An Unfinished Woman

By Paul Gray

SCOUNDREL TIME by LILLIAN HELLMAN

Introduction by GARRY WILLS

155 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.

When she was subpoenaed in 1952 to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Playwright Lillian Hellman made a firm decision. She would tell committee members whatever they wished to hear about her own political views and activities, but she would not discuss the real or imagined subversions of anyone else. In a letter to HUAC Chairman John S. Wood 1 she declared: "I am not willing, now or in the future, to bring bad trouble to people who, in my past association with them, were completely innocent of any talk or any action that was disloyal or subversive ... to hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions..."

This approach seemed calculated not merely to ask for trouble but require it. If she agreed to talk about herself, Hellman waived Fifth Amendment protection and invited a contempt citation and jail because of her silence about others. Her lover Dashiell Hammett, who had just served a prison term for contempt, warned her that she was courting a martyrdom much worse than she imagined. He scolded, "Just remember there are rats in jail, and tough dykes, and people who will push you hard just because they like it, and guards who won't admire you, and food you can't eat, and unless you do eat it, they'll put you in solitary." Hellman remained obdurate. She would not even let her lawyers inform the committee about past attacks on her work by the Communist press: "In my thin morality, it is plainly not cricket to clear yourself by jumping on people who are themselves in trouble."

Laconic Anticlimax. Her moment of truth with HUAC forms the heart of this slim memoir, Hellman's first--and long-anticipated--public word on her brush with McCarthyism. Two earlier autobiographical volumes, An Unfinished Woman (1969) and Pentimento (1973), ignored this subject. Yet when the crucial scene in Scoundrel Time comes, it is a laconic anticlimax. The committee seems flummoxed by Hellman's strategy. When the chairman asks that her letter be read into the public record, Hellman's lawyers leap to distribute copies to the assembled reporters. Minutes later a voice is heard in the press gallery: "Thank God somebody finally had the guts to do it." More than a little bewildered, Hellman is dismissed after a mere 67 minutes.

Not that her troubles were over. Screenwriting jobs dried up overnight. She was forced to sell her beloved farm in Pleasantville, N.Y., and, at a particularly low ebb, clerk in a Manhattan department store. Scoundrel Time does not dwell on these privations or, for that matter, anything else. It can be read in roughly the same amount of time Hell man spent with HUAC. Yet its understated fury is unforgettable.

Her targets are not the HUAC members and such headline-grabbing inquisitors as McCarthy and Richard Nixon. Rage is reserved for those -- such as Clifford Odets and Elia Kazan-- who named names before congressio nal committees and liberals who allowed their distaste for Stalinism to excuse the home-grown trampling of civil liberties during the late 1940s and early '50s. "None of them," she writes, "has yet found it a part of conscience to admit that their Cold War anti-Communism was perverted, possibly against their wishes, into the Viet Nam War and then into the reign of Nixon, their unwanted but inevitable leader."

Such absolutism is not entirely attractive nor is the inference that Hellman alone had a monopoly on conscience. This tone makes -"<<--"" Scoundrel Time read like a morality tale set in a vacuum. Those who wish to learn how things reached the nadir that Hellman lived through must look elsewhere. The introduction by Garry Wills, a revisionist view of the cold war as a figment of the American mind, does not provide much illumination.

Still, Hellman does not pretend to cover all the complexities of what she calls that "sad, comic, miserable time," and the very single-mindedness of her narrative yields an intense, moving moral. She was brave because her private code would not allow her to be anything else. She dabbled in radical politics and befriended Communists because she thought it was her right as an American to associate with whomever she damn well pleased. She paid heavy dues for that belief. But if her troubles put lines on her face, they also put a face on her lines. Scoundrel Time is a memorable portrait of, in her own phrase, "an unfinished woman," a polished stylist and an invaluable American.

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