The forthcoming appearance of Lillian Hellman's biography by her longtime editor, William Abrahams, promises to shed some new light on a literary figure who has frequently been a subject of controversy. The outline of her long career which ended in June 1984 is now well known: the years as a successful playwright in the 1930s, beginning with The Children's Hour and continuing with The Little Foxes and Watch on the Rhine; her thirty-year on-again off-again relationship with Dashiell Hammett; her appearance in 1952 before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which led to years of being blacklisted for refusing to testify; her comeback on Broadway with the production of her play Toys in the Attic; and, beginning in 1969 in her seventh decade of life, her new success as a writer of memoirs with An Unfinished Woman (1969), Pentimento (1972), and Scoundrel Time (1974). The publication of the last-named account of her life during the McCarthy era raised a storm of criticism after the initial laudatory reviews, and led to questions about her veracity as an autobiographer that remain unanswered today. To many of her critics she seemed to have minimized her own Stalinist politics during the 1930s and 40s while lashing out at anti-Communist liberals among her contemporaries; more generally, she was accused of reducing a complex era in American political history to the crudest melodrama with herself as heroine. The work occasioned further unpleasantness for the author when her publisher, Little, Brown, attempted to stop publication of Diana Trilling's We Must March My Darlings after the author refused to delete from it a few passages mildly critical of Scoundrel Time. (Trilling quickly found another publisher when Little, Brown broke their contract with her, but the publicity reflected badly on Hellman, who had presented herself as a champion of free speech in Scoundrel Time.) Worse yet was the feud which developed with Mary MacCarthy, who had called Hellman a liar on national television and was promptly slapped with a suit—still pending at the time of Hellman's death—for having caused her mental anguish (that is to say, for slander).

Since that time Hellman's reliability as a memoirist has been attacked in other quarters. In a 1981 Paris Review article, Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway's third wife, contested the unflattering portrait of the writer given by Hellman in An Unfinished Woman, offering a point-by-point rebuttal of her account of their meetings during the Spanish Civil War. For Gellhorn, as for other critics, Hellman was attempting to glorify herself by making others (in this case, Hemingway) look like knaves and fools. Along with this was yet another dispute concerning Hellman's veracity—the long-held suspicion that the “Julia” episode in Pentimento, made into a successful film in 1978, was fiction, not fact. Critics both friendly and unfriendly have raised the suggestion over the years, most recently after the 1983 publication of Muriel Gardiner's book about her real-life work in the anti-Nazi underground which parallels some of the exploits of Julia (who Hellman claimed was killed by the Nazis in 1938).

With hindsight it is easy to see that Scoundrel Time, as a political memoir, was bound to be controversial because of the strong passions still aroused by its subject-matter. The book reopened old wounds among writers of the Left, and revealed the extent of the split between the younger generation of revisionist historians and the older generation of anti-Communist liberals. Indeed, while reading reviews of Scoundrel Time and other books about the period, such as Victor S. Navasky's Naming Names (1982)—an account of the testimony offered by “friendly witnesses” in the entertainment industry—one is astonished to find opinion so polarized that there is not even consensus on what should be matters of sheer fact, let alone interpretation. Did the Committee really need any of the information publicly given by the witnesses it summoned, or did it have it all already, and the testimony was simply a “degradation ritual,” as Navasky and others contend? Was the influence of the Communist Party in the post-war years to any degree a legitimate subject of public concern? Did most American liberals betray their own principles by failing to attack McCarthyism and by not rushing to the defense of those HUAC witnesses who claimed the Fifth Amendment? And what of Hellman's refusal to answer the question of whether she was a member of the Communist party in 1949, when she denied that she had been one when separately questioned about 1950, 1951, and 1952? For Sidney Hook, one of her fiercest critics, it signifies that she was not as candid with the Committee—or with her later readers—as she would appear to be; for another writer, Bernard Dick, it simply means that Hellman was “so rattled that she took the Fifth Amendment when she did not have to.”¹ In short, whether one sees her as a heroine or not depends a good deal on how one views the period; judgment of her account seems to depend on the political persuasion of the reviewer. Some saw her as a figure of uncompromised integrity; others detected a lack of generosity towards others in her writing—a failing Hellman readily admits to and takes pride in. (When Scoundrel Time was republished along with the two earlier memoirs in a volume entitled Three in 1979, she wrote of herself in an afterword that “you do not forgive people.”)

For all these reasons An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento would seem to be safer critical grounds on which to discuss Hellman's veracity as an autobiographer. Although both works, especially the earlier memoir, deal with Hellman's political commitments and sympathies, they are more concerned with her personal life and, if not more easily subject to factual verification, at least would tend to engender fewer passions. In any case, Martha Gellhorn's violent objections to Hellman's memoirs is all the more surprising. It would take far too long to detail all of her charges against Hellman, but some of the anecdotes she considers self-serving fabrications of the author are as follows:

