To the Editors:
I found your article about Lillian Hellman (“The Death and Life of Lillian Hellman,” October, 1984) dishonest, unfair, and (to use your own word) malevolent toward her. You accuse her and denounce her without saying where this happened: “She took revenge upon her anti-Stalinist adversaries as soon as she felt rich enough and powerful enough to do so.” Where and how did she take revenge? When? I have just re-read Scoundrel Time and what I particularly like about it is that it is so honest. You say it isn’t honest, but you don’t say where. You use words like “malign” in reference to a fact; you say she “maligned” the editors and writers of Partisan Review and Commentarybut it is a fact that they failed to come to the defense of those questioned by Senator McCarthy. You are doing the maligning—maligning her by twisting the truth into something malignant. I haven’t read Martha Gellhorn’s article lately, concerning Hellman’s adventures during the Spanish Civil War, but it certainly was about very inconsequential things, such as who did or did not stand on the balcony after dinner, nothing more important than that. And that article by Samuel McCracken on the veracity of certain details in “Julia” is about trivial pursuits too, and a waste of everybody’s time. Who cares whether or not there was a morning train or not? While McCracken was at it, why didn’t he check out Anna Karenina’s trains too and prove Tolstoy a total