The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words Read online

  Welcome to the World of Raymond Chandler—in the Words of Raymond Chandler …

  BARRY DAY

  2014

  One

  A Man with No Home

  What is really the matter with me is that I have no home and no one to care for in a home, if I had one.

  —Letter to Neil Morgan—February 20, 1956

  A man who has no country will often invent his own.

  Raymond Chandler did just that. American-born, raised in Edwardian England (“English manners don’t intimidate me”), then voluntarily repatriated to the surrealistic frontiersville of Southern California, he took elements of what he found there and created an emotional universe out of the Los Angeles he saw that became just as much a character in his fiction as any of the people he invented to populate it.

  He took pride in the fact that “I was the first to write about Southern California at all realistically” and was saddened by what he saw happening to it. The industrial smog wasn’t the only form of pollution on the horizon. “Now half the writers in the country piddle around in the smog. Los Angeles is just a tired old whore to me now,” he wrote in 1956. By that time he was tired himself—tired of writing and tired of life. But that was a long time and a brilliant career later …

  The swans of our childhood were probably just pigeons.

  —Raymond Chandler

  Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago on July 23, 1888, of an American father, who was a civil engineer, and an Anglo-Irish mother. It was a scenario he would gladly have rewritten.

  I was conceived in Laramie, Wyoming, and if they had asked me, I should have preferred to be born there. I always liked high altitudes and Chicago is not a place where an Anglophile would choose to be born.

  It was a place he was soured by quite early on. “When I was a kid in Chicago I saw a cop shoot a little white dog to death.” It didn’t do much to make him feel benevolent toward the law, either.

  All of this—as he told his publisher, Hamish Hamilton, in 1950—“was so damned long ago that I wish I had never told anybody when. Both my parents were of Quaker descent. Neither was a practicing Quaker. My mother was born in Waterford, Ireland, my father came of a Pennsylvania farming family, probably one of the batch that settled with William Penn.”

  1940. Raymond Chandler in Los Angeles. Alfred A. Knopf (illustrations credit 1.1)

  1890. Handwritten caption reads: “Alfred Raymond Chandler relaxing.” Bodleian Library, Oxford (illustrations credit 1.2)

  Chandler’s mother—Florence Thornton Chandler. (illustrations credit 1.3)

  At the age of seven I had scarlet fever in a hotel, and I understand this is a very rare accomplishment. I remember principally the ice cream and the pleasure of pulling the loose skin off during convalescence.

  The Chandlers moved to Nebraska ……

  I remember the oak trees and the high wooden sidewalks beside the dirt roads and the heat and the fireflies and walking sticks and a lot of strange insects … and the dead cattle and once in a while a dead man floating down the muddy river and the dandy little three-hole privy behind the house … I remember the rocking chairs on the edge of the sidewalk in a solid row outside the hotel …

  —Letter to Charles Morton—November 20, 1944

  He would remember those old hotels when he came to describe their L.A. equivalents.

  c. 1896. Chandler in Waterford, Ireland. When he was a child his mother would take him to visit relatives. (illustrations credit 1.4)

  When his father, Maurice, deserted them (“an utter swine”), his mother, Florence, headed home to Ireland in 1895 with young Raymond in tow. They later moved on to England and stayed with her family in the London suburb of Norwood. After the age of seven Chandler never saw his father again.

  An amazing people, the Anglo-Irish. They never mixed with Catholics socially … I grew up with a terrible contempt for Catholics, and I have trouble with it even now …

  —Letter to Charles Morton—January 1, 1945

  His mother sent him to Dulwich College, a second-rank public school “not quite on a level with Eton and Harrow from a social point of view but very good educationally.” There he was a contemporary of P. G. Wodehouse and William Henry Pratt (Boris Karloff). In those days the school had two “sides”—the Modern Side, intended for boys who were likely to end up in business, and the Classical Side for those with ambitions to learn the Latin and Greek to take them to Oxford or Cambridge. The young Chandler was bright enough to be able to combine both sides, and it was here that he acquired the “classical education” he would refer to proudly (and frequently) for the rest of his life. It was quite conceivable that he could have gone on to university but the uncle (Ernest) who was subsidizing his education felt that enough was enough. The avuncular view was that the young Chandler’s proper destination should be the Civil Service, and that the boy now needed some more practical qualifications.

  Two views of Dulwich College, one of the better public schools in England, located in a London suburb. Courtesy of Dulwich College (illustrations credit 1.5, illustrations credit 1.6)

  As a student at Dulwich College. “I don’t think education ever did me any great harm.” Bodleian Library, Oxford (illustrations credit 1.7)

  1903. The Classical Lower Fifth in midsummer. Courtesy of Dulwich College (illustrations credit 1.8)

  1905. The year he went to Paris to study French. (illustrations credit 1.9)

  As a result, he left school in 1905 at the age of seventeen and embarked on a cut-down version of the traditional European “grand tour,” spending six months each in Paris and Germany. He appears—in those days at least—to have had a facility for languages. After working with a private tutor he could speak German “well enough to be taken for a German,” but the French were, predictably, a tougher nut to crack. “One never speaks well enough to satisfy a Frenchman. Il sait se faire comprendre is about as far as they will go” (Letter to Wesley Hartley—November 11, 1957).

