vanessa redgrave

â€SI think I have always known about my memory: I knew when it is to be trusted and when some dream or fantasy entered on the life, and the dream, the need of dream, led to distortion of what happened.

And so I knew early that the rampage angers of an early child were distorted nightmares of reality. But I trust absolutely what I remember about Julia.

There are women who reach a perfect time of life, when the face will never again be as good, the body never as graceful or as powerful. It had happened that year to Julia, but she was no more conscious of it than she had been of being a beautiful child.”

This was written by Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) in a story called Julia, which later became the movie with Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda. It is not technically a poem but is poetic like much of her writing.

Hellman was in a relationship for 30 years with Dashiell Hammett who wrote the detective novels The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, which also became Hollywood movies. Hellman was his inspiration for Nora Charles in The Thin Man series.