Unfinished Women

The public feud between Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman continues to warrant our attention long after its two vehement opponents have left the stage. To be sure, the nature of their dispute transcended the specific questions it raised regarding Hellman's misrepresentation of her past. Truth versus mendacity, fact versus fiction, call it what you will--at the heart of their argument was one of the more troubling developments of the twentieth century, which has only intensified as we've moved into the twenty-first: the culture's growing tendency to conflate fact with fiction, both diluting and polluting our reality.

In retrospect, the war between the Jewish leftist Hellman and the Catholic liberal McCarthy seems to have been inevitable. Hellman was a playwright and memoirist who clearly believed in a writer's artistic license to embroider. Though McCarthy based some of her novels on her own life, she was a stickler--and ultimately a crusader--for the truth.

What might be viewed as their lifelong rivalry culminated in 1980, when McCarthy famously said of Hellman during a TV interview with Dick Cavett: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" In spite of Hellman's bringing a $2.25 million lawsuit against her, McCarthy has been vindicated over the years, as we've come to learn that the plaintiff indeed lied about any number of things in her ostensibly autobiographical trilogy: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento and Scoundrel Time.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.