The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction 1909-1959
Page 13
. . . There always seems to come a point in a story where the impetus of the original situation dies down and you have to turn the corner. It's the hardest thing to do and a lot of people (especially Hungarian playwrights) never do it at all.
Letter to staff at Houghton Mifflin,
11 April 1949, in response to the serialization of The Little Sister which had appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine.
The bastardized anecdote appearing under my name in the current issue of Cosmopolitan (may their returns be the largest in history) contains words and sentences I did not write at all, dialogue I would not spew, and lacunae that are comparable to amnesia on one's honeymoon. This is a cadaver of a book, post-mortemed by a drunken body-snatcher and stitched together by a sailmaker with delirium tremens.
Letter to James Sandoe,
14 April 1949.
Have read The Moving Target by John Macdonald and am a good deal impressed by it, in a peculiar way. What you say about pastiche is of course quite true, and the materials of the plot situations are borrowed here and there. E.g. the opening set up is lifted more or less from The Big Sleep, mother paralyzed instead of father, money from oil, atmosphere of corrupted wealth, and the lawyer-friend villain is lifted straight out of The Thin Man; but I personally am a bit Elizabethan about such things, do not think they greatly matter, since all writers must imitate to begin with, and if you attempt to cast yourself in some accepted mold, it is natural to go to examples that have attained some notice or success.
What strikes me about the book (and I guess I should not be writing about it if I didn't feel that the author had something) is first an effect that is rather repellent. There is nothing to hitch to; here is a man who wants the public for the mystery story in its primitive violence and also wants it to be clear that he, individually, is a highly literate and sophisticated character. A car is ‘acned with rust’ not spotted. Scribblings on toilet walls are ‘graffiti’ (we know Italian yet, it says); one refers to ‘podec osculation’ (medical Latin too, ain't we hell?). ‘The seconds piled up like a tower of poker chips’, etc. The simile that does not quite come off because it doesn't understand what the purpose of the simile is.
The scenes are well handled, there is a lot of experience of some kind behind this writing, and I should not be surprised to find the name was a pseudonym for a novelist of some performance in another field. The thing that interests me is whether this pretentiousness in the phrasing and choice of words makes for better writing. It does not. You could only justify it if the story itself were devised on the same level of sophistication, and you wouldn't sell a thousand copies, if it was. When you say ‘spotted with rust’ (or pitted, and I'd almost but not quite go for ‘pimpled') you convey at once a single visual image. But when you say, ‘acned with rust’ the attention of the reader is instantly jerked away from the thing described to the pose of the writer. This is of course a very simple example of the stylistic misuse of language, and I think that certain writers are under compulsion to write in recherche phrases as a compensation for a lack of some kind of natural animal emotion. They feel nothing, they are literary eunuchs, and therefore they fall back on an oblique terminology to prove their distinction. It is the sort of mind that keeps avant garde magazines alive, and it is quite interesting to see an attempt to apply it to the purposes of this kind of story.
Letter to Canadian journalist Alex Barris,
16 April 1949.
Do I think Hamlet was the best picture of 1948? Definitely not. Olivier was marvellous. Felix Aylmer was top notch, but the camera work was a pain in the neck and a lot of the acting barely acceptable. But I'm glad Hollywood was shamed into giving it to a foreign picture for all that.
Letter to Carl Brandt,
18 April 1949. ‘Norbert D.’ is Norbert Davis, a former Black Mask man, now destitute.
It was very kind of you indeed to send me a wire about Norbert D. However right or wrong, I am sending him a couple of hundred dollars. Who am I to judge another man's needs or deserts? It's a pretty miserable thing to live off in the country and watch them all [stories] come back and be scared. He says he has sold one out of fifteen this last year. Say it's his fault. Say he got big-headed or drunk and lazy or what have you – what difference does it make? You suffer just as much when you're wrong. More. Write it off, call it a waste, forget it, and hope the guy won't hate you for helping him, or rather for having to ask you to help him ... I know that two hundred bucks will not buy me the key to heaven, but there have been times when it would have looked like it would, and I didn't have it, and nobody was around to give it to me. I never slept in the park but I came damn close to it. I went five days without anything to eat but soup once, and I had just been sick at that. It didn't kill me, but neither did it increase my love of humanity. The best way to find out if you have any friends is to go broke. The ones that hang on longest are your friends. I don't mean the ones that hang on forever. There aren't any of those.
Four months later, on 14 August 1949, Chandler would write again to Brandt: ‘I had a letter from N.D.’s wife. It seems he committed suicide a couple of weeks ago. I hadn't realized it was that desperate a situation.‘
Letter to Dale Warren,
20 April 1949. Having finally got his much-interrupted fifth novel out of the way, Chandler was now ready to embark on a more ambitious Marlowe book, which he would eventually call The Long Goodbye.
