Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
11 November 1949.
This is Armistice Day here, a sort of mixed holiday. Banks and post offices closed, and a few stores, but not many. Big parade of troops and marines and sailors, none of them have any idea what the first world war was like. It was a damn sight worse than they think . . .
While reviewing generally is not very reliable anywhere, I really think that English reviewing is getting absurd. There are far, far too many novelists reviewing other novelists. There is far too much consideration for books that are obviously going to get nowhere, and far too little understanding of what it is in books that makes people read them. And there is a tight group of critics or reviewers who are monotonously willing to say something nice about almost any book at all. Your own book ads show it. These names, supposedly of influence, really can't have any because they show no discrimination to speak of ... And at the other extreme is that ridiculous publication The Times Literary Supplement, which is apparently compiled from the blitherings of a group of aged dons, whose standards of comparisons, points of reference or what have you, seem to be stuck in the year when Jowett translated Plato . . .
P.S. I suppose you know this, but I think it wonderful, from Fontemara, by Ignazio Silone:
At the head of all is God, lord of heaven.
Then comes Prince Torlonia, lord of earth.
Then comes the armed guard of Prince Torlonia.
Then come the hounds of the armed guard of Prince Torlonia.
Then comes nobody else.
And still nobody else.
And still again nobody else.
Then come the farmers.
Letter to James Sandoe,
19 November 1949.
Why do women write such ordinary books? Their observation of everyday life is splendid, but they never seem to develop any color . . .
Letter to Dale Warren,
20 November 1949. Chandler is referring to the Philip Marlowe radio show.
The Marlowe show has gone so soft that even old ladies like it now. I should worry. Who said mystery programs were sadistic? This one is about as sadistic as a frosted marshmallow sundae. The boys who wrote it are on their sixteenth script. Pause and let us have two minutes of silence. That is one hell of a way to make a living. Think of the work, the strain, the deadlines, and for what?
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
4 December 1949.
Your man Hodge is a superb editor, the rarest kind of man. These trained-seal critics, even the best of them, bore me at least two thirds of the time. Give a man a name of prestige and he is already a fair way to being an ass. I do not suggest that Alan Hodge lacks prestige, but he is still in that happy territory where the man's voice is more important than his name. Surely no one could write better introductions. The Betjemans (I may have spelled this wrong), the Quennels, the Mortimers, etc. are always a little intent on making a good appearance before their admiring public. Hodge is concerned with the book and damn all else.
... I expressed myself badly about playwriting. Of course Maugham is right, as he always is. It is more difficult to write plays, harder work, I have no doubt, although I have never even tried to write one. It is also very much more difficult to write screenplays than novels. But it does not, in my opinion, take the same quality of talent. It may take a more exacting use of the talent, a more beautiful job of cabinet work, a finer and more apt ear for the current jargon of a certain kind of people, but it is much more superficial all round. Take any good, but not great, play and put it in fiction form and you have a very slight matter . . . Incidentally, if I knew Maugham, which I fear I never shall, I should ask him for an inscribed copy of Ashenden. I've never asked a writer for an inscribed copy and as a matter of fact I attach very little value to such things. (I wouldn't mind having a prompt copy of Hamlet.) But I'm a bit of a connoisseur of melodramatic effects, and Ashenden is so far ahead of any other spy story ever written, while his novels, the best of them, and good as they are, do not outclass the field. A classic in any manner appeals to me more than the large canvas. Carmen, as Mérimée wrote it, ‘Hérodias’, ‘Un Cœur Simple’, The Captain's Doll, The Spoils of Poynton, Madame Bovary, The Wings of the Dove, and so forth and so on (A Christmas Holiday, by God too), these are all perfect. Long or short, violent or still, they do something that will never be done as well again. The list, thank God, is long, and in many languages.
Too bad you are such an old, old man of 50, or not quite. (Fiftieth year means 49 over here.) Too bad, I have sympathy with you. It is a bad age. A man of fifty is not young, not old, not even middle-aged. His wind has gone and his dignity has not yet arrived. To the young he is already old and stodgy. To the really old he is fat and pompous and greedy. He is a mere convenience to bankers and tax collectors. Why not shoot yourself and be done with it?
Letter to James Sandoe,
4 December 1949. Theodor Geisel, the La Jolla-based author of the Dr Seuss children's books, was also involved in the following incident.
Max Miller found a cat the other day with a coyote trap on its foot. We tunnelled through some Manzanita to get it and the poor damn cat's foot was all maggots, must have been wearing the trap for days and days. So gentle and no scratching or yelling when we took the trap off. I'm haunted by its almost inevitable end because I can't find the owner. It still has two toes and is doing fine at the vets, but I can't give it a home and what the hell can I do? A great big affectionate torn cat all scarred up with many battles, not a whimper in its character, and no place to go, no one who cares to give it a home.
Letter to James Sandoe,
28 December 1949.
That feeling you get in English books and so seldom in ours that the country with all its small details is a part of their lives and that they love it. We are so rootless here. I've lived half my life in California and made what use of it I could, but I could leave it forever without a pang.
