Face-to-Face: Dashiell Hammett portrait

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David C. Ward: One of America's most successful cultural exports - along with abstract expressionism, jazz, and probably the french fry - is the detective novel.

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In particular, the American revolutionizing of it into an entirely new genre separate from the European tradition where it began out of the gothic tradition, really, that comes from Frankenstein and Dracula, kind of a modified horror mov- uh, horror book.

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Um, Edgar Allen Poe is probably the author of the first detective novel - Murder on the Rue Morgue - which has very strongly gothic elements which fit totally into Poe's own gothic, rather morbid style.

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But those early detective novels, and most of them up to the 20th century, relied on a puzzle - there was usually a code, it was a case of mistaken identity - it was very much a process,

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almost a descendant- a descent from the Enlightenment, that there was something that you had to figure out, you had to discover knowledge and it was based on the accumulation of information.

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Uh, Conan Doyle's 'Sherlock Holmes' is the most famous of those, in which there's a puzzle which he has to logically unravel with the help of the faithful Dr. Watson.

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[[ambient noise]] Um, wonder what that is?

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Um, and that is still a tradition in England-- if you read the novels of Agatha Christie there's very much a kind of contrived situation, the most famous of which are murders which occur in a locked room in which it appears impossible that it could have ever been committed, let alone solved.

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Well what happens in America is, there's a fusion between what essentially is the western genre of the cowboy, the sheriff, the man on the frontier avenging the rights and wrongs, and enforcing the rights of society—

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Because in America— there's a great- there's this element of individualism, as opposed to Conan Doyle whose Holmes *works* with the police, and America you have this indivi— [[individualistic, cut off]]

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David C. Ward: individualistic tradition in which authority is distrusted as much as the criminal element.

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And the detective in America works his way - walks the line as it were - between the criminal society (the world in the streets) and the world of justice which is not being fulfilled by the people who should be fulfilling it.

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And Dashiell Hammett, his career spanning - born in 1894 died 1961 - a brief 7 to 10 year literary career, is considered widely as the founder of the modern so-called hard-boiled noir detective. The man in the streets.

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His early career, informed by Hammett's own work as a Pinkerton detective between 1915 and 1921, in which he piled up a tremendous storehouse of knowledge - he kept a notebook of things that he found that were curious about the criminal world and the world of the courts.

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He writes in it at one point - he had to find a man who had stolen a Ferris wheel - not just find the man, he had to find the Ferris wheel.

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Um, he describes other oddities - the man who went to prison and whose wife- he left his wife when he got out because while he was in jail she had learned to smoke.

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Another man - he was working in the South - a sheriff who left him a detailed description down to the lapel pin of someone he was trying to catch - a murderer or an armed robber - but the sheriff forgot to tell him he only had one arm.

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So there's this element of the comic - the tragicomic, the Grand Guignol, this human comedy - which Hammett's usually anonymous hero goes out into the streets to try and restore justice to a world which is completely disordered.

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Hammett was born on the eastern shore of Maryland from an old colonial family - it's Samuel Dashiell Hammett - the Dashiell is really a family name - he was known as "Sam Dash", or "Dashell".

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Um, he kicked around - the family was largely impoverished - he kicked around in a bunch of jobs, didn't-never completed college, technical college in—

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David C. Ward: —Baltimore. And in 1915 he answers an ad - a blind ad for somebody who is looking for adventure, willing to travel, and is quick-witted - he applies and it turns out that he's applied to the Pinkerton Detective Agency, the most famous- "The Eye that Never Sleeps", if you'll remember.

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Now the Pinkertons - I don't want to go off too far on this because it's an incredibly sordid tale in and of itself - by 1915 had a rather checkered reputation—

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—which was - that in addition to doing the ordinary work of getting evidence in divorce and industrial espionage cases - they were well-known for being strike-breakers.

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They were known as the "arm of industrial capitalism" and the most famous example of that is in 1886 at Homestead Steel strike where the owners, in Pittsburgh of the U.S. Steel Company, hire the Pinkertons who used a machine on a barge to kill 26 strikers. So their career is more than a little bit checkered.

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By 1915 - although we tend to forget that the Socialist Party was very strong in the United States, labor radicalism was still in the ascension - and this supposedly caused a huge- what was the beginning of Hammett's radicalism because he worked with the Pinkertons from 1915 to the early 1920s—

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—um, and this is where Hammett's career gets a little murky in a way that I don't feel it's been well-served by his biographers—

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—because, on the one hand he's living this adventurous life: riding the rails looking for Ferris wheels—

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—on the other hand he's involved because he's in the West, um, the Socialist Party and the new International Workers of the World, the I.W.W., is very strong in the mining and farming communities of Idaho, the Dakotas, Wyoming, and California—

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—he's also running up against this sense of injustice with these people being disenfranchised.

