Hellman died in 1984 amid allegations that An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, and Scoundrel Time contained serious distortions of the truth, even outright lies. Though Hellman’s veracity had been questioned before, the debacle reached its high point in 1980, when novelist Mary McCarthy claimed on national television that Hellman was an overrated writer and a systematic purveyor of untruths in her memoirs. Always combative, particularly when her reputation was at stake, Hellman responded by suing McCarthy for $2,225,000. While the suit never reached trial—it was on its way to court at the time of Hellman’s death—it triggered a wave of similar, more specific complaints against Hellman’s truthfulness. Such writers as Leo McCracken, assistant to the president of Boston University, and Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife, wrote and published detailed articles that cited specific examples of what they saw as blatant lies on Hellman’s part. Earlier, the distinguished writer and critic Diana Trilling had infuriated Hellman by attacking in print Scoundrel Time, Hellman’s memoir of the McCarthy era, calling it one sided and dangerously misleading. Nor was Trilling the only writer to question Hellman’s interpretation of the “Communist witch-hunt” of the 1950’s: Both conservatives and anti-Communist liberals accused Hellman of casting herself in a much more heroic role than she had actually played in her appearance in 1952 before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, an event that forms the central episode in Scoundrel Time.

Perhaps the most crushing blow to Hellman’s veracity came in 1983, with the publication of Code Name “Mary”: Memoirs of an American Woman in the Austrian Underground, the autobiography of Muriel Gardiner, a woman whose life so closely matched that of Hellman’s Julia that it seems almost certain that they were one and the same. When asked about Hellman’s book and about the film made from it, Gardiner repeatedly stated that she could not be Julia since she had never met Lillian Hellman. Gardiner’s denials went far toward establishing among Hellman’s critics that “Julia” was indeed a total fabrication: what Hellman wished had happened rather than what had actually happened. (Gardiner was also said to have served as the inspiration for the character Sara Muller in Hellman’s 1941 play, Watch on the Rhine.)

Still, for all of its intensity, this controversy was confined for the most part to the intellectual community; the general public, since the release of the film version of “Julia,” had come to revere Hellman as never before. In the post-Watergate climate of the later 1970’s and the early 1980’s, Hellman seemed to many a doughty warrior in the fight against corrupt authority, a woman who had stood by and suffered for her convictions. Not even her detractors could deny that Hellman had indeed recognized early the Fascist threat at a time when the American government had seemed complacent about it, or that her stand before the McCarthyite inquisitors had been a courageous one. In the light of her legend, the literal truth of her memoirs seemed of little importance to those who admired her life and her writing.

On balance, however, it is the books and not the image that must be judged. While Hellman’s use of artistic license in Pentimento and in the other memoirs seems beyond question, they are interesting and readable accounts of a fascinating life and irresistible self-portraits of a narrator to whom the reader is strongly drawn. If not the literal truth, they strongly suggest truthfulness and honesty. Further, Hellman’s constant disclaimers, her frequent asides concerning the impossibility of achieving truth, her relentless questioning of her own memory, would seem to lift the memoirs outside the range of autobiography into a realm where truth and fiction merge. As her biographer William Wright has noted, her attitude toward the role of the memoirist and toward the factual basis of the stories she tells would seem to be summarized by the title of her last book, Maybe.