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

by Unknown

  A charming young lady of France

  Had scorned my most careful advance

  Till a sunny day

  Made her feel very gay,

  And I found she was wearing no pance.

  A certain young charmer of Ghent

  Was rather too clearly enceinte

  When her father yelled ‘Who??’

  She replied with a coo:

  ‘I don't know. He just came – and he went.’

  There was a young lady of Spain

  Who regarded my love with disdain,

  Till one night on champagne

  She was feeling no pain,

  And we did it again and again.

  Letter to Jessica Tyndale,

  23 December 1957. Helga Green, a divorcee, had been to stay with Chandler in California. ‘You know who’ was Natasha Spender. Chandler's ‘next Marlowe story’ was titled Poodle Springs, but was never completed.

  Helga and I get along so perfectly that I am amazed. She seemed so aloof when I first met her. We never quarrel, she takes everything in stride, and all is peace and happiness between us, as it never was with you know who. For reasons of her own life and temperament she doesn't want to get married again, and this is all right with me, as long as I can live close to her and go away with her.

  I am flying to Palm Springs today to attend a very fancy party at the home of a rich woman to whom my doctor gave me an introduction. She begged me so hard to come that I finally gave in. She is a redhead (with assistance), about fifty, very easy to get along with and a fine dancer. I want to use her home for my next Marlowe story, which I plan to lay in Palm Springs, with Marlowe married to the 8 million dollar girl from The Long Goodbye. I think the struggle between them as to whether he is going to live her kind of life or his own might make a good sub-plot. Either she will give in, or the marriage will bust up. I don't know. But I do know that nobody, but nobody, is going to keep Marlowe from his shabby office and his unremunerative practice, his endurance, determination and his sarcastic pity. She'll probably want to redo his office, but she won't get to first base on that either.

  Verse from a Christmas poem to Jean Fracasse,

  Chandler's new Australian La Jolla secretary.

  Is it a dream of poetry and youth

  That makes us long too late

  Once more to know

  The hopes we died for?

  Letter to Bernice Evans,

  linguist and presenter of a word quiz show on television, 18 January 1958.

  There is an old story about us Americans which, to the right mind, tells us a great deal. At a fork in the road there are two signs. One said, TO A CONCERT OF THE MUSIC OF BACH. The other said, TO A LECTURE ON THE MUSIC OF BACH. Guess which way the American went.

  Letter to Jessica Tyndale,

  3 February 1958.

  My Sweet and Adorable Jessica:

  Please pardon the effusiveness, but since I finished the goddam book I have been a little nutty. Tomorrow my copyist will go to work on the final copy. You know, if it hadn't been for Helga, I'd never have finished the damn book. She arouses my mind and my ambition by some strange quality in her own mind. She makes me want to conquer the earth, which of course I shan't do, but wanting to is a lot different from my lackadaisical attitude of the past few years. There are many sweet and adorable women in the world, and you are one of the sweetest and most adorable, but there is some sort of chemistry between Helga and me that gives me a driving impulse. With Helga around I feel as though I could write anything. What on earth happened between this rather cool, aloof woman and me? Something very strange . . . somehow, just by the way she talks and acts, by her simplicity, her lack of pettiness, the keenness of her mind, she inspires me.

  Letter to Robert Campigny,

  a French critic, 7 February 1958.

  La Pièce que vous avez dernièrement écrite dans La Revue-Critique, sous le titre ‘Raymond Chandler et le Roman Policier’ m'est parvenu de la part de mon éditeur à Londres, and mon ami depuis longtemps, M. Jamie Hamilton, et aussi de la part de Mme Helga Greene, qui est ce qu'en anglais on appelle ‘my literary agent’. Je ne suis pas trop sûr du mot précis en français.

