The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction 1909-1959

by Unknown

  Letter to B. D. Zevion,

  a publisher who had written to Chandler asking if he might provide a pre-publication blurb for a book of poems by another colleague from his old Black Mask days, 9 March 1947.

  Thank you very much indeed for the Sandberg book. These poems are curious reading now. When they were first published, apparently they were blunt and brutal as hell. Now they seem, if anything, restrained. They have a lot of Whitmanesque blether about man-child and woman-child etc. which seems curiously strained, like a pulp writer trying to achieve force by the use of harsh words rather than harsh things. The ‘he latchkeyed his way into the room’ sort of style. Once in a while I find it in my old stories, but don't think I put it there. Editors took a lot of liberties with me in those days. I have a couple of letters from Sandberg, very nice ones and very kind. They are written in the same hopped-up lingo, which I suppose is natural to him now, but I think originally it was just heavy breathing.

  Letter to Edgar Carter,

  H. N. Swanson's assistant, with whom Chandler still discussed incoming Hollywood offers, 28 March 1947.

  By the way, do you ever read the Bible? I suppose not very often, but I had occasion to the other night and believe me it is a lesson in how not to write for the movies. The worst kind of overwriting. Whole chapters that you could have said in one paragraph. And the dialogue! I bet you Macmillan's are sore as hell they didn't get to publish it. They could have made it a best-seller easy. And as for getting it banned in Boston I don't think they'd even have to grease the Watch and Ward Committee to put the red light on it.

  Letter to Jane Bethel,

  Erle Stanley Gardner's wife, 20 April 1947.

  The really good detective picture has not yet been made, unless by Hitchcock, and that is a rather different kind of picture. The Maltese Falcon came closest. The reason is that the detective in the picture always has to fall for some girl, whereas the real distinction of the detective's personality is that, as a detective, he falls for nobody. He is the avenging justice, the bringer of order out of chaos, and to make his doing this part of a trite boy-meets-girl story is to make it silly. But in Hollywood you cannot make a picture which is not essentially a love story, that is to say, a story in which sex in paramount.

  Letter to Charles Morton,

  15 July 1947.

  The picture of you I got from Swanson was a great shock to me. I had imagined you as a dry, pawky individual about 45 years old, addicted to a smelly pipe, conservative in dress and appearance, and a little Edwardian or perhaps late-Victorian or earlier. The fact seems to me that you are addicted to violent waistcoats like an English bookmaker, that you like to travel in souped up Fords which can outrun Cadillacs, and that you and your wife toured France on a motorcycle.

  Letter to James Sandoe,

  10 August 1947.

  The Partisan Review arrived. It is rather a good magazine of the sort. These clever-clever people are a useful catharsis to the more practical minded writer who, whether he be commercial or not, has usually lived long enough not to take any set of opinions too seriously. As a very young man, when Shaw's beard was still red, I heard him lecture in London on Art for Art's Sake, which seems to have meant something then. It did not please Shaw of course; few things did unless he thought of them first. But art for propaganda's sake is even worse. And a critical magazine whose primary object is not to think intelligently but to think in such a form as to exploit a set of political ideas of whatsoever color always ends up by being critical only in the colloquial sense and intelligent only in the sense of a constant and rather labored effort to find different meanings for things than other people have found. So after a while these magazines always perish; they never achieve life, but only a distaste for other people's views of it. They have the intolerance of the very young and the anaemia of closed rooms and too much midnight smoking. And God help you if you have faith in them and meet them in person. But this last is a rather unfortunate jibe since it could be said of most writers. It is an awful thing to admire a man's book and then meet him, and have your entire pleasure in his work destroyed by a few egotistical attitudes, so that not only do you dislike his personality, but you can never again read anything he writes with an open mind. His nasty little ego is always leering at you from behind the words.

  Letter to Charles Morton,

  28 October 1947.

  I had an idea for some time back that I should like to do an article on The Moral Status of the Writer, or more frivolously, The Hell With Posterity I Want Mine Now. Not a frivolous article really. It seems to me that in all this yapping about writers selling themselves to Hollywood or the slicks or some transient propaganda idea, instead of writing sincerely from the heart about what they see around them, – the people who make this kind of complaint, and that includes practically every critic who takes himself seriously, overlook the point (I don't see how they can, but they do) that no writer ever in any age got a blank check. He always had to accept some conditions imposed from without, respect certain taboos, try to please certain people. It might have been the Church, or a rich patron, or a generally accepted standard of elegance, or the commercial wisdom of a publisher or editor, or perhaps even a set of political theories. If he did accept them, he revolted against them. In either case they conditioned his writing. No writer ever wrote exactly what he wanted to write, because there was never anything inside himself, anything purely individual that he did want to write. It's all reaction of one sort or another.

  Oh the hell with it. Ideas are poison. The more you reason, the less you create.

