Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe

by Robert B. Parker

  It started to come clear to me the minute we got into his studio. “I thought your name was Geisel,” I said, pointing to the drawing of a funny-looking chicken on his easel with a flower coming out of its ear. “That’s by Dr. Seuss. I’d recognize it anywhere.”

  “Seuss is my pen name,” he said.

  “You know who he is?” said Chandler, staring at me with a wounded look on his face. “I thought you were strictly a non-fiction reader. Everything Ted writes is definitely fiction.”

  “I don’t know what you call it,” I said. “But the kids on my block . . . every one of them loves that ‘Cat in the Hat’ more than their own parents. And that ‘Mulberry Street’ book. They sleep with it and drag it around all day like a security blanket, talking in rhymes. They can’t get enough of it.” Chandler winced and turned away. He seemed jealous, but was it my fault Geisel’s stories were as popular as “Mother Goose”? “Listen, Ted or doctor or whoever you want to call yourself,” I continued. “I owe it to the children of America to find those water colors of yours. And there’ll be no charge.”

  “No, no, I insist,” said Geisel. “It’s nothing to me. I just got a new offer from Random House. They’re trying to sign me up for the next decade.” I could see Chandler wince again by the window.

  “Suit yourself,” I told Geisel. “So this wetback Roberto’s the only one with a key to the studio.”

  “Yeah, but he’s off today,” said Geisel.

  “That is mysterious,” I said, rubbing my chin.

  “I hope you gentlemen don’t mind,” said Chandler, “but I have some unfinished business I need to attend to. Ted, farewell. Don’t take it personally. You’ve been a good friend. Nice to meet you, Mr. Marlowe, brief as it was. I doubt we’ll have a second chance, so. . . .Adieu.” He shook my hand and exited. Five seconds later I could hear his motor turn over as he took off down the hill, making a u-turn with a deafening screech.

  “We better postpone the investigation,” I told Geisel. “I think it’s more than one in a hundred that your buddy’s about to do himself in.”

  The doctor looked shocked. “Are you serious?”

  “That’s how we met,” I said. “It looked to me as if he was about to drop a Charlie off a rock six miles this side of Point Lomo.”

  “Oh, no. . . .That’s must’ve been what he meant by ‘Don’t take it personally.’”

  “Now you’re the mystery writer,” I said. I filled him in on the details as we barreled down the mountain after Chandler. The blighter was a hundred yards ahead of us, driving his Buick like there was no tomorrow. And maybe there wasn’t.

  “So Brandt didn’t like his new novel,” said Geisel. “Was he right?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Probably a little right and a little wrong. Ray’s always trying to make his books more than they are, but what they are is just fine. Know what I mean?” I couldn’t say that I did, but I assumed he knew. He was Dr. Seuss, after all.

  Chandler turned onto the Coast Highway, heading back for the rock. I slowed down. I didn’t want him to see us, get jumpy and drive straight into the next telephone pole. “What I don’t get about you writers,” I said,” is why you take everything so personally.”

  “Don’t you take it personally when you don’t get your man?”

  “Nuts,” I said. “It’s all in a day’s work.”

  “You’re lucky,” said Geisel, “I guess what Ray really wishes is that he could be you.”

  “And give up his house in La Jolla for a two bedroom walk-up on Franklin?” But I had to admit I was feeling a little queasy about Chandler. Maybe I shouldn’t have run off my mouth about what a big deal Geisel was. And now he was turning off the Coast Highway again, heading for the bluff above the ocean they call Devil’s Curve.

  It was then I figured I had to push the doctor out of the car. “What’re you doing?” he said, as I pulled over and threw the door open.

  “I don’t want two dead writers on my hands,” I said, giving him a solid shove onto the pavement. “And don’t worry about your water colors. They’re the ones in the fancy box with the French label, right?”

  Geisel nodded, picking himself up.

  “They’re on your coffee table in the living room,” I said, pulling out and aiming my short up Devil’s Curve.

  I caught up with Chandler just as he was about to launch his Buick into the Pacific. I swerved the Ford in front of him, praying he wouldn’t take me into Neptune’s Net with him. He screeched to a halt six inches away from my door and I jumped out, pulling him out from behind the wheel and pushing him down on the ground. I sat on his chest, pinning his shoulders onto the cold dirt with my knees.

  “Listen, you limey nitwit, I’m not your mother. I’m going on vacation in Ensenada and I can’t keep following you around stopping you from killing yourself.” He didn’t say anything. “And stop being so jealous of Geisel. He writes children’s books, for crissakes.” Chandler looked shame-faced. “And another thing. I may not read mysteries but a lot of people seem to like them, so stop feeling sorry for yourself and get back to work. Maybe this Brandt character thinks you’re being lazy and you should do a little—what-do-you-call—it—rewriting.”

  “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said Chandler, but I could see he didn’t have his heart in it. I stood up and let him hoist himself up. Then I followed him one last time, straight to his house, and made sure he got back in front of the typewriter. It turned out the blighter was married to a woman sixteen years older than he who was sick on top of it, but I didn’t want to let that make me feel sorry for him, so I just said “What’s the title of that novel you’ve been working on?”

