Chandler clearly had as much fun putting the gags into Marlowe’s mouth as if he had delivered them himself, and as the years went by they came zinging out like bullets. Even more so after he’d become a screenplay writer:
My tendency to gag is undoubtedly the influence of Hollywood, which I struggled against to the best of my ability … Shakespeare does it too, does it all the time. He just does it better.
—Letter to James Sandoe—September 14, 1949
So, when advising the writers of a radio series based on Marlowe, he has clear guidelines in mind for them:
Don’t have Marlowe say things merely to score off the other characters. When he comes out with a smart wisecrack it should be jerked out of him emotionally, so that he is discharging an emotion and not even thinking about laying anyone out with a sharp retort … There should not be any effect of gloating … Too many first person characters give an offensively cocky impression. That’s bad. To avoid that you must not always give him the punch line or the exit line. Not even often.
What makes Marlowe endearing—and sets him apart from the smart-aleck, hard-boiled heroes that have come to infest the genre—is his nice sense of self-deprecation. We can take him seriously as a human being—because he doesn’t take himself seriously.
A typical exchange between Marlowe and a disgruntled barman:
“Drink while waiting?”
“A dry martini will do.”
“A martini. Dry. Veddy, veddy dry.”
“Okay.”
“Will you eat it with a spoon or a knife and fork?”
“Cut it in strips,” I said. “I’ll just nibble it.”
“On your way to school,” he said. “Should I put the olive in a bag for you?”
“Sock me on the nose with it,” I said. “If it will make you feel any better.”
“Thank you, sir,” he said. “A dry martini.”
—The High Window
As Chandler said, he is “the sort of guy who behaves according to the company he is in”:
He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
—“The Simple Art of Murder”
The clichés of his business never cease to amuse him …
I rumpled my hair which was already rumpled. I put the old tired grin on my face.
—The Long Goodbye
“You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off.”
—Playback
The actual mechanics of smoking provide another Marlowe theme:
I killed my cigarette and got another one out and went through all the slow futile face-saving motions of lighting it, getting rid of the match, blowing smoke off to one side, inhaling deeply, as though that scrubby little office was a hilltop overlooking the bouncing ocean—all the tired clichéd mannerisms of my trade.
—The Little Sister
I sat down and lit a cigarette, the always mechanical reaction that gets so boring when someone else does it.
—Playback
I lit my pipe again. It makes you look thoughtful when you are not thinking.
—Farewell, My lovely
He lit his cigarette the way I do myself, missing twice on the thumbnail and then using his foot.
—The Big Sleep
I snicked a match on my thumbnail and for once it lit.
—The Big Sleep
Quite often he would use a large wooden “kitchen” match—or else his trusty Zippo lighter:
You should be able to do it one-handed. You can, too, but it’s an awkward process.
—Playback
Then there’s the technique of getting heavy with a heavy, or separating someone from a nasty-looking gun pointed in your direction …
The idea was to get close enough to make a side swipe at the gun, knock it outwards and then jump in fast before she could bring it back in line. I’ve never had a lot of luck with the technique, but you have to try it once in a while.
—The Lady in the Lake
A kid trick, but once in a while it will work, especially after a lot of smart conversation, full of worldliness and sly wit.
—The High Window
At least once in every story, however, it doesn’t work and Marlowe is required to sleep the small poetic sleep. As the series hero, he clearly can’t be killed, and yet, if he were to escape unscathed, he would rapidly lose all credibility. Therefore, he must take a beating or two. Interestingly, it is these episodes that seem to bring out the most purple and personal of Chandler’s prose, and one is left with the feeling that the imagery of violence could apply equally well to a man on an alcoholic binge—something he knew a good deal about.
There was nothing but hard aching white light, then there was darkness in which something red wriggled like a germ under a microscope, then there was nothing bright or wriggling, just darkness and emptiness and a rushing wind and a falling as of great trees.
—The Big Sleep
A pool of darkness opened at my feet and was far, far deeper than the blackest night. I dived in. It had no bottom.
—Farewell, My Lovely
At that moment an army mule kicked me square on the back of my brain. I went zooming out over a dark sea and exploded in a sheet of flame.
—Playback
The scene exploded into fire and darkness … and just before the darkness a sharp flash of nausea.
—The Lady in the Lake
It had been happening to Marlowe for years …
The floor rose up and bumped me. I sat on it as on a raft in a rough sea … Drums were beating in my head now, war drums from a far-off jungle. Waves of light were moving, and dark shadows and a rustle as of a wind in the treetops. I didn’t want to lie down. I lay down.
