The Raymond Chandler Papers

by Tom Hiney

  Letter to Dale Warren,

  19 December 1948

  Your caliber is all right so far as I can see. You can kill a man with any size gun, but you are more likely to hit him with a small one, unless of course it's a custom-built job like a Mauser x763 (approx .32 caliber) which has an effective range almost as great as a military rifle and must therefore have a terrific kick. I have a .38 Smith and Wesson Special and even that is pretty damn heavy for accurate shooting (which I'm not capable of anyhow). You use so much muscle holding it straight, that you are apt not to be able to relax enough to hold it steady. The frontier boys who used .44's so well had very strong hands and wrists, which was a natural development of constant riding. A Luger is normally nine mm. and that corresponds to a .3 8.

  Letter to Bernice Baumgarten,

  editor at Carl Brandt's agency, 29 December 1948. The Young Lions was a novel by Irwin Shaw.

  I got The Young Lions for Christmas. It looks phony as hell in spots. And how do you do something ‘with careful deliberation'? And, ‘But the girl's expression hadn't changed. She had broken off a twig from a bush and was absently running it along the stone fence, as though she were pondering what he had just said.’ The last clause and the ‘absently’ throw away the effect. You either describe an action and let the reader make the deduction of the inner reaction it expresses, or else you describe the inner reaction and view what she does from within. You don't do it both ways at the same time. A small thing, but it places the stuff for me. I guess I'm just being a stickler. And enjoying it.

  Letter to Paul Brooks,

  of Houghton Mifflin, January 1949.

  I have often wondered what the hell an editor-in-chief was, but I suppose you know. For purposes of identification it identifies nothing to me. Hell, I corresponded with Dale Warren off and on for many years thinking he was a publicity man, and very much impressed. Isn't that wonderful, I said to myself, in Boston even publicity men can speak English. Then he sent me a couple of anthologies he had edited and I was still more impressed. Hell, the guy is almost educated. Then I learned, or thought I learned, he was one of your editors. And THEN he sent me a blurb he had written, and I don't know whether he is a publicity man or not.

  Letter to Carl Brandt,

  23 January 1949. Chandler had recently attended meetings in Hollywood to discuss a plan to write a Marlowe film set in England. The film was never in the end made.

  These Hollywood people are fantastic when you have been away for a while. In their presence any calm sensible remark sounds faked. Their conversation is a mess of shopworn superlatives interrupted by four telephone calls to the sentence. Stark is a nice chap. I like him. Everybody at his bagnio is nice. He has done a fine job with the radio show. It could have been on the air five years already, if I had had him in the first place. It has a better rating they tell me than some quite expensive shows. Just the same I came away depressed. I really don't know why. Perhaps it's just Beverly Hills. It was such a nice place before the Phoenicians took it over. Now it's just a setting for an enormous confidence racket.

  Letter to Dale Warren,

  23 January 1949.

  Other writers do things all the time – talk at book marts, go on autographing tours, give lectures, spread their personalities in silly interviews – which I can't help thinking make them look a bit cheap. To them it's part of the racket. To me it's the thing that makes it a racket.

  ... I hate explanation scenes and I learned in Hollywood that there are two rules about them. 1) You can give only a little at a time, if there is much to give. 2) You can only make an exposition scene when there is some other element, such as danger or love making, or a character reversal suspected. Suspense of some sort, in one word.

  Letter to Jamie Hamilton,

  24 January 1949. It appearing that Chandler might go to London in order to research the British Marlowe film, Hamilton had assured him a great reception there. Hamilton and his staff had also written to Chandler to thank him for sending them parcels during and in the aftermath of the war.

  Your remarks about red carpets, though ever so kindly meant, scare me a little. I'm strictly the background type, and my character is an unbecoming mixture of outer diffidence and inward arrogance. It's so very kind of you to make so much of what to me is so very simple a thing. After all what do I do? And if it were anything at all, which it is not, I have in my mind an unforgettable little story of some friends who visited Luxembourg a couple of years ago. They stayed at a very nice hotel where the food and wine were magnificent. The atmosphere was cheerful, people from all the countries of Europe, almost, were there, having their ease. At two tables were English people, only two. At one sat an elderly couple, formerly well-to-do, now not so well-to-do. At the other a demobbed tank officer with his mother. On all the tables of the hotel dining room but these were bottles of wine. This is a true story. The English could not afford wine. Those who had never surrendered drank water in order that those who had surrendered might drink wine. I think this story is wonderful.

  Letter to James Sandoe,

  regarding the ongoing Nuremberg Trials, 25 February 1949.

