The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words

by Raymond Chandler

  —Letter to Alfred Knopf—January 12, 1946

  A real writer … exists on many levels of thought. Perhaps as a result of my business training I always knew that a writer had to follow a line with which the public would become familiar. He had to “type” himself to the extent that the public would associate his name … with a certain kind of writing.

  Chandler’s corrections for a draft of his sixth novel. Bodleian Library, Oxford (illustrations credit 8.3)

  The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called “significant literature” will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles … So like all half-educated publics in all ages it turns with relief to someone who tells a story and nothing else. To say that what this man writes is not literature is just like saying that a book can’t be any good if it makes you want to read it. When a book, or any sort of book, reaches a certain level of artistic performance, it becomes literature.

  —Letter to Erle Stanley Gardner—January 29, 1946

  I concentrated on the detective story because it was a popular form and I thought the right and lucky man might finally make it into literature.

  —Letter to Wesley Hartley—December 3, 1957

  A writer who hates the actual writing, who gets no joy out of the creation of magic by words, to me is simply not a writer at all. The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.

  —Letter to Hamish Hamilton—September 19, 1951

  The only thing he could conceive of that would be worse would be “the emptiness of a writer who can’t think of anything to write.” In a 1951 short story “A Couple of Writers” (published posthumously), he identifies with Hank Bruton …

  “Pastiche,” he said drearily. “Everything I write sounds like something a real writer threw away.”

  Just like a lousy writer, he thought. Never the thing itself, always the cheap emotion that goes with it.

  The emptiness was

  a pretty painful emptiness, but for some reason it never even approaches tragedy. Jesus, we’re the most useless people in the world. There must be a hell of a lot of us too, all lonely, all empty, all poor, all gritted with small mean worries that have no dignity. All trying like men caught in a bog to get some firm ground under our feet and knowing all the time it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference whether we do or not … All the world’s would-be writers, the guys and girls that have education and will and desire and hope and nothing else. They know all there is to know about how it’s done, except they can’t do it. They’ve studied hard and imitated the hell out of everybody that ever rang the bell.

  Too much preoccupation with the mechanics of writing is a sure sign of a weak talent or none at all.

  —Letter to Mrs. Robert Hogan—March 8, 1947

  I think that certain writers are under a compulsion to write in recherché phrases as a compensation for a lack of some kind of natural animal emotion.

  —Letter to James Sandoe—April 14, 1949

  “Most writers sacrifice too much humanity for too little art.”

  Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

  —Letter to James Sandoe—December 17, 1944

  Oh, the hell with it. Ideas are poison. The more you reason, the less you create.

  —Letter to Charles Morton—October 28, 1947

  The business of a fiction writer is to recreate the illusion of life. How he does it, if he can do it, it does not in the least help him to know.

  —Letter to James Sandoe—December 17, 1944

  I don’t particularly care for the hard-boiled babies, because most of them are traveling on borrowed gas, and I don’t think you have any right to do that unless you can travel a little farther than the man from whom you borrowed the gas.

  —Letter to Frederic Dannay—July 10, 1951

  Although writing was most certainly Chandler’s own personal salvation, he persisted in seeing the dark cloud behind the silver lining. If something was any good, it was, by definition, too good for him …

  Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or drive to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.

  —Introduction to Trouble Is My Business

  It has been said, I think, that writers always like the wrong things in their own work.

  (A self-fulfilling prophesy he subsequently worked hard to encourage.)

  In the early years he was capable of occasional and charming ingenuousness:

  There must be some magic in the writing after all, but I take no credit for it. It just happens, like red hair. But I find it rather humiliating to pick up a book of my own to glance at something, and then find myself twenty minutes later still reading it as if someone else had written it.

  —Letter to Alex Barris—April 16, 1949

  By this time his reputation was secure but even fame had its downside in the Chandler scheme of things …

  Writers who get written about become self-conscious.

  —Letter to Dale Warren—September 15, 1949

  The more things people say about you the more you feel as if you were writing in an examination room, that it didn’t belong to you any more, that you had to protect critical reputations and not let them down. Writers even as cynical as I have to fight an impulse to live up to someone else’s idea of what they are.

  I am so little neglected that I am often actually embarrassed by too much attention.

  Defiantly (and self-consciously) he would write Carl Brandt a year later …

  From now on I am going to write what I want to write as I want to write it. Some of it may flop. There are always going to be people who will say I have lost the pace I had once, that I take too long to say things now, and don’t care enough about tight active plots. But I am not writing for those people now. I am writing for the people who understand about writing as an art and are able to separate what a man does with words and ideas from what he thinks about Truman or the United Nations …

  Style was a constant concern—another by-product of his public school education …

  The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off. He can’t do it by trying, because the kind of style I am thinking about is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it … Preoccupation with style will not produce it.

