The mystery of influence: why Raymond Chandler persists while so many more respected writers are forgotten - Critical Essay
I opened my eyes, in no hurry to wake up. The memory that started off my Sunday was Dona Maura's fingers on the table. I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep. It didn't work. It was after eleven and I'd slept enough. The light that worked its way through the venetian blinds was weak, almost nonexistent, and was accompanied by the sound of rain, which I wasn't sure if I really heard or just imagined. ... The vision that greeted me in the mirror was of a man whose hair and general demeanor recalled one of the Marx Brothers.
This passage from the Brazilian novel The Silence of the Rain, by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, just translated into English, brings with it a kind of deja vu. Something is being conjured Narrative Essays up out of the collective memory--the rain, the loneliness, the restless man alone--that feels as familiar, the worldly-wise narrator would no doubt say, as a hangover on a Sunday morning. Inspector Espinosa writes with a Parker pen that "dated back to the war--the second, naturally"; he envies the "cops in American movies." When he gets home at night there's no wife, or even dog, to greet him, just an answering machine; for breakfast he munches on leftover cheese, and admits, "It wasn't brunch at the Plaza, but it would do." When the narrative switches to the third per son and we see the inspector from outside, wandering, as often as not, from a local McDonald's to the Forensic Institute, it is to find that he "walked across the weight room like a priest walking through a nudist colony."
That simile is the tip-off: here is none other than Philip Marlowe, the iconic Narrative Essays gumshoe patented by Raymond Chandler, translated into modern-day Rio and outfitted with a few local mannerisms and a new name. It is not entirely surprising to find Marlowe walking the sun-bleached, crime-riddled streets of Rio. Of all the great figures of the American Century, he seems one of the most durable, in part because he travels so widely and so well. Haruki Murakami, who has quietly revolutionized Japanese literature with his everyday mysteries of identity and disappearance (who am I, and what happened to that memory--that girl--that was here a moment ago?), began his career by translating Chandler, among others, into kanji and katakana script. Fay Weldon, in her recent autobiography, confesses to growing up on Chandler at her Scottish-inflected school in New Zealand. Many of the most distinctive writers to have come from Los Angeles in recent years, from Ross Macdonald and Walter Mosley to Kem Nunn and even Bret Narrative Essays Easton Ellis (those coyotes howling in the hills), could never have written without Chandler's shadow by their side. And his list of admirers extends to even more unexpected places--W. H. Auden, Somerset Maugham, and now Garcia-Roza. "I opened a beer and waited for the three beeps from the microwave," says Inspector Espinosa, and we are instantly on familiar ground again.
Influence is a curious thing, as the Everyman's Library release of the first complete collection of Chandler's short stories (and its simultaneous release of two omnibus editions of his novels) underlines. There is, after all, no anniversary to celebrate, no ostensible reason why Chandler should be brought before the public eye again (none of his seven novels has ever been out of print). Yet he seems as central to us today as the Nobel Prize-winning poet born in the same year as he was, who likewise commuted between the English and the Narrative Essays American ways of seeing things to suggest a modern fracture, T. S. Eliot. Dreiser, Lewis, and Upton Sinclair are all more warmly received into the canon, yet none of them gave us a voice, a presence--a moral stance, really--as easy to recognize and as hard to forget as Raymond Chandler did.
Even fewer American writers of the past century gave us a location (in Chandler's case, Los Angeles) that casts such a mythic spell. L.A., in Chandler's fiction, is not only a femme fatale but a shorthand for illusion; Hollywood comes to seem an allegorical zone in which nobody is what he seems (not even the straight-talking detective), morality itself is in turnaround, and the self is undergoing its ninth rewrite, being worked on by other hands. Even those who have never heard of Marlowe recognize, almost instinctively, the setting in which we most often find him: the rain-washed streets, broken neon Narrative Essays flickering above the empty hotel, the darkened room. Chandler's favored locales have become as familiar as the souls who inhabit them, the dangerous blondes circling around a loner who hides his soft heart behind quick quips and a hopeful bravado.
One way to explain Chandler's continued hold on us is to point out that he was among the first writers lucky enough to begin creating novels just as the movies were asserting their force as the mass art form of the American moment; like Graham Greene in his way (and, more recently, Elmore Leonard), Chandler wrote with the movies and sometimes for them, even when he was only writing novels. Whereas the novelists of a slightly earlier generation--Faulkner and Fitzgerald, famously--lost their way in trying to become screenwriters, Chandler allowed the movie's sense of story to quicken his prose even as his feel for atmosphere colored the films around him. Six of Narrative Essays his works were made into motion pictures, and twice he was nominated for an Academy Award (for Double Indemnity, which he wrote with Billy Wilder, and The Blare Dahlia, which he adapted from a work in progress). At some level Humphrey Bogart--prep-school dropout turned romantic loner--could never have existed if Chandler had not invented him.
