July 14, 2008
St. Mary’s County, MD

My jaw was long and razor-burned, my hair a brownish pond icing up from the temples in. I looked rather pleasantly like a salt-and-pepper satan. I was tailing Sam Hammett down Great Mills Road in St. Mary’s County, Md., where he was born, but the trail was a hundred years cold.

Everywhere I went, I got “Sam who?” After a day of chasing played-out leads and a night at some fleabag, I was fed up and on my way out of town. While my imaginary Argentine secretary, Effie Peron, ducked into a filling station to powder her nose, I called the last number I had for the county tourism bureau. A courtly man with an accent like crab cakes and clotted cream answered. Louis Buckler, he called himself, and asked me my business. I told him.

“The Hammett place?” he said. “Try up Indian Hill Road. Big house, two or three stories, with a wing on the side. Two chimneys, even.”

“You mean it’s still standing?”

“Standing? Hell, it’s still in the family.”

I took the directions down and pointed my motor accordingly. A house approximating Buckler’s description loomed up on the left. We were barely out of the car when a couple with a child emerged and made us welcome.

“I’m Connie Little,” the frail said, extending a hand. “I’m the librarian around here.”

I introduced myself and brandished a buff-colored card at them.

“You’re from The Big Read?”

Grudgingly I allowed as how I was. It’s getting harder and harder to keep my hatbrim down and get a simple job done, what with all the hoopla about the Read, but the hell with it.

“So this isn’t Hammett’s house?”

“No, that’s back along Great Mills Road. Watch for the historical marker about him.”

“There’s a sign about him?”

“You can’t miss it.”

Effie said, “He already did.”

She folded her legs back into the passenger seat of the sedan with no great urgency, and we backtracked to Great Mills. It’s amazing how different a stretch of road can look when you’re headed back down the way you came. If I’d been the philosophical type, I might have made something of that. Sure enough, up ahead on the right was a weathered white sign marking Hammett’s birthplace.

A wooden sign commemorates the Hammetts’ ancestral pile, Hopewell & Aim. No points deducted for spelling, but the omission of “Red Harvest” seems a shame. Photo by David Kipen.

We snapped the marker with my Kodak and got back into my machine. Just as Buckler had described it – but nowhere near where he’d put it – down a dead end next to a driving range stood the house. It had seen better days, but you would have too, after all that time. I went around back and found a polite but wary woman there, picking cucumbers. She identified herself as a descendant of the family who’d bought out the Hammetts, and surrendered her name. It wasn’t his.

So much for Buckler’s story about Hammetts still on the premises. Together she and I circumambulated the property. On one side was a small manmade lake, on the other a jumble of rusting farm equipment. The man of the house came onto the porch, blinking. We stood there, me, Effie and the two of them. I didn’t know what I’d come for, but this wasn’t it. A squirrel scampered around a tall outdoor cage. The woman noticed my attention and answered it.

“He likes it here. We only lock him up on account of the dogs.”

Just then a gunshot echoed across the lake.

“That’ll be the sportsman’s club. It’s hunting season.”

I talked my way into the place. It was as if a 200-year-old farmhouse had eaten a suburban bungalow whole and washed it down with a swig of air freshener. The only trace that remained of the house Hammett grew up in was the view from a second-floor window above the front porch. I stared out of it a long time.

I’d come on a bad tip that led to a good one, with a dead writer in my head and an imaginary woman by my side. It was good to be there, hearing the gunfire, kidding myself that it all added up to something. My hostess tried to spook me with stories about weird noises at night, but I wasn’t biting.

Above the second-floor landing was a locked rectangular trapdoor, painted brown and scored with scratches. I tried to get a runelike symbol on it to look like an H, but no dice. Some doors you just can’t open. I was trying to picture Hammett up in the attic as a kid, woolgathering out the window, that week’s library books freshly devoured at his side. I took a picture of the trapdoor and hoped the snap might tell me what the original wouldn’t.

March 18, 2008
Terre Haute, IN

Already they’re talking about disqualifying the Vigo County library from competing in Terre Haute’s annual Tablescapes competition, since they won last year for their Gatsby-themed Big Read table, and again this for the stupendous Falcon entry adjacent. Each place setting this year had crystal stemware and black plate bearing an appetizing prop, such as a pair of brass knuckles or a gun. Photo by David Kipen.

