The central figure of ["Maybe," a] strange short memoir (if it can be called such), is not its ostensible subject, Sarah Cameron, nor the memoirist, Lillian Hellman, but the elusive, mutilated, often reeling character of memory itself. Again and again Miss Hellman tries to corner memory, forcing it to reveal the truth about the people and events she is trying to make sense of. Important epistemological questions are suggested: How valid is what we know—or think we know—about the people who dropped in and out of our lives in the past? How can we tell where memory blends into fantasy, producing a composite that takes on different shapes at different times, according to our needs? At the end of Miss Hellman's struggle with these questions, we have to settle for some very dusty answers; meanwhile we have been entertained, dismayed and, above all, tantalized….
Lillian Hellman has created [a very interesting persona] for herself in these pages. She portrays herself as truculent, sardonic and (better than most around her) able to hold her liquor. Sexually independent herself, she is nonetheless caustic with her longtime lover Dashiell Hammett for letting strange ladies drift casually in and out of his whiskey-soaked Hollywood existence. The conversations of this sharp-tongued, easily angered woman tend to be sparring matches that modulate into gentle banter when she is with someone like "Dash," for whom she feels strong affection. The recorded or reconstructed talk is permeated with a fine period flavor, full of goddamns and wisecracks, with situations referred to as "nutty" and people as "nuts."…
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