Re: [Marxism] Dashiell Hammett

[Greg McDonald <sabocat59@xxxxxxx>]

I like the way "Dash" was portrayed in the movie "Julia", in terms of  
his relationship with Liliian Hellman , as mentor and editor of her  
plays and as an emotional support after Lillian learns of Julia's  
death at the hands of the nazis.

I don't think Elroy's piece does justice to Hammett's communist  
conversion in the thirties, and his refusal to name names in the  
'50's, but then it was concerned with Hammett's fiction and the force  
behind it, the guilt of being involved directly with the repression  
against the IWW and obliquely with the murder of Frank Little at the  
behest of Anaconda Copper as a Pinkerton in Montana, obviously the  
subject matter behind "Red Harvest".

In any event, the piece below fills out the biographical details.

Greg McDonald


Dashiell Hammett's legacy lies not only in his writing, but in his  
living -- rough, wild and on the edge

Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, February 7, 2005


He was a dashing, elusive figure who rose from rural working-class  
roots to become one of the best paid and most celebrated American  
writers of the 1930s. A free-spending sybarite who nearly drank  
himself to death before putting down the bottle in '48, he died broke  
and mostly forgotten in 1961 at the age of 66.

Thirty-three years earlier, he sat at the kitchen table in his Post  
Street apartment, writing the book that would up the ante for the  
detective novel. Steeped in the foggy mystery of the sin-loving city  
on the Pacific edge of the continent, "The Maltese Falcon'' made  
Dashiell Hammett's name. Published on Valentine's Day 75 years ago,  
it's a signal work of American fiction as revered as "Huckleberry  
Finn'' or "The Sun Also Rises.''

The rail-thin man with the white hair and black mustache wrote four  
of his five novels in San Francisco in the 1920s. But it was  
Hammett's rough-and- tumble experiences as a private detective before  
coming here -- consorting with cops and crooks and duplicitous  
officials, miners, vigilantes and the rich men who pulled the strings  
-- that shaped the way he and his tough fictional heroes saw the  
world: It was a corrupt place run by ruthless people, to be navigated  
with cunning and adherence to one's own ethical code.

The things Hammett saw as a Pinkerton operative also helped make him  
a Marxist. A distinctly American Marxist. He was an upbeat, patriotic  
man who enlisted in the Army during both world wars and stuck to the  
ideals of equality and justice, despite the going-over he got from  
the government during the commie witch hunts of the early '50s, when  
he was jailed and blacklisted. Never one to bellyache, he accepted  
his fate with the steely grace and ironic humor with which he took  
everything chance had brought him.

He was born Samuel Dashiell Hammett on his father's family farm in  
Maryland in 1894. His father was an alcoholic womanizer who worked as  
a watchman, a salesman and at other short-lived occupations. At 14,  
Hammett dropped out of Baltimore's Polytechnic high to help support  
the family (both sides of which traced their American lineage back to  
the 1700s). He worked as a messenger for the B&O Railroad, where he  
developed a taste for gambling, booze and hookers. Then he got a job  
as a clerk with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. With his  
brains and quiet competence, Hammett was promoted and trained in the  
stealthy trade of the private eye by James Wright, a squat little man  
on whom he based the Continental Op, the dogged detective of his  
early stories.

Around 1917, Hammett was sent to Montana, where he infiltrated the  
ranks of striking copper miners. He and other Pinkertons were  
apparently offered $5, 000, a bloody fortune at the time, to help  
kill Frank Little, the Wobbly (Industrial Workers of the World)  
leader organizing the miners. Little was lynched from a Butte train  
trestle without Hammett's help.

It was then, "perhaps at the moment he was asked to murder Frank  
Little, or perhaps at the moment that he learned that Little had been  
killed, possibly by other Pinkerton men, Hammett saw that the actions  
of the guards and the guarded, of the detective and the man he's  
stalking, are reflexes of the same sensibility, on the fringe where  
murderers and thieves live,'' wrote San Francisco novelist Diane  
Johnson in her rich 1983 Hammett biography.

"He saw that he himself was on the fringe or might be, in his present  
line of work, and was expected to be, according to a kind of oath of  
fealty that he and other Pinkerton men took,'' Johnson continued. "He  
also learned something of the lives of poor miners, whose wretched  
strikes the Pinkerton people were hired to prevent, and about the  
lies of mine owners. Those things were to sit in the back of his mind.''

They came to the fore nine years later in San Francisco, as Hammett  
sat at the typewriter pecking out his first his novel,  
"Poisonville,'' a darkly comic tale that drew on his Montana  
experiences. The title was changed to "Red Harvest'' when Knopf  
published it in '27. The book was serialized in Black Mask, the pulp  
magazine that had published Hammett's stories since 1923 and  
serialized "The Maltese Falcon.''

