Raymond Chandler: Master of a Moral Shadow Land
RAYMOND CHANDLER has written more evocatively about Los Angeles than anyone else. Chandler wrote “The Big Sleep” (1939), “Farewell My Lovely” (1940), “The High Window” (1942), “The Lady in the Lake” (1943), “The Little Sister” (1949) and “The Long Goodbye” (1953). Though his work began as detective fiction, many now consider Chandler one of the great American writers of the 20th century. Evelyn Waugh called Chandler the greatest American novelist of his era. The Library of America has published two volumes of Chandler’s work, totaling 2,275 pages.
Was he really an American? Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888, and lived in Nebraska for a few years as a young boy. But at the age of seven, he moved to London, England with his mother and he stayed there until he was 24. He got a proper British education before moving to Los Angeles in 1913, an interesting, ambitious, rather confused young man. He served in World War One, in the Canadian Army, and made friends during the war with another soldier from the Los Angeles area whose last name was Pascal.
After the war, he plunged into an affair with Pascal’s mother Cissy, who was 18 years older than Raymond — and married. Raymond was financially supporting his own mother, who was furious about his taking up with Cissy Pascal. In 1924, Chandler’s mother died, and a month later Raymond married Cissy Pascal. Their 30-year marriage seems to have been a happy one.
Chandler became a highly-paid oil executive, a Vice President of the Dabney Oil Syndicate. But in 1932 he was fired. The romantic myth about the firing is that heartless capitalism (“Big Oil”) couldn’t tolerate an artist like Chandler.
The truth is that Dabney was likely right to show Raymond Chandler the door. He was drinking far too much, and fondling the female staff. He was gone for long, unexplained periods… He’d even threatened suicide. So in one of the worst years of the Great Depression, at the age of 44, he was fired.
The conventional thing would have been to try to hook up with another oil company. Instead, Raymond Chandler set out to make a living by writing detective fiction — pulp fiction. He began by making a careful study of it — how the pieces worked, how long they were, what sort of style they had and what stylistic tricks they used. He studied especially Erle Stanley Gardner’s books featuring the detective Perry Mason. The principal journal Chandler studied was Black Mask, a magazine founded in 1920 by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, as a pulpy moneymaker whose profits could support Mencken and Nathan’s high-brow, money-losing magazine The Smart Set.
Black Mask published good detective fiction, though it was a pet theme of Chandler’s that a well-written detective story simply shows that detective stories aren’t worth trying to write well. He believed detective stories rely on melodrama, a form which suits mediocre writers better than excellent ones. Of the famous Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Chandler said that “as stories, they are pretty thin milk. But that does nothing to diminish the character of Holmes himself. He rises above them…” THAT, he decided, was the key: to create a distinctive and compelling lead character who rises above the genre limitations of detective fiction. Chandler’s Sherlock Holmes was a detective he named Philip Marlowe.
Chandler said of Marlowe: “He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham and a contempt for pettiness.”
Marlowe is lonely and he has his demons. His code of conduct can be alarmingly amoral for readers raised on straight arrows like Superman. But Philip Marlowe is one of life’s good guys and we always see that by the end of a Marlowe novel. If we start feeling too grateful to Marlowe, Chandler shows us that Marlowe needs to take these risks, to face down bad men. He’s not only making the world safer; he’s also working out something for himself.
Chandler, too, was working out something for himself: how to write in a popular genre — with artistic ambitions. Chandler once said, “It is no easy trick to keep your characters and your story operating on a level which is understandable to the semi-literate public and at the same time give them some intellectual and artistic overtones which that public does not seek or demand or in effect recognize, but which somehow subconsciously it accepts and likes… The lucky writers are those who can outwrite their readers without out-thinking them.”
Maybe the way to decide if Chandler was English or American is to look at the ways that English and American writers typically describe crime. To the English, it’s a shock and an aberration — sometimes a delectable shock, when some cruel and pious fraud is murdered — but still something aberrant, a stain on the canvas of life, a rent in the fabric.
Whereas, crime writers in the U.S. tend to see crime as a ruling fact of life, especially in our glittering cities, with their bright lights and their riches. Chandler was an American because his Los Angeles was a world of seedy brutality and sham, of crooked doctors, shyster lawyers — and of this hard, street-smart, caustic and curiously idealistic detective Philip Marlowe.
Marlowe’s world has been well-described by the critic Walter Kirn: “The private eyes of classic American noir dwell in a moral shadow land somewhere between order and anarchy, principle and pragmatism. They’re too unruly to be cops and too decent to be crooks, leaving them no natural allies on either side but attracting enemies from both. Their loneliness… makes them at least as intriguing as their cases, which usually start as tales of greed and lust but tend to evolve into dramas of corruption that implicate lofty, respected institutions and indict society itself.”
Or, as James Wolcott has observed: “To Marlowe, the rich are risen scum.”
Chandler is suspect to many today because some of his writing is anti-Semitic, homophobic, and racist. He describes a Native American by saying, “His smell was the earthy smell of primitive man…” Many of the women he describes have mental problems, and almost none of them makes life easier for a man.
