Hard-Boiled Anxiety by Karen Huston Karydes

Author:Karen Huston Karydes [Karydes, Karen Huston]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004230 Literary Criticism / Mystery & Detective
ISBN: 9781944962005
Publisher: Secant Publishing, LLC
Published: 2016-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

We lived as if we were already dead, as if we’d died when we were diagnosed and nothing we did after that mattered. We lived as if nothing was important.65

In Sue Miller’s novel The World Below, set in a sanitarium in 1919, she wrote of sex “in hunger and terror and a kind of willed abandon.”66 Hammett was already an exuberant womanizer; he had been treated for gonorrhea as a teenager. He was, however, an equal opportunity philanderer; he never held promiscuity against the women he loved.

What matters is that they loved each other: he and Jose were friends, and she was pregnant. She wrote to Hammett, who wrote back, “Come to San Francisco and I will marry you.” And she did and he did. On their wedding day, she wrote that “he bought me flowers”67—and Mary was born in October, all in 1921.

The pregnancy only became an issue seventy-one years later when Mary died, and Jose and Hammett were already gone. Lillian Hellman abruptly claimed that Mary was not Hammett’s child, that Jose had had an affair with a different soldier and that when she came up pregnant, she wrote to Hammett. He had played knight-errant and married Jose, Hellman contended. Trying to debunk Hellman’s assertion, the Hammett family proffered an incomplete Hammett-to-Jose letter written in May 1921:

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