LIKE A FIST HAND WHEN OPEN
46 years ago that the American novelist Dashiell Hammett be finished in this world.
As you know, many of his novels were brought to the film and its famous private investigator Sam Spade, the classic hero of the "crime novel" - is known throughout the world with the melancholy face of Humphrey Bogart.
In The Maltese Falcon, the characters do not hang like puppets of the rope stretched taut over the frame. Have another dimension, more humane, less stuffy, more dramatic. The motivation of a character like Sam Spade is to find the murderer of Miles Archer, his colleague in the private detective agency they have in San Francisco. This is its momentum: it is a matter of principles and the fact that Spade walk with Archer's wife belongs to a different moral order-the-periphery relations and does not count.
If Dashiell Hammett, born in St. Mary, Maryland, in 1894, and did not know the craft of detective because between 1915 and 1918 he worked at Pinkerton agency, which also served as strikebreakers brought to the detective genre-psychological dimension and aesthetics that he lacked, it was because rather than a "copyright police" was a writer without adjectives. One might think from the perspective of our time in Mexico, which at heart he was a stickler for ethics and therefore his hero, his alter ego, Sam Spade, acting on logical consequence.
More than an idea of \u200b\u200brevenge, in a final section of the novel traces a sense of justice or solidarity whose text could be placed at the entrance to every group of journalists when they kill a fellow,
"When one would kill their partner is supposed to do something about it. Opinion does not matter that one has of him. It was your buddy and you're supposed to do something. "
With these lines you explain to Brigid O'Shaughnessy, the delinquent girl Maltese Falcon," why, though perhaps love can not miss.
In an earlier scene in Chapter VII, Hammett had put the two characters in dialogue. Cairo while waiting to return to the enigmatic black bird begins to tell Sam Spade to Brigid O'Shaughnessy story apparently has nothing to do with his situation at that time.
is a nice story, a story within the novel: A man named Flitcraft came a day of its offices in Tacoma and was never heard from him. Others disappeared. Organized civil death. The classic disappeared, like Hawthorne's Wakefield or Mattia Pascal, Pirandello, which disappears and adopts another identity. His wife and children never saw him again. When Spade was in Seattle working for one of the great detective agencies in 1927 was commissioned to look at Flitcraft, found him in Spokane. Seven years had elapsed since his disappearance. Mr. Flitcraft
Spade explained that a morning spent in front of a demolished building that was only the skeleton and suddenly, from about ten stories high, fell, touching a beam. "He felt as if someone had lifted the lid that covers the life, allowing you to see the mechanism." The mechanism of the fragility and randomness.
"The life I knew was a clean business, orderly, sane, responsible. Now, a detached beam showed him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen, good husband, good father, could be wiped off the world into his office and the restaurant, thanks to interpolation of a detached life. He realized then that the men died by accident and lived only while blind chance respected them. "
felt at odds with living life. And I would never know peace until they have adjusted their behavior to this new glimpse into the essence of life. "Your life could end by the hazard of falling beam: he would change his life for a mere chance of escape."
paragraph illustrates what another author, Marshall Berman, think of all that is solid melts into air: those who are happier in their homes may be most vulnerable to the demons that haunt: the daily routine of the parks and bicycles, shopping, meals and cleaning, the usual hugs and kisses can be not only infinitely joyous and beautiful but also infinitely precarious and fragile, but "to maintain this life can cost desperate and heroic struggles, and sometimes we lose." The story within the story turns out, also, ua meditation on chance and contingency.
But what most intrigued him Brigid in the course of his conversation with Sam Spade, in that first scene Hawk Maltese, was the sense of history: a story of what was coming: "Brigid listened, obviously more surprised by the fact that the story tell that by being interested in it, the more intrigued by the earlier intention to tell that Spade history itself. "
And, apparently without coming to the case, without any preliminary remarks, Sam Spade began to tell the girl delinquent Flitcraft episode:
" It was just like that, "Spade said," like a fist when you open your hand. "
Hammett died on January 10, 1960. In the past 26 years of his life he returned to writing and publishing a single line. Never could concentrate more, never regained the ability to concentrate persistent behaves the making of a novel. Dispersed in several political causes, spent much of his talent to help Lillian Hellmann when he wrote his plays, including The Children's Hour, for example. One of the biographers of Hammett said that maybe it was a case of self-immolation: the artist who canceled his literary talent and moves to another person, to the woman he loved, for example.
In the early months of 1939 he began writing again. A novel. He bought a new typewriter and engaged the services of a macanógrafa, but spent the morning talking without working. Everyone told him he was writing it and allowed his publisher announced that appearance was imminent. Perhaps he thought that if I said I was writing something, and he said quite often, and let his promise was published in the press, some sense of honor would compel him to comply with the above. If I say I write, the better I write. However, the truth was that I could write and when people asked about a new book the first thing I said was in her head.
no longer had many illusions about himself. Ideas to spare, as all writers. But he could not perform them. With his partner Lillian Helmann, Diane Johnson says in his biography of Hammett, was more candid:
"I know, I know this sounds to project strength." It was even more honest with himself: he could not write. "Because there was nothing to write about." Apparently his life was over when he went to San Francisco and left the dark, work, family and social class to which he said owed allegiance, but which was uncomfortable.
"I could not give meaning to their existence any longer, but the most direct way to put an end was the drink," says Diane Johnson.
had been become dispersed. Not concentrated. Squandered what was left of their savings, having come to hold more than one million dollars. Wrote manifestos and letters. Is excited in the project of a new regular combat.
"But ideas and words faded from his mind as soon as they sat at the typewriter, and were replaced by empty exasperating, and if I could write a paragraph or a line, suffered an almost incorrigible need to minimize destructive , reduce it, destroy it. "
In no other book I've read a more accurate description of what may become the hell of impotence literature. Why at some point in your life a writer can not keep writing? Hammett Dasiell
rewrote what he had written and shrinking. It was a kind of torture. He sat at the typewriter and the momentum expected never came.
trying to deceive himself: a new typewriter, a different type of paper, handwriting, start writing letters hoping that once you reach the words would slip imperceptibly into narrative work.
A glass of whiskey before work, do not drink whiskey until they have completed a day of decent work, a walk, get up bluntly of the bed in the morning, or six p.m. on time: no their strategies gave fruit. And so she lived or survived during the last 26 years of his life. Follow that routine, that simulacrum of writing, the torture, the impotence, to the end. But unable to regain the thread of his creativity.
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