by Tom Hiney
Letter to Jean de Leon,
18 April 1957. The Light of Asia was a nineteenth-century life of Buddha, written by Sir Edwin Arnold.
No, I haven't read The Light of Asia. I really feel that formal religions, however liberal in thought, are a little too late for me now. And perhaps – I hope so – I am not the type who runs crying to an Unknown God when he feels alone, desperate, or facing death. I think I shall take it as calmly as I took the dangers in my war so long ago. But one never knows. Anyone can be broken by suffering. Perhaps, in a way, I am lucky to have reached the decision to take my own life and to have failed, since in a sense I have already known what it is to look death in the eye. Neither prayers nor religion could have helped me then. It was between me and myself, so to speak. Of course, torture is something else. I doubt very much that I could have put on as good a show as so many did.
I don't know what I make of Billy Graham. I saw him once on TV and he seemed a well-dressed, pleasant sort of chap, young, good-looking, and so on. But in America we are inclined to regard all such people as ‘on the make’, I suppose. There have been too many of them over here and they have made too much money. The flagrant cases seem to me Aimee Semple MacPherson and Father Divine.
Letter to Deirdre Gartrell,
23 April 1957.
Most people make do with what is available and seemingly appropriate to their condition. Ferocious romantics of my sort never make do with anything. They demand the impossible and on very rare occasions they actually achieve it, much to their surprise. I was one of those, one of the perhaps two per cent, who are blessed with a marriage which is forever a courtship. I never proposed marriage formally. My wife and I just seemed to melt into each other's hearts without the need of words.
Letter to Helga Greene,
30 April 1957.
I think today there are much better film writers than I could ever be, because I never quite saw things in the terms of the camera, but always as dramatic scenes between people. I suppose you know the story of the writer who racked his brains how to show, very shortly, that a middle-aged man and his wife were no longer in love with each other. Finally he licked it. The man and his wife got into a lift and he kept his hat on. At the next stop a lady got into the lift and he immediately removed his hat. That is proper film writing. Me, I'd have done a four page scene about it. What this chap did took a few seconds.
A schoolmaster of mine long ago said, ‘You can only learn from the second-raters. The first-raters are out of range; you can't see how they get their effects.’ There is a lot of truth in this.
The date and addressee of this fragment are unknown.
Gatsby ... It is not perfect; evasive of the problem often, side-stepping scenes which should have been written, but somehow passing along, crystalized, complete, and, as such things go nowadays, eternal, a little pure art ... there is such a difference between the real stuff and a whole shelf full of Pulhams and Forsythes and Charlie Grays.
Letter to Helga Greene,
5 May 1957.
I was an executive in the oil business once, a director of eight companies and a president of three, although actually I was simply an over-paid employee. They were small companies, but very rich. I had the best office staff in Los Angeles and I paid them higher salaries than they could have got anywhere else, and they knew it. My office door was never closed, everyone called me by my Christian name, and there was never any dissension, because I made it my business to see there was no cause for it. Once in a while, not often, I had to fire someone – not someone I had picked myself, but someone who had been imposed upon me by the big man – and that I hated terribly, because one never knows what hardship it may mean to the individual. I had a talent for picking out the capabilities of people. There was one man, I remember, who had a genius for filing. Others were good at routine jobs but had no initiative. There were secretaries who would remember everything and secretaries who were wonderful at dictation and typing, but whose minds were really elsewhere. I had to understand them all and use them according to what they were. There was one girl, not pretty and not too bright, who could have been given a million dollars in cash, and a month later, without being asked, she would have known the number of every bill and listed it, and would have, at her own expense, taken a safe deposit box to keep the money in. There was a lawyer on salary in our office (I didn't approve of the idea, but was overruled by the Board) who was very acute but also very unreliable, because he drank too much. I found out just how to use his brain, and he often said and publicly that I was the best office manager in Los Angeles, and probably one of the best in the world. (Eventually, he crashed a police car and I had to get him out of jail.)
Business is very tough and I hate it. But whatever you set out to do, you have to do as well as you know how . . . I remember one time when we had a truck carrying a pipe in Signal Hill (just north of Long Beach) and the pipe stuck out quite a long way, but there was a red lantern on it, according to law. A car with two drunken sailors and two girls crashed into it and filed actions for $1000 apiece. They waited almost a year, which is the deadline here for filing a personal injury action. The insurance company said, ‘Oh well, it costs a lot of money to defend these suits, and we'd rather settle.’ I said, ‘That's all very well. It doesn't cost you anything to settle. You simply put the rates up. If you don't want to fight this case, and fight it competently, my company will fight it.’ ‘At your own expense?’ ‘Of course not. We'll sue you for what it costs us, unless you pay without that necessity.’ He walked out of the office. We defended the action, with the best lawyer we knew, and he proved that the pipe truck had been properly lighted and then we brought in various barmen from Long Beach (it took money to find them, but it was worth it) and showed that they had been thrown out of three bars. We won hands down, and the insurance company paid up immediately about a third of what they would have settled for, and as soon as they did I canceled the policy, and had it rewritten with another company.
