SOURCE: Brantley, Will. “Lillian Hellman and Katherine Anne Porter: Memoirs from Outside the Shelter.” In Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir: Smith, Glasgow, Welty, Hellman, Porter, and Hurston, pp. 133-84. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

[In the following essay, Brantley examines similarities between Hellman's and Porter's attempts in their respective memoirs to portray themselves in the highly politicized atmosphere in which they lived.]

Lillian Hellman and Katherine Anne Porter did not produce autobiographies on the order of The Woman Within or One Writer's Beginnings, though, like Lillian Smith, they did attempt to represent themselves within works that combine self-analysis and cultural critique.

… Smith, Hellman, and Porter were each drawn to one important theme—the dangers of a passive collusion with evil—and each has used her self-writing to explore her own motives while venting scorn on those who, through passivity, ignorance, or their own refusal to explore themselves, allow reactionary leaders and masses to perpetrate their own forms of evil. Neither Hellman nor Porter suffered Smith's ostracism for their liberal commitments. Their acceptance by a large number of readers should not suggest, however, that their memoirs, especially Scoundrel Time (1976) and The Never-Ending Wrong (1977), have been read and interpreted in the most meaningful ways. The memoir has suffered a peculiar fate: rarely has it failed to create problems for readers and rarely has it been privileged by intellectual historians in their attempts to chart the course of modern American (or southern) history and culture. Yet an understanding of the memoir as a distinctive genre of self-writing is germane to an understanding of Scoundrel Time and The Never-Ending Wrong, two remarkably similar works that provide the basis for a new look at how these two enigmatic southern writers chose to understand and represent themselves within a political framework.

Undoubtedly, the liberalism espoused by Lillian Hellman and Katherine Anne Porter owes something to their wide travels, though in this respect neither writer is unique. Most women writers of the Southern Renaissance traveled in Europe or other parts of the world. Glasgow said England was her second home; Gordon and McCullers lived for intervals in Paris (Gordon the agrarian regretted that she had to leave the Paris cafes); Lillian Smith traveled widely and taught for three years in China; Welty traveled in Europe and Ireland; and O'Connor, though more homebound than the others, spent a brief period in Lourdes. It is Hellman and Porter who traveled most extensively, however, and who produced works such as Watch on the Rhine (1941) and Ship of Fools (1962) that are decidedly international in focus (an unknowing reader might feel caught off-guard to discover that either work is the product of a writer with strong ties to her native region). It is not surprising that both women left memoirs that define selves within a community that is not circumscribed by regional borders.¹

Published within a year of one another, the two memoirs take as their immediate subject the writer's reaction to an event that occurred in the past—an event with both personal and national implications. Scoundrel Time is Hellman's reflection on the McCarthy era and specifically her testimony on 21 May 1952 before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC); The Never-Ending Wrong is Porter's account of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial and execution and her limited involvement, under the direction of a Communist support group, as the translator of the two men's letters to friends in the outside world.² Hellman's memoir was published almost twenty-five years after her appearance before HUAC; she had attempted to produce a similar work on two previous occasions but was not pleased with the results. Porter's memoir was published for the fiftieth anniversary of Sacco's and Vanzetti's execution. She had attempted to produce her memoir for the twenty-fifth anniversary but, like Hellman, found that she needed even more time to synthesize and come to terms with her many reflections.

Both writers define themselves within the context of four predominant and overlapping themes: the betrayal of liberalism by liberals themselves; the role of the state and its power, and the failure of traditional ethics when power is abused and justice miscarried; the value of anger and personal heroism; and, perhaps most southern in emphasis—though with a distinctive twist—the necessity of both personal and national recollection. It is these connections that prompt an intertextual examination of the two works.

While critics have linked Porter's fictional techniques to those of Welty, McCullers, O'Connor, and Gordon, there is not only a greater thematic resemblance but a more pronounced affinity of life experiences between Hellman and Porter, each of whom projected images, written and pictorial, of herself as a grand dame. An extended comparison would have to include the following details. Both were able to use their art to make themselves very wealthy: Hellman's estate at the time of her death in 1984 was estimated at nearly four million dollars, and though Porter lived at times in near poverty, the film rights to Ship of Fools alone brought her close to one million dollars. Both women had many affairs: Hellman's paramours included Dashiell Hammett, theatrical agent Arthur Kober, magazine manager Ralph Ingersoll, and Third Secretary of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, John Melby, one of the men whose reputations she tried to protect during the time of her hearing. Porter was married four times—to John Henry Koontz, Ernest Stock, Eugene Pressly, and Albert Erskine. “If all the men I'm supposed to have lived with were crammed into this room,” she once remarked, “we couldn't turn around” (Givner, Conversations 157). As the photographic legacy reveals, both women were attracted to the world of glamour and high fashion: the huge emerald ring that Porter was at last able to purchase in the midsixties is one of the items on display in the Katherine Anne Porter Room in the McKelden Library at the University of Maryland; Hellman of course created a minor sensation when in the midseventies she posed for a Blackglama fur ad under the caption, “What Becomes a Legend Most?” Both women worked for a period of time in Los Angeles (each detested the West Coast and most of the work she did there), both became lecturers and campus celebrities, and both were candid about their experiments with marijuana, though Porter, for her part, was less willing to acknowledge her reputation as a hard drinker.

The careers of the two women overlap in other surprising ways as well. Each was strongly affected by her personal exposure to the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (he is only thinly disguised as Andreyev in Porter's “Hacienda”); each wrote reviews for the New York Herald-Tribune at the start of her career; and each secured the same publisher, Little, Brown, and Company, a firm noted for its receptiveness to liberals and leftist writers. (Without making too much of the matter, one cannot fail to notice a similarity between even the dust jackets of Scoundrel Time and The Never-Ending Wrong, a pronounced red motif that functions, at least with Scoundrel Time, as a subliminal cue to any knowing reader's expectations.) The most significant similarity, however, is that these two women from the South could not accept the prevailing gender norms of their culture. Porter said in a 1974 interview that she left Texas because she did not “want to be regarded as a freak. That was how they regarded a woman who tried to write. I had to make a revolt, a rebellion … so you see, I am the great-grandmother of these bombers, and students beating each other up with bicycle chains” (Givner, Conversations 165). Neither Hellman nor Porter could remain detached and uninvolved—prerequisites for the traditional southern lady. Further, each had the knack of placing herself in positions in which she could observe and even participate in events that have marked the century. Hellman's dangerous 1944 flight across Siberia in a one-engine plane to observe, as a cultural emissary, the German attack on the Russian front is analogous to Porter's brief encounter with Hermann Goering in Berlin as the Nazis rose to power or her revolutionary activities in Mexico.³

Politically, however, Hellman and Porter took separate paths. Both were unmistakably liberal, but while Hellman continued to advance political causes—many of which had Communist backing—Porter became disillusioned with and shied away from politics altogether. Neither was ever a hard-nosed ideologue: Hellman regretted that she was not a radical in the truest sense (that is, her love of wealth and comfort did not always complement her political sympathies), and Porter, though she was drawn to the essential tenants of anarchism, could not embrace this philosophy anymore than she could accept the worst excesses of unchecked capitalism, or what she called in her memoir “the never-never-land of the theoretically classless society that could not take root” (24).

In The Never-Ending Wrong, Porter notes that she served for a short time as assistant to the editor of ROSTA (later TASS), the official Russian news agency and propaganda center in America. Her experiences in Mexico finally led her to distrust Communists, and she eventually accused them of the very behavior that Hellman would defend them against: their policy, as Porter saw it, to join in and take over, their eagerness to comply with whatever the party ordered (18-19). Still, though Porter came to disparage the behavior of Communists and their vision of society (see, for example, a letter to The Nation, 11 May 1947, that is included in her Collected Essays), she cannot be numbered among the passive liberal anti-Communists that Hellman attacks in Scoundrel Time. To the contrary, Porter once covered a political debate for a California newspaper—a confrontation between anti-Communists who claimed that Hollywood was a seething bed of Red activity (including the mother of Ginger Rogers and Senator Jack Tenney) and the men who countered their distorted charges (Emmet Lavery, president of the Screen Writers Guild, and Albert Dekker, an actor and former state assemblyman). Porter resented the staging of the event—it reminded her of Hitler's demand for compliance—and she was disturbed that Rogers and Tenney could so cavalierly dismiss the “piece of good American doctrine” that says it is not acceptable to discriminate on the basis of religious or political beliefs. This witty article, “On Communism in Hollywood,” reveals that as early as 1947, even before the trial of the Hollywood Ten, Porter discerned the threat of what became known as McCarthyism. “I still don't know how many Communists there are in Hollywood, nor where they are,” she concludes; “but I will trust Mr. Dekker and Mr. Lavery and that audience to fight them more effectively than any number of Anti-American Activities Committees, whose activities have seemed to me from the beginning the most un-American thing I know” (Collected Essays 205-8).

It is necessary to differentiate Porter from those liberal anti-Communists who did find astounding ways to defend the HUAC hearings and the anti-Communist sentiment (Red-baiting) that scarred this country during the midpoint of the century.⁴ Any student of American history can see the connection between, say, the Palmer Raids of 1919, the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, motivated as it was by both xenophobia and an often irrational fear of radicalism, and the worst abuses of the McCarthy era. In a review of The Never-Ending Wrong, John Deedy correctly notes that “Sacco and Vanzetti were the victims of a political hysteria that was no less real, only less sophisticated, than that of the McCarthy era thirty years later” (572). Not all liberals saw the blatant abuse of political power in Boston as evidence of an innately corrupt capitalist system, but few if any defended what took place there. Indeed, Sacco and Vanzetti initiated more single pieces of protest literature than did any other figures of what was a fundamentally conservative era. By contrast, while McCarthyism became the subtext of many works of the fifties—for example, Lillian Smith's One Hour (1959), Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953), and Hellman's own translation of Jean Anouilh's The Lark (1955)—McCarthy did not spark a major protest literature against the abuse of basic civil liberties. The mood of the country had become so divided that even in 1978 Diana Trilling could make this amazing defense: “The actions of the HUAC and of McCarthy were plainly anti-liberal. But this is not to say that everyone who came under their attack was thereby redeemed of responsibility for his own acceptance of the destruction of liberty by Communism: it takes more than victimization by illiberalism to certify one's liberalism. And even in those dark years of violation of civil rights, the only punishment of these ‘dissidents’ was loss of very high-paid jobs or, at worst, which was indeed bad enough, a short jail term; no one was put to death for exercising his right of free speech” (We Must March 50).

As David Cook points out in a standard history of narrative film, many of these dissidents did lose their lives: “Philip Loeb, one of the stars of the popular television series The Goldbergs, committed suicide; the screen actors John Garfield, Canada Lee, J. Edward Bromberg, and Mady Christians died as a result of the stress they were subjected to” (409). Sadly, these are only a few of the names that such a list might include.

It is by no means insignificant that the largest group of people brought before HUAC were connected in one way or another to the highly visible entertainment industry; it was, in fact, a former Hollywood connection, Martin Berkeley, that led to Hellman's subpoena. Most of those summoned had abandoned their leftist ties by the time of their testimony and many had been only marginally connected with the Communist party in the first place. As Victor S. Navasky observes in Naming Names (1980), a work that examines a period in American history in which the traditionally despised informant achieved the dubious status of folk hero, many Hollywood people had joined the Communist party because it seemed to be the most liberal thing going. They were not people with access to atomic secrets, nor could they easily sway the nation's young. Diana Trilling and those who have upheld her argument tend to gloss over the uglier dimensions of the McCarthy era. Since most of the witnesses were not connected to the government, Navasky questions HUAC's role as an overseer: “The purpose of the hearings, although they were not trials, was clearly punitive, yet the procedural safeguards appropriate to tribunals in the business of meting out punishment were absent: there was no cross-examination, no impartial judge and jury, none of the exclusionary rules about hearsay or other evidence” (xiv). Those who acted on behalf of HUAC—not only McCarthy, but others like Senator Pat McCarren, whose power exceeded that of McCarthy himself—had at least one clear goal in mind. “The Committee's action was scandalous,” David Cook writes, “but its meaning was crystal clear: HUAC wished to purge Hollywood and, if possible, the entire country of any and all liberal tendencies by creating and then exploiting anti-Communist hysteria” (408). The result, Cook adds, was a Hollywood that mirrored the “intellectual stagnation and moral paralysis” that came to characterize the nation as a whole (410).⁵ In short, HUAC was a formidable opponent to a left that had divided itself since the time of Sacco and Vanzetti. It is against this backdrop of American leftism and its divisions that Hellman's and Porter's memoirs might best be read and judged.

Neither Hellman nor Porter produced the kind of autobiography that sets out to examine a life in its totality. The Never-Ending Wrong is, in fact, Porter's longest autobiographical work. At the age of eighty-five, Porter joked, “I'm not going to write my autobiography. Every book I pick up these days has something about me in it, right or wrong. So I don't have to bother” (Givner, Conversations 185). Her biographer, Joan Givner, takes another perspective; she argues that Porter must have known she could not produce a genuinely honest autobiography: “in the accounts given in autobiographical notes, essays, and interviews she resembles her own description of Mexico. She called it ‘this sphinx of countries which for every fragment of authentic history yields two riddles’” (A Life 22). Hellman's biographers, William Wright and Carl E. Rollyson, would agree that the same could be said of her. While Porter shied away from a book-length autobiography, Hellman in her early sixties did not hesitate to write about her past; indeed, she set out to discover a form that would accommodate her particular sense of self.

