Editorial / The Harold Robbins Award, 1976

...The deerstalker cap is hardly a plumed helmet...

...Henry Wallace's preposterous run for the White House fetched her to the soap box where she simultaneously served as his Ron Ziegler and his Rabbi Korff...

...What a prodigy the son therefore had to be--a creation transcending time, national borders, and even a certain public discomfort with the creator's eccentricities...

...How shocked she must have been after the 1948 election in which the Progressives fared no better than the last-ditch Prohibitionists, but the indomitable Lillian still burned for a better world and in 1949 she served as the Shirley MacLaine o f the famed Waldorf-Astoria Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, quite possibly the most oudandish collection of Stalinists and fellow travellers ever allowed outside the Soviet Fatherland...

...It was a grh,~ moment, especially when the fierce Cousins questioned the brethren about their possible allegiances to a "foreign government...

...Yet the thing is sustained by the almost voluptuous fascination of Lillian's incessant belly-aching about how a conspiracy of right-wing pols and left-wing intellectuals denied her a $l40,000-a-year honorarium for creating Hollywood masterpieces...

...For once a spark of idealism flickered in America, and the Comrades were itching to get down to some constructive lying and utopianizing, when that ferocious Communist-hater Norman Cousins barged in, leading an entire brigade of Saturday Review storm troopers...

...What is more, the Blackglama fur company has given her a $7,000 mink coat for modeling it in the New Yorker—another example of capitalism's brazen exploitations perhaps, but a swell mink coat nonetheless...

...Still, she loved that $l40,000-a-year income, and I am personally relieved to see that the capitalists have held no grudges...

...The first two of these whoppers were laid dow~n by Garry Wills in his introduction to Scoundrel Time, and they so neatly typify the inverted insight that I would be remiss were I to allow them to pass...

...The theory, though underdeveloped, isn't a bad one, especially given that Doyle believed explicitly in fairies...

...How did Sir Arthur do it...

...When, in the '20s, Doyle became a renowned spokesman for spiritualism, it was not his convictions or his special insights that propelled him to public notice...

...Born of wealthy and somewhat moldy New Orleans parents, Lillian allowed Mr...

...He may be just that--which would mean that the social planners and the feminist harpies have botched their work...

...36 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977...

...For more information, conUwt: Baron Von Kannon, Harold Robbins Award Banquet Committee, c/o The Alternative, Box 877, Bloomington, Indiana 47401...

...Throughout her woeful maunderings Lillian hardly mentions him, yet by the late 1940s he had already done in some twenty million of his own countrymen, established the horrible Gulag, broken his word on countless diplomatic agreements, and ravished much of Asia and all of Eastern Europe...

...Yet the largest piece missing from her diary is a portrait of Old Joe, perhaps the most bloodthirsty tyrant of all time...

...they have failed to wipe out the age of chivalry, for they have proved their incapacity to purge Sherlock Holmes...

...Dash and his friends never broke with the enlightened Russian leader...

...Now to my mind no Congressional committee should ever have the power to demand testimony from reluctant private citizens...

...Such a complaint issuing from Lillian has great dramatic force even though she has an Outer Mongolian's ear for English prose and no belief in historical accuracy whatsoever...

...Doyle would have been an inferior spiritualist had he not adored all his life the things of the spirit--honor, valor, gallantry, pageantry...

...cisely the opposite of logical deduction anc plain fact...

...She got the dress, scrapped a visit to the National Gallery because there was "no place to walk refined," and instead examined the Washington zoo, apprising her readers mat "I've always wanted to go to bed with an orangutan...

...Why Miss Lillian Hellman, the ageless coed who intoned the above declaration of principle, was not immediately arrested and garroted at the feet of the Statue of Liberty is a mystery...

...A limited number of tickets for the fete are availabTe to the generalpublic...

...Citizens suspected of crimes should be prosecuted in courts of law, not persecuted before ambitious Congressmen who deny them the legal safeguards of the courtroom...

...Admittedly nuisances have rights, but from Lillian's revelations I cannot see that her fellow Americans abused her all that much...