  —Letter to Mrs. Robert Hogan—March 8, 1947

  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.

  —Letter to Bernice Baumgarten—April 16, 1951

  Since from the beginning he had been attempting to write

  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,”

  he had been involved in an ongoing battle with publishers to make them understand what he was trying to achieve artistically. “Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs,” he wrote to Atlantic Monthly publisher Edward Weeks (January 18, 1947) …

  and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split. And when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of a more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with
the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.

  The “he or she” turned out to be a she—one Margaret Mutch. When Chandler learned this, he composed a piece of verse to the lady …

  Miss Margaret Mutch she raised her crutch

  With a wild Bostonian cry.

  “Though you went to Yale, your grammar is frail,”

  She snarled as she jabbed his eye.

  “Though you went to Princeton, I never winced on

  Such a horrible relative clause!

  Though you went to Harvard, no decent larva’d

  Accept your syntactical flaws.

  Taught not to drool at a Public School

  (With a capital P and S)

  You are drooling still with your shall and will

  You’re a very disgusting mess!”

  As he “learned” the language Chandler became fascinated by American slang and what he called “hard talk.” In his scrapbook he recorded some examples that caught his ear …

  Chicago lightning—gunfire

  Dip the bill—take a drink

  Cough yourself off. Be missing … beat it

  Under glass—in prison, caught

  Squibbed off—shot

  New Sweet—new girl

  Kick the joint—break in

  Lip—lawyer

  Hard Harry—a hard guy

  Pin jabber—hypo user

  Dodo—any addict

  Daisy crushers—shoes

  Kick the gong around—use dope (Harlem)

  Caught in a snowstorm—cocained up

  Broom—disappear hastily

  Put the cross on—mark for death

  Back door parole—die in prison

  In the early stories he felt obliged to toe the pulp line and pack them with the street jargon he had so laboriously learned. In “Smart-Aleck Kill” alone we find “Drive the heap, bozo!” … “It don’t listen” … “I draw water in this town and I could hang a sign on you” … “Light me a pill.” In “Nevada Gas”: “Are you a guy that can stay clammed?”

  And as late as The Big Sleep: “Shake some business and pour it. I haven’t got all day.”

  As the years went by and success intruded, Chandler felt he didn’t need to try quite so hard with the argot. He dropped a good deal of it and, in any case, as with all “inside” talk, it had passed out of fashion. But for those first few years Los Angeles American really did rival Shakespearean English in its use of the exotic: punk … gat … butts … jake … frail … powder … beef … rube … grift … shamus … keester … peeper … shine … pigeon …

  The literary use of slang is a study in itself. I’ve found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be passé before it gets into print.

  —Letter to Alex Barris—March 18, 1949

  The lingo varies from place to place, and it also varies from year to year. And there is no doubt that a large part of it is of literary origin … Cops and crooks are readers of crime literature, and I have no doubt that many a Western sheriff has ornamented his language and perhaps even his costume from a study of six-gun literature.

  —Letter to Eric Partridge—May 29, 1952

  Why is that the Americans—of all people the quickest to reverse their moods—do not see the strong element of burlesque in my writing? Or is it only the intellectuals who miss that?

  The question may have been somewhat rhetorical but any card-carrying Brit could have told him the answer. Americans—with few exceptions—have never developed the sense of irony that seems to have been built into the English psyche.

  In most ways he was self-aware as a writer and had been from the outset …

  I have been so belabored with tags like tough, hardboiled, etc., that it was almost a shock to discover occasional signs of almost normal sensitivity in the writing,

  he wrote apologetically to his first publisher, Alfred Knopf (February 8, 1942).

  On the other hand I did run the similes into the ground.

  But by 1948 he is rather proud to claim,

  I think I rather invented the trick [of extravagant similes].

  Similes and comparisons were Chandler’s signature device from the first. In his writer’s notebook he kept a list of those that might come in handy, and in The Long Goodbye he has alter ego Roger Wade deride it:

  Writers. Everything has to be like something else.

  It was a preemptive response but a needless one. Everyone who reads him with pleasure is waiting for the next little gem.

  The frustrated poet is at work and at home when Chandler observes “a glassed in lounge into which the moonlight poured like water through the floodgates of a dam” (The Little Sister) or “a shaft of sunlight tickled one of my ankles” (The Long Goodbye).

