The Raymond Chandler Papers
Page 6
Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn't have to stay there for ever, but it was a good idea . . . Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people who do it for a reason, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with handwrought duelling pistols, curare and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes . . . He was spare, frugal, hardboiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before . . .
Letter to Charles Morton,
20 November 1944. ‘Ak-Sar-Ben’, referred to in the letter by Chandler, was a populist movement that had flourished in the Nebraska of his childhood, Ak-Sar-Ben being Nebraska spelt backwards. ‘Bryan’ was Senator William Jennings Bryan, who was nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate in the 1890s (he lost) and who later in his life reappeared as counsel for the prosecution in the famous ‘monkey trial’ against a Tennessee schoolteacher who had taught the theory of evolution to his pupils.
Perhaps I ought to live in Boston. The civilized intelligence is pretty rare out west. This sounds like a snobbish thing to say, but I have lived here a long time and met very few people who were not half-baked in one way or another. Hollywood is full of very clever people, some of them rather more than clever, but the hard, glossy patina of Hollywood and New York smartness depresses me. You meet the bright people who have written something successful and have arrived and are very damn conscious of the fact. You meet lively young men who are really keen on making good pictures, if it is at all possible. But you do not meet the quiet, restrained, well-bred and inconspicuously intelligent kind of mind that is fairly common in England and I imagine also in New England. At least I hope so.
One of these days I'll write you something about myself. In the meantime things are not going too well. P. Marlowe is acting up, I have had many interruptions, and also a long-drawn-out wrangle with Paramount about a contract. I wish I had one of these facile plotting brains, like Erle Gardner or somebody. I have good ideas for about four books, but the labor of shaping them into plots appals me.
There was a time when I should have adored your kind of job, but would have been incapable of handling it. I never really had a great urge to write fiction, which is becoming more and more of a pseudo-art. (There's an article in that idea.) But you guys have an obligation too. That is, to avoid pompously bad writing and the kind of dulness that comes from letting flatulent asses pontificate about things they know no more about than the next man, if as much. There is a (to me) shocking example of this in the November Harper’s, called ‘Salute to the Literateurs’. Consider:
‘For writers are people of peculiar sensitivity to the winds of doctrine which blow with especial violence in a time of rapid change – some more so than others, but none, except the outright hacks, completely immune.’
I regard that sentence as a disgrace to English prose. It says nothing and says it ponderously, in a clichéd manner, and without syntax. The ‘some’ obviously, by the sense, refers to writers, but just as obviously by the construction refers to ‘-winds of doctrine’. (Can't we leave phrases like that to Somerset Maugham?) How outright is a hack? And how completely immune is immune. Phooey. I continue:
‘They react this way and that; they resist the currents and run with them: and while some produce works of little value in literary or any other terms, others of greater ability and substance, and therefore of greater importance, exhibit the same tendencies in writings of a high degree of excellence.’
Is there anything said here that could not be said better with a simple after-dinner belch? A little later he says:
‘When the present war was in the making the most indicative scratchings on the literary seismograph were in red.’
When I showed that to my little seismograph he began to indicate four letter words in a very nasty shade of brownish-purple and had to be shut up in a dark room.
‘Most indicative’, ‘literature seismograph [sic]’, ‘run with the current’, two thousand years of Christianity and this is what we get in a literary magazine. Shame on you fellows!
I had an uncle in Omaha who was a minor politician – crooked, if I am any judge of character. I've been there a time or two. As a very small boy I used to be sent to spend part of summer at Plattsmouth. I remember the oak trees and the high wooden sidewalks beside the dirt roads and the heat and the fireflies and walking-sticks and a lot of strange insects and the gathering of wild grapes in the fall to make wine and the dead cattle and once in a while a dead man floating down the muddy river and the dandy little three-hole privy behind the house. I remember Ak-Sar-Ben and the days when they were still trying to elect Bryan. I remember the rocking chairs on the edge of the sidewalk in a solid row outside the hotel and the tobacco spit all over the place. And I remember a trial run on a mail car with a machine my uncle invented to take on mail without stopping, but somebody beat him out of it and he never got a dime. After that I went to England and was raised on Latin and Greek, like yourself.