  Letter to Charles Morton,

  18 December 1947.

  I have a great idea for an article which I don't want to write but want to read. Some dispassionate intelligent legally inclined man, not too legal, should write a piece explaining not who is a Commie or a Fellow Traveler, but why reasonably intelligent and well-to-do people like these Hollywood characters are Commies or FT's. Fundamentally they are not out to overthrow the government nor do they think they would be better off under Stalin. Most of them would be shot as right deviationists . . .

  Letter to James Sandoe,

  21 December 1947. By ‘Uncle Dugastiviti’ one presumes Chandler is referring to Joseph Stalin (known as Dzhugashvili), the then Communist leader of Russia, who still at this point had many admirers in the West.

  You and I perhaps had better leave politics alone, since I am the reactionary type, who thinks the only reason Uncle Dugastiviti has no extermination camps is that he is still trying to find out how to get 50,000 miles out of a truck without greasing it.

  Letter to Charles Morton,

  1 January 1948.

  I am one of those people who have to be known exactly the right amount to be liked. I am standoffish with strangers, a form of shyness which whisky cured when I was still able to take it in the requisite quantities. I am terribly blunt, having been raised in the English tradition which permits a gentleman to be almost infinitely rude if he keeps his voice down. It depends on a complete assurance that a punch on the nose will not be the reply. Americans have no manners as such; they have the manners that arise from their natures, and so when their natures are sweet they have the best manners in the world.

  Letter to Dale Warren,

  8 January 1948.

  All my best friends I have never seen. To know me in the flesh is to pass on to better things.

  Letter to James Sandoe,

  27 January 1948. The ‘Hollywood show in Washington’ is in reference to the questioning of what was known as ‘The Hollywood Ten’ by Senator McCarthy's Committee on Un-American Activities.

  Yes, I'd like to read George Orwell's essay ‘The British People’ very much. Orwell, like other clever people, probably including you and me, can be an ass on occasion. But that doesn't mean he is never interesting, perceptive, and very intelligent.

  I've just read The Iceman Cometh, and I wish somebody would tell me what is so wonderful about this guy O'Neill. Of course, I
haven't seen the play. I've only read it. In fact the only play of his that I ever saw was Strange Interludes, and you can not only have that but, if necessary I will pay you to cart it away . . . O'Neill is the sort of man who could spend a year in flophouses, researching flophouses, and write a play about flophouses that would be no more real than a play by a man who had never been in a flophouse, but had only read about them. If I am utterly wrong, please instruct me.

  You ask me what I think about the Hollywood show in Washington. Well I think it's pretty awful that an investigation of this sort should be conducted by a man who thinks Abie's Irish Rose is a novel. I do not think that the Founding Fathers intended this sort of investigation to be conducted with microphones, flash bulbs, and moving picture cameras. Apart from that, until the Supreme Court defines the powers of Congressional committees and limits them (and our present Supreme Court are no bunch of legal masters) I cannot see where the committee exceeded its rights . . . I think the ten men who were cited had very bad legal advice. They were afraid to say they were Communists or to say that they were not Communists; therefore they tried to raise a false issue. If they had told the truth, they would have a far better case before the courts than they have now, and they would certainly have no worse a case as regards their bosses in Hollywood. If Jack Warner fires me because I admit to being a Communist, he's in a far more shaky legal position than if he does the same thing because, through refusing to answer the questions of the Congressional Committee, I have brought the moving picture industry into bad repute . . . I don't mean that these ten men are all convinced and avowed Communists. I think about three of them are, that at least two definitely are not, and that the rest don't know what the hell it's all about. But I ought to qualify my remarks about the boys by saying that, although I have no sympathy for them, and don't think anything very awful will happen to them, except that they will spend a lot of money on lawyers, and the worst kind of lawyers, I reserve my real contempt for the industry. A business as big as the motion picture industry ought to be run by men with a few guts, men with enough moral and intellectual integrity to say that while these matters are sub judice and while these men have not been declared guilty of any crime by the courts, the producers are not going to treat them as guilty . . . Sometimes I feel kind of sorry for the poor bastards. They are so damned scared they won't make their second or third million. In fact, they are just so damned scared, period. What a wonderful thing it would be if the Motion Pictures Producers Association had said to Mr Thomas, ‘Sure, I guess we have Communists in Hollywood. We don't know who they are. How would you expect us to? We're not the F.B.I. But even if we did know, there's an Attorney General in this country. He hasn't accuşed these men of any crime. Congress hasn't legislated anything that would cause their present or future membership in the Communist party to be a crime, and until it does we propose to treat them just as exactly as we treat anyone else.’ You know what would happen if the producers had the guts to say anything like that? They would start making good pictures, because that takes guts too. Very much the same kind of guts.

  Letter to Frederick Lewis Allen,

  editor of Harper's Magazine, 7 May 1948. Chandler refers to the magazine's dramatic critic, Eric Bentley.

  Bentley is probably the best dramatic critic in the US and, with the possible exception of Mary McCarthy, the only dramatic critic in the US. The rest of the boys are just think-piece writers whose subject happens to be a play. They are interested in exploiting their own personal brand of verbal glitter. They are witty and readable and sometimes cute, but they tell you next to nothing about the dramatic art and relationship of the play in question to that art.

