PENTIMENTO: A Book of Portraits

by Lillian Hellman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 25, 1973

More, a random more, of that unfinished woman -- that free-thinking, hardheaded, difficult, often drunk, bewildered, witty woman who was once ""the sweetest smelling baby in New Orleans."" The first two sketches stem from there and from the shabby, cluttered house where she spent much of her childhood in a gumbo of deep Southern, newer Northern, Catholic, Jewish, decadent, traditional confusions: there was Willy, the adventurer husband of her aunt with her acquired tastes for Paris jewelry and morphine -- Willy who trafficked in guns and women and ended up stone-broke on Bourbon Street. Or cousin Bethe, imported from Germany to marry a man who deserted her, six months later to become the common-law wife of an Italian gangster. In between there's a long inset on ""Theatre"" which is everything -- her plays -- how she felt about them -- Tallulah at the top of her shrill form -- here and there Dorothy Parker -- and of course Dashiell Hammett who appears intermittently if constantly and abidingly wherever she is then or now. For sheer unforgettability, try ""Julia""; she was the friend of her childhood who became ""political"" in Nazi Germany before the war -- Julia for whom she smuggled 50,000 dollars' refugee aid money from Berlin to Moscow -- Julia who left a leg and an illegitimate child there before Lilly collected the rest of her from a London funeral parlor. Or Arthur W. A. Cowan, a 100-proof nut who in an altogether disembodied fashion drifted in and out of her life telling impossible stories and writing thousand dollar checks. Mrs. Hellman has reclaimed it all with indulgence and intelligence -- and her portraits of people are idiosyncratically, palpably, marvelously real and present. You might have known them -- you will have known them.

Pub Date: Sept. 25, 1973

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1973

Categories: NONFICTION