Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman were known to have kept their Stalinist sympathies long after such sentiments were no longer in fashion, which is close to what Hellman said in her defense during her appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Hellman’s Stalinism is clear in her writing. Her “Watch on the Rhine”, which gained fame for its prematurely anti-Fascist sympathies, to adapt another phrase that had weight in its time, should also be remembered for its major plot device: an ostensibly all American family becomes involved in a plot to murder a Nazi envoy, despite the fact that committing political murder is illegal in the United States, as well as a violation of the spirit of the national political culture, even if the play provides prudent motives for doing so. Hellman approves of thuggery as sometimes moral. It is a necessary means to a good end: participating on the right side of a world wide war that at the time happened to be undeclared. By that reasoning, anti-Communists would have been in their rights, some fifteen years later, to kill her. Politics may go in and out of fashion, but American political principles, I like to think, are for the long run. It is better for Jews and Arabs to live together in peace in Brooklyn than to carry over to here the conflicts that inflame some other region of the world.
Where is Hammett’s Stalinism to be found? Not a question, you might say. He just wrote penny-dreadfuls to make money and struck it rich with “The Thin Man”. Hollywood, at that time, did not produce Stalinist tracts (It would, briefly, for the few years, when the Allies depended on the Russians to hold off the Germans.) Well, “The Thin Man” was no tract, but it was Stalinist in its sense of life. I know no other literature this side of John Gay’s Eighteenth Century play “The Beggar’s Opera” (itself the model for Brecht’s “The Threepenny Opera”) that glorifies small time thugs both for themselves and for their representation of the nature of small time capitalists, who are considered to be thugs, however much they are personally charming. Hellman does this with the capitalist drawn into the Southern world of “The Little Foxes”. Her capitalist is very straightforward and not at all pushy about the fact that he is only out to make a profit. That Hellman can look so objectively at the capitalist, without anger but with real understanding of his point of view, which is also her own view of how the system works, lends to her an air of tolerance that isn’t there.
Hammett also lets the small time thugs and ex-convicts who are invited to Nick and Nora Charles’ apartment exert their less than benevolent charm, only bowing to his illusion that they would not steal the silverware or the women, a point Woody Allen does not miss when he portrays Radical Chic a few generations later in “Everybody Loves Somebody”, the riffraff not to be trusted with your daughters. Moreover, the charming Nick and Nora, who have money and dabble in the seedy side of life, are in fact, remarkably respectable. They are a loyal couple who are never jealous of one another because they know how steeped they are in one another’s affections. They do drink a lot and smoke a lot and spend too much money and so live the lives of the carelessly rich, another conceit of how the rich may be clever and all, but incredibly useless. Busby Berkeley is in fact far more damning of the rich because he portrays them as sugar daddies that prey on not too innocent women, while Hammett is Aesopean enough to make the rich adorable. Those who know how to read him for his inner message will do so. Those who don’t know how to read him will be liberated into a sense that they too can for a moment be like the rich who get their thrills by living off and engaged with the adventures of the criminal class.
There are other Stalinist authors who pursue the same theme with more bite. Brecht’s Mahagonny is a town founded by prostitutes and merchants to exploit miners, which is a true enough description of how cities like San Francisco were founded, but is not true to the way other cities, such as New York, were founded, New Amsterdam a place where a merchant class established a tolerance unknown at that time outside the Netherlands. That too is capitalism. “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” has a surfeit of bitterness that turns industrial development into a subject for cynicism rather than analysis. It has no room for the sentimentality found in Damon Runyon, whose characters, you remember, were gamblers rather than criminals, even if they did talk in a New York patois.
Brecht and the much inferior Hammett are part of the “overseas” Stalinists: those who were tied to the Soviet Regime by loyalty rather than by residence, and so do not sing of Soviet progress but of the corrupt West. The most theoretical, most learned and wisest of these “overseas” Stalinists was Georg Lukacs, the Hungarian literary critic who supported the Soviet crackdown on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He explains in his ‘History and Class Consciousness” (1922) the fixation with the gangster as a subject as an “infantile disorder of the communist movement” obviously borrowing that term from Lenin’s dismissal of premature revolution as an “infantile disorder” of revolution. To Lukacs, such literature glamorized hoodlums because anything illegal seemed to be rebellious, when in fact a correct legality was just what a real revolution was to entail, one that would produce heroes generated by their service to the state rather than to themselves. To quote from Lukacs: “For to rebel against the law qua law, to prefer certain actions because they are illegal, implies for anyone who so acts that the law has retained its binding vitality.” To which I add: and that includes the sentiment of sympathy for the illegal, as if illegality were a form of liberation, when it is, at best, a form of opportunism that may or may not serve the needs of the revolution and the risk of which Lukacs regards as no more significant a choice than “the risk of missing a train connection when on an important journey”.
