In 1917, Chandler journeyed north of the United States border in order to enlist with the Gordon Highlanders. Only the twentieth century could produce the scenario of an American-born Anglo-Irishman travelling to Canada in order to join a Scottish regiment to fight Germans in France.
*
I am one of those people who have to be known exactly the right amount to be liked. I am standoffish with strangers, a form of shyness which whisky cured when I was still able to take it in the requisite quantities. I am terribly blunt, having been raised in the English tradition which permits a gentleman to be almost infinitely rude if he keeps his voice down. It depends on a complete assurance that a punch on the nose will not be the reply.
*
They obey no laws except those of gravity.
*
I personally believe, and I am not a socialist or anything of the sort, that there is a basic fallacy about our financial system. It simply implies a fundamental cheat, a dishonest profit, a non-existent value.
*
Other writers do things all the time – talk at book marts, go on autographing tours, give lectures, spread their personalities in silly interviews – which I can't help thinking make them look a bit cheap. To them it's part of the racket. To me it's the thing that makes it a racket.
*
Their freedom of choice seems to me little more than freedom to prefer death to dishonor, and that's asking too much of human nature.
*
I HATE PUBLICITY. It is nearly always dishonest and quite always stupid. I don't think it means anything at all. You don't get any until you are ‘copy’ and what you get makes you hate yourself.
*
The sort of semi-literate educated people one meets nowadays . . . are always saying, more or less, ‘You write so well I should think you would do a serious novel.’ And then you find out that what they mean by a serious novel is something by Marquand or Betty Smith, and you would probably insult them by remarking that the artistic gap between a really good mystery and the best serious novel of the last ten years is hardly measurable compared with the gap between the serious novel and any representative piece of Attic Literature from the Fourth Century BC.
*
It has seemed to me for a long time now that in straight novels the public is more and more drawn to the theme, the idea, the line of thought, the sociological or political attitude and less and less to the quality of the writing. For instance, if you were to consider Orwell's 1984 purely as a piece of fiction, you could not rate it very high. It has no magic, the scenes have very little personality . . . where he writes as a critic and interpreter of ideas rather than of people or emotions he is wonderful.
*
How, after the Katyn Forest and Moscow Treason Trials, the Ukraine famine, the Arctic prison camps, the utterly abominable rape of Berlin by the Mongolian divisions, any decent man can become a Communist is almost beyond understanding, unless it is the frame of mind that simply doesn't believe anything it doesn't like.
*
Why in God's name don't those idiots of publishers stop putting photos of writers on their dust jackets? I bought a perfectly good book . . . was prepared to like it, had read about it, and then I take a fast gander at the guy's picture and he is obviously an absolute jerk, a really appalling creep (photogenically speaking) and I can't read the damn book. The man's probably quite all right, but to me he is that photo, that oh so unposed-posed photo with the gaudy tie pulled askew, the man sitting on the edge of his desk with his feet in his chair (always sits there, thinks better). I've been through this photograph routine, know just what it does to you.
*
Because the bitter fact is that outside of two or three technical professions which require long years of preparation, there is absolutely no way for a man of this age to acquire a decent affluence in life without to some degree corrupting himself, without accepting the cold, clear fact that success is always and everywhere a racket.
*
How do you tell a man to go away in hard language? Scram, beat it, take off, take the air, on your way, dangle, hit the road, and so forth. All good enough. But give me the classic expression actually used by Spike O'Donnel (of the O'Donnel brothers of Chicago, the only small outfit to tell the Capone mob to go to hell and live): What he said was: ‘Be missing’. The restraint of it is deadly.
*
There are things about the publishing business that I should like, but dealing with writers would not be one of them. Their egos require too much petting. They live over-strained lives in which far too much humanity is sacrificed to far too little art ... To all these people literature is more or less the central fact of existence. Whereas, to vast numbers of reasonably intelligent people it is an unimportant sideline, a relaxation, an escape, a source of information, and sometimes an inspiration. But they could do without it far more easily than they could do without coffee or whisky.
*
Of course the lawyers always back each other up because they know that if they couldn't hang together they'd hang separately.
*
regarding television, 15 November 1951.
