by Unknown
You know, that sort of thing makes a cold shiver run down my spine.
My alcoholic capacity is down to three doubles and even after that I feel dopy and stupid. I can remember better and brighter days. I can remember being so cockeyed on Scotch that I crawled up to bed on my hands and knees and woke up singing like a lark at seven in the morning. I can remember sitting around with two or three congenial chumps and getting plastered to the hairline in a most agreeable manner. We ended up doing acrobatics on the furniture and driving home in the moonlight filled with music and song, missing pedestrians by a thin millimetre and laughing heartily at the idea of a man trying to walk on two legs.
Letter to the editor of The Third Degree,
a writers’ magazine, April 1954.
The idea that writers of fan letters are psychopathic is judging the general by the exceptional. A few of them are of course. If I get a letter (I haven't lately) from a lady in Seattle who says she likes music and sex and practically invites you to move in, it is safe not to answer it. If you get a letter from a schoolboy asking for an autographed photo to hang in his den you ignore that too. But intelligent people write intelligent letters.
Letter to Hardwick Moseley,
6 May 1954.
I am strictly a gin drinker. Irish whisky is tolerable but Scotch and Rye and Bourbon for some reason I could never like. They had a sour mash corn whisky in Oklahoma when it was dry (perhaps it still is, I don't know) which topped them all. It was delivered in flat pints by a greasy but honest character who produced about 14 pints from various pockets. The stuff tasted so awful that it had to be leaded with lemon and ginger ale and sugar and even then you were apt to throw it across the room until your nervous system was paralyzed enough to kill the reflexes.
Letter to James M. Fox,
19 May 1954.
I'm caught talking to myself quite a lot lately. They say that is not too bad unless you answer back. I not only answer back, I argue and get mad.
Letter to James Sandoe,
26 May 1954.
Giving Shakespeare the documentary treatment is really an enormous joke. No writer has ever lived who cared less about that sort of dime-store accuracy.
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
15 July 1954. Pompadour was by Nancy Mitford.
I don't know whether we Americans ... are more mentally lazy than you English; I rather think we are, but I'm not sure; but I do think we are more resentful of having to do the donkey work of getting interested in something – unless we know in advance that it is worth the effort. For instance The Go-Between was a highly praised book, but I started it and dropped it and went back half a dozen times before I got far enough into it to give a damn about anyone. And even then I did a lot of skipping. And I never quite believed the book. I tried to see the world through the eyes of this boy, but I was a twelve year old myself and in much the same period and it just didn't look that way to me. Somehow for me the book lacks dimension. Or I lack it. I've read Maugham's articles in The Sunday Times as far as they have come this way. Maugham would have done that story to perfection, but he wouldn't have written it through the eyes of a 12 year old boy. He would have known damn well that it is not possible and he is much too acute to attempt the impossible. Sometimes one thinks that is rather a pity. So long and distinguished a career deserves at least one magnificent failure.
Pompadour is a lot of fun. What a woman, what a world, what a waste! But the world I grew up in is almost as remote. A wonderful world if you were born into exactly the right family, a blasted cold hypocritical cruel world if you were not. Still, at least part of the population had a good time. No one has nowadays except the crooks and the oil millionaires (there may be some distinction here but I was in the oil business for about ten years and the distinction is very fine), and perhaps some of the higher paid civil servants, but they are usually too stupid to know it. What a strange sense of values we had. What godawful snobs! My grandmother referred to one of the nicest families we knew as ‘very respectable people’ because there were two sons, five golden haired but unmarriagable daughters and no servant. They were driven to the utter humiliation of opening their own front door. The father painted, sang tenor, built beautiful model yachts and sailed a small yawl all over the place. My grandmother was the widow of an Irish solicitor. Her son, very wealthy later on, was also a solicitor and had a housekeeper named Miss Groome who sneered at him behind his back because he wasn't a barrister. The Church, the Navy, the Army, the Bar. There was nothing else. Outside Waterford in a big house with gardens and gardens lived a Miss Paul who occasionally, very occasionally, invited Miss Groome to tea on account of her father had been a canon. Miss Groome regarded this as the supreme accolade because Miss Paul was County. It didn't seem to bother Miss Paul but it sure as hell made a wreck of Miss Groome.