In an interview with Nora Ephron, Hellman made this comment regarding her first book-length autobiography, An Unfinished Woman (1969): “It was faute de mieux, that book. I decided I didn't want to write for the theatre, so what was I to do? I didn't want to do an autobiography—that would have been too pretentious for me. I had a lot of magazine pieces I'd done that hadn't been reprinted, and I started to rewrite them. But I didn't like them, I thought, maybe now I can do better with the same memories” (134). In An Unfinished Woman, a short chapter sets the stage for a vivid period from Hellman's life which is then developed in the longer chapter that immediately follows. Hellman concludes the book with portraits of Dorothy Parker, her maid Helen, and Dashiell Hammett. It is the portrait—an indirect means of self-presentation—that Hellman perfected as a mode of self-representation in Pentimento (1973) and that critics agree will remain her most significant contribution to twentieth-century autobiographical writing. In an interview with Stephanie de Pue, Hellman accounts for her indirect approach: “I don't ordinarily talk about myself very much. That's why I try to write memoirs without being a central part of them.” She added, “It seems to me that summation of what you feel, not what's happened but of what you feel, is a dangerous game to play. The words become too simple” (Bryer 201).⁶ Unlike Porter, Hellman was not a writer of great psychological depth, though it may be that—like Porter—she understood her limitations. One cannot imagine Hellman producing an autobiography such as Ellen Glasgow's The Woman Within; in none of Hellman's memoirs does she speak at any length about her creative processes. Yet as Maureen Howard observed, Hellman did formulate an autobiographical style that relates “the emotionally charged moment to a wide cultural reference” (Scoundrel Time 134) and that, as Doris Falk remarked, allows “for unanswered questions, and for a certain mysterious quality that evoked a response from readers who knew that mystery for their own” (157).

Perhaps the chief problem that both Hellman and Porter pose as memorialists is that, as their biographers have made clear, neither writer was apparently capable of complete honesty about her own past; Porter, for instance, perpetrated stories about an aristocratic lineage that did not exist (see Jefferson). As much as they may have insisted upon truth in art (and from others), both writers produced a body of personal commentary that has required their biographers to become detectives who sift through the self-images each writer perpetrated at different times and for different reasons. It is possible to take a sympathetic view of either writer's misrepresentations; one might argue that their diverse accomplishments as artists outweigh their value as truth-bearers. Porter, for example, went so far in questioning the old order—the southern patriarchy with its cavalier myths—that her inability to be completely honest about herself is, as far as her art is concerned, a fairly moot point, but how is one to judge a memoir by a woman like Lillian Hellman whom a significant section of the reading public now identifies as a morally damaging prevaricator?⁷ This question necessitates an analysis of the memoir as genre. Such an examination will clarify the modes of self-representation that this often misunderstood genre affords; it should also aid in understanding that facticity—as is true of autobiography—must not obscure the deeper level of self-definition the memoir inscribes.

In what may be the most complete assessment of the memoir as genre, Marcus Billson, writing in 1977, stated, “The current academic interest in forms of self-literature, such as autobiographies and diaries, has curiously excluded memoirs from serious critical attention. … Literary critics have faulted memoirs for being incomplete, superficial autobiographies; and, historiographers have criticized them for being inaccurate, overly personal histories” (259). Billson is concerned that so much misunderstanding has resulted from what appears to be an inability on the part of historians and critics to read the memoir on its own terms or to understand what it requires from both writer and reader. Hence Billson's definition, which sets out to valorize the memoir as a form of self-literature, works from a consideration of what the memoir is not.

After noting briefly, “The memoir recounts a story of the author's witnessing a real past which he considers to be of extraordinary interest and importance” and embodies “a moral vision” of that past (261), Billson goes on to insist that the artful memorialist never produces a mere document of reportage or a simple chronicle of fact. Nor can the memorialist be overly disturbed by the modern historian's demand for objectivity: “the memorialist accepts quite freely the subjectivity of his own perception as the sine qua non of his work; without it, his work would have little interest or meaning; it would not be a memoir” (264). It is for this reason that Hellman and Porter stress the subjective nature of their accounts. Porter calls The Never-Ending Wrong “my story” and admits in her Afterward that she refused to read other accounts of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair until she had revised her own notes (58). Hellman concludes the first section of Scoundrel Time with this remark: “I tell myself that this third time out, if I stick to what I know, what happened to me, and a few others, I have a chance to write my own history of the time” (43).⁸ These remarks help to substantiate Billson's argument, “The memoir is never a presentation of history; it is a representation of history, sometimes an argument, always a personal interpretation” (264).

It would thus appear that as a genre the memoir is not particularly suited for self-scrutiny or self-definition, yet the focus of the memoir's narrative is not exclusively outward as some have argued. As with autobiography, the memoir's narrative can take a sustained inward turn, and at times the two genres appear to merge in a single work. Thus “what distinguishes the memoir from the autobiography is not the focus of the narration, but the interplay of two specific factors in a given work: the length of time of the narration, and the dynamic nature of the author's represented self” (Billson 265). The self a memoir inscribes may be no less whole than that of an autobiography: what is generally missing from the memoir is an attempt to trace the stages in the growth of the memorialist's sense of self. Billson displays an androcentric bias (aside from Gertrude Stein, he cites only works by male writers), but he correctly observes that a “lack of kinesis in the author's concept of himself as an ontological being separates the memoir from the autobiography” (265).

One additional feature of the memoir deserves attention. Because of its more compressed scope, “the Memoir as genre is closely associated with periods of crisis, both historical crises, such as wars and revolutions, and intellectual crises, as Ortega y Gasset defines them, such as periods of intellectual and spiritual transition” (Billson 280). In Scoundrel Time and The Never-Ending Wrong, Hellman and Porter confront individual crises that are part of what they perceive to be a larger national crisis—a crisis that, as far as the life of a nation is concerned, carries grave consequences. This notion of a self in confrontation with a crisis explains part of the memoir's distinctive appeal. Readers of Hellman and Porter not only get to glimpse two embarrassing eras in our nation's history, but they get to view these periods through the consciousness of two women whose fiction and drama and whose lives have exerted a real influence on the literary life of our time. It is not just a matter of the reader's living “vicariously the quality and essence of the memorialist's being there” (Billson 280); it is additionally a matter of the reader's knowledge that what the author conceals can be as revealing as what she gives. As Pauline Kael remarked of Julia, the 1977 film based on a chapter from Pentimento, Hellman's memoirs are “more exciting as drama than her plays are, since you can feel the tension between what she's giving you and what she's withholding” (308). Readers know that with Scoundrel Time they may not be getting a view of the past that is true in all its particulars, but as Victor Kramer remarked of Tennessee Williams's opposite attempt to be brutally honest in his Memoirs (1975)—to tell all—a “life” is a matter of self-perception and self-deception: it is more than the events that have come to comprise a “public” record (665).

In terms of direct self-presentation, Hellman provides more personal background than does Porter. Like the bulk of her generation of the late twenties and early thirties, Hellman was “a kind of aimless rebel” (43), but she says twice that she cannot define herself as a genuinely committed radical despite her sympathy with a great many radical goals. Hellman speaks of her own family's corruption (her mother's relatives made money by exploiting African-Americans but Hellman does not say how), and she acknowledges her guilt about the money she made in an era of mass poverty and suffering. Hellman does not downplay the importance of Dashiell Hammett's presence in her life, nor does she disavow the tag of “southerner”—in fact, this label figures prominently in her justification of her own value system. Finally, Hellman claims not to be a political person or to belong to any political group, but she undercuts such assertions by expressing a number of political views and by even detailing some of her contributions to various political groups, particularly her involvement with Henry Wallace and his Progressive party of 1948.

Porter also notes an affinity between herself and the generation of the late twenties; Hellman's phrase, “aimless rebel,” applies equally well to Porter, a woman who emphasizes her own “lifelong sympathy” with those who devoted themselves to ameliorating “the anguish that human beings inflict on each other—the never-ending wrong, forever incurable” (62). What neither Hellman nor Porter say directly is that their rebellion became less aimless and their focus more clearly centered on its fundamental causes. Like Hellman, Porter claims to have been politically mistaken, but she knows that it would be pointless to claim that she had no real political leanings: “I was then, as now, a registered voting member of the Democratic Party, a convinced liberal—not then a word of contempt—and a sympathizer with the new (to me) doctrines brought out of Russia from 1919 to 1920 onward by enthusiastic, sentimental, misguided men and women who were looking for a New Religion of Humanity, as one of them expressed it, and were carrying the gospel that the New Jerusalem could be expected to rise any minute in Moscow or thereabouts” (14).

Porter defines her early political thinking as “the lamentable ‘political illiteracy’ of a liberal idealist—we might say, a species of Jeffersonian” (13). Unlike Hellman, what Porter does not provide is any direct reference to her southern upbringing (though certain values she expresses here might best be illuminated by comments she has made elsewhere on her southern past); nor does she allude to the many friends or companions in her life at the time. Porter does not even refer to her vocation as a writer since in 1927 she had been read by only a handful of people; her first collection of stories, Flowring Judas, did not appear until 1930.

Part of what prompts each writer to (re)construct her memories is her sense of victimization. Each depicts herself as having been duped—Hellman by Stalinism, Porter by Communists and the nasty “self-appointed world reformers” (38); but worse, from a later perspective, each feels betrayed—Hellman by the intellectuals she feels stood by and passively watched McCarthy, Nixon, and their cohorts damage the lives of others, Porter by those not concerned with a fair trial or with an honest enactment of justice. Hellman and Porter did not agree on the nature of communism—Porter says she “flew off Lenin's locomotive and his vision of history in a wide arc” just days before Sacco and Vanzetti were put to death (20)—but they were altogether alike in defining selves that, within the community of morally responsible men and women, sense a betrayal of their most deeply felt moral values and who, upon careful examination, see themselves as somehow separate and at least partially heroic.

Their shared anger accounts in part for a similarity of style—a hard-boiled edge that verges at times on cynicism. Here is Hellman describing some of the key participants in her story:

The McCarthy group—a loose term for all the boys, lobbyists, Congressmen, State Department bureaucrats, CIA operators—chose the anti-Red scare with perhaps more cynicism that Hitler picked anti-Semitism. He, history can no longer deny, deeply believed in the impurity of the Jew. But it is impossible to remember the drunken face of McCarthy, merry often with a kind of worldly malice, as if he were mocking those who took him seriously, and believe that he himself could take seriously anything but his boozed-up nightmares. And if all the rumors were true the nightmares could have concerned more than the fear of a Red tank on Pennsylvania Avenue, although it is possible in his case a tank could have turned him on.

(41)

Hellman denies that McCarthy, Whittaker Chambers, or Nixon—with his unfortunately justified “contempt for public intelligence” (42)—or any of the others ever bothered her on a serious level; rather, she was deeply grieved by the intellectuals she believed stood passively by “when McCarthy and the boys appeared! Almost all, either by what they did or did not do, contributed to McCarthyism, running after a bandwagon which hadn't bothered to stop to pick them up” (42).

Couched in the same hard-hitting prose is Porter's meditation on an earlier public's reaction to large-scale crime. She opens her memoir by noting that Sacco's and Vanzetti's offense was rather commonplace, the distinctive “feature being that these men were tried, convicted, and put to death”; she continues with a passage that sets the tone for the rest of her piece:

Gangsters in those days, at any rate those who operated boldly enough on a large scale, while not so powerful or so securely entrenched as the Mafia today, enjoyed a curious immunity in society and under the law. We have only to remember the completely public career of Al Capone, who, as chief of the bloodiest gang ever known until that time in this country, lived as if a magic circle had been drawn around him. … When he died, there was a three-day sentimental wallow on the radio, a hysterical orgy of nostalgia for the good old times when a guy could really get away with it. I remember the tone of drooling bathos in which one of them said, “Ah, just the same, in spite of all, he was a great guy. They just don't make 'em like that anymore.” Of course, time has proved since how wrong the announcer was—it is obvious they do make 'em like that nearly every day … like that but even more indescribably monstrous—and the world radio told us day by day that this was not just local stuff, it was pandemic.

(3-4)

The similarity of tone is not accidental. Both writers wish to convey the impression that they have lived through and thought long about the events they will narrate; one can guess that the “wise-guy” attitude—so reminiscent of thirties protest literature—helped them to establish their authority to comment on the course of modern history. There are moments in each work, however, when the writer's tone becomes softer, more sympathetic, and at times even mournful. Porter was praised by several reviewers for the poetic nature of her images (and particularly for her re-creation of the death night), and even Hellman's relentless tone gives way to a lyrical description of the night, not long after her appearance before the committee, when she and Hammett observed the silent movement of a herd of deer across her farm. For the most part, though, the tone of the two works is harsh. Neither writer forgives those who perpetrate against others what Porter calls the never-ending wrong. Both feel isolated even from people who share their own feelings. The tone of the two memoirs underscores what Marcus Billson detects as the key irony of memoir writing: “the participant desires to define himself as in society, and yet paradoxically to see himself also as against it” (277).

Structurally, the two memoirs are also alike. Each progresses within a loose chronology, with each building to the climactic event: Hellman's presence before the committee (covered in roughly 13 of her 124 pages), and Porter's account of the night the execution took place (about 5 pages of her 63-page text). These sections are inherently dramatic, and neither writer downplays their intensity. Billson notes that the memorialist's art derives in part from his or her “exhilarating awareness of actual life as drama” (269). The distinguishing structural feature of the two works is not their dramatic build-up, however. Life may be fused with emotional intensity and a sense of dramatic movement, but rarely is it structured like a well-made play, and history itself is more than a linear pattern of intense moments. As Hellman remarks in a moment of introspection, “It is impossible to write about any part of the McCarthy period in a clear-dated, annotated form; much crossed with much else, nothing obeyed a neat plan” (80), and Porter remarks in a similar vein, “After more than half a long lifetime, I find that any recollection, however vivid and lasting, must unavoidably be mixed with many afterthoughts. It is hard to remember anything perfectly straight, accurate, no matter whether it was painful or pleasant at that time” (31-32). Porter adds a comment that would appear to typify Hellman as well: “I find that I remember best just what I felt and thought about this event in its own time, in its inalterable setting; my impressions of this occasion remain fast, no matter how many reviews or recollections or how many afterthoughts have added themselves with the years” (32). It is these afterthoughts, the many rearview glances and recollections—the evidence of a thinking, reflective self—that tend to structure the memoir and give it its nonlinear, often anecdotal, but not necessarily arbitrary form.

