The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction 1909-1959
Page 20
Letter to James Sandoe,
27 December 1951.
Many thanks for the letter and books. The one on Gertie [Gertrude Stein] seemed to me as subtle as hell, a bit over my head, in fact. Frankly, I don't think the old girl was worth the effort but I can see that an English prof who has to dish out a book now and again is wise to champion a cause that is not too lost and not too won. My own views of Gertie come closer to those of Mrs Porter. She talked a great game, but if she ever cracked ninety, she moved her ball. She had the sort of reputation that depends less on what she did and more on what the intellectuals said about her. When I read Eliot's play The Cocktail Party I wondered what all the fuss was about. But of course I knew. There are always enough sterile critics looking around hunting for a piece of stale cake they can wrap up in a distinguished name and sell to the host of snob-fakers that infest all semi-literate societies.
Letter to Carl Brandt,
27 December 1951.
We had a lousy Christmas, thanks. The cook took sick, and the turkey didn't get cooked, and my wife is either in bed or lying down most of the time, trying to slough an obstinate bronchitis. Swanie sent me a tie for Christmas. It is all covered with Sherlock Holmeses and bloody footprints. I wish Hollywood agents didn't feel they had to give Xmas presents to clients – especially as the presents are a far too accurate a register of a client's standing. A guy who worked his way up to a wrist watch and then slid back to a tie knows exactly what his rating is . . . I wouldn't wear the thing to a post mortem on an Ozark sharecropper.
Letter to William Townend,
Dulwich acquaintance of Chandler's, and part-time writer of adventure stories, 3 January 1952.
Your publishers are probably quite right to ask you to cut your book. I think we all grow a little more prolix as we grow older. Our memories are so packed with experiences and emotions that all our perceptions are overlaid by a patina of memory. We lose interest in plot which is kindergarten stuff mostly, and we forget that the public has interest in very little else . . . Even a hundred thousand words seems to me too long; eighty thousand ought to be the limit. Only a very rich writer, rich that is in style and illusion, should go beyond eighty thousand words . . . You couldn't cut Proust or Henry James for example, because the things you would be apt to cut would be the very things that make these men worth reading.
Townend had been a friend of P. G. Wodehouse's at Dulwich, and had kept in touch with him since then; Wodehouse had left Dulwich the year before Chandler's arrival. Wodehouse, who now lived most of the year in New York, was in trouble with the British authorities over his wartime activities; while a captive of the Germans, he had made five entertainment radio broadcasts for them.
I agree that it is perfectly absurd that Wodehouse cannot go back to England . . . plenty of people both in England and America are beginning to think that the War Crimes Trials were a bad mistake regardless of whether the people who were tried deserved hanging, which of course most of them did . . . Even if the Hitler government was vicious, it was still a government legally constituted in its own country, and we recognized it as such. Yet in these trials we now say that generals who had sworn an oath of allegiance to their government had no right to be bound by an oath of allegiance. Also, the trials were in effect drumhead court-martials by the victors. An American general writing in the Saturday Evening Post about the Battle of the Bulge told how after a bunch of American prisoners had been murdered in cold blood by German tank crews, various American units were taken to see their bodies laid out on the field. He went on to say that thereafter we, that is the Americans, took the two prisoners a day required by Intelligence and no more. That's just another way of saying that we shot every German who tried to surrender . . . Men attacking under fire often shoot prisoners, or rather men who try to make themselves prisoners, for the simple reason that they cannot let the surrendered men get behind them and that they have no way to handle them.
Letter to S.J. Perelman,
9 January 1952.
I guess you've lost interest in Rancho Santa Fe and so have I, but only because in their efforts to keep the place from getting cluttered up with the conveniences of life, the property owners have gone so far in the other direction that there is only one store for food, and that not much of a store, no drugstore, no movie theater . . . and the essential technicians of life, such as plumbers, electricians and carpenters, are probably so scarce that one would find the aristocratic hauteur of their manners even more trying than the union scale . . . I do think Rancho Santa Fe would be a pretty ideal place in which to bring up children, not that I regard that as one of the essential occupations. As for Florida, there must be some attractive spots in it but evidently not those you visited. Why is your wife so mad at Hollywood? After all, there are lots of nice people in Hollywood, far more than there are in La Jolla. The picture business can be a little trying at times, but I don't suppose working for General Motors is all sheer delight.
