The voice of the turtle
Anne Chisholm
LILLY: REMINISCENCES OF LILLIAN HELLMAN by Peter Feibleman Chatto & Windus, £14.95, pp.364 Not long ago Lillian Hellman was widely admired both as a writer and as a woman who displayed moral courage dur- ing the squalid, confused McCarthy years. First famous in the 1930s for her plays, The Children's Hour and The Little Foxes, she became during the late Sixties and early Seventies still better known for her auto- biographical books, written in spare, con- sciously clean prose. Based faithfully on a chapter of Pentimento, the film Julia (1977) — in which Jane Fonda played the young Hellman, bravely helping her anti-Fascist friend, played by Vanessa Redgrave made the Hellman story and Hellman- esque integrity convincing and seductive to a very wide audience. Since then, the legend has been under scrutiny, culminat- ing in William Wright's inelegant but con- vincingly researched biography of 1986; by now, it has been demolished. Throughout her life, but especially as the manufacture of her own past seduced her, Lillian Hellman was a compulsive liar. Both her private and her public dealings were marked by deviousness and manipulation of the truth.
Nevertheless, she was a skilful writer, an influential figure in the literary and politic- al world of her time, and in her later years, as is demonstrated by this book — itself somewhat squalid but, like all prurient gossip, horridly readable — a powerful, indomitable old bat. No longer a sacred icon for feminists and left-wingers — more a sacred monster — she even so does not quite deserve this book. It purports to be a tribute, even a vindication, but reads more like an act of revenge.
Although Mr Feibleman makes frequent references to his '43-year friendship' with Hellman, their meetings were few until the early 1960s, when he was in his thirties and she was 25 years older. In 1963, she invited him to stay at her house on Martha's Vineyard, where they became lovers; a love affair of sorts continued for the next 20 years. Much is made of two bonds between them: their common origins in the South, and writing. Mr Feibleman is the author of novels, plays and film scripts, but
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