To this day Chandler's stamp is most obvious in the movies, from Chinatown to L.A. Confidential; when Christopher Nolan, the director of Memento, made his first film, Following, on a tiny budget in contemporary London, he based his story (a story, as it happens, of a burglar's ruthlessness) on a two-timing blonde who wears her hair like a forties heroine and a lonely dupe in a small room with a typewriter and a picture of Marilyn Monroe on his wall. Yet there were other writers--James M. Cain, Jim Thompson, and especially Chandler's immediate inspiration, Dashiell Hammett--who gave Narrative Essays us the noir voice, too. What is it about Chandler that moved Evelyn Waugh, of all people, to refer to him, in the late forties, as "the greatest living American novelist"?
The Everyman's Library stories, a few of them long unavailable and the rest drawn from hard-to-find collections, suggest an answer by showing how Chandler wrote before he was truly Chandlerian. Mostly written in the thirties (the years running up to the publication of his first novel, The Big Sleep, in 1939) for such pulp magazines as Black Mask and Dime Detective, Chandler's earliest warm-up exercises feature a kind of proto-Marlowe known as Mallory, who struggles, of course, to bring justice to an L.A. that probably thought the Morte d'Arthur was an Italian joint on Sunset. (Chandler himself was literate enough to recall, no doubt, that the real Sir Thomas Malory, who gave us our sense of high chivalry, was, in William Narrative Essays Gass's words, "charged with robbing churches, with extortion, with rape, and jailed nine times by our least numerous count.")
Earlier detective writers, such as Hammett, had perfected the story of action; Chandler in some sense extended their work into an entire vision, a Pi!grim's Progress through a culture that had never heard of Bunyan. It is no surprise that in the course of his career Marlowe comes to the rescue of a woman called Miss Quest and falls for a cop's daughter called Miss Pride. The very first page of his first novel finds him sidling up to a rich man's mansion and taking note of a stained-glass panel of a knight in dark armor trying to help a naked lady. If he lived in the house, Marlowe thinks, he'd probably be trying to help the knight.
A little of what Chandler brought to the form, then, is reflected just in the way Narrative Essays he took the brute monosyllables of Hammett's detective, Sam Spade, and turned them into the more flowery and literary-sounding Mallory and then Philip Marlowe. Yet in the early stories, Chandler is locked inside a bare-bones formula; trying to embellish it he sounds very much like today's Chandler imitators: "Beautiful hands are as rare as jacaranda-trees in bloom, in a city where pretty faces are as common as runs in dollar stockings." Three similes appear in consecutive sentences; adjectives are thrown on as if they were exotic spices.
One unusual aspect of Chandler's literary career is that he published his first story only when he was forty-five, his first novel when he was fifty, after a long career as an executive for various oil companies. Thus he and his central character are already bruised and disenchanted when we meet them--yet never without a touch of schoolboy romanticism, and the hope of something better. Narrative Essays Even in his often wooden apprentice exercises Chandler had his hold firmly on the two characters that would distinguish him forever, the knight-errant detective, living alone with his wounds, and the woman, the city, that is usually about to bring him down.
Somehow it is always night in Chandler's Los Angeles, and the fog is coming in off the ocean while the lights up above, beckoning and half unreal, belong to the houses of the crooked. Chandler's gift, always, was to see that the sunshine is the least interesting thing about California; all that is real there happens in the shadows. Darkness, in fact, is what gives dimension to the place, as the bright surfaces of the day are peeled back to reveal something troubled. In books such as The Little Sister, Chandler would give us near-perfect Hollywood novels, in which the exotic Mexican beauty turns out to be a gangster's moll Narrative Essays from Cleveland, and the movie star comes from Manhattan, Kansas. But all his books, really, are meditations on false fronts and borrowed identities, on a world in which everyone is on the make; Los Angeles is a "paradise of fakers," for which Hollywood is really just a symbol. Chandler located abortionists, dope addicts, and beatniks before the rest of America knew that such characters existed; but deeper than that, he saw how people were beginning to take their cues, their lives, even their sense of themselves, from the unreal characters onscreen. In one of the stories, a man wears a hat "which looked like a reporter's hat in a movie"; ten pages later, the lobby of a private club "looked like an MGM set for a night club."