Letter to Charles Morton,
18 December 1944.
I cannot complete my piece about screenwriters and screenwriting for the simple reason that I have no honesty about it. I may wake up with a different notion, but you cannot bully me into sending you something I am so deadly unsure about. There are points like these to make, but when you make them you get in a mess. E.g., 1. There is no mature art of the screenplay, and by mature I don't mean intellectual or postgraduate or intelligentsia-little magazine writing. I mean an art which knows what it is doing and has the techniques necessary to do it. 2. An adult, that is dirty or plain-spoken art of the screen, could exist at any moment the Hays Office and the local censorship boards would let it, but it would be no more mature than Going My Way is. 3. There is no available body of screenplay literature, because it belongs to the studios, not to the writers, and they won't show it. For instance, I tried to borrow a script of The Maltese Falcon from Warners; they would not lend it to me. All the writer can do is look at pictures. If he is working in a studio, he can get the scripts of that studio, but his time is not his own. He can make no leisurely study and reconstruction of the problems. 4. There is no teaching in the art of the screenplay because there is nothing to teach; if you do not know how pictures are made, you cannot possibly know how to write them. No outsider knows that, and no writer could be bothered, unless he was an out-of-work or manqué writer. 5. The screenplay as it exists is the result of a bitter and prolonged struggle between the writer (or writers) and the people whose aim is to exploit his talent without giving it the freedom to be a talent. 6. It is only a little over 3 years since the major (and only this very year the minor) studios were forced after prolonged and bitter struggle to agree to treat the writer with a reasonable standard of business ethics. In this struggle the writers were not really fighting the motion picture industry at all; they were fighting those powerful elements in it that had hitherto glommed off all the glory and prestige and who could only continue to do so by selling themselves to the world as the makers of pictures. This struggle is still going on, and the writers are winning it, and they are winning it in the wrong way: by becoming producers and directors, that is, by becoming showmen instead of creative artists. This will do nothing for the art of the screenplay and will actually harm those writers who are temperamentally unfitted for showmanship (and this will include always the best of them). 7. The writer is still very far from winning the right to create a screenplay without interference from his studio. Why? because he does not know how, and it is to the interest of the producers and directors to prevent him from learning how. If even a quarter of the highly-paid screenwriters of Hollywood (leaving out all the people who work on program pictures) could produce a completely integrated and thoroughly photographable screenplay, with only the amount of interference and discussion necessary to p
rotect the studio's investment in actors and freedom from libel and censorship troubles, then the producer would become a business co-ordinator and the director would become the interpreter of a completed work, instead of, as at present, the maker of the picture. They will fight to the death against it.
I have a three year contract with Paramount, for 26 weeks work a year, at a vast sum of money (by my standards). Nothing of the above would give particular offense to the studio, but much of it would be deeply resented by many individuals and would involve me in constant arguments which would wear me out. But there is still more to be said, and it is worse yet. A system like this, prolonged over a long period of time, produces a class of kept writers without initiative, independence or fighting spirit; they exist only by conforming to Hollywood standards, but they can produce art only by defying them. Few, very few, of them are capable of earning a living as independent writers, but you will always have to have them, because you will never find enough talent in all Hollywood to make more than one tenth of its pictures even fairly good. Granted that there are too many made; they are going to be made, or the theaters will be dark. Enormous vested interests and the livelihoods of countless thousands of people are involved. Granted again that ninety per cent of Hollywood's pictures are not really worth making; I say that ninety per cent of the books and plays and short stories they were made from are not worth seeing or reading, by the same standards. And you and I know those standards are not going to change in our time.
Yet a writer, like me, who has little experience in Hollywood, and presumes to discuss the writers of Hollywood, must either lie, or say that they are largely over-dressed, overpaid, servile and incompetent hacks. All progress in the art of the screenplay depends on a very few people who are in a position (and have the temperament and toughness) to fight for excellence. Hollywood loves them for it and is only too anxious to reward them by making them something else than writers. Hollywood's attitude to writers is necessarily conditioned by the mass of its writers, not by the few who have what it calls integrity. It loves the word, having so little of the quality. Yet it is not fair for me to say in print that the writers of Hollywood are what they are; they have a guild and it may be that in so large an industry they must fight as a group; it is obvious that I have done nothing to help them achieve what they have achieved, and am not likely to, except indirectly, by helping to get out a few pictures a bit above the ruck. It is not even fair to call them overpaid; because other writers as a group are shockingly underpaid; Hollywood is the only industry in the world that pays its workers the kind of money only capitalists and big executives make in other industries. If it is something less than ideal, it is the only industry that even tries for idealism; if it makes bad art, no other makes any art, except as a by-product of money-making. If it makes money out of poor pictures, it could make more money out of good ones, and it knows it and tries to make them. There is simply not enough talent in the world to do it with, on any such scale. Its pictures cost too much and therefore must be safe and bring in big returns; but why do they cost too much? Because it pays the people who do the work, not the people who cut coupons. If it drains off all the writing talent in the world and then proceeds to destroy it by the way it treats it, then why is it able to drain off that talent? Because it knows how to pay for talent. The man who publishes my books has made more out of me than I have out of him, and he has not made it by selling the books, but by cutting himself in on radio and motion picture and reprint rights, which did not cost him a cent. Did he venture anything on the books? Of course not, not a dime. He was insured against loss by the rental libraries. He does not even know how to sell my kind of books, or how to promote them or how to get them reviewed. He just sits there and waits for something to happen, and when it happens, he rubs his hands and cuts himself a nice fat slice of it. But Hollywood pays me a large salary merely to try to write something it can perhaps use. And when I write something that pays, then it tears up my contract and writes a better one. I cannot despise an industry that does this.
Letter to Charles Morton,
1 January 1945.
I have a story in mind which I hope to do before I die; it will have almost no surface toughness at all, but the go to hell attitude, which is no pose with me, is likely to appear in it all the same.