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
who had secured a signed copy of Ashenden, 5 January 1950.
Of course I'll write to the old boy, trying not to be too deferential on the one hand and not too clubby on the other. I have a feeling that fundamentally he is a pretty sad man, pretty lonely. His description of his seventieth birthday is pretty grim. I should guess that all in all he has had a lonely life, that his declared attitude of not caring much emotionally about people is a defense mechanism, that he lacks the kind of surface warmth that attracts people, and at the same time is such a wise man that he knows that however superficial and accidental most friendships are, life is a pretty gloomy affair without them. I don't mean that he has no friends, of course; I don't know enough about him to say anything like that. I get my feeling from his writing and that is all.
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
11 January 1950.
I often wonder why so many English intellectuals turn to Catholicism. But I wonder so many things and as I grow older I have less and less respect for the human brain and more and more respect for human courage. Over here the Catholics are numerous, powerful and mostly quite genial, but the hierarchy is overwhelmingly of Irish origin and the Irish Catholics, always excepting the Jesuits of Maynooth, are pretty crude specimens of high Catholic thinking, compared with the French, English, Scottish, and Italian prelates. Of course I also wonder why people turn to religion at all. As a young man I was very high-church and very devout. But I was cursed with an analytical mind. It still worries me.
Letter to Dale Warren,
15 January 1950. Warren had just sent Chandler the proof of a biographical sketch, written by Warren, which was to appear on the new Marlowe dust jacket.
This is the sort of document that makes writers dog themselves out in a velveteen smoking jacket, a cap with a tassel, a pipe full of Craven Mixture, and lollygag around admiring themselves instead of putting out a little careful but uneven prose. The piece is a miracle of overstatement. What about my classical profile, my head of wavy brown hair scarcely th
inning at the temples, my erect bearing, and smiling Irish eyes and my unfailing courtesy to my social inferiors? What about those early days in the back of a Fifth Street bar, cleaning spittoons with the tail of my shirt, dining off the debris of the free lunch mixed with sawdust. A butt of bullies, a familiar of courtesans, a whipping boy for shamed alcoholics? What about the time I spent under the shadow of the Saint Sulpice in that short but intoxicating affair with a demoiselle from Luxembourg – the one that afterwards became known the world over – but no, that is dangerous ground. Even in Luxembourg they have libel laws – in three languages as a matter of fact. And what about the lost six months I spent in the Hollenthal, trying to persuade a funicular railway to run on the level? You fellows leave out so much that happened, and put so much in that didn't.
Letter to James Sandoe,
25 January 1950.
I am getting sick and tired of all these women writers who are never satisfied to tell you a story; they have to tell you exactly how to think about it every minute, reminding one of John Betjeman's translation of the critical cliche ‘thoughtfully written’ as ‘by a woman and boring’. Between them and the synthetic tough smart alecks there is a wide vacant space into which modestly steals only now and then a decent, honest, controlled and thoroughly likeable job.
Letter to Dale Warren,
7 March 1950.
The contrast between the claims made for books in the ads ... and the books themselves, when you get them in hand, is so ludicrous that one begins to wonder whether this stuff doesn't overreach itself.
Letter to Leroy Wright,
Chandler's attorney in San Diego, 12 April 1950.
Some time when you are not too busy or when someone in your office is not too busy, would you be good enough to let me know the present status of the licensed private operative. Specifically (but not inclusively):
What authority licenses him? How must he qualify? What are his rights privileges and duties? What information does he give, and what shows on the license? Must it be in plain view on the wall of his office? How much is his bond? Are his fingerprints on record locally and at the F.B.I. files? Has he automatically a right to carry weapons or must he qualify like anyone else? Is this within the discretion of the Sheriff or whom? Are his weapons registered and testfired? By whom?
How is a complaint made against him? (a) by a private citizen, (b) by a police authority? What is the procedure in hearing such a complaint (assuming the matter to be short of a criminal charge)? On what grounds may his license be canceled? If it is for a specific period (what is the fee?) is it automatically renewed, or must he re-qualify?
To what extent is information given him by a client a privileged communication? (A lot of stories turn on this.) Has he any greater power of arrest than the ordinary citizen? Can he be held without bond as a material witness at the discretion of the D.A.? Has he any kind of badge (not being a uniformed special officer such as the men who patrol baseball parks, movie lots and so on)? What identification, etc. is he required to carry?
Letter to Dale Warren,
16 May 1950.
When I open a book and see writing like ‘her appearance was indeed shocking'; ‘I felt the first stab of remorse'; ‘rich full-bodied beauty’ etc. I get the impression that I am reading a dead language, that awful petrified mandarin English which no one can get away with except perhaps Maugham, and not always he.
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
18 May 1950.
How do you tell a man to go away in hard language? Scram, beat it, take off, take the air, on your way, dangle, hit the road, and so forth. All good enough. But give me the classic expression actually used by Spike O'Donnel (of the O'Donnel brothers of Chicago, the only small outfit to tell the Capone mob to go to hell and live): What he said was: ‘Be missing’. The restraint of it is deadly.