That is perhaps to dismiss too readily the moral opprobrium that should be associated with political opportunism, but don’t dismiss Lukacs too readily. He did understand a good deal about the relation of culture to the state, of how people partly or more fully embraced a sense of opposition and, eventually, of identity with the state. And, moreover, he was an excellent reader. He caught the feel of any number of particular authors and did justice to how they were positioned in the argument between state, society and personhood. However much Tolstoy’s prudishness and conventionality now leave me less taken with an author so able at story telling that I, like many other readers, was sorry to see “War and Peace” end even after having been through its thousand pages, Lukacs was right, in his “Studies in European Realism” (1948), to characterize Tolstoy as the last great exponent of European Realism, in that Tolstoy gave an extremely accurate account of the give and take in the lives of people, how customs and politics and social structure interacted in the lives of oh so actual people. Everybody loves Natasha, whether or not she is worth it, because her naïve enthusiasm for love is so well placed in its setting. She is both heroine and victim, a twin condition of which every Marxist critic is or should be acutely aware.
It is no wonder, then, that Prokofiev, working under the mandate of a Stalin-led and not just Stalinist regime of artistic control, would turn to Tolstoy as a source for an opera. Prokofiev’s version of “War and Peace” is to make the first part about peace and the second part about war, which is very contrary to the entire flavor of Tolstoy’s enterprise, which is to see these two as in alternation, people attracted or horrified by first one and then the other, and then returning to the other, as if life were a cycle of war and peace, rather than a peacetime followed by an apocalyptic war followed by a peacetime that would be unrecognizable to the prior time of peace. Tolstoy is right that, most of the time, what comes after takes on a normality very similar to the normality that had obtained in the previous period of peace. Take note of Germany’s economic miracle after the Second World War or the fact that England declined after the Second World War just as would have been the case if there were no Second World War because the United States would have emerged anyway as the single economic superpower. (Life for the Eastern European Jews, of course, did change; for the most part, they ceased to exist.)
Prokofiev also falls into other characteristics of homeland Stalinism: it is the people who make the victory, who preserve Mother Russia, just as they do in Eisenstein’s “Alexander Nevsky”, while Tolstoy thinks it is General Kuznetsov’s sense of history as having its own logic that accounts for the Russian victory. Prokofiev turns Kuznetsov into a Stalin like figure who presides over the deeds of others. More generally, homeland Stalinism allowed Prokofiev and Eisenstein to “defeat” their censors only in the symbolic sense that they were able to use their technical ingenuity for the creation of Soviet emotions: a fullness of heart and a will to sacrifice. Those are the emotions found in all totalitarian literature. Prokofiev and Eisenstein could as well have worked for Goebbels.
There is a defense of the literary theme of thuggery. It is provided by another “overseas” Stalinist, the English historian Eric Hobsbaum, whose book “Primitive Rebels”, published in 1959, says that Robin Hood and various Italian gangsters he identifies who die by gunfire when they have been trapped in the hills, express nothing more than an anger that something is wrong with the society and that it has to be righted, the conditions not ripe, either in psyche or social structure, for anything to come of the activities of these un-ideological personages other than tributes to their good natures. The impulse to turn the tables and have poor people get some of the goodies was in them, but there was nothing more to them, and so one can admire them for the romance of it all. Thugs speak to a sense of outrage as that is made appealing by making the thugs attractive. Think of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” or “Bonny and Clyde”. They don’t understand their circumstances as well as the moviegoer does, but that makes them naïve and heroic, never mind whether their cause is just. A critic might say whether they are good guys or bad guys is merely a plot device about which the audience does not really care.
Lukacs, however, expects authors and events to be more serious than that, and so would no doubt have condemned Norman Mailer as merely someone who rhapsodized violence, however much Mailer did call attention to how violence warped the psyches of those who perpetrated it. Bourgeois authors are notorious for their willingness to wonder at the audacity and energy that is contained within the worst of miscreants, to see how depraved emotions shadow and transform more conventional emotions so that we are all on one side or another of a great and invisible line between the lawful and the lawless. Lukacs would try to make nothing of the lawless, to rid it of its aura, an occasion for planning of no more moral significance than a plan to avoid missing a train, when lawfulness, for the bourgeois, is a transcendental circumstance that defines inclusion in a society far more than does whether a protagonist makes a cultural identification with the society in which he lives, whether to be for it or against it. Gangsters may be patriots; they still kill people as part of their business, and you might be next.
The meaning of literature is not in its messages but what it is: how its plots work, how its characters are portrayed, how the stage is set, the backgrounds painted in. Yes, there are works of art that have no heft, are mere entertainments, cannot bear much meaning, unless one notices James Bond movies for the obvious fact that they revel in a fantasy of commercialism and a stereotypical adventurism borrowed from a stereotyped aristocratic manner. Most literature, put aside “High Noon” and Thomas Mann, does not wear its symbolism on its sleeve but rather generates associations the patterns of which stick in the reader or viewer’s mind as meaning. That is what Hammett accomplishes. We take delight in thieves and in a decadent life reconciled to middle class morality. Hammett does not bother to remind us of the pleasures that await us in the brave new world that will be established when the present bourgeois dispensation is abolished and is replaced by a government taken over by the thieves.