1. Hellman's description of the Hollywood party she helped give in 1938 for the screening of The Spanish Earth (just made by Hemingway and Joris Ivens), where Hemingway vented his ill-temper, much to the distress of an already shaky Scott Fitzgerald. Gellhorn points out that Hellman first met Hemingway in Paris some weeks after the only Hollywood showing of the film in July 1937, which Hellman could not have attended.
2. Hellman's claim in Pentimento that she and the financier Arthur Cowan sent money to an impoverished friend, Gustav Regler, who was ill in Paris after the Spanish Civil War. In fact, Gellhorn notes, Regler was released in 1939 from a concentration camp in Vernet through the intervention of Eleanor Roosevelt and subsequently lived in Mexico; although his autobiography lists the many friends who helped him, it does not mention Hellman: “Where did that money of Miss Hellman's and Mr. Cowan's go?” she asks.
3. Hellman's accounts of her trip from Paris to Moscow via Berlin in 1937, as given in both An Unfinished Woman and the “Julia” section of Pentimento. Gellhorn, checking her own records of their meeting in Paris, and the timetables Hellman gives, notes that the chronology is simply impossible. For example, Hellman could not have enjoyed the Moscow Theater Festival production of Hamlet, as she claimed, because the Festival took place a month before the earliest date Hellman could have been in Moscow—and that besides, there was no production of Hamlet in Moscow that year (only in Leningrad).
4. Hellman's general portrayal of Hemingway as having “danced attendance on her,” particularly during her last night in Paris before the trip to Moscow. According to An Unfinished Woman, Hemingway pounded on her door with the proofs of To Have and Have Not, asking her to read it and give her critical opinion. She obliged, reading through the night. Later he told her that he wished he could sleep with her but could not, since he was already involved with someone else. Gellhorn reminds us that Hellman presents an entirely different account of the same night in “Julia,” where Hellman tells that she said goodbye to her friends Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell and went to bed early, sleeping through the night and rising early to catch the morning train. Moreover, Hemingway had already read his proofs for the novel before sailing for Paris.
5. Hellman's description of an evening spent in October 1937 173Madrid with Hemingway, Gellhorn, and two other friends, during which time the others went out to the balcony to “enjoy” the spectacle of the bombardment of the city, while the terrified Hellman huddled on the sofa. Later, however, she left them to make a broadcast from the radio station, even though she had just heard that the station had been bombed and that it would have been too dangerous to ride out there. Hemingway whispered to her, “So you have cojones, after all; I didn't think so upstairs,” and Hellman notes that “I kept wanting to tell him that I would have gone into far more dangerous places to get out of that apartment that night.” False on every count, says Gellhorn, including even what Hellman claims they ate for dinner. There was no bombing of Madrid that night, according to both her memory of the evening and the contemporary newspaper accounts; and had there been, their behavior would have been different from that of the “monsters” Hellman depicts. Nor would there have been anything to see since incendiary shells were not used in Spain, and if any windows were opened during a bombing, it was simply because plate glass was irreplaceable. Lastly, if the radio station was being hit, Hellman could not have broadcast from it that night (“Miss H. cannot have rushed into a rain of shells to do her superb bit for the Republic at a microphone that was not operational”); moreover, if Hellman had actually driven to the station through such a bombing, she would have described the trip in detail. Instead, such description of the shellings that Hellman gives us sounds more like romantic imaginings than the real thing.

What, then, are we to make of Gellhorn's claims? Offered space to reply by Paris Review editor George Plimpton, Hellman declined to say anything, unlike Stephen Spender, who was also criticized by Gellhorn for creating Hemingway “apocrypha,” but who attempted to rebut her assertions.² Certainly Gellhorn's attack would have been more convincing had it been less obviously ill-tempered, badly organized and long-winded. Moreover, from the exchange with Spender we learn that Gellhorn is apt to forget facts herself: her categorical denial of ever having met Spender's first wife—or even heard of her—is answered by Spender's account of their luncheon together, along with details of an additional meeting, which gives us less than total confidence in Gellhorn's memory. Still, even when the fallibility of memory is taken into account and we remind ourselves that we are all the heroes and heroines of our own autobiographies, we are left with the uneasy feeling that Hellman has rewritten her own history out of the desire for self-glorification.

One should note parenthetically that there is a certain irony in Gellhorn's attacking Hellman for caricaturing Hemingway after his death when he could not defend himself. Did not Hemingway do much the same to others in his posthumously published A Movable Feast a decade before, where he presented Scott Fitzgerald obsessed with an adolescent anxiety about the length of his penis, Pauline Pfeiffer as a predatory femme fatale breaking up the happy marriage of Ernest and Hadley Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein engaged in unsavory (sado-masochistic?) rituals with her longtime companion, Alice B. Toklas? In the case of Gertrude Stein, Hemingway was getting back at her for her earlier portrayal of him in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as an immature young writer and unwilling father-to-be, unsure of everything save his wholehearted admiration for the older, successful Gertrude. (One has a certain feeling of compassion for the hapless Hemingway, skewered early and late in the memoirs of such formidable women.) All three autobiographers can be said to have engaged in self-promotion, although Stein is the most high-spirited and least censorious, her distortions of fact being more in the interests of comedy.

At any rate, Hellman's memoirs have been questioned over the years (more politely but just as insistently) on other grounds than those that Gellhorn chose to discuss. Reviewers of both An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento have occasionally suggested that the memory pieces “read like fiction” because of their dramatic vividness and clipped dialogue of conversations recalled verbatim forty years after the fact. Nowhere is this so true as in “Julia,” with its suspenseful action and its mythic heroine, a millionaire American socialist who comes to Vienna to study medicine and joins the anti-Nazi underground. After losing a leg in the 1934 right-wing riots, she is visited in the hospital by Hellman and later gets Hellman to smuggle $50,000 across the German border during her next visit to the Continent. She dies heroically in 1938, her mutilated body lying unclaimed in London until Hellman arrives to take charge. Her illegitimate child, named Lilly, is presumably left to die in Occupied France by Julia's uncaring American relations, for when Hellman attempts to contact them about the child, they threaten legal action.