  1906. Raymond Chandler, World Traveler. On leaving Dulwich he spent six months each in Paris and here in Germany, learning the languages. (illustrations credit 1.10)

  On his return, the Civil Service examination loomed … “I wanted to be a writer, but I knew my Irish uncle would not stand for that, so I thought perhaps that the easy hours in the Civil Service might let me do that on the side. I passed third in a group of about six hundred.” He was posted to the Admiralty but found the work so “stultifying” that he resigned after only six months—much to his uncle’s irritation.

  I thoroughly detested the civil service. I had too much Irish in my blood to stand being pushed around by suburban nobodies. I wanted to be a barrister, but I didn’t have enough money.

  So I holed up in Bloomsbury, lived on next to nothing, and wrote for a highbrow weekly review [The Academy] and also for The Westminster Gazette … But at the best I made only a bare living.

  —Letter to Leroy Wright—March 31, 1957

  He wrote reviews, essays, satirical sketches (in emulation of Saki), anything that occurred to him that the editors would print. (“My first piece of writing was a poem.”)

  The sketches written … away back when I was an elegant young thing with an Old Alleynian hatband on a very natty basket weave straw hat … show childish petulance and a frustrated attempt to be brilliant about nothing.

  —Letter to Charles Morton—December 18, 1944

  For all of this, he had to struggle to net more than three or four pounds a week. He prided himself particularly on his verse, though in retrospect, “most of which now seems to me as deplorable, but not all.” He would later describe it as “Grade B Georgian.”

  Come with me, love,

  Across the world,

  Ere glory fades

  And wings are furled,

  And we will wander hand in hand,

  Like a boy and girl in a playroom land.

  —Excerpt from “A Woman’s Way” in Westminster Gazette—April 22, 1909


  A little twist or phrase or thought

  This way or that

  To give it an air of meaning such a lot

  More than it says.

  —Excerpt from “Free Verse”—unpublished

  He later prided himself on the fact that he had never subscribed to the “I-dare-you-not-to-understand-what-I-am-talking-about” school of poetry. As for his early essays, they were, he felt, “of intolerable preciousness of tone, but already quite nasty in tone.”

  It is possible that like Max Beerbohm, I was born half a century too late, and that I, too, belong to an age of grace.

  —Letter to Alfred Knopf—January 12, 1946

  After “several years freelancing in London in a rather undistinguished way,” he was forced to the regretful conclusion that the role of the amateur writer was one for those clever young men who were professionally employed—doing something else for a living.

  I was distinctly not a clever young man. Nor was I at all a happy young man. I had very little money … I had grown up in England and all my relatives were either English or Colonial. And yet I was not English. I had no feeling of identity with the United States, and yet I resented the kind of snobbish criticism of the Americans that was current at that time.

  “A Gordon for me, a Gordon for me,/If ye’re no a Gordon, ye’re no use to me,/The Black Watch are braw, the Seaforth and a’/But the cocky wee Gordon’s the pride o’ them ‘a.’ ” —Traditional Scottish song (illustrations credit 1.11)

  1918. Chandler in the uniform of the British Columbia Regiment at Seaford, Sussex. He had just returned from France, having witnessed the rest of his unit killed by German shells. “My battalion had a normal strength of 1,200 men and it had over 14,000 casualties.” (illustrations credit 1.12)

  While he was studying in Paris he had run into a number of Americans,

  and most of them seemed to have a lot of bounce and liveliness and to be thoroughly enjoying themselves in situations where the average Englishman of the same class would be stuffy or completely bored. But I wasn’t one of them. I didn’t even speak their language. I was, in effect, a man without a country …

  —Letter to Hamish Hamilton—December 11, 1950

  Years later he would echo Shaw’s line:

  There can be no greater mistake than to think that we and the English people speak the same language.

  —Letter to Neil Morgan—June 3, 1955

  In 1912 at the age of twenty-four he took the plunge and immigrated to the United States with a £500 loan “from my irate uncle (every penny of it was repaid with six per cent interest).”

  Then came the “Great War”—the “war to end all wars”—and Chandler enlisted in the Canadian Gordon Highlanders. He served in France and rose to the rank of sergeant and then platoon commander …

  Courage is a strange thing: One can never be sure of it … If you had to go over the top somehow all you seemed to think of was trying to keep the men spaced, in order to reduce casualties.

  —Letter to Deidre Gartrell—March 2, 1957

  Once you have had to lead a platoon into direct machine-gun fire, nothing is ever the same again.

  Most of the men were in fact killed in action, and the survivors, including Chandler, were sent back to England and transferred to the Royal Air Force. Before he had time to complete his flight training the Armistice was signed and he was demobilized. He and his mother returned to America.