Thank heaven for site-visit reports, because my twice-a-week blogging regimen can’t half cover all the places I go. So when I get back from, say, Terre Haute, Ind., and last week’s eminently postworthy WPA conference takes up the space where I’d otherwise recap my Indiana adventures, I still have a site-visit report where I can write up my impressions. Right there on the form, Uncle Sam asks me to “[p]rovide a brief summary of your overall impression of the implementation of the project…”

In the case of Terre Haute, it’s hard to do this without resorting to superlatives. I fetched up in the Terre Haute Hilton Garden at the “Crossroads of America,” where the old highways 40 and 41 meet, only to find a detectives’ notebook in my room. Airport security later obliged me to relocate this witty spiral-bound notebook somewhere I probably won’t find it until my next trip, but I remember it held all manner of putative clues to the Maltese Falcon’s whereabouts. Appointments with famous no-shows from literature and film abounded in its pages, including one rendezvous apiece with everyone from George Kaplan — the nonentity Cary Grant is mistaken for at the beginning of North by Northwest — to Godot himself. (Perhaps Kaplan got waylaid north of town, where I’m assured Hitchcock filmed that picture’s famous cropduster sequence.)

Next up, the site-visit report form requires me to “[i]nclude any issues you feel may need to be addressed.” Frankly, the only issue that comes to mind is the regrettable brevity of my stay. I adjourned from the hotel to Terre Haute’s main library, where the resourceful librarian who’d ginned up the notebook proceeded to keep an all-ages ESL pizza party spellbound with her storytelling. Afterward we all went out for some convivial, beef-intensive Terre Haute cuisine at a converted stable (!), and next morning I breakfasted with assorted local arts dignitaries, who regaled me with lore of native sons Eugene V. Debs and James Jones, and had me contemplating a return visit at my earliest opportunity.

“Include any appropriate future actions you feel will benefit the organization,” goes the next item on the report form, and the one thing I can think of might be to hold all keynote speakers to an hour. I must’ve talked for two, easy, at my SRO lecture that afternoon. Folks seemed receptive, though, especially to my chaffing of the Mayor for not having read the book yet.

The last injunction on the site-visit form is, ” If you have answered NO to any compliance question above, please explain further.” That refers to the part above where it asks, “Did the organization comply with the stipulations of the agreement?” Well, the main stipulations are 1) to round up strong partners, which in this case included one of very few all-volunteer theaters nationwide whose budget reaches seven figures, 2) to involve the media, which in this case included the Terre Haute Tribune-Star, where my beloved quondam San Francisco Chronicle colleague Stephanie Salter gave us a nice write-up and promptly, alas, skipped town, and 3) to use The Maltese Falcon to get people reading like it’s going out of style. Which, with enough Big Reads like this one, it may just not be.

December 4, 2007
Washington, DC

Sometimes, even if the picture won’t win any prizes, the subjects are the story. Snapped here are Big Read partners Jane Wood and Henry Fortunato, flanking a first edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Jane presumably brings the same dynamism to chairing the English department at Park University that she’s brought to co-organizing a Big Read, while bemused, voluble Henry directs public affairs at the nearby Kansas City Public Library. Darwin, meanwhile, helped start World War I, if you believe a text panel accompanying this display inside Kansas City’s new National World War I Museum (one of Jane and Henry’s Big Read partners). But more about that later.

It was my privilege to fly into Kansas City two weekends ago for the finale of their salute to A Farewell to Arms. What I saw there capped a series of fine recent Reads, each superlative in its own way. Attleboro, Mass., whose Fahrenheit 451 Read I posted about not long ago, drummed up some of the strongest school participation I’ve seen yet. Rochester, N.Y. — not surprisingly, in light of its Kodak history and consequent movie madness — programmed an ambitious film series around The Maltese Falcon, and created a readable, handy, stylish Big Read calendar that could serve as a model for Big Read cities everywhere. And in White Plains, a SUNY Purchase English professor hosted an absolutely exemplary book discussion, putting aside academic jargon to engage a score of townspeople whose demographics rivaled Pauline Kael’s proverbial World War II movie bomber crew for diversity.