From the beginning of her career, Hellman always had a penchant for melodrama and a tendency to view people according to simple moral categories. This is especially true of “Julia,” with its stark opposition of good and evil. There are the heroic few, like Julia and Hellman, who struggle against fascism, and the corrupt many, who betray Julia or her memory: her former lover, the father of her child; her idle mother, living the good life at the expense of others; her snobbish grandparents, who want no part of Julia or her child; the false friend, Ann Marie, a shallow society woman; and Ann Marie's brother, who insults Hellman for her friendship with Julia, implying that they are lesbians. Even Hellman's friend Dorothy Parker, who was with her in Paris in 1937, here represents, along with her husband, a pleasure-loving frivolity that seems almost morally culpable in comparison with Hellman's dangerous mission. Those who feel that life offers more complex choices than the either/or situation presented in “Julia” may feel irritated by the sentimentality of its vision, and dismiss the story as hopelessly contrived.

But aside from the stereotypes and melodrama of “Julia,” there were other indications of fictionality. One was the strong similarity between the character Julia and a woman friend Hellman briefly mentions as “Alice” in An Unfinished Woman of whom she says, “Her father was a rich Jew from Detroit and she was already started on the road to Marxism that would lead her, as a student doctor, to be killed in the Vienna riots of 1934.”³ Clearly the two figures seem to be the same woman, revived in “Julia” for further antifascist adventures under a new name. Then, too, there was the deliberate lack of surnames in a memoir that otherwise bristles with them. Hellman claimed in “Julia” that she did this out of fear of litigation from Julia's surviving relations and because she was not sure, even now, that Germans honored their premature anti-fascists. As John Simon has pointed out, both arguments are implausible, and what casts further doubt on the story is that no one, after the publicity generated by the 1978 film, stepped forward with information to identify Julia. Even the film's director, Fred Zinnemann, when questioned by a skeptical London Times interviewer, conceded, “It's difficult to understand how a wealthy American woman, presumably a woman of a well-known family, could have been so ill-used by the Nazis without some kind of outcry being raised.”⁴

When in fact someone did appear in 1981 to confirm a part of Hellman's story, it only served to cast further suspicion on Hellman's veracity. Muriel Gardiner's autobiographical account of her life in the anti-Nazi underground pre-War Austria, Code Name “Mary,” had many striking parallels with Julia's life: a background of great wealth, an Oxford degree followed by medical school and psychiatric training in Vienna (with a disciple of Freud rather than with the master himself, as Julia had), and a splendid record of heroism in helping to smuggle victims of the Nazis out of Austria—all of this while being a single mother of a young daughter from a brief early marriage. The parallels were enough to convince Gardiner that she was, at least in part, the model for Julia, especially in view of the fact that although she and Hellman had never met, they shared for many years a mutual friend, the late attorney Wolf Schwabacher, who related stories of the theatrical life to Gardiner and presumably had the opportunity to tell Hellman of Gardiner's exploits in Vienna. She wrote to Hellman in October 1976 asking whether Julia was a composite figure based in part on her experience, but received no reply; when questioned by the New York Times about the letter from Gardiner, Hellman said that she did not remember receiving it. “She may have been the model for somebody else's Julia, but she was certainly not the model for my Julia,” she remarked to the Times.⁵

Hellman's denial of any relationship of her account to the life of Gardiner is understandable, for she had an enormous investment in claiming that the story of Julia is real and just as she has told it. For one thing, Gardiner's story belies the tragic, bitter moral of “Julia”: she escaped Austria to have a long and distinguished career as a psychiatrist; she found enduring love with her third husband, Joseph Budinger, leader of the Austrian Revolutionary Socialist Party, whom she met in the 1930s; her child, Connie, far from being murdered in France, is now herself the mother of six children in Aspen, Colorado. Gardiner's account of her adventures in Austria is flatter and less artfully narrated than Hellman's. Even so, for all its occasional dullness and mass of detail, it reminds us that people are far more complex than Hellman would have them. To cite a small example, Gardiner discovered that some of her fellow conspirators were morally obtuse and even inept at their underground activities—unlike the efficient group of heroes shepherding Hellman on the train ride across Europe with her smuggled cash.

