heroic figure in the underground resistance to the European Fascist movement of the 1930’s. Next comes “Theatre,” a celebrity-filled account of Hellman’s career as a playwright, followed by “Arthur W. A. Cowan,” another purely personal portrait of an eccentric friend from Hellman’s middle years. “Turtle” is a semimetaphysical story concerned with nothing less than life and death, while “Pentimento” serves as a sort of coda for the book and a final justification of its existence.

Written after her autobiography An Unfinished Woman (1969) and before her castigation of the McCarthy era entitled Scoundrel Time (1976), Pentimento lives up to its title. Hellman explains this artistic term at the beginning of the book thus: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.

This is a memoir, organized by devoting a chapter to Hellman’s cousin Berthe Bruno Koshland, her Uncle Willy, her childhood friend Julia, and her friend Arthur W. A. Cowan; her longtime companion Dashiell Hammett appears throughout, and the one nonhuman “character” is a turtle. There is also a chapter entitled “Theatre,” which deals with Hellman’s memories of many people involved with her during her years as a playwright. There is also a last, very brief chapter called “Pentimento” in which the author speaks of an experience that she had while teaching a writing seminar at Harvard University just after Hammett’s death.

True to her explanation of the book’s title, Hellman looks at both the original “paintings” and the same incidents and people years later. This technique lends credence to the criticism that some of the stories may have been altered to the point that they approach fiction. Yet her interaction with these compelling characters (including the turtle) results in a fascinating and readable book. It also gives a complete picture of a woman who saw herself clearly, faults and all, and who remained true to her feminist ideas throughout her life.

As Doris Falk makes clear in her 1978 biography of Hellman, however, she herself never felt the need of being “liberated from the male put-down,” although she resented being called “a woman playwright—even America’s greatest.” Rather, she believed that the goal of the feminist movement should be economic equality for women. This viewpoint is entirely compatible with Hellman’s general stance regarding the connection between money and power, delineated so forcefully in all of her work.

Some of the people appearing in Pentimento were sketched in An Unfinished Women, and Hellman has modeled many of the characters in her plays on friends and members of her family mentioned in both books. This is a common practice of writers in all genres, but some have wondered whether a character such as Julia, represented by Hellman as a “real” person in Pentimento, actually lived or was a complete fabrication, as the author Mary McCarthy charged publicly on The Dick Cavett Show. This accusation and other derogatory remarks by McCarthy resulted in a libel suit brought by Hellman. She and her attorney, Ephraim London, felt confident of success, but the suit never came to trial because of Hellman’s death.

One of Hellman’s themes throughout her work is love in its many forms. When she first discusses some of the personages as she remembers them from her own adolescence, she does not recognize the sexual undertones that she sees quite clearly as a mature adult. For example, Berthe, a distant cousin who is brought to the United States for an arranged marriage and then deserted, seems at first only an occasional visitor to the boarding house run by Hellman’s aunts, Hannah and Jenny. When Berthe becomes involved with a small-time member of the mafia who is murdered, however, young Lillian recognizes sexual attraction as one form of love. Later, she accuses her aunts of having deserted Berthe but learns that they have secretly supported the “fallen woman” for years out of another kind of love.

Also on the theme of love, in the chapter entitled “Willy” Hellman first sees this handsome husband of her Great-Aunt Lily from the perspective of a child. He seems a swashbuckling adventurer, not a merchant of illegal guns shipped to quell “troublemaking natives” in Central America. Willy, treating her like a child, takes the young girl fishing, but on the overnight stay in a bayou, she comes to realize that Willy has a Cajun mistress. The mature Hellman recognizes that she was indeed sexually attracted to Willy and jealous in a very adult way. When she sees him one last time, years later in New Orleans, she finds some of his charisma is still there for her, but she wisely returns to Hollywood and Hammett after spending one day with Willy.

