by Tom Hiney
Letter to Hardwick Moseley,
undated. Leussler was Houghton Mifflin's West Coast rep.
Thank you very much for the two books. I guess it was Leussler's idea because we got talking about Westerns and I said there were only about two people who could or ever could write them – Owen Wister and Eugene Manlove Rhodes – and he brought up Jack Scheefer. I've read Shane and it is excellent in its way, but fundamentally rather childish. I guess the trouble with Westerns as a species is a kind of appalling solemnity about such elementary things. This Leussler is a terrible man. He is a kind-hearted guy and would do anything for you, but he will kill you with talk in the process. We had him here to dinner and by 9.30 he had me so exhausted that I went and put my pyjamas on – a hint that would be considered too broad in the best society (if there is any) but it was just right for Leussler. Anything less pointed would have missed him by a yard and I didn't quite feel up to holding up a card with large letters on it saying: FOR CHRIST'S SAKE STOP TALKING AND GO HOME!
Chandler had booked himself a passage to England from New York on the Mauritania. He had little idea how long he planned to be in England for, or where he would go after that. The house in La Jolla had now been sold.
Letter to Roger Machell,
7February 1955.
Perhaps when I get away from this house and all its memories I can settle down to do some writing. And then again I may just be homesick and to be homesick for a home you haven't got is rather poignant.
Tomorrow it would have been our thirty-first wedding anniversary. I'm going to fill the house with red roses and have a friend in to drink champagne, which we always did. A useless and probably a foolish gesture because my lost love is so utterly lost and I have no belief in any after life. But all the same I shall do it. All us tough guys are hopeless sentimentalists at heart.
Report in the Hollywood Citizen-News, 24 February 1955: ‘Raymond Chandler, widely known mystery writer, today was released from the psychopathic ward at San Diego County Hospital where he was taken to hospital following an apparent suicide attempt. Police said Chandler had been drinking heavily since the death of his wife in December.‘
Letter to Roger Machell,
5 March 1955.
Everything is all right with me, or as near as one could hope for. I couldn't for the life of me tell you whether I really intended to go through with it or whether my subconscious was putting on a cheap dramatic performance. The first shot went off without my intending to. I had never fired the gun and the trigger pull was so light that I barely touched it to get my hand in position when off she went and the bullet ricocheted around the tile walls of the shower and went up through the ceiling. It could just have easily have ricocheted into my stomach. The charge seemed to me very weak. This was born out when the second shot (the business) didn't fire at all. The cartridges were about five years old and I guess in this climate the charge had decomposed. At that point I blacked out ... I don't know whether or not it is an emotional defect that I have absolutely no sense of guilt nor any embarrassment at meeting people in La Jolla who all know what happened. It was on the radio here. I had letters from all over the place, some kind and sympathetic, some scolding, some silly beyond belief. I had letters from police officers, active and retired, from two Intelligence officers, one in Tokyo and one in March Field, Riverside, and a letter from an active professional private eye in San Francisco. These letters all said two things: 1, they should have written to me long before because I hadn't known what my books meant to people, and 2, How in the name of wonder did a writer who had never been a cop come to know them so precisely and portray them so accurately. One man who had served 23 years on the Los Angeles Police said he could put an actual name to practically any cop I put in any of my stories. He seemed to think I must actually have known all these men. This sort of thing staggered me a little because I have always suspected that if a real live police officer or detective read a mystery, it would be just to sneer at it. Who was it – Stevenson possibly – who said, experience is largely a matter of intuition?
In England, I believe, and in some other places, including New York State, attempted suicide, or what looks like it, is a crime. In California it is not, but you do have to go through the observation ward at the County Hospital. With a more than able assist from a friend of mine who does a column in the San Diego paper, I talked myself out of it the next noon but on condition I went to a private sanatorium. This I did. I had more trouble talking myself out of that. I stuck it for six days and then got a feeling I was being strung along with half promises. At that point I announced that I was going to discharge myself. Upheaval. This simply wasn't done. All right, I said, Tell me the law that keeps me here. There wasn't any and he knew it. So finally he conceded that I could leave any time I wished, but would I come to his office and talk to him. I said I would, not because I expected any good from it, but because it would make his case record look better, and in addition, if he was perfectly frank with me, I might be able to help him.
So I came home and since nothing has mattered to me about the whole business except that they shot me so full of dope to keep me tractable that I still have a little hangover from it. Isn't it amazing that people should sit around depressed and bored and miserable in those places, worried about their jobs and their families, longing to go home, subjected every day to Electrical Shock Treatments (they didn't dare try that on me) and in between insulin shock, worrying about the cost of it all and the feeling of being a prisoner, and yet not have the guts to get up and walk out? I suppose it is part of what's the matter with them. If they had more guts they wouldn't be there in the first place. But that's hardly an answer. If I had more guts I shouldn't have let despair and grief get me so far down that I did what I did. But when I found myself dealing with a lot of psychiatric claptrap and with a non-existent authority that tried to make me think it had power, I didn't find that it took any special daring to tell them all what I was going to do and to do it. And in the end strangely enough they almost seemed to like it. The head nurse kissed me and said I was the politest, the most considerate and co-operative and the most resilient patient they have ever had there, and God help any doctor who tried to make me do anything I wasn't convinced I ought to do. And so much for that.
