The Long Goodbye—Raymond Chandler
A soft-boiled detective
Raymond Chandler published the sixth Philip Marlowe novel in 1953, The Long Goodbye, which weaves together several strands the events surrounding Terry Lennox, a rich drunk whom Marlowe rescues one night and later befriends. In these sorts of novels, one can’t simply befriend a rich person without opening a portal into a world of corruption and murder. And although the story seems to become unmoored from Terry fewer than a hundred pages in, the intrigue has no trouble carrying on of its own inertia without his presence. We meet the usual crowd of rich drunk men, stunning blondes, sketchy cops, and knuckleheaded thugs as Marlowe pokes into dangerous and unwelcoming places.
One of Raymond Chandler’s last books, The Long Goodbye earned him the newly established Edgar Allen Poe Award in 1955. The public at that time knew Philip Marlowe quite well, from the previous five novels and several movies. Chandler’s Marlowe, together with Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, largely define the hard-boiled detective genre. But Marlowe stands apart from the others in the depth of his character, call it a hard-boiled softness. Fundamentally honest and caring, he appreciates classical music, great literature, and chess. That doesn’t fit what we think of as the standard role for private eyes from that era. In the hands of Hollywood, in fact, only a criminal mastermind would have such interests or appreciation, but Marlowe, despite his tough-guy demeanor, hides an educated and sensitive soul. Admittedly, Marlowe never shows this side of himself to others, and Chandler displays Marlowe’s intellectual interests in a somewhat comedic way, but the reader must have a good cultural education to grasp the jokes. For example, in describing his sleepless night, Marlowe says,
At three A.M. I was walking the floor and listening to Khachaturyan working in a tractor factory. He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it.
If you don’t get it, listen to the first movement. The numerous cultural and literary allusions don’t come from a writer who did just enough research to bluff his way through. Born in Chicago, Chandler moved with his mother to England at age ten, and as a teenager studied classics in Dulwich College near London where he read Virgil, Livy, and Ovid in the original Latin, as well as Plato, Aristophanes, and Thucydides in Greek. After graduating he went on to study French in a Parisian business college and German with a tutor in Munich. He also experienced his share of horror. Having moved back to America, he enlisted in the Canadian army in 1917 and fought in the trenches in France, 1918. About this experience he said, “Once you have had to lead a platoon into direct machine-gun fire, nothing is ever the same again.”
During the Great Depression, readers and moviegoers craved entertainment. Producers of entertainment supplied plenty of rags-to-riches stories or movies about royalty, millionaires, or beautiful people living charmed lives. With the emergence in the United States of the Hays Commission, and the McCarthy investigations, it became hard and even dangerous to indulge in social criticism. But these immensely popular hard-boiled detectives necessarily lived out their lives in a seamy underworld that showed people at their worst. The crime story thus became a common vehicle for the type of observation or thinking that could otherwise get one blacklisted or thrown in jail. Here, for example, we have part of a rambling soliloquy delivered by the filthy rich Harlan Potter, a soliloquy that Marlowe listens to patiently.
The average man is tired and scared, and a tired, scared man can’t afford ideals. He has to buy food for his family. In our time we have seen a shocking decline in both public and private morals. You can’t expect quality from people whose lives are a subjection to a lack of quality. You can’t have quality with mass production. You don’t want it because it lasts too long. So you substitute styling, which is a commercial swindle intended to produce artificial obsolescence. Mass production couldn’t sell its goods next year unless it made what it sold this year look unfashionable a year from now. […] We make the finest packages in the world, Mr. Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk.
Such a critique of American consumerism one might expect in the ’sixties, but in 1952? Chandler can say it and disavow it if it comes from the mouth of an evil and reclusive millionaire. And again, this meditation comes from Bernie Ohls, an old friend who has come to tell Marlowe to stop poking around already. He relaxes before getting down to business.
He lit one of my cigarettes and puffed at it for a minute or two, then put it out. “Getting so I don’t like the stuff,” he said. “Maybe it’s the TV commercials. They make you hate everything they try to sell. God, they must think the public is a halfwit. Every time some jerk in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck holds up some toothpaste or a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of beer or a mouthwash or a jar of shampoo or a little box of something that makes a fat wrestler smell like mountain lilac I always make a note never to buy any. Hell, I wouldn’t buy the product even if I liked it...”
(Yes, they had actors dressed as doctors marketing cigarettes and beer on television back then.) Back in 2008, when I wrote reflections on two other Chandler novels, The Big Sleep, and Farewell, My Lovely, I didn’t especially enjoy his style. I thought Hammett’s writing much better and I thought that Chandler tried, unsuccessfully, to do a Sam Spade only with implausible similes. I now think of Marlowe, not as a gimmick, but as a sincere expression of Chandler’s own self. But several of the other characters also serve that end. For instance, Roger Wade, a successful writer like Chandler, struggles with alcoholism to the point that he attempts suicide, also like Chandler. Wade’s observations about the demons that plague a writer on the decline, as well as Potter’s thoughts on the mess that mass production has made of the human soul, and Ohls’s rant against TV commercials, must surely express Chandler’s own repugnance at the crassness of a world obsessed with money and power, his world.
Chandler’s writing stood out from the other crime writers of the time. For one thing, Chandler gave Marlowe a sense of humor. All those wild similes that bothered me several years ago I now see as coming from a sensitive intellectual amused at the tough-guy mask he wears. A couple of my favorite similes: In interviewing a doctor, Marlowe becomes mesmerized by the fellow’s eyebrows. At one point he says, “His eyebrows waved gently, like the antennae of some suspicious insect.” And then later, while waiting for a phone call, he says, “An hour crawled by like a sick cockroach.” But the mask comes off completely in this passage as a phone conversation ends abruptly.
He hung up in my ear. I replaced the phone thinking that an honest cop with a bad conscience always acts tough. So does a dishonest cop. So does almost anyone, including me.
Chandler suffered greatly while writing this novel and watching his wife, Cissy, decline in health. He completed the novel and sent it to some agents in 1952 only for them to criticize it for Marlowe’s “softness.” He breaks off his relationship with the agents but spends much of 1953 revising and resuming his heavy drinking. After Cissy dies in 1954, he wrote, “For thirty years, ten months and four days, she was the light of my life, my whole ambition. Anything else I did was just the fire for her to warm her hands at. That is all there is to say.”
Next up: Kristin Lavransdatter, Volume 1: The Bridal Wreath, by Sigrid Undset
Amazon links to works mentioned in this post.
The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback
I’m reading the translation of Kristin Lavransdatter by Charles Archer and J. S. Scott, which has been panned for its archaic and stilted English.
These are the Tiina Nunnally translations. They are generally considered truer to the original and easier to read.
Kristin Lavransdatter, the complete trilogy
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Reads like a love letter. I'm in.