Chandler on cats and ...

 Letter to Charles Morton,

19 March 1945.

A man named Inkstead took some pictures of me for Harper's Bazaar a while ago (I never quite found out why) and one of me holding my secretary in my lap came out very well indeed. When I get the dozen I have ordered I'll send you one. The secretary, I should perhaps add, is a black Persian cat, 14 years old, and I call her that because she has been around me ever since I began to write, usually sitting on the paper I wanted to use or the copy I wanted to revise, sometimes leaping up against the typewriter and sometimes just quietly gazing out of the window from a corner of the desk, as much as to say, ‘The stuff you're doing's a waste of my time, bud.’ Her name is Taki (it was originally Take, but we got tired of explaining that this was a Japanese word meaning bamboo and should be pronounced in two syllables), and she has a memory like no elephant ever even tried to have. She is usually politely remote, but once in a while will get an argumentative spell and talk back for ten minutes at a time. I wish I knew what she is trying to say to them, but I suspect it all adds up to a very sarcastic version of ‘You can do better.’ I've been a cat lover all my life (have nothing against dogs except that they need such a lot of entertaining) and have never quite been able to understand them. Taki is a completely poised animal and always knows who likes cats, never goes near anybody that doesn't, always walks straight up to anyone, however  lately arrived and completely unknown to her, who really does. She doesn't spend a great deal of time with them, however, just takes a moderate amount of petting and strolls off. She has another curious trick (which may or may not be rare) of never killing anything. She brings ‘em back alive and lets you take them away from her. She has brought into the house at various times such things as a dove, a blue parakeet, and a large butterfly. The butterfly and the parakeet were entirely unharmed and carried on just as though nothing had happened. The dove gave her a little trouble, apparently not wanting to be carried around, and had a small spot of blood on its breast. But we took it to a bird man and it was all right very soon. Just a bit humiliated. Mice bore her, but she catches them if they insist and then I have to kill them. She has a sort of tired interest in gophers, and will watch a gopher hole with some attention, but gophers bite and after all who the hell wants a gopher anyway? So she just pretends she might catch one, if she felt like it.

She goes with us wherever we go journeying, remembers all the places she has been to before and is usually quite at home anywhere. One or two places have got her – I don't know why. She just wouldn't settle down in them. After a while we know enough to take the hint. Chances are there was an axe murder there once and we're much better somewhere else. The guy might come back. Sometimes she looks at me with a rather peculiar expression (she is the only cat I know who will look you straight in the eye) and I have a suspicion that she is keeping a diary, because the expression seems to be saying: ‘Brother, you think you're pretty good most of the time, don't you? I wonder how you'd feel if I decided to publish some of the stuff I've been putting down at odd moments.’ At certain times she has a trick of holding one paw up loosely and looking at in a speculative manner. My wife thinks she is suggesting we get her a wrist watch; she doesn't need it for any practical reason – she can tell the time better than I can – but after all you gotta have some jewelry.

I don't know why I'm writing all this. It must be I couldn't think of anything else, or – this is where it gets creepy – am I really  writing it at all? Could it be that – no, it must be me. Say it's me. I'm scared.

P.S. Am working on a screen treatment of The Lady in the Lake for MGM. It bores me stiff. The last time I'll ever do a screenplay of a book I wrote myself. Just turning over dry bones.

Letter to Charles Morton,

13 October 1945. Chandler was writing from Big Bear Lake, a mountain resort he and Cissy often used to escape the Angelino inferno. ‘La Hellman’ refers to Lillian Hellman, the New York playwright and long-term companion of Dashiell Hammett.

As to talking about Hammett in the past tense, I did myself in that essay. I hope he is not to be so spoken of. As far as I know he is alive and well, but he has gone so long without writing – unless you count a couple of screenplay jobs which, rumor says, La Hellman really did for him that I wonder. He was one of the many guys who couldn't take Hollywood without trying to push God out of the high seat. I recall an incident reported to me when Hammett was occupying a suite at the Beverly-Wilshire. A party wished to make him a proposition and called late of a morning, was admitted by Hammett's houseboy to a living room, and after a very long wait, an inner door opened and the great man appeared in it, clad in an expensive lounging robe (no doubt with his initials on the pocket) with a scarf draped tastefully around his neck. He stood in silence as the man expounded. At the end he said politely: ‘No.’ He turned and withdrew, the door closed, the houseboy ushered the gent out, and the silence fell, interrupted only by the gurgling of a Scotch from an inner room. If you ever saw Hammett, you will realize the dignity and pathos of this little scene. He is a very distinguished-looking guy, and I imagine he could say ‘no’ without perceptible trace of a Brooklyn accent. I liked him very much and he was an amazingly competent drunk, which, having a poor head for liquor, I seem always to admire. It was a great pity that he stopped writing. I've never known why. I suppose he may  have come to the end of his resources in a certain style and have lacked the intellectual depth to compensate for that by trying something else. But I'm not sure. I think the man has been both overrated and underrated. Your friend Dale Warren recently read The Maltese Falcon, for the first time too, and saw little in it. But I have read so much of this kind of writing that the gulf between Hammett and the merely tough boys seems to me vast. Old Joe Shaw may have put his finger on the trouble when he said Hammett never really cared for any of his characters. 

(...)

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? 

(...)

Our cat is growing positively tyrannical. If she finds herself alone anywhere she emits blood curdling yells until someone comes running. She sleeps on a table in the service porch and now demands to be lifted up and down from it. She gets warm milk about eight o'clock at night and starts yelling for it about 7.30. When she gets it she drinks a little, goes off and sits under a chair, and comes and yells all over again for someone to stand beside her while she has another go at the milk. When we have company she looks them over and decides almost instantly if she likes them. If she does she strolls over and plomps down on the floor just far away enough to make it a chore to pet her. If she doesn't like them she sits in the middle of the living room, casts a contemptuous glance around, and proceeds to wash her backside . . . When she was younger she always celebrated the departure of visitors by tearing wildly through the house and ending up with a good claw on the davenport, the one that is  covered with brocatelle and makes superb clawing, and it comes off in strips. But she is lazy now. Won't even play with the catnip mouse unless it is dangled in such a position that she can play with it lying down. I believe I told you how she used to catch all sorts of very breakable living things and bring them in the house quite unhurt as a rule. I'm sure she never hurt them intentionally. Cats are very interesting. They have a terrific sense of humor and, unlike dogs, cannot be embarrassed or humiliated by being laughed at. There is nothing worse in nature than seeing a cat trying to provoke a few more hopeless attempts to escape out of a half-dead mouse. My enormous respect for our cat is largely based on a complete lack in her of this diabolical sadism. When she used to catch mice – we haven't had any for years – she brought them alive and undamaged and let me take them out of her mouth. Her attitude seemed to be, ‘Well, here's this damn mouse. Had to catch it, but it's really your problem. Remove it at once.’ Periodically she goes through all the closets and cupboards on a regular mouse-inspection. Never finds any, but she realizes it's part of her job.

From: The Raymond Chandler Papers

Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909–1959