One of the longest-running and most famous literary feuds ever was between two writers who only met once, but fired at each other from a distance for decades like battleships – out of sight but within range.
The dramatist Lillian Hellman was born in 1907, and wrote several fine plays, such as The Children’s Hour (1934), possibly the first Broadway play to tackle lesbianism, and The Little Foxes (1939). The novelist Mary McCarthy was born in 1912, and is now best known for The Group (1963), a novel about the ambitions and sex lives of a group of Vassar graduates. Both women were politically active and joined in many of the leftist campaigns of the 1930s. and although they may have been in the same room together at different points, their 1948 encounter is the only certain face-to-face encounter.
The poet Stephen Spender was teaching literature at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and asked his (all female) students which women writers they would like to meet. they nominated McCarthy and Hellman, and both accepted Spender’s invitation to meet the students. McCarthy arrived late, and stood at the back of the room (she said, perhaps optimistically, that Hellman mistook her for a student). She was in time to hear Hellman tell the students that the novelist John Dos Passos had only made a short visit in 1937 to Spain during the Spanish Civil war, and abandoned the Loyalist (socialist) cause, because he didn’t like Spanish food. An incensed McCarthy exploded. She later wrote that Hellman was trying to brainwash the students, and described the comment on Dos Passos as ‘vicious’. She broke in and told the students: ‘I’ll tell you why he broke with the loyalists, you’ll find it in his novel, The Adventures of a Young Man, and it wasn’t such a clean break’. The Dos Passos novel, detailing the progress of a young idealist disillusioned with communism, reflects the experiences of many contemporary socialists, such as McCarthy and George Orwell. McCarthy says Hellman began to ‘tremble. . . it was a very dramatic moment of someone being caught red-handed’. According to Spender, the enmity between the two women was already an old one.
What Happened Next
Whatever her other faults may have been, Hellman gave a magnificent response to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952: ‘I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions’. But it was not just McCarthy who accused her of being less than truthful: the accepted original, Muriel Gardiner, for ‘Julia’ in Hellman’ 1973 memoir Pentimento (Jane Fonda played Hellman in the subsequent movie, Vanessa Redgrave played ‘Julia’), said she had never even meet Hellman. The feud became world news when McCarthy, in a 1980 episode of the Dick Cavett Show, said of Hellman: ‘I once said in an interview that every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’". Hellman responded with a lawsuit for libel, but died in 1984 before the case came to court. The feud is the subject of Nora Ephron’s musical play Imaginary Friends (2002).