The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909–1959

by Raymond Chandler

  Love Ray

  P.S. La Valencia Hotel, Glencoe 52175 (San Diego) in case of emergency. An emergency would to my mind be a lot of money for nothing.

  Chandler having decided to stop studio work and move permanently to La Jolla, the Atlantic Monthly persuaded him to report on that year's Oscar ceremony for them.

  If you think most motion pictures are bad, which they are (including the foreign), find out from some initiate how they are made, and you will be astonished that any of them could be good. Making a fine motion picture is like painting ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ in Macy's basement, with a floorwalker to mix your colors for you. Of course most motion pictures are bad. Why wouldn't they be? Apart from its own intrinsic handicaps of excessive cost, hypercritical bluenosed censorship, and the lack of any single-minded controlling force in the making, the motion picture is bad because 90 per cent of its source material is tripe, and the other 10 per cent is a little too virile and plain-spoken for the petty-minded clerics, the elderly ingénues of the women's clubs, and the tender guardians of that godawful mixture of boredom and bad manners known more eloquently as the Impressionable Age.

  The point is not whether there are bad motion pictures or even whether the average motion picture is bad, but whether the motion picture is an artistic medium of sufficient dignity and accomplishment to be treated with respect by the people who control its destinies. Those who deride the motion picture usually are satisfied that they have thrown the book at it by declaring it to be a form of mass entertainment. As if that meant anything. Greek drama, which is still considered quite respectable by most intellectuals, was mass entertainment to the Athenian freeman. So, within its economic and topographical limits, was the Elizabethan drama. The great cathedrals of Europe, although not exactly built to while away an afternoon, certainly had an aesthetic and spiritual effect on the ordinary man. Today, if not always, the fugues and chorales of Bach, the symphonies of Mozart, Borodin, and Brahms, the violin concertos of Vivaldi, the piano sonatas of Scarlatti, and a great deal of what was once rather recondite music are mass entertainment by virtue of radio. Not all fools love it, but not all fools love anything more literate than a comic strip. It might reasonably be said that all art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and that if it does not it dies and is forgotten.

  The motion picture admittedly is faced with too large a mass; it must please too many people and offend too few, the second of these restrictions being infinitely more damaging to it artistically than the first. The people who sneer at the motion picture as an art form are furthermore seldom willing to consider it at its best. They insist upon judging it by the picture they saw last week or yesterday; which is even more absurd (in view of the sheer quantity of production) than to judge literature by last week's ten best-sellers, or the dramatic art by even the best of the current Broadway hits. In a novel you can still say what you like, and the stage is free almost to the point of obscenity, but the motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom. If it were merely a transplanted literary or dramatic art, it certainly would not. The hucksters and the bluenoses would between them see to that.

  But the motion picture is not a transplanted literary or dramatic art, any more than it is a plastic art. It has elements of all these, but in its essential structure it is much closer to music, in the sense that its finest effects can be independent of precise meaning, that its transitions can be more eloquent than its high-lit scenes, and that its dissolves and camera movements, which cannot be censored, are often far more emotionally effective than its plots, which can. Not only is the motion picture an art, but it is the one entirely new art that has been evolved on this planet for hundreds of years. It is the only art at which we of this generation have any possible chance to greatly excel.

  In painting, music and architecture we are not even second-rate by comparison with the best work of the past. In sculpture we are just funny. In prose literature we not only lack style but we lack the educational and historical background to know what style is. Our fiction and drama are adept, empty, often intriguing, and so mechanical that in another fifty years at most they will be produced by machines with rows of push buttons. We have no popular poetry in the grand style, merely delicate or witty or bitter or obscure verses. Our novels are transient propaganda when they are what is called ‘significant’, and bedtime reading when they are not.

  But in the motion picture we possess an art medium whose glories are not all behind us. It has already produced great work, and if, comparatively and proportionately, far too little of that great work has been achieved in Hollywood, I think that is all the more reason why in its annual tribal dance of the stars and the big-shot producers Hollywood should contrive a little quiet awareness of the fact. Of course it won't. I'm just daydreaming.

  Show business has always been a little overnoisy, overdressed, overbrash. Actors are threatened people. Before films came along to make them rich they often had need of a desperate gaiety. Some of these qualities prolonged beyond a strict necessity have passed into the Hollywood mores and produced that very exhausting thing, the Hollywood manner, which is a chronic case of spurious excitement over absolutely nothing. Nevertheless, and for once in a lifetime, I have to admit that Academy Awards night is a good show and quite funny in spots, although I'll admire you if you can laugh at all of it.

