Ex-Friends by Norman Podhoretz

Author:Norman Podhoretz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2001-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

For some reason, however, I was spared another troublesome demand that I gather from her biographers Lillian made of all her other friends. This was never to associate with anyone who had “named names” or cooperated in any way with the congressional committees investigating Communist influence. Evidently, she broke with a number of people who refused to follow this injunction. Yet even though she chided me from time to time for having become friendly with the director and screenwriter Robert Rossen (an ex-Communist who, after working abroad for some years, finally offered to testify because he saw no point in remaining on the blacklist when he had ceased believing in the cause that had put him there), she never did unto me what she did to a theatrical producer named Lester Osterman when he hired Rossen to direct a play in which she was not even involved. “When Lillian found out about it,” Osterman recalled to William Wright, “she was beside herself. . . . How did I know that she considered him an archenemy because he was a friendly witness to HUAC? I knew nothing about it.” Well, I did know about it, but Lillian neither screamed at me nor accused me of disloyalty nor insisted on pain of losing her friendship that I have nothing further to do with Rossen.

Apart from her sometimes troublesome demands, there was also the problem of her writing, which, try as I might, I simply could not bring myself to admire. I could see that her plays were very well crafted, but I could not see in what other respect they ever rose above the conventional theatrical fare produced and admired by the people she herself witheringly dismissed as “Broadway intellectuals.” This was as true of plays like The Children’s Hour and The Little Foxes, which had made her famous (and rich) in the 1930s, as it was of the two she wrote during the time of our friendship, Toys in the Attic and My Mother, My Father, and Me.

I was no more impressed by the memoirs she produced when, disgusted by the failure of My Mother, My Father, and Me, she finally decided to give up on the theater altogether. Much acclaimed for their honesty, to me these memoirs seemed self-servingly false. Her prose style (as I would say when I finally came clean about it years later in Breaking Ranks) was an imitation of Hammett’s imitation of Hemingway; and the style was already so corrupted by attitudinizing and posturing in the original that only a miracle could have rendered it capable of anything genuine at this third remove. As for the stories she told in those books, they were often too good—too neat and self-congratulatory—to be true. No doubt Mary McCarthy went much too far when she later said (provoking Lillian to sue her for libel) that “every word [Hellman] writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” Yet the fact is that many details, some small and some large, would

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