—“Goldfish”—1936
I was looking at the ceiling, lying on my back on the floor, a position in which my calling has occasionally placed me … I was as dizzy as a dervish, as weak as a worn-out washer, as low as a badger’s belly, as timid as a titmouse, and as unlikely to succeed as a ballet dancer with a wooden leg.
—The Little Sister
…as, indeed, it had to his predecessors, such as Carmady (“Then all the lights went out very slowly, as in a theatre just as the curtain goes up”—“The Man Who Liked Dogs,” 1936) (“I went out like a puff of dust in a draft”—“The Curtain,” 1936) or John Dalmas (“My head was a large pink firework exploding into the vault of the sky and scattering and falling slow and pale, and then dark, into the waves. Blackness ate me up.”—“Bay City Blues,” 1938) or John Evans (“My head came off and went halfway across the lake and did a boomerang turn and came back and slammed on top of my spine with a sickening jar.”—“No Crime in the Mountains,” 1941) or Walter Gage (“I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor.”—“Pearls Are a Nuisance,” 1939).
After which comes the invariable hangover—and Chandler managed to find variations on that, too …
It was my voice but somebody had been using my tongue for sandpaper … I was leaning against the bathroom wall and sorting out my fingers.
—The Little Sister
Blood was beginning to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.
—The Big Sleep
I lifted a foot at last, dragged it out of the cement it was stuck in, took a step, and then hauled the other foot after it like a ball and chain.
—“The Lady in the Lake”—short story, 1939
It took a lot out of me, and there wasn’t as much to spare as there once had been. The hard heavy years had worked me over.
—The Long Goodbye
Humor is Marlowe’s armor against the mean streets and grim ghettoes, but there are times when it deserts him and we find the “lonely man” in the lonely room that Chandler essentially saw him to be. Linda Loring taunts him i
n The Long Goodbye:
“What have you now? An empty house to come home to, with not even a dog or cat, a small stuffy office to sit in and wait.”
I filled and lit my pipe and sat there smoking. Nobody came in, nobody called, nothing happened, nobody cared whether I died or went to El Paso.
—The High Window
I looked at my watch. Nine forty-four. Time to go home and get your slippers on. Time for a tall cool drink and a long quiet pipe. Time to sit with your feet up and think of nothing. Time to start yawning over your magazine. Time to be a human being, a householder, a man with nothing to do but rest and suck in the night air and rebuild the brain for tomorrow.
—The Lady in the Lake
Having thought that, Marlowe goes off to walk another mean street …
I watched the last of the sunlight sneak over my windowsill and drop into the dark slit of the valley.
—“Bay City Blues”
Let the telephone ring, please. Let there be somebody to call up and plug me into the human race … Nobody has to like me. I just want to get off this frozen star.
—The Little Sister
Marlowe’s dilemma is that he has no choice. For him it is this or nothing. In The Long Goodbye he contemplates the alternative that most people settle for—the American Dream of middle-class home and family:
You take it, friend. I’ll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.
[Marlowe] is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.
—“The Simple Art of Murder”
After five Marlowe novels, Chandler had evolved his personal philosophy of what it took to be a private eye:
The detective exists complete and entire and unchanged by anything that happens; he is, as detective, outside the story and above it, and always will be. That is why he never gets the girl, never marries, never really has any private life except insofar as he must eat and sleep and have a place to keep his clothes. His moral and intellectual force is that he gets nothing but his fee, for which he will if he can protect the innocent, guard the helpless, and destroy the wicked, and the fact that he must do this while earning a meager living in a corrupt world is what makes him stand out. A rich idler has nothing to lose but his dignity; the professional is subject to all the pressures of an urban civilization and must rise above them to do his job. Because he represents justice and not the law, he will sometimes defy or break the law. Because he is human he can be hurt or beguiled or fooled; in extreme necessity he may even kill. But he does nothing solely for himself.
—Letter to James Sandoe—May 12, 1949
It’s easy—especially today—to read all sorts of liberal values into Marlowe, but he was not one who saw himself as a knight errant. Merely a guy doing a job. It takes Chandler to remind us that he is a literary creation, not a real man: “The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation, who acts and speaks like a real man.”
When critics endlessly discussed Marlowe’s “social conscience,” Chandler became irritated. “Marlowe has as much social conscience as a horse. He has a personal conscience, which is an entirely different matter.” And then the identification creeps in. “Philip Marlowe and I do not despise the upper classes because they take baths and have money; we despise them because they are phony” (Letter to Dale Warren—January 7, 1945).
“It’s no real fun but the rich don’t know that. They never had any. They never want anything very hard except maybe somebody else’s wife and that’s a pretty pale desire compared with the way a plumber’s wife wants new curtains for the living room.”