Hammett had come here in '21, sick with tuberculosis. The  
debilitating disease had been diagnosed when he was hospitalized with  
the deadly Spanish flu while serving stateside in the Army ambulance  
corps during World War I. After his discharge, he went back to  
Pinkerton and transferred west to Spokane. But he fell ill again and  
entered the Public Health Service hospital in Tacoma. He met a nurse  
there named Josephine Dolan, and they fell in love.

Hammett went off to a San Diego hospital that treated "lungers.'' He  
smoked and read -- he'd tackled Kant at 13 and read everything from  
James and Dostoevsky to books on physics and birdsong -- and caroused  
in Tijuana. The guys who laid in bed, he said, seemed to die sooner.  
Josephine wrote saying she was pregnant. He wrote back proposing  
marriage. They met in San Francisco, got hitched at St. Mary's  
Cathedral in July of '21 and moved into a little apartment on Eddy  
Street above a bootlegging operation. In October, Mary, he first of  
their two daughters, was born.

Hammett briefly resumed his Pinkerton career until he became too sick  
to spend nights in the frigid fog tailing some mark. One of his last  
jobs was snooping for the defense in the scandalous case of Roscoe  
Fatty Arbuckle, the actor accused of raping and crushing to death a  
party girl named Virginia Rapp at the St. Francis (Hammett thought  
Arbuckle was framed by the district attorney).

He scuffled for work -- the tiny disability pension he got from the  
Veterans Bureau was the source of a yearslong epistolary battle that  
fueled his disdain for authority -- before he got an advertising job  
at Samuels Jewelry. He found a friend in the avuncular Albert  
Samuels, with whom he lunched at John's Grill and to whom he  
dedicated "The Dain Curse.'' A shy man who loosened up after a few  
snorts of whiskey, Hammett enjoyed the ad game. But the TB acted up  
again. After he was found unconscious at the Market Street store  
lying in a pool of blood, he had to quit.

"He was so sick as a young man, he thought he was going to die,''  
says Hammett's younger daughter, Jo, a 78-year-old who lives in the  
Orange County town of Cypress. "I think his writing saved him.''

In 1926, the year Jo was born, a nurse advised Hammett to live apart  
from Josephine and the kids so as not to infect them. He rented a  
little house for them in Fairfax and took the ferry over to Marin  
every Sunday to visit. He found the arrangement conducive to writing  
and conducting his affairs. He never lived with his family again, but  
supported them until the money ran out 30 years later, and remained  
close (the Hammetts were divorced in 1937).

His fortunes on the rise, Hammett said so long to San Francisco in  
'29. He moved his family to Los Angeles, where his wife had  
relatives, and left for New York with his mistress, writer Nell  
Martin, to whom he dedicated his fourth novel, "The Glass Key.''  
Within a year, she was history.

After the success of "The Maltese Falcon,'' Hammett was lured to  
Hollywood, where he lived lavishly, hanging out with people like  
Harpo Marx, Jean Harlow and S.J. Perelman. And, like fellow writers  
F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, he became a stellar drunk.  
He spent most of the '30s alternately living in New York and  
Hollywood, a loathsome but lucrative place where his books were made  
into movies and where he wrote screenplays for films like "City  
Streets'' and one of the movies based on what turned out to be his  
last book, "The Thin Man.'' He responded to the greed and phoniness  
of Tinsel Town -- and to the writer's block that stymied his ambition  
to go beyond the detective genre -- by getting sloshed.

"So I'm a bum -- so what's done of the book looks terrible -- so I'm  
out here drowning my shame in MGM money for 10 weeks,'' Hammett wrote  
in '34 to publisher Alfred Knopf, who was eager for the new novel  
that never appeared. He blew his money on hotel suites and fine  
clothes, expensive gifts for his family and lady friends, on favored  
pastimes like "the races, poker and whores, '' as Johnson put it  
(Hammett was acquainted with the clap and its painful pre- penicillin  
treatment). He loaned loads of money to people who rarely paid him back.

"My father was generous to a crazy fault,'' says Jo Hammett, who  
attributes his reckless ways to his early poverty and illness. "He  
came from a poor family, and getting all that money was  
inconceivable. It must've been impossible to handle. Well, he didn't  
handle it very well. He never planned for the future. Why would he,  
when he wasn't going to have any?''

He had a long future with Lillian Hellman, whom he met a few months  
after hitting Hollywood. She was a smart, stylish MGM script reader  
married to screenwriter Arthur Kober. According to biographer Richard  
Layman, Hammett and Hellman met at a party at producer Daryl Zanuck's  
house, left together and remained lifelong companions. They both had  
other lovers and lived separate lives, but their bond was never  
broken. She was there till the final curtain and was largely  
responsible for reviving his reputation -- despite her penchant for  
stretching the truth and casting herself center stage -- in the years  
after his death.

Hellman was the model for Nora Charles, the rich, witty heroine of  
"The Thin Man,'' an instant hit when it came out in '34. The year  
before, Hammett suggested Hellman write a play based on a lesbian  
scandal at a Scottish girls school. It became "The Children's Hour,''  
which made Hellman's name.