  “The garden hummed with flowers” (Farewell, My Lovely) … the lake “was as motionless as a sleeping cat” (The Long Goodbye) … the shadows were “like crawling lava” (The High Window) … “a wedge of sunlight slipped over the edge of the desk and fell noiselessly to the carpet” (Farewell, My Lovely) … “I stood there, listening to the sunshine burn the grass” (The High Window).

  Or … “the elevator rose as softly as mercury in a thermometer” (“Trouble Is My Business”) … “Consciousness evaporated from his eyes” (“Blackmailers Don’t Shoot”) … “a few unbeatable wild flowers clawed and hung on [the bank] like naughty children who won’t go to bed” (“Mandarin’s Jade”) … “The bar entrance was … dusky and quiet and a bartender moved mothlike against the faint glitter of piled glassware” (The High Window) … “The room was suddenly full of heavy silence, like a fallen cake” (The Little Sister) … “The swell is as gentle as an old lady singing hymns” (The Long Goodbye).

  He was very sensitive to sound—even the sound of silence … “The silence held. The room was full of it, brimming over with it. A bird chirped outside in a tree, but that only made the silence thicker. You could have cut slices of it and buttered them” (The Lady in the Lake) … Marlowe “opened the door very silently, like snow falling” (The High Window) … “The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips” (The Lady in the Lake) … “The silence fell like a bag of feathers” (Playback) … “A slug went softly and politely into the parchment-covered wall, high up, making no more sound than a finger going into a glove” (“Mandarin’s Jade”) … “The noise the gun made was no louder than a hammer striking a nail or knuckles rapping sharply on wood” (“Spanish Blood”) … The car “moved away from the curb and around the corner with as much noise as a bill makes in a wallet” (“Trouble Is My Business”) … The dollar “went into his pocket with a sound like caterpillars fighting” (The Lady in the Lake) … “He breathed with a faraway unimportant sound, like distant footfalls on dead leaves” (“Bay City Blues”) … “making as much noise as a fly makes walking on the wall” (Farewell, My Lovely).

  Sometimes, of course, the sounds were less soothing … “He pushed a cigarette past his lips with a sound like somebody gutting fish” (“Goldfish”) … “The threshing sound of a telephone being dialed” (The High Window) … “His words were coming so fast they were leap-frogging themselves” (Farewell, My Lovely).

  The unusual details of physical appearance invariably caught his questing eye …

  A black string tie poked a small hard knot out at the bottom of his collar, like a mouse getting ready to come out of a hole.

  —The High Window

  A hand as steady as a stone pier in a light breeze.

  —The High Window

  He wore an ascot tie that had been tied about 1880, and the green stone in his stickpin was not quite as large as an apple barrel.

  —Farewell, My Lovely

  His hat was at least two sizes too small and had been perspired in freely by someone it fitted better than it fitted him. He wore it about where a house wears a wind vane. A tie had apparently been tied with a pair of
pliers in a knot the size of a pea.

  —Farewell, My Lovely

  His small neat fingers speared [a cigarette] like a trout taking the fly.

  —Farewell, My Lovely

  A large pleasant-faced man with silvery hair and a dimpled chin and a tiny little mouth made to kiss babies with. He wore a well-pressed blue suit, polished square-toed shoes, and an elk’s tooth on a gold chain hung across his stomach … He chewed violet-scented breath purifiers.

  —“Bay City Blues”

  One character was “a piece of gray driftwood carved to look like a man” (“Bay City Blues”).

  “Old men with faces like lost battles” … “He had a wedge-shaped face that ended in a point, like the bottom half of the ace of diamonds” (“Trouble Is My Business”) … “The upper part of his face meant business. The lower part was just saying goodbye” (Lady in the Lake) … “His composed gray face was long enough to wrap twice round his neck” (The Little Sister) … “His chin would never hit a wall before he saw it” (The Big Sleep) … “He was a tall man with glasses and a high-domed head that made his ears look as if they had slipped down his head” (The High Window).

  As for the face itself … it was “like a gnawed bone” (The Lady in the Lake) … “as threadbare as a bookkeeper’s coat” (Farewell, My Lovely) … “as intelligent as the bottom of a shoe box” (“Killer in the Rain”) … “as clear as a cameo” (“Smart-Aleck Kill”) … “as much expression as a cut of round steak and was much the same color” (“Red Wind”) … and under pressure it “went to pieces like a clay pigeon” (“Try the Girl”) … “His face was like a vacant lot” (The High Window) … “a face like a collapsed lung” (The Long Goodbye).