By 1939, Hammett and Knopf had parted company amid frightening rows. After Hammett was released from his contract with Knopf, Random House paid him $5,000 for his next novel. Alfred told Bennett Cerf, president of Random House, that the novelist was a “terrible man.” 7 Though Hammett reported optimistically to Cerf that he was plugging away at his new novel, called There Was a Young Man or My Brother Felix, he confessed to Jo that he had lied. At first, he shared the agony of his blockage with Lily, who did not understand. This was her mentor, the disciplined writer, who had taught her how to write well. She watched him buy a new typewriter, settle regularly to work, either having a drink to encourage the words or curtailing drinking so the words were clear. No words came. Nothing helped. No strategies prevailed. Yet Hammett kept trying to write, kept up those sad schedules for the next twenty years. He never gave up trying to write. He never succeeded. But he talked less about it to Lillian, then never.
When his daughter Mary later required psychiatric help, Hammett talked to Mary’s psychiatrist about his writing trauma. Some days, he felt he had too much money, and if he lost it, spent it, or gave it away, then he would be able to write. He drank it away. He threw it away. Though he wrote the screenplay for Another Thin Man, he found no words for his fiction. Some days, he felt he had nothing left to write about. He wrote nothing, was nothing, yet his fame and wealth increased. He missed San Francisco and the obscurity and poverty that drove him to write.
In March 1939, Madrid fell to the Fascists. On August 23, Hitler and Stalin signed a nonaggression pact. When, a week after the pact was signed, on September 1, Hitler invaded Poland, England and France declared war on Germany. Two weeks later, Russia invaded Poland, leaving American Communists, including Hammett, confused as to how to respond. Should they oppose the war? Should they support Russia’s invasion but not Germany’s? Or, should America support a war to stop Fascism? Most Communists took the first stance. Hammett believed America should ignore the war temporarily and continue domestic socialist reforms. He was on the League of American Writers’ Keep America Out of War committee in January 1940. Also in 1940, he was elected national chairman of the Committee on Election Rights, which promoted Communists as political candidates, his most proactive political commitment. In 1941, he became president of the LAW. That summer, the league ended its antiwar position when the Germans invaded the USSR.
Only at Hardscrabble did he relax from his political activities. He fished, he walked, he recalled his childhood farm, he listened to Lily’s ideas for her new anti-Nazi play, Watch on the Rhine. Her protagonist, Kurt Muller, an anti-Fascist German, had similarities to Hammett. “I suppose there’s some of Hammett in almost every character I ever wrote,” Hellman said. “In everything I’ve written, Hammett has been somewhere, some form of him.” 8
In 1940, two auspicious meetings occurred. The first was Lillian’s encounter with the child of a Jewish New Orleans friend, ten-year-old Peter Feibleman. The boy intrigued Lillian, who watched him grow up, saw him at intervals as he changed from a small boy to a young man, and who after Hammett’s death would replace Dash in her affections and become her heir.
The second meeting was between Dash and Lily and Arthur Kober’s fiancée, Maggie Frohnknecht. Art brought her to Hardscrabble to meet them. They both liked her immediately. Lily became matron of honor at Maggie’s marriage to Kober on January 11, 1941, when her own marriage to Art finally ended. Maggie soon became one of Dash’s closest, most devoted friends. Inevitably, the Kobers would ask Lily to be godmother to Cathy, their only child, born March 16, 1942.
Nineteen forty-one was a year of human suffering on an unbearable scale. Tragic examples included the Warsaw Ghetto, where more than 4,000 Jews died every month, and the Vitebsk Ghetto, where in October 1941, 4,090 Jews and several mentally ill Jewish children were killed. Of course, the mass suffering did not stop there.
