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

by Raymond Chandler

  Letter to William Gault,

  7 September 1956.

  If there is anything in life I hate it is going out to dinner alone. I could cook it, but that would be worse. Four days a week I have someone to go with, but the other three are hell. I feel like chucking the whole thing and going back to England to become a resident and pay their bloody taxes.

  Hearing that Natasha Spender was on a concert tour of the United States (she was a concert pianist) Chandler arranged to meet her at Phoenix, and take her to Palm Springs for Christmas, after which she was to meet up with friends of hers who lived in Los Angeles, including the English poet Christopher Isherwood.

  Letter to Hardwick Moseley,

  5 January 1957.

  Spent the time since December sixth until last week taking an English friend all over Arizona and part of Nevada, and then Palm Springs. Arizona never had such a going over, perhaps, since this friend is an incorrigible and insatiable sightseer, which I am not. Friend was entranced by the mountain scenery, which is unlike anything in Europe or California. The Dolomites are rugged enough, but the cypresses grow halfway up their sides, whereas everything in Arizona is barren, as though God had quit with the job half done.

  Letter to Jessica Tyndale,

  18 January 1957.

  I met Christopher Isherwood in Santa Monica and liked him. I think he is the only queer I have felt entirely at ease with. I also met Gerard Heard (he wrote a very clever thriller called A Taste For Honey) and found him amusing and learned, but much too pontifical. Americans generally seem to be quite content to be lectured at for a whole evening. I resent it, no matter how clever the talk is. Natasha said I was being very hostile to him, but her social standards and mine are quite different. You can't interrupt these people, because they are constantly interrupting one another and someone is always talking. You could interrupt them, but it would take violence. Really one should, because when they realize they are cornering the conversation they become apologetic.

  Back in La Jolla alone, Chandler worked on the new Marlowe novel, Playback, based on an unused screenplay he had once written. Though Chandler was now using his telephone more often than ever, he continued his letter-writing. Indeed, at a time when his drinking was taking him to a point of complete disorder, his novel- and letter-writing were generally the only focused parts of his day. His correspondents had now widened to include several new London acquaintances. These included his London secretary Jean de Leon.

  Letter to Jean de Leon,

  11 February 1957. The Angus Wilson novel referred to is Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.

  It was very sweet of you to send me some of your poems ... I am very glad that you can accept your father's death without too much grief. But of course I know from my own experience that it takes time, quite a lot of time, to reconcile oneself, and that so far you are being very brave. I am one of those who do not believe in personal immortality, since I see no reason for it. God probably finds something to preserve, but what, I don't know. He might find even in me, a sensual, sardonic, cynical man, some essence worth preserving, but I don't really think it is anything I could recognize. So much of it is external, environmental, caused by our experiences here on earth, so little of us is pure and undiluted. God knows, but I don't. I share your antipathy to dogmas, but more than that I just will not surrender my right to examine, to dissect, to question. Credo quia impossibile seems to me just one of those devices the Catholic Church is too clever at, and yet, taking it broadly and admitting the many corruptions, the Catholic religion is the only one in our world (I'm not considering the religions of the East) which really lives. The Church of England and our Episcopalian church here live in individual priests, but not as a faith. Its services have beautiful words (which it didn't write) and many of its priests are fine people; but the faith itself is barren and tired.

  Your theory of poetry may be right; I don't know. I have no theories about writing; I just write. If it doesn't seem to me to be good, I throw it away. There is a certain quality indispensable to writing, from my point of view, which I call magic, but which could be called by other names. It is a sort of vital force. So I hate studied writing, the kind of thing that stands off and admires itself. I suppose I was a born improviser, I calculate nothing in advance, and I believe that whatever one may have done in the past, one always starts from scratch.

  I don't deny you your right to be tolerant of homosexuality; one more or less has to in England. But I do think that homosexuals (not bi-sexuals, that is a matter of time and custom), however artistic and full of taste they may seem to be, always lack any deep emotional feeling. They are wonderful with surfaces. I simply could not read Angus Wilson's novel, because it seemed to me he described his characters and did not create them. People of his kind have no real emotional life. They see life through mirrors. As for their having a better understanding of women, be off with you. I know more about women than any of them will ever know, and I don't know very much. They like women who are sympathetic to them, because they are always afraid, even if they act arrogantly. Their physical bravery was proved in the war, but they are still essentially the dilettante type. Some of them, like Isherwood, are very likeable, some of them are repulsive.

