The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909–1959
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Why not try me with a little advice some time? I am sure I should treat yours with the greatest respect and should, in any case, like to hear from you.
Letter to Charles Morton,
15 January 1945. Chandler had just signed another contract to work for Paramount, working on an original screenplay. ‘HJ’ is Henry James.
Yes, I know damn well that Harry Fitt was one of the clan of Limerick. I didn't know that he drank, but liquor was a family vice. Those who escaped it either turned religious or went in for white duck pants, like my Uncle Gus. Harry, your father's hired hand, must have been a cousin of my uncle. He was no near relation and I hardly know him, but when I read your letter I recalled that there was a Harry Fitt, that he lived in Omaha and that he worked in a hardware store. Since I was fresh out from England at the time and a hardware store was ‘trade’ I could hardly be expected to get on terms of anything like familiarity with him. Boy! Two stengahs, chop chop!
I am back at the grind and you might as leave write me there for a while. It makes no difference. (Perhaps you won't be writing to me any more at all.) In less than two weeks I wrote an original story of 90 pages like this. All dictated and never looked at until finished. It was an experiment and for a guy subject from early childhood to plot-constipation, it was rather a revelation. Some of the stuff is good, some very much not. But I don't see why the method could not be adapted to novel writing, at least by me. Improvise the story as well as you can, in as much detail or as little as the mood seems to suggest, write dialogue or leave it out, but cover the movement, the characters and bring the thing to life. I begin to realize the great number of stories that are lost by us rather meticulous boys simply because we permit our minds to freeze on the faults rather than let them work for a while without the critical overseer sniping at everything that is not perfect. I can see where a special vice might also come out of this kind of writing; in fact two: the strange delusion that something on paper has a meaning because it is written. (My revered HJ rather went to pieces a bit when he began to dictate.) Also, the tendency to worship production for its own sake. (Gardner suffers badly from this: but God never had any idea of making him a writer anyway. Edgar Wallace ditto. But Dumas Père might really have missed something by grinding the stuff out of the sausage machine.)
Had a nice letter from Dale Warren, but I wish people would stop writing letters about the neglected works of Raymond Chandler. I am so little neglected that I am often actually embarrassed by too much attention.
Letter to Charles Morton,
21 January 1945.
I have one complaint to make, and it is an old one – the cold silence and the stalling that goes on when something comes in that is not right or is not timely. This I resent and always shall. It does not take weeks to tell a man (by pony express) that his piece is wrong when he can be told in a matter of days that it is right. Editors do not make enemies by rejecting manuscripts, but by the way they do it, by the change of atmosphere, the delay, the impersonal note that creeps in. I am a hater of power and of trading, and yet I live in a world where I have to trade brutally and exploit every item of power I may possess. But in dealing with the Atlantic, there is none of this. I do not write for you for money or for prestige, but for love, the strange lingering love of a world wherein men may think in cool subtleties and talk in the language of almost forgotten cultures. I like that world.
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
26 February 1945.
It was nice to hear from you and to be writing to you. I suppose agents are necessary to a writer because the writer, living a more or less secluded life as a rule, cannot possibly know what is going on in the literary world, what he ought to get for his material, and on what sort of conditions he should sell it. But I think the agent's function ends there. The moment he tries to influence a writer in his work, the agent just makes a nuisance of himself.
