For the last few years of her life, Hannah Arendt was teaching and publishing at the enviable pace that is possible only for someone who has reached a place of profound comfort in her life. But that changed in October 1970.“HEINRICH DIED SUNDAY OF A HEART ATTACK,” Arendt told McCarthy in a telegram. McCarthy was then living in Paris with her last husband, Jim West, a diplomat. She flew to New York immediately for the funeral.
Arendt and Blücher had, by then, been together for more than thirty years. She was bereft without him. “I am now sitting in Heinrich’s room and using his typewriter,” she wrote to McCarthy not long after his death. “Gives me something to hold on to.” And in fact, she would not last very long without him. On December 4, 1975, Arendt died of a heart attack herself as she was having dinner with friends.
McCarthy was named Arendt’s literary executor, and she also put herself in charge of the funeral arrangements, negotiating with the family. In another sort of friendship, this might have been unusually intimate, but this was the kind where the best friend was the natural mourner in chief. In New York, McCarthy gave a eulogy in which she talked of Arendt sometimes in the mode of a lover, praising her looks, the way she’d lie on a sofa and think. She even talked about Arendt’s legs and ankles in a way that would get her mocked. But it fitted if you considered McCarthy described her friend as someone who embodied thought:
The first time I heard her speak in public—nearly thirty years ago, during a debate—I was reminded of what Bernhardt must have been or Proust’s Berma, a magnificent stage five, which implies a goddess. Perhaps a chthonic goddess, or a fiery one, rather than the airy kind. Unlike other good speakers, she was not at all an orator. She appeared, rather, as a mime, a thespian, enacting a drama of mind, that dialogue of me-and-myself she so often summons up in her writings.
McCarthy then gave up over two years of her own writing time to work on compiling and editing Arendt’s last project. It was to be a three-volume treatise called The Life of the Mind. The first volume would consider the act of thinking, the second the act of willing, and the third the act of judging. Arendt had substantially completed drafts of only the first two parts, and left, for the third, just two epigraphs on a sheet of paper still in her typewriter when she died. Though McCarthy’s German was not good and fundamentally she was no theorist, she considered it a matter of honor to finish the book. And she did, though the publisher paid her only a quarter of the advance and royalties to do so, the rest going to Arendt’s extended family.
It was an act of extraordinary generosity. Time is the one thing artists covet most; as Sontag once remarked, it’s the main thing they use money to buy. But in the last twenty years of her life, McCarthy was not producing as much work as she once did. She finished one novel, Cannibals and Missionaries, which was to be her last. Arendt’s death, and later Robert Lowell’s, depressed her. She was still a figure of considerable influence—though Cannibals and Missionaries is not her best work, it got favorable reviews—but she was floundering a bit in search of a real role.
Perhaps this explained what then happened with Lillian Hellman.
Hellman was, to say the least, a complicated person. Her first great success as a writer was a play called The Children’s Hour, in which children accuse two teachers at a boarding school of lesbianism. The success of the play, and the contracts she could subsequently command in Hollywood because of it, made Hellman rich. Her wealth and fame were, however, an odd match for her politics. Like Parker, whom she befriended in Hollywood, Hellman was a leftist activist in her youth. Unlike Parker, Hellman tended to lie about that. Hellman was widely believed to have lied to the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s when she testified that she had no current link to the Communist Party, or indeed “any political group.” Her testimony rescued her from the jail time served by more honest witnesses, like Hellman’s partner, Dashiell Hammett. The whole affair made her very unpopular with left intellectual types like McCarthy and her friends.
As to any personal animus, McCarthy had met Hellman only twice. The first time was at a lunch at Sarah Lawrence College, where McCarthy taught for a while in 1948. There, she overheard Hellman bashing John Dos Passos to a group of students, saying he’d abandoned the anti-Fascists during the Spanish Civil War because he hated Spanish food. McCarthy, never one to let an opportunity for correction pass her by, pointed out that in fact Dos Passos had said in his writings that he had become disenchanted because of the murder of a friend. McCarthy saw Hellman’s anger at the time, she wrote to a friend in 1980:
I remember that on her bare shriveled arms she had a great many bracelets, gold and silver, and that they began to tremble—in her fury and surprise, I assumed, at being caught red-handed in a brain-washing job.
It seems neither Hellman nor McCarthy ever forgot the incident. Then suddenly, while doing publicity rounds for Cannibals and Missionaries, McCarthy decided to bring it up. First she told a French interviewer about it. Then, invited on The Dick Cavett Show, she was fatefully asked which writers she considered “overpraised”:
McCarthy: The only one I can think of is a holdover like Lillian Hellman, who I think is tremendously overrated, a bad writer, and dishonest writer, but she really belongs to the past, to the Steinbeck past, not that she is a writer like Steinbeck.
