A Difficult Woman

These thematic chapters produce a telescoping effect, as all the related episodes of Hellman’s life are stacked against the subject on hand, regardless of chronology.  Often, this forces repetition.  So, on page 139, after a chapter detailing Hellman’s romantic entanglements, Kessler-Harris reminds us of “Dashiell Hammett, who became Hellman’s lover and partner after 1931,” and halfway through the book, we are told that Hellman earned “her living as a writer for the theater and for the cinema.” Despite the fact that Kessler-Harris is clearly trying to layer our understanding of Hellman’s life by reading it successively through the spheres in which she moved, the approach could have been made sharper by more aggressive editing.  

Much of the controversy surrounding Hellman’s name comes from the accusation of lying that she faced late in life: Mary McCarthy famously declared that “every word [Hellman] says is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” The sound bite, nasty enough to stick, contains some truth: Hellman’s memoirs do misrepresent the facts, engage in mythmaking, and deal with desire as often as actuality. Hellman’s memoirs purposefully claim no control over experience; they recognize the interplay of life and desire.

Yet Hellman was also a truth-teller and moralist, who didn’t hesitate to point out to others when they strayed. This is one of her central contradictions, and while Kessler-Harris tries to locate it too in history, it is more of a problem of genre rather than time – as recent scandals surrounding John D’Agata and Mike Daisey show, such questions are still with us.

The title of "Pentimento," Hellman explained, is taken from painting: “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.”

One might say that this is what Kessler-Harris has tried to do, writing Hellman onto various layers of history to see what shows through. Her book, nuanced as it is flawed, is a way of seeing Hellman again, and of possibly changing our minds.

Jenny Hendrix is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.

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