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In life Raymond Chandler, along with Dashiel Hammett the setter of the benchmark standard for the thriller, was a dedicated alcoholic. In death he became a commodity. Thus, in the latter regard, since 1959 his novels and stories have been endlessly re-issued, his original screenplay “Playback” (which predates emergence of the same material in novel form) has been exhumed from the Universal vaults and published in its own right, several biographies have come down the pike, Robert B. Parker has completed – indifferently – Chandler’s fragment of a last shot at a Marlowe novel and two selections of Chandler’s voluminous correspondence have been put before the public.
For all the strong whiff of publishing opportunism it gives off this third and overlapping selection (by two of Chandler’s biographers!) of letters is very much to be welcomed. The quality of Chandler’s observation and expression justifies the exercise. He writes not as a bombed and blasted incoherent but, quite otherwise, with trenchant, stylish sharpness. Literature, California, politicians, Hollywood, slang, the McCarthy era witch-hunts, you name it all come under his coolly ascerbic lens. Recurrently surfacing is his disdain for the East Coast-New Yorker literary set. Edmund Wilson “writes as if he had a loose upper plate” and his “careful and pedestrian and sometimes rather clever book reviews misguide one into thinking there is something in his head besides mucilage”. Eugene O’Neill “is the sort of man who could spread a year in flophouses, researching flophouses, and write a play about flophouses that would be no more real than a play by a man who had never been in a flophouse, but had only read about them.” His classical education (in England and on the Continent) armored Chandler’s self-confidence in taking on America’s literary Establishment - just as his seat-of-the-pants survival of the Depression down on Main Street convinced him he had a working edge over the Wilsons and the Tates. Not that he was the least crudely anti-intellectual. When, already past fifty, he saw his first novel published, he mapped out for himself a direction distinctly literary. He wrote to Albert Knopf: ‘The Big Sleep is very unequally written. There are scenes that are all right, but there are other scenes still much too pulpy. In so far as I am able, I want to develop an objective method – but slowly – to the point where I can carry an audience over into a genuine dramatic, even melodramatic, novel written in a very vivid and pungent style, but not too slangy or overly vernacular. I realize that this must be done cautiously and little by little. ' This is the game-plan of a writer setting his sights way beyond the pulps. A letter to Knopf’s wife underlines as much.‘Hammett is all right. I give him everything. There are a lot of things he could not do, but what he did he did superbly. But James Cain – faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of a writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls.’ Nothing more offended the Chandler who had realized his game-plan than to be asked by some ‘intellectual’ when he was going to attempt a ‘real’ book. Hints of paranoia dance attendance on him in this context but, hand on his heart, he truly saw no difference in kind between Farewell My Lovely and Madame Bovary. Both he and Flaubert, he could see, were linked by their fixation upon the ‘mystery’ of style: ‘In the long run, however little you talk about it, the most durable thing in writing is style, amd style is the most reliable investment a writer can make with his time…the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off. He can’t do it by trying because the kind of style I am thinking about is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. But granted that you have one, you can only project it on paper by thinking of something else.’ Whatever in fact is lastingly worthwhile or ‘true’ in literature, these letters make clear, resides in style. With cheerful candor Chandler confesses that he regards plot – even in a thriller! – as no more than a necessary evil. While as for Marlowe being drawn from ‘real’ life, ‘the private eye of fiction is pure fantasy and is meant to be.’ The most famous of goers down mean streets is both less and much more than the real-life collectors of divorce evidence. Marlowe is ‘a failure and knows it. He is a failure because he hasn’t any money. Why does he work for a pittance? The answer to that is the whole story – the struggle of all fundamentally honest men to make a decent living in a corrupt society. It is an impossible struggle. He can be poor and bitter and take it out in wisecracks and casual amours but there is absolutely no way for a man of this age to acquire a decent affluence in life without to some degree corrupting himself, without accepting the cold, clear fact that success is always and everywhere a racket.’ This is surely why we all love and identify with Marlowe this side of idolatry. But for Chandler his hero’s refusal to allow corruption into his life saddled his creator with technical considerations. To fellow English-educated man about Hollywood (and latterday actor), John Houseman he wrote: ‘The stories I wrote were ostensibly mysteries. I did not write the stories behind those stories because I was not a good enough writer. That does not alter the basic fact that Marlow is a more honorable man than you and I’. Chandler was not being falsely modest. Although he was capable of great professional honor (the letter in this collection putting down that jumped-up poseur Hitchcock is a minor masterpiece), his loner’s life contained a long chain of casual adulteries, too sentimental and ignoble an overcompensating uxuriousness, alcohol-fueled freak-outs and a Mickey Mouse ‘cry for help’ suicide attempt. But inside him all the while and struggling to get out was Marlowe. That Marlowe gained his freedom and went striding through the pages of seven marvelous novels is a literary taking it on the lam for which we are repeatedly grateful. So should we be grateful for this recycling of his creator’s correspondence. The root reason is not hard to pin point. In the still watches of the boozy nights it was the inner, the Marlovian voice that spoke so uninhibitedly off the perfectly laundered cuff and into the old Bakelite Dictaphone. |
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