Chapter 10

Liar, Liar

I don’t know what the hell the truth is, maybe just not lying.

—Harvard lecture, 1961

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable.

—from Three, 1978

Lillian Hellman, I think, is tremendously overrated, a bad writer, a dishonest writer. Every word she says is a lie, including “and” and “the.”

—Mary McCarthy, 1979

Lillian Hellman died in 1984, in the midst of a scandalous lawsuit, fighting for her honor and her integrity against accusations of lying. There is more than irony in this, for Hellman struggled all her life to sort out the meaning of truth and to adhere to a high standard of honesty. She had, she tells us in the story of Bethe Bowman, learned as a child the damage that could be done by lying and vowed then and there never to tell a lie, under penalty of torture and the guillotine.¹ She sometimes thought of herself, as she once said, as “too honest.” Indeed, asked by Dashiell Hammett to identify her worst fault, that’s the one she recorded.²

But what was truth? Efforts to find the answer to that question permeate Hellman’s work: The Children’s Hour rotates around a lie told by a disturbed thirteen-year-old girl that destroys three lives and a cherished school for girls. Dark Angel, her first movie script, focuses on a white lie, meant to hide a marriage, that subjects the hero to a dangerous wartime mission he might otherwise have avoided—and to a lifetime of blindness. The Little Foxes turns on a lie about a theft of bonds whose discovery places Regina in a position of power and allows her to win a financial victory over her brothers. Toys in the Attic features a young wife from whom truth is withheld who then becomes the unwitting instrument of her husband’s ruin. How is it that the writer who spent so much of her energy defending truth became known as the archetype of liars? The answer to that question lies less in Hellman’s life than in the historical debates that consumed her final decade.

Hellman continued to puzzle over questions of truth, and particularly its relationship to memory, as she developed her lectures and talks in the 1960s. At a 1960 University of Michigan reading of Toys in the Attic, she told an audience that wanted to hear something of the history of the play that she could “not remember all or much” of what they wanted to know. But, she promised, “I will certainly be more accurate tonight than I will be next year or next week.”³ She told a group of Harvard students in 1961 that her memory had always been poor. When she offered to recall for them her memories of the theater, she paused to warn them that she hoped they would be “accurate and as truthful as anybody can make memory, which is not very truthful at all.”⁴ Though she admitted that she could not remember where she was at particular times, she did not apologize for her “extremely cranky memory.”⁵ She understood, as she would say later, that memory “is not the same thing as what happened in the real minute of pleasure or pain.”⁶ Over and over again, whether the stories were about herself or about others, she deflected the notion that memory could point to truth. “I have no memory for dates,” she told Hammett biographer Diane Johnson, along with a story about how a dozen people she knew each remembered Hammett in a different way.⁷

The struggle to tell the truth and to recognize that truth itself was elusive persisted all her life. She did not know if it was a writer’s task to tell the truth, or what truth meant, she told her Harvard students. Though she kept notebooks, carefully researched and recorded details, and certainly “tried to get things right,” she never escaped her dictum that “truth is larger than the truth of fact.”⁸ When she turned to writing memoirs in the mid-1960s, questions of truth and memory came to the fore in a literal as well as a metaphorical sense. She had, she confessed in the last paragraph of An Unfinished Woman, never known “what I meant by truth, never made the sense I hoped for.”

Later, after the trouble started, people would return to An Unfinished Woman to challenge the literal truth of what she had written. She shrugged off the factual discrepancies. It was no secret that she had a poor memory. She had been speaking about it for years. “I have little sense of time and often when I have tried to walk back through memory’s lane I have stumbled in the dark and lost my way,” she wrote in 1967.⁹ In this respect, Hellman differs little from most memoirists who practice an art that relies exclusively on their unchallengeable memories and distances itself from anything called objective truth. As one commentator remarked, “She heightened things, she shuffled them around, she remembered some things and repressed others.”¹⁰ Hellman admitted that she could not have written her memoirs without “a feeling for fiction, some belief that what I was writing about was interesting or dramatic.”¹¹ Doris Lessing would have approved. “There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth,” she wrote trenchantly.¹²

When she wrote Pentimento, which Little, Brown published in 1973, Hellman gambled that she could construct her vivid, beautifully written, sharply characterized stories about her past with the license of the fiction writer. The title itself, as she announced in the epigram, refers to the painter’s practice of reconceiving an old image as “a way of seeing and seeing again.” To editor William Abrahams, she confided that “the accuracy or lack of accuracy of my memory was not important.”¹³ And in the book she wrote, “I wanted to see what was there for me once, and what is there for me now.”¹⁴ She did not want to describe the book as a memoir. “For reasons best known to cranky authors, I am anxious that this book not be thought of as sequel to An Unfinished Woman, but as a book of portraits,” she wrote to an editor at Esquire who wanted to publish an excerpt from it.¹⁵

In the seven stories of Pentimento, Hellman chose to revisit scenes of her childhood and young womanhood to see if she could recapture the feelings evoked by some key moments. Repeatedly she warned her readers that she was simply writing what she remembered, that she doubted her capacity to remember: What she wrote was her version of what happened, but others, she readily conceded, might remember things differently. “I know all I have written here,” she wrote in Pentimento, “or I know it the way I remember it, which of course may not be the whole truth.”¹⁶ The book, written in the style she had introduced in An Unfinished Woman, was filled with words unspoken, questions unasked and unanswered, places never again visited, and people, once encountered, never again known. “I was never to be angry with him again,” Hellman might write. A few pages later she would maintain, “I was never to see her again,” and shortly afterward, “we were never to talk about it again.” The phrases infused the stories with an air of mystery and suspense that enhanced their intrigue and her own centrality, for they suggested that the unwritten words held secrets never to be unlocked.

Many read into her prose a reflection of her personality, seeing in it either a “Hammett-like parsimony” or an elliptical and evasive quality. Others described “a rich, murky, Henry Jamesian” quality that could be “wildly elusive and vague.”¹⁷ Those who thought her tough, direct, and honest, as did a New York Times book critic, declared that she wrote “a prose as brilliantly finished as any that we have in these years.”¹⁸ They admired her “elegantly simple style” and, somewhat hyperbolically, described it as shining “with a moral intelligence, a toughness of character that inspires even as it entertains.” Critic John Leonard, who penned that phrase, added, “the prose is as precise as an electron microscope.”¹⁹ But those who caviled at the image of a courageous and honest Hellman thought her writing style “irritating” rather than “slight and charming.” It was, said one critic, imitative of “a time when Hemingway and Hammett made it seem fresh, new and appropriate.”²⁰ Another described her style as “obdurate, flat and mannered” and flailed her as a “virtuoso of the ellipsis.”²¹ The contrasts may be less aesthetic assessments than expressions of feeling about the author.

