Pentimento

A wnderful "re-visit" to this writers journey of her life, an independent soul, perhaps even "unfinished" (are we ever "finished?". I last read this many years ago when I was staring my own "journey" as a young man...I am now 70 and looking at the "Pentiemento" of my own life...

It is morning. The turtle Lilly and Dash have been preparing for dinner has vanished from the kitchen stool. After some brilliant detective work, Dash (father of private eye stories) discovers the turtle in the garden, where it has crawled sans functional head. "Is it alive?" says Lilly. "Lilly, I'm too old for that stuff" says Dash. They argue about the age difference and whether or not Dash should answer. Turtles are for eating, Dash affirms. Unrepentant, Lilly refuses to eat the turtle. They bury it. It has earned its life, asserts Lilly.

Lillian Hellman, one of the great playwrights of the Twentieth Century, bares her soul in this electrifying collection of vignettes about her life in the theatre; her friends and family; her complex relationship with the great Dashiell Hammett; and much more.Reading this book is like listening to Hellman talk intimately about her life. It is a true memoir; she does not remember details; the conversations tend to be fragmented, and she freely admits that her memories may have been blurred by the passage of time.Hellman was an extraordinary writer and an extraordinary woman. In PENTIMENTO she reveals herself as few writers have ever done. She makes no attempt to portray herself as a hero or a villain, but as a real, living, breathing woman with changing views and difficult but fascinating relationships.Some people have questioned the truth of some of the stories in this book. Hellman does not claim to be an historian; she is merely a human being talking about the things, places, and people of her life. It is precisely because the book is so fragmented and uneven that it rings so true.All in all, a MUST READ!!

Pentimento: A Book of Portraits is electrfying in its earnestness and candor, incisive in its tone, acerbic in its wit and picturesque in its mental imagery - a memoir (unlike An Unfinished Woman) that is a bit more honed and focused and less formless in how the recollections and diary entries jump from one to the next. Be that as it may, let it not mitigate the merit of An Unfinished Woman, for in its own right, it is a very worthy read and most deserving of its National Book Award. Each chapter in Pentimento is framed, each segment representing a person, place or experience that had a certain signifigance to Lillian Hellman's life and development not only as a playwrite but as a person. The book chapters are listed as thus: Bethe, Willy, Julia, Theatre, Arthur W.A. Cowan, Turtle, and Pentimento. The writing fluidity is fragmented, almost jarring, but the fierce, explicit prose enhances the flavor of the volatile, broken mishmash of truth and hyperbole, a choice style that is not a detriment to what Hellman has to say. With magnetic intimacy, the portraits all have something meaningful to declare; they range from the profound to the wittily bizarre. The latter is best represented in the portraits entitled "Arthur W.A. Cowan" and "Turtle." It is in these two portraits where Hellman's mordant humor especially shines.From Arthur W.A. Cowan:I said, "Oh, shut up, Arthur."And he did, but that night as he paid the dinner check, he wrote out another check and handed it to me. It was for a thousand dollars.I said, "What's this for?" "Anybody you want."I handed it back.He said, "Oh, for Christ sake take it and tell yourself it's for putting up with me.""Then it's not enough money." (P.235)AndFrom Turtle:Toward afternoon I telephoned the New York Zoological Society of which I was a member. I had a hard time being transferred to somebody who knew about turtles. When I finished, the young voice said, "Yes, the Chelydra serpentina. A ferocious foe. Where did you meet it?""Meet it?""Encounter it?""At a literary cocktail party by a lake." (P.278)Considering the period, the one-liners are quite sharp; the portrait that obviously stands out the most is "Julia," the 'supposed' friendship that developed between Hellman and a Freud disciple who happened to be an anti-facist supporter - a 'friendship' that later formed the basis for the Academy Award-winning film of the same title. Whether the story is fact or fiction, that is up for the reader to decide. Whether "Julia" represented a single woman or a group of dedicated individuals fighting to stop/lessen the evils of war whom Hellman truly admired and who thus wanted her name associated with, may also never be known. But what can be said of the Julia portrait is that it is a written down homage to a person or persons who tried to make a positive difference in that dark epoch of our global history.

Pentimento is a brilliant--and entertaining--portrait of a woman's life seen through the doubleness of "then and now." Hellman sketches the people within her life, now housed in her memory. Although dubbed a memoir, it transcends a mere record of Lillian Hellman's life and portrays instead the way in which a woman's history merges with the memory of it. Each chapter is a portrait of someone or something symbolically important, and each is written in a different style reflecting its content and theme. Not history, not autobiography, not fiction, Hellman tried instead to get the feeling of her life right, to find something individual and universal. Drama, humor, tragedy--it's here, and it's important.