At 07:01 PM 1/20/2006 -0800, you wrote:
>"In spite of the many kind words about Hammett
in
>Chandler's famous 'Simple Art of Murder' essay,
there
>was at least comment that made me think that
Chandler
>didn't much care for Hammett's literary
abilities."
I've spend a couple of days intermittently thinking about
this and looking up a couple of items. First, I think
Chandler was a quirky, acerbic personality. One of my
favorite Chandler self-descriptions is "All my best friends I
have never seen. To know me in the flesh is to pass on to
better things." It would not surprise me if somewhere,
sometime, Chandler did "diss" Hammett.
But, as to what I have found, here are a couple of statements
that, at least, offer a bit of critical thought and, in one
case, rumor-spreading, about Hammett's work:
In a letter to Blanche Knopf, October 22, 1942:
"Most of all perhaps, in my rather sensitive mind, I hope the
day will come when I won't have to ride around on Hammett and
James Cain like an organ grinder's monkey. Hammett is all
right. I give him everything. There were a lot of things he
could not do, but what he did he did superbly."
In a letter to Charles Morton, October 13, 1945:
"As to talking about Hammett in the past tense, I did myself
in that essay [evidently, "Simple Art of Murder"]. I hope he
is not to be so spoken of. As far as I know he is alive and
well, but he has gone so long without writing -- unless you
count a couple of screenplay jobs which, rumor says, La
Hellman really did for him...that I wonder. He was one of the
many guys who couldn't take Hollywood without trying to push
God out of the high seat. [Chandler then goes on to describe
a scene involving a drunken Hammett rejecting a proposition.]
It was a great pity he stopped writing. I've never known why.
I suppose he may have come to the end of his resources in a
certain style and have lacked the intellectual depth to
compensate for that by trying something else. But I'm not
sure. I think the man has been both overrated and
underrated...Old Joe Shaw may have put his finger on the
trouble when he said Hammett never really cared for any of
his characters."
Finally, from MacShane biography (p. 48):
"What also impressed Chandler was Hammett's attention to
detail and his ability to transform a physical observation
into something that reveals character. He admired Hammett's
narrative ability and said that he'd gladly read one of his
novels even if the last chapter were torn out. 'It would be
interesting enough without the solution,' he wrote. 'It would
stand up by itself as a story. That's the acid test.' Yet
Hammett lacked Chandler's verbal facility and the vision that
illuminated a scene. Here Chandler exceeds him in a
fundamental way. Chandler realized that the American
language, which belonged to both of them, was capable of
saying things that Hammett 'did not know how to say, or feel
the need of saying. In his hands it had no overtones, left no
echo, evoked no image beyond a distant hill.'"
Bill Harker
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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