  But I am not ashamed to be a lover of women. The difficult thing to make another person understand is that I have a code, that I adhere to it, that I have always adhered to it. There was a time in my life as a young man when I could have picked up any pretty woman on the street and slept with her that night. (Bragging again, but it is true.) I didn't do it because there has to be something else and a man like me has to be sure he is not hurting anyone, and he can't know that until he knows more about her. There are lots of cheap women, of course, but they never interested me. There are women who are inaccessible, and I can tell that in five minutes. I always could. There are women who could be had tomorrow but not tonight. That I knew also. There are women who for one reason or another would give themselves wrongly, and who would feel awful about it the next morning. That also I had to know. Because one doesn't love in order to hurt or destroy. There were girls who could have been scarred for life by giving way to a normal human impulse, but not by me. There were girls who didn't care, but for them I didn't care either. I don't know whether it is a talent or a curse, but I always know. I don't know how I know but I could give you specific instances in which, against all the outward appearances, I knew. Sometimes this haunts me. I feel as though I must be an evil man, that this intuition is given to me only to destroy me. But I guess I don't mind being destroyed very much any more. After all, I was a loving and faithful husband for almost thirty-one years, and I watched my wife die by half-inches and I wrote my best book in the agony of that knowledge, and yet I wrote it. I don't know how. I used to shut myself in my study and think myself into another world. It usually took an hour, at least. And then I went to work. But I always listened. And late at night I would lie on the eight-foot couch reading because I knew that round midnight she would come quietly in and that she would want a cup of tea, but would never ask for it. I always had to talk her into it. But I had to be there, since if I had been asleep, she wouldn't have wakened me, and wouldn't have had her tea.

  Do you think I regret any of this? I'm proud of it. It was the supreme time of my life.

  Fragment of a carbon

  to a letter written in February 1957. The remaining pages, including the details of the addressee, are missing.

  A writer has nothing to trade but his life. Most are frustrated bastards with unhappy domestic lives.

  Notes from Chandler's notebook, undated.

  Has anyone ever said clearly that what is wrong with the modern family, or modern marriage, is not messy divorce, sexual infidelity or sort like that, but the fact that there is no longer a leisure class, no longer any kind of people who are not in some sense cornered. The lawyer may love his wife and children, but his true love is the law. What a man does to live is all. Like the house, the mistress, the drunken orgy, t
he perversion even, marriage is only a convenient arrangement. A man of this age really lives (and dies) for his work.

  The more men are ruled by law, the less they are ruled by honor.

  The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.

  A Poem, ‘Youth to Age’

  undated.

  Let him not perish soon,

  That scheming greybeard loon.

  Let not his eye grow dim,

  Fate needs a laugh at him . . .

  Young men are vainly warned,

  Yet are forever mourned.

  Old men remember well,

  How sounds the passing bell.

  Lie back in lonely chairs

  Dreaming of routs and fairs.

  Touching with leaden hand

  Some still unfaded strand.

  Young men may die in May;

  Old men must pass away

  When winter nights are cold,

  Damp, damp the graveyard mold.

  Letter to Edward Weeks,

  at the Atlantic Monthly, 27 February 1957.

  When I wrote a couple of rather caustic things about Hollywood, writers warned me that I had destroyed myself; but I never had a word of criticism from any important executive. In fact, it was after you published these things that I had the most lucrative assignments. I think Hollywood people are much underrated; they think, many of them, what I think, but they just don't dare say it, and they are really rather grateful to anyone who does. I always knew there was only one way to deal with them. In any negotiation you must be prepared to lay your head on the block. A writer never has anything to fight with but whatever guts the Lord gave him. He is always up against business organizations that have enough power to destroy him in an hour. So all he can do is try to make them understand that destroying him would be a mistake, because he may have something to give them.

  I found it quite wonderful to deal with the Moguls. They seemed so ruthless, they conceded nothing, and they knew they could throw me out, that in a sense I was nobody, that I said things to them that a writer in Hollywood simply does not say to the big bosses. But somehow or other they were too clever to resent it. And in the end I almost think they liked me for it. At any rate, they never tried to hurt me. And some of them are very clever people. I wish I could write the Hollywood novel that has never been written, but it takes a more photographic memory than I have. The whole scene is too complex and all of it would have to be in.

  Letter to Deirdre Gartrell,

  an Australian fan who had written to him, 2 March 1957.

  Courage is a strange thing: one can never be sure of it. As a platoon commander very many years ago, I never seemed to be afraid, and yet I have been afraid of the most insignificant risks. If you had to go over the top somehow all you seemed to think of was trying to keep the men spaced, in order to reduce casualties. It was always very difficult, especially if you had replacements or men who had been wounded. It's only human to want to bunch for companionship in face of heavy fire. Nowadays war is very different. In some ways it's much worse, but the casualties don't compare with those in trench warfare. My battalion (Canadian) had a normal strength of 1200 men and it had over 14,000 casualties.

  Letter to Helga Greene,

  18 March 1957.

  She was a terrific fighter. If an awkward or unpleasant scene faced her, and at times we all face that, she would march right in, and never hesitate a moment to think it over. And she always won, not because she deliberately put on the charm at the tactical moment, but because she was irresistible without even knowing or caring about it.

