Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (77 page)

In 1922 Hammett’s TB flared up and writing was the only occupation he could handle. His first ‘Continental Op’ story was published in
Black Mask
in October 1923. The ‘Op’ is ‘fat, fortyish and the Continental Detective Agency’s [i.e. Pinkerton’s] toughest and shrewdest operator’. Around him, Hammett constructed formulaic stories featuring crime detection, gang-busting, locked room murders, and high order physical violence – all narrated in cool, laconic, disillusioned, waste-no-words style. He had created a dialect for the ‘hard-boiled detective novel’: a genre at the other end of the spectrum from the cosy English ‘Colonel Mustard in the library’ crime novel.

In 1926 Hammett separated from his wife and children on medical advice: he was infectious. Although his doctors’ prognoses were gloomy Hammett threw himself into a productive burst of writing over the next four years. In 1929 he published his first book,
Red Harvest
. Initially it was called ‘The Cleansing of Poisonville’ and featured the ‘Continental Op’. It was followed by
The Dain Curse
(1929). Both books sold well and on the strength of their success Hammett abandoned his family and moved, with a girlfriend, to New York, where he was fashionable enough to be taken up by the
New Yorker
, Algonquin Hotel, set. The kind of novel he had patented was not just profitable, it was smart.
The Maltese Falcon
was published in 1930, a runaway bestseller which was reprinted seven times in its first year. It introduced the San Francisco PI, Sam Spade – a man who looks ‘rather pleasantly like a blond satan’. Hammett followed it in 1931 with an even better novel,
The Glass Key
. Its title comes from
Alice in Wonderland
and the novel portrays a through-the-looking-glass world in which politics and gangsterism are inseparable. The story is told by Ned Beaumont, a cold-eyed gambler on a lifelong losing streak.
The Glass Key
was the author’s personal favourite of his works.

Hammett moved on to Hollywood, and even bigger paydays. Here, momentously, he fell in with Lillian Hellman, a writer for MGM and a budding playwright. She was twelve years younger than he. Their relationship lasted until his death, although after 1942 it is recorded as having been asexual. Hired as a writer for Paramount, Hammett set up house in the Sutton Club Hotel, where he wrote
The Thin Man
(1934). He was, in Hellman’s words, ‘the hottest thing in Hollywood’. He drank deep with Faulkner and Nathanael West and gained a reputation as a philanderer. He had his own limousine and a black chauffeur, ‘Jones’ – and, of course, Hellman. Nora and Nick Charles (the ‘thin man’ and his wife) represent a glamorised version of their sophisticated café life: all martinis, silk sheets and wisecracks. Hellman too would become ‘hot’ after her hugely acclaimed play,
The Little Foxes
, was produced on Broadway in 1939. But Hammett’s literary activity effectively finishes at this point. Over the next few years he was still wealthy from film and radio options on his work, but he was often drunk and missed deadlines. He was now manifestly alcoholic and in early 1936 was hospitalised for several weeks. He whiled away the boredom of sobriety reading Karl Marx.

He had belatedly divorced his wife in 1937, but he and Hellman chose not to marry. Both of them were radicalised by the Spanish Civil War. Hammett carried the brand of the ‘premature anti-Fascist’ for the rest of his life – something that haunted him in the witch-hunting 1950s. Bravely, Hammett helped organise screenwriters and spoke at communist rallies. In 1941, the second film version of
The Maltese Falcon
, starring Humphrey Bogart and directed by John Huston, was released. A highpoint of film
noir
, it is as faithful to the original novel as the moralistic code of Hollywood allowed.

In 1942, after several attempts, Hammett rejoined the army, aged forty-eight, and served as a military journalist. He was discharged in September 1945, as before with the rank of sergeant: he was not officer class. After the war, in New York, his drinking again spiralled out of control until he finally went on the wagon in 1948. Drunk or sober, he was paralysed by writing block and it was his daily habit to spend hours uselessly at his typewriter. He made no progress with his last work,
Tulip
, which was abandoned around 1952–3. In 1951, he was sent to prison for six months for refusing to testify in a communist-hunting trial. He was fifty-seven years old and tubercular. For the rest of his life, he was persecuted, unmercifully, by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for unpaid taxes. The TV and radio networks dropped his serials under pressure from right-wing groups, and his income fell drastically. He had a heart attack in 1955 and died six years later of lung cancer, tended faithfully by Hellman who, after negotiation with the IRS, inherited his copyrights. His family got nothing.

