by Barbara D'Amato
"In the High and Far-Off Times, the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk. He only had a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side, but he couldn't pick up things with it. But there was one Elephant -- a new Elephant -- an Elephant's Child -- who was full of 'satiable curtiosity, and that means he asked ever so many questions."
Thus begins "The Elephant's Child" by Rudyard Kipling, one of the most charming and wittiest of tales for children. I read it to my grandchildren several times a year, and it's fun for adults as well. Some years ago, an edition appeared in which "'satiable curtiosity" was changed to "insatiable curiosity," thus entirely removing the charm. [The good news is that, as far as I can tell, that edition is no longer in print.]
Heaven forefend some innocent child might think "curiosity" was "curtiosity" or go through life saying "satiable."
This brings me, without too huge a leap, to a subcategory of censorship I'll call well-meaning paternalism.
"Out, crimson spot!"
Yes, that's one of Thomas Bowdler's "improvements" on Shakespeare. Bowdler, who gave us the eponym "bowdlerize", in fact did not fix Shakespeare himself. His sister Harriet did. But they had to publish Family Shakespeare under his name because they could not admit that a gentlewoman even understood Shakespeare's racy passages.
I've heard recently that Harlequin is going to reprint some 1940s pulp fiction--re-edited to make the scenes of women being physically abused by men more PC. As a result, not only is the work of fiction altered, but our ability to study these books and learn about the 40s is crippled.
I think you can in fairness ask a writer to be somewhat ahead of his or her time, somewhat less in thrall to the prejudices of his or her day, and disapprove of bigotry. But is not fair to ask them to be generations ahead. However, that's not my point. My point is that you, whoever you are, don't have the right to make my decisions for me.
Yes, a lot of Raymond Chandler includes homophobia.
Yes, I have a few friends who want the singing crows scene in Dumbo ["I seen a horse fly"] to be cut from the film.
Let this stuff alone.
I can figure out these issues for myself. My grandchildren can figure them out, too, and so can you and so can most people who take time to read.
It's partly the arrogance of "fixing" the words of great writers of the past that is reprehensible. Equally unacceptable is the condescending paternalism of deciding what I, or my grandchildren, or anybody else out there is able to handle. We can make up our own minds. In fact, if we're not allowed to do so, we may never learn how.
Rant over.
But if you had an example to add, I'd be interested to hear it.
Showing posts with label Raymond Chandler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Raymond Chandler. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Sunday, April 27, 2008
The End of The Long Goodbye
By Barbara D’Amato
This is the last of The Outfit’s postings on Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Our attention to it was inspired by the Chicago Public Library’s choice of the book for their One Book One Chicago program.
After posts on Chandler himself and the book’s content, I thought it would be appropriate to ask, “How does Chandler get his effects?” And to focus this question, we could examine Chandler’s revisions of the very end of the novel, the last couple of sentences of The Long Goodbye. The changes they passed through tell something about Chandler’s thinking and demonstrate his care for his craft.
The late Hugh Holton, a police officer who wrote thrillers centered on the Chicago Police Department, was often asked at lectures how long it took him to write a book. He would say, “Six weeks,” and when the gasping stopped, would add, “And eleven months to rewrite.” Chandler’s rewrites are so meticulous, they remind me that he began his writing career as a poet.
Mark Coggins is the Shamus and Barry-nominated author of The Immortal Game, Vulture Capital and Candy from Strangers, featuring private eye August Riordan. Bleak House Books published his fourth book, Runoff, last November. In addition to writing fiction, he is a Chandler scholar, author of the article, “Writing the Long Goodbye.” In it Coggins says, “I recently had the opportunity to examine some 200 pages of original typescript with excised or rewritten scenes while visiting the special collection of Raymond Chandler papers at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.” What he found gives fascinating insight into how Chandler wrote.
He worked on The Long Goodbye intermittently from