A tough broad

When the modern reader thinks of Lillian Hellman, if he or she thinks of her at all, the image that presents itself is likely to be of a wizened old doll marooned in a gigantic mink coat, a still bigger hairdo — and wreathed in the smoke emanating not only from a cigarette but from her smouldering pants.

Her enemy Mary McCarthy said in a 1979 television interview that ‘every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the” ’. That memorable zinger — and the lawsuit that followed, still ongoing at the time of Hellman’s death — all but did for her reputation. Chuck Palahniuk’s novel about the golden age of Hollywood, Tell All, has as a running joke the eye-stretching lies told by Hellman. 

Her reputation as a liar has almost eclipsed her reputation as a playwright. Among the most stinging things McCarthy said in that interview, because true, was that as a writer she ‘belongs to the past’. The ‘well-made play’ of the sort Hellman specialised in — neatly plotted, naturalistic in idiom, somewhat melodramatic, heavily didactic — looks quaint in the age of Beckett, Pinter and Ionesco. The writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick described Hellman’s as a ‘craftsmanship of climaxes and curtain-lines and discoveries’. Yet the fine recent West End revival of The Children’s Hour affirmed just how satisfying such craftsmanship can be.

So Alice Kessler-Harris’s book is a fair-minded attempt to dust Hellman down and see her in a less hysterical light. Why is it, she wonders, that where other former communists and fellow travellers were allowed to repent of their positions, Hellman continues to be regarded as ‘an unregenerate Stalinist’? Why, when countless writers have embroidered or confused the details of their lives, is Hellman singled out as a wicked fantasist? Kessler-Harris suggests misogyny might have played a part.