Each chapter in Pentimento purports to tell a story about other people yet begs us to understand what she tells us about herself. In the first story, Lillian’s distant cousin Bethe arrives from Germany, rejects the family’s advice to marry a dependable relative, and ends up living disreputably with a minor-league crook. We never know whether Bethe existed, or in what form. But it does not matter. The story Lillian tells of how, as a teenager, she defied parental injunctions and tracked down her cousin illustrates the rebellious spirit of which Lillian was so proud. The second story, “Willy,” portrays an uncle by marriage who becomes a mysterious, much-admired gunrunner and wealthy fruit importer. Looking behind the words, we find a provocative tale of adolescent Lillian’s emerging sense of sexuality. A story about Hellman’s life in the theater reveals her discomfort with the one arena that generously embraced her. “I always knew that I was seldom comfortable with theatre people,” she writes.²² Describing her tormented relationships to the actors, directors, and producers who collaborated with her in her life’s work, Hellman articulates her continuing sense of isolation even as she became a celebrated playwright. Once again we are pulled by a powerful magnetism rooted in the doubt, confusion, and anguish she expresses with every anecdote. “Turtle,” ostensibly a story about an animal she and Hammett trapped and then killed, turns into a meditation about survival and her fear of death. The final story, titled “Pentimento,” is an extended reflection on race relations, constructed around the tale of a talented young black man who could not bring himself to participate in a corrupt scientific world.

The centerpiece of the book—the essay that attracted the most attention and was widely reprinted—is “Julia,” a mostly fictional story of Hellman’s effort to smuggle a hat full of money to her friend Julia in Berlin. The money is destined to save the lives of Jews, communists, and socialists stuck in a hostile Austria in the late 1930s. The story describes a fearful young Lillian who, contemptuous of her own cowardice, agrees to undertake the dangerous mission. Julia appears in it first as Hellman’s closest childhood friend, whom she admires beyond reason and to whom she cannot say no. She reappears as a crippled resistance fighter whose loss of a leg symbolizes the danger Hellman imagines. Here then is a story about a loyal and loving friend willing to risk untold danger to serve an important cause. This was the woman Hellman wanted to be. More tellingly, the story casts aspersions on those who refused to risk their lives and fortunes when, during the McCarthy period, they would not “rescue” people under attack.

Lest there be any doubt about the message Hellman wanted to convey, another story in the collection—one that most reviewers dismissed as inconsequential—makes it explicit. “Arthur W. A. Cowan” is on its face a story about a rich Philadelphia lawyer with whom Hellman had a long relationship and who became something of a financial adviser. Cowan is a good guy. He is rich, very rich, as Hellman tells us, and his politics very conservative, but he nevertheless spends his money to support the cause of freedom, including the freedom to advocate unpopular causes like communism. Hellman uses the story to open up the questions she would pursue in her next memoir, Scoundrel Time, and which she claims there to have feared writing about for so long. She tells us that she knew all along that the reason for what she calls the “bitter storm” inside her “was not due to McCarthy, McCarran, Nixon and all the rest, but was a kind of tribal turn against friends, half-friends, or people I didn’t know but had previously respected … Others, almost all American intellectuals, had stood watching that game, giving no aid to the weak or the troubled, resting on their own fancy reasons.”²³ Cowan, in contrast, spent a portion of his fortune to defend communists and others.

All these stories reveal the self-dramatizing Hellman. They paint portraits of the woman Hellman wished she had been: the self who, given an opportunity, would have overcome her fears to act with a rare courage. But the voice is also that of the moral Hellman, the Hellman who could not and would not stop talking about the way she and others should have acted in times of stress. The book revealed Hellman, as Mark Schorer put it in the New York Times, in the “character of an extraordinary woman with rare powers of self-analysis, a woman both proud and self-assured but without a taint of self-importance, a woman of rare wisdom.”²⁴ Critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt put it even more strongly: “These portraits of others add up to nothing less than a self-portrait of Miss Hellman, an autobiography of her soul.”²⁵ Hellman was “an emancipated woman for her period,” wrote a Ms. magazine reviewer, “showing us, with sensitive, wise perceptions, where we have been and where it remains for us to go.”²⁶ The praise and the months of bestseller status demonstrated Hellman’s success in the battle for celebrity. She had won, hands down.

Whether the stories in Pentimento and An Unfinished Woman were factually “true” or not mattered less to readers and critics at the time they were published than the “cultural” and “interpersonal” truths they conveyed. Biographer Louise Knight notes that these forms of truth are necessarily produced by a narrator constructed “to serve the author’s rhetorical purposes.”²⁷ Hellman was such a narrator. Her childhood recollections re-created images of place and time, fears and interactions that defined the sensibilities of a moment for her readers. Her ability to describe her own weaknesses, her sexuality, her failed ambitions humorously and without self-pity appealed to readers not because they faithfully recorded what really happened but because they evoked moments of awareness with which readers could identify. Putting herself at risk, she appealed to audiences of all kinds. She located herself in the middle of her stories, unafraid to chastise and to celebrate herself in the same sentence, willing to let go of the story after it had reached its dramatic moment. If Hellman’s stories tended to cast her in a good light, if they offered an image of a woman in the middle of an adventure, if they celebrated her achievements at the expense of others and mocked the personalities of the great and famous women and men she knew, all of this contributed to the legend of a resilient woman with a strong moral spine. The writer Alice Munro might have been speaking for Hellman when she wrote, of her own memoir: “I put myself in the center and wrote about that self as searchingly as I could. But the figures around this self took on their own life and color and did things they had not done in reality … You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on.”²⁸ Memoirist Joel Agee put it differently. “Everything in this book is true,” he wrote of his own memoir, “but not everything is precisely factual.”²⁹