The persistent image for the treacherous allure of California is, of course, the blonde, not because Chandler was a misogynist but because a beautiful Narrative Essays woman was the thing most unsettling to a susceptible man alone--especially a man with a quixotic taste for gallantry. The women in Chandler's fiction make for his detectives much more trouble than the men make for them, and there is always the sense--a sense that gives the stories much of their psychological unease--that the man who can handle killers and lowlifes so effectively is undefended, at some level, against women (or, at least, against the softer and more credulous side of him that women arouse). The real action and tension in most of the stories comes from this intricate dance with and around attraction.
Toward the end of his career, Chandler started bringing these themes to the fore, having Marlowe reminisce about the love he has never really gotten over, while the women around him start asking ever more searching and personal questions:
"You in show business?"
"Just the opposite of show business. I'm Narrative Essays in the hide-and-seek business."
Yet greater explicitness was un necessary. The charged space in Chandler's writing is the space, often very small, that separates Marlowe from whatever woman is coming on to him.
Style is the easiest thing to admire about Chandler, of course, and his most famous device, the simile, is a perfect way of catching a world in which everyone is playing at being somebody else. "The swell," you read of the ocean near San Diego, "is as gentle as an old lady singing hymns," and with that inflection you inhale essence of Chandler. His style (like Hemingway's) is so easy to imitate that it becomes almost impossible to transcend. Yet one thing about Chandler that put him beyond the reach of many of his disciples is that, apart from the smell of the sage and the sound of the ocean in the distance, the red lights disappearing off toward Ventura Narrative Essays and the suburban houses with their curtains drawn in midday, what Chandler was really doing was mixing worlds that had seldom heard of one another's existence. "People who spend their money for secondhand sex jags are as nervous as dowagers who can't find the rest room," he writes in The Big Sleep, and one realizes how few writers conversant with secondhand sex jags were likely to write about dowagers (or vice versa). Much of the spin of his sentences comes from these unlikely juxtapositions ("Strictly speaking," says a thug in The Little Sister, "we don't have to get into no snarling match").
It is easy to forget, amid his California settings, that Chandler was classically educated, at an English public school (the same school from which P. G. Wodehouse graduated four years before him), and that, as a faithful son of Anglo-Irish gentry, he fought in the trenches of World War I Narrative Essays with the Gordon Highlanders. California has always been best seen by slightly questioning ironists from abroad (such as Chandler's movie colleagues Hitchcock and Wilder), but in Chandler's case there was the particular magic of a world of con men and "demi-virgins" being inspected by someone raised on Euripides and Victorian hymns. The fictional biography has Marlowe born in Santa Rosa and educated at the University of Oregon, but instinct tells us that he is really an English gentleman in mufti set loose on the mean streets of Bugsy Siegel and George Raft.
Chandler had few illusions about England, and one of the most intriguing stories in the Everyman's collection is the last in the book, "English Summer," which was never published in his lifetime and was buried, in raw form, in one of his notebooks. One of only two Chandler stories set outside California, it takes place in England, and, moreover, a Narrative Essays fragrant, never-never England where the seductions of California are even more chimerical: a woman's hair here is not blonde but "gold," the kind of hair that might belong to "a princess in a remote and bitter tower." (Chandler, one recalls, could find even in Bay City a place called the Tennyson Arms.) Yet for all the glamour of Lady Lakenham and her Elizabethan home, husbands are being knocked off and women are playing on men's weaknesses as expertly as they had in California. "Nasty," the totemic Chandler word that echoes on the second page of his first story, takes on an ever more disquieting nuance, as when the protagonist of "English Summer" puts his arms around a murderer: "'He was always nasty,'" she says. "`So I did what I did.'" At times Chandler sounds almost like D. H. Lawrence in his rage at England's proprieties ("so careless, so smooth, so utterly Narrative Essays dead inside").
Yet Marlowe never relinquishes something in him of the classic public schoolboy, as anatomized so powerfully by John Le Carre and Graham Greene--romanticizing the women he does not otherwise know what to do with, nursing his pipe and his game of chess, dropping allusions to Eliot and Kierkegaard while thugs cosh him on the head. To the end of his days, Chandler drank the favorite drink of the raj--gin with lime juice--and lived by the code of his school and its famous old boy, Ernest Shackleton. When Marlowe finally extends his trust to someone--Terry Lennox, in The Long Goodbye--it is largely, we feel, because the otherwise feckless-seeming Terry speaks in an English accent, has perfect manners, and is first seen in a sleek Rolls-Royce (most dangerous of all, Marlowe believes Terry to be a hero from the foxholes of World War II). And one has to recall that when Chandler Narrative Essays visualized his books being turned into films, it was not Humphrey Bogart he saw as Philip Marlowe but, incredibly, Cary Grant.
