A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  Hellman continued to puzzle over questions of truth, and particularly its relationship to memory, as she developed her lectures and talks in the 1960s. At a 1960 University of Michigan reading of Toys in the Attic, she told an audience that wanted to hear something of the history of the play that she could “not remember all or much” of what they wanted to know. But, she promised, “I will certainly be more accurate tonight than I will be next year or next week.”3 She told a group of Harvard students in 1961 that her memory had always been poor. When she offered to recall for them her memories of the theater, she paused to warn them that she hoped they would be “accurate and as truthful as anybody can make memory, which is not very truthful at all.”4 Though she admitted that she could not remember where she was at particular times, she did not apologize for her “extremely cranky memory.”5 She understood, as she would say later, that memory “is not the same thing as what happened in the real minute of pleasure or pain.”6 Over and over again, whether the stories were about herself or about others, she deflected the notion that memory could point to truth. “I have no memory for dates,” she told Hammett biographer Diane Johnson, along with a story about how a dozen people she knew each remembered Hammett in a different way.7

  The struggle to tell the truth and to recognize that truth itself was elusive persisted all her life. She did not know if it was a writer’s task to tell the truth, or what truth meant, she told her Harvard students. Though she kept notebooks, carefully researched and recorded details, and certainly “tried to get things right,” she never escaped her dictum that “truth is larger than the truth of fact.”8 When she turned to writing memoirs in the mid-1960s, questions of truth and memory came to the fore in a literal as well as a metaphorical sense. She had, she confessed in the last paragraph of An Unfinished Woman, never known “what I meant by truth, never made the sense I hoped for.”

  Later, after the trouble started, people would return to An Unfinished Woman to challenge the literal truth of what she had written. She shrugged off the factual discrepancies. It was no secret that she had a poor memory. She had been speaking about it for years. “I have little sense of time and often when I have tried to walk back through memory’s lane I have stumbled in the dark and lost my way,” she wrote in 1967.9 In this respect, Hellman differs little from most memoirists who practice an art that relies exclusively on their unchallengeable memories and distances itself from anything called objective truth. As one commentator remarked, “She heightened things, she shuffled them around, she remembered some things and repressed others.”10 Hellman admitted that she could not have written her memoirs without “a feeling for fiction, some belief that what I was writing about was interesting or dramatic.”11 Doris Lessing would have approved. “There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth,” she wrote trenchantly.12

  When she wrote Pentimento, which Little, Brown published in 1973, Hellman gambled that she could construct her vivid, beautifully written, sharply characterized stories about her past with the license of the fiction writer. The title itself, as she announced in the epigram, refers to the painter’s practice of reconceiving an old image as “a way of seeing and seeing again.” To editor William Abrahams, she confided that “the accuracy or lack of accuracy of my memory was not important.”13 And in the book she wrote, “I wanted to see what was there for me once, and what is there for me now.”14 She did not want to describe the book as a memoir. “For reasons best known to cranky authors, I am anxious that this book not be thought of as sequel to An Unfinished Woman, but as a book of portraits,” she wrote to an editor at Esquire who wanted to publish an excerpt from it.15

  In the seven stories of Pentimento, Hellman chose to revisit scenes of her childhood and young womanhood to see if she could recapture the feelings evoked by some key moments. Repeatedly she warned her readers that she was simply writing what she remembered, that she doubted her capacity to remember: What she wrote was her version of what happened, but others, she readily conceded, might remember things differently. “I know all I have written here,” she wrote in Pentimento, “or I know it the way I remember it, which of course may not be the whole truth.”16 The book, written in the style she had introduced in An Unfinished Woman, was filled with words unspoken, questions unasked and unanswered, places never again visited, and people, once encountered, never again known. “I was never to be angry with him again,” Hellman might write. A few pages later she would maintain, “I was never to see her again,” and shortly afterward, “we were never to talk about it again.” The phrases infused the stories with an air of mystery and suspense that enhanced their intrigue and her own centrality, for they suggested that the unwritten words held secrets never to be unlocked.

  Many read into her prose a reflection of her personality, seeing in it either a “Hammett-like parsimony” or an elliptical and evasive quality. Others described “a rich, murky, Henry Jamesian” quality that could be “wildly elusive and vague.”17 Those who thought her tough, direct, and honest, as did a New York Times book critic, declared that she wrote “a prose as brilliantly finished as any that we have in these years.”18 They admired her “elegantly simple style” and, somewhat hyperbolically, described it as shining “with a moral intelligence, a toughness of character that inspires even as it entertains.” Critic John Leonard, who penned that phrase, added, “the prose is as precise as an electron microscope.”19 But those who caviled at the image of a courageous and honest Hellman thought her writing style “irritating” rather than “slight and charming.” It was, said one critic, imitative of “a time when Hemingway and Hammett made it seem fresh, new and appropriate.”20 Another described her style as “obdurate, flat and mannered” and flailed her as a “virtuoso of the ellipsis.”21 The contrasts may be less aesthetic assessments than expressions of feeling about the author.

