by Unknown
Letter to Carl Brandt,
13 February 1951.
I've known a number of these not-quite writers. No doubt you have also. But in your profession you would get away from them as fast as possible: whereas I've known several of them quite well. I have spent time and money on them and it's always wasted, because even if they make an occasional sale it turns out they have been traveling on someone else's gas. I guess these are the hardest cases, because they want so hard to be professionals that it doesn't take very much encouragement to make them think they are. I knew one who sold a short story (most of which, incidentally, I had written for him) to that semi-slick MacFadden publication that Fulton Oursler used to edit – I forget the name of it. Some cheap outfit bought the picture rights for five hundred bucks and made a very bad B picture with Sally Rand in it. This fellow thereupon got very drunk and went around snooting all his writer friends because they were working for the pulps. A couple of years later he sold a short story to a pulp magazine, and I think that is the total of his contribution to literature in a commercial sense. To hear this fellow and his wife discussing and analyzing stories was a revelation in how much it is possible to know about technique without being able to use any. If you have enough talent, you can get by after a fashion without guts; and if you have enough guts, you can also get by, after a fashion, without talent. But you certainly can't get by with neither. These not-quite writers are very tragic people and the more intelligent they are, the more tragic, because the step they can't take seems to them such a very small step, which in fact it is. And every successful or fairly successful writer knows, or should know, by what a narrow margin he himself was able to take that step. But if you can't take it, you can't. That's all there is to it.
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
14 February 1951. Jonathan Latimer, mentioned latterly in the letter, was another of La Jolla's small colony of writers.
Priestley descended on me out of the skies yesterday without warning, except a telegram from Guadalajara just before he came, and at a damned inconvenient time, because my wife is not well and unable to entertain him. However I have done the best I could. I drove down to Tijuana and picked him up, a damned long unpleasant drive, if ever there was one, and have installed him in our best hotel since we have no spare room. He is a likeable, genial guy; fortunately a great talker, so about all I had to do was click my tongue against my teeth. He was not entirely satisfied with my company, for which I do not at all blame him, and suggested gently as I departed from him late last night at the door of the hotel that tonight we might possibly meet some of the fellows. So this morning I burst into tears and threw myself at the feet of Jonathan Latimer, who knows everybody and likes everybody (whereas I am just the opposite); so tonight I am going to take him over to Latimer's house, where will be gathered a reasonable selection of what passes for intelligent humanity in our city.
Letter to H. F. Hose,
a contemporary of Chandler's at Dulwich, and subsequently a master at the school, February 1951.
I agree with you that most contemporary writing is rubbish. But hasn't that always been true? The situation is no different over here, except that hardly anyone pays much attention to Latin and Greek any more. I think the English writers generally speaking are apt to be much more leisurely and urbane than ours, but these qualities do not seem to carry them very far. I suppose a generation gets the literature it deserves, just as it is said to get the government it deserves.
Most of us become impatient with the messiness that is around us and are inclined to attribute to the past a purity of line which was not apparent to the contemporaries of that past. The past after all has been sifted and strained. The present has not. The literature of the past has survived and it has prestige on that account, apart from its other prestige. The reasons for its survival are complex. The past is our university; it gives us our tastes and our habits of thought, and we are resentful when we cannot find a basis for them in the present. It is quite possible that they are just the same. You can't build a Gothic cathedral by assembly line methods; you can't get artistic stone masons from the union. For myself, I am convinced that if there is any virtue in our art, and there may be none at all, it does not lie in its resemblance to something that is now traditional, but which was not traditional when it was first produced. If we have stylists, they are not people like Osbert Sitwell – Edwardians who stayed up too late; nor are they pseudo-poet dramatists like T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry; nor bloodless intellectuals who sit just at the edge of the lamplight and dissect everything to nothing in dry little voices that convey little more than the accents of boredom and extreme disillusion. It seems to me that there have been damn few periods in the history of civilization that a man living in one of them could have realized as definitely great. If you had been a contemporary of Sophocles, I think you might have thought of him almost as highly as you do now. But I think you might have thought Euripides a little vulgar. And if you had been an Elizabethan, I am quite sure you would have thought Shakespeare largely a purveyor of stale plots and over-elaborate rhetoric . . .
