Half-Told Tales

By Martha Duffy

PENTIMENTO: A BOOK OF PORTRAITS by LILLIAN HELLMAN 297 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.

Lillian Hellman has had the kind of life that Zelda Fitzgerald and many another lost lady wanted and thought she deserved. Hellman drank with the big boys, but held her liquor and her health. Her 30-year love affair with Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon) was the kind of tough-tender romance that Hemingway daydreamed about in his novels. Most important, she had a successful career as a playwright: twelve Broadway plays, eight of them hits, and one, The Little Foxes, a classic.

She was a woman of action too.

Shortly before World War II she made a perilous trip across the German border with $50,000--the price of freedom for 500 Jews. She was equally skilled in personal combat. She once flung a chair through Tallulah Bankhead's door. On another occasion, having learned that Hammett had another woman in his Hollywood house, she flew across the country, smashed up his bar, and caught the next plane back to New York.

It would be pleasant to report that Hellman writes her memoirs in the same forthright, energetic fashion as she apparently lived her life. Alas, not so. Four years ago, she published a quirky, episodic volume called An Unfinished Woman. Her new book covers different material in the form of portraits of people whom she loved at one time or other, plus a chapter about life in the theater and an anomalous, charming piece about a snapping turtle.

To her credit, Hellman is neither a name dropper nor a restaurant and resort recorder. Those standbys of nostalgia, Gerald and Sara Murphy, crossed her path, but she merely remarks that they were perhaps "not as bonny or without troubles with each other" as they are usually depicted. Edmund Wilson appears, not as a mighty mind but as a comfortable pal who said sane things. Dorothy Parker was a close if infuriating friend. In 1937 she and Lillian traveled to Paris together. Parker was invited by the rich and famous to "tennis she didn't play and pools she didn't swim in." She thought, says Hellman sharply, "that nobody could buy her. She was wrong: they could and did for years." It is a rather sad irony that the book should be called Pentimento, an artist's term for an old image that reappears through later repainting done on a canvas. Singular and moving memories flicker everywhere, but few emerge clearly.

The author's self-portrait is shadowy. She likes her tough side, noting that a friend once said, "I've always liked your anger, trusted it." From girlhood, Hellman went for the impulsive gesture, skipping school to trail shady relatives around New Orleans, insulting proper ones. The writing often recalls Gertrude Stein's stonier prose -- obdurate, flat and mannered. Hellman is a virtuoso of ellipsis, a quality that doubtless served her well as a dramatist. In Pentimento she seems to take pride in leaving out connectives, or capping a half-told tale with a brief coda, unrelated except for the faintest resonance of tone.

Though he appears infrequently, Hammett steals every scene he is dragged into. There is a long account of a poor relation named Bethe who became a Mafia moll and therefore some one Hellman idolized as a girl. She thought of Bethe the first afternoon she slept with Hammett. "As I moved toward the bed I said, I'd like to tell you about my cousin, a woman called Bethe.' "Hammett said, 'You can tell me if you have to, but I can't say I would have chosen this time.'" A patient man, Hammett. Again and again, Hellman requires similar restraint from the reader.

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