Letter to Dale Warren,
14 June 1950.
Strange things the eyes. Consider the question of the cat. The cat has nothing to express emotion with but a pair of eyes and some slight assistance from the ears. Yet consider the wide range of expression a cat is capable of with such small means. And then consider the enormous number of human faces you must have looked at that had no more expression than a peeled potato.
. . . Some invented slang, not all, becomes current among the people it is invented for. If you are sensitive to this sort of thing, I believe you could often, not always, distinguish between the colored up lingo that writers produce and the hard simplicity of the terms that originate in the circle where they are actually made. I don't think any writer could think up an expression like ‘mainliner’ for a narcotic addict who shoots the stuff into a vein. It's too exact, too pure.
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
23 June 1950.
Your Paris trip sounds like a typical publisher's jaunt, every meal an interview, and authors crawling in and out of your pockets from morning till night. I don't know how publishers stand these trips. One writer would exhaust me for a week. And you get one with every meal. There are things about the publishing business that I should like, but dealing with writers would not be one of them. Their egos require too much petting. They live over-strained lives in which far too much humanity is sacrificed to far too little art ... To all these people literature is more or less the central fact of existence. Whereas, to vast numbers of reasonably intelligent people it is an unimportant sideline, a relaxation, an escape, a source of information, and sometimes an inspiration. But they could do without it far more easily than they could do without coffee or whisky.
Letter to Ray Stark,
28 August 1950.
Of course the lawyers always back each other up because they know that if they couldn't hang together they'd hang separately.
Letter to Bernice Baumgarten,
13 September 1950. Chandler had been hired by Warner Brothers to work on an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel Strangers on a Train, to be directed by Alfred Hitchcock. He would be allowed to work on it from La folia, rather than travel to the studios.
I'm still slaving away for Warner Brothers on this Hitchcock thing, which you may or may not have heard about. Some days I think it is fun and other days I think it is damn foolishness. The money looks good, but as a matter of fact it isn't. I'm too conscientious and, although I do not work nearly as fast as I would have worked twenty years ago, I still work a good deal faster than the job requires or has any reason to expect. For the most part the work is boring, unreal, and I have no feeling that it is the kind of thing I can do better than anybody else. Suspense as an absolute quality has never seemed to me very important. At best it is a secondary growth, and at worst an attempt to make something out of nothing.
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
28 September 1950. Chandler is initially referring to Jean-Paul Sartre.
God but this fellow could stand a good pruning. He writes superbly at times, but he never knows where to stop. He's just like most of the goddamned Russians.
. . . There seems to be a general feeling about Hitchcock that he has shot his wad, but that is always a dangerous assumption with a man of any talent. He is definitely a man of talent, but he belongs to a type which is rather dull outside its particular skill. Some movie makers, like some writers, seem to do their work without committing more than a small part of their real abilities. They belong to the class I call the amateurs; when they are big enough they are geniuses. Others can do some particular thing extremely well, but you would never think they had it in them merely by meeting them. These are the technicians. I'd say Hitch belongs to this group, but of course I don't really know the man.
Letter to James Keddie,
29 September 1950. Keddie had written to Chandler, to ask whether he would be interested in joining the Baker Street Irregulars, a Sherlock Holmes fan club. Chandler had turned the offer down ('I do not seem to find any hollow place in my life which the cult of the master alone could fill. If I were drawn into any esoteric activity of this so
rt, I think it would probably be devoted to the desperate analysis of certain actual crimes which have never been satisfactorily explained and, of course, never will be.’). Keddie had written again to Chandler, pressing him for his opinion of the detective stories of Austin Freeman. Chandler replied:
Where the solution of a mystery turns on the correct analysis of scientific evidence, there arises a question of honesty. I realize that this is a big problem in detective stories – just what honesty is. But if you accept the basic premise, as I do, that in a novel of detection the reader should have been able to solve the problem, if he had paid proper attention to the clues as they were presented and drawn the right deductions from them, then I say that he had no such opportunity if, to evaluate said clues, he is required to have an expert knowledge of archaeology, physics, chemistry, microscopy, pathology, metallurgy, and various other sciences. If, in order to know where a man was drowned, I have to identify the fish scales found in his lungs, then I, as a reader, cannot be expected to tell you where he was drowned ... In spite of all this, I have a very high regard for Freeman . . . His problems are always interesting in
themselves, and the expositions at the end are masterpieces of lucid analysis.
Letter to Charles Morton,
9 October 1950. The Hemingway book referred to was Across the River and into the Trees.
Quite a lapse in our once interesting correspondence, don't you think? Of course it's my fault because the last letter was from you. And you are most correct in saying in it that I owe you a letter . . . Apparently it is what the years do to you. The horse which once had to be driven with a tight rein now has to be flicked with a whip in order to make him do much more than amble . . . Walter Bagehot once wrote (I am quoting from an increasingly unreliable memory) ‘In my youth, I hoped to do great things. Now, I shall be satisfied to get through without scandal.’ In a sense, I am much better off than he was because I never expected to do great things, and in fact have done much better than I ever hoped to do.
The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909–1959 Page 15
