He returned to his apartment to be greeted by Rose Evans. Living alone at West 10th Street, he suffered several weeks of acute illness, unable to restart his teaching in January at Jefferson. He looked forward to going to Pleasantville, counting on the farm to revive him. Then Lily broke the news. Her own tax difficulties, her unemployment, and Hammett’s legal fees had left her severely in debt. She feared she would be called before HUAC and would have to finance more lawyers. She had been forced to sell Hardscrabble, which she advertised as “authentic Colonial lovingly remodeled,” set in an “enchanted forest” where, among fertile fields and woodlands, the lucky buyer could “step into another world, another century.” Dash and Lily believed every word of that advertisement. 17 This time they grieved together.
Then Dash submerged his sorrow, writing to Jo on April 10: “Lillian’s been moving P’ville this week. . . . I haven’t thought about it much except to know it’s going to leave quite a hole in life.” 18
It left a huge hole. It had been their shared home for twelve years. Lily felt that saying their farewell to the place together would just make it worse, so Dash did not help with the move.
In 1952, except for the birth of Evan, his second grandchild, Dash had little comfort. He had absolutely no money, for his income was attached by the Internal Revenue Service in lieu of back taxes totaling $111,008.60. Hellman made a list of those who owed him money. Hammett wouldn’t let her send any letters. “Forget it,” he said abruptly.
The fierce blacklist in Hollywood excluded from employment all party members and fellow travelers except those who had recanted and “reformed.” Hammett had done neither, so his major sources of income, the radio shows The Adventures of The Thin Man, The Adventures of Sam Spade, and The Fat Man, were canceled. None of his books were reprinted, posters advertising a movie of The Maltese Falcon were torn down. He was unable to send any money to Jose, who was forced to return to nursing in Santa Monica but understood better than anyone how hard prison had been for Dash.
He could no longer afford his rent. In October, his friends Sam and Helen Rosen offered him a four-room cottage near their weekend house in Katonah. Lily suggested he take the tiny payment of $75 from her safe each month, and the Rosens, who paid his telephone and electricity, agreed to tell the IRS Dash was staying rent-free.
The United States government had almost broken his spirit, while claustrophobia had emotionally destroyed him. He had left prison with health massacred by incarceration. He would never again be well, not even for a few weeks. Though he lived ten more years, at this point he started his slow painful death, to which he seemed indifferent. He did not encourage callers; he shrugged off friends.
Dash never talked or wrote about the fact that Lily had betrayed him. He appeared to accept it, as he accepted his sentence. Somewhere, Dash knew his life plot had one more twist. HUAC was not finished with him. On February 21, 1952, it attacked.
PART SEVEN
TOWARD THE END, 1952–1961
CHAPTER 15
Hammett’s release from jail on December 9, 1951, allowed him ten weeks and four days without battles with HUAC. Then Hammett was faced with a new problem.
On February 21, Lily received a subpoena from HUAC to appear as a witness before a subcommittee investigating subversion in the entertainment industry. Dash told her she must not name names. For counsel, he approved of the world-renowned New Deal lawyer, Abe Fortas, from whom Lily initially sought advice. Fortas was enormously effective in defending witnesses against HUAC. He suggested informally that she should stake out a moral position and testify about herself but not about others. Dash, fearful that Lily would be jailed, rats would attack her, and she wouldn’t survive, opposed this. Then Fortas found himself unable to represent Hellman, so he sent her to lawyer Joseph Rauh, founder and national chairman of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, both anti-Communist and anti-McCarthy. Hammett approved the choice, for he admired Rauh’s fierce belief in civil liberties.
Rauh decided Lily should take the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination, then give it up if HUAC agreed not to ask her about other people. She was to write a letter to the press, pointing out that she was standing up for her conscience, and let fireworks go off during the hearing. Dash hated this strategy. He felt she should simply take the Fifth. No tricks, he told her.