Letter to Dale Warren,
11 January 1952. A Place in the Sun was a movie adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.
Last night, inveigled by the critics and the ballyhoo, although I should now know better, we went to see A Place in the Sun. This morning, looking through the Variety anniversary number, I see it is listed as the number 8 top grosser for 1951, three and a half million dollars domestic gross, which is very high for these times. So for once the New York critics and the public are agreed. My sister-in-law, who likes practically any kind of picture except slapstick, hated it. And I despised it. It's as slick a piece of bogus self-importance as you'll ever see. And to mention it in the same breath as A Streetcar Named Desire seems to me an insult. Streetcar is by no means a perfect picture, but it does have a lot of drive, a tremendous performance by Marlon Brando, and a skilful if occasionally rather wearisome one by Mrs Vivien Leigh. It does get under your skin, whereas A Place in the Sun never touches your emotions once. Everything is held too long; every scene is milked ruthlessly. I got so sick of starry-eyed close-ups of Elizabeth Taylor that I could have gagged. The chi-chi was laid on not with a trowel, not even with a shovel, but with a dragline. And the portrayal of how the lower classes think the upper classes live is about as ridiculous as could be imagined. They ought to have called it ‘Speedboats for Breakfast’. And my God, that scene at the end where the girl visits him in the condemned cell a few hours before he gets the hot squat! My God, my God! The whole damn thing is beautifully done technically, and it reeks of calculation and contrivance emotionally. The picture was made by a guy who has seen everything and has never had a creative idea of his own. Not once but twice in the picture he uses the great trick which Chaplin used in Monsieur Verdoux, where instead of fadeout to close an act he shoots out a window and watches the darkness turn to daylight. But this slab of unreal hokum makes three and a half million dollars and Monsieur Verdoux was a flop. My God, My God! And let me say it just once more. My God!
It's no wonder the people in Hollywood go crazy trying to figure out what the public likes. Variety lists 131 pictures which made a million dollars or over, and the list tells a few things, but not very many. A spectacle will bring in the big gross, but it costs so much that it is doubtful whether it really pays off. A big Broadway stage success will pay off much better, because it costs much less. The public will still go to see stars like Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart and James Stewart in pictures which are not up to standard. The public will go to see comics, even if they are not funny. They will go to see war pictures, which is rather unusual. And among the so-called prestige pictures it is obvious that neither the public nor the critics can tell the real thing from the phony. There were only half a dozen melodramas, by which I mean melodrama without a social message, and some very good ones didn't even get back their cost of production.
Letter to the editor of Sequence magazine, undated.
I hate to see the magazine fold. There is so little intelligent
writing about films, so little that walks delicately but surely between the avant garde type, which is largely a reflection of neuroticism, and the deadly commercial stuff. I think you have been a little too hard at times on English films, which even when not top notch do give you the feeling of moving around in a civilized world – something which the Hollywood product falls pretty short of as a rule. Even if you had been less intelligent, I should be sorry to see you go. Sight and Sound is all very well so far as it goes. I suppose it is subsidized, and everything that is subsidized compromises, and everything that compromises ends up by being negative.
Letter to Bernice Baumgarten,
14 May 1952.
I'm sending you today, probably by air express, a draft of a story which I have called The Long Goodbye. It runs 92,000 words. I'd be happy to have your comments and objections and so on. I haven't even read the thing, except to make a few corrections and check a number of details that my secretary queried. So I am not sending you any opinion on the opus. You may find it slow going.
It has been clear to me for some time that what is largely boring about mystery stories, at least on a literate plane, is that the characters get lost about a third of the way through. Often the opening, the mise en scène, the establishment of the background, is very good. Then the plot thickens and the people become mere names. Well, what can you do to avoid this? You can write constant action and that is fine if you really enjoy it. But alas, one grows up, one becomes complicated and unsure, one becomes interested in moral dilemmas, rather than who cracked who on the head. And at that point one should retire and leave the field to younger and more simple men.
Anyhow I wrote this as I wanted to because I can do that now. I didn't care whether the mystery was fairly obvious, but I cared about the people, about this strange corrupt world we live in, and how any man who tries to be honest looks in the end either sentimental or plain foolish. Enough of that. There are more practical reasons. You write in a style that has been imitated, even plagiarized, to the point where you begin to look as if you were imitating your imitators. So you have to go where they can't follow you . . .
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
21 May 1952. LS is Little Sister.
The book is a bit longer than LS but I think I don't care. I was not writing for speed. I'm bored stiff with the edge of the chair stuff, and much prefer in these times the flat-on-the-back-on-a-comfortable-couch-with-pipe kind of thing. Add a tall cool drink if you can spare it. Anyhow, it's out of my system and the hell with it. What an enormous emptiness there is around the frantic little fire of creation!
Letter to Charles Morton,
29 May 1952.
At its best, and only at its best, the Hollywood product is untouchable; that is it has a pace, a directness, an innate hardness, and a lack of chi-chi camera work and lighting which only a very occasional foreign film, including the British, can match or come anywhere near matching, and usually at the price of a disorganized story, a lot of irrelevant background and too many cute little character touches.
Baumgarten read the manuscript of The Long Goodbye and wrote to Chandler saying that she was concerned Philip Marlowe had become ‘too Christlike and sentimental’. Chandler sacked her by return of post, and never reinstated her.
Letter to Bernice Baumgarten,
20 July 1952.
Thanks for your note, but I see no reason why you should, even as a matter of form, apologize for speaking what was on your mind. I am not much good at tinkering or revising. I lose interest, lose perspective, and whatever critical sense I have is dissipated in trivialities such as whether it is better to put in ‘he said’ or let the speech stand alone.
