The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909–1959

by Raymond Chandler

  Letter to Charles Morton,

  5 July 1951.

  Many thanks for the signed photograph of yourself in your good suit. That's a nice piece of material kid. You're executive as hell. You look as if you'd just been telling the head of production control that if he couldn't maintain schedule No. BF 7139×21 you'd get someone who could.

  Letter to Frederic Dannay,

  10 July 1951. Dannay was the co-editor of Ellery Queen crime magazine, and had written to Chandler asking him to contribute to a survey in the magazine of the top ten living crime writers.

  My list, if I made it, would probably leave out some of those names which will inevitably appear on your list. . . I have liked some very pedestrian stories because they were unpretentious and because their mysteries were rooted in hard facts and not in false motivations cooked up for the purpose of mystifying a reader. I suppose the attraction of the pedestrian book is their documentary quality and this, if it is authentic, is pretty rare, and any attempt to dish it up with chi-chi and glamour turns my stomach completely. I think you are up against a difficult problem, because I think we may take it as granted that a mystery fan would rather read a bad mystery than none at all. You are bound to give some weight to volume of production, and strictly speaking volume of production means absolutely nothing. A writer discloses himself on a single page, sometimes in a single paragraph. An un-writer may fill a whole shelf, he may achieve fame of a sort, he may occasionally concoct a plot which will make him seem to be a little better than he really is, but in the end he fades away and is nothing.

  Letter to Jamie Hamilton,

  14 July 1951. Chandler is talking about his novel-in-progress, The Long Goodbye.

  The trouble with my book is that I wrote about half of it in the third person before I realized that I have absolutely no interest in the leading character. He was merely a name; so I'm afraid I'm going to have to start all over and hand the assignment to Mr Marlowe, as a result of which I'm going to lose a number of good scenes because they took place away from the leading character. It begins to look as though I were tied to this fellow for life. I simply can't function without him.

  Letter to Dale Warren,

  20 July 1951. Chandler had now seen the released version of Strangers on a Train.

  It has no guts, no plausibility, no characters, and no dialogue. But of course it's Hitchcock, and a Hitchcock picture always does have something.

  An insurance inventory

  filled in by Chandler in August 1951, listing some of his typical office equipment as well as the Chandlers’ post-Hollywood furniture.

  Equipment

  Audiograph

  Dictator

  Transcriber

  Typewriter Control

  Hand Microphone

  Earphone

  Ash Tray Speaker

  Remington Typewriter

  Underwood Typewriter

  Corona Portable

  Dumont TV Zenith Radio

  Furniture

  1 gold sofa

  1 gold and rust sofa

  Chrome chairs

  Steinway Grand

  Boudoir lamps

  Chaise Longue

  Letter to Dale Warren,

  6 August 1951.

  I had a couple of very pleasant times with Syd Perelman when he was out here on an assignment, presumably from Holiday. There is one hell of a nice guy, easy going, unassuming and without vanity. When Priestley spent about fifty per cent of his time and energy trying to make you realize how good he is, Perelman doesn't give it two minutes. Did I say two minutes? He doesn't give it ten seconds. He acts as though he didn't care, and I don't think it's an act.

  Letter to Mr Hines,

  the Superintendent of the US Post Office in La Jolla, 13 August 1951.

  Dear Mr Hines,

  Once in a while I get a special delivery letter. Sometimes they are out in my box, since that is my delivery address, and sometimes they are delivered to the house. Whoever does this lately has developed a habit of arriving at 7:30 in the morning and trying to batter the front door down, thus arousing my wife from sleep which she badly needs. I don't criticize the man at all, since he is probably impelled by a strong sense of duty. But may I, in all courtesy and friendliness, point out: first that a special delivery letter is hardly that urgent, as anything really urgent would come by wire and telephone; and second, that there is a mail slot in the side door of our house at ground level, and that simply dropping the letter in that slot would be my idea of a beautiful job accomplished with tact and consideration. If this should prove impossible to accomplish or should be in violation of some post office rule, then may I request that special delivery be deposited in my box, No 128, just like any other first-class mail. In my case at least it does not really require the red light and siren treatment. When this house was built the mail slot was put in the side door deliberately so that the mail man would not have to climb any steps. Usually, whoever delivers special delivery mail does not know this, so he climbs to the front door, finds no mail slot and is thereby stung to fury.