  II va sans dire que j'ai eu grand plaisir en lisant ce que vous avez écrit, et je vous remercie plus que beaucoup pour l'honneur que vous m'avez fait en écrivant avec tant de soin sur une espèce de littérature qui est souvent regardé comme peu de chose. Naturelle- ment, je ne sais pas écrire en français avec la netteté de style que vous possédez. Mais ce que je dis, c'est moi tout seul qui le dit.

  . . . l'idée que Madame Christie déjoue ses lecteurs sans farce me paraît presque impossible à croyer. N'est ce pas qu'elle fait ses surprises en détruisant le portrait d'une caractère ou d'un personnage de roman qu'elle a jusqu'à ce moment peintu en couleurs complètement opposées au portrait fini? Tout cela est sans aucune vraie importance, sans doute, et les lecteurs qui ont besoin d'etre taquinés par cette espèce de mystère ne se donnent la peine d'être fâchés si le mystère existe seulement parce que ces autres sont trop paresseux de faire l'effort de penser . . .

  [English Translation: The piece that you wrote recently in the Revue-Critique entitled ‘Raymond Chandler and the Detective Novel’ reached me from the office of my London publisher, my longtime friend, Mr Jamie Hamilton, and also from Mrs Helga Greene, who is what is called in English ‘my literary agent’. I am not sure of the correct word in French.

  It goes without saying that I took great pleasure in reading what you had written, and I thank you very much indeed for the honor you have given me in writing with such care on a kind of literature which is often considered insignificant. Of course, I cannot write in French with your precision of style, but what I say is said by me alone.

  . . . the idea that Mrs Christie baffles her readers without trickery seems almost impossible for me to believe. Isn't it true to say that rather she creates her surprises by destroying the portrait of a character or of a person in a novel whom she has up to this point depicted in colours completely opposed to the finished portrait? All this is doubtlessly without great importance, and readers who need to be teased by this sort of mystery do not take the trouble to become angry if the mystery exists only because others are too lazy to make the effort to think . . .]

  Letter to Maurice Guinness,

  cousin of Helga Greene, 10 February 1958.

  I plan my next Marlowe with a background of Palm Springs, Poodle Springs I call it, because every third elegant creature you see has at least one poodle. I have the very house in which Linda Loring might care to live. The house is in La Jolla. It has a sort of offhand elegance and virtuosity which was once fairly usual in England among the upper classes. The people who live in it are clearly rich, but their enormous drawing room, or living room as we call it, escapes that air of having been done by an expensive decorator. It is full of things which I feel sure are priceless, but are treated in the most casual way. It has the largest oriental rug on the floor that I have ever seen. It has space and warmth. You sit in the room and you know that everything in it cost the earth, and you feel perfectly comfortable and at ease. I haven't known many genuine aristocrats in my life, naturally, but the real ones all have a certain way, not only of behaving with perfect ease in any situation, but of being able to impart this ease to others.

  You make light of your accident in rock-climbing, but it must have been rather awful just the same. And I do realize how depressing it must be to find oneself on retirement from a position of responsibility, importance, and affection. Retiring is a kind of dying. The best way to revive is certainly what you have in mind. Work like hell at something just a little creative. No man grows old as long as he can create. You may die in the midst of it – so may I, who am older than you are – but you don't die of lethargy.

  Unknown recipient,

  8 March 1958.

  You can't have everything, even in California.

  Letter to ‘Lucky’ Luciano Lucania,

 
the Prohibition-era American gangster deported from America after the Second World War. The London Sunday Times had commissioned Chandler (through Ian Fleming) to conduct an interview with Lucania in Naples. 21 March 1958.

  Caro Signor Lucania,

  I am an American author, not a journalist, not connected with any newspaper. I shall be in Naples shortly and would greatly appreciate the favor of an interview with you and the purpose of this interview would be solely the attempt of one man to understand another and would be in no way or under any circumstances to smear you.

  I suppose we are both sinners in the sight of the Lord and it is quite possible that you have not been represented to the public of my country as you really are. I am aware that it is not what a man does, but what it is made to appear in court which decides.

