SOURCE: Brown, Maurice F. “Autobiography and Memory: The Case of Lillian Hellman.” Biography 8, no. 1 (winter 1985): 1-11.

[In the following essay, Brown argues that Hellman's dependence on memory rather than factual evidence in her autobiographies helped to transform the genre into a specific literary form.]

Lillian Hellman's autobiographical writing is of interest because it extends the range of the form and explores significant theoretical issues. Hellman presents herself as both human being and writer in process, exposing her methods of recall, probing the multiple meanings of the past, and commenting on her problems as investigator and writer. Her focus has been on the nature of her personal involvement with herself and others, not on her career as dramatist nor on herself as a political person. Hellman's “life-record” is a full one: among her documents are the many detailed notebooks she began keeping when she was fourteen. While she turned to a fully-documented autobiographical format in Scoundrel Time, the body of her work presents a quest for the truth of life as experienced—for the poetic and philosophical life. Hellman confronts the tension in her motives in this passage from the Dashiell Hammett chapter of her first volume, An Unfinished Woman:

Thirty years is a long time, I guess, and yet as I come now to write about them the memories skip about and make no pattern and I know only certain of them are to be trusted. I know about that first meeting and the next, and there are many other pictures and sounds, but they are out of order and out of time, and I don't seem to want to put them into place. (I could have done a research job, I have on other people, but I didn't want to do one on Hammett, or to be a bookkeeper of my own life.)

(Three, 279)¹

Hellman is grappling with the issue central to any consideration of biography as a literary form. The historian's instinct and training lead him to seek pattern by arranging documents and memories chronologically and evoking meaning with the aid of the discursive reason. But memory is “out of order and out of time.” Or rather, it has its own perverse order, its irrational metonymies and opaque symbolisms. The “memory work” is poetic in nature. As such, it bears relation to the dream work as Freud came to understand it. If the dream work sometimes takes the form of disguised wish fulfillment, the memory work should be viewed as a restructuring of the past to sustain and integrate a positive personality structure. Contemporary theoretical work by Erik Erikson in ego psychology suggests the complexity of the memory work, which involves self-creation through a non-rational process of rejection of “negative identity fragments.” Erikson writes:

Identity formation normatively has its dark and negative side, which throughout life can remain an unruly part of the total identity. Every person and every group harbors a negative identity as the sum of all those identifications and identity fragments which the individual had to submerge in himself as undesirable or irreconcilable. …²

Furthermore, disciplined study of poetry, of myth and dream, of legend and folklore, and of subliminal psychological process has provided students of life-writing with insights and analytical tools by which we have gained access to the poetics of memory. We cannot accept mere “memory,” even when well-documented, as valid life-history; and the truth revealed by critical probing of memory is more relevant to the structure of human personality and life than a bookkeeper's record, however adequate that might be to the historian.

For such probing in the context of literary criticism, William C. Spengemann has recently provided a promising approach. In The Forms of Autobiography³ he identifies St. Augustine's Confessions as a formal paradigm for Western autobiography, distinguishing three modes which are interwoven but given different emphasis in any given text. Drawing upon his paradigm, I shall consider Hellman's quest for her life and its appropriate form as a dialectical process in which life is presented as 1) history of the self (a chronological, developmental record of actions and conscious motivations); 2) philosophy (a process of discovery of the self); and 3) poetry (the presentation of self and its contexts in literary form). Spengemann's modes have a relationship to traditional classifications of autobiography: the memoir tends to take on the historical mode; confession, the philosophical; and apology, the poetic. But Spengemann's approach frees us from these casual nineteenth-century classifications to focus on literary process and style.

