Lillian Hellman Read online

  Their next meeting did not take place until a decade later, in 1948, at Sarah Lawrence, where McCarthy was teaching, and where Hellman had been invited to visit. This time they spoke. According to McCarthy, she arrived at a gathering in time to hear Hellman telling the students that John Dos Passos’s break with the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War had to do with his dislike of the food in Madrid. McCarthy knew otherwise: While Dos Passos had been in Madrid he had learned that his old friend, Jose Robles, had been murdered by the Soviet advisors in Spain, who were eliminating dissenters to their control of the war. Hellman, McCarthy said, “was just brain-washing those girls—it was really vicious. So I finally spoke up and said, I’ll tell you why he broke with the Loyalists.” Hellman, McCarthy said, “trembled with rage.”10

  McCarthy, who often reviewed plays, seldom mentioned Hellman’s name in print. She had seen The Children’s Hour in 1934, and had liked it, but she did not write about the play. In a later review she had referred to the “oily virtuosity” of certain playwrights, and did mention Hellman’s name among several others. She had not liked the adaptation of Candide, and had said so in print in 1957, but did not mention Hellman’s name as the play’s adaptor. Also in 1957, McCarthy wrote an article praising Arthur Miller for the bravery of his testimony before HUAC, and this piece must have cut close to Hellman’s bone: “Called before the [Committee] last June, Mr. Miller declined to name the names of persons he had seen at Communist-sponsored meetings, although he testified freely about his own past association with Communist-front groups. . . . He was almost the only prominent figure heard by the Committee who did not either tell all or take refuge in the Fifth Amendment. . . . Against the ritual reply droned out so often during these past years—‘I decline to answer on the ground that it might tend to incriminate me’—Mr. Miller’s forthrightness struck a note of decided nonconformity.” Without mentioning Hell-man’s name, McCarthy dismissed her cherished claim to uniqueness among HUAC’s witnesses.11

  For her part, Hellman seems to have publicly spoken disparagingly of McCarthy only once. In an interview with the Paris Review in 1964, she was asked about McCarthy’s opinion of her work—that it was “too facile, relying on contrivance.” Hellman answered: “I don’t like to defend myself against Miss McCarthy’s opinions, or anybody else’s. I think Miss McCarthy is often brilliant and sometimes even sound. But, in fiction, she is . . . a lady magazine writer. Of course that doesn’t mean she isn’t right about me. But if I thought she was I’d quit.”12

  Although they seldom met, Hellman and McCarthy lived in overlapping worlds, and knew many of the same people; each was bound to hear news of the other. Both were writers after all, and aware of each other as such. McCarthy’s first book of linked stories, The Company She Keeps, was a critical success and made her name. By the measure of money and reknown, Hellman was the more successful writer. But she was not necessarily admired by McCarthy’s friends who were at the center of New York intellectual and literary life—Hannah Arendt, Philip Rahv, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Silvers—people whose friendship Hellman sought, but among whom she never gained complete acceptance or intimacy.

  Of McCarthy’s fiction, her novel The Group, based on her student years at Vassar, was most commercially, if not critically successful. But her considerable reputation as an intellectual was based on her essays on literature and politics that appeared in the New Yorker, Partisan Review, New York Review of Books, New Republic—journals and magazines which, as Meyer Scha - piro, the art historian and critic, said, “stood for perhaps a more accomplished style of writing and a more knowing audience than [Hellman] achieved.”13

  McCarthy began to write her memoirs while she was still in her forties. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood appeared in 1957 to a stunning review in the New York Times: “One of the most stinging, brilliant and disturbing memoirs ever written by an American. The autobiographical stories are marinated in italic commentaries that tell how much commonplace veracity or creative mendacity they contain . . . And probably the sharpest criticism of her [own] work you can find anywhere.”14