  If you can go past those awful idiot faces on the bleachers outside the theater without a sense of the collapse of the human intelligence; if you can stand the hailstorm of flash bulbs popping at the poor patient actors who, like kings and queens, have never the right to look bored; if you can glance out over this gathered assemblage of what is supposed to be the elite of Hollywood and say to yourself without a sinking feeling, ‘In these hands lie the destinies of the only original art the modern world has conceived'; if you can laugh, and you probably will, at the cast-off jokes from the comedians on the stage, stuff that wasn't good enough to use on their radio shows; if you can stand the fake sentimentality and the platitudes of the officials and the mincing elocution of the glamour queens (you ought to hear them with four martinis down the hatch); if you can do all these things with grace and pleasure, and not have a wild and forsaken horror at the thought that most of these people actually take this shoddy performance seriously; and if you can then go out into the night to see half the police force of Los Angeles gathered to protect the golden ones from the mob in the free seats but not from that awful moaning sound they give out, like destiny whistling through a hollow shell; if you can do all these things and still feel next morning that the picture business is worth the attention of one single intelligent, artistic mind, then in the picture business you certainly belong.

  Act IV (1946–1954)

  In 1946, Raymond Chandler bought a house overlooking the coast at La Jolla, north of San Diego, and tried to complete his fifth Marlowe novel, which he had entitled The Little Sister. Freed from the strain of studio jobbing, and relishing the peace and quiet, Chandler also returned with fresh vigour to his letter-writing.

  Letter to Dale Warren,

  2 October 1946.

  I suppose you read a bookseller out here was convicted of selling indecency in Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hectate County. Very discouraging. The book is indecent enough of course, and in exactly the most inoffensive way – without passion, like a phallus made of dough. Now they are bootlegging the damn thing at $25 a copy. It isn't worth the original . . . Wilson's careful and pedestrian and sometimes rather clever book reviews misguide one into thinking there is something in his head besides mucilage. There isn't.

  Having started both the above paragraphs with I – I was taught not to as a schoolboy – let me add that I (we) have moved to La Jolla permanently, or as permanently as anything can be nowadays. If I do any more w
ork in Hollywood, which I probably shall, I can do nine tenths of it here anyway. That is, if I can find a secretary. We live close beside the sounding sea – it's just across the street and down a low cliff – but the Pacific is very sedate. We have a much better home than an out-of-work pulp writer has any right to expect.

  The story I am working on seems to me to lack some of the nobler qualities. In addition to which I find it dull. I wonder could I be washed up for good. It's possible. Better men than me have gone to grease in Hollywood.

  Letter to Jamie Hamilton,

  6 October 1946.

  My title may not be very good. It's just the best I can think of without straining. I have peculiar ideas about titles. They should never be obviously provocative, nor say anything about murder. They should be rather indirect and neutral, but the form of words should be a little unusual. I haven't achieved this here. However, as some big publisher once remarked, a good title is the title of a successful book. Offhand, nobody would have thought The Thin Man a great title. The Maltese Falcon is, because it has rhyme and rhythm and makes the mind ask questions.

  Letter to Charles Morton,

  5 December 1946.

  The only slang that was any use to me in a book was either fresh-minted by Chandler or had stood a reasonable test of time. Anything else is liable to be obsolete by the time you get it into print.

  Letter to Charles Morton,

  12 December 1946.

  I have my pedantic days, my ignorant days, and my don't-give-a-damn days, and I hope my secretary shares my moods.

  Letter to Mrs Robert Hogan,

  a New Jersey teacher who had written to Chandler asking for advice to give the young, 27 December 1946.

  My experience with trying to help people to write has been limited but extremely intensive. I have done everything from giving would-be writers money to live on to plotting and rewriting their stories for them, and so far I have found it to be all waste. The people whom God or nature intended to be writers find their own answers, and those who have to ask are impossible to help. They are merely people who want to be writers.

  Letter to Charles Morton,

  5 January 1947. The book he refers to, Command Decision, was by a writer named William Wister Haines. ‘Mr Weeks’ was the Arts Editor of the Atlantic.

