Maybe
1980 $7.95

Scoundrel Time
1976 $7.95 cloth

Pentimento
1973 $8.95

An Unfinished Woman
1969 $9.95 cloth

Maybe is not an ingratiating book. It is readable but not easy. Those Hellman fans who come to it expecting more of the witty chronicles of the famous, affectionate portraits of the beloved, and political adventures of the author which graced Hellman’s earlier autobiographical works will be disappointed. As if in deliberate defiance of those previous accounts of her life Hellman now chooses to write about people we have never heard of, who were, if not down right nasty, not at all heroic or brilliant, whom she did not love, and most important, did not understand. Sarah and Carter Cameron, the central figures in this book, were tangential, even marginal figures in their biographer’s life. Hellman’s encounters with Sarah over the years seem almost always to have been unexpected and accidental. They ran into each other at restaurants, parties, Italian hotels, and French terraces; they rarely sought each other out. And so Hellman’s memories of Sarah lack the focus and insight that would have been given by the choice of friend ship. Instead they are scattered, vague, frustratingly evasive, and Hellman’s written records are accordingly disjunctive and unresolved. That Hellman remembers her at all seems to be partly accidental, as does her later, rather tepid affair with Sarah’s ex-husband, Carter Cameron. Even at the end of the book, after assembling and presenting all her material on the Camerons, Hellman still has not achieved and cannot therefore communicate any coherent understanding of who they were and what they finally meant to her.

What then are we to make of this abortive journey into the past? Why write a book about people you really did not know or love? There are a number of possible replies to these inevitable questions, ranging from the cynical suspicion that Maybe is finally just an undisciplined, burnt out potboiler to the embarrassed concern that Hellman is engaging in public confession of psychic scars which she had scrupulously and properly kept covered up in her earlier memoirs. This is suggested by her revelation of her tragicomic obsession with her body odor—a striking and much-criticized feature of the book. However, the style, curiously tough and vulnerable at once, certain italicized passages in which Hellman speculates on her role as biographer in search of truth, and the title, with its implication of open possibility and irresolution, all hint that Maybe is a more resonant, coherent, and ambitious work than its scattered narrative at first suggests.

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