The scandalous Lillian Hellman

A new production of Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour opens tonight; it is attracting predictable attention for the wattage of its stars, Keira Knightley and Elisabeth Moss (Peggy from Mad Men), but when the play was first produced, the star was the author. A playwright, screenwriter and memoirist nearly as well known for her life and politics as for her writing, Hellman (1905-84) was one of the most famous American women writers of the 20th century. She was also the first woman to be admitted into the previously all-male club of American "dramatic literature", primarily on the basis of two enormously successful plays from the 1930s: The Children's Hour (1934) and The Little Foxes (1939).

The Children's Hour, an instant succès de scandale, was Hellman's first play, making her a celebrity at the age of 29; it is the story of two women running a school for girls whose lives are ruined by a malicious student spreading the lie that they are lovers. Lesbianism – even more so than male homosexuality – was still so taboo that the play was banned in London, as well as in Chicago and Boston. But the play was almost as shocking for its suggestion that schoolgirls knew not only about sex, but about "sexual perversion" – from reading dirty books. The Children's Hour was considered too scandalous for the Pulitzer prize, a decision that outraged the New York theatre critics into forming the Drama Critics' Circle in protest. It was an immense hit, however, in the more sophisticated, or salacious, environs of New York and Paris, running on Broadway for almost two years.

After several more hit plays, Hellman revived The Children's Hour in 1952, when the communist witch-hunts were in full swing. The pertinence of a story about the effects of lying, rumours and community paranoia was unmistakable, and the play was a popular success once again. Just a month later, Arthur Miller would produce his own parable about McCarthyism, The Crucible – although his play was considerably less popular at the time (it also didn't comment implicitly on the persecution of homosexuals the way that The Children's Hour did).

Like many writers of her generation, Hellman was an outspoken leftist in the 1930s whose political convictions would result in her being brought before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) herself. Unlike some of her contemporaries, however – whom she later denounced as "clowns" who "just took to the hills" – Hellman took a defiantly principled stand against the HUAC, refusing to name names. In a letter published in the New York Times in May 1952, she informed the committee that she would testify about her own activities, but refused to incriminate others, declaring: "To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonourable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." (That said, she was not above following that year's fashions, and later disarmingly admitted that the Balmain dress she wore to appear before the committee made her "feel better".)

As commendable as her position in regards to the HUAC may have been, her politics were not always so admirable. Throughout the 1930s, Hellman, like many other Americans on the left, became an outspoken apologist for Stalin, even after the scale of his crimes began to be revealed. Many of her contemporaries found her later seizure of the moral high ground in her dealings with the HUAC understandably enraging, given her unrepentant Stalinism: she publicly supported the Moscow purge trials and continued to insist that Stalin had created "the ideal democratic state".

Born on 20 June 1905 in New Orleans, Lillian Florence Hellman was an only child. After her father's business failed, she and her mother spent part of each year with her mother's relatives in New York and part with her father's sisters, who ran a boarding house in New Orleans. After dropping out of NYU and Columbia, and a brief stint at Horace Liveright's publishing house, she married Arthur Kober, a press agent, in 1925. Both Kober and Hellman began writing, and within a few years they had moved to Hollywood; it was there, in 1930, that she met Dashiell Hammett. He was 36, the famous author of Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon. A former Pinkerton detective, he was a notorious drunk in an age of hard drinkers. He was also compulsively promiscuous (and unsurprisingly, given his predilection for prostitutes, prone to bouts of gonorrhoea), possibly abusive, and certainly patronising (although Hellman always insisted she appreciated his tutelage). Before long she divorced Kober, and she and Hammett were lovers on and off for the next 30 years, until he died. Having told various accounts of their first meeting (in the most picturesque, they talked about TS Eliot in his car until dawn), it appears that Hellman began as she meant to go on: her stories about her life with Hammett were as romantic as they were inconsistent, and more than one subsequent biographer has concluded that she made much of their relationship up out of whole cloth.

