[PEN-L:8703] Lillian Hellman and Dashiel Hammett

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

PBS departed from its usual antique road show, psychotherapeutic
self-discovery and investment advice programming last night to air two
fascinating profiles on Lillian Hellman and Dashiel Hammett back-to-back.

Hellman (1907-1984) was an up-and-coming writer in the film industry when
she met Hammett in 1931. The two shared a passion for left wing politics,
writing and hobnobbing with high-living sophisticates on the East and West
Coasts.

By the time Hammett met her, he was at the end of his tether artistically.
He converted whatever artistic energy he had left into working with her.
For example, her first big success was "The Children's Hour," a play about
the damage done to two teachers at a private school who are accused falsely
of having a lesbian affair. Hammett suggested the story to her, based on a
novel, and helped her to shape the plot and dialog. Hammett's notes to her,
contained in the margins of the manuscripts, are much longer than the play.

While both had left-wing sympathies during the 1920s, the Depression
heightened their commitment to radical, if not revolutionary, politics. She
wrote "Watch on the Rhine", a powerful antifascist play. Not only did she
write plays, she took significant risks on behalf of the left. During the
Spanish Civil War, she traveled to Spain and hosted a pro-Republic radio
show. On one occasion, she continued her broadcast even though the building
was being bombed.

She also made trips to Russia and developed strong ties to the government.
After Hitler's invasion began, she accompanied the Russian press corps to
the front and wrote powerful dispatches on the fighting.

After WWII, she plunged into the Progressive Party campaign which was
essentially the last gasp of the 1930s radicalization.

Hellman was not only outspoken politically, she was caustic and even rude
in social settings. Despite and perhaps because of this, she was also
greatly admired. She was also, despite being what one interviewee described
as "no oil painting", a object of desire for many men. Hammett, who looked
like a model, was drawn to her because he had never encountered such an
intelligent woman before in his life. She in turn decided the minute she
saw him that he would be her next conquest. Mailer commented that Hellman
pursued men in the fashion that some aggressive men pursue women.

When the witch hunt began, Hellman was subpoenaed to appear before HUAC,
where she refused to name names. She issued a famous press release that
stated that she would not tailor her political beliefs to satisfy those
currently in fashion. The IRS charged her with not paying back taxes and
she lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. This occurred at the same time
when ordinary professional outlets were not open to her.

As the power of the blacklist began to diminish, Hellman went back to work
as a playwright. Her last big success was "Toys in the Attic." Most of her
income following her retirement from the theatre came from college teaching
jobs. She lived in a spacious home in Provincetown, Massachusetts where she
kept a bedroom for Hammett, who she had been separated from for more than a
decade. By the 1960s, he was a shell of a man, broken down by a lifetime of
alcoholism, lung illness, political repression and clinical depression. The
two continued to share political passions and loved to entertain guests at
lavish parties. She was close to Warren Beatty, Norman Mailer, Jules
Feiffer among other celebrities on the left.

In the 1960s, she picked up a NY Times that included an article on the
major living American playwrights that included three men, but not her.
Infuriated, she decided to clear the record by writing a series of memoirs
that would document her successes. They included "An Unfinished Woman",
"Pentimento" and "Scoundrel Time". I recommend "Scoundrel Time" as one of
the best accounts of McCarthyism. It is etched in acid and memorable.

Her memoirs were all best-sellers. Not only had she come back into the
limelight as a writer, she was also enjoying prestige as a radical once
again. She spearheaded counterattacks on FBI harassment through the
prestigious Committee on Public Justice. This group put the FBI on the
defensive around the time it was interfering with the rights of antiwar
activists and black freedom fighters.

But a bitter struggle with Mary McCarthy which began in 1979 turned the
remainder of her life into a hell. McCarthy told TV interviewer that
Hellman was a complete liar, that events recorded in her memoirs were
fabricated. She was less of a hero than she painted herself to be and had
not fought McCarthyism with the kind of courage she had a reputation for.
Hellman sued McCarthy for libel and the case cost her a fortune as well as
her piece of mind. Apparently some of McCarthy's charges were identical to
those leveled by anthropologist David Stoll against Rigoberta Menchu, that
Hellman had embellished aspects of her personal history in order to make
for a more lively and compelling account. Norman Mailer says that anybody
who is trained as a writer will use fictional techniques when writing a
memoir. It would be a good subject for a PhD thesis by one of our
enterprising young Marxist scholars, to trace the whole tangled subject of
biography, truth and politics.