  Yours very sincerely

  Raymond Chandler

  Letter to S. J. Perelman,

  4 September 1951. Perelman was thinking about moving to the West Coast with his family from Florida.

  If you are still interested in Rancho Santa Fe and haven't forgotten all about it by this time, there is no objection there to your keeping tropical birds and a few tropical animals, provided you keep them off the main street and out of the dining room at the Rancho Santa Fe Inn. Rancho Santa Fe is part of the San Dieguito high school district . . . I don't know anything about the scholastic standing of this school, if any. I have heard the California high schools range from putrid to rotten, and I have one relative, fortunately distant, who graduated from the Fairfax high school in Los Angeles while still struggling with the alphabet. As to the La Jolla schools, which might be representative of this part of the state, the only authentic comment I have heard is from a party living across the street from my sister-in-law. This party has four children and is thinking of moving back to Kansas where there is a possibility of them being educated. It seems that they all get ‘A's’ out here, although they know nothing and do no work. She regards this as very suspicious, inasmuch as before coming to California they did some work and got nowhere near ‘A's’ at all.

  Perelman replied to Chandler a few days later: ‘I'm seated in an all-plastic motel overlooking another all-plastic motel which in turn overlooks the Gulf Stream, but there is no man in America but yourself (or for that matter on the earth) who could convey the grisly charm of the establishment. It's roughly three in the afternoon, sun beating down in a fury, and no sound but the occasional flapping of the laundry and the occasional flush of a toilet in the next booth . . . a rush of work has had me on the ropes since just about six weeks ago, and as of day before yesterday I holed up in here to belt out an article. I'd spent the four or five days prior rubbering at Miami beach and points immediately north, and a depressing sight it is, too. I actually had a cocktail (you see what I have to subject myself to for copy) in the Peekaboo Room of the Broadripple Hotel, a conjunction of syllables I wouldn't have believed had I been told about it. I think you will admit that I earn a hard dollar.‘

  Letter to Jamie Hamilton,

  19 September 1951. Chandler had just taken Cissy for a recuperative holiday at a ‘dude ranch’.

  I don't know if you have ever been to a dude ranch. I had never been to one before. This one is called the Alisal, which in Spanish means a grove of sycamores, according to the publicity. It is a small part of a 10,500 acre cattle ranch, which is one of the few intact Spanish land grants of California and was originally made to the Carrillo family. It has a lovely climate, at least at this time of the year. It is situated in an inland valley, the Santa Ynez valley just north of Santa Barbara, and is almost as dry as a desert, very hot in the daytime, very cool in the mornings, in the evenings and at night. I think it must be pretty awfu
l in the summer. We found the place both very amusing and intensely boring, expensive, badly run but nicely laid out with the usual swimming pool, tennis courts, etc. The kind of place where the people who work in the office wear riding boots, and where the lady guests appear for breakfast in levis riveted with copper, for lunch in jodhpurs with gaudy shirts and scarfs and in the evening either in cocktail gowns or in more jodhpurs and more gaudy shirts and scarfs. The ideal scarf seems to be very narrow, not much wider than a boot lace, and run through a ring in the front and then hangs down one side of the shirt. I didn't ask why; I didn't get to know anybody well enough. The men also wear gaudy shirts, which they change constantly for other patterns, all except the real horsemen, who wear rather heavy wool or nylon and wool shirts with long sleeves, yoked in the back, the kind of thing that can only be bought in a horsy town. I imagine the place is a lot of fun for the right sort of people, the kind who go riding in the morning, swimming or tennising in the afternoon, then have two or three drinks at the bar, and by the time they arrive for dinner are able to be quite enthusiastic over the rather inferior and much too greasy cooking. For us who were rather tired and out of sorts and consequently much too finicky, the place was a trial. But it was fun to see a whole army of quail strolling unconcernedly past the bungalows in the evening and to see birds that looked like jackdaws, which we never see anywhere else, not even in the mountains.

  Letter to Jamie Hamilton,

  5 October 1951.

  I do hope to have a book in 1952, I hope very hard. But dammit I have a great deal of trouble getting on with it. The old zest is not there. I am worn down with worry over my wife. She has lost a lot of ground in the last two years. When I get into work I am already tired and dispirited. I wake in the night with dreadful thoughts. Cissy has a constant cough which can only be kept down by drugs and the drugs destroy her vitality. It is not TB nor is it anything cancerous, but I am afraid it is chronic and may get worse instead of better. She has no strength and being of buoyant disposition and a hard fighter, she fights herself to the point of exhaustion. I dread, and I am sure she does, although we try not to talk about it, a slow decline into invalidism. And what happens then I frankly do not know.

  Letter to Mr Inglis,

  a fan, October 1951. Inglis had written to Chandler. At one point in his letter he speculated that, to a psychologist, Philip Marlowe might appear emotionally immature.