A strange and puzzling thing, the English snobbishness. I was a poor relation and one of my cousins had a short job as some kind of companion to a very well-to-do family living in a suburb not very far away. Later on when I was about seventeen, I think, I was invited over to the house to play tennis. They were rather gaudy people, except the father. A number of the guests were very young girls and young men, all expensively dressed, and several rather drunk. I was in no way expensively dressed, but far from feeling inferior I realized at once that these people were not up to the standard of even Dulwich, and heaven knows what Eton or Rugby would have thought of them. The boys and girls had gone to private schools, but not the right kind. There was a little something about their accents. During the course of an afternoon of rather studied courtesy on my part the family dog chewed up my straw hat with the school ribbon on it. When I left, the head of the family, a very nice man in some kind of ‘trade’ in the City, insisted on paying for the hat. I coldly refused to accept his money, although in those times it was quite usual for the host to tip a schoolboy at the end of a visit. But this seemed to me different. This was taking money from a social inferior: not to be thought of. Yet they were kind people and full of fun and very tolerant and probably much more worth knowing than my stupid and arrogant grandmother.
Letter to Dale Warren,
10 August 1954.
This country through its enormous capacity for manufacture has worked its way into an economy of overproduction, which needs an enormous artificial wastage of manufactured products. We get that kind of waste in war. In time of peace you have to try to create it artificially by advertising.
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
27 September 1954.
I have a private hunch that nowadays any government in any so-called democracy, and always excepting the occasional great man, is merely window dressing for obscure and powerful forces which motivate and determine its every action and which it understands no better than the man on the street does.
When I write to Roger I shall have the pleasure of giving him a detailed account of my toe, because he, as a victim of gout, would probably have some small sympathy for me. I've got nowhere over here. Some little time ago I was in the garage where we send our car to be serviced and having about fifteen minutes of time on my hands to converse with the assistant manager, I thought this might be a good opportunity to tell him about my toe. But I didn't even get a complete sentence out. As soon as he realized what I was leading up to he started on a long and detailed account of how he dislocated his thumb. I think the foundations for the accident went back to childhood and to a time when he was about five years old, and from then on the detail was copious. I left him with many expressions of sympathy and by this time I don't think he even knew I had broken my toe. It's been the same everywhere.
If you really want to know what I should really like to write, it would be fantastic stories, and I don't mean science fiction. A dozen or so of them have been rattling around in my head for a great many years, pleading to be put down on paper. But they wouldn't make a thin worn dime. That would just be a wonderful way to become a Neglected Author. God, what a fascinating documen
t could be put together about Neglected Authors . . . there's Aaron Klopstein. Who ever heard of him? I don't suppose you have. He committed suicide at the age of 33 in Greenwich Village by shooting himself with an Amazonian blow gun, having published two novels entitled Once More the Cicatrice and The Sea Gull has no Friends, two volumes of poetry, The Hydraulic Face Lift and Cat Hairs in the Custard, one book of short stories called Twenty Inches of Monkey, and a book of critical essays entitled Shakespeare in Baby Talk.
Well I guess that's enough for now, Jamie. All the best to you.
Act V (1954–1959)
That winter, on 12 December, Cissy died. As well as being his wife, she had been Chandler's only close friend for the last thirty years. The first two months after her death saw Chandler in a mood of stunned acceptance. Thereafter, he was in state of erratic drunkenness and nervous despair which lasted – almost continuously —for the remaining five years of his life. The lonely breakdown would begin in earnest on 22 February 1955, when he tried to shoot himself.
Letter to Leonard Russell,
the literary editor of The Sunday Times in London, 29 December 1954.
Your letter of December 15th has just reached me, the mails being what they are around Christmas time. I have received much sympathy and kindness and many letters, but yours is somehow unique in that it speaks of the beauty that is lost rather than consoling with the comparatively useless life that continues on. She was everything you say and more. She was the beat of my heart for thirty years. She was the music heard faintly on the edge of sound. It was my great and now useless regret that I never wrote anything really worth her attention, no book that I could dedicate to her. I planned it. I thought of it, but I never wrote it. Perhaps I couldn't have written it.