Back in Missouri, the celebration of A Farewell to Arms combined sturdy versions of these three Big Read components with a positively unprecedented amount of workplace participation. At least five local corporations distributed books to their employees and invited an especially industrious KCPL librarian to lead office discussions. Kansas City Star arts columnist and book critic Steve Paul, who had already keynoted KC’s kickoff event with a talk about Hemingway’s year as a cub reporter at his newspaper, moderated a reputedly overflow office book group at the international headquarters of Hallmark. (If you see a spate of Hemingwayesque greetings cards in the coming months, feel free to blame the Big Read.) All these so-called “Corporation Big Reads” must’ve gone over well, because every last company involved is already clamoring to know which book — Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl, in particular, came up — they want to do next year.

On the Origin of Species, as a work of British nonfiction, won’t be appearing on the Big Read list anytime soon. But its prominent placement in the WWI Museum raises the question of its alleged role in the runup to the war that wounded Hemingway and so many others. It’s an interesting hypothesis, casting a gentle naturalist’s case for the theory of natural selection as the trigger for what became, in its time, probably the bloodiest war in human history. All the combatant countries had considered themselves “naturally selected” for greatness, of course, and assumed that in a war of all against all, they’d surely come out on top. None of them was right.

Lincoln once called Harriet Beecher Stowe “the little lady who made this big war.” So, did Darwin really help make an even bigger one? Me, I’d hang more of the blame on the British political economist Herbert Spencer. He’s the one who perverted “natural selection” into “survival of the fittest” — a phrase Darwin never used.

But there’s another dimension to all this. Kansas has played host to some of the most contested litigation in recent years over the teaching of evolution. By placing Darwin in one of the very first display cases at the World War I Museum, our docent noted that curators were implicitly defending a book often under attack elsewhere in their state.

Then again, they were also blaming a five-year bloodbath on that same treatise. Books are dicey things, and mean different things to different people. To Kansas City, A Farewell to Arms has meant the chance to come together around a single book in their schools, their libraries, their spectacular new museum and, most originally, around the office water cooler. Only light, not blood, was shed. Arguments broke out in book groups all across town, but no gunplay. To my knowledge, no book discussion has ever ended in violence.

Might make a good novel, though. Watch this space.

November 30, 2007
Washington, DC

As I read some of the recent blogs—Paulette’s about her commendable effort to give up TV and David’s about what constitutes “literature”—I was reminded of the first time I encountered the art of Dashiell Hammett.

Ten years ago, before becoming the Publications Manager at the NEA, I was living in Norway with my wife, in Bodø, roughly 60 miles above the Arctic Circle (about 100 kilometers for those counting in metrics). We had no television for the year we were living there, which left time for lots of reading. I had already plowed through the small quantity of books we brought, which was a problem—I tend to get anxious if I don’t have something to read. When I don’t have a paper in the morning, I start reading the cereal box, or the wrapper of whatever food substance I am ingesting. This became problematic as my knowledge of Norwegian was quite bad.

So I went in search of reading material. Unfortunately, we were living in a small, isolated town whose library had a very limited books-in-English section. There was a used book store with English books, but they were mostly romance books, science fiction, and mystery novels—nothing I relished reading (though I did do a fair amount of sci-fi reading as a teenager). Still, it was something to read, so I picked three authors that I recognized but had mostly stayed away from due to their reputation as “genre writers” or “popular writers.” They were Martin Cruz Smith Gorky Park, Graham Greene The Power and the Glory, and Dashiell Hammett The Maltese Falcon. I had always assumed that if a writer was popular, it was probably because his/her writing was appealing to the lowest common denominator. Never have I been so wrong about authors as I had been about these three.

Although I knew Greene as the author of The Quiet American (which I hadn’t yet read at the time) and the short story “The Destructors” (which I read in high school and enjoyed), his work was regularly shunned in college. An English major as an undergraduate and an MFA recipient as a graduate student, I took many literature classes—not once did I read a Greene book. So The Power and the Glory took me by surprise with its strong narrative and amazingly perceptive character study of a drunken, fornicating priest on the run during the religious persecutions in Mexico in the 1930s. It was anything but a genre book—it was literature, and at the same time an exciting read (believe me, that is not always the case). The same was true of Gorky Park, which followed Moscow detective Arkady Renko during the Cold War years of the 1980s as he tries to solve the murder of two people in city’s park. The strong attention to character development made it much more than a run-of-the-mill detective story. And then there is Hammett.