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And the story is - by his lover and long-time companion, Lillian Hellman - that around about 1917 he was given an offer of between 5 or 10,000 dollars to kill Frank-assassinate Frank Little, the I.W.W. leader—

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David C. Ward: —leader in Butte, Montana. Hammett supposedly, well like we know he refused.

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Um, although Little was later lynched, uh, was killed - although not necessarily by a Pinkerton.

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And this was the beginning of Hammett's radicalism, according to Hellman.

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What that doesn't explain is that he stayed with the Pinkertons for several more years.

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So he's storing up his sense of injustice - but he clearly is dissatisfied, he's dissatisfied where he is in life, as well.

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And while he's kicking around, looking for one-armed men, he begins to write for the flourishing pulp fiction novels-- I'm sorry um, magazines of the day.

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I mean, remember we only have radio as entertainment. The magazine industry was, was tremendously important. And it, it covered all kinds of genres.

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And he begins to send in stories to The Smart Set, which is a sophisticated magazine and more importantly Black Mask, which is the leading detective mystery magazine.

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And he's successful right off the bat. And in a period between 1923 roughly and 1934 he writes hundreds of stories.

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And in an amazing period of creativity between 1929 and 1934 he writes and publishes five novels.

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Among which is the Maltese Falcon, probably the most successful early and, and still at the top of the heap when it comes to quality.

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Uh, four other novels one of whi-, all of which or most of which have been made into films -

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the most famous of the film versions is the Thin Man, which you have may have seen,

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which is the very sophisticated, alcoholic couple of Nick and Nora Charles and their dog, Asta pursuing um, criminals in a rather playboy-ish fashion.

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Um, Hammett writes these in a storm of creative fury. Um, and he stops in 1934. Writes nothing more. Uh, it's, it's, it's largely inexplicable.

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In 1918 he had broken his career with the Pinkertons to enlist in the army. And in- while in the the army he was str-

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David C. Ward: —struck down by the incredible Spanish influenza pandemic which struck that year,

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which killed more than 16 million people worldwide.

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And that permanently impaired his health- he was in tuberculosis clinics for the rest of his life.

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His natural, uh, the condition of tuberculosis was exacerbated, as you'll see, with his non-stop chain-smoking habit.

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I don't like to throw around the word 'alcoholic' but he drank continually, all of that exacerbated his health.

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It probably helped to decide him to become a writer in addition to his own ambitions,

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but, it messed him up - in some way or another - that he was unable, because of his sickness,

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to participate fully in the world that he was writing about.

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It combined his sen- combined with that- it exacerbated his sense of being an outsider.

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Hammett, in his novels, "The Maltese Falcon" with Sam Spade, is the most important—

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sets up this almost amoral world, in which there are people acting totally from their own self interests.

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Self interests which they disguise under layers and layers of other self deceptions and other public deceptions.

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And he, uh-and Sam Spade - the name is not accidental - Spade, the man who digs,

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has to restore order to a world which has been defused-which has been disturbed because his partner has been killed.

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And he hates-he doesn't like his partner, he's been having an affair with the partner's wife,

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but the point is that if your partner is killed, you have to do something about it.

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There's a personal order that has to be restored.

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And as I said at the outset, Spade and Hammett had no trust for authority either.

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You could not - in "The Maltese Falcon" or in any other of his novels - count on the authorities.

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In "The Dain Curse", the character Ned Beaumont -

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if you know the film, the Coen brothers film "Miller's Crossing", that's loosely based on that book, which had Gabriel Byrne as Ned Beaumont.

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Ned Beaumont, as well, he's corrupt. He's a—

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David C. Ward: —he's a fixer. He's sexy as hell and attractive - anybody, any man would want to be him.

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Uh, but none-the-less he knows that something is out of kilter and he has to restore it because the institutions won't do it for him--

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the police, and the politicians, and the criminals are all more-or-less equally corrupt.

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And there's this sense in Hammett, of searching for that equipoise, that notion that you can turn society, it's not a puzzle, but it's a social system that always needs balancing.

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And faced with that ideology - coupled with his experiences with the Pinkertons um, - I had the sense that Hammett in many ways, was constantly searching for a perfect society whether it's small or large in which, when which there would be an element of order.