There are strong movements to all three of Spengemann's modes in Hellman's work. An Unfinished Woman (1969) opens in historical mode. The work's first half is structured chronologically in terms of life-stages identified by developmental psychology (childhood, latency, adolescence, etc.). Tension between the contrasting heritages of her father's and her mother's families and between New Orleans and New York City provides the context for Hellman's early development, much as it does in the autobiographical models provided by Henry Adams and George Santayana in the early modern period. The later portion of the volume rests heavily on long sections of selected but apparently undoctored diary relating to Hellman's European trips and her involvement in anti-Fascist movements. At the end of the book, three portraits are presented—one of Dorothy Parker (her closest friend), one of Hammett (with whom she lived tumultuously for over thirty years), and one of the two black women of significance in her life. Hellman's second and third autobiographical volumes develop the two sides of her antithetical approaches to autobiography. She treats her personal life in poetic mode in Pentimento (1973), and her political life in a relentlessly documented historical mode in Scoundrel Time (1977). Maybe (1980) is subtitled “a story,” but it is an extension of the mode of Pentimento. Perhaps Hellman is suggesting that life fragments that do not take palpable form can stand as contemporary fiction but not as authentic life-writing. Here autobiographical materials turn into a fascinating tone-poem, steeped in dream/alcohol/disguise states of semi-awareness with sharp, irrational leaps and turns of motive, character, and event. Hellman presents two metaphors for her autobiographical memory data: 1) memory is a hodgepodge of bundles of ribbons and rags, and 2) life is a puzzle with missing pieces. The narrative is occasionally interrupted by sections in italics, in one of which she writes:

What I have written is the truth as I saw it, but the truth as I saw it, of course, doesn't have much to do with the truth. It's as if I have fitted parts of a picture puzzle and then a child overturned it and threw out some pieces.⁴

At book's end we are left with six or seven characters, including Hellman, in search of an author. In brief, the sequence of volumes suggests an underlying philosophical concern which increasingly dictates autobiographical form. Hellman's life-writing turned into a quest for her “true” life—a quest which pushed both her historical and poetic commitments to their ragged outer edges.

Considered in the context of Hellman's entire body of work, much of An Unfinished Woman is a frustrated venture in autobiography. Long periods of Hellman's life—1931-35, 1942-44, and 1945-65—are omitted except for a casual reference here and there. Though we can perhaps excuse fragmented and bored treatment of her career, several relationships central to her personal life are practically ignored. Hellman's early affair and her abortion, her life with husband Arthur Kober, her years with Hammett, and her late affair with Carter Cameron are not presented in any detail until Maybe. Other significant relationships surface in Pentimento and Scoundrel Time. Hellman's later volumes move to fill gaps in An Unfinished Woman—gaps which required a deeper confrontation with herself and her experience than she previously had wanted to or was able to deal with. There is conscious concealment in that volume, and perhaps throughout her autobiographical writing, which represents an effort to avoid embarrassment of herself and others. And some segments of her life simply do not interest her. But more often, especially in regard to sexual relationships and political activity, Hellman seems to have been unable to arrive at a coherent sense of her actions and motives.

On the public side, mere inclusion of the European diaries in An Unfinished Woman suggests the conflict between her deeply personal human involvements and the vagueness of her public, political stance and its implications. The abrupt stylistic shift to direct documentation of life through diary entries seems almost desperate, with an extreme analogue, perhaps, in the later pages of Rousseau's Confessions. It took Hellman seven more years to come to terms with the trauma of the McCarthy witch hunt, and she was torn by her sense of the conflicting commitments and perspectives of her multiple audiences for that book. The intensity of Hellman's desire to find the truth about herself is present in the text, and even more in her later displeasure with the way she came to feel Scoundrel Time misrepresented her. Commenting on the book in 1979, she wrote:

I am angrier now than I hope I will ever be again; more disturbed now than when it all took place. I tried to avoid, when I wrote this book, what is called a moral stand. I'd like to take that stand now. I never want to live again to watch people turn into liars and cowards and others into frightened, silent collaborators. And to hell with the fancy reasons they give for what they did.

(Three, 726)

The issue is larger than that of adequate expression of emotion and moral stance in a work. Much of the fascination of autobiography for the literary critic lies in the fact that the style and form of the work are as much a revelation of the “life” of the protagonist as the ostensible content. The problem of “misrepresented” life is in part a stylistic one—Hellman's quest for appropriate style is part of our data for her “life.” At the age of sixty Hellman shifted from established dramatist to autobiographer. The considerable skill she had developed in dramatic projection of experience is evident in the power of her life-writing. And she was able to draw on experimentation with the short story form that went back to her twenties. The strengths of these “apprenticeships,” together with her strong sense for historical contexts of the action in her dramas, transfer to her work in autobiography. But Hellman had to learn to deal with the problem of presentation of memory in narrative and with the larger philosophical demands of a maturely conceived autobiographical form.

