Una mujer con atributos

It is not that the events of her life were novel material: it is that she knew how to narrate them in such a way that they seemed so. Lillian Hellman's life was intense and peculiar, as she was present in the most important conflicts of her time such as the Spanish Civil War, the anti-Nazi resistance in Austria and Germany, the Soviet officialdom or the persecution of left-wing filmmakers by the Senator McCarthy, but what was fundamental was his ability to select the best moments of each experience and recount them in a perfect tableau that absorbs us and places us at his side in the middle of the action. Perhaps the least relevant of what Hellman tells us in these pages is his career, the eleven successful films and twelve plays he wrote, and what is crucial, on the other hand, is the human relationships of those who took part in them, beginning with his long and particular story with the novelist Dashiell Hammett, a bond that alternated love with friendship and that was marked, like almost everything in his life, by its own rules. Neither romantic nor sentimental, Ella Hellman was a woman with attributes very much her own: she liked to hunt, fish, and of course drink and smoke with her friend Dorothy Parker, but more than anything she liked to narrate. These memoirs, which want to remember her thirty years after her death, are a tribute to a great woman and a great writer, who she stepped on and kept going until the end of her days.