PARTISAN REVIEW
377
sche, "should see to it that in the process he does not become a mon–
ster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into
you." The abyss looks into Hammett, the Old Man, and the Op.
It
is through such complex devices as I have merely sketched here
that Hammett was able to raise the crime story into literature. He did it
over a period of ten years. Yet the strain was finally too much to bear
-that shifting, entangled, and equilibrated state of contradictions out
of which his creativity arose and which it expressed could no longer be
sustained. His creative career ends when he is no longer able to handle
the literary, social, and moral opacities, instabilities, and contradic–
tions that characterize all his best work. His life then splits apart and
goes in the two opposite directions that were implicit in his earlier,
creative phase, but that the creativity held suspended and in poised yet
fluid tension . His politics go in one direction; the way he made his
living went in another-he became a hack writer, and then finally no
writer at all. That is another story. Yet for ten years he was able to do
what almost no other writer in this genre has ever done so well-he
was able to really write, to construct a vision of a world in words, to
know that the writing was about the real world and referred to it and
was part of it; and at the same time he was able to be self-consciously
aware that the whole thing was problematical and about itself and
"only" writing as well. For ten years, in other words, he was a true
crea tor of fiction.