  I'm afraid I can't give you much of an argument about your concept of what you call maturity . . . It may be that your ‘advanced psychology student’ friend was pulling your leg a little, or it may be that the advanced psychology itself has got him into a state of confusion in which he will probably remain for the rest of his life. We seem to be somewhat over supplied with psychologists nowadays, but I suppose that is natural enough, since their jargon, tiresome as it is to me personally, seems to have the same attraction for muddled minds that theological hair-splitting had for people of a former age. If being in revolt against a corrupt society constitutes being immature, then Philip Marlowe is extremely immature. If seeing dirt where there is dirt constitutes an inadequate social adjustment, then Philip Marlowe has an inadequate social adjustment. Of course, Marlowe is a failure and knows it. He is a failure because he hasn't any money. A man who without physical handicaps cannot make a decent living is always a failure and usually a moral failure. But a lot of very good men have been failures because their particular talents did not suit their time and place. In the long run I guess we are all failures or we wouldn't have the kind of world we have. I think I resent your suggestion that Philip Marlowe has contempt for other people's physical weakness. I don't know where you got that idea, and I don't think it's so. I am also a little tired of the numerous suggestions that have been made that he's always full of whisky. The only point I can see in justification of that is that when he wants a drink he takes it openly and doesn't hesitate to remark on it. I don't know how it is in your part of the country, but compared with the country-club set in my part of the country he is as sober as a deacon.

  Letter to Carl Brandt,

  27 October 1951.

  I am having a hard time finishing the book. Have enough paper to make it complete, but must do all over again. I just didn't know where I was going.

  Letter to Dale Warren,

  7 November 1951.

  You ask me how anybody can survive Hollywood? Well, I must say that I personally had a lot of fun there. But how long you can survive depends a great deal on what sort of people you have to work with. You meet a lot of bastards, but they usually have some saving grace. A writer who can get himself teamed up with a director or a producer who will give him a square deal, a really square deal, can get a lot of satisfaction out of his work. Unfortunately that doesn't happen often. If you go to Hollywood just to make money, you have to be pretty cynical about it and not care too much what you do. And if you really believe in the art of the film, it's a long job and you really should forget about any other kind of writing. A preoccupation with words for their own sake is fatal to good film making. It's not what films are for. It's not my cup of tea, but it could have been if I'd started it twenty years earlier. But twenty years earlier of course I could never have got there, and that is true of a great many people. They don't want you until you have made a name, and you have developed some kind of talent which they can't use. The best scenes I ever wrote were practically monosyllabic. And the best short scene I ever wrote, by my own judgement, was one in which a girl said ‘uh-huh’ three times with three different intonations, and that's all there was to it. The hell of good film writing is that the most important part is what is left out. It's left out because the camera and the actors can do it better and quicker, above all quicker. But it had to be there in the beginning.

  Letter to Carl Brandt,

  regarding television, 15 November 1951.

  However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money. After all the public is entitled to what it wants. The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.

  Letter to Jamie Hamilton,

  29 November 1951.

  Publishers may apologize to authors and to other publishers and to other writers. But with agents it is enough that you let them live.

  Letter to Paul McClung,

  11 December 1951. McClung, Chandler's paperback publisher, had written to Chandler about a line in one of his novels where he implied having been told, by a doctor, that alcoholism was incurable.

  The doctor on whose point of view I founded the opinion you quote has been dead for several years. In any case I doubt very much whether he would have appreciated my revealing his identity to a magazine or a newspaper in connection with an opinion which his profession as a group would consider defeatist and most improper. I remember his saying to me in effect: ‘The toughest thing about trying to cure an alcoholic or a user of dope is that you have absolutely nothing to offer him in the long run. He feels awful at the moment no doubt; he feels shamed and humiliated; he would like to be cured of it if it is not too painful, and sometimes even if it is, and it always is. In a purely physical sense you maybe say he is cured when his withdrawal symptoms have passed, and they can be pretty awful. But we forget pain, and to a certain extent we forget humiliation. So your alcoholic cured or your former dope addict looks around him, and what has he achieved? A flat landscape through which there is no road more interesting than another. His reward is negative. He doesn't suffer physically, and he is not humiliated or shamed mentally. He is merely damned dull.’ Obviously such a point of view is inconsistent with the Polyanna attitude we impose on the medical profession. They know better, but they have to live too, although there are times when in particular cases one doesn't quite see why.

  I put my opinion, which you seem to have taken rather seriously, in the mouth of a crook. In times like these only a crook may safely express opinions of this sort. Any medical man of standing would hav
e to add something like: ‘Of course with proper psychiatric treatment, blah, blah, blah –’ He would certainly have you on the upbeat. And by mentioning psychiatry he would, for me at least, instantly destroy the entire effect of any frank statement into which he may have ventured, since I regard psychiatry as fifty per cent bunk, thirty per cent fraud, ten per cent parrot talk, and the remaining ten per cent just a fancy lingo for the common sense we have had for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, if we ever had the guts to read it.

  Letter to Dale Warren,

  undated. Chandler recalls a conversation with Hitchcock about how far film technique had evolved since its beginning.