Cavett: What is dishonest about her?
McCarthy: Everything. But I said once in some interview that every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the.”
Many people later told McCarthy’s biographers they had found this “reckless,” her delivering such a pointed insult “with that smile of hers.” Apparently Hellman had been watching too: she called Dick Cavett in an absolute fury, as he later told the story:
“I guess I never thought of you as defenseless, Lillian,” I managed.
“That’s bullshit. I’m suing the whole damn bunch of you.” In that, at least, she proved a woman of her word.
McCarthy thought she had simply been saying something everyone knew. Instead, she found herself staring at a lawsuit she could not really afford to defend herself against. The lawsuit asserted that McCarthy had known her statement was false and that she had made the accusation that Hellman was a liar with malice. Hellman named McCarthy, The Dick Cavett Show, and the PBS station on which it appeared as defendants and demanded 2.25 million dollars in damages. The New York Times called Hellman for comment on the suit, and she speculated about McCarthy’s reasons:
I haven’t seen her in 10 years, and I never wrote anything about her. We have several mutual friends, but that would not serve as a cause for her remarks. I think she has always disliked me. It could go back to the Spanish Civil War days, in November or December of 1937, after I had returned from Spain.
For her part, McCarthy told the Times:
I barely knew her … My views are based on her books, especially Scoundrel Time, which I refused to buy, but borrowed. I did not like the role she had given herself in that book.
Never one to avoid an opportunity for publicity, Norman Mailer took it upon himself to try to referee the dispute. “They are both splendid writers,” he offered. “They are, however, so different in their talents that it is natural for them to detest each other. Writers bear this much comparison to animals.” He called McCarthy’s remark “stupid” and “best left unsaid.” Coming from a man who considered pugilism an essential virtue, this was a remarkable position. No one listened to him.
Martha Gellhorn, the pioneering female journalist and former wife of Ernest Hemingway, also came out of retirement to lob sixteen pages of attacks at Lillian Hellman in the Paris Review, pointing out that nearly every date in Hellman’s An Unfinished Woman had to be wrong. Gellhorn was particularly knowledgeable about Hemingway’s activities during the Spanish Civil War and more or less destroyed Hellman’s claims about them. “In my unspecialized study of apocryphism,” she concluded, “Miss Hellman ranks as sublime.”
Privately, McCarthy was worried. Not so much about whether she would ultimately prevail in the suit, for she was quietly gathering materials that would show Hellman’s lies. She did learn of one concrete example, not then widely known, in Hellman’s memoir Pentimento, one section of which had been made into the Hollywood film Julia starring Jane Fonda. This “Julia,” according to Hellman, was a childhood friend who been a kind of Zelig of the early twentieth century, analyzed by Freud, heroically at the front in the Spanish Civil War, and then died during World War II.
It did turn out that Julia was fiction, drawn in part from the life of a woman named Muriel Gardiner, who had written to Hellman of the similarities between her life and Julia’s and received no response. But none of this was public knowledge at the time McCarthy went on the Cavett show. Everyone had suspicions; in particular, Martha Gellhorn thought most of Hellman’s assertions complete lies.
Proof or no proof, the legal costs were worrisome. McCarthy had not had a bestseller since The Group, back in 1963. Meanwhile, Hellman was unqualifiedly rich, and far more determined to see the thing through to the end. She even won the first couple of skirmishes, getting a judge to rule against McCarthy’s initial motion to dismiss the case.
It was sheer luck that before she could see her vendetta through to its end Hellman died, in late June 1984. A dead person can’t be slandered or libeled, so the damages became largely academic. By August the suit was gone entirely. But the spectacle had become legendary; today it is often the only thing the public remembers about Mary McCarthy at all. Late in her life, still obsessed with the subject, Nora Ephron wrote an entire play about the enmity, which she titled Imaginary Friends. She had been, for a while, befriended by Hellman:
It was quite a while before I began to suspect that the fabulous stories she entertained her friends with were, to be polite about it, stories. When she sued McCarthy years afterward, I wasn’t surprised. She was sick by then, and legally blind. And her anger—the anger that was her favorite accessory—had turned wearisome, even to those who were loyal to her.
Ephron’s play went up on Broadway in 2002. It was not successful, running for only seventy-six performances over three months. But for Ephron, at the time living in what she called movie jail after a string of flops, it was a passion project, a kind of relief, a return to form. “I could write about a subject that has interested me since my days as a magazine journalist: women and what they do to each other.” But she didn’t quite manage to pass her passion along; the play was totally forgotten by the time she died in 2012.