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A Spiritual Affinity

I don’t know about you, but I have a number of books on the go at any one time. There’s one in the downstairs loo, one in the bathroom, a couple by my armchair in the living-room, and two or three by the bed. But one book has been permanently by my bed since my wife gave it me for Christmas in 2000, and I turn to it more or less every night for the crisp good sense which is guaranteed wherever I open it, and perhaps a laugh as well. Consider this, for instance:

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!

No doubt some readers will have immediately recognized the ‘compulsively readable’ (Washington Post) writing style of the book I’d take to my desert island: The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Non-Fiction, 1909–1959. Mordant, splenetic, dry, wise, tender, never wordy, never trivial, Chandler’s hundreds of letters never descend to mere gossip. He himself said, ‘If a collection of letters is to mean anything, it shou

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I don’t know about you, but I have a number of books on the go at any one time. There’s one in the downstairs loo, one in the bathroom, a couple by my armchair in the living-room, and two or three by the bed. But one book has been permanently by my bed since my wife gave it me for Christmas in 2000, and I turn to it more or less every night for the crisp good sense which is guaranteed wherever I open it, and perhaps a laugh as well. Consider this, for instance:

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!
No doubt some readers will have immediately recognized the ‘compulsively readable’ (Washington Post) writing style of the book I’d take to my desert island: The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Non-Fiction, 1909–1959. Mordant, splenetic, dry, wise, tender, never wordy, never trivial, Chandler’s hundreds of letters never descend to mere gossip. He himself said, ‘If a collection of letters is to mean anything, it should reveal all sides of a man’s character, not only the sweetness and light.’ Well, how about this for an insight into childhood with the Chandlers:
What a strange sense of values we had. What godawful snobs! My stupid and arrogant grandmother referred to one of the nicest families we knew as ‘very respectable people’ because there were two sons, five golden-haired but unmarriageable daughters and no servant. They were driven to the utter humiliation of opening their own front door.
Chandler’s brutal frankness was directed no less at himself: ‘All my best friends I have never seen. To know me in the flesh is to pass on to better things.’ This was overly harsh; when, in the last few years of his life, he was hopelessly alcoholic, he nonetheless retained the affection of a number of intelligent women, who went to inordinate lengths to look after him while fending off his repeated proposals of marriage, so there must have been a genuine bedrock charm that managed to survive the intake of whiskey, gimlets and martinis.
I am supposed to be a hardboiled writer, but that means nothing. It is merely a method of projection. Personally I am sensitive and even diffident. At times I am extremely caustic and pugnacious; at other times very sentimental. I am not a good mixer because I am easily bored, and the average never seems good enough, in people or in anything else. I am a spasmodic worker with no regular hours, which is to say I only write when I feel like it. I am always surprised at how very easy it seems at the time, and at how very tired one feels afterwards.
It may be that Mary Wesley holds the record for the latest of late starts on a literary career (her first novel published at the age of 70), but Chandler had led a number of lives before he joined the writing game, producing his first ‘pulp’ story at the age of 45, and his first full-length Philip Marlowe novel at 50 (see Slightly Foxed No. 8). These other experiences – a classical English education, front-line service in the First World War, most of the 1920s as a successful executive in the oil industry – gave him a healthy contempt for anyone who banged on about ‘significance’ in writing.
The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called ‘significant literature’ will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles. It is equally obvious that since this public has been taught to read by brute force it will, in between its bouts with the latest ‘significant’ bestseller, want to read books that are fun and excitement. So, like all half-educated publics in all ages, it turns with relief to the man who tells a story and nothing else. To say that what this man writes is not literature is just like saying that a book can’t be any good if it makes you want to read it.
That comes from a letter to the creator of Perry Mason, Erle Stanley Gardner, a thriller writer of prodigious output whom Chandler greatly admired. When Chandler had first decided to try his hand at writing, one of his initial experiments was to dissect a Gardner story and then rewrite it himself. He set about learning the craft in a completely business-like way, and again wrote to Gardner:
