The Raymond Chandler Papers

by Tom Hiney

  Heigho. I think I'll write an English detective story, one about Superintendent Jones and the two elderly sisters in the thatched cottage, something with Latin in it and music and period furniture and a gentleman's gentleman: above all one of those books where everybody goes for nice long walks.

  Letter to Alfred Knopf,

  8 February 1943.

  Thanks for yours of Jan 14th, and it was friendly, understanding and welcome, as always. Thank you also for the two-bit edition of The Big Sleep. I looked into it and found it both much better and much worse than I had expected – or than I remembered. I have been so belabored with tags like tough, hardboiled, etc., that it is almost a shock to discover occasional signs of almost normal sensitivity in the writing. On the other hand I sure did run the similes into the ground.

  William Irish is a man named Cornell Woolrich, an author under his own name, and one of the oldest hands there are at the pulp detective business. He is known in the trade as an idea writer, liking the tour de force, and not much of a character man. I think his stuff is very readable, but leaves no warmth behind it.

  No, I don't think the sinus condition is clearing up. This place bores me. But I've just about been talked into sticking out the mountains and the desert for another year. After that to hell with the climate, let's meet a few people. We have a one-store town here, and the meat situation would make you scream. On Wednesday morning the guy opens at 7 A.M. and all the desert rats are there waiting for him to give out numbered [rationing] tickets. Anybody who delays long enough to wash his face is automatically classed as parasitic and gets a high number, if he gets one at all. On Thursday at 10 the inhabitants bring their bronchitis and halitosis into the store and park in front of the meat counter and the numbers are coon-shouted. When we, having a very late number, kick our way up to the collapsed hunk of hamburger we are greeted with a nervous smile that suggests a deacon caught with his hand in the collection plate, and we leave bearing off enough meat for the cat. This happens once a week and that is all that happens, in the way of meat.

  Of course we got to Palm Springs. If we didn't, I should not be writing this letter. I should be out in the desert trying to dig up a dead gopher. We happened on a rib roast a couple of weeks back, just walked in and said hello, and there the damn thing was. We ate for six nights running, behind drawn curtains, chewing quietly, so the neighbors wouldn't hear.

  There are a bunch of guys in Washington, high-minded and pure, but once in a while I hunger for a touch of dirty Irish politics.

  I hope to get a book out fairly soon. I am trying to think up a good title for you to want me to change.

  Despite his restlessness, Chandler was growing more and more intrigued by the mechanics of writing and storytelling. There was also some glimmer of turning luck for him, from England. His first two novels had been published in Britain by Hamish Hamilton, and although he had been similarly ignored there by the critics, a significant fan base (including some in high literary circles) had started to emerge. In recognition of this, The High Window had been reviewed prominently by The Sunday Times. His British sales were now matching his American ones.

  Chandler had started assembling some of his thoughts about writing for his own reference. From this early period, they include the following.

  Notes (Very Brief Please) on English and American Style

  The merits of American style are less numerous than its defects and annoyances, but they are more powerful.

  It is a fluid language, like Shakespearean English, and easily takes in new words, new meanings for old words, and borrows at will and at ease from the usages of other languages, for example, the German free compounding of words and the use of noun or adjective as verb; the French simplification of grammar, the use of one, he, etc.

  Its overtones and undertones are not stylized into a social conventional kind of subtlety which is in effect a class language. If they exist at all, they have a real impact.

  It is more alive to clichés. Consider the appalling, because apparently unconscious, use of clichés by as good a writer as Maugham in The Summing Up, the deadly repetition of pet words until they almost make you scream. And the pet words are always little half-archaic words like jejune and umbrage and vouchsafe, none of which the average educated person could even define correctly.

  Its impact is sensational rather than intellectual. It expresses things experienced rather than ideas.

  It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

  It has Disadvantages.

  It overworks its catchphrases until they not merely become meaningless play talk, like English catchphrases, but sickening, like overworked popular songs.

  Its slang, being invented by writers and palmed off on simple hoodlums and ballplayers, often has a phony sound, even when fresh.

  The language has no awareness of the continuing stream of culture. This may or may not be due to the collapse of classical education and it may or may not happen also in English. It is certainly due to a lack of the historical sense and to shoddy education, because American is an ill-at-ease language, without manner or self-control.

  It has too great a fondness for the faux naif, by which I mean the use of a style such as might be spoken by a very limited sort of mind. In the hands of a genius like Hemingway this may be effective, but only by subtly evading the terms of the contract, that is, by an artistic use of the telling detail which the speaker never would have noted. When not used by a genius it is as flat as a Rotarian speech.

