By ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS
Bloomsbury Press, 2012, 439 pages, $39.99 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
The writer, and one-time Trotskyist, Mary McCarthy, said in
a 1979 television interview that the celebrated playwright and one-time
Communist, Lillian Hellman, was not only over-rated but that ‘every word she
writes is a lie, including and and the’.
Hellman spent the last five years of her life suing McCarthy for libel.
As Kessler-Harris says in her biography of Hellman, this
famous literary feud was the culmination of a lifetime of attempts to discredit
Hellman by ranting conservatives and ‘respectable’ liberals whose illiberal
support for, or inaction in the face of, government attacks on freedom of
speech in 1950s America Hellman had held up to public reproach. The very name, ‘Lillian Hellman’, continues
to act as Pavlovian stimulus to a seething right-wing response of charges of
left-wing hypocrisy and totalitarian evil.
Hellman does not deserve this.
Hellman, galvanised by the Spanish Civil War, adopted
left-wing politics in the thirties, was a union organiser for the Screen
Writers’ Guild, was briefly a member of the US Communist Party (1939-41),
opposed the anti-communist government witch-hunts in the 1950s, was blacklisted
by Hollywood producers from the movie industry, bounced back to theatre and
movie success in the 1960s, was a strong but not uncritical supporter of the
New Left, Black rights and women’s liberation, before character assassination
brought her to a messy, litigious end.
The lies told about Hellman dwarf her own. A rigid Stalinist would not have, unlike
Hellman, condemned Soviet repression of writers, or opposed the party line
during the Nazi-Soviet pact by writing an overtly anti-fascist play (Watch on the Rhine). Although Hellman was late to see through some
Stalinist crimes, she did admit she had been wrong about Stalin, an awakening
delayed by her overriding concern about the march of fascism which saw her
adopt a stance of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’.
Like many other thirties’ communists, Hellman’s acceptance
of the Soviet Union as a model for a socialist society was motivated by her
commitment to a world free from the class, economic and racial injustice caused
by the power of money. When Senator
McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was persecuting
leftists, Hellman refused to turn on her party comrades, whose intentions had
been good, by courageously refusing to name names at her HUAC hearing in 1952.
Soviet and domestic communism was no threat to the US, said
Hellman, but McCarthyist attacks on freedom of thought and speech were. This stance infuriated the ‘cowardly
liberals’ who had junked their fine words on liberty for fear of being tarred
with the communist brush. Hellman’s 1976
memoir, Scoundrel Time, which revisited the political and personal
failure of America’s liberal intellectuals under McCarthyism reignited a storm
of anger from those she accused of moral failure who were now Cold War
political conformists bravely fighting repression in Russia, safely distant
from the struggle against political surveillance and the silencing of dissent
in their own backyard.
In smearing Hellman as a liar, her critics were aided by one
episode from Hellman’s memoirs. Her 1973
story, Julia, was an account of
Hellman’s purported effort to smuggle, in Berlin in 1939, a fur hat containing
$50,000 to a friend, Julia, who was active in the Austrian resistance. A 1977 film
(starring Jane Fonda as Hellman and Vanessa Redgrave as Julia) widely
publicised this daring act of anti-fascist heroics but it is “most likely”,
says Kessler-Harris, that Hellman had based her story on what she had heard
from a common friend about a Muriel Gardiner, a US psychiatrist, appropriating
this woman’s life for Hellman’s own ends.
In this, Hellman “overstepped the bounds of memoir”, letting
her life as a dramatist take over. This
was Hellman’s one ‘big lie’ which has been used ever since to opportunistically
tarnish Hellman’s lifelong moral and political integrity. Many of Hellman’s friends and admirers
retreated in the face of the onslaught and Hellman’s lawsuit against Mary
McCarthy in response was far from her finest hour.
The liberals who folded before HUAC could now absolve their
far greater sins before this one, far less significant, fictional fantasy by
Hellman. They had a field day but
Hellman loved a stoush and used her quick wit and biting sense of humour to
continue to show up the false friends of freedom who abandon history’s victims
as soon as the going gets personal.
No comments:
Post a Comment