Writing With Intent by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood [Atwood, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Writing, Reference, Adult
ISBN: 9780786715350
Amazon: 078671767X
Goodreads: 99651
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2005-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

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Notes

1. Diane Johnson, Dashiell Hammett: A Life (New York: Random House, 1983).

2. The term “pulp” didn’t refer to the sleaziness of the writing, but to the quality of the paper: the “pulps” were printed on uncoated paper, as opposed to the more upmarket “slicks.” But many good writers got their start in the pulps, and they were a source of income if you could write quickly.

3. As he was already a star by then, he evidently didn’t have to suffer the mind-bending and humiliation dished out to lesser CPUSA members, such as Richard Wright.

4. The third Samuel in the trio is Sam Spade. Hammett was very conscious of names, and would have given his own to this character quite deliberately.

5. As Jo Hammett remarks, “Papa loved all kinds of word play: thieves’ cant, convict argot, Yiddish expressions, restaurant and cowboy talk, Cockney rhyming slang, gangster-lowlife speak.”

6. In 1931 he was reading Sanctuary, which—with its twisted Popeye and its socialite who plays with the toughs—is probably Faulkner’s most Hammett-like book. Hammett didn’t think highly of it, but revised his opinion of Faulkner upward in later years.

7. Hiassen’s amazing “Velcro-Face” of Skin Tight and his road-kill-eating ex-governor exist on a continuum that leads from Hammett’s squinty or big-chinned grotesques through Faulkner’s twisted Popeye through Dick Tracy of the comics, with its gargoyle thugs such as “Anyface,” who looked like Swiss cheese.

8. This strain—awfulness behind the apple-pie facade—runs through Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” in which the wholesome townsfolk are in league with the Devil, through Hammett, through Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, where the town conceals murderous Martians, through the film The Stepford Wives, in which robot wife doubles have replaced real wives, to the television show Twin Peaks and certain episodes of The X Files. In real life it has played itself out in versions of Satanic cults, as well as its ar-form, the infamous Salem witchcraft trials.

9. Hammett was a moviegoer. It’s endearing to find him giving his opinion of the relative merits of Pinocchio versus Snow White. Needless to say, he liked Pinocchio better.

10. Jo Hammett describes all the kinds of toughness Hammett admired: tough men, tough women, tough sports. It was a quality of character as well as a physical quality. “Toughness,” she says, “would take him through the last bad years.”

11. There were three main attempts: My Brother Felix, which was “going to be pretty good for both magazines and movies”; The Valley Sheep Are Fatter, a title that comes from one of Thomas Love Peacock’s novels; and Tulip, this last about a writer who can no longer write.

12. Thought of as a piece of syrupy kitsch by those who haven’t read it closely. But Hammett was a good reader, and must have seen it for the creepy poem it is.

13. The only words Corey is said to have uttered were “Put on more stones,” but Longfellow has the pressing take place offstage and so does not use them.

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