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

by Unknown

  Letter to Neil Morgan,

  18 November 1955.

  On the eve of my departure into regions where Eskimos starve and the polar bears wear mittens and galoshes and are still dissatisfied (Anybody ever see a polar bear that liked anybody?), and on the eve of your dive into marriage with a lovely girl – I'm not sure that dive was the word I wanted – may I wish for you the kind of magic that Maeterlinck's donkey could hear: the roses opening, the grass growing and the day after tomorrow coming. May I wish for you the kind of magic vision that birds have, such as on a morning after rain seeing a worm make love to its other end. May I wish for you the knowledge (I'm getting a little heavy-handed here) that Marriages do not Take Place, they are made by hand; that there is always an element of discipline involved; that, however perfect the honeymoon, the time will come, however brief it is, when you will wish she would fall downstairs and break a leg. That goes for her too. But the mood will pass, if you give it time. Here are a few words of sound advice. I know.

  Ride her on a short rein and never let her think that she is riding you.

  If the coffee is lousy, don't say so. Just throw it on the floor.

  Don't let her change the arrangement of the furniture more than once a year.

  Don't have any joint bank accounts unless she puts in the money.

  In case of quarrel, remember that it is always your fault.

  Keep her away from antique shops.

  Never praise her girlfriends too much.

  Above all never forget that a marriage is in one way very much like a newspaper. It has to be made fresh every damn day of every damn year.

  Letter to Michael Gilbert,

  4 January, 1956. Chandler's residency and tax situation was complicated by the fact that – according to British law – a British woman who is divorced from a foreign man (as Chandler's mother had been), and returns to Britain, thereby resumes her British status, as do her children. Chandler was therefore still registered as being British. The complication was adding to Chandler's rootlessness.

  I wish you would send me a bill because I read a blood-curdling article about lawyer's fees somewhere lately and it said re. solicitors that every time you called them up (sorry, rang them up) they rushed for their swindle sheets to put down a charge and that if you passed their chambers and they happened to be looking out the window, they entered a modest charge of a guinea. You realize of course that it is only curiosity that makes me want to see the bill. I haven't the remotest intention of paying it.

  Letter to Dorothy Gardner,

  secretary of the Mystery Writers Association, January 1956.

  The trouble with most English mystery writers, however well known in their world, is that they can't turn a corner. About halfway through a book they start fooling about with alibis, analyzing bits and pieces of evidence and so on. The story dies on them. Every book which is any good has to turn the corner. You get to the point where everything implicit in the original situation has been developed or explored, and then a new element has to be introduced which is not implied from the beginning but which is seen to be part of the situation when it shows up. Or I see it that way.

  The great fault of American mystery writers, on the other hand, is a lack of texture, a sort of naiveté which probably comes from them not being very well educated or well read. Exceptions here, of course. Always there are exceptions. And the trouble with brutality in writing is that it has to grow out of something. The best hardboiled writers never try to be tough; they allow toughness to happen when it seems inevitable for its time, place and condition.

  Chandler rented a flat close to St John's Wood, near Natasha Spender, at 49 Carlton Hill. The drinking continued.

  Letter to Neil Morgan in La Jolla,

  20 February 1956.

  I am having a delightful time here soaking my feet in boiling water to restore the circulation, and lying in bed under four blankets and an eiderdown and an electric pad, and if it ever got out that I used an electric pad I should be spat upon in California. My health has been bad, and every doctor finds something else the matter with me. But what is really the matter with me is that I have no home, and no one to care for in a home, if I had one.

  London is wonderful up to a point, but I get very tired of the bitchy women who are all darling, darling, darling when they meet you, but have an assortment of little knives for your back. They don't do it to me as much as your dearest friends . . . It is a technique I have never learned and will never learn. But it is a mistake to think that they are not friends, for in any time of trouble they are. But they live on malicious gossip.

  Letter to Ian Fleming,

  whom Chandler had met – and liked – on his previous trip, 11 April 1956. The review in question was of Moonraker, which Chandler had written for the London Sunday Times.

