Customer Reviews

Scoundrel Time

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) originally came to public attention as the author of THE CHILDREN'S HOUR and would go on to create a number of other landmark plays for the stage, including WATCH ON THE RHINE, THE LITTLE FOXES, and TOYS IN THE ATTIC. She is easily among the great American dramatists of the 20th Century--but even so she is perhaps more famous for the events of 1952, the year in which she faced the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee at the height of its dark powers... and the committee blinked.

In 1969 Hellman published the autobiography AN UNFINISHED WOMAN; in 1973 she continued writing of her life with PENTIMENTO; and in 1976 she wrote an account of her encounter with HUAC in SCOUNDREL TIME. All three books were controversial, and writer Mary McCarthy famously stated "Everything she writes is a lie--and that includes 'and' and 'the!'" It was true that Hellman shaded the truth more than just a little, especially where her own support for Soviet Russia was concerned; it was true that she also had a distinct tendency to ignore her own failings and excesses even as she zeroed in mercilessly on those of others. All the same, no one can deny a singular fact: unlike a long line of others, she neither crawled nor self-destructed before HUAC. In the process she became among the first to show up the committee for the lawless, headline-hungry entity it had become.

As more than one biographer has noted, Hellman actually behaved with the courage and dignity we hope we would possess if confronted with a similar situation. It cost her a great deal: blacklisted and unable to work, Hellman would spend more than a decade counting pennies and struggling to rebuild her life and career. SCOUNDREL TIME, which presents Hellman's confrontation with HUAC from her own clearly biased view, is a fascinating portrait of both the "red scare" and the various figures who swirled through it--from then-congressman Richard Nixon to director Elia Kazan to writer Clifford Odets--and of how she herself saw her own place in a moment that would come to define mid-20th Century America. Flawed? Shaded? Yes, indeed. But nonetheless involving and revealing for that. Recommended.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

`Scoundrel Time' is a harrowing, highly personal account of the events surrounding Lillian Hellman's appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC, in 1952. It was, to put it mildly, a tricky situation. Although Hellman did not `cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions,' the damage to her life and career were extensive. Even though she was not a friendly witness the Committee didn't cite her for contempt. That did nothing to save her from being blacklisted, however. Beyond a revealing look at a life disrupted by a government that felt, as Garry Wills puts it in his extended introduction, `Hollywood must be censored politically if nation was to be protected ideologically,' Hellman details the post-hearing shake-out. Without a chance to work at home, and with work abroad hindered by an ever-suspicious government, Hellman would eventually lose her home, a number of fair-weather friends, while we all lost a decade's worth of plays and screenplays.

It's helpful to read Wills' introduction prior to Hellman's book. Wills writes that Hellman's scheduled appearance before the Committee `was especially dangerous because Miss Hellman was as little qualified to understand the Committee as it was to grasp her code of honor.' Wills supplies the context while Hellman concentrates on the emotions of someone undergoing a witch hunters' scrutiny. Wills rightly discerns an inability on Hellman's part to understand that Richard Nixon, Joe McCarthy, and others of their ilk were sincere Cold Warriors. All things considered Hellman displays a rather surprising dearth of rancor towards her persecutors, but she doesn't hide the fact that she considers them unscrupulous opportunists.

`Scoundrel Time' was published in 1976, shortly after the resignation of one of Hellman's persecutors, Richard Nixon. To paraphrase Jimmy Breslin, the good guys finally won and it must have given an odd sense of satisfaction to those who lives were disrupted by his rise to power. Hellman is a flawed and vulnerable character in this memoir, and all the more human for it.

In the spring of 1952, Lillian Hellman was ordered to Washington to appear before the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC). The length of her testimony was only a few minutes more than one hour and consisted of repeatedly invoking the Fifth Amendment. Nevertheless, the experience had a chilling and sobering effect on her. So much so, it took her more than two decades to attain the necessary degree of emotional equilibrium to write about it. The result is Scoundrel Time a short, curious book.

Miss Hellman deftly describes the nightmarish environment in which she found herself once subpoenaed to testify. Like so many film industry artists who had gone before her, she knew she would be required to "name names"; something she could never bring herself to do even though failure to do so could mean jail or further harrassment.

After her one HUAC appearance, she was never called to testify again and, other than some difficulties with passport renewal, suffered no official governmental sanctions. However, she was immediately blacklisted and her highly successful screenwriting career came to a screeching halt.

Included within the pages of Scoundrel Time are many anecdotes about the author's life during those troubling years. Some of these anecdotes appear to have little or nothing to do with the topic at hand and it's not at all clear why they were selected and others left out.

The introduction (which takes up more than 20% of the book) was written by Garry Wills and gives some historical perspective on HUAC. Wills explains how the committee was founded in 1938 but only came into its own after the Cold War era had begun.

