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

  . . . You cannot have art without a public taste and you cannot have a public taste without a sense of style and quality throughout the social structure. Curiously enough this sense of style seems to have very little to do with refinement or even humanity. It can exist in a savage and dirty age, but it cannot exist in an age of the Book of the Month Club, the Hearst press, and the Coca-Cola machine. You can't produce art by trying, by setting up exacting standards, by talking about critical minutiae, by the Flaubert method. It is produced with great ease, in an almost offhand manner, and without self-consciousness. You can't write just because you have read all the books.

  Letter to Jamie Hamilton,

  22 June 1949.

  I think my favorite Hollywood story is about the Warner brothers, Jack and Harry. The day after Hal Wallis (who had been head of production at the studio) ankled and left them flat, there was deep gloom and a horrid sense of catastrophe at the executive lunch table. All the boys huddle down at the bottom of the table to get far away from Jack Warner when he comes in. All but one, a pushing young producer named Jerry Wald (supposed by some to be the original of Sammy Glick in What Makes Sammy Run) who sits down near the head of the table. Jack and Harry Warner come in. Jack sits at the head of the table and Harry just around the corner. Jerry Wald is near and all the others as far away as possible. Jack looks at them with disgust and turns to Harry.

  JACK: That sonofabitch, Wallis.

  HARRY: Yes, Jack.

  JACK: A lousy fifty dollar a week publicity man. We build him up from nothing. We made him one of the biggest men in Hollywood. And what does he do to us? He picks up his hat and walks out and leaves us cold.

  HARRY: Yes, Jack.

  JACK: That's gratitude for you. And take that sonofabitch Zanuck. A lousy hundred a week writer and we took him in hand and built him up and made him one of the biggest men in Hollywood. And what did he do to us? Picked up his hat and walked out on us cold.

  HARRY: Yes, Jack.

  JACK: That's gratitude for you. Why we could take any sonofabitch we liked and build him up from nothing and make him one of the biggest men in Hollywood.

  HARRY: Yes, Jack.

  JACK: Anybody at all. (He turns and looks at Jerry Wald) What's your name?

  WALD: Jerry Wald, Mr Warner.

  JACK: (to Harry) Jerry Wald. Why, Harry, we could take this fellow here and build him up from nothing to be one of the biggest men in Hollywood, couldn't we, Harry?

  HARRY: Yes, Jack, we certainly could.

  JACK: And what would it get us? We build him up to be a big man, give him power and reputation, make him one of the biggest names in Hollywood, and you know what would happen, Harry? The sonofabitch would walk out and leave us flat.

  HARRY: Yes, Jack.

  JACK: So why wait for that to happen, Harry? Let's fire the sonofabitch right now.

  Letter to Dale Warren,

  9 July 1949. Laski is the novelist Marghanita Laski; Waugh is Evelyn Waugh; Stranger in the Land was a novel by a writer called Ward Thomas.

  I have had a bout with a strep throat which was only fun because it gave me a chance to be shot full of penicillin, a very wonderful thing that makes you almost feel that God is on the side of the right people after all. One had begun to doubt it.

  ... I thought Laski's book had a great idea, but she hasn't either the style or the comic invention to put it over. If Waugh had written it, it would have been really something. As for Stranger in the Land I thought it well-written in a negative anonymous sort of way, but the subject repelled me. There ought to be a good novel in homosexualism, but this isn't it ... What I think would be interesting would be a picture of the peculiar mentality of the homosexualist, his sense of taste, his surface brilliance often, his fundamental inability to finish anything ... I can't take the homo seriously as a moral outcast. He's no more than the other rebels against a sanctimonious and hypocritical society. There is no more disgusting spectacle on earth than the business man at a stag smoker, and this is just the type of man who would come down hardest on the abnormal. The difficulty of writing about a homo is the utter impossibility of getting inside his head unless you are one yourself, and then you can't get inside the head of a heterosexual man. If you ever read the cross examination of Wilde by Edward Carson in the suit against Queensberry, I think you are bound to admit that here were two people shouting across oceans of misunderstanding. The mob impulse to destroy the homo is like the impulse of a wolf pack to turn on the sick wolf and tear him to pieces, or the human impulse to run away from a hopeless disease. This is probably very old and very cruel, but at the bottom of it is a kind of horror, like a woman frightened by a scorpion. All cruelty is a kind of fear. Deep inside us we must realize what fragile bonds hold us to sanity and these bonds are threatened by repulsive insects and repulsive vices. And the vices are repulsive, not in themselves, but because of their effect on us. They threaten us because our own normal vices fill us at times with the same sort of repulsion.

  Letter to Paul Brooks,

  who planned to publish a collection of Chandler's old pulp stories, 19 July 1949.

