Sam Leith
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A very funny series of digressions concerns her incessant, possibly fraudulent claims on her household insurance (eventually she struggled to find a company willing to insure her). Plus, for a champion of social justice, she did like the high life, once declaring: ‘Anybody’s a fool who doesn’t live in a hotel.’
She was also ballsy and self-willed. She had to be. She was on her own. Hellman was a Southerner, a woman and a Jew — though her relationship to none of those identities was straightforward. She laid claim to sexual, political and professional freedoms that set her against the grain of her time. And she was never quite settled in love. Her soul-mate, inasmuch as she had one, was Dashiell Hammett — but he never loved her quite as much as she loved him. She wrote herself, a little poignantly, more thoroughly into his story after his death. She was a tough broad, and in the final analysis a lonely one.
The more serious blot on her memory isn’t that she fictionalised her past to make herself look good: it’s that she actively defended Stalin even after knowledge of his purges had reached the West. That one, unfortunately, sticks. She joined the party after the Moscow trials, and in full knowledge of them, and she was one of the signatories to an open letter in support of them. She never publicly repudiated it.
Hellman’s long failure to condemn Stalinism even after she left the Communist party — and failure even then, as her enemies saw it, to condemn it sufficiently — is, in Kessler-Harris’s account, essentially a by-product of her unshakeable anti-fascism. Hellman grew up in an age when for intellectuals of the left, the great enemy was fascism and the likeliest bulwark against it looked like communism. She was just slower than most to come round.
Kessler-Harris portrays Hellman as having a child’s elementary sense of justice — and with it, perhaps, a child’s egocentricity and petulance. She saw McCarthyism harming America, and did not see communism — whatever the shortcomings of the Soviet experiment — as a threat to the nation’s security. Accordingly — and heroically — she refused to plead the Fifth at her hearing in front of the House Unamerican Activities Committee, refused to name names, and published a letter fiercely rebuking the procedures of the committee.
As to the lying, Kessler-Harris points out that Hellman herself repeatedly insisted on the fallibility of her own memory and the fugitive nature of truth. She was clear that she didn’t want her second volume of reminiscence, Pentimento, presented as a memoir at all. Even so, she did go a bit beyond the bounds of fuzzy recollection, appropriating in ‘Julia’, most notoriously, the story of a woman she’d never met as an anecdote from her own life.
So, it’s great to see a version of Hellman’s story that, without ignoring her faults, celebrates the extraordinary courage and doggedness she showed in championing civil liberties under Joe McCarthy. The story’s appeal, though, barely survives its telling. The prose is terribly stodgy. Kessler-Harris inflates her sentences with syntheton
and deadens their sense with second-order cliché. Ten pages apart we get a ‘passionate affair’ and a ‘passionate romance’. On a single page, New York is described as being home to ‘intellectual ferment’ and ‘cultural ferment’. In a single paragraph we get a ‘maelstrom of ideas’ and a ‘political maelstrom’. The same arguments, and the same quotations even, pop up again and again.
The sense of Hellman as a writer, too, which should surely be front and centre, is barely there: play after play, for instance, is dispatched with a dutiful précis of the plot followed by a two- or three-page pile-up of quotations from reviews. This is a shame: where we are allowed to hear Hellman’s own voice it is alive and affecting.
Here she is, following a miscarriage, to her husband Arthur Kober:
But please console me a little — I’m ashamed really — I always thought I was a super-creator of babies … please write more often and please love me. I miss you an awful lot.
Or here, reporting a bombardment in the Spanish civil war:
In a kitchen back of my hotel, a blind woman was holding the bowl of soup that she came to get each night. She was killed eating the bowl of soup. Finding the range on a blind woman eating a bowl of soup is a fine job for a man.
Did that blind woman exist? We will never know.
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