Raymond Chandler, in ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, observes that ‘Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.’

Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter ‘repented,’ changed his mind.

Lillian Hellman made her name as a dramatist, scriptwriter, helpmeet to Dashiell Hammett and – in her later years – a memoirist. She may also be claimed, if in a very minor and dubious way, for fiction. In the second of Hellman’s three autobiographical volumes, evocatively entitled
Pentimento
(1973), she recalls her years of engaged political activism in 1930s when she was a doughty fighter against European fascism.
Pentimento
was a bestseller and film rights were acquired. One chapter – some fifty pages in the book – was adapted into the film
Julia
, three years later and was very well received and garnered Oscar nominations. It was everywhere accepted as fact, not fiction. The narrative, in both versions, chronicles a friendship in adolescence between Lillian (played in the film by Jane Fonda) and ‘Julia’ (played by Vanessa Redgrave). The relationship is passionate. ‘I have had plenty of time to think about the love I had for her,’ Hellman muses: ‘too strong and too complicated to be defined as only the sexual yearnings of one girl for another. And yet certainly that was there. I don’t know, I never cared, and now it is an aimless guessing game.’

They go their separate ways: Julia to study psychoanalysis in Vienna under Freud, Lillian to fame as a dramatist, and partner to Dashiell Hammett (played in the movie by Jason Robards). Their paths cross again in the mid-1930s and the women’s early thirties. Julia has been active in the anti-underground in Germany, specifically the imminent Nazi takeover of Austria. Lillian, at great personal risk,
undertakes to bring $50,000 to Julia’s group in transit via Berlin to a writers’ conference in Russia (Hellman was a staunch Stalinist). During their brief meeting, cash and catch-up information are exchanged and Lillian learns that her friend has a daughter. Some time after her return to the US, she discovers that Julia has been murdered – a heroine of the resistance. So, of course, was Lillian Hellman a heroine.

Stephen Spender, the English poet, caught up with the film in America, where he was lecturing. He had actually been in Vienna in 1934–5. It was a dramatic period of his life: he was there with his gay lover, Tony Hyndman (‘Jimmy Younger’ in Spender’s autobiography,
World Within World
), but while in Austria he had met a dazzling young American psychoanalyst, Muriel Gardiner. She had come to Vienna to study under Freud’s circle, had a failed marriage behind her and a young daughter, Connie. Spender fell in love with Muriel, to Tony’s immense chagrin. She was the first woman he had slept with and the relationship produced love poetry and a letter of apology to his fellow gay, Christopher Isherwood: ‘I find actual sex with women more satisfactory, more terrible, more disgusting,’ he reported, enigmatically.

Muriel was, when Spender met her, active in the Viennese underground. She was engaged in the dangerous business of smuggling at-risk Austrians out of the country to safety. Spender hoped to marry her, but delayed fatally, and in the interval she fell in love and married a fellow resistance member, Joseph Buttinger. The Buttingers escaped to America in 1938 before the outbreak of war. Spender, and his second wife Natasha, became their close friends after the war. It was apparent to Spender that ‘Julia’ must be Muriel (whose underground code-name was ‘Mary’), although Hellman never identified her heroine, other than by first name, nor did she ever – in the later legal hubbub – offer any documentary evidence as to who Julia actually was. The problem was, Hellman had never met Gardiner. ‘Am I Julia?’ Muriel asked in a letter which was never replied to. At the Spenders’ encouragement, after the ‘who is Julia?’ controversy was widely aired (putting a big question mark over the movie), Gardiner wrote her own autobiographical account of her activities in pre-war Vienna,
Code-Name Mary: Memoirs of an American Woman in the Austrian Underground
, published in 1983. Hellman died a year later. She never factually contradicted Gardiner’s account, although she resolutely denied it in conversation and correspondence until her dying day. But how had she come by it? All was clear when it emerged that the two women had shared a lawyer, Wolf Schwabacher, who had evidently passed on Gardiner’s story. It had lodged, like grit, in Hellman’s sensibility and resulted in ‘Julia’.