  I myself run a certain danger in this because a sympathetic interview with you might possibly make trouble for me, but I am willing to face this danger because the object of my life is to understand people, their motives, their origins, how they became what they are and not ever to judge them.

  Some of my questions to you may be rather brutal, but if you decline to answer them, there will be no record that they have been asked. There will be nothing published by me which you do not say, but of course, I cannot be responsible for editorial comment.

  I am sincere and I would like you to believe so, but I imagine that it is now very difficult to believe that anyone would approach you sincerely.

  If you are receptible to my request, would you kindly reply on this prepaid telegram, to the Ritz Hotel [in London]?

  The interview took place later in 1958. The resulting article by Chandler was never published by the newspaper. Helga Greene, who sat in on the Naples interview, had warned the paper that both men had been extremely drunk by the end of it. The article is not really an interview at all, in the purest sense, but it is nonetheless now quite gripping. Chandler had offered the title ‘My Friend Luco’.

  That is what they call him in Naples where no one I met had an unkind word for him. No doubt the Neapolitan police have, but they haven't been getting very far lately in prosecuting him. Nor has the American Narcotics Bureau, which at present is under the control of the Attorney General Brownell, who, as I understand, was campaign manager for the man who prosecuted Luco.

  His real name is Charles Luciano Lucania. He is known to the newspaper public as Lucky Luciano. Lucky in what way? He is supposed to be a very evil man, the multimillionaire head of a world-wide narcotics syndicate. I don't think he is either. He seemed to me about as much like a tough mobster as I am like the late unlamented Mussolini. He has a soft voice, a patient sad face, and is extremely courteous in every way. This might all be a front, but I don't think I am that easily fooled. A man who has been involved in brutal crimes bears a mark. Luciano seemed to be a lonely man who had been endlessly tormented and yet bore little or no malice. I liked him and had no reason not to. He is probably not perfect, but neither am I.

  His story goes back a long time, and many people may have forgotten what a monster he was made out to be. He was born in Sicily and taken to America as a child by his parents. He grew up in a tough section of New York. Italian and Sicilian immigrants are usually too poor to live anywhere but in tenement districts. At seventeen he admits to having been involved in some kind of narcotics business. Later on, during the prohibition era, he became a bootlegger or proprietor of gambling houses. So, considering his handicaps, he must have been a very able man.

  Of course these were illegal activities under the law, but few Americans except bluenoses and fanatics ever believed in prohibition. Most of us went to speakeasies and bought bootleg liquor quite openly, the ‘most of us’ including judges, police officers and government officials. I remember that in one night club in Culver City, a town near Los Angeles where the Metro Goldwyn Studios are situated, two policemen were always on duty – not to keep you from getting liquor, but to keep you from bringing your own instead of buying it from the house.

  Prohibition was one of our worst mistakes. It enriched the mobs and made them powerful enough to organize on a nation-wide scale, so that today they are almost untouchable. As for gambling, in some form or other it is legal or countenanced almost everywhere in America. Betting on horse races at pari-mutual tracks is more than legal; it is a valuable source of revenue to the various states.

  Every so often we try to salve our consciences by selecting a highly publicized scapegoat in order to create the illusion that our laws are being rigidly enforced. In 1936 Luciano had reached a position of sufficient eminence to be selected. Some such scapegoats are guilty, some half or doubtfully guilty, and some – not many, I hope – are framed.

  I believe Luciano was deliberately framed by an ambitious prosecutor. He was outside the law, technically speaking, but I don't believe the crime with which he was charged: compulsory prostitution, and for which he was convicted, had anything to do with his real activities. He was first of all tried in the press, which is an unfortunate part of our way of life, since if a man is abused long enough and hard enough, his actual trial in court makes him guilty at the beginning. Judge Jerome Frank in his posthumous book Not Guilty says of a certain case: ‘The prosecution as one of its principal witnesses used a stool pigeon, a prostitute and drug addict who was getting her drugs from the government as her pay for informing on others.’ If a government agency can stoop to this, it is hardly surprising that so many Americans, including myself, regard a man's fate in court as a game of blackjack or vingt-et-un. What happens to you depends on how the cards fall, how good a lawyer you have, if you can afford a good one, how stupid or intelligent the jury is, and most of them are hopelessly stupid, because intelligent men can usually find a way of escaping jury duty.