Hellman's early inclination and experience had prepared her to view life as a constantly shifting pattern. Childhood experiences were uprooting, complex, and confusing. Hellman learned to approach life as a mystery which offered her tantalizing clues to dimly-understood human motivations and relationships. At twelve she and Julia (the Julia of her chapter in Pentimento) formed a secret espionage society of two and took to following strange characters about the streets of New York, observing their movements and on one occasion alerting a policeman to suspected evil.⁵ Dashiell Hammett was the major influence in her later career as dramatist, and we should not forget that Hellman was the model for Nora in his Thin Man series. The stance to life carries over into Hellman's writing methods. Revising—“re-seeing”—became an obsessive gesture in her work in the drama. Her manuscripts for the final book for the original Bernstein-Wilbur-Hellman production of Candide include twelve complete and varying versions of it and twenty-five folders of individual scenes.⁶ Hellman's need was to find a stylistic correlative to her sense of life that was appropriate to writing her own life. In the effect known as “pentimento” in painting, she located a metaphor for the method appropriate to her vision. She writes:

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.

(Three, 309)

Passage of time affords a means by which an event is placed outside of time—it provides for the medium's shift from opacity to transparency and to multiple vision. Both the earlier and later visions of the painter are present in overlay, revealing a shift not only of style and judgment but also of the data themselves.

Hellman's stylistic solution involves identification of both past and present selves in sensory, emotional, active immediacy. Under psychoanalysis for long periods of time beginning as early as the nineteen-thirties, Hellman was familiar with eliciting otherwise unavailable life data by the use of psychoanalytic methods of recall and interpretation. In her writing conscious analysis and artistry enter the process to develop context through description and narration or, occasionally, to make a brief observation or judgment. Hellman's desire is to strip away defenses and distortions to reveal emotions, values, motivations, traits of character, and quirks of personality basic to the evoked living presence in action and event. She writes in a tradition which looks back through contemporary writers she admired, like Faulkner and Proust, to that master autobiographer, Rousseau. James A. Boon has explored this tradition in From Symbolism to Structuralism. He observes that Rousseau, though committed to presenting past as palpable present, adopted a linear chronology which does not catch the diachronic complexity of multiple versions of an event. Marcel Proust developed such complexity. Boon's observation on Proust is applicable to Hellman's mature autobiographical method. Boon writes:

It is perhaps only with Proust that this full implication of such multiplicity—in his case due to time passing—is captured. For Proust's narrator has experienced a series of interpenetrating orderings each time his ‘involuntary memory’ was triggered. This enables him to move back and forth between different conceptualized versions of what constituted any particular event. He can conceive of the event as the narrator remembering it, as the narrator thinking of it while living it, as the narrator remembering remembering it during an instance of ‘involuntary memory’ (etc?)⁷

Hellman's memory flashbacks, triggered by a minor and casual event are sometimes developed, sometimes merely recorded, producing in a reader the effect of living in several time slots at once. Occasionally we are able to intuit Hellman's unexplained metonymic leaps. For example, in the midst of a passage closely focused on her relationship with Julia, she writes:

I was pleased that she [Julia] thought I knew the excellence of Toulouse-Lautrec, because I didn't, and had to be told about him by a fellow student who used to buy me hamburgers in order, I think, to tell me about his homosexual experiences. (He was a very decorated hero during the Second World War and was killed a week before it ended.)

(Three, 418-9)

The sentence runs on in the pattern of an uncontrolled memory drift, to be capped by what seems to be a parenthetical chunk of irrelevant, gratuitous information. It “fits,” however, when we come to realize that the hero has sprung back to life in Hellman's involuntary memory leap because he is a male analogue of Julia herself. Hellman increasingly exposes her memory processes as part of her creation and re-creation of self in Pentimento and Maybe. And in those volumes she occasionally speculates on that process in paragraphs she italicizes.

