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

  Of all the people we met in London, I think we liked best Roger Machell, a director of Jamie Hamilton, a cheerful, rather pudgy, light-hearted character, with a droll sense of humor and the sort of offhand good manners which you rarely find except in a genuine aristocrat. This fellow is an old Etonian, which of course is not conclusive. He is a great grand-nephew of Queen Victoria, he is the grandson of Prince Hohenlohe, and his mother, Lady Something or Other Machell, lives in St James Palace. He was badly wounded in the war and made a joke of it. He seemed to think it was characteristic that he should have been wounded while telephoning London from a French pub. A bomb just dropped on it and blew a piece of a wall through his chest. It just missed killing him, but he seems to show no ill effects now. He said he got a commission as a major in some guards regiment, but he doesn't know how, probably pure luck or someone else made a bad mistake. When he reported one morning to a barracks in London in uniform he found them in the act of the changing of the guard. He said he didn't know whether he was supposed to salute the guard or if the guard was supposed to salute him, so he just sat in his car outside until it was all over. He has the sort of humorous, self-deprecating manner which by sheer magic of personality is never overdone or posey or artificial. He lives handsomely in chambers in the Old Albany, drives a ramshackle old car, mixes perfectly awful martinis in a two-quart water pitcher (two of them would knock you out for a week) and took us on a wonderful tour of London, including the East End bombed-out district, making all the time such comments as, ‘Well, let's run down and take a look at the Tower, supposing I can find it,’ and ‘Over there is St Paul's or something of that sort.’ He had us in giggles the whole time, yet he is in no sense of the word an intentional comedian. I claim that a man who can get away with this sort of thing and be perfectly natural about it is a bit of a genius.

  Letter to Jamie Hamilton,

  7 December 1952.

  Just a quick chit to let you know the state of affairs in beautiful La Jolla which has not been beautiful to me lately. Cissy came back from hospital yesterday. She had an intestinal block, probably a long, slow accumulation and a result of the costivating effect (the French word is so much nicer, don't you think) of certain drugs given to her for her cough. It was removed without an operation, but not without pain. Cissy is in bed and we had a nurse last night, but may get by without one tonight.

  Anyway, life has been hell and I have done nothing in the way of work at all. In fact, I got so completely exhausted that I had to go in for a check-up myself and was found to be quite anaemic and to be suffering from malnutrition ... I knew I'd lost my interest in food but I didn't know you could get malnutrition that fast.

  Letter to H. F. Hose,

  6 January 1953.

  Our trip to England was a qualified success. There is a fundamental decency about the English people and a sort of effortless sense of good manners which I find very attractive. English people themselves seem to think that their manners have deteriorated, but they are still far better than anywhere else in the world. Americans can be very polite too, especially when they are trying to sell you something.

  Letter to James Sandoe,

  4 February 1953.

  The only private eye I have met personally was brought to the house one night by a lawyer friend of mine. He did seventeen years as a detective on the San Diego police force. Most of his work consists of digging up info for lawyers, finding witnesses etc. He struck me as a bombastic and not too scrupulous individual. The private eye of fiction is pure fantasy and is meant to be. In California the private eye is licensed to investigate and nothing else. He is licensed by the same authority that licenses beauty parlor operators. His bond, which costs him fifty dollars, is for no other purpose than to protect clients against swindling.

  Letter to H. N. Swanson,

  14 March 1953.

  Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction? It's a scream. It's written like this: ‘I checked out with K19 on Adabaran III, and stepped out through the crummaliote hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked on the heat bars and the Bryllis ran swiftly on five legs using their other two to send out crylon vibrations. The pressure was almost unbearable, but I caught the range on my wrist computer through the transparent cysicites. I pressed the trigger. The thin violet glow was icecold against the rust-colored mountains. The Bryllis shrank to half an inch long and I worked fast stepping on them with the poltex. But it wasn't enough. The sudden brightness swung me around and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn't enough. He was right.’ They pay brisk money for this crap?

  Letter to Roger Machell,

  15 March 1953. Machell had sent Chandler a copy of an interview with him, published in John O'London's Weekly.

  This is going to be awful, because I'm balling the jack myself and on a Corona yet. On Sunday nobody works but Chandler and he breaks his heart seven days a week and without no music. He calls me small. What is his standard? I have hardly ever weighed less than twelve stone – is that small in England? I have often weighed almost 13 stone. Attired for the street I am an inch short of six feet. My nose is not sharp but blunt, the result of trying to tackle a man as he was kicking a ball. For an English nose it would hardly be called prominent. Wispy hair like steel wool? Nuts. It is limp. Walks with a forward-leaning lope, huh? Chandler cantered gaily into the cocktail lounge, rapidly consumed three double gimlets and fell flat on his kisser, his steel wool hair curling gracefully against the pattern of the carpet. No wonder this man Forster thinks me observant. By his standards anyone who noticed how many walls the room had would be observant.