I can't seem to get started doing anything. Always very tough for me to get started. Thought I could use Bel Air, but then you drag in the whole phony Hollywood life, and everything becomes scenery, back projections, matt shots, miniatures, papier mâché rocks, tubbed trees, deluges of tropical rain out of which the characters come in, having walked in it for hours, with one damp lapel and two curls out of place. Three feet of film later the suit's pressed and the guy has a fresh carnation in his buttonhole.
Well, it's not as bad as pinning a posthumous V.C. on the saddle bag of a cavalry horse, which they did in Lives of a Bengal Lancer.
I see from The Sunday Times that your picture He Walked By Night didn't get much from Dilys Powell but a remark about the chase through the Sewers. She's damn good too, and usually very fair about American pictures. What's the matter with the films? I rack my brain for an answer, and I have a queer recurring thought that it isn't anything specific, the films aren't so bad, but they're simply no longer a novelty. The medium, the things it can do, have lost the sting. We're back where silent films were when Warners bought the Vitaphone. Except for forced focus there has hardly been a real technical advance in fifteen years, and you don't realize what forced focus does unless you look at a film made in the middle thirties and note that in a medium close shot everything more than ten feet from the camera is a blur.
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
22 April 1949. Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden were the pre-eminent British poets of the day, and both reported Chandler fans. Cyril Connolly was an equally pre-eminent literary journalist.
I like this fellow Spender very much. In fact I like him better than Auden, about whom I have always had reservations. (I am also disturbed at your remark that Connolly has no conscience.) His account of the silken barbarity of Eton is wonderful, of course, and the way these fellows thought and wrote and talked, at an age when Americans can hardly spell their names, is also most impressive. Nevertheless, there is something about the literary life that repels me; all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success. I believe the really good people would be reasonably successful in any circumstances; that to be very poor and very beautiful is probably a moral failure much more than an artistic success. Shakespeare would have done well in any generation, because he would have refused to die in a corner; he would have taken the false gods and made them over, he would have taken the current formu
lae and forced them into something lesser men would have thought them incapable of. Alive today he would undoubtedly have written and directed motion pictures, plays, and God knows what. Instead of saying ‘This medium is not good,’ he would have used it and made it good. If some people had called some of his work cheap (which some of it is), he wouldn't have cared a rap, because he would know that without some vulgarity there is no complete man. He would have hated refinement, as such, because it is always a withdrawal, a shrinking, and he was much too tough to shrink from anything.
Letter to Charles Morton,
2 May 1949.
The cult of failure is embedded in all highbrow aesthetics, and the current slang for this is probably the ‘death-wish’ ... In a way, I am inclined to think that all failure (apart from illness or awful bad luck) is really a kind of moral failure. Half or more of the stuff that has survived time would have been judged pure pot-boiler in its day – or in our day, if done now.
Letter to James Sandoe,
regarding Nathaniel West's novel Miss Lonelyhearts, 3 May 1949.
A powerful, strange and unusual book – not pretty, but to my mind definitely in the class of real as opposed to merely calculated writing.
Letter to Dale Warren,
5 May 1949. ‘U-I’ refers to the Universal-International Studios in Hollywood.
Sales of the Cosmopolitan in La Jolla are not sensational, which proves that competition in articles on impotence is not serious, as the incidence of this malady is probably higher in La Jolla than in any other locality or organization except the annual get-together of us Chickamauga veterans.
You mention Joan Fontaine as one of your pals. I met her once, at a lunch with John Houseman, but I knew her husband, Bill Dozier, quite well. He hired me at Paramount, and gave my stoop of an agent a rooking on the salary that was memorable, and remained an unhealed sore until I took Dozier for a hundred grand when he was boss at U-I. Paramount made a shocking mistake when they let him resign. At U-I it was understandable, because he was supposed to handle the contract producers while Bill Goetz handled the independent production units. These one by one folded and withdrew, leaving Goetz with nothing to do. Once looking out of Joe Sistrom's window on the U-I lot I happened to see the big boys strolling back from lunch in the exec dining room in a loose group. I was transfixed with a sinister delight. They looked so exactly like a bunch of topflight Chicago gangsters moving in to read the death sentence on a beaten competitor. It brought home to me in a flash the strange psychological and spiritual kinship between the operations of big money business and the rackets. Same faces, same expressions, same manners. Same way of dressing and same exaggerated leisure of movement.