  It is not enough for a critic to be right, since he will occasionally be wrong. It is not enough for him to give colorable reasons. He must create a reasonable world into which his reader may enter blindfold and feel his way to the chair by the fire without barking his shins on the unexpected dust mop. The barbed phrase, the sedulously rare word, the highbrow affectation of style – these are amusing, but useless. They place nothing and reveal not the temper of the times. The great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for truth.

  In his review of The Iceman Cometh that fading wit and tired needlepoint worker, George Jean Nathan says: ‘With the appearance of this long awaited work our theater has become dramatically alive again. It makes most of the plays . . . during the more than twelve-year period of O'Neill's absence look comparatively like so much damp tissue paper.’ Cute and quite easy, and with two sentences the spuriousness of an entire career seems to stand revealed. A critic who could write that drivel about O'Neill's drivel is hors concours. It would be charitable to say that he has lost contact with his brains; it would be far more accurate to say that he has merely made public a truth which was privately known from the beginning: that George Jean Nathan's critical reputation is not founded on his knowing what he is talking about, since obviously

  she doesn't now and most probably never did, but on a certain personal dexterity and the choice and order of words.

  This play, The Iceman Cometh, is a sort of touchstone. If that fools you, you are a knuckle-headed sucker for pretentiousness.

  It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all. This leads or forces them to develop a technique of pseudo-subtlety and abstruseness which, when acquired, permits them to deal with trivial things as though they were momentous. This is the basis of all successful advertising copy.

  In answer to the question as to whether Chandler's novels offered a serious insight of the criminal milieu.

  Are you serious? No. Is this a criminal milieu? No, just average corrupt living with the melodramatic angle over-emphasized, not because I am crazy about melodrama for its own sake, but because I am realistic enough to know the rules of the game.

  A long time ago, when I was writing for the pulps I put into a story a line like ‘he got out of the car and walked across the sun-drenched sidewalk until the shadow of the awning over the entrance fell across his face like the touch of cool water’. They took it out when they published the story. Their readers didn't appreciate this sort of thing: just held up the action. And I set out to prove them wrong. My theory was that they just thought they cared nothing about anything but the action; that really, although they didn't know it, they cared very little about the action. The things they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialogue and description; the things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half opened in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. He didn't even hear death knock on the door. That damn paper clip kept slipping away from his fingers and he just wouldn't push it to the edge of the desk and catch it as it fell.

  Letter to Charles Morton,

  referring to an editorial in the Atlantic Monthly, 7 May 1948.

  Dear Charlie,

  Your magnificent piece of prose about wedding presents was read at the last meeting of the La Jolla Hermosa Writers Club. For a moment at the end there was a deadly silence, reminiscent of the silence that so discouraged Lincoln after his Gettysburg address. These hardened veterans of the rejection slip, the La Jolla writers, just sat stunned by your eloquence. Tears streamed down their worn faces and their toil-hardened hands tightened convulsively into knots of bone and sinew. Then, suddenly, with a crash of a giant comber on a reef the applause swelled up to a thunder. They came to their feet as one man, although nine tenths of them were women, and screamed with enthusiasm. There were roars of Author! AUTHOR! AUTHOR! and when the president restored order at last (by waving her hand-kni
tted bloomers) and it was explained that the Author was on the other side of the continent in a place called Boston (Laughter!) a resolution was passed that he be signed up to give a series of lectures on The American Home and How To Avoid It.

  Your health was then drunk in elderberry wine and a toast proposed by a recently exhumed member of the British colony, an Old Surbitonite complete with tie. There followed a rendering of several arias from Madame Butterfly by the Choir of Kept Women from the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club ... I think you would have been very pleased and proud and touched. The affair was quite orderly for La Jolla. Two stick pokings, one assault with pearl hatpin, a couple of fountain pen squirtings, and a few spitballs alone marred the perfect harmony of the occasion. There was a slight tendency to cluster at one end and one old lady was pushed a little by another old lady who told her to stick her ear trumpet in her own ear if she had to use it. For a moment it looked as if this disagreement might end in a spot of hair-pulling, but the president quickly began to read a short story of her own composition and the hall emptied in a flash.

  Letter to Jamie Hamilton,

  10 August 1948. Chandler was unimpressed by British hardboiled writing. Nor was he that impressed by Graham Greene.

  Just read an English opus called Blonde Iscariot by Lustgarten. The year's worst for me. Half-cent pulp writing. What the hell's the matter over there?

  I am trying desperately to finish The Little Sister, and should have a rough draft done almost any day I can get up enough steam. The fact is, however, that there is nothing in it but style and dialogue and characters. The plot creaks like a broken shutter in an October wind . . . Am reading The Heart of the Matter, a chapter at a time. It has everything in it that makes literature except verve, wit, gusto, music and magic; a cool and elegant set-piece, embalmed by Whispering Glades . . . There is more life in the worst chapter Dickens or Thackeray ever wrote, and they wrote some pretty awful chapters.