However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money. After all the public is entitled to what it wants. The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.
*
Talking of agents, when I opened the morning paper one morning last week I saw that it had finally happened: somebody shot one. It was probably for the wrong reasons, but at least it was a step in the right direction.
*
I'm caught talking to myself quite a lot lately. They say that is not too bad unless you answer back. I not only answer back, I argue and get mad.
*
I am still a bit dizzy from some remarks your pal Dale Warren made about The Maltese Falcon, which he apparently regards as quite inferior to The Leavenworth Case. (Read it for laughs, if you haven't.) I reread the Falcon not long ago, and I give up. Somebody in this room has lost a straitjacket. It must be me. Frankly, I can conceive of better writing than the Falcon, and a more tender and warm attitude to life, and a more flowery ending; but by God, if you can show me twenty books written approximately 20 years back that have as much guts and life now, I'll eat them between slices of Edmund Wilson's head. Really I'm beginning to wonder quite seriously whether anybody knows what writing is anymore, whether they haven't got the whole bloody business so completely mixed up with the subject matter and significance and who's going to win the peace and what they gave him for the screen rights and if you're not a molecular physicist, you're illiterate, and so on, that there simply isn't anybody around who can read a book and say that the guy knew how to write or didn't. Even poor old Edmund Wilson, who writes as if he had a loose upper plate, dirtied his pants in the New Yorker a few short weeks ago in reviewing Marquand's last book. He wrote: ‘A novel by Sinclair Lewis, however much it may be open to objection, is at least a book by a writer – that is, a work of the imagination that imposes its atmosphere, a creation that shows the color and modelling of a particular artist's hand.’ Is that all a good writer has to do? Hell, I always thought it was, but hell I didn't know Wilson knew it.Can I do a piece for you entitled ‘The Insignificance of Significance’, in which I will demonstrate in my usual whorehouse style that it doesn't matter a damn what a novel is about, that the only fiction of any moment in any age is that which does magic with words, and that the subject matter is merely the springboard for the writer's imagination; that the art of fiction, if it can any longer be called that, has grown from nothing to an artificial synthesis in a mere matter of 300 years, and has now reached such a degree of mechanical perfection that the only way you can tell the novelists apart is by whether they write about miners in Butte, coolies in China, Jews in the Bronx, or stockbrokers on Long Island, or whatever it is; that all the women and most of the men write exactly the same, or at least choose one of half a dozen thoroughly standardized procedures; and that in spite of certain inevitable slight differences (very slight indeed on the long view) the whole damn business could be turned out by a machine just as well, and will be almost any day now; and that the only writers left who have anything to say are those who write about practically nothing and monkey around with odd ways of doing it?
*
What do I do with myself from day to day? I write when I can and I don't write when I can't; always in the morning or the early part of the day. You get very gaudy ideas at night but they don't stand up. I found this out long ago . . . I'm always seeing little pieces by writers about how they don't ever wait for inspiration; they just sit down at their little desks every morning at eight, rain or shine, hangover and broken arm and all, and bang out their little stint. However blank their minds or dim their wits, no nonsense about inspiration from them. I offer them my admiration and take care to avoid their books. Me, I wait for inspiration, though I don't necessarily call it by that name. I believe that all writing that has any life in it is done with the solar plexus. It is hard work in the sense that it may leave you tired, even exhausted. In the sense of conscious effort it is not work at all. The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at least, when a professional writer doesn't do anything else but write. He doesn't have to write, and if he doesn't feel like it, he shouldn't try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor. But he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks. Write or nothing. It's the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules, a. you don't have to write. b. you can't do anything else. The rest comes of itself.
*
18 April 1949. ‘Norbert D.’ is Norbert Davis, a former Black Mask man, now destitute.It was very kind of you indeed to send me a wire about Norbert D. However right or wrong, I am sending him a couple of hundred dollars. Who am I to judge another man's needs or deserts? It's a pretty miserable thing to live off in the country and watch them all [stories] come back and be scared. He says he has sold one out of fifteen this last year. Say it's his fault. Say he got big-headed or drunk and lazy or what have you – what difference does it make? You suffer just as much when you're wrong. More. Write it off, call it a waste, forget it, and hope the guy won't hate you for helping him, or rather for having to ask you to help him ... I know that two hundred bucks will not buy me the key to heaven, but there have been times when it would have looked like it would, and I didn't have it, and nobody was around to give it to me. I never slept in the park but I came damn close to it. I went five days without anything to eat but soup once, and I had just been sick at that. It didn't kill me, but neither did it increase my love of humanity. The best way to find out if you have any friends is to go broke. The ones that hang on longest are your friends. I don't mean the ones that hang on forever. There aren't any of those.