  Hellman’s lawsuit against McCarthy in effect required McCarthy, a writer who loved facts, to review Hellman’s memoirs. In a letter to her lawyer Ben O’Sullivan, McCarthy attempted to distinguish between the false statements in Hellman’s memoirs, those “false in all respects, and [those] instances of intellectual dishonesty, which without outright lying amount to misrepresentation of the truth, often through concealment or through variations of the smear technique . . . The fact that she does not say in so many words . . . makes it a worse lie, because more specious and evasive than a lie direct. There are many examples of this kind of misrepresentation strewn through her ‘autobiographies.’ Indeed the peculiar effect of untruthfulness created by what she writes is that there is so little, often, that can be pinned down and refuted while so much, at the same time is insinuated.”15

  Of Hellman’s three volumes of memoirs, McCarthy was particularly incensed by the most recent, Scoundrel Time, which “distort[s] events which are part of the plaintiff’s time, distort and aggrandize her relationship to these events and are harshly unfair to many individuals, a few of whom are still living (or were at the time of publication) but most of whom are dead and unable to defend themselves.”16

  When news of the lawsuit broke, Hellman’s friends took sides, not always hers. Norman Mailer went so far as to take out an ad in the magazine of the SundayNew York Times, pleading with both women to back off; Hellman ended her friendship with Mailer. William Styron mildly characterized the lawsuit to a reporter as “unfortunate”; Hellman wrote him a stinging letter of rebuke, to which he replied with a long letter of appeasement and protestations of his regard for her. It was true, Styron wrote, that he wished Hellman had done nothing in the face of McCarthy’s attack; he thought silence much the best response to gratuitous insults. However, he assured Hellman of his “fondest love for you which, despite falterings and differences has never failed.” It may say more about Styron than Hellman that he later wrote to his daughter, Susanna, in a different vein: “Miss Hellman, I fear, is utterly insane and loathsome to everyone, but is mercifully immobilized by her cigarette, her blindness, feebleness and venom and so can really bite no one seriously.”17

  “Lillian,” Joseph Rauh said to her on the telephone, “every one of us has told a fib now and then. If this ever got to court, they could bring up every word you ever wrote or said and examine it for truthfulness. Do you really want that?” Hellman hung up in a rage.18 Hellman’s friend Dr. Milton Wexler told her directly that she would lose the case; she replied: “I’m going to destroy that bitch. I’m going to prove that she’s stupid, I’m going to prove that she doesn’t know how to write, that nobody should respect her.”19

  The lawsuit dragged on for more than three years. At one point Ephraim London asked Ben O’Sullivan to lunch. London suggested that if McCarthy would publicly apologize for her remarks, Hellman might withdraw the lawsuit. McCarthy refused. Her position was that she had spoken the truth and she wanted to face Hellman in court.

  And all the while McCarthy was gathering evidence, reading Hellman’s work closely, asking everyone who knew anything about Hellman’s life to help her. “People came out of the woodwork to corroborate Mary’s experience. . . . Mary was just alight with excitement. She was hot on the trail . . . She loved every minute of it.”20

  Martha Gellhorn, whose distaste for Hellman dated to 1937 and their shipboard meeting en route to France, wrote an article for the Paris Review casting an eyewitness’s doubt on almost every aspect of Hellman’s account of her experiences in Spain.21 Through Stephen Spender, who had been a friend of Muriel Gardiner’s since the 1930s, McCarthy learned about “Julia,” the one Hellman story that was not amorphous but full of extraordinarily specific details that might prove to be “the lie direct.” “Lizzie [Hardwick] has had a very sharp, indeed brilliant thought about ‘Julia,’” McCarthy wrote to her lawyer. “If the story was true
, what made Hellman change the names. Nobody could have been hurt . . . it could only have redounded to the dead friend’s credit to have the story told and her name honored. In fact it was H’s duty to proclaim ‘Julia’s’ heroism.”22

  In the late 1960s, or early seventies, in any case shortly before she wrote the Julia story, Hellman had tried it out on a number of people. One day, at lunch, she told Norman Podhoretz that she was in a quandary; there had been an incident in her life, she said, which she had promised to keep secret, but now she felt impelled to write about it. Podhoretz heard her out and failed to see why the story should be kept secret.