If Hellman won the battle for celebrity, the battle for history had yet to be fought. Some critics, most notably John Simon, felt cheated by Hellman’s focus on herself. Simon protested that Hellman’s stories were not pentimenti—they lacked a subtle interplay “between what was and is, or what was and is no more.” He complained that the portraits constituted Hellman’s effort to complete the autobiography she had started in An Unfinished Woman. They camouflaged, in his view, her own persona in the same melodramatic style that infused her plays. She had drawn no portrait of Julia, complained Simon, “however great and tragic she may have been … the acts of bravery and devotion that we actually read about are Miss Hellman’s.”³⁰ Critic James Lardner disagreed. “She exaggerated many things,” he wrote shortly after her death, but “you knew more about her times after reading her than before, and there are many more matter-of-factly reliable chroniclers about whom that could never be said.”³¹

When it came to the third volume of her memoirs, Scoundrel Time, questions of historical truth came to the fore. Hellman had long been unable to write about the McCarthy period for reasons she claimed not to understand. “I wish I knew why I couldn’t write about it. If I knew it I could do it,” she told interviewer Bill Moyers in the spring of 1974.³² But she did know, and the feelings ran deep. In Pentimento, she reflected on the “bitter storm that the McCarthy period caused, causes, in me … it was as if I had been deprived of a child’s belief in tribal safety. I was never again to believe in it and resent to this day that it has been taken from me.” She held intellectuals responsible: “It is eccentric, I suppose, not to care much about the persecutors and to care so much about those who allowed the persecution,” she wrote, pointing her finger at “American intellectuals.”³³ To Nora Ephron, shortly afterward, she was more specific: “I don’t remember one large figure coming to anybody’s aid … I suppose I’ve come out frightened, thoroughly frightened of liberals. Most radicals of the time were comic, but the liberals were frightening.”³⁴ Fear, Hellman thought, fear of isolation, fear that nobody would stand up for her, fear that she lacked the courage to stand by her friends, led her to take refuge in silence. “I had only one way out, and that I took: to shut up about the whole period.”³⁵

In the early seventies, as the war against communism in Vietnam wound down and a disgraced Richard Nixon left office, Hellman prepared to speak. Her friend Peter Feibleman warned her against doing so: too many of the old actors were still alive, he said. But it was time for Hellman to put the past behind her. She wanted, most of all, to record the emotional truths of her experience. She had already made the decision to write about the McCarthy years when she had an accident that would shape the style of the book. The summer before she started to write, traveling in Europe with Billy Abrahams and Peter Stansky, she had a small stroke. It did no visible damage beyond landing her briefly in a Paris hospital. This was probably the first of several small strokes that successively brought emotion to the surface and left her with a reduced ability to control outbursts of anger. Likely, the strokes released some of the pain and anger that had festered for more than twenty years.³⁶ “I don’t want to write about my historical conclusions,” she says in the beginning of Scoundrel Time. “If I stick to what I know, what happened to me, and a few others, I have a chance to write my own history of the time.”³⁷ Scoundrel Time is “mostly about me,” she told interviewer Rex Reed shortly before the book appeared. “I’ve forgotten about historical background and stuck to personal feelings, and I think that’s worked out better.”³⁸ But when Hellman turned her private pain into public statements, she discovered that her truth differed dramatically from the truths of some others. The result was to set off a storm of anger that she might have anticipated.

Scoundrel Time retold the story of the McCarthy period through the lens of Hellman’s 1952 appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. HUAC was the scourge of the entertainment industry, and Hellman’s appearance before it was part of the committee’s long campaign to uncover the radicalism thought to permeate the film industry at the time. When she sat down to write the book, Hellman could remember odd details about her appearance: the Balmain dress and the expensive new hat she had bought to comfort herself and boost her confidence; the probably apocryphal voice from the gallery that congratulated her afterward. But she had only sketchy memories of preparing for her ordeal, and almost none of the thirty-seven minutes she endured before the committee. To jog her memory and help her reconstruct the circumstances around her appearance, she wrote to Joseph Rauh, her lawyer at the time, and others. Had they not prepared a letter and a statement? she asked. Why had Rauh distributed the letter rather than the statement? How did it happen that Rauh had copies ready to distribute to the press? What had happened after the hearing ended? Rauh replied with detailed answers, sending along copies of her testimony, her letters and memoranda documenting the emergence of their strategy and the sequence of events. Many of these made their way into Scoundrel Time. In that sense, the book is literally accurate.

But Hellman was after something more. “If you survive something,” she said shortly after the book came out, “it’s hard to remember the terrible pressure on you when you believe that survival is not possible.”³⁹ She wanted to capture the prevailing sense of confusion and fear generated by continuing investigatory commissions, the fury at their power to destroy lives without evidence, the helplessness of individuals faced with a Hobson’s choice of maintaining their capacity to earn a living by telling committees what they wanted to hear or staying silent and risking jail. Above all she wanted to express her blinding contempt for people (she labeled them liberals and cowards), under no threat themselves, who betrayed their own commitment to liberty and freedom of speech for fear of being tarred with the brush of communist sympathy. These were the American intellectuals, who “had stood watching that game, giving no aid to the weak or the troubled, resting on their own fancy reasons.”⁴⁰ In a refrain that permeated Scoundrel Time, she told interviewer Nora Ephron, “I wasn’t shocked in the way so many people were. I was more shocked by the people on my side, the intellectuals and liberals and pretend radicals … I mean, I wasn’t as shocked by McCarthy as by the people who took no stand at all.”⁴¹

For all the pithy and direct language of Scoundrel Time, Hellman’s position took the moral high ground: she had stood up for the ordinary American values of decency, honesty, and integrity while many had, like cowards, given way. For those who cooperated with the investigatory committees, she had only scorn: “Some of them … had sprinted to demean themselves, apologizing for sins they never committed, making vivid and lively for the committees and the press what had never existed.” Dismissing the committees as made up of “men who invented when necessary, maligned even when it wasn’t necessary,” she declared that from them she expected nothing. The shock and anger, the sense of betrayal came rather “against what I thought had been the people of my world.” She had believed, she wrote, that “the educated, the intellectual, lived by what they claimed to believe: freedom of thought and speech, the right of each man to his own convictions, a more than implied promise, therefore of aid to those who might be persecuted. But only a very few raised a finger when McCarthy and the boys appeared.” These, then, were the scoundrels: the American intellectuals who would not “fight for anything if doing so would injure them.”