* * *

Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) was an eighth grade dropout from Baltimore who
ended up in San Francisco as a young man, where he took his first job as a
private detective with the Pinkerton Agency. This experience shaped his
outlook of the world, as he came to the conclusion that criminals, cops and
businessmen all operated in the same money-grubbing web of deceit and
corruption.

Unfortunately, his stint with Pinkerton also put him in conflict with the
workers movement. Paul Buhle's indispensable "Encyclopedia of the American
Left", states in its entry on Hammett that "According to some accounts, he
witnessed and even took part in the lynching of a Wobbly militant Frank
Little in Butte, Montana, in 1917."

An early bout with tuberculosis made it impossible for him to continue work
as a detective, so he tried to launch a career as a writer. His first
assignments were with pulp fiction magazines that paid a penny a word.

Hammett was the first American writer who believed that detective stories
could be an art form. His early successes with "The Maltese Falcon", the
"Glass Key" and "Red Harvest" proved he was right. As one interviewee put
it, these novels had dialog which was more engaged with the American
vernacular than anything ever written before. Hammett both used the speech
of workaday Americans, but elevated them in a way that could only be
compared to what Shakespeare did for the English language. Hammett was as
much of an innovator as Hemingway, who is undoubtedly influenced by
Hammett's style.

The other important element of Hammmett's fiction is the uncompromisingly
bleak view of society, in which nothing ever ends positively at the end of
his tale. There are no real heroes. In "The Maltese Falcon", Sam Spade acts
out of self-interest and nothing else. Perhaps one can analyze Hammett as a
source of inspiration for those Communist Party screenwriters who worked in
the "film noir" genre. Apparently Hammett himself could not write films
himself, since as Ring Lardner Jr. put it, he would sit in film studio
writing sessions to see a lost, vacant expression on Hammett's face.
Hammett had simply lost the creative urge.

Hammett relied on the kindness of lovers and friends in Hollywood in order
to make ends meet. He stayed at a hotel called the Sutton, whose desk clerk
was CP'er and aspiring "noir" novelist Nathaniel West. West made a point of
letting Hammett use a fake name and get out of paying rent for months on
end. When the hotel management caught up with him, West would warn Hammett
and let him flee only to return with a new false name as soon as the coast
was clear. He did the same thing for Trotskyist James T. Farrell, author of
"Studs Lonigan".

His last novel was "The Thin Man" which is revealed as a commentary on his
relationship with Hellman. Nick Charles, the detective, is a complete
alcoholic who can barely tend to his cases because he is preoccupied with
where he is going to get his next drink. Nora Charles, a heiress, while
supporting him financially, loves to put him down with pithy barbs. This
apparently was exactly what happened in real life as Hellman would pop her
head into Hammett's bedroom up in Provincetown, accompanied by houseguests,
and make sarcastic remarks about what a ne'er-do-well Hammett was.

In addition to converting whatever artistic energy he had left into
collaborating with Hellman, Hammett also launched a new unpaid career as a
Communist Party activist. He headed up countless committees, including one
to aid Spanish Civil War veterans. One of them is interviewed as stating
that he met Hammett in a bar (where else) and received a large cash payment
that literally saved his life. Hammett told him that he wanted to go to
Spain himself, but the CP thought he would be more useful doing this kind
of work.

Hammett did manage to get into the anti-fascist crusade during WWII as he
cajoled the army to accept him as an ordinary grunt at the age of 48. He
was stationed in Alaska during the entire war. On trips to NYC, he would
visit his old haunts in his private's uniform and get a big kick out of
being allowed in prestigious clubs and restaurants like the 21, while
officers were standing on line. The doorman would see him and welcome him
with a flourish, "Come right in, Mr. Hammett."

When the witch-hunt began, Hammett was ordered to turn over the names of
the people who donated to the various committees he was involved with. He
refused and was sentenced to 6 months in prison, which had a severe impact
on his health. He came out of prison broken both physically and emotionally.


Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)