But the trick worked. Opposing counsel Frank S. Tavenner read out the now-famous letter, including the dramatic line, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” which made political history. Lillian was not sent to jail and instead became a national heroine, having won a rare battle against HUAC.
Hammett was less lucky.
On March 26, 1953, he was summoned to appear before Joseph McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which asked him about two main areas of his alleged Communist interests. The first was whether he thought Communism was superior to the current American form of government. Hammett said he couldn’t give a definite answer. Asked whether he favored adopting Communism in their country at the present time, Hammett said no. When questioned further, he said his negative answer had been because it would be impractical, as most people were against Communism.
The second area of investigation was of more interest to Hammett, as it was about books and writing. The committee was investigating the purchase of books written by Communists for State Department libraries abroad. They asked Hammett whether, if he were fighting Communism, he would allow books by Reds to be distributed internationally. Dash said he would not give people books at all!
Naturally, all Hammett’s books were efficiently removed from State Department libraries.
Hammett, knowing that his time to write was growing short, had begun the year before to write Tulip, his final work of fiction. 1 It gave him his one satisfaction.
“I am looking on the book as something that might turn out to be very worth while,” he wrote to Lily. Then on August 24, 1952: “I’m having a mess of trouble with my book, but it’s the kind of trouble I suppose I ought to be having. . . . I’m having a hard time making it as nearly as good as I want it in the way I want it.”2
Tulip, which Hammett wrote intermittently but never once gave up on, achieving twelve thousand five hundred words before his death, was a new departure: autobiographical, reflective, descriptive, with anecdotes replacing plot. He hoped it would be the book he had been waiting years to write.
Each fictional event mirrored a real one. His white-haired writer, Pop (Hammett’s army nickname), a lunger from Tacoma hospital who has just been released from jail, having been attacked by the state and federal governments and sentenced for improper politics, tries to tell his friend, Tulip, who, like Hammett, has been stationed in the Aleutians, why he has stopped writing.
Tulip, who believes Pop, now on the wagon, is short of subjects, says, Write about me. Pop replies: “Organizing the material is the problem, not getting it.”
Fourteen-year-old Tony, their host’s son, joins them. “I suppose most of my talking was done to him and I think Tulip knew it. . . . I had always beaten Tulip by not talking, or, at least, by not talking about the things he wished to talk about.”
Did Lily flinch when she read this?
Through Tony, Pop talks to his readers:
I’ve been in a couple of wars—or at least in the Army while they were going on—and in federal prisons and I had t.b. for seven years and have been married as often as I chose and have had children and grandchildren and except for one fairly nice but pointless brief short story about a lunger going . . . for an afternoon and evening holiday from his hospital . . . I’ve never written a word about any of these things. Why? All I can say is they’re not for me. Maybe not yet, maybe not ever. I used to try now and then . . . but they never came out meaning very much to me.
Yet, Pop admits his one lunger story contains “more material than I got out of wars and prisons.” Does personal experience benef
it writers? Pop and Tulip, two warring sides of Hammett’s nature, debate the question, then focus on the relationship between “the real” and “the written.”
Pop contends that anything can become symbolic but admits “stuff of that sort” is not his literary style. Symbols are “devices of the old and tired.” Hammett’s last antihero suggests that, if you are tired, it is better to ease up. “You ought to rest, I think, and not try to fool yourself and your customers with colored bubbles.”
These lines in the original manuscript occur on page fifty-one, where it appears that Hammett initially decides to end his story. Here the narration breaks off.
But tossed in with the fifty-one-page manuscript was one extra unnumbered page, which Hellman said later was Hammett’s final page. Her apparent evidence for this was that Hammett had scrawled “last page” on that unnumbered sheet. Editor Joe Fox followed her instructions. In the published book, after the “colored bubbles” line, a paragraph in square brackets in the center of the page states: “Tulip was never completed and the manuscript ends here. But Hammett evidently wrote the very end of the book, and this is it, L.H.”
Then followed a page containing four paragraphs:
Two or three months later I heard Tulip was in a Minneapolis hospital, where he had a leg amputated. I went out to see him and showed him this.
