by Sam Toperoff
Lillian invited him back into her bed. He couldn’t do very much, but he felt as though he had come home.
Lillian hired a nurse to take care of him, mostly to administer his pain medication. She stayed in the guest room.
One day after Hammett found it necessary finally to take to the hospital bed for reading comfort, Lillian entered the room and saw that he had his hand on the nurse’s ass. The young woman was turned away from him preparing his medication. His hand on her ass meant absolutely nothing to her. It seemed to mean the world to Hammett, which the nurse apparently understood. Lillian smiled. Hammett was being Hammett in a world that no longer minded a great deal.
Lillian was willing to carry him to the very end even though that might take many months.
She thought the end had come when his breathing became so shallow, so labored he lay on his bed like a bird fallen to the pavement. The doctor ordered an ambulance that brought him again to Lenox Hill. Lillian waited patiently in the hallway. This was the very end. She imagined the situation reversed and wondered what she would want Hammett to do for her. Only to have him tell her he loved her. Only that.
She then realized the reverse gift—her declaration of love past and future—was something he already had. She further realized that dying was so fucking hard to do it didn’t really matter what anyone else thought about it.
But dying wasn’t only for the dying. It was as much for who got left behind. The perfect gift for him came to her then. A priest. She’d give him a priest.
The hospital provided Lillian with a name and a parish. She sent a cab to St. Stephen’s. It took the old man an hour to come down from the Bronx. Father Gerrity it was, who told Lillian with a brogue that there was no such thing as a lapsed Catholic, only comatose ones. Lillian was in the room as Gerrity administered last rites. She believed Hammett rolled his eyes in her direction. Oy, Doctor, Doctor.
The next morning his breathing deepened. His face took on a weak expression, an almost smile, a faint thoughtfulness, faint disapproval. The doctor was hopeful. Hammett was beginning to come back and Lillian welcomed the reprieve. She still wanted a Hammett, any Hammett, in her life. It looked as though she would have him. But no.
DASHIELL HAMMETT ALWAYS ASSUMED he’d be buried at the Arlington National Cemetery. It fell to Lillian to see to an interment befitting the man who had been a U.S. Army sergeant in two world wars.
There was a concerted campaign by Hammett’s implacable political enemies to deny him such a burial. A sample editorial in the Journal American ended as follows: “A soldier, yes, certainly. An honorable American, not by a long stretch. Mr. Hammett was an enemy of the United States as we know and love it, a man convicted of traitorous un-American principles and activities. To allow him to lie in such hallowed ground, next to true American heroes, would be an affront and an insult to the service of loyal and true Americans.”
There were many such pieces in many such places.
Lillian prevailed in the legal and public battle to have Sergeant Samuel Dashiell Hammett buried with full military honors at Arlington. Afterward, on the Dick Cavett television show, Lillian said, “You know, it’s beautiful in Washington this time of year. Cherry blossoms fill the air. You can come and read the Constitution for yourself—not some tortured Supreme Court interpretation. In the evening you might want to take in a new play, Toys in the Attic. It’s by some bright young thing, named Lillian, who …” The APPLAUSE sign flashed on. “… and … and I’d strongly recommend you take a cab ride across the Potomac to Arlington National Cemetery. Standing there you will have some sense of how much our freedom actually costs …” She swallowed. “I have a friend buried there. Dashiell Hammett. The writer. He is in section 12, site 508.” She repeated the site for emphasis. “I really don’t want him to be alone for too long. So please stop by and introduce yourself. He’s a good listener.”
HALF AN HOUR before Dashiell Hammett became that forever silent good listener, he began his tumble toward and through oblivion. Lillian was called away from a party. Hammett was alive, still alive when she got to him. He was being allowed to die by the doctor. Hammett signaled her closer with his eyes. She thought he said, “I may not live to see you again, Miss Amanda …”
Lillian flushed, put a hand to her chest, batted her lashes, and said, “My word, Captain Beauregard, you have declared your love for little ole me so sweetly and so often, I’m having the devil’s own time not pulling off my beautiful undergarments and lying down with you right here in this gazebo.” She slid toward him on the bed.
Hammett’s eyes smiled and beckoned her very close. His voice was scratches in air coming from parched lips to her shelled ear. Not words, only scratches.