...Lillian never reveals why anti-Communism had such broad support, aside from her bogus explanation that it was a reaction to the New Deal...

...had I come from such a jungle my political philosophy might include whopping doses of genocide...

...Think of it, she hollered for the only Presidential candidate in the history of the Republic actually to subscribe to the hocus-pocus of at...

...Lillian Hellman is to our era what Patty Hearst might become...

...Through it all Americans grew increasingly dubious of Communists and downright curious about Lillian's friends...

...Actually she had railed lustily against those anti-Communist liberals like John Dewey and Sidney Hook who were suspicious of the Moscow trials, and she published her objurgations in cultural journals like the Daily IVorker and the New Masses...

...These the Holmes stories richly provided...

...N. Konstantinovich Roerich, a quack guru for a sect of theosophists...

...For instance it is both illustrative of her predicament and suggestive of her character that many of her friends were not simply Marxists but slavish Stalinists...

...He wrote, declares Higham, a collection of "fairy tales--magical, improbable, buoyed up by an imagination as inexhaustible as that of Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm...

...As with all diaries Scoundrel Time is elliptical, a concatenation of events and insights of quality varying from the pedestrian to the moronic...

...The fever of McCarthyism was upon the Great Republic: the Bill of Rights had been adjourned, the Supreme Court was in hiding, every cultural fount in the Republic was being patrolled by fanatical yahoos and— worse still—out-and-out anti-Communists...

...If she ever associated with any normal Americanoes other than her domestic servants she rarely mentions it...

...His manners were chivalrous...

...Having made her famous statement to the committee, she sells her New York farm and vamooses to Rome...

...and Mrs...

...They thrill to the obvious inverted insights that "America in the early 1940s fell in love with total war," that Harry Truman "launched the Cold War in the spring of 1947," and that anti-Communist intellectuals of the 1950s conduced America "straight into the Vietnam War and the days of Nixon...

...for Lillian is no champion of the Chamber of Commerce, much the contrary...

...There have always been enor...

...sionist, whose chief racket is merchantin[ the inverted insight, a colossal bit of intellectual sleight-of-hand that propounds a., the truth of any issue that which is pre...

...Her desultory discussion of the epic evenr in Scoundrel Time raises doubts...

...This is doubtless what Doyle himself sensed so early as 1893, when he decided that Holmes had interfered long enough with his more serious work and had to be disposed of definitively...

...Whether THE HAROLD ROBBINS AWARD Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman HONORABLE MENTION Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic Lovers and Tyrants by Francine du Plessix Gray Patty ever has her diary published is a question of moment to the entire literary world, but for now we have to satisfy ourselves with the adventures of Lillian...

...the magnifying glass is no Excalibur...

...Of course the absurd nature and behavior of her associates is not the only piece missing from the puzzle Lillian presents...

...American military secrets began turning up in Soviet attach~ cases, Czechoslovakia was forcibly overthrown, and Lenin's pupils throughout the world began to crow and to fuss...

...But how then explain Holmes' enduring appeal...

...Yet Miss Hellman is here with us today, free to relate this tale of villainy, fain to admit her dominant role in saving us from the totalitarian night, and glad to fill her purse with loot so suavely exacted from that vast body of untutorable gulls who today queue up for every sequel of anti-American soap opera provided by Hollywood and the publishing industry...

...His agents were at work throughout most of the civilized world, and free citizens everywhere had reason in the wake of Hitlerism to feat Soviet expansion and subversion...

...The commonsensible British and American publics would never have listened so politely to Doyle's ceaseless testimonies to the proximity of the spirit world had they not known him as the father of Holmes...

...The award is to be presented at a civic banquet in Miss Hellman ' s honor on the weekend of Apri115-16 in Chicago, Illinois...

...Our heroic Soviet allies reneged on the Yalta agreement and became dyspeptic over all sorts of diplomatic questions...

...There has arisen in the land a new ant prosperous breed of charlatan, the revi...

...But these are great days...