  The last noted item is very probably the result of the submerged but still very strong homespun revolt against English cultural superiority. ‘We're just as good as they are, even if we don't talk good grammar.’ This attitude is based on complete ignorance of the English people as a mass. Very few of them talk good grammar. Those that do probably speak more correctly than the same type of American, but the homespun Englishman uses as much bad grammar as the American, some of it being as old as Piers Ploughman, but still bad grammar. But you don't hear English professional men making elementary mistakes in the use of their own language. You do hear that constantly in America. Of course anyone who likes can put up an argument against any other person's ideas of correctness. Naturally this is historical up to a point and contemporary up to a point. There must be some compromise, or we should all be Alexandrians or boors. But roughly and ordinarily and plainly speaking, you hear American doctors and lawyers and schoolmasters talking in such a way that it is very clear they have no real understanding of their own language and its good or bad form. I'm not referring to the deliberate use of slang and colloquialisms; I'm referring to the pathetic attempts of such people to speak with unwonted correctness and horribly failing.

  You don't hear this sort of collapse of grammar in England among the same kind of people.

  It's fairly obvious that American education is a cultural flop. Americans are not a well-educated people culturally, and their vocational education often has to be learned all over again after they leave school and college. On the other hand they have open quick minds and if their education has little sharp positive value, it has not the stultifying effects of a more rigid training. Such tradition as they have in the use of their language is derived from English tradition, and there is just enough resentment about this to cause perverse use of ungrammaticalities – just to show'em’.

  Americans, having the most complex civilization the world has seen, still like to think of themselves as plain people. In other words they like to think the comic-strip artist is a better draftsman than Leonardo – just because he is a comic-strip artist and the comic strip is for plain people.

  American style has n
o cadence. Without cadence a style has no harmonics. It is like a flute playing solo, an incomplete thing, very dextrous or very stupid as the case may be, but still an incomplete thing.

  Since political power still dominates culture, American will dominate English for a long time to come. English, being on the defensive, is static and cannot contribute anything but a sort of waspish criticism of forms and manners. America is a land of mass production which has only just reached the concept of quality. Its style is utilitarian and essentially vulgar. Why then can it produce great writing or, at any rate, writing as great as this age is likely to produce? The answer is, it can't. All the best American writing has been done by men who are, or at some time were, cosmopolitans. They found here a certain freedom of expression, a certain richness of vocabulary, a certain wideness of interest. But they had to have European taste to use the material.

  Final note – out of order – the tone quality of English speech is usually overlooked. This tone quality is infinitely variable and contributes infinite meaning. The American voice is flat, toneless, and tiresome. The English tone quality makes a thinner vocabulary and a more formalized use of language capable of infinite meanings. Its tones are of course read into written speech by association. This makes good English a class language, and that is its fatal defect. The English writer is a gentleman (or not a gentleman) first and a writer second.

  Having completed a fourth Marlowe book, The Lady in the Lake, at the start of 1943, Chandler's enthusiasm for the detective format was beginning to wane. The thought of starting on a fifth book did not much excite him, nor did writing for the pulps. He still had next to no money, and he was fed up with his nomadism, as well as his intense reclusivity. It was in this lull that Chandler received a fateful phone call from Los Angeles. Paramount Studios were searching for someone to adapt James Cain's novel Double Indemnity, and a producer called Joe Sistrom had happened to read and like a cheap copy of The High Window. He rang Chandler and asked him if he would be interested in the job. Chandler drove over to the studio and met with Sistrom and the film's director Billy Wilder. The meeting sparked a four-year stint in Hollywood which would turn Chandler quite quickly into a rich and famous man.

  Act III (1944–1946)

  Throughout his time in Hollywood, and despite returning to full-scale drinking while there, Chandler remained a private man, eschewing the studio party scene. Most of his new intimacies continued to be forged in late-night letter-writing, at his rented house on Drexel Avenue, after Cissy – now in her seventies – had fallen asleep.

  The adaptation of Double Indemnity, Chandler's first screenwriting project, proved a box-office and critical success, and Paramount decided to hire their new find as a contract writer, resurrecting below-standard scripts for them. As his stock quickly rose in Hollywood, and as Warner Brothers announced its plans to make an A-movie adaptation of his first novel, The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart, Chandler became drawn further into Hollywood. It was to be a brief and intense relationship.

  Two new names began to feature in the correspondence of this time. Charles Morton was an early fan of Chandler's Marlowe books and editor of the intellectual East Coast journal Atlantic Monthly, a magazine he was to persuade Chandler to contribute to occasionally. James Sandoe was also a Chandler fan, a crime book reviewer, and a university librarian in Colorado.

  Letter to James Sandoe,

  26 January 1944.

  What you say about me and Cain is very nice. It has always irritated me to be compared with Cain. My publisher thought it was a smart idea because he had a great success with The Postman Always Rings Twice, but whatever I have or lack as a writer I'm not in the least like Cain. Cain is a writer of the faux naif type, which I particularly dislike.