  “So you think it would be okay if I wrote about it?” Hellman asked him. Podhoretz assured her that he saw no reason not to.23

  Peter Feibleman, too, had been told the story of Hell-man’s girlhood friend who had been killed resisting the Nazis. Feibleman was staying with Hellman on the Vineyard as she wrote the story; she showed him pages as she went along, figuring out the details with him—what sort of wallpaper might have hung in a Berlin cafe in the 1930s? What would the entrance to the funeral parlor have looked like? Which ship might she have taken to bring Julia’s body back to the States? “Because I was interested in what she was doing,” Feibleman wrote, “it never occurred to me at the time that people would take all the details of the story for literal truth, since it seemed so clear that she was fusing fact and fiction.”24

  Podhoretz, who had believed the story when Hellman told it to him over lunch, read “Julia” when it was published in Pentimento in 1973 and found it incredible: “The story as she had told it seemed genuine enough, but on paper it came out sounding as false as everything else she had written in the same Hemingway-via-Hammett prose style.”25 Reviewing Pentimento, Clive James, the Australian critic, also felt a pervasive tone of falsity: “For the truth is that the Julia chapter, like all the others, happens in a dream . . . the story reads like a spysketch by Nichols and May . . . To have been there, to have seen it, and yet still be able to write it down so that it rings false—it takes a special kind of talent.”26

  Hellman’s confidence in “Julia” had not been shaken by a few negative reviews. Muriel Gardiner’s letter to her, dated October 1976, may have given her some pause, but Hellman had decided to ignore the letter. And for a number of years, as she heard nothing more from Gardiner, and no one else came forward to challenge the story, Hellman doubled down on her claim to Julia, repeating to an interviewer what she had written in the story: “But nothing on God’s earth could have shaken my memory about [ Julia.] I did finally look at whatever notes I had left, but I didn’t need to.”27

  Not long before the movie of “Julia” was released in 1977, Hellman posed for an advertisement for Blackglama mink. A full page photograph of herself swathed in fur, seemingly naked underneath, holding a lit cigarette, appeared in national women’s magazines. It was one of a series of such advertisements—What Becomes a Legend Most—that included women, most of them movie stars, so famous they did not need to be named. Hellman’s face was as famous as any. As famous as Jane Fonda’s, who played Lillian in the movie of Julia, or Vanessa Redgrave’s who played Julia. Julia was released without incident in 1977. It won three Oscars. Hellman’s triumph seemed unchallengeable, and she went on to other things. She worked on the comments she was adding to the edition of her collected memoirs to be published under the title Three, in 1979. She wrote her novella, Maybe, which was published a year later.

  But in the spring of 1983, as Hellman’s suit against McCarthy slowly wound its way through the legal system, Muriel Gardiner was about to publish Code Name Mary, her own account of her experiences in the Austrian underground. In the introduction to her book Gardiner wrote that she had been “struck by the many similarities between my life” and Hell-man’s character of Julia. And just as Code Name Mary was about to be released, the New York Times picked up on a possible literary scandal. The respected biographer Joseph Lash, who had written biographies of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, had given Gardiner’s book a cover blurb which seemed very pointed: “No self-styled thriller can match this book’s story. There are no fantasies. Names are named. There are real Socialists and Communists as well as Nazis and Fascists. They are recognizable and verifiable.”

  In an interview with the Times, Lash was asked whether he had been thinking of Hellman’s “Julia,” when he wrote Gardiner’s blurb. He admitted that he had been. “The thing that appalled me,” Lash said, “was that ‘Julia’ ends up with Lillian Hellman bringing Julia’s body back to this country. Well, if Julia is, in effect, Muriel Gardiner, then I think readers are entitled to some explanation.”

  The Times reported Hellman’s response: “Miss Hellman said that she had never heard of Dr. Gardiner until this week. ‘She may have been the model for somebody else’s Julia, but she was certainly not the model for my Julia,’ she said.”

  Had Gardiner written her a letter?

