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

by Unknown

  Letter to Jamie Hamilton,

  10 November 1950. Hamilton, also keen to update his dust-jacket biography of Chandler following the latter's adventures in Hollywood, had asked him for some information about his life.

  The wise screen writer is he who wears his second-best suit, artistically speaking, and doesn't take things too much to heart. He should have a touch of cynicism, but only a touch. The complete cynic is as useless to Hollywood as it is to himself.

  . . . I have been married since 1924 and have no children. I am supposed to be a hardboiled writer, but that means nothing. It is merely a method of projection. Personally I am sensitive and even diffident. At times I am extremely caustic and pugnacious, at other times very sentimental. I am not a good mixer because I am very easily bored, and to me the average never seems good enough, in people or in anything else. I am a spasmodic worker with no regular hours, which is to say I only write because I feel like it. I am always surprised at how easily it seems at the time, and at how very tired one feels afterwards. As a mystery writer, I think I am a bit of an anomaly, since most mystery writers of the American school are only semi-literate, and I am not only literate but intellectual, much as I dislike the term. It would seem that a classical education might be a rather poor basis for writing novels in a hardboiled vernacular. I happen to think otherwise. A classical education saves you from being fooled by pretentiousness, which is what most current fiction is too full of. In this country the mystery writer is looked down on as sub-literary merely because he is a mystery writer, rather than for instance a writer of social significance twaddle. To a classicist – even a very rusty one – such an attitude is merely a parvenu insecurity. When people ask me, as they occasionally do, why I don't try my hand at a serious novel, I don't argue with them; I don't even ask them what they mean by a serious novel. It would be useless. They wouldn't know. The question is parrot-talk.

  Reading over some of the above, I seem to detect a rather supercilious tone here and there. I am afraid this is not altogether admirable, but unfortunately it is true. It belongs. I am, as a matter of fact, rather a supercilious person in many ways.

  Letter to Dale Warren,

  13 November 1950. ‘The Fitzgerald book’ refers to a recently published biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a writer Chandler had always strongly respected. In fact, it was only an option impasse among the studios that had prevented Chandler, in the 1940s, from working on a movie adaptation of The Great Gatsby.

  You don't sound completely satisfied with the Fitzgerald book. I'm sad about that, because Fitzgerald is a subject no one has the right to mess up. Nothing but the best will do for him. I think he just missed being a great writer, and the reason is pretty obvious. If the poor guy was already an alcoholic in his college days, it's a marvel that he did as well as he did. He had one of the rarest qualities in all literature, and it's a great shame that the word for it has been thoroughly debased by the cosmetic racketeers, so that one is almost ashamed to use it to describe a real distinction. Nevertheless, the word is charm – charm as Keats would have used it. Who has it today? It's not a matter of pretty writing or clear style. It's a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite, the sort of thing you get from string quartets.

  Letter to Edgar Carter,

  15 November 1950.

  I am having a feud with Warners. I am having a feud with the gardener. I am having a feud with a man who came to assemble a Garrard changer and ruined two LP records. I had several feuds with the TV people. Let's see who else – oh, skip it. You know Chandler. Always griping about something.

  Letter to Charles Morton,

  22 November 1950.

  Television is really what we've been looking for all our lives. It took a certain amount of effort to go to the movies. Somebody had to stay with the kids. You had to get the car out of the garage. That was hard work. And you had to drive and park. Sometimes you had to walk as far as half a block to the theater. Then people with big fat heads would sit in front of you and make you nervous . . . Radio was a lot better, but there wasn't anything to look at. Your gaze wandered around the room and you might start thinking of other things – things you didn't want to think about. You had to use a little imagination to build yourself a picture of what was going on just by the sound. But television's perfect. You turn a few knobs and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in poor man's nirvana. And if some nasty-minded person comes along and says you look more like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind . . . just who should one be mad at anyway? Did you think the advertising agencies created vulgarity and the moronic mind that accepts it? To me television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our civilization that never had any standard but the soft buck.

  Letter to Gene Levitt,

  who had been adapting Marlowe for the radio show, 22 November 1950.

  I am only a very recent possessor of a television set. It is a very dangerous medium. And as for the commercials – well, I understand that the concoction of these is a business in itself, a business that makes prostitution or the drug traffic seem quite respectable. It was bad enough to have the sub-human hucksters controlling radio, but television does something to you which radio never did. It prevents you from forming any kind of a mental picture and forces you to look at a caricature instead.