In July that year, Jo, fifteen, and Mary, twenty, took the train east to stay with Dash in his apartment in the Fifth Avenue Hotel. He took them to shows, nightclubs, and Hardscrabble Farm, where he taught them to fish, plant, and understand nature. Jo was happy. Mary, who had binged on drink, drugs, and sex back home, began to reveal her wild ways. Perhaps she thought her father would understand. Perhaps she didn’t care. Hammett either cared too much or too little, for he hit her, blacked her eyes, and grew crazier than she was with anger and distress. Jose had concealed from him the tragic turn Mary’s life had taken. He had no idea where to start to help. Irritable and powerless, he would not allow Lily, who despised Mary, to intervene. When the girls returned to California, Lily was relieved but Hammett was icily morose.
They spent some of the next weeks at Hardscrabble and then, on Sunday, December 7, 1941, Hellman, Hammett, the Kobers, and Shumlin were relaxing there when the news came through the radio that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. One hundred and eighty-eight aircraft were destroyed on the ground. The number of Americans killed was 2,403, including sixty-eight civilians. Roosevelt told Congress: “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.”
Lily’s Watch on the Rhine had opened at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York on April 1, 1941, and exceptional notices meant that on January 25, 1942, Rhine was chosen for the Washington celebration of President Roosevelt’s birthday. Warner wanted to film the play as an anti-Nazi movie, and since Hellman was still working for Goldwyn, she recommended Hammett as screenwriter.
On January 30, Warner signed him up for $30,000. Hammett approved of the way Hellman handled the issue of conscience in the play, so he determined to keep close to her original in the screenplay. However, the initial scenes were overladen with slow philosophical dialogue, and Herman Shumlin, the anxious director, found he needed to encourage and prompt Hammett into finishing the script. He finished writing the script in pencil on April 23, 1942. Lillian typed it and took her version to Hollywood on May 20. In her contract, Hellman had added the proviso that she would polish the script at $3,000 a week before filming started, so in a curious role reversal, she rewrote Hammett’s lines to sharpen them. When the movie was released in August 1943, the credits read: “Screenplay by Dashiell Hammett, Additional Scenes and Dialogue by Lillian Hellman.” Neither of them mentioned the irony. Hammett was nominated for an Oscar, and the movie was nominated for best picture but narrowly lost to Casablanca.
During 1942, he began to frequent Harlem whorehouses, where they understood impotency. He found black and Asian girls the most useful. If sex didn’t work, the whorehouses offered pornographic shows that sometimes satisfied him. With Lily, there were always struggles of power or sentiment. Lily’s practice of seeing herself as the equal of her male counterparts often undermined his masculinity. With whores, there was a straightforward understanding of desires that Lily’s “nice girl” side shrank from.
Just as Lily had not forgiven him for driving her to abort their baby, so Hammett had not forgiven her for the abortion.
One night, when Lily was driving him to town, he pawed and leered at her, wretchedly plastered, demanding sex. She had never before refused him. But that night, appalled at the degrading waste of his life and the insecurity of hers, she said no. She would not make love when he was in that state. He sobered up with shock. If she refused him now, she could refuse him again. He could not cope with that.
Hellman told Diane Johnson that Hammett made a decision never to sleep with her again. In that public version, Hellman said Hammett never apologized, never mentioned the decision. Subsequent biographers made a good case that just as Lily punished Dash for his behavior with that abortion, so now, by withholding sex, he was punishing her for going through with it. 9 That case has not been believed by everybody, however. Hellman privately told Peter Feibleman a different version. He writes:
That theory is wrong. Lily stopped sleeping with Hammett. He did not decide to stop sleeping with her. If you are sexually in love with somebo
dy who likes whores and the neighbors then one day you say “OK. Enough!” Lily told me that was what she felt. I know what other critics have said. . . . Their view made a better story but it was fictional. I knew Lillian. Hammett would always have kept up an affair with her. She emotionally couldn’t afford it. 10
Hellman’s version in public. Hellman’s version in private. No version from Hammett. Silence: always Hammett’s version of events.
If Feibleman was correct and it was Lillian’s decision to end their sexual relationship, then was it a face-saving loyalty that made her change her story and protect Hammett from a further slippage of his masculinity?
