November 2, 2007
The Genius of Raymond Chandler: An Interview with Judith Freeman (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 10:00 AM EST Raymond Chandler is the most influential mystery writer since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His leading advocates, including W. H. Auden, Clive James, and even, grudgingly, Edmund Wilson, have argued that he transcends the genre of detective fiction and that his books should be simply considered literature. No one denies that Chandler’s influence on popular culture has been enormous: The Big Sleep, the Bogart-Bacall vehicle directed by Howard Hawks, is still regarded (along with John Huston’s film from Dashiell Hammett’s book The Maltese Falcon) as one of the two greatest American detective movies ever made, and Chandler’s books and film scripts (most notably for Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train) helped define the concept of film noir, which continues to influence writers as diverse as the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami and the graphic novelist Frank Miller, who is set to direct a film version of Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business. Judith Freeman’s The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, which comes out November 6 from Pantheon, is the first book to examine in depth the strange relationship between Chandler and his much older wife, Cissy, as well as their peripatetic life together in and around Los Angeles. Ms. Freeman answered questions for us from her home in California. The interview is appearing in two parts. Raymond Chandler has been imitated, parodied, and practically plagiarized for so long that his style of detective story has practically become a cliché. Yet somehow the work not only survives but stays fresh. Just about all his books have been in print continuously since they were published. What do you think it is about Chandler that endures? The short answer is his brilliance, which is a multi-faceted thing. There’s his humor for starters. As Christopher Isherwood observed, There’s fun in Chandler. He’s an immensely amusing writer, and readers connect with that wit. And yet he says some profound things about American society and the corruption in its institutions, how we’re a big, rough, rich, appetent society, and crime is the price we pay for our gluttony. His books contain that quality he most valued in writing, namely vitality, and it is a hard thing to fake if you don’t have it, which is why so many imitators fail. But in the end I think it’s Marlowe that gives the books their real staying power. Philip Marlowe is an enigma. He says so himself at one point. He’s vulnerable, like us, and we feel his sad good-naturedness. He’s an iconic America male, just as Marilyn Monroe was an iconic American female. And this is interesting because Chandler once said that only he and Marilyn Monroe had managed to reach all the brows—high-brow, middle-brow, and low-brow. This is another reason why Chandler endures. He reaches across the intellectual spectrum with stories that still seem fresh in their telling. When I was at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival two years ago the writer whose name was evoked most often when taking about L.A. was Raymond Chandler. This is odd because Chandler certainly had mixed feelings about Southern California in general and Los Angeles in particular. I think one of his most famous putdowns was that L.A. had “all the personality of a paper cup.” Yet he had many opportunities to move and never did. How would you sum up his strange on-again, off-again affair with the City of Angels? He had a definite love-hate relationship with L.A. I think he loved it when he first arrived, in 1913, and it must have been a pretty idyllic place then, very different from London, the city where he’d spent much of his childhood. He really took to driving and loved automobiles. But L.A. was a place that got despoiled quite rapidly, and the banality and lack of taste in a population composed increasingly of transplanted Midwesterners—the so called hog-and-hominy crowd—began to disgust him. On the one hand, you had religious nuts of every stripe, and on the other, you had bunko artists bilking the ignorant rubes, as well as gangsters, bad cops, and corrupt politicians. Smog arrived, and stupid fads, and objects with built-in obsolescence. After a while L.A became Paradise Despoiled for him, a grotesque and impossible place to live. California, he said, was the department store state—everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else. He lost it as a place to set his fiction, because he had to either love a city or hate it to write about it, or maybe both, he said, “like a woman.” Eventually L.A. bored him. It became “just a tired old whore” to him. Still, he put it on the literary map. His relationship with L.A. was very symbiotic. The city gave him his material, and in return he gave it a lasting identity. No one wrote better about L.A. or captured more of its unique essence. What were Cissy’s feelings about her husband’s writing? Was she supportive or did she feel, as many of Chandler’s contemporaries did, that he should try to write something more “serious”? Chandler claimed his wife never liked what he wrote. He said her advice to him was to quit writing out of the corner of his mouth. What did she mean by that? I think she meant, drop that tough-guy stuff. Loose the slang and prison talk and violence, write a story that depicts a softer, more romantic world, not one filled with gangsters and crooks and rotten blondes. We should be glad he didn’t take her advice.
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