Scoundrel Time
by Lillian Hellman
Reviewed by Ed Lengel
Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman.
Originally published 1976.
Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) is best remembered for her work as a playwright, especially in the 1930s. Her corpus includes a number of Broadway hits that remain memorable, such as Toys in the Attic and The Little Foxes. All of them challenged social conventions in one way or another, which made it difficult to rework them into screenplays (The Little Foxes, which became a 1941 film starring Bette Davis, being a successful exception). The Children’s Hour, which was produced as a play in 1934 traced the story of a student who accused two of her teachers of lesbianism, made the transition into an expurgated screen version with much more difficulty; but it still packs a punch.
For all of her impact as a playwright, Hellman was also in a position to produce work of even more lasting value in her capacity as a witness. One her most powerful short works is her wryly compassionate introduction to The Big Knockover, a collection of short stories by her longtime lover, the pioneering detective story writer Dashiell Hammett, featuring his series character, The Continental Op. Hellman’s piece traces his life, focusing on the alcoholism that eventually killed him. She only touches briefly, however, on Hammett’s membership in the Communist Party—a popular dalliance, and sometimes commitment, among intellectuals and writers between the world wars. Hellman knew—and socialized with—Hammett’s like-minded friends, many of their associates, and understood their motivations at a time when many Americans were fascinated with the Soviet experiment in Russia and were blithely unaware of—or indifferent to—Stalin’s atrocities.
Whether or not they committed themselves to, or just toyed with Communism, many of these intellectuals would pay for it after World War II. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was the best known of the so-called Red baiters, who used institutions—the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) for example, to expose and harass those who allegedly had been—or still were—in cahoots with Communists domestic and foreign. The prosecutors in these cases presented an odd mixture of self-described crusaders who (for the most part, at least) genuinely believed in what they were doing—among them Richard Nixon; and careerists and opportunists such as McCarthy who saw them as an avenue to personal aggrandizement and power. As for the victims, they presented a mixture of genuine innocents, politically naïve artists, and actual true believers in Communism.
Hellman witnessed these prosecutions—or persecutions—as one of the artists who was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and also as a friend of many of the others. Her memoir Scoundrel Time, published in 1976 in the aftermath of Nixon’s downfall in Watergate, chronicles an era, then quarter of a century old, when she and her circle of left-leaning intellectuals were subjected to what took on all the trappings of a witch hunt. Called before the Committee, as Hellman was, or questioned in other venues, men and women were questioned closely about their youthful or current political associations and urged or bullied into ratting on their associates in order to save their careers. Hellman dramatically announced in public before her own interrogation that she would answer any questions about herself, but not about anyone else; and in fact, this is the path that most of them took when called to the dock. Others tried to take a middle path, while some—like the famed director Elia Kazan of On the Waterfront—snitched.
Kazan’s fate is perhaps the most frightening aspect of this tragic era. As the story is usually told by Hellman and other witnesses, and described in school textbooks, victims of what Hellman called the “scoundrels” orchestrating the Red Scare were blacklisted professionally, and their careers destroyed or at least suspended. Although she was only questioned once before the Committee for an hour—her opportunities in film and on Broadway quickly dried up. On the other side, though, was an internal process of persecution by the artists themselves; Kazan was blackballed by his colleagues for decades—for cooperating nominally with the Committee.
Scoundrel Time offers some interesting, if not always nuanced, observations of the time, as well as timeless lessons on conformism, whether imposed from inside or outside. The accuracy of Hellman’s memoirs, including Scoundrel Time, was later challenged by many of her own peers; she was probably less than forthcoming about her activities (although she always denied it, it has been suggested that Hellman remained a committed Stalinist through her life). Perhaps her most revealing remarks, though, concern her disgust with her own fellow artists and their behavior under pressure. “Simply, then and now,” she wrote, “I feel betrayed by the nonsense I had believed. I had no right to think that American intellectuals were people who would fight for anything if doing so would injure them; they have very little history that would lead to that conclusion.”
Ed Lengel is an author, a speaker, and a storyteller.
