Arthur Krystal No Failure Like Success:The Life of Raymond Chandler,, pp. 445-455, The American Scholar, Summer, 1996, 3, 65, 445-455.
Around the time a transplanted adolescent American was matriculating through the Dulwich College Preparatory School in South London, studying music, divinity, English history, and the classics a peculiar American form of reading entertainment known as the “pulps” was just getting off the ground. Printed on seven-by-ten inches of untrimmed wood pulp, featuring sensationalistic fiction and even more fantastic ads, the pulps enthralled a nation of readers—or at least those who liked their women fast and their action faster. Had the youngster at the Dulwich School been aware of those first pulps, the Argosy (1896) and All-Story (1905), which soon called forth a hundred sexy and snarling imitators, no doubt he would have sniffed and retreated to his Ovid and Thucydides, which he was reading in Greek and Latin. All this to say, it would have taken a wily Nostradamus to predict a confluence of those two events, whereby the product of an English public school education would one day place his stamp on a gaudy and lowbrow form of writing and make it, as he put it, “into something like literature.” That modest, but not-too-modest, appraisal has now been shored up—one might even say raised up—by the Library of America’s decision to reprint the works of Raymond Chandler.
Coming at a time when the distinction between high culture and popular culture is dissolving in academic saucepans, and when the time-bound views of fallible human beings, who happen also to be writers, are adduced to the detriment of their actual achievement, the Library of America’s inclusion of Raymond Chandler presents an interesting case of these factors at work. Enemies of elitism will cheer, but because they are for the most part the same professors who suss out politically incorrect views in everyone from Lucretius to Lincoln, they will not always find Chandler fighting the good fight, at least not where African Americans, Native Americans, Jews, and homosexuals are concerned. Possibly none of these considerations entered into the Library’s decision to set Chandler alongside Adams, Twain, Hawthorne, Melville, Wharton, James, Faulkner, Frost and the rest. The publisher may simply have felt that Chandler’s writings merit his inclusion among these literary eminences and acted accordingly.
This too presents a point of interest. Chandler, in case one is an immitigable highbrow and disdains to know such things, wrote fiction almost exclusively from the perspective of a California private eye; he also worked on half a dozen screenplays and published exactly five essays. Given that we are speaking of some two dozen short stories (manyof them fairly weak) and only seven novels, the question must be asked: Does Chandler belong in a literary pantheon that is not restricted to mystery or detective fiction? Or put another way: Would a mystery writer at any other time but ours even be considered for literary sanctification?
Writers. mystery buffs, and even many educated readers of detective fiction will tell you that Chandler is a great writer, not a great, great writer, mind you , but a great writer (none the less.) Readers with less than a personal investment in detective fiction will shrug off such an exalted notion. Flaubert or Joyce, he’s not. But he is a fine stylist, a craftsman who labored to fashion a prose style whose precision and panache, often imitated, has never been duplicated. The best of Chandler looks down upon the imitations like an Old Master portrait hanging among thousands of pedestrian and slapdash attempts at emulation.
Of course, if you don’t have an eye for these things, or a tolerance for the hard-boiled detective tale, you might not discern the difference or care about it—in which case the Library of Congress’s imprimatur will count for little. Skiptics, however, should note that Chandler, despite an ambivalence second to none, regardimg crime fiction, took his work seriously, believing he could rehabilitate ashabby stylistic cousin to standard English. The prose tradition he inherited—one finally shorn of its English roots—sprang directly from American print journalism and the story weeklies and dime novels of the late nineteenth century. And while it is true that the private eye’s antecedents can be found in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales and in Mark Twain’s pungent first-person narratives, a far more generative condition for pulp writing was the demand for plentiful prose delivered in record time—which it barely needs saying, tended to produce literary effects appealing to the lowest common denominator of reader. Ludwig Wittgenstein may have eagerly awaited his monthly issue of Street and Smith’s Detective Story Magazine, but then Ludwig was an odd duck as well a genius. In truth, few middlebrow readers, let alone intellectuals, ever gave the pulps a glance. [One wonders about the author’s condescending tone, when every condition was ripe for covering up any class betrayals, except for Germanic speakers practicing high Baroque Drama.]
So along comes Raymond Thornton Chandler (1888-1959), Chicago born, Nebraska raised and England educated, to give such writing a veneer of respectability. He did not alter general opinion about the pulps (they were petty dreadful, and Chandler said so), but he did manage to take a genus of pulp writing, the hard-boiled detective story, and invest it with a rude wit and wised up intelligence that made even readers of serious literature sit up and take notice. Yet in satisfying the reading public. Chandler would forfeit all opportunity of satisfying himself, for this was a man who, however, much he railed at the “arbitrary” distinctions that separated “straight” fiction from detective fiction, would have preferred to go straight. In fact, his life up to the point when he began to write for the pulps might be described as the outcome of an early failure to become a serious man of letters.
Having prepared himself for a career in business after leaving Dulwich, Chandler qualified for a job in the supplies office of the Admiralty in 1907. He lasts all of six months. For the next two years he works sporadically for English newspapers, while writing poems, sketches, and book reviews on the side. In 1911 he manages to place a few literary essays in The Academy. A few years later, unable to earn money by writing, he’s had enough. With five hundred pounds bt he could write pulp borrowed from an uncle, Chandler returns to America, where after kicking aroud for a bit, picking apricots and stringing tennis rackets, he becomes an accountant for the Los Angeles Creamery.