  Memo to Juanita Messick, 1953.

  That is a lot of bunk – removing the grid while preheating. Because why? The grid gets hot very quickly during cooking. The meat splatters grease all over it. The meat has to be turned and therefore does not always lie in the same place. What drivel sales people do talk! Take cigarette advertising. Every favorite brand is milder and less irritating than every other. The ideal cigarette has no taste at all. Therefore why smoke? What we need for broiling is a non-spattering steak, a steak containing no grease, fat, or other injurious ingredients, and incidentally, no flavor. What we need is a steakless steak to be broiled on a heatless broiler in a non-existent oven and eaten by a toothless ghost.

  Letter to Alan K. Campbell,

  the director of the Harvard Summer School, 22 April 1953.

  I am replying to your kind letter of April 1st, inviting me to have something to say at a conference of the Harvard Summer School. Naturally, I am grateful and flattered that you should think of me, and I am regretful that largely for personal reasons I cannot be in Boston in August. I say largely for personal reasons, and these reasons are compelling. But I do not say entirely, since it is not within my scheme of living, and I don't see how it could ever be, to get up on a platform and tell anyone about anything. Perhaps I am trying to make a virtue out of diffidence. I hope that is not entirely true, but it may be. I am not a lecturer, nor do I have any qualifications to be one. Too bad. It would be a nice one to drop into the still pool of respectful attention, ‘You know I lectured at Harvard last summer. It was rather fun.’ Thank you again.

  Letter to Jamie Hamilton,

  11 May 1953.

  I've just read a book you put out by Miriam Bougenicht called Ring and Come In. Frankly, I'm getting pretty damn tired of suspense stories by neurotic females and their atmosphere of half-delayed psychiatry. It's one of those books where every line of action, or every line of dialogue immediately has to be followed by a paragraph of analysis, explanation, interior monologue or whatever you call it, so that half way through you start skipping that.

  Two things I am annoyed about in The Journal of Eugène Delacroix: one is the India Paper, which of course I like very much in some ways but when the tops o
f the pages are painted they are so hard to turn: the other is reading a book as fine as this in English when I might just as well be reading it in French. I suppose this is an excellent translation, but the style seems to be a bit stuffy compared with the French. Take any sentence at random. Take the second one in the book: ‘My keenest wish is to remember that I am writing only for myself What a heavy lump of suet that is compared with the lightness and ease of the French, the casual arrangement of the words and so on. Damn translations anyway. We have to have them because there are so many languages we don't know, but they're never the real thing, not even the best of them.

  As to my own efforts, I should say I am about four-fifths of the way through. It is almost completely rewritten because of my unfortunate inability to edit anything except changing a word here or there. If it isn't right, I always have to start all over again and rewrite it. It seems easier to me; it isn't easier I know, it just seems easier. Every now and again I get stuck on a chapter, and then wonder why. But there's always a reason, and I have to wait for the reason to come to me.

  Letter to Jamie Hamilton,

  26 May 1953.

  Some titles, not many, have a particular magic which impresses itself on the memory. I guess we would all like to have them, but we can't very often achieve them, and certainly not by trying. Titles like RED SHOES RUN FASTER, DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON, THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED, JOURNEY'S END, LOST HORIZON, POINT OF NO RETURN, etc.

  Letter to Alfred Knopf,

  16 July 1953.

  I am no longer with Brandt & Brandt, and in a way I regret that I was ever persuaded to leave you, although I realize I was no great financial asset to your publishing house. But I did, and a man can't keep jumping about from publisher to publisher . . . I'm a little tired of the kick-'em-in-the-teeth stuff myself. I hope I have developed, but perhaps I have only grown tired and soft, but certainly not mellow. After all, I have fifty per cent Irish blood.

  Letter to H. F. Hose,

  16 September 1953.

  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.

  Letter to thriller writer James M. Fox,

  January 1954. The ‘s.o.b.’ is J. Edgar Hoover.

  All secret police forces come to the same end. I'll bet the s.o.b. has a dossier on everybody who could do him damage. The F.B.I. throws up such a smoke screen that they make the public forget all the tough ones they never broke . . . Practically all secret police forces are fundamentally pretty stupid because it is so damned easy for them to cover up. I don't mean the men in the field, but the desk jockeys.

  Letter to Jamie Hamilton,

  16 January 1954.

  Los Angeles has nothing for me any more. It's only a question of time until a Gentile has to wear an armband there. The story I am fitfully working on at the moment is laid in La Jolla and will be much shorter and more light-hearted than The Long Goodbye. But I'm fed up with the California locale . . . There are things about writing that I love, but it is a lonely and ungrateful profession and personally I'd much rather have been a barrister, or even an actor.

