JEWEL WITHOUT PRICE
Maloff, Saul
JEWEL WITHOUT PRICE SAUL MALOFF "Friendly witnesses," as informers were once strangely called, did not write memoirs-Whittaker Chambers excepted, and a small number of others, bent on striking...
...Their identity could be guessed at but not definitively known...
...Conversely, another reader might insist, with the relentless purity of safe distance, that such concessions as she offered the Committee were and are unforgivable...
...all were blacklisted or otherwise barred from work by a gentleman's agreement, unless they contrived, as did some of the Hollywood writers, to work under a pseudonym, (at a fraction of their usual rates...
...This is what her memory retained, what sticks in her mind after all these years, and in the context they can only be intended to explain, at least in part, why she didn't join the Party-an open invitation to some, perhaps many, readers to think ill of her, to think her capricious, frivolous, self-indulgent, snobbish, as if causes were guilds limited in membership to the aristocracy of the spirit...
...But she evidently felt some sense of obligation to try her hand at it, however uncongenial to her temperament: after all, what befell her, and in another part of the forest her great friend Dashiell Hammett, was History, not merely a personal catastrophe, and as such it called for the heavy artillery of analysis...
...When his big scene came, he couldn't supply the scalps of friends, acquaintances, associates, colleagues to HUAC fast enough...
...in consequence, the "history" she writes is the history we need...
...A bone-weary "after-the-war" feeling settles into the book of her life, a kind of listlessness and drift and confusion before a deep inner clarity reasserts itself...
...Desperately worried about money, she nevertheless decided to spend a lot of it before meeting the hangmen: steak and caviar and an expensive Balmain testifying dress and a very expensive bat and a fine pair of white kid gloves to go with it-and threw in a hundred dollar gift for the hospitalized wife of a cabdriver with whom she'd struck up an itinerant friendship...
...Hammett had told her that as she was fearful of rats, she couldn't take jail...
...Shipley's interrogation, she says, was "degrading...
...Hammett, she thinks, joined the Communist Party in the late Thirties but she's not sure because she never asked, and if she had asked would not have been answered...
...Overtures, mild ones, were made by Earl Browder and the "theoretician" V. J. Jerome...
...had they asked for it he would have given them his liver, having already given his heart and mind...
...a particularizing birthright...
...He scared the hell out her, she says, with all that pounding the table and yelling...
...The stage is set In her own opening pages Lillian Hell-man makes an attempt at historical analysis-and it lacks force and persuasiveness, an authoritativeness of tone and idea...
...One notes the source, notes the hedge, and passes on...
...When Lillian Hellman told Odets she didn't know what she would do under fire she meant just that: she didn't know, couldn't predict, how she would behave...
...At the time she was widely congratulated by right-thinking persons for her stand...
...How do you explain to one who doesn't and can't understand that there's nothing furtive, secretive, about this: to have done otherwise would be a violation of privacy- prying, intrusive, unmannerly, not "done...
...Having tried her hand at it, she breaks off abruptly, leaves standing the evidence of her attempt, and calls it quits...
...instead she went to the zoo and wondered (according to her diary notes for May 16, 1952) what it would be like to go to bed with an orangutan...
...it is a right of democratic citizenship...
...Those who remained silent, she says, harmed the country, those who "went to too many respectable conferences that turned out not to be under respectable auspices, contributed to and published too many CIA magazines...
...Unlike Hammett, Lillian Hellman was not (and is not), in a sense HUAC couldn't possibly understand, "political...
...What are we to make of this...
...the Fifth was a stigma...
...If there is no glorious literature of the period-something comparable, say, to the memoirs of Graves, Blun-den, Sassoon rising out of the Great War-these are among the reasons...
...like his old friend Odets, the friendliest of witnesses...
...An unsympathetic reader might recoil from the farewell-to-the-deer scene, as I was touched by it...
...they did not write memoirs...
...Hence the Fifth Amendment defense...
...it is exactly what Miss Hell-man is not: ordinary, without distinction...
...and adds: "Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice...
...For years, to cite a mere two examples from a large number of possible ones in my own limited experience, I expected two old friends, both well-known "cases" at the time, both having courageously rested their refusal to "talk" to HUAC on the First Amendment and both having lost their appeal to the Supreme Court and subsequently served sentences-for a long time I expected both men, one of whom was a writer, to tell their tale...