All in all, an interesting read about a regrettable period in US history. One which contains valuable lessons applicable to the present day.

Scoundrel Time is a very interesting book. It takes you through the events that happened in Lillian Hellman's life during a very troubled time in American history. I found it interesting to here her opinion on the issue. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the Cold War or McCarthyism. I bought this book for a Cold War upperdivision class in college and am glad that I did.

I was very pleased with the service I received in the shipping of Scoundrel Time from this vendor.

Lillian Hellman was a decent person who was caught in a terrible cross wind and ruined. From a charmed life as a screenwriter, she fell to the bottom more quickly than she could have imagined possible. I found this to be the least successful of her series of memoires, in which she re-made herself and re-entered the spotlight as a good if not truly distingusihed writer. However, the topic is more focused than the other volumes, in particular focusing on the travials of her friend, Dashell Hammett. This is very moving. In fact, I found the best part of the book was the introduction by Garry WIlls, who is a truly first-rate political writer. His depiction of the time, made more vivid by his self-identification as a conservation, is chilling and comic at the same time - he recalls how Ayn RAND said that any film with Russians even smiling was propaganda and hence punishable by law!

Recommended, but there are better and far more comprehensive histories of the period.

Desensitized for a long time to the stressful pain of the infamous McCarthy period, Scoundrel Time must have been a most cathartic memoir for Lillian Hellman to write; it is, of the autobiographical trilogy, the most unfeigned and succinct of the three books. Her voice resonates, echoes, and behind hers, the voices of other 'Red Scare' victims closely follow. This is not her book alone; it is a book belonging to a past, present and future generation of people who were, are, and regrettably will be, victims of slanderous tales and virulent gossip. Scoundrel Time searchingly delves into a dark time in our country when Freedom of Speech, Religion, Press, Assembly and Petitioning of government was on a gossamer threshold to nonexistence. This memoir was also clearly the most difficult one for Lillian Hellman to write, for as she herself says, "...I had a strange hangups and they are always hard to explain. Now I tell myself that if I can force them, maybe I can manage. The prevailing eccentricity was and is my inability to feel much against the leading figures of the period, the men who punished me. Senators McCarthy and McCarran, Representatives Nixon, Walter and Wood, all of them, were what they were: men who invented when necessary, maligned even when it wasn't necessary. I do not think they believed much, if anything, of what they said: the time was ripe for a new wave in America, and they seized their political chance to lead it along each day's opportunity, spit-balling whatever and with whoever came into view." (P.37) That 'new wave' hurt a lot of innocent people, human beings who were not spared the iniquitous rod of economic, career and social deprivation all because they, like Hellman, would not name names, who would not cede their code of conviction, honor and belief(s). The irony of this period is a true slap-in-the-face, for the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the most revered parchments of this country were verbally shaken into dust by those who wanted to shout and search out communistic evils where none existed in the first place. Like the Civil War of 1861 - the period of McCarthyism, name dropping, The House Un-American Activities, The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, it turned brother against brother, friend into foe (Elia Kazan and Clifford Odets are perfect examples), rich people into poor. And in the end - the true tragedy is - nothing came out of the whole mess except a lot of miserable people who, by not subscribing to Truman's loyalty program or proposition of Americanism, sacrificed either their material luxury or worse, their character and integrity. Should a horrid 'craze' of this political and social nature (which really was a political subterfuge) ever arise in this land of republicism/democracy, I would subscribe to the very wise words of Lillian Hellman, "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." (P.30)

Lillian Hellman was one of the most gifted memoirists in the English language. (Read also her "An Unfinished Woman" and "Pentimento.") It is not merely the historical, political, social and personal content of her autobiographical works that elevates them to classics, but her uniquely mellifluous and dexterous command of language. The fact that she was a brilliant playwright has much to do with her gift. Scoundrel Time explores Hellman's and Dashiell Hammett's involvement in The McCarthy [Witchhunt for Communists] Hearings and particularly how she, with the help of good attorneys, got out of naming names and thus sending friends, acquaintances and Hollywood business associates to prison for treason. There has been some question regarding the "truth" in Hellman's memoirs, as there should be in any memoir, for memory is fickle and cannot be trusted--as Hellman herself admitted. Read this long essay on the McCarthy Era as a work of self-reflective art, as exploration of the nature of memory, as one historical document of thousands documenting how history indeed is written by the victor. Read it to better understand just how many people would send their friends and family to prison if pressured.

Intellectual children, still fresh from their nurseries,

sip this revolting woman's non-stop deceit. Her utter

silence about her lover Otto Katz's torture and execution back

in communist Czechoslovakia, and her totally bogus JULIA say

it all. When she was not suing someone, she was confabulating

her own autobiography along the way. Funny, her career begins

as Hammett's fades. A HUAC plot, no doubt.