Pentimento by Lillian Hellman

First published: 1973

Type of work: Memoir

Time of work: 1905 to the early 1970’s

Locale: The United States and Europe

Principal Personages:

• Lillian Hellman, the author, a playwright
• Bethe, ,
• Willy, and
• Julia, friends or relatives who are remembered in this memoir
• Dashiell Hammett, Hellman’s longtime companion

Form and Content

The title of playwright Lillian Hellman’s second book of memoirs is a painterly one, which Hellman defines in a brief prologue:

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.

This elegant definition, along with the book’s subtitle—A Book of Portraits—goes far toward explaining Hellman’s method, style, and focus in Pentimento. The book is indeed a series of portraits, most of them devoted to people and places important only to the narrator. One might extend the painterly metaphor to describe the seven essays in the book as finely wrought miniatures, each of them more reliant on detail than on scope. In Pentimento, the United States’ most important twentieth century woman dramatist casts herself as the repenting painter defined above, and it is her voice, her special vision, that unifies the many disparate parts of the book. In its emphases on memory, on time, and on taking responsibility for one’s own actions, Pentimento is as much as anything else a self-portrait.

Far from being the sort of name-dropping celebrity memoir that one might expect of someone who had, by the time of the book’s publication, lived in the public eye for some forty years, Pentimento is intensely private; only one of its chapters deals to any extent with the rich and famous. Rather, Pentimento is a group of seemingly unconnected reminiscences of a famous woman’s off-duty hours, of the times when a public life goes underground, and of the often eccentric characters who people any life. Certainly Hellman makes no attempt whatsoever at straightforward, chronological autobiography in Pentimento; her earlier memoir An Unfinished Woman, which won the National Book Award in 1969, was as close as Hellman would ever come to conventional autobiography. A scholar trying to piece together the details of Hellman’s life would be frustrated by the evasions, the chronological lapses, the omissions that characterize Pentimento. Though the book includes everything from Hellman’s childhood in New Orleans to her years of preeminence as a playwright to her later life as a memoirist, and while the essays are arranged in a loose chronological order corresponding to the time periods during which Hellman knew the people she describes, many of the conventions of autobiography are deliberately flouted. Dates, for example, are hazy and vague, filtered through the consciousness of a narrator who is herself trying to order a series of disconnected memories.

Pentimento is divided into seven portrait-essays, each of which describes impressionistically a person or an event or both that had a strong effect on the psychic or emotional development of the narrator. The first, “Bethe,” is the story of a stalwart German emigrant, a distant relative of Hellman, who becomes involved in a series of romantic liaisons with shady New Orleans characters and who is eventually implicated in a gangland murder. “Willy” describes Hellman’s cavalier great-uncle by marriage, a romantic figure for whom Hellman experienced early sexual yearnings. “Julia,” the third and most famous of the book’s portraits—in 1977, Fred Zinnemann released a highly successful film version starring Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and Jason Robards—is a tribute to a childhood friend of Hellman who became a heroic figure in the underground resistance to the European Fascist movement of the 1930’s. Next comes “Theatre,” a celebrity-filled account of Hellman’s career as a playwright, followed by “Arthur W. A. Cowan,” another purely personal portrait of an eccentric friend from Hellman’s middle years. “Turtle” is a semimetaphysical story concerned with nothing less than life and death, while “Pentimento” serves as a sort of coda for the book and a final justification of its existence.

Critical Context

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.

Bibliography

Falk, Doris V. Lillian Hellman. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978. A well-written biography of Hellman covering her life and her work, with many references to Pentimento. A bibliography is included.

Feibleman, Peter. Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman. New York: William Morrow, 1988. An affectionate portrait which defends the way in which Hellman wrote Pentimento, particularly the chapter “Julia.” Hellman carefully researched details that would later, in Feibleman’s view, be “examined thread by thread, picked bare by all those nimble writers whose finest tools are a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers.”

Gould, Jean. Modern American Palywrights. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1966. Published years before any of Hellman’s memoirs, the chapter entitled “Lillian Hellman” illuminates the playwright’s position on social issues and feminism.

Harriman, Margaret Case. Take Them Up Tenderly. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944. In her chapter “Miss Lilly of New Orleans,” Harriman focuses on Hellman’s life from childhood through the first plays and makes clear the playwright’s feelings about “the little people” in society.

Lederer, Katherine. Lillian Hellman. Boston: Twayne, 1979. Devoting only one short chapter to “Life and Times,” Lederer concentrates instead on a critical view of Hellman as an ironic voice in both her plays and her memoirs. Offers a section devoted to Pentimento and a selected bibliography.

Riordan, Mary Marguerite. Lillian Hellman: A Bibliography, 1926-1978. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1980. An extraordinary book listing in easy-to-find form everything that Hellman wrote, all the speeches she made, and all the books and articles written about her and about her work through 1978.

Rollyson, Carl. Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. With copious notes, a bibliography, and a carefully done index, Rolly-son’s picture of Hellman (and Pentimento) seeks a well-balanced analysis of the woman and her work.

Wright, William. Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986. A well-written, unauthorized biography which makes claim to an inordinate amount of research in the attempt to show “a more human portrait of Hellman” than she painted of herself. Contains notes to each chapter and an index, but no bibliography.