...even their masters must feel a certain contempt for them, even their partisans must, even the prosecutors and police they serve...
...Moreover, it didn't apply: it distorted my experience, which was in queer ways liberating as wars can be for survivors...
...In her letter to HUAC, she offered to talk about herself and about no one else but herself...
...Just make sure," she told herself, "you come out unashamed...
...I rejected, and reject, the role...
...Her language reflects it: the likes of McCarthy, Nixon and HUAC's other inquisitors probably should be characterized historically and politically, but to her they're "scoundrels," a "group of political villains," "corrupt and unjust men," society's untouchables, scummy...
...Three or four times, she says, she did go to meetings with Hammett, twice to an "ugly Spanish house in Hollywood," and once or twice to an apartment in New York which she can't recall any more than she can the people there, "maybe because I lett after a short time...
...The step from such capers was straight into the Vietnam War and the days of Nixon...
...According to Joe McGinnis, in his odd little book Heroes, Buckley, when asked about heroes, had replied that "Whittaker Chambers certainly had seemed to be heroic...
...Not that there was any possible question of her conducting herself less than honorably...
...Most Americans, asked to sign a petition consisting of the Bill of Rights, refused on the grounds that it was a subversive document, and in any case they just didn't sign petitions...
...She didn't know...
...Pondering statement is not her metier...
...but she was, and is, rightly, I think, unhappy with it...
...but though it is none of our business she tells us she didn't join...
...Making oneself the protagonist of a mass movement was not only temperamentally unacceptable-for me unthinkable-it was also out of the question...
...Just before be collapsed into the open arms of the Committee, Clifford Odets, whom she hardly knew and hadn't seen in years, suddenly asked her to dinner, to ask what she planned to do when subpoenaed...
...So too with other great issues...
...Not the stuff of which epic poetry is made...
...without knowing it, behind my own back, I had become the "old Left...
...Miss Hellman's special wrath, a wonder to behold, is reserved for the intellectuals who stood by while it happened, either by maintaining silence or by giving their assent-Partisan Review, Commentary (Norman Podhoretz at last, in the April, 1976 issue of that journal, publicly embraced McCarthyism), Irving Kristol, all the others for whom "Truth made you a traitor . . . in a time of scoundrels...
...A victim...
...it is always with us...
...who, as a legal nonentity serving at the pleasure of a university administration, had no recourse more noble than to "resign" his posts and go quietly...
...but as it happened the lady moved her shop when the scoundrel time encroached, and disafiih'ated both from the party and from her brother, who went to jail for his affiliations...
...She and Hammett were stone broke...
...but she's not writing epic poetry...
...A memoir seemed presumptuous...
...Instead they vanished into silence and still deeper obscurity: found new ways of making a living, kept their politics, if any remained, to themselves, signed nothing, attended no meetings, and for a long time dreaded the mail and the phone...
...She wrote her celebrated letter to the Committee, and went to Washington to await the appointed time...
...They'd see- they'd see what the Man of Tomorrow looked like, the proletarian hero...
...but on the whole they were silent, though they were heroes of conscience...
...and as she was fully human, such acts must have been virtually instinctive...
...By the time the Warren Court had helped clear the air somewhat and the climate of opinion had changed, they had long since assumed a virtual new identity and left behind with their abandoned old one whatever need they may once have felt to tell their story...
...There are no unsung heroes...
...it was a matter of detail: how could she know before the fact that she might not throw up or fling objects...
...Ah, the bravery you tell yourself was possible when it's all over, the bravery of the staircase...
...Highly personal, "subjective," a dirty word to the ideologists of the Thirties, as against "objective," the noblest word in their lexicon...
...and she says with moving candor that she would have walked out "if I hadn't worried about rats in jail, and such...
...and one's life, patched up and taking unexpected turns, caused the past to recede exponentially in disconcerting ways, so that it seemed severed from the present Overriding these and other considerations that seemed of interest only to myself was the problem of form...
...A straight factual account didn't interest me much at the time...
...These were the well-publicized cases-writers, intellectuals, scientists, entertainers...
...Perhaps in expressing a personal revulsion she comes closer to significant truth than does analysis on the grand scale...