Hellman instead chose to write a morality play about good and evil, and as a result painted herself into a corner: “I think I have always known about my memory: I know when it is to be trusted and when some dream or fantasy entered on the life, and the dream, the need of dream, led to distortion of what happened. … But I trust absolutely what I remember about Julia,” she writes in the story. In later interviews she remained rock-like in her insistence on the truthfulness of her memories: to a Rolling Stone reporter she said that writing “Julia” was difficult but that “nothing on God's earth could have shaken my memory about her.”⁶ In fact, the evidence points strongly to Hellman's fictionalizing in “Julia,” using the story of Muriel Gardiner, combined perhaps with features of a real-life friend from her youth in New York, to create simultaneously the effects of mystery and veracity. The story of Julia's life gradually unfolds in the course of Hellman's elliptical narrative using flashbacks which relate the story on several levels of time, ending with a party in 1952 where she met the son of Julia's family's lawyer. In an afterword to the story, when it was reprinted in Three (1979), Hellman lets drop further tantalizing hints to deepen the mystery and substantiate her claims for the truthfulness of the story: only one person half-guessed the true identity of Julia, and the son of the English doctor to whose office the dying Julia was brought, calls Hellman up when she is in London years later to baffle her with his equivocations and secrecy. (She does learn from him, however, that Julia's child was definitely murdered by the Germans.) All these sequelae further the portrayal of Hellman herself as a heroine attempting to discover the truth about Julia and her child. Just as the living Julia stood for truth. Hellman, in recounting the story of her friend and seeking to locate the missing daughter, participates by extension in her noble mission. Needless to say, the entire effect of the story—its heroic portrayal of Julia and Hellman, and its air of mystery—depends on the assertion of Julia's real-life existence. Once we perceive that “Julia” is indeed a work of fiction, and that Hellman may well have fictionalized some of the other episodes in her memoirs, we read the pieces very differently. We may perhaps enjoy them as much, and be more appreciative of Hellman's creative powers; or we may instead simply feel disillusioned, seeing the “Julia” episode as a meaningless exercise in sentimental melodrama. In either case her work now belongs to a different realm of discourse. Is such fictionalizing a legitimate prerequisite of the autobiographer, or are we to agree with Martha Gellhorn that Hellman is an “apocryphiar?”

For Hellman apologists like Bernard Dick, there is no problem at all. She has fictionalized, but never mind: “Hellman was not aiming for factual accuracy in her memoirs; she was seeking the essence of events,” he claims as though there were a natural antipathy between “facts” on the one hand and “the essence of events” on the other. (Do we live in a Platonic universe in which earthly life as we know it is but a dim shadow of the real?) At another point he attempts another argument: “What Gellhorn keeps forgetting is that Hellman is not writing history, and that what might be reprehensible to a journalist might not be to a literary critic,”⁷ implying that autobiographers need not be called on to tell the truth and that Gellhorn's insistence on veracity is merely the idosyncrasy of her particular profession (we all have our narrow specialities). The same arguments have appeared of late in more general form in the work of literary critics of autobiography, who find the reader's intuitive expectations of veracity evidence of a naive and benighted literalism; for them a person who inquires as to the truth-value of an autobiography is cousin to the puritan who centuries ago scorned art for not being “true.” Unlike biography, autobiography for these writers is inherently subjective and therefore must give up all claims to historicity. In the words of Georges Gusdorf, one of the most influential theoreticians of autobiography, “One must choose a side and give up all pretense of objectivity, abandoning a sort of false scientific attitude that would judge a work by the precision of its details”; in autobiography “the literary, artistic function is … of greater importance than the historic and objective function.”⁸ Another critic, James Olney, holds a more extreme position; in one of his most recent essays, “How Many Children Had Jean-Jacques Rousseau?,”⁹ he dismisses as misguided any concern with the historical truth of Rousseau's Confessions and insists that we should concentrate rather on its aesthetic, narrative values. To do otherwise is to be nearly as simple-minded as some earlier readers who discussed Shakespeare's characters as though they had a separate existence outside the text.

It is easy to see why such critics should want to argue for the aesthetic autonomy of autobiography, once we understand their concomitant desire to expand the traditional definition of autobiography to include any work, whether prose or verse, narrative or non-narrative, in which the self-reflective element is present. (Lyric poems, for example, become fair game, so we should not be surprised to find Professor Olney discussing T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets as a specimen of autobiography in his study Metaphors of Self; indeed, by such a definition few literary works would not qualify as autobiography.) Any aggrandizement of their subject-matter naturally reflects credit on the critics themselves: by annexing further, more varied territory to their purview, they can stress autobiography's more creative aspects and glory in its (newfound) aesthetic autonomy. Accordingly, they have been forced to downplay or ignore the element of factuality essential to the traditional definition of the genre; hence the claim that biography and autobiography are diametrically opposed activities, one dealing with the objective and the other with the subjective. To quote Gusdorf again,

We must, therefore, … give up thinking about autobiography in the same way as we do an objective biography, regulated only by the requirements of the genre of history. Every autobiography is a work of art and at the same time a work of enlightenment; it does not show us the individual seen from outside in his visible actions but the person in his inner privacy, not as he was, not as he is, but as he believes and wishes himself to be and to have been [emphasis added].¹⁰

If the autobiographer wishes to appear in a certain way that is utterly repudiated by contemporary witnesses, so much the worse for them: historical truth is of little value to the memoirist, who is apparently free to dispense with it entirely.

Of course, when we have so defined autobiography to include much of what was formerly termed imaginative literature, only the most misguided of philistines would insist on any obligation to literal veracity; but when discussing those works that have always been known as autobiography, the critics also take care to reason away any ethical obligation on the part of the autobiographer. Their argument is based on the fact that autobiography is by its very nature a work of selection, interpretation, and imaginative re-creation—in short, what the critic Roy Pascal has called a combination of “truth” and “design,” each of which imposes its limitations on the other.¹¹ Going beyond this rather commonsensical view, they argue that we can never “remember” our past, for, as Heraclitus has observed, you cannot step into the same river twice, and the very act of recalling the past (assuming we could recall it) alters our perception of it. Therefore, argues Olney, “we are left with a present no doubt formed by the past but utterly sundered from it. … In the act of remembering the past in the present, the autobiographer imagines into existence another person, another world, and surely it is not the same in any real sense, as that past world that does not, under any circumstances, nor however much we may wish it, now exist.”¹²