Letter to Charles Morton,
19 March 1945.
A man named Inkstead took some pictures of me for Harper's Bazaar a while ago (I never quite found out why) and one of me holding my secretary in my lap came out very well indeed. When I get the dozen I have ordered I'll send you one. The secretary, I should perhaps add, is a black Persian cat, 14 years old, and I call her that because she has been around me ever since I began to write, usually sitting on the paper I wanted to use or the copy I wanted to revise, sometimes leaping up against the typewriter and sometimes just quietly gazing out of the window from a corner of the desk, as much as to say, ‘The stuff you're doing's a waste of my time, bud.’ Her name is Taki (it was originally Take, but we got tired of explaining that this was a Japanese word meaning bamboo and should be pronounced in two syllables), and she has a memory like no elephant ever even tried to have. She is usually politely remote, but once in a while will get an argumentative spell and talk back for ten minutes at a time. I wish I knew what she is trying to say to them, but I suspect it all adds up to a very sarcastic version of ‘You can do better.’ I've been a cat lover all my life (have nothing against dogs except that they need such a lot of entertaining) and have never quite been able to understand them. Taki is a completely poised animal and always knows who likes cats, never goes near anybody that doesn't, always walks straight up to anyone, however lately arrived and completely unknown to her, who really does. She doesn't spend a great deal of time with them, however, just takes a moderate amount of petting and strolls off. She has another curious trick (which may or may not be rare) of never killing anything. She brings ‘em back alive and lets you take them away from her. She has brought into the house at various times such things as a dove, a blue parakeet, and a large butterfly. The butterfly and the parakeet were entirely unharmed and carried on just as though nothing had happened. The dove gave her a little trouble, apparently not wanting to be carried around, and had a small spot of blood on its breast. But we took it to a bird man and it was all right very soon. Just a bit humiliated. Mice bore her, but she catches them if they insist and then I have to kill them. She has a sort of tired interest in gophers, and will watch a gopher hole with some attention, but gophers bite and after all who the hell wants a gopher anyway? So she just pretends she might catch one, if she felt like it.
She goes with us wherever we go journeying, remembers all the places she has been to before and is usually quite at home anywhere. One or two places have got her – I don't know why. She just wouldn't settle down in them. After a while we know enough to take the hint. Chances are there was an axe murder there once and we're much better somewhere else. The guy might come back. Sometimes she looks at me with a rather peculiar expression (she is the only cat I know who will look you straight in the eye) and I have a suspicion that she is keeping a diary, because the expression seems to be saying: ‘Brother, you think you're pretty good most of the time, don't you? I wonder how you'd feel if I decided to publish some of the stuff I've been putting down at odd moments.’ At certain times she has a trick of holding one paw up loosely and looking at in a speculative manner. My wife thinks she is suggesting we get her a wrist watch; she doesn't need it for any practical reason – she can tell the time better than I can – but after all you gotta have some jewelry.
I don't know why I'm writing all this. It must be I couldn't think of anything else, or – this is where it gets creepy – am I really writing it at all? Could it be that – no, it must be me. Say it's me. I'm scared.
P.S. Am working on a screen treatment of The Lady in the Lake for MGM. It bores me stiff. The last time I'll ever do a screenplay of a book I wrote myself. Just turning over dry bones.
Letter to Charles Morton,
13 October 1945. Chandler was writing from Big Bear Lake, a mountain resort he and Cissy often used to escape the Angelino inferno. ‘La Hellman’ refers to Lillian Hellman, the New York playwright and long-term companion of Dashiell Hammett.
As to talking about Hammett in the past tense, I did myself in that essay. I hope he is not to be so spoken of. As far as I kno
w he is alive and well, but he has gone so long without writing – unless you count a couple of screenplay jobs which, rumor says, La Hellman really did for him that I wonder. He was one of the many guys who couldn't take Hollywood without trying to push God out of the high seat. I recall an incident reported to me when Hammett was occupying a suite at the Beverly-Wilshire. A party wished to make him a proposition and called late of a morning, was admitted by Hammett's houseboy to a living room, and after a very long wait, an inner door opened and the great man appeared in it, clad in an expensive lounging robe (no doubt with his initials on the pocket) with a scarf draped tastefully around his neck. He stood in silence as the man expounded. At the end he said politely: ‘No.’ He turned and withdrew, the door closed, the houseboy ushered the gent out, and the silence fell, interrupted only by the gurgling of a Scotch from an inner room. If you ever saw Hammett, you will realize the dignity and pathos of this little scene. He is a very distinguished-looking guy, and I imagine he could say ‘no’ without perceptible trace of a Brooklyn accent. I liked him very much and he was an amazingly competent drunk, which, having a poor head for liquor, I seem always to admire. It was a great pity that he stopped writing. I've never known why. I suppose he may have come to the end of his resources in a certain style and have lacked the intellectual depth to compensate for that by trying something else. But I'm not sure. I think the man has been both overrated and underrated. Your friend Dale Warren recently read The Maltese Falcon, for the first time too, and saw little in it. But I have read so much of this kind of writing that the gulf between Hammett and the merely tough boys seems to me vast. Old Joe Shaw may have put his finger on the trouble when he said Hammett never really cared for any of his characters.