Perhaps all this sounds a little hardboiled. But it wasn't like that really at all. I was just doing what I thought was my job. It's always been a fight, hasn't it? Everywhere you go, everything you do – it all takes it out of you.
Letter to Paul Brooks,
7 May 1957.
I once told a lawyer whom I know very well that it seemed to me that if the American Bar Association got after the hoodlum lawyers without whom highly organized crime could not exist in this country, they might very possibly wrap it up in a matter of months. These boys, and I mean the really big operators, never make a move without legal advice, and these boys are bound to be crooks because they are taking crooked money and assisting crooked operators. Well, this lawyer friend of mine looked at me in a confused manner and changed the conversation. It seems they would rather protect themselves and each other than the public. To a certain extent the same is true about doctors.
Letter to Helga Greene,
7May 1957. Chandler was now considering returning again to London.
If you go somewhere to study new surroundings, absorb new atmospheres, meet different types of people, you always have at the back of your mind at least a hope of getting some use from it all. I have lost Los Angeles as a locale. It is no longer the part of me it once was, although I was the first to write about it in a realistic way. Now half the writers in America live in or near it, the war has made it an industrial city, and the climate has been ruined partly by this and partly by too much vegetation, too many lawns to be watered, and in a place that nature intended to be a semi-desert. It was hot and dry when I first went there, with tropical rains in winter, and sunshine at least nine-tenths of the year. Now it is humid, hot, sticky, and when the smog comes down into the bowl between mountains which is Los Angeles, it is damn near intolerable.
So naturally I look around for something else to write about. I can't write about England until I feel England in my bones. Love is not enough.
Letter to Deirdre Gartrell,
; 8 May 1957.
May I comment on the fact that in none of your letters to me have you ever told me about anything external to your own thoughts? You have never described your room, your university, the buildings, the place, the atmosphere, the climate, what sort of place Armidale is. You may think this unimportant, but to me it indicates a state of mind; a state of mind which must be unhappy. I am interested in Australia, in everything about it, what it looks like, what its houses are like, how many rooms they have and what sort, what flowers grow there, what animals and birds are there, what the seasons are, what the ordinary life of people of your sort consists of. You tell me a great deal about your thoughts, but nothing about the life around you. Do you suppose I became one of the most successful mystery writers of any age by thinking about me – about my personal torments and triumphs, about an unending analysis of my personal emotions? I did not. And you should know that very well. But from you all I hear is about you. This is not said to blame you or accuse you of being egocentric at all.
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
16 May 1957.
A friend of yours called me a `flaming egotist’. For a long time I thought myself to be a rather modest man, but I am beginning to believe this friend was right, that all writers are bound to be egotists since they drain their hearts and souls to write at all, and therefore become introspective. I think I have lately become worse, because I have been praised too much, because I live a lonely life and have no hope of anything else from now on.
Letter to the editor of the London Daily Express,
21 May 1957.
I have read in the Los Angeles Times Mr Rene MacColl's remarks on certain things which he does not seem to like about my country, and with many of them I am forced to agree. There is another side to America which Mr MacColl seems to have overlooked. We became too rich and too powerful through a sort of genius of production technique, and as a result I think we placed ourselves in a position to dominate the world before we had any real knowledge of how to do it or any real desire to do it. We were just stuck in the Number One spot. For 100 years, as you may remember, England dominated the world and was rather cordially detested by everyone else. That seems to be the price of power. The position we find ourselves in is almost impossible to maintain either gracefully or cleverly.
I admit that most of our values are quite wrong, but they result from something we did not intend to be wrong. I admit that our motor cars tend to be absurd in their design, but we live in an economy of overproduction and fantastic advertising campaigns are waged to make us think that anything six months old belongs with the Pharaohs. I admit that the cost of living here has reached absurd levels, but at least we have clean kitchens and clean bathrooms – and we bathe. Ours is a young, large, and variegated country. We don't know everything. Do you? We try, and have tried very hard, to do what we think we should do in the world, and our workmen occasionally do a day's work, which is more than yours do so far as I have observed. Once on Wimpole Street while waiting for a friend in a doctor's office, I watched two men moving those light-weight fireproof bricks which are extensively used in construction in England. It took two of them to move two of them across the pavement and drop them into a chute – and that seemed to make them very tired. We should have devised a machine to do it in twenty minutes. They were probably at it for two days.
Not everything about us is right, of course; but is everything about England right? It is so easy to write a newspaper article sneering at some other country; but it is not easy to create a civilization in that country, however many men of good will and great ability may try.
Letter to Edgar Carter,
3 June 1957. As Chandler's television agent, Carter was attempting to negotiate a Philip Marlowe television series. There was no lack of interest within the industry, but Chandler was being careful, and had already turned down one set of proposed scripts from NBC, the standard of which he deemed too mediocre. Both NBC and Carter were surprised at the refusal, but Chandler was adamant.