Letter to James Sandoe,
12 May 1949.
I admit that if you can't create a sufficiently dominating detective, you might compensate to some extent by involving him in the dangers and emotions of the story, but that isn't a step forward, it's a step backward. The whole point is that the detective exists complete and entire and unchanged by anything that happens; he is, as detective, outside the story and above it, and always will be. That is why he never gets the girl, never marries, never really has any private life except insofar as he must eat and sleep and have a place to keep his clothes. His moral and intellectual force is that he gets nothing but his fee, for which he will if he can protect the innocent, guard the helpless, and destroy the wicked, and the fact that he must do this while earning a meager living in a corrupt world is what makes him stand out. A rich idler has nothing to lose but his dignity; the professional is subject to all the pressures of an urban civilization and must rise above them in order to do his job. Because he represents justice and not the law, he will sometimes defy or break the law. Because he is human he can be hurt or beguiled or fooled; in extreme necessity he may even kill. But he does nothing solely for himself. Obviously this kind of detective does not exist in real life. The real life private eye is a sleazy little judge from the Burns Agency, or a strong arm guy with no more personality than a blackjack, or else a shyster and a successful trickster. He has about as much moral stature as a stop-and-go sign.
The detective story is not and never will be a ‘novel about a detective’. The detective enters it only as a catalyst. And he leaves it exactly the same as he was before.
Letter to Charles Morton,
13 May 1949.
The big publishers will always carry a few prestige writers as window dressing, the rest will be formula writers, and after a while even the formulas will be restricted . . . The higher the cost of production, the more power flows to the people who put up the money.
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
13 May 1949.
I don't know what's happening to the writing racket in this country. I get an offer of $1200 a year for the use of my name on the title of a new mystery magazine. Raymond Chandler's Mystery Magazine. I have nothing to do with the magazine, no control over the contents and no contact whatever with the editorial policy. It does seem to me that a line has to be drawn, and I am even willing to argue that you can rule out ethics and you would still, if you had any vision, have to draw that line as a matter of policy. But such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck.
Letter to James Sandoe,
14 May 1949.
I HATE PUBLICITY. It is nearly always dishonest and quite always stupid. I don't think it means anything at all. You don't get any until you are ‘copy’ and what you get makes you hate yourself.
Letter to James Sandoe,
20 May 1949. Daniel Chaucer was a pseudonym used by the novelist Ford Madox Ford.
I suppose every man has among his memories a few books which for subtle reasons occupy a more exalted place in his mind than they really deserve. For example: The Unbearable Bassington, Lavengro, The New Humpty-Dumpty by a man named Chaucer of whom I never otherwise heard, The New Arabian Nights etc. Not all of these were flops, of course, but those that were were not flops to me.
Letter to James Sandoe,
2 June 1949. Chandler is initially referring to The Day of the Locust, the novel by Nathaniel West.
The whole book is a suicide note. It is not tragic, not bitter, not even pessimistic. It simply washes its hands of life . . .
Modern outspokenness has utterly destroyed the romantic dream on which love feeds. The synthetic stallions like James Cain have made a fetish of pure animal lust which honester and better men take in their stride, without literary orgasms, and which the middle classes seem to regard as a semi-respectable adjunct to raising a family. The literary glorification of lust leads to emotional impotence, because the love story proper has little or nothing to do with lust. It cannot exist against a background of cheese cake and multiple marriages. There is nothing left to write about but death and the detective story is a tragedy with a happy ending. The peculiar appropriateness of the detective or mystery story to our time is that it is incapable of love. The love story and the detective story cannot exist, not only in the same book – one might almost say the same culture.
Letter to James Sandoe,
16 June 1949.
The sort of semi-literate educated people one meets nowadays . . . are always saying, more or less, ‘You write so well I should think you would do a serious novel.’ And then you find out that what they mean by a serious novel is something by Marquand or Betty Smith, and you would probably insult them by remarking that the artistic gap between a really good mystery and the best serious novel of the last ten years is hardly measurable compared with the gap between the serious novel and any representative piece of Attic Literature from the Fourth Century BC.
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
17 June 1949.
I am very uneasy in mind. I seem to have lost ambition and I have no ideas any more ... I read these profound discussions, say in the Partisan Review, about art, what is it, literature what is it, and the good life and lib
eralism, and what is the definitive position of Rilke or Kafka, and the scrap about Ezra Pound getting the Bollingen award, and it all seems so meaningless to me. Who cares? Too many good men have been dead too long for it to matter what any of these people do or don't do. What does a man work for? Money? Yes, but in a purely negative way. Without some money, nothing else is possible, but once you have the money (and I don't mean a fortune, just a few thousand quid a year) you don't sit and count it and gloat over it. Everything you attain removed a reason for wanting to attain anything. Do I wish to be a great writer? Do I wish to win the Nobel Prize? Not if it takes much hard work. What the hell, they give the Nobel Prize to too many second-raters for me to get excited about it. Besides, I'd have to go to Sweden and dress up and make a speech. Is the Nobel Prize worth all that? Hell, no.