  You are certainly not without company in your wish that ‘something could be done about the disadvantages of the redlight segregation of detective stories from “novels” by the reviews’. Once in a long while a detective story writer is treated as a writer, but very seldom. However, I think there are a few very good reasons why this is so. For example: (a) Most detective stories are very badly written. (b) Their principal sale is to rental libraries which depend on a commercial reading service and pay no attention to reviews. (c) I believe the detective story is marketed wrong. It is absurd to expect people to pay any more for it than they would for a movie. (d) The detective or mystery story as an art form has been so thoroughly explored that the real problem for a writer now is to avoid writing a mystery story while appearing to do so. However, none of these reasons, valid or invalid as they may be, changes the essential irritation to the writer, which is the knowledge that however well and expertly he writes a mystery story, it will be treated in one paragraph while a column and a half of respectful attention will be given to any fourth-rate, ill-constructed, mock-serious account of the life of a bunch of cotton pickers in the deep south. The French are the only people I know of who think about writing as writing. The Anglo-Saxons think first of the subject matter, and second, if at all, of the quality.

  Letter to James M. Cain,

  20 March 1944. Mildred Pierce was another book by Cain, soon to be made into a film by Warner Brothers. Chandler would not work on the project.

  It was very kind of you to send me an inscribed copy of your book and I'm very grateful to you. We have been down in the desert for a month, with poor luck in weather. I don't offer that as an excuse for not writing before, the fact being that I was so completely pooped after nine months at Paramount that I couldn't even make myself write a letter. Just sat and stared morosely out of the window at the sand dunes.

  Very glad to hear about Warners’ Mildred Pierce. It seems I may have a chance to work on it for them, but Paramount was not too keen about loaning me. Everybody who has seen Double Indemnity likes it (everybody that has talked to me, at least). The feeling is that it is a pretty fine picture and for once an emotionally integrated story has got on the screen in the mood in which it was written. I don't think any of the changes we made were in conflict with your basic conception. In fact, you would have had to make them yourself. I do not doubt that some of them might have been made better, but they had to be made. The emotional integration is due to the fact that the three guys who worked on the job did not at any time disagree about what they had wanted to achieve, but only on how to do it.

  A curious matter I'd like to call to your attention – although you have probably been all through it with yourself – is your dialogue. Nothing could be more natural and easy and to the point on paper, and yet it doesn't quite play. We tried it out by having a couple of actors do a scene right out of the book. It had a sort of remote effect that I was at a loss to understand. It came to me then that the effect of your written dialogue is only partly sound and sense. The rest of the effect is the appearance on the page. These unevenly shaped hunks of quick-moving speech hit the eye with a sort of explosive effect. You read the stuff in batches, not in individual speech and counterspeech. On the screen this is all lost, and the essential mildness of the phrasing shows up as lacking in sharpness. They tell me that is the difference between photographic dialogue and written dialogue. For the screen everything has to be sharpened and pointed and wherever possible elided. But of course you know far more about it than I do.

  I hope you get as good a script of Mildred Pierce. You don't need one quite so sharp. Are you working on it yourself?

  Letter to Charles Morton,

  12 October 1944.

  The other day I thought of your suggestion for an article of studied insult about the Bay City (Santa Monica) police. A couple of D.A.’s investigators got a tip about a gambling hell in Ocean Park, a sleazy adjunct to Santa Monica. They went down there and picked up a couple of Santa Monica cops on the way, telling them they were going to kick in a box, but not telling them where it was. The cops went along with the natural reluctance of good cops to enforce the law against a paying customer, and when they found out where the place was, they mumbled brokenly:
‘We'd ought to talk to Captain Brown about this before we do it, boys. Captain Brown ain't going to like this.’ The D.A.’s men urged them heartlessly forward into the chip and bone parlor, several alleged gamblers were tossed into the sneezer and the equipment seized for evidence (a truckload of it) was stored in lockers at a local police headquarters. When the D.A.’s boys came back next morning to go over it everything had disappeared but a few handfuls of white poker chips. The locks had not been tampered with, and no trace could be found of the truck or the driver. The flatfeet shook their grizzled polls in bewilderment and the investigators went back to town to hand the Jury the story. Nothing will come of it. Nothing ever does. Do you wonder I love Bay City? Alas that its gambling ships are no more. The present governor of California won his office by disposing of them. Others had tried (or pretended to) for years and years. But there was always the legal argument as to whether the 12-mile limit should be measured from this place or that. Warren solved it very simply, and no doubt quite illegally. He commandeered enough boats and deputies to surround the ships and keep anyone from leaving them or reaching them. Then he just stayed there until they gave up.

  A real clinical study of such a town would be fascinating reading.

  Chandler wrote an article for Morton that autumn about detective writing, published that December in Morton's magazine under the title ‘The Simple Art of Murder’.