Lillian Hellman – Tuesday 20 June 1905 – Saturday 30 June 1984

Introduction

Discovered Lillian Hellman through reading her first autobiography, An Unfinished Woman (like the title). Haven’t read or seen any of her plays; but I did read her subsequent autobiography, Penitmento: A Book of Portraits, and saw the film Julia, which is based on the portrait of the same name in her book.


Foreword from Pentimento: A Book of Portraits

“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.

That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged now and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.”

Excerpt from Theatre in Pentimento: A Book of Portraits

“It is strange to me that so many people like to listen to so many other people talk about the theatre. There are those who talk for large fees or give it away at small dinner parties and often their stories are charming and funny, but they are seldom people who have done much solid work. You are there, you are good in the theatre, you have written or directed or acted or designed just because you have and there is little that you can or should be certain about because almost everything in the theatre contradicts something else. People have come together, as much by accident as by design, done the best they can and sometimes the worst, profited or not, gone their way vowing to see each other the next week, mean it, and wave across a room a few years later.

The manuscript, the words on the page, was what you started with and what you have left. The production is of great importance, has given the play the only life it will know, but it is gone, in the end, and the pages are the only wall against which to throw the future or measure the past.”


Yesterday’s writer – Lorraine Hansberry
Tomorrow’s writer – Katharine Hepburn

Source: Hellman, Lillian. Pentimento: A Book of Portraits. Signet, 1974. Foreword: page 1, Excerpt: page 125

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Pentimento: A Book of Portraits

Center: Lillian Hellman from MD, March 1974