[Marxism] Dashiell Hammett

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Guardian, Saturday September 29, 2007

The poet of collision

Dashiell Hammett knew that his day job as a detective for the anti-trade 
union Pinkerton agency made him in large part a fascist tool - his 
guilt, writes James Ellroy, was the driving force of his crime fiction

by James Ellroy

Dashiell Hammett was allegedly offered five Gs to perform a contract 
hit. It is most likely a mythic premise. He was a Pinkerton operative at 
the time. A stooge for Anaconda Copper made the offer. The intended 
victim was a union organiser. The stooge had every reason to believe 
Hammett would take the job - post-first-world-war Pinkertons were a goon 
squad paranoically fearful of all perceived reds. Hammett's mythic 
refusal is a primer on situational ethics. He knew it was wrong and 
didn't do it. He stayed with an organisation that in part suppressed 
dissent and entertained murderous offers on occasion. He stayed because 
he loved the work and figured he could chart a moral course through it. 
He was right and wrong. That disjuncture is the great theme of his work.

It explains why Hammett's vision is more complex than that of his 
near-contemporary Raymond Chandler. Chandler wrote the man he wanted to 
be - gallant and with a lively satirist's wit. Hammett wrote the man he 
feared he might be - tenuous and sceptical in all human dealings, 
corruptible and addicted to violent intrigue. He stayed on the job. The 
job defined him. His job description was in some part "Oppression". That 
made him in large part a fascist tool. He knew it. He later embraced 
Marxist thought as a rightwing toady and used leftist dialectic for 
ironic definition. Detective work both fuelled and countermanded his 
chaotic moral state and gave him something consistently engaging to do.

The critic David T Bazelon wrote of Hammett: "The core of his art is the 
masculine figure in American society. He is primarily a job holder. He 
goes at his job with a blood-thirsty determination that proceeds from an 
unwillingness to go beyond it. This relationship to the job is perhaps 
typically American. The idea of doing or not doing a job competently has 
replaced the whole larger issue of good and evil."

Hammett lived and wrote in the agitated condition this implies. 
Detective work was a job. Writing was a job. The craft within both was 
The Manoeuvre. The workday Hammett stealth-walked through a world of 
laudanum-guzzling grifters and bent cops susceptible to night sweats and 
visions. It was The Boom. The mechanised horror of the first world war 
roiled in recent memory. The Manoeuvre was steeped in drudge work 
punctuated by brief bursts of action. Read files, tail, surveil. Write 
reports, proffer bribes, track down suspects and on occasion risk 
danger. Speak the language of duplicity and male one-upmanship. Solve 
cases in a rigorously circumscribed fashion and wonder how they ramify 
beyond final-report status. Observe how crime seamlessly pervades the 
body politic and defines a whole culture. Take The Manoeuvre and exalt 
its language and turn it into popular fiction.

This presented Hammett with a second - and wildly challenging - 
disjuncture. Detective work was by nature prosaic. File prowls, blown 
tails, attenuated stakeouts. Crime stories demanded near-continuous 
action. File prowls must yield revelation. Blown tails must provide 
climax. Stakeouts must further plot. Hammett knew this going in: crime 
fiction was preposterous melodrama with a gnat-sized reality base. Never 
had there been a single case rife with multiple shootouts, homicidal 
seductresses and wall-to-wall mayhem succinctly resolved at tale's end. 
Hammett had to fit social realism into a suffocatingly contrived form. 
He did it with language - densely spare exposition and multilayered 
dialogue. He gave us a spell-binding male discourse - The Manoeuvre as 
moral crusade, the job holders' aria and torch song. Hammett's 
male-speak is the gab of the grift, the scam, the dime hustle. It's the 
poke, the probe, the veiled query, the grab for advantage. It's the 
threat, the dim sanction, the offer of friendship cloaked in betrayal. 
Plot holes pop through Hammett's stories like speed bumps. The body 
count accretes with no more horror than pratfalls in farce. It doesn't 
matter. The language is always there.

It's the language of suspicion, alienation and the big grasp for 
survival. It's a constant jolt of physical movement and conversation. 
Hammett's heroes move and talk, move and talk, move and talk. They are 
professional followers, entrappers and interlocutors. They go at 
professional liars with great zeal and find their own dissembling skills 
in no way disconcerting. It is a harrowing workday context. They have 
placed themselves in it consciously. Hammett's workday men risk peril 
for trifling remuneration and never question the choice. The great 
satisfactions of the job are the mastery of danger and the culling of 
facts to form a concluding physical truth. These facts comprise the 
closing of the case and thus the story. Hammett's men stand hollowly 
proud in their constant case conclusions. They are in no way affirmed or 
redeemed. They have survived. They are hopped-up versions of the schmuck 
clerk who got through one more shift at Wal-Mart. Their mundane world 
swirls around them and ignores them. The Continental Op is Hammett's 
ultimate workday drone. He's unnamed and unattractive. He caroms through 
Hammett's first two novels, subsumed by lunatic events. He tails and 
talks, lies and lie-detects, plays off factions. He ties up cases and 
stands dead still, fat and implacable. The next case will show up soon. 
He'll find the language for it. He'll probably survive it. He'll stand 
dead still, fat and implacable again. He'll be a bit more ground down 
and frayed at the soul. He'll go on from there.

The Op speaks the first words of Red Harvest: "I first heard Personville 
called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big 
Ship in Butte." That line stands as the tonal chord for the entire 
hardboiled canon. Hammett equates human beings with toxic substances and 
goes south from there.

