The press
Nil nisi bunkum
Paul Johnson
Students of the American intellectual scene, and of the ferocious vendettas waged between its various political factions,. must been wryly amused by the obituaries British newspapers carried on the death of Lillian Hellman last week. Hellman was once best known for her plays The Children's Hour (1934) and The Little Foxes (1939), and for her much-proclaimed love-affair with the thriller writer Dashiell Hammett, who is said to have portrayed her as Nora in his 'Thin Man' stories. The papers could not agree about her age some said 77, others 79 — but they were united in acclaiming her as a major writer. `In the front rank of American dramaturgy', wrote Eric Shorter in the Daily Telegraph; 'one of the most distinguished playwrights of the 20th century' was the Times's ver- dict. The Sunday Telegraph's Rosemary Say described her as 'a respected and ac- claimed member of various American academies of arts and letters'. All agreed she was a courageous and honourable fighter against McCarthyism. The Times praised her 'refusal to compromise with the changing times' and, along with other papers, quoted her letter, declining to testify, to the House Un-American Ac- tivities Committee in 1952: 'I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions'. Clancy Sigal in the Guardian lauded her bravery and what he termed her 'no-nonsense humour and generous spirit'. She was 'dedicated', said the Times, `to the principles of freedom and tolerance'.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum, but this is ridiculous. Far from being dedicated to the principles of freedom, Lillian Hellman was a notorious Stalinist who frequently went on sponsored trips to Russia and hotly defended the party line throughout Stalin's heyday in the Thirties. For her, the Moscow purge trials were models of justice, and the evil Vishinsky, who prosecuted at them, a Jurisprudential hero. Not only did she de- fend the show trials: she fiercely attacked those Americans and European writers who dared to question their fairness. Later much later — she renounced Stalinism, but her repentance was ne',er more than per- functory: 'there are plenty of sins and plen- ty that for a long time I mistakenly denied.' She added: 'There is nothing in my life of which I am ashamed.' As for tolerance and 'generous spirit', she was remarkable for the unremitting hatred with which she pursued (especially in her 1976 autobiographical book Scoundrel Time) former left-wing intellectuals who testified to congressional committees, such as Clif- ford Odets, Budd Schulberg, Elia Kazan and Jose Ferrer. She was particularly bitter towards those, like Diana Trilling, who campaigned actively for democracy and who really did fight for 'the principles of freedom and tolerance'. Hellman's behaviour was, to some extent, excused by the sadness of Hammett's decline, after his blacklisting by Hollywood. But she herself did not suffer for her views. She was never subpoenaed by McCarthy, she testified
before a House committee for an hour or so without any repercussions, and, having taken the Fifth Amendment (which gave her legal immunity from self-incrimination), sLe was never cited on charges of contempt.
What none of the obituaries I have seen mentioned was that, towards the end of her life, Hellman came up against another Mc- Carthy, this time a more deadly female of the species. Mary McCarthy, appearing on the Dick Cavett TV Show, drew attention to Hellman's most persistent characteristics: a cavalier attitude towards the truth, Miss McCarthy went so far as to say: 'Every
word she writes is a lie, including "and" and "the".' In February 1980 Hellman brought a libel action against McCarthy, and earlier this year won an important preliminary hearing, the judge rejecting the argument of McCarthy's counsel that Hellman, being a public person, could not be libelled unless she could prove express malice and other preconditions.
The action will not now take place, but it served to place under scrutiny the reliability of Hellman's autobiographical writings, her chief claim to fame in recent years. The most celebrated of them is Pentimento (1973), which deals (in part) with her life in the Thirties and the struggle against Nazism. In particular, it describes her friend, a rich young American girl, referred to simply as 'Julia', who worked in the anti- fascist underground in Europe, was fatally wounded by the Nazis, and whose body Hellman brought back to America for cremation. This narrative was made into a film, Julia, starring Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman, Vanessa Redgrave as Julia, and Jason Robards Jr as Dashiell Hammett. Redgrave and Robards got Academy Awards for their performances, and one way and another it was all a great triumph for the Left.
In last month's issue of Commentary, however, Samuel McCracken of Boston University published a long article entitled ' "Julia" and Other Fictions by Lillian Hellman'. Some doubt about 'Julia's' iden- tity, or indeed existence, had been cast before (Clancy Sigal in his Guardian piece described her as Hellman's 'semi-mythical girlhood friend'). What McCracken demonstrates, by dint of checking Thirties railway timetables, steamship passenger lists and many other obscure sources, is that most of the facts Hellman provides about `Julia's' movements and actions, and in- deed her own, are not true. In 1983, a psy- choanalyst called Dr Muriel Gardiner published her memoirs, Code Name: Mary, showing that she had performed work remarkably similar to 'Julia' in the 1930s anti-fascist underground. Unlike Julia, however, she had not been mortally wound- ed by the Nazis, and survived to tell her tale. It is highly unlikely, to put it mildly, that there were two such American girl- agents, and survivors of the resistance do in fact insist there was only one. Knowledge of Dr Gardiner's work seems to have reached Hellman through a friend of the doctor's called Wolf Schwabacher, who became Hellman's attorney. When questioned about this mystery, Hellman always refused to answer, claiming she could not identify `Julia' for legal reasons. When McCracken and others put specific queries to her, their letters were ignored. McCracken's article shows beyond any doubt that many of the salient facts about Hellman!s account of `Julia's' activities and death were invented, and we must now conclude that 'Julia' herself did not exist, except of course in the persona of Dr Gardiner, whom Hellman never knew. Time will show whether other episodes in her writings, much treasured by the Left, are equally spurious.
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