Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  Once in America, Baum took up remunerative employment in the film industry, despite a total ignorance of the techniques of screenwriting, and still imperfect English. In 1932, with the triumph of the Nazis, she and her family entered permanent exile, settling in Hollywood, where she helped promote the 1932 MGM production of Grand Hotel, starring John Barrymore, Greta Garbo and a young Joan Crawford. The film was a box office hit, and made Baum a household name among English-speaking readers. A string of works aimed at that market (and the big screen) ensued: Men Never Know (1935), Career (1936), A Tale from Bali (1937), Grand Opera (1942).

  After 1933 her books were banned and burned in Germany. By the end of the 1930s she was writing primarily in English, and continued to do so until her death in 1960. It was only after the Second World War that her fiction was translated back into German. Despite the fame of Grand Hotel, Baum’s better novel is Shanghai ’37. The story of nine intertwining lives is centred, again, on the grand hotel milieu with an extravagantly international dramatis personae. The novel touches on such topical themes as the rise of Nazism and climaxes with the Japanese invasion of Shanghai and the assault on the international community there. One of the cowering English children in the unnarrated hinterland of the novel – it is pleasant to fantasise – was little James Ballard.

  In the 1950s, Baum enjoyed modest book-club successes with novels such as The Mustard Seed (1953) and Written on Water (1956). But for the English market, she tends to be remembered, if at all, as a one-title author, and a vehicle for Garbo. Baum categorised herself as a ‘first-rate second-rate author’. She left a posthumously published autobiography, with the ironic title, It Was All Quite Different, in 1964.

  FN

  Vicki Baum (Hedwig Baum; later Prels, later Lert)

  MRT

  Grand Hotel

  Biog

  L. J. King, Best-Sellers by Design: Vicki Baum and the House of Ullstein (1988)

  139. Raymond Chandler 1888–1959

  American style has no cadence.

  Chandler was born in Chicago. On both sides of his parentage he could claim Irish-Quaker extraction. His father Maurice was a railway engineer at a period when new tracks were creating work all over the continent. Maurice followed the job, was drunken when at home, and soon drifted away from his son and wife. Chandler’s mother, Florence Thornton, was resourceful in the face of this breakdown. Chandler would always need such women in his life – older, competent, emasculating. Florence (a newer American than her husband) emigrated, first to Ireland, where she had relatives, then to England where she had better-off relatives. Still beautiful, she had affairs, Chandler recalled much later, but she was not fool enough to remarry.

  Raymond’s rich English uncle Edward took an interest in the clever little boy. His way was paid through Dulwich College, a minor public school, in south London. He was a day boy, living with his mother in a grand house nearby, but the five years he spent at Dulwich College were formative. Chandler had the old school tie tattooed on his soul for life. He won prizes and took full advantage of the ‘classic’ education offered him. Uncle Edward, open-handed as he was, would not stump up for university, which, given his ability, Chandler would have walked into. Aged sixteen, he left Dulwich with the expectation that, after a year learning languages in Europe, he would enter the Civil Service.

  What he did in Paris is unknown other than that, to his later chagrin, he neglected to lose his virginity. He duly took the Civil Service exams and came out at the top of the list. It was obligatory to naturalise. At what later point he became American is fuzzy. He was appointed as a junior clerk to the Admiralty but only lasted six months before resigning. He could not, he later said, stand the ‘suburban nobodies’. Or, one deduces, the banality of the desk-bound career that lay ahead: without a degree, without membership of the best London clubs, he would never get to the top of Whitehall’s slippery pole and would be another Pooter trudging to work and back with a briefcase, brolly and bowler.

  Not a single letter of Chandler’s before 1937 survives or much other documentary record. The only accounts we have of his early life are circumspect and casual recollections in his late years. When, in those years, his publisher suggested an autobiography, it was fended off with a Chandlerism: ‘Who cares how a writer got his first bicycle?’ There are things one does care to know. Why, for example, did Uncle Edward pull the plug on him? Whatever the reason, the money stopped coming and Raymond and his mother had to move to less salubrious lodgings. For a year or two he scraped a living as a journalist and wrote reams of poetry in his spare time – some of which was published (it’s not very good).