You have to persuade these lunatics that if a show is to last, it must have some sort of special quality, and that quality must be on terms the public can understand and appreciate. I may be wrong, but to me Marlowe is a character of some nobility, of scorching wit, sad but not defeated, lonely but never really sure of himself. Some of this has to go into Philip Marlowe if he is to be any good. Otherwise, he is just another sharp-talking nobody. If it is not possible to achieve this, I think we should forget the whole thing.
Letter to Roger Machell,
3 June 1957.
Of course I wonder about a lot of things, such as whether I should be psychoanalyzed, or hypnotized, or perhaps quietly put to sleep. No doubt you sometimes wonder the same things yourself as what sensitive man does not.
Letter to Roger Machell,
19 June 1957.
It was certainly amusing to read of Montgomery and Eisenhower explaining the errors of both sides, since Montgomery probably never admired anyone but himself and Ike was never a general at all, but rather a bridge player with a talent for making men of different nationalities co-operate, to a certain extent. I imagine that all the really difficult decisions were made by Marshall – and most of them wrong.
Letter to Michael Gilbert,
25 June 1957.
I went to a fancy cocktail party on Saturday night. Ye Gods, almost all the women were overdressed and overjewelled and burnt brown and coarse by the sun (a sign here you don't have to work for a living). I found a rather nice New York girl to talk to. About half the men were going on to a dance at the Beach Club and wore white DJ's, but loud bow ties in all colors. One man wore a violet plaid jacket which should have been burnt on the spot . . . These people are well off and some are rich, but to me they are quite unattractive, their range of conversation limited to Cadillacs, clothes, redecorating or building, personalities, who was drunk enough to paw whose wife last night . . .
Letter to Michael Gilbert,
5 July 1957.
I don't think one can accept or be happy with corrupt people without being a little corrupt oneself. It seems to me a sort of disease which grows almost unnoticed until one doesn't even know what is happening, and when it has happened, one doesn't know that either . . . Perhaps these darling pansies are the symbols of a civilization of the future. If so, let them have it.
Letter to Helga Greene,
11 July 1957. ‘Here’ is La Jolla.
I think it would be impossible for me to live here. I am not surrounded by old friends, because in order to have friends you have to cultivate them and for years I almost never went out at night and never had anyone to the house. Also the sort of people who one would expect to know are a stupid lot whose lives center around the Beach and Tennis Club. You probably have exactly the same sort of people in England, but in London there are others. Here there are no others.
Letter to Michael Gilbert,
25 July 1957.
It seems that I have had a very severe anaemia – not quite pernicious, but damn close to it. A blood count on the edge of nothing, but that doesn't worry me at all. I have lived my whole life on the edge of nothing.
Letter to Deirdre Gartrell,
25 July 1957.
I don't quite know why you are so close to my heart, but you are. In some mysterious way you have put me inside of you, so that I have to lie awake at night and worry about you – you a girl I have not ever seen. Why? The older you get, the less you know . . .
Letter to Helga Greene,
20 September 1957.
My ideas of what constitutes good writing are increasingly rebellious. I may even end up echoing Henry Ford's verdict on history, and saying to unlistening ears: ‘Literature is bunk.’ In the meantime, I don't think I should passionately care for either The Last Angry Man or the one on the other side of the sheet you so kindly sent me. You are an agent, and have to keep abreast. I may satisfy myself with Richard II or a crime novel and tell all the fancy boys to go to hell, all the
subtle-subtle ones that they did us a service by exposing the truth that subtlety is only a technique, and a weak technique at that; all the stream-of-consciousness ladies and gents, mostly the former, that you can split a hair fourteen ways from the deuce, but what you've got left isn't even a hair; all the editorial novelists that they should go back to school and stay there until they can make a story come alive with nothing but dialogue and concrete description: oh, we'll allow them one chapter of set-piece writing per book, even two, but no more; and finally all the clever-clever darlings with the fluty voices that cleverness, like perhaps strawberries, is a perishable commodity. The things that last (I admit they sometimes miss) come from deeper levels of a writer's being.
Unknown recipient,
1 October 1957.
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 that you don't get prolix. If there isn't a little meat on each, something is wrong.
Letter to Paul Brooks,
proposing he write a cookbook, 28 November 1957.
It will have headlines such as HOW TO BROIL A STEAK – DON'T. HOW TO MAKE A DINNER IN TEN MINUTES. HOW TO MAKE COFFEE THAT DOESN'T TASTE LIKE COLORED WATER OR A STEWED SLIPPER. DISHES THAT TAKE ALL DAY AND THE HELL WITH THEM. REALLY GOOD MASHED POTATOES ARE AS RARE AS VIRGINS, BUT ANY FOOL CAN MAKE THEM IF HE TRIES.