PARTISAN REVIEW
367
take it to
be
exemplary, that I share this experience with countless oth–
ers. (Earlier than this, at the very dawn of consciousness, I can recall
William Powell and Myrna Loy and a small dog on a leash and an
audience full of adults laughing; but that had nothing to do with
Hammett or anything else as far as I was concerned.) What was strik–
ing about the event was that it was one of the first encounters I can
consciously recall with the experience of moral ambiguity. Here was
this detec tive you were supposed to like-and did like-behaving and
speaking in peculiar and unexpected ways. He acted up to the cops,
partly for real, partly as a ruse. He connived with crooks, for his own
ends and perhaps even for some of theirs. He slept with his partner's
wife, fell in love with a ladycrook, and then refused to save her from the
police, even though h e could have. Which side was he on? Was he on
any side apart from his own? And which or what side was that? The
experience was not only morally ambiguous; it was morally complex
and enigmatic as well. The impression it made was a lasting one.
Yea rs later, after having read
The Maltese Falcon
and seen the
movie again and then reread the novel, I could begin to understand
why the impact of the film had been so memorable, much more so than
that of most other movies. The director, John Huston, had had the wit
to recognize the power, sharpness, integrity, and bite of Hammett's
prose-particularly the dialogue-and the film script consists almost
entirely of speech taken directly and without modification from the
written novel. Moreover, this unusual situation is complicated still
further. In selecting with notable intelligence the relevant scenes and
passages,from the novel, Huston had
to
make certain omissions. Par–
adoxically, however, one of the things that he chose to omit was the
most importantor central moment in the entire novel. It is also one of
the central moments in all of Hammett's writing. I think we can make
use of this oddly "lost" passage as a means of entry into Hammett's
vision or imagination of the world.
It
occurs as Spade is becoming involved with Brigid O'Shaugh–
nessy in her struggle with the other thieves, and it is his way of com–
munica ting to her his sense of how the world and life go. His way is to
tell her a story from his own experience. The form this story takes is
that of a parable.
It
is a parable about a man named Flitcraft. Flitcraft
was a successful, happily married, stable, and utterly respectable real
estate dealer in Tacoma. One day he went out to lunch and never re–
turned. No reason could be found for his disappearance, and no ac-
