read the offending words, simply laughed.74 When the Times interviewed Diana Trilling, its readers learned that Trilling had been excluded from the summer social scene on Martha’s Vineyard at Hellman’s behest.75 Nobody now remembers that, but several of Hellman’s friends found the notion plausible.76 At the time, the truth hardly mattered. Those who heard the story—and the press covered it in juicy detail—delighted in the possibility that Hellman had directly or indirectly brought pressure on her publishers to demand the retraction and at least implicitly suggested that her friends might not wish to associate with Trilling. The incident inspired further suspicions of hypocrisy, even glee at the thought that Hellman, self-proclaimed champion of free thought, wanted to censor a rival.

  It also added zest to a series of unrelenting criticisms of her person, and most especially her capacity for self-aggrandizement. “I can’t stand her,” wrote one critic, who nevertheless went on to praise the book. “I can’t stand the person … No writer I have ever come across is so convinced of her own absolute superiority, and innocence, and nobility.”77 William Buckley thought the book mistitled. It should have been called “The Heroism of Lillian Hellman during the Darkest Days of the Republic,” he wrote in the pages of the National Review.78 Despite the criticism, Alfred Kazin thought Hellman’s posturing effective. “It has convinced the generation that has grown up since the fifties that the author was virtually alone in refusing to name past or present communist party members to the House Un-American Activities Committee.”79

  Nor did critics hold back on the most personal forms of ridicule. William Buckley refused her even the benefit of her hard-earned reputation as a playwright, scornfully dismissing Garry Wills’s attribution of her as the “Greatest Woman Playwright.” That, he wrote, was the same as talking about “the downhill champion on the one-legged ski team.”80 Who else but a woman, asked Murray Kempton, would write about the Balmain dress and the hat she purchased so that she would feel good at her HUAC hearing? Was she afraid of going to jail? Did she decry the victimization of herself and others? Melvyn Lasky dismissed these fears as “an embarrassing insensitivity to history” in the age of the gulag and the gestapo.81 Kempton thought that she had turned to Joseph Rauh because of his reputation for saving clients from jail.82 “The best way to sell one’s courage,” wrote Walter Goodman, “is to make much of one’s weaknesses.”83 Kazin, perhaps tongue in cheek, averred that she had escaped jail because “not only was she a woman amid all these shambling and shamefaced witnesses and congressional inquisitors, she was vivid, as always, brave yet somehow wistful, and a famous playwright.”84 Everyone agreed that she was a snob, repeatedly recalling her allusions to cooperative witnesses as the “children of timid immigrants” from whom nothing better could have been expected.85

  Hellman found the biting mockery and the personal criticisms hard to take. More than once she responded to them with letters to editors and demands for retractions. A review of Scoundrel Time in the Baltimore Sun began by interpreting Hellman’s photograph on the front and b
ack covers of the book: “The masculine pose, Harris tweed coat, and casual cigarette convey that air of sassy androgyny cultivated by forties movie heroines.”86 The covers, continued the review, “seem products of the same carefully cultivated self concept, sophisticated, butch, and gutsy.” Hellman took umbrage. She was not wearing a tweed coat at all, she wrote to the publisher, but a suit. “It does not matter that the clear intimation that I am a Lesbian happens to be a lie. It is low down stuff. I guess maybe the lowest I ever read in a respectable newspaper.”87 What, she wanted to know, could be done about this extraordinary review? When George Will wrote a column that described Scoundrel Time as including misrepresentations of herself, she demanded that he show her where she had done that: “You have, of course, every right to disagree or criticize my opinions … but that does not give you the right to say that I lied without saying where I lied.”88

  Hellman remained adamant about her position, becoming angrier with each passing attack. She produced a brief introduction to a collected edition of her three memoirs in which she unapologetically defended her work, including Scoundrel Time. “I tried in these books to tell the truth,” she wrote. “I did not fool with facts. But of course that is a shallow definition of the truth.”89 Then she started working on her fourth book of prose. This one would be called Maybe, a word she frequently used to describe her sense that she could no longer tell what she believed and what she didn’t. Unlike her earlier books, which gloried in rich anecdotal detail and obfuscated uncertainty behind her witty tongue and tough style, Maybe reeks of self-doubt. She had hinted at the doubt in the introduction to the collected volumes published just a year before. Hellman asks of those books, “What didn’t I see during the time of work that I now see more clearly?” And yet, she goes on to say, she is no wiser now than when she wrote them. Of truth, she is convinced that “I can be sure I still do not see it and never will.”90