  I thought my review was no more than you deserved and I tried to write it in such a way that the good part could be quoted and the bad parts left out. After all, old boy, there had to be some bad parts. I think you will have to make up your mind what kind of a writer you are going to be. You could be almost anything except that I think you are a bit of a sadist!

  I am not in any Hampstead hospital. I am at home and if they ever put me in a hospital again I shall walk out leaving corpses strewn behind me, except pretty nurses.

  As for having lunch with you, with or without a butler, I can't do it yet – because even if I were much better than I am I should be having lunch with ladies.

  Chandler would also review Fleming's next Bond novel, Diamonds Are Forever, for the London Sunday Times, writing: `I don't like James Bond thinking. His thoughts are superfluous. I like him when he is in the dangerous card game: I like him when he is exposing himself unarmed to half a dozen thin-lipped professional killers. I like him when he finally takes the beautiful girl in his arms, and teaches her about one tenth of the facts of life she already knew.‘

  Letter to Captain Tore Bakke,

  4 May 1956.

  Thank you so much for your letter and believe me most of the most intelligent fan mail I have ever received has come from the Scandinavian countries. You are very kind to have written to me and I thank you sincerely.

  Chandler was hospitalized for drink in London and again dried out at his flat. In May, having been in Britain another six months, he realized the seriousness of his position with the tax authorities and returned to New York, where he stayed at the Grosvenor on Fifth Avenue. He was drinking again. Going to visit his friend Red Barrow in the countryside outside New York, he fell down the stairs, and had to spend a few days recuperating in a New York hospital before returning to La Jolla.

  Letter to Ian Fleming,

  9 June 1956.

  I didn't like leaving England without saying good-bye to the few friends I knew well enough to care about, but then I don't like saying good-bye at all, especially when it may be a long time before I come back. As you probably know, I long overstayed the six months allowed, but I had a compelling reason, even if I get hooked for British income tax. I am also likely to lose half my European royalties, which isn't funny. It's all a little obscure to me, but there it is ...

  I am looking forward to your next book. I am also looking forward to my next book.

  I rather liked New York this time, having hitherto loathed its harshness and rudeness. For one thing the weather has been wonderful, only one hot day so far and that not unbearable. I have friends here, but not many. Come to think of it, I haven't many anywhere. Monday night I am flying back to California and this time I hope to stick it out and make some kind of modest but convenient home there.

  I am wondering what happened to all the chic pretty women who are supposed to be typical of New York. Damned if I've seen any of them. Perhaps I've looked in the wrong places, but I do have a feeling that New York is slowly being downgraded.

  Letter to Helga Greene,

  10 June 1956.

  I bet you haven't many boy friends who write you two letters in one day. And p
erhaps it bores you, but since Friday noon I haven't a damn thing to do but write letters, read, take a taxi or bus uptown and potter about a bit, or just go for a walk through the Village, which always fascinated me with its quaint houses, little culs-de-sac, iron railings painted in odd colors, innumerable hidden restaurants, and the people themselves, the way they dress and the look they have of belonging to another world from uptown New York.

  Back in La Jolla, Chandler rented a small house at 6925 Neptune Place, and – with the assistance of self-injected vitamin boosters – began work on a seventh Marlowe novel.

  Letter to Hardwick Moseley,

  20 June 1956.

  Anyone as naturally careless as me could fall down those stairs. They are a menace. But I think Barrow might have waited to see whether I had cracked a rib before he began yanking at me. It will be a hell of a long time before I go to Old Chatham again. Also, this couple live such an ingrown, self-sufficient life, in which I think they are perfectly happy, that it's a bit of a bore to be there much, kind as they usually are. You can't go out with Jane Barrow without having every bloody tree pointed out to you and hearing the history of every damned house between Old Chatham and Bennington.