One after another, she skewered with forceful language those who had not lived up to her standards of honor. Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, the columnist James Wechsler, and her old friends Lionel and Diana Trilling all fell victim to her angry words and wittily venomous barbs. Their silence, she continued, allowed McCarthy to quash freedom of thought, opening the door to a continuing witch hunt. It encouraged intellectuals to sell their souls to the CIA (as had recently been revealed), which used their names to foster thinly disguised propaganda through sponsored magazines and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Appeals to the fear of communism accounted, in her view, for the disastrous war in Vietnam and the ascendance of Richard Nixon.⁴² Hellman gave no quarter, dismissing the rationalizations of the silent as cowardice and “pious shit.” “Lives were being ruined and few hands were raised in help,” she wrote accusingly. “In every civilized country, people have always come forward to defend those in political trouble.” Why not in the United States? She thought the answer obvious. “These men and women, too eager to secure themselves and their material possessions, were too often the children of immigrants, determined to keep what they had earned.”

The first reactions to Scoundrel Time took Hellman’s story at face value, affirming her sense of decency and applauding the moral courage she had shown before HUAC. Repeatedly and admiringly, they echoed the line that had resonated in 1952 and turned Hellman into a heroine: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” Friendly critics described Hellman’s story as “compelling,” brave, and written with “plainspoken vigor.” Time magazine alluded to her personal code of morality: “She was brave because her private code would not allow her to be anything else.”⁴³ Her friends Richard Poirier and Robert Coles pitched in admiringly. What one does at a moment when one is faced with earning a living or losing one’s honor, declared Coles, was a measure of character. Hellman had not flinched. She had made that difficult choice with “explicit, unhedged moral decisiveness.”⁴⁴ Scoundrel Time soared to the top of the bestseller lists, where it remained for twenty-one weeks. “I found the kind of unwritten code of honor and decency, which she feels she has lived by, extremely moving and touching,” said the distinguished British critic Marina Vaizey. “It felt truthful to me.”⁴⁵ Hellman had earned a right to tell her story as she remembered it, said journalist Murray Kempton, “thanks to her superb hour of resistance to banal chic.”⁴⁶

And yet there were dissenters. A few reviewers noted that the book contained false notes. Scoundrel Time accused James Wechsler, for example, of being a friendly witness before HUAC. In fact he had been called before McCarthy’s Government Operations subcommittee rather than HUAC, and he hotly contested Hellman’s attribution of friendliness. Wechsler, who had an unimpeachable record of opposition to McCarthyism both in print and before the committee, had decided for perhaps misplaced strategic reasons to give the committee some names they already had. Doing so, he believed, would enhance his credibility in the fight against McCarthyism. Hellman found this rationalization absurd but under threat of a lawsuit agreed to modify her characterization of Wechsler in subsequent editions of the book.⁴⁷ Critics also noted that Hellman had incorrectly described the use of the pumpkin in which Whittaker Chambers had hidden rolls of microfilm later used to convict Alger Hiss of perjury. While Hellman had insisted that none of the microfilm was ever useful, they pointed out that two rolls of it were in fact used as evidence at the trial.

The “scoundrels” (some of whom Hellman identified as the editors of magazines like Commentary and Partisan Review, and many of whom had once been her friends) did not remain silent for very long. In accusing them of not coming to her aid, Hellman called their morality and decency into question. But their view of history was quite different from Hellman’s, and on that basis they refused to cede the high ground. In 1976, those who had once counted themselves among the New York intellectuals and their allies still perceived communism as a very real threat. They remembered the postwar period as a difficult moment when even those who had opposed McCarthyism felt that their first obligation was to challenge Stalin, who, in their view, constituted a powerful enemy of freedom and world peace. From the anti-Stalinist perspective, those who cooperated with the committees were heroes rather than collaborators. Those who denounced the committees were the real cowards. They deserved the contempt of all right-thinking Americans, not their gratitude. As William Buckley, an old-fashioned conservative, noted, anyone who was a communist in that period was complicit in the deaths of ten million people.⁴⁸

Beyond crude politics, the economic crisis of the 1970s played a crucial role in the reception of Scoundrel Time. Stagflation—the unholy combination of high unemployment and inflation—along with the decline of the industrial Midwest left economists in a quandary over how to reduce joblessness without increasing inflation. The old liberals of the 1950s who had once battled over whether centralized planning and the socialization of the economy was a viable alternative to capitalism now wondered whether some sort of industrial planning along with a greater attention to social justice and equality might improve the economic outlook.⁴⁹ They were resolutely opposed by social commentators who insisted that such a return to socialist ideas posed a danger to the American way of life. Blaming the breakdown in self-discipline and individual entrepreneurship on the 1960s cultural revolution that advocated resistance to authority and promoted a new sexual and personal freedom, conservatives gathered under the umbrella of what would become known as neoconservatism. The most vociferous among them (including Encounter editor Irving Kristol, philosopher Sidney Hook, sociologist Nathan Glazer, and Hellman’s former friend Norman Podhoretz) linked America’s economic woes to its failure to confront the Soviet Union. America’s prosperity and safety, they argued, lay in a vigorously aggressive posture toward the Soviet Union that would revive free-market economies at home and abroad. Supporting traditional family and gender values at home and establishing democracy and free markets everywhere would save an America that had lost its way. Allying themselves with traditional conservatives and with liberal anticommunists, neoconservatives sought to foster a more stable world order in which the United States would play a leading role. By 1976, when Scoundrel Time appeared, neoconservatives were on the cusp of acquiring a powerful ideological presence. To them the book, in Nathan Glazer’s words, was more than naïve: it trivialized the real dangers of “an awesome power that was, after the defeat of Hitler, unquestionably the enemy of freedom throughout the world.”⁵⁰