  Letter to James M. Fox,

  5 February 1954.

  Ninety per cent of mysteries are written by people who can't write.

  Letter to James M. Fox,

  16 February 1954. Fox had written to congratulate Chandler on The Long Goodbye.

  As to the ending or denouement not being a surprise, what ending is to someone in the trade? . . . Very often just for the fun of it I look at the end and then amuse myself with watching the author trying to smudge his fingerprints. And a surprise ending is no good if you don't believe it. If the reader doesn't think he should have known, he has been had. The typical mystery is like that thing on Studio One last night. An obvious suspect is presented and played up and you immediately eliminate her just because she has been played up. An old man in a wheel chair can get out of it to snitch a drink at the sideboard. Another red herring. The old housekeeper is obviously just what she pretends to be. The youngest sister is in love with the doctor who is going to solve the mystery. So who is left? The sister who got the poison pen letters. So she wrote them to herself. Why? No reason that makes sense. So she did it without knowing what she was doing. At that point I didn't give a damn.

  Letter to Paul Brooks,

  1 March 1954. Chandler is referring to the US cover of The Long Goodbye.

  Some day, someone ought to explain to me the theory behind dust jacket designs. I assume they are meant to catch the eye without offering any complicated problems to the mind. But they do present problems of symbolism that are too deep for me. Why is there blood on the little idol? What is the significance of the hair? Why is the iris of the eye green? Don't answer. You probably don't know either.

  Letter to Hardwick Moseley,

  the sales manager at Chandler's publisher, 23 March 1954.

  I'm sick as a dog, thank you, with one of those lousy virus infections the doctors have invented to cover up their ignorance . . . For the first time in my life I was reviewed as a Novelist in the London Sunday Times. I was discussed on the BBC by as addled a group of so-called intellectuals as ever had soup on their vests. But over here? The New York Times which surely should know what it is doing if any newspaper does has twice given books of mine for review to mystery writers who have been waiting for years for the chance to knife me because I have ridiculed the sort of thing they write themselves.

  Letter to Roger Machell,

  24 March 1954.

  There's quite a bit to answer in your good letter but before I get on to it, two or three items I'm afraid of forgetting. 1. For God's sake save your people the anguish and expense of sending me 8 copies of Finnish translations. Four would be more than enough. They do a nice job on them, but Jesus what a language! Everything is backwards. I once hoped to be a comparative philologist (just a boyhood fancy no doubt) and dabbled in such strange lingos as Modern Greek (there's a debased language – it just looks like Greek, all the richness and variety is gone, all the subtlety, all the charm), Armenian, Hungarian, besides the simpler and more obvious Romance tongues and the Germanic group. I slept with a chart of the 214 key ideographs of the Chinese Mandarin language pinned to the wall at the head of my bed in the Pension Marjollet, 27 Boulevard St Michel, au cinquième. But Finnish, hell it's worse than Turkish . . .

  Machell and Chandler were discussing the rise of big corporations.
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br />   The point is and always from now on will be, that beyond a certain point of size and power it is more tyrannical than the state, more unscrupulous, less subject to any kind of inspection, and that in the end it destroys the very thing it purports to represent – free competition. It can be benign, charming, friendly and full of charity – when it has won the battle. It is not as ruthless as Big Brother because it is too intelligent to think that fear can make men creative; it can't, it can only make them assiduous. It is technically subject to government control but that means nothing, because we live in an economy of overproduction and if you chastise a big corporation like Alcoa or the Du Ponts or Standard Oil of New Jersey, they can create a serious unemployment situation overnight. And, of course, they are the only organizations that can afford large scale research not directly connected with national security.

  As for Commercial TV, here is a small true story of the kind of atmosphere the big advertising agencies can create. A few years back the Pepsodent Company took over sponsorship of a radio series on Philip Marlowe as a summer replacement. Their agency was a big firm which also at the time handled Chesterfield cigarettes. The producer told me the story. A company big shot (partner) visited the L.A. office on business, a severe and elegant gentleman immaculate and grey, one of those extraordinary people of our time who seem to be able to reconcile wealth, position, blameless private lives and perfect manners with an idiotic devotion to the latest brand of skin-poisoning detergent or face cream (if the manufacturer is their client, natch). This geek happened to see a junior executive entering the premises that morning smoking a Philip Morris cigarette. He stopped him and said: ‘I observe, Mr Jones, that you do not care for the product of our sponsor.’ Mr Jones flushed and looked at the cigarette he was holding. ‘Oh, I'm extremely sorry Mr Blank. I was rather in a hurry this morning and instead of my own Chesterfields I must have grabbed up one of my wife's cigarettes.’ Mr Blank stared at him in silence for a long moment, then, as he turned away, he remarked icily: ‘I presume that your wife has an income of her own.’