  I know from my own knowledge that in the first world war, during the final German retreat from the Hindenburg line the machine gun crews left behind to hold up the advance as long as possible were almost always bayoneted to the last man, even though they rose out of the ground and tried to surrender. There is an element of hypocrisy in these war trials that hurts. Hanging generals and politicians and concentration camp people is fine, but when it comes to junior officers and N.C.O.’s I'm not at all easy about it. Their freedom of choice seems to me little more than freedom to prefer death to dishonor, and that's asking too much of human nature.

  Letter to Bernice Baumgarten,

  11 March 1949.

  Every now and then I get a shock by seeing myself through other eyes. In the current number of Partisan Review (which incidentally has several very good things in it) a man writing about Our Mutual Friend says: ‘It is possible that the question of true-to-life did not arise, and that Dickens’ contemporaries accepted his dark vision of England and London ... as readily as we today accept Raymond Chandler's California with its brutal and neurotic crew of killers and private eyes –’ etc. Another writer in an avant garde magazine referred to me as ‘a Cato of the Cruelties’. Apart from the obvious compliment of being noticed at all by the rarefied intellectuals who write for these publications – and I should understand them well, because I was one of them for many years – I cannot grasp what they do with their sense of humor. Or let me put it a better way: Why is it that the Americans – of all people the quickest to reverse their moods – do not see the strong element of burlesque in my writing? Or is it only the intellectuals who miss that? And as for true-to-life I don't think these cloud dwellers can have much understanding of the kind of world they live in and the kind of world Dickens lived in. There is a strong element of fantasy in the mystery story; there is in any kind of writing that moves within an accepted formula. The mystery writer's material is melodrama, which is an exaggeration of violence and fear beyond what one normally experiences in life. (I said normally; no writer ever approximated the life of the Nazi concentration camps.) The means he uses are realistic in the sense that such things happen to people like these and in places like these. But this realism is superficial; the potential of emotion is overcharged, the compression of time and event is a violation of probability, and although such things happen, they do not happen so fast and in such a tight frame of logic to so closely knit a group of people.

  Letter to Charles Morton,

  16 March 1949. Chandler had told Morton in an earlier letter that he was on the lookout for a new car. Morton had suggested to him that he buy the new model Jaguar that had recently been launched.

  The Jaguar is a knockout, but it is completely out of my price class. There is a last year's model roadster, or runabout or whatever they call them, here in La Jolla, all black with red le
ather seats and chromium radiators. But even if I felt justified in spending half the money, I'd just feel Hollywoodish and phony to be riding about in the thing. Also, and this may not be so important back there, my soul cringes at the thought of the average American mechanic laying his incompetent hands on a piece of real machinery.

  Letter to Alex Barris,

  a Canadian journalist who had sent Chandler a number of interview questions about himself, 18 March 1949.

  We live in a rather too large one-story house on a corner across the street from the ocean. La Jolla, as you might not know, is built on a point north of San Diego, and is never either hot or cold. So we get two seasons of tourists, one in winter, one in summer. Two years ago the town was very quiet, exclusive, expensive, and almost as dull as Victoria, B.C. on a wet Sunday afternoon in February. Now it is just expensive. There is a lot of shingle here and lots of low soft sandstone cliff which the ocean has wrought into very strange shapes, but very little beach, except at the north end of town where it is much more exposed than down where we live. Our living room has a picture window which looks south across the bay to Point Loma, the westerly part of San Diego, and at night there is a long lighted coast line almost in our laps. Our radio writer came down here to see me once and he sat down in front of this window and cried because it was so beautiful. But we live here, and the hell with it.

  As you may know I am a half-breed. My father was an American of a Pennsylvania Quaker family originally and my mother was Anglo-Irish, also of a Quaker family. She was born in Waterford where there is still, I believe, a famous Quaker school – famous to Quakers anyhow. I grew up in England and I served with the 1st Canadian Division in the first war. As a boy I spent a lot of time in Ireland and I have no romantic ideas about the Irish.

  What do I do with myself from day to day? 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. I found this out long ago . . . 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. However blank their minds or dim their wits, no nonsense about inspiration from them. 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. The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at least, when a professional writer doesn't do anything else 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. It's the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules, a. you don't have to write. b. you can't do anything else. The rest comes of itself.

  I hate publicity, quite sincerely. I've been through the interview mill and I regard it as a waste of time. The guy I meet in those interviews masquerading under my name is usually a heel I wouldn't even know. I'm an intellectual snob who happens to have a fondness for the American vernacular, largely because I grew up on Latin and Greek. I had to learn American just like a foreign language . . . The literary use of slang is study in itself. I've found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be passe before it gets into print. But I'd better not get off on that subject, or I'll be writing for a week.