“It’s all right, I guess,” he said when he had read it, “but you seem to have missed the point.”
People nearly always think that.
“But I’ll read it again if you want me to,” he added. “I hurried through it this first time, but I’ll read it again kind of carefully if you want me to.” 3
The line, “It’s all right, I guess, but you seem to have missed the point,” offers evidence for the view that Hammett was concerned with the relationship between reality and invention. Fiction might seem to miss the point for those concerned with reality, as Hammett had been all his life. 4
Hellman’s later view was that those four paragraphs were all written at the same time and that this was Hammett’s decisive ending.
My evidence suggests Hellman might be wrong.
First, the fourth paragraph, “But I’ll read it again . . . kind of carefully if you want me to,” is in a different typeface, suggesting that it was added to the previous ending at paragraph three: “People always think that.”
Second, the words “last page?” scrawled on the original manuscript are not in Hammett’s handwriting but in Hellman’s and have a question mark. 5
It seems to be Hellman who designated that particular page as the last one. So, it is plausible that Hammett intended Tulip to end on the “colored bubbles” line. If the book ended that way, it was provisional and negative, like Hammett’s characteristic philosophy. If the book ended on “people always think that,” the tone was definite and ordered, like Hellman’s philosophy, but negative because the narrator had missed the point. If the book ended with “kind of carefully if you want me to,” the ending was provisional, like many Hammett conclusions, but hopeful and positive, a new Hammett slant.
If Hellman found the extra page and it did not contain Hammett’s “last page” instruction, then her manipulative decision to make it the final page gave readers a Hammett, who, quite out of character, had an orderly goal.
Some biographers have said that Hammett stopped writing Tulip in 1953, but Jo Hammett told me he never stopped writing novels, especially Tulip; he merely stopped finishing them. Certainly, as his debilitating diseases of the lungs and liver progressed during the late fifties, he continued to reconstruct his experimental novel. Thirteen days before he died, Hammett still fretted about Tulip. On December 27 or 28, 1960, Lily wrote wearily: “[He] spoke of Tulip. Said he couldn’t work, had never liked writers who didn’t know what they were doing, and now he didn’t know what he was doing . . . I am so torn with pity and love and hate and so bored by the struggle.” 6
On February 23, 1955, Hammett was again subpoenaed, this time to testify before the New York State Joint Legislature Committee investigating charitable organizations said to be Communist fronts. Under oath, Hammett said: “Communism to me is not a dirty word. When you’re working for the advancement of mankind, it never occurs to you if the guy’s a Communist or not.” 7
In 1955, Dash’s strength failed dramatically. He could do nothing. Books were piled high on chairs. Unanswered mail crowded the desk. The typewriter remained untouched.
Lily bought a new house in Martha’s Vineyard, which included a separate apartment, ideal for a sick guest, but Dash didn’t want to be her guest any more than he wanted to be sick. They argued. He was too ill to hold the pen. He admitted he had been falling down and agreed he couldn’t live alone, but told her he would go into a VA hospital. Lily, appalled, would not hear of it. Dash visited her house. Then in August, he had a heart attack on Martha’s Vineyard.
Heart disease, added to his lung and liver maladies, enabled him to claim total disability. He felt trapped by creeping disease and literary silence.
In March 1957, James Cooper of the Washington Daily News, who interviewed him, recognized how grim his situation was. When the FBI interviewed him, also in March 1957, they estimated that he owed $140,795.96 back taxes. Hammett claimed he was unemployed, had no income, had not received royalties for years, earned only $30 the previous year, had no stocks, shares, or insurance policies, and lived alone, rent-free, in a friend’s cottage. He had no personal possessions apart from furniture and clothes. He had started a book called Tulip but now could hardly write. His debts included: $1,000 to accountants Bernard Reis Associates, $300 to Burrell’s press clippings service, and $15,000 back taxes to New York State. He could see no possible future change in his financial status. Hammett told journalist Cooper: “All my royalties are blocked. I am living on money borrowed from friends.” 8
However, it was not merely finances that were grim.
