Word: hellman
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...three volumes of prose, Lillian Hellman has been telling the story of the anger of her life, which she describes as "an uncomfortable, dangerous, and often useful gift." Through An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento, Hellman patched together the fabric of her life, revealing stories in the latter book she had not been able to bring herself to tell in the former. In both books she only touched on the period of the early 1950's. In Scoundrel Time, however, she concentrates on that era, exploring the wide range of her memories of times now remembered as the McCarthy...
...story is, chronologically, fairly straightforward. In early 1952, Hellman was subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, to testify on her life and her friends of the thirties and forties. She told the committee, in a letter dated 24 years ago today, that she would volunteer any information requested about her own history. But she refused to discuss the history of any other person. She wrote...
This stance was unacceptable to the committee. Hellman offered to testify about herself, and in doing so, waived her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. She could be held in contempt for failing to answer any other questions. When she actually appeared before the committee on May 21, 1952, she compromised her position. She took the Fifth Amendment on almost every question, incriminating herself by not incriminating herself, for the sake of decency. The cleverness of her lawyer and the ineptitude of the Committee members enabled Hellman's letter to be read into the public record. One month later, when...
...HELLMAN'S is a story of simple heroism--a courageous stance in a cowardly time. In her letter to the committee Hellman spoke of the "simple rules of human decency," and she writes that she feels all she did was to follow these simple rules. As a result of her action she lived for months with the threat of jail hanging over her life; she was blacklisted, spied upon, impoverished, forced to sell her home. Her story is the stuff of which martyrs are made...
...here Hellman's anger serves her well. She is still angry enough at American intellectuals and their reluctance to follow the simple rules of decency--"to try to tell the truth, not to bear false witness, not to harm my neighbor, to be loyal to my country"--in the first half of the fifties to be even more angry at their attempts now to glorify her. Hellman claims she feels little against the McCarthys or Nixons, whom she regards as merely the leaders of a movement in search of a scapegoat. Her anger is instead directed towards "the people...