  You say some of them I will doubtless want to omit. Or in other words they stink. Which? I doubt if I'm the best judge. Well, let's be bloody frank about this. If something dates, or makes you cringe, out. If it is a small thing that can be fixed, I'll try to fix it. If it is inherent in the plot, I can't. Take the story called ‘Blackmailers Don't Shoot’, the first I ever wrote. It took me five months to write this thing, it has enough action for five stories and the whole thing is a goddam pose. ‘Finger Man’ was the first story I felt at home with. ‘Smart Aleck Kill’ and ‘BDS’ are pure pastiche. When I started out to write fiction I had the great disadvantage of having absolutely no talent for it. I couldn't get characters in and out of rooms. They lost their hats and so did I. If more than two people were on scene I couldn't keep one of them alive. This failing is still with me, of course, to some extent. Give me two people snotting at each other across a desk and I am happy. A crowded canvas just bewilders me. (I could say the same of some rather distinguished writers, only they don't know it and I do.) I don't know who was the original idiot who advised a writer, ‘Don't bother about the public. Just write what you want to write.’ No writer ever wants to write anything. He wants to reproduce or render certain effects and in the beginning he hasn't the faintest idea how to do it.

  Letter to Carl Brandt,

  22 July 1949.

  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.

  Letter to Carl Brandt,

  1 September 1949. Asphalt Jungle, considered by many a classic of the hardboiled school, was by W. R. Burnett. The introduction being referred to is to the collection that was being published of Chandler's old pulp stories.

  I quite agree with you about the Asphalt Jungle. I tried to read it and couldn't. This is a sample of what Hollywood does to writers. The stuff is sound and honest and knows what it is doing. But it has no inner urgency, it just doesn't matter. A man may sit down to write a book with no other motive than to meet a deadline or make a few dollars, but if he is a real writer, that is soon forgotten. In Hollywood they destroy the link between a writer and his subconscious. After that what he does is merely a performance.

  As to the introduction I suppose an idea of how to go about it. I'm certainly not going to write about these stories as though I were an elderly Henry James or Somerset Maugham tidying up the shelves for posterity. I'm strictly an amateur and an iconoclast in these matters. I think literary history and criticism are as full of bunk and sheer dishonesty
as school history generally.

  Letter to James Sandoe,

  14 September 1949.

  Sometimes I wonder what my politics would be if I lived in England. Can't imagine myself voting now that its nasty bureaucratic soul has been revealed. If you vote Conservative, what do you vote for? You don't, you just vote against. Very much like the last election here. All very well to talk about the patriotic duty of voting and so forth, but why should it be my duty to choose either of two candidates when I don't believe either has any business in the White House? My English friends tell me that the Labor Party will win the next election by a small majority and that by that time the country will be in such a mess that there will be a schism in the Labor Party between the moderates like Crossman and Attlee and the wild men like Nye Bevan. I wouldn't know. Eventually, I am afraid, even in England, the scoundrels will inherit the revolution. They always have where the revolution was real and internal, not a revolt against foreign domination. And that, to dispose of the subject, is where you can't class the Catholic Church with the Communists. The Catholic Church in spite of its sins and its hypocrisy and its politicking and its fascist tendencies and its nasty unprincipled use of the boycott is capable of internal discussion and growth without liquidation of its best elements. It can tolerate heresy and it is not afraid to go abroad among the heathen ... It proselytizes constantly, but it does not shoot people in the back of the head because they are forty-eight hours behind the party line.

  Letter to Dale Warren,

  15 September 1949.

  The news from here is rotten. Nervous, tired, discouraged, sick of the chauffeur-and-Cadillac atmosphere . . . disgusted at my lack of prescience in not seeing that this kind of life is unsuited to my temperament . . . Writers who get written about become self-conscious. They develop a regrettable habit of looking at themselves through the eyes of other people. They are no longer alone, they have an investment in critical praise, and they think that they must protect it. This leads to a diffusion of effort. The writer watches himself as he works. He grows more subtle and he pays for it by a loss of organic dash. But since he often achieves a real success in the commercial sense just about as he reaches this stage of regrettable sophistication, he fools himself into thinking that his last book is his best. It isn't. Its success is the result of a slow accumulation. The book which is the occasion of success is more often than not by no means the cause of it.

  Letter to James Sandoe,

  20 September 1949. Chandler was reading a book called American Freedom and Catholic Power, by Paul Blanshard.

  I'd like to see a reasoned reply, but where would you get it? The Jesuits seem to have a monopoly on this sort of chore and their casuistical double talk would be disgusting if it were not so logically comical. Any time they get on dangerous ground they simply rule that its solidity is a matter of directed faith and not subject to question by the faithful ... I suppose I only concern myself with this because the closed mind is the worst enemy of freedom. The highbrows, fantastic as they sometimes are, seem to be about the only people we can rely on for a perpetual challenge to what passes for truth. That's why I read the Partisan Review. There's a lot of nonsense in it and some of the terminology used by these rare birds like Allen Tate nearly makes me throw my lunch. But at least they don't take things for granted.

