BOOKS

Infinite Cruelty

by Epicene Wildeblood

At the age of 30, Raymond Chandler, an American raised in England and thoroughly imprinted with the stoic code of the English Public School, found himself a platoon commander in World War I. For nearly a decade Chandler had been struggling to establish himself as a writer and had gotten nowhere, for excellent reasons: his peotry was ninth-rate imitation Swinburne and his essays were even worse. Now, suddenly separated from what was then called literature, he found himself confronting life and death. Specifically, he led several charges against German machine-gun fire.

“Courage is a strange thing: one can never be sure of it,” he wrote in a letter years later. “As a platoon commander very many years ago I never seemed afraid, and yet I have been afraid of the most insignificant risks.” Warming to the subject, Chandler discussed the psychology of moving forward against a machine-gun nest: “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. It was always very difficult, especially if you had replacements or men who had been wounded. It’s only human to want to bunch together for companionship in the face of heavy fire.”

One day in Hollywood in the 1950s, when Chandler had become rich and famous and the Black List was speaking louder than the Box Office about who would get hired next year, J. Edgar Hoover found himself in a restaurant at which Chandler was dining. Hoover sent a message via a waiter that he would like to speak to the most famous detective-story writer in the country. Chandler’s reply was terse and typical: “Tell Mr. J. Edgar Hoover to go to hell.”

That’s what an English education will do for you: Chandler wouldn’t forget the “Mr.” even when telling a man to go to hell; but he would offer no other meed of good manners to a thug like Hoover, even if Presidents of the US or really powerful presidents of film studios quaked before Hoover’s wrath.

People who met Raymond Chandler after he became a celebrity always commented that he was nothing like the hero of his novels, Philip Marlowe. Frank MacShane’s Life of Raymond Chandler (1978) makes amply clear how wrong they all were. Chandler at 5'11" was an inch and a half shorter than Marlowe; he wore glasses and, it was usually said, “talked like a professor”—which is to say that he talked like what he was, an English Public School graduate who had majored in classics. Underneath these superficialities, Chandler was Marlowe and Marlowe was Chandler. The man who told J. Edgar Hoover to go to hell in the witch-hunting ’50s was the man who, in the novels, is willing to fight alone for his own concept of decency against oil millionaires, Hollywood producers, corrupt cops, crooked DAs, and the whole power apparatus which has made southern California the wealthiest right-wing enclave outside Dallas.

It took Chandler a long time to create Marlowe. Like Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Chandler found that WWI “destroyed in him / the artist’s urge.” He stopped writing his Romantic poetry—what the hell did that have to do with the world he had seen in the war?—and returned to the land of his birth, where he didn’t write a line for 15 years. Instead, he deliberately mutated himself from an English esthete into an American businessman: no small feat of neurological reprogramming. That he succeeded until the age of 45 is astonishing in itself; that he became a major executive in three oil firms reminds one of Paul Gauguin, another artist who spent most of his life in flight from art.

As Chandler later wrote, “I have spent my life on the edge of nothing”—and, in another place, he added, “Once you have had to lead a platoon into direct machine-gun fire, nothing is ever the same again.” He had a vision of a world that was made of glass, a world where anyone could be smashed in an instant, carelessly or maliciously as the case might be, but in any case shattered beyond repair: no literary technique existed to convey that vision. Chandler spent 15 years, the prime years of a man’s life, in the oil-executive game before the Daemon or Holy Guardian Angel that haunts artists got its teeth into him again. Typically, the first symptoms were pathological: he became an alcoholic, and seems to have made a career of it. MacShane makes abundantly clear that because of his excellent previous record, Chandler was given a great deal of tolerance before the patience of his Board of Directors was exhausted. He was only fired after several monumental benders in which he stayed drunk for weeks on end without coming anywhere near the office.

At the age of 45, with a vain and expensive wife, no job, and a heavy alcohol habit, Chandler had no place to go but up. He stopped drinking and started writing again, and in a few years he had created the unique literary form which is his and his alone, although more widely counterfeited than any other technique but Hemingway’s. It was a kind of detective story that had never existed before, not even in the bitter and bloody pages of Dashiell Hammett; some purists of the logical-deductive tale even claimed it wasn’t a detective story at all.

What Chandler had invented, as Edmund Wilson was the first to note, is akin to the espionage novels of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, in which “it is not simply a question here of a puzzle which has been put together but of a malaise conveyed to the reader, the horror of a hidden conspiracy which is continually turning up in the most varied and unlikely forms.” Farewell, My Lovely—a Romantic title for a horrid story—begins with a seemingly senseless murder in Los Angeles’s Black ghetto, but as Marlowe investigates, the reader is led step-by-step into every aspect of southern California life, from the mansions of the very rich to the gambling casinos run by the Mafia, and the “hidden conspiracy” is everywhere. Chandler had learned a lot in the oil business, and the links between rich men with fine manners and delicate sensibilities down through corrupt politicians and crooked cops to outright hoodlums and psychopaths are traced with clinical accuracy, foreshadowing newspaper exposes that didn’t appear until 30 years after Chandler’s earliest novels. His world is indeed the claustrophobic landscape of Ambler and Greene, and would be a paranoid fantasy anywhere but Los Angeles, where it is simply naturalistic social fiction as cool as John O’Hara at his iciest.

But Ambler and Greene are, compared to Chandler, relatively humorless writers; it was Chandler’s genius to treat this mean city with so much grotesque and ironic comedy that he literally created the modern style of Black Humor three decades before Lenny Bruce, Joseph Heller, William S. Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., or whoever wrote Illuminatus!

