“Addiction grows in the dark places created by secrets,” writes John Cheever’s daughter in Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction. She goes on to say:
There are many causes, of course: there is brain chemistry and genetic predisposition, and there is character and opportunity. Most of all, there are secrets and fakery, worlds created to mask the real world and images meant to fool everyone. Addicts are brilliant storytellers, and my father was one of the best.1
Chandler told stories too. Here is a doctor in his Hollywood novel, The Little Sister:
[A]ll the little neurotic types that can’t take it cold. Have to have their little pills and little shots in the arm. Have to have help over the humps. It gets to be all humps after a while. . . . They can be deprived of their drug. Eventually after great suffering they can do without it. That is not curing them, my friend. That is not removing the nervous or emotional flaw which made them become addicts. It is making them dull negative people who sit in the sun and twirl their thumbs and die of sheer boredom and inanition. . . . A hopeless alcoholic. You probably know how they are. They drink and drink and don’t eat. And little by little the vitamin deficiency brings on the symptoms of delirium. There is only one thing to do for them . . . needles and more needles. . . . I practice among dirty little people in a dirty little town.2
Chandler was an alcoholic and he died denying it, maybe because it gave him common ground with his father and that was something he couldn’t think about. In any event, in his oil-business years, Chandler made lame excuses; during his Hollywood tenure, he gave unlikely explanations; and as a widower, he told unbelievable stories that eventually became self-delusional.
In 1946 Cissy and Raymond did two things for the first time: they moved away from Los Angeles (to La Jolla) and they bought a house. Artistically, this last move was a mistake; Chandler’s Los Angeles is, in significant part, a fiction of place:
I know now what is the matter with my writing or not writing. . . . Los Angeles is no longer my city. . . . There’s nothing for me to write about. To write about a place you have to love it or hate it or do both by turns. . . . But a sense of vacuity and boredom—that is fatal.3
Socializing was tense: Cissy fussed, and Chandler was anxious. It was easier not to try. A schedule was reassuring: Chandler dressed every day in a shirt and tie, tried to write in the mornings, had lunch at home with Cissy, then drove into La Jolla to run his errands. Chandler liked this, chatting with the lady at the post office, nobody getting too close. Cissy insisted on tea at 4:00 p.m., and they ate dinner at home because they were hard to please when it came to food. Cissy went to bed early: breathing made her tired, and the medicines made her vague. And so Chandler started writing letters. Although he wrote mostly to his agents, publishers, editors, critics, and other writers—including J. B. Priestly, Somerset Maugham, and S. J. Perelman—the business at hand was just his starting-off point. Taken together, the letters fed Chandler’s need to be creative and constitute nearly a writer’s notebook and certainly a valuable self-assessment of his canon. Cissy, the post office lady, and the letters: life could be lived, it seemed, safely at a remove.
“In all addictions,” claims Susan Cheever, “there is a rupturing of the individual’s connection to society—a breaking of the social contract, the divorce of a single man or woman from the human race. . . . An addict is a community of one.”4 But not Chandler: he had Cissy, and they became recluses together—a community of two.
In December 1954 Cissy died; she was eighty-four, but the death certificate reads sixty-eight. She had been married to Chandler for nearly thirty-one years and lived in thirty-five different apartments and rental houses in Los Angeles. Eight people came to her funeral. Chandler was lost, threatening suicide and claiming, “I never wrote anything . . . that I could dedicate to her. I planned it. I thought of it, but I never wrote it. Perhaps I couldn’t have written it.”5
And so Chandler began his own dying, still casting about for extenuated explanations in a letter to Jessica Tyndale, a New York friend and banker, in 1955:
Anyone who can drink a great deal steadily over a long period of time is apt to think of himself as an alcoholic, because liquor is part of his life and he is terribly let down without it. Yet he is not an alcoholic. . . . I said: “Doctor, am I an alcoholic? They told me I was in New York.” He said: “If you can become a controlled drinker, and personally I think you can with the right sort of life, you are not an alcoholic.”6
In 1956, again corresponding with Tyndale, he returned to the topic:
Finally the head guy said: “You think you are depressed, but you are quite wrong. You are a fully integrated personality and [I] wouldn’t dream of trying to interfere with it by psychoanalysis or anything of that sort. All that’s the matter with you is loneliness. You simply cannot and must not live alone. If you do you will inevitably drink and that will make you sick.”7
In February 1955, Chandler shot off his revolver into the bathroom ceiling. He was committed to the local hospital’s psychiatric ward and then moved to a private “drying-out” facility. He checked himself out against doctors’ orders. In March he sold his house and in April took the train to New York, en route to England. While in New York, he was hospitalized for alcoholism. Back in his hotel, he called his secretary in California to tell her he was going to jump out the window. He did not. He went to England.
