A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  McCarthy’s relationships with men also took a different trajectory from Hellman’s. After her first marriage to aspiring actor Harold Johnsrud ended, she lived for a couple of years with Philip Rahv, one of the editors of Partisan Review. She left him to marry Edmund Wilson, with whom she had a son and whom she credits for inspiring her to write the novels that would make her literary reputation. But Wilson was not her Hammett. McCarthy left him after seven years for another man, Bowden Broadwater, whom she married in 1946. Broadwater in turn gave way to a fourth husband, James West, whom she met and with whom she fell in love in 1960 while on a State Department–sponsored tour of Eastern and Central Europe. West was a State Department officer in Warsaw at the time. By 1980, McCarthy had been happily married to Jim West for nearly twenty years.

  All the while, McCarthy maintained a feisty political persona distinctly at odds with Hellman’s. They occupied opposite sides of the Stalinist divide in the thirties: Hellman strongly supported the Soviet Union in that decade, while McCarthy deeply mistrusted it. Hellman traced their differences back to the Spanish Civil War, when help to those fighting Franco came largely from the Soviet Union. Hellman welcomed that help, failing to see that it came at the price of communist control over the forces fighting Franco and oblivious to the atrocities that communists committed in an effort to sustain their influence. McCarthy, along with George Orwell, John Dos Passos, and many others, condemned the Soviet policy of trying to eliminate opponents of Franco who did not agree with the Soviets. She blamed people like Hellman for the murder of opposition leaders and for the ultimate defeat of the Loyalists. McCarthy claims to have had “angry words with Hellman about the Spanish Civil War” at a small dinner at the home of Robert Misch, then head of the elite Wine and Food Society. Hellman denied that she ever attended such a dinner, and remembers meeting McCarthy in the apartment of Philip Rahv shortly after she came back from Spain.102

  There is no disagreement about where the two stood with relationship to Leon Trotsky, archenemy of Joseph Stalin. Hellman believed that the Soviets, if they could only get rid of internal enemies, might achieve the revolution to which they aspired. Leon Trotsky was, in her eyes, one of those enemies, justly exiled. McCarthy thought the opposite. Trotsky had been exiled, she believed, for opposing Stalin’s dictatorial visions. He had no wish to overthrow the Soviet state, only to reform it. The question, investigated in 1938 by a commission led by distinguished philosopher John Dewey, roiled the left. When Dewey’s commission exonerated Trotsky of evil intent, McCarthy wholeheartedly supported its conclusions. Hellman excoriated the commission and signed a petition defending the Soviet Union’s notorious Moscow show trials as legitimate efforts to police itself internally. Hellman’s position, McCarthy argued later, echoed the Stalinist line. By turning a blind eye to Stalin’s sins, Hellman had indirectly participated in the murders of thousands of innocent people. Hellman later refused to condemn the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact—clear evidence, in McCarthy’s view, of her subservience to the Soviets. But Hellman never admitted guilt.

  Resonances of these political differences lasted during occasional encounters through the years. The two attended a dinner in 1948; McCarthy remembers the event taking place in the home of Harold Taylor, president of Sarah Lawrence College. She describes Hellman “sounding off to some students about how John Dos Passos betrayed the Spanish Loyalists because he didn’t like the food in Madrid!” McCarthy maintains she embarrassed Hellman by offering to tell the students why Dos Passos broke with the loyalists. Hellman, she recalled, “started to tremble.”103 Hellman remembers the same dinner as having taken place at the home of Stephen Spender. She left early, she remembers, because “two male students came over to tell me that they felt it was their duty to report that I had been asked to Spender’s in order to be ‘baited.’ “104 Spender affirmed Hellman’s recollection that the dinner was at his home but noted that there were only girls present and that Hellman and McCarthy had been invited together for no other reason “than to please these girls … We have never in our lives,” Spender continued, “deliberately invited people who disliked each other.”105 McCarthy alleged that Hellman held a grudge against her for her dissenting role at the 1949 Waldorf conference, where McCarthy spoke from the floor in objection to the presence of authorized Soviet participants. Hellman, a sponsor of the conference, claimed not to have known that McCarthy was present, and in any event to have been among those who encouraged the voices of dissenters.

