HAPPY TO PLAY THE SAP (via Mike Daley):

Hellman, Hammett, and Stalin (Joshua Muravchik, 2.9.2007, Contentions)

On February 6th, Human Rights Watch announced the winners of this year's Hellman-Hammett grants, awarded to "writers all around the world who have been victims of political persecution." The grants honor playwright Lillian Hellman and novelist Dashiell Hammett and are funded from Hellman's estate. This year's recipients were mostly from China, Vietnam, and Iran, and were presumably worthy and needy.

But what is a "human rights" organization doing honoring the memory of these two literary thugs? HRW says that "Hellman and Hammett were both interrogated in the 1950's about their political beliefs and affiliations" in an era when Senator Joseph McCarthy's "Communist paranoia helped fuel nearly a decade of anti-Communist 'witch hunts.'. . . Hellman suffered professionally. . . . Hammett spent time in jail."

Whatever paranoia and witch hunts there may have been in the 1950's, Hellman and Hammett could not have been among the objects, for they were Communists, true-believing, loyally-serving devotées of Stalin.

Since Cervantes wrote the first one, novels have been getting away from their authors and circling around to rebuke their ideologies--as Don Quijote ended up a paean to the very chivalry that was supposedly being parodied. The phenomenon accelerated greatly in the 20th Century, because writers came to believe so much more rubbish, but the best ones found it impossible to corrupt their work with such. But no one ever came off worse at the hands of his own narrative than Hammett, whose own refusal to reveal fellow Communists stands in such sharp contrast to Sam Spade's willingness to wait for Brigid O'Shaugnessy to finish her prison rap, but unwillingness to compromise moral standards for her.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 12, 2007 2:03 PM