  This place really has a climate. You have to go through an English winter to appreciate it. Very seldom hot and very seldom cold, built on a point of land with the Pacific on three sides. I have tried using it as the setting for a story I am trying to write; I have changed the topography a little. I can't make heavies of the cops, because they are nice cops and most of them are friends of mine. The captain in charge is a grizzled veteran of long service and he told me he had never fired his Smith and Wesson .38 except to qualify on the police target range, as per the standing orders. Sometime last year a man shot his wife in a store here and the cop who came rushing in – too late – was so nervous that he shot a bystander by mistake. (He didn't kill him.)

  Letter to Jessica Tyndale,

  12 July 1956.

  If I sound a little as if I had been smoking reefers, I had a tooth out this afternoon and am still a little on the goof side. No pain at all, but beginning to feel feverish. Wonderful how they do it though. I never knew it was out until he showed me. I supposed they had to strap you down and pull like hell. It was a molar too.

  This place is an unfurnished apartment on the ocean front. That is, it was unfurnished. It now has so damn much furniture in it that only a steeple-chaser would feel at home in it. But in spite of having all this lovely (and to me now detestable) furniture, a fine electric stove, a Frigidaire and some cartons which keep me from putting my shirts and underclothes away, in spite of having a small private patio and a large private storeroom, all I have to eat off is one cup, one saucer, one plate, all borrowed. But a full set of sterling silver, oh my yes.

  I know now what is the matter with my writing or not writing. I've lost any affinity for my background. Los Angeles is no longer my city, and La Jolla is nothing but a climate and a lot of meaningless chi-chi. I went to a cocktail party a week or so ago and my God there was a man there in a checked dinner jacket and another in a rose moire dinner jacket. And today in Dutch Smith's shop I saw one in puce. This country is riding the crest of a boom, everybody is making fine wages and everybody is in debt to the ears from instalment buying. God help them if rearmament slows down. There is nothing for me to write about. To write about a place you have to love it or hate it or do both by turns, which is usually the way you love a woman. But a sense of vacuity and boredom – that is fatal. I was the first writer to write about Southern California at all realistically. Now half the writers in the country piddle around in the smog. Los Angeles is just a tired whore to me now.

  Letter to Jessica Tyndale,

  20 August 1956.

  I have just come back from the Las Encinas Sanitarium in Pasadena, a very wonderful place but frightfully expensive. Cost me over $1400. I had to find out if I was off my rocker and didn't know it. And Las Encinas is the place to find out. They have a psychiatrist there that an intelligent man can really respect. They treat all kinds of people, senile old people (with money, natch), incurable alcoholics, guys on benders, a few psychotics who have to be kept in a special locked bungalow, depressed people etc. It's a beautiful place, carefully landscaped, all bungalows, and the atmosphere is absolutely uncritical. The doctors are very attentive, the food magnificent. They kept me in a state of semi-somnolence for several days until I started to eat, and God, how I did eat then. I had some of the best food I've ever had in my life. Then they went through the usual boring program of tests, and after that they went to work on me. I told them the truth very frankly. I said that I had been married so long and so happily that after the slow torture of my wife's death it seemed at first treason to look at another woman, and then suddenly I seemed to be in love with all women.

  They gave me tests, apperception tests, Rorschach tests, wood block tests. I haven't had the lowdown on them yet, but I think I was pretty brilliant except on the drawing. I never could draw, couldn't even learn under a drawing teacher at school.

  Finally the head guy said: ‘You think you are depressed, but you are quite wrong. You are a fully integrated personality and I wouldn't dream of trying to interfere with it by psychoanalysis or anything of that sort. All that's the matter with you is loneliness. You simply cannot and must not live alone. If you do you will inevitably drink, and that will make you sick. I don't care if you live with one woman or twenty, as long as you live with someone. That in my opinion is an absolute.’

  I thought he was damned clever to take me to pieces so smoothly. I hadn't expected anything so penetrating.

