Raymond Chandler
Stories & Early Novels and Later Novels & Other Writings
Library of America, 1,199 pages and 1,076 pages, $35 each
Like a big success in a small town, Raymond Chandler was tormented throughout his career by the question of his own importance. Thirty-six years after his death the Library of America has issued a gratifying posthumous answer by bringing out Chandler’s collected works in a series whose other members include Melville, Lincoln, Mark Twain and Henry James.
The inclusion of Chandler makes sense as a nod toward a department of American fiction and a style and atmosphere that became hugely influential in our culture. Chandler’s voice, mixing hard-boiled observation and romantic brooding, the sardonic and the lyrical, is instantly familiar. When you read “An hour crawled by like a sick cockroach” or “You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell,” several recognitions register beyond the humor, sharpness and economy of the prose: that you’ve heard this voice before in many other places, that a decade of movies sounded like this, and that not just a literary style but one of the basic American postures is being invented and refined on the page.
But the question of Chandler’s worth as a writer is independent of his cultural status, and in fact one has to get past the famous style to begin to answer it. One way of doing so is to read straight through these two large volumes. As the mannered sound of the prose subsides, Chandler’s gifts emerge: the suggestion of every trivial character in two or three strokes, the superb dialogue and pacing, the mastery of plot (which demanded patience and which Chandler considered a chore). Above all the vitality, which never flags through all the Philip Marlowe novels, as consistent and reliable over a period of 20 years as something produced by machine.
Reliability is the essence of popular fiction: you always get what you expect. But vitality–the cheap, vivid pleasure available in a phrase like “a thin-faced man with an uninteresting pallor”–isn’t easy to manufacture. Most writers of what’s called literary fiction, derided by Chandler as “the anemic subtleties of the litterateurs,” don’t come close and often don’t seem to try.
Yet his sneer reveals the drastic limits Chandler was always operating under. He had verve without range or depth. Once you come back from the spell of thinking like Philip Marlowe you realize how much Chandler left out. “Most serious matters,” Saul Bellow wrote in “Dangling Man,” “are closed to the hardboiled.” Chandler was only capable of evoking a few narrow moods–physical fear, sardonic humor, the emptiness of the urban night. These aren’t very grown-up moods, and Chandler didn’t create grown-up characters. His men all have to perform on a scale of toughness and honor, while his women, if they aren’t simply sluttish or high-strung or vacuous, keep turning into killers, after which they become less interesting. Characters who begin against any type–helpful, unrequited Anne Riordan in “Farewell, My Lovely,” or weak, kind, doomed Terry Lennox in “The Long Goodbye”–are soon overwhelmed by the burdens of plot and never given room to develop beyond the premise.
Whenever Marlowe is faced with a genuine moral dilemma or a love entanglement he finds his way out into tough, honorable solitude, a deeply sentimental posture in which he can say of himself: “You don’t get rich, you don’t often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jailhouse. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money.”
Chandler wrote that the detective must be “a man of honor . . . without thought of it, and certainly without saying it,” but Marlowe can’t help reminding us. The narcissistic appeal of this type of hero for both writer and reader is considerable. Recognizing it doesn’t mean being able to resist.
It might seem pointless to fault Chandler for being Chandler. But he invited literary comparison when he declared “an effect of movement, intrigue, cross purposes and the gradual elucidation of character . . . is all the detective story has any right to be about,” and also in the ambitious reach of “The Long Goodbye” (1953), a more interesting and less perfect novel than the early ones. It maintains the conventions of his other work but also devotes many pages to matters that wouldn’t have been allowed into “The Big Sleep” or “Farewell, My Lovely,” much less the early pulp stories. There’s a sort of Chandler stand-in, an alcoholic writer whose self-tormenting drunken scribblings drastically alter the novel’s tone for a few pages: “The moon’s four days off the full and there’s a square patch of moonlight on the wall and it’s looking at me like a big blind milky eye, a wall eye. Joke. Goddam silly simile. Writers. Everything has to be like something else.”
Marlowe’s impossible assignment is to keep this man from doing violence to his wife and find out what’s blocking him in his latest novel. Not the usual work for a P.I., and Marlowe spends a lot of time ambiguously hanging around the writer’s house and wife, learning things too late, doing more psychologizing than sleuthing in scenes that strive for and sometimes achieve certain “anemic subtleties,” then resolve themselves with Marlowe saying things like “He’s a haunted man. He has a massive guilt complex.”
Chandler also put in the mouths of various characters a good deal of raging against big money and power. He had always used his mysteries to indict the corruption of the modern city that he exploited so well for mood; he was a social novelist, seeing his murderers and blackmailers as strands in a giant web rather than merely individuals driven by private motives. But in “The Long Goodbye” corruption is universal, and the indictment reaches a malignancy that suggests both the settling of personal scores and also a larger disenchantment with doctors, newspapers, book publishers, the rich, the police, gambling, mass production, interior decorating, television commercials–above all with law and justice, which are commodities for sale.
America in the ’50s had lost its glamor for Chandler and begun to leave him behind. His Los Angeles was ceasing to be sinister and becoming merely large and corrupt. In “The Long Goodbye”one sees him, admirably at age 65, trying to adapt his writing to an alien new period and emulating the psychological novel, with mixed results. His collected works show that it was the older Los Angeles of the ’30s, the shadowy, elegant, tightly woven city whose “streets were dark with something more than night,” in which Chandler and his famous hero felt most at home with wickedness.