  One of the worst menaces to any real justice is the big-time newspaper columnist. They are out to create sensation at whatever cost; they care nothing about the fate of the people they attack, and still less about truth. In a way they are worse than the crooks they attack. One columnist, whose name I fortunately forget, said that a prominent film star had taken a million dollars in cash to Luciano in Cuba. This film star, whom I happen to know, has never laid eyes on Luciano, and I very much doubt that Luciano ever had a million dollars, or anything like it.

  So he came to trial before twelve good men and true, whose minds, if they could read, had already been corrupted by the press, and if they could not read, there was always radio.

  Every witness against Luciano was facing prosecution for a crime, and not for the first time. The prosecutor secluded a number of brothel madams in ‘protective custody’, ostensibly to protect them. During this seclusion they were no doubt thoroughly coached on what evidence to give and how to give it, and promised immunity if they did the job properly. Of course, there is no legal record of this. The principal witness against Luciano was a man held on a burglary charge. If convicted he would have been a fourth time loser, which in New York State would have required an automatic life sentence – a real one, not a nominal one. He would probably have testified that his own mother was a multiple poisoner, if immunity had been promised to him. He said that he had known Luciano for eight or nine years and that Luciano had recently offered him a job at $40 a week as a collector from houses of prostitution. This makes me laugh almost hysterically, but not with pleasure. If he had said $400 a week or $1,000, I might have kept a straight face. But $40 a week for that? Absurd. It gives me some slight pleasure to know that this witness later, after the prosecutor was out of office, recanted his testimony and said that he had only seen Luciano in a bar.

  A judge may be the most honorable man in the world, but he can't do more than instruct the jury to the best of his ability. If their minds have already been made up for them, he is helpless. Perhaps it may seem that in Luciano's case the sentence was rather excessive, but I am no judge of that. He got 30 to 50 years – quite a chore.

  He served ten years and then, by some rather unusual executive procedure,
he was released and sent to Sing Sing to be deported. He was pardoned on the grounds that he had given the armed forces valuable information for the invasion of Sicily. The armed forces must have laughed their heads off. About all Luciano could have told them about Sicily was that it was an island. They probably already knew more about Sicily than the Sicilians. The real reason for his release could surely have been only one thing: that his lawyers has secured evidence that he had been framed and were prepared to use it against the prosecutor, now an important political figure. He had built his career on spectacular convictions. But he never got what he wanted. We Americans are not fools. At times we may look foolish, but in the pinch we can tell a cat from a leopard.

  Luciano went to Rome, but the police made his life impossible. He went to Cuba, and the American Narcotics people jumped on his back. He went to Naples. The police there watched him constantly. He changed his residence every few months. No use. America has become an empire. Its money and influence penetrate everywhere outside the Iron Curtain. Nothing can give him back his life or his freedom. The job on him was too thorough.

  No one knows all the facts. I can only go by my feeling about a man. If Luciano is an evil man, then I am an idiot. The man who convicted him has had his reward – and also his failure. I'd rather be an idiot than live with his soul, if he has one.

  Verse from an untitled poem,

  written by Chandler in spring 1958.

  But always lay the grave

  In waiting, and the silence and the maggot (naught)

  This was at last the honor which they bought.

  Man is too often nobler than his fate.

  Letter to Dale Warren,

  17 June 1958. Chandler is referring to his seventh Marlowe book, Playback.

  Please don't praise the book; sell it!

  Concerning horror stories about plumbing in British hotels:

  If a country has destroyed itself in two wars, it cannot immediately achieve the American kitchen.