A Difficult Woman (57 page)

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
.”
⁹³
The 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 Star
negatively, 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.”
¹⁰³
Hellman 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.