Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Lillian Hellman.
March Is Women's History Month
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Winter 1980-81 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest, for old "new leftists", perhaps. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.
Lillian Hellman vs. Mary McCarthy:
What Becomes a Legend Most?
Two such literary legends as Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy squabbling over who's a liar and who's a slanderer, with over a million bucks at stake, certainly isn't very becoming. But these really aren't two bitter old ladies locked in senile death-battle over whose cat killed the canary. Although New York intelligentsia clique fights are often best left to Woody Allen ("I hear Dissent and Commentary are fusing—they're calling it Dysentery," he said in Annie Hall), this case did provoke a few thoughts.
Two self-serving myths of American liberalism are in collision here, with roots going back to the '30s when so many literati had heady affairs with communism. The current fracas was kicked off by Mary McCarthy's caustic comment on the Dick Cavett show last January that "Lillian Hellman...is terribly overrated, a bad writer and dishonest writer... every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." So liberal darling/ feminist heroine Hellman, author of Scoundrel Time and the memoir which became the popular movie Julia, promptly sued McCarthy et al. for $1.7 million, claiming "mental anguish" and "injury in her profession."
But it isn't really the money, or literary reputation, that Hellman and McCarthy are fighting over—the real question is whose legend will prevail. Hellman's defenders cite her defense of "simple decency" before the infamous 1952 HUAC trials. Many of McCarthy's partisans, on the other hand, recall her image as a righteously indignant seeker-for-truth, attacking Stal¬in's brutal repression and exposing the cheery "men of good will" Popular Front lies fellow travelers like Hellman spouted. Of course it is to Hellman's credit that she refused to fink to HUAC—unlike Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets and so many others—and to McCarthy's that she recognized the Moscow Trials for the vicious frame-up they were. Yet the truth is rather more complicated, and even though a lot of blood's flowed under the bridge since the '30s and '40s, it's obvious the old wars haven't been forgotten (and why not; after all, for many their brush with communism was the most vivid, important part of their lives). As we pointed out in a Workers Vanguard (18 June 1976) review of Scoundrel Time: "Hellman's memoir...confirms the general warning appropriate to the confessional genre: look out for what is omitted— although [Hellman] explains her stand before HUAC by 'these simple rules of human decency,' life was not so simple, she was not so simple, and it was all political."
Hellman was a well-known Stalinist fellow traveler, as McCarthy remembers full well. Hellman joined the Stalinists in cheering on their bloody Popular Front policies in the Spanish Civil War, while McCarthy supported the POUMists being butchered on Stalin's orders. Hellman's "simple decency" didn't extend to the victims of the 1936 Moscow Trials frame-up, nor to the Trotskyist leaders sent to prison in 1943 under the U.S. Smith Act, nor to artists like the Russian composer Shostakovich, muzzled and harassed by the bureaucra¬cy while she burbled on about the progressive culture of the USSR. No wonder McCarthy today still can't stand Hellman, wrapped up in her Blackglama mink and utterly snobbish self-congratulations as just another well-bred white Southern lady steeped in "old-fashioned American traditions."
Of course Mary McCarthy did her bit for the Cold War, abandoning her earlier Trotskyist sympathies. During the '50s she opposed the anti-Communist witchhunts only because they gave real anti-Communism a bad name with their "red-neck anti-intellectual boorish methods," and attacked "the Communist's concealment of his ideas and motives" in a speech to the notoriously Cold War, anti-Communist American Committee for Cultural Freedom. Still, to her credit McCarthy did break with the Cold War crowd relatively early during the Vietnam War, and wrote a good book exposing U.S. imperialism's crimes in Vietnam—and attacking those '50s organizations she had addressed. Polemicizing against Diana Trilling in her book Hanoi, McCarthy wrote:
"I reject Mrs. Trilling's call to order.... And if as a result of my ill-considered actions, world Communism comes to power, it will be too late then, I shall be told to be sorry. Never mind. Some sort of life will continue, as Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavski, Daniel have discovered, and I would rather be on their letterhead, if they will allow me, than on that of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, which in its days of glory, as Mrs. Trilling will recall, was eager to exercise its right of protest on such initiatives as the issue of a U.S. visa to Graham Greene and was actually divided within its ranks on the question of whether Senator Joseph McCarthy was a friend or enemy of domestic liberty."
It's too bad Hellman and McCarthy have chosen to battle it out on the rather obscure terrain of purely personal "morality," since both know where plenty of bodies are buried. But they seem to have settled for enshrinement in a panoply of petty-bourgeois legends of liberalism. As Trotskyists we have long pointed out that such legendary "personal morality" does not stand outside class politics. This case proves it doesn't even stand above vicious squabbles over money. Nor can we help noting that Hellman hasn't forgotten at least one of the grand old Stalinist traditions—she's still seeking revenge against her enemies through the capitalist state.
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