I don't know whether this is a relaxed letter or not. I do begin to feel a little easing of the strain. This place is 7000 feet up, on the edge of a lake 20 miles long. It is no longer unspoiled nature, but it still has its points. The air is thin and dry like the desert (the Mojave is just down the hill to the east) and at this time of year it is very quiet, warm in the daytime and rather cold at night. We have had a fire before evening only once. There is nothing to do and I do it. We go out in the woods and I chop knots out of fallen trees and break up a few stumps of ironwood or mountain mahogany, a very hard reddish wood that burns like coal. I try to keep work out of my head, but can't quite do that. I had a bad time with MGM, very bad. Not their fault, they were very nice to me. After the first two days I worked entirely at home, which is against their rules but they made an exception. The trouble was that I was already too fed up to do a good job on any script; that I did not like working on a story of my own, being stale on it long since; and that I assumed in the beginning that a preliminary script would be all they could expect, since they take a very long time making their pictures. I found out as I began to send it in that they were regarding it as a shooting script (subject to cutting) and didn't want any other writer on it. That put the heat on me and I began to get nervous. MGM never had a script in 13 weeks since the company was organized, and here they were talking about going into production in November. Towards the end when I realized that I was getting more mechanical every day I tried to explain to them that they were making a mistake, that this work was full of loose ends and tired attitudes, and that if they really wanted to start shooting that soon, they needed a writer with some enthusiasm. No soap.
Letter to Charles Morton,
12 December 1945. Chandler had written a piece about screenwriting for the Atlantic Monthly. Beirne Lay was the author of a book called Twelve O'Clock High, and Studs Lonigan was the pseudonym of the writer James T. Farrell. Jules Romains was a well-reputed French poet and dramatist. J. P. Marquand, also referred to in this letter, was a writer considered a great by many serious New York critics of the time, but who Chandler – correctly, as it turned out – predicted would be soon forgotten. Wolcott Gibbs and Edmund Wilson were both New York critics.
I noticed that (unlike the Post) you did not open my fan mail. There wasn't much, but there was a very charming letter from Beirne Lay and also one from Studs Lonigan which I have still to answer. He thinks I didn't go far enough, that I should have co-ordinated Hollywood with the special problems of the time. That's the worst of these deep thinkers. They can't let you speak your piece, then put your hat on and go home. Everything to them is just a chapter in the unfolding of the human struggle for decent expression, or like another volume from Jules Romains. Of course they're right in a way, more right than Wolcott Gibbs, for example, who seems to take the view, intellectually unsound, that an art which is practiced badly is simply a bad art and the view, socially and factually unsound, that a man is of necessity more intelligent than his cook. I liked his piece because I like the way he says things; I like but do not crave to practice the somewhat arctic style of the New Yorker. It has made New Yorker writers out of too many people who might have been their own writers. But I should somehow like to ask Wolcott whether he really believes the medium which has produced The Last Laugh, Variety, M., Mayerling, Night Must Fall, Intolerance, The Little Foxes (screen version), The More the Merrier, etc. etc. is really inferior to the medium which has produced Dear Ruth, The Voice of the Turtle, Mrs Tanqueray's Past, The Lion and the Mouse, Oklahoma, Dear Brutus, Getting Married, etc. etc. And if he agrees that it is not, I should further like to ask him whether criticism has any function whatsoever in the development and self-education of an art; because if it has, all he is really saying is that he does not want to review pictures because they are bad and bore him, whereas he does want to review plays because they are good and do not bore him. That may be his privilege but it is certainly not a critical opinion.