  Letter to Jamie Hamilton,

  21 March 1949.

  I remember several years ago when Howard Hawks was making The Big Sleep, the movie, he and Bogart got into an argument as to whether one of the characters was murdered or committed suicide. They sent me a wire (there's a joke about this too) asking me, and dammit I didn't know either. Of course I got hooted at. The joke was in connection with Jack Warner, the head of Warner Bros. Believe it or not, he saw the wire, the wire cost the studio 70 cents, and he called Hawks up and asked him whether it was really necessary to send a telegram about a point like that. That's one way to run a business.

  ... I know how careful English proof readers are, but a writer who deals in vernacular and on occasion makes up his own language may find the printer making corrections of things he assumed to be errors, but were in fact meant exactly as written. Knopfs printers once had the greatest of difficulty in reconciling themselves to a sentence which read, ‘a guy's there and you see him and then he ain't there and you don't not see him’, and which to them was clearly a double negative, but was to me a much more forcible way of saying, ‘don't miss him’, obvious and conventional, but not alive.

  Letter to Dale Warren,

  27 March 1949. The film being referred to is He Walked By Night.

  I thought it was damn good ... I thought Basehart did a grand job and one didn't see enough of him. But to me the really shocking thing about the picture was the assumption that the gestapo methods of the police are natural and proper. By what authority do they mark off an area and bring everyone inside it in for questioning? This is nothing but arrest without warrant and without any reasonable presumption of guilty knowledge. By what authority do they force a man they admit to be innocent to continue in the role of decoy, even beaten up? By none except what they have usurped and been allowed to usurp by the gullible public, most of whom, by this time, had their origins in countries where the police made their own laws just as they do here . . . They make illegal searches, illegal arrests, illegal entrapments, and they get their evidence by illegal means. Because a cop has been killed (and the statistics on cop killing would probably show it to be one of the safest jobs in the world) they declare martial law and do exactly what they please. They commit armed assault with impunity, since the use or threat of force while armed and without warrant or reasonable grounds is armed assault.

  Letter to Bernice Baumgarten,

  31 March 1949, regarding a New York Times article about him. Also mentioned later in the letter is that year's Best Picture Oscar, which had gone to the British film Hamlet, starring Laurence Olivier.

  Mr Steegmuller is quite a guy. He not only quotes from me in quotes but without quotes. And where did I ever say that only my type of detective story is serious literature? My argument is and always has been merely that there is no such thing as serious literature, that the survivals of Puritanism in the American mind make all but the most literate people incapable of thinking of literature without reference to what they call significance, and that most of this so-called serious literature or fiction is the most transient stuff in the world; the moment its message is dated, damn quick, it is dead stuff.

  It is one of the (few) charms of not being as young as you were that you can stick your neck out, because you don't give a damn. If a young writer knocks a reigning favorite, he can be accused of envy and malice, and it hurts him and makes him cautious. I get a lot of fun out of sticking pins in the popular balloons. The most fantastic pratfall of the moment is Elizabeth Bowen's last book, which in spots is a screaming parody of Henry James. Jamie Hamilton wrote me that the English critics are tying themselves in knots trying to be polite to her (because of course they know she is potentially a fine writer), knowing all the time that the poor girl is giving an exhibition of what happens when an over-earnest writer completely loses her sense of humor.

  There's a lovely fight going on at the Academy. The boys were finally shamed into giving the award more or less on the basis of merit (except the musical award, which stank) and the five major companies which have been contributing to the cost of the show have wi
thdrawn. ‘Look fellows,’ they say without saying, ‘we want the Oscars to go to the best pictures all right, but we're not in business for our health. The best pictures from Hollywood savvy.’ They don't care who is best as long as it's them.

  Letter to Carl Brandt,

  3 April 1949.

  The last actual research I did was in 1945 while writing The Blue Dahlia, the first story incidentally which betrayed to the public the fact that the head man of the Homicide Bureau, then a very nice guy called Thad Brown (Captain), did not even have a private office. His desk was sat right next to that of a female secretary and his door was always open. Outside there was a bare largish room in which the dicks lounged about and quite literally did not have enough chairs to sit down in all at once. The entrance to this was a dutch door (which we didn't use in the film) and both of these rooms together would have fitted easily into our living room. This was positively all the boys had to work with and out of ... A very good cop picture I saw recently called He Walked by Night shows some excellent technical stuff, but the shots inside Police Headquarters are much too spacious. You get the impression of a very complex and highly efficient organization staffed by innumerable men. As a matter of fact they are a pretty dumb bunch who operate about on the mental level of plumbers.