Hella
David's American fiancée, in Europe to become someone other than the woman she was expected to be, and away in Spain deciding whether to marry him.
To stop drifting and belong to someone. She puts it without any softening the night she comes back: "I guess I just want a man to come home to me every night… I want to start having babies. In a way, it's really all I'm good for."
The book
At a glance
- David's fiancée — an American living in Paris, away in Spain for most of the story
- Hella Lincoln, of Minneapolis. Her father is a corporation lawyer
- To study painting, then found out she was not a painter
- Barcelona, Mallorca and Seville, deciding whether to marry David
- Jacques, on sight and permanently — "I always feel a cold wind go over me"
- Two years younger than David
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeHella Lincoln is an American woman from Minneapolis, engaged to the novel's narrator, David. Her father is a corporation lawyer. She came to Europe some years earlier to study painting, discovered she was not a painter, and stayed on in Paris anyway.
She spends most of the book offstage. David proposed before she left for Spain, she laughed and said she would have to go away and think about it, and she is still travelling when he meets Giovanni. She reaches Paris roughly two-thirds of the way through, and the last part of the novel belongs to her as much as to anyone.
She is funny, impatient and clear-sighted about everything except the one thing she needs to know. Baldwin gives her the novel's flattest statements about what a woman of her generation was permitted to want, and lets her say them about herself.
How the book draws them
- How they metDavid tells it in the first pages, and he is not flattering about either of them. He met her in a bar in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where "she was drinking and watching" the men, "and that was why I liked her, I thought she would be fun to have fun with." He adds that he is not sure it ever meant more than that to either of them.
- The letter from SpainShe writes from Mallorca, cheerful and sharp, about pensioned widows guzzling drinks and making eyes at anything in trousers. Then the joke turns on her: "I said to myself, Hella, my girl, take a good look. You may be looking at your future." That is the sentence in which she decides to marry him.
- Her argument about men and womenWalking through Paris she tells David that a woman cannot begin to be herself until she is at the mercy of some unshaven stranger, and that a man stays a stranger permanently: "For a woman, I think a man is always a stranger. And there's something awful about being at the mercy of a stranger." He laughs at it. She is describing, accurately, the next six months of her life.
- What she notices about GiovanniShe meets him once, briefly and by accident, in a bookshop. Later that night, in bed, she keeps returning to him: "He's very beautiful, as a matter of fact. But there's something in that face — so old-fashioned." She also gets there well before David admits it, telling him plainly, months later, "He was in love with you. Why didn't you tell me that? Or didn't you know it?"
- The offer she makesIn the house in the south, watching David withdraw and not knowing why, she offers to become smaller in exchange for being kept: "I'll wear my hair long, I'll give up cigarettes, I'll throw away the books." Then, touching his face, "Don't throw me back into the sea, David. Let me stay here with you." He stands perfectly still and feels nothing.
- How she takes the truthWhen she finally learns what has been wrong she does not rage at first. She reserves her hardest line for herself, and for how long she waited to be told: "But I knew. This is what makes me so ashamed. I knew it every time you looked at me. I knew it every time we went to bed. If only you had told me the truth then."