Letter to William Gault,
thriller writer, April 1955. The friend Chandler refers to was ‘Red’ Barrow, an old lawyer friend from Chandler's oil days.
I thought I was extremely lucky to get as far as I did in our field, and believe me when I say lucky I am not talking to the birds. Talent is never enough. The history of literature is strewn with the corpses of writers who through no fault of their own missed out on the timing or were just a little too far ahead of their generation. An old and wise friend of mine once said the world never hears of its greatest men; the men it calls great are just ahead enough of the average to stand out, but not far enough ahead to be remote.
Yesterday I finished the rather agonizing business of getting the furniture out of my house and closing it up for the new buyer. When I walked through the empty rooms checking the windows and so on I felt a little like the last man on a dead world. But it will pass. On Wednesday I leave for Old Chatham, New York, to stay with my best friend and on April 12th I sail on the Mauritania. I expect to be back about the end of October and to find a house in La Jolla – much smaller of course – because it is an easy place to live in and everybody knows me here.
Thank you for writing and for what you say and I hope you are not exaggerating too much, unconsciously. It would not matter much to me, but it would not be good for you. Because you have it in you to be as good as the best. Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone else's advice about changing it. They just don't know.
All the best.
Letter to Hardwick Moseley,
24 April 1955. Chandler was now in London, staying at the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair.
I am here at least unti
l May the 8th after which I may have to go and sleep in Green Park. I am not happy and I am terribly hoarse from laryngitis. The racket here is just too intense also; you go to a luncheon with eight people and the next day five of them invite you to a dinner party. So dine, drink and drab is about all you do. I love this hotel, though, but I do not love being stared at and being pointed out to people, and I do not love newspaper interviews.
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
27 April 1955. Natasha Spender was the wife of poet Stephen Spender; Sonia was the wife of George Orwell.
Would you please have someone tell the Daily Sketch that not only will I not do a piece of writing for them but that I wouldn't use their rotten rag even to stuff up a rat hole. Our press is no bargain, but your gutter press is fantastically bad. You might also call up that nice Mr Harris of the Standard and tell him I'm sorry but cannot now put my mind to what he wants, don't feel well enough and simply cannot get my private letters written. I'll write him a note and send him back the tear sheets because I liked him personally.
The whole thing last night was rather weird. Natasha Spender is a charming and devoted hostess and served up a magnificent meal and everybody got tight. They poured it on me a little too thick I imagine. A Sonia somebody said that I was the darling of the British intellectuals and all the poets raved about me and that Edith Sitwell sat up in bed and read my stuff with passion. They said Cyril Connolly had written a piece about me which was considered a classic. The funny part of it was that they seemed quite sincere. Well anyhow it was a lot of fun.
Chandler was drinking morning to night. He was eventually asked to leave the Connaught. He moved into a furnished flat on Eaton Square, one of the smartest Georgian addresses in London.
Letter to Louise Loughner,
a fan who had written to him from San Francisco after his suicide attempt, 21 May 1955.
Please, if you at all care, write to me and tell me about yourself. I may in return send you some ribald nonsense I have been writing over here, mostly in the middle of the night, just to get over the St John's Wood-Chelsea hyperthyroid method of talking. I sleep very little, unfortunately. I am apt to get up around 4 a.m., take a mild drink of Scotch and water and start hammering at this lovely Olivetti 44, which is far superior to anything we turn out in America. It is a heavy portable and put together like an Italian racing car, and you mustn't judge it from my typing.
To get this flat I almost had to be acquainted with royalty and I had to be interviewed and inspected by the manager of the estate. The interview was very formal and by appointment. I was so bloody polite that I began to sicken myself. So I suddenly said to the man: ‘I'm naturally a very polite person but I do think that I'm overdoing it a little at the moment.’ He laughed and stood up and held out his hand and thanked me for coming in. I said, ‘What about the lease?’ He said, ‘Well, usually we do like some sort of document, but often in practice we tend to rather overlook the necessity.’ That's the way they work over here. And that is why for generations they were the bankers of the world.
Letter to Neil Morgan,
friend in La Jolla, 3 June 1955.
I don't think you'd recognize me if you saw me now. I have become so damned refined that at times I loathe myself. I still don't sleep well and often get up at 4 or 5 in the morning, and lately have been indulging in a form of polite pornography, which would probably interest you mildly and I am, therefore, enclosing a couple of samples. You should understand that the basic motif behind this is an attempt to spoof the upper-middle class sort of talk. There can be no greater mistake than to think that we and the English talk the same language.