Letter to James Sandoe,
20 February 1951.
I have been having another look at the Adelaide Bartlett case, God knows why. I think one of its most confusing elements is that Sir Edward Clarke's defense was so brilliant in contrast to the rather uninspired defense of Maybrick and Wallace that you are almost fooled into ignoring the facts. But the facts, if you look them straight in the eye, are pretty damning. For example:
Edwin Bartlett died of drinking chloroform. Adelaide, his wife, had liquid chloroform procured for her surreptitiously by Dyson, the clergyman, who, if not actually her lover in a technical sense, was certainly doing some very high-powered necking. Her stated reason for wanting the chloroform is nonsense. Edwin was an unattractive and unnecessary husband and a dope as well. If he died she got Dyson and Edwin's money. Edwin's health was excellent in spite of his constant complaining. It was more than usually good the night before he died. His insomnia seems to have been severe, but is not consistent with his hearty appetite. Morphia and chloral hydrate had both been tried on him without effect. He was obviously a hard person to drug. See about the gas at the dentist's. The wine glass which was found smelled of chloroform behind brandy. The chloroform bottle was not found. According to Adelaide it had been on the mantel earlier. The house was not searched, and Adelaide was not searched. Adelaide had opportunity to hide what remained of the chloroform. She admitted to disposing of it later. There are three principal arguments against her guilt: (1) her nursing care seemed genuine and fairly self-sacrificing; (2) she urged a quick post mortem and herself scouted the chance of his having taken the chloroform himself; (3) the difficulty of poisoning Edwin by this method was enormous according to medical testimony, and there was no previous record of murder by this means. But assuming her guilt, the first argument is meaningless. What else would you expect? How else has any poisoner ever acted? As to the second argument, there is no reason to assume, as the judge did, that she knew a delay in the post mortem would be in her favor. How about the theory of ‘methinks you protest too much'? He didn't die of jugged hare. There was bound to be an investigation. If you know that, and you have murdered him, how best can you look innocent? The way she did. The judge disposed of the third argument. If she murdered him, it was by a method which had one chance in twenty of succeeding. But she didn't know that. To her it may have looked easy.
The insomnia makes me laugh. I have had insomnia – quite severe insomnia. I did not want a big meal of jugged hare. I did not want a supper of oysters and cake. I did not want a haddock for breakfast – a large haddock – so badly that I would have been willing to get up an hour earlier in order to start eating. I think this guy was a neurotic insomniac. That is to say, if he didn't feel as fresh as a daisy in the morning, he said he hadn't slept more than twenty minutes the night before. But I don't believe his insomnia was severe, I can't believe he would be desperate en
ough to take the chloroform himself, even though the unpleasantness of it is not a conclusive argument because people used to take castor oil. If you hold your nose, you can swallow almost anything without tasting it. But you do have to believe that this guy was desperate from insomnia and yet had a very fine appetite for his food. It is quite true that the stuff burns. But if you have sniffed enough of it to make you woozy, it might seem that your senses had been blunted. Apart from murder, this seems to be the only possibility. And it is not a very convincing one.
Assuming Adelaide's guilt, her behavior with the bottle must have been entirely to protect Dyson, because if she admits possession of the chloroform, she has to tell how she got it. If she is willing to do that, the best bet is to leave the bottle where it was and stand on the insomnia and Edwin's desperate attempt to overcome it. Dr Leach, the dope, will certainly back her up. Some of the medical history is in favor of it (but not the jugged hare). It makes a neat little problem all right. If she makes him sniff enough chloroform to put him almost under but not quite, and then gives him a nice fat drink of it in circumstances where he doesn't exactly know what he is drinking, just takes things on trust, and he swallows the chloroform and it kills him. The doctors say that if he had been quite unconscious, he wouldn't have swallowed it, and that his swallowing would not be working. But they also seem to think that if he had swallowed it while he were conscious, he would have thrown it up. What they really mean is that they would, or you would, or I would. Edwin is a little bit different from us. You can feed anything to Edwin, and all he wants is to get up an hour early the next morning and start eating more. I think the man had a stomach like a goat. I think he could digest sawdust, old tin cans, iron filings, and shoe leather. I think he could drink chloroform just like you and I could drink orange juice. Anyhow, any argument against his being able to retain it in his stomach is nonsense, because he did retain it in his stomach; so the only real argument is against the difficulty of getting it down his throat. And in Edwin's case that doesn't seem to me a very strong argument. He probably thought he was drinking ginger wine.
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
27 February 1951.
I wouldn't say that I found Priestley tactless, and I certainly haven't any quarrel with him. He plays the part of the blunt-spoken Yorkshireman very well. He was very pleasant to me and went out of his way to be complimentary. He is rugged, energetic, versatile, and in a way very professional; this is, everything that comes his way will be material and most of the material will be used rather quickly and superficially. His social philosophy is a little too rigid for my taste and a little too much conditioned by the fact that he finds it impossible to see much good in anyone who has made a lot of money (except by writing of course), anyone who has a public school accent or a military bearing, anyone in short who has a speech or mannerisms above the level of the lower middle class. I think this must be a great handicap to him, because in his world a gentleman of property is automatically a villain. That's a rather limiting viewpoint, and I would say that Priestley is rather a limited man . . . Of course I don't like socialism, although a modified form of it is inevitable everywhere. I think a bunch of bureaucrats can abuse the power of money just as ruthlessly as a bunch of Wall Street bankers, and far less competently. Socialism so far has existed largely on the fat of the class it is trying to impoverish. What happens when all that fat is used up?