  In 1912 he returned to America and took a succession of clerking jobs in small towns before ending up in California. ‘Why?’ he was once asked. ‘Everyone does,’ he replied. In San Francisco, at a very low point, he worked as a tennis-racquet stringer at a measly $12.50 a week. A clerical position with an ice-cream firm in Los Angeles furnished enough to rent an apartment. Possessed of superb manners, cultivated, interestingly ‘foreign’, and – at this stage of his life good-looking – Chandler was taken up by well-off friends. He brought his mother over to live with him. Chandler stuck with the creamery for three years and his mother for life.

  It was now 1917 and he was twenty-eight. Enthused by the war, in which so many of his ‘fellow’ Englishmen were dying and, perhaps, unenthused by four years with Mom, he decided to join in the fight. America was not recruiting so he went north to Canada to join up. Chandler saw action in France and sustained a serious head wound. Given his public school background, it is odd that he was not commissioned. He left the service a sergeant. It is plausibly suggested that his later, pathological, drinking and regular blackouts may have originated in the psychophysical trauma of his months in the trenches. Head injury (by ‘sap’, fist and pistol butt) as his biographer Tom Hiney notes, is prominent in his fiction.

  Honourably discharged, Chandler rejoined his mother and went back to work in the creamery. At this period there entered the second woman in his life, Pearl Eugenie Pascal. The wife of a concert pianist (her second marriage), in the throes of a divorce, ‘Cissy’, as everyone called her, was a woman of the world. Tantalisingly, only one studio photograph of her seems to have survived. It confirms Chandler’s repeated compliments as to her ‘peach skin’ beauty. He also mentioned other snaps of her naked, from her ‘modelling’ days – which were now far behind her. Cissy was old enough (by eighteen years) to be Chandler’s mother. But he had one already, and she disapproved. Any formal union was put on ice for four years. It’s strange that a thirty-plus decorated veteran, creator, no less, of the most famous tough guy in detective fiction, should await his mom’s consent, or death (Florence was afflicted with a lingering cancer) before marrying the woman he loved. It is curious too that he let himself be duped as to Cissy’s proclaimed age (something that a quick look at her sheaves of divorce papers would contradict). Until after they married he believed she was in her pre-menopausal early forties.

  The jobs were, as in his novels, easier than the dames. Cissy had raised Chandler’s sights beyond the creamery. As the roaring twenties took off, Los Angeles was a city of opportunity: the West was wild again. Chandler went into the oil business and shot to the top. Within a couple of years he was earning a grand a month. In a few years more he was a Vice President earning a whopping (for the mid-1920s) $40,000 p.a. It beat stringing racquets. Other things fell neatly into place. Florence died in 1924 and within days Chandler was able to marry Cissy. There would never until many years later be anything that could be called a home for the couple: just apartments, hotels, and, of course, no children. He loved the patter of little feet, Chandler said – running in the opposite direction.

  The early years of the marriage were good. But as he rose up the executive ladder boozing, absenteeism and misconduct with secretaries led to Chandler’s being fired in 1932. It coincided with the Depression and what would be decades of semi-invalidism for the fast-ageing C
issy. For reasons that are mysterious, Chandler decided, close on forty-five, to give up drink and become a professional writer. He cocooned himself in cheap lodgings with Cissy, who seems, nobly, to have gone along with a suddenly hard life. For several years Chandler imposed a gruelling writer’s apprenticeship on himself. He chose crime writing, he said, because it was ‘honest’. Poverty, too, was ‘purifying’. The Chandlers scraped by on savings and what was left of her alimony.

