PBS departed from its usual antique road show, psychotherapeutic self-discovery and investment advice programming last night to air two fascinating profiles on Lillian Hellman and Dashiel Hammett back-to-back.

Hellman (1907-1984) was an up-and-coming writer in the film industry when she met Hammett in 1931. The two shared a passion for left wing politics, writing and hobnobbing with high-living sophisticates on the East and West Coasts.

By the time Hammett met her, he was at the end of his tether artistically. He converted whatever artistic energy he had left into working with her. For example, her first big success was "The Children's Hour," a play about the damage done to two teachers at a private school who are accused falsely of having a lesbian affair. Hammett suggested the story to her, based on a novel, and helped her to shape the plot and dialog. Hammett's notes to her, contained in the margins of the manuscripts, are much longer than the play.

While both had left-wing sympathies during the 1920s, the Depression heightened their commitment to radical, if not revolutionary, politics. She wrote "Watch on the Rhine", a powerful antifascist play. Not only did she write plays, she took significant risks on behalf of the left. During the Spanish Civil War, she traveled to Spain and hosted a pro-Republic radio show. On one occasion, she continued her broadcast even though the building was being bombed.

She also made trips to Russia and developed strong ties to the government. After Hitler's invasion began, she accompanied the Russian press corps to the front and wrote powerful dispatches on the fighting.

After WWII, she plunged into the Progressive Party campaign which was essentially the last gasp of the 1930s radicalization.

Hellman was not only outspoken politically, she was caustic and even rude in social settings. Despite and perhaps because of this, she was also greatly admired. She was also, despite being what one interviewee described as "no oil painting", a object of desire for many men. Hammett, who looked like a model, was drawn to her because he had never encountered such an intelligent woman before in his life. She in turn decided the minute she saw him that he would be her next conquest. Mailer commented that Hellman pursued men in the fashion that some aggressive men pursue women.

When the witch hunt began, Hellman was subpoenaed to appear before HUAC, where she refused to name names. She issued a famous press release that stated that she would not tailor her political beliefs to satisfy those currently in fashion. The IRS charged her with not paying back taxes and she lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. This occurred at the same time when ordinary professional outlets were not open to her.

As the power of the blacklist began to diminish, Hellman went back to work as a playwright. Her last big success was "Toys in the Attic." Most of her income following her retirement from the theatre came from college teaching jobs. She lived in a spacious home in Provincetown, Massachusetts where she kept a bedroom for Hammett, who she had been separated from for more than a decade. By the 1960s, he was a shell of a man, broken down by a lifetime of alcoholism, lung illness, political repression and clinical depression. The two continued to share political passions and loved to entertain guests at lavish parties. She was close to Warren Beatty, Norman Mailer, Jules Feiffer among other celebrities on the left.

In the 1960s, she picked up a NY Times that included an article on the major living American playwrights that included three men, but not her. Infuriated, she decided to clear the record by writing a series of memoirs that would document her successes. They included "An Unfinished Woman", "Pentimento" and "Scoundrel Time". I recommend "Scoundrel Time" as one of the best accounts of McCarthyism. It is etched in acid and memorable.

Her memoirs were all best-sellers. Not only had she come back into the limelight as a writer, she was also enjoying prestige as a radical once again. She spearheaded counterattacks on FBI harassment through the prestigious Committee on Public Justice. This group put the FBI on the defensive around the time it was interfering with the rights of antiwar activists and black freedom fighters.

But a bitter struggle with Mary McCarthy which began in 1979 turned the remainder of her life into a hell. McCarthy told TV interviewer that Hellman was a complete liar, that events recorded in her memoirs were fabricated. She was less of a hero than she painted herself to be and had not fought McCarthyism with the kind of courage she had a reputation for. Hellman sued McCarthy for libel and the case cost her a fortune as well as her piece of mind. Apparently some of McCarthy's charges were identical to those leveled by anthropologist David Stoll against Rigoberta Menchu, that Hellman had embellished aspects of her personal history in order to make for a more lively and compelling account. Norman Mailer says that anybody who is trained as a writer will use fictional techniques when writing a memoir. It would be a good subject for a PhD thesis by one of our enterprising young Marxist scholars, to trace the whole tangled subject of biography, truth and politics.