  Letter to Alfred Hitchcock,

  6 December 1950.

  In spite of your wide and generous disregard of my communications on the subject of the script of Strangers on a Train, and your failure to make any comment on it, and in spite of not having heard a word from you since I began the writing of the actual screenplay – for all of which I might say I bear no malice, since this sort of procedure seems to be part of the standard Hollywood depravity – in spite of this and in spite of this extremely cumbersome sentence, I feel that I should, just for the record, pass you a few comments on what is termed the final script. I could understand your finding fault with my script in this or that way, thinking that such and such a scene was too long or such and such a mechanism was too awkward. I could understand you changing your mind about things that you specifically wanted, because some of such changes might have been imposed on you from without. What I cannot understand is your permitting a script which after all had some life and vitality to be reduced to such a flabby mess of clichés, a group of faceless characters, and the kind of dialogue every screen writer is taught not to write – the kind that says everything twice and leaves nothing to be implied by the actor or the camera . . .

  I think you may be the sort of director who thinks that camera angles, stage business, and interesting bits of byplay will make up for any amount of implausibility in a basic story. And I think you are quite wrong. I also think that the fact that you may get away with it doesn't prove you are right, because there is a feeling about a picture that is solidly based which cannot be produced in any other way than by having it solidly based. A sow's ear will look like a sow's ear even if one hangs it on a wall in a frame and calls it French modern. As a friend and well-wisher, I urge you just once in your long and distinguished career . . . to get a sound and sinewy story into the script and to sacrifice no part of its soundness for an interesting camera shot. Sacrifice a camera shot if necessary. There's always another camera shot just as good. There is never another motivation just as good.

  Letter to James Sandoe,

  7 December 1950.

  You should by all means catch The Bicycle Thief, and if possible an English picture called I Know Where I'm Going, shot largely on the west coast of Scotland – the coast that faces the Hebrides. I've never seen a picture which smelled of the wind and rain in quite this way, nor one which so beautifully exploited the kind of scene
ry people actually live with, rather than the kind which is commercialized as a show place. The shots of Corryvreckan alone are enough to make your hair stand on end. (Corryvreckan, in case you didn't know, is a whirlpool which, in certain conditions of the tide, is formed between two of the islands of the Hebrides.)

  Letter to Jamie Hamilton,

  11 December 1950.

  J. A. Spender was editing the Westminster Gazette in the days when I worked for it. It seems to me that I have written to you about him before. He was the sort of man who could make a frightened young nobody feel at ease in the company of the cream of patrician society. Spender put me up for the National Library Club in order that I might have the use of its reading room, and I used to browse through the French and German papers looking for odd paragraphs and news items which could be translated and adapted for a column the Westminster Gazette ran. Spender thought I could make six guineas a week out of this, but I don't think I ever made more than about three. I wrote quite a lot of verses for him also, most of them now seem to me deplorable, but not all, and a good many sketches, most of a satirical nature – the sort of thing that Saki did so infinitely better. I still have a couple of them somewhere, and they now seem to me very precious in tone. But I suppose they weren't so bad, considering how little valid experience I had to back them up . . . I had only the most limited personal contact with Spender. I would send the stuff in, and they would either send it back or send me the proof. I never collected the proof, didn't even know if I was expected to. I simply took it as a convenient form of acceptance. I never waited for them to send me the money but appeared regularly on a certain day each week at their cashier's office and received payment in gold and silver, being required to affix a penny stamp in a large book and sign my name across it by way of receipt. What a strange world it seems now! I suppose I have told you of the time I wrote to Sir George Newnes and offered to buy a piece of his trashy but successful weekly magazine called Tit-Bits. I was received most courteously by a secretary, definitely public school, who regretted the publication was not in need of capital, but said that my approach had at least the merit of originality. By the same devise I did actually make a connection with the Academy, then edited and owned by a man named Cowper, who had bought it from Lord Alfred Douglas. He was not disposed to sell an interest in his magazine, but pointed to a large shelf of books in his office and said they were review copies and would I care to take a few home to review . . . I met there also a tall, bearded, and sad-eyed man called Richard Middleton, of whom I think you may have heard. Shortly afterwards he committed suicide in Antwerp, a suicide of despair, I should say. The incident made a great impression on me, because Middleton struck me as having far more talent than I was ever likely to possess; and if he couldn't make a go of it, it wasn't very likely that I could . . . I had no feeling of identity with the United States, and yet I resented the kind of ignorant and snobbish criticism of Americans that was current at that time. During my year in Paris I had run across a good many Americans, and most of them seemed to have a lot of bounce and liveliness and to be thoroughly enjoying themselves in situations where the average Englishman of the same class would be stuffy or completely bored. But I wasn't one of them. I didn't even speak their language . . . All in all, perhaps I ought to have stayed in Paris, although I never really liked the French. But you didn't exactly have to like the French to be at home in Paris. And you could always like some of them. On the other hand, I did like the Germans very much, that is the South Germans. But there wasn't much sense living in Germany, since it was an open secret, openly discussed, that we would be at war with them almost any time now. I suppose it was the most inevitable of all wars. There was never any question about whether it would happen. The only question was when ... I have just received my copy of the Old Alleynian Yearbook, and although Dulwich is not, I suppose, quite out of the top drawer as public schools go, there is an astonishing number of quite distinguished old boys with enormous strings of letters after their names, titles, peerages, etc. I notice that two of us, though quite undistinguished, have addresses in La Jolla. Apparently there is only one more in all of California, a fellow named Gropius, who seems to have had the same address in San Francisco for the past thirty years, and probably went to school sometime during the reign of William IV.

