Lillian and Dash (17 page)

Gómez said, “They would have fed us even if you were not so famous.”

“I’m not famous.”

“To them, you are Charlie Chaplin’s sister.”

“You didn’t …”

“As I said, they would have fed you anyway.”

It was nightfall when they spotted Madrid in the distance on a high plateau above them. It was lighted periodically by bombs exploding near the city center. There were no airplanes. This was a constant artillery barrage from the Nationalists. “The front is just to the west, so close, within range already of the big cannons,” Gómez explained, which was why it was better to try to enter the city from the rear, even though that would take much longer. Gómez was nothing if not prudent, you’d have to give him that. Lillian was frightened when they finally drove into the city.

Gómez pulled his Ford through and around the rubble of devastated neighborhoods, past the skeletons of old homes, and then down alleyways and streets almost untouched by artillery bombardment, but all in all what she could see of Madrid was in very bad shape. Perhaps it was the time of night, but the city had a ghostly quality. It took Julio a very long time to make his way to the villa where Lillian was finally to meet Hemingway and Gellhorn and Ivens.

Hemingway. He brought up such conflicting emotions in her. Jealousy foremost. Superb writer, really. And prolific. But even more successful than superb or prolific justified. Wasn’t he exactly what all writers wanted for themselves? She said no and thought yes. Wasn’t he what she wanted for Hammett? Again, no was yes.

Eight o’clock was its usual time, and the night’s bombardment had just begun. They drove again through the
patchwork of destruction quite a distance to the safety of the higher ground north of the city. The large villa stood alone on a cliff just above a chapel. Gómez escorted her to the door and said he’d wait in the car, all night if necessary. If she could remember to bring something for him, dessert, fruit, cheese, anything, he’d be grateful.

Lillian walked unsteadily up a flight of unlighted stairs. She entered a darkened room and saw the silhouettes of Ernest and Martha on the balcony against the red backdrop of the city. They were watching the shelling of Madrid from this safe dark place. Lillian approached and leaned on the railing of the balcony, a bit weak in the knees, watching the flashes and then waiting for the impacts. No one spoke. During a brief lull, they kissed their welcomes, still without speaking.

“You’re here,” Martha whispered, “thank God.”

“Welcome to hell,” Hemingway said.

“Pleasure’s all mine.”

They faced the bombardment as they spoke, more pauses than conversation. Slowly, information emerged and was exchanged. The important thing for Lillian, the only thing, was the footage from Ivens so she could see what she had to write. There was no footage yet, either from Ivens or from Gellhorn. Soon, it would all be here soon.

Ivens was not in Madrid but at the front shooting the fighting ten miles west of the city. The fighting there was vicious, the outcome of the war might hinge on it. If that line
were to crack … But not to worry, Joris will get her his film. And where was Martha’s? Being processed.

Lillian very much wanted to talk about her narration. Didn’t Hemingway want to collaborate on it?

“I’d only screw it up. You’re the best film writer in the world. Well, at least the best one in Madrid tonight. Hah. Don’t think I don’t know how lucky we are to have you. You just write it. I’ll just say your words, and that will be that.” All said distractedly, so fascinated was he by the explosions. It was easy for her not to believe him.

Lillian noticed that the shelling this night was not really random after all. Although there were flashes around the city center, mostly they illuminated a towering building and the surrounding complex of downtown buildings near the bridge that spanned the Manzanares. Fires had started there and begun to spread throughout the area. Distant sirens sounded continually. “It’s the central communications building,” Martha said. “They’ve been trying to knock it out for a week. Somehow they can’t.”

“Look at that,” Hemingway said, “just look at it. Hell itself.”

“I’d love to turn it back on the bastards.”

“Of course, but look at it. Beautiful.”

“Not beautiful to me.”

Hemingway wasn’t listening: “It’s sickening, but it’s beautiful too, a modern war can be stunning.”

“Fuck that romantic bullshit about modern war,” Lillian said and turned to go.

Martha followed her to the stairs. “You’ll get your film, I promise, Lilly. Be careful. And forgive him, he’s not been himself lately.”

“Careful, yes. Forgive him, no.”

Martha called after her, “We’ll be in touch.”

L
ILLIAN WANTED TO SEE
last night’s devastation to put herself more directly into the war she had to write about. Early as it was, horses pulling carts filled with rubble clomped over the cobblestones. A few cars and trucks rolled by slowly. From one she saw a leg hanging limply. The smell of damp ashes was ever present.

She found the greatest destruction by looking up and across the river. Dark smoke rose from just beyond the dome and spires of the Madrid Cathedral. A soldier would not let her walk across the bridge. She distracted him and ran across. As she approached the smoke, the odor—now it was almost a taste—got stronger. The church was not on fire; everything around it was. She turned the corner and saw all the devastation she could possibly want.