What mattered was that when Lillian decided on the termination and when she said “no” that night, she had no idea of the consequences.
Hammett had tried to enlist that year but the recruiters sent him away, scornful of his age and ill health. Then on September 17, 1942, he read that the army had relaxed their rules. He went to the Whitehall Induction Center carrying X-rays that showed his TB had been arrested. As an alcoholic with a history of chronic illness and nervous breakdown, he could not credit they would take him. However, the psychiatric officer was a fan of Hammett. As a famous writer, you are not a nervous person, are you? he asked. Hammett calmly said he wasn’t. The officer decided writers knew a great deal about human nature. They could be useful in the US Army. He signed the forms.
Hellman was aghast. Dash was running away from his problems, their problems. Dash would get sick. Dash would get killed. Dash glowed with excitement. “This is the happiest day of my life,” he said. 11
CHAPTER 13
The military that had accepted Hammett’s enlistment knew his speeches at anti-Nazi rallies. In 1940, for instance, he had spoken at a meeting in protest against Nazi atrocities against Jews and Catholics in Germany. He had also spoken at a meeting of the Professionals Conference Against Nazi Persecution, of which he was president. The military knew, too, that he led campaigns to protest discrimination against Communists. Yet, they inducted him at the age of forty-eight, an old man by army standards, still on a disability pension from World War I, and assigned him to a signal training unit at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, where he wrote training manuals. A year later, on August 8, 1943, the army sent him to Adak, Alaska, not a quiet bolthole for elderly invalids but an area of fierce fighting, where the Japanese Imperial Army had invaded US territory. Hammett became a corporal, then a sergeant, and helped secure the Aleutian Islands. He remained in Alaska for the duration of the war.
Dash thought about Lily often while he was away. It was always easier to think about her when he or she was absent. Lily felt lonely and useless. She talked at rallies, wrote speeches for people in Washington, planted a granite field that broke two ploughs, waited for Hammett’s war missives but contrarily didn’t always answer them. The early ones seemed dull.
27 September 1942, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey
Dear Lily—
Army manners seem to have changed a lot for the better since my last experience . . . our food is put on the table in platters, from which we dish it into our mess-kits. The man who takes the last full portion from a platter carries it back to the counter to be refilled. . . .
Love—
Pvt. S.D.H. 1
His constant flow of letters to her should have told her what he felt. In them, in letter after letter, especially the later ones, he expressed the depths of his feelings, which he had rarely shared with her, according to what Lily told Diane Johnson. But in his absence, her jealousy grew unbounded. Lily suspected Dash wrote as regularly to Jose as to her. He had given Jose’s address to the army, not hers, as next of kin. That rankled. Perhaps he wrote regularly to other women as well.
She was right about Hammett’s letters. He wrote often to Jose, to Jo, to Mary, to Lily’s secretary, Nancy Bragdon, and a great deal to Maggie Kober, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in October 1943, and to Pru Whitfield, whom he had installed in the Princeton house, who received seventy-five letters during his army years. “Family letters” were always dispatched to Jose.
Fort Monmouth, New Jersey
[Postmarked September 28, 1942]
Dear Jose,
Well, here I am, back where I started twenty-four years ago—a private in the United States army . . . am training for combat duty, with, I think, a fair chance of making it, though Army regulations say men over forty-five must be non-combatants.
So far my middle-aged bones are holding up pretty fair under the strain of romping around on the drill field with a lot of kiddies, and I feel fine . . .
Hammett told Mary on July 15, 1943, that her name and address were on his dog tags. “You are the one the government will notify if it has any news to give out about me, like . . . ‘DESERTED,’ or ‘MISSING IN ACTION,’ or ‘WE CAN’T GET RID OF HIM.’ If any such news comes along, wire Lillian, will you.”
Hammett lent his Abercrombie credit card to Lily and asked her to become his shopper, banker, and not-quite-wife, whom he instructed to mail food parcels and to purchase “low brown shoes” size ten and a half C. At first, she was unaware then later shocked to discover that Dash was making long-term provisions for Jose and trying to secure his children’s future.