...the city on a hill - looked the other way, though some particularly close friends made sympathetic sounds in whispered sibilants, while casting sidelong glances over both shoulders...
...Then and now, now and then: nearly 25 years elapsed between Lillian Hellman's famous appearance before HUAC in 1952 and the appearance of her memoir based on it, Scoundrel Time (Little, Brown, $735...
...To subject herself to Mrs...
...Inevitably, the offer was refused...
...She would have made a lousy member of anything requiring unquestioning adherence to an imposed "line...
...He was going to show those "bastards on the Committee...
...She didn't go to the National Gallery, though she thought she should...
...seeing it not as emblematic of the ordeal, of the price of Conscience, but as maudlin, lachrymose, sentimental, false, self-dramatizing-an abject appeal for sympathy...
...The "silent generation" of students in the Eisenhower Fifties went quietly about their business, which was Business...
...the face of a radical man and tell them to go fuck themselves...
...and the faculty, carefully husbanding their careers in hot pursuit of tenure-the great, good place...
...It's all been decided so long ago," she noted in her diary, "when you are very young, and all mixed up with your childhood's definition of pride or dignity...
...the farm they loved had to be sold, the most painful episode of her life, together with her movingly sad farewell to the deer she loved, an unbearable wrenching...
...Meanwhile, as the distance between then and now stretched, the past in losing immediacy inevitably lost its urgency, if not for me then for others and one wanted to avoid all semblance of the bore at the dinner table going on and on about how things had gone for him during that famous war when the lights went out all over the world -only to lind that when they went on again, all the guests were asleep...
...and, as of its nature it occupies a spikey, treacherous territory somewhere between fact and fiction, verifiable event and the notorious quicksands of memory-memoir as such appeared to me to raise insuperable obstacles...
...Dressed to the nines she'd do what she had to do when the time came...
...of course she held "progressive" views, and was on the "right side" of the issues, and no doubt attended meetings and signed petitions and contributed money-in short did those things that anyone even approximately human did at the time...
...there's almost none...
...She measures a civilized country by its moral capacity to generate people who "come forward to defend those in political trouble," adding there "was once even some honor in being a political prisoner...
...in saying this I do not mean to "clear" her of taint (an odious and persisting legacy of that period), only to stress the essential element of cranky unencompassable personality...
...No one wanted his name appended to anything...
...HUAC was what it was...
...But I don't want to write about my historical conclusions," she says impatiently,"-it isn't my game...
...For the first time in years she had to worry about money: by now Hammett, all his assets seized by the IRS, was blacklisted and she knew her big-money days were over for as far ahead as she could see...
...An academic career (which I'd never really wanted in the first place) a minor academic career had been wrecked or at least derailed (and then embarrassingly restored by a curious circuitous route from pathos to farce -and once reestablished, freely abandoned) and a passport .denied (after the usual visit by the usual two agents of the FBI, one who growled and one who purred, and a futile, foredoomed hearing before a bleak, silent official of the Passport Office) until the decision by the Warren Court in the Robeson and Rockwell Kent cases ended that shabby episode in contemporary history-when I no longer wanted or could use a passport (My flickering desire to do what is called research in the British Museum had been deemed contrary to the "national interest"-and for all I know Passport Officer Frances Shipley and J. E. Hoover were right in ways they couldn't have had in mind-plodding academic research directed toward the shimmering goal of tenure is assuredly not in the national interest The story, to my mind, is rich in comic detail, though at the time it was no laughing matter...
...Lives were being ruined and few hands were raised in help," she observes...
...Myself, I think-I've come to think-otherwise: that her visceral responses were an excellent guide to the perplexed: conduct reveals, manners tell...
...In the previous volumes the reader was always aware of its presence-by-absence in the zone just outside the lighted area of whatever scene was playing...
...Then she brings herself up short by saying she's making her "political history too simple," that other factors "had to do with whatever I believed" and goes on to enumerate them: "personal conflicts, work problems, whiskey, too much money after The Children's Hour, the time of my time, Hammett...
...my modest, unspectacular "past" came to seem to me myself what it was to my children-a period piece of no more than antique interest and uncertain meaning...
...Elia Kazan, too...