Others complain that Chandler idealized the lone man standing up for civilization in a way that seems to call for vigilantes: “…down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” The writer Kingsley Amis felt private eyes like Philip Marlowe were compromised, because they’re paid off by one of the players as they sort out justice, and Amis found Chandler morally pretentious when he came down on “the perverted producers, the writers drowning in bourbon and self-hatred, the chicks…”
But Chandler was sure that readers would sniff out moral pretension and stop reading. Another time he wrote about the need to “create a reasonable world into which his reader may enter blindfold and make his way to the chair by the fire without barking his shins…”
Chandler was a master of the establishing shot, as in the opening to “The Big Sleep”: “Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair.” Things are taut and well-described in the greenhouse as well, where General Sternwood is declining toward death, the orchids smell like prostitutes and stalks of once-lively things remind Marlowe of “the newly washed fingers of dead men.”
It’s interesting to wonder to what degree Philip Marlowe was an idealized self-portrait of Raymond Chandler. Chandler was a touchy sort of man, who thought publishers often ruined the author’s hard work with an author photo so awful that readers would put the book down. To an Atlantic Monthly editor, E.C. Thiessen, he groused at being paid just $300 for an article, then added: “I am well aware that magazine editors, like the Roman god Janus, must of necessity have two faces, one to smile benevolently on the literature contributor as writer and the other to regard more grimly the matter of his remuneration. That is part of his job, as it is part of my job as a businessman not to let him do it too well.”
Raymond Chandler didn’t like being corrected. Once he got his writing “fixed” by a copy editor at the Atlantic Monthly, and Chandler responded: “When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split…”
Chandler gave his alter ego Philip Marlowe the same aversion to meddling outsiders. At the start of “The Little Sister,” Marlowe is interrogated by a teenage girl from Manhattan, Kansas:
“Do you drink, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Well, now that you mention it — .”
“I don’t think I’d like to employ a detective that uses liquor in any form. I don’t even approve of tobacco”
“Would it be all right if I peeled an orange?”
The English crime writer and critic Dorothy Sayers wrote that the detective story “does not, and by hypothesis never can, attain the loftiest level of literary achievement.” In “The Simple Art of Murder,” Chandler replied, “I do not know what the loftiest level of literary achievement is: Neither did Aeschylus or Shakespeare; neither does Miss Sayers.
“Other things being equal, which they never are, a more powerful theme will evoke a more powerful performance. Yet some very dull books have been written about God, and some very fine ones about how to make a living and stay fairly honest. It is always a matter of who is writing the stuff and what he has in him to write it with… All reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce or “The Diary of the Forgotten Man.” To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.”
When Time magazine, in 1949, called Philip Marlowe “amoral,” Chandler groused that “The Big Sleep” is about “the struggle of all fundamentally honest men to make a decent living in a corrupt society. It is an impossible struggle; he can’t win. He can be poor and bitter and take it out in wisecracks and casual amours; or he can be corrupt and amiable and rude like a Hollywood producer… success is always and everywhere a racket.”
Chandler wrote the screenplay for the 1944 noir classic “Double Indemnity” and for the underrated 1951 Alfred Hitchcock film “Strangers on a Train.” But he was never a Hollywood insider, never much liked the place and, in 1946, he and Cissy moved down to La Jolla, where they lived a quiet life. Chandler loved La Jolla’s climate, and the views along the coastline. He admired the “cool decency” and good manners of the place, but cringed at its literary provincialism and said La Jolla was filled with tired old men and tired old money.
He wrote a friend in 1949 of what he saw as a perfect expression of the La Jolla mentality. “I found ‘Men and Brethren’ and ‘Ask Me Tomorrow’ in the public library here. Not obtainable to buy. I had no card, and when I asked for one, the elderly, white-haired, prim-mouthed librarian said: ‘Oh, you’re Raymond Chandler, the writer. I read one of your books when I was in the hospital last year.’
‘I hope it didn’t make you worse,’ said I.
‘I wanted to throw it across the room, it made me so mad,’ she said, then grudgingly, ‘But I didn’t. There was something about the writing.’
Chandler wrote “The Long Goodbye” in 1952, at an awful time of his life. Cissy was dying. He told a friend, “I watched my wife die by half-inches and I wrote my best book in the agony of that knowledge.” Actually, “The Big Sleep” is better, but it’s interesting that Chandler didn’t think so. “The Long Goodbye” has a weary tone, a tone of exhausted hope which matches the tone of two lines he wrote to a friend in 1950: “We still have dreams, but we know now that most of them will come to nothing. And we also most fortunately know that it really doesn’t matter.”
Chandler spent his last years mourning Cissy, and drinking. He wrote vivid letters but had few close friends and seems to have wanted it that way. He died in 1959, at the age of 70, and was buried in San Diego.
The best Chandler prose, the stuff that approaches magic, is not only about human corruption but about the feel of car drives at night; about the way that buildings, respectable people and even lush nature can seem implicated in corruption — and about the fever that hounds a man, keeps him sleepless, and sends him out to search for clues in the rain.