by Unknown
I had to throw my second book away, so that leaves me with nothing to show for the last six months and possibly nothing to eat for the next six. But it also leaves the world a far far better place to live in than if I had not thrown it away.
The literary colony here has undergone a few modifications since we were here last year. That is, those of the boys who are making any money are now playing their tennis at the Beach Club. The old caste system at its dirty work again. I don't think the beach club is very expensive, but a few bucks off his whisky ration plays hell with a writer's inspiration. Max Miller still frequents the public courts. He is a tall angular sourpuss with motheaten hair and very surly manners and a habit of swearing under his breath at himself and out loud at his partner. He is a splendid example of the good rule, Never Meet a Writer if You Liked his Book. There is also a dick pulp writer who writes under the name of Dale or something or other – I daresay I could find out. Maybe it's Dale Carnegie. This one has the shoulders of a weight-lifter and is very temperamental, throwing rackets and making tragic gestures at the sky, both arms extended and a look of agony on his face.
Letter to Blanche Knopf,
17 January 1940.
Terribly sorry to be so dilatory in getting out some work for you. I have had bad luck, bad health and a bad disposition for a long time. I finally did get a very rough draft done but was not at all pleased with it and had to put it aside for a while, in the hope of later discovering whether it was just plain lousy or whether it was a distorted point of view that made me think so. However I am a bit cheered up about it (in absentia) as my researches have convinced me that just plain lousy is the normal temperature of the detective story.
The troubles of advancing age drove me away from La Jolla. I actually developed a rheumatic right arm. We have not yet found a place to live but hope to soon and when there is a little peace in a world which knows no peace – all I ask is a quiet corner and deaf and dumb neighbors – I'll get at this thing again. You couldn't do anything with it now anyway, I suppose.
Letter to Blanche Knopf,
14 June 1940.
Sorry I haven't any snapshots to send you yet. I don't know how much time there is. My wife will try to take some, a very agonizing process for both of us, since she is very particular and I am very badly behaved. Commercial photos are no good. I am reaching the age where it takes an artistic touch to make anything of me. The fellows who have this want too much money, and I doubt the importance of the cause. While I am compelled by weight of opinion, some of it expert, some frankly prejudiced, to admit being one of the handsomest men of my generation, I also have to concede that this generation is now a little seedy, and I with it.
The last time no page proofs were sent to me. Your Mr Jacobs with whom I wrangled about this and that felt it was not necessary. I guess it wasn't. I never thought it was. As the book finally appeared there were, I think, two slight typographical errors, which should be a very low average for this kind of book. I certainly don't want to read two sets of page proofs, if I don't have to. Nor do I want the set of galley proofs as finally corrected which they sent me. It seems to be a custom, but I regret to say I burned them. Too heavy to carry in my hip pocket.
One thing I should like and that is a few changes in the natty biographical sketch on the jacket, if it is to be repeated. I haven't a copy of the book here, having lent my last copy to a friend who has so far failed to return it. From memory I recall three things I didn't like, one of which was my own fault, the second a misunderstanding, the third a use of the expression ‘checkered career’ which to me has a pejorative connotation. I used the phrase ‘tax expert’. The third point was that your promotion man seemed to get the impression that Dulwich College was a university. It is, in fact, one of the larger English Public Schools, not ranking with Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse, or Marlborough, but certainly ranking ahead of many of those which Life made a fuss over in its last issue. Incidentally, the editors of Life seem entirely unaware that a School Tie and an Old School Tie are entirely different things. But I daresay these pathetic relics of a lost world are no longer worth accuracy.
Fourth point, and one I'm sensitive on, but one which is difficult to make other Americans understand. I am not an Irish-American in the sense commonly understood. I am of Quaker descent on both sides. The Irish family my mother belonged to had not a single Catholic relative or connection, even by marriage. Furthermore the professional classes in Southern Ireland are and always have been largely non-Catholic. Those few Irish patriots who have had brains as well as spite have also been non-Catholics. I should not like to say that in Ireland Catholicism reached its all-time low of ignorance, dirt and general degradation of the priesthood, but in my boyhood it was bad enough. It does the Irish great credit that out of this flannel-mouthed mob of petty liars and drunkards there has come no real persecution of the non-Catholic elements.
Letter to George Harmon Coxe,
27 June 1940. In referring to his forthcoming second novel, Chandler mentions the resistance shown by Alfred and Blanche Knopf to Farewell, My Lovely as a title.
Your letter sounds rather gloomy. If so, forget it. The English Channel, even at its narrowest point, is worth fifty Maginot lines, and the English troops are at least equal to the Germans and the British colonials are far better. The job of landing in England enough shock troops, tanks and guns to overrun the country is probably a military possibility, but it is infinitely more difficult than anything the Nazis have yet attempted. Probably Hitler would rather have destroyed or captured the British army than anything else in the world, and he had all the cards.