  “Miss Hellman said if she received such a letter she doesn’t remember it.” Informed by the Times reporter that Gardiner had been given assurances by the director of the Austrian underground archives that she was the only American woman whose name was recorded in the archives of the resistance movement, Hellman responded: “Who would keep archives of an underground movement? That’s comedy stuff. A real underground movement would have been in hiding and would have had almost no records.”28

  The chutzpah of Hellman’s challenge is breathtaking: she knew better about the record-keeping habits of underground movements in the Nazi era than the director of its archives. Cornered, she had held her ground. But in May, just as Gardiner’s book was released, Hellman tried to arrange a meeting with Gardiner, hoping to persuade her to make a statement denying that she was Julia. Gardiner first agreed to see her, but she had learned enough about Hellman at that point to be wary, and the meeting never took place. At one point Gardiner received a telephone call from Hellman’s analyst, Dr. George Gero; he asked whether she would make a statement to that effect that she was not Julia. Gardiner replied that she would have to “disappoint” Miss Hellman; since she had never claimed to be Julia, she could not claim not to be.29

  And now, Hellman’s loyal lawyer, Ephraim London, was pleading with Hellman for Julia’s real name. Hellman flailed. At lunch with London and Blair Clark, she came up with a name, but it was soon clear that she had pulled it out of thin air. She then said that she had received a threatening letter from a lawyer named “Wolf ” telling her that Julia’s family would sue her for defaming them if she named them.

  Where was this letter?

  Hellman couldn’t find it.

  How could it be that Julia’s parents were still alive? Hellman was in her late seventies; hadn’t she and Julia been girl-hood friends?

  Oh, no, Hellman suddenly remembered; Julia was actually ten years younger than she was.30

  For so many years Hellman had cultivated and, for the most part, achieved a reputation as a woman of moral courage, honesty, and integrity. The McCarthy suit, if it came to court, would bring down the edifice of her life. Did she not understand how vulnerable she was? McCarthy speculated that Hellman was so convinced of her own rectitude, so “persuaded . . . of her version of the truth,” that she was “deaf to any other.”31 Sid Perelman, Hellman’s friend of more than forty years, had written to a mutual friend of theirs in 1974: “I’m in a cold rage at La Hellman . . . people have been feeding her vanity to the point where it’s becoming insufferable . . . the compliments that she’s forced out of us to buttress her self-esteem . . . the phone calls from her publishers congratulating her, and all that sort of rot piled upon the hosannas about [An Unfinished Woman] have puffed her ego out of all recognition.”32

  It was no secret to Hellman’s friends that she “didn’t know the boundary between fact and fiction,” as Norman Mailer said after Hellman’s death.33 In her personal life this would matter only to her friends; they could take her with a grain of salt, or not at all. But Hellman had a publ
ic life, and she wrote about it. She wrote about herself as witness to the world—in Moscow, in Spain, in Vienna and Berlin, in Finland, in Washington, at the very time of crucial historical events. Her readers saw the world through her eyes. She wrote about her relations with celebrated people—Hammett, Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Scott Fitzgerald—and her readers saw them through her often unadmiring eyes. Does it matter if she was actually in all those places, at those times, and if she saw what she said she did? Does it matter if the tales she tells about other writers are true? Does it matter if one or many of the stories that make up her memoirs are invented? Readers enjoyed them and, after all, every memoirist, everyone who tries to tell a true story for that matter, fails in some degree. It is not truth that is tricky and unreliable, as Hellman would have it. Memory is the problem: the color of a dress, the arrangement of furniture in a room, the words of a conversation—these things can be lost or confused. Truth remains in the facts; facts can be verified, but only if the writer cares to do so.

  Hellman either knew or did not know a Julia. Stalin did or did not offer Hellman an interview. A voice from the balcony of the HUAC hearing room did or did not call out to congratulate her for her guts. Hemingway did or did not suggest that she join him on the balcony in Spain to watch the beauty of the falling bombs. She did or did not belong to the Communist Party.

  A few years ago the historian and author Timothy Garton Ash, whose subject is Central and Eastern Europe, wrote with strong feeling about what he called the “frontier” between the “literature of fact” and the “literature of fiction”: