Sam Spade -- Is His Code Our Code?

“For your private detective… wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander, or client.” — Dashiell Hammett, 1934

By 1935, after a hardscrabble apprenticeship, Dashiell Hammett was a major celebrity. The Maltese Falcon, and especially The Thin Man and the movie made from that not very good novel, placed him squarely in the literary-movie celebrity circles on both coasts. In that year, Gertrude Stein the literary lioness from Paris came to see what American culture was all about. While in Los Angeles, she asked her hostess if she could arrange a meeting with Dashiell Hammett. In conversation, she told Hammett that in the twentieth century, “The men all write about themselves . . . as women used to do in the nineteenth century.”

Stein reported later that Hammett agreed with this. “He said twentieth-century men lacked the self-confidence of men in the nineteenth century, and therefore had to exaggerate their own qualities.”

The character Sam Spade, and too many living and breathing men on into the twenty-first century have continued to do so. Unfortunately it’s not the best within themselves they exaggerate.

With this in mind, I answer those who, with varied attitudes — sneeringly, quizzically, enthusiastically — ask me: “OK Daily, you’ve pushed The Maltese Falcon at me for weeks. Now it’s time for you to come clean. Sam Spade – up or down, your kind of guy or not.”

My unvarnished view is that Hammett’s famous character not only personally rubs me the wrong way, I’d judge him a symptom of a problem in our society. And it’s all about what is being exaggerated in this famous hard-boiled, detective novel.

I feel the Sam Spade type too often serves as a model in our society. And that model is a flawed, distorted symbol of competence and manliness. Sam Spade serves as a reinforcing template for a sterile, narrowly professional, self as center, go it alone, hero. He lives by a code that is tough, personal, and cynical. And what are the qualities falling outside of this code?

Many readers are drawn to Sam Spade because he navigates the treacherous waters of a dangerous world with cool understanding and professional expertise. In the novel, this world stretches from Malta in the Mediterranean during the era of the Crusades to the contemporary alleyways of San Francisco. Across space and through time, all is a fog of danger and deviousness.

Spade strides through this fog, wise-cracking and self-assured. He always gives back more in pain and cunning than he receives. In the pursuit of the dingus, the black bird, the falcon, Sam and The Maltese Falcon’s cast of characters are driven by bloodless individualism.

Business partners die, marriages are betrayed and love is non-existent or fatally suspect. (Every love story in the novel, I count five, fails.) Lies constitute the language spoken, and the institutions created by society to keep this jungle life in check, the law and the police, are corrupt, timid, scoffed at.

As a writer of the famous Lost Generation, Hammett brings to mind Hemingway. The Maltese Falcon takes place at the end of the hollow excesses of the Roaring Twenties and on the eve of the Great Depression.

Readers of the day, especially men, were drawn to Spade and the manly, gun-slinging heroes of western and crime pulp fiction. Hammett manages to rise above the grossest of these macho heroes with Sam Spade, but the sensibility of his famous character remains the same. Spade is a loner. Spade is coolly professional. Spade trusts no one. Spade triumphs against all odds.

In the end, the novel seems to boil down to a bad joke pursuing a false reality guided by a blind code: A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. We are all surrounded by evil and threats. Stand by your rough man, Effie. Falcons are fake and so are dreams.

Because to some degree reading great literature for me is reading great literature into one’s life and being, I reject Sam Spade, Hammett’s greatest creation. I can’t accept his aloneness. I can’t abide a society and individuals that inordinately value professional coolness.

And I need to trust other human beings and dreams.

If all this sounds naive, other worldly, sentimental, mawkish, then I would argue this reaction supports my case. Without going all Dr. Phil on this, Hammett’s Spade as a model to admire and copy serves and contributes, especially among the males of the species, to the crushing out of the social and the sharing needs of human beings. An exaggeration of male qualities I can read about, but attributes unworthy of idealization or emulation.

For some lovers of Hammett and his work, I’ve just kicked Sam in the head like some punk gunsel. Maybe. But I would never confuse this author’s characters with the creator. After all, Hammett wrote and lived this credo throughout the last decades of his life:

“We will work for united actions by all peoples, all religious groups and all nationalities, to defend democracy and combat anti-Semitism and Fascism.”

[Terre Haute Tribune Star, March 15, 2008 --Go Here]

Flitcraft, Trances and FTR Nightmares

“In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.” – Marcel Proust

Literary critics and deep readers of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (this year’s Big Read book) are justifiably entranced with what has come to be called the “Flitcraft parable.” Next to the symbol and search for the falcon itself, Flitcraft’s story is the most intriguing puzzle in the novel.

Readers are jarred when suddenly reaching out from the pages of The Maltese Falcon, almost stopping the flow of the developing mystery, Sam Spade offers up the Flitcraft tale.

Briefly, the parable (read it for yourself in chapter 7, “G In the Air”) goes like this:

Flitcraft is a comfortably fixed professional, a model family man, no skeletons in the closet, no personal or business problems or tests on the horizon. He lives an acceptable and accepted life in Tacoma, Washington. On the way to lunch, a large steel beam falls from an upper story on a building construction site, just barely missing him. His escape from a random death brings Flitcraft to this belief: in the sensible ordering of his existence, “he had got out of step, not into step, with life.” Flitcraft never goes home that day; he disappears from the life he had been living.

Sam Spade traces Flitcraft down years later. He’s moved to Spokane. He’s settled down, renamed himself Charles Pierce, remarried, plays golf. It’s the Tacoma-life all over again. As Spade puts it: “I don’t think he even knew he had settled back into the same groove . . . But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”

This interruption, this digression, sounds like nothing else in the book.

Here’s vintage Sam Spade dialogue: “Keep that gunsel away from me while you’re making up your mind. I’ll kill him. I don’t like him.” Spade speaks in a series of short punches to the solar plexus and moves on. In telling Flitcraft’s story, however, Hammett’s detective holds our attention for over three pages. By far the longest of Spade’s speeches. And the parable’s impact is to choke rather than punch. It’s not aimed at the stomach. It seeps into the night side of our being.

And the Flitcraft parable is a parable in the sense that it serves up a lesson, or some kind of truth. But unlike the “lessons” in today’s ubiquitous advice books, those offering simplistic, well-defined steps to success in everything from raising children to erasing credit card debt, the elusive truth in the Flitcraft parable is not one you can take to the bank and deposit in a “Ten Ways to Really, Really Be Very Happy” account.

Flitcraft’s truth is unsettling, not reassuring. It serves the willing reader by delving deeply into the meanings of living with ambiguity and chance while yearning for predictability.

Scholars of Hammett’s work seize on the Flitcraft story with relish. Many feel it’s the Rosetta stone to everything Hammett/Spade. And that’s well worth the brain exercise. But as Big Read readers, we can also lean forward and do our bad Sam Spade imitations, asking the experts: “Yeah, right. Flitcraft, Hammett/Spade, falling beams. If I read your damn book, what’s in it for me?”

Each reader eventually answers this question for her or himself. One thing is certain and applies to all. As readers we are readers of ourselves. We may “escape” into a book, but we choose the form and force of that escape. We may “identify” with characters, but identification comes through looking into a mirror. And we may dismiss a novel as “not real,” but that “not real” judgment comes from a gathering up of our personal experience, or the studied avoidance of the same.

So Flitcraft and the parable, too, is in ways shallow and deep, about us, the reader. As Proust puts it, readers have the unavoidable burden to be “. . . the reader of his own self.”

And could this burden be one reason why more Americans do not read powerful books? Are non-readers leery about what they may find out about themselves in the pages of such books? Are we, like Flitcraft, ready to adjust ourselves, “settle(d) back into the same groove,” and live trance like lives that seem easier, more comfortable, less demanding while we ignore the truths in the falling beams of great literary works?

Ah. Now that’s the stuff dreams, or is it nightmares, are made of.

[published in Terre Haute Tribune Star, March 9, 2008-- Go Here]

ONLY YOU CAN FIGHT THIS . . .

THE TRAGIC RESULT OF FTR!

Terre Haute Tribune Star Big Read Column

March 02, 2008

Students are found to be part of general slide away from reading

“. . . it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it. It’s bad all around . . .”
– Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon

The Big Read is coming to the Wabash Valley this March. It’s a program that works and encourages everyone to read and discuss the same book. This year’s book is Dashiell Hammett’s classic hard-boiled detective novel, The Maltese Falcon. Let’s hope it’s not too late, because right now . . .

It’s almost as if we’re living in a cheap sci-fi horror movie.

It’s not that tin can robots are clanking up Wabash Avenue. And we’re not being terrorized by pre-historic lizards or ravenous super crows looking for a meal after being starved out of their native land fill habitat by our recycling efforts. No World Wrestling Federation behemoths with tiny heads gliding about uttering the timeless command:

“Take me to your leader–Burke or Bennett will do.”

Nothing this unusual to report. Yet sunny skies on unusually warm late winter days carry a sense of dread and unease. As in all sinister horror movies, the marks of trouble are subtle, hiding in plain sight.

Much of the evidence of this lowering darkness comes from whispered rumors. A coffee shop in town drops subscriptions to several newspapers. Magazines and newspapers add “Short Take” type sections and more pictures and less print to their publications. Walks through a college campus revealing students staring blankly into their cell phone screens rather than into books. A report that the Cracker Barrel Syndicate is cornering the supply of audio books [sic] while buying up and scraping printing presses.

Meaningless, or (add scary music here) predictors of a creeping catastrophe?

As we read less and less literature, we labor under the impression that truth can only be found in numbers. But this may be due to Killer Smog from Outer Space deadening our critical sensibilities. But, OK, here are some shocking statistics of a stealth-type monster in our midst.

Over the past few decades fewer and fewer people are reading newspapers. In 1970, Billy the newspaper kid plunked a newspaper on or near your front porch about once every three days. Today Billy shows up less than once every five days and, lacking practice, he usually misses the porch. On purpose, or is he one of Them!?

In 2002, only half of the adults, aged 18 to 44, read at least one book as a leisure time activity over the 365 days in that year. (A full page a day!) And what exactly were the non-reading human beings doing every day of that year? Is the answer too frightening to contemplate?

“It’s all about the kids.” And the kids are more than ready to match and surpass their parents and grownup role models when it comes to not reading. More kids are reading less and understanding less of what they read. Is this an omen or are they from “The Omen”?

In 2004, 25%, one in four, high school seniors spent ZERO hours per week on leisure reading. Up from 20% in 1994. Americans between 15 and 24 do 7-10 minutes per day of volutary reading.

Are they zombies? Well, maybe. They’re like us. They watch TV for 2 to 2 1/2 hours a day. And 7th to 12th graders multi-task (meaning they can do two things poorly at the same time) like fiends. While reading, 11% watch TV, 3% play video games, 2% play computer games. This leaves them with plenty of time for drug therapy and counseling, the growth industries for teenagers with Attention Deficit Disorder.

In the heart of America’s heart, employers have started to notice something different about the latest batch of job seekers. 38% of these picky employer types find high school applicants “deficient.” Oh, they’re personable enough, confidently “casual” in dress and conversation, but they just can’t seem to fully comprehend the meanings of those strange symbols on paper pages.

Holding their aching heads and waving their fists at the public school system, business leaders handing out the pay checks report that one in five workers read at a lower skill level than that required by the job. Panic follows. More multiple choice tests are given. Fewer books are read and discussed. Writing becomes a lost skill limited to tattoo artists.

Not surprisingly, given their youthful years of non-reading or reading with TV remote in hand, our students in college and those with degrees in hand are found to be part of the general slide away from reading. Around 35% were found to be “proficient” readers in 2003 (down from 45% in 1992). “Proficient” in this case fits nicely with the rumors of grade inflation. One measure of a “proficient” reader is the ability to compare two newspaper editorials from two different points of view. Election coverage increasingly emphasizes the candidates haircuts, facial wrinkles and celebrity posse.

Does all this add up to the horror movie atmospherics mentioned at the outset? Life goes on in our “happy-busy” non-reading, deficient reading, low skill level reading, and meager proficient level reading America.

We may not yet be the Pod People of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” writhing shells of humanity, but the blank looks on the faces of the iPod people seen every day on the streets can give you the chills.
_____________
All statistics in this column are from the NEA publication, “To Read or Not to Read.”

[Published in Terre Haute Tribune Star, March 2, 2008 -- Go Here]