Scoundrel Time contains seventeen sections; The Never-Ending Wrong contains twenty sections and an Afterword. The sections vary greatly in length and are not numbered in either work. Few reviewers failed to note the elliptical quality of the two books. The form of the memoir itself seems to mandate the loose organizational scheme, for the memoir writer is not offering pure history but a confrontation of the self with history (which, in a sense, may be a more authentic way of writing history than the objective accounts that textbook writers set out to provide). Both writers rely heavily on diary notes, and even refer to their diaries in order to validate their memories. Each finds herself jumping ahead in time, and each work includes sections that are almost free-associational. In just one paragraph, Porter moves from the “terrible irony” of Mussolini's asking Governor Fuller of Massachusetts to grant clemency, to her own experience in Mexico with refugees from Mussolini's Italy, to “Voltaire's impassioned defense of an individual's right to say what he believed,” to her conclusion that the Communists were in on the protests for their own benefit (40-41). Section ten of Scoundrel Time has the same free-associational quality. Hellman even transcribes diary notes that cover the week before her testimony, notes that include impressions of her dutiful cab driver in Washington, her desire “to go to bed with an orangutan” (100), and her revulsion at having J. Edgar Hoover pointed out to her during a luncheon. Her loosely joined reflections culminate in her displeasure over her lawyer Joseph Rauh's awareness that she might sink under the pressure once she is in the committee room: “It is impossible to think that a grown man, intelligent, doesn't have some sense of how he will act under pressure. It's all been decided so long ago, when you are very young, all mixed up with your childhood's definition of pride or dignity” (103).

Even in passages where she is not citing notes, Hellman's representation of history is anecdotal, occasionally gossipy, and characterized by sometimes abrupt shifts. After announcing to Rauh that she would not cite the articles in which certain Communists had denounced her and her work—“my use of their attacks on me would amount to my attacking them at a time when they were being persecuted and I would, therefore, be playing the enemy's game” (64)—Hellman turns her attention, with no transition, to Clifford Odets, a dramatist whose work she had admired, but with whom she had never been good friends (Hammett, she discloses, thought very little of Odets or his work). Though her shift of attention to Odets is abrupt, it is not without significance. Apparently Odets wanted to meet with Hellman to find out how she might act if subpoenaed by the committee, claiming that he himself would “show them the face of a radical man and tell them to go fuck themselves” (69). As it turns out, Odets became a friendly witness. This incident leads Hellman into a lengthy consideration of the paranoia that plagued the movie bosses who employed writers like her and Odets and what she saw as the willingness of these men “to act out the drama that the government committees preferred” (75). At this point, some of the previous and seemingly random impressions, trivia, and short anecdotes gel in the stringently stated moral she derives from the cowardly behavior of the men who controlled the studios: “It is well to remember what these very rich movie men were like, since I doubt they have changed. … Hollywood lived the way the Arabs are attempting to live now, and while there is nothing strange about people vying with each other for great landed estates, there is something odd about people vying with each other for better bathrooms. It is doubtful that such luxury has ever been associated with the normal acts of defecating or bathing oneself. It is even possible that feces are not pleased to be received in such grand style and thus prefer to settle in the soul” (73-74).

Hellman then illustrates her moral with an account of how she had to turn down Harry Cohn's offer of a lucrative and very attractive movie contract at Columbia Pictures because she could not agree to the terms of an agreement that, as she tells us in a parenthetical remark, made a “straight demand that nothing you believed, or acted upon, or contributed to, or associated with could be different from what the studio would allow” (77).

Hellman's brief portrait of Cohn, which culminates in an act of pettiness (he denies an employee the luxury of a simple chicken sandwich) is only one of many such essentially negative, even hostile portraits that are scattered throughout both Scoundrel Time and The Never-Ending Wrong. Hellman provides an especially scathing account of Henry Wallace, whose Progressive party she had supported and had hoped might make a small difference in the life of American liberalism and political reform. Not only does Hellman express her doubts about Wallace's “suspicious innocence” of Communist involvement in his party, but she also describes Wallace's miserliness; he never left adequate tips and had the gall to invite her to a measly dinner of eggs on shredded wheat. Porter's account of Rosa Barron, the woman who headed her outfit at the protest, is equally blistering; not once, but three times Porter repeats Barron's view that—all questions of their innocence aside—Sacco and Vanzetti could do the Communists no good alive. Her portrait of Lincoln Steffens is only slightly less caustic (16-17).

These miniportraits, which seem at times to emerge full-blown from nowhere, serve various purposes. Often they culminate in the author's realization of something about herself and her own motives. Hellman's description of Wallace, for example, leads her to reveal that she was misguided in her own assumption that “the Communist Party is dictated to by a few officials” (129). Similarly, Porter prepares the way for one of her own realizations as she describes a Mrs. Leon Henderson, another champion of the two accused men, a vegetarian who could not bear the thought of “eating blood” but who apparently had no reservations about wearing the skins of animals: “I could not avoid seeing her very handsome leather handbag, her suede shoes and belt, and a light summer fur of some species I was unable to identify lying across her shoulders. My mind would wander from our topic while, bewildered once more by the confusions in human feelings, above all my own, I gazed into the glass eyes of the small, unknown peaked-faced animal” (35). Invariably, these miniportraits, which rely upon the quick brush stroke—the telling detail—present Hellman and Porter as they perceive themselves in contrast to others whose personal characteristics or approaches to life and its problems they do not share. To what extent they intend to represent themselves so obliquely is open to question, but the often hostile portraits do figure in one's assessment of the self each writer deliberately or inadvertently defines. These sometimes intimate observations of other people—themselves a part of the flow of history—are the particulars of each writer's response to an era she is remembering; that they often end by highlighting the pettiness of human nature (a quality neither writer consciously perceives in herself) is itself a reflection of two historical periods that now evoke a loss of balance and a failure of moral responsibility.

Such sections, though they seem to meander, convey a sense of immediacy; readers share not only the author's sense of having been there, but also her impressions—filtered through the years—of what it meant to have been there. These two highly self-conscious women are always aware of their roles as participants or performers on the stage of twentieth-century history. Hellman must have known that she was giving a dramatic but fitting name to a whole era of American history, and though she may have seen herself as a fairly menial participant—a kitchen policeman—Porter nonetheless dramatized her own limited involvement. About halfway through her narrative, she even transcribes into dialogue her notes of the conversations she had with the blond policeman who escorted her to jail on each of the days she was sent out to picket. The dialogue takes on the character of a morality play as these two figures make contact:

SECOND DAY:

HE:
(taking my elbow and drawing me out of the line; I go like a lamb): ‘Well, what have you been doing since yesterday?’
I:
‘Mostly copying Sacco's and Vanzetti's letters. I wish you could read them. You'd believe in them if you could read the letters.’
HE:
‘Well, I don't have much time for reading.’

(26-27)

Their conversations end after the last picket line forms and it is clear that the governor will not issue a reprieve. Porter gives their parting scene an almost conscious cinematic quality: “We did not speak or look at each other again, but as I followed the matron to a cell I saw him working his way slowly outward through the crowd” (28).

“Well, it was fifty years ago and I am not trying to bring anything upto-date. I am trying to sink back into the past and recreate a certain series of events recorded in scraps at the time which have haunted me painfully for life” (46). This is a clear expression of Porter's self-reflexive goal, and perhaps the word that deserves emphasis is “scraps.” Like Hellman, Porter relies upon her scraps—the contents of diaries and notes—as she structures her narrative. Notes that were taken as a record of previous impressions are reflected upon through the lens of the passing years; consequently, both of the memoirs exhibit a double reflexivity. While each writer attempts to be true to earlier impressions—Porter, for example, insists that her's is the story of what happened, not of what should have been—neither writer can resist the inclination to reconceptualize the past. Hellman, especially, is drawn to remarks about what she should have said or done. She says that what she would like to have told the committee would go something like this: “‘You are a bunch of headline seekers, using other people's lives for your own benefits. You know damn well that the people you've been calling before you never did much of anything, but you've browbeaten and bullied many of them into telling lies about sins they never committed. So go to hell and do what you want with me!’ I didn't say any of that to [Abe] Fortas [the lawyer she first consulted and a subsequent Supreme Court Justice] because I knew I would never be able to say it at all” (57).

Such a comment reveals the complexity of defining one's true or deepest sense of self, for it shows that what never took place can figure as prominently in a sense of personal identity as what actually occurred. One observes the same complexity in Porter's self-representation. While Porter is generally reluctant to acknowledge an irritable streak in her nature (something that Hellman freely acknowledges), she too shows that what she would like to have done is not only part of the record of her impressions but that it weighs heavily in the way she perceives herself. One example in particular stands out. As she and other protestors were on the way to their “trial,” she overheard one man—the stereotype of a “capitalist monster” that “no proletarian novelist of the time would have dared to use”—make the following comment: “It is very pleasant to know we may expect things to settle down properly again” (45). Porter's response is unlike anything else in her nonfiction prose: “To this day, I can feel again my violent desire just to slap his whole slick face all over at once, hard, with the flat of my hand, or better, some kind of washing pot or any useful domestic appliance being applied where it would really make an impression—a butter paddle—something he would feel through the smug layer of too-well-fed fat. … My conscience stirs as if, in my impulse to do violence to my enemy, I had assisted at his crime” (49-50).

As this passage indicates, an overheard remark can be the basis of a genuine self-revelation. Both Porter and Hellman refer often to what they hear in passing, and not infrequently these remarks lead to self-discovery and become central to the self-image each writer wishes to project. Moments before she is to be questioned, Hellman makes this observation: “I hadn't seen the Committee come in, don't think I had realized that they were to sit on a raised platform, the government having learned from the stage, or maybe the other way around. I was glad I hadn't seen them come in—they made a gloomy picture. Through the noise of the gavel I heard one of the ladies in the rear cough very loudly. She was to cough all through the hearing. Later I heard one of her friends say loudly, “Irma, take your good cough drops” (109).

Hellman says nothing else; she allows the overhead remark to speak for itself and to highlight the fact that her predicament is not hers alone, that she is a pawn in a public spectacle complete with a gallery of passive (and callous) bystanders. It is of course another overheard remark that has become almost legendary and that tends to figure prominently in any critical reaction to Hellman's personal history. After Judge John S. Wood agrees to enter a letter from Hellman into the official transcript of her hearing—a letter in which she proclaims her willingness to answer any questions about herself but not about others—Hellman overhears a comment from a member of the press: “Thank God,” the voice exclaimed, “somebody finally had the guts to do it” (114).

Within the arena of the memoir, overheard remarks can assume as much significance as the formal documents—such as letters—that become part of the official historical record. Porter relies heavily on overheard remarks, but she also quotes generously from Sacco's and Vanzetti's letters, telling her policeman that he would believe in them if he could examine their correspondence. Hellman's letter to Judge Wood is so fundamental to her self-understanding that she reprints it in full, giving it a section to itself with only the sketchiest of prefacing remarks. After stating her willingness to answer anything about herself—“I have nothing to hide from your Committee and there is nothing in my life of which I am ashamed” (97)—she expresses her difficulty in understanding the legality that would require her to answer questions about others if she fails to plead the Fifth Amendment. Hellman then gets to the gist—to the punch—of her request:

But there is one principle that I do understand: 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. I do not like subversion or disloyalty in any form and if I had ever seen any I would have considered it my duty to have reported it to the proper authorities. But 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, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.

(98)

Hellman makes one additional remark; she proclaims that her values are those that stem from “an old-fashioned American tradition” and that she does not believe Judge Wood would desire her “to violate the good American tradition from which they spring” (98).

On the most basic level, Hellman includes the entire letter because it covers succinctly her reasons for not wishing to plead the Fifth Amendment. Yet the letter is also a clear expression of the liberal values that underlie her deepest sense of self. Carl Rollyson, Hellman's most recent biographer, accurately observes that “the cunning” of her defense “resided in her letter to HUAC,” a document that “made her seem entirely reasonable … a person of conviction and conscience who only wanted to do the right thing … a dissenter who respected authority” (327-28). Rollyson claims that the bulk of the letter is Rauh's but that “the ringing phrases” are indisputably Hellman's (319). Such phrases—especially the unexpected “bad trouble”—are brief indexes to the self Hellman is preserving for history, and built into these ringing phrases are indictments of those who would claim the same liberal and “old-fashioned American tradition” but whose very actions reveal that it is not in fact a tradition they can live up to. The sometimes radical playwright is out to save her own hide but not without a clear stab at the enemy. The historical circumstances require that Hellman define and defend her sense of self.

Significantly, Hellman presents her letter immediately before the long series of notes that dramatize her state of awareness in the days preceding the hearing itself, which is to suggest, once again, that she structures her memoir so that it builds dramatically. This is not to say that there is anything affected or artificial about her account. Marcus Billson explains that the memoir writer views “time as extraordinary” and writes with the “kind of consciousness that vitalizes all experience” (269). Though Hellman has been accused of overworking the dramatic element in her self-presentation, even Carl Rollyson, who takes every opportunity to note those instances in which her account is questionable, concedes that the centerpiece of Scoundrel Time, those few pages in which Hellman recounts her appearance before HUAC, stick close to the events that actually occurred, filtered though they were through the consciousness of a woman who was always attuned to the dramatic possibilities of a given situation. Rollyson quotes Joseph Rauh on the accuracy of Hellman's version of the hearing: “I would say it is Lillian's dramatization of it. I don't want to say anything that throws doubt on her veracity. … It was pretty exciting. Even if I had told the story in a pedestrian way, it would still be pretty exciting. But when she got done with it, it was better than a Babe Ruth home run” (330).