...Missing also is any suggestion that in the early 1950s there was ever anyone, aside from LiUian, actively critical of the forms anti-Communism had taken...

...Nonetheless the kid bounces back, for she is a trooper, an intellect of note, a good and indomitable spirit...

...It comes as no surprise to me that her political aspirations for humanity were so foolish...

...The people of an increasingly scientific age yearned for fantasy, for magic, and for wild adventure," Higham asserts...

...Hellman to escape what must have been a life of hell when she took her marvellous mind and all of its complaints off to New York, there to study at New York University, drop in on all the highbrow salons, and pick up the visionary notions of the young Trotskyites without every having to read Trotsky or accept an ice pick to the cerebrum...

...Like Kipling, whom he greatly admired, he venerated the Empire and the Army...

...jays like Lillian had become nuisances...

...In the 1940s when anti-Communists were barred from Hollywood and from university teaching posts, she was off mooning over deer on her upstate New York farm, dreaming of the day when she could fence them all in near her picture window, the better to appreciate their sylvan charm...

...All we know for a certitude is that before the appearance ~he yearned for steak, caviar, an expensive dress, and the chance "to spend a lot of money on something...

...No woman is ugly...

...But always she returned to Dashiell Hammett, a modern Dickens whose compassion for the brotherhood of man compelled him to side with Marshal Joseph Stalin, the late Soviet humanitarian...

...The intellectuals yearn for tales of 100% American infamy, and the ancient laws of supply and demand are responding admirably...

...The last is sheer Hellman, and it is for the masterful way that she has grafted this newest form of charlatanry onto the trunk of that aged literary form, the school girl's diary, that I do solemnly and officially tender her the third annual Harold Robbins Award for the Worst Book of the Year...

...Asian mystic, the Rev...

...Close textual analysis of Scoundrel Time and of Lillian' s earlier biographies convinces me that many of her associates were ignoramuses, others were bitter-end malcontents, while the rest were mostly bounders, catatonic liars, half-wits, CIA prowlers, and the most egregious Hollywood wheeler-dealers...

...How any literate person who has to read this book will suffer...

...Congressmen started calling them before their investigative committees both to fashion anti-subversive legislation and to snare headlines...

...Scoundrel Time: Diary of a Schoolgirl "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions"—proud and worthy words orated in the cruel spring of 1952 as mobs of American Legionnaires swept down the boulevards of America and the virtuous remnant shivered behind drawn curtains, schooling themselves in the legal arcanum of the Fifth Amendment: "I refuse to answer on the grounds, I refuse to answer on the grounds...

...At the end of World War II when the devious American government withdrew its armies into its occupational zones, reduced its troop strength from 12 million to approximately 1.5 million by the end of 1945, and began making proposals for international control of atomic power, red stars sprouted throughout Eastern Europe...

...It is Holmes, and Holmes alone, who makes Doyle one of the world's most famous authors...

...If Lillian did not approve such raffish associations it is one of the few complaints she has ever kept to herself...

...How she has suffered...

...The conference The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 35 was saved, but Lillian was to pay for her spunk, and God knows how many celluloid masterworks were lost during the ensuing horror...

...The 1970s are badly at outs with science, and yet Holmes remains as beloved as ever...

...If Congressmen cannot research legislation in ways that do not infringe on the constitutional liberties of private citizens, they ought not to make such legislation...

...The thesis is of course somewhat at odds with Ousby's suggestion that Holmes was a rational man who titillated science-minded Victorians by imposing order on nature...

...Is Holmes, then, a Victorian knighterrant mounted on a hansom cab, tilting with consummate style and skill against the powers of darkness...

...Felicitations, Lillian, you have done well by your wail...

...Not definitively enough, as it happened, to prevent his resurrection, the late detective having been, if nothing else, a solid money-maker...

...Behind all these tribulations Lillian sees the dark hand of democracy...

...And she neglects the evidence and reasoning for dozens of other appalling canards such as the claim that "Cold War anti-Communism was perverted.., into the Vietnam war and then into the reign of Nixon, their [anti-Communists'] unwanted but inevitable leader...