...and when she let him down badly by saving she didn't want to talk about convictions because when she does "I'm never sure I'm telling the truth," he told her sternly that her friend Hammett had convictions and he admired him...
...She should have gone into the Committee room, she now says and then thought, "given my name and address, and walked out...
...The writer's literary bliss-that if you write truly and well of particulars, general truths will take care of themselves-accords perfectly with the nature of her gifts...
...The period we call McCarthyism (which in reality began long before its namesake's hectic career and continued for some time after it drowned in booze and disgrace and which is always incipient in American life) was a bad time for constitutional law...
...The First Amendment was no defense...
...More exactly: never having surfaced in the first place, they felt no need afterward to call attention to themselves...
...By all rights there should have been a substantial body of such writings by now...
...Besides, it would have required the steady perspective of the first-person-singular, a voice that seemed to me impertinent...
...The decision she made was rooted in the rock of her character from the time the first crust formed...
...But she was no ideologist...
...They could be anybody: as likely a total stranger as an old friend, a colleague, a member of the family...
...that another man kept using the phrase "the face of the Party...
...How should it be done...
...and her offer to talk about herself was a defeat for her and experienced as such...
...Who was I to employ it...
...Lean times followed, bad times...
...or she would approach it again and again, allude to it, and leave it unscored, either because she was for some reason not yet ready for it or was saving it for the moment when the perspective had been drawn, the protagonist fully established, the ground prepared...
...To this day they live among us...
...In the brief coda, she says the past is always there, the past which was then and the present which is now and die years in between...
...But how was it to be done...
...A few wrote fictional accounts, a form of disguise, though subterfuge wasn't the intention...
...William Buckley excepted...
...her reflexes and instincts were far too balky...
...Hammett went to jail...
...didn't seem necessary...
...What she remembers, nearly forty years after the event, was that the chairman of one of the Hollywood meetings had unpleasant personal habits (as if the architecture wasn't bad enough...
...though I promised and still promise myself that one day I shall, I must Good reasons always lay near at hand: in the Fifties, who cared...
...Neither did...
...In any case, each time I approached it, good reasons blocked my way...
...but at last having written it "the then and now are one...
...So with aesthetic criticism of ideology, a version, after all, of Orwell's linguistic criticism of politics...
...A passport is not a privilege, a favor which a government may confer or deny or limit as it fancies...
...Even to have written the equivocal letter was a concession to the Committee of its right to exist, an acknowledgment, as she says, of their power and therefore their legitimacy...
...JEWEL WITHOUT PRICE SAUL MALOFF "Friendly witnesses," as informers were once strangely called, did not write memoirs-Whittaker Chambers excepted, and a small number of others, bent on striking the hot iron of expiation of self-martyrdom or justification...
...and for whatever reason they did not choose to write about their ordeal...
...and so too her sympathy for the poor black and white...
...As for herself, she remarks, her "belief in liberalism was mostly gone," and she has "substituted for it something private called, for want of something that should be more accurate, decency...
...the moment had passed...
...The possibility of fiction occurred and recurred but it afforded a disguise I fastidiously rejected...
...Earlier he had told Miss Hellman he wanted to talk to her about "political and moral convictions...
...Who was I? A young man who had lost a couple of jobs and been denied the right to leave the country, had been compelled to take stock of himself and, using himself in new ways, required to find other things to do-other than being that pallid character the "untenured" junior professor and therefore a non-person not only to university administrators but to the Academic Freedom Committee of the AAUP as well...
...Some unfriendly witnesses went to prison...
...they leave a stain on the page no matter who writes the history...
...and it was...
...But neither did the unfriendly witnesses write memoirs...
...They're unclean...
...even now, they have to be considered...
...Nor, for that matter, did I, and with less reason...
...that two ladies talked a lot in a state of "high irritation...
...if a case were to be made for seeing the three volumes as a coherent, unitary work-a kind of spiritual autobiography-rather than a fairly random scattering of episodes, portraits, scenes, fragments, each of them autonomous or nearly so and held together only by the force of the writer's personality, it would have to be made in some such way as that: the creation of the character and accumulation of experience leading to ordeal and decisive trial...
...She speaks of herself as always having been "an aimless rebel," but the rebelliousness was grounded in the moral revulsion she felt at her mother's family having made money by exploiting Negroes...