My doubtfully honest uncle's (by marriage only) name was Ernest Fitt, and he was a boiler inspector or something, at least in name. He is dead now. I remember him very well. He used to come home in the evening (in the Plattsmouth period) put the paper on the music rack and improvise while he read it. I have read somewhere that Harold Bauer used to play his programmes through while reading a paper, but I always thought him a dull pianist, so it didn't surprise me. My uncle had talent, but no musical education. He had a brother who was an amazing character. He had been a bank clerk or manager in a bank in Waterford, Ireland (where all my mother's people come from but none of them were Catholics) and had embezzled money. He cleaned out the till one Saturday and, with the help of the Masons, escaped the police net to the continent of Europe. In some hotel in Germany his money was stolen, or most of it. When I knew him, long after, he was an extremely respectable old party, always immaculately dressed, and of an incredible parsimony. He once invited me to dinner. After the dinner he leaned over and in a confidential whisper said: ‘We'll each pay for our own.’ Not a drop of Scotch blood anywhere either. Pure middle-class Protestant Irish. I have a great many Irish relatives, some poor, some not poor, and all Protestants and some of them Sinn Feiners and some entirely pro-British . . . People over here don't understand the Irish at all. A third of the population of Eire is Protestant, and it is by far the best educated and most influential third. Almost all the great Irish rebels were Protestants, and the whole tone of their present nation is Calvinistic rather than Catholic. I grew up with a terrible contempt for Catholics, and I have trouble with it even now. My uncle's snob housekeeper wouldn't have a Catholic servant in the house, although they were probably much better than the trash she did have. What a world! The rather amusing development in my uncle's case was that he took unto himself a Jewish mistress in London, raised her son, had two illegitimate children himself, and then married her. But he never took her to Ireland! I could make a book about these people, but I am too much of an Irishman myself ever to tell the truth about them.
Well, Hollywood is funny too. They had a contract with me and no story for me to work on. So I cooked up an idea and went in and told it to them and they rubbed their hands and said lovely, when do we start? But when my agent enquired what they proposed to pay for the idea, they tore their clothing into shreds and heaped ashes on their heads. It took several weeks of bitter wrangling to get them to see the light. I don't care anything about the money, I just like to fight. I'm a tired old man, but it takes more than a motion picture studio to push me around.
Letter to Dale Warren,
publicity director of the Houghton Mifflin publishing firm, 7 January 1945. Chandler's relationship with Alfred Knopf had soured during his time in Hollywood, following a plagiarism incident. It had been brought to the attention of Chandler, by a fan, that the crime writer James Hadley Chase was lifting whole passages of Chandler's old fiction, most blatantly in a book called No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Chandler had contacted both his British and American publishers. While Hamish Hamilton had forced Chase to write an apology in the British trade press, Knopf – under advice from his attorney – had decided not to press the matter. Annoyed, Chandler had moved to Houghton Mifflin. To enhance the fresh slate, he was about to take the opportunity to change agents, leaving Sydney Sanders for the New York firm Brandt & Brandt.
I wrote melodrama because when I looked around me it was the only kind of writing I saw that was relatively honest and yet was not trying to put over somebody's party line. So now there are guys talking about prose and other guys telling me I have a social conscience. P. Marlowe has as much social conscience as a horse. He has a personal conscience, which
is an entirely different matter. There are people who think I dwell on the ugly side of life. God help them! If they had any idea how little I have told them about it! P. Marlowe doesn't give a damn who is president; neither do I, because I know he will be a politician. There was even a bird who informed me I could write a good proletarian novel; in my limited world there is no such animal, and if there were, I am the last mind in the world to like it, being by tradition and long study a complete snob. P. Marlowe and I do not despise the upper classes because they take baths and have money; we despise them because they are phony. And so on. And now I see ahead of me either an acute self-consciousness about simple things which I never had any idea of explaining, or a need to explain them at length, and with fury, in the very lingo I had been trying to forget. Because that is the only lingo people who can understand explanations of the sort will accept them in.
I have a letter from a lady in Caracas, Venezuela, who asks me if I would like to be her friend when she comes to New York. It has a faint suggestion about it of another letter I had once from a girl in Seattle who said that she was interested in music and sex, and gave me the impression that, if I was pressed for time, I need not even bother to bring my own pyjamas.
Letter to Hamish ‘Jamie’ Hamilton,
Chandler's British publisher, 11 January 1945. Chandler quotes a recent letter from Hamilton, whom he has never met.
‘I gather that he is a very big shot in Hollywood these days, and might resent advice, whoever the sender may be and however good his intentions.’ That really cuts me to the quick. I am not a big shot in Hollywood or anywhere else and have no desire to be. I am, on the contrary, extremely allergic to big shots of all types wherever found, and lose no opportunity to insult them whenever I get the chance. Furthermore, I love advice and if I very seldom take it, on the subject of writing, that is only because I have received practically none except from my agent, Sydney Sanders, and he has rather concentrated on trying to make me write stuff for what we call the slick magazines over here. That is, the big shiny paper national weeklies and monthlies which cater principally to the taste of women. I have always felt myself entirely unfitted for this kind of writing. I much prefer Hollywood, with all its disadvantages.