Lucking Out - James Wolcott [38]
What I do remember was my first meeting with Gore Vidal, who was then, as now, quintessentially Gore Vidalish—“in character,” as it were. We chatted beforehand while Pauline was elsewhere, perhaps in makeup, about the literary feud ablaze between Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, which one wag compared to the gunfight between Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge in Johnny Guitar, only less butch. It was one of those spats that escalated into a rift that divided cocktail parties into two opposing camps glowering at each other with frosty eyebrows. The fracas uninnocently began when McCarthy, a guest on The Dick Cavett Show (during its PBS iteration), rendered a verdict regarding Hellman’s veracity as a memoirist, declaring with a leopardess smile that had claimed many a victim before: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ” That Hellman’s relationship with the truth was a rather smoky romance with a lot of room for mythmaking and revision was not a controversial notion. Pauline, for example, had pegged the heroic saga of Julia as a phony from the get-go, a suspicion vindicated when the real Julia—Muriel Gardiner, who shared a lawyer with Hellman—surfaced to reveal that Hellman’s memoir was a self-glorifying fiction, a form of identity theft. And those in the liberal anti-Communist camp were almost admirably agog at how Hellman had managed to misty-watercolorize her Stalinist past, repackaging herself as a doughty heroine—a thorny survivor—for a new generation of feminist readers for whom the iridescence of Anaïs Nin had lost its lozenge effect. But the forest-clearing sweep of McCarthy’s dismissal—executed with such blithe condescension (“tremendously overrated, a bad writer, a dishonest writer, but she really belongs to the past”)—was like flaunting a red flag in Hellman’s face, if I may mix metaphors with mad abandon, and Hellman retaliated not with a poison-dipped dart of her own but with a lawsuit upside McCarthy’s head. She sued not only McCarthy for defamation but Cavett and the Educational Broadcasting Corporation too, asking $2.25 million in damages. The cost of defending the suit threatened to impoverish McCarthy (Hellman was far wealthier, in part due to the royalties of the Hammett estate), and the spectacle of two writers dragging their war of words to court was abhorrent even to many of those who felt Hellman had been wronged.
Vidal was dispassionate, viewing this folly, like so many others, through a long lens. He understood what motivated Hellman to persevere, and it wasn’t a sense of injustice. “When you reach a certain age,” he philosophized, “sometimes there’s nothing that gets you out of bed in the morning with more zest than a nice juicy lawsuit.” (It only occurred to me later that Vidal must have had more than his share of zippedy-do-dah days, given his headline-making lawsuits with William F. Buckley Jr. and Truman Capote.) I mentioned that Norman Mailer was playing the unlikely role of truce maker, referring to an article Mailer had done for the New York Times appealing to Hellman and McCarthy to drop their gloves and call off the legal hostilities. “Ah, yes, Norman,” Vidal said, “he always has such a vital role to play, being our Greatest Living Writer, as you so often remind us in the pages of the Village Voice.”
Boy, did I feel swatted! And yet thrilled too. Here I was, low person on the totem pole, being put in my place as a Mailer fanboy by Gore Vidal in his inimitable epigrammatic manner, his irony at