. . . I am still a bit dizzy from some remarks your pal Dale Warren made about The Maltese Falcon, which he apparently regards as quite inferior to The Leavenworth Case. (Read it for laughs, if you haven't.) I reread the Falcon not long ago, and I give up. Somebody in this room has lost a straitjacket. It must be me. Frankly, I can conceive of better writing than the Falcon, and a more tender and warm attitude to life, and a more flowery ending; but by God, if you can show me twenty books written approximately 20 years back that have as much guts and life now, I'll eat them between slices of Edmund Wilson's head. Really I'm beginning to wonder quite seriously whether anybody knows what writing is anymore, whether they haven't got the whole bloody business so completely mixed up with the subject matter and significance and who's going to win the peace and what they gave him for the screen rights and if you're not a molecular physicist, you're illiterate, and so on, that there simply isn't anybody around who can read a book and say that the guy knew how to write or didn't. Even poor old Edmund Wilson, who writes as if he had a loose upper plate, dirtied his pants in the New Yorker a few short weeks ago in reviewing Marquand's last book. He wrote: ‘A novel by Sinclair Lewis, however much it may be open to objection, is at least a book by a writer – that is, a work of the imagination that imposes its atmosphere, a creation that shows the color and modelling of a particular artist's hand.’ Is that all a good writer has to do? Hell, I always thought it was, but hell I didn't know Wilson knew it.
Can I do a piece for you entitled ‘The Insignificance of Significance’, in which I will demonstrate in my usual whorehouse style that it doesn't matter a damn what a novel is about, that the only fiction of any moment in any age is that which does magic with words, and that the subject matter is merely the springboard for the writer's imagination; that the art of fiction, if it can any longer be called that, has grown from nothing to an artificial synthesis in a mere matter of 300 years, and has now reached such a degree of mechanical perfection that the only way you can tell the novelists apart is by whether they write about miners in Butte, coolies in China, Jews in the Bronx, or stockbrokers on Long Island, or whatever it is; that all the women and most of the men write exactly the same, or at least choose one of half a dozen thoroughly standardized procedures; and that in spite of certain inevitable slight differences
(very slight indeed on the long view) the whole damn business could be turned out by a machine just as well, and will be almost any day now; and that the only writers left who have anything to say are those who write about practically nothing and monkey around with odd ways of doing it?
I think you're all crazy. I'm going into the motion picture business.
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
9 January 1946.
I am out on strike at Paramount – a one man strike. That is to say I refuse to perform under my contract and so far they refuse to cancel it. There is much talk of money, but that is a smoke screen. Beyond a certain point money merely means complication. You have the bother and expense of handling it and protecting it and you do not have the spending of it. Fundamentally the issue is freedom. I have only a limited number of useful years left and I do not want to use any of them up destroying what talent I have. It is possible to make good pictures – within limits – but to do it you have to work with good people. They exist in Hollywood, but they are scattered and at the moment none of them is available to me at Paramount. The studio is now under the control of a man whose attitude to picture-making is that if you own 1600 theatres, all you have to do is grind out the product as quickly and economically as possible. I cannot do anything in that atmosphere except spend time and collect a salary. It's not good enough. The last picture I did there nearly killed me. The producer was in the doghouse – he has since left – and the director was a stale old hack who had been directing for thirty years without once achieving any real distinction. Obviously he never could. So here was I a mere writer and a tired one at that screaming at the front office to protect the producer and actually going on the set to direct scenes – I know nothing about directing – in order that the whole project might be saved from going down the drain. Well, it was saved. As pictures go it is pretty lively. No classic, but no dud either. But at what a price! And then I had to go to MGM to work on The Lady in the Lake, which bored me so enormously that I practically rewrote the story in order to have something fresh to look at. I didn't finish it, and it is probably all bitched up by now (or perhaps I bitched it up), but after that one was over I had to be hit on the head with a baseball bat to make me get out of a chair.