  The personal and the political slipped into petty jealousies and touched trivial issues as well as large ones. Hellman skipped out of a theater festival in Edinburgh where Mary McCarthy turned up. After a futile request to her agent to get her out of the gig, she told a friend that she planned to give herself “a vacation from the warlock smile of Miss Mary MacCarthy [sic].”106 McCarthy, in turn, claimed to remember, thirty years after her encounter with Hellman at Sarah Lawrence, that Hellman “had rather aging wrinkled arms, bare and on them were a lot of gold and silver bracelets—and all the bracelets started to jangle.”107 Hellman, hearing this story, replied that she found it “particularly comic since I was in my very early forties, and arms don’t age quite that fast, and I never wore dangling bracelets in my life.”108

  Discomfort and jealousy manifested themselves as well within the overlapping intellectual circles to which the two women belonged. Hellman began to mingle with the New York intellectuals and the Partisan Review crowd in the late fifties and sixties. She drew close to Philip Rahv and Edmund Wilson, one a former lover of McCarthy’s and the other a former husband. She socialized with Robert (Cal) Lowell, his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, and with Lowell’s school chum Blair Clark, all of them close friends of McCarthy’s.109 Try as she might, Hellman never became fully a part of the New York intellectual community in which Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy figured. This might not have been entirely her fault, for, despite the presence of Arendt, Hardwick, and McCarthy, the New Yorkers did not generally take women seriously as intellectuals.110 Hellman did try to get to know Arendt. “Hannah and I met a number of times for dinner and lunch through the many years before her death … and never mentioned Mary McCarthy.”111

  The history of feuds and jealousies came to a head in the years just before the Dick Cavett show aired. Ever since the 1940s, Hellman had been engaged in the effort to raise money for refugees who had fled Spain after Franco’s victory in 1939. In 1969, Dwight MacDonald, friend to both McCarthy and Hellman and an independent anticommunist, persuaded her to become a sponsor of Spanish Refugee Aid, then the most important vehicle for aiding the now aging and ailing refugees of the conflict. Spanish Refugee Aid identified itself as both antifascist and anticommunist. It was run by MacDonald’s former wife, Nancy. Its sponsors included, among many others, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Roger Baldwin of the ACLU, Mary McCarthy, and Gabriel Javsicas. All of their names, along with Hellman’s, appeared on SRA letterhead for 1970 and after. Javsicas, a Russian-born and German-educated anarchist, had been briefly imprisoned by Franco’s regime in 1964 when he tried to make contact with anarchist opponents of the dictator.

  After the publication of Scoundrel Time, Javsicas noticed that Hellman was a member of the board and began a campaign to oust her.112 In close communication with McCarthy, to whom he copied much of his correspondence, he insisted that he would resign if Hellman were not removed from the board. “She is a nasty, hard headed homo sapiens knowing full well what she was doing when she viciously attacked us for presuming to question Stalin’s right to exterminate our fellowmen,” he wrote.

  Nor can it be said that she has repented. She is as good a Stalinist propagandist as ever, voluntarily spreading the Tchekist line that the mass murder of intellectuals and peasants under Stalin was a sin, a slight aberration of Stalin in an otherwise admirable human experiment. This woman is also an unconscionable liar, a hypocrite who sends me monthly appeals to join her so-called Committee for Public Justice (no less) while condoning the censorship exercised by her
publishers against a friend who presumed the mildest disapproval of her politics … Supposing we had unmasked a Nazi among our sponsors who condoned the extermination of the Jews, would you vote to retain such a person?113

  In April 1978, the board voted to drop Hellman as an SRA sponsor. MacDonald, who had invited Hellman onto the board, intervened. When the board met (in Javsicas’s absence) the following September, he persuaded its members to reinstate her. Furious, Javsicas submitted a letter of resignation and wrote to Mary McCarthy to encourage her to resign too. Nancy MacDonald begged him to rethink: “I think it is all very foolish and wish you wouldn’t do it. After all you do believe in the work we are doing and Lillian is hardly an impediment to it.”114 McCarthy, too, offered to resign in an ambivalent letter to Nancy at the end of November. “Gaby has sent me copies of his letters to you on the subject of Lillian Hellman,” she wrote. “I’m sorry to say that I thoroughly agree with him and feel, though with pain, that I should ask for my name to be removed too from the list of sponsors … How in the world did it happen that she was invited to join? I had no knowledge of it at all.” The letter was signed “with my love.”115

