We leave Marlowe in the fragment of Poodle Springs married to Linda and already the cracks are appearing:
“Damn you, Marlowe, it’s not my fault that I’m rich. And if I have the damn money I’m going to spend it. And if you are around some of it is bound to rub off on you. You’ll just have to put up with that.”
“Yes, darling.” I kissed her. “I’ll get a pet monkey and after a while you won’t be able to tell us apart.”
Luckily he didn’t live to get the pet monkey …
In Marlowe’s final short story, “The Pencil” (published in England), he meets Anne Riordan again. She admits her feelings for him but, once again, the knight errant in him comes to his own rescue:
The mature Taki with the mature Chandler at their house in the Pacific Palisades, sometime in the mid-1930s. Bodleian Library, Oxford (illustrations credit 7.8)
“I’m honest. That’s something. But I’m too shop-soiled for a girl like you. I’ve thought of you, I’ve wanted you but that sweet clear look in your eyes tells me to lay off … I’ve had too many women to deserve one like you.”
The women you get and the women you don’t get—they live in different worlds. I don’t sneer at either world. I live in both myself.
* * *
TAKI: A PERSONAL INTERPOLATION
“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.”
Chandler saw himself as a tough guy—someone who could take it and dish it out.
But he had one weakness to which he freely admitted.
Her name was Taki.
Chandler explains his addiction in a letter to Charles Morton on March 19, 1945 …
Taki is a black Persian cat, 14 years old, and I call her that because she has been around me since I began to write, usually sitting on the paper I wanted to use or the copy I wanted to revise, sometimes leaning 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 then, but I suspect it all adds up to a very sarcastic version of “You can do better.” 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 murderer 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 it 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.
Ray and Taki at work in La Jolla, c. 1948. Bodleian Library, Oxford (illustrations credit 7.9)
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.
Three years later proper diplomatic relations between cat and owner have been established. Chandler brings James Sandoe up to date (September 23, 1948):
Our cat is growing positively tyrannical. If she finds herself alone anywhere she emits blood curdling yells until somebody 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, then 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 plops down on the floor just far enough away 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. In the middle of this engaging performance she will stop dead, lift her head without any other change of position (one leg pointing straight at the ceiling) stares off into space while thinking out some abstruse problem, then resumes her rear-end-job. This work is always done in the most public manner. 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 her catnip mouse unless it is dangled in such a position that she can play with it lying down. I’m going to send you her picture. It has me in it, but you’ll have to overlook that. 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 in nature worse 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.
April 9, 1948. “I had to hold Taki’s tail to keep it still.” “Taki” is another spelling for the Japanese word Take (bamboo).Photofest (illustrations credit 7.10)
Taki as a kitten, 1932. Chandler described her as “all fur with four legs peeping out from under it.” Bodleian Library, Oxford (illustrations credit 7.11)
Our little black cat had to be put to sleep yesterday morning. We feel pretty broken up about it. She was almost 20 years old. We saw it coming, of course, but we hoped she might pick up strength. But when she got too weak to stand up and practically stopped eating, t
here was nothing else to do.
All my life I have had cats and I found that they differ almost as much as people … Taki had absolute poise, which is a rare quality in animals as well as in human beings.… In a group of people she would march straight up to the one cat lover in the room and she would ignore absolutely the occasional individual who was pronouncedly anti-cat. I have never liked anyone who disliked cats, because I’ve always found an element of acute selfishness in their dispositions. Admittedly a cat doesn’t give you the kind of affection a dog gives you. A cat never behaves as if you were the only bright spot in an otherwise clouded existence. But this is only another way of saying that a cat is not a sentimentalist, which does not mean it has no affection.
But in late 1951 there was something of a happy ending …
We have a new black Persian who looks exactly like our last one, so exactly that we have to call him by the same name, Taki.
Eight
Writing (2)
Making Magic
There is a certain quality indispensable to writing from my point of view, which I call magic, but which could be called by other names. It is a sort of vital force.
—Letter to Jean de Leon—February 11, 1957
Without magic there is no art.
—Raymond Chandler
In England I am an author. In the USA just a mystery writer.
—Letter to Paul Brooks—September 28, 1952
To exceed the limits of a form without destroying it is the dream of every magazine writer who is not a hopeless hack.
—Raymond Chandler
A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
—Raymond Chandler
[Literature is] any sort of writing that glows with its own heart.
—Raymond Chandler
Those who know most about writing are those who can’t write.
—Raymond Chandler
You can’t write just because you have read all the books.
—Raymond Chandler
Possibly it was the smell of fear which the stories managed to generate. Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun.
—Introduction to Trouble Is My Business
The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.
—“Twelve Notes on the Mystery Story”
I have no theories about writing; I just write. If it doesn’t seem to me to be good, I throw it away.
—Letter to Jean de Leon—February 11, 1957
For someone who claimed to have no theories on the subject and whose published output was relatively small, Raymond Chandler wrote a great deal about writing.