I found out that the trickiest part of your technique was the ability to put over situations which verged on the implausible but which in the reading seemed quite real. I hope you understand I mean this as a compliment. I have never come even near to doing it myself. Dumas had this quality in a very strong degree. Also Dickens. It’s probably the fundamental of all rapid work, because naturally rapid work has a large measure of improvisation, and to make an improvised scene seem inevitable is a trick. At least I think so. And here I am at 2.40 a.m. writing about technique, in spite of a strong conviction that the moment a man begins to talk about technique, that’s proof he’s fresh out of ideas.
From very early on, demonstrating a faith in his own abilities, he was unsparing of other writers whose work he disliked:
James M. Cain – faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way. Nothing hard and clean and cold and ventilated. A brothel with a smell of cheap scent in the front parlor and bucket of slops at the back door. Do I, for God’s sake, sound like that?
His own style developed two strands; a plain, sturdy, educated prose, interspersed with vivid bouts of vernacular. This was not always understood at his publishers. Would you convey my  compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive . . . I think your proof-reader is kindly attempting to steady me on my feet, but much as I appreciate the solicitude, I am really able to steer a fairly clear course, provided I get both sidewalks and the street in between. I not only have the Hiney & MacShane selection of Chandler’s letters by my bedside, but elsewhere in the house, among the drifting piles of paperbacks, there’s the Gardiner & Walker Raymond Chandler Speaking. The books are organized differently: Gardiner & Walker (hereafter GW) arrange their selection thematically – Chandler on Chandler, on the Mystery Novel, on the Craft of Writing, on the Film World and so forth: Hiney & MacShane (HM) have their much larger selection simply arranged chronologically, and with helpful brief notes on the recipients and the circumstances of each letter. It is useful, for example, before reading the following extract, to know that Chandler was writing to his agent’s assistant, who had received a questionnaire about him from Picture Post.
I am exactly like the characters in my books. I am very tough and have been known to break a Vienna roll with my bare hands. I am very handsome, have a powerful physique, and change my shirt regularly every Monday morning. When resting between assignments I live in a French Provincial château off Mulholland Drive. It is a fairly small place of forty-eight rooms and fifty-nine baths. I dine off gold plate and prefer to be waited on by naked dancing girls. But of course there are times when I have to grow a beard and hole up in a Main Street flophouse, and there are other times when I am, although not by request, entertained in the drunk tank at the city jail . . . I am a heavy smoker and according to my mood I smoke tobacco, marijuana, corn silk and dried tea leaves. I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes. In my spare time I collect elephants.
That’s the HM version of the letter. The GW version is pretty much identical as far as the ‘tall blondes’, then no mention at all of collecting elephants, and a completely different rounding-off . . .
I get my material in various ways, but my favourite procedure consists of going through the desks of other writers after hours. I am thirty-eight years old and have been for the last twenty years. I do not regard myself as a dead shot, but I am a pretty dangerous man with a wet towel. But all in all I think my favourite weapon is a twenty-dollar bill.
The more one delves into the two books, the more the need for a variorum edition becomes plain. Here’s an extract from a letter in GW of 16 June 1949 to James Sandoe, librarian at the University of Colorado, a reviewer of crime fiction and one of Chandler’s regular correspondents:
You cannot have art without a public taste and you cannot have a public taste without a sense of style and quality throughout the whole structure. Curiously enough this sense of style seems to have very little to do with refinement or even humanity. It can exist in a savage and dirty age, but it cannot exist in the Coca-Cola age, the age of the Book-of-the-Month and the Hearst Press. You cannot have it in an age whose dominant note is an efficient vulgarity, a completely unscrupulous scramble for the dollar, an age when the typical middle-class family (in California at any rate) seems to exist to support a large, gaudy and expensive automobile which as a piece of engineering is outmoded junk.
That letter is not included in HM: instead they have a letter of the very next day, 17 June, to Chandler’s London publisher, Hamish Hamilton, which is identical as far as ‘Hearst Press’ and then:
You can’t produce art by trying, by setting up exacting standards, by talking about critical minutiae, by the Flaubert method. It is produced with great ease, in an almost offhand manner, and without self-consciousness. You can’t write just because you have read all the books.
The passage in Chandler’s life that boosted him to serious celebrity was his time in Hollywood, 1943–7, where he was for a while the highest-paid screenwriter in the industry. Leaving it behind, he had no regrets, but notice how in the following extract from a letter to his American publisher, he does not simply rant but, in his conclusion, brings his thinking to a profound generality:
The overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bogus enthusiasm, the constant drinking and drabbing, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots . . . the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world. It is a great subject for a novel – probably the greatest still untouched. But how to do it with a level mind, that’s the thing that baffles me. It is like one of those South American palace revolutions conducted by officers in comic opera uniforms – only when the thing is over the ragged dead men lie in rows against the walls and you suddenly know that this is not funny, this is the Roman circus, and damn near the end of civilisation.
There were aspects of celebrity that Chandler found amusing:
I have a letter from a lady in Caracas, Venezuela, who asks me if I would like to be her friend when she comes to New York. It has a faint suggestion about it of another letter I had once from a girl in Seattle who said she was interested in music and sex, and gave me the impression that, if I was pressed for time, I need not even bother to bring my own pyjamas.
Not the least of Chandler’s charm is that, while his books were set in an often sleazy Californian milieu, he himself remained at heart an old-fashioned, public school-educated intellectual, and he very much enjoyed writing occasional articles for the Atlantic Monthly, an unashamedly egghead publication. After he produced The Simple Art of Murder for the magazine in December 1944, he was amused to relate:
The Atlantic article has got me into a lot of trouble. Mr P. Marlowe, a simple alcoholic vulgarian who never sleeps with his clients while on duty, is trying to go refined on me. What the hell’, he says, ‘do you mean by keeping me in the basement all this time? Here you are unmasked as a guy who can write English – after a fashion – so get busy and write about me.’ I can imagine the result. I suppose if I write another article in the Atlantic he will demand spats and a monocle and start collecting old pewter.
He later wrote to the editor:
I’m beginning to wonder quite seriously whether anybody knows what writing is anymore, whether they haven’t got the whole bloody business so completely mixed up with the subject matter and significance and who’s going to win the peace and what they gave him for the screen rights and if you’re not a molecular physicist, you’re illiterate, and so on, that there simply isn’t anybody around who can read a book and say that the guy knew how to write or didn’t . . . Can I do a piece for you entitled ‘The Insignificance of Significance’, in which I will demonstrate in my usual whorehouse style that it doesn’t  matter a damn what a novel is about, that the only fiction of any moment in any age is that which does magic with words, and that the subject matter is merely the springboard for the writer’s imagination.
Tom Hiney, introducing the 2000 selection, reckoned that Chandler’s correspondence would easily fill two large wardrobes. And that’s only what has survived; a mass of letters to Hamish Hamilton were lost in a fire there in 1948. For those minded to explore the goldmine further, the letters are to be found in two large collections, at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and at the University of California, Los Angeles. Their attraction is the revelation of a man far broader than might appear from his strictly fictional output, a man who found a welcome at the Atlantic Monthly that was something like a homecoming:
I am a hater of power and of trading, and yet I live in a world where I have to trade brutally and exploit every item of power I may possess. But in dealing with the Atlantic, there is none of this. I do not write for you for money or for prestige, but for love, the strange lingering love of a world wherein men may think in cool subtleties and talk in the language of almost forgotten cultures. I like that world.
No doubt Chandler would have found a similar spiritual affinity with Slightly Foxed, had he lived to 120 or so . . .

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 19 © John Sheppard 2008


About the contributor

John Sheppard is a veteran documentary film-maker, once of World in Action and Disappearing World. His account of The Doors at the Roundhouse, his portrait of Olga Korbut and his celebration of Sergeant Pepper’s twentieth anniversary are remembered with affection by an ageing coterie. In the present state of British television there is no place for him. He prefers to think he is not retired, rather disused.

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