My kind of writing demands a certain amount of dash and high spirits – the word is gusto, a quality lacking in modern writing – and you could not know the bitter struggle I have had in the past year even to achieve enough cheerfulness to live on, much less to put into a book. So let's face it: I didn't get it into the book. I didn't have it to give.
Letter to James Sandoe,
11 August 1952.
I don't know how you feel about it, but I wish to God that Hollywood would stop trying to be significant, because when art is significant, it is always a by-product and more or less unintentional on the part of the writer.
Chandler and Cissy visited England in 1952, sailing via the Panama Canal on account of Cissy's fear of flying.
Letter to Paul Brooks,
28 September 1952.
Today is an English Sunday and by God it's gloomy enough for a crossing of the Styx. I thought England was broke but the whole damn city is crawling with Rolls Royces, Bentleys, Daimlers, and expensive blondes.
Never thought I'd get sick of the sight of a grouse on toast or a partridge, but by God I am.
On my return Oct. 7 via Mauritania shall be at the Hampshire House for a few days and will call up to say hello, if you are available. The book (seen from here in perspective) is all right. It had a few changes here though. Bernice is an idiot (I hope).
In England I am an author. In the USA just a mystery writer. Can't tell you why. God knows I don't care one way or the other. I have met:
(1) An Oxford don who writes bad Westerns under a pen name.
(2) A secretary who lunches on bread and butter and straight gin.
(3) A valet who enters without knocking while my wife is having a bath.
(4) A publisher who makes the world's worst martinis. And so on.
Back in La Jolla, Chandler changed The Long Goodbye's ending, and made some cuts. The pruned material included the following lines:
I walked away from them and out of the front door and across the lawn to the row of hibiscus bushes inside the fence. I took a few lungfuls of air. It was nice cool stuff, quiet and comforting, and just for a little while I wanted no part of the human race. Just a few lungfuls of clean air that no liar or murderer had breathed. That was all I wanted.
She was dead now and I could take her for what she seemed to be the first time I saw her, and what she did and why she did it could be left to the solemn fools who explain everything and know nothing.
It's the fall guys that make history. History is their requiem.
– I'm a tired and disappointed woman. I'm no bargain for anyone. I need someone to be kind to me.
– You don't need anyone to be kind to you. You've got all the honesty and a large part of the guts in your family. You can tell anybody to go to hell, including me.
– I think you've already been there.
Letter to J. Francis,
a London bookshop-owner Chandler had met, 30 October 1952.
I seem to recall that Edmund Wilson took rather nasty issue with Maugham about Maugham's claim that the writers of straight novels had largely forgotten how to tell a story. I hate to agree with such an ill-natured and bad mannered person as Edmund Wilson, but I think he was right on this point. I don't think the quality in the detective or the mystery story which appeals to people has very much to do with the story a particular book has to tell. I think what draws people is a certain emotional tension which takes you out of yourself without draining you too much. They allow you to live dangerously without any real risk. They are something like those elaborate machines which they used to use and probably still do use to accustom student pilots to the sensation of aerial acrobatics. You can do anything from a wing over to an Immelman in them without any danger.
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
5 November 1952. Cissy's ‘bad luck’ was falling into a taxi while in London, and damaging her leg.
Well, Jamie, let's face it. We loved London and we had a lovely time there. What little inconveniences we happened to have suffered were all due to our own inexperience and probably would not have happened and probably would not happen again. All your people were wonderful to me. It was really extremely touching. I am just not used to being treated with that much consideration. There are things I regret, such as losing several days over my vaccination, such a
s not going to any of the picture galleries, such as only seeing one rather poor play, such as not having dinner at your house. I spent too much time talking about myself, which I don't enjoy, and too little time listening to other people talking about themselves, which I do enjoy. I missed seeing something of the English countryside. But all in all there was a hell of a lot I did not miss, and all of it good. And for that you above all others are to be thanked. I'll be writing you again soon. In the meantime my best love to you and Yvonne, and that goes for Cissy too. I think the trip did her a lot of good. She had bad luck, but psychologically she was buoyed up no end . . .
Letter to William Townend,
11 November 1952.
The present generation of English people impressed me very well. There is a touch of aggressiveness about the working classes and the non-Public School types which I think is something new and which I personally do not find at all unpleasant, since it is even more emphatic in this country. And the real Public School types, or many of them, with their bird-like chirpings are becoming a little ridiculous, I thought. I grant you that English food is pretty dreary. For instance, at the Café Royal we had pork chops, pork apparently being the only unrationed fresh meat. Now pork chops are not particularly difficult to cook. I can cook them myself. You cook them in their own fat, they bring with them everything that is necessary except salt and pepper. Yet these pork chops were badly cooked and were messed up with some kind of sauce, which added nothing to their flavour and probably took away what little they had left. It's this sort of bastard imitation of French cooking, a fussiness without the skill or grace.