Hellman had a very different view of history. She had never believed, and did not in 1976 believe, that communism constituted a threat to American freedom. To be sure, she had once thought that social justice would be best served by following the Soviet example, and into the sixties she still hoped that the Soviet Union could reform itself. But she had long ago abandoned any commitment to Stalinist Communism. She was an American patriot, convinced that the route to a nonracist and more egalitarian America lay in defending freedom of thought, the capacity to dissent, and curbs on the power of money. For all that she had briefly been a member of the CPUSA who now recognized the sins of Stalinism, she no longer advocated utopian beliefs that had once made sense to her and to millions of others. And she could not, even symbolically, kick a man when he was down. Though Hellman acknowledged three times in Scoundrel Time that she had wrongly believed ideas that she now rejected, her sense of decency, her code of loyalty, forbade her from turning on others whose intentions had been good. “Think of what it would be like,” remarked her goddaughter Catherine Kober Zeller. “She sees through the politics, hates herself for having supported it, but can’t say anything for fear that if she says it, it will look as if she’s betraying her friends.”⁵¹ After all, as she wrote in Scoundrel Time, “Whatever our mistakes, I do not believe we did our country any harm.”⁵²

To skeptics, Hellman’s stance seemed like rank hypocrisy. Had she simply been blind? She had, after all, early on attacked fascism (which in the eyes of many of the liberal anticommunists was simply another version of totalitarianism). How could someone “who pictures herself as a heroine defending intellectual and cultural freedom” defend a system now known to have destroyed millions of lives at the whim of Stalin, asked Sidney Hook.⁵³ Scoundrel Time, they argued, was simply an obfuscation of Hellman’s longtime support of the Soviet Union and of the totalitarian policies of Stalin. Her work for “world peace” in the late forties and early fifties, they charged, was ample evidence of her political naïveté and of her continuing acquiescence to the communist line. How, Sidney Hook asked, could she have portrayed the Soviet Union to be peaceful and freedom-loving at a time when “dissenting or non-conforming intellectuals were being martyred in Communist countries?”⁵⁴ Her silence in 1952, and her continuing silence in the sixties, provided tacit support for what President Ronald Reagan would label an evil empire. Either she was a hypocrite and a liar or she was, in their language, an unregenerate Stalinist.

Hellman could not apologize for something she could not see. In her view, communism posed no real threat to the United States, but attacks on freedom of thought and speech did. Her position was reinforced by a turn in historical interpretation that occurred in the 1960s. A new group of revisionist historians led by William Appleman Williams, then at the University of Wisconsin, began to seek new explanations for U.S. military and economic involvement in the world. Particularly in Latin America and South Asia, they traced American foreign policy back to a relentless search for power and influence.⁵⁵ These New Left historians suggested that the United States was as single-mindedly self-interested as any nation. Driven by economic impulses, the United States had followed its own ideological bent into the world, imposing on allies a vision of freedom and democracy that ran roughshod over the wills of indigenous peoples. The new view recognized the brutality of Stalinism and the failures of the Soviet system even as it acknowledged the Soviet Union’s territorial and ideological goals. It suggested not so much an apology for the Soviet Union as an effort to understand the dynamics of national self-interest. And there was the rub. Far from being an innocent defender of freedom, the United States, revisionist historians suggested, enacted a foreign policy as much in pursuit of power and economic influence as any in the world. This view both emanated from the ongoing war in Vietnam and fuelled opposition to it.

Furious opponents of the Soviet regime held New Left historians at least partly responsible for undermining American security by ignoring the excesses of communism while they critiqued America’s search for power. The new truth, wrote former liberal Nathan Glazer, was inspired in great part “by the unending flow of volumes of apparently serious research revising the history of World War II and its aftermath.” Referring back to the McCarthy period, he emphasized the consequences of the research. “Young scholars now believe that the congressional committees investigating Communism represented a totally unjustified attack on the freedom of thought, speech, and action of progressive-minded Americans … and that those investigations posed a greater danger to this country’s liberties than Communism itself ever did.”⁵⁶ These views, for which Scoundrel Time provided juicy evidence, could not be allowed to go unrefuted. As Richard Falk perceptively noted, “the success of Scoundrel Time would, if not challenged, endow its views of the McCarthy period in the early 1950s with an authoritative status.”⁵⁷

Hellman probably never fully appreciated the dimensions of the conflict into which she landed. Yet she enthusiastically endorsed historian Garry Wills, who her publisher suggested might write the introduction to her book. And Wills fully endorsed the new view of history. His lengthy introduction quickly became part of the problem—singled out by reviewers as proposing a biased and problematic view of the Cold War. In his view, that Cold War was incited not by Russian territorial aggression, not by efforts to impose communist regimes in Greece and Turkey, but by Truman’s efforts to appease anticommunists by imposing loyalty and security oaths on government employees. Wills believed that the loyalty-security program had encouraged the climate of fear that led directly to the flaunting of civil liberties by congressional committees and other investigatory bodies. In turn, the failure of liberal intellectuals to stand firm against McCarthyite tactics led the authorities to believe that they could trample the civil liberties of opponents to the war in Vietnam, New Left dissenters, and protesters against the Democratic convention in 1968. That, in turn, had given credence to Richard Nixon’s successful run for the White House and to the culture of surveillance that his administration sustained. To this extent, Hellman and the New Left historians held common ground.

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.”⁵⁹ 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.”⁶¹

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.⁶²

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.”⁷²Little, 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.⁷⁵Nobody 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 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.”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.”⁹³The 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 Starnegatively, 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

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.”¹⁰³Hellman 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, McCarthy 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

McCarthy’s effort to tarnish Hellman as an unregenerate Stalinist encouraged sparks to fly in unanticipated directions. McCarthy quickly tried to stamp them out. She learned early on that Diana Trilling wanted to participate in a defense committee on McCarthy’s behalf. But McCarthy mistrusted Trilling and believed that she had her own motives for wanting to help. “The intrusion of Diana affects me disagreeably,” she wrote to her lawyer.¹³² Later she elaborated: she would resist the idea of a defense committee “even if it came from other sponsors rather than from that Cold-War Bellona.”¹³³ Above all she resented the fact that Trilling seemed less interested in raising money for McCarthy’s defense than, in Trilling’s words, “to mobilize sentiment on Mary’s behalf and extrude Lillian from the community of the fair-minded.”¹³⁴ When Sidney Hook, who earned his political stripes as an anticommunist and had since moved to the far right, offered to provide McCarthy with evidence of Hellman’s political misdeeds, McCarthy found the offer repugnant.¹³⁵ This was another offer she wanted to refuse.