Now I had seen the movie of The Maltese Falcon, the John Huston version, many times. I enjoyed it each time—from Bogart’s tough guy Sam Spade to Peter Lorre’s fey Joel Cairo to Sidney Greenstreet’s unforgettable Gutman—but had never picked up the book before. I have found that the best movie adaptations are often of books that are mediocre, and that good books just as often make wretched films (not always the case, as I was to find out). So I picked up The Maltese Falcon with trepidation; I was afraid it might ruin the movie for me.

Two things immediately struck me: one, the description of Sam Spade resembled nothing of Humphrey Bogart, and two, the brilliant dialogue from the film seemed to have come entirely from the book. In the first paragraph, the description of Spade is of a “blond Satan,” his face a series of v’s. Not exactly what you think of when you think of Bogart’s fleshy face. Throughout the book, there’s a hardness to Spade that Bogart managed to soften in the film, but to the character’s disadvantage in my view. The reason Spade survives is through his hardness and his unwillingness to “play the sap” for anyone.

And then there’s the dialogue—I say without hyperbole (okay, maybe a little) that Hammett is one of the finest writers of dialogue in the English language this side of Hemingway’s short stories. They are tough, simple sentences, but like Hemingway’s, say more than just the words alone. There’s implications and unspoken allusions sneaking around the edges of the sentences, which in a mystery like The Maltese Falcon, add to the intrigue. And they’re something that Hemingway’s often isn’t: funny. Hammett has his way with wisecracks and witty repartee that would make Oscar Wilde smile.

Years after I read the book, I came across a story, possibly apocryphal, about how director John Huston wrote the screenplay. Huston was way behind in writing the screenplay for the film, so finally he ordered his secretary to take the book and type out all the dialogue, and he would use that to work on the screenplay. She did so and left the typed pages on her desk before she went to lunch. In the meantime, the producers of the movie came by to see where Huston was with the screenplay. They were reading the typed pages when Huston returned. They congratulated him on an excellent screenplay and Huston just smiled and said nothing. A strong endorsement of the writing in the book if nothing else…

The Maltese Falcon compelled me to be less likely to categorize and dismiss a book because of its popularity or the “genre” it was written in. Good writing is good writing, whether it is decreed from on high by the literary gods to be “literature” or a paperback picked up at the airport. All that matters is the words on the page. And that’s the stuff that dreams are made of (which, incidentally, isn’t a line from the book—allegedly it was thought up by Bogart on the movie set…).

July 23, 2007
Washington, DC

While tabulating responses to our survey of teenagers’ favorite books, I’ve been thinking what I’d do if I ever found myself in front of a teenage English class for a semester — besides panic, that is. This is where my trusty know-it-all megalomania comes in handy. Here, drawing on all the classroom expertise that seven years as newspaperman and two as an arts administrator have afforded me, is my notion:

On the first day of class, I’d challenge each student to name a book he likes. No fudging, no sucking up, just any book. Gatsby, Danielle Steele, X-Men — I don’t care. Each kid’s first assignment would just be to tell the class why they ought to read it too, thereby helping develop those powers of argumentation. Then the class votes, and whichever book polls highest becomes the first assignment on an otherwise blank syllabus. (So it’s an alternative school, OK? Work with me.)

Say the class picks some Robert Ludlum thriller. Onto the syllabus it goes. The class reads it, I read it, the kid who championed it re-reads it. Over a week we talk about whether Ludlum creates suspense effectively or not, whether his characters sound real or don’t, whether he nails the ending or doesn’t, quite.

We now return the class to its regularly scheduled taskmaster, i.e., me. For Lesson 2, I suggest a slightly older, slightly better thriller. Some Frederick Forsyth, maybe, or Michael Crichton’s Binary, written under the pen name John Lange.

Lesson 3: Something short, but with a little more meat on its bones. Maybe John LeCarre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold or Graham Greene’s The Third Man.

