Lillian and Dash (38 page)

H
ALF 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.

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