Belated Justice

...author, "Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald," "Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times," "Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company" The career of Josephine Herbst followed the familiar trajectory of many an American writer in the earlier part of this century...

...Born in the Midwest—in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1892—she developed a fierce determination to get into print, to make something of herself...

...Hiss' lawyers at first thought she was a prosecution plant, then decided she was too risky to call upon for testimony in any event...

...Langer's suggesting that this was in fact the case has revived the story and prompted Hiss to publish a letter of denial in the New York Times Book Review...

...She was squinting through thick eyeglasses, and I thought her eyesight might well be worse than she admitted...

...I have been damaged," she maintained, "by a long monotonous poverty which I had to pretend was not there to live at all...

...John Herrmann was a card-carrying Communist...

...Influential champions, many of them younger than she, arranged for stays at Yaddo, the writers' colony, and for occasional grants and awards...

...She wrote fiction, too...

...Josie's oasis, the old stone farmhouse she owned in Erwinna, Pennsylvania, was frequently in need of repair, and she rented it out as often as she lived in it...

...there was simply something a bit desperate in her attempt to be agreeable...

...Still, she did not garner much financial reward...

...Yet I also had the feeling that with casual friends she very definitely aimed to please—perhaps too much so...

...Josie and I did have occasional meetings, though...

...She was not being insincere, exactly...

...Josie never went that far...

...The Spanish Civil War she experienced in the company of Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos...

...I knew Josie only casually, at the close of her life, through mutual friends— Hilton Kramer, a former associate editor of this magazine who became her literary executor, the publisher Leslie Katz, and his wife, Jane Mayhall...

...Like her emotions, Josie's politics were more complicated and human—that is, more compromising and demeaning—than her a vowedly feminist biographer expected to find...

...Josie's strategy at the time of the investigation was to describe herself frankly as an anarchist opposed to the state...

...Langer has presented Josie not as a Joan of Arc but as a dynamic and talented woman whose career, to a greater extent than those of her celebrated literary contemporaries, was emblematic of America during the first two thirds of this century...

...the appearance of New Green World (1954), her beautifully written account of the father-and-son American naturalists John and William Bartram...

...Another meeting sticks out in my mind...

...Herbst's politics cost her...

...They tried to bury her," Josie told me once, darkly, without identifying the "they...

...She did her stint in Greenwich Village during the heyday of Prohibition, emancipated sex, necessary abortions, and radical politics...

...She felt she deserved more than she had gotten from the world...

...Amid various observations—I had a copy of Eck-ermann's Conversations With Goethe with me, for example, and she mentioned that she did not like the Sage of Weimar because he was too authoritarian for her taste—Josie exclaimed again and again how beautiful everything was...

...They separated in the mid-'30s, but during World War II her political affiliations and the false testimony of a confidential source, identified by Langer as none other than Katherine Anne Porter, led to Josie's ouster from a government job...

...I realize now that Josie must have identified with Stein, who had not been given her due by the critical establishment...

...These people kept me informed about her most of the time...

...In this vivid and revealing biography, Elinor Lang-er leaves the impression that Josie, as she was always known to family and friends, accepted the politics of expediency—in particular, the principle that successful revolutions, no less than successful omelets, required the breaking of a few eggs...

...Another time I learned that Josie disapproved of an article of mine characterizing the 1920s in terms she regarded as somewhat frivolous...

...The literary grind Langer describes is a hard, hand-to-mouth struggle for existence...

...Not until the last stage of her career—thanks to the efforts of friends...

...Langer believes that Josie's evasions were meant to protect Herrmann, whom she still loved despite their rancorous parting...

...Discarding easy charity, Langer has done justice to the life...

...When Whittaker Chambers' charges against Alger Hiss made the headlines in 1948, Josie was implicated because she and Herrmann had known Chambers as the agent "Karl" in the previous decade, and because she may have had hearsay evidence, which she withheld, of Hissmeeting his accuser in 1934, earlier than he conceded...

...Perhaps her apparently desperate need to please was matched by a desperate need to rebel against the authority of her emotions, so that when she felt she had given too much of herself and the intensity of her feelings had not been reciprocated she became impossibly demanding...

...But these blessings came too late for her to be modest or obviously grateful, in private anyway...

...Of course her own career, begun in that era, had been very different from the glamorous and exciting public lives of its more famous writers, such as the Fitzgeralds and Hemingway...

...Then, in the 1930s, her life and work became increasingly politicized...

...She was twice refused a passport, a necessity for anyone with a reputation as a political correspondent...

...We shared an admiration for Gertrude Stein...

...Commissions for articles...

...It is not altogether clear whether she did this out of political naivete or shrewdness, but the maneuver was effective: FBI agents thought her "cooperative...

...an important part of her income, therefore dried up...

...Presumably she meant the critics, especially Katherine Anne Porter, with whom she had a notable debate on the subject...

...She died of cancer in a New York hospital in January 1969, her faith in radicalism, including her own, seemingly undiminished by her experiences...

...As one of them noted: "My own impression is that neither the government nor we would dare to put her on the stand...

...I took her to the final day of the New York Flower Show one afternoon before we were to have dinner with mutual friends...

...I have no personal knowledge of Jo-sie's intimate private life, but Langer's account of her tormented relations with John Herrmann and other male and female lovers convincingly makes her seem difficult and embittered...

...and the publication of a few chapters from her continually delayed and revised autobiography—did Josie achieve fame and a following...

...her reputation as a novelist rested on her trilogy, Pity is Not Enough (1933), The Executioner Waits (1934) and Rope of Gold (1939), the chronicle of a family similar to her own, and of radical hopes defeated by capitalist and totalitarian pressures...

...She is likely to do more harm than good to anyone who calls her as a witness...

...The exhibits had started to wilt, some were being dismantled and the whole place looked seedy...

...But it was there that she planted her garden and invited her friends...

...As she put it in a letter to her friend Katherine Anne Porter, growing oppression in the world and the Soviet betrayal of the Spanish Loyalists were "far worse for me to look at than the killing of any dozen or even 50 men, old Bolsheviks or whatnot...

...With her husband John Herrmann, a once-popular novelist, she made the usual trek to the Soviet Union to look at the future and see how it was working...

...As a journalist, Herbst investigated a Soviet-type commune in Cuba for the Communist New Masses and covered Hitler's Germany for the New York Post...

...She also served time in Weimar-era Berlin and in the Paris of the expatriates...

...Josie's correspondence with Jean Garrigue, the much younger poet and former NL poetry critic with whom she had a long and wrangling romance at the end of her days, is painful to read—alternating currents of pleading and whining are countered by harsh recriminations...

...Like many liberals of the period (she preferred to think of herself as a radical, indeed as an anarchist), Herbst was slow to acknowledge the sinister implications of Stalin's purge trials and was stunned, rather than disgusted, by his 1939 non-aggression pact with Hitler...