Four months later, on 14 August 1949, Chandler would write again to Brandt: ‘I had a letter from N.D.’s wife. It seems he committed suicide a couple of weeks ago. I hadn't realized it was that desperate a situation.‘
*
I admit that if you can't create a sufficiently dominating detective, you might compensate to some extent by involving him in the dangers and emotions of the story, but that isn't a step forward, it's a step backward. The whole point is that the detective exists complete and entire and unchanged by anything that happens; he is, as detective, outside the story and above it, and always will be. That is why he never gets the girl, never marries, never really has any private life except insofar as he must eat and sleep and have a place to keep his clothes. His moral and intellectual force is that he gets nothing but his fee, for which he will if he can protect the innocent, guard the helpless, and destroy the wicked, and the fact that he must do this while earning a meager living in a corrupt world is what makes him stand out. A rich idler has nothing to lose but his dignity; the professional is subject to all the pressures of an urban civilization and must rise above them in order to do his job. Because he represents justice and not the law, he will sometimes defy or break the law. Because he is human he can be hurt or beguiled or fooled; in extreme necessity he may even kill. But he does nothing solely for himself. Obviously this kind of detective does not exist in real life. The real life private eye is a sleazy little judge from the Burns Agency, or a strong arm guy with no more personality than a blackjack, or else a shyster and a successful trickster. He has about as much moral stature as a stop-and-go sign.
The detective story is not and never will be a ‘novel about a detective’. The detective enters it only as a catalyst. And he leaves it exactly the same as he was before.
*
Letter to Charles Morton,
9 October 1950. The Hemingway book referred to was Across the River and into the Trees.
Quite a lapse in our once interesting correspondence, don't you think? Of course it's my fault because the last letter was from you. And you are most correct in saying in it that I owe you a letter . . . Apparently it is what the years do to you. The horse which once had to be driven with a tight rein now has to be flicked with a whip in order to make him do much more than amble . . . Walter Bagehot once wrote (I am quoting from an increasingly unreliable memory) ‘In my youth, I hoped to do great things. Now, I shall be satisfied to get through without scandal.’ In a sense, I am much better off than he was because I never expected to do great things, and in fact have done much better than I ever hoped to do.
My compliments to Mr Weeks on belonging to that very small minority of critics who did not find it necessary to put Hemingway in his place over his last book. Just what do the boys resent so much? Do they sense that the old wolf has been wounded and that it is a good time to pull him down? I have been reading the book. Candidly, it's not the best thing he's done, but it's still a hell of a sight better than anything his detractors could do. There's not much story in it, not much happens, hardly any scenes. And just for that reason, I suppose, the mannerisms sort of stick out. You can't expect charity from knife throwers obviously; knife throwing is their business. But you would have thought some of them might have asked themselves just what he was trying to do. Obviously he was not trying to write a masterpiece; but in a character not too unlike his own, trying to sum up the attitude of a man who is finished and knows it, and is bitter and angry about it. Apparently Hemingway had been very sick and he was not sure that he was going to get well, and he put down on paper in a rather cursory way how that made him feel to the things he had most valued. I suppose these primping second-guessers who call themselves critics think he shouldn't have written the book at all. Most men wouldn't have. Feeling the way that he felt, they wouldn't have had the guts to write anything. I'm damn sure I wouldn't. That's the difference between a champ and a knife thrower. The champ may have lost his stuff temporarily or permanently, he can't be sure.
now reached such a degree of mechanical perfection that the only way you can tell the novelists apart is by whether they write about miners in Butte, coolies in China, Jews in the Bronx, or stockbrokers on Long Island, or whatever it is; that all the women and most of the men write exactly the same, or at least choose one of half a dozen thoroughly standardized procedures; and that in spite of certain inevitable slight differences (very slight indeed on the long view) the whole damn business could be turned out by a machine just as well, and will be almost any day now; and that the only writers left who have anything to say are those who write about practically nothing and monkey around with odd ways of doing it?