  For months after that—into the spring and summer of 1979—Javsicas, Mary McCarthy, Dwight MacDonald, and Nancy MacDonald exchanged letters and phone calls airing the issue of whether or not Hellman was still a Stalinist, deserving of ostracism. Finally, by the end of June the issue had boiled down to a question of choice: “Are you going to maintain Hellman rather than Mary?” Javsicas asked Nancy MacDonald.116 In July James Farrell, persuaded by Javsicas, resigned from the board. But then the tide turned. Dwight MacDonald convinced McCarthy to change her mind, not because she thought any better of Hellman but because she and others had “kept silent for so long.” McCarthy wrote apologetically to Javsicas about her change of heart: “My present feeling is that if Hellman does something new that we can and ought to object to, the whole question could be reopened.”117 McCarthy sent this letter a week before she taped the Dick Cavett show.

  Nor did the antagonism end there. Javsicas expressed concern at McCarthy’s comment. By now he had become so obsessed with having Hellman removed that he went to small claims court to ask for the return of his $160 contribution. McCarthy tried to persuade him to drop the action. “It will probably have the reverse effect of creating sympathy for the very undeserving Hellman,” she wrote to him.118 Still, Javsicas persisted, eventually alienating everyone including Mary McCarthy, who rescinded her resignation and volunteered to contribute to some of the SRA’s legal fees if necessary. All this occurred just as her own legal problems with Hellman descended, suggesting that Hellman had been much on McCarthy’s mind in the months before and after she went on the Dick Cavett show. Her claim afterward not to have thought much about Hellman during the months before seems patently false.

  To defend herself in a lawsuit that she hoped at first would simply die, McCarthy began searching for proof of Hellman’s falsehoods. From Castine, Maine, she wrote that summer to friends and friends of friends, reminding them of the lawsuit and asking them for help. In snowball fashion, evidence accumulated. McCarthy asked her friend Jon Randal what he remembered; he put her in touch with Martha Gellhorn, who suggested that she contact Charles Collingwood. Her old friend Stephen Spender put her in touch with Muriel Gardiner, who turned her on to John Hite, an expert on European railway timetables between the wars. Several people suggested she contact Sidney Hook and Diana Trilling, but she balked at the idea of allying with such politically incompatible bedfellows. And so it went. By November she could write that “I spent my workless summer rather fruitfully on this.”119 The stress was enormous. She worried about money and she developed a bad case of shingles in July, which did not dissipate until November.

  Unsurprisingly, the search turned up enormous amounts of evidence demonstrating that Hellman had embroidered stories, dramatized and inflated her own role in them, conveniently consolidated different versions of the same tale, and misremembered dates and their relationships to events. These were all acknowledged techniques deployed by Lillian over the years, and all “deeds that countless good writers have committed,” as one commentator put it.120 McCarthy understood that her own memory could be faulty too. Indeed, when Stephen Spender confirmed Hellman’s account of the 1948 meeting at Sarah Lawrence College, she began to doubt herself: “They’re so sure, and so had I been,” she wrote to her lawyer.121 Self-doubt did not stop McCarthy from taking great comfort in discovering small and large aberrations in Hellman’s stories. She wrote about them to friends and acquaintances to jog their own memories and to confirm her sense that Hellman routinely lied. In the process, McCarthy constructed a mountain of information that, added together, seemed to confirm the reputation of Lillian Hellman as a liar.