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Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) was an eighth grade dropout from Baltimore who ended up in San Francisco as a young man, where he took his first job as a private detective with the Pinkerton Agency. This experience shaped his outlook of the world, as he came to the conclusion that criminals, cops and businessmen all operated in the same money-grubbing web of deceit and corruption.

Unfortunately, his stint with Pinkerton also put him in conflict with the workers movement. Paul Buhle's indispensable "Encyclopedia of the American Left", states in its entry on Hammett that "According to some accounts, he witnessed and even took part in the lynching of a Wobbly militant Frank Little in Butte, Montana, in 1917."

An early bout with tuberculosis made it impossible for him to continue work as a detective, so he tried to launch a career as a writer. His first assignments were with pulp fiction magazines that paid a penny a word.

Hammett was the first American writer who believed that detective stories could be an art form. His early successes with "The Maltese Falcon", the "Glass Key" and "Red Harvest" proved he was right. As one interviewee put it, these novels had dialog which was more engaged with the American vernacular than anything ever written before. Hammett both used the speech of workaday Americans, but elevated them in a way that could only be compared to what Shakespeare did for the English language. Hammett was as much of an innovator as Hemingway, who is undoubtedly influenced by Hammett's style.

The other important element of Hammmett's fiction is the uncompromisingly bleak view of society, in which nothing ever ends positively at the end of his tale. There are no real heroes. In "The Maltese Falcon", Sam Spade acts out of self-interest and nothing else. Perhaps one can analyze Hammett as a source of inspiration for those Communist Party screenwriters who worked in the "film noir" genre. Apparently Hammett himself could not write films himself, since as Ring Lardner Jr. put it, he would sit in film studio writing sessions to see a lost, vacant expression on Hammett's face. Hammett had simply lost the creative urge.

Hammett relied on the kindness of lovers and friends in Hollywood in order to make ends meet. He stayed at a hotel called the Sutton, whose desk clerk was CP'er and aspiring "noir" novelist Nathaniel West. West made a point of letting Hammett use a fake name and get out of paying rent for months on end. When the hotel management caught up with him, West would warn Hammett and let him flee only to return with a new false name as soon as the coast was clear. He did the same thing for Trotskyist James T. Farrell, author of "Studs Lonigan".

His last novel was "The Thin Man" which is revealed as a commentary on his relationship with Hellman. Nick Charles, the detective, is a complete alcoholic who can barely tend to his cases because he is preoccupied with where he is going to get his next drink. Nora Charles, a heiress, while supporting him financially, loves to put him down with pithy barbs. This apparently was exactly what happened in real life as Hellman would pop her head into Hammett's bedroom up in Provincetown, accompanied by houseguests, and make sarcastic remarks about what a ne'er-do-well Hammett was.

In addition to converting whatever artistic energy he had left into collaborating with Hellman, Hammett also launched a new unpaid career as a Communist Party activist. He headed up countless committees, including one to aid Spanish Civil War veterans. One of them is interviewed as stating that he met Hammett in a bar (where else) and received a large cash payment that literally saved his life. Hammett told him that he wanted to go to Spain himself, but the CP thought he would be more useful doing this kind of work.

Hammett did manage to get into the anti-fascist crusade during WWII as he cajoled the army to accept him as an ordinary grunt at the age of 48. He was stationed in Alaska during the entire war. On trips to NYC, he would visit his old haunts in his private's uniform and get a big kick out of being allowed in prestigious clubs and restaurants like the 21, while officers were standing on line. The doorman would see him and welcome him with a flourish, "Come right in, Mr. Hammett."

When the witch-hunt began, Hammett was ordered to turn over the names of the people who donated to the various committees he was involved with. He refused and was sentenced to 6 months in prison, which had a severe impact on his health. He came out of prison broken both physically and emotionally.

Louis Proyect