Reenacting a literary claws célèbre
by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 12-8-2002


' Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'
- Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman, the "Dick Cavett Show," Oct. 18, 1979.

In certain circles, those words became known as The Line. It poisoned the final years of both Hellman and McCarthy, writers of high reputation, and reverberates through "Imaginary Friends," a new play with its book by Nora Ephron and music by Marvin Hamlisch. The Line caused Hellman to launch a $2.5 million lawsuit against McCarthy, which in turn led to the swift erosion of Hellman's own reputation. One message of the play: Words can have unpredictable consequences.

The Line joined Hellman and McCarthy in ways that had no foundation in life, which is why Ephron has placed them in an imagined world after each has died. In life, they didn't know each other. There was one glancing encounter, at Sarah Lawrence in 1948, where McCarthy was teaching for a semester. Hellman came to speak to the students, and McCarthy slipped in to listen. She heard Hellman say that novelist John Dos Passos ("U.S.A.," "Manhattan Transfer") broke with the Loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War because "he didn't like the food in Madrid."

McCarthy, who hated lies even more than she despised Stalinism, challenged Hellman.

"She was just brainwashing those girls - it was really vicious," McCarthy remembered later. "So finally I spoke up and said, 'I'll tell you why he broke with the Loyalists, and it wasn't a clean break.' started to tremble. She had rather aging wrinkled arms, bare, and on them were a lot of gold and silver bracelets - and all the bracelets started to jangle...."

McCarthy, a clear-eyed, unsentimental liberal, then explained that Dos Passos made his break because the Communists were much more efficient at killing liberals, socialists and anarchists on the Loyalist side than engaging the fascist army of Francisco Franco.

Across the years, McCarthy's irritation with Hellman grew at a distance. In 1952, Hellman was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, a major forum for the anti-Communist mania that took the generic name of McCarthyism (after Joseph McCarthy). She took the Fifth Amendment on most questions, but read a statement that contained another famous line:

"I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions."

That line was the basis of the later Hellman legend: that she was a brave and lonely voice for traditional American values. She didn't say that she was a member of the American Communist Party from 1938 to 1940. She was not fined or otherwise penalized, but she was blacklisted in Hollywood, where she had earned greats sums of money.

She told her version of the story in her memoir "Scoundrel Time" in 1976, a powerful piece of writing with many elisions and omissions. The legend grew. By the 1977 Academy Awards, Hellman was introduced by Jane Fonda as a martyr to principle and received the greatest of all American accolades: a standing O.

But McCarthy never bought the legend, saying in 1978: "I think it's still scoundrel time as far as she's concerned."

The politics of the Hellman-McCarthy quarrel might seem as remote now to some audiences as the Council of Trent. But Ephron has gone deeper into the lives of each woman, looking for those things that, in Auden's phrase about Yeats, hurt them into art.

Onstage, the two women keep going back to the events that shaped them: the injuries of childhood. When she was an 8-year-old in New Orleans, Hellman was shocked to see her beloved father in the company of a lover. A black maid urged her to say nothing. She became a lifelong liar, and in her plays and memoirs, some of those lies were transformed into superb art.

McCarthy was 6 when her parents died in the 1918 influenza epidemic, leaving Mary and her three younger brothers as orphans. The Dickensian story of those years is told in her fine 1957 book, "Memories of a Catholic Girlhood." Not told at the time what had happened, she was made to feel guilty, and used her high intelligence in a lifelong pursuit of truth.

On the surface, they had little in common. McCarthy was beautiful; Hellman was not. During the Depression, Hellman made plenty of money from her plays and screenwriting; McCarthy, primarily a critic for Partisan Review and The Nation, lived more austerely. Hellman inhabited a world of celebrities; McCarthy was an uneasy, and snobbish, resident of Bohemia.

Fighting words

Both, in different ways, used language as armor, employing irony, the barbed remark, the withering insult as a means of striking at a perceived enemy or warding off hurt.

Both took many lovers. McCarthy would marry four times, including among her husbands the great literary journalist Edmund Wilson, who urged her to write fiction, but was brutal and tyrannical behind closed doors.

Hellman married only once, in the 1920s to writer Arthur Kober. But in 1931 in Hollywood, she began an affair with Dashiell Hammett that would endure until Hammett's 1961 death in her Manhattan townhouse. Hammett, an ex-Pinkerton and a groundbreaking writer of crime fiction ("The Maltese Falcon," "The Thin Man"), was a committed Communist and probably urged Hellman into the party in 1938.

Even in the 1930s, when young Mary McCarthy was a kind of fellow traveler, she was too intelligent to embrace the Communist creed. She saw clearly that Stalinism was a monstrous lie about a socialist utopia, one that would create millions of corpses.

But in some ways, McCarthy's truthobsessed intelligence prevented her from becoming a major literary artist, while Hellman's gifts for invention led to such plays as "The Children's Hour," "The Little Foxes" and "Toys in the Attic." Ephron's play asks: What, in the end, was more valuable?

Built into Ephron's play is the possibility of a conversation and a conciliation that, in life, never took place. The lawsuit went on until June 30, 1984, when Hellman died. McCarthy, who expended much time and money defending The Line, was unsentimental to the end.

"I didn't want her to die," said McCarthy, who died at 77 in 1989. "I wanted her to lose in court. I wanted her around for that."

Originally published on December 11, 2002