  To be sure, all three books of memoir declare Hellman’s uncertainty about memory and truth. An Unfinished Woman ends with a single word: “However.” Pentimento starts with an explanatory paragraph that describes an ongoing effort at “seeing and seeing again.” Scoundrel Time concludes with an intriguing idea: “I tell myself that was then, and there is now, and the years between then and now, and the then and now are one.” But in Maybe Hellman turned her story into an ode to self-doubt, a defense of the revelations of memory whose value lies not in its capacity to speak truth but in its ability to expand the unconscious. The book contains barely a hint of the tough-minded and willful woman of the three previous volumes. This Lillian is weak, vulnerable. She focuses on what she cannot know rather than on what she can. In that sense, Maybe reflects some of the torment of the years that followed the release of Scoundrel Time. At one level it explores the elusiveness of memory; at another it asks what kinds of truths memory can reveal. In the end, Hellman commits herself to writing about what she sometimes calls the “truth of her memory” or “the truth as I saw it.” If there is another truth somewhere, she cannot write about it.91

  Neither memoir nor fiction, Maybe seems to oscillate between the two. It interweaves a series of encounters with a distant friend named Sarah Cameron with ruminations about herself, her sexuality, her relationships with men. While Sarah is a dreamlike fantasy figure who flits in and out of Hellman’s life, Hellman uses her as a guide to her own memories. Early in the book, for example, Hellman recalls a period in her life when a destructive sexual episode with a man named Alex left her feeling as if she “smelled down there.” For years, she tells us, she took as many as three baths a day and could take no pleasure in sex. Then Sarah, at a chance lunch, tells Hellman that she laughed off a similar experience with Alex, and Hellman is magically cured of her negative feelings about herself. How much of Sarah is Hellman’s alter ego we do not know. Sarah is the occasion for Hellman to tell us that memories fail, that memory is inaccurate, that names and dates disappear, that she might have seen what she could not have witnessed, that she cannot remember what she must have experienced. All this provides justification for Maybe and, not incidentally, a response to the attacks generated by the publication of Scoundrel Time. Repeatedly Hellman insists that though she may not know—perhaps cannot know—the literal truth of what happened and when and where events took place, there is nevertheless truth in the tale she tells.

  Maybe was already in press when, early in 1980, novelist and literary critic Mary McCarthy lit a match to the firestorm that would serve as a metaphor for the twentieth century. The moment provided a ready supply of fuel: everywhere one looked, small conflagrations were already erupting. There was confusion and concern about the changing roles of women; debate over the legitimacy of sexual preference and the value of the traditional nuclear family; declining opposition to left-wing ideologies, including communism, and a resulting escalation in the politics and language of anticommunism; the rise of identity politics as a factor in domestic and world politics; the vanishing influence of the intellectual; and the simultaneous rise of a popular, seemingly mindless, celebrity culture. All these created a tinderbox of politics and emotion, and the aging Lillian Hellman seemed to have provided a spark to each of them. In the conflagration lay questions petty and mean, twinges of common jealousy and sparks of rage. When the fire died down, Lillian Hellman’s reputation was reduced to ashes.

  On October 18, 1979, McCarthy arrived at the studios of the Educational Broadcasting Corporation to tape an interview with talk show host Dick Cavett. She had a new novel to publicize, Cannibals and Missionaries—her first in eight years. She hoped for the kind of success that would bring her back into the limelight. Cavett looked forward to the interview: “She was lively, witty, opinionated, and striking on camera,” he recalled later.92 The interview was going smoothly when, in response to a question about “overrated writers,” she mentioned, among others, Lillian Hellman, “who I think is tremendously overrated, a bad writer, and a dishonest writer, but she really belongs to the past.” Cavett followed up. What was dishonest about Lillian? he asked. Cavett knew Hellman reasonably well. He had occasionally had dinner with her, previously interviewed her on his show, and claimed to like her a lot. “Everything,” McCarthy replied. “I said once in some interview that every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.”93 The audience laughed; the moment passed, and Cavett went on to other arenas. The network lawyer complimented him afterward on a “nice show,” and the tape was stashed away in preparation for its scheduled air time on January 24, 1980.

