Despite past sentiment that writers Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett should be celebrated--for their writing and societal escapades--Joan Mellen reveals that deceit and insecurity founded their relationship, and the only real loyalty they possessed was for Stalin. As unregenerate Stalinists, they publicly endorsed the verdicts in the Moscow purge trials and never recanted their oft-stated belief that the Soviet Union under Stalin was, "the ideal democratic state." While Hammett will be remembered along with Raymond Chandler for his detective fiction, Hellman's work, according to Mellen, was her attempt to be like him rather than to shape her own identity. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Dependent upon Lillian Hellman's writing income at the close of his life after drinking and wenching himself into literary and sexual impotence, Dashiell Hammett, the author of The Maltese Falcon, has survived as an artist while she is remembered as a self-loathing liar. A compulsive fantasist in such late-life memoirs as Pentimento, from which the film Julia was made, Hellman (1905-1984) outlived her turbulent and romanticized intimacy with Hammett (1894-1961), creator of hard-boiled private-eye fiction, and even outlasted her reputation for the realistic melodramas (The Little Foxes) that Hammett coached her in composing. When Hellman died, she was even more unlikable than in her glory days as hit playwright and parlor radical of the 1930s and 1940s. Mellen (Kay Boyle) evokes a "she-Hammett" (the term is irritatingly overused) who boozed and whored and talked tough in imitation of her sometime lover, but neither one of the pair compels much empathy as the drinking and the infidelities and the devotion to Stalinism pile up, while the narrative weaves in and out of fixable time. Yet the years matter little. The subjects' exhibitionistic literary and showbiz coteries on both coasts remain tiresomely self-indulgent. Of her image-enhancing fabrications, the aged Hellman would boast to a friend: "That's what writing is for." Mean, dishonest, insecure and possessive, Hellman comes off much worse than Hammett, who went to prison during the McCarthy years, served hitches in both world wars and fashioned elegantly spare tough-guy novels. Morally insolvent, the pair are viewed unsentimentally yet sympathetically in Mellen's carefully researched account of their lives.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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