The same is in its own way true of Porter's evocative rendering of Sacco's and Vanzetti's execution night. The drama of the event was actual but, again, filtered through the consciousness of a woman attuned not only to the drama but to the whole nightmarish quality of the occasion—a consciousness that could perceive and render the event in precisely etched images such as the one of a dazed Lola Ridge as she stood beneath one of the mounted policemen. Porter's memoir is in fact structured as though it were a series of slides with each dramatic image carrying its own emotional weight. One reviewer made this observation: “Not always coherent, random and shifting as memory itself, it gains power and reveals some indelible pictures: of Luigia Vanzetti looking with horror into the faces in the crowd raging at a rally for her doomed brother; of the midnight vigil outside Charleston prison, where the men were being put to death; of a ‘party’ afterward, wakelike, desperate, and charged with guilt and anger” (Fludas 32).

In his review of Scoundrel Time for the New York Review of Books, Murray Kempton was more than mildly outraged over Hellman's description of Henry Wallace's parsimony. Even if such accounts are accurate, Kempton did not believe they have a rightful place in Hellman's memoir. On issues that were less impressionistic, that could be judged by a standard of accuracy, reviewers did not hesitate to charge both writers with technical inaccuracies and, in the case of Hellman, willful misrepresentation. When Porter's memoir first appeared as half of the June 1977 issue of The Atlantic, it contained errors that the subsequent issue took note of, but these were not corrected by the time the book appeared in August. The source of these errors—confused places, dates, and titles—is in all likelihood the fifty-year gap between occurrence and recollection; they do not stem from the same kind of biographical misrepresentation that characterizes some of Porter's more informal essays.⁹

Hellman's veracity is a more complex issue; while no one accused Porter of overplaying her role in the drama that unfolded before her, Hellman, in addition to factual errors, was accused of egoism and of overvaluing her importance as a key figure in the McCarthy era. Here again, her letter to Judge Wood becomes central to the charge. Though in Scoundrel Time, Hellman tends to downplay its significance for others who would testify after her, a remark she made in 1978 to Peter Adam clearly indicates her pride in the stand she and Rauh so carefully articulated: “That letter, as you, Mr. Adam, know, had a very beneficial effect in many ways. It gave other people a place to stand, a legal place to stand, and was the first of its kind. Of that I'm proud” (Bryer 226). Carl Rollyson, for one, refuses to see Hellman in the same light, noting that though she did in fact take a difficult stand, her approach was not as brave as that of Arthur Miller who based his defense on the First rather than the Fifth Amendment (329). Rollyson claims that Rauh's reaction was much the same, that he too refused to “accept the image of [Hellman] as a heroine, a leader of ‘the moral forces’” (329). In order to prove his point, Rollyson questions the authenticity of the incident involving the press member who supposedly applauded Hellman's courage: “There is no question that this is what she wanted to hear,” he notes; nor could Hellman “resist adding that when the press gallery voice was greeted by Chairman Wood's threat to remove the press from the room, the voice answered, ‘You do that, Sir.’ The polite but steely rejoinder sounds just like the way Hellman would write the scene for a play” (327).

If Rollyson does not come right out and say that Hellman invented the voice from the press gallery, he does offer evidence in other places to show that she did not always resist her inclination to alter or reshape certain facts that can be verified. On at least four occasions in Scoundrel Time, Hellman equates selling her Pleasantville farm with the pain she retained from the whole McCarthy experience; she even says at one point that “the sale of the farm was the most painful loss of my life” (120). Rollyson, however, gives this version: “Always one to make a story better, in Scoundrel Time she puts the selling of Hardscrabble Farm in 1952, after her testimony before HUAC. Actually, the farm was gone by the end of 1951. She knew her idyll in Pleasantville was over” (317). Perhaps a more important issue is Hellman's claim in her HUAC letter that she “was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group”—the implication being that she could not have been a real Communist, an assertion she has upheld in subsequent interviews. “In any case, whether I signed a Party card or didn't was of little importance to me,” Hellman writes in Scoundrel Time. “I couldn't have known then what importance would be attached to it a few years later” (47). Rollyson discovered that, in an early draft of her HUAC letter, Hellman had in fact admitted to membership in the party between 1938 and 1940; he adds that Rauh, the leader of the influential Americans for Democratic Action, had himself “forgotten her admission of Communist party membership and was surprised by it when he recently examined his papers, now on deposit with the Library of Congress” (319). Of course it was probably wise in 1952 for Hellman to refrain from so readily admitting to party membership, but in 1975 one could wonder why Hellman persisted in equivocating on her Communist connections, especially when, as Robert P. Newman makes clear in his recent The Cold War Romance of Lillian Hellman and John Melby (1989), her membership, if it ever existed, was brief and hardly synonymous with party enthusiasm. Finally, Rollyson argues that “her decision in Scoundrel Time to ‘stick to what I know, what happened to me’ is disabling. … Her account of the Hiss-Chambers case, for instance, is seriously in error and significantly compromises her personal Cold War history” (13).

“If,” as Marcus Billson writes, “the memoir genre projects a personal vision of past life which may not be in all particulars factually true, one is led to ask what the reader looks for when he picks up a memoir” (280). Billson, who devotes a brief section of his essay to reception theory, answers his question by saying that the reader wants more than facts and that “if we are to understand the memoir as literature, we, as readers, must be willing to allow the memorialist his projection of what he hopes will be remembered as ‘the way it was’” (280). Reviews of Hellman's and Porter's memoirs would appear to substantiate these claims, for even the negative reviews often single out these authors' abilities to evoke the mood—the zeitgeist—of a vanished era. Rollyson rejects Hellman as a historian but draws attention to “her extraordinary talent for projecting her personality on the times” (489). Billson's theory of the memoir reader's response is acceptable as far as it goes, but the many negative reviews—some of them charged with anger—reveal that many readers look for more than a sense of authentic experience, and this may be especially true with writers like Lillian Hellman and Katherine Anne Porter who have produced a large body of writing, much of it concerned with the self and its moral responsibilities, prior to the memoirs that appeared rather late in each author's life. Readers familiar with these two women's work would have been dismayed had they produced nothing but a record of their experience. To understand the many negative reviews, particularly those of Scoundrel Time, it is necessary to take another look at the memoir as genre, and here again Billson's seminal essay provides some useful grounding.

Billson sees the form of the memoir as consisting of “three rhetorical stances—the eyewitness, the participant, and the histor—employed by the memoir-writer to evoke the historicity of his past and to argue for the truth of his vision of history” (271). The first of these, the eyewitness, is the central means of asserting “one's authority to recall and to interpret the past” (273). Hence, in The Never-Ending Wrong, Katherine Anne Porter can declare that she knows what she knows because she heard and saw (11). This stance assumes what Billson calls the ideographic strategy: “The substance of life presents itself as scattered until the memorialist organizes it through analysis” (274), an analysis that relies heavily upon metaphor. The eyewitness stance often merges with that of the memorialist as a participant who “concentrates on himself and relates the course of his own role, however major or ancillary, in the story he has to tell” (275). Since the memorialist as participant can examine a role or performance that has ended, he or she can project a sense of closure that is not always characteristic of the autobiographer. Billson uses the term “egotistical” to characterize the strategy of the participant, a figure whose personal desires and social self-interests are always near at hand. These self-interests become a paramount concern of critics evaluating Scoundrel Time and The Never-Ending Wrong (though less so with Porter since, as she willingly admits, her role was ancillary). With Hellman, the crucial problem is the extent to which her egoism undermines the heroic self her memoir so carefully if at times obliquely defines.

Billson identifies one additional rhetorical stance, that of the memorialist as histor: “Whenever the narrative intention shifts noticeably toward providing information or establishing facts, the histor is raising his head” (279). Since the memoir-writer rarely accommodates “the rigorous standards expected in modern historiography,” Billson warns against confusing the memorialist with the historian. The Romantic movement, with its valorization of subjectivity, may have enabled memoir writers to claim merit for their books on the basis of subjective truth alone, but few memoir writers can resist the need to contextualize, to move beyond the range of their own memories. Thus the “great digressions of the memoir genre—the editorializing and the generalizing—are all done from the histor stance with its concomitant contextualist strategy,” a strategy that aims for integration and synthesis (279).

It is the interplay of these rhetorical stances and strategies—along with “various techniques customarily associated with artful narrative: characterization, dialogue, stream of consciousness, and landscape description” (262)—that make Scoundrel Time and The Never-Ending Wrong such intriguing works of self-literature. It is, however, the stance of histor that has caused the greatest difficulty for the critics of both works. Before assessing the critical response, it is necessary to look at those passages where the voice of the histor is most apparent. It is through their historical perspectives that Hellman and Porter exhibit what is probably their closest affinity.

Throughout their memoirs, both writers interrupt the narrative of events to make connections, to place a single event or thought within a larger framework. Thus, Porter speaks of her mistaken hopes that were rooted in the values she had been taught in ethics courses: “Based on these teachings, I never believed that this country would alienate China in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900; or that we would not help France chase Hitler out of the Ruhr … or that we would aid and abet Franco; or let Czechoslovakia, a republic we had helped to found, fall to Soviet Russia” (The Never-Ending Wrong 13). Porter, of course, is writing fifty years after the fact, and she is aware that, in her attempt to contextualize the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, she must define the big “isms” that are fundamental to an understanding of the era. Though xenophobia and American puritanism were most assuredly at the heart of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial (and Porter does not downplay the fear of things foreign—a fear that led to and indeed was fueled by McCarthyism three decades later), her most provocative explanation of the fear that defined the era centers on something more than human prejudice. In her synthesis, prejudice and ignorance are “in some deeply mysterious way” subsumed by a more fearful term: “Anarchy had been a word of fear in many countries for a long time, nowhere more so than in this one; nothing in that time, not even the word ‘Communism,’ struck such terror, anger, and hatred into the popular mind; and nobody seemed to understand exactly what Anarchy as a political idea meant any more than they understood Communism …” (6). What became evident to Porter is that

the human mind can face better the most oppressive government, the most rigid restrictions, than the awful prospect of a lawless, frontierless world. Freedom is a dangerous intoxicant and very few people can tolerate it in any quantity; it brings out the old raiding, oppressing, murderous instincts; the rage for revenge, for power, the lust for bloodshed. The longing for freedom takes the form of crushing the enemy—there is always the enemy!—into the earth; and where and who is the enemy if there is no visible establishment to attack, to destroy with blood and fire? Remember all that outcry when freedom is threatened again. Freedom, remember, is not the same as liberty.

(7)

From Porter's point of view, human beings are deeply flawed; they retain ideals that interfere with their ability to understand themselves or to form workable governments. In a sense it becomes an act of heroism even to acknowledge the deceptions and to admit one's complicity with a social order that could not exist without deception. It is a cynical view but one that is in keeping with a predominant theme in Porter's nonfiction, a theme that she stresses in her self-reflective essay, “Saint Augustine and the Bullfight” (1955). It could be argued that Porter becomes the histor with a vengeance; a writer with a strong polemical sense, she cannot resist the urge to sermonize or to reduce her fifty-year reflections to a series of what she calls “truisms” (The Never-Ending Wrong 46).

It might appear that Gary Wills's Introduction to the American edition of Scoundrel Time provides needed historical background and a necessary revisioning of events that led to McCarthy and his era. Actually, Hellman's revisionary perspective stands on its own; she needed no introductory apparatus and subsequently omitted the piece by Wills when she collected her three memoirs in 1979. Hellman says that after World War II “the time was ripe for a new wave in America” and that McCarthy and his aids and representatives merely seized their chance as political opportunists (40). In a key paragraph that follows, Hellman provides her own historical synthesis; she argues that the new wave was not in fact new:

It began with the Russian Revolution of 1917. The victory of the revolution, and thus its menace, had haunted us through the years that followed, then twisted the tail of history when Russia was our ally in the Second World War, and, just because that had been such an unnatural connection, the fears came back in fuller force after the war when it looked to many people as if Russia would overrun Western Europe. Then the revolution in China caused an enormous convulsion in capitalist societies and somewhere along the line gave us the conviction that we could have prevented it if only. If only was never explained with any sense, but the times had very little need of sense.

(39-40)

Hellman may say that historical conclusions are not her game, but she does not refrain from making them; thus: “It was not the first time in history that the confusions of honest people were picked up in space by cheap baddies who, hearing a few bars of popular notes, made them into an opera of public disorder, staged and sung, as much of the Congressional testimony shows, in the wards of an insane asylum” (40). If Hellman's liberalism is not absolutely clear by this point, she adds, “A theme is always necessary, a plain, simple, unadorned theme to confuse the ignorant. The anti-Red theme was easily chosen from the grab bag, not alone because we were frightened of socialism, but chiefly, I think, to destroy the remains of Roosevelt and his sometimes advanced work” (40-41).

Put briefly, Hellman and Porter leave us with a vision of history that can be defined as follows: people are fickle, confused, and become, as Porter tersely writes, “intoxicated with the vanity of power,” the kind of power that manifested itself in Judge Webster Thayer's boastful remark during a game of golf: “Did you see what I did to those anarchistic bastards?” (5). People cause one another great harm and are willing, even eager, to forget the evils of the past. To prove this point, Hellman notes that if it were true that “when the bell tolls it tolls for thee,” then Americans could not have elected Richard Nixon so soon after the McCarthy debacle (159). Towards the conclusion of Scoundrel Time, she makes this frequently quoted assertion: “We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them” (159). Porter does not limit this problem to Americans; in “Notes on Writing,” she says, “One of the most disturbing habits of the human mind is its willful and destructive forgetting of whatever in its past does not flatter or confirm its present point of view” (Collected Essays 449). That she and Hellman share the same view on the nature of a nation's collective memory is clear from the brief Foreword that Porter attached to her memoir when it appeared in book form. To a newspaper reporter's response to hearing that Sacco and Vanzetti were the subjects of her new work—“Well, I don't really know anything about them … for me it's just history”—Porter rejoins with, “It is my conviction that when events are forgotten, buried in the cellar of the page—they are no longer even history” (The Never-Ending Wrong vii). In their attempts to establish the historical significance of the events they narrate, both writers come to the same conclusions: for Hellman, McCarthyism was one step on the road to subsequent abuses of individual privacy, a step on the road to the nation's acceptance of Nixon, Watergate, and Vietnam; for Porter, the Sacco-Vanzetti trial was even more grave; it was a turning point in “the long death of the civilization made by Europeans in the Western world” (31). “The evils prophesied by that crisis,” she adds, “have all come true and are enormous in weight and variety” (32).

