PARTISAN REVIEW
365
minish in frequency. Hammett had left San Francisco in 1929 and
moved to New York; from there in 1930, with the Great Depression
setting deeply in , Hammett moved out to Hollywood. Warner Brothers
had bought the film rights for
The Maltese Falcon,
and Hammett was
offered high-paying work on a variety of film projects.
It
was here, one
night in November, as he was coming out of a monumental drunk that
had lasted for days, that he met a young woman named Lillian Hell–
man . The two were immediately attracted
to
one another, and there
then began what was for both of them the most important relation in
their lives.
It
was impassioned and tempestuous; it was often cruel and
harsh and harmful, and there were times when neither was faithful to
the other and when they went their own ways and lived apart. But in
the end it endured; it lasted for thirty years, until his death.
By 1934 Hammett's career as a creative writer was finished. He did
not know this, of course, and in 1932 in an interview said that he was
planning to write a play. That play never got written, but another one
did. It was called
The Children's Hour,
and Hammett's work as a
careful reader, stem schoolmaster, and relentlessly honest critic was
instrumental in its realization. His connection with Lillian Hellman's
career as a playwright was to remain close, intimate, and instrumental
as the years went on .
During the 1930s Hammett continued to work at various kinds of
writing and rewriting jobs in the movie industry. He also became in–
volved, as did so many other writers and intellectuals of the period, in
various left-wing and anti-Fascist causes. He had become a Marxist; he
had also committed himself to the cause of the Communist Party in
America, and became a member of it probably sometime during 1937.
Although he never surrendered his personal critical sense about the
limitations and absurdities of many of his political associates and al–
lies, both here and abroad, the commitment he had made was deep,
and it was lasting, and he would pay for it in the end.
It
was charac–
teri stic of him-as both man and writer-that he was willing to pay
the price.
Shortly after America entered World War II, Hammett-at the age
of forty-eight-enlisted in the Army. Through some inexplicable
sleight of hand and mouth he managed to persuade the Army doctors
tha t the scars on his lungs that showed up on the X-rays were of no
importance. He volunteered for overseas service and was sent to the
Aleutians-where, among other things, he edited a daily newspaper