Chandler talked incessantly about Cissy in naked, runaway monologues that embarrassed his listeners. His letters were fulsome. Below are excerpts from three different letters in which he extolled her.
My sister-in-law says I was the most wonderful husband a woman ever had. But isn’t it easy to be a wonderful husband if you have a wonderful wife?8
But if you find an ideal and an inspiration, you don’t cheapen it.9 I wasn’t faithful to my wife out of principle but because she was completely adorable. . . . I already had perfection.10
In London, Natasha Spender organized a “shuttle service” of women friends to take him to lunch, listen to him, and coax him not to drink so much. It wasn’t easy. Chandler misconstrued the women’s genuine affection for him as sexual. He sent sprays of orchids. He bought them expensive jewelry that they had to refuse diplomatically. He called them after midnight, subjecting the women of the shuttle service to long, lugubrious monologues hinting at suicide.
He was literally hell-bent on finding a new woman in need of rescue, someone stricken whom he could marry. The women he found weren’t all as kind as those in the shuttle service. After drying out yet again in New York and La Jolla, Chandler went to San Francisco to meet a woman who had written him after one of his suicide attempts. Chandler already loved her, he was convinced, and he had changed his will and was planning a wedding. It took one weekend together to end things. There would be another, similar woman who would take advantage of him and tell him about her divorce problems; he, in turn, would give her too much of his money and dignity.
Overlapping and nearly outlasting that mess was Helga Greene, Chandler’s English literary agent—an able, efficient, single, and self-supporting soul. With her substantive encouragement, Chandler wrote a last novel, the only one he wrote while drinking. In Playback, Marlowe is weary:
Give up? Sure I give up. I’m in the wrong business. I ought to have given up before I started. All you get out of this racket is problems you can’t solve, clients who beat you out of your fees, people you don’t want to know, and cracks on the noggin that make you punchy as a stand-by prelim fighter who gets fifty bucks to wait in a cold dressing room with broken hands and a face full of scar tissue in case the main event ends too quick to give the customers their bucket of blood. The hell with it.11
Greene grew worried about Chandler and agreed to marry him; that way he could live permanently in England with her and get free medical care. In a bizarre scene in New York, Chandler insisted upon asking Greene’s father for her hand in marriage. H. S. H. Guinness was disinclined to encourage his daughter to marry a seventy-year-old groom with significant problems. Chandler acquiesced. He and Greene would have to wait for Guinness to die. So, Chandler didn’t go to England and didn’t marry Greene. Instead, he went back to La Jolla, lived alone for three weeks, drank heavily, and died on March 26, 1959.
Afterward, Jon Tuska, who writes about film noir, set out to interview people who had known Raymond Chandler. “No one I have spoken with who knew [him] has the foggiest notion of what he wanted from life,”12 Tuska subsequently reported. “He was a chronically unhappy man,”13 wrote George V. Higgins. “Nobody understands me,” Philip Marlowe says, “I’m enigmatic.”14
Hammett became a drunk—and a mean one—after leaving Jose. In 1932 Elise De Viane, a “starlet,” sued Hammett for sexual assault and battery, and she won a $2,500 judgment. He used a friend as go-between to give money to a different woman “in trouble.” His venereal disease recurred.
At a party, Hammett was seated next to a formerly well-known actress who had aged beyond the roles for which she was famous.
During the meal, tomato sauce spilled on her beige dress and Hammett boomed, “Doesn’t it remind you of when we were both still menstruating?”15
Years later, when Mary came east to live with her father, they drank together and there was a rumor that he slapped her around. His other daughter, Jo, writes that alcohol made
my father . . . sarcastic-mean. . . . drunk he had a kind of lashing-out desperation about him that scared me to death. I couldn’t understand how anyone so funny and kind could turn so awful; why a man who cared for his privacy and dignity so much could trash them.16
Most of what Hammett did when he was drunk seemed unleashed: anger, threatened physical violence against men and mostly verbal violence against women. In his unfinished and posthumously published novel Tulip, the eponymous character says, “It wasn’t so much that I was quarrelsome when I drank as that I forgot not to be.”17 Hammett was a famously, remarkably “unangry” man when he was sober. Maybe while sober, he could control the rage he really felt and when he was drunk, the anger broke out, unrestrained.