  Letter to Michael Gilbert,

  6 September 1956.

  La Jolla is no place in which to live . . . There is no one to talk to. All the well-to-do and almost well-to-do crowd accomplish in their lives is an overdecorated home – the house beautiful for gracious living – a wife who, if she was young, plays tennis at the Beach Club, lies on the beach until her visible skin looks like brown sandpaper, shrieking with laughter at some joke which hardly merits more than a mild ‘huh’. If she is middle age she is very chic in a tasteless way, talks a great deal about how she is going to have the guest room done over by some jerk with long sideburns, has her husband so tamed that he is afraid to sit down in some of the chairs, and however tired he may be, he must shower and shave and put on his white dinner jacket (in summer) because Mr and Mrs Whoosis are coming over to play bridge, which he hates almost as much as he hates Mr and Mrs Whoosis. Then there are the quite elderly, quite rich retired people. They dress immaculately, are helped into Cadillacs by colored butler-drivers and are driven to the Beach Club, where they sit in perfect silence, or converse in low monosyllabic voices with others of their kind.

  Letter to William Gault,

  7 September 1956.

  If there is anything in life I hate it is going out to dinner alone. I could cook it, but that would be worse. Four days a week I have someone to go with, but the other three are hell. I feel like chucking the whole thing and going back to England to become a resident and pay their bloody taxes.

  Hearing that Natasha Spender was on a concert tour of the United States (she was a concert pianist) Chandler arranged to meet her at Phoenix, and take her to Palm Springs for Christmas, after which she was to meet up with friends of hers who lived in Los Angeles, including the English poet Christopher Isherwood.

  Letter to Hardwick Moseley,

  5 January 1957.

  Spent the time since December sixth until last week taking an English friend all over Arizona and part of Nevada, and then Palm Springs. Arizona never had such a going over, perhaps, since this friend is an incorrigible and insatiable sightseer, which I am not. Friend was entranced by the mountain scenery, which is unlike anything in Europe or California. The Dolomites are rugged enough, but the cypresses grow halfway up their sides, whereas everything in Arizona is barren, as though God had quit with the job half done.

  Letter to Jes
sica Tyndale,

  18 January 1957.

  I met Christopher Isherwood in Santa Monica and liked him. I think he is the only queer I have felt entirely at ease with. I also met Gerard Heard (he wrote a very clever thriller called A Taste For Honey) and found him amusing and learned, but much too pontifical. Americans generally seem to be quite content to be lectured at for a whole evening. I resent it, no matter how clever the talk is. Natasha said I was being very hostile to him, but her social standards and mine are quite different. You can't interrupt these people, because they are constantly interrupting one another and someone is always talking. You could interrupt them, but it would take violence. Really one should, because when they realize they are cornering the conversation they become apologetic.

  Back in La Jolla alone, Chandler worked on the new Marlowe novel, Playback, based on an unused screenplay he had once written. Though Chandler was now using his telephone more often than ever, he continued his letter-writing. Indeed, at a time when his drinking was taking him to a point of complete disorder, his novel- and letter-writing were generally the only focused parts of his day. His correspondents had now widened to include several new London acquaintances. These included his London secretary Jean de Leon.

  Letter to Jean de Leon,

  11 February 1957. The Angus Wilson novel referred to is Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.

  It was very sweet of you to send me some of your poems ... I am very glad that you can accept your father's death without too much grief. But of course I know from my own experience that it takes time, quite a lot of time, to reconcile oneself, and that so far you are being very brave. I am one of those who do not believe in personal immortality, since I see no reason for it. God probably finds something to preserve, but what, I don't know. He might find even in me, a sensual, sardonic, cynical man, some essence worth preserving, but I don't really think it is anything I could recognize. So much of it is external, environmental, caused by our experiences here on earth, so little of us is pure and undiluted. God knows, but I don't. I share your antipathy to dogmas, but more than that I just will not surrender my right to examine, to dissect, to question. Credo quia impossibile seems to me just one of those devices the Catholic Church is too clever at, and yet, taking it broadly and admitting the many corruptions, the Catholic religion is the only one in our world (I'm not considering the religions of the East) which really lives. The Church of England and our Episcopalian church here live in individual priests, but not as a faith. Its services have beautiful words (which it didn't write) and many of its priests are fine people; but the faith itself is barren and tired.