Maybe, but the good side of Wade is easy to miss in print and in the end even Marlowe had had enough …
Roger Wade is dead … He was a bit of a bastard and maybe a bit of a genius, too. That’s over my head. He was an egotistical drunk and he hated his own guts. He made me a lot of trouble and in the end a lot of grief. Why the hell should I be sympathetic?
It was the kind of epitaph Chandler might have written about himself: “It’s as if I had two natures, one good, one bad.”
“He was a good actor,” Eileen Wade says of her late husband. “Most writers are.”
And Chandler admitted to Natasha Spender, a friend of later years,
I have an endless sense of the dramatic that I never seem to play any part quite straight. My wife always says I should have been an actor.
And to another friend …
“All the rest [has] been play-acting.”
Late-life loves. Helga Greene: Chandler met her in England in 1955. She became his agent in the late 1950s and also his fiancée. Her father disapproved of their intended marriage and Chandler died soon afterward. She inherited his estate. (Chandler is wearing gloves to cover a skin condition.) (illustrations credit 9.2)
The letters certainly give an impression of someone striving to shape a public persona and not entirely sure of the character he is trying to create. What does seem clear is that Chandler was increasingly writing for posterity. (“To hell with posterity. I want mine now!”—1947)
While frequently disclaiming their importance, he nonetheless sounded out his British publisher, Hamish Hamilton, on the feasibility of publishing his letters at some point. Certainly, he had kept copies.
When I have done what passes for a day’s work, I am sucked dry. I have nothing to say in the damn letters. I start them but don’t finish them. I have a box file stuffed with carbon copies … Gosh, what a lot I had to say, and on the whole how well I said it. Now it is becoming a bit of an effort to say anything. I am only too well aware that I have said it all before and said it better.
—Letter to Charles Morton—October 9, 1949
Natasha Spender (1919–2010): Chandler wanted to marry her but there was one small snag. She was already married to the English poet Stephen Spender. (illustrations credit 9.3)
As his output of fiction declined, so the volume of letters increased. Quid pro quo? By this time he was in his sixties and under severe stress. After Cissy died he lived, by his own admission, “a posthumous life.” Friends, he came to believe, could be “a fire against the darkness”—though he was not particularly skilled or consistent in tending the fire.
Apart from his observations on the writer’s lot, much of what he wrote to his very varied correspondents was about his own state of mind …
She was the beat of my heart for thirty years. She was the music heard faintly at 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 … 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 times more.
—Letter to Leonard Russell—December 29, 1954
Cissy was gone but she never left him …
I try not to think too much about Cissy. Late at night when people have gone to bed and the house is still and it is difficult to read I hear light steps rustling on the carpet and I see a gentle smile hovering at the edge of the lamplight and I hear a voice calling me by a pet name. Then I go out to the pantry and mix a stiff brandy and soda and try to think of something else.
—Letter to Hamish Hamilton—January 22, 1955
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 just the same I shall do it. All us tough guys are sentimentalists at heart.
—Letter to Roger Machell—February 7, 1955
As the months passed the need to be in love grew …
Right now I’d like to sleep with almost any pretty soft gentle woman, but of course I shan’t do it (even if I had the chance), because there has to be love. Without that it is nothing … because I loved her so much that now she is gone I love all gracious and tender women.
—Letter to Helga Greene—June 19, 1956
Greene was by now his agent and, just before Chandler died, had agreed to marry him. On July 13 he continued the line of thought.
I knew so little about women … I know almost too much now. And yet I have never become cynical about them, never ceased to respect them, never for a moment failed to realize that they face hazards in life which a man does not face, and therefore should be given a special tenderness and consideration … This feeling which I have about women which women obviously do not feel about themselves … Women are so damn vulnerable to all sorts of hurts.
The thought of marriage recurred constantly. He wrote to Jessica Tyndale (“a girl I have not even seen”) in August of that year …
I really don’t want to get married again because my heart was in too many places and a wife would never have more than a part of me.
A year later …
I suppose that a man who was married for almost 31 years to a woman he adored becomes in a sense a lover of all women, and is forever seeking, even though he does not know it, for something he has lost.
—Letter to Edgar Carter—June 3, 1957
In the end, death decided the debate.
Chandler appears to have had no real political agenda apart from a total distrust of power in any form and a more general philosophy of life, picked up at an early age, that the whole business was “today a pat on the back, tomorrow a kick in the teeth.”
As the later years dragged by—and despite his assertion that he had “no belief in any after life”—he became more reflective about what, if anything, came next:
The older you get, the less you know.
—Letter to Deirdre Gartrell, July 25, 1957
In his last novel, Playback, two of his several self-portraits engage in a debate of sorts. Marlowe is asked by Henry Clarendon, an old man close to death …
“Do you believe in God, young man?”
“If you mean an omniscient and omnipotent God who intended everything exactly the way it is, no.”