Thus denied the possibility of any meaningful knowledge of the past and/or the means to convey it in language, the autobiographer is freed to be as creative as he likes in dealing with his past, presenting, in Gusdorf's phrase, the past as “he wished it to have been”; indeed, such distortions may allow the autobiographer to express the “true” or “essential” nature of his lie in contrast to the mere “facts.” Here we are back in the realm of Platonic essences invoked by Bernard Dick in discussing Hellman, and it is a favorite argument of current theorists. Yeats's notoriously unreliable anecdotes in his Autobiographies are described by Olney as portraying “a truer truth than fact, a deeper reality than history. … how various people would speak and act if their speech and action were always in keeping with their deepest character” (“Ontology,” 263). Or, as one critic has written of Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, her flights of imagination allowed her to escape “the tyranny of time and memory” and transcend “the merely subjective of egotistical identity” by “dramatizing her position at the center of movements in art and literature”: Stein “idealized, even advertised herself as a mature, established, normal, successful, and above all, serene writer … the prophet of new art, presiding over the creation of twentieth-century art and literature.”¹³ That the idealized self-portrait which allowed her such transcendence was at times at variance with the facts and caused pain to the named individuals misrepresented in it is supremely irrelevant.

In extolling the creative power of the autobiographical imagination, critics tend to stress the activity of consciousness or memory rather than the product of such activity; it is no coincidence that Elizabeth Bruss's influential book is titled Autobiographical Acts. As Olney has noted in his brief history of autobiographical criticism in “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment,” there has been a shift of critical attention from the bios to the autos in “autobiography,” a fascination with the self “and its profound, its endless mysteries.”¹⁴ (I am here referring to the middle-of-the-road critics like Olney and Gusdorf rather than the poststructuralist and deconstructionist critics for whom autobiography, like other forms of literature, is impossible, where intentionality is abolished, and a text is completely divorced from its author.) Such an approach would seem to run the risk of ignoring the rhetorical function of autobiography vis-à-vis its audience in favor of speculative generalities on language, epistemology, and ontology. One may detect here, too, a tendency toward a neo-romantic glorification of subjectivity. Readers of M. H. Abrams's classic history, The Mirror and the Lamp, will recall his apt metaphor for the change of critical consciousness in the late eighteenth century, by which a mimetic theory of art was replaced by a doctrine of inspiration: instead of holding a glass up to nature, the poet himself (the lamp) became the center of attention, and his subject-matter was his own feelings. The notion of truth to objective reality has little place in such a schema, any more than it does in contemporary definitions of autobiography. Yet, autobiography as it is traditionally known, does make certain claims to veracity, and so to say that the autobiographer, like Sir Philip Sidney's poet, cannot lie because he “nothing affirmeth” is simply wrong. Autobiographers do make factual claims and thus are theoretically capable of lying, although far more frequently it is a case of honest mistake of self-delusion. (Most lies are committed under some kind of duress, and few of us are under compulsion to produce our autobiographies.)

Moreover, in their zeal for claiming aesthetic autonomy for autobiography, such critics ignore the fact that works of art are hardly as autonomous as we sometimes think, for we habitually judge literature by values other than aesthetic ones. For example, if we find a writer's beliefs strongly at variance with our own, we may be repelled by the work itself, regardless of the genius which produced it (think of Pound's and Eliot's anti-Semitism); we do not come to literature as empty vessels waiting to be filled. Even in the supposedly aesthetically autonomous realms of painting, sculpture, and music—where, by their nonverbal nature, matters of veracity would be irrelevant—historical considerations inevitably influence our judgment. Thus we ascribe lower value to forgeries, even the most expert, because they lack the historical dimension that belongs only to an original work of art.¹⁵ (One might also note that scholarly journals as a rule demand biographical data on their would-be contributors, and are not prepared to pass judgment on essays submitted anonymously.)

All the more do we require external clues as to how to read a work of autobiography, and in the absence of any authorial indications to the contrary, correlate the claims made by the writer with what we know of his or her past life from other sources. Frequently the results are instructive. The reader who turns from Richard Wright's moving account of his youth, Black Boy, to the work of his various biographers will find a host of discrepancies, so that Michel Fabré in The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright can note casually by way of explaining his methods that his sources for his opening chapter are “certain episodes from the second draft of Black Boy that have not been disproven by evidence from other sources.”¹⁶ Among the details Wright fictionalized, apparently, was the episode of his uncle Silas Hoskins driving a carriage containing Richard and himself into the river, a prank which frightens the young child. According to another Wright biographer, Constance Webb, the episode never happened to Wright but rather was something told him in later life by his friend Ralph Ellison.¹⁷ (The case of Gertrude Stein has already been mentioned. Upon the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, her brother Leo's response was, “God, what a liar she is!” and her former colleagues on the magazine transition devoted a supplementary number of an issue to rebutting her portrayal of them in her work.)¹⁸ Every reader has his own point at which an autobiographer's artistic shaping of his past exceeds the limits of rhetorical purpose to become fictionalizing; such fictionalizing may involve the omission of significant details as well as the invention of others. In Wright's case, for example, Fabré has shown how the novelist systematically excluded from his autobiography information about his cordial relations in his youth with some Southern whites since it would tend to work against his overall aim of depicting the destructiveness of racism on his life. Indeed, so close were his contacts with one white family (where, according to his biographer, “he met with more understanding than from his own family”)¹⁹ that his encounters with racism elsewhere were all the more shocking for his having been sheltered from it—a more interesting and subtle irony than the monochromatic picture of terror given in Black Boy.