“There’ll be the usual amount of money for you and the children for some time to come,” Hammett reassured Jose on September 28. “But I don’t know how the more distant future will work out, so I’d suggest you try and save as much as you can. I took out $10,000 insurance—$5,000 in the name of each of the children—and the Army allotment . . . will come to Josephine each month. I couldn’t claim Mary as a dependent, since she is more than eighteen . . . I think we’ll make out all right financially.” 2
Hammett had been bonded to Lily, treating her as his not-quite-wife for twelve years, but when he said “we” he meant the Hammetts.
In October 1942, Dash wrote and told Lily that the men, who called him Pop, had seen through his anonymity. He had blossomed as the camp celebrity. One man got past the name Samuel “to the D.” Autograph requests followed, including one from his company commander. One lieutenant thanked Hammett for his books, which gave him back much-needed self-respect. Hammett told him it was the nicest thing anybody could say to a writer. He finished his note to Lily: “I love a girl like you, Dash.”
In December 1942, Dash told Lily the truth about his feelings when she left New York for Hollywood to work on The North Star, her movie script about a group of Russian villagers. “I am left behind to face the war practically single-handed . . . I suppose I’ll first really miss you when I can’t phone you in the morning. Maybe I’ll phone anyhow just to keep my hand in.”
He managed to calm her spirits by sending her one army letter she loved. It began, “Dear cutie and good writer,” written after he had read her script.
I kind of guess it’s kind of all right. I like. Maybe you’re going to have to cut the early parts a little . . . but . . . It’s nice and warm and human and moving.
And so are you.
Love
Rookie3
As Hammett foresaw, more trouble between Lillian and Goldwyn instigated the stormy end of their professional relationship. Their successful film of The Watch on the Rhine was controversial. Lily needed Dash to face the outcries. Instead, in May 1943, she went to Hardscrabble to recover. “Please write me,” she asked. Dash wrote to her constantly.
Why was Dash happy in the army? Why did an eccentric man who largely lived by his own standards find hard discipline pleasant and entertaining? He loved the army’s order, rituals, regulations, and admiring male comrades. One called him a “male Garbo,” others made him a hero, everyone called him Sam. He was “liked because he was likable—pleasant, mild and frank.” 4
Maybe a life ruled over by other people solved some of his problems. Maybe he got a sense of pride that he could stand up with men half his age. Was it simpler? That he liked his country? That he felt it was a just war?
Still, he sent Lily lovi
ng letters. “New York tonight . . . and, with very pleasant finality, to the quarters of a girl named Hellman, who had better be heading in the same direction herself . . . Love, Whitey.”
On May 9, 1943, came a witty note: “What do you look like? . . . What are your hobbies? Would you like to correspond with one of our soldier boys in a New Jersey camp? . . . His hobby is Jewish playwrights.”
Then came a telegram from Seattle, Washington, July 17, 1943: “I AM A PATIENT ELDERLY MAN WHO SAYS TO ARMIES QUOTE ALL RIGHT I WILL LIE ON THIS BUNK UNTIL YOU TELL ME WHAT TO DO UNQUOTE AND WHO LOVES YOU=DASH.” 5
The war brought her warmth not seen in peacetime.
One significant note asked Lily to buy him a ring. On May 27, 1943, she had missed his birthday.
“You say you love me, but you haven’t yet given me the birthday present due last May.” He wanted to have “some very nice little thing to hold on to.” He wanted a symbol of their bond. “I want a ring.” Not any old ring but a platinum-mounted one. “I’ll leave the details to you. All I ask is that the ring be sturdy, beautiful and valuable: I don’t want any Japanese hacking off my finger to get at some trifling bauble.” He asked her to engrave something inside the band. She wrote instantly, saying how glad she was. “I’m glad you’re glad I asked for the ring and I’m glad you’re glad to send it,” he replied. 6
Dashiell Hammett Page 15