  In November she asked Carol Gelderman, who was just then negotiating a contract to write McCarthy’s biography and who conveniently resided in New Orleans, to check to see whether the “Willy” story in Pentimento was true or not. She had spoken to a friend who “recognized much of this material, but as belonging to the public domain rather than to Hellman or her family.”122 Gelderman and a student searched the record, interviewed neighbors, and read old newspapers. They concluded that the figure of Willy was a fiction—a composite made up of the husband of her great-aunt and the husband’s nephew by marriage. This and other trivial differences led Gelderman and McCarthy to conclude rather gleefully that it would be easy to label her a liar. And Hellman had, in a literal sense, lied. She had conflated Willy’s house with that of his nephew; she had invented a visit of her great-aunt to the farm in Pleasantville; she claimed that Willy had been “thrown out” of the big company he created, when in fact he had quit; she described Willy as dying in bankruptcy when, it seemed, his wife and daughter had “rejected the estate because it contained nothing but debts.”123

  In these ways, McCarthy produced a fat file of “lies.” Hellman could not have gone on an errand in the time she claimed it had taken her. The big dining room in which she remembered a conversation happening probably didn’t exist in the house in which she put it; a giant doll’s house that Lillian remembered as having contained elaborate furniture contained only simple objects. Her cousin Bethe would have been eaten up by mosquitoes had she been naked when Hellman saw her hanging clothes on the line. Southern azaleas did not have an odor, much less the sweet scent that Hellman attributed to them. Hellman sometimes claimed to speak fluent French in a patois that resembled the Marseilles dialect, and at others declared herself unable to make herself understood. There were plenty of lies to be found in Lillian’s books, and McCarthy had no difficulty identifying many of them. “I have a feeling that she will be sorry she sued,” Gelderman concluded after her search ended.124

  But what did these lies reveal about Hellman or about the 1970s? McCarthy needed enough evidence to exonerate herself from the charge of libel. To her it did not matter how trivial the lie or what its meaning. We cannot blame McCarthy for the consequences of the kind of search she conducted, nor for her efforts to bias her sources. Nor can we accuse her of living in a glass house: McCarthy found herself trapped in several small lies of her own and confessed her propensity to mendacity in a newly published autobiography.125 She was, after all, defending herself from what she thought of as a vindictive lawsuit; she needed all the ammunition she could get. And Hellman made an easy target. Her brilliant storytelling, published under the rubric of the memoir; her propensity to fudge in the interest of a good story; her skill for manufacturing realistic detail—all these made literal truth easy to demolish. Hellman would be exposed as someone who had tried to turn herself into the heroine of her own life. She had, as Irving Howe would later put it, turned her life with Hammett into a myth.

  McCarthy attacked the myth directly when she tried to illuminate Hellman’s politics. Often her letters asked for information that would demonstrate that Hellman was still the unregenerate Stalinist her friends assumed. Could Mrs. Sheila Hale, McCa
rthy wrote to a woman to whom Hellman had apparently been unpardonably rude, provide information about an incident in which Hellman had called Solzhenitsyn insane and claimed that the gulag was a total invention? If true, wrote McCarthy, “It gives the lie to her pretense of … having had her eyes opened to the sins of Stalin.”126 Sheila Hale replied promptly, if somewhat cautiously. There was some truth in what McCarthy had heard, she wrote—Hellman had called Solzhenitsyn insane. But this was after a good dinner with a few close friends, and she had never said his numbers were “a total invention,” only that “he had exaggerated the numbers of prisoners in the Gulag.”

  Accurate or not, the conversations around the lawsuit helped to revive and spread Hellman’s reputation as a Stalinist. William Buckley aimed an opening salvo: “What Lillian Hellman specialized in, during almost two bloody decades,” he wrote shortly after the lawsuit became public, “was precisely in cutting her conscience to fit the whims of Joseph Stalin.”127 McCarthy avidly sustained that notion, even as she claimed that “examples of [Hellman’s] political dishonesty, unless especially flagrant, aren’t what’s needed in a case of this kind.”128 Hellman, who remained critical of dissidents who earned their freedom by betraying others, had at this point roundly condemned the Soviet repression of intellectuals and allied herself with Solzhenitsyn.129 McCarthy nevertheless took advantage of the fear and suspicion of Stalinism sparked by the newly resurgent neoconservative movement to fan the dying flames of an old battle. She described Hellman in her letters as a “virtually unreconstructed” Stalinist. “Maybe the organization has something on her which has kept her a captive all these years,” she wrote. “A friend close to the CIA tells me he is convinced that she was an agent, literally on the payroll, in the Forties and possibly Fifties.”130 She triumphantly called the attention of her friends to an article in Harper’s that referred to Hellman’s “decades long affair with the dashing Communist, Joseph Stalin.”131