*
What do I do with myself from day to day? I write when I can and I don't write when I can't; always in the morning or the early part of the day. You get very gaudy ideas at night but they don't stand up. I found this out long ago . . . I'm always seeing little pieces by writers about how they don't ever wait for inspiration; they just sit down at their little desks every morning at eight, rain or shine, hangover and broken arm and all, and bang out their little stint. However blank their minds or dim their wits, no nonsense about inspiration from them. I offer them my admiration and take care to avoid their books. Me, I wait for inspiration, though I don't necessarily call it by that name. I believe that all writing that has any life in it is done with the solar plexus. It is hard work in the sense that it may leave you tired, even exhausted. In the sense of conscious effort it is not work at all. The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at least, when a professional writer doesn't do anything else but write. He doesn't have to write, and if he doesn't feel like it, he shouldn't try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor. But he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks. Write or nothing. It's the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules, a. you don't have to write. b. you can't do anything else. The rest comes of itself.
*
18 April 1949. ‘Norbert D.’ is Norbert Davis, a former Black Mask man, now destitute.It was very kind of you indeed to send me a wire about Norbert D. However right or wrong, I am sending him a couple of hundred dollars. Who am I to judge another man's needs or deserts? It's a pretty miserable thing to live off in the country and watch them all [stories] come back and be scared. He says he has sold one out of fifteen this last year. Say it's his fault. Say he got big-headed or drunk and lazy or what have you – what difference does it make? You suffer just as much when you're wrong. More. Write it off, call it a waste, forget it, and hope the guy won't hate you for helping him, or rather for having to ask you to help him ... I know that two hundred bucks will not buy me the key to heaven, but there have been times when it would have looked like it would, and I didn't have it, and nobody was around to give it to me. I never slept in the park but I came damn close to it. I went five days without anything to eat but soup once, and I had just been sick at that. It didn't kill me, but neither did it increase my love of humanity. The best way to find out if you have any friends is to go broke. The ones that hang on longest are your friends. I don't mean the ones that hang on forever. There aren't any of those.
Four months later, on 14 August 1949, Chandler would write again to Brandt: ‘I had a letter from N.D.’s wife. It seems he committed suicide a couple of weeks ago. I hadn't realized it was that desperate a situation.‘
*
I admit that if you can't create a sufficiently dominating detective, you might compensate to some extent by involving him in the dangers and emotions of the story, but that isn't a step forward, it's a step backward. The whole point is that the detective exists complete and entire and unchanged by anything that happens; he is, as detective, outside the story and above it, and always will be. That is why he never gets the girl, never marries, never really has any private life except insofar as he must eat and sleep and have a place to keep his clothes. His moral and intellectual force is that he gets nothing but his fee, for which he will if he can protect the innocent, guard the helpless, and destroy the wicked, and the fact that he must do this while earning a meager living in a corrupt world is what makes him stand out. A rich idler has nothing to lose but his dignity; the professional is subject to all the pressures of an urban civilization and must rise above them in order to do his job. Because he represents justice and not the law, he will sometimes defy or break the law. Because he is human he can be hurt or beguiled or fooled; in extreme necessity he may even kill. But he does nothing solely for himself. Obviously this kind of detective does not exist in real life. The real life private eye is a sleazy little judge from the Burns Agency, or a strong arm guy with no more personality than a blackjack, or else a shyster and a successful trickster. He has about as much moral stature as a stop-and-go sign.
The detective story is not and never will be a ‘novel about a detective’. The detective enters it only as a catalyst. And he leaves it exactly the same as he was before.