In a hushed quietude, small fires were still being extinguished by firemen. Rubble was being sifted, collected, and piled. The efforts at reordering had yet to make a dent; destruction still held the upper hand. Not all the bodies had been removed. They, too, were being stored like reusable wreckage in the shade of the rectory, covered for the most
part, but more coverings were needed. She walked toward the place where bodies were being laid, in some cases with their arms and legs intertwined or grotesquely outstretched as if reaching or striding. These people had been killed so recently and so violently that Lillian was stunned by the life still on their faces. She had the mad thought that she was looking at an accident that could somehow be undone.

One face in particular held her attention. A woman about her age, roughly thirty, lay on a stretcher apart from all the others, placed there, it was explained, because she had not yet been identified. She was, apparently, a visitor to someone unknown in the neighborhood. Though closed, her eyes were unusually large; lidded, they conveyed an expression of peacefulness teased by the irony of her half-smile. One cheek was dimpled. Lillian could not break off her gaze. She was asked to move aside by a man backing in a truck to take away some of the identified victims.

The face had shaken Lilly to numbness. She sat down on the steps of the rectory. Movement around her slowed. She heard no sound. Many years before in New York at dinner Hemingway told of arriving at a battlefield near Udine, and smelling the war dead for the first time and being pleasantly surprised by its sweetness. She smelt death now, beneath the choke of wet, charred wood. There was no sweetness whatsoever. Lilly coughed and almost threw up.

There was no electricity in room 323 so she sat with her notebook perched on the windowsill. She sat down intending
to write some narration for a film she hadn’t seen but could now imagine. Instead she wrote:

The Republican press office promised to send the letter in a pouch to its New York consulate and then have it hand-delivered.

S
AMUEL
D
ASHIELL
H
AMMETT WAS A MAN
for whom the word
unattached
was not a negative thing, for whom the
un-
was not a prefix but an integral part of its Teutonic root.
Attached
meant a harnessing—meant limitation, restriction, and unhappiness all rolled into one. Even when it came to Lillian Florence Hellman.

More often, though, being attached to Lilly meant a greater sense of “unattachment” to everything else in his life, and that could become a source of his contentment. This was, of course, the only way a man alone, an
isolato
, could love, although such a man did not even think to acknowledge the term. Hammett could not write about the subject of love, could not even think clearly about love. His detective heroes—the Op, Sam Spade, the more recent Secret Agent X-9—were such men, men who could not love or even talk about it, especially not talk about it.

Nick Charles was most assuredly not the loner. Nick Charles, a bon vivant and raconteur, a schmoozer and bullshitter par excellence, who had too many old pals and drinking buddies from his single days, an irrepressible ladies’ man and flirt; but also married and fundamentally loyal to Nora because he loved her. Of course Nickie professed his love in the only way a Hammett lover could—ironically. So when he says, “Of course I’ll miss you, dahling. If you go out shopping, my beloved, I won’t have anyone to throw darts at,” he really means, “Please stay home, sweetheart. I need someone to drink with this afternoon.”

In Lillian’s absence, Hammett still had not taken a drink. That didn’t mean his mind was clear. Actually, drinking produced wonderful clarity until drunkenness kicked in. Sober now, Hammett was woefully confused about something as emotionally charged as his love for Lillian. So he walked the city a great deal and wrote a bit.

The hardest part of writing about his family was thinking about his family, bringing it back in memory. During his walks he tried to see more clearly the true events of his childhood years. He particularly liked to stop at construction sites and watch men working. Their actions gave him a sense that there was a positive counterforce to human impermanence and the physical law of entropy. Even if it wasn’t actually so, the illusion gave him pleasure. He liked watching the girders go up and stay up. He particularly liked to walk to Grand Central Terminal and watch passengers going and coming,
especially arrivals being greeted by friends and family, something he’d never done.

Hammett bought a new notebook just before Lillian left for Spain in a shop down on Sheridan Square. It was slightly less than full-size and had lined pages. On the spine the word
NOTES
stood out in embossed gold. He bought a black Waterman fountain pen that had just the right heft to it. Its nib produced a sinewy script that gave him pleasure as he put it on the page.

Here he was, a middle-aged man, a famous writer by any reasonable standard, someone who received tens of thousands of dollars for simply telling a story, and now he was walking around Manhattan scratching observations in a notebook like a kid serving a literary apprenticeship. That realization gave Hammett pleasure. He kept his notes and sketches in the back of his notebook, preserving the front pages for an early memory of his mother. He had accumulated quite a few typed pages of family memories already. He reserved the story about his mother, Anne Bond Dashiell, because he wanted it to inaugurate his notebook.