  I wrote you once in a mood of rough sarcasm that the techniques of fiction had become so highly standardized that one of these days a machine would write novels. What bothers me about this book, Command Decision, and others like it is that it has everything in the way of skill and perception and wit and honesty a good novel ought to have. It has a subject, something I never had yet; it has a sharp immediate sense of life as it is right now. I'd be hard put to it to say just what it does not have. I'm absolutely sure of that, although I don't expect to sell anyone else on the idea. Your Mr Weeks, who is a much more intelligent man than I am, thinks Marquand is a serious writer. I do not. I think he is a quick and clever journalist. I think he will be utterly forgotten five years after he dies, by all but a few. Is it that these books are written very quickly, in a kind of heat? No answer; so was a lot of literature that has lasted a long time. The time of composition has nothing to do with it; some minds distill much faster than others. Is it that writers of these books are using completely borrowed techniques and consequently do not convey the feeling that they have created, but rather that they have reported? Closer, but still not quite the answer. Undoubtedly we are getting a lot of adept reportage which masquerades as fiction and will go on getting it, but essentially I believe that it is lacking an emotional quality. Even when they deal with death, and they often do, they are not tragic. I suppose that is to be expected. An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except that cleverness of a decadence. The boys can say anything, their scenes are almost tiresomely neat, they have all the facts and all the answers, but they are little men who have forgotten how to pray. As the world grows smaller, so the minds of men grow smaller, more compact, and more empty. These are the machine-minders of history.

  Letter to Edward Weeks of Atlantic Monthly,

  regarding Chandler's article on the Oscar ceremony.

  I'm afraid you've thrown me for a loss. I thought ‘Juju Worship in Hollywood’ was a perfectly good title. I don't see why it has to be linked up with crime and mystery. But you're the Boss. When I wrote about writers this did not occur to you. I've thought of various titles such as Bank Night in Hollywood, Sutter's Last Stand, The Golden Peepshow, All it Needs is Elephants, The Hot Shot Handicap, Where Vaudeville Went When it Died, and rot like that. But nothing that smacks you on the kisser. By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few dozen words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have. I think your proof reader is kindly attempting to steady me on my feet, but much as I appreciate the solicitude, I am really able to steer a pretty clear course, provided I get both sidewalks and the street in between.

  Letter to James Sandoe,

  7 February 1947.

  The element of suspense in watching two characters gradually approach an inevitable catastrophe simply makes me nervous. I find I cannot read books like this any more.

  Letter to Howard Haycroft,

  mystery writer, 7 February 1947.

  Not very long ago, I was reading a book called Man Against Himself by the eminent Dr Karl Menninger, who has a lucrative psychiatric clinic somewhere in Kansas and was, I believe, a Brigadier General in charge of neuroses in the United States Army. I got about a third of the way through the book before I became completely convinced that the whole thing was a fake.

  Letter to Mrs Robert Hogan,

  8 March 1947.

  One of my peculiarities and difficulties as a writer is that I won't discard anything. I have heard that this is unprofessional and that it is a weakness of the amateur not to be able to tell when his stuff is not coming off. I can tell that all right, as to the matter in hand, but I can't overlook the fact that I had a reason, a feeling, for starting to write it, and I'll be damned if I don't lick it. I have lost months of time because of this stubborness. However, after working in Hollywood, where the analysis of plot and motivation is carried on daily with an utter ruthlessness, I realize that it was always a plot difficulty that held me up. I simply would not plot far enough ahead. I'd write something I liked and then I would have a hell of a time making it fit to the structure. This resulted in some rather startling oddities of construction, about which I care nothing, being fundamentally rather uninterested in plot.

  Another of my oddities (and this one I believe in absolutely) is that you never quite know where your story is until you have written the first draft of it. So I always regard the first draft as raw material. What seems to be alive in it is what belongs in the story. Even if the neatness has to be lost, I will still keep whatever has the effect of getting up on its own feet and marching. A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled. In the long run, however little you talk about it, the most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that 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. This is ironical in a way. It is the reason, I suppose, why in a generation of ‘made’
writers, I still say you can't make a writer. Preoccupation with style will not produce it. No amount of editing and polishing will have any appreciable effect on the flavor of how a man writes. It is a product of the quality of his emotion and perception; it is the ability to transfer these to paper which makes him a writer, in contrast to the great number of people who have just as good emotions and just as keen perceptions, but cannot come within a googol of miles of putting them on paper. I know several made writers. Hollywood, of course, is full of them; their stuff often has an immediate impact of competence and sophistication, but it is hollow underneath, and you never go back to it.