Letter to James Sandoe,
6 March 1951. The Kefauver committee had been set up by Washington to investigate organized crime.
I don't know whether you have a television set, or whether having one you could have seen films of the Kefauver committee hearings. I saw part of those held in Los Angeles and found them fascinating. Obviously nothing that a mystery writer could dream up could be more fantastic than what actually goes on in the hoodlum empire which infests this country. Kefauver himself is worth the price of admission any day – a big powerful guy with absolute poise of manner and unfailing politeness to the witness, no trace of Southern accent whatever. He was hardly ever even sarcastic. Nevertheless, he made these racketeer witnesses very nervous, much more nervous I think than if he had been really tough with them. Even when he produced a piece of documentary evidence which made nonsense of what they had been saying, he didn't do it with any air of pouncing but in an offhand, casual manner as if it didn't really matter what they said, because it had all been decided somewhere else what was going to happen to them. I hope it has, although it is pretty obvious that under our present laws only income tax evasion could ever really be proved against these fellows. There was one fascinating little session in which an ex-sheriff of San Bernardino county described a visit to Big Bear Lake up in the mountains, where he had heard two women mourning over some gambling losses their husbands had sustained locally and he found out where the gambling house was and went there. He said there were about a hundred and fifty people in the place, two roulette wheels were operating, at least one crap table, and numerous slot machines. He circulated around, determined who the managers and gamblers were, then talked to them and found out that the house was owned by a man named Gentry, who was the foreman of the grand jury. He then arrested all the gamblers, confiscated all the gambling equipment apparently with no opposition at all, although he was alone and not young, took the gamblers down to the justices of the peace, where they pleaded guilty and paid fines. Thereafter he was approached by emissaries of Mr Gentry offering him money to get the gambling equipment back. Kefauver then put Mr Gentry on the stand, the former foreman of the grand jury. Mr Gentry said: (a) that he had never owned any gambling equipment and therefore had never sent anybody to try and buy it back from the sheriff; (b) that he had never owned this house in Big Bear Valley, although he had once had a twenty-six hundred dollar mortgage on it; (c) that he had never lived in it; (d) that the house consisted of a rather small living room, a bedroom, a small kitchen and a bathroom, and that if you could get fifteen people into it, the walls would bulge. Senator Kefauver smiled politely, thanked him, and left it at that.
Letter to Dale Warren,
14 March 1951.
A few years ago a publicity man came to see me, his face shining with triumph and said he had ‘set it up’ for me to do a guest column for some newspaper lady on vacation. He seemed to think I ought to blush with delight, and he was quite annoyed when I kicked him in the groin and poured a bottle of red ink down his neck.
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
19 March 1951.
I had a friendly note from Priestley, flawlessly typed on Gracie Fields’ stationery. I hear she is giving up California and going to live in Capri. She seems to feel about Los Angeles very much as I do: that it has become a grotesque and impossible place for a human being to live in. Priestley left me with one uncomfortable and probably exaggerated idea, but it is one in which he seems to believe implicitly. He thinks the entertainment world in England and the literary world for that matter, at least from the critical side (stage, films, radio, television, reviewing, etc.) is completely dominated by homosexuals, and that a good fifty per cent of the people active in this area are homosexuals; including, he says, practically all the literary critics . . . He also mentioned several rather distinguished writers as pansies, whom I had never thought of in that way. And when I said, ‘Well, if there are so many of them, why doesn't somebody write a really good novel about it?’ He mentioned the name of a very distinguished novelist, a notorious case according to him, and said that he had retired from publication for several years and written a long novel about homosexualism from the inside by an expert, but that nobody would publish it. Well, well. These are dangerous thoughts to implant in a young and impressionable mind like mine. Now, every time I read one of these flossy and perceptive book reviewers, I say to myself, ‘Well, is he, or isn't he?’ And by God, about three quarters of the time I am beginning to think he is. The Saturday Review of Literature published an article a couple of weeks ago about twelve new and presumably promising nov
elists of 1950, together with their photographs. There were only three whom, on their physiognomy, I would definitely pass as male. From now on I'll be looking for them under the bed like an old maid looking for burglars. Maybe I ought to try an article for the Atlantic on the subject. I should call it, ‘You Too Could Be A Pansy'; or perhaps simply, ‘Homo Sapiens’.
Letter to Bernice Baumgarten,
16 April 1951. Ambler is the British thriller writer Eric Ambler, and the book being referred to is Judgement on Deltchev.
It would seem to me that Ambler has fallen between two stools and that he has succumbed to a danger which afflicts all intellectuals who attempt to deal with thriller material. I know I have to fight it all the time. It is no easy trick to keep your characters and your story operating on a level which is understandable to the semi-literate public and at the same time give them some intellectual and artistic overtones which that public does not seek or demand or in effect recognize, but which somehow subconsciously it accepts and likes. My theory has always been that the public will accept style provided you do not call it style either in words or by, as it were, standing off and admiring it.
