An Unfinished Woman

Playwright Lillian Hellman cautions that her memoir, An Unfinished Woman (1969), is a series of recollections, as opposed to a listing of historical facts – readers are warned not to expected strictly accurate dates or even locations. Nevertheless, this hardly compromises the strength of Hellman's memoir, which shines on the merits of its vivid characterizations and Hellman's superb writing. Formally, the book does not follow a single plot arc: it comprises a combination of diary excerpts, character sketches, anecdotes, and occasionally – perhaps some of its strongest passages – tender but unsentimental portraits of important figures from Hellman's life. These include her longtime nanny Sophronia, longtime partner, Dashiell Hammett, and close friend, fellow irascible female writer, and legendary wit, Dorothy Parker – all of whom receive entire detailed chapters. Conspicuously absent from Hellman's memoirs is much discussion of that aspect of her life for which she became famous: the theater. Although Hellman discusses her early days as a writer in Hollywood, her later maturation as a playwright is skimmed over in favor of details that are more personal. An Unfinished Woman was awarded a National Book Award.

Hellman's memoir includes many interesting stories from her youth: a childhood that spanned New York and New Orleans, and included such colorful characters as her dashing but philandering father (whose affair she discovers), her warmhearted but somewhat naive mother, and always, always, her one rock, her nurse Sophronia. Her father was a liquor salesman, whose busy life made it expedient that Hellman spend half of each year in New Orleans in the care of her aunts, who ran a boarding home. Hellman describes several events from her early life – breaking her nose after jumping out of her favorite tree, her shock at the arrival of her period, the time she ran away from home – with an emotional immediacy that makes the events touching, but also gives her childhood an almost epic sense of wonder and movement.

In her early twenties, Hellman moved to New York where she pretended to be much more sophisticated than she really was. She obtained a job writing script and novel summaries at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and while the work was boring, it exposed her to many important people in the industry. One, in particular, stood out: “I needed a teacher, a cool teacher, who would not be impressed or disturbed by a strange and difficult girl. I was to meet him, but not for another four or five years.” That teacher would turn out to be Dashiell Hammett, a dozen years her senior, with whom Hellman would develop an “off and on” relationship that lasted over three decades, until the end of his life.



Her time in Hollywood exposed Hellman to many of the day's luminaries: she recounts stories of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Nathanael West, and several famous Hollywoodians. She also recounts her brief marriage to fellow playwright Arthur Kober. Some of Hellman's most moving descriptions, however, are of the woman who came to be one of her closest friends, Dorothy Parker. She says of Parker's mannerisms: “She was modest — that wasn’t all virtue, she liked to think that she was not worth much — her view of people was original and sharp, her elaborate, over delicate manners made her a pleasure to live with, she liked books and was generous about writers, and the wit, of course, was so wonderful that neither age nor illness dried up the spring from which it came each day. No remembrance of her can exclude it.” Hellman goes on to candidly describe Parker's struggle to love men who loved her back, her struggle with alcohol, and, despite her infamously acid wit, her surprising softness. Parker had an inner instinct for social justice – as when she left the entirety of her estate, on her death, to Martin Luther King Jr., a man she had never met. Hellman was designated the executor of her will.

Hellman's An Unfinished Woman is a remarkable example of the memoir form – and perhaps of what distinguishes a memoir from an autobiography. Hellman's book does not attempt to be comprehensive or chronological, focusing instead upon those moments and people who most moved and shaped her over the course of her illustrious and controversial life (she discusses her early brush with Nazism, for instance, a flirtation that ended abruptly when Hellman, a Jew, became aware of their anti-Semitism). Arguably, in reflecting the subjectivity of its author, the memoir more honestly reflects its author than the purportedly more “objective,” but trope-laden autobiography. Hellman's memoir epitomizes this. In homage to its own title, An Unfinished Woman memorably ends: “All I mean is that I left too much of me unfinished because I wasted too much time. However.”