Memories

By Paul Gray

MAYBE by Lillian Hellman

Little, Brown; 106 pages; $7.95

This slim book calls itself a story and reads like a fourth installment of Playwright Lillian Hellman's memoirs. In the latter guise, it is not a sequel but a haunting. Its 92 pages of actual text skip glancingly over the life already set forth in An Unfinished Woman (1969), Pentimento (1973) and Scoundrel Time (1976). This time, though, Hellman seems less interested in setting her record straight than in wondering whether such a task is possible at all. She writes: "So much of what you had counted on as a solid wall of convictions now seems on bad nights, or in sickness, or just weakness, no longer made of much that can be leaned against. It is then that one can barely place oneself in time."

Instead of succumbing to this uncertainty, Hellman illustrates it. For her ostensible subject, she chooses Sarah Cameron, a rich, frivolous American woman who has dropped briefly into Hellman's life at widely separated times and places: Rome, rural France, Hollywood, Harlem. She is evidently pseudonymous and may be fictional as well. It hardly matters here. What matters to Hellman is that Sarah's story seems beyond the author's powers to tell. "Why am I writing about Sarah?" she wonders. "I really only began to think about her a few years ago, and then not often. Although I always rather liked her, she is of no importance to my life and never was." If authors truly succeed by writing what they know, Hellman seems to be courting failure.

Yet she succeeds, not in bringing Sarah Cameron to life but in capturing an altogether different subject: the enigma of experiences filtered through memory. As if dropping a clue, Hellman mentions Proust in passing. Her method, as it turns out, is the opposite of his. She extracts drama from the act of forgetting: "As time and much of life has passed, my memory--which for the purpose of this tale has kept me awake sorting out what I am certain of, what maybe I added to what, because I didn't see or know the people--won't supply what I need to know.'' Because they have been struggled for, the snippets of the past reclaimed for the narrative seem weightier than they should Sarah Cameron never appears to be much more substantial than a wraith, even, apparently, to those much closer to her than

Hellman. The reports of her death may have been exaggerated. Evidence is presented that Sarah lives on, the beneficiary of a life-insurance scam. She is important to the author only because she survives in the mind, one ghost among many.

Maybe tantalizes, but it does not tease.

Hellman convincingly portrays herself as someone who would tell more if she only knew more. Pose or not, the stratagem works and the surface holds. People meet, get drunk together, exchange pleasantries or insults, separate, come to various bad or unhappy ends. Mobsters mix with writers, money is thrown around, beauty saves the last waltz for evil. All this is transmitted through a literary imagination clearly shaped by the 1930s. The wastrels and addled debutantes whom Hellman keeps bumping into could have been, perhaps were, created by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

When she describes a sensuous experience, like going swimming, Hellman reaches for her Hemingway: "The water was the right temperature, everything was good, everything was better." She has kept a large vocabulary out of Dashiell Hammett, her longtime companion, and gang ster films. "Stuff' and "junk" are all-purpose nouns; a restaurant is a "steak joint" or a "fish dump."

Those who have been annoyed by such mannerisms in the past may find them less objectionable here. They not only convey the period that Hellman strains to retrieve, but their tough-gal veneer is offset by the sadness and vulnerability of the woman within.

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