By MICHAEL MOYNIHAN
The Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2012
Hellman disdained a system that made her fabulously rich while romanticizing one that made its citizens spectacularly poor.
Upon returning from the Soviet Union in 1933, the British writer Malcolm Muggeridge, stunned by the privation and state terror of communism, wondered how it was possible that "so many obvious and fundamental facts about Russia are not noticed even by serious and intelligent visitors." In 1937, as Stalin commenced his psychopathic purge of "Trotskyite enemies," the serious and intelligent playwright Lillian Hellman arrived in Moscow a stalwart supporter of Bolshevism, eager to demonstrate Muggeridge's point.
Upon returning from the Soviet Union in 1933, the British writer Malcolm Muggeridge, stunned by the privation and state terror of communism, wondered how it was possible that "so many obvious and fundamental facts about Russia are not noticed even by serious and intelligent visitors." In 1937, as Stalin commenced his psychopathic purge of "Trotskyite enemies," the serious and intelligent playwright Lillian Hellman arrived in Moscow a stalwart supporter of Bolshevism, eager to demonstrate Muggeridge's point.
Hellman, who cycled between writing for the theater and fattening her wallet producing Hollywood melodrama, would cite this Potemkin visit to Moscow as inspiration for "The North Star," her 1943 screenplay celebrating a verdant collective farm in Ukraine whose productive peasants—singing, insouciant comrades—were rudely dispersed by invading Nazis. The critic Mary McCarthy, who would later emerge as one of Hellman's fiercest detractors, declared the film a "tissue of falsehoods woven of every variety of untruth."
The script earned Hellman an Oscar nomination. But a decade later it would also earn her a subpoena from the House Committee on Un-American Activities—and a reputation as an iron-spined dissident. In a letter to the committee, Hellman declared that she would not "cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions," while insisting that she had little interest in politics.
Like most of Hellman's public statements about her political activities, this was a lie. It is because of her political activism that Hellman, whose literary output was of variable quality, has been the subject of countless biographies and academic studies. In "A Difficult Woman," Alice Kessler-Harris, a professor of history at Columbia University, returns to this well-tilled soil, offering an "empathetic view of Hellman and her politics."
Like most book-length treatments of Hellman, "A Difficult Woman" is less concerned with her oeuvre than with relitigating the politics of anticommunism. Now that key claims of American radicalism have been upended by revelations from the Soviet archives—the innocence of Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg, the independence of the American Communist Party—Ms. Kessler-Harris grouses that "victory went to those who defined communism as the enemy of national security."
A Difficult Woman
By Alice Kessler-Harris
(Bloomsbury, 439 pages, $30)
(Bloomsbury, 439 pages, $30)
One can dip into a shallow reserve of sympathy for those who, like Muggeridge, were briefly seduced by utopianism and soon disabused by reality. But Hellman deserves no such leniency. Ms. Kessler-Harris marvels that Hellman "dedicated much of her life to the cause of civil liberties; in return, she earned the Stalinist label." This is giving Hellman short shrift: she worked rather hard to earn the Stalinist label.
Consider: Hellman zealously supported the Moscow line on Trotsky, offering no criticism when he was murdered by Kremlin agents; she defended Stalin's mass executions of party cadres in 1937-38, signing a petition that accused the victims of being "spies and wreckers" of socialism; she supported Stalin's alliance with Nazi Germany, despite her supposed devotion to "anti-fascism," and defended Moscow's indefensible invasion of Finland in 1939-40, claiming that the country supported Nazism and deserved no pity, a scurrilous lie that Ms. Kessler-Harris leaves unchallenged.
Hellman disdained a system that made her fabulously rich while romanticizing one that made its citizens spectacularly poor. And as Hellman biographer Carl Rollyson noted, she never made "more than a grudging admission of how profoundly wrong she was about Stalin." Unlike Martin Heidegger and Ezra Pound, both of whom supported a different genocidal tyrant, Hellman barely saw her reputation suffer because of her repellent allegiances.
Ms. Kessler-Harris's defense of Hellman and others who refused to abjure Stalinism will sound familiar. While some party apparatchiks were "vaguely aware in the 1930s of Stalin's increasingly ruthless methods"—a rather limp way of describing a roiling genocide—one must remember that "this was, after all, a period when rumors flew." Soviet enthusiasts like Hellman, Ms. Kessler-Harris writes, were merely showing a commitment to "social justice" and not Stalinism per se. The Communist Party plumped for the noble goals of racial equality and a vaguely defined "peace," leading Ms. Kessler-Harris to ask: "How could [Hellman] not have joined?" It is a question easily answered by Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe and countless other liberal intellectuals who understood the axiomatic immorality of Bolshevism.
Ms. Kessler-Harris claims that American anti-communists waged campaigns "filled with hyperbole and outright lies." But it was the Stalinists, Hellman included, who made falsehood a core principle. Her penchant for fantastical tales prompted Mary McCarthy's acid comment that "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' " The story of Hellman's friendship with "Julia," an Austrian working in the anti-fascist resistance whom she supposedly assisted, was put forward in Hellman's memoir "Pentimento" (1973) and made into a Hollywood film. The story, it turned out, was cribbed from an acquaintance. (The film's director would later denounce Hellman as a "phony.")
Ms. Kessler-Harris acknowledges Hellman's prevarications only grudgingly, resorting to a tedious postmodern explanation that writers are entitled to their own version of "truth"—though Hellman insisted that stories like Julia's were literal truth. Despite voluminous evidence to the contrary, Ms. Kessler-Harris insists that Hellman's "concern for accuracy persisted throughout her life." Not when it came to her memoirs and certainly not when it came to communism's crimes. The previous draft of history was correct: The anticommunists were right, and Hellman was profoundly, inexcusably wrong.
Mr. Moynihan is a contributing editor of Reason magazine.
