A Difficult Woman Read Free Page A

liar? … Whether or not (as a good friend once observed) she had a face that looked as if a mouse had died on it, she lied about her Party membership, she lied about Communist infiltration in the Wallace campaign, and she lied about anticommunist liberals and the magazines
Partisan Review
and
Commentary
, saying that they never attacked McCarthy.”
    The palpable anger embedded in these assertions emerges in the distortions they reaffirm. Hellman did, several times before 1976 and three times in
Scoundrel Time
, oppose the actions of Soviet dictators and admit that she had been wrong about Stalin; she was criticized for not saying so apologetically enough and with sufficient force. She did lie about her party membership, a necessary maneuver in the fifties when the economic consequences of admitting party membership could be dire. She continued to deny that she’d ever been in the party, as did many others who only after the fall of the Soviet Union admitted membership. 8 She informed Wallace that communists were involved in his campaign: that wasn’t illegal in 1948, just unpalatable. She did not accuse those magazines of failing to attack McCarthy: she accused them of not standing by the victims. In words infused with a passionate abhorrence of a long-dead woman, the critics repeated crude gossip, introduced irrelevant connections between Hellman’s appearance and her politics, and repeated charges no more accurate than Hellman’s defenses.
    I puzzled over whether these rifts could have been due to fallout surrounding the Communist Party, of which she, like many of her peers, was briefly a part. But others had long been forgiven party membership and honored to boot. Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, and Pete Seeger come immediately to mind. And, as this book demonstrates, neither in the period of her membership from 1939 to late 1941 nor afterward did she follow the party line. Robert Newman, who has studied the subject more carefully than anyone else, counts her as, at best, a bit player. 9 She was and remained what has come to be called a “fellow traveler.” She never gave up her visionof a society with a greater measure of social and racial justice, and she clung longer and more naïvely than many to the hope that the Soviet Union might mend itself and prove to be a reasonable model. Many of her friends, including Arthur Miller, Aaron Copland, and Marc Blitzstein, did as much.
    To what, then, was Hellman’s capacity to elicit vituperation and anger due? Certainly her self-righteous stance, her continuing moral certainty, and her willingness to fight back played a role. Her continuing belief that she had “done no harm” irked many. To those who recognized the horrors of Soviet Communism early on, she and others who continued to believe in the possibilities of socialism in any form seemed willfully blind or complicit. Hellman’s publicly acclaimed refusal to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952 fueled the anger of anticommunists who seethed at her unwillingness to acknowledge her sins and her escape from the punishments others experienced. Coming from a woman, the finger-pointing proved especially galling. But her greatest offense, and the one that called forth the most scathing denunciation, was her insistence on holding to account those who had failed to defend the victims of McCarthyism. Then and afterward she became, to anti-communists on the right and left, a kind of lightning rod, attracting public disapproval and criticism not because of her failures but because of her strengths. She had, after all, positioned herself as a truth teller, as a patriot acting in defense of American values.
    Hellman’s moralism (her insistence that she stood for truth, loyalty, antagonism to corruption, commitment to social justice, and racial egalitarianism) may have been her undoing, placing her, as it did, at the fulcrum of ideological disagreement.