  “‘Summer in Idle Valley’,” he said.

  I frowned.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “Not enough snap,” I said.

  “What would you call it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m not a writer but. . . .How about ‘The Long Good-Bye.’ ”

  And then I left.

  * * *

  * * *

  Many say the most treacherous demon in a writer’s life is alcohol, but for me it’s always been jealousy. For a long time I’ve been looking for an opportunity to explore this theme comically. It’s far too grim to take seriously. So when Byron Preiss asked me to do another Marlowe story for this collection, I gravitated to the period late in Raymond Chandler’s life when he was indeed a drinking buddy of Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss) down in La Jolla. I don’t know if Chandler really was jealous of the younger writer, but he well could have been. Geisel was at that point poised to become one of the most famous children’s writers of the century, clearly the equal of Chandler in a different, happier genre. Whether this would have prompted Chandler to “drop a Charlie” (a mock-Forties term I made up for the story) is anybody’s guess.

  Roger L. Simon

  AFTERWORD

  * * *

  * * *

  HE MADE WORDS DANCE:

  THE CENTENARY OF

  RAYMOND CHANDLER

  FRANK MACSHANE

  RAYMOND CHANDLER DID not write detective stories because he had something to say about crime in America but because he wanted to understand and come to terms with the contradictions that assailed him. Growing up as a young man with his mother in England, he had bitter memories of his childhood in America, where he was born one hundred years ago. His father was such a violent alcoholic that his mother had to divorce him, and the clash of their personalities made him wary and suspicious although he was by nature open and romantic.

  As a student at Dulwich College in South London, Chandler received a vigorous classical education which led him to write incisive critical essays and reviews. But he was also drawn towards romantic poetry. What he sought as a writer was an art form that would bridge the gap between the two sides of his nature, one that would be truthful without being coarse and that would be beautiful without being sentimental.

  To improve his own wri
ting and develop his craft, Chandler took a course in short story writing in London. He wrote sketches and paragraphs that were wordy and literary, though well phrased, and he also produced a short story in the manner of Henry James. Not having a style of his own, he turned to writers he admired and modeled his work on theirs, but the results read like parodies.

  Realizing he could not make a success in London as a literary journalist and poet, Chandler decided to return to America in 1912. He took a number of odd jobs across the country, but was eventually employed by the Dabney Oil Company in Los Angeles, where he rose to be vice president and office manager. During this period, Chandler read a lot of contemporary fiction, but he did not try to write. In 1932, however, he was fired from his job at the oil company because of his drinking and failure to come to work. He then decided to change his ways and to make another attempt at becoming a writer. He even listed himself as “writer” in the Los Angeles Directory.

  Once again, he began with imitations, and this time his model was Ernest Hemingway. Unfortunately, his sense of humor led him into burlesque:

  Hank went into the bathroom to brush his teeth.

  “The hell with it,” he said. “She shouldn’t have done it.” It was a good bathroom. It was small and the green enamel was peeling off the walls. But the hell with that, as Napoleon said when they told him Josephine was waiting without. The bathroom had a wide window through which Hank looked at the pines and the larches. They dripped with a faint rain. They looked smooth and comfortable.

  “The hell with it,” Hank said. “She shouldn’t have done it.”

  Chandler was right in seeking a model, for he knew that the emotions he wanted to express could not be naively or baldly expressed. He needed to find a form that would allow him to express his feelings in an honest way. Writing, he knew, is not a mere technique that can be learned: it is a process which allows novelists, poets, and nonfiction writers to understand the truth about their feelings. The act of writing is the only means by which this discovery can be made. It is a process which helps the writer make sure that his work is emotionally and intellectually accurate.

  It was at this point that Chandler discovered pulp fiction and, in particular, the crime magazine Black Mask, which had been established in 1920. Chandler found that he liked mystery writing because it was entirely without pretensions. There were also practical considerations. “It suddenly struck me,” he said, “that I could write this stuff and get paid while I was learning.” Chandler was attracted to pulp fiction because it depended on a discipline that could be mastered. Unlike “literary” writing, it made demands on the writer regarding length and subject matter, and therefore required that he learn the art of storytelling, which was not absolutely necessary in literary fiction. Chandler began by studying the work of writers like Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner to see what he could learn from them. He copied their techniques and wrote and rewrote many stories in their styles until he understood the medium.

  In later years, Chandler would write, “Analyze and imitate; no other school is necessary.” That is what he did for months on end and with no intention to publish. Moreover, he was realistic. “No writer ever in my age got a blank check,” he wrote. “He always had to accept some conditions imposed from without, respect certain taboos, try to please certain people.” What was more, Chandler understood a basic truth that few writers like to admit: “No writer every wrote exactly what he wanted to write, because there was never anything inside himself, anything purely individual that he did not want to write. It’s all reaction of one sort or other.”

  When he thought he had progressed far enough in his training, he sent his work off to Joseph T. Shaw, the editor of Black Mask, who immediately accepted and published it. These first stories were competent and had more individuality than most of the other stories published in the pulps, but there was little that was special or individual in them. It was simply evident that Chandler had mastered the technique. Whether he would produce anything that was truly original, and therefore capable of expressing his feelings and ideas, remained to be seen.