  Each chapter in Pentimento purports to tell a story about other people yet begs us to understand what she tells us about herself. In the first story, Lillian’s distant cousin Bethe arrives from Germany, rejects the family’s advice to marry a dependable relative, and ends up living disreputably with a minor-league crook. We never know whether Bethe existed, or in what form. But it does not matter. The story Lillian tells of how, as a teenager, she defied parental injunctions and tracked down her cousin illustrates the rebellious spirit of which Lillian was so proud. The second story, “Willy,” portrays an uncle by marriage who becomes a mysterious, much-admired gunrunner and wealthy fruit importer. Looking behind the words, we find a provocative tale of adolescent Lillian’s emerging sense of sexuality. A story about Hellman’s life in the theater reveals her discomfort with the one arena that generously embraced her. “I always knew that I was seldom comfortable with theatre people,” she writes.22 Describing her tormented relationships to the actors, directors, and producers who collaborated with her in her life’s work, Hellman articulates her continuing sense of isolation even as she became a celebrated playwright. Once again we are pulled by a powerful magnetism rooted in the doubt, confusion, and anguish she expresses with every anecdote. “Turtle,” ostensibly a story about an animal she and Hammett trapped and then killed, turns into a meditation about survival and her fear of death. The final story, titled “Pentimento,” is an extended reflection on race relations, constructed around the tale of a talented young black man who could not bring himself to participate in a corrupt scientific world.

  The centerpiece of the book—the essay that attracted the most attention and was widely reprinted—is “Julia,” a mostly fictional story of Hellman’s effort to smuggle a hat full of money to her friend Julia in Berlin. The money is destined to save the lives of Jews, communists, and socialists stuck in a hostile Austria in the late 1930s. The story describes a fearful young Lillian who, contemptuous of her own cowardice, agrees to undertake the dangerous mission. Julia appears in it first as Hellman’s closest childhood friend, whom she admires beyond reason and to whom she cannot say no. She reappears as a crippled resistance f
ighter whose loss of a leg symbolizes the danger Hellman imagines. Here then is a story about a loyal and loving friend willing to risk untold danger to serve an important cause. This was the woman Hellman wanted to be. More tellingly, the story casts aspersions on those who refused to risk their lives and fortunes when, during the McCarthy period, they would not “rescue” people under attack.

  Lest there be any doubt about the message Hellman wanted to convey, another story in the collection—one that most reviewers dismissed as inconsequential—makes it explicit. “Arthur W. A. Cowan” is on its face a story about a rich Philadelphia lawyer with whom Hellman had a long relationship and who became something of a financial adviser. Cowan is a good guy. He is rich, very rich, as Hellman tells us, and his politics very conservative, but he nevertheless spends his money to support the cause of freedom, including the freedom to advocate unpopular causes like communism. Hellman uses the story to open up the questions she would pursue in her next memoir, Scoundrel Time, and which she claims there to have feared writing about for so long. She tells us that she knew all along that the reason for what she calls the “bitter storm” inside her “was not due to McCarthy, McCarran, Nixon and all the rest, but was a kind of tribal turn against friends, half-friends, or people I didn’t know but had previously respected … Others, almost all American intellectuals, had stood watching that game, giving no aid to the weak or the troubled, resting on their own fancy reasons.”23 Cowan, in contrast, spent a portion of his fortune to defend communists and others.

  All these stories reveal the self-dramatizing Hellman. They paint portraits of the woman Hellman wished she had been: the self who, given an opportunity, would have overcome her fears to act with a rare courage. But the voice is also that of the moral Hellman, the Hellman who could not and would not stop talking about the way she and others should have acted in times of stress. The book revealed Hellman, as Mark Schorer put it in the New York Times, in the “character of an extraordinary woman with rare powers of self-analysis, a woman both proud and self-assured but without a taint of self-importance, a woman of rare wisdom.”24 Critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt put it even more strongly: “These portraits of others add up to nothing less than a self-portrait of Miss Hellman, an autobiography of her soul.”25 Hellman was “an emancipated woman for her period,” wrote a Ms. magazine reviewer, “showing us, with sensitive, wise perceptions, where we have been and where it remains for us to go.”26 The praise and the months of bestseller status demonstrated Hellman’s success in the battle for celebrity. She had won, hands down.

  Whether the stories in Pentimento and An Unfinished Woman were factually “true” or not mattered less to readers and critics at the time they were published than the “cultural” and “interpersonal” truths they conveyed. Biographer Louise Knight notes that these forms of truth are necessarily produced by a narrator constructed “to serve the author’s rhetorical purposes.”27 Hellman was such a narrator. Her childhood recollections re-created images of place and time, fears and interactions that defined the sensibilities of a moment for her readers. Her ability to describe her own weaknesses, her sexuality, her failed ambitions humorously and without self-pity appealed to readers not because they faithfully recorded what really happened but because they evoked moments of awareness with which readers could identify. Putting herself at risk, she appealed to audiences of all kinds. She located herself in the middle of her stories, unafraid to chastise and to celebrate herself in the same sentence, willing to let go of the story after it had reached its dramatic moment. If Hellman’s stories tended to cast her in a good light, if they offered an image of a woman in the middle of an adventure, if they celebrated her achievements at the expense of others and mocked the personalities of the great and famous women and men she knew, all of this contributed to the legend of a resilient woman with a strong moral spine. The writer Alice Munro might have been speaking for Hellman when she wrote, of her own memoir: “I put myself in the center and wrote about that self as searchingly as I could. But the figures around this self took on their own life and color and did things they had not done in reality … You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on.”28 Memoirist Joel Agee put it differently. “Everything in this book is true,” he wrote of his own memoir, “but not everything is precisely factual.”29

