To the Editor:

In response to Patrick McGilligan’s review of Dan Auiler’s “Hitchcock’s Notebooks” (Book Review, July 18), several clarifications are in order. McGilligan’s statement that “the academy collection lacks significant material on the first half of the director’s filmography” overlooks the presence of such items as Hitchcock’s personal scrapbooks from the 1920s as well as a large quantity of high-quality photographs from his British films (including those from the lost film “The Mountain Eagle,” reproduced by Auiler without correct attribution). The Bernstein letters and “39 Steps” storyboards mentioned in the review are not in the academy’s collection, though in fairness to McGilligan it is almost impossible for a reader to tell this by looking at the book. While the majority of the photocopied documents reproduced in the book are from the academy, Auiler also reproduced items from USC’s Warner Bros. archives, the British Film Institute and other sources. By failing to properly identify and give complete citations for the various documents and other materials in his book, Auiler has compiled a publication which may look good at first glance but is of questionable research value. Insofar as the book’s having been “authorized,” we would like it to be known for the record that Auiler’s wholesale publication of materials from the Alfred Hitchcock Collection was, in fact, done without our knowledge or permission.

Linda Harris Mehr, Director, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills

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To the Editor:

Most of those who have read Elia Kazan’s testimony before HUAC have read it in my book “Thirty Years of Treason.” A larger number of people have heard a key excerpt from this testimony in my play “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?” which was televised on Showtime with Liza Minnelli as Lillian Hellman.

Both of these works may have done some damage to Kazan’s reputation, as in both cases he was placed among relatively bad guys who Named Names, not among relatively good guys who refused to do so.

It is not surprising, then, that in 1998-99 I was invited to join in a veritable hue and cry after Kazan. If I declined, it was partly because the hostility seemed to me excessive, if not positively paranoid, and partly because the perspective of the century’s end is different from that of the century’s middle. For one thing, other facts have emerged about the history of communism and about the lives of communist and anti-communist Americans.

What prompts me to share these thoughts is Peter Biskind’s review of “Kazan” by Jeff Arnold (Book Review, July 18). It does not make the extreme accusations against Kazan that were leveled at him last year by various old Lefties. But it is quite unfair to him and in being so travesties the facts. For example, Biskind has Kazan in 1952 groveling “before Parnell Thomas and Richard Nixon et al.” Here the verb “to grovel” is unfair, but the two names are dead wrong and belong in the earlier context of the Hollywood Ten, 1947.

There are more important errors in Biskind’s account. Echoing Jeff Young, he asks why Kazan didn’t name Arthur Miller, implying that this is a really tough question. It isn’t. Miller hadn’t been a communist, so Kazan didn’t name him as one. (If Miller had been a communist, Kazan wouldn’t have known it; just as I don’t know it right now.)

More important still: Biskind asks why Kazan couldn’t have reported his own communist past and refused to name others. Several people had done this, hadn’t they? Actually only one name springs to mind: that of Lillian Hellman. A case worth looking at, indeed. For what Hellman did was lie about her record, deleting from her famous letter before she sent it to HUAC the admission that she had been a member of the Communist Party. All Hellman did was take part in a cover-up.

Did I report this in “Thirty Years of Treason” or in “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?”? No, I didn’t discover it for years later, just as I didn’t know until years later that John Reed had been the well-paid agent of the Soviet Union decades before. It seems to me that Biskind and many others have failed to keep track of recent revelations and have also failed to go back and look at what actually went on. Biskind seems to assume the Soviet Union had no Comintern and made no notable attempt to infiltrate any part of the American population. He puts quotes round the word “conspiracy” and says that the pro-Soviet Lefties were just liberals who wished to raise the minimum wage and secure social justice for blacks.

Minimum wage and civil rights: interesting that Biskind cites these two issues, because the pro-Soviet Left abandoned both those fights in June 1941 or soon thereafter. Why? Because they had a prior loyalty that interfered. The motherland, as Hellman put it, had been attacked.

Eric Bentley, New York City

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Peter Biskind replies:

I am a little surprised to see Eric Bentley carrying water for the “relatively bad guys” as he puts it, but then again the opportunities to advertise for oneself--in this case his out-of-print book and dimly remembered play--are not unlimited, so I suppose he cannot be blamed for seizing the opportunity. Bentley takes me to task for suggesting that had Kazan been a little more principled, he might have testified about his own affiliations while refusing to name others. The fact that he can recall only Lillian Hellman so doing, and that she may or may not have told the truth, is irrelevant to my point. Bentley wonders how Kazan could have named Arthur Miller when Miller was never a party member. Then in the next sentence contradicts himself, saying he, Bentley, doesn’t know whether Miller was or wasn’t. Either way, he assumes that only card carriers were named when, of course, practically anyone who looked sideways at the wrong person or sent a penny to an anti-Fascist organization found him or herself in jeopardy.

Space does not allow me to rebut each of Bentley’s points. Suffice to say, his complaints boil down to the same accusation--although more restrained--with which the offending Richard Nixon slimed his adversaries: being “soft” on communism. I’m sorry, but none of the recent revelations about Soviet moles justifies the wholesale decimation of the Hollywood community that occurred in the ‘50s.