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Nuanced views on Dashiell Hammett, warts and all

Hardboiled Activist: The Work and Politics of Dashiell Hammett

by Ken Fuller

(Praxis Press, £19.99)

EVER since Roland Barthes’s essay The Death of the Author in 1967, academic critics have come to regard an author’s political views and biography as meaningless tools for understanding his or her novel that, willynilly, has a life of its own.

Though this idea has some merit, it has deprived literary criticism of a lot of pleasure.

Fortunately, for readers interested in the life and work of US crime novelist Dashiell Hammett, Ken Fuller does not share Barthes’s approach. Consequently, his study of Hammett’s work and politics is not only serious but a lot of fun.

Unlike biographers and critics who have seen Marxist or socialist ideas in Hammett’s work, Fuller argues that, at the time he was writing, Hammett was not a Marxist. At most he was a nihilist and the only thing political about his work was a vague anti-capitalism.

During the Popular Front period in the 1930s Hammett joined the Communist Party and, while a communist, no longer wrote fiction. During the last 25 years of his life — he died in 1961 at the age of 66 — he was a committed and knowledgeable communist activist and he did not travel this path alone.

But most treatments of Hammett’s politics, Fuller claims, are fundamentally misleading, presenting him as a dupe, naive or intellectually lazy. Fuller observes that most writers have more interest in showing their own anti-communist credentials than understanding Hammett.

Instead, Fuller’s perspective leads to some penetrating insights into Hammett’s writing and such puzzles of his life as why and when he became a communist and why he never produced another book or short story after 1936.

He imagines why Hammett was attracted to the Popular Front positions, why he supported the verdicts of the Moscow Trials, why he rejected George Orwell’s position on the Spanish civil war and why he supported the SovietGerman non-aggression pact of 1939 and the change in the Communist Party’s stance that came with it.

For someone who has devoted so much time and attention to him, Fuller does not display much liking for Hammett. His judgements about the man and his inferences drawn from Hammett’s writings constitute the most problematic aspects of the book.

Undoubtedly, there was much about Hammett to dislike. He made a lot of money from his books and screenplays and spent it wantonly on wine, women and for a time, a lavish, Hollywood lifestyle.

He evaded his duties as a provider for his former wife and two daughters, had affairs, saw prostitutes and, on more than once occasion, hit a woman.

In his stories and books, particularly in the 1920s, he occasionally used racist language and stereotypes. For much of his life, he had a severe drinking problem.

Hammett’s drinking was linked to suicidal depression and a nervous breakdown, as well as deteriorating physical health and, while Fuller credits Hammett for giving up alcohol for good in 1949, he scorns his alcoholism rather than pitying it or even recognising it as such.

He castigates Hammett’s use of racist language and stereotypes in his stories and such usage certainly strikes contemporary ears as offensive.

Unfortunately, such US socialist notables as Victor Berger and Jack London used racist language and some racially exclusionary practices even existed in fraternal groups connected with the Communist Party of the USA until 1930, when the party campaigned to educate its members and eradicate such behaviour.

Barthes’s caution about not confusing an author with his or her works might have application here.

As Fuller shows, Hammett’s writing often portrayed the corruption, venality and criminality of a capitalist society in which a progressive thought or character rarely appeared. Racism was certainly part of the world Hammett described and hence his descriptions may not be the best guide to his personal views.

The most striking thing about Hammett’s “racial biases,” is not that he once had them but how thoroughly he shed them. As a communist, Hammett devoted most of his time to the Civil Rights Congress, a communist-led organisation mainly concerned with defending the civil rights of African-Americans — for which he was the New York president and, Fuller says, it would have “the biggest impact on his life.”

But he only discusses one aspect of the congress’s work, raising bail for communists indicted under the Smith Act. Hammett’s refusal to turn over names of bail-fund donors resulted in him going to prison for contempt of court.

Thus Fuller, who takes the lack of dialectics in Hammett’s writing to task, does not give quite enough credit to Hammett’s own dialectical change from an agent for the strikebreaking Pinkerton Agency to a communist and from a casual racist to a civil rights activist. If there was much to dislike about Hammett, there was also much to admire.

Such reservations are minor cavils because Fuller treats his subject with seriousness and his readers with intelligence. I cannot imagine a more politically empathetic and engaging treatment of Hammett’s life and work.

Roger Keeran

  • Hardboiled Activist is available to Morning Star readers at the price of £15, including p&p, from Unity Books, 72 Waterloo Street, Glasgow G2 7DA. Cheques made payable to Praxis Press. This review first appeared in Marxism-Leninism Today, mltoday.com

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