Did Dashiell Hammett Hate Poetry?

We here at Poetry & Popular Culture might offer a sawbuck for hard evidence to prove it, because we think he did—hated it like a private dick hates a glass that's half empty or a heart that's too full. And if Hammett didn't hate it, then the hard-boiled Continental Op of Hammett's fictional San Francisco Continental Detective Agency sure did. Which makes sense—as much sense as a skirt in heels and the flatfoot hot on her tail. After all, what use does a private eye have for poetry—the genre that obscures, covers its tracks, revels in riddles, and deals in metaphor? A dick deals in facts, untangles riddles, sorts out mystery. He may have gum on his shoes, but he doesn't need his toenails to twinkle.

Poetry and the P.I., it would seem, are as incompatible as a chili dog and a just-pressed shirt. Exhibit A: Red Harvest from 1929, in which the Continental Op is hired to clean up Personville, a town so corrupt that most people know it as Poisonville. Seems that Personville's original gangsta—Old Elihu Willsson, who owns the bank, newspapers, a senator and the governor—is losing ground in his old age. The Op is reluctant to stick around and do the dirty work, so Old Elihu appeals to the Op's manhood. "I'll talk you your sense," he says. "I want a man to clean this pig-sty of a Poisonville for me, to smoke out the rats, little and big. Its a man's job. Are you a man?"

But the Op retorts:

What's the use of getting poetic about it? If you've got a fairly honest piece of work to be done in my line, and you want to pay a decent price, maybe I'll take it on. But a lot of foolishness about smoking rats and pig-pens doesn't mean anything to me.

In the Op's calculus, the values of money and honesty overlap with clear speaking; foolishness, rats, and pig-pens, on the other hand, line up with poetry.

Exhibit B: The Dain Curse, also from 1929, in which the Continental Op returns to investigate a string of mysterious deaths that follow Gabrielle Leggett wherever she goes. The people using Gabrielle as cover explain to her that her bad luck is the product of a family curse, an explanation Gabrielle buys but which the Op thinks is a bunch of hooey—about as real as a peroxide blonde. Check out this exchange with Fitzstephan, a novelist interested in psychoanalysis who becomes the Op's drinking acquaintance and sounding board:

Fitzstephan drank beer and asked:

"You'd reduce the Dain curse, then, to a primitive strain in the blood?"

"To less than that, to words in an angry woman's mouth."

"It's fellows like you that take all the color out of life." He sighed behind cigarette smoke. "Doesn't Gabrielle's being made the tool for her mother's murder convince you of the necessity—at least the poetic necessity—of the curse?"

"Not even if she was the tool, and that's something I wouldn't bet on."

In hindsight, this passage becomes even more damning of poetry (not to mention psychoanalysis) when it turns out that Fitzstephan himself is actually the murderer who's been framing Gabrielle. So not only does poetry come up short because it's not the "tangible, logical, and jailable answer" that the Op seeks, but in The Dain Curse it's the very language of criminal activity. Even novelist-criminals speak it!

It's clear that the Continental Op's factual, logic-based approach to solving crime extends to language as well. When he reports in The Dain Curse, for example, that "Her face didn't tell me anything. It was distorted but in a way that might have meant almost anything," he's talking about the act of reading—the inability to read. And regardless of whether he's reading poetry or a suspect's face, distortion and indeterminacy almost always get in his way. The irony of all this, of course, is that the Continental Op's own language is so colorful at times that he himself could be called downright poetic. In fact, one character in Red Harvest calls him on this. "My God!" she exclaims, "for a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy, you've got the vaguest way of doing things I ever heard of." What happens to this truth teller? It's no surprise to P&PC that she ends up dead as a doornail.

Poetry Beat: San Francisco

"Poetry & Popular Culture" has just returned from a week in San Francisco, part of which was spent attending the 2008 convention of the Modern Language Association—the largest gathering of teachers and scholars in the humanities. There was admittedly some material of interest (a panel on Byron as popular culture, for example) but, as usual, we found ourselves wanting more scholarship addressing the intersections of our two favorite topics: poetry and popular culture. The fires of this perpetual craving were further stoked, however, by the city of San Francisco itself—the birthplace of Robert Frost, by the way—where we were assaulted by poetries of all sorts and on nearly all fronts.

The onetime haunting ground of Bret Harte gave us, of course, the San Francisco Renaissance and City Lights Bookstore—the first American publisher of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and center of the subsequent 1957 obscenity trial. If one looks hard enough in North Beach, one can even find Lawrence Ferlinghetti Way; poetry has become part of the city's literal map as well as its literary one. San Francisco State University is home to The Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives, an amazing storehouse of audio recordings of poets reading their work. And the Mission District includes 826 Valencia, a rockin' pirate-supply store and after-school literacy tutoring center which offers—so a flier I picked up explains—a "Poetry Class for Teens." Open to 18 students, the class will be taught this March by Meghan Adler and Emilie Coulson. It carries the following description:

"Do you find yourself comparing the rain to a harmonica, your heart to your breakfast or some other unlikely noun? Do you scribble song lyrics in your science notebook? WARNING: you may be a poet. Join us to learn about new forms, practice old ones, and carve out a little time for poetry. Share your favorite poets and test-drive their best techniques. Bring those words you've been hiding in a diary out into the open! We will create our own literary journal/chapbook and have a poetry reading (berets are optional)."

If poetry is in San Francisco's history and bookstores and literacy programs, not to mention on its audiotapes and maps, it's also embedded in its sidewalks. The language around many storm drains not only reminds city dwellers to (re)consider what they toss into the sewers but does so in rhyme: "Only Rain / Down the Drain."

At risk of sounding too much like a homebody, "Poetry & Popular Culture" found itself overwhelmed by poetry within the hotel room as well. We flipped on the tv to watch Adrienne Shelly's 2007 film Waitress (starring Keri Russell) and encountered a character who composes spontaneous poetry in his wooing of one of the main character's best friends. We then flipped the channel to MTV, where the dating reality show Next is narrated in rhyme. We flipped the channel again—can you tell we don't have cable tv in the "Poetry & Popular Culture" office?—where Puffs Plus tissues were being pitched in rhyme; not to be outdone, a longer infomercial for Snuggies (the blanket with sleeves!) incorporated rhyme and was composed in a loose but indisputable four-beat iambic line.

In short, no matter where we went or where we looked in the city by the bay, poetry had not only gotten there first but was waiting for us. Which is exactly how we like it.