As the details of McCarthy’s search began to coalesce, they turned all of Hellman’s life into a trough of suspicion in which truth was the first casualty. When McCarthy contacted Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife and a distinguished journalist, Gellhorn responded eagerly. She would cooperate “with pleasure and would do the same for anyone against all liars and self vaunters as I am sick of the lot.”¹³⁶ From Castine, Maine, McCarthy mailed to Gellhorn in London a copy of An Unfinished Woman. Gellhorn replied before she had finished it: “As I read this book, I think it’s ALL lies,” she wrote to McCarthy, adding that she thought the book “egomaniacal malarkey.”¹³⁷ Later, she added, “everything she writes is self praise and all rot.”¹³⁸ Gellhorn had already made up her mind about Hellman based on an earlier experience with her. She had met Hellman first on the boat that took both of them to Europe in the summer of 1937. Gellhorn resented Hellman, who, accompanied by her friends Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell, traveled first class. In Paris, Gellhorn, not yet married to Hemingway, kept a low profile and then joined Hemingway to travel with him to Spain. Hellman claimed to have seen a good deal of Hemingway in the weeks before they left for Spain. Gellhorn, deeply involved with him, denied it. The three would meet again in Valencia.

Gellhorn, digging enthusiastically into the material that McCarthy sent her, filled McCarthy with advice about how to go about her research: “You should take specific statements and demolish them—make her out to be what she is, a self-serving braggart.”¹³⁹Gellhorn advised going for the jugular: “Specific details, wherever she actually names a place, a street, a fact: simply prove it cannot be true.” Find out, she told McCarthy, whether Lillian was actually on the Russian front, as she claimed to have been in An Unfinished Woman. Gellhorn doubted it. How could she have perched in a dugout with a glass wall? How could a grenade be thrown at her if she was five hundred feet from the enemy lines?

McCarthy pursued these leads with zest. At Gellhorn’s suggestion, she wrote to John Hersey, who had shared some of Hellman’s Moscow experiences and accompanied her partway to the front. Hersey, who had since become one of Hellman’s closest friends, disappointed McCarthy. He had not personally witnessed the event, he replied. Hellman’s interpreter and companion, Raisa Orlova, who had been with her at the front and recently defected, was just then publishing a memoir of her own. Recalling the trip to the front, Orlova described Lillian’s courage under machine-gun fire and “during the moments that brought us close to death.” She was, according to Orlova, “clever, sharp witted, and often full of anger.”¹⁴⁰ McCarthy dropped her inquiry into Hellman’s experience under fire to follow more promising leads.

Particularly sure of herself about events in Spain during 1937, Gellhorn denied that Hellman could have been there for as long as she claimed. She mocked Hellman’s self-proclaimed courage under bombing that could not have happened and accused her of making up encounters with Hemingway that she could not have had.¹⁴¹ McCarthy could neither confirm nor deny most of Gellhorn’s stories and in the end did not use them, but Gellhorn persisted. Inspired by McCarthy’s search, she set to work on an article based on her research. Resentment infected her quest. “I cannot bear liars, apocryphiars,” she explained to McCarthy to justify her continuing interest. “As a reporter, I regard them as wicked, deforming the news and the facts. As a writer, I consider that fact and fiction are totally different and I object fiercely to lying. And besides I do despise self aggrandizement in a general way.”¹⁴² Gellhorn did not use the word liar in the piece that the Paris Review published in June 1981.¹⁴³ Cautioned by the editors, she invented instead the euphemism apocryphiar and acquiesced grumpily when the same editors altered the essay’s title from “Close Encounters of the Apocryphal Kind” to “Plume de Guerre.”¹⁴⁴

But she did her best to demolish Hellman’s account of her experiences during the Spanish Civil War and her encounters with Hemingway. Hellman, Gellhorn claimed, could not have been as close to Hemingway as she protested, for he was simply not in the locations at the times Hellman described. He could not, for example, have been with Gustav Regler at the Stork Club at the time that Lillian recalled Hemingway challenging Hammett to bend a spoon with one elbow. Gellhorn insisted Hemingway was abroad at the time of the purported meeting. Nor could Hellman have read the manuscript of To Have and Have Not during one Paris night. The manuscript, Gellhorn claimed, was in press at the time. Besides, Gellhorn wrote to friends, Hemingway could not stand her.

The piece drew wide attention despite the fact that Gellhorn’s veracity was itself called into question. When she leveled accusations of lying against Stephen Spender (former editor of the neoconservative publication Encounter and, incidentally, former lover of Muriel Gardiner and friend to Mary McCarthy), Spender responded dismissively, telling her that her memory was faulty.¹⁴⁵ Yet he and the world at large continued to hold the opinion that her account of Hellman’s lies was substantially correct. A year later, in 1981, he cited Gellhorn’s piece as evidence for asserting that Hellman was no more than a “fiction writer and a plagiarist.”¹⁴⁶

Eventually the idea that Lillian was no more than a liar spread to every detail of her life. “Being a liar is deeper than politics—ingrained, surely,” wrote McCarthy to a friend.¹⁴⁷ Was Hellman really born in New Orleans? What about the two aunts: had Hellman made them up too? How old was she? McCarthy suspected that Hellman had deducted a year or two from her age and enthusiastically broadcast her suspicions to Gellhorn, who promptly exaggerated the difference. Hellman, Gellhorn guessed, had probably been born between 1899 and 1901. Indeed Hellman did routinely (and in the fashion of many women of her generation as they grew older) deduct a year and sometimes two from her age. She was born in 1905. But the casual accusations against her veracity descended to an ugly level of callousness. When witnesses could not be found to support Hellman’s stories, McCarthy suspected that she had deliberately chosen anecdotes that could not be verified. To CBS news anchor Charles Collingwood, who could not find information about a CBS radio broadcast that Hellman claimed to have made from Madrid in October 1937, McCarthy wrote, “There’s an unusually high mortality rate among witnesses to her doings wherever she was.”¹⁴⁸ Gellhorn agreed with this assessment: “That’s the clever side of mythomanes,” she wrote to McCarthy, “they wait until everyone is dead (except me) before they really go to town.”¹⁴⁹

The coup de grâce came from the story of Julia, the fifth chapter of Pentimento, which purported to describe Hellman’s courage in aiding antifascist resistance in 1937 Austria. The story became a film starring Vanessa Redgrave as Julia and Jane Fonda as Lillian. Released in the fall of 1977 at a fund-raising party for the Committee for Public Justice, it produced immediate accolades for Hellman. European editions of Pentimento followed, along with invitations to read the story and describe her experiences to college audiences. Suddenly Hellman turned into the beautiful blonde she had always wanted to be; she became the courageous woman of her fantasies and an icon of twentieth-century womanhood. But was this Lillian’s story or someone else’s?