Alcoholism wrecked Hammett’s writing career. His last Op story was published in 1930, and he couldn’t write reviews for the Saturday Review of Literature anymore—a job he had taken pride in. Except for Watch on the Rhine, he never made much of a go of screenwriting.
But he wrote The Thin Man, published in 1934. Dedicated “To Lillian Hellman,” it was his last, saddest novel, although it made Hammett wealthy. It is two leveled, in the same way that Hammett’s frantic spending on starlets, hotel suites, expensive eating and drinking, and incautious generosity to strangers and drinking friends was sophisticated, arch, and glamorous on its surface with distraught dissipation at its root. It says something about the American reader during the Depression and about what one expects to find when reading a detective story that The Thin Man was a huge hit as a madcap comedy. Detective fiction writer Donald Westlake did recognize The Thin Man’s double structure:
When I was fourteen or fifteen I read Hammett’s The Thin Man (the first Hammett I’d read) and it was a defining moment. It was a sad, lonely, lost book, that pretended to be cheerful and aware and full of good fellowship, and I hadn’t known you could do that: seem to be telling this, but really tell that; three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess.18
The novel is a cautionary tale: retirement is dangerous. Nick Charles has been retired for six years. All the suspects come to him in The Thin Man, and the minimal hard-boiled thinking he does is spaced between drinking, flirting with women, and being witty. In Hammett’s 1924 short story “The Scorched Face,” a cop named Pat Reddy has married a rich wife but refuses the chance to change his life. The Op comments approvingly: “I don’t know what his wife did with her money, but Pat didn’t even improve the quality of his cigars—though he should have.”19 Now, ten years later, here is Charles living off his wife. Critic and poet John Irwin realized an interesting connection:
It seems only appropriate that Hammett’s last novel was published in the same year, 1934, as Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, and the structural resemblance between the two books is noteworthy—each is the story of a man who marries an heiress and of the effect the wife’s money has on his career.20
The Thin Man is facile: if everyone is amusing all the time, maybe they don’t have to admit to despair. The novel ends with Nick and Nora Charles doing just that:
“This excitement has put us all behind in our drinking.”
“It’s all right by me. What do you think will happen to Mimi and Gilbert now?”
“Nothing new. They’ll go on being Mimi and Dorothy and Gilbert just as you and I will go on being us and the Quinns will go on being the Quinns. Murder doesn’t round out anybody’s life except the murdered’s and sometimes the murderer’s.”
“That may be,” Nora said, “but it’s all pretty unsatisfactory.”21
In 1948, a doctor told Hammett he would die if he continued drinking and so, in a very Op or Spade-like move, he quietly quit for good.
“It would be good to say that as his life changed the productivity increased, but it didn’t,” Hellman said afterward. “Perhaps the vigor and the force had dissipated.”22 Soon Hammett was referring to “reformed drunks who ‘should have stayed drunk, so that they don’t wake up to find out they haven’t any talent.’”23
But what is the real answer? Why did Hammett stop writing? There are three answers—or approaches to three answers. First, he did other things instead. He lost years to alcoholism and lung cancer at the end. He found that he liked teaching and was good at it. He began by substantively mentoring Hellman. He found her a true story about a disturbed girl in a Scottish boarding school conjuring up an accusation of lesbianism against two of her teachers. He then coached Hellman, painstakingly vetting and exhorting, and the result was The Children’s Hour. The man who girded himself against revealed introspection drove Hellman to write about her mother and her mother’s family in The Little Foxes, a second critical success. Years later a friend suggested to Hellman that she needn’t put up with Hammett’s drunkenness. Hellman replied, “You don’t understand. He gave me The Little Foxes.”24 In 1943 Hammett won the Oscar for Best Screenplay of Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine.
Hammett flabbergasted everybody, including the US Army, by successfully enlisting in World War II. He was forty-eight, with bum lungs and a membership in the American Communist Party. The military sent him to bleak Adak, one of the Aleutian Islands, where he created a camp newspaper. Hammett had a ball: he got Jose to send him wool socks and Lillian to send him news clippings daily. He wrote controversial editorials—“Don’t Let ‘Em Kid You into Buying War Bonds”25 was one. Even better, he taught his young staff of GIs, who called him “Pop,” how to be journalists. William Marling, who writes about Hammett and Chandler, thinks that
the Army provided Hammett with an opportunity: service was patriotic, it was a political statement, it removed him from the Los Angeles-New York circuit, and allowed him to practice the egalitarianism that he preached. He probably suspected that the structured environment, and the calm spaces it afforded, allowed him to compose a new Dashiell Hammett to meet the world.26
“Maybe a life ruled over by other people solved some of the problems,”27 said Hellman.