Author’s Note
All lives are mysterious. What we do not know about ourselves is only exceeded by what we cannot know about others, which is why novelists try to live so intimately with the characters they create. Fiction writers may think they’ve gotten to the heart of the mystery if they create characters out of whole cloth. I’ve never believed that. Mystery is as inherent in the human condition as our contradictory emotions, our need to love and be loved, and our impulse to create and destroy.
When I first encountered Lillian and Dash in their own words and in biographies written by others, I knew it would have been foolish—and unnecessary—to re-create them as characters in a novel with different names. The who, what, when, and where of their lives were all pretty well established by the biographies and autobiographies. The mysterious why—the mystery, the fiction writer’s domain—was not. So I embarked.
For me interwoven fact and fiction—the hybrid “fictional biography”—is the best path to satisfying novelistic truth. In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster writes, “A memoir is history, it is based on evidence. A novel is based on evidence + or – x, the unknown quantity being the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always modifies the effect of the evidence …” To remain faithful to the facts—the “evidence”—and still arrive at the “truth” I hope for in a good novel has been my goal in Lillian & Dash.
So in essence what remains factual in this novel are all those things a reader would encounter in a good Hellman or Hammett biography—and there are many. Chronology is by and large untouched, as are their family backgrounds and literary output, their travels, their personal interests, their politics, and well-documented anecdotes about their public behavior and misbehavior.
What we cannot know about them—Forster’s mysterious x factor—is where the novelist’s temperament, intelligence, and inspiration can transform evidence into compelling fiction. The nature of their lovemaking, their private conversations as well as those with friends, rivals, and colleagues, events that have gone unrecorded, their inner lives and memories, in short, everything we cannot know about another human being—these are the elements of this novel that are no different from those in any other fiction.
Of course there is always that undifferentiated middle ground between evidence and imagination where incident and character and dialogue must be invented to carry the characters and the plot forward in a meaningful way. Where it is necessary to invent as a true novelist does, I’ve not been shy. In these instances, readers will have to determine the degree of truthfulness for themselves. That’s the fun of the fictional biography—actually, I prefer to call it the novel of conjecture—both in the making and in the reading.
My “evidence” has been gathered assiduously from the same sources a scholarly biographer would have explored. I have read and seen all the novels, plays and screenplays, memoirs, radio scripts, letters, newspaper pieces and cartoons, and interviews with both Hammett and Hellman. In short, it’s fair to say I’ve been a fan of both from an early age. When the idea of writing about their relationship occurred to me, I read as many biographies of each as I could acquire. The most helpful were: William Wright, Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman; Joan Mellen, Two Invented Lives: Hellman and Hammett; and Richard Layman,
Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett. I particularly loved reading Dashiell Hammett: Selected Letters, edited by Richard Layman with Julie M. Rivett. Martin Grams Jr., The Radio Adventures of Sam Spade, gave me back my childhood.
After Lillian & Dash was finished and sent off to the publisher, I happened to see Wim Wenders’s 1982 film, Dashiell Hammett, in which he imagines Hammett holed up in his San Francisco apartment writing The Maltese Falcon while at the same time trying to solve the murder of a local prostitute and drinking himself nightly into oblivion. Good movie, and good to know that Wenders and I shared the same appreciation.
I promised myself in this note not to make a two-column list of facts and fictions, of true and false. But I very much want the reader to know that Dashiell Hammett really is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in section 12, site 508. Like Lillian, I too loved and admired him in spite of himself, and would very much like you to visit the site when you’re in the neighborhood.
After a long writing career I’ve come to discover that what satisfies me most is simply a good story well told. Around a dinner table someone taking liberties with the facts in order to tell an interesting and instructive tale always has my attention and admiration. I like it most when I’m the teller.
—Sam Toperoff
May 6, 2012
Champ Clavel, France
SAM TOPEROFF has published twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including Jimmy Dean Prepares (Granta) and Queen of Desire (Harper-Collins). His stories and articles have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Granta, New York Times Magazine, Town & Country, and Sports Illustrated. He was awarded an Emmy for his documentary work at PBS. He lives in France, in a house he built.