“But you should, Mr. Marlowe. It is a great comfort. We all come to it in the end because we have to die and become dust. Perhaps for the individual that is all, perhaps not. There are grave difficulties about the afterlife. I don’t think I should really enjoy a heaven in which I shared lodgings with a Congo pygmy or a Chinese coolie or a Levantine rug peddler or even a Hollywood producer. I’m a snob, I suppose, and the remark is in bad taste. Nor can I imagine a heaven presided over by a benevolent character in a long white beard locally known as God. These are foolish conceptions of very immature minds. But you may not question a man’s religious beliefs however idiotic they may be. Of course, I have no right to assume that I shall go to heaven. Sounds rather dull, as a matter of fact. On the other hand how can I imagine a hell in which a baby that died before baptism occupies the same degraded position as a hired killer or a Nazi death-camp commandant or a member of the Politburo? How strange it is that man’s finest aspirations, dirty little animal that he is, his finest actions also, his great and unselfish heroism, his constant daily courage in a harsh world—how strange that these things should be so much finer than his fate on this earth. That has to be somehow made reasonable. Don’t tell me that honor is merely a chemical reaction or that a man who deliberately gives his life for another is merely following a behavior pattern. Is God happy with the poisoned cat dying alone in convulsions behind the billboard? Is God happy that life is cruel and that only the fittest survive? The fittest for what? Oh no, far from it. If God were omnipotent and omniscient in any lit
eral sense he wouldn’t have bothered to make the universe at all. There is no success where there is no possibility of failure, no art without the resistance of the medium.”
Chandlerworld: The Long Goodbye (in Serbo-Croatian); The High Window (Italy); The Big Sleep (Italy); The Big Sleep (Norway). (illustrations credit 9.4)
Clarendon—and perhaps Chandler, too—had predicted in some detail how the game was likely to end …
The starched white dragons will minister to me. The bed will be wound up, wound down. Trays will come with that awful loveless hospital food. My pulse and temperature will be taken at frequent intervals and invariably when I am dropping off to sleep. I shall lie there and hear the rustle of starched skirts, the slurring sound of rubber shoe soles on the aseptic floor, and see the silent horror of the doctor’s smile. After a while they will put the oxygen tent over me and draw the screens around the little white bed and I shall, without even knowing it, do the one thing in the world no man ever has to do twice.
Chandler shortly before his death, 1959. (illustrations credit 9.5)
What he felt at the end is a matter of surmise.
Raymond Thornton Chandler died on March 26, 1959.
It was not a dramatic ending and perhaps the cynic in him would have found that appropriate, since he was never convinced that he was entitled to what he had. The five-year “posthumous life” he lived after Cissy’s death had proved a burden to him and his friends. A halfhearted suicide attempt had thrown him back into the embrace of his significant other—alcohol.
He chose to see Helga Greene as his last lifeline, and they planned to marry. Chandler stayed sober to meet her father but when it became clear that he met with no favor in that quarter, he let go of the lifeline. As far as he could see, there was nothing left to live for. But what was so surprising about that?
“I have lived my whole life on the edge of nothing,” he wrote to his English lawyer, Michael Gilbert (July 25, 1957).
The fact that we are still thinking and writing about him more than half a century later surely indicates that in this, at least, he was wrong.
Angel’s Flight, Bunker Hill. Courtesy Estate of William Reagh (illustrations credit 9.6)
Permissions and Thanks
I am grateful to the RAYMOND CHANDLER ESTATE for permission to quote from Chandler’s fiction and letters and to reproduce illustrations from the Chandler Archive held in Oxford’s Bodleian Library … in particular to Graham Greene, CBE, Ed Victor and Sarah Williams.
… to the staff of the BODLEIAN … in particular Colin Harris, Superintendent of the Department of Special Collections.
… to HAMISH HAMILTON for permission to reproduce their dust jacket designs for Chandler’s U.K. editions.
… to ALFRED A. KNOPF for permission to reproduce their original book jackets.
… to DULWICH COLLEGE—Chandler’s alma mater—for permission to publish the views of the college … in particular Calista Lucy, Keeper of the Archive.
… to PHOTOFEST for never failing to come up with just the picture you had in mind … in particular Howard and Ron Mandlebaum.
… to CRAIG TEMMEY of Harold Ober Associates Inc. for permission to reproduce James M. Cain’s letter to Chandler after Double Indemnity.
… and especially to my publisher, VICTORIA WILSON, who, over the years, has learned how—politely but firmly—to keep me on track!
And, as always, my agent and friend, ALAN BRODIE.
—BARRY DAY
2014
Index
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
Academy, loi.1, 1.1
Academy Awards (Oscars), xiv, 2.1, 6.1
Adams, Cleve
Adrian, Jean (char.)
African Americans, Los Angeles and
Alfred A. Knopf, fm1.1, fm1.2, 2.1, 2.2
Allen, Frederick Lewis
American English
Amthor, Jules (char.), 3.1, 3.2, 7.1
Anthony, Bruno (char.)
Arcadia, Calif.
