THE DESCRIPTION of a thing, or a person, as a "scoundrel" is a word most often used in anger. It is an epithet hurled, stronger for its restraint and contradictory in its mildness, bolder than any sort of effluent obscenity.

For three volumes of prose, Lillian Hellman has been telling the story of the anger of her life, which she describes as "an uncomfortable, dangerous, and often useful gift." Through An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento, Hellman patched together the fabric of her life, revealing stories in the latter book she had not been able to bring herself to tell in the former. In both books she only touched on the period of the early 1950's. In Scoundrel Time, however, she concentrates on that era, exploring the wide range of her memories of times now remembered as the McCarthy era.

Her story is, chronologically, fairly straightforward. In early 1952, Hellman was subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, to testify on her life and her friends of the thirties and forties. She told the committee, in a letter dated 24 years ago today, that she would volunteer any information requested about her own history. But she refused to discuss the history of any other person. She wrote:

To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.

This stance was unacceptable to the committee. Hellman offered to testify about herself, and in doing so, waived her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. She could be held in contempt for failing to answer any other questions. When she actually appeared before the committee on May 21, 1952, she compromised her position. She took the Fifth Amendment on almost every question, incriminating herself by not incriminating herself, for the sake of decency. The cleverness of her lawyer and the ineptitude of the Committee members enabled Hellman's letter to be read into the public record. One month later, when she appeared onstage at a New York theater, she received a standing ovation.

HELLMAN'S is a story of simple heroism--a courageous stance in a cowardly time. In her letter to the committee Hellman spoke of the "simple rules of human decency," and she writes that she feels all she did was to follow these simple rules. As a result of her action she lived for months with the threat of jail hanging over her life; she was blacklisted, spied upon, impoverished, forced to sell her home. Her story is the stuff of which martyrs are made.

But here Hellman's anger serves her well. She is still angry enough at American intellectuals and their reluctance to follow the simple rules of decency--"to try to tell the truth, not to bear false witness, not to harm my neighbor, to be loyal to my country"--in the first half of the fifties to be even more angry at their attempts now to glorify her. Hellman claims she feels little against the McCarthys or Nixons, whom she regards as merely the leaders of a movement in search of a scapegoat. Her anger is instead directed towards "the people of my world":

I had, up to the late 1940's, believed that the educated, the intellectual, lived by what they claimed to believe: freedom of thought and speech, the right of each man to his own convictions, a more than implied promise, therefore, of aid to those who might be persecuted.

A paragraph later comes her summation: Simply, then and now, I felt betrayed by the nonsense I had believed.

That is perhaps why Hellman chose for the first sentence of her book the words "I have tried twice before to write about what has come to be known as the McCarthy period but I didn't much like what I wrote." Hellman has chosen as her enemy, her "scoundrels," those who would deify her if they had the chance.

Hellman might have alleviated their guilt. She is a master dramatist; if it had been her intention, she would have structured a book of building tension and inner agony, climaxing in her triumph, in swells of applause and a vindicated life.

Scoundrel Time is far from such a book. It rambles, jumps around in time, from Washington to Spain to upstate New York. Hellman intersperses her stories of lawyers and committee rooms with anecdotes about clothes and cabdrivers and manure and stage-hands pouring bourbon down her throat. The stories are exquisite in and of themselves because Hellman has a sharp memory for detail and is a master storyteller. But because the stories break up the passage of events in her book, they destroy the buildup of dramatic tension. Hellman's last segment begins with the words "Nothing more was to happen to me." She deliberately avoids the high tragic ending of all stories about martyrs.

Hellman's courage is still evident in spite of her deliberate down-playing of it. And so also is her anger--especially at those who would praise her now but did not have any beliefs worth holding on to when the conditions of the age tested them.

Hellman says that her own feelings were perhaps best summed up by the English writer Richard Crossman, who claimed that "It took an Englishman a long time to fight for a liberty, but once he had it nobody could take it away, but that we in America fought fast for liberty and could be deprived of it in an hour." The events of the past four years have proven Mr. Crossman all too wise, and have proved that Hellman's anger is all too well-founded.