As time passes, old paint on a canvas often becomes transparent. When this happens, the original lines can be seen in some paintings. This is called pentimento, because the painter has changed his mind.
Pentimento is the best-known of Lillian Hellman's memoirs, the one that, despite its title, continues to gain increasing visibility. In it, the writer combined, with impressive precision, autobiographical narrative and portraiture. The chronological order
creates growing tension. It all starts in the family, with the succession of relatives, the lucid description
and somewhat ironic of her parents. The raw material with which the author begins to compose her “book of
portraits” is the same one used in some of his plays.
A particularly striking episode in Pentimento is related to the order of historical events: it concerns Julia, the fictional name of a friend who became an anti-fascist activist in Vienna. Years later, the same friend managed to involve the writer in a dangerous mission: delivering money to the resistance to Hitler in Austria. This almost implausible story ended up being made into a film – Julia (1977). Today, there is no doubt that the title character was inspired by the life of psychoanalyst Muriel Gardiner (1901-1985), with the added bonus that the writer never met her... This fact leads to the conclusion that Lillian Hellman's book is not just memoirism, but may be, above all, fiction.
Pentimento also deals with the writer's great love for Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961), a renowned author of detective stories. The pages are marked by anxiety, by a woman's pure devotion to her lover over 30 years—the definitive portrait in which all traces, real or not, are present, as Lillian Hellman, proud of her stories and her imagination, desired.