The temptation to fictionalize may be well-nigh overpowering for a novelist or playwright accustomed to shaping his material and rewriting scenes to improve their effectiveness. Even those prose writers more interested in ideas than art may present a view of their past refracted through the prism of ideology and thus be tempted to alter incidents to make their rhetorical points more effective. Both aesthetic and ideological considerations seem to have been at work in the memoirs of Wright and Hellman. How dramatically appropriate that young Richard was compelled to quit his job as an optometrist's assistant after death threats from his white fellow-workers, instead of merely leaving this summer job to resume high school in the fall, as Fabré reports; how fitting that Julia's wealthy relations, true to their Marxist role in the class struggle, should be unrelievedly repellent, unlike Muriel Gardiner's family (and most other people we know).

On the other hand, one might ask what all the fuss is about over such lapses from veracity, since fact and fiction are so intermingled in contemporary autobiography that the line between novel and memoir would seem to be nonexistent.²⁰ Much of the later writing of Isaac Bashevis Singer, for example, has a quasi-factual framework based on his earlier life, whereas his latest volume of memoirs, Lost in America, is also somewhat fictionalized: Singer admits this himself in the preface, where he remarks that the book is “no more than fiction set against a background of truth.” To take a younger writer, Maxine Hong Kingston, in her much-praised The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts about her Chinese-American childhood, recounts her dreams and fantasies as a woman warrior in such detail that the reader is forced to perceive that the work is more a present-day meditation on a theme from her past than a literally factual account. And what are we to make of Anatoli Kuznetzov's work, Babi Yar, subtitled “a document in the form of a novel,” and opening with the sentence, “This book contains nothing but the truth?” One could multiply examples endlessly, including Lillian Hellman's last autobiographical volume, Maybe (1980), a testament to the fallibility of memory, which coyly refuses to attest to its own veracity. (The book's packaging, including the subtitle “a story” and a jacket blurb describing it as “drawn, it would seem, from life,” reinforces our sense of its generic ambiguity.)

We might then conceivably argue that the difference between fictionalizing and falsifying in autobiography lies simply in how the reader is meant to perceive the work—that is, whether we are informed, either explicitly or implicitly, of departures from literal fact. As William Hale White—himself the author of a fictitious autobiography—once wrote, “The point is what do people understand us to mean when we use certain words? Nobody supposes that a man is really dear to us when we say ‘Dear Sir’.”²¹ However, the question of determining the implied authorial intent is itself problematic—what may be an implied admission of fictionalizing may vary from reader to reader—and even when we are told unequivocally that the author has fictionalized, the mingling of fact and fiction in autobiography raises some serious questions of interpretation. Inasmuch as we are aware that the writer has fictionalized, we may admire the work, but are distanced from it: it is as though there is an inverse relationship between aesthetic coherence and verisimilitude.²²

To be sure, our various responses to fact and fiction in literature are not all that simple: the human mind is flexible enough to accommodate different kinds and degrees of “belief” in a work of fiction. How else can we explain our different expectations for various literary genres across the spectrum from tales of fantasy and the supernatural through realistic fiction to historical or docu-drama? All types of fiction may be said to involve the willing suspension of disbelief, but to different degrees and to different ends; we only ask that the works in question be internally consistent. At the same time, there seems to be a primary distinction in the belief we accord works of fact and fiction, and the particular claim made by autobiography—to the degree that it is autobiography and not some other literary form—is to veracity to the best of the writer's knowledge. Unlike fiction and drama, where extra-textual matters are only of secondary interest and the writer can stand aloof and godlike, paring his fingernails over his creation (no matter how autobiographical the fictional material may actually be), the narrative in autobiography moves both centripetally and centrifugally, the “I” of the autobiographer existing both within and outside the text—and, as such, vulnerable to the remonstrances of contemporaries and the prying of biographers.