Enlisting in the Canadian Army in 1917, he sees action in France. Two wartime experiences stamd out: he is the sole survivor of a German artillery bombardment on his outfit and, as a platoon leader, has the responsibility of leading human beings directly into machine-gun fire. The war over, Chandler returns to Los Angeles and begins a love affair with Pearl Eugenie (“Cissy”) Pascal, a married woman eighteen years his senior. His mother drops in, stays on, and Chandler takes a job as an auditor for an oil company.
After his mother’s death, Chandler now marries the now-divorced Cissy (he is thirty-six, she, fifty-four) and quickly works his way up to the president in charge of the L.A. office. The next seven years finds him working hard, drinking heavily, dealing with other women, and occasionally displaying erratic behavior. In 1932 he is fired. With nothing to do, Chandler again tries to write. This time, however he eschews poetry and essays for the pulps because it occurred to him that he could write pulp fiction and actually get paid for it. Five months of work and he produces his detective story, which is accepted by Black Mask, the best pulp magazine of the day (started by, of all people, H.L Mencken.) More stories follow, and in 1938 he finishes The Big Sleep, the novel that effectively launches his literary career and just as effectively prohibits a life in literature as he had once envisioned it.
Chandler’s travails havve been nicely recounted in Frank MacShane’s biography, The Life of Raymond Chandler, which has the enviable quality, rare these days of being both informative and brief.Without drumming the point home, it also suggests that, given Chandler’s grounding in the classics, his youthful literary aspirations, and his unswerving romanticism, the fact that he ended up writing hard-boiled detective fiction was, despite his worldly success and its acclaimed brilliance, something of an intellectual cross for him.
From the moment he began to publish, Chandler veered from dismissive remarks about his work to rather grandiose pronouncements about how well it stacked up against the serious fiction of the day. Always contemptuous of mystery writers, especialy the British “cozy,” Chandler managed to convince himself that “murder novels . . . are no eassier reading than Hamlet, Lear, or Macbeth. They border on tragedy and never quite become tragic. Their form imposes sa cettain clarity of of outline, which is only found in the most accomplished n”straight” novels. Of course , if a critic gave too much weight too Chandler’s own work he was immediately suspicious. When W.H. Auden pronounced Chandler “interested in writing, not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu” Chandler demurred.”Auden leaves me lost and groping . . . I’m just a fellow who jacked up a few pulp novelettes into book form. Not to like his work was to misunderstand it. Not to like it too much, ditto. “The better you write a mystery,” he informed his London publisher, “the more clearly you demonstrate that the mystery is not really worth writing.”
The sense of doing something well that may not be worth doing at all, never left him. He could’t let it because—well, because he had a classical education and knew that it. at least. was worth something. In a phrase, the same education that enabled him to write clean, economical sentences made him painfully ambivalent toward the form in which they appeared. He saw himself writing detective fiction much as an architect might feel if forced to design if forced to design useless, elaborate boxes. Hard-boiled narrative was a species of arcana to be examined and learned from; he analyzed, parsed, imitated and revised repeatedly, teaching himse4lf to write pulp stories, as MacShane notes, “in the great spirit of translating Cicero into English and then back into Latin”—just as he had done at Dulwich.
[A note from Kelyn: Repitition, translating from English to Latin and back again might well have found Chandler discovering that the machine was often asymmetric producing different translations and different versions over time.]
The other difference between Chandler and even competent pulp writers was an ear trained in Edwardian England. “I had to learn American just like a foreign language,” he said, and certainly that played into the hands of a writer who believed that, “the most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.” From the outset, Chandler thought he could do things with detective fiction that the readers didn’t even know they wanted. “They just thought they cared nothing about anything but the action,” he claimed. “The things that they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialogue and description; the things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper-clip up off the polished surface of a desk.” Much the same point, incidentally, is made in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon when studio executive Monroe Stahr, using a nickel rather than a paper-clip, expatiates on the art of writing for the movies.
Like its maker, Chandler’s famous style contains an inherent contradiction. Although he admired Dashiell Hammett for giving murder back to the nasty, impulsive people who commit it and who “talk and think in the language they customarily used for such purposes,” Chandler was not about to get realistic. Hammett, though no stranger to gothic plotting, wrote matter-of-factly. But then Hammett was the real article—he’d been a Pinkerton detective and hung out with cops and robbers, saloon owners and such—and perhaps felt no need to embellish. Chandler, on the other hand, learned about criminals from newspapers, textbooks, and the pulps. Both physically and temperamentally removed from the rough-and-tumble, he had to find a way to get himself interested in writing about it: “How could I possibly care a button about the detective story as a form?” he explained to the editor of Harper’s. “All I’m looking for is an excuse for certain experiments in dramatic dialogue. To justify them I have to have plot and situation; but fundamentally I care almost nothing about either. All I really care about is what Errol Flynn calls “the music,” the lines he has to speak.”
Chandler was not being disingenuous, but music was not all he cared about. He would also claim with typical contrariety that had essays paid enough, he would have given up fiction altogether. One may doubt it; fiction freed him—his character Philip Marlowe freed him—to sing of chivalric quests and fantasy (this after all was a writer who never quit dabbling with poetry or fabularistic tales); at the ssame time. Marlow enabled him to express the bitterness and disillusionment of a man coming to maturity in the period between the wars.