Pentimento

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Summary: HOW TO STEAL SOMEONE'S LIFE STORY AND GET AWAY WITH IT
Review: I really enjoyed this book. After I saw a special on Lillian Helllman on PBS, I purchased this book. She led a fascinating life and her immediate friends...Dorothy Parker and lovers...Dashiell Hammett confirmed this. Pentimento takes you through time as you visit her family in New Orleans, her friends in New York and London and her deep resentment and bitterness over the McCarthy era...that caused her to suffer greatly because she would not bend to their will. She was an amazing woman, who led an amazing life and Pentimento delves deep into the characters of her life that made an impact. Pentimento is a great read and find.

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Summary: Unrepentant pentiment
Review: 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.

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Summary: A Fascinating Portrait of a Fascinating Life
Review: 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!!

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Summary: Memoirs of a pathological liar
Review: One of the published reviews cited by Amazon says: "Whether fact or fiction, begged, borrowed, or stolen, who cares?"

Well, I care. This book is supposed to be a memoir -- a sort of autobiography. A memoir is NOT a work of fiction. Even less should a memoir consist of hijacking another woman's life and claiming it as your own.

Anyone who has looked into the matter at all seriously knows that Lillian Hellman was one of the greatest liars and scoundrels of the twentieth century -- she not only plundered the literary talent of Dashiell Hammett when Hammett was in fully alcoholic mode, she also managed to gyp Hammett's heirs out of his copyrights, and the profits from them. In line with all this, and very much connected to her other book of lies, "Scoundrel Time," Hellman was not only a Communist but an unrepentant Stalinist -- she went a Stalinist to her grave.

If you have any interest in getting to the facts of the matter, I suggest you peep into Paul Johnson's books "Intellectuals," which has a fascinating chapter on this loathsome Medusa of American "intellectual" life.

Not recommended, except for those researching sociopaths!

Rating:
Summary: A Woman's Life: Real Stuff
Review: 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.

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Summary: The mystery of 'Julia'
Review: Pentimento is a fine example, not only of Hellman's writing, but of her imaginative style. The story 'Julia' stands out in this collection because of its basis in reality.
The character of Julia is based, at least partly, on the adventures of the New York psychiatrist, Muriel Gardiner. Like the fictitious Julia, Gardiner studied in pre-war Vienna where she became involved with an anti-Nazi group. Hellman, who also lived for a time in New York, heard bits and pieces of Gardiner's story. Though Gardiner did not lose a leg and obviously survived, her story piqued Hellman's imagination. Hellman's portrait of Julia does not exactly parallel the life of Muriel Gardiner but it was sufficiently close, especially the Vienna section, for some critics to accuse Hellman of purloining Dr Gardiner's story.
Dr Gardiner produced her own memoir in 1983, a book titled 'Code Name "Mary" '. Though she had an exciting time in Vienna, her story is not nearly as fascinating as Hellman's 'Julia'. The ending is especially poignant and avoids the happy ending that brought Dr. Gardiner's book to a close.

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Summary: A fiercely intelligent continuation to An Unfinished Woman.
Review: 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)

And

From 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.

Rating:
Summary: Delicious alterations to reality
Review: While reading the book, I thought "If half this stuff is true, then this woman is not exactly sane. But if she isn't sane, it probably isn't totally true."
Take this story as read, and you will find--
(1) Hellman was nuts.
(2) Take a look at her family, can you blame her for being nuts?
(3) Even if this book is entirely made up of it, it's more than worth a read.
(4) The personalized condom story.
(4 1/2) Is any of this important?

Only if you value veracity over entertainment. Perhaps Hellman used cheat codes for her general approach to life, who knows? Personally I believe truth is stranger than fiction, and while Hellman may not have smuggled money in a fur hat to aid Nazi-fighters, it's interesting that she *thinks* she did. Also interesting were the incidents where she threw up at her play premiere, Tallulah Bankhead stuck cocaine in her eyes, when she suddenly realized that Arthur Cowan was nutty as a fruitcake (Really! what was your first indication?) and last but not least, the condom thing. If you don't laugh yourself breathless while reading her account of the personalized condom episode, someone has surgically excised the humor portion of your brain and you need to seek medical help immediately. You may also be missing a kidney.

If you think your life is ridiculous and out of control, just read this and it'll put everything in perspective. At least you dont have issues with turtles.