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He sought it in some way with the Pinkertons, realized he couldn't because of the strike breaking propensities.

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He sought it in society um, he becomes increasingly radicalized during the 1930s particularly over the issue of the Spanish Civil War.

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Um, and fighting on the side of the Loyalists.

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Um, he abandons his first wife and takes up with Lillian Hellman in 1931.

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Um, this picture is take-, is painted when he is riding high.

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It's 1937 - he's working in Hollywood - his books are all making a lot of money.

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Uh, they're all being made into movies and yet there's something about this that's very artificial to me.

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To me this looks like it's a picture of like a machine, or a car, or something, it's a picture that I don't think—

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Portraits always disguise as much as they uncover and in this one there's an element of repression, of tightly "wrappedness" to it. He's wearing this kind of strange double-breasted tweed jacket.

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He's all buttoned up. His hair is usually much more disheveled than that. He's very severe.

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Although you can see how thin he is, I mean, he - the tuberculosis just ate away at him and ultimately kills him.

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And I think inadvertently, or possibly intentionally, the portraitist has caught an element here, of Hammett trying to hold himself together.

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He holds himself together by catching criminals he gives—

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David C. Ward: —himself a task, and increasingly, particularly Lillian Hellman, is also very politically engaged.

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He stops writing for reasons that we still don't know - although he seems to have transferred his creative urge to Hellman, working with her on her very successful plays that start in 1935, and her career.

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It may be significant that after they broke up um, and after he died, they-she never wrote a play again.

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It was only when Hammett was essentially her play-doctor that she got stuff done.

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So, what Hammett does - working his way through this sense of injustice, this sense in the foreign policy - Hellman oriented towards-him towards Europe, foreign policy.

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And after, during and after the war, he joins the Communist Party USA— again this notion of fighting for the underdog, fighting um, against fascism in particular.

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But more widely than that I think there was, at least for Hammett personally, there's the element here that he really wanted to belong to something that he never felt that he had.

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This rootless childhood, this rootless occupation, a career as a writer that comes and goes,

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and then this strange career in the netherworld of American communism, which is, at the one hand, at one point when we're fighting with Stalin, it's-it's more or less tolerated,

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but by after the war - after 1945 - communism, as we know, becomes the "red menace".

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We're fighting Stalin, being a member of the communist party USA becomes illegal.

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Hammett gets himself more and more involved, not so much I think um,

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because of any particular interesting communist ideology, although he read a lot of the literature, he was self-taught and very well-read,

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but I think it really was the sense that he was standing up for the little guy.

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But more than that, I think it was the sense that he had a- got a feeling of fellowship out of it.

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I'll go back again just to emphasize that point. At age 51, in 1942, Hammett

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somehow manages to convince the army to take him in as an enlisted man after—

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David C. Ward: After having served in Worl- after having enlisted during World War I, served in the army, he comes back at age 51 and re-enlists.

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And when he tells Hellman this, she's appalled - I mean he's in terrible health. She's appalled, and of course she's gonna lose him, he's gonna be shipped out, and I don't know what the army was thinking.

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I mean I really don't. Fifty-one, you know.

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Um, so, and she is angry with him and says, "well, how can you do this?" And he says, "this is the happiest day of my life".

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And goes off and serves three years quite honorably in the Aleutian Islands,

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um, you know, in a backwater theater of the war, but nonetheless he serves for three years and gets out.

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And I think again, that notion that he was going into an organization that somehow it would give him what he'd always wanted - this sense of home, this sense of stability, this sense that people were working,

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whether it's for a common purpose or just to accomplish a task.

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Um, he's arrested and charged, he- as part of his activities, he's in charge, he's a trustee of a bail foundation in New York which would be providing bail for political prisoners.

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Um, he refuses to divulge who had given the money to the bail fund. Again, this notion that he's protecting the little guy.

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He does 22 months in jail in a Kentucky prison, where again, his notion for a structure that he-

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he apparently liked being in prison - it was relatively mild, there were moonshiners and car thieves and mostly eighteen to twenty year-old kids.

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He was like- he was called "Pops", as he had been in the army. He smoked a lot of cigarettes and read a lot.

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Um, and he liked it. And again, there's this notion of the individual. And there's this curious tension again that runs throughout history- throughout American history--

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that the problem with being a loner, the problem with being the individual out there on your own riding your horse, or with your trench coat, the problem with being a loner is that you're alone.