  Chandler had accepted the tough guy school of detective fiction as the one that best suited him. The English school was to his mind hopelessly unreal. In actual life, detectives are not aristocrats or country vicars; they are men of limited intelligence who are just doing a job of work. In his own writing, he therefore created detectives who fit the conventions of the hard-boiled school. They had little individuality, however, and their names said little about them: Johnny Dalmas, Ted Carmady, Johnny De Ruse, Pete Anglich, Sam Delaguerra, and Mallory. Sometimes they told their own stories; often there was an omniscient narrator. It didn’t much matter, because they all sounded alike, and the stories were so full of action that there was little room for character or atmosphere.

  Since he had been educated in England, Chandler found that he had to start from scratch in writing these slangy stories. “I had to learn American just like a foreign language,” he said. The process genuinely engaged his imagination. As a poet, he was in love with what he called the magic of words, and he wanted to bring that quality into his detective stories. He knew that taut storytelling was essential to hold the reader’s interest, but at the same time he wanted to express the feelings that accompanied action.

  In later years, Chandler explained what he meant in a letter to Frederick Lewis Allen of Harper’s magazine: “A long time ago when I was writing for the pulps I put into a story a line like ‘he got out of the car and walked across the sun-drenched sidewalk until the shadows of the awning over the entrance fell across his face like the touch of cool water.’ They took it out when they published the story. Their readers didn’t appreciate this sort of thing: just held up the action. And I set out to prove them wrong. My theory was that they just thought they cared about nothing but the action; that really, although they didn’t know it, they cared very little about the action. The things they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialogue and description; the things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face, and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. He didn’t even hear death knocking on the door. That damn little paper clip kept slipping away from his fingers and he just couldn’t push it to the edge of the desk and catch it as it fell.”

  While the writing of description helps induce feeling, it is less effective than the human voice, whether used in dialogue or narrative. A distinctive voice carries conviction and authenticity. It takes the story into a new realm and captures the reader’s sympathies. This voice becomes, in fact, the author’s style. For Chandler, this style was expressed in a language that combined the strength of the classical English of Dulwich College with the vitality of American vernacular speech. Together, these made the bridge that allowed Chandler to unite the two sides of his consciousness, the romantic and the realistic.

  Philip Marlowe was the vehicle Chandler used to make this union possible. Marlowe was physically tough, fair-minded, and intelligent. Evolving from the detectives of the earlier stories, he had some of Chandler’s traits, but he was not Chandler. Nor was he the plodding detective of real life. He was not only tough and fearless but also witty and gentle. In real life such a combination is improbable, but by giving Marlowe a strong and vivid personality, Chandler made him believable and convincing.

  To imagine that Chandler created Marlowe as an idealization of himself is to miss the point, for Marlowe is a figure of fantasy. He is, in Chandler’s words, “the personification of an attitude, the exaggeration of a possibility,” and little else. “The whole point,” said Chandler, “is that the detective exists complete and entire and unchanged by anything that happens, that he is, as detective, outside th
e story and above it, and always will be. That is why he never gets the girl, never marries, never really has any private life, except insofar as he must eat and sleep and have a place to leave his clothes. His moral and intellectual force is that he gets nothing but his fee, for which he will, if he can, protect the innocent, guard the helpless and destroy the wicked, and the fact that he must do this while earning a meager living in a corrupt world is what makes him stand out.”

  Marlowe’s energy and idealism helped Chandler develop Marlowe as a complex character. Chandler conceived him so completely and in such detail as a human being that he is able to carry the story. It often happens in writing fiction that after the author begins the story, it starts to have a life of its own. The author is so in tune with the psychology of his characters he is no longer obliged to invent. He just follows along where his characters take him and thereby reveals the inner logic of the story.

  As the medium through which Chandler told his stories, Marlowe became as real for his creator as any actual human being. In 1951, Chandler even wrote a portrait of Marlowe, giving his habits, his educational background, his preferences for drink and women, his domestic arrangements, and the furnishings of his house. Yet despite many similar beliefs and habits, Marlowe is very different from Chandler the introspective artist. Like Joseph Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, after whom Philip Marlowe was probably named, he was a kind of co-conspirator with Chandler. As he tells the story in place of an omniscient narrator, he can make comments which as author Chandler would not care to make for fear of being morally heavy-handed.

  Usually a character who is repeated in one novel after another becomes a familiar stock figure. He is welcomed by readers who have come to like him, and he serves as a familiar point of reference for each new story. But as Chandler changed over the years, so too did Marlowe. After finishing The Little Sister, a novel which won Chandler a great deal of notice among literary intellectuals, Chandler told his London publisher, Hamish Hamilton, that he might stop using Marlowe. “I find the attitude more and more artificial,” he wrote. “I am afraid Mr. Marlowe has developed far more than a suspicion that a man of his parts is beginning to look pretty ridiculous as a small-time private detective. He’s getting self-conscious, trying to live up to his reputation among the intellectuals. The boy is bothered.”