This is not to say that the autobiographer should be treated with automatic suspicion like a prisoner in the dock, his most trivial assertions requiring external verification. But just as one naturally looks for internal coherence within the text and perceives the self-portrait the writer has constructed from the totality of images he gives us, one may also need the additional perspective afforded by biography or history in order to make sense of his story—that is, to evaluate it in the proper context. Certainly in the case of a political figure like Hellman, one needs to know something of the period she is discussing, particularly in a polemical work like Scoundrel Time, with its accusations against her contemporaries and her dramatic presentation of her own behavior. In reading the book one cannot wholly separate the literary from the extra-literary experience: instead we are forced to take a stand on the case she presents. The passionate critics of Hellman's autobiographical writings may have been wrongheaded and biased by their own political orientation, but they paid the author the ultimate compliment of taking her ideas seriously, unlike those for whom she is merely a literary icon. Among the latter critics is Linda W. Wagner, in “Lillian Hellman: Autobiography and Truth,”²³ who sees no disharmony between the demands of art and veracity in Hellman's writing, and who blandly ignores the controversy swirling around so much of her work. At times Wagner contends that historical truth is irrelevant to Hellman's purpose, since she is attempting to capture a more subjective truth than that of historical fact, one that must be re-created by the literary imagination—a reasonable contention, as far as it goes—but in dealing with Scoundrel Time, a work whose claims to historical veracity would be hard to ignore, Wagner simply assumes that Hellman's account is unquestionably the last word on the subject and that it presents no problem in interpretation. As a result, Wagner has to resort to political demonology to explain the hostility the book aroused: Scoundrel Time was “maligned” (note the verb) because Hellman, in her forthright way, “named names” of those intellectuals who behaved dishonorably during the McCarthy era, and they naturally rushed to attack her in their reviews. Nor does Wagner have any trouble with the introduction by Gary Wills, which, as she serenely puts it, gives the historical context for Hellman's account. (A born-again revisionist, having come from the far right of the political spectrum, Wills now feels that Harry Truman unilaterally started both the Cold War and the Korean War.) It apparently escaped Wagner's attention that Hellman's choice of Wills to introduce her work was a political act; as a best-selling author of Little, Brown of long standing, she obviously had editorial control over the introduction to her book and must have approved the version of recent history given by Mr. Wills, one which was almost universally condemned for its bias and intemperance. Critics more sensitive to political overtones also had no trouble connecting the fierceness of Hellman's denunciation of American intellectuals for their lack of moral fiber and her own lukewarm disavowal of the Stalinism she espoused long after most other intellectuals had abandoned it. (Many recalled her staunch defense of the Moscow trials, her applause at the Russian invasion of Finland, her participation in the 1949 Waldorf Conference.) I do not want to belabor the inadequacies of Wagner's discussion, or to attack Hellman's politics, but merely to point out the limitations of the ahistoric approach to this kind of autobiography. If the writer evinces an understandable partiality in her account, this does not excuse the critic from exercising reasonable judgment so as to be aware of possible distortion.²⁴

It is entirely understandable that, after the bitter disputes occasioned by Scoundrel Time, Lillian Hellman retreated into the quasifictional form and purely private content of her last autobiographical work. With Maybe there was no chance that anyone would come forth to contest her account because the matters narrated therein are so shadowy to begin with: Sarah Cameron, her friends and family, are seen through a blur of time and contradictory evidence, and the whole book is testimony to the impossibility of ever knowing anything real about such a mysterious, distant figure. Hellman's own inability to learn the truth about Sarah is evidently meant to have metaphysical reverberations for us, the readers, and give us a sense of the ultimate elusiveness of truth. (Hellman uses the poor vision that has afflicted her later years to symbolic effect here.) Unfortunately, the slightness of the story cannot sustain the weight of import it was intended to bear, as Hellman herself admits halfway through the book when she asks, “Why am I writing about Sarah? I really only began to think about her a few years ago, and then not often. Although I always rather liked her, she is of no importance to my life and never was. I do not know the truth about her or much of what I write here.”²⁵ By denying that her given subject-matter was either real or important to her, Hellman undemines the very structure she is erecting and works against her considerable gifts as a narrator. The book seems especially uncharacteristic of a writer who is best known for her uncompromising stand on issues and her passionate commitment, whether to individuals or causes. On the other hand, her last work can be seen as the logical extension of the tendency toward fiction already present in her earlier volumes: there, too, we found the famous elliptical, laconic style, the deliberate blurring of chronology, the juxtaposition of fragments of experience which lift her account out of the here and now to take on the dimensions of myth. The relative failure of Maybe was in the execution rather than in its conception as a literary experiment per se.²⁶ That is, for all of her mystification about the Camerons, Hellman simply had not come up with a subject which could lay claim to significance, at least in the form she gave it. What was needed, perhaps, was more invention rather than less.

It remains to be seen whether Hellman left behind further autobiographical fragments for eventual publication which will cause us to reevaluate her collection of memoirs. Through the controversies attendant on her first three volumes, she found autobiography to be a risky business, particularly when—as in the case of “Julia” and Scoundrel Time—her need for a coherent aesthetic and moral vision went against the expectations of documentary veracity inherent in her chosen form. Perhaps such a conflict is inevitable in all memoirs by literary figures, with hers merely an extreme example of a general condition. Whatever the case, it seems likely that the issue of truth in autobiography raised by her work will continue to arouse debate among her readers for years to come.

Notes

1. See Sidney Hook, “Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time,” Encounter, Feb. 1977, 87 and Bernard F. Dick, Hellman in Hollywood (Rutherford, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1983), 155.

2. The Gellhorn critique appeared in the Paris Review, 23 (Spring 1981):281-309, and Spender's rebuttal immediately afterwards in the same issue.

3. Quotations from Hellman, unless otherwise indicated, are from Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), in this case 54. Bernard Dick points out the resemblance between “Julia” and “Alice” in Hellman in Hollywood, 160.

4. See John Simon, “Literary Lionesses,” National Review, 16 May 1980, 615-16; Zinnemann is quoted by Philip Oakes in “Looking for the Lady,” London Times, Sunday, 6 Nov. 1977, 35a.