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You've got nothing else, you're relying only on yourself, and that's a tremendous burden for anybody to um, to bear.

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And it's been a particularly difficult burden for Americans to bear because we're so infused with this individualistic ethos,

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and how do you survive between

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David C. Ward: —between a society which must build up its institutions and see those institutions not do what you want them to do, and maintain your individual integrity.

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And I would argue that for, for Hammett - in his constant search that he has - is that it breaks him physically.

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He becomes a, a really horrible - there's no other word for it - he becomes a horrible drunk.

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He and Lillian Hellman rent a house in Princeton, New Jersey where she's trying to work - they destroy the house from the outside in.

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Literally destroy it. It's like, you know, Animal House times 58.

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And, and for Hammett that self-destructive urge - he never gives up smoking, he never gives up drinking.

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He, he allows - Congress brings him in to be investigated, there's this comic episode with him being interrogated by Senator McCarthy

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about how it is that the USIA and the American embassies have bought so many of his books, that he's making all this money off his books and why are these books in American libraries?

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And Hammett looks at him, he says, "Well, because they're good and because you bought them."

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And it turns- and of course, McCarthy has no, you know, who was just rampaging over the truth. But the problem is that the government then goes after the money that he's making off those books.

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The IRS and the constant investigations um, bankrupt him.

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He serves the twenty-two months, he and Hellman are not in very good, they're estranged essentially.

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And he lives in this kind of half-limbo life as a guest in a game cottage up in the Catskills and finally expires in 1961.

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You know, his career - checkered with this brief period of tremendous creativity - as his descendant in the detective novel, Raymond Chandler, in his great essay "The Simple Art of Murder" says:

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Hammett was the one who took the detective novel out of the Venetian vase and dropped it in the street and put tough men on the street who went down to protect society from itself.

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And Hammett, that's his legacy.

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I don't think he's been well-served by his biographers, I think he's been idolatrized on the one—

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David C. Ward: —on the one hand, by peop- particularly by Hellman whose own memoirs are very unreliable.

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I don't think his literary impact has been adequately assessed,

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as somebody who wrote in a genre fiction- wrote genre fiction but in a way that's redolent of Hemingway,

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bridging the gap from the 19th century into modern 21st century literature.

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And I don't think his career, the cards that he showed, um- in maintaining his conscience before the HUAC committees in the various investigations has been adequately assessed. It's a very strange career.

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Um, and what I'd like to do is close, not so much with me talking, but I just want to read one passage from Hammett from The Maltese Falcon,

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um, which I think exemplifies at his best, how he could write. And I think if you gave somebody a blind test - it's very difficult to tell this passage from Ernest Hemingway.

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Let me read this one-- this is Sam Spade, just learning of the death of his partner Miles Archer, who's been shot.

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The phone rings. "Hello. Yes, speaking? Dead. Yes? Fifteen minutes, thanks."

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A switch clicked and a white bowl hung on three gilded chains from the ceiling center filled the room with light.

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Spade, barefooted in green and white checked pajamas, sat on the side of the bed.

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He scowled at the telephone on the table while his hands took from beside it a packet of brown papers and a sack of Bull Durham tobacco.

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Cold steamy air blew in through two open windows bringing with it half a dozen times a minute the Alcatraz foghorn's dull moaning.

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A tinny alarm clock insecurely mounted on a corner of Duke's 'Celebrated Criminal Cases of America' face down on the table, held its hands at five minutes past two.

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Spade's thick figures [[fingers]] made a cigarette with deliberate care,

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sifting a measured quantity of tan flakes down into curved paper, spreading the flakes so that they lay equal at the ends with a slight depression in the middle - thumbs rolling the paper's inner edge down and up, under the outer edge—

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{Speaker= "David C. Ward"} —edge, as four fingers pressed it over thumbs and fingers sliding to the paper cylinder's ends to hold it even while tongue licked the flap.

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Left forefinger and thumb pinching their end while right forefinger and thumb smooth the damp seam.

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Right forefinger and thumb twisting their end and lifting the other to Spade's mouth.

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And I think in that packet- passage you can see everything that Ernest Hemingway tried to do in describing the inner lives, the turmoil of his own heroes. The men who went out in the world who had been broken by the world, but somehow in the act of doing and the small rituals of daily life and the ultimate hope that they could achieve justice through their own work.

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I think you see that - in the small moment, the small career, but nonetheless brilliant gem-like career of Dashiell Hammett. Thank you. [[clapping]]