458 Making It New: 1900–1945theme of miscegenation. “I am a moral writer,” Hellman once wrote; and, in her
drama, she used the conventions of the well-made play to compel her mainly
middle-class audience to confront questions of justice, social equality, and personal
responsibility. The crises her characters face are invariably ones that force them to
choose between the imperatives of conscience and the demands of society. Hellman
was eventually made to make that choice herself, when, in 1952, because of her
political activities, she was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities
Committee. And, courageously, she told the committee that, while she was willing to
speak about her own activism, she would not say anything about the activities of
others. “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” she told
the committee. For this, although she was not jailed as many of her friends and her
companion Dashiell Hammett were, she found herself blacklisted. However, she
responded by launching a new career as a writer of autobiographical memoirs. An
Unfinished Woman (1969) and Pentimento (1973) are largely concerned with her
childhood experiences and early personal and political involvements. In Scoundrel
Time (1976), however, she returned to the period when, as she put it, thanks to the
Un-American Activities Committee, “truth made you a traitor as it often does in a
time of scoundrels.” The book replays the familiar theme of Hellman’s drama, a
crisis of choice, a moral challenge that, as she shows, many American intellectuals
and radicals of the time failed. And it emphasizes, just as that drama does, the
dangers of American innocence in the face of evil and injustice – whether that evil
come from fascism in Germany or Spain, childish malice or familial pride, or “high-
powered operators” like the members of the Un-American Activities Committee.
“We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads,” Hellman
observes in Scoundrel Time. “It is considered unhealthy in America to remember
mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell upon them.” Hellman
shows, however, that it is necessary to look backward honestly in order to be able
to go forward. If America does not acknowledge its errors, it will simply go on
repeating them; if Americans do not accept their responsibilities as individuals
and citizens, then they will get the kind of scoundrels to rule them they deserve.
A similar concern with moral and social responsibility lies at the heart of all
Mary McCarthy’s work. McCarthy began her career by writing reviews for The
New Republic, The Nation, and The Partisan Review, whose editor Philip Rahv was
for a while her partner. In 1938, however, McCarthy left Rahv to marry the critic and
novelist Edmund Wilson (1895–1972); and, at Wilson’s urging, she began to write
fiction. That fiction has often been quite close to the autobiographical bone. The
Company She Keeps (1942), for instance, is a witty portrait of a bohemian, intellectual
young woman; while The Groves of Academe (1952), a satirical portrait of faculty life
at a liberal college for women, is based on McCarthy’s experiences of teaching at
Bard and Sarah Lawrence colleges. Her most famous novel, The Group (1963), in
turn springs from its author’s experiences as a student at Vassar in the early 1930s.
Beginning with the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt and ending with that of
Harry Truman, The Group follows the lives of eight Vassar women. McCarthy
commented that the book was “about the idea of progress really, seen in the femaleGGray_c04.indd 458ray_c 04 .indd 458 8 8/1/2011 7:54:00 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 00 AM