...Odets stayed in Hollywood, what remained of it after the carnage...
...A note on ideology and criticism, partisanship and reviewing...
...who wanted to know...
...the invisible ones appeared behind closed doors in "executive session" or more furtively than that as confidential "sources" whose identity was never disclosed, and not because there was any danger of retribution, as they claimed, unless retribution is defined as public contempt...
...The friendly witnesses of course appeared in public before investigating committees or in courtrooms...
...their work done they tend to vanish into some black hole, as if they had never been...
...Other people had to be considered, after all...
...that she should have stood outright on the Fifth or First Amendment, should have told the Committee to go to hell if it came to it, and herself gone to jail, the rats be damned...
...Her "liking for black people maybe came," she can allow herself to say, not from ideological theories of national and class oppression, but from her love of her wet-nurse (of whom she has written movingly before...
...In mitigation she could have pointed out to the Committee that the Party had attacked Watch on the Rhine, her anti-Nazi play written at the "wrong" time, the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but that would have been a violation of the rules she lived by, her "thin morality book" and its stern injunction that "it is plain not cricket to clear yourself by jumping on people who are themselves in trouble...
...Whatever the reason, she attached to this episode the meaning of her life...
...A "finished" woman, a diamond-in-the-rougfc, a jewel without price...
...informers do not write memoirs...
...it wasn't enough to deliver heads, he had to follow his testimony with a once-notorious advertisement in the New York Times "that is hard to believe for its pious shit...
...all of them highly personal...
...Of course she was anti-fascist, she was the best kind-a "premature anti-fascist...
...Everything about her confirms this, everything she helplessly is...
...HUAC's reason for being was to compel witnesses to talk about "others," to perform the "ugly business" of making "cowards into liars...
...I tell myself this third time out, if I stick to what I know, what happened to me, and a few others, I have a chance to write my own history of the time...
...Refusing to resign and instead forcing the administration to fire one was merely quixotic: in cases involving untenured faculty on yearly contracts no "cause" need be shown...
...She didn't tell him that Hammett had walked out on Awake and Sing "because I don't think writers who cry about not having had a bicycle when they were kiddies are ever going to amount to much...
...In the Sixties, it seemed beside the point...
...Others were less contemptuous but, no less victims: blacklisted teachers and assorted others who owing to some caprice in the system escaped notoriety or who, because they were obscure and therefore had little or no publicity value, simply disappeared from sight...
...A loathing of informers runs very deep in all but the truly perverse and can almost be said to be instinctive, biologic, archaic -or, less fancifully, our oldest knowledge of social conduct, a commandment, pre-logical...
...Finally assessing the experience at the end, she allows herself to yield to the temptation of grand statement, a kind of self-indulgence that would have been wildly out of character...
...Shipley's grant of a limited passport in order that she might take a sorely-needed offer of a screenwriting job in Italy...
...what more need be said...
...Now and then, then and now...
...That reader might also argue she should never have requested, or accepted, Mrs...
...She has still not quite forgiven herself for failing to attain that state of perfection...
...and though one hopes she goes on writing her memoirs, to the end of the century and beyond, this volume has the feel of an ending, not because she has exhausted her life as material for art or memoir (whole areas of her life are barely touched on and her writing is as spare, crabbed, idiosyncratic, expressive, granitic as ever, a direct reflection of a thorny, complex character) but because the climactic event is the one for which the others have been clearing a space all along-the obligatory scene in the drama of her life: the moral test and proving-ground...
...Taken together with its two predecessors (An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento) it is surely the finest work of a distinguished career and a notable work of autobiography by the most exacting standards...
...One of the ladies owned a fashionable dress shop and Miss Hellman was briefly impressed considering that die lady's radical politics might have cost her dearly had they been known to her clients...
...Garry Wills introduces the volume with a scathing, if conventional analysis of the immediate origins of McCarthyism in the Cold War, anti-Communist vigi-lantism, Truman's Executive Orders, and the Hiss affair...
...she's writing memoir, personal history, and phobia played a part in it...
...but by God be knew...
...others left the country if they could manage to get out...
...That's as accurate as need be, the best kind of politics where the instinct for decency is unerring...
Vol. 103 • July 1976 • No. 14