Mostly I run around with the St John's Wood-Chelsea literary, artistic crowd, and perhaps they are a little special. Of course I know some cockneys too, but the people that I run around with have expressions of their own which need translating. For instance: ‘I simply adore her’ means ‘I'd stick a knife in her back if she had a back.’ ‘They are absolutely and utterly precious’ means ‘What rubbish, but that woman never did have any taste.’ ‘I rather care for that’ means ‘Give it to me quick.’ And ‘I'm simply impossibly in love with him’ means ‘He has enough money to pay for the drinks.’
It has been a wonderful spring, the squares flaming with the most gorgeous tulips three and even four feet high. Kew Gardens is a paradise of green and colour, rhododendrons, azaleas, amaryllis, flowering trees of every kind. It catches you by the throat after the hard dusty green of California. The shops are beautifully dressed and full of all kinds of wonderful things. Harrods is easily the finest department store in the world. Nothing in New York or Los Angeles can equal it. The traffic control system here is superb. The one thing lacking is tender meat. They simply haven't got the storage to age it. You get it at very good hotels like the Connaught, the Savoy or Claridge's, but almost nowhere else.
But the women! If they ever had buck teeth I don't see them now. I've seen glamor girls at parties that would stun Hollywood. And they are so damn honest that they won't even let you pay their taxi fares. Americans are not as a rule successful with the best type of English girls and women. They move too fast and too roughly. There is far too much of this ‘Come on, baby, let's hit the hay’ motif. They don't like it. They expect to be treated as ladies. They are perfectly willing to sleep with you if they like you and if you treat them with deference, because in a country where women outnumber the men so excessively that is almost inevitable, but they don't want to be treated as easy lays.
Letter to Louise Loughner,
15 June 1955.
At the darkest and most desperate moment of my life, when I had nothing left to fight with and hardly cared to fight, there came to me out of the unknown a spray of flowers and a letter. And suddenly I had all the fight in the world. I beat them at their own game, I out-talked them and out-thought them, so that in the end they sent me home in a limousine, merely because they were dazzled by the display of wit and courage I put up. But why? Solely and entirely because of you. So never, never in the world thank me for anything. The orchids are all yours. And believe me they will be the most beautiful orchids of all time.
... I have three eccentricities. No one can buy a drink at my table at any bar; no guest of mine can look at a menu; I will neither pay nor even sign a check in front of a guest nor, except in special cases (I have one friend who is a diabetic) will I even ask them what they want. It will all be arranged in advance, and if the guest is a lady, there will be a special handwritten menu. I suppose this may sound a bit chi-chi, but dammit I'm entitled to a few tricks.
Letter to the Evening Standard,
30 June 1955. Ruth Ellis was a night-club hostess sentenced to be hanged for shooting her racing driver boyfriend.
As a part-time resident and full-time friend and admirer of England, I have always, until now, respected its legal system – as has most of the world. But there is at times a vein of savagery that repels me.
I have been tormented for a week at the idea that a highly civilized people should put a rope around the neck of Ruth Ellis and drop her through a trap and break her neck. I could understand perhaps the hanging of a woman for bestial crime like a multiple poisoning, an axe murder (à la Lizzie Borden) or a baby-farm operator killing her charges, but this was a crime of passion under considerable provocation. No other country in the world would hang this woman.
In France she would get off with a light sentence or none. In America it would be first or second degree manslaughter and she would be out of prison within three to seven years.
This thing haunts me and, so far as I may say, disgusts me as something obscene. I am not referring to the trial, of course, but to the medieval savagery of the law.
Chandler by now had a number of women whom he would take to lunch and dinner and flirt with and confide in. Some were genuinely fond of him and, as he realized, male escorts were something of a rarity in a country whose male population had been decimated by two wars in the space of thirty years. Some
were considerately concerned for his mental stability (his suicide attempt was known about) and had formed an unofficial ‘Chandler patrol’ to keep his diary filled with engagements. One of these minder-companion-fans was an English woman called Jessica Tyndale, who worked for a bank in New York, knew many of the Chelsea set, and whom Chandler had met on the Mauritania.
Letter to Jessica Tyndale,
17 September 1955.
You know, you never really saw me sober and I have been sober now for some weeks – absolutely bone-dry sober. Dull as it may be I intend to remain that way. Something in my chemistry will no longer accept alcohol. There is some sort of chain reaction. I start off with a drink of white wine and end up drinking two bottles of Scotch a day. Then I stop eating. I have to quit and the withdrawal symptoms are simply awful. I shake so that I can't hold a glass of water. One day I vomited eighteen times. My father was an alcoholic and I have lived my whole life in fear of becoming one but until my wife died I always quit drinking on my own power when I felt there was a real need for it. For three years before she died I was dry as a bone.
