3. Cakewalk dance with Peter Feibleman

Lillian and Peter Feibleman first met in 1940 when Peter was 10 years old and Lillian was 35. Lillian had been invited to the party as a friend of Peter's mother.

LILLY: How old are you?
CUFF: Only ten.
LILLY: I don't know what you mean by "only." Ten's not so young.
CUFF: It's n-not?
LILLY: It's not.
- from Act One of "Cakewalk"

When Peter was invited to Lillian's house in Martha’s Vineyard in the early 1960s, he started to build a close friendship as depicted in the Cakewalk. Yes, these two strange amusing communal lives began here.

Lillian was a teacher for Peter as well as Hammett was for her. She encouraged him to write a new book by disclosing everything to overcome trauma in his childhood. Her advice helped him to come out of slump, and he published later "The Columbus Tree" about Spain.
At that time, Lillian had stopped writing a play, but one day she read the article in The Times;

"The great American playwrights who are still active, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee" - no mention of me. I'm not dead yet, but I'll have to prove it. I'd like to start the memoir in New Orleans.  from "Cakewalk"

She wrote "An Unfinished Woman" (1969), "Pentiment" (1973), "Scoundrel time" (1976) and "Maybe" (1980), and they were a great success.

These memoirs provoked much controversy by Diana Trilling, Muriel Gardiner, Norman Podhoretz and others. Especially Mary McCarthy was famously said of Lillian on the Dick Cavett television show in 1979, “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” Ironically, their attacks on her greatly contributed to remain Lillian as a legendary writer.

According to the article of Washington Post, Lillian won the first round of the suit when a New York state judge ruled that she was not a public figure, which allowed the suit to go forward, a judgment that McCarthy appealed. Lillian's death means that the lawsuit is over. Ephraim London, Lillian's attorney, said "It wasn't the money she cared about. In fact we offered early on to drop it if McCarthy would apologize. But she refused . . . We agreed that if we won the verdict, we would both get a car and a chauffeur."

Peter described her new form of memoirs in Page 148 of  "LILLY: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman":

"Lillian was in the process of dramatizing her life. She brought to the business of memory the art of fiction and she was begining to forge for herself a new form. Because I was interested in what she was doing it never occurred to me at the time that people would take all the details of the story for literal truth, since it seemed so clear that she was fusing fact with fiction. Lillian wrote about that in the last of the four memoirs, MAYBE, whose title carries the meaning of the whole. Shortly after MAYBE was published and not long before she died, Lilly remarked to a friend that she'd discovered a new form for herself in writing, a form that was neither fiction nor memory but a combination of both, which is probably what most recollection is. "I've been overpraised for the books," she said, "I'll be attacked too hard to make up for it - but maybe one day they'll be read for what they are."

Despite almost losing sight with glaucoma and embedding pacemakers and relying on wheelchairs, she never gave up writing until her last moment.

"Lillian went to the Vineyard at the beginning of the summer and waited for me there. The galleys were held up an extra few days at the publisher's, too late to bring them for her birthday, and I called to tell her so.

"You can't be late," Lilly said.

I told her it was only a matter of days.

"You don't understand," she said, "I want to work, I want to work, I want to work...""
- from "LILLY: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman" written by Peter Feibleman

Peter could pick up the galleys in time to catch an earlier flight but she died of cardiac arrest on June 30th 1984 before his arrival.

The nurse said "she took one of my hands and held it...so affectionate, you know - and then she began to squeeze my hand very hard - very, very hard - and she said: 'I think you and I are going to get along just fine,' Then she died."

Lillian was a writer until her last moment. I believe she did break "the worst case of writer's block."

Here's some part of graveside eulogy by John Hersey in "LILLY: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman."

 "Her inmost fire, though, was not sensual. It was in the mind. It was a rage of the mind against the unfairness of death. In everything she wrote, and in her daily life, she fought against slander, greed, hypocrisy, cruelty and everything shabby and second-rate and dangerous in those in power. She was very, very angry at death - and not just at the end. Death became her enemy years ago, when Hammett died, and this enemy made her even more vibrant and alive.

What could calm this anger? Only the sea, and money, and love. Anyone who gave her the slightest flicker of love got in return a radiance of laughter and fun that was unbelievably enjoyable; this was the bright other face of the anger.

Dear Lillian, you are a finished woman, now. I mean "finished" in its better sense. You shone with a high finish of integrity, decency, uprightness. You have given us this anger to remember and to use in a bad world. We thank you, we honor you, and we all say good-bye to you now with a love that should calm that anger of yours forever."