A Difficult Woman (56 page)

The parallels between Hellman's ideas and those identified with revisionist history fueled the ire of Hellman's critics—former liberals, traditional conservatives, and neoconservatives alike. In an influential piece,
New York Times
cultural critic Hilton Kramer identified
Scoundrel Time
as just one among “a new wave of movies, books and television shows” that were “assiduously turning the terrors and controversies of the 1940s and 1950s into the entertainments and best-sellers of the 1970s.” He traced this wave back to “academic historians” who had redrawn “the history of an earlier era along … often fictional lines.” “For a decade,” he argued, they “have been laboring to persuade us that the Cold War was somehow a malevolent conspiracy of the Western democracies to undermine the benign intentions of the Soviet Union.” The point of
Scoundrel Time,
in his view, was “to acquit 60's radicalism of all malevolent consequences and to do so by portraying 30's radicalism as similarly innocent, a phenomenon wholly benign, altruistic and admirable.”
⁵⁸
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., historian, political adviser to presidents, and a friend and longtime dining companion of Hellman's, dropped Kramer a note declaring his wish that the article “could be made required reading for everyone born after 1940.”
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Hellman, who had dined with Schlesinger just the day before the article appeared, promptly wrote him a scathing note: “In my cricket book, you don't sit next to people at dinner in apparent friendship and not tell them that you have publicly embraced their attacker.”
⁶⁰
Schlesinger forwarded it to their mutual friend, Joe Rauh, with a one-sentence comment: “Now I am on the enemies list too.”
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As in so many instances, Hellman had turned herself into the center of a controversy waiting to happen. She had challenged the morality of the
anticommunists who had betrayed their nation by refusing to defend freedom of speech. She had called them scoundrels, accused them of undermining the values they held dear. In reply, the neoconservatives unleashed all the fury of morally wronged victims, the personal venom of opponents bent on destruction. These attackers were not after her to tell the “truth”: what they wanted was a confession of “sin.” What right did she have to claim moral authority, this woman who could not get her facts straight, who placed herself at the center of a struggle in which she was at best a peripheral player? Why believe someone who still publicly denied her participation (and that of her longtime friend and companion Dashiell Hammett) in the Communist Party, who hypocritically overlooked the millions of murdered and destroyed lives in Stalin's Russia even as she wept over her own lost financial security? What right did she have to claim that she had done no harm? By refusing to cooperate with the investigations, some asserted, she had reinforced the credibility of a totalitarian system and prolonged the life of McCarthyism. If this fight was to be fought on the basis of virtue and morality, then Hellman's virtue was fair game.
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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”?
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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Nobody now remembers that, but several of Hellman's friends found the notion plausible.
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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.”
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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.
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Kempton thought that she had turned to Joseph Rauh because of his reputation for saving clients from jail.
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“The best way to sell one's courage,” wrote Walter Goodman, “is to make much of one's weaknesses.”
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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.”
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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.
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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 back covers of the book: “The masculine pose, Harris tweed coat, and casual cigarette convey that air of sassy androgyny cultivated by forties movie heroines.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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