  He had set his sights on Black Mask, the magazine that had launched Dashiell Hammett, pioneering in its pages ‘hardboiled’ detective fiction and a classier product than was purveyed in the pulps. The hardboiled genre originates in one short story of Hemingway’s, ‘The Killers’. Nothing happens in the story. A couple of gangsters come into a ‘greasy spoon’ restaurant, engage in wisecracking, but laconic, badinage with the guy behind the counter. They’ve come to kill someone. That’s it. Chandler realised there was space in this new crime fiction genre (which Hemingway had immediately moved on from) to establish a whole new style, and over the late 1930s created a niche as a regular contributor to Black Mask. But he was not prolific; he could never turn stuff out at the speed of, for example, his new friend Erle Stanley Gardner. He cultivated a specialism in the Los Angeles-based ‘Private Eye’. By this point he knew LA, the canyons, boulevards, beaches and hills, as well as Hammett had known Baltimore – with the difference that his city was more interesting.

  Hammett’s Sam Spade is the progenitor of Marlowe, although the Private Eye pedigree can be tracked at least as far back as 221b Baker Street. The name – tempting to literary critics as the supposition is – owes nothing to Conrad. Marlowe was one of the house names at Dulwich College. What Chandler perfected was voice. His favoured narrative mode is autobiographical – the tone is laconic, wise cracking, seen-it-all, reminiscential. His rhetoric can be categorised as a love of litotes, hyperbole, extravagant simile, zeugma. But above all he aimed at what he called ‘cadence’ – a quality which American literature (unlike English) sadly lacked. An opening paragraph of his finest novel, Farewell, My Lovely (1940), will indicate the packed cadenzas (sudden falls) in his prose:

  It was a warm day, almost the end of March, and I stood outside the barber shop looking up at the jutting neon sign of a second floor dine and dice emporium called Florian’s. A man was looking up at the sign too. He was looking up at the dusty windows with a sort of ecstatic fixity of expression, like a hunky immigrant catching his first sight of the Statue of Liberty. He was a big man but not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck … he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

  Marlowe is, as usual, a flâneur, drawn in, not diving into, events. He is, by the end of Farewell, My Lovely, revealed as the only decent thing in LA, a city which, as in Nathanael West’s vision of it, is ripe for wrathful destruction. Chandler anatomised Marlovian Man in an essay, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1944) and its famous imperative: ‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.’ And why ‘must’? Noblesse oblige. Marlowe, as Chandler put it, is a ‘shop-soiled Galahad’ (and, like Galahad, sexually pure) in a world beyond salvation and whose filth he can never quite shake off and whose mean streets he can never leave. There is nothing west of the West Coast – no frontier left in which to exercise true American values.

  Having perfected his instrument in Black Mask and conceived his hero (Philip Marlowe grew out of a PI called John Dalmas), Chandler broke into full-length fiction with The Big Sleep. The book was taken by a class publisher, Knopf, and sold reasonably. But the opinion-forming critics ignored it. It was the fate of the first four ‘Marlowes’ to be critically disregarded. Between The Big Sleep in 1939 and The Little Sister in 1949 Los Angeles was transformed from a sleepy little Western town to megalopolis: the city of the future. The same period saw also the massive growth of the film-studio system. Chandler and Cissy had been lifted from years of penury by his book (particularly paperback) royalties but re-entered the ranks of the seriously rich when Hollywood discovered Chandler. More particularly, the director Billy Wilder discovered him after reading The High Window (1942).