Yet for all the foreign airs and graces (combined, uncomfortably, with a naked hatred of the rich), Chandler knew the inside of the grifter's world as if to the manner born. If you read Kevin Starr's latest volume in his ongoing history of California--Embattled Dreams, which covers the forties--you realize that Chandler was making none of his material up. L.A.P.D. detectives in the forties really did wear gold rings and shoot suspects in the back, Starr reports, and when a body was found in the morning, the apartment of the deceased was sometimes on the market by late afternoon (thanks to cops more eager to secure a real-estate agency's commission than to pursue a fleeing murderer). Murders were so common in 1947 that roughly fifty of them were covered only on Narrative Essays the back pages of the Los Angeles Times (where they were devoured by, among others, Thomas Mann), and even after the "Black Dahlia" case of the same year--a naked woman found in a car, sawed in half, her nickname taken from Chandler's film of the year before--there was never any shortage of juicy scandal: Walter Wanger, producer of Joan of Arc, shot his wife's lover in the scrotum; Robert Mitchum was set up in a marijuana bust.
What Chandler brought to all this was not just a foreign eye and sensibility but, more, an old-fashioned, even outdated moral sense that saw in L.A. a kind of Jacobean wasteland (it is a passing irony that Chandler also happens to be the name of the ruling family of Los Angeles, which, until recently, owned the Los Angeles Times and has bestowed upon the city, among other things, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion). As Jonathan Lethem, Narrative Essays who has smuggled some of Chandler into his own post modern novels, said this summer at a Chandler celebration, the classic detective story presents us with a group of innocents from which we try to pick the guilty party; Chandler's work, by contrast, presents us with a group of guilty souls from whom Marlowe tries (with increasing bitterness) to find an innocent. And whenever he does find someone on whom he can project his hopes, that person turns out to be the most cunning dissembler of all.
Earlier this year Tricycle, the Buddhist magazine, ran an article portraying Philip Marlowe as a "true American bodhisattva," a "Zen Peacemaker" seeing through the emptiness of surfaces--California, a perfect image for what the Buddhists might call samsara--one who, holding to no creed, ventures out into the dark to banish illusion. This might sound farfetched, but it is certainly true that in the Zen temples of Narrative Essays Kyoto, near which I live, Chandler is devoured as eagerly as if he were Suzuki (one American Zen student I know wrote his master's thesis on Chandler's vision); and if this is not how most of us see the shopworn detective, it is, surely, part of how Chandler saw him. "Are you honest?" a woman asks our hero at one point. "Painfully," he answers. "I heard you levelled with the customers," says a client in the late story "The Pencil." "That's why I stay poor," says Marlowe.
Over and over we see Marlowe suffering from his attempts to remain upright in a city that is all curves. Where a Hercule Poirot or a Sherlock Holmes, say, compels our admiration by brilliantly solving a puzzle of some kind, Marlowe wins our sympathy by singularly failing to do so. He is always in the dark, at some level, getting the wrong end of the Narrative Essays stick. The classic detective invariably gets his man; Marlowe usually fails even to get his woman. It is a measure of the kind of fiction that Chandler was producing, in fact, that the mysteries he contemplates (how can someone possibly betray a friend, and what is the right course of action in a society that's turned upside down?) are the kind that can never be solved.
Thus the very people Marlowe looks down upon, from his dark aerie, invariably look down on him--the women because he has no money, the men because he has no clout. One stock scene in almost every Chandler story has someone asking the detective how much he earns, and, when answered honestly ($25 a day, plus expenses), greeting him with an incredulity that borders on contempt. "You're small-time," a hoodlum says to Marlowe in The Long Goodbye. "You're a piker, Marlowe. You're a peanut grifter. You're so Narrative Essays little it takes a magnifying glass to see you." This strain of abuse continues until, by the final novel, Playback, he is being described as a "beat-up California peeper," a "dirty low-down detective," a "small-town nobody." "Well, what do you know?" a woman says when he insists on his honesty. "A dick with scruples." The men he meets hit him on the head, and the women hit him in ways that leave even more lasting injuries.
