Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler by Frank MacShane (ed) - review by Ruth Dudley Edwards

Ruth Dudley Edwards

Complete Writer

Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler

By

Jonathan Cape 501pp. £12.50
 

These are wonderful letters – passionate, furious, funny, trenchant, informed and intelligent. Whether addressing the famous or the unknown, Chandler gave of his best on a range of subjects that included politics, religion, Hollywood, literature, sex, alcohol, food and himself.

Sincere emotion is rarely absent. J B Priestley ‘likes my books, says he smiling politely in order to get the subject out of the way and forget it, then he wishes I would write something without murders in it. Now isn’t that a typical attitude? You slam murder mysteries à la Edmund Wilson, because they are usually written, you say, by people who can’t write well. And the moment you find someone who you are willing to admit can write well, you tell him he should not be writing murder mysteries.’

Chandler took murder mysteries seriously, as he took all his work. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was quickly followed by three more which established his reputation as a major new talent in crime writing. Financial necessity drove him for a while to Hollywood as a writer, where he was angered by the high-handedness with which directors altered scripts on a whim. He cared about film making too much to bear patiently the rule of mediocrities. The same loud philistine environment that so distressed even the placid and tolerant Wodehouse drove Chandler frantic. His harshest assaults were directed at the crassness, stupidity and lack of ethics that abounded in the studios, but writers and critics provided even more targets. Always fiercely independent and quick to condemn, he had a breadth and depth of reading, a sharpness of wit and a shoot-to-kill attitude that made his missiles lethal: James Cain was ‘a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking.’ Edmund Wilson’s ‘careful and pedestrian and sometimes rather intelligent book reviews misguide one into thinking there is something in his head beside mucilage. There isn’t.’ George Bernard Shaw was ‘a whiskered bore … a voluble cicada, an antediluvian scene-stealer.’ The Times Literary Supplement ‘is apparently compiled from the blitherings of a group of aged dons, whose standards of comparisons, points of reference or what have you, seem to be stuck in the year when Jowett translated Plato.’

It wasn’t all bile, by any means. There is compassion in abundance, and that made more telling by a consistent and finely tuned perception. Writing about Somerset Maugham, for instance: ‘I should guess that all in all he has had a lonely life, that his declared attitude of not caring much emotionally about people is a defense mechanism, that he lacks the kind of surface warmth that attracts people, and at the same time is such a wise man that he knows that however superficial and accidental most friendships are, life is a pretty gloomy affair without them.’ This analysis was all the more poignant for coming from the lonely man that Chandler was. His later years were devoted to his ailing wife, Cissy, eighteen years his senior. Their intolerance of sloppy servants left most of the domestic burden on Chandler. A revealing letter written when he was 65 showed the strain was telling: ‘Getting the breakfast, then driving myself to the typewriter for 3 or 4 hours, then almost at once going out to do the marketing, coming back and immediately starting to prepare the dinner, cooking it, washing the dishes, cleaning up afterward – this is not easy for me.’ Cissy died slowly and Chandler could only hope at the end that perhaps she now realised ‘that I regarded the sacrifice of several years of a rather insignificant literary career as a small price to pay, if I could make her smile a few times more.’

Intimate and revealing as many of these letters are, it is strange to reflect that many of them were written to people he had never met, during evenings when his domestic duties and nursing responsibilities were acquitted and Chandler was alone with his typewriter and his cat. There is undoubtedly a self-analytical thread running through them, but Chandler’s honesty and vigour of expression wove it into something well short of self pity or maudlin egotism. He avoids those, sometimes, by the third-person convention: ‘In every generation there are incomplete writers,’ he wrote in 1951 to Hamish Hamilton, ‘people who never seem to get much of themselves down on paper [he does here, in these letters], men whose accomplishment seems always rather incidental [he never devoted himself fully to works for publication]. Often, but not always, they have begun too late [he was 44] and have an overdeveloped critical sense [his made it hard for him to pass his own writings as ready for consumption]. Sometimes they just lack the necessary ruthlessness and think other people’s lives as important as their own [Cissy and others], other people’s happiness more essential than the expression of their personalities, if any. I guess maybe I belong in there.’

Not surprisingly, literary achievement did not come easily. Dissatisfied with the manuscript of The Long Goodbye, he wrote to his literary agent: ‘My kind of writing demands a certain amount of dash and high spirits – the word is gusto, a quality lacking in modern writing – and you could not know the bitter struggle I have had the past year even to achieve enough cheerfulness to live on, much less to put into a book. So let’s face it: I didn’t get it into the book. I didn’t have it to give.’

The books are fine and are growing in status still. These letters complete our picture of Chandler to our total satisfaction. From them we get a complete writer whom one can only love and admire for his recognition of his own strengths and failings, his unerring eye for the phoney, his dislike of cant, his sardonic wit, his deep compassion, his courage in the face of suffering and his determination to remain an honourable man in a corrupt world. When he wrote of Philip Marlowe, he wrote his own epitaph: ‘… to me Marlowe is a character of some nobility, of scorching wit, sad but not defeated, lonely but never really sure of himself … He doesn’t talk or behave like an idealist, but I think he is one at heart’.