Archer, Lew (char.), 5.1
Archer, Miles (char.), 5.1
Ashenden (Maugham), 2.1, 2.2
Atlantic Monthly, fm1.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 8.1, 8.2
Babcock, Dwight, 2.1
Bacall, Lauren, 3.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 7.1
Ballard, W. T., 2.1
Barnes, Arthur, 2.1
Barris, Alex, 2.1, 2.2, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3
Baumgarten, Bernice, 3.1, 8.1, 8.2
“Bay City,” fm1.1, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 5.1, 5.2
“Bay City Blues” (Chandler), fm1.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.1, 6.1, 6.2, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5
Beerbohm, Max
Beifus (char.)
Bendix, William
Bethel, Jean
Beulah (char.)
Big Sleep, The (Chandler), 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, 7.1, 9.1
chess in
cops in, 4.1, 4.2
foreign editions of, 9.1
Geiger in, 2.1, 7.1
Hollywood in, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3
Los Angeles in, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4
Marlowe’s beating in, 3.1, 3.2
Marlowe’s ethics in, 3.1, 3.2
Marlowe’s office in, 3.1, 3.2
Marlowe’s pragmatism in
Marlowe’s smoking in
Marlowe’s wit in, 3.1, 3.2
publication of, 2.1, 2.2
reviews of, 2.1, 3.1
Sternwood Mansion in, 3.1
women in, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5
writing process of, fm1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5, 8.6, 8.7, 8.8
Big Sleep, The (film), fm1.1, 3.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 7.1, 7.2
Billy Wilder in Hollywood (Zolotow)
“Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” (Chandler), loi.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.1, 5.1, 7.1, 8.1
Black Mask, loi.1, loi.2, fm1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 3.1, 3.2, 6.1
Blue Dahlia, The (film), fm1.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 6.6, 6.7
Bogart, Humphrey, 3.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4
Bond, James (char.)
Brackett, Leigh
Brandt, Carl, 8.1, 8.2
Brasher Doubloon, The (film), fm1.1, 7.1
Breeze, Lieut. (char.), 4.1, 4.2
British Columbia Regiment, 1.1
Brody, Joe (char.), 5.1, 6.1
Brooks, Paul, 2.1, 8.1
Bruton, Hank (char.)
Butler, John K., 2.1
Cahuenga Building, 5.1
Cain, James M., fm1.1, itr.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4
California, Chandler’s arrival in, 1.1, 1.2
Camel cigarettes, 3.1, 3.2
Canadian Expeditionary Force
Canadian Gordon Highlanders, 1.1, 1.2
Carmady (char.), 3.1, 8.1
Carter, Edgar, 8.1, 9.1
“Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel” (Chandler)
Chandler, Cissy Pascal, loi.1, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 7.1, 8.1, 9.1
death of, fm1.1, 3.1, 3.2, 7.1, 9.1
Chandler, Florence Thornton, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6
Chandler, Maurice, 1.1, 1.2
Chandler, Raymond, 1.1, 3.1, 5.1
Adams and
Alfred Knopf and, fm1.1, fm1.2, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 6.1, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3
Allen and
Arcadia and
awards and honors of, fm1.1, 2.1, 6.1, 6.2
Barris and, 2.1, 2.2, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3
Baumgarten and, 3.1, 8.1, 8.2
Bethel and
“big sleep” phrase and
birth of, loi.1, 1.1, 1.2
Blanche Knopf and, 2.1, 2.2, 5.1, 8.1
Blue Dahlia screenplay of, fm1.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5
Brandt and, 8.1, 8.2
Brooks and, 2.1, 8.1
Cain and, fm1.1, itr.1, 2.1, 2.2, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4
Carter and, 8.1, 9.1
cat (Taki) and, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5
in Chicago
childhood and youth of, loi.1, fm1.1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4,
1.5
chronology of
Cissy Pascal and, loi.1, fm1.1, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 9.1, 9.2
civil service and
Coxe and, 2.1, 2.2, 5.1, 6.1, 8.1
Cypress Grove and, 1.1
Dannay and
death of, fm1.1, 9.1, 9.2
de Leon and, 8.1, 8.2
Depression and, 1.1, 1.2
Double Indemnity screenplay of, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 6.6
drinking of, loi.1, fm1.1, fm1.2, 1.1, 3.1, 6.1, 7.1, 9.1, 9.2
education of, loi.1, itr.1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 8.1
England and, loi.1, fm1.1, fm1.2, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 2.1
European sojourn of, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4
fantasy fiction and, 2.1, 8.1
film industry and, fm1.1, fm1.2, 2.1, 3.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 8.1
first story of
Fitzgerald and
Gardner and, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 6.1, 8.1, 8.2
Gartrell and
Gilbert and, 4.1, 7.1, 7.2, 9.1
Guinness and, 3.1, 3.2
Hamilton and, fm1.1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 3.1, 3.2, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 6.6, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4
Hammett and, itr.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 3.1, 3.2, 5.1, 6.1
Hartley and, 1.1, 2.1, 8.1
Hawks and, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 7.1
health of, fm1.1, fm1.2
Helga Greene and, fm1.1, 2.1, 5.1, 6.1, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3
Hemingway and, itr.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.1
Hersey and, 2.1, 6.1
Higgins and