Pentimento (1973)

After I read Kingsolver's The Lacuna, I fell back a bit to this moving memoir I read years ago. Joe McCarthy really existed, and all of his viciousness still resounds in the political dialogues of today. ( )

i read somewhere that she made up a lot of stuff in her memoirs especially about hammet. so what! ( )

Wonderful collection of recollections written by the famous playright and screenwriter. Each story has a lazy, lyrical quality with characters drawn from her past, including long-time companion Dashiel Hammett (of Maltese Falcon fame). The stories begin in her youth migrating between New Orleans and New York City, and end up in Martha's Vineyard after the death of Hammett. The most famous story included in the collection if that of "Julia", which was later made into a move starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave (a very good movie too). The story recounts how Hellman, a Jew, was recruited by a wealthy (Christian) childhood friend to smuggle a large sum of money into Nazi-Germany to assist in saving Jewish and others from the Nazi regime. The story is a real nail-biter and makes Hellman into a heroine - almost a mini-Schindler. After the book was published, Mary McCarthy, another famous author who had many mutual associates of Hellman and whose most famously known work is entitled "The Group", publicly called Hellman a liar. McCarthy's position was that she knew the real women who was portrayed as the childhood friend in Hellman's memoir, and that this women said that she and Hellman did nothing of the sort. McCarthy rather famously stated that Hellman was a liar, and was always lying, and that every word she wrote was a lie "including the 'and' and 'the'". Hellman, not being one to take this sort of thing quietly, promptly sued McCarthy for defamation of character and the whole mess dragged on in court for a long period of time. I don't recall the final outcome, but I believe that it was inconclusive as McCarthy died before the final judgement was passed. Despite of the controversy, the book is beautifully and evocatively written. ( )