Psychologists, at this point, could talk of Chandler's own bitterness at being consigned to the small-town nowhere of genre fiction, even as his letters and essays were showing him to be among the most thoughtful American writers of his time; part of his frustration, often, was that he was writing books for readers who had no time for his allusions to Anatole France and The Brothers Karamazov, even as the people who might have enjoyed his Narrative Essays digressive reflections felt embarrassed about opening books that were said to be crime fiction. If Marlowe's tragedy is to be a man of principle in a city where morality is a dirty word, Chandler's was to be a figure of high culture (at least as he saw it) in a genre where fanciness was seen as a needless obstacle.
In his movie version of The Long Goodbye, from 1973--a film best savored if you assume it has little to do with Chandler--Robert Altman catches something of this sense of being out of time and place by having Elliott Gould, a Bogart of the seventies, drive around post-sixties L.A. in a sleek black roadster from the forties, dressed, almost pathetically, in a dark suit and tie even as the California girls around him are dancing around topless. "What the hell are you from?" a cop asks, and Marlowe answers, "A long time ago." Narrative Essays When Altman actually has Marlowe turn into a killer at the end, he is, in effect, killing off Marlowe himself, or at least that high heroic Marlowe that Chandler so defended. In the books, after all (on one of the last pages of the last novel), Marlowe walks away from a $5,000 payoff and, when pressed, suggests it be sent to the Police Relief Fund.
John Bayley, in his introduction to the stories, is one of those who disparages Chandler when he becomes serious and reflective, preferring instead the rat-a-tat-tat action of The Big Sleep. For those in search of vivid, fast-moving detective stories, rich with the smell of murder and honeysuckle, the early books are indeed the best; but for those of us who read Chandler not because of his plots but in spite of them (when asked by filmmakers shooting The Big Sleep to reveal who killed one of the Narrative Essays characters, Chandler famously cabled back, "NO IDEA"), his writing is best when it leaves detective fiction behind altogether.
Chandler's culminating work, for this kind of reader, is, without question, The Long Goodbye, which takes the love affair with Los Angeles to its last bitter gasp and, like the better kind of fiction, leaves us with more questions than it answers; one is more unsettled than satisfied at the book's conclusion. There are almost no one-liners in the book, and very few similes; most of the narrative seems to be moving away from any mystery of the kind that can be "solved." Marlowe dares to make himself vulnerable, even to lay himself on the line, for Terry Lennox, the smooth playboy who at some level represents everything Marlowe longs to be (with his nice manners and his background of heroism), and when Terry is found to have played him, the way everyone else Narrative Essays does, there is nowhere for Marlowe to turn. Whatever illusions he kept himself going on before are now exhausted, and the detective-story formula so clearly shown in the early stories is stretched to the point where it snaps. When Marlowe, at the end of the book, takes a woman into his bed, for almost the only time in his career, it feels, in the context of his loneliness, less a triumph than a gesture of defeat.
By the time of the throwaway coda that is his final novel, Playback, the spirit of the books has vanished. Many of the story's characters are senior citizens, and, instead of L.A., the detective tools around the affluent San Diego suburb of La Jolla, as Chandler did in his final years. Neither the author nor his detective even seems to have the strength for any wit--"Down below, the ocean was getting a lapis lazuli blue that Narrative Essays somehow failed to remind me of Miss Vermilyea's eyes." As in the later stories, Chandler starts to turn a faintly therapeutic eye on Marlowe, and the fine balance of woundedness and conscience that distinguished him is gone. "Haven't you ever been in love?" a woman asks him, and then, "How can such a hard man be so gentle?" When Marlowe actually finds a virgin in his final published story, twenty-eight years old and kind, he turns away from her regretfully. "I've had too many women to deserve one like you." In his final novel he likewise rejects a redhead (and New Yorker reader) who invites him to come and escape with her to "one of those tall apartment houses along the ocean front in Rio" (where, we might imagine, Inspector Espinosa lives).
Were Chandler to see how his character has been reborn in such a building (the dust jacket of The Silence Narrative Essays of the Rain describes Espinosa as blessed with "the mind of a philosopher, the heart of a romantic, and enough experience to realize that things are not always as they seem"), he might permit himself a smile. And were he to see how his books are being released with such fanfare--Professor Bayley acknowledging that his late wife, Iris Murdoch, was a Chandler aficionado, too--he might feel himself vindicated a little. Yet in his life he ended with a sense of failure. He had used up the form he took on, and there was nothing to put in its place. On the last page of the last novel, Marlowe seems to accept an offer of marriage, and for those of us who have followed him through a quarter of a century, we know the jig is up. A married Marlowe is about as resonant as a Hamlet with two kids and a Narrative Essays dog.
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