Lillian Hellman, unregenerate Stalinist, ended her thoroughly dishonest life exposed to the bone by fellow writer Mary McCarthy as one of the classic frauds of American Letters. All those memoirs, one more ridiculously fabricated than the next [“Julia“]!
Her enshrinement as a Leftist heroine standing forthrightly up to the witch-hunting HUAC [“Scoundrel Time”] during the Fifties has proven to be total fantasy.
Interviewed by Dick Cavett in 1979 and asked what writers she thought overrated, McCarthy mentioned several but focused on Hellman, calling her “…a dishonest writer…every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'”
Hellman filed suit, intent on inflicting financial ruin on McCarthy and in so doing only set in motion her own undoing, Scholarly (and incensed) McCarthy proceeded to thoroughly document Hellman’s whole lifetime of lies. Hellman had the good sense to die before the case reached the courts where she would’ve suffered a most final public disgrace. Instead, despite the celebrity of the case, the myth of Hellman’s unimpeachable, heroic integrity (“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions!”) persists among the Faithful as it almost always does. Ask Goebbels.
The Left, its entire dream of Socialist Paradise a perennially propped-up ‘n dressed corpse, will hear none of it. On the contrary, Progressives thrive only on false narrative. Think Dan Rather or, particularly, Hillary Clinton. A mendacious media sees in such figures both good copy and kindred spirits in the business of making up swill that the masses eagerly crave. How else does a serial dissembler and liar like Hillary miraculously survive? In a rational world, this transparently greedy, corrupt creature would be instantly, summarily relegated to history’s dustbin as she deserves, not still (God help us!) running for POTUS.
Why Hellman is not completely discredited is one of those mysteries that has dogged me for years. She’s another wealthy communist (or useful idiot as the communists called them) like so many others: the Castro brothers, Bill Ayers, Lenin, Carlos the Jackal. They all grew up with money and none of them ever worked in a field a or factory, or troubled themselves to learn a trade or a skill. Telling others how to lead their lives was their game. Oh, if only Hellman could have moved to the Soviet Union instead of to Hollywood! They’d have shipped her off to Kolyma if they didn’t put her up in front of a firing squad.