  A short, bitter, marriage ensued, which produced a masterpiece. The two men hated each other: Wilder thought Chandler a pansy; Chandler thought the philandering hard-drinkingWilder a degenerate with the manners of an oaf. Moreover, the film Wilder had recruited him for was based on a short story by James M. Cain. If there was anything Raymond hated more than Billy it was the author of Double Indemnity: ‘James Cain – faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naïf, a Proust in greasy overalls … Such people are the offal of literature.’ None the less, out of this raging studio feud came the classic film noir for which, as scriptwriter, Chandler deserved an Oscar (he was nominated for a later, less worthy script for John Huston’s The Blue Dahlia, 1945). He went on to collaborate with Hitchcock on another classic in the dark genre, Strangers on a Train (1950). He had a higher estimate of Patricia Highsmith, although he thought her work overplotted – never a charge which would be levelled against the author of The Big Sleep, a work whose plot even the author himself could not explain to the director Howard Hawks, who adapted it with Chandler’s favourite screen Marlowe, Humphrey Bogart.

  Hollywood, subsidiary rights, and radio franchise (a medium particularly congenial with Chandler’s style) meant that he would never, after 1945, be poor again. But Hollywood – as with Faulkner and Nathanael West – dismantled the carefully constructed defence systems which had allowed him to become a writer. Wilder, particularly, took a Mephistophelean glee in destroying Chandler. ‘Chandler was typical of a man who was an alcoholic and was on the wagon and was married to a very old lady, and so he had no sex and no booze … But the small revenge I had – because at the very end, he hated me – was that he started drinking again.’ Once again, as in those lost years in the oil business, it was the bottle in the briefcase, the long morning sessions that used up the whole day, and furtive adulteries – Cissy was closing on her seventies, chronically frail, and often seriously unwell. His own health was increasingly poor.

  Chandler would grind out two more Marlowes – The Little Sister (1949) and the aptly named The Long Good-Bye (1953). Neither ranks with his best early work, although, so exiguous is his oeuvre, that one is very glad to have them. His fiction was always better thought of in his other home country, England, and positively revered by the French in its Gallimard Série noire livery. American critical opinion remained unimpressed and his work was accused of racist and misogynistic taints.

  Cissy died in 1954 – she was eighty-four. Keeping her alive had been Chandler’s noblest achievement. With her gone, he fell apart. A few months later he attempted suicide in his shower (to prevent too much posthumous mess), aiming two shots at his head. So drunk was he that he missed. In 1955 he returned to England, enjoyed his fame (‘in England,’ he said, ‘I am an author’). He made a fool of himself – he had a poor head for drink at this stage – with a succession of women. Some of them, Natasha Spender notably, did their best to put him back together again, but all gave up, eventually. As he told Natasha, poignantly, ‘I know what you are all doing for me, and I thank you, but the truth is I really want to die.’

  A few pieces of writing sputtered out along with a stream of lonely long lovely letters to anyone whose address he happened to have in his address book. They were written in his long insomniac nights when all that comforted him was his typewriter and his extraordinary gift with words. He died exhausted in hospital in La Jolla, California. One knows far too much about the foolish, drink-addled Chandler of the 1950s and far too little about the first fifty years of his life. The big question remains unanswered: why, in the mid-1930s, did he turn to writing crime novels? And how did this man – whose personal life is so pathetic – create such wonderful crime novels?

  FN

  Raymond Thornton
Chandler

  MRT

  Farewell, My Lovely

  Biog

  T. Hiney, Raymond Chandler (1997)

  140. Katherine Mansfield 1888–1923

  I intensify the so-called small things.

  Few authors’ lives rival Katherine Mansfield’s for chaos. It is as if she were blown into shrapnel reassembled as collections of short stories. She was, she proclaimed, a writer first and a woman second. Ottoline Morrell, the Bloomsbury hostess, said Mansfield was as aware of being a writer as Victoria was of being a queen. She was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp: the variant forenames and surnames she would adopt for herself through life are the bane of biographers. As baneful for those close to her was that with every different name they encountered a different woman. Multiple personality was not with Mansfield a disorder but a vocation. She had, she boasted, ‘hundreds of selves’. Her father Harold had but one and that, by dull colonial standards, admirable. A New Zealand import merchant, he rose to become a magnate and, simultaneously with his daughter’s death, Sir Harold. The title would not have impressed her; the irony might have done.