5. Edwin McDowell, “Publishing: New Memoir Stirs ‘Julia’ Controversy,” New York Times, 29 Apr. 1981, C30. Stephen Spender, in his review of Code Name “Mary” in the London Review of Books, 7-20 July 1983, 16, argued strongly that Gardiner was the unacknowledged model for Hellman's “Julia.” (Spender himself had been personally involved with Gardiner in Vienna in the 1930s, and their affair is described both in her book and in Spender's 1953 memoir, World Within World, where she is called “Elizabeth.”) The latest attack on the authenticity of the “Julia” story, by Samuel McCracken in the June 1984 Commentary (“‘Julia’ & Other Fictions by Lillian Hellman,” 35-43), notes that many of the details of Hellman's account of her travels through Europe are contradicted by contemporary records, so that, for example, she could not have gone from Paris to Berlin in the manner and at the times of day that she claimed, according to the monthly train schedules for 1937; nor is her name on the passenger list for the DeGrasse, the ship she says she took back to America in 1938. Moreover, McCracken's inquiries to Scotland Yard produced no evidence of the dying Julia's entry into England, or her body's departure, although both events must have come to the attention of the authorities had they, in fact, occurred.

6. Quoted by Christine Doudna in “A Still Unfinished Woman: A Conversation With Lillian Hellman,” Rolling Stone, 24 Feb. 1977, 53. The immediately preceeding quotation is from Three, 412.

7. Hellman in Hollywood, 157.

8. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” trans. James Olney in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton University Press, 1980), 42-43.

9. Paper read 23 June 1983 at a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar on “The Forms of Autobiography” at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The title alludes to a classic essay by the Shakespearean scholar L. C. Knights, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?,” which was itself a parody of such titles as “The Childhood of Shakespeare's Heroines.” Knights, reacting against the impressionistic criticism of his day, argued for viewing the plays as poetic dramas rather than stories about “real” individuals with extra-textual existences; Olney would do someting of the same thing for autobiographies.

10. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” 45.

11. Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960).

12. “The Ontology of Autobiography” in Autobiography: Essays, 240-41.

13. G. Thomas Couser, “Of Time and Identity: Walt Whitman and Gertrude Stein as Autobiographers,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 17 (Winter 1976):795-97. For a brief summary of hostile contemporary reactions to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by those mentioned in it, see Janet Hobhouse, Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein (New York: Putnam's, 1975), 163-68.

14. Autobiography: Essays, 19, 23.

15. For a fascinating collection of essays on the question of the aesthetic value of forgeries, see The Forger's Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Denis Dutton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

16. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, trans. Isabel Barzun (New York: Morrow, 1973), 533.

17. Constance Webb, Richard Wright: A Biography (NY: Putnam, 1968), 409, n.9.

18. See “Testimony Against Gertrude Stein,” supplement to transition, No. 23 (The Hague: Servire Press, 1934-35), which includes items by Georges Braque, Eugène and Marie Jolas, Henri Matisse, André Salmon, and Tristan Tzara. Leo Stein's remark is found in Journey Into the Self: Being the Letters, Papers and Journals of Leo Stein, ed. Edmund Fuller (New York: Crown, 1960), 134, and is reprinted in Hobhouse, 167.

19. Fabré, 46-47.

20. For a discussion of the overlapping of fiction and autobiography in contemporary American letters, see Albert E. Stone, Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts: Versions of American Identity from Henry Adams to Nate Shaw (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 265-78.

21. Letter to Sophia Partridge, 8-11 Sept. 1897, rpt. in Letters to Three Friends (London: Oxford University Press, 1924), 159-60. White's fictionalized autobiography appeared as The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford and Mark Rutherford's Deliverance (1881; 1885).

22. For discussion of this problem in the memoirs of I. B. Singer, see my recent article, “The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer: Lost in America and the Problem of Veracity,” in Twentieth Century Literaure 30 (1984):30-45.

23. Southern Review 19 (Spring 1983):275-88. Another recent scholarly article, Maurice F. Brown's “Autobiography and Memory: The Case of Lillian Hellman,” Biography 8 (Winter 1983):1-11, similarly holds up Hellman's art for our admiration without any mention of the controversy over her veracity as an autobiographer. Indeed, far from questioning the accuracy of any of her recollections, he describes Scoundrel Time first as “fully-documented” and later as being in a “relentlessly documented historical mode.”

24. To give one last example, Hellman in Scoundrel Time leads us to infer that Dashiell Hammett's financial trouble with the Internal Revenue Service was somehow an extension of the political persecution he suffered during the McCarthy era: we learn that the government attached all his income so that he was penniless for the last ten years of his life. What the memoir does not tell us is that Hammett owed the government back taxes amounting to $100,000 that he had failed to pay over an eight-year period beginning in 1943, and that he lost the tax judgment against him by default by not showing up at the court hearing. Hammett was indeed a victim of HUAC's witch-hunt, which landed him in prison for six months, but he brought financial ruin upon himself. That he simply couldn't manage his money had little to do with his political principles, and our knowledge of this puts Hellman's account in a somewhat different light, introducing an element of doubt in the morality play that she would have us believe that she and Dash acted out.

25. Maybe: A Story by Lillian Hellman (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 50.

26. At least one reviewer took Hellman's publisher to task for not being more careful about the internal chronoglogy of the story, which seemed to be mistaken about the year of Ottoline Morrell's death. Since the whole book was suffused by an air of unreality, Robert Towers' complaint in the New York Times Book Review (1 June 1980, 3, 36) seems to miss the point. One might better criticize the book on purely aesthetic grounds. For instance, we could have done without Hellman's account of how an early lover persuaded her that she had an offensive vaginal odor, which occasioned years of compulsive bathing, despite the reassurances of the other men in her life. Whatever the intended effect was to be, the episode sinks into bathos (as it were), leaving us wondering why she didn't merely go to a gynecologist.