Word: hellman
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That is perhaps why Hellman chose for the first sentence of her book the words "I have tried twice before to write about what has come to be known as the McCarthy period but I didn't much like what I wrote." Hellman has chosen as her enemy, her "scoundrels," those who would deify her if they had the chance...
...Hellman might have alleviated their guilt. She is a master dramatist; if it had been her intention, she would have structured a book of building tension and inner agony, climaxing in her triumph, in swells of applause and a vindicated life...
Scoundrel Time is far from such a book. It rambles, jumps around in time, from Washington to Spain to upstate New York. Hellman intersperses her stories of lawyers and committee rooms with anecdotes about clothes and cabdrivers and manure and stage-hands pouring bourbon down her throat. The stories are exquisite in and of themselves because Hellman has a sharp memory for detail and is a master storyteller. But because the stories break up the passage of events in her book, they destroy the buildup of dramatic tension. Hellman's last segment begins with the words "Nothing more...
...Hellman's courage is still evident in spite of her deliberate down-playing of it. And so also is her anger--especially at those who would praise her now but did not have any beliefs worth holding on to when the conditions of the age tested them...
...Hellman says that her own feelings were perhaps best summed up by the English writer Richard Crossman, who claimed that "It took an Englishman a long time to fight for a liberty, but once he had it nobody could take it away, but that we in America fought fast for liberty and could be deprived of it in an hour." The events of the past four years have proven Mr. Crossman all too wise, and have proved that Hellman's anger is all too well-founded...