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Review of Raymond Chandler: A Life by Tom Williams

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RAYMOND CHANDLER: A LIFE by Tom Williams

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Authors are seldom like their creations, but few are quite so different as Raymond Chandler.

His hero, Philip Marlowe, played by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep, is the brave, crumpled, world-weary realist who, sometimes a little worse for wear, single-handedly takes on the corruption of Los Angeles while femmes fatales throw themselves at him.

As a private detective, he is the embodiment of Chandler’s beautiful sentence, ‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.’

Chandler himself was quite the opposite. J. B. Priestley described him as looking like a boffin in an Ealing Comedy. Unlike his hero, he was both tarnished and afraid. ‘Am I comfortable? No.’ he once wrote. ‘Am I happy? No. Am I weak, depressed, no good, and of no social value to the community? Yes.’

Worlds apart: Humphrey Bogart with Lauren Bacall, as Marlowe in the 1946 film The Big Sleep

Whereas Marlowe was tough and stoic, Chandler was thin-skinned and self- pitying. He resented even the gentlest criticism. Having finished the first draft of The Long Goodbye, he sent it to his agents, saying he would value their ‘comments and objections and so on’.

They read it carefully before sending him a letter saying the new book contained ‘some of your best writing’ but that, at times, Marlowe became uncharacteristically sentimental.

This mild, sensible advice deeply upset the prickly Chandler, who said that receiving this reply was like being ‘slapped in the face’, adding that ‘some of these comments, if correct, are devastating, and if incorrect are intolerable’.  A few weeks later, he sent the agents a telegram which stated bluntly: ‘I herewith terminate my agency account with you. Please acknowledge.’

In the same way, when J. B. Priestley went to Los Angeles, the blunt, pipe-puffing Yorkshireman got off on the wrong foot by saying, as Chandler drove him away from the airport, that although he liked Chandler’s books, he thought perhaps he should try writing something without murders in it. ‘Ray was quietly furious,’ writes his biographer, ‘and the drive home was a long and unpleasant one.’

A virgin until the age of 31, when he married someone 18 years his senior,  he remained nervous around women throughout his life. After his wife’s death, he wrote an extraordinarily moving letter to his English publisher, saying that ‘she was the light of my life, my whole ambition.

Anything else I did was just the fire for her to warm her hands at’, yet he had once drunkenly confided to colleagues in Hollywood that he wanted to divorce her, but she was too old.

The writer, Raymond Chandler

And as a sleuth among the mean streets, he was to prove, unlike Marlowe, hopelessly incompetent.

Towards the end of his life, he was commissioned by a newspaper to interview the Mafia boss ‘Lucky’ Luciano. Far from battling against corruption, he readily embraced it, describing this notorious mobster as a scapegoat who had been ‘deliberately framed’.

He added: ‘He has a soft voice, a patient sad face, and is extremely courageous in every way. This might be all a front, but I don’t think I am that easily fooled. A man who has been involved in brutal crimes bears a mark. Luciano seemed to be a lonely man who had been endlessly tormented and yet bore little or no malice.’

Even Inspector Clouseau was never quite so cack-handed.

Although he grew up in England, Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888, to a life of incessant grumbling. As a young man he got a job as a Whitehall civil servant, but packed it in after a few months: ‘I thoroughly detested the Civil Service.’ He then went to work as a reporter in Fleet Street: ‘I was a complete flop, the worst they had ever had.’

He tried his hand at any number of jobs – teacher, apricot-picker, shop assistant, tennis-racket restringer – before finding a successful niche, once back in America, as the chief auditor of a large oil company, rising to the position of director of three companies and president of another three.

It was only after he got the sack, at the age of 43, that he thought about making a start as a writer.

Even then, he took a year to complete his first story, Blackmailers Don’t Shoot, for a pulp crime magazine, and a further five years to complete his first novel.

On the page, he possessed all the brilliance, the self-confidence, the poetry and wit that he lacked in the world beyond it. 

In life, he was a chronic alcoholic, rarely going anywhere without a bottle of whisky in his briefcase, endlessly picking random arguments with people, and once even pulling out a gun and threatening to shoot himself, just because friends had cancelled a game of tennis.

Yet when it came to writing about alcohol, rather than drinking it, he was able to come up with a wondrously funny sentence like this: ‘I’m an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.’

His method of writing was unusual, to say the least. He would take a sheet of yellow paper, 8½in by 11in, then cut it in half, and place it into a typewriter ‘turned up longways’. Using triple-spacing he would write a small number of words – between 125 and 150 – on each sheet of paper.

He thought this kept his prose lean and punchy: ‘If there isn’t a little meat on each page, something is wrong.’

This is the strength of his books, but also their weakness: each individual para-graph is marvellously exact but, taken as a whole, the plots are all over the place. He was never able to work things out in advance, which meant that he wrote his books from scene to scene, never knowing what was going to happen next.

More often than not, he would end up buried in a hopeless tangle of conflicting plot-lines, with the murderer still not caught for the simple reason that the author had no idea which one he was.

Famously, halfway through filming The Big Sleep, the director, Howard Hawks telegraphed Chandler asking him which of the characters had murdered the chauffeur. Chandler swiftly re-read his own book before telegraphing back: ‘I DON’T KNOW.’

Commissioned to write an original screenplay, he whizzed through the first half in three weeks but then came to a halt because, once again, he couldn’t work out who the murderer was. Confronted by this serious case of writer’s block, the studio offered Chandler an additional $5,000 if he could deliver on time.

Chandler reacted in fury, claiming that the offer betrayed Paramount’s lack of faith in him, and saying that his creative mechanism had now been wrecked. The film was never made.

‘If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood,’ he once observed, ‘and if they had been any better, I should not have come.’

Hollywood was just the latest in a lifelong line of gripes: ‘The pretentiousness, the bogus enthusiasm, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent . . . the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have never really ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world.’

His life was tattered and unwieldy, filled with rage and frustration: his only consolation lay in filtering it all through his typewriter, so that it was transformed into his wry and magical prose.

His first biographer, Frank MacShane, put it nicely when he concluded that Chandler ‘led a tortured and lonely life only temporarily relieved by moments of happiness and given meaning by his stubborn adherence to the highest standards of art’.

This new biography might lack the elegance and sweep of MacShane’s, but it is a good starting point for those who can’t resist a peek past the glittering stage-set of an author’s work to the  tawdry mess that so often lies beyond.WORLDS APART: Humphrey Bogart, with Lauren Bacall, as Marlowe in the 1946 film The Big Sleep. Below: Raymond Chandler


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