Though both writers take note of the historical fact that masses of people often behave as a herd and succumb to fallacies that appear valid if only because they have been repeated often enough (anarchists pose a threat that must be destroyed; Communists are a menace set out to penetrate the pluralistic fabric of American life), they nonetheless believe that certain groups of people can be expected to behave more responsibly than the herd and its leaders. Hence, Hellman feels betrayed by the intellectuals and liberals who stood passively by, or who did not remain passive but who nonetheless allowed their fear of communism to lead them into complicity with what should have been their mortal enemy. She is not naive enough to ignore why many liberals feared radicals and those with radical leanings: “Not alone because the radical's intellectual reasons were suspect, but because his convictions would lead to a world that deprived the rest of us of what we had.” Yet she also says that “radicalism or anti-radicalism should have had nothing to do with the sly, miserable methods of McCarthy, Nixon and colleagues, as they flailed at Communists, near Communists, and nowhere-near-Communists. Lives were being ruined and few hands were raised to help. Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?” (Scoundrel Time 89).¹⁰

Porter's sense of betrayal is equally great and, like Hellman's, it too is rooted in the problem of justice. The case of Sacco and Vanzetti led Porter to see that liberalism itself is subject to human frailty; highly conscious of the gulf between her status as an intellectual-cum-artist and that of the proletarians she set out to defend, Porter feels betrayed by the angry bystanders and the power-hungry men who can so cavalierly dismiss the necessity of a fair system of justice. The group she most resents and defines herself as being against, however, are the nasty “self-appointed world re-formers” (38), those like Rosa Barron whom she had expected to behave differently if only because she, again like Hellman, had wanted to believe in the existence of a small coterie of people whose sense of social responsibility did not exist at the expense of others.

Hellman and Porter become histors in order to define the state of affairs that forced them to rely upon their own inner resources and to substitute more personal values for those they believed had been abused. Hellman says that for liberalism she has substituted “something private called, for want of something that should be more accurate, decency” (118). Porter is not alone in insisting that Judeo-Greek-Christian ethics could not adequately prepare one for the mixed motives and outright malice that characterize human behavior. Both writers use the memoir to test beliefs they were brought up with; Porter contrasts her observation of the various factions of policemen—the well-behaved Pink Tea Squad as well as those menacing figures mounted on horses—with her belief, formed in childhood, that the police existed for her protection. Hellman, comparing herself to Hammett, asserts that her own nature and upbringing would not tolerate any notion of easy compliance: “It was not only my right, it was my duty to speak or act against what I thought was wrong or dangerous. It is comically late to admit that I did not even consider the fierce, sweeping, violent nonsense-tragedies that break out in America from time to time, one of which was well on its way after World War II” (51-52). Had Hellman provided an itemized list of such nonsense-tragedies, she would surely have included the deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti.

In addition to the stance of histor, such statements may suggest the presence of a rhetorical stance that Marcus Billson does not identify, that of the memorialist as confessor, or, rather, the memoir writer whose meditations on the self in confrontation with history prompt revelations of a frankly personal nature. Fully conscious observers of their pasts, Hellman and Porter use the memoir to acknowledge and confront the pain that accompanied their self-realization.

If both writers admit to personal failings and to a previous lack of sophistication about the way of the world, both also indicate that they would have had no right to produce these memoirs had they not behaved properly. To be sure, knowing how to act is not easy in a time when wrongs are blatantly perpetrated against others—a scoundrel time. Nonetheless, underlying their shared moral vision is a belief held by both writers that a modest personal heroism can and must exist, even in a time of scoundrels. Porter downplays the threat to her own security, but as others have pointed out, one could not have participated in the demonstrations without courage and a real sense of danger. In Writers on the Left (1961), Daniel Aaron cites Michael Gold's description of a city “‘in the lynching mood.’ It was dangerous for anyone to walk through the police-cordoned streets if he wore a beard, had ‘dark foreign hair or eyes,’ or acted in any way like a man who had not graduated from Harvard” (170). Hellman, by contrast, does not underplay the possible consequences of behaving honorably; nor does she hesitate to identify those features of her personality that qualify as heroic—her refusal, for example, to use articles that Communists had written against her since in her “thin morality book it is plain not cricket to clear yourself by jumping on people who are themselves in trouble” (Scoundrel Time 93-94). Hellman's method of self-representation may be oblique, but it is nonetheless clear where she stands. She may even insist that she does not much like what she did before the committee, but her indirect method of self-representation—her tendency to characterize herself through the remarks of others—leaves little doubt about how she wishes to be perceived. In addition to the voice from the press about someone finally having “the guts to do it,” she quotes the comment of another lawyer to Joseph Rauh—“You and [Abe] Fortas are making a martyr of this woman” (106)—and she paraphrases a remark from Rauh himself to the effect that “everybody had a right to make themselves a little more heroic, maybe I would do it, too” (102). When Ruth Shipley, head of the State Department's Passport Division, issues Hellman a passport in spite of the accusations that had been brought against her, Hellman submits to Hammett's explanation of why she was perhaps the only unfriendly witness to have received one: “one Puritan lady in power recognized another Puritan lady in trouble. Puritan ladies have to believe that other Puritan ladies don't lie” (86-87).¹¹

It is not, however, their status as woman memorialists that has elicited the negative critical commentary; it is when they assume the rhetorical stance of histor that Hellman's and Porter's memoirs appear to antagonize the greatest number of readers. The Never-Ending Wrong, though it did not pass by unnoticed, solicited nothing like the sometimes violent response that was accorded Scoundrel Time and its author. Still, readers were puzzled by a number of Porter's historical conclusions. All of the letters to the editor that appeared in the August 1977 issue of The Atlantic, two months after it published Porter's memoir, were harshly critical of her historical position. One writer noted that she failed “to establish her main thesis; namely, that the deaths of two impoverished immigrants, one a shoemaker, the other a fishmonger, constituted a grave miscarriage of justice which can never be effaced.” Another asked: “What was the ‘wrong’ that brought forth all those words?” Still another was disturbed by Porter's conclusion that authorities must not place the law “above the judgment of the people,” meaning of course “some people” (28-29). It was also noted that since Porter acknowledges in her Afterword the possibility that Sacco may have in fact been guilty, a possible miscarriage of justice becomes even more problematic.

Many of these observations were developed at greater length in the reviews that appeared in the following months. In Commonweal, John Deedy argued that Porter became too entrenched in “the fair-trial issue” and that her “interest in the case turns out to have been, and remains still, more institutional than individual” (571). In the Times Literary Supplement, Julian Symons took note of Porter's “customary brilliant clarity” but claimed that her argument is “distinctly confused.” He pointed specifically to her conclusion that the trial and execution were symptomatic of a frighteningly new public willingness to accept as commonplace the abuse of power—a change so sinister that Porter claims it evades her powers of analysis. Symons took exception to this assertion and to Porter's suggestion that more recent protest movements have not been characterized by the same “selfless innocence” that typified her motives and those of the men and women who joined her in Boston. Symons's response is that people have not changed. “The mistake made by unreconstructed liberals like Miss Porter,” he argues, “is not to understand that the motives of practical politicians are never pure, as are those with a single fixed end like banning nuclear weapons, or preserving the countryside, or reducing aeroplane noise” (198).

Since Porter's memoir did not generate the kind of response that would prompt reviewers and critics to challenge one another's observations, no one has yet addressed these criticisms of her historical conclusions, and though her memoir can surely stand on its own, it seems necessary to counter some of the objections that have been brought forth. Unlike Dos Passos, Porter never renounced her liberalism, and her work, especially her nonfiction, retained its polemical edge. She did, however, become distrustful of all political groups and much less prone to play the part of activist. The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti came at a point in Porter's life when she was beginning to realize her creative potential; her goals became more clearly focused, and she subsequently devoted most of her energy to her writing, interrupted though it always was. The Sacco-Vanzetti affair appears to have functioned as a catalyst to her self-understanding. In what may be the most self-reflexive passage in her memoir, Porter writes:

I was not an inexperienced girl, I was thirty-seven years old; I knew a good deal about the evils and abuses and cruelties of the world; I had known victims of injustice, of crime. I was not ignorant of history, nor of literature; I had witnessed a revolution in Mexico, had in a way taken part in it, had seen it follow the classic trials of all revolutions. Besides all the moral force and irreproachable motives of so many, I knew the deviousness and wickedness of both sides, on all sides, and the mixed motives—plain love of making mischief, love of irresponsible power, unscrupulous ambition of many men who never stopped short of murder, if murder would advance their careers an inch. But this was something very different, unfamiliar.

(56)

What Porter saw at first hand was something that another southern writer, Walker Percy, would later articulate as the most distinguishing characteristic of evil in our century: its sheer banality (156). It is not insignificant that Porter finally defines the event as a “tragic farce,” for gathered in Boston were the finest writers of a generation, all come to protest not merely the thinly veiled assault on American leftism but the glaring abuse of human rights guaranteed by our constitution. It was an event that did in fact foreshadow the public's acceptance of larger abuses of power, of even more banal wrongs to come. Though it may have received less attention than any of her other works, The Never-Ending Wrong is one of the essential fragments of the larger plan that Porter mentioned in her famous 1940 Preface to Flowering Judas and Other Stories. It is, in effect, the culminating expression of a moral vision that was brought into focus by Porter's minimal participation in an event that occurred half a century earlier.

Porter's work is not the “plain, full record” she claims it to be in her Foreword, but she does not fail to prove her thesis. Nor is it really logical to argue that her speculation regarding the innocence or possible guilt of the two accused men undermines her claim that justice was miscarried. As Roger Starr remarked in his Commentary review, the mystery of Sacco's and Vanzetti's innocence has dogged liberals from the late twenties on: “The questions multiply even if they never erase the implacable fact that the two men were put to death on findings of guilt which satisfied almost no educated American under fifty” (95). Starr shows that Porter's memoir has a historical value that lies beyond its specific historical conclusions, for in one brief work, Porter managed to emphasize the mystery of the affair; she highlighted the socioeconomic threats that emigrants posed for the country's upper and lower classes; she drew attention to the presence and importance of American Communists; and through her own presence in Boston, she signaled a “periodic emergence in America of a social protest led by members of the ruling class, or what would elsewhere be called the ruling class” (96).¹² It is not incidental that the last three of these concerns also play a major role in the critical reaction to Hellman's historical synthesis.

It is safe to say that Hellman's attempt to define herself and her role within the course of twentieth-century political history set off a reaction that has had few parallels in the last several decades. Anyone who had a stake in defining himself or herself as a liberal anti-Communist felt compelled to respond to Scoundrel Time, a book that received an initial set of highly favorable reactions before the more negative and, some would say, more text-centered appraisals began to appear. Almost without fail, critics centered their responses on one or more of four issues: Hellman's charge that magazines that were in the position to denounce McCarthy and his tactics failed to do so; her theory about the children of immigrants and their cultural assimilation; her contention that liberal anti-Communists played into the hands of the men who led the nation to Vietnam, Watergate, and beyond; and what was frequently taken to be her ignorance about the real nature of communism. It goes without saying that Hellman's decision to point a finger at people who were still living—at Diana Trilling, for instance—assured the notoriety of her self-presentation, for it is largely by means of contrast to Trilling and others that Hellman characterizes herself.

“Partisan Review, although through the years it has published many, many pieces protesting the punishment of dissidents in Eastern Europe, made no protest when people in this country were jailed or ruined. … Commentary didn't do anything. No editor or contributor ever protested against McCarthy” (90). William Phillips, editor of Partisan Review, responded to this charge by noting that Richard Rovere, Arthur Schlesinger, Dwight McDonald, and Philip Rahv, among others, made several anti-McCarthy statements; he added, “I suppose if we were the ideal, selfless human beings we sometimes pretended to be, we would have … come to the defense of people we thought to be the instruments, whether conscious or not, of a new barbarism” (338-39). Irving Howe takes note of his own violently anti-McCarthy article for Partisan Review, a piece that Hellman herself singled out for praise even though it appeared at the rather late date of 1954, only shortly before the Army-McCarthy hearings would begin to silence McCarthy and help curb the nation's hysteria. Though Hellman did not single out The Nation, editor Carey McWilliams felt the need (in the same issue that included a highly favorable review of Scoundrel Time) to clear the magazine of any guilt by association; he pointed specifically to a 28 June 1952 special issue, “How Free Is Free?” These pieces aside, it seems clear that Hellman has not distorted the historical picture on this point. Thus it is not surprising that her opponents would sidetrack the issue and fall victim to a common fallacy of argument. Sidney Hook (whose invective is rivalled only by that of William Buckley) maintains that Hellman had no right to charge others with negligence when she herself never protested the abuses of human rights under Stalin, and Howe protested what he saw as the timidness and rather late date of Hellman's own realization of Stalin's “sins.” Nathan Glazer takes perhaps a more subtle tack when he says that Hellman, a respected and talented writer with many readers, was in the position to offer a better understanding of communism but failed in her own intellectual responsibilities: “Perhaps Communism in the world was a threat but Communists at home were not? Very well, let us hear about it” (38). Glazer has a point, but he seems to have forgotten the Red-baiting and generally hostile atmosphere of the postwar era.