She died hard. Her body fought a hundred lost battles, any one of which would have been enough to finish most of us. Twice I brought her home from the hospital because she hated hospitals, and had her in her own bed in her own room with nurses around the clock. But she had to go back. And I suppose she never quite forgave me for that. But when at the end I closed her eyes she looked very young. Perhaps by now she realizes that I tried, and that I regarded the sacrifice of several years of a rather insignificant literary career as a small price to pay, if I could make her smile a few more times.
Letter to Jamie Hamilton,
5 January 1955. Vinnie was Cissy's sister, who lived in Los Angeles.
I had to measure out all her medicines, or else she would have taken them twice or three times over without realizing she had already taken them. The cortisone didn't work, so at the end of the first week in November he took her off that and started her on ACTH, and this, after the first shots, I was able to give her myself hypodermically, as I had been used for several years to give her hypodermic shots of various vitamins. This didn't do much good either. She got lower and lower and more and more depressed, and she was not an easily depressed person. On November 30th she developed pneumonia and had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance . . . The doctor wanted to try a medicine called ruwaulfia, or African snake root, which apparently has the property of inducing a condition of euphoria without any damage and can be taken indefinitely. He told me at the time that she would have to spend the rest of her life in a sanatorium and that he was hoping the ruwaulfia would put her in such a complaisant mood that she would accept that. The next morning she called up early and demanded to be taken home. By this time she was very ill and very weak, had to be helped to the bathroom, had to have someone stay there with her. She was very miserable, gasped all the time, coughed violently, and said she was in great pain. By December 7th I realized she was dying. In the middle of the night she suddenly appeared in my room in her pyjamas looking like a ghost. We got her back to bed and she tried it once more, but this time the nurse was watching. At three A.M. on the morning of December 8th her temperature was so low that the nurse got frightened and called the doctor, and once more the ambulance came and took her off to hospital. She couldn't sleep and I knew it took a lot of stuff to put her under, so I would take her sleeping pills and she would tie them in the corner of her handkerchief so that she could swallow them surreptitiously when the nurse was out of the room. She was in an oxygen tent all the time, but she kept pulling it away so that she could hold my hand. She was quite vague in her mind about some things, but almost too desperately clear about others. Once she asked me where we lived, what town we lived in, and then asked me to describe the house. She didn't seem to know what it looked like. Then she would turn her head away and when I was no longer in her line of vision, she seemed to forget all about me. Whenever I went to see her she would reach her handkerchief out under the edge of the oxygen tent for me to give her the sleeping pills. I began to be worried about this and confessed to the doctor, and he said she was getting much stronger medicine than any sleeping pills. On the nth when I went to see her I had none and she reached out under the edge of the oxygen tent with the handkerchief, and when I had nothing to give her she turned her head away and said, ‘Is this the way you wanted it?’ About noon that day the doctor called me up and said I had better come over and talk to her as it may be the last chance I would have. When I got there he was trying to find veins in her feet to inject demerol. He managed to get her asleep, but she was wide awake again that night. That is she seemed to be wide awake, but I'm not even sure she knew me. She went to sleep again while I was there. A little after noon on December 12th, which was a Sunday, the nurse called up and said she was very low, which is about as drastic a statement as a nurse ever makes. Vinnie's son was here then with Vinnie, and he drove me over to the hospital at fifty miles an hour, breaking all the traffic regulations, which I told him to ignore as the La Jolla cops were friends of mine. When I got there they had taken the oxygen tent away and she was lying with her eyes half open. I think she was already dead. Another doctor had his stethoscope over her heart and was listening. After a while he stepped back and nodded. I closed her eyes and kissed her and went away.