Red Harvest was published in 1929. It's a coda to the Boom and a 
prophecy of the Depression. The Op witnesses and largely precipitates a 
hallucinogenic bloodbath in a Montana mining town. He pits labour 
against management and cops against crooks. He waddles and bluffs his 
way through uncountable interrogations and acclimatises himself to 
fatalities in war-zone numbers. He drinks laudanum and wakes up with a 
woman knifed to death. His actions create a momentary peace in 
Poisonville. That peace will soon shatter. It doesn't matter. He's moved 
on already - to the labyrinthine and largely incomprehensible events of 
The Dain Curse.

It is the sophomore curse novel that is exemplified by The Dain Curse. 
Whereas Red Harvest was tight and cohesive and rooted in the recent 
shock of the Anaconda Copper wars, its sequel is a hodgepodge of 
religious cult antics and baroque family lore. The story is divided 
unconvincingly between San Francisco and a small coastal town. Hammett 
wrote the book for magazine serialisation. The story runs in fits and 
starts and loopy plot turns, and jerks to an abrupt conclusion. Red 
Harvest was all dark power. The Dain Curse is all grotesquerie. It lacks 
context. The colourful geography and a few pithy characters fail to 
eclipse the what's-going-on-here?, was-this-book-written-on-booze? 
questions. The Dain Curse is recognisably Hammettian in this manner: a 
little jazz-age relic and his final ode to the Boom. The Dain Curse is a 
pure mystery novel written on contract. Red Harvest was a 
steeped-in-history novel written on spec. It displayed the advantage of 
personal history linked to politics.

Hammett views politics as crime most cancerous and genteel. It's crime 
buttressed by unspoken sanction. It's crime facilitated by a callous 
legal system. It's crime enforced by vicious cops in hobnailed boots. 
Hammett treats politics-as-crime in deadpan fashion. He assumes that the 
reader knows this: politics is The Manoeuvre as public spectacle and 
reverential shuck. That means America was a land grab. That means all 
political discourse is disingenuous. That means his workmen heroes 
refuse to soliloquise or indict - they know the game is rigged and 
they're feeding off scraps of trickle-down graft.

Hammett saw himself as complicit. The realisation may have fuelled his 
self-destructive path with alcohol and women. He was a Pinkerton. He 
signed on to work for an enforcement agency that squashed workers flat. 
He knew it was wrong. He knew he was wrong. He did the job on an ad hoc 
basis and couched his Manoeuvrings within The Manoeuvre in a personal 
moral code. The monstrous force of systemic corruption cast his code and 
his own job holder's life in extreme miniature and rendered everything 
about him small - except his guilt.

Something other than guilt drives Ned Beaumont in The Glass Key. He 
never tells us why he's doing what he's doing. His lack of explanation 
couched in constant action obscures motive and tells us that the absence 
of introspection is essential to the successful manoeuvre. The plot of 
The Glass Key is one long manoeuvre - speedballing toward a futile 
resolution. It's Hammett's flat-affect tale of grasping men who want 
things and don't know what to do with them when they get them. It's a 
short novel with epic sweep and a treatise on The Manoeuvre as one long 
grab for power.

Beaumont is a political fixer. He's a functioning drunk and a compulsive 
gambler on a losing streak. He works for a ward boss named Paul Madvig. 
Madvig runs a mid-size burg near New York City. Beaumont and Madvig have 
a tentative friendship based on interlocking needs within The Manoeuvre. 
Beaumont lives alone in a hotel suite. Madvig lives with his elderly 
mother and a 20-year-old daughter from some gone bust marriage. He wants 
to marry a senator's daughter. It's a two-front Manoeuvre: 
personal/political. The senator's son is murdered. Madvig's the key 
suspect. It's an election year. Factions want him voted out, factions 
want him re-elected. He wants the woman to solidify his political base 
and to sate an odd and gnawing tenderness within him. A gambler stiffed 
Ned Beaumont for three grand and change. They're both sleeping with the 
same woman. Ned wants his gelt. The gambler may have killed the 
senator's son. Ned sets out to grab his money and exonerate or doom 
Madvig in the process.

It's a cavalcade of Depression-era fiends in extremis. Hammett gives us 
dollar-driven DAs, psychopathic hoodlums, women poised with murderous 
intent. The story is all dialogue and movement. Horrible and heedless 
self-interest defines every character. The movement within movement 
exceeds breathlessness. People drink and light cigarettes continually. 
It's fuel for The Manoeuvre. Politicians blithely consider homicide as a 
political option. Mentions of kickbacks, bribes, pay-offs, bagmen, feral 
goons, strumpets, pimps, building contracts and quashed indictments 
abound. The Glass Key is a conversational epic. Casual talk embraces 
issues of great moral weight. The who-killed-the-senator's-son? quest 
pales behind the theme of expediency. The 
who-gets-the-senator's-daughter? quest ends on a bleak footnote. The 
survivors retain their survival skills in a diminished fashion. Their 
journey has stained them in ways they cannot comprehend and has impeded 
their shots at successful future Manoeuvres. They'll go on anyway. The 
game is fixed and that's what they do.

The Glass Key is Hammett's last great work of fiction. It's a model of 
economical storytelling. It's sombre and invigorating in equal measure. 
It's a predator's vision of the American jungle, and a book with a deep 
and troubled love for America - this huckster's paradise - itself. 
Hammett was the great poet of the great American collision - personal 
honour and corruption, opportunity and fatality.

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