But presentation of the memory process almost always moves to poetic fulfillment in dramatization and dialogue. In scenic presentation, Hellman's mastery of the arts of theatre and film enables her to create autobiography more fully dramatized than almost anything in biography since Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson. Techniques of camera work, lighting, and film editing are adapted to literary use, and she built on William Faulkner's achievements in such adaptation, which she admired. In addition, we find Hellman's sense of theatre in the significant dramatic gesture, brisk dialogue weighted with implication, the sense of half-glimpsed backgrounds and motives, the invitation to participate in clues leading to the solution of a mystery, and emerging unifying symbols—a fig tree, a suitcase full of family data, a dying snapping turtle, pentimento as recognition of love, and (in Maybe) the peculiar odor Hellman's first lover ascribes to her vagina. Hellman's stylistic development in the use of symbol to focus the implication of plot parallels the development in her handling of data, memory, and voice. The fig tree symbol is modernist, heavy with Freudian implication, and used to support a coherent narrative structure. Her turtle is at the center of the chapter in Pentimento titled “Turtle” and is not a modernist symbol but what critics of contemporary poetry have identified as “deep image.” In Maybe an absurdist fragmented plot rests on an undescribable sensory non-image—the odor of the protagonist's vagina.

The portrait, “Helen,” in An Unfinished Woman signals the method and the mature autobiographical style which was to dominate Pentimento. “Helen” begins, “In many places I have spent many days on small boats” (Three, 249). The generalized scene, unlocated in space or time, shifts as a camera focus might to a descriptive revery, anchored by references to beachcombing in New Orleans and Martha's Vineyard. A concrete and specific catalogue of her findings is given: “periwinkles and mussels, driftwood, shells, horseshoe crabs, gull feathers, the small fry of bass and blues, the remarkable skin of a dead sand shark, the shining life in rockweed.”

Hellman's second paragraph places the reader in a time and place, and it turns her opening into the vehicle for an extended metaphor: “One night about six months ago, when I was teaching at Harvard, it occurred to me that these childish, aimless pleasures … might have something to do with the digging about that occasionally happens when I am asleep.” And she proceeds to develop her metaphor in an extravagant metaphysical conceit: her head becomes the sandy beach from which the pole of her attention catches a card which answers “a long-forgotten problem,” now solved as if arranged for her “on a night table.” Mind has retrieved a set of scraps from memory “arranged” by the poetic of dream.

Opening paragraph three with “On that night …,” the narrative camera zooms in on a physical event which clicks in memory networks. The night is stormy. Hellman, disturbed by a noise downstairs, descends and sees a fallen, shattered light fixture at the foot of the stairs. (The mythic motif is introduced naturally and effortlessly.) Involuntary memory flows, presented in a long tumbling sentence which piles up different but now related experiences from time-sets clued by verbs in all the tenses but future and future perfect:

I thought: Of course, one has been dead three years this month, one has been dead for over thirty, but they were one person to you, these two black women you loved more than you ever loved any other women, Sophronia from childhood, Helen so many years later, and it was all there for you to know two months ago when, poking about the beach, a long distance from the house Helen and I had lived in, I found a mangled watch, wondering where I had seen it, and knew a few hours later that it was the watch I had bought in the Zurich airport and that had disappeared a short time after I gave it to Helen.

(Three, 250)

Hellman's access to the structure of the memory work is marked by self-directed recognition with the opening phrase, “of course.” Her primary audience is herself, the “you” with whom she is engaged in dialogue, but the sentence is filled with data which would have come instantaneously to Hellman. A larger audience of readers is prepared to overhear a self-absorbed protagonist discovering something that had escaped her two months earlier in a different setting. A simple shift from second to first person pronoun in the middle of the sentence further suggests the integration that comes in the shock of recognition triggered by the chance event. The paragraph continues, retaining the first person pronoun, but moving to cognitive mode, presented in short declarative sentences. The style is now that of conscious reconstruction of past even and motive:

The answer now was easy. She [Helen] never walked much because her legs hurt. Sam had brought it down to the beach and she didn't want to tell me that my dog [Sam], who loved her but didn't love me, could have done anything for which he could be blamed.