Or maybe living and working only with men, as Hammett had done as a happy Pinkerton, was easier. Not so surprisingly, he later kind of liked prison. The man who said “I like women, I really like women”28 and who literally had them crossing each other on the stairs may have felt off balance in their company.
After the war and later after jail, Hammett taught at the Marxist Jefferson School of Social Science in lower Manhattan. His course, Mystery Writing, was billed as “devoted to the history of the mystery story, the relationship between the detective story and the general novel, and the possibility of the detective story as a progressive medium in literature.”29 A student remembers, “He taught us that tempo is the vital thing in fiction, that you’ve got to keep things moving, and that character can be drawn within the action. . . . He was very serious, very intense when he talked about writing.”30
Hammett was a nonviolent Marxist who loved his country and had no interest in visiting, much less championing, communist countries. His views that were communist in 1937 are still around and merely liberal in 2015: voting rights for blacks and other minorities, prounion, immigration for victims of political persecution in their homelands, and the right of federal and state employees to voice their political beliefs without reprisal. Hammett worked at his politics, assuming offices in, signing petitions for, endorsing public letters from, acting as spokesman for, and donating money and services to myriad leftist organizations.
Hammett was one of three trustees of the Civil Rights Congress’s (CRC) bail fund, which was used to bail out persons arrested for political reasons. The fund’s contributors were kept secret. In 1949 the CRC bailed out eleven men convicted under the Smith Act of “criminal conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the United States by force and violence.” Four of the eleven men jumped bail. The US District Court, Southern District of New York, subpoenaed the three trustees, wanting to know where the four fugitives were and who the bail contributors were. On July 9, 1951, Hammett appeared in District Court and refused to answer questions. Finding Hammett guilty of contempt of court, the judge asked him if he had anything to say before being sentenced. He said peaceably, “Not a thing,” and went off to federal prison for six months.31 Hellman later said that “he talked about going to jail the way people talk about going to college.”32 In 1957 journalist James Cooper asked Hammett why hadn’t written while in prison. Hammett said, “I was never bored enough.”33
A second approach to why Hammett stopped writing is to look at the nature and path of the writing he had done. Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon are Hammett’s best novels and are more hardboiled than his other three—that is, they operate within more of the hard-boiled conventions. Hammett was in a frustrating situation: he wanted to break out of the hard-boiled genre and write serious, mainstream novels, yet the further his work got from being hardboiled, the less critically successful it was.
Beginning in 1926, Hammett wrote longer hard-boiled fiction. Both he and Shaw believed that was the direction in which to go. Yet the detectives in Hammett’s novels are “softer” than those in his stories, which is to say, more fleshed out. It could be said that when the detectives acquired human weaknesses, they stopped being hard-boiled. It is true that the trajectory from the Op to Spade to Beaumont to Charles is in the direction of no detective at all. But the latter two characters aren’t less hard-boiled because they have depth and flaws. The are less hard-boiled because they make no attempt to resist checking their worst impulses, in part because they lack or have abrogated a personal value system, a code. All of this is to say that Hammett could—and did in Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon—create human hard-boiled detectives.
Consider too a possible working definition of hard-boiled fiction: an existential man in a nihilistic world. Black Mask historian Herbert Ruhm points out, “The left-wing periodicals of the Thirties had given Hammett no play . . . perhaps because his work suggests no solution: no mass-action . . . no Emersonian reconciliation and transcendence.”34
In the 1930s, Hammett’s politics made him more hopeful about the world. As an active Marxist and a humanistic philosopher, Hammett came to believe in a different worldview: man can effect change for the good. Sinda Gregory thinks that
[a]s a Marxist, he believed in the pursuit of economic and personal freedom; a cohesive, meaningful world was possible and all his political efforts worked towards that end. . . . He was carried by his fiction to an aesthetic and philosophical position that is chaos and random transformation. . . . Thus his deeply-felt political convictions clashed with his artistic beliefs.35
In his introduction to a collection of Op pieces, Steven Marcus elaborates on the same insight:
His creative career ends when he is no longer able to handle the literary, social, and moral opacities, instabilities, and contradictions that characterize all his best work. His life then splits apart and goes in the two opposite directions that were implicit in his earlier, creative phase, but that the creativity held suspended and in poised yet fluid tension. His politics go in one direction; the way he made his living went in another—he became a hack writer, and then finally no writer at all.36
Can there be a hard-boiled detective in a world that can be imbued with meaning? He needn’t actually make the world better; he just has to believe that he could, that is, believe in the aim and hope. Hammett didn’t invent such a man, but Macdonald did—so it can be done. On different paths, Hammett and Macdonald came to a similar place. Through political study and work as an activist, Hammett came to believe that humankind could make the world better. Through Freudian psychoanalysis and work as a writer, Macdonald came to believe that each man can get past primary wounds, which are axiomatically shared, and into a collective, better-but-not-perfect future.