*
Letter to Charles Morton,
9 October 1950. The Hemingway book referred to was Across the River and into the Trees.
Quite a lapse in our once interesting correspondence, don't you think? Of course it's my fault because the last letter was from you. And you are most correct in saying in it that I owe you a letter . . . Apparently it is what the years do to you. The horse which once had to be driven with a tight rein now has to be flicked with a whip in order to make him do much more than amble . . . Walter Bagehot once wrote (I am quoting from an increasingly unreliable memory) ‘In my youth, I hoped to do great things. Now, I shall be satisfied to get through without scandal.’ In a sense, I am much better off than he was because I never expected to do great things, and in fact have done much better than I ever hoped to do.
My compliments to Mr Weeks on belonging to that very small minority of critics who did not find it necessary to put Hemingway in his place over his last book. Just what do the boys resent so much? Do they sense that the old wolf has been wounded and that it is a good time to pull him down? I have been reading the book. Candidly, it's not the best thing he's done, but it's still a hell of a sight better than anything his detractors could do. There's not much story in it, not much happens, hardly any scenes. And just for that reason, I suppose, the mannerisms sort of stick out. You can't expect charity from knife throwers obviously; knife throwing is their business. But you would have thought some of them might have asked themselves just what he was trying to do. Obviously he was not trying to write a masterpiece; but in a character not too unlike his own, trying to sum up the attitude of a man who is finished and knows it, and is bitter and angry about it. Apparently Hemingway had been very sick and he was not sure that he was going to get well, and he put down on paper in a rather cursory way how that made him feel to the things he had most valued. I suppose these primping second-guessers who call themselves critics think he shouldn't have written the book at all. Most men wouldn't have. Feeling the way that he felt, they wouldn't have had the guts to write anything. I'm damn sure I wouldn't. That's the difference between a champ and a knife thrower. The champ may have lost his stuff temporarily or permanently, he can't be sure.
But when he can no longer throw the high hard one, he throws his heart instead. He throws something. He doesn't just walk off the mound and weep. Mr Cyril Connolly, in a rather smoother piece of knife throwing than most of the second-guessers are capable of, suggests that Mr Hemingway should take six months off and take stock of himself. The implication here apparently is that Hemingway has fully exploited the adolescent attitude which so many people are pleased to attribute him, and should now grow up intellectually and become an adult. But why? In the sense in which Connolly would define the word, Hemingway has never had any desire to be an adult. Some writers, like painters, are born primitives. A nose full of Kafka is not at all their idea of happiness. I suppose the weakness, even the tragedy, of writers like Hemingway is that their sort of stuff demands an immense vitality; and a man outgrows his vitality without unfortunately outgrowing his furious concern with it. The kind of thing Hemingway writes cannot be written by an emotional corpse. The kind of thing Connolly writes can and is. It has its points. Some of it is very good, but you don't have to be alive to write it.
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.
*
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 Edgar Carter,
who had been sent 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.
*
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.
*
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?
*
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 novelists 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 Mr Inglis,
a fan, October 1951. Inglis had written to Chandler. At one point in his letter he speculated that, to a psychologist, Philip Marlowe might appear emotionally immature.
I'm afraid I can't give you much of an argument about your concept of what you call maturity . . . It may be that your ‘advanced psychology student’ friend was pulling your leg a little, or it may be that the advanced psychology itself has got him into a state of confusion in which he will probably remain for the rest of his life. We seem to be somewhat over supplied with psychologists nowadays, but I suppose that is natural enough, since their jargon, tiresome as it is to me personally, seems to have the same attraction for muddled minds that theological hair-splitting had for people of a former age. If being in revolt against a corrupt society constitutes being immature, then Philip Marlowe is extremely immature. If seeing dirt where there is dirt constitutes an inadequate social adjustment, then Philip Marlowe has an inadequate social adjustment. Of course, Marlowe is a failure and knows it. He is a failure because he hasn't any money. A man who without physical handicaps cannot make a decent living is always a failure and usually a moral failure. But a lot of very good men have been failures because their particular talents did not suit their time and place. In the long run I guess we are all failures or we wouldn't have the kind of world we have. I think I resent your suggestion that Philip Marlowe has contempt for other people's physical weakness. I don't know where you got that idea, and I don't think it's so. I am also a little tired of the numerous suggestions that have been made that he's always full of whisky. The only point I can see in justification of that is that when he wants a drink he takes it openly and doesn't hesitate to remark on it. I don't know how it is in your part of the country, but compared with the country-club set in my part of the country he is as sober as a deacon.
