A Difficult Woman (60 page)

The swiftly unfolding events quickly turned friends into enemies. When Norman Mailer begged the two women, in print, to reconcile, Richard Poirier wrote a passionate defense of his old friend Hellman. Mailer responded with a personal note that he copied to several of the literati. “Your righteous mind and sulphurous bottom,” he wrote to Poirier, “produce much brimstone.”
¹⁵⁹
Hellman promptly broke off a thirty-year friendship with Mailer. “I am sorry about you and me,” she wrote to him, “genuinely sorry.”
¹⁶⁰
Hellman reached out to Barbara Epstein—an editor at the
New York Review of Books
with whom she had long been close. Epstein responded cautiously, indicating her distress at the lawsuit and hoping that they could “meet again soon.”
¹⁶¹
Then in private correspondence with McCarthy, Epstein expressed her distaste for Hellman. She refused Hellman's subsequent requests to meet. Hellman expressed only a little regret at this. “My lawsuit against Mary McCarthy,” she wrote to her friend Dorothy Pritchett, “has caused Barbara to increase her already very stern dislike of me. She actually told me that she thought it was disgraceful of me to take so crazy a statement seriously and to cause McCarthy pain.”
¹⁶²
Bob Silvers, editor of the
New York Review of Books
and for a decade Hellman's colleague in the Committee for Public Justice, rallied to McCarthy's side. A year or so after the lawsuit was filed, he wrote to McCarthy to tell her that he had denounced Lillian's suit to her face: “Since then silence from her and most of her friends.”
¹⁶³
Elizabeth Hardwick (also part of the
New York Review of Books
circle and the ex-wife of Lillian's friend Robert Lowell) had offended Lillian in 1967 with a scathing review of a revival of
The Little Foxes
. Now she tried to organize her friends to write a public letter condemning the suit. The letter, she suggested, would support Mary McCarthy's position that she was entitled to express her opinions freely.
¹⁶⁴

But Hellman remained staunch in the face of criticism. Bill Alfred, who had arranged her first job at Harvard, wrote to tell her that he hadn't called to talk about the suit because “I would have to tell you that I think it mistaken.”
¹⁶⁵
Hellman replied with uncharacteristic dispassion. “I don't think we will ever agree about the Mary McCarthy mess … You must know from the tone of my letter that I was offended by yours. But that, of course, will heal, and has nothing to do with an old affection, and one that I hope can soon be mended.”
¹⁶⁶
Bill Styron wrote her a letter of apology when a reporter quoted him saying that the lawsuit “was unfortunate all around.” Hellman accepted the apology, which was filled with admiration and praise, telling him, “I am deeply glad we can continue in great friendship with each other.”
¹⁶⁷

Some took sides on the grounds that the rich, vindictive Lillian wanted to pursue the lawsuit merely to bankrupt McCarthy. Hellman, irascible and old, they suggested, wanted only revenge. Rumor spread that the lawsuit would cripple McCarthy financially and wreck her health.
¹⁶⁸
Hellman had little sympathy. “Quite simply I feel I was treated in a most brutal fashion and, while I have no desire to ruin her, or anybody else, I have heard no words of apology or attempt to make one.”
¹⁶⁹
Lillian, McCarthy's friends carped, was represented without charge by her old friend Ephraim London. But McCarthy was no victim. Though she worried about the money the lawsuit would cost, especially if it went to trial, she desperately wanted victory. Two years into the proceedings, she received a $25,000 contribution from an anonymous “angel” and around the same time bought herself a new fur coat.
¹⁷⁰
Lillian insisted throughout the entire ordeal that money was not the object. Honor was at stake. McCarthy's assertions of lying, she argued, constituted the last straw in a long campaign to undermine the integrity that Hellman held so dear. Egged on by friends, one of whom wrote, “Here's hoping you get every nickel she's got,” she withheld public comment about McCarthy's refusal to say she was sorry.
¹⁷¹
In the meantime, and over London's objections, Hellman sent several checks to cover some of the cost of court expenses. “Please, please, please,” she wrote to London, “If you do not accept any money from me, I will become an even greater cripple than I am.”
¹⁷²

1983: She grew increasingly frail. (Photofest)

All this took second place to the most forceful argument against the suit, and perhaps the one that rankled most. Increasingly, the literati focused their discontent on what they viewed as Hellman's attack on freedom of expression. Hellman's suit, insisted her detractors and some of her friends, violated an unspoken code of writers. As Gellhorn put the case to McCarthy, “Miss H, by resorting to libel law, has broken an ancient and noble tradition of writers, which is to call each other any names they like, in print, insult not law being the proper behavior.”
¹⁷³
Herself the victim of blacklisting, Hellman was now thought to be engaged in muffling the free expression of others, leading some to say that she embraced the First Amendment only in her own defense. When Hellman dismissed Stephen Spender's support of Mary McCarthy as coming from someone who had “long been a member of the anti-Hellman group,” he responded quickly.
¹⁷⁴
He had never heard of an “anti-Hellman group,” he told her, and then later explained his opposition to the suit. “I think such cases, whatever the provocation, lower the status of literature. A writer, after all, is someone who believes in the power of words, and if he wishes to defend himself he can do so in language without resort to the law.”
¹⁷⁵
Others thought the suit could have devastating effects. “Should it be successful,” Charles Collingwood wrote to McCarthy, sympathetically, “it would have the most inhibiting effect on critical comment within whose bounds of propriety your observations certainly fell.”
¹⁷⁶

