A Difficult Woman by Alice Kessler-Harris Page B

is an amalgam of the person and of our image of the person; of the good and the bad that she did and was thought to have done. This then is a book (a biography if you will)about a woman, about the idea of a woman, and about the world that formed and shaped her.
    Hellman, living and dead, is a most uncooperative source. She was committed to controlling her own legacy and savvy enough to try to do so. In 1961, Hellman contracted to sell her early manuscripts to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which also owns the papers of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and many other major writers. 2 She was pleased that they wanted the manuscripts, and she settled for a generous initial purchase price along with an arrangement that would allow the library to accession some of the manuscripts immediately and to release others annually. As was then general practice, the library evaluated the additional accessions as it opened them to public use, recording them as gifts for which Hellman would receive tax deductions. Thereafter, she carefully adhered to her obligation to send future drafts of plays and published material to the library. But she rigorously excluded personal papers from the collection. In the seventies, she included provisions to donate her remaining manuscripts to the Harry Ransom Center in the several versions of her will. All of them instructed that personal papers be withheld as they “could be of no possible interest to anyone.”
    Because she wanted to remain the subject of her own imagination, Hellman tried, sometimes deliberately, to shape her image to her liking. In the diaries and appointment books that she kept sporadically all of her life, she often disguised the identities of lovers and friends. Recognizing herself as the butt of anger and misunderstanding, she frequently made up stories about herself, her childhood, and her family that illustrated who she wanted to be. With her friend Hannah Weinstein, she invented a fictional Mr. Schwartz who might or might not appear to marry her. 3 She narrated her stories in letters to friends, dinner-table conversations, and in four books of memoir and reminiscence that presented herself as she wished to be remembered. She destroyed, insofar as she could, anything that might allow another judgment or correction of the record. She asked her friends to return her letters to them. With a few exceptions (her first husband, Arthur Kober, didn’t return her letters, nor did John Melby), they complied. Hellman then destroyed many of these and other letters.
    At first, Hellman insisted that she wanted no biography written about her. “I am not sure that anybody’s life shows us much about their work,” she wrote, as she refused to cooperate with those who wanted to write about Dorothy Parker or Dashiell Hammett or herself. An early effort byStephen Marcus to undertake a biography of Hammett, her longtime lover, ended in discord and the threat of lawsuits. When she finally acquiesced to Diane Johnson’s biography of Hammett, she monitored the sources and tried to control their interpretation, telling Johnson that she did not believe in “fictionalized biography” and hoped she would not write one. 4 When it became clear that biographers would write about her with or without her permission, she wrote to her friends asking them not to talk to them. The result, of course, was that, as William Wright confessed, he interviewed her enemies and produced a biography bent toward their derisive interpretations. At the end of her life, she appointed her friend and editor William Abrahams as her official biographer. She requested that the archive close all her papers to other researchers for an unspecified period of time. The archive complied. Abrahams gamely started the project, only to be interrupted by death.
    Under these circumstances it would be folly to try to capture the “real” Lillian, whoever that is. Her story has