Hammett was famously averse to introspection and, so the theory goes, that is why he couldn’t break out of genre work and write mainstream, serious fiction. There is plenty of evidence that he was unwilling or unable to talk about his motivations, fears, and loves, but this doesn’t mean he didn’t think about these warring forces. Indeed, the proof that he did is in the best of his writing. Through the years of the Op stories and novels, the Op changes, becoming aware of beguiling appetites he is loath to own up to. Hammett could not have written those later Op pieces if he had not experienced that kind of private shame himself. He could not have made The Thin Man flamboyant on the surface and depressed beneath if he did not experience his own life at two levels.
Hammett’s letters are full of ghosts of books:
I keep plugging away at the book—which I hope to finish next month. . . . I’m trying to get a book—tentatively entitled Man and Boy started. . . . I was hoping I’d do enough on the book to brag about in this space. I did some, but not enough to brag about. . . . Not working on it is partly a sort of stage fright, I think—putting the finishing touches on a book can be kind of frightening.37
What the letters and Jo’s memoir make plain is that “he didn’t stop writing. Not until the very last. What he stopped was finishing.”38 That Hammett continued to start for twenty-seven years suggests a sort of suffering. Anna Freud posits that depression is a defense mechanism against anxiety, that depression is what people who can’t get angry experience. Perhaps the enraged-when-drunk Hammett stopped drinking, still couldn’t get angry while sober, and got depressed instead.
When he was dying of lung cancer—not of tuberculosis or alcoholism—Hellman once asked, “Do you want to talk about it?” Hammett said, “No. My only chance is to not talk about it.”39
Dashiell Hammett died on January 10, 1961. In his introduction to The Continental Op, Steven Marcus writes, “By his own wish, he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He had served the nation in two World Wars. He had served it in other ways, which were his own.”40 His filmmaker friend, Nunnally Johnson, wrote:
From the day I met Hammett, in the late 20s, his behavior could be accounted for only by an assumption that he had no expectation of being alive much beyond Thursday. . . . Once this assumption was accepted, Hammett’s way of life made a form of sense.41
And Sam Spade says to Effie Perine, “Somebody ought to write a book about people some time—they’re peculiar.”42
In 1978, Macdonald stopped seeing his psychiatrist, telling him that he thought his problems were now less psychological and merely “the encroachments of age.”43 The encroachments proved hard: Macdonald soon had symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and was diagnosed with it in 1981. Margaret had had lung cancer surgery in 1977 and now began to go blind from macular degeneration. “Here we are, two people who live by books,” Margaret told a friend:
What has happened has taken ninety percent of our lives away. I keep reminding myself of what we have left. I can’t get out of it anyway. I’ve faced my own problems pretty well. I haven’t faced his well, as least not as well as I think I should. . . . I lose my temper and then I go on guilt trips. The trips aren’t as big as they used to be, but the temper remains the same.44
Margaret always said the truth as she saw it, and her words here speak to an eventual, tenuous contentment with each other, to which another of Margaret’s friends attested:
Margaret told me of one conversation where she sat down at his bedside and asked him, “Who am I?” and [Macdonald] looked at her and smiled and said, “The boss.” Well, at once that’s marvelously clever and marvelously sad. And marvelously true: she had taken his life over.45
Welty came to see him: “He looked at me and he said, ‘I can’t write.’ And he looked at his hands.”46
I thought he was a brave man, very brave. I think he had a very curious and unhappy life. Born into an extraordinarily dislocated situation: Californian, lost his father, raised as a poor relation in Canada, then going to Michigan. . . . Nah, he’d started with most of the strikes against him. That he’d managed to put it all together and get steadily better for a long time—I thought it was wonderful.47