Audacity

I spent some time looking into the story of Muriel Gardiner, the American medical student who worked in the Austrian socialist resistance and was almost certainly the model for “Julia” in Lillian Hellman’s memoir, Pentimento. Hellman claimed to have been good friends with the Julia in question, and a lot of the power of the memoir comes from the portrayal of their intense connection and Hellman’s acts of solidarity during Julia’s time in the Austrian underground in the 1930s. However, the story of Julia appears to have been lifted wholesale from the life of Gardiner. Gardiner and Hellman never met, but they had a friend in common who could have passed along details of Gardiner’s life. In the memoir, Hellman claimed that Julia lost a leg in her battle with the Nazis and later died young, whereas Gardiner lived into her eighties, with no such injury.

The story of Julia from Pentimento was adapted into a movie in 1977, starring Jane Fonda as Hellman and Vanessa Redgrave as the tragic, mysterious Julia. Redgrave’s few minutes on film were so luminous and engaging that they won her an Oscar for the supporting role. I saw the film version as a child and was hugely impressed by it. On reading a detailed takedown of Hellman’s story (by Elizabeth McCracken’s dad), I remembered large chunks of the movie whole. McCracken goes into how absurd and showy the details are in Hellman’s description of her part in a resistance operation, and I could recall perfectly how mysterious it was that Jane Fonda, as Hellman, had to wear a certain hat while going through customs at the German border, but was told to leave the hat box on the train. Why were there so many people involved in a simple transfer of funds? Why did Julia travel all the way up to Berlin to receive them? And what was the significance of the candy? These bizarrely specific elements appealed to my childish idea of what espionage was like—I could relate to Fonda’s confusion, as well as her sense that all these mysterious people and instructions existed for some unrevealed but compelling reason. They met an ideal cloak and dagger notion of what life was like in the underground. In reality, they made no sense.

Now I can contrast this with Gardiner’s account of what it was like helping her Austrian socialist and Jewish friends hide and leave the country. Money wasn’t the issue. She was an heiress who owned several properties in Austria. She could get money wired over from an American bank at any time. The brave—but simple—thing she did was hide people in the houses she owned and also travel back and forth between Prague and Vienna to acquire fake passports for them. There was a time she traveled with five of these fake passports at once, having bought herself a corset so that she could hide them. But she bought the corset. She didn’t have someone secretly leave her the corset in a box on the train.

Pentimento appeared in 1973. The movie version, Julia, came out in 1977. In 1979, Mary McCarthy made her famous remark about Hellman: “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” The evidence from Gardiner suggests that Hellman borrowed the life of someone she did not know, pretended to be close friends with her and changed important details about her—such as killing her off at a young age—and then passed the story off as truth. It’s a spectacular lie. And it’s evidently not the only lie told in her autobiographical writing. Martha Gellhorn also accused Hellman of lying about her experiences in Spain in an earlier memoir, An Unfinished Woman. Gellhorn—unlike Hellman—backs up her assertions with facts and timetables, for instance showing that Gellhorn’s husband, Ernest Hemingway, was in Cuba at a time that Hellman claims to have had drinks with him in New York. Hellman’s own accounts conflict with one another in the different volumes of the memoirs, insisting she was in Spain on a certain date in one book, and in Moscow on that date in another. No doubt it is hard to keep track of the calendar and whatnot when you are just making stuff up.

It must have been galling in the extreme for the witnesses to the same history. They had to watch someone they knew was lying get praised to the skies and have her big lie of a book turn into a successful film—with Jane Fonda portraying the author, no less! The psychological explanation for Hellman’s actions is not hard to find. In reality, she spent the 1930s doing things like defending Stalin’s purges and show trials, so it could not have been very comfortable for her to look back on that period of her life. Clearly, Hellman the dramatist knew how to spin a good yarn, and the reception of the book and film suggest that the same instincts leading her astray also paid off. The requirements of drama do tend to lead writers off the path of truth, if the factual content of your average biopic is anything to go by. Still, I would say Hellman is in a class of her own.

There is an ascending scale of wrongs here. It’s not great to call something fact when it is fiction—especially when you are an artist and can just explore the fuzziness of those distinctions in a play or novel. But it does not necessarily harm anyone, on its own. Readers might not mind so much, and may even enjoy the extra mess and drama. There is a potential for harm, of course, in weakening the public’s grasp on truth and history. But Hellman’s is one story among many, which dilutes the effect. The real harm starts to come in with borrowing Gardiner’s experiences. Hellman is using a real person as a means to an end, essentially forcing her to reclaim her own story and sort through the thicket of lies being told about her. One of the most touching aspects of Gardiner’s account is that she entertained the idea that there may have been a second American medical student in Vienna—who also happened to be an heiress—involved in the resistance. It was only when she consulted the historian Herbert Steiner, who specializes in the Austrian underground after the Anschluss, that she learned that no member of the resistance had ever heard of such a person. That’s real work that Gardiner had to do, to overcome a feeling that she might be crazy. But the truly unforgivable thing about Lillian Hellman was that she was enough of a psychological wreck that she sued Mary McCarthy (and Dick Cavett, and PBS) for millions of dollars, claiming harm to her reputation. That is utter shamelessness and malice. The suit haunted McCarthy’s life for years, and she had to spend almost all her resources fighting it off. It is an indictment of the American legal system that Hellman was able to wreak as much destruction as she did, with a track record like hers. McCarthy only got a reprieve on Hellman’s death in 1984. The legal battle hints at a larger societal harm, related to our recent political struggles, in which frauds with enough money are able to hammer their critics out of existence.

The most audacious aspect of Hellman’s memoirs, for me, is that she states up front in Pentimento that her memories are unreliable and her truth her own. The very title refers to the reappearance of an earlier layer of a painting, underneath its surface. It’s as if she’s daring the audience to see the misguided and unrepentant Stalinism under the tale of stolen antifascist valor, as if to say, Well, that’s how memory works. While it’s true that all of us have unreliable memories, we don’t usually present the very thrilling and specific tales we’ve heard second-hand as our own. That’s not a common quirk of memory, and it seems doubly malicious to not only tell spectacular lies but insist that really everyone does it, too. That feels like the original kernel of her gaslighting, contained in the first paragraph of the book.