Putting Aside the MacGuffin

I've been reading The Maltese Falcon lately, Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel. I hadn't read it or The Thin Man despite having read all of Hammett's other novels. I suppose I figured the famous films made from both titles were perfectly fine substitutes. But I was jonsing for some Hammett so I started in on the Falcon. I'm enjoying it, of course.

The biggest difference from the 1941 film so far is a long story Sam tells Brigid about a man who abandoned his wife and kids to start over with another life with another name in another state. He does this after a near death experience when he's almost brained by a falling beam at a construction site.

Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.

It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace again until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life.

I should hope all of us would take such inspiration from nearly dying. He was kind enough to leave his first wife and kids with enough money to support them, so it's not like he completely shirked all responsibility--though Sam describes this as an act of love, just not "the sort that would make absence painful."

One thing I thought was especially relevant for young people to-day was the reaction of the man's first wife when she found out the truth behind his disappearance:

She thought it was silly. Maybe it was. Anyway, it came out all right. She didn't want any scandal, and, after the trick he had played on her--the way she looked at it--she didn't want him. So they were divorced on the quiet and everything was swell all around.

You see, ghosting is unattractive. I think some people do it under the theory that "absence makes the heart grow fonder" and see it as a way of wrapping a someone around their little finger. I'm happy to say that I've gotten to the point in my life where, if someone pulls that kind of thing, it has the effect of them espousing a love for Gallagher or Paul Haggis; I'm actively repulsed and I don't much sweat their lack of attention.