*
Letter to Paul McClung,
11 December 1951. McClung, Chandler's paperback publisher, had written to Chandler about a line in one of his novels where he implied having been told, by a doctor, that alcoholism was incurable.
The doctor on whose point of view I founded the opinion you quote has been dead for several years. In any case I doubt very much whether he would have appreciated my revealing his identity to a magazine or a newspaper in connection with an opinion which his profession as a group would consider defeatist and most improper. I remember his saying to me in effect: ‘The toughest thing about trying to cure an alcoholic or a user of dope is that you have absolutely nothing to offer him in the long run. He feels awful at the moment no doubt; he feels shamed and humiliated; he would like to be cured of it if it is not too painful, and sometimes even if it is, and it always is. In a purely physical sense you maybe say he is cured when his withdrawal symptoms have passed, and they can be pretty awful. But we forget pain, and to a certain extent we forget humiliation. So your alcoholic cured or your former dope addict looks around him, and what has he achieved? A flat landscape through which there is no road more interesting than another. His reward is negative. He doesn't suffer physically, and he is not humiliated or shamed mentally. He is merely damned dull.’ Obviously such a point of view is inconsistent with the Polyanna attitude we impose on the medical profession. They know better, but they have to live too, although there are times when in particular cases one doesn't quite see why.
I put my opinion, which you seem to have taken rather seriously, in the mouth of a crook. In times like these only a crook may safely express opinions of this sort. Any medical man of standing would have to add something like: ‘Of course with proper psychiatric treatment, blah, blah, blah –’ He would certainly have you on the upbeat. And by mentioning psychiatry he would, for me at least, instantly destroy the entire effect of any frank statement into which he may have ventured, since I regard psychiatry as fifty per cent bunk, thirty per cent fraud, ten per cent parrot talk, and the remaining ten per cent just a fancy lingo for the common sense we have had for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, if we ever had the guts to read it.
*
I'm sending you today, probably by air express, a draft of a story which I have called The Long Goodbye. It runs 92,000 words. I'd be happy to have your comments and objections and so on. I haven't even read the thing, except to make a few corrections and check a number of details that my secretary queried. So I am not sending you any opinion on the opus. You may find it slow going.
It has been clear to me for some time that what is largely boring about mystery stories, at least on a literate plane, is that the characters get lost about a third of the way through. Often the opening, the mise en scène, the establishment of the background, is very good. Then the plot thickens and the people become mere names. Well, what can you do to avoid this? You can write constant action and that is fine if you really enjoy it. But alas, one grows up, one becomes complicated and unsure, one becomes interested in moral dilemmas, rather than who cracked who on the head. And at that point one should retire and leave the field to younger and more simple men.
Anyhow I wrote this as I wanted to because I can do that now. I didn't care whether the mystery was fairly obvious, but I cared about the people, about this strange corrupt world we live in, and how any man who tries to be honest looks in the end either sentimental or plain foolish. Enough of that. There are more practical reasons. You write in a style that has been imitated, even plagiarized, to the point where you begin to look as if you were imitating your imitators. So you have to go where they can't follow you . . .
*
One of the weird problems of our times is the juvenile delinquent. Gangs of young crooks pop up in the most exclusive neighborhoods. Atlanta, Georgia, had a wave of burglaries and vandalism and it was traced to the young of some of the wealthiest families in the city. Our local high school (realschule or grammar school) had a Thieves Club among the children of the best families. The wars have a lot to do with it, no doubt, but much of it would have happened anyway. There is no discipline in the schools because there is no means of enforcing it. And in the homes parents argue with their children, they don't tell them. If I had children, and thank God I never had any, I should send them abroad to school. American schools are rotten, especially in California. If your boy won't behave himself, you can try a military school where he will be taught to behave himself (or expelled), but he won't learn anything else. You can send him to one of the New England snob schools like Groton, if you can afford it but unless you are well off it is not always the kind thing to do. He will meet boys who drive Jaguars and Rileys and have too much spending money and he will feel inferior. Or you can send him to a Jesuit school, regardless of religion. The public schools are trash. About all they learn there is the increasingly simple art of seduction. One of my wife's nephews graduated from high school with the mental equipment of the Lower Fourth, say the middle third of that form. But he has turned out very well. He couldn't have got into a state university, much less a place like Stanford or Pomona, but he faced the problem of earning without any trouble at all. I find that curious, and very American. He did fourteen months in Korea without the trace of old soldier nonsense about him, he is married, and he is very scrupulous about money.