(Three, 250)

What has happened? The broken light fixture calls forth the broken crystal of the watch she had found on the beach two months earlier. It was the watch she had bought in Zurich five years earlier for Helen, who had died in 1965. (These dates are not given in Hellman's text.) Helen couldn't have dropped it—the beach was too long a walk for her. Sam must have picked it up and taken it there, and Helen said nothing, out of protective love for the dog. What does Sophronia have to do with it? Helen's silence was exactly what Sophronia's response would have been under similar circumstances fifty years earlier, but the reader doesn't know that yet. In this opening, persons, times and places have coalesced in an instant of unsolicited memory work that Hellman here recreates in a verbal sequence with a stylistic complexity which is unusual to biography, even biography of the self. Furthermore, the relation of the reader to the life is immediate and participatory: we are involved in reconstruction of the events and share in the illumination.

Something more of the brilliance and variety of Hellman's style in “Helen” can be suggested by brief glances at several transitional passages in the chapter. For example, she lays bare the process of her conscious mental work in a passage like this one:

How often Helen had made me angry, but with Sophronia nothing had ever been bad. … But the answer there is easy: Sophronia was the anchor for a little girl, the beloved of a young woman, but by the time I had met the other, years had brought acid to a nature that hadn't begun that way—or is that a lie?—and in any case …

(Three, 251)

Here the reader is involved in the writer's ambivalence, one keyed by verb alternation of past-perfect with present and simple past tenses, and by her alertness to possible deception in her image of herself as a child. An outburst of emotion provides a second daring and abrupt transition from Helen to Sophronia: “Oh, Sophronia, it's you I want back always. It's by you I still so often measure, guess, transmute, translate and act” (Three, 255). The outcry moves us into two sharply realized incidents involving Sophronia and the child, Lilly, followed by a shift back to Helen gazing at a photograph of Sophronia and young Lilly and finding a protective love there that Hellman herself had not seen in all her fifty years of living with the photograph. From this base (the first half of the chapter), Hellman moves to consider other black/white relationships in her life, presented in narration and dramatic vignettes. The chapter ends with a final reconsideration of the overlap of black and white worlds in American society. At one point she crosses the invisible line between them into a guarded all-black world, and Helen roughly thrusts her back into neutral territory. Hellman intuits and evokes an unknown black world of shadows thrown by her own lighted experience, but she cannot enter or understand it, nor does she try.

I have hoped to suggest something of the complexity of an autobiographical style and form which Hellman casually refers to as “stream-of-consciousness.” I do not wish to label it, but that label is surely incorrect. In “Helen” Lillian Hellman finds and presents many overlapping selves in a variety of places and times in relationship with two dead black women, and she enters upon a new and life-giving love and understanding of them, of herself, and of human experience. We begin to see, not merely through a glass darkly, but in a transparency of vision, placed in time but free from its distortions and tyrannies. Hellman turns flotsam and jetsam—scraps on the surface of life or partially buried by tidal ebb and flow—to present possession and wholeness. Hellman's past, with its distinctive shades and passions, comes alive in the present, illuminating present life in a new structure of understanding and emotional balance—a fresh sense of identity. Hellman would not claim transcendence of place and time for her art—her position is too rigorously existential for that. Rather, self is found—or perhaps only a small part of self—for right now in participation by Hellman and her involved readers in the on-going process of making art and thereby making life.

Hellman's work has helped move autobiography as a literary form into our time. Her autobiographical materials have shifted from dates and historical records to memory and its processes. Voice has shifted from objective, if personal, narration to presented and involved writer/protagonist, acting, creating, revising, speculating, and questioning. From a frustrated modernist style, Hellman has moved to multilayered pentimento and to baffling tone-poem. As a quest for self and for answerable autobiographical style and form, Hellman's is a significant achievement in contemporary autobiography and a provocative probing of philosophical issues basic to the development of autobiography as a literary form.

Notes

1. All citations of Hellman's autobiographical writing will follow this form, giving book title and page numbers in parentheses. References are to Three (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), a one volume collection of An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, and Scoundrel Time, intro. by Richard Poirier, with new commentaries by the author.

2. Life History and the Historical Moment (New York: Norton, 1975), p. 20.

3. (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1980), pp. 5-6, 32-3, and passim.

4. Maybe (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 51-2.

5. Richard Moody, Lillian Hellman, Playwright (New York: Pegasus, 1972), pp. 4-5.

6. Ibid., pp. 270-1.

7. (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 154-5.