  If Hellman won the battle for celebrity, the battle for history had yet to be fought. Some critics, most notably John Simon, felt cheated by Hellman’s focus on herself. Simon protested that Hellman’s stories were not pentimenti—they lacked a subtle interplay “between what was and is, or what was and is no more.” He complained that the portraits constituted Hellman’s effort to complete the autobiography she had started in An Unfinished Woman. They camouflaged, in his view, her own persona in the same melodramatic style that infused her plays. She had drawn no portrait of Julia, complained Simon, “however great and tragic she may have been … the acts of bravery and devotion that we actually read about are Miss Hellman’s.”30 Critic James Lardner disagreed. “She exaggerated many things,” he wrote shortly after her death, but “you knew more about her times after reading her than before, and there are many more matter-of-factly reliable chroniclers about whom that could never be said.”31

  When it came to the third volume of her memoirs, Scoundrel Time, questions of historical truth came to the fore. Hellman had long been unable to write about the McCarthy period for reasons she claimed not to understand. “I wish I knew why I couldn’t write about it. If I knew it I could do it,” she told interviewer Bill Moyers in the spring of 1974.32 But she did know, and the feelings ran deep. In Pentimento, she reflected on the “bitter storm that the McCarthy period caused, causes, in me … it was as if I had been deprived of a child’s belief in tribal safety. I was never again to believe in it and resent to this day that it has been taken from me.” She held intellectuals responsible: “It is eccentric, I suppose, not to care much about the persecutors and to care so much about those who allowed the persecution,” she wrote, pointing her finger at “American intellectuals.”33 To Nora Ephron, shortly afterward, she was more specific: “I don’t remember one large figure coming to anybody’s aid … I suppose I’ve come out frightened, thoroughly frightened of liberals. Most radicals of the time were comic, but the liberals were frightening.”34 Fear, Hellman thought, fear of isolation, fear that nobody would stand up for her, fear that she lacked the courage to stand by her friends, led her to take refuge in silence. “I had only one way out, and that I took: to shut up about the whole period.”35

  In the early seventies, as the war against communism in Vietnam wound down and a disgraced Richard Nixon left office, Hellman prepared to speak. Her friend Peter Feibleman warned her against doing so: too many of the old actors were still alive, he said. But it was time for Hellman to put the past behind her. She wanted, most of all, to record the emotional truths of her experience. She had already made the decision to write about the McCarthy years when she had an accident that would shape the style of the book. The summer before she started to write, traveling in Europe with Billy Abrahams and Peter Stansky, she had a small stroke. It did no visible damage beyond landing her briefly in a Paris hospital. This was probably the first of several small strokes that successively brought emotion to the surface and left her with a reduced ability to control outbursts of anger. Likely, the strokes released some of the pain and anger that had festered for more than twenty years.36 “I don’t want to write about my historical conclusions,” she says in the beginning of Scoundrel Time. “If I stick to what I know, what happened to me, and a few others, I have a chance to write my own history of the time.”37 Scoundrel Time is “mostly about me,” she told interviewer Rex Reed shortly before the book appeared. “I’ve forgotten about historical background and stuck to personal feelings, and I think that’s worked out better.”38 But when Hellman turned her private pain into public statements, she discovered that her truth d
iffered dramatically from the truths of some others. The result was to set off a storm of anger that she might have anticipated.

  Scoundrel Time retold the story of the McCarthy period through the lens of Hellman’s 1952 appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. HUAC was the scourge of the entertainment industry, and Hellman’s appearance before it was part of the committee’s long campaign to uncover the radicalism thought to permeate the film industry at the time. When she sat down to write the book, Hellman could remember odd details about her appearance: the Balmain dress and the expensive new hat she had bought to comfort herself and boost her confidence; the probably apocryphal voice from the gallery that congratulated her afterward. But she had only sketchy memories of preparing for her ordeal, and almost none of the thirty-seven minutes she endured before the committee. To jog her memory and help her reconstruct the circumstances around her appearance, she wrote to Joseph Rauh, her lawyer at the time, and others. Had they not prepared a letter and a statement? she asked. Why had Rauh distributed the letter rather than the statement? How did it happen that Rauh had copies ready to distribute to the press? What had happened after the hearing ended? Rauh replied with detailed answers, sending along copies of her testimony, her letters and memoranda documenting the emergence of their strategy and the sequence of events. Many of these made their way into Scoundrel Time. In that sense, the book is literally accurate.