Pentimento
Originally published in an abbreviated format April 24, 2006
Pentimento is a term used to describe when the top layer of a painting starts to fade away or become transparent, and previous versions (or sometimes an entirely different work) can be seen underneath. Thus, the viewer can see what the artist’s final rendering was and what he started out with, and how the two differ; or can see how two different paintings meld together over time to become one, one that can neither be extricated from the other nor incontrovertibly understood what was the original and what came later.
Pentimento is also the title of a book - one of my five favorite books of all time - by Lillian Hellman. This is the book upon which the 1977 movie “Julia,” starring Jane Fonda as Hellman and Vanessa Redgrave as her radical leftist and ultimately doomed friend Julia, was based. Pentimento was published as a memoir of Hellman’s childhood in New Orleans and New York City and of her later years as a playwright and author; her 30-year association with Dashiell Hammett; and her time living on Cape Cod and teaching at Harvard during and after the time Hammett was dying. She said she chose that word as the title because she wanted to record what those people and events in her life meant to her then, while they were happening, and what they mean to her now [at the time of the writing], now that she can look back and see them in the context of her life before and after them.
I was almost devastated to learn, many years after first reading this most affecting of works, that Hellman likely fabricated large parts of it: that many of the events she described so movingly did not happen the way she said, or even at all. It was like a punch in the gut. The visualization I had created in my mind shattered - I felt the same as if I had just found out that my dearest friend in the whole world had lied to me about her entire life. I guess that’s the mark of a good author. The ability to create such vivid imagery and emotional connection in the reader’s mind, that is; not the lying.
Hellman responded to the people questioning her veracity by saying she had changed names and layered certain characters in order to protect her friends and in particular Julia’s daughter, who she claimed still lived in New York and whose father was some famous person, a doctor if I remember correctly. The writer Mary McCarthy once went on The Dick Cavett Show and, referring to Hellman, said, “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” Hellman filed a multi-million dollar slander suit against McCarthy for this remark but the suit was dropped by her estate when she died.
One good thing that did come out of this - well two good things because I still love the book, even if it’s fiction - is that Hellman talked quite a bit about her friendship with Dorothy Parker, and this got me interested in reading about her and she thus turned into one of my favorite authors. I love Parker. She was a master of the quick-witted jab, and I am a huge fan of people who can just pop them out with no preparation. This is actually what improv actors have to be really good at: they don’t know what the other person is going to offer and they need to be able to take whatever it is and run with it and turn it into something bigger and not block the development of the scene by making dead-end statements. Actually Parker probably did “end” a lot of scenes because she was not improvising; she was shooting back at foolish pretentious people who thought they were being clever, but they were usually far surpassed by Parker, and they were left with their mouths hanging open, dumbly stunned, while she turned on her heel and walked away. But she would have been great in that art form.
As for pentimento, sometimes I look back at things I wrote long ago and think about them from where I am right at that moment in time. Sometimes what I read has the same picture underneath, and sometimes the original words are faded and ghosted and I can no longer remember everything that was originally there.