  1918. Chandler was transferred from the Canadian army to the R.A.F. Bodleian Library, Oxford (illustrations credit 1.13)

  Chandler back in California after the war. (illustrations credit 1.14)

  In those early years there he had such a variety of jobs that he might have been suspected of collecting them for the cover of the eventual paperback. There is no evidence of the highly-favored lumberjack or short-order cook, but for the rest …

  Chandler and his mother at Cypress Grove, California, soon after the end of World War I. Bodleian Library, Oxford (illustrations credit 1.15)

  I arrived in California in 1919 with a beautiful wardrobe, a public school accent, no practical gifts for earning a living, and a contempt for the natives which, I am sorry to say, has in some measure persisted to this day. I had a pretty hard time trying to make a living. Once I worked on an apricot ranch ten hours a day, twenty cents an hour. Another time I worked for a sporting goods house, stringing tennis rackets for $12.50 a week. I taught myself book-keeping and from there on my rise was as rapid as the growth of a sequoia …

  —Letter to Hamish Hamilton—November 10, 1950

  He made no secret of the fact that he detested business life but undoubtedly had an aptitude for it. The bookkeeping course that was scheduled to take three years, Chandler completed in six weeks. And when he settled on the oil business as his speciality, “I finally became an officer or director of half a dozen independent oil corporations … They were small companies, but very rich.”

  Chandler in the 1920s. (illustrations credit 1.16)

  Cissy Pascal (née Pearl Eugénie Hurlburt). Bodleian Library, Oxford (illustrations credit 1.17)

  “Business is very tough and I hate it,” he would write to his literary agent, Helga Greene (May 5, 1957). “But whatever you set out to do, you have to do as well as you know how …”

  I once hoped to be a comparative philologist (just a boyhood fancy, no doubt).

  “The depression finished that,” but by that time he had already passed two turning points in his personal life. In 1924 his mother died. That same year in Los Angeles he married a divorcée—Pearl Eugénie Hurlburt (“Cissy”) Pascal. She was an older woman and at the time they married he may not have realized just how much older she was; her birth certificate and her marriage license differ by ten years. In fact, she was then fifty-three to Chandler’s thirty-five. Despite her continued ill health in later years, it was a happy marriage, “as happy a marriage as any man could expect.”

  “For thirty years, ten months and four days, she was the light of my life, my whole ambition,” he told Hamish Hamilton. “Anything else I did was just the fire for her to warm her hands at. That is all there is to say.”

  That was the good news. The bad news was that he had begun to drink heavily—an expensive as well as illegal activity during Prohibition, which lasted from 1920 to 1933. It was the alcohol as much as the Depression that ended his business career. His last employer sacked him in 1932. He was then forty-four and had absolutely no idea what he was going to do to pay their bills.

  “I still think of myself as an exile,” he wrote to Hamish Hamilton in 1946, “and want to come back. But I suppose it will be years before that is a reasonable thing to do.”

  Two

  Writing (1)

  Turning Pulp into Gold

  The young Cissy lived in New York. On occasion she worked as an artist’s model. Bodleian Library, Oxford (illustrations credit 2.1)

  I had to learn American just like a foreign language …

  —Letter to Alex Barris —March 18, 1949

  The chances are I’ll never get written half of what there is in my mind asking to be written at this moment.

  —Letter to John Hersey—March 29, 1948

  The French are the only people I know of who think about writing as writing. The Anglo-Saxons think first of the subject matter, and second, if at all, of the quality.

  —Letter to James Sandoe, January 26, 1944

  Thank heaven that when I tried to write fiction I had the sense to do it in a language that was not all steamed up with rhetoric.

  —Raymond Chandler

  He did not write about crime, or detection … He wrote about the corruption of the human Spirit.

  —George V. Higgins—1988

  “You’re looking at a small time operator in a small time business … All writers are punks and I am one of the punkest.”

  —Novelist Roger Wade in The Long Goodbye

  There is nothing to write about but death, and the detective story is a tragedy wi
th a happy ending.

  —Letter to James Sandoe—June 2, 1949

  When he arrived in America, Chandler was painfully realistic about his chances of literary success. His early efforts in England had not exactly set London alight. “So far I had shown very little talent for writing, and that little was riddled with intellectual snobbery.”

  With the distraction of having to earn a living, he published virtually nothing for more than a decade. What would he write about in this alien land? The answer came by apparent happenstance …

  In 1931 my wife and I used to cruise up and down the Pacific Coast (in our automobile) in a very leisurely way, and at night, just to have something to read, I would pick a pulp magazine off a rack (because they were cheap enough to throw away and because I never had any time or any taste for the kind of thing which is known as women’s magazines) … it struck me that some of the writing was pretty forceful and honest, even though it had its crude aspect. I decided that might be a good way to try to learn to write fiction and get paid a small amount of money at the same time.