Of course in a sense I had said goodbye to her long ago. In fact, many times during the past two years in the middle of the night I had realized that it was only a question of time before I lost her. But that is not the same thing as having it happen. Saying goodbye to your loved one in your mind is not the same thing as closing her eyes and knowing they will never open again. But I was glad that she died. To think of this proud, fearless bird caged in a room in some rotten sanatorium for the rest of her days was such an unbearable thought that I could hardly face it at all. I didn't really break until after the funeral, partly because I was in shock and partly because I had to hold her sister together. I am sleeping in her room. I thought I couldn't face that, and then I thought that if the room were empty it would just be haunted, and every time I went past the door I would have the horrors, and the only thing for me was to come in here and fill it up with my junk and make it look the kind of mess I'm used to living in. It was the right decision. Her clothes are all around me, but they are in closets or hidden away in drawers . . . For thirty years, ten months and two days, she was the light of my life, my whole ambition. Anything else I did was just the fire for her to warm her hands at. That is all there is to say.
Letter to Hardwick Moseley,
undated. Leussler was Houghton Mifflin's West Coast rep.
Thank you very much for the two books. I guess it was Leussler's idea because we got talking about Westerns and I said there were only about two people who could or ever could write them – Owen Wister and Eugene Manlove Rhodes – and he brought up Jack Scheefer. I've read Shane and it is excellent in its way, but fundamentally rather childish. I guess the trouble with Westerns as a species is a kind of appalling solemnity about such elementary things. This Leussler is a terrible man. He is a kind-hearted guy and would do anything for you, but he will kill you with talk in the process. We had him here to dinner and by 9.30 he had me so exhausted that I went and put my pyjamas on – a hint that would be considered too broad in the
best society (if there is any) but it was just right for Leussler. Anything less pointed would have missed him by a yard and I didn't quite feel up to holding up a card with large letters on it saying: FOR CHRIST'S SAKE STOP TALKING AND GO HOME!
Chandler had booked himself a passage to England from New York on the Mauritania. He had little idea how long he planned to be in England for, or where he would go after that. The house in La Jolla had now been sold.
Letter to Roger Machell,
7February 1955.
Perhaps when I get away from this house and all its memories I can settle down to do some writing. And then again I may just be homesick and to be homesick for a home you haven't got is rather poignant.
Tomorrow it would have been our thirty-first wedding anniversary. I'm going to fill the house with red roses and have a friend in to drink champagne, which we always did. A useless and probably a foolish gesture because my lost love is so utterly lost and I have no belief in any after life. But all the same I shall do it. All us tough guys are hopeless sentimentalists at heart.
Report in the Hollywood Citizen-News, 24 February 1955: ‘Raymond Chandler, widely known mystery writer, today was released from the psychopathic ward at San Diego County Hospital where he was taken to hospital following an apparent suicide attempt. Police said Chandler had been drinking heavily since the death of his wife in December.‘
Letter to Roger Machell,
5 March 1955.
Everything is all right with me, or as near as one could hope for. I couldn't for the life of me tell you whether I really intended to go through with it or whether my subconscious was putting on a cheap dramatic performance. The first shot went off without my intending to. I had never fired the gun and the trigger pull was so light that I barely touched it to get my hand in position when off she went and the bullet ricocheted around the tile walls of the shower and went up through the ceiling. It could just have easily have ricocheted into my stomach. The charge seemed to me very weak. This was born out when the second shot (the business) didn't fire at all. The cartridges were about five years old and I guess in this climate the charge had decomposed. At that point I blacked out ... I don't know whether or not it is an emotional defect that I have absolutely no sense of guilt nor any embarrassment at meeting people in La Jolla who all know what happened. It was on the radio here. I had letters from all over the place, some kind and sympathetic, some scolding, some silly beyond belief. I had letters from police officers, active and retired, from two Intelligence officers, one in Tokyo and one in March Field, Riverside, and a letter from an active professional private eye in San Francisco. These letters all said two things: 1, they should have written to me long before because I hadn't known what my books meant to people, and 2, How in the name of wonder did a writer who had never been a cop come to know them so precisely and portray them so accurately. One man who had served 23 years on the Los Angeles Police said he could put an actual name to practically any cop I put in any of my stories. He seemed to think I must actually have known all these men. This sort of thing staggered me a little because I have always suspected that if a real live police officer or detective read a mystery, it would be just to sneer at it. Who was it – Stevenson possibly – who said, experience is largely a matter of intuition?