Lesson 4: A vintage American mystery, like the Big Read’s own Maltese Falcon.

Lesson 5: A classic proto-thriller, like Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda or John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps.

Lesson 6: The original and still best geopolitical mistaken-identity thriller of all time: A Tale of Two Cities.

This way, we’ve taken them from Robert Ludlum, via Dashiell Hammett, all the way to Dickens in just one semester. Similarly, if the class picks Danielle Steele, maybe regress them through Gone With the Wind to Little Women to Henry James’s Washington Square, which is joining the Big Read in fall 2008. If they pick an X-Men comic, take them back through H.G. Wells to Edgar Rice Burroughs to Jules Verne. If they pick Harry Potter, walk them down the years past the Big Read’s A Wizard of Earthsea to The Hobbit.

The point is, let them pick the first book on the syllabus, then follow it back through the genealogy of literature wherever it leads. This way they’ll have a stake in the assigned reading, since they indirectly picked it. Start them cold with Dickens or Alcott, and they might not stick around for Ludlum or Steele.

Believe me, I know how impractical this all is. Feel free to file it under “unsolicited advice, passed along just to vent.” But if somebody had put me on to Ring Lardner’s You Know Me, Al when I was 8 when Jim Bouton’s Ball Four was my favorite book, I would have discovered classic American literature a whole lot sooner…

July 13, 2007
Washington, DC

I hate to deluge the Communications office with yet another post, but by the clock on the wall, it’s time for Uncle David to dip into the ol’ mailbag and see what you blog fans out there in cyberland are exercised about. Turns out there’s a fascinating letter from someone who writes:

“I am curious of your stance on books which constantly battle censorship in schools and the public realm, such as Huckleberry Finn. Will you push to raise awareness of certain books which parents, or communities may deem inappropriate for the way they describe slavery, war, sexuality, inequality?”

Good question. As it turns out, there aren’t a whole lot of books out there that haven’t been deemed inappropriate by “somebody.” Here at the Big Read, at least three of our books reliably rank pretty high on the American Library Association’s annual list of challenged books: The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Farewell to Arms. I’d guess that the mystical elements in A Wizard of Earthsea and Bless Me, Ultima make them frequent targets, too.

But as for whether we’ll “push to raise awareness” of these or other potentially controversial books, my instinct is not to do any more pushing than our Readers Circle already did by putting them on the list. None of us would choose a book because it’s been banned, any more than we’d choose a book because it’s innocuous.

Our principal criterion is and always will be literary excellence. If that means ruffling a few mockingbird feathers, we’ll just have to live with it. Certainly Dashiell Hammett, author of our list’s Maltese Falcon — and nobody’s schoolmarm — isn’t going to be getting any posthumous medals from GLAAD any time soon.

As for Huck Finn, Big Read aficionados may have noticed that among our announced new additions for Fall ‘08 will be The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In the first place, Tom Sawyer is an unalloyed gem, and I’d argue a much deeper book than many smart people give it credit for. While more people may know a set-piece or two from Tom Sawyer — painting the fence, etc. — I suspect that more people have read Huck Finn, and one of things the Big Read endeavors to do as it hits its stride is to enlarge people’s ideas about
what is or isn’t canonical.

Second, Tom Sawyer is, on its own terms, a more successful book than Huck Finn. By that I don’t mean better, or deeper, or more worth reading. I only mean that Tom Sawyer realizes its own modest ambitions more completely than its sequel. The ending of Huck Finn just plain doesn’t work, as Big Read mainstay Ernest Hemingway was not the first to point out. The ending of Tom Sawyer, while perhaps less memorable, unquestionably delivers.

Third, as I’ve suggested, there’s more to Tom Sawyer than meets the eye, as there usually is to less-read books by great writers. Here, after all, is a book set in the antebellum South that begins with a scene about a fence–that is to say, a border — being painted white — that is to say, the opposite of black — as a result of somebody getting other people do his work for him. As Tom Lehrer once remarked, you don’t have to be Freud to figure that one out.

We do our best around here, but we need questions like this one to help keep us honest. So please, keep that correspondence coming. And in the meantime, check out the Big Read Blog’s maiden foray into the age of streaming video: some footage that Thomas Edison shot of Mark Twain …