Hellman, bothered by this line of attack, consulted Burke Marshall, distinguished law professor at Yale and an active member of the Committee for Public Justice. Marshall gave her little comfort, but he was in an odd position. He was an old friend of Renata Adler, once Lillian's protégé and now on McCarthy's side. Lillian turned to him in 1983, as the suit dragged on, to ask whether he could support her position in the suit. Marshall replied in the negative. “I think the courts should be left out of that kind of business and that it should be left up to dispute in other places.”
¹⁷⁷

Through almost four years, while the lawsuit bounced around, Hellman grew increasingly frail. What was left of her eyesight diminished rapidly. Sometimes she could hardly breathe. Often she had to be carried in and out of public appearances that she stoutly refused to cancel. Still, she had one more victory to savor. McCarthy's lawyers tried to get the courts to issue a summary judgment against the case on the grounds that Lillian Hellman, as a public figure, was fair game for criticism. Ephraim London responded by claiming that Hellman was not a public figure at all. The claim drew loud chortles from some of Hellman's enemies. But it
persuaded Judge Harold Baer Jr., who, after many months of delay, refused the plea. “In addition to being a person of general notoriety,” Baer wrote in May of 1984, “a public figure must be someone who is involved in a public issue, question, or controversy.”
¹⁷⁸
Siding with Hellman, the judge reminded the participants of McCarthy's deposition. Hellman might not consciously have lied, McCarthy conceded there. She was not speaking of “ ‘prevarication per se' or a conscious intent to state an untruth.” “I don't mean literally nothing when I say ‘nothing in her writing rings true,' “ McCarthy said. “I don't mean of course … say perhaps 70 per cent of her factual statements are probably true … I mean the general tone of unconvincingness and falseness.” Asked directly if she thought that all of Hellman's writings were in fact lies, she replied: “I would say, no.”
¹⁷⁹
Under the circumstances, to call Hellman a “dishonest writer,” the judge concluded, “crosses the boundary between opinion and fact.”
¹⁸⁰

Both sides now regeared for action. McCarthy promptly hired distinguished First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams to represent her in court. Hellman claimed to relish the court trial that would soon occur. The trial never happened. Hellman grew sicker and more irascible by the day, and a month later she was gone. McCarthy, hearing the news, expressed sorrow only that she would not get her day in court.

Life owes it to you to die your own way.

—Lillian Hellman
,
Harvard lecture, 1961

You don't necessarily have to like her, but you should understand her. It's more about empathy than sympathy.

—William Luce

It may be that her life, with its strong loyalties, combative courage and abiding hatred of injustice, will eventually be considered her greatest theatre.

—Robert Brustein

Lillian Hellman died in her home on Martha's Vineyard on June 30, 1984, a few days after her seventy-ninth birthday. The night before, Bill Styron carried her into a small dinner party at John and Barbara Hersey's. She ate and drank almost nothing, but she was in good spirits and planned a fishing expedition for the next morning. Anecdote has it that she propositioned a guest at dinner, inviting him back to her place for a nightcap. He declined the playful request. She returned home after dinner to the care of her nurse and housekeeper and died quietly in the night. The coroner listed the death as coronary arrest, but most likely the underlying cause was the emphysema from which she had suffered for years.

Her death was no surprise. Over a period of several years, Hellman had become increasingly frail. Bronchial problems caused by her ubiquitous cigarettes impeded her blood circulation and contributed to heart failure; a series of small strokes reduced her ability to walk and eventually to eat by herself; glaucoma and cataracts reduced her eyesight to near zero. Hellman's eyesight became so poor by the winter of 1980 that she could no longer read a printed page. At that point her helpers began to write in large spiral-bound notebooks, using bold markers to make block letters. The notebooks contain schedules and plans, as well as reminders to Lillian. The one she kept from February to March 1980, while she was in California, includes a poignant comment on her troubles that winter. A single page, written in block letters, contained the words: “MARY MACARTHY QUOTE ON THE DICK CAVETT SHOW: EVERY WORD SHE WRITES IS A LIE INCLUDING ‘AND' AND ‘THE.'”
¹

That was the winter that Hellman spent in San Francisco, where she celebrated the publication of
Three
, a single-volume edition of her memoirs. Billy Abrahams, her editor, arranged a tribute to the book at the Marin County Veterans' Center and agreed that he and Peter Feibleman would host the event. As it turned out, Hellman was too weak to make the trip without help, and Abrahams and Feibleman together assisted her onto the stage. Abrahams introduced her to an enthusiastic crowd, telling them that she was ill but that “she said if she had to, she'd come by ambulance. And in fact, she did.”
²
Her appearance, said Abrahams, demonstrated her “indomitability.” Peter Feibleman pitched in to read a section of
Pentimento
for her. Hellman read two pages from a new afterword she wrote for
Scoundrel Time.
“I am angrier now than I hope I will ever be again,” the piece concluded, and then went on to say that she wanted to take the moral stand she tried to avoid taking when she wrote
Scoundrel Time.
“I never want to live again to watch people turn into liars and cowards and others into frightened, silent collaborators. And to hell with the fancy reasons they give for what they did.”
³
The audience gave her a rousing ovation, and Lillian left in a limousine followed by two ambulances, one of them filled with friends, just in case.

The next day, the writer Kay Boyle wrote to her friend Jessica Mitford, also Lillian's friend. She was, she wrote, shattered by the “macabre performance” of the previous evening: “The ambulance might have been a hearse from which they lifted the poor, desperately ill, emaciated creature that Lillian has become.” She blamed William Abrahams and the publishing house for “its total horror of exploitation.” And she spluttered that “that
terrible liquid cough that shook her was like a sound from the grave.”
⁴
Little did she suspect that Lillian had in fact insisted on appearing.