  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. How can the same decent man become a convert to a religious system that played ball with Franco in Spain, and still does, that never in the history of the world has refused to play ball with any scoundrel who was willing to protect and enrich the Church? Well, I guess nobody wants to hear from me about it.

  Letter to Marcel Duhanel,

  Raymond Chandler's French publisher, 28 September 1949.

  Duhanel worked for Gallimard, under whose umbrella he had published a number of talented hardboiled American writers in a series called ‘Série Noire’. This influential (and successful) series had brought the likes of Chandler, Hammett and Cain to a generation of French intellectuals. Albert Camus was famously to claim that the hero of his epochal novel L'Étranger had been more influenced by Série Noire than by any literary fiction. It was from the name of this Gallimard series that the popular expression ‘Film Noir’ would also arise.

  I have always thought it one of the charms of dealing with publishers that if you start talking about money, they retire coldly to their professional eminence, and if you start talking about literature, they immediately yank the dollar sign before your eyes.

  Letter to James Sandoe,

  14 October 1949.

  Am now reading Marquand's So Little Time. As I recall or seem to recall it was rather deprecated when it came out, but it seems to me full of good sharp wit and liveliness and altogether much more satisfying than Point of No Return, which I found boring in its total impact, although not boring as one read it. Have also started A Sea Change by Nigel Dennis which looks good. But I always like the wrong books anyhow. And the wrong pictures. And the wrong people. And I have a bad habit of starting a book and reading just far enough to make sure that I want to read it and look forward to reading it and then putting it to one side while I break the ice on a couple more. In that way, when I feel dull and depressed, which is too often, I know I have something to read late at night when I do most of it and not that horrid blank feeling of not having anybody to talk or listen to.

  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.

  Letter to John Houseman,

  a British producer with whom Chandler had been friendly while at Hollywood, October 1949.

  Your article in Vogue was much admired here. I think it was beautifully written and had a lot of style. For me personally it had an effect (aftertaste is a better word) of depression and it aroused my antagonism. It is artistically patronizing, intellectually dishonest and logically unsound. It is the last wimper of the Little Theater mind in you. However, I'm all for your demand that pictures, even tough pictures, and especially tough pictures, have a high moral content. Time this week calls Philip Marlowe ‘amoral’. This is pure nonsense. Assuming that his intelligence is as high as mine (it could hardly be higher), assuming his chances in life to promote his own interest are as numerous as they must be, why does he work for such a pittance? For the answer to that is the whole story, the story that is always being written by indirection and yet never is completely or even clearly. It is the struggle of all fundamentally honest men to make a decent living in a corrupt society. It is an impossible struggle; he can't win. He can be poor and bitter and take it out in wisecracks and casual amours, or he can be corrupt and amiable and rude like a Hollywood producer. 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.

  The stories I wrote were ostensibly mysteries. I did not write the stories behind those stories, because I was not a good enough writer. That does not alter the basic fact that Marlowe is a more honorable man than you and I. I don't mean Bogart playing Marlowe and I don't m
ean because I created him. I didn't create him at all; I've seen dozens like him in all essentials except the few colorful qualities he needed to be in a book. (A few even had those.) They were all poor; they will always be poor. How could they be anything else.

  Letter to Jamie Hamilton,

  11 November 1949.

  This is Armistice Day here, a sort of mixed holiday. Banks and post offices closed, and a few stores, but not many. Big parade of troops and marines and sailors, none of them have any idea what the first world war was like. It was a damn sight worse than they think . . .

  While reviewing generally is not very reliable anywhere, I really think that English reviewing is getting absurd. There are far, far too many novelists reviewing other novelists. There is far too much consideration for books that are obviously going to get nowhere, and far too little understanding of what it is in books that makes people read them. And there is a tight group of critics or reviewers who are monotonously willing to say something nice about almost any book at all. Your own book ads show it. These names, supposedly of influence, really can't have any because they show no discrimination to speak of ... And at the other extreme is that ridiculous publication The Times Literary Supplement, which is apparently compiled from the blitherings of a group of aged dons, whose standards of comparisons, points of reference or what have you, seem to be stuck in the year when Jowett translated Plato . . .

  P.S. I suppose you know this, but I think it wonderful, from Fontemara, by Ignazio Silone:

  At the head of all is God, lord of heaven.

  Then comes Prince Torlonia, lord of earth.

  Then comes the armed guard of Prince Torlonia.

  Then come the hounds of the armed guard of Prince Torlonia.

  Then comes nobody else.

  And still nobody else.