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Non-Fiction
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| Raymond Chandler - Brief Notes | |
| By Henry | ||||||||||
| 20 February 2008 | ||||||||||
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This piece is "Work in Progress" and will be amended from time to time. This version: 09 June 2008 / 1,137 words Sources: Ian Fleming interviews Raymond Chandler – BBC 1958 Gardiner / Walker – Raymond Chandler Speaking; 1962 Frank MacShane – The Life of Raymond Chandler; 1976 Raymond Chandler – Briefe 1937 – 1959; 1981 Thomas Degering – Raymond Chandler; 1989 Al Clark – Raymond Chandler in Hollywood; 1996 Tom Hiney – Raymond Chandler, a Biography; 1997 Hiney / MacShane – The Raymond Chandler Papers; 2000 Judith Freeman - The Long Embrace, RC and the Woman He Loved; 2007
Raymond Thornton Chandler was born 1888 in Chicago. His parents split up in 1895, and together with his mother, the seven-year old boy moved to London, where he received education at Dulwich College.
A stay in France and Germany during 1905 gave him ample opportunity to appreciate style and colloquialisms in other languages, an experience which may have been significant to his later development of his own style and language. However, in 1907 a career as a British Civil Servant appeared to be young Raymond's destiny, as he passed the necessary exams to commence with his duties at the Admiralty. It turned out that this was not his thing, and he took up an unsteady life as a would-be writer, journalist, and even poet. Money was extremely short, to put it mildly, and in 1912, with the help of a loan from a relative, Raymond returned to the United States, leaving his mother Florence behind for the time being. He managed to hold a few odd jobs in Los Angeles and successfully completed a book-keeping course in record time. Actually working as a book-keeper now with a regular income, he was able to support himself and his mother Florence who had just crossed the Atlantic to join him in California. World War I touched North America in 1917, and Raymond enlisted in the Canadian Army. After stints in England and in France, he was discharged in February 1919. He was not too keen to return to the regular life, but stayed in San Francisco for a while. Jobs with a newspaper and two banks did not work out for him, and finally, at the age of 31, Raymond made the move back to Los Angeles, to his mother, and to a lady whose name was Cissy Pascal. Born as Pearl Eugenie Hurlburt in 1870, she was married to the pianist Julian Pascal in 1911. The Pascal family looked after Florence Chandler, and it must have been in 1919, during one of Raymond's brief trips to LA, that he had become attracted to Cissy. It was rumoured that before her marriage, as a nude model she was part of the fast life and the opium scene in New York. Cissy obtained a divorce by the end of 1920, but she did not get married to Raymond before 1924, after his mother's death who had opposed the union fiercely. Cissy was eighteen years older than Raymond, a fact he was apparently still unaware of at the time of the wedding. She was a strikingly beautiful woman as a surviving photograph shows, and falsifying her age on the marriage certificate by ten years had been no problem at all. Meanwhile, Chandler had embarked on a career with an oil company and he even made it to vice-president; however, his increasing problems with alcohol got him fired in 1932. What now? For some reason and with the urgent necessity to earn a living, Chandler turned his attention to pulp fiction writing – with success: in 1933, he published his very first story “Blackmailers Don't Shoot“ in 'Black Mask', a popular and cheap-priced publication designed for quick consumption. More than fifteen stories followed, until in 1939, Chandler succeeded with his first novel “The Big Sleep“. Very quickly, Raymond Chandler was established now and even wrote screenplays in Hollywood, commanding top weekly salaries. Cissy Pascal Chandler died in 1954, and Raymond never recovered from this blow. Despite their difference in age, he had been extremely devoted to her (save for numerous drinking bouts and a small number of Hollywood secretaries). His drinking increased and in 1955, he made a half-hearted attempt at suicide. During Cissy's final months, he worked on “The Long Good-Bye“, which was published shortly before her death. A number of years followed without literary output, save for “Playback“ in 1958, and the posthumous “Poodle Springs“ fragment. Chandler disintegrated continually, hitting the bottle and involving himself with useless and superficial, unseccessful attachments to women who tried to care for him or for themselves, and he died a lonely death in a hospital in La Jolla. Chandler's end could be taken from one of his own books – perhaps Marlowe would have died the same way had Chandler lived long enough? Philip Marlowe, the central character in Chandler's work, is a private detective with a complex personality and with a clear-cut code of conduct. If he feels that he does not meet a client's expectations, or that he is unable to do the job because it is against his own principles, he will not accept any money. Marlowe plays chess, he listens to music, he appreciates attractive women, drinks a lot, fights hard, carries guns, and conducts a personal war against corrupt policemen. His attitude towards women is that of an old-fashioned, chivalrous 'knight' – that is, he will not take advantage of women, where others in his position would do so. A living anachronism? Chandler did not think so. He made that clear in his essay “The Simple Art or Murder“ (1944), a classic on the craft of writing up to this day. Philip Marlowe is the private eye 'par excellance', and there is no getting away from that. Chandler made use of his earlier pulp stories – he extracted large sections from them and combined them with other parts taken from other stories in order to produce new pieces. He happily called that procedure 'cannibalizing'. Although he was influenced by Dashiell Hammett ('he started where Hammett left off'), Chandler introduced a cool and witty approach to the detective story – the cliché 'hard-boiled' was coined somewhere along the line – and although many critics did not like it, he was an intellectual representative of modern American literature. His influence on later writers was immense, he excelled with hilarious similes (very, very few writers managed to equal his incongruous and sometimes loony equations: for example 'She was as cute as a washtub.' - “Farewell My Lovely“, Ch.5, and where Hemingway, whom he approved of, excelled with pure style and pure language, Chandler excelled with tough and curt descriptions of people, locations and persons, as well as with downbeat renditions of feelings and situations. Raymond Chandler was an avid writer of letters – luckily, many of his letters have survived and his major biographer Frank MacShane edited a large volume of them. Additionally, Chandler issued a few critical essays on the writing and film businesses, respectively (“Oscar Night in Hollywood“, 1948) – his scathing remarks are not only fun to read today, but they should be placed permanently on the desks of all so-called agents, directors, and publishers. Raymond Chandler was an unhappy person, unfriendly, impolite, irate, and defeated by the bottle, but he wrote a number of immortal works and lines which will pass the test of time.
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