The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved by Judith Freeman
I took a great fiction class from Judith Freeman at USC, and I got to hear about some of the travails involved in getting this book finished, so when I happened across a copy in the bookstore this past week I was eager to check it out. It’s a quirky sort of biography — the book recounts Judith’s own present-day pilgrimage to each of Chandler’s more than twenty L.A. residences, and along the way she fills us in on what was going on in Chandler’s life when he lived at each address. The book focuses particularly on the relationship between Chandler — an alcoholic oil company executive who turned to writing fiction while in his fifties — and his wife Cissy, who left her husband to marry Chandler, and who lied to Chandler about her age. (She claimed to be eight years older than him when actually she was eighteen years older.)
I couldn’t put the book down. In fact, I started reading it outside the bookstore and then kept reading it for over an hour as I walked home. I’ve never walked and read at the same time before, but it’s a lot of fun. You can actually walk and read pretty easily in Santa Monica because the sidewalks are straight and flat, and since everyone in L.A. drives, the sidewalks are almost completely deserted. (It’s actually quieter on the sidewalks than it is in my apartment.)
Here’s a section of the book that particularly struck me: “[Chandler] read Hammett and Hemingway, attracted by the swiftness and simplicity of their prose, the clean, sharp sentences and the cool, hard surface of the masculine world they depicted. Hemingway and Hammett: each in his own way understanding the need for terseness and direct forcefulness, for a prose of terrible urgency. From Hemingway Chandler learned to keep his sentences short and swift–sometimes very short, and very swift, as in ‘He drank.’ Or, ‘He sat.’ From Hammett he took the detective, a hardened hero like Sam Spade. But whereas Hammett had simply described the lone man walking in the rain, Chandler made us hurt for that man. His lonely man was more likeable than Spade, less harsh and brittle, more human. He exposed the man’s wounds, his longings, his fears, and the biggest wound of all was the man’s haunting, endemic, incurable, ever-present loneliness. An existential separation oozed from the writer, like something dark seeping from an unseen place. It takes an existentialist to know one, and Chandler was our first, our best, our homegrown existentialist, admired even by Camus. Ray took something else from Hammett: a sense of the wisecracking humor of The Thin Man, which came out the year Ray published his first story. His Marlowe owes a lot to Nick Charles — the cool, suave, imperturbable cosmopolitan who tosses back his first drink with breakfast and keeps going to midnight and somehow never gets a hangover but just grows wittier and more clever as the day wears on. In some ways, Marlowe was Nick without Nora, the more streetwise Angeleno version of the more effete San Fransiscan, but what connected these characters was the love of the bon mot, the fast repartee, and a good manly capacity for liquor. Neither Hammett nor Chandler was particularly good at depicting crowd scenes. They focused on the intimate one-on-one. Chandler once said he could never manage a roomful of people in his fiction, but give him two people snotting at each other over a desk and he was a happy man.”
And this, from one of Chandler’s letters to his editor, Blanche Knopf: “I’m afraid the book [The High Window] is not going to be any good to you. No action, no likeable characters, no nothing. The detective does nothing … all I can say by way of extenuation is that I tried my best … the thing that rather gets me down is that when I write something that is tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, I get panned for being tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, and then when I try to tone down a bit and develop the mental and emotional side of a situation, I get panned for leaving out what I was panned for putting in the first time … From now on, if I make mistakes, as I no doubt shall, they will not be made in a futile attempt to avoid making mistakes.”