  Letter to Paul Brooks,

  19 March 1957. Chandler had suggested that he might write a book about the modem medical profession.

  The book would not be liked by the bigwigs in the medical profession, by the surgeons who perform all sorts of unnecessary operations to get the money, by the hospitals who charge patients for all sorts of unnecessary tests, by the ‘operators’ who, although often very competent, put every patient they get into a long and expensive routine, no matter how simple his ailment may be to diagnose. Not by the ‘come back boys’ (I'd like to see you again on Friday) when there is nothing to come back about. Not by the sort of doctor who wants to get you into a hospital so that he can pop in two or three times a day and say a few pleasant words and stick you ten bucks for every time he drops in. Nor by certain types who want to give every medicine by hypodermic and charge you for giving it to you and charge you the material (they say what it costs them) but at four or five times what it costs them. I know them all; I've had dealings with them all. There are many things people don't know about such practices, nor how to beat overcharges. They don't even know the various county medical associations have scales of fees. They don't know that no doctor has a right to make an unrequited call, unless he does not charge for it.

  They don't know how to beat an overcharge. Suppose you receive what you think is an exorbitant bill – it happened to me when my wife was ill, and she was ill many times – and I wrote that I considered it exorbitant and explained why. The next thing I knew I was served by a collection agency. Well, it so happened that one of the lawyers we used at that time (I was in the oil business then) volunteered to represent me and my wife, and refused any fee. So we went to court and the doctor sent one of his juniors to testify. On the stand he had to admit he had not himself rendered any of the services involved and did not of his own personal knowledge know anything about them. The attorney immediately moved for a dismissal and got it. He might not have got it from every judge – some of them automatically give judgement for a collection agency – but he got it this time. So I called the doctor and told him what I thought I should pay and he accepted gladly, although he had already lost half of it to the collection agency. I might add that he was personally a very charming man.

  Letter to Deirdre Gartrell,

  20 March 1957.

  I always opened the car door for her and helped her in. I never let her bring things to me. I always brought things to her. I never went out of a door or into a door before her. I never went into her bedroom without knocking. I suppose these are small things – like constantly sending her flowers, and always having seven presents for her birthday, and always having champagne on our anniversaries. They are small in a way, but women have to be treated with great tenderness and consideration – because they are women.

  Letter to James Howard,

  of the Mystery Writers of America, who had written to Chandler asking him how he had come to write crime fiction, 26 March 1957.

  In 1931, my wife and I used to cruise up and down the Pacific Coast, in a very leisurely way, and at night, just to have something to read, I would pick a pulp magazine off a rack. It suddenly struck me that I might be able to do this stuff and get paid while I was learning. I spent five months on my first novelette, but I did something I have never been able to persuade any other writer to do. I made a detailed synopsis of some story – say by Gardner, he was one of them, and he is a good friend of mine – and then tried to write the story. Then I compared it with professional work and saw where I had failed to make an effect, or had the pace wrong, or some other mistake. Then I did it over and over again. But the boys who want you to show them how to write won't do that. Everything they do has to be, they hope, for publication. They won't sacrifice anything to learn their trade. They never get it into their heads that what a man wants to do and what he can do are entirely separate things, that no writer worth the powder to blow him through a barbed wire fence into hell is ever in his own mind anything but starting from scratch. No matter what he may have done in the past, what he is trying to do now makes him a boy again, that however much skill in routine technical things he may have acquired, nothing will help him now but passion and humility. They read some story in a magazine and get a lift out of it and start banging the typewriter on borrowed energy. They get a certain distance and then they fade.


  Letter to William Gault,

  31 March 1957.

  I've often tried to figure out what makes these teenagers what they often are. Do they think they live in a lost world? Even here in La Jolla, after a very nice party down somewhere at La Jolla Shores, the boys and girls amused themselves by slashing tires on the way home. Why? Why do highschool kids of decent families get fun out of destroying things belonging, for all they know, to people who may have a hard time getting by? Is it a sort of revolt against a world they don't believe in? Is it the result of the war? I don't know, but it is not just us. In London, they have the Teddyboys, so called because they affect clothes of the Edwardian era. They are plenty tough, and their girlfriends too.

  Letter to Helga Greene,

  16 April 1957.

  I remember my first love, but that was a different world. When we met my throat choked up and I could hardly get a word out. To have held her hand would have been ecstasy, to have kissed her would have been unthinkable. But I don't think at that point one is really in love with a particular girl; one is in love with love. Of course one never finds out, because when one meets her later on, if one does, she has long since been married, and usually to some dullard one considers quite unsuitable. Did you ever read a novel by Leonard Merrick, called Conrad in Quest of His Youth? Probably not too good by our standards, but I liked it. The moral is, Never Go Back.