  Two months later, alone in her bedroom, Lillian watched the show on a cold Saturday night. Ill with emphysema and almost blind, she listened to Mary McCarthy accuse her of being a liar. Worn down by the accusations of Stalinism and unwarranted sympathy for the Soviet Union that followed the publication of Scoundrel Time, tired of the never-ending negativity about her personal life, and defensive about her rumored greed, she was unprepared for this new assault. The following morning, she picked up the phone and called her old friend and lawyer, Ephraim London, one of the two people to whom she dedicated Maybe. She wanted to know if there were grounds for a lawsuit. Ephraim London agreed that there might be. Still in a fury, she called Dick Cavett, demanding to know why he hadn’t defended her. She would be suing “the whole damn bunch of you,” Cavett recalled her telling him.94

  Mary McCarthy, at home in her Paris apartment, heard rumors of a pending lawsuit and at first laughed them off. On February 18, a process server knocked on her door and handed her the formal notice. She claimed disbelief. Cavett’s question caught her unaware, she protested, and Lillian’s name came to the forefront accidentally. Surely her opinion was not actionable. Notes from Cavett’s assistant that day suggest that Mary McCarthy was dissembling. Several days before the interview, the assistant noted, she had offered McCarthy a range of questions, including the one about overrated writers. “When I asked if she’d like to discuss which writers are overrated and which underrated and suggested that it could be like a game, she was
delighted,” the assistant alerted Cavett.98 Afterward, McCarthy continued to deny that Lillian had been on her mind. But that seems unlikely. For more than forty years the two had shared a climate of hostility, their trajectories running along parallel paths, their opinions conflicting and confronting as they avoided personal encounters.

  Seven years younger than Lillian, an acknowledged beauty with a winning smile, Mary McCarthy was, like Lillian, a woman with a quick wit, a bad temper, strong political opinions, and “famous for her malice.”96 Both women had married young and divorced fairly quickly. Both had lived sexually adventurous lives, abused alcohol, and achieved success in worlds generally reserved for men. Each had a passion for good food and drink and generous hospitality.97 But there the similarities ended. McCarthy, graduating from Vassar in 1933 as a self-declared socialist, had soon chosen Trotskyism, rather than the Communist Party, as her ideological home. From the beginning she despised what she called the brutality of Stalinism and vigorously opposed the Soviet Union. She became the only female to participate in reviving the Partisan Review—champion of the non-Stalinist left—in the late 1930s, and served as its drama critic for many years.

  The two women were on opposite sides of a 1930s cultural divide that preceded, and continued long after, their contretemps. McCarthy, who had once been called “the first lady of American letters,” thought of herself as “a mind” to whom reasoning was natural.98 Along with her good friend, philosopher Hannah Arendt, and unlike the marginal Hellman, she understood herself as a significant voice among intellectuals. In the 1950s and ’60s she wrote literary criticism for some of the country’s most influential publications, including the New Republic, Harper’s, the Nation, and the New York Review of Books as well as Partisan Review, all of them magazines that paid minimal attention to Hellman and for which Hellman only rarely wrote. Hellman’s desire to appeal to a broad audience as a playwright and essayist countered her appeal to intellectuals who thought of her as decidedly middlebrow.99 And Hellman’s eagerness to immerse culture in political debate offended the partisans of highbrow, and theoretically apolitical, culture. As a drama critic for more than a decade, McCarthy pretty much ignored the plays of Lillian Hellman. They were, she would later claim, destined for a mass audience and not interesting to her or her readers. She reviewed Hellman’s film North Star negatively, finding its romanticization of the Soviet Union unpalatable. McCarthy likely did not know at the time that Hellman, too, had found the final film lacking in the same respect. A decade later, McCarthy trashed Candide.100 When asked, she could remember referring to Lillian only once, comparing Hellman’s “oily virtuosity” to the greater talents of Eugene O’Neill and other modern playwrights.101