Since they rest on generalities that cannot be substantiated by something as neat as a date of publication, the other charges brought against Hellman's historical conclusions are less easy to prove or disprove. Hellman contends that “thoughtful and distinguished men and women” who failed to speak out against McCarthy have not yet found it “a part of conscience to admit that their cold-war anti-Communism was perverted, possibly against their wishes, into the Vietnam War and then into the reign of Nixon, their unwanted but inevitable leader” (Scoundrel Time 90-91). This is a broad generalization, as Howe observed in what is the most spirited attack on this feature of Hellman's argument (378-79), but it is not so broad that it loses all credence. In effect, Hellman is saying that silence itself gave tacit approval to greater and even more dangerous government abuses and intrusions. Her account of the CIA agent who trailed her in Europe during the months after her hearing pales by comparison to the revelations about CIA and FBI surveillance of private citizens which emerged during Watergate and its aftermath. Hellman aligns herself with the revisionist view that the hysterical fear (and silence) that characterized the fifties played into the hands of an emerging military-industrial complex that, even now, continues to find ways to sanction its intrusions and imperialistic missions (Hellman did not live to see the appalling Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s). Yet while she makes the connection between then and now, Hellman does not offer enough evidence to convince the skeptical; as Doris Falk rightly notes, such facts “were plentifully available in the publications of her own Committee for Public Justice, and might have strengthened her position” (152).

Nothing about Hellman's historical stance seems to have ignited more ire than this assertion: “Many [American intellectuals] found in the sins of Stalin Communism—and there were plenty that for a long time I mistakenly denied—the excuse to join those who should have been their hereditary enemies. Perhaps that, in part, was the penalty of a nineteenth-century immigration. The children of timid immigrants are often remarkable people: energetic, intelligent, hardworking; and often they make it so good that they are determined to keep it at any cost” (Scoundrel Time 43).

Hellman may have thought she was referring primarily to the many immigrants who had made their fortunes in Hollywood, but her critics still charged that this statement undermined her liberalism through its implication that she herself was in some way fully American and not subject to the same fear or weaknesses (see Kazin, “Legend of Lillian Hellman” 34; Marcus 97; Glazer 38; Kempton 22; Hook 85-86). Here the generality of Hellman's historical conclusion is less offensive than its glaring arrogance. Only Victor Navasky was willing to look past Hellman's condescension in order to concede her point. In what is arguably the most provocative examination of Cold-War Hollywood, Navasky implies that Hellman may not have taken her historical observation far enough: “For some, the very act of denouncing was a form of assimilation, of status elevation … the truth was that by denouncing fellow immigrants (or children of immigrants) before HUAC, one consolidated one's identification with the dominant society. The practice came with the prestige of the state conferred upon it; it legitimated betrayal” (322).

The fourth charge—that Hellman was naive about Communists and their real intentions—rests upon her belief that there was never a Communist menace in this country. It is a charge that holds up as badly as the other three. While Nathan Glazer believes that Hellman failed in her obligation to explain why she saw no Communist threat, in Hollywood or the country at large, Irving Howe focuses on what he sees as an even greater failure: “Those who supported Stalinism and its political enterprises, either here or abroad, helped befoul the cultural atmosphere … helped destroy whatever possibilities there might have been for a resurgence of serious radicalism in America” (382). Howe and Sidney Hook are not alone in calling Hellman a hardnosed Communist; Paul Johnson makes the same conclusion in his book on the moral credentials of intellectuals to position themselves as advisers to others. All of these claims have been successfully countered by Robert P. Newman in The Cold War Romance of Lillian Hellman and John Melby (1989), the most sustained examination of Hellman's leftist involvements to date. Anyone interested in an undistorted picture of Hellman's politics can do no better than to begin with Newman's carefully researched biography.

Taking an unbiased approach to his topic, Newman concludes that there is no evidence to suggest that Hellman was ever anything other than a fellow traveler. Any careful reader of her plays will admit that she was more interested in character and personality than in political theory; in Scoundrel Time, Hellman remarks that one of her central complaints against Communists is their obsession with theory. Newman shows that it is absurd to suggest that Hellman ever kowtowed to the Communist position on anything. Watch on the Rhine, the antifascist play that figures prominently in her FBI file, was actually an outcry against the Soviet Union's decision to form a pact with Hitler; it was denounced by both the Daily Worker and the New Masses. When Hitler broke the pact and invaded Russia, it was the party line that followed Hellman. Still, Newman argues, “To the extent that Communist Russia was for most of the Hitler period the chief force opposed to fascism, her support of Russia was understandable” (299). Hellman may have overestimated the Communist commitment to peace, especially during the postwar years, but at the heart of her many leftist involvements was an intense desire for world peace. Hellman had, after all, observed from close range the devastation of World War II; it was this first-hand experience that prompted her to make this remark at the 1949 Waldorf Conference: “It no longer matters whose fault it was. It matters that the game be stopped. Only four years ago millions upon millions of people died, yet today men talk of death and war as they talk of going to dinner” (quoted in Newman 300).

After returning from Russia in 1945, Hellman held a New York press conference in which she noted, “I wouldn't want to see Communism here. We're never going to have it. It is no problem with us. I see no signs of it here.” As Newman discovered, the FBI deleted these remarks from the file it “later passed out to right-wing columnists, congressional committees, and the Passport Office” (54). Such deception does not surprise Newman, who claims that the FBI's methods are amateurish and unquestionably biased against radicals and others identified with liberal-left causes. Hellman had friends that “ranged across the ideological spectrum” (298), yet the FBI interviewed only sources that were hostile to her, who would confirm their suspicions or who would remain quiet about the investigation. Newman discredits most of the accusations in Hellman's file (including those of key informant Louis Francis Budenz), but perhaps his most valuable service has been to show how meaningless it is to continue calling Hellman a Stalinist: “As to the Stalinist label, since she was pro-Communist but not a Trotskyite during the 1930's, it might have been appropriate then. In the 1980's it is ludicrous. What could it mean now? She has fully repudiated the purges and Stalin, their instigator, as well as Vishinsky, their prosecutor. There is no possible meaning of the term that could now be applied to her. In this era, Stalinism is simply a swear word applied by fanatical anti-Communists to people whom they dislike” (304).

Hellman's critics have faulted her for, one, not seeing quickly enough and, two, for understanding the “sins” of Stalin only when they became publicly apparent. What these critics want from her is something akin to the degradation ceremonies carried out by the committee: a simple acknowledgement of human frailty is not enough. Yet Hellman was too cagey, too scrappy, to concede anything more; she was too knowing to play into the hands of Cold-War sentiment and give reactionaries or even anti-Communist liberals any further reasons to rail against the blindness of American radicals. Newman concludes his appendix—“Was Lillian Hellman a Communist?”—with this defense: “In the final judgment, one is forced to conclude that Ruth Shipley, hard-nosed anti-Communist that she was, using the FBI files as she did, solicitous as she was of the good name of the United States to the nth degree, was right: Lillian Hellman was not a Communist in any significant sense, certainly not in the 1950's. It is simple nonsense to call her this; sheer polemics to call her a Stalinist; and plain insanity to believe, as J. Edgar Hoover did at one time, that she was in any way disloyal to the United States of America” (329).

When the various objections to the historical conclusions of both writers have been countered or at least acknowledged, there still remains a puzzling, at times even ambivalent, edge to the selves they define within the given historical context. At the heart of both memoirs is a tension that neither writer seems to acknowledge: a desire, on the one hand, to demonstrate that she is a responsible, thinking, political human being and a reticence, on the other hand, to provoke the charge that her politics have in any way diminished her value as an artist. Richard King has recently analyzed a reluctance on the part of southern writers, both male and female, to explore “the essential arrangements of the political order, including of course power-relationships” and “what it means to lead a political life,” this despite the fact that, as King puts it, “being political and acting politically are as clearly part of our experience as falling in love, making money, having a religious experience, finding satisfaction in the life of the mind, or in ‘mere’ everydayness” (“Politics and Literature” 190-91). King points specifically to Eudora Welty's contention that fiction, at least, must keep a “private address” and that the artist must reject any intrusion, political or otherwise, into her inward space. Part of the reluctance King observes can be traced to the bias of the southern New Critics against works that were blatantly political—their tendency, as King remarks, “to locate the field of significant action in artistic expression itself” (197). Another part of this reluctance may be traced to the southern writer's often-noted fear of abstraction. In an essay on E. M. Forster, Porter declared that human relationships must be formed “not in the mass, not between nations, nonsense!—but between one person and another” (Collected Essays 74). In this context it is necessary to remember that, because they ardently rejected any system of thought that placed man as a political being at its center, some of the men who contributed essays to I'll Take My Stand (1930) had wanted to call their Agrarian manifesto Tracts against Communism. King's analysis focuses almost exclusively on fiction, but it bears upon the fact that Hellman and Porter, two southern writers, have produced memoirs that engage the political sphere but that define selves with only the broadest of political terms. The piecemeal nature of their political definition has forced others to clarify what they themselves might have made more explicit.

There is a surprising coyness of tone in Scoundrel Time whenever Hellman alludes to her political thinking and involvements, and her pronouncements do not always coincide with the facts her biographers have uncovered. Hellman claims not to fit into any party and even tells Judge Wood in her letter that she is not a political person, yet she admits to having had easy access to high-ranking Communist party members, to having had very specific plans for the Progressive party (she hoped to secure a modest future for the new organization by avoiding Wallace's plan to mount a major presidential campaign), and she boldly decries what she perceived to be a political vacuum in “the American creative world” (119). Moreover, towards the conclusion of her memoir, she asserts, “In every civilized country people have always come forward to defend those in political trouble” (161), which is itself a political act. One can accept Hellman's claim in An Unfinished Woman that “rebels seldom make good revolutionaries, perhaps because organized action, even union with other people, is not possible for them” (118), but it is disconcerting to turn from this work in which Hellman details her extensive reading of the great political theorists of our time, to her apology in Scoundrel Time for making her political history “too simple” (49). A reader might justifiably ask why Lillian Hellman, a woman who helped to form the Committee for Public Justice, who was one of four to initiate a law suit that pressured Richard Nixon to release the Watergate tapes—why she of all people would find it necessary or desirable to simplify her political history, as indeed one might wonder why upon two occasions in Scoundrel Time alone she would understate her radicalism, perhaps the one inherently political term that encompasses the woman and her worldview as it emerges from the pages of Scoundrel Time.¹³

In 1979 Hellman collected her three memoirs and supplied new commentaries on each work. While she acknowledged the charges that were brought against Scoundrel Time, she did not take this opportunity to address any of the issues that had been raised. Instead, her remarks indicate that precise political self-definition was never her goal in the first place. Again, she focuses on those early anti-Communists whose “view from one window, grown dusty with time, has blurred the world and who do not intend ever to move to another window.” The curious thing about this commentary is that Hellman seems unaware that most of her angry critics had faulted her for the very thing she says she tried to get around in Scoundrel Time—for moralizing rather than clarifying herself. She writes: “I tried to avoid, when I wrote this book, what is called a moral stand. I'd like to take that stand now. I never want to live again to watch people turn into liars and cowards and others into frightened, silent collaborators. And to hell with the fancy reasons they give for what they did” (Three 722-26). Hellman's commentary does little more than reify her earlier stand.

Katherine Anne Porter was as reluctant as Lillian Hellman to describe her political beliefs and commitments. It was in her Introduction to Eudora Welty's A Curtain of Green (1941) that Porter gave a mini-sermon on the artist and her necessary disengagement from the world of politics. Porter says that Welty escaped “a militant socialist consciousness” and “has not expressed, except implicitly, any attitude at all on the state of politics or the condition of society.” For Porter, Welty's work is grounded rather in “an ancient system of ethics,” in “an unanswerable, indispensable moral law.” The absence of politics in Welty's writing does not disturb Porter, who believes that when the artist abandons such laws “in favor of a set of political, which is to say, inhuman rules, he cuts himself away from his proper society—living men” (Collected Essays 287).¹⁴ Porter wrote this piece in 1941; the international political means at that time helps to account for a tone that becomes even more indignant as she continues: “There exist. documents of political and social theory which belong, if not to poetry, certainly to the department of humane letters. They are reassuring statements of the great hopes and dearest faiths of mankind and they are acts of high imagination. But all working, practical political systems, even those professing to originate in moral grandeur, are based upon and operate by contempt of human life and individual fate; in accepting any one of them and shaping his mind and work to that mold, the artist dehumanizes himself, unfits himself for the practice of any art” (287).

As unyielding as these comments may seem, they provide the necessary focus for a complete understanding of Porter's enduring attachment to the Sacco-Vanzetti affair. It is reductive to argue that her long-evolving interest in the two men resulted primarily from her nagging belief that they had not been given a fair trial or that she wrote The Never-Ending Wrong to express her fifty-year outrage over having been a pawn for a Communist organization. Though Porter does not make the connection for her readers (and perhaps she did not fully see the connection herself), the two men and their trial grew to embody her suspicion that government and politics, unlike art or religion, could never serve as a genuinely effective means of ordering lives. Her Introduction to Welty's stories strongly indicates that Porter accepted anarchism as a philosophy or vision of society that, though it has taken many forms, hinges on one necessary but seemingly impossible goal: the liquidation of all state authority. Porter quotes Nietzsche—“The State is the coldest of all cold monsters”—and then adds her own belief that “the revolutions which destroy or weaken at least one monster bring to birth and growth another” (61).

At the conclusion of her memoir, Porter recounts a conversation with one of the best-known anarchists of the age:

In 1935 in Paris, living in that thin upper surface of comfort and joy and freedom in a limited way, I met this most touching and interesting person, Emma Goldman, sitting at a table reserved for her at the Select, where she could receive her friends and carry on her conversations and sociabilities over an occasional refreshing drink. … She finally came to admit sadly that the human race in its weakness demanded government and all government was evil because human nature was basically weak and weakness is evil. She was a wise, sweet old thing, grandmotherly, or like a great-aunt. I said to her, “It's a pity you had to spend your whole life in such unhappiness when you could have had such a nice life in a good government, with a home and children.”

She turned on me and said severely: “What have I just said? There is no such thing as a good government. There never was. There can't be.”

I closed my eyes and watched Nietzsche's skull nodding.