...Maybe he was...

...As winner of the coveted Harold Robbins Award for Worst Book of the Year, Miss Hellman will receive Robbins' complete works in handsome, pre-owned, paperbound volumes...

...Further, most of them were making a bundle and continued to do so throughout the 1950s...

...The trouble, too, as Higham shows, is that Doyle himself believed in science with only a part of his mind...

...That it is a tale full of poppycock, poorly written by a writer seemingly incapable of the higher forms of cognition, does not even occur to them...

...mous numbers of people whose intellect~, furiously resist reality, who search out the most remote explanations for the most commonplace happenings, who live with the conviction that influenza and misfortune are always the creation of winged spirits and gyrating heavenly bodies...

...Were we the denizens of any other era, one might imagine that Lillian's mischievous brother had plucked the torrid manuscript from its hiding place beneath a tangle of teen-form bras and secreted it off to a publisher of fourth-rate melodrama...

...Genius is abused and betrayed...

...The modern intellectualoids feast on such preposterous explications, and so they have ravenously gulped down Scoundre, Time without even pausing to spit out the seeds...

...he cried...

...The Communist North Koreans swarmed into South Korea...

...They stuck with him through the Moscow trials, the purges, the Hitler pact, the whole program of reform and Soviet progress...

...Gulps were heard throughout the ballroom, Adam's apples bobbed furiously, but Lillian screwed up her courage and with pith and wit scotched the knave...

...Once, he struck his son for speaking of a woman as ugly...

...According to the redoubtable Publishers Weekly she now maintains handsome quarters overlooking Park Avenue and a house on Martha's Vineyard—all the better to continue her researches into the evils of America's privileged classes...

...Billed as a memoir, Scoundrel Time is, in its vitals, the balmy diary of a spoony school girl...

...Life is hard...

...But they serve, and while they serve, there is hope...

...She is an artiste, and life-long critic of George Babbitt and all his bourgeois kin...

...Lillian is flaming youth, an ingenue illused by this too, too cruel world and often ambushed by the uncontrollable thumpings of her very big heart...

...The party was called the Progressive Party, and it was composed of equal parts Communists and simpletons...

...How the Republic survived into 1976 is a greater mystery still...

...Popin...

...In fact to this day she remains somewhat coy about Old Joe, referring to his torture chambers, his {continued on page 35) 4 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 Brigadier Gerard, or The Maraeot Deep, or The ~auderings of a Spiritualist...

...however, insofar as I have been able to penetrate her dizzy narrative all I can perceive is Lillian's almost willful nmvete" " and impudence...

...That she howls so about how society battered her and set her down ever so temporarily into the middle class is only evidence that, as nuisances go, Lillian is a decadent nuisance--the prototype for radical chic...

...China fell to the poet, Soviet defectors told ghastly tales, and Marshal Sokolovsky blockaded Berlin...

...He served as a surgeon in the Boer War and later wrote the-conflict's history...

...Past Robbins Laureates Theodore White and Peter Schrag head the list of invited dignitaries...

...This having been said I leave it to future generations to decide whether when called before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities on May 21, 1952, Lillian acted honorably, intelligently, or even rationally...

...Science could never bring back the dead for a spot of civil conversation--quite unlike those fraudulent mediums in whom Doyle so confidently trusted...

...It is characteristic of Lillian to exempt certain relevant matters from her diary especially when those matters cast a smudge on her halo...

...WORST BOOK OF THE YEAR (continued from page 4) concentration camps, and his show trials as "infringements on personal liberty...

...In the 1930s she became a playwright of third-rate stuff and a rising Hollywood dramatist...

...Hence, for a pittance, readers can now gasp with Lillian Hellman, the sempiternal college girl lost in trivial and incoherent fantasies, selfpitying, self-deluding, and mortifying...

...Great fame exacts its toll...

...It ~ not as fairy tales, then the Holmes tales are perhaps most accurately to be regarded as exquisitely polished romances...