Julia had long been rumored to be based on the life of Muriel Gardiner, then a psychiatrist living just outside Princeton, in Pennington, New Jersey, and the only American woman known to have worked in the Austrian resistance. Lillian shrugged off the rumors, insisting that although she had heard them, nobody had ever publicly come forward. She said she had never received a letter that Gardiner claimed to have sent her, pointing out the similarities between her life and Julia’s. She and Gardiner shared one friend in common—a lawyer named Wolf Schwabacher who had talked about Hellman to Gardiner and who could easily have shared Gardiner’s story with her. But Lillian insisted that the story was that of her pseudonymous friend. Though her memory was poor—as she wrote in Pentimento and repeated in interviews—she remembered this story absolutely. Instead of retreating as the rumors began to spread, Hellman elaborated on them. Before McCarthy’s interview, before the lawsuit, she told one interviewer that “nothing on God’s earth could have shaken my memory about” Julia.¹⁵⁰ To another, she described in great detail how she had discovered the fate of Julia’s baby from the doctor who treated Julia in London at her death.¹⁵¹

McCarthy learned about Muriel Gardiner in the summer of 1980, probably from Stephen Spender, once Gardiner’s lover and still a close friend. She wrote immediately to Gardiner, who responded positively. But Gardiner did not want the story repeated. McCarthy wrote to a friend that “the distinguished professional woman who has come to recognize herself as the original of Julia” was “hesitating as to whether to offer a deposition.” And then, perhaps projecting her own feelings onto Gardiner, McCarthy added, “She has been warned that Hellman is a dangerous antagonist, quick to revenge herself.”¹⁵² When Gardiner subsequently published an account of her experiences in the resistance, she did not claim the identity of Julia. Instead she merely acknowledged that she “had often been struck by the similarities between my life” and that of Hellman’s heroine.¹⁵³ But others noted that Gardiner, like the fictional Julia, was born to a wealthy family, studied at Oxford, went to Vienna to be analyzed, and there enrolled in medical school. Crucially, as Gardiner pointed out, Julia had worked in the Austrian resistance—the Austrians could identify only one American who had been so active. And she was Muriel Gardiner.

Was this, then, a lie? Most likely, Hellman concocted the outlines of Julia’s story from the comments she had heard about Muriel Gardiner from Schwabacher. After Gardiner’s book appeared, Hellman went to some lengths to contact Gardiner, only to be rebuffed. To her friend and psychiatrist George Gero, who tried to arrange a meeting, Hellman wrote that she feared McCarthy would “use the publicity on Gardiner’s book to discredit my word on everything.”¹⁵⁴ Later she reported to him that her lawyer, Ephraim London, “was very frightened of her and so indeed am I.”¹⁵⁵ London, increasingly disturbed by the idea that Hellman had invented Julia, pressured Hellman to reveal the name of Julia’s family. She tried to convince him that she should not mention Julia’s last name with a story so convoluted and fanciful that those named in it could only laugh at the whole cloth out of which it was made.¹⁵⁶ But the puzzle is why Hellman tried to keep this story going for so long; why she could not admit that, though she might have been inspired to invent the tale from the little she knew of Gardiner’s life, most of the story came out of her fantasy life, out of her desire to be the courageous woman she imagined she might be.

This was not the first time Hellman had created and kept spinning a long-running tale that could not have been true. There was her insistent saga to Blair Clark about an aristocratic foreigner and the child she claimed to have borne him. She invented a story about why she kept changing her age, which she told with a straight face to Hunter College colleague Alex Szogyi. Her father, she said, was a gallant gentleman who never wanted her to know her age, and by the time she was interested enough to ask, “the hospital in which she was born had burned down and the records were lost.”¹⁵⁷ Nor was it the first time that she had built on the experiences of others (including family members) to construct portraits or stories out of her imagination. She was, after all, a dramatist, and self-dramatization was her strength. Unaccountably, she continued to stand by the veracity of the Julia story.

By continuing the tale, by appropriating the outlines of somebody else’s life, Hellman overstepped the bounds of memoir, crossed an invisible line, and—in the context of the lawsuit against Mary McCarthy—revealed her lying habits. Conversations around the lawsuit quickly deteriorated into name-calling, venom, and malice. Hellman was a “Bloody vindictive old broad,” wrote CBS reporter Charles Collingwood to McCarthy. Hellman supporters responded in kind: “I have been incensed since I heard about that ‘bitch’ Mary McCarthy’s attack on the television. You have more in your ASS than she has in her brain,” wrote Sam Jaffe to Hellman. Hellman replied, “Dear Sam, Thank you very much.”¹⁵⁸

The swiftly unfolding events quickly turned friends into enemies. When Norman Mailer begged the two women, in print, to reconcile, Richard Poirier wrote a passionate defense of his old friend Hellman. Mailer responded with a personal note that he copied to several of the literati. “Your righteous mind and sulphurous bottom,” he wrote to Poirier, “produce much brimstone.”¹⁵⁹ Hellman promptly broke off a thirty-year friendship with Mailer. “I am sorry about you and me,” she wrote to him, “genuinely sorry.”¹⁶⁰Hellman reached out to Barbara Epstein—an editor at the New York Review of Books with whom she had long been close. Epstein responded cautiously, indicating her distress at the lawsuit and hoping that they could “meet again soon.”¹⁶¹ Then in private correspondence with McCarthy, Epstein expressed her distaste for Hellman. She refused Hellman’s subsequent requests to meet. Hellman expressed only a little regret at this. “My lawsuit against Mary McCarthy,” she wrote to her friend Dorothy Pritchett, “has caused Barbara to increase her already very stern dislike of me. She actually told me that she thought it was disgraceful of me to take so crazy a statement seriously and to cause McCarthy pain.”¹⁶² Bob Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books and for a decade Hellman’s colleague in the Committee for Public Justice, rallied to McCarthy’s side. A year or so after the lawsuit was filed, he wrote to McCarthy to tell her that he had denounced Lillian’s suit to her face: “Since then silence from her and most of her friends.”¹⁶³ Elizabeth Hardwick (also part of the New York Review of Books circle and the ex-wife of Lillian’s friend Robert Lowell) had offended Lillian in 1967 with a scathing review of a revival of The Little Foxes. Now she tried to organize her friends to write a public letter condemning the suit. The letter, she suggested, would support Mary McCarthy’s position that she was entitled to express her opinions freely.¹⁶⁴