(62-63)

Porter does not call herself an anarchist, but this passage makes it unquestionably clear that she was drawn to the anarchistic critique of society. As a social force, anarchism may have failed for reasons Irving L. Horowitz explains in his still useful introduction to the major anarchists and their writings. Though theoretically sound, anarchism tended to focus on “the world of what ought to be” (60); further, it never got beyond primary group associations and “never admitted of a strategy and theory for the maintenance of power” (61). Yet as the conversation with Emma Goldman reveals, anarchists, and intellectuals like Porter who were drawn to their critique, saw that they could survive on what Horowitz calls “the unmasking tradition” (61)—on what Porter has identified elsewhere as her own position: “the great tradition of dissent.”¹⁵

In short, Hellman and Porter may shy away from political definition, but their disclaimers do not hold up under careful scrutiny. Though Porter remained a liberal idealist, she came to believe that no government or political philosophy could protect the human rights of those without power or property. The first object of the United States Constitution is, according to James Madison, the protection of an unequal distribution of both property and power. Porter and Hellman would accept what Irving Horowitz calls the anarchist's only true morality: the belief that there must be no distinction between what is done for self and what is done for others. Yet after her experiences in Mexico, Porter could not accept the “never-never-land” of a “theoretically classless society” (24). It does not appear that Hellman, on the other hand, ever lost faith in the power of the state to eradicate inequality; she thus became, if somewhat unwittingly, an apologist for the Soviet Union: “I thought that in the end Russia, having achieved a state socialism, would stop its infringements on personal liberty. I was wrong” (Scoundrel Time 49). The difference between the two women is in some respects the difference between an anarchistic and a socialistic critique of society, the difference between two competing visions that are for the most part submerged but surface intermittently in the two memoirs.

The ambivalence each writer expresses regarding her political identity extends to the way she does (and does not) confront her southern past. Hellman draws upon her southern upbringing to account for, even to justify her independent and rebellious nature: “Whatever is wrong with white Southerners—redneck or better—we were all brought up to believe we had a right to think as we pleased, go our own, possibly strange ways” (47). The paradox is that these “strange ways” resulted in the degradation and subordination of a whole race of people. Hellman does not take note of the irony when she recalls that it was a black woman—her nurse Sophronia—who instructed her in the value of anger. For her part, Porter never mentions her southern background in The Never-Ending Wrong except to say that after the executions she felt far from home. There may be a reason for this omission other than the fact that most readers would have been familiar with her status as an important southern author. In those pieces in which Porter does confront her southern past—“Noon Wine: The Sources” and “Portrait: Old South”—she falsifies the record in order to identify with a class of aristocratic southerners she did not in fact belong to. Whatever prompted her need to have descended from the wealthy slave-owning plantation owners, it remains that such an identification, real or imaginary, would have been at odds with her assertion in The Never-Ending Wrong that she had lived the span of nearly a century in sympathy with those who had devoted their lives to ameliorating “the anguish that human beings inflict on one another” (62). “The Never-Ending Wrong” is in fact a title Porter had originally intended for another work: an unpublished story about a southern lynching.

Though in interviews both writers have adopted a somewhat less somber tone regarding the same events and experiences they narrate in their memoirs,¹⁶ the worldview that unites Scoundrel Time and The Never-Ending Wrong—the titles are almost interchangeable—is pessimistic, even at times grim. “There are not many places or periods or scenes,” Hellman writes, “that you can think back upon with no rip in the pleasure” (132); Porter goes one step further and denounces “the whole evil trend toward reducing everything human to the mud of the lowest common denominator” (12). Both attack the gullibility of Americans—their willingness to believe almost any assertion that is repeated often enough, as well as their willingness to forget sections of the historical past that do not please or flatter. Both have been guilty of the same forgetfulness, but memorialists see themselves as separate from others even while they acknowledge their own frailty and their own mixed motives. This isolationist posture cannot fail to raise problems (and pleasures) for the reader who must accept or reject the subjectivity that undergirds the memoir as a genre that blends history with self-reflexivity.

Even in the earliest published work of each writer, one can see the threads that would be more pronounced in the subsequent memoirs. Hellman's first play, The Children's Hour (1934), is a searing depiction of scandalmongering; it concludes with the ruin of two school teachers' lives as the result of unchecked hysteria (the charge brought against the two teachers: lesbianism). Hellman's antifascist plays, Watch on the Rhine (1941) and The Searching Wind (1944), are forceful denunciations of people who remain passive in the face of social and political threats. In what is probably her most popular play, The Little Foxes (1939), the family servant, Addie, makes an observation that solidifies one of Hellman's central themes: “Well, there are the people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the Locusts. Then there are the people who stand around and watch them eat it. Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it” (Collected Plays 182). Hellman has acknowledged her attraction to innately evil characters; in an interview with Stephanie de Pue, she admitted, “I've long been fascinated by villains who very well know they were villains, who didn't give a damn” (Bryer 190). Her most pressing concern, however, is the danger of a passive collusion with such villains, a theme that obsessed Porter as well. Doris Falk has highlighted a pattern of evil or villainy that emerges from Hellman's sustained glance at her own past and from her observation of the world at large. This pattern, which characterizes so much of her drama, finds one of its most stringent embodiments in Hellman's memoir: “The ‘scoundrels’ of the title resembled the characters of Hellman's plays: they included not only the active villains, the “despoilers,” like Senator McCarthy himself, but those whom Hellman accused of being his fellow-travellers—the ‘bystanders’ who supported the “witch-hunt” by failing to attack McCarthy or to defend or rescue those like herself whose reputations and fortunes had been damaged. In fact, Hellman is harder on these than she is on the senator and the various committees” (147-48).

Fortunately, Hellman's moral vision does not stop with a duality of active and passive doers of evil; in her adaptations she has been drawn especially to characters who discover a measure of personal dignity—even a degree of heroism—by finding and remaining true to moral commitments, who become radicals in the best sense of the word. In Montserrat (1949), taken from a French play by Emmanuel Robles, the central character refuses to say where a South American liberator is hiding during the Spanish occupation of Venezuela in 1812; because he remains faithful to his own values and refuses to speak, he is forced to watch six innocent men and women put to death and then suffers the same fate himself. It could have been no surprise to viewers of her work, and to those familiar with her public life, that Hellman was drawn to the historical figure of Joan of Arc. Three years after her hearing, Hellman adapted Jean Anouilh's The Lark (1955) with a Joan that freely sacrifices her life for a political ideal. In 1956 Hellman collaborated with Leonard Bernstein and Richard Wilbur on a musical adaptation of Voltaire's Candide. Hellman translates Candide's final remark to Cunegonde as “We will not live in beautiful harmony, because there is no such thing in this world, nor should there be. We promise only to do our best and live our lives” (Collected Plays 678). A reader familiar with Hellman's adaptations can see that Montserrat, Joan, and even Candide merge in the pivotal character of Scoundrel Time: Lillian Hellman herself.

Katherine Anne Porter's fascination with villainy and the inquisitorial spirit was germane to her uncompleted biography of Cotton Mather and dates as far back as her first newspaper reviews for the Rocky Mountain News. Joan Givner has discovered that these early pieces contain an embryonic expression of a moral vision that lies at the heart of Porter's subsequent fiction and that is fundamental to her long-standing interest in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti. Givner quotes a 1919 review in which, like Hellman, Porter admits her “longstanding fascination with the psychology of villainy,” adding that “it takes imagination and real nerve to become a first class sinner” (quoted in Givner, A Life 134). Givner also points out that after she recognized the “positive qualities” of the villain, Porter turned her pen to “the virtuous, passive heroine, and it was on this figure that she eventually focused all her scorn and contempt” (134-35). The figures that most incensed Porter are those who through their complacency or passivity allow evil to occur.

Givner sees this philosophy at work in an early story, “Magic,” in the more famous “Flowering Judas” with its triangular cast of characters—Braggioni, a pure unmitigated villain; Eugenio, the victim; and Laura, the indifferent heroine—and in Ship of Fools where it is given one of its fullest and perhaps most explicit expressions. Here Dr. Schumann, in agreement with the ship's captain, claims that “it takes a strong character to be really evil. Most of us are too slack, half-hearted or cowardly—luckily, I suppose. Our collusion with evil is only negative, consent by default you might say” (quoted in Givner, A Life 136). Incidentally, when Porter singles out various twentieth-century villains she does not exclude the key figure in America's Red-baiting: “the collusion in evil that allows creatures like Mussolini, or Hitler, or Huey Long, or McCarthy—you can make your own list, petty and great—to gain hold of things, who permits it? Oh, we're convinced we're not evil. We don't believe in that sort of thing, do we? And the strange thing is that if these agents of evil are all clowns, why do we put up with them? God knows, such men are evil, without sense—forces of pure ambition and will—but they enjoy our tacit consent” (quoted in Givner, A Life 316).

With The Never-Ending Wrong, the victims are clearly identifiable as those who suffer at the hands of callous, complacent, and power-hungry men like Governor Fuller, Judge Thayer, and the judges who sentence the protestors to their small and demeaning fines. The victims are the two men who did not receive a fair trail, their families, and the many well-wishers from the community of artists and intellectuals who demonstrated on their behalf. The bystanders in this work are not entirely passive, however; their collusion with the villains becomes blatant to Porter if not to themselves; hence her repetitive emphasis on Rosa Barron's terse remark that the two foreign men could do “us” nothing good as long as they were alive.

Eudora Welty was the first reviewer who knew Porter's writing well enough to make the connection between The Never-Ending Wrong and the thematic concerns of Porter's fiction. In her piece for the New York Times Book Review, Welty writes: “Elements of guilt, the abandonment of responsibilities in human relationships, the betrayal of good faith and the taking away of trust and love are what her tragic stories are made of. Betrayal of justice is not very different from the betrayal of love” (29).

It seems somehow right that Welty would produce one of the most perceptive pieces on Porter's last book; it was, after all, Porter who had helped to launch Welty's career by writing an enthusiastic and discerning introduction to A Curtain of Green, Welty's first collection of stories. There is, however, one connection between The Never-Ending Wrong and Porter's fiction that neither Givner, Welty, nor any other reviewer took note of. Like Hellman, Porter was adept at creating believable male characters. Elizabeth Hardwick, in her Introduction to Virago's edition of Porter's Collected Stories, notes, “A hard knowledge of the world in extreme, masculine dilemmas was part of the knowledge [Porter] brought to fiction. So it was her good luck after all not to be quite as she would have wished—a Southern lady” (xi). Taken as a whole, however, most of Porter's heroes are not men but women like Granny Weatherall whose life has been blighted by her rage and sense of powerlessness at having been jilted; or Sophia Jane Rhea whose sense of herself as a commanding matriarch does not deflect the reader's awareness of her subordinate status in the southern patriarchal order; or most important because she was Porter's fictional stand-in, Miranda Gay, who embarks on a quest for self-authenticity in “Old Mortality” but who, in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” sinks into a listless depression as she looks squarely into the war-ravaged world of men. Porter may have disclaimed the feminist label, but what she presents is in essence a feminist critique of a world in which women, even when they refuse to cooperate with their oppressors, are still often stupefied by their lack of power. She may acknowledge her own propensity for evil, but in The Never-Ending Wrong, she is neither villain nor passive bystander; the memoir is rather a record of her defiance. Yet it is also a record of her own sense of victimization and powerlessness in the face of an event that had become a “tragic farce” (54). She explains her feelings after the execution: “In my whole life I have never felt such a weight of pure bitterness, helpless anger in utter defeat, outraged love and hope” (48). In the briefest section of her memoir—and consequently emphatic in its brevity and position near the end—Porter attempts to crystallize the most intense images she has retained since that date: “Now, through all this distance of time, I remember most vividly Mrs. Harriman's horsehair lace and flower garden party hats; Lola Ridge standing in the half darkness before Charleston Prison under the rearing horse's hoofs; the gentle young girl striding and drinking gin from the bottle and singing her wake-dirges; Luigia Vanzetti's face as she stared in horror down into the crowd howling like beasts; and Rosa Barron's little pinpoints of eyes glittering through her spectacles at me and her shrill, accusing voice: ‘Saved? Who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive?’” (56-57).

It is neither accidental nor insignificant that Porter's memories focus entirely on the women participants, two of whom are dazed or bewildered, all of whom, even Rosa Barron, were like Porter herself—ultimately powerless to effect change.

What is implicit regarding gender and its restrictions in Porter's memoir is neither explicit nor implicit in Scoundrel Time. Hellman clearly sees herself as a woman who can compete and stand on her own in a man's world, and indeed, her account has led a great many readers to believe that hold her own she did. When asked to explain the nature of her victory, Hellman quotes her lawyer Joseph Rhau: “‘[The committee] had sense enough to see that they were in a bad spot. We beat them, that's all” (117). This explanation may be valid; and by reducing it to a note, Hellman is again underplaying her own heroism. Valid or not, it is important to see this explanation in light of one that appeared in Time a week after Hellman's hearing. In a patronizing tone that seemed built into all Luce publications of the time, a nameless reporter says, “Playwright Hellman, who once described herself as ‘the greatest meeting-goer in the country,’ went last week to meet the House Un-American Activities Committee.” After insinuating strongly that Hellman, “an expert at smooth dialogue,” used her dramatic skills on her own behalf—that she performed rather than cooperated—the Time reporter clinches his piece: “After she had been excused, Chairman Wood said gallantly: ‘Why cite her for contempt? After all, she's a woman’” (74).