Poignantly, Hammett told the journalist that he harbored three typewriters to remind himself he was once a novelist. He said he stopped writing because he was repeating himself. He had settled for style with its diminished artistic integrity. He was now learning to be a hypochondriac. Previous biographers have taken these words to be a literary explanation. I believe those lines to be deeply ironic, as was characteristic of Hammett’s dealings with the press. What was accurate was that he was able to sit up only for short intervals while a single breath exhausted him.
Distressed at being beholden to Lily, Dash activated his VA pension so he would have some income. On April 29, 1959, he applied for compensation from the Veterans Administration on the grounds of respiratory illness, saying the most he expected to earn that year was $300. Without self-pity, he said he was almost entirely bedridden. In May, they granted him a pension of $131.10 a month.
Lily, who had moved him to her house in New York, gave him her room and dressing room, where he placed the manuscript of Tulip on his desk. Some days when Lily was away, she telephoned Dash. Lily’s secretary, Selma, saw him rush to the phone, eager to talk to her. Yet, when Lily was at home, he never once showed his affection. They were a strange couple, Selma thought, all emotions deeply buried.
When Lily’s highly original play Toys in the Attic, about the destructive nature of love, opened in New York in February 1960, Dash bought his first new dinner suit for decades. The indomitable Hammett had devised and helped her construct it, despite his debility. Though X-rays revealed that Dash had inoperable lung cancer, he struggled from bed to the theater to watch it with her. Later, as critics showered the play with awards, Hammett lay prone with Tulip on the counterpane.
In spring 1960, when Dash and Lily were at Martha’s Vineyard, Loyd Marshall flew east with Jo and their children. Jo, heavily pregnant with Lynn, arrived at Lillian’s Vineyard house with Ann, ten, Evan, eight, and Julie, three.
“Lillian was charming to the children,” Jo said. Jo’s father was lying down, almost asleep after his lung treatment. Dash was dressed casually in ch
arcoal slacks, sports coat, and a paisley neck scarf, looking unbearably thin. Jo felt that it was almost as if he were not there inside the beautiful clothes. She described his face as paper white and infinitely sad. She said, “I knew that he still loved us, but now it was in a muted, abstracted way. Part of him was already gone.”
Hammett told Jo he still tried to use a typewriter but his fingers would not follow his brain’s instructions. Jo felt stumped and confused. She said she reached into her “handy Catholic grab-bag” and pulled out a Catholic cliché: “I guess we all have our crosses to bear.” The poor young woman felt embarrassed, but her father merely laughed. What he said was: “Boy, how right you are.”
By December 31, back in New York City, Dash’s stoicism deserted him. Lily’s typed note said:
“Tough” and he cried with one tear.
“Tell me.”
“No, I’m trying not to think about it.”
That night Lily recorded: “This was the night the nurse called me—Dash was irrational.”
The next day, January 1, 1961, Dash, unbearably reluctant to go, was taken to the hospital by ambulance. As bearers put him on the stretcher and Lily put on her coat, Dash opened his eyes wide with surprise. Are you coming? he asked. As if she would not, she thought. But Dash was preoccupied with death, not diplomacy.
The next Sunday, at 4:00 a.m. in Lenox Hill Hospital, the night nurse told Lillian to run to the bed and shout loudly in his ear. Lily yelled. Dash, disrupted from dying, opened his eyes, and in that moment she saw his profound terror. Then he fell back into a last coma.
The sixty-six-year-old writer had already left. But it took two more days before his body caught up.
On Tuesday, January 10, 1961, Lily made a stark note: “Dash died about 7:00 a.m. . . . I arrived about 7:23 a.m.”
The cause of death was lung cancer, complicated by emphysema and pneumonia, as well as diseases of the heart, kidneys, liver, spleen, and prostate gland.
Dashiell Hammett Page 18