Scoundrel Time

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`Scoundrel Time' is a harrowing, highly personal account of the events surrounding Lillian Hellman's appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC, in 1952. It was, to put it mildly, a tricky situation. Although Hellman did not `cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions,' the damage to her life and career were extensive. Even though she was not a friendly witness the Committee didn't cite her for contempt. That did nothing to save her from being blacklisted, however. Beyond a revealing look at a life disrupted by a government that felt, as Garry Wills puts it in his extended introduction, `Hollywood must be censored politically if nation was to be protected ideologically,' Hellman details the post-hearing shake-out. Without a chance to work at home, and with work abroad hindered by an ever-suspicious government, Hellman would eventually lose her home, a number of fair-weather friends, while we all lost a decade's worth of plays and screenplays. It's helpful to read Wills' introduction prior to Hellman's book. Wills writes that Hellman's scheduled appearance before the Committee `was especially dangerous because Miss Hellman was as little qualified to understand the Committee as it was to grasp her code of honor.' Wills supplies the context while Hellman concentrates on the emotions of someone undergoing a witch hunters' scrutiny. Wills rightly discerns an inability on Hellman's part to understand that Richard Nixon, Joe McCarthy, and others of their ilk were sincere Cold Warriors. All things considered Hellman displays a rather surprising dearth of rancor towards her persecutors, but she doesn't hide the fact that she considers them unscrupulous opportunists. `Scoundrel Time' was published in 1976, shortly after the resignation of one of Hellman's persecutors, Richard Nixon. To paraphrase Jimmy Breslin, the good guys finally won and it must have given an odd sense of satisfaction to those who lives were disrupted by his rise to power. Hellman is a flawed and vulnerable character in this memoir, and all the more human for it.

Desensitized for a long time to the stressful pain of the infamous McCarthy period, Scoundrel Time must have been a most cathartic memoir for Lillian Hellman to write; it is, of the autobiographical trilogy, the most unfeigned and succinct of the three books. Her voice resonates, echoes, and behind hers, the voices of other 'Red Scare' victims closely follow. This is not her book alone; it is a book belonging to a past, present and future generation of people who were, are, and regrettably will be, victims of slanderous tales and virulent gossip. Scoundrel Time searchingly delves into a dark time in our country when Freedom of Speech, Religion, Press, Assembly and Petitioning of government was on a gossamer threshold to nonexistence. This memoir was also clearly the most difficult one for Lillian Hellman to write, for as she herself says, "...I had a strange hangups and they are always hard to explain. Now I tell myself that if I can force them, maybe I can manage. The prevailing eccentricity was and is my inability to feel much against the leading figures of the period, the men who punished me. Senators McCarthy and McCarran, Representatives Nixon, Walter and Wood, all of them, were what they were: men who invented when necessary, maligned even when it wasn't necessary. I do not think they believed much, if anything, of what they said: the time was ripe for a new wave in America, and they seized their political chance to lead it along each day's opportunity, spit-balling whatever and with whoever came into view." (P.37) That 'new wave' hurt a lot of innocent people, human beings who were not spared the iniquitous rod of economic, career and social deprivation all because they, like Hellman, would not name names, who would not cede their code of conviction, honor and belief(s). The irony of this period is a true slap-in-the-face, for the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the most revered parchments of this country were verbally shaken into dust by those who wanted to shout and search out communistic evils where none existed in the first place. Like the Civil War of 1861 - the period of McCarthyism, name dropping, The House Un-American Activities, The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, it turned brother against brother, friend into foe (Elia Kazan and Clifford Odets are perfect examples), rich people into poor. And in the end - the true tragedy is - nothing came out of the whole mess except a lot of miserable people who, by not subscribing to Truman's loyalty program or proposition of Americanism, sacrificed either their material luxury or worse, their character and integrity. Should a horrid 'craze' of this political and social nature (which really was a political subterfuge) ever arise in this land of republicism/democracy, I would subscribe to the very wise words of Lillian Hellman, "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." (P.30)

Lillian Hellman was one of the most gifted memoirists in the English language. (Read also her "An Unfinished Woman" and "Pentimento.") It is not merely the historical, political, social and personal content of her autobiographical works that elevates them to classics, but her uniquely mellifluous and dexterous command of language. The fact that she was a brilliant playwright has much to do with her gift. Scoundrel Time explores Hellman's and Dashiell Hammett's involvement in The McCarthy [Witchhunt for Communists] Hearings and particularly how she, with the help of good attorneys, got out of naming names and thus sending friends, acquaintances and Hollywood business associates to prison for treason. There has been some question regarding the "truth" in Hellman's memoirs, as there should be in any memoir, for memory is fickle and cannot be trusted--as Hellman herself admitted. Read this long essay on the McCarthy Era as a work of self-reflective art, as exploration of the nature of memory, as one historical document of thousands documenting how history indeed is written by the victor. Read it to better understand just how many people would send their friends and family to prison if pressured.