But Hellman remained staunch in the face of criticism. Bill Alfred, who had arranged her first job at Harvard, wrote to tell her that he hadn’t called to talk about the suit because “I would have to tell you that I think it mistaken.”¹⁶⁵ Hellman replied with uncharacteristic dispassion. “I don’t think we will ever agree about the Mary McCarthy mess … You must know from the tone of my letter that I was offended by yours. But that, of course, will heal, and has nothing to do with an old affection, and one that I hope can soon be mended.”¹⁶⁶ Bill Styron wrote her a letter of apology when a reporter quoted him saying that the lawsuit “was unfortunate all around.” Hellman accepted the apology, which was filled with admiration and praise, telling him, “I am deeply glad we can continue in great friendship with each other.”¹⁶⁷

Some took sides on the grounds that the rich, vindictive Lillian wanted to pursue the lawsuit merely to bankrupt McCarthy. Hellman, irascible and old, they suggested, wanted only revenge. Rumor spread that the lawsuit would cripple McCarthy financially and wreck her health.¹⁶⁸Hellman had little sympathy. “Quite simply I feel I was treated in a most brutal fashion and, while I have no desire to ruin her, or anybody else, I have heard no words of apology or attempt to make one.”¹⁶⁹ Lillian, McCarthy’s friends carped, was represented without charge by her old friend Ephraim London. But McCarthy was no victim. Though she worried about the money the lawsuit would cost, especially if it went to trial, she desperately wanted victory. Two years into the proceedings, she received a $25,000 contribution from an anonymous “angel” and around the same time bought herself a new fur coat.¹⁷⁰ Lillian insisted throughout the entire ordeal that money was not the object. Honor was at stake. McCarthy’s assertions of lying, she argued, constituted the last straw in a long campaign to undermine the integrity that Hellman held so dear. Egged on by friends, one of whom wrote, “Here’s hoping you get every nickel she’s got,” she withheld public comment about McCarthy’s refusal to say she was sorry.¹⁷¹ In the meantime, and over London’s objections, Hellman sent several checks to cover some of the cost of court expenses. “Please, please, please,” she wrote to London, “If you do not accept any money from me, I will become an even greater cripple than I am.”¹⁷²

1983: She grew increasingly frail. (Photofest)

All this took second place to the most forceful argument against the suit, and perhaps the one that rankled most. Increasingly, the literati focused their discontent on what they viewed as Hellman’s attack on freedom of expression. Hellman’s suit, insisted her detractors and some of her friends, violated an unspoken code of writers. As Gellhorn put the case to McCarthy, “Miss H, by resorting to libel law, has broken an ancient and noble tradition of writers, which is to call each other any names they like, in print, insult not law being the proper behavior.”¹⁷³ Herself the victim of blacklisting, Hellman was now thought to be engaged in muffling the free expression of others, leading some to say that she embraced the First Amendment only in her own defense. When Hellman dismissed Stephen Spender’s support of Mary McCarthy as coming from someone who had “long been a member of the anti-Hellman group,” he responded quickly.¹⁷⁴ He had never heard of an “anti-Hellman group,” he told her, and then later explained his opposition to the suit. “I think such cases, whatever the provocation, lower the status of literature. A writer, after all, is someone who believes in the power of words, and if he wishes to defend himself he can do so in language without resort to the law.”¹⁷⁵ Others thought the suit could have devastating effects. “Should it be successful,” Charles Collingwood wrote to McCarthy, sympathetically, “it would have the most inhibiting effect on critical comment within whose bounds of propriety your observations certainly fell.”¹⁷⁶

Hellman, bothered by this line of attack, consulted Burke Marshall, distinguished law professor at Yale and an active member of the Committee for Public Justice. Marshall gave her little comfort, but he was in an odd position. He was an old friend of Renata Adler, once Lillian’s protégé and now on McCarthy’s side. Lillian turned to him in 1983, as the suit dragged on, to ask whether he could support her position in the suit. Marshall replied in the negative. “I think the courts should be left out of that kind of business and that it should be left up to dispute in other places.”¹⁷⁷

Through almost four years, while the lawsuit bounced around, Hellman grew increasingly frail. What was left of her eyesight diminished rapidly. Sometimes she could hardly breathe. Often she had to be carried in and out of public appearances that she stoutly refused to cancel. Still, she had one more victory to savor. McCarthy’s lawyers tried to get the courts to issue a summary judgment against the case on the grounds that Lillian Hellman, as a public figure, was fair game for criticism. Ephraim London responded by claiming that Hellman was not a public figure at all. The claim drew loud chortles from some of Hellman’s enemies. But it persuaded Judge Harold Baer Jr., who, after many months of delay, refused the plea. “In addition to being a person of general notoriety,” Baer wrote in May of 1984, “a public figure must be someone who is involved in a public issue, question, or controversy.”¹⁷⁸ Siding with Hellman, the judge reminded the participants of McCarthy’s deposition. Hellman might not consciously have lied, McCarthy conceded there. She was not speaking of “ ‘prevarication per se’ or a conscious intent to state an untruth.” “I don’t mean literally nothing when I say ‘nothing in her writing rings true,’ “ McCarthy said. “I don’t mean of course … say perhaps 70 per cent of her factual statements are probably true … I mean the general tone of unconvincingness and falseness.” Asked directly if she thought that all of Hellman’s writings were in fact lies, she replied: “I would say, no.”¹⁷⁹ Under the circumstances, to call Hellman a “dishonest writer,” the judge concluded, “crosses the boundary between opinion and fact.”¹⁸⁰

Both sides now regeared for action. McCarthy promptly hired distinguished First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams to represent her in court. Hellman claimed to relish the court trial that would soon occur. The trial never happened. Hellman grew sicker and more irascible by the day, and a month later she was gone. McCarthy, hearing the news, expressed sorrow only that she would not get her day in court.