But not all of it. In 1934, Hammett dedicated The Thin Man, his last novel, to Hellman; she liked to claim she was the inspiration for Nora, Nick Charles's witty, beautiful, wife – but then who wouldn't like to claim that? Nora was a breakthrough in the representation of women in detective fiction: neither victim nor femme fatale, she was an equal partner, sympathetic, quick-witted, and just as hard-drinking as her husband.

The Children's Hour, finished not long after The Thin Man, was prompted by Hammett's suggestion: he showed Hellman the 19th-century account of an Edinburgh case in which two female schoolteachers were accused of a lesbian affair by a 14-year-old schoolgirl; the two women spent the rest of their lives attempting to clear their reputations, bankrupting themselves in futile lawsuits. In the historical case it is not, actually, certain whether the girl was lying; only that the women resolutely defended their innocence. Hellman makes it clear that her characters have been falsely accused; she also changed the race of the girl, whom she described as having been "a little Indian girl – an India Indian".

After a hugely successful three decades in the theatre, Hellman was understandably galled in later life by an article declaring that Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee were America's three greatest living playwrights, given that each of them could well be said to owe a debt to Hellman's own, much earlier, plays. Her popularity as a dramatist in decline, Hellman began writing what would become four volumes of legendarily unreliable memoirs, An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time and Maybe. All four were critical and commercial successes, An Unfinished Woman winning the National Book award in 1969.

They were less popular, however, with some of the people who also remembered the events she was recounting. Hellman was repeatedly accused of untruthfulness, most notably by her longtime adversary Mary McCarthy, who announced on US television: "Every word [Hellman] writes is a lie – including 'and' and 'the'." The accusation prompted Hellman, by then a very wealthy woman, to sue the much less rich McCarthy for defamation; characteristically, Hellman was still pursuing the lawsuit when she died (it was dropped by her estate). McCarthy was not the only prominent figure to challenge Hellman's veracity: Martha Gellhorn said that Hellman's accounts of the Spanish civil war and her friendship with Ernest Hemingway were distorted, and the psychoanalyst Muriel Gardiner said that Hellman had used her life as a central episode in Pentimento – a chapter called "Julia", which was made into a Hollywood film starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave – but unfortunately Gardiner had never met Hellman. They did, however, share an agent, which might have had something to do with Hellman's hearing the tale.

Hellman unquestionably engaged in mythmaking, misrepresentation and exaggeration: but she also admitted as much, albeit obliquely, in the opening of An Unfinished Woman: "What I have written is the truth as I saw it, but the truth as I saw it, of course, doesn't have much to do with the truth. It's as if I have fitted parts of a picture puzzle and then a child overturned it and threw out some pieces." Hellman helped to usher in the era of postmodern autobiography that rejects the conventional cradle-to-grave story of a life, and instead reflects on memory, truth, authenticity and fact: instead of confident assertions of mastery over her own experience, Hellman's autobiographies are unstable, shifting, questioning. She approaches the idea of the self-portrait obliquely, using portraits of others to imply a picture of herself.

Indeed, recent notorious false memoirists such as James Frey and Margaret Seltzer owe a considerable (if shady) debt to Hellman, but her accounts are superior to theirs in every way. Not only vastly better written, they are also a much more astute exploration of the tricks that memory and consciousness play – and of their resemblance to the tricks that writers play.

There's a strong case for saying that most of Hellman's career revolves around themes of misrepresentation, from The Children's Hour to The Little Foxes to The Autumn Garden (Hellman's own favourite play) to Pentimento to Mary McCarthy's denunciation. Hellman once described The Children's Hour as "not really a play about lesbianism, but about a lie. The bigger the lie, the better, as always." Evidently this philosophy inspired her memoirs as well.

In Pentimento, Hellman explains that her title is taken from painting: "Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter 'repented', changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again." For Hellman, the image is a way of describing the processes of memory, but it might also serve as a useful reminder to us, as audiences, that we need to be willing to repent, to change our minds, to see, and then see again. Lillian Hellman certainly deserves another look.

The Children's Hour is at The Comedy Theatre, London SW1 until 30 April. Box office: 0870 060 6637.

This article was amended on 24 January 2011. The original said that the film "Julia" starred Jane Fonda and Vanessa Richardson. This has been corrected.

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