Her deep love for a girlhood friend, who is called Julia in Pentimento, is quite probably an accurate account of her feelings in adulthood when she realizes that such love calls for involvement, even at the risk of personal danger. Whether, as Carl Rollyson suggests in Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy (1988), she based the character on Muriel Gardener’s activity in the anti-Nazi Resistance and whether she exaggerated details of her own part in smuggling money for the Resistance are moot. What this chapter illustrates is Hellman’s love not only on a personal level but also in a broader social sense—it is her love of justice in the world.

In recounting her thirty-one-year relationship with Dashiell Hammett, another facet of love becomes clear. Both he and Hellman had problems with alcohol, and there were a number of partings and reconciliations through the years. Nevertheless, she appreciated his role as unrelenting critic of her work and gives credit for much of her success to his encouragement. Furthermore, they truly loved, understood, and respected each other, despite disagreements from time to time.

“Theatre” describes Hellman’s first success with the play The Children’s Hour, which was an important landmark work in 1934 because it dealt with lesbianism. She also tells of her second play, Days to Come, which was a failure so devastating that it was two years before the playwright tried again, this time rewriting The Little Foxes nine times to ensure its success. In Pentimento, she credits Hammett with working hard for her on this play because after Days to Come he was “scared for her future.”

In this chapter she also tells of her Hollywood days, working as a writer for Samuel Goldwyn, and of her relationship with Tallulah Bankhead, who starred in The Little Foxes. She tells too of Watch on the Rhine and a visit to the White House when it played there for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. Her memories of The Searching Wind include anecdotes of Dudley Digges and his conversations with a brilliant newcomer, Montgomery Clift.

Next, in typically frank fashion, Hellman discusses her clumsy attempt to direct her play Antoher Part of the Forest, admitting that the only positive result of that experience was her discovery of the young Patricia Neal, who became a lifelong friend. Most significant of her other plays and adaptations perhaps is one of her later works, Toys in the Attic (1960), in which she began to tell the story from the viewpoint of its protagonist, Julian Bernier, but found that she had to rewrite it so that the play focuses on the women who control and ultimately ruin his life: his sisters, Carrie and Anna; his young wife, Lily; his mother-in-law, Albertine Price; and a former lover, Mrs. Charlotte Warkins. Hellman discussed her concern with Hammett, tore up the original script, and revised the play emphasizing the women. It was a huge success.

The chapter in Pentimento entitled “Arthur W. A. Cowan” is episodic, going back and forth through time, but it never really explains Hellman’s friendship with Cowan. Perhaps this is because his peculiar, mercurial personality defies labeling. The only consistent fact is that Cowan, a millionaire, was able to take care of Hellman’s money and did so successfully. In all other respects, their relationship seems strange simply because Cowan was strange. Several biographers believe that they were lovers, but Hellman does not admit this in Pentimento. This man lies about everything: his age, his nationality, his politics, even his occupation. Hellman’s friend Molly Howe, also a friend of Cowan, characterizes him as “a game of true or false, a James Bond character,” which seems an accurate assessment.

“Turtle” is on the surface merely a retelling of how a large snapping turtle injured Hammett’s favorite dog, in reprisal for which Hammett shot the turtle. The animal, however, survived both the bullet and the axe blow which severed its head, not succumbing until the following day.

The final short piece entitled “Pentimento” recounts Hellman’s time at Harvard, shortly after Hammett’s death. Here she talks of her companion Helen (who replaced her “childhood mammy, Sophronia”) and of Helen’s young friend Jimsie, a brilliant but impoverished student.

As Hellman would probably have admitted, her impact on women’s literature was not dependent on Pentimento, or even on its autobiographical companion pieces, but on her plays. As an important dramatist, she made her foremost contribution in that area. Yet Pentimento did assure her place in a second genre—as a literary figure—and this no doubt pleased her. Her candor about her life, even if it is sometimes viewed through a veil of memory (and embellished, her detractors claim), paints a picture of a strong, somewhat angry personality, but one capable of great love. She was undoubtedly opinionated and seemed somewhat egotistical to those who did not like her, but above all, she had a keen desire to sample all that life offered. It is therefore no surprise to read in all the books written about Hellman that even when she was almost blind and very ill during the last months of her life, she insisted passionately on continuing her activities. She was indeed, like the turtle, a survivor.