—The Long Goodbye
To hell with the rich. They made me sick.
—The Big Sleep
And they weren’t the only ones. When his sense of humor was on hold:
You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women. Women made me sick.
—The Big Sleep
“You self-sufficient, self-satisfied, self-confident bastard.”
—Linda Loring in The Long Goodbye
“You’re the hardest guy to get anything out of. You don’t even move your ears.”
—Vivian Regan in The Big Sleep
All us tough guys are hopeless sentimentalists at heart.
—Letter to Roger Machell—February 7, 1955
And when in 1957 toward the end of his life, Chandler talks about Marlowe being “a character of some nobility, of scorching wit, sad but not defeated, lonely but never really sure of himself,” one is left wondering which of them he is really talking about.
For the problem with a fictional character—particularly the kind of emotional doppelgänger of Chandler that Marlowe had become—is that, as the writer ages and changes, so does the character, often in ways his creator is unaware of until they are pointed out.
Whether Chandler realized it or not, Marlowe had changed by The Little Sister, for the simple reason that Chandler himself had changed. His Hollywood experience had soured him and he had not enjoyed writing the book, even though it was to make him financially independent. It was, he said, “the only book of mine I have actively disliked. It was written in a bad mood and I think that comes through.”
It certainly came through in Marlowe’s self-evaluation:
A blank man. I had no face, no meaning, no personality, hardly a name. I didn’t want to eat, I didn’t even want a drink. I was a page from yesterday’s calendar crumpled at the bottom of the waste basket …
There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the glass and wonder … Hold it, Marlowe, you’re not human tonight.
Soon after writing this, Chandler expressed his concern to Hamish Hamilton (August 10, 1948):
The trouble with the Marlowe character is he has been written and talked about too much. He’s getting self-conscious, trying too much to live up to his reputation among the quasi-intellectuals. The boy is bothered. He used to be able to spit and throw the ball hard and talk out of the side of his mouth.
He will at any time, because he is that sort of man, meet any danger, since he thinks that is what he was created for, and because he knows the corruption of his country can only be cured by men who are determined if necessary to sacrifice themselves to cure it. He doesn’t talk or behave like an idealist, but I think he is one at heart; and I think that he rather hates to admit it, even to himself.
The Long Goodbye was a revelation to him. It was meant to break away from Marlowe. He wrote the first draft in the third person before he “realized 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 … It begins to look as though I were tied to this fellow for life. I simply can’t function without him,” he wrote to his British publisher, Hamish Hamilton (July 14, 1951), with the kind of recognition of the inevitable that Conan Doyle never expressed in a comparable context about his own invention, Sherlock Holmes.
The situation was not exactly one that any writer would choose for his chef d’oeuvre …
I watched my wife die by half-inches and I wrote my best book in my agony of that knowledge. 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.
—Letter to Jean de Leon—February 11, 1957
What he didn’t realize was what the changes in him had done to Marlowe. From The Long Goodbye:
No feelings at all was exactly right. I was as hollow as the spaces between the stars.
I got home late and tired and depressed. It was one of those nights when the air is heavy and the night noises seem muffled and far away. There was a high misty and indifferent moon. I walked the floor, played a few records and hardly heard them. I seemed to hear a steady ticking somewhere, but there wasn’t anything in the house to tick. The ticking was in my head, I was a one-man death watch.
“I don�
��t mind Marlowe being a sentimentalist, because he always has been. His toughness has more or less always been a surface bluff,” he wrote to Hamilton; but to Bernice Baumgarten he went further:
I knew the character of Marlowe had changed and I thought it had to because the hardboiled stuff was too much of a pose after all this time. But I did not realize that it had become Christlike and sentimental, and that he ought to be deriding his own emotions.
Other characters in Marlowe’s world did seem to recognize the changes in him—almost as though they could sense what Chandler could not.
It was always par for the course for his opponents to abuse him, verbally as well as physically, but in the early novels they do it as much out of fear of this one-man army as anything else. Their insults are reverse compliments.
Jules Amthor in Farewell, My Lovely calls him “a dirty little man in a dirty little world.” But he was busy making it dirtier … But by The Long Goodbye Menendez, a second-rate hoodlum, feels able to insult him at length:
“You’re a piker, Marlowe. You’re a peanut grifter. You’re so little it takes a magnifying glass to see you … You’ve got cheap emotions. You’re cheap all over … You got no guts, no brains, no connections, no savvy, so you throw out a phony attitude and expect people to cry over you. Tarzan on a big red scooter … In my book you’re a nickel’s worth of nothing.”
The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words Page 7