*
Report in the Hollywood Citizen-News, 24 February 1955: ‘Raymond Chandler, widely known mystery writer, today was released from the psychopathic ward at San Diego County Hospital where he was taken to hospital following an apparent suicide attempt. Police said Chandler had been drinking heavily since the death of his wife in December.‘
Letter to Roger Machell,
5 March 1955.
Everything is all right with me, or as near as one could hope for. I couldn't for the life of me tell you whether I really intended to go through with it or whether my subconscious was putting on a cheap dramatic performance. The first shot went off without my intending to. I had never fired the gun and the trigger pull was so light that I barely touched it to get my hand in position when off she went and the bullet ricocheted around the tile walls of the shower and went up through the ceiling. It could just have easily have ricocheted into my stomach. The charge seemed to me very weak. This was born out when the second shot (the business) didn't fire at all. The cartridges were about five years old and I guess in this climate the charge had decomposed. At that point I blacked out ... I don't know whether or not it is an emotional defect that I have absolutely no sense of guilt nor any embarrassment at meeting people in La Jolla who all know what happened. It was on the radio here. I had letters from all over the place, some kind and sympathetic, some scolding, some silly beyond belief. I had letters from police officers, active and retired, from two Intelligence officers, one in Tokyo and one in March Field, Riverside, and a letter from an active professional private eye in San Francisco. These letters all said two things: 1, they should have written to me long before because I hadn't known what my books meant to people, and 2, How in the name of wonder did a writer who had never been a cop come to know them so precisely and portray them so accurately. One man who had served 23 years on the Los Angeles Police said he could put an actual name to practically any cop I put in any of my stories. He seemed to think I must actually have known all these men. This sort of thing staggered me a little because I have always suspected that if a real live police officer or detective read a mystery, it would be just to sneer at it. Who was it – Stevenson possibly – who said, experience is largely a matter of intuition?
In England, I believe, and in some other places, including New York State, attempted suicide, or what looks like it, is a crime. In California it is not, but you do have to go through the observation ward at the County Hospital. With a more than able assist from a friend of mine who does a column in the San Diego paper, I talked myself out of it the next noon but on condition I went to a private sanatorium. This I did. I had more trouble talking myself out of that. I stuck it for six days and then got a feeling I was being strung along with half promises. At that point I announced that I was going to discharge myself. Upheaval. This simply wasn't done. All right, I said, Tell me the law that keeps me here. There wasn't any and he knew it. So finally he conceded that I could leave any time I wished, but would I come to his office and talk to him. I said I would, not because I expected any good from it, but because it would make his case record look better, and in addition, if he was perfectly frank with me, I might be able to help him.
So I came home and since nothing has mattered to me about the whole business except that they shot me so full of dope to keep me tractable that I still have a little hangover from it. Isn't it amazing that people should sit around depressed and bored and miserable in those places, worried about their jobs and their families, longing to go home, subjected every day to Electrical Shock Treatments (they didn't dare try that on me) and in between insulin shock, worrying about the cost of it all and the feeling of being a prisoner, and yet not have the guts to get up and walk out? I suppose it is part of what's the matter with them. If they had more guts they wouldn't be there in the first place. But that's hardly an answer. If I had more guts I shouldn't have let despair and grief get me so far down that I did what I did. But when I found myself dealing with a lot of psychiatric claptrap and with a non-existent authority that tried to make me think it had power, I didn't find that it took any special daring to tell them all what I was going to do and to do it. And in the end strangely enough they almost seemed to like it. The head nurse kissed me and said I was the politest, the most considerate and co-operative and the most resilient patient they have ever had there, and God help any doctor who tried to make me do anything I wasn't convinced I ought to do. And so much for that.
Quotes from the book The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction 1909-1959