Hammett edited many of her plays (and wrote the screenplay for the  
1943 movie version of her "Watch on the Rhine''), but couldn't finish  
the mainstream novels he labored at for decades. A 20,000-word  
fragment of his autobiographical novel "Tulip'' was published  
posthumously. Johnson, whose early work, particularly her suspense  
novel "The Shadow Knows,'' was influenced by Hammett's lean,  
unmannered prose, found it turgid.

"He wanted to get out of the detective genre and be a more serious  
literary novelist, and he failed in that," said Johnson, on the phone  
from her Paris home. "That was a source of great anguish to him.''

The booze obviously didn't help. It "turned my father maudlin and  
sarcastic -- mean,'' Jo Hammett wrote in her frank and loving memoir,  
"A Daughter Remembers,'' recalling her father and sister getting  
smashed at tony spots like the Stork Club. "I couldn't understand how  
anyone so funny and kind could turn so awful; why a man who cared so  
much for his privacy and dignity so much could trash them.''

But the good times made up for all that. "He was just so much fun to  
be with, so full of knowledge, and he looked at everything so  
amusingly,'' she said. "He was an intensely private person. No one  
will ever explain him.''

It took everyone by surprise when Hammett, who became a Communist in  
the '30s and worked for antifascist and civil rights causes, enlisted  
in the U.S. Army in 1942. He was a skinny, 48-year-old alcoholic with  
a history of TB. They took him anyway. He spent most of the next  
three years serving in the frozen isolation of the Aleutian Islands,  
where he liked the landscape's barren beauty and the regimen of  
military life. Among other things, he edited an Army newspaper whose  
staff included a young GI named Bernard Kalb, who later became a TV  
news correspondent.

"Here was this giant of an author who took a bunch of semiliterate  
kids and turned them into amateur newsmen,'' Kalb recalled. He can  
still picture the quiet gent with the "shock of white hair who  
must've weighed 35 pounds,'' lying supine on a table in a cramped  
Quonset hut, reading a book or cooking up pointed captions to  
cartoons about life on the North Pacific front. The man they called  
Sam or Pop sometimes read aloud parts of Hellman's letters from  
Moscow, where she covered the war for Collier's.

After the war, the Russian allies became the enemy, and Hammett was  
one of many prominent leftists punished for their politics during the  
red-baiting hysteria of the late '40s and '50s. He lost his income  
when radio programs based on his characters were dropped from the  
air, and his royalties were blocked by a $140,000 tax lien.

Hammett was president of the Civil Rights Congress, which fought  
against the lynching of blacks and defended Communist Party members  
charged with violating the Smith Act, the 1940 alien-registration law  
aimed at people accused of advocating the overthrow of the U.S.  
government.

In 1949, 11 Communist leaders were convicted of violating the Smith  
Act. They were bailed out by the Civil Rights Congress' bail fund  
committee, which Hammett chaired. When they lost the final appeal in  
'51, four of the men jumped bail. Hammett was summoned to federal  
court, where he refused to testify about them or the bail fund  
contributors. He believed freedom of speech included the right to  
silence. On his lawyers' advice, Hammett took the Fifth Amendment. He  
was found in contempt of court and sentenced to six months in jail.

Hammett did most of his time at the federal pen in Ashland, Ky.,  
where he cleaned toilets and mopped floors, read Gogol and doted over  
photographs of his first grandchild, Jo's newborn, Ann. His spirit  
was intact but his health was shot when he came out of jail.

In 1953, Hammett was summoned by the infamous Sen. Joseph McCarthy to  
testify before the Senate Committee on Government Operations about  
books by Communist writers. Nothing came of it. The year before, he'd  
had to give up his Greenwich Village apartment. He moved to a cottage  
on the Katonah, N.Y., property of his friends Sam and Helen Rosen,  
where he lived for five years. It wasn't far from Hellman's  
Hardscrabble Farm, where Hammett had spent happy times, hunting and  
fishing as he'd done as a boy. In '55, he had a heart attack.

"I am concentrating on my health. I am learning to be a  
hypochondriac,'' he told an English reporter, quoted in Johnson's  
book, two years later. "I stopped writing because I found I was  
repeating myself. It is the beginning of the end when you discover  
you have style.''

The end came in January 1961, when Hammett, who'd been living at  
Hellman's Upper East Side Manhattan apartment, died at Lenox Hill  
Hospital. He'd been suffering with lung cancer and emphysema, but as  
always, kept his pain to himself.

"I can stand anything I've got to stand,'' says Ned Beaumont, the  
hero of "The Glass Key.'' That could've been Hammett's motto, his  
daughter said. "The idea of somebody snooping around into his life  
would've made him unhappy,'' said Jo, whose father was buried at  
Arlington National Cemetery over the objections of J. Edgar Hoover.  
But he'd be pleased people still read him.

"He very much wanted to be remembered as an American writer. He was  
always very proud of his heritage, and it shows in his treatment of  
the language. Few people have written American speech as well as he  
did. He and Mark Twain. He's in good company.''


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