As Chandler once wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, “Murder, which is a frustration of the individual and hence a frustration of the race, may have, and in fact has, a good deal of sociological implications.” Which is only to say that there are reasons, which most of us would prefer not to know, why America has one murder every fourteen minutes and the Swedes hardly ever have a violent assault. Digging out these reasons, the frustrations of our culture as exemplified and heightened by the sun-belt hedonism of Los Angeles, is what Chandler’s mysteries are about. His contempt for the puzzle type of detective story was based on the fact that it was only a puzzle, and didn’t face these implications; as he said, the authors preferred to forget “that murder is an act of infinite cruelty.”

Chandler added, hinting at the function of humor in his work, “It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.” When you have finally untangled the plot of The Little Sister (another deceptively sedate Chandler title for a blood-spattered horror story), the hidden conspiracy goes back to a large studio’s attempt to protect the reputation of a rising actress, and to the decisions of a producer so eccentric he allows his dogs to pee in his office even though it disgusts his secretaries. He can allow his dogs to pee in the office, or anywhere, because he has the money and power to do whatever the hell he wants. This is satire, yes, but it is deadly accurate. See the career of Howard Hughes.

It is commonplace to say that the humor of Chandler’s brutal stories lies in the famous Chandler style. But that style is not merely comic; it is capable of haiku-like beauty, and at its best it can say literally anything. For instance, the emotional impact of Chandler’s books lies in something that critics have not widely discussed: his capacity to render physiological sensations (neurological nuances) which most writers have avoided as being totally beyond words. Somehow, Chandler found the words—for the stages of hallucination and pain through which Marlowe rises gradually to consciousness after being beaten senseless, for the ghastly quiet in a room after you have found a dead body, for drug trips that even the psychedelic writers of the ’60s have not rendered so precisely, for the intolerable boredom and sudden moments of terror that make up an investigator’s life. American English, as it is called—that is a euphemism for underworld and show-biz slang—joins with classic Engligh English, in Chandler’s style, to form the most genuine synthesis of Folk Art and High Art we have seen in this country.

It is an axiom of bon-ton literary criticism that the style should fit the subject; Chandler meets that standard with such ease he hardly seems to be trying. When he describes Los Angeles as “a big department store of a city with no more personality than a paper cup,” he is precise the way Ezra Pound is precise. The department store is the mot juste for both the commercialism and the startling juxtapositions of L.A.; the paper cup is an emblem of mass production and quick obsolescence that no Imagist poet could improve. If people are being stabbed, shot, beaten, framed, and betrayed all over the landscape, a style based on deliberate semantic miscegenation (humor in the wrong place, beauty when you least expect it, the continuous shock of jumping from slums to mansions, from dirty police interrogation rooms to jacaranda trees blooming in Laurel Canyon) is a montage of Paradise Lost, a world that could be unspeakably beautiful if power were not being so relentlessly abused everywhere in it.

“In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption,” Chandler once wrote. This appears in his novels through the personal honor of the hero, Philip Marlowe, but it is only moving and convincing and exemplary because Chandler himself believed it and lived it. The most revealing story in MacShane’s biography concerns Chandler’s outrage when a Paramount executive offered him a $5,000 bonus to finish a script on time. Since Chandler had contracted to finish the script on time, the bonus appeared an insult to him—an honorable man lives up to a contract signed—and he indignantly refused it. This exactly parallels the instances in which Marlowe refuses or returns a client’s fee, because he has failed to do an adequate job—scenes that probably seem incredible to the average reader in this cynical and swinish decade. Such scenes of old-fashioned morality remain powerful because they were written with the one ingredient no writer can fake: total sincerity.

What Chandler added to the detective story was not just style and humor and sociological depth; he added his own sense of the mysterious psychology of courage—something noboby can ever totally own or totally lose. The eighth or ninth layer of humor in his books, when you’ve read them as often as I have, lies in Marlowe’s acute awareness that his courage just possibly might not be there when he needs it. To know that we live in a world where murder is the “coin of civilization” is to five on the edge of nothing, like the Existentialist; to build a philosophy of courage in the teeth of that high sense of vulnerability is to live with a romantic myth that might collapse abruptly, like Hemingway, who died a suicide; to believe in courage, and in honor, and in even more old-fashioned virtues, while acknowledging that courage itself might leave you as rudely as a Hollywood agent slams his door on a fading star, is to live in the Black Comedy that Chandler captured better than any other novelist of our century.

A 1950s poll found that only two artists were equally popular with highbrows and lowbrows. One was, of course, Marilyn Monroe. The other was, deservedly, Raymond Chandler. His novels are all still in print even though the earliest of them is set in the 1930s and the last in the early 1950s and they seem superficially “dated.” They are as topical as the latest theory about the Cowboy and Yankee war among conspiracy buffs. We are still in the world Chandler described, and he has much to teach us about how to laugh and remain honorable and decent in such a world.

EPICENE WILDEBLOOD is the most highly esteemed literary critic in the United States. He has never been known to split an infinitive or to descend to pleonasm. Due to circumstances beyond his control he has appeared in four vulgar, common science-fiction novels, where he was not treated gently, and he is still engaged in trying to find his way back to the Real World. “I am not a character in fiction,” he insists, “but a critic of fiction. The difference should be clear to anyone with a sound mind. Don’t you believe me? Please say you believe me.…”

Reprinted by permission of City Miner Magazine. P.O. Box 176, Berkeley, CA 94701. Subscriptions $4/year.