Hellman and Porter were each drawn to classical women heroes, a further connection between the two women that seems appropriate in concluding this examination. Like Hellman, Porter was particularly intrigued by the historical figure of Joan of Arc—by her sense of divine mission and her prominence as a victim of the capriciousness of human nature. In 1955, the same year that Hellman's translation of Jean Anouilh's The Lark opened to perceptive and appreciative notices (it ran for 229 performances), Regine Pernoud published The Retrial of Joan of Arc with a Foreword by Katherine Anne Porter. Pernoud's book is a selection of the proceedings of the rehabilitation trials that took place at the request of Charles VII twenty years after Joan's death. Fifteen hundred witnesses gathered throughout France to clear Joan of heretical charges; she was declared innocent at Rouen in 1456, six years after the rehabilitation began. The witnesses highlighted the deceptive nature of Joan's trial, her humiliating prison experiences, her essential goodness and chastity. The trial of Joan of Arc had merged for Porter with that of Sacco and Vanzetti, and even with that of Christ, all of them trials in which the accused were assumed guilty from the outset. Porter's Foreword was well received, and her interest in Joan as a victim of a predetermined verdict was not lost on the book's reviewers, one of whom summarized the sham of Joan's original trial: “Testimony was suppressed or altered before it got into the record. Witnesses were bribed or frightened; the questioning was organized so as to confuse rather than elicit fact, legal counsel was denied. … All of which—and more—has a terrifyingly familiar ring today and makes Miss Pernoud's book doubly fascinating” (Chubb 50).

Likewise, Hellman's translation of Anouilh's The Lark, which appeared three years after her hearing, is as much about the mood of the McCarthy era as it is about a medieval French peasant hero. Though Hellman is working with Anouilh's material, the play is undeniably self-referential; Joan's inquisitors merge with the “Inquisitor priests” Hellman denounces in Scoundrel Time (83). The play opens with the Earl of Warwick's question: “Everybody here? Good. Let the trial begin at once. The quicker the judgment and the burning, the better for all of us” (Collected Plays 551). Joan's inquisitors are petty, small-minded men, intolerant even of one another's differences. They embody the fear of genuine liberalism in Hellman's own era. Warwick says, for example, that “as a man of politics, I cannot afford the doctrine of man's individual magnificence. I might meet another man who felt the same way. And he might express his individual magnificence by cutting off my head” (567). It is Cauchon who claims that “the time will come when our names will be known only for what we did to her; when men, forgiving their own sins, but angry with ours, will speak our names in a curse” (568). It is a remark that seems less pointed at McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Wood, and the other “cheap baddies” than at those who yielded to them, who for whatever reason chose to play their game and “name names.”

Beyond her value as victim, Hellman and Porter were even more intrigued by Joan's importance as a female hero with a fiercely independent nature. Joan makes it clear that, regardless of the consequences, intelligent and morally responsible behavior is not only sexless but inseparable from self-realization. To Cauchon's question, “Are you in a State of Grace?” she replies: “When I lost my faith, when I recanted, or when, at the very last minute, I gave myself back to myself? When—” (556). In Hellman's translation, Beaudricourt tells Joan, “A horse costs more than a woman. You're a country girl. You ought to know that” (561); but Warwick, ironically, understands and articulates Joan's true value: “The girl was a lark in the skies of France, high over the heads of her soldiers, singing a wild, crazy song of courage” (580). Do Hellman and Porter see themselves as Joan's descendants? The answer would seem to be a guarded yes. When Jane Fonda played Hellman in Julia, the 1977 film taken from Pentimento, she told an interviewer that the story centers on “a woman who is a real heroine. It is very important to make movies about women who grow and become ideological human beings and totally committed people. We have to begin to put that image into the mass culture” (Weintraub 17). One can see Hellman and Porter nodding in agreement.

Notes

1. Though four of her plays feature southern settings and themes, critics will probably continue to debate the extent to which Hellman is in fact a “southern writer.” While she refuses to overplay her southern connections, Hellman has acknowledged their importance. When asked in a 1975 interview if she in fact considered herself a southerner, Hellman responded: “Well, I have no right to, because the New York years now far outweigh the Southern years, but I suppose most Southerners, people who grew up in the south, still consider themselves Souther.” Like other writers from the South, Hellman drew attention to her ancestry: “It wasn't simply a question that I was brought up and down from the South. I came from a family, on both sides, who had been Southerners for a great many generations” (Bryer 186). See Holditch for an illuminating discussion of Hellman as a southern writer.

2. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants, were put to death on 23 August 1927 for the robbery and murder of a paymaster and a guard outside a shoe factory in Braintree, Massachusetts. The two men were anarchists and apostates, and as such they aroused great fear among New Englanders who were already alarmed by the Red scare of the early twenties and who, in any event, had no desire to alter the existing power structure. Their trial became the cause célèbre of the late twenties; the many artists and intellectuals who protested on their behalf (including those in Europe like John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, and Thomas Mann) agreed that it was the political beliefs of the two men, rather than any hard and fast evidence of robbery and murder, that sent them to the electric chair. A generally reliable history of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair is Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht's Justice Crucified: The Story of Sacco and Vanzetti (1977), published the same year as Porter's memoir; of interest also is Paul Avrich's Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (1991). For a brief but pertinent analysis of the cultural significance of Sacco and Vanzetti, see Hoffman 400-408.

3. Darlene Harbòur Unrue provides one of the most satisfying accounts of how Porter's activities in Mexico helped to shape her subsequent development as an artist. See Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction (1985), especially the first three chapters.

4. I make this assertion even while acknowledging Porter's betrayal of fellow writer Josephine Herbst to the FBI in 1942. On the surface, such an act would appear to be politically motivated or, considering that Porter and Herbst were once good friends, a deed of pure malice. The latter is the view taken by Herbst's biographer, Elinor Langer, who discovered and made public Porter's brief role as a highly inaccurate informant (245-60). In the revised edition of her biography of Porter, Joan Givner argues for a more sympathetic interpretation of events. Givner believes that Herbst's radicalism in the 1930s had much less to do with Porter's betrayal than did the problematic nature of the two writers' friendship. Possibly frightened by a side of herself that she saw in Herbst, Porter may have been “even more repelled and frightened when she discovered that Josie was under investigation, that her rebelliousness and recklessness threatened to make her an outcast and drag Porter down with her.” Givner speculates, “Once again, from the distant past the specter of pariahdom came into Porter's consciousness, a legacy of the long battle she had fought against poverty, disease, and suffocating relationships” (8). The event is a dark point in Porter's career, but it is also, Givner asserts, “a powerful illustration of the difficulty of female friendship and loyalty under patriarchy” (10).

5. In addition to Cook and Navasky, see Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960 (1980). For more general assessments of McCarthyism see Reeves, Fried, and Kutler.

6. Hellman's last book, Maybe (1980), is a sustained meditation on the nature of memory, its processes and deceptions. Shortly after the book appeared, she made this candid remark in an interview: “There's only x amount you remember clearly—or you think you remember clearly. By the time you're 50, let us say, you've seen and known so many places there is a great deal you do not clearly remember. I think most people are not willing to see that or admit it if they do see it” (Bryer 277).

7. See Gellhorn, Jackson, and Spender, “Guerre de Plume”; McCracken, “‘Julia’ and Other Fictions by Lillian Hellman”; and Johnson, Intellectuals, a chapter of which he titles, “Lies, Damned Lies and Lillian Hellman” (288-305). These three studies set out to prove that Hellman was indeed no book-keeper of her own life, but neither offers what is needed most, a psychoanalytical critique that attempts to explain why Hellman might have needed her “fictions.” “Guerre de Plume” focuses on Hellman's apocryphal account of experiences she and Gellhorn shared in Spain in 1937; McCracken and Johnson write with a seemingly less personal purpose, wishing to expose Hellman as untrustworthy and therefore unfit to comment on the moral life of her time. For other perspectives see Wagner-Martin, “Lillian Hellman: Autobiography and Truth,” Grossman, and Adams, 121-66.

8. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Scoundrel Time are to the edition that appeared in 1976.

9. John Deedy draws attention to one of Porter's mistakes. He notes that Porter's belief in Vanzetti's innocence is based in part on her conclusion that he had a firm alibi: friends and family testified that he had been selling eels throughout the day of Christmas Eve, 1919. “But, of course,” Deedy writes, “Miss Porter has confused the attempted Bridgewater robbery of December 24, 1919, with the South Braintree robbery of April 15, 1920. … The murders were committed at South Braintree, and although Vanzetti had an alibi for what he was doing that April day of 1920, it wasn't that he was selling Christmas eels” (572).

10. To Nora Ephron, Hellman said that many intellectuals, liberals, and “pretend-radicals”—the people on her side—now regard themselves as having been anti-McCarthy when in fact they were not: “If they say they were anti-McCarthy, what they mean is that they were anti-Joe McCarthy, not what he represented. I don't remember one large figure coming to anybody's aid. … Most radicals of the time were comic but the liberals were frightening” (Bryer 134). Actually, Hellman was never really comfortable with liberalism as a term of self-definition, but by the time Ronald Reagan became president of the United States in 1981, she said to another interviewer that she was saddened that “liberalism seems to have passed away from this country … though perhaps it's really there somewhere, quietly” (Bryer 284).

11. The response to Hellman's status as a cultural hero will most likely remain mixed, though clearly divided across the ideological boundaries that were drawn in the late forties and early fifties. The reactions so far have ranged from William Buckley's predictable refusal in the National Review to concede anything remotely heroic about Hellman's performance before HUAC, to Robert Sherrill's insistence in The Nation that Hellman “performed the necessary legal maneuvers to stay out of jail; which is to say, she was smart enough not to be physically sacrificed for an era that would not have appreciated the gesture in the slightest” (757). Sherrill gives the subject of Hellman's heroism an intriguing twist: “But in another way she was quite heroic. As all children of Adam Smith know, accepting jail for principle is not nearly so great a sacrifice as rejecting money for principle. Hellman did the latter, in spades” (757). On a similar note, Robert Coles said in the Washington Post Book World that Hellman was and perhaps still is “a lonely figure—brave precisely because she was afraid, and knew the power and cunning of her accusers.” Coles believes that Kierkegaard would “have loved Scoundrel Time for its fine, sardonic humor, its unsparing social observation and, not least, the skill of its narration. … He longed for companions who would summon personal memory, among other modes of expression, to the task of making concrete and specific ethical analyses—as opposed to cleverly worded abstractions that conceal as much as they tell” (5). Murray Kempton's piece in the New York Review of Books is less enthusiastic, but Kempton looks past his reservations and applauds Hellman for her unwillingness to hurt innocent people: “It was enough for Miss Hellman to have done the single great thing of having once and for all defined the issue” (24).

12. Roger Starr notes Porter's reference to what she and other protestors had been told was a law specifying that anyone arrested more than four times could receive a sentence of life imprisonment. Starr clarifies that the statute in question, Baumes Law, applied only in New York and pertained solely to convicted felons whose habitual offenses could in fact lead to life sentences: “The law had nothing to do with Boston in 1927. But it was essential to Miss Porter to believe this nonsense because it helped her, and presumably others, to narrow the gap between themselves and the two victims of a social disaster for which they held their parents or their own class responsible” (96).

13. Gary Wills's Introduction to Scoundrel Times came under severe attack, but on the nature of Hellman's radicalism, Wills's remarks are right on target: “One of the unfortunate results of our generally muddled political terminology is a tendency to think of those on what is called the left as points on a continuum moving out from the center. The difference between, say, liberals, socialists, radicals, and Communists is a matter of degree within a continuum.” Wills argues, however, that we should not let our political terminology obscure crucial distinctions. “Cold War liberals were ideologues,” Wills asserts, “and ideologues meet each other on the same ground, if only to do battle there. Radicals of the Hellman and Hammett sort cannot even find that meeting place” (32). Wills correctly observes that while radicals are concerned with people as individuals, ideologues focus on orthodoxy. Hellman, he writes, has “spent her life creating vivid and individual people on stage; the thought of a McCarthy intent on destroying whole classes and types of people is almost too horrible for her to contemplate” (34).

14. Joan Givner traces Porter's antipathy to politics to her botched effort in 1922 to set up galleries in the United States for a Mexican folk art exhibition that was organized by, among others, Adolpho Best-Maugard and Miguel Covarrubias. Porter did extensive research for her catalog-essay, Outline of Mexican Popular Arts and Crafts (1922), a historical survey that set forth the goals of the exhibition—a work that, regrettably, has not been reprinted since its initial appearance. As Givner points out, “The United States government, which did not recognize Obregon's regime, labeled the show ‘political propaganda’ and refused to let it into the country. It remained on a railroad siding for two months, until it was finally declared a commercial enterprise, duty was paid, and it was sold to a private dealer in Los Angeles. All those who had worked on it were bitter and disillusioned.” Givner cites Porter's remark to Enrique Hank Lopez that she was “as bitter as gall that politicians could have been allowed to do so much destruction, so much damage; that international politics, and oil and finance could ruin art” (A Life 167). Porter nonetheless aligned herself with various political causes over the years. For example, in response to a 1938 circular letter on Franco and fascism from the League of American Writers, she loudly denounced “the whole principle and practice of dictatorship in any form, by any class and for whatever reason,” and she voiced her long-standing opposition “to any nation attempting to impose its own form of government, no matter what it may be, upon any other nation, either by propaganda or by acts of war” (League, Writers Take Sides 47). See Bevevino for an interesting analysis of Porter's evolving political views as revealed in selected letters, essays, and fictional works.

15. The phrase appears in Porter's “On a Criticism of Thomas Hardy” (Collected Essays 6). See Edward G. Schwartz, “The Way of Dissent: Katherine Anne Porter's Critical Position.”

16. See, for example, Rex Reed's 1975 interview with Hellman (Bryer 179-83), and Enrique Hank Lopez, “Six Days in a Boston Jail,” in his Conversations with Katherine Anne Porter (99-123). Porter's “conversation” with Lopez differs from her memoir in a few particulars. In the interview, she gives more attention, for example, to the clothes she chose for the occasion, and she tells Lopez that she herself took part in the bawdy behavior of the “wake” that followed the executions. In the revised edition of his book on Porter, George Hendrick and Willene Hendrick claim to favor the version that Porter gave to Lopez; of the two personas, the Hendricks prefer Porter the “charmingly loquacious storyteller” to Porter the “jaded and world-weary author” (134).