having a fallout with a friend over politics is one of the shittiest feelings ever.

reading about The New York Intellectuals feels very relevant now—the serious rifts between the Stalinists & the Trotskyists, & then the later split between the Trotskyists & neocons

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The New York Intellectuals were individually some of the best American writers & cultural critics & in terms of friend groups none came close

The best history books about this group as a whole are:

-The New York Intellectuals, Alan Wald
-Prodigal Sons, Alexander Bloom

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My favorite memoir of the period was written by Norman Podhoretz, where he incisively analyzes the literary landscape of the 1950s & 1960s, especially the small political and literary magazines.

The best edition of Making It (1967) is a reprint by New York Review Books.

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“Making It” is one of my favorite books of all time and it’s the best, in my opinion, at analyzing class status, higher education, and social climbing in America.

Podhoretz also wrote Breaking Ranks & Ex-Friends about his various falling outs.

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Two friends that had a disastrous, public falling out were Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy. It’s debatable if they were ever that close, but they were in the same friend group and had all the same literary pals and parties.

Lillian was a Stalinist and Mary a Trotskyist.

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Lillian Hellman was an author, playwright and screenwriter, and Mary McCarthy a novelist and essayist.

Hellman is mainly known for writing the play, Children’s Hour, which was adapted for radio, tv and a feature film starring Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine.

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The Children’s Hour is brilliant & the movie is definitely worth watching. It’s a melodrama about two teachers at a private school accused of being lesbians

She also wrote, Scoundrel Time, of her time in the McCarthy era & appearing before House Un-American Activities Committee

McCarthy wrote the novels, The Group, Birds of America, and several more; and the memoir, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. Library of American has a good collection of her work available.

Lillian Hellman was more commercially successful, especially in Hollywood, and Mary McCarthy (even though The Group was adapted for the big screen) was seen as more of a highbrow literary figure.

The falling out between the two friends exploded on the national stage when Mary McCarthy told Dick Cavett on his national tv show that every word that Lillian Hellman ". . . writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”

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Lillian Hellman attempted to sue Mary McCarthy, PBS, and Cavett for $2.5 million in a libel lawsuit, but she passed away before anything was settled, so her executors decided to drop the litigation.

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Nora Ephron dramatized the falling out between Hellman and McCarthy in a play called "Imaginary Friends"

Dick Cavett (mentioned above) wrote about the play and his reflections on his part in the story in The New Yorker in 2002.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/12/16/lillian-mary-and-me

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The Claremont Review of Books has a scathing review of two sympathetic biographies of Lillian Hellman in the winter of 2014/2015

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/what-becomes-a-liar-most/

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The two books reviewed in Claremont are:

-A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman, by Alice Kessler-Harris

-Lillian Hellman: An Imperious Life, by Dorothy Gallagher

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New York Times reviews of the Lillian Hellman biographies:

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/books/review/dorothy-gallaghers-lillian-hellman-an-imperious-life-and-more.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/books/review/a-difficult-woman-by-alice-kessler-harris.html

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History in this case clearly favors Mary McCarthy (mainly because Lillian Hellman did lie about a lot of things).

However, Mary McCarthy's evolution into a Cold War liberal hawk makes it much easier for us to paint her as the champion because the U.S. outlived the U.S.S.R.

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It was chic in Hollywood circles in Hellman's & McCarthy's time to be pro-Stalinist, but the actual state power at the time was with the New Deal liberals & Cold War Hawks.

McCarthy chose the home-team, which was more advantageous in the short-term

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However, Lillian Hellman presented the Academy Award for documentary in 1977, and she was greeted to a standing ovation.

Clearly (and this was before the end of the cold war remember), Lillian Hellman was a hero in Hollywood.

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Lillian Hellman was wrong to support Stalin and run interference for his genocides

however . . .

did Mary McCarthy sufficiently critique U.S. liberal imperialism? I don't think so. We barely have a full picture of the American Empire in the 20th century. . .

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Both Hellman and McCarthy are geniuses, in my opinion, and I often wonder how both would be remembered today (if at all) if they weren't so political.

what's the point of this thread?

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I think today's political tensions are much worse, socially, than they were during the Cold War.

The Blacklist and red scare of McCarthyism was terrible for a lot of people, but not nearly as totalizing as cancel culture today, and the brown scare of de-Trumpification

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I don't have any advice but this: in this climate, choose your friends wisely, and be kind to them.

And try to avoid calling a friend a liar on national television unless they really deserve it.

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END/

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might find this thread interesting