  Letter to H. N. Swanson and Edgar Carter,

  15 December 1950.

  Our beautiful black cat had to be put to sleep yesterday morning. We feel pretty broken up about it. She was almost 20 years old. We saw it coming, of course, but we hoped she might pick up strength. But when she got too weak to stand up and practically stopped eating, there was nothing else to do. They have a wonderful way of doing it now. They inject nembutal into a vein of the foreleg and the animal just isn't there any more. She falls asleep in two seconds. Then, after a few minutes, just to make certain, they inject it into the heart directly. Pity they can't do it to people. I watched my mother die under morphine and it took almost ten hours. She was completely unconscious, of course, but how much better if it took two seconds — if it had to be anyhow.

  Letter to Dale Warren,

  4 January 1951.

  I have always been a great admirer of French colloquial slang. I think it's the only body of slang that can compare with ours. German is pretty good too. There is a wonderful precision and daring about French slang. I don't think it has quite the reckless extravagance of ours, but it seems to have more endurance.

  Letter to Somerset Maugham,

  5 January 1951.

  I have seen a number of the television films of your stories and, admirable as the material is, I cannot help feeling a dissatisfaction with the way in which it is presented. There is something wrong with the medium as it is now used. For one thing the acting is not casual enough. The emphasis of stage acting (one might even call it overemphasis) had to be enormously reduced for films, and it seems to me that it must be still further reduced for television. The slightest artifice glares. The feeling of restricted space is so intense that one almost expects the dialogue to be carried on in whispers by a couple of people hiding in the clothes closet. The camera work seems to me to be pretty bad, as bad as the camera work in those English films of the ‘30s of which we see so many on television now. The settings are so poor that one feels it might be better to do without them altogether and play against a back drop. But the worst thing to me is that the actors, instead of interpreting the story and making it come alive, seem to bulk right between the story and the audience. Their physical presence is overpowering. Their slightest motion distracts the eye. It strikes me that good acting is very much like style in a novel. You should not be too conscious of it. Its effect should be peripheral rather than central. But in television you can hardly be conscious of anything else.

  Letter to Jamie Hamilton,

  9 January 1951.

  All my life I have had cats and I have found that they differ almost as much as people, and that, like children, they are largely the way you treat them except there are a few here and there who cannot be spoiled. But perhaps that is true of children also. Taki had absolute poise, which is a rare quality in animals as well as in human beings. And she had no cruelty, which is still rarer in cats. She caught birds and mice without hurting them, and had no objection whatever to having them taken away from her and released. She even caught a butterfly once . . . I have never liked anyone who disliked cats, because I've always found an element of acute selfishness in their dispositions. Admittedly, a cat doesn't give you the kind of affection a dog gives you. A cat never behaves as if you were the only bright spot in an otherwise clouded existence. But this is only another way of saying that a cat is not a sentimentalist, which does not mean it has no affection.

  Letter to James Sandoe,

  10 January 1951.

  A legal system which can't convict Al Capone of anything but income tax fraud is apt to make the police rather cynical.

  Letter to Edgar Carter,

  who had been sen
t a letter by the British magazine Picture Post with some questions about Chandler, 5 February 1951.

  The Picture Post is for people who move their lips when they read. Surely they can get anything they want from my English publisher, Jamie Hamilton, Ltd., 90 Great Russell Street, London, W.C.1. The questions you ask would seem to me to indicate the intellectual level of the editorial department of the Picture Post. Yes, I am exactly like the characters in my books. I am very tough and have been known to break a Vienna roll with my bare hands. I am very handsome, have a powerful physique, and change my shirt regularly every Monday morning. When resting between assignments I live in a French Provincial château off Mulholland Drive. It is a fairly small place of forty-eight rooms and fifty-nine baths. I dine off gold plate and prefer to be waited on by naked dancing girls. But of course there are times when I have to grow a beard and hold up in a Main Street flophouse, and there are other times when I am, although not by request, entertained in the drunk tank at the city jail. I have friends from all walks of life. Some are highly educated and some talk like Darryl Zanuck. I have fourteen telephones on my desk, including direct lines to New York, London, Paris, Rome, and Santa Rosa. My filing case opens out into a very convenient portable bar, and the bartender, who lives in the bottom drawer, is a midget named Harry Cohn. I am a heavy smoker and according to my mood I smoke tobacco, marijuana, corn silk, and dried tea leaves. I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes. In my spare time I collect elephants.