Like many writers before him, he believed a certain routine or discipline was essential and when he was in a fit state to write at all, he kept to it religiously. He claimed he spent six hours a day thinking about his writing, four hours writing, four hours reading—too many magazines—six hours sleeping and two hours eating.
There should be a space of time, say four hours a day at least, when a professional writer doesn’t do anything but write. He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks. Write or nothing.
—Letter to Alex Barris—March 18, 1949
Chandler himself was a slow, meticulous writer. “I am a fellow who writes 30,000 words to turn in five,” he wrote to Charles Morton (October 12, 1944):
I work too slowly, throw away too much, and what I write that sells is not at all the sort of thing I really want to write.
And in an interview with Irving Wallace (August 24, 1945) …
I work very fast but I work for the waste basket. I never revise phrase by phrase and line by line. Instead I rewrite things I don’t like. I work on a typewriter for novels, but at the [film] studio I dictate. I’ve written 5,000 words at one sitting, and I always write the final draft. The faster I write the better my output. If I’m going slow I’m in trouble. It means I’m pushing the words instead of being pulled by them … I’m a poor plotter and bad at construction. I never write plots down but work them out in my head, never completely, but in advance of the words I’m writing. I’m best when I know my ending, always try to, though I know intermediate steps.
Chandler was not always completely consistent in his description of his modus operandi. Only three years later he is telling Mrs. Robert Hogan (March 7, 1947) …
One of my peculiarities and difficulties as a writer is that I won’t discard anything. I can’t overlook the fact that I had a reason, a feeling, for starting to write it, and I’ll be damned if I won’t lick it.
“I write when I can and I don’t write when I can’t, always in the morning or the early part of the day. You get very gaudy ideas at night but they don’t stand up,” he told Alex Barris (March 18, 1949). (On another occasion he had explained that he “rarely wrote fiction after dark”—“too ghoulish.”) He went on to debate the nature of inspiration …
“In England I am an author. In the USA just a mystery writer.”
“I may have written the most beautiful American vernacular ever written (some people think I have), but if it is so, I am still a writer trying to find his way through a maze. Should I be anything else? I can’t see it.”
“I’m an improvisor, and perhaps at times an innovator.”
“The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.” (illustrations credit 8.1)
I’m always seeing little pieces by writers about how they don’t ever wait for inspiration; they just sit down at their little desks every morning at eight, rain or shine, hangover and broken arm and all, and bang out their little stint … I offer them my admiration and take care to avoid their books.
Me, I wait for inspiration, though I don’t necessarily call it by that name. I believe that all writing that has any life in it is done with the solar plexus. It is hard work in the sense that it may leave you tired, even exhausted. In the sense of conscious effort it is not work at all …
As the years went by, out went some of the discipline …
I am a spasmodic worker with no regular hours, which is to say I only write because I feel like it. I am always surprised at how easy it seems at the time, and at how very tired one feels afterwards.
—Letter to Hamish Hamilton—November 10, 1950
Chandler’s definitive essay on crime, “The Simple Art of Murder,” was first published in 1943 in The Atlantic Monthly. In 1950, Houghton Mifflin added other material and published it in hardback form. (illustrations credit 8.2)
Some of his methods were a little idiosyncratic but they worked for him and provided a necessary focus …
I do all my work on yellow paper. Sheets cut in half, typed the long way, triple-spaced. The pages must be from 125 to 150 words and they are so short you don’t get prolix. If there isn’t a little meat on each, something is wrong.
—October 1, 1957
The character of novelist Roger Wade in The Long Goodbye allowed Chandler to write about writing, but also about himself …
WADE: In my racket it’s so easy to tighten up and get all stiff and wooden. Then the stuff is no good. When it’s good it comes easy. Anything you have heard or read to the contrary is a load of mish-mash.
MARLOWE: Depends on who the writer is, maybe. It didn’t come easy to Flaubert and his stuff is good.
Wade “has made too much money writing junk for halfwits. But the only salvation for a writer is to write. If there is any good in him, it will come out.”
No amount of editing and polishing w
ill have any appreciable effect on the flavor of how a man writes. It is the product of the quality of his emotion and perception; it is the ability to transfer these to paper which makes him a writer …
—Letter to Mrs. Robert Hogan—March 7, 1947
I do not write … for money or prestige, but for love, the strange lingering love of a world wherein men may think in cool subtleties and talk in the language of almost forgotten cultures.
—Letter to Charles Morton—January 15, 1945
When a book, any book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things.
—Letter to Erle Stanley Gardner—January 29, 1946
From quite early on he was ambivalent about what he was doing:
I no longer have any passion for this stuff. I find myself kidding myself. I enjoy it and find it fun, but I have a suspicion that the quality that finally put these stories over was a sort of controlled half-poetical emotion … From the beginning, from the first pulp story it was always with me a question … of putting into the stuff something they would not shy off from, perhaps even not know was there as a conscious realization, but which would somehow distill through their minds and leave an afterglow.
The World of Raymond Chandler Page 16