This is Easter Week, the most sombre and introspective, yet the most hopeful week of the Christian year, which seems to correspond to the year in the news. I posted a hopeful wish for a pessimistic week on my Second Thoughts Substack
Good Things
Review of The Maltese Falcon
I am writing this after at least my third reading of The Maltese Falcon. Some critics say the book is Hammett’s best; it’s undoubtedly his best-known and most popular, but I prefer Hammett’s next novel, The Glass Key. TMF sports flamboyant characters and an exciting plot that’s nearly a conspiracy theory. The Glass Key contains more realistic views of corruption and human frailty, which is more to my taste.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed TMF and recommend it. The book is about Samuel Spade, private detective. Raymond Chandler modeled Philip Marlowe on Spade, but Spade has a far different role. Marlowe is clearly an errant underdog knight in Los Angeles. Spade may be a knight, but he’s not an underdog. He declares that San Francisco is his town, and, at points, he’s the town fixer who pulls strings to guide political outcomes. Note also that Spade has a partner, Miles Archer. Marlowe never had a partner and never will. The closest Marlowe had to a partner was his stumbling buddy, Terry Lennox, in the Long Goodbye.
Hammett’s style rings oddly in my ear. Hammett was widely read, but he dropped out of school in his early teens to help support his family. He claimed to have developed his authorial skills writing reports for the Pinkertons. His word choice is dated. His sentences often feel to me like he was pushing himself into a more elevated style than was natural to him. For example, “The boy raised his eyes to Spade’s mouth and spoke in a strained voice of someone in physical pain…” is awkward and abstract for pulp magazine readers. Chandler, on the other hand, writes with the self-assuredness of a well-trained Oxfordian, which he was. Nevertheless, both have an ear for the best in language. Compare the near iambic pentameter a few paragraphs later in TMF: “’Come on,’ he [Spade] said. ‘This will put you in solid with your boss.’”
I divide the book into three parts. The key to this division is the “Flitcraft episode” in which Spade tells Bridgid the story of a man from Tacoma who leads an ordinary moderately prosperous life with a wife who enjoys new salad recipes. One day, a heavy beam drops from a construction site and lands next to Flitcraft, barely missing him, and leaving him with a scratch from a flying concrete chip that becomes a permanent scar. Flitcraft immediately vacates his ordinary life. His wife and children are well provided for and he disappears into a life of wandering. After a few years, Flitcraft turns up in Spokane, leading an ordinary and moderately prosperous existence with a wife who looks nothing like his first wife, but enjoys new salad recipes. The three parts of TMF correspond to Flitcraft’s Tacoma, wandering, and Spokane lives. The pursuit of the Maltese falcon is Spade’s wandering. That phase ends when the pursuers of the falcon exit and the final chapters are Spade’s return from the life interrupted by the falcon. This structure is like a fairy tale in which much of the action is in a dream that intertwines with the waking world.
I leave the book with a question: has Spade’s adventure in fairy land transformed his life and character? Or has Spade’s walk-about with the falcon only revealed what was previously hidden or latent? In Chapter 20, Spade says to Bridgid “Don’t be too sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be.”
Has Hammett told us that Spade has not changed, but we have?
China’s Woes
The decline in China’s economy has occupied the economic press lately. Fifty years ago, I studied more in classical Chinese than English. I was working on a PhD. thesis on China of the Confucian era. Many of the basic tenets of traditional Chinese government and economics go back to Confucius and his followers in the Yellow River Valley, like much of western tradition goes back to Athens and Jerusalem of classical antiquity, which was roughly contemporaneous with Confucius. Maybe sunspots or a burst of cosmic radiation spurred civilization onward, although that ignores the great civilizations of Africa and the Americas.
It grieves me that I can’t say “I told you so,” to those who thought China would never get beyond the chaos of Mao because I didn’t tell anyone.
That bit of personal history has shaped my views of China. In the 1970s, China was in the bitter throes of the cultural revolution, but I concluded that China, if it could ever shake off its legacy of western colonial oppression and poverty, was a better platform for 20th century western market-driven capitalism than Max Weber’s characterization of the protestant ethic.
I wish I had published those views to refer to now, but I didn’t, so you will have to take my word for them. Herrlee Creel, my mentor at the University of Chicago, hinted at this view in his bestseller of 1949, Confucius: The Man and the Myth, in which he argued that Confucius held democratic ideals. I do not entirely agree with my mentor on that, but Joseph Needham’s encyclopedic Science and Civilization in China convinces most readers that traditional Chinese society fostered scientific and technical innovation. I assert that Confucian world view fostered individual initiative bolstered by a vigorous familial system. A budding entrepreneur in traditional China was more likely to receive encouragement and financial support than a western protestant in recent centuries.
The last decade of the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st century have proved me right. Family support of entrepreneurship has helped the contemporary rise of the Chinese economy. It grieves me that I can’t say “I told you so,” to those who thought China would never get beyond the chaos of Mao because I didn’t tell anyone.
A common trope is a Chinese gangster who starts firing a weapon and can’t stop until the magazine is empty. The trope is pure xenophobia and racism, but it reminds me of the Chinese official policies on Covid-19.
I read a lot of popular American detective and mystery fiction written in the 1930s and 40s. A common trope is a Chinese gangster who starts firing a weapon and can’t stop until the magazine is empty. The trope is pure xenophobia and racism, but it reminds me of the Chinese official policies on Covid-19.
China’s initial reaction to Covid-19 was a crackdown: mandatory masks, draconian quarantines, workers locked in factories, and whole cities shutdown over scattered cases of the virus. The policy was successful. China kept their death toll down and their economy led the world in the early years of the pandemic.
But like the gangster with the machine gun, the CCP could not take its finger off the trigger until the gun was empty; the rest of the world was in recovery and Covid-19 restrictions were holding China back when Emperor Xi Jinping let up and abruptly tossed the zero-Covid weapon aside; Covid-19 roared back. Death tolls rose and China’s internal economy suffered.
Information on current events in China passes through many filters. Closest to the ground, reports are tailored for a favorable response from the next level up in the government. The Chinese government filters and massages published information to shore up their position. Then western agendas kick into gear and add their own layers of distortion. And finally, your lowly servant here is picking and choosing to tell a story that will keep your interest.
I won’t go into the details of China’s current economic woes. I suggest reading The Economist on the subject or any business publication for more information. Most are gloating over the inherent weakness of authoritarian governments.
I agree that authoritarians are weak, I won’t go into why I think that, but I haven’t seen that the commentators have taken into consideration the peculiar nature of traditional China’s authoritarian empire, which has failed, recovered, and triumphed over and over for the last two thousand years. A more resilient empire than the Romans or the British.
There’s an old Chinese saying: The mountains are high and the emperor is distant. (Shān gāo, huángdì yuǎn.) It’s used in many situations, but slow, unreliable communication in the empire frequently served as a buffer between alternate centers of power and culture and the sometimes inept central government located wherever the emperor happened to sit.
I am forced to wonder if the flattened mountains and shortened roads of twenty-first century communications and transportation have worsened China’s current economic woes. The west has a century of experience with rapid communications and a well-informed populace. China does not.
I am watching carefully.
Hold fast. Be patient. Keep trying.