Lilly question

Peter Feibleman’s loving memoir is a useful companion to the latest Hellman biography, “A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman.” (1905-84) Alice Kessler-Harris’s work, examining the playwright in relationship to the history of her generation, is a sober, worthy, but a bit pretentious effort. As friend, lover, nurse, companion (and then principal heir), Feibleman knows where the bodies are buried. What he offers is the raw and uncensored –and often unlovely—Hellman, brought to life in a jumble of intimate details about the final decades of her life, when she was writing best-selling memoirs like “An Unfinished Woman.” Not unexpectedly, his account is Hellman-lite when dealing with the fabricated story of Julia and Hellman’s bitter legal battle with Mary McCarthy, who had denounced her on television as queen of liars. I noticed that Feibleman dumps on early biographies of Hellman for being, in his opinion, woefully inaccurate but admits that she forbade friends to cooperate. This interested me since she rebuffed all my attempts to interview her for my biography of Dorothy Parker.