tom moody

Standing near the doors on a crowded 5 train I heard a mother ranting non-stop at her approx. 9 year old son in a language that might have been Mongolian. The boy made the occasional barely audible one or two syllable response. The ranting continued and reached a climax as Mom slapped the kid on the forehead, harder than I would hit a child. He didn't seem fazed -- must happen a lot.

A few minutes went by and as we were nearing a station the mom abruptly turned around and started walking into the middle of the subway car. She didn't tell the kid her intentions or even turn around to see if he was following her. She grabbed a pole for herself and left the kid swaying uncertainly in the middle of the car, surrounded by strangers. Another woman noticed the abandoned boy and with a look of concern, took his shoulder and guided him to a pole, pushing him past his own mother so he'd have something to hold on to.

Possibly this wasn't really the boy's mom and I was witnessing the treatment of a brainwashed kidnap victim. I was standing too far away to intervene, pinned next to the doors, so I settled for giving Mom a Seinfeldesque Hard Stare (as in "What was I supposed to do? I gave her the head shake! I gave her the Hard Stare!").

I was having Chuck Palahniuk thoughts about how yeah, men are swine, but we get it from somewhere.

Am reading or re-reading two of the great macho writers: Dashiell Hammett and Robert E. Howard. Both were emasculated after death by female biographers who were close to them. Novalyne Price's posthumous quotes from Howard make him seem like another mere angry right-winger ranting about the death of civilization. Lillian Hellman in her intro to The Big Knockover dwells on Hammett's illnesses, drinking, and years as a non-productive writer.* I haven't read Price's Howard bios, only the quotes a Howard scholar lifted from them but REH sounds like an ass, which he is anything but in his supremely confident writing.
Price admits not liking one of his main creations, Conan the Barbarian. It's hard to see how this wouldn't color her impressions of the man. "Oh yeah, world, you like that big brawler? Well let me tell you about the mama's boy who created him (after he is safely dead)."
The interesting stories, O Long-Lived Women, are not the bundles of frailties behind the legends but how the frailties were transcended or sidestepped in writing that endures. In her Knockover intro Hellman tells us nothing about how the young Hammett could be so smart about human nature or how his years with the Pinkerton detective agency prepared him for his intricately-wrought plots. Instead we get emphysema, hoarding, booze and jail. You have to keep reminding yourself as you read what Mary McCarthy famously said about Hellman. Conan, as Howard paints him, is more akin to a philosopher-king than Schwarzenegger muscleman, and the stories, like Hammett's, have a preternaturally wised-up world view for having been written by someone so young (and even less travelled than Hammett). That's what we want to know about, not his personal opinions on, say, how decaying societies become sex-obsessed. In fairness to Price, perhaps her biographies bristle with more insight than the few quotes I've read -- will read them and let you know.
And of course, biography is not literary criticism and we shouldn't hold that standard to people who tell us about people. Unfortunately literary critics look at any scraps of biographical info (especially about tight-lipped writers) to explain the stories. Hence this short gripe.

*Update: A friend commented that Hellman also attests to Hammett's intelligence and character in that intro. True, but her compliments seem backhanded: the lingering image is of a man reading a stack of complicated books on a variety of subjects yet no longer assimilating them into art.