One of the great catfights in American literary history was triggered when Mary McCarthy, on the Dick Cavett talk show, alleged that every word Hellman wrote was a ‘lie’ – including ‘the’ and ‘and’. It was the wisecrack which stung. In the legal
confrontation which followed, McCarthy offered as clinching evidence ‘the unbelievability of Julia’. She was, of course, no more unbelievable than Anna Karenina or Jane Eyre. Knowingly or unknowingly, Hellman had written not memoir, but a little novel. And, like many novels, a beautiful lie.

A fully fledged, fuzzy-brained California mystic.
John Carey on Huxley

Aldous Huxley died on the same day as JFK: bad career move, as Gore Vidal might say. Half a century on, he survives better than his fiction or his ‘philosophical writing’ warrant. Two books above all have kept his posthumous reputation buoyant.
Brave New World
(1932) is, on the face of it, as clever but ephemeral as most of Huxley’s writing. Its targets (Freud, Ford, meritocracy) and its phobias (sex, sex, sex) have dated badly, or else been overtaken by events. But curriculum framers in schools have always liked dystopias (they generate lively classroom discussion) and, along with
Nineteen Eighty-Four
and
The Handmaid’s Tale
, Huxley’s vision of life in ‘World State, A.F. 632’ has been grafted, permanently it would seem, into the British education system. The other book of Huxley’s to keep his name fresh is
The Doors of Perception
(1953), which has won its author a place alongside Timothy Leary in the pantheon of Class-A substance evangelism. As biographers stress, Huxley’s experiments with mescaline, under the influence of which he was vouchsafed a vision of the chairness of chairs, were timid. They resemble nothing so much as nervous Victorian dabblings with Mr Sludge, the Medium. It’s a nice question as to whether Leary or Huxley has destroyed more young brain cells. Huxley has certainly sold more copies.

No writer wrote more clearly from his life wounds than Aldous Huxley. The most grievous of those traumas was the suicide of his older brother, Trevenen, who hanged himself when Aldous was twenty. The event resurfaces, symptomatically, everywhere in his fiction and a particularly vivid depiction comes in the last paragraphs of
Brave New World
. After an orgy of sexual riot followed by self-flagellating disgust, John the Savage, who is too good for the new world, strings himself up in a lighthouse: ‘Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east.’

Trev killed himself in 1914. The background is tangled and obscure. ‘Huxley No. 2,’ as he called himself, was a rock-climber, blond, outgoing, well liked. He, like Aldous and Julian, was brilliant and from his cradle marked for intellectual greatness. But for all his gifts, he was haunted by a sense of dynastic inadequacy: the genetic confluence of the Arnold and Huxley clans, with, on one side, the great liberal Matthew Arnold; and on the other, the great nay-sayer Thomas Huxley (‘Darwin’s Bulldog’). Even Aldous had difficulty living up to it. At Eton, Trev ‘worked beyond his strength’, bringing on that strange Edwardian condition, ‘brain fag’ and developing a stammer. He went up to Balliol in 1907, following in Julian’s footsteps (Julian would be a lecturer at the college by 1910; Aldous would enter as a scholar in 1913). In 1909 he got a First in Maths. Then, as his career track demanded, he switched to Greats, where, to the amazement of his family, he managed only a Second. For a Huxley-Arnold not to excel was to fail utterly. Trev hung on at Oxford as a postgraduate, helping Aldous, who was held back by his bad eyes (he had gone partially blind while at Eton as a result of an untreated eye infection). In 1913, Trev sat the Civil Service exam and did poorly. ‘Huxley No. 2’ was a certified second-rater – a fate worse than death.