As for bombing, it will be bad, but it will work both ways. If Hitler uses gas on England, it will be used on Germany. If he bombs London, Berlin will be bombed. And the British night bombers are better than the Germans, because the British have made a speciality of night bombing for twenty-five years. And on top of all this the English civilian population is the least hysterical in the world. They can take an awful pounding and still keep on planting lobelias.
On your recommendation and that alone I read Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, and after reading it I wrote an analysis of it, because it was blurbed as the perfect crime story, incapable of dishonesty by reason of the way it was constructed. As entertainment I like the first half and the opening, in particular. The second half got pallid. But as an honest crime story, honest in the sense that the reader is given a square deal and the motivation and mechanisms of the murders are sound – it is bunk. The fundamental conception of the book in particular annoyed me. Here is a judge, a jurist, and this man condemns to death and murders a group of people on nothing but hearsay evidence. In no case did he have a shred of proof that any one of them had actually committed murder. In every case it was merely someone's opinion. But proof, even absolute inner conviction, simply did not exist. Some of these people admit their crimes, but this is all after the murders were planned, the judgement entered, the sentence pronounced. In other words it is as complete and shameless a bamboozling of the reader as ever was perpetrated. And I won't go into the mechanism of the crimes, most of which were predicated on pure chance, and some actually impossible. They also show an abysmal ignorance of lethal drugs and their action. But I'm very glad I read the book because it finally and for all time settled a question in my mind that had at least some lingering doubt attached to it. Whether it is possible to write a strictly honest mystery of the classic type. It isn't. To get the complication you fake the clues, the timing, the play of coincidence, assume certainties where only 50 per cent chances exist at most. To get the surprise murderer you fake character, which hits me hardest of all, because I have a sense of character. If people want to play this game, it's all right by me. But for Christ's sake let's not talk about honest mysteries. They don't exist.
Time out while I take a long breath.
The title of my book is not The Second Murderer, and that was not the title I had in mind when I was talking to you. I use
d that for a while as a working title, but I didn't like it, although Mrs Knopf did. I didn't know it had been announced under that name. When I turned the manuscript in they howled like hell about the title, which is not at all a mystery title, but they gave in. We'll see. I think the title is an asset. They think it is a liability. One of us has to be wrong. I suppose, since they are in the business, it should be I. On the other hand I have never had any great respect for the ability of editors, publishers, play and picture producers to guess what the public will like. The record is all against them. I have always tried to put myself in the shoes of the ultimate consumer, the reader, and ignore the middleman. I have assumed that there exists in the country people of education and some educated by life, who like what I like. Of course the real trouble is that you can be read by an enormous number of people who don't buy any books. My book is supposed to come out in August. The proofs were a bloody mess. I've just finished them and don't feel at all that they are a clean job yet.
All the best,
Ray
Letter to Blanche Knopf,
9 October 1940. Despite Knopf's efforts, Chandler's second novel had again been largely ignored by the critics. Knopf was now rather bitterly putting this down to the title.
Thanks for yours of October 1st which only just caught up with me. I am terribly sorry about the title and all that, and because the advance sales disappointed us, but you must remember that I didn't refuse to change the title, I just couldn't think of another one, you gave me no time at all, and although I said I liked the title, that should not have made you go against your business judgement. Everyone I know likes the title very much, but of course they are not in the trade. And I still think Zounds, He Dies was a good title. If I had had some of the time the book was being prepared, I'm sure I could have come up with something that would have satisfied you. But you caught me offbase and got me rattled.
Personally, and in this I am borne out by one professional opinion, I think the handicap of the title will be only temporary and that if the sales do not do anything, it will really be for some other cause. For instance, the war. A woman out here who runs a string of rental libraries in and around Hollywood told a friend of mine that one of her branches had ten copies of the book out and that she hardly ever bought more than two copies of a mystery story. She said she thought this was in part due to a ‘very marvellous’ review in the Hollywood Citizen-News of Sept 21st. I hope you have seen this. Evidently they jumped the gun on the publication date. Of course it would have only a local influence, but the mere fact that a critic who confessedly does not like mystery stories and thinks they are mostly tripe should take this book seriously as a piece of writing is worth an awful lot to me. Because I am not innately a hack writer.
Syd Sanders sent me a cut of your advertisement in The New York Times. I don't see how you can afford it. If that doesn't start something, what's the use?
Letter to George Harmon Coxe,
5 November 1940.
Funny thing civilization. It promises so much and all it delivers is mass production of shoddy merchandise and shoddy people.
Letter to Erle Stanley Gardner,
1 February 1941. ‘The streps’ means streptococcus, a bacterial infection.
Good God, we have moved again.
Living, if you call it that, in a big apartment house in Santa Monica, brand new and all that, I longed for your ranch. I longed for some place where I could go out at night and listen and hear the grass growing. But of course it wouldn't do for us, just the two of us, even if I had the price of a piece of virgin foothill. It's better over here, quiet and a house in a nice garden. But they are just beginning to build a house across the way. I shan't mind it as much as the good neighbors bouncing on the bed springs over at the apartment house.
Awfully sorry to hear you had been sick. I know what the streps can do to a person. Sulfanilimide seems to be able to cure anything but flat brain, which is what I suffer from.
Regards to your gang
Going to ground for a year, in which time he wrote hardly any letters, Chandler worked on a third novel. He was starting to grow dispirited with his lack of success.
Letter to Blanche Knopf,
15 March 1942.
Your letter, kind and charming as always, reaches me at a very bad time. I'm afraid the book is not going to be any good to you. No action, no likeable characters, no nothing. The detective does nothing. I understand that it is being typed, which seems like a waste of money, and will be submitted to you, and I'm not sure that that is a good idea, but it is out of my hands. At least I felt that you should be relieved of any necessity of being kind to me in a situation where kindness is probably not of any use. About all I can say by way of extenuation is that I tried my best and seemed to have to get the thing out of my system. I suppose I would have kept tinkering at it indefinitely otherwise.
The thing that rather gets me down is that when I write something that is tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, I get panned for being tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, and then when I try to tone down a bit and develop the mental and emotional side of a situation, I get panned for leaving out what I was panned for putting in the first time. The reader expects thus and thus of Chandler because he did it before, but when he did it before he was informed that it might have been much better if he hadn't.
However all this is rather vain now. From now on, if I make mistakes, as no doubt I shall, they will not be made in a futile attempt to avoid making mistakes.
Most sincerely,
Raymond Chandler
Letter to Alfred Knopf,
16 July 1942. The third book was published under the title The High Window.
I think the book is a very nice job indeed. I particularly like the type, which being smaller and yet very clear, keeps the page from looking crowded. The jacket also seems to be very effective. My wife does not like the photo on the back. All the photos I sent you were bad, and this is perhaps about the best, except the very first one, which no longer looks like me. I was reading in an English book the other day and noticed the remark, ‘the kind of squit who has his picture on the dust cover of his book’, or something like that. I feel a good deal like that myself. It is the custom in the country, of course, but most writers are such horrible-looking people that their faces destroy something which perhaps wanted to like them. Perhaps I am oversensitive, but I have several times been so repelled by such faces that I have not been able to read the books without the face coming between. Especially these fat crowlike middle-aged women's faces.
Letter to Blanche Knopf,
22 October 1942. The High Window, yet again, was ignored by the reviewers.
Thank you very much for writing to me about the sales of my last story, and many thanks also for your kind invitation to lunch. But alas, I'm down here in the desert 130 miles from Beverly Hills and I'm afraid I simply can't make it this time. I'm trying to bake out a sinus condition which has been weakening me for years. Don't expect any luck, but felt it had to be tried. I hope you and Mr Knopf are well and are bearing up under the many cares of these times.
So sorry you are feeling badly about the sales of The High Window. Last time you were out here you told me 4000 copies was the ceiling on a mystery. Either you were just saying that to comfort a broken heart or you are now repining for nothing at all. Why should it sell any more? And why should you spend so much advertising, and such very demanding advertising? I don't know anything about promotion, but when Mr Knopf was out here he gave me figures on what had been spent advertising FML, and to me they seemed very high. I said: ‘Can you afford it?’ He said: ‘No.’ But you keep on doing it. Why? The High Window was not the striking and original job of work that could be promoted to anything of consequence. Some people liked it better than my other efforts, some people liked it much less. But nobody went into any screaming fits either way. I'm not disappointed in the sales. I think it did well to get by at all. I am sure Sanders thinks so. I hope th
e next will be livelier and better and faster, because, as you know very well, it is the pace that counts, not the logic or the plausibility or the style. I have just been reading a book called Phantom Lady, by William Irish, whoever that is. It has one of those artificial trick plots and is full of small but excessive demands on the Goddess of Chance, but it is a swell job of writing, one that gives everything to every character, every scene, and never, like so many of our overrated novelists, just flushes the highlights and then gets scared and runs. I happen to admire this kind of writing very much. I haven't seen the book advertised anywhere and such reviews as I have seen of it show a complete unawareness of the technical merits of the book. So what the hell.
But as I said I do hope the next one will be better and that one of these days I shall turn one out that will have that fresh and sudden touch that will click. Most of all perhaps, in my rather sensitive mind, I hope the day will come when I won't have to ride around on Hammett and James Cain, like an organ grinder's monkey. Hammett is all right. I give him everything. There were 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 writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal to literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way. Nothing hard and clean and cold and ventilated. A brothel with a smell of cheap scent in the front parlor and bucket of slops at the back door. Do I, for God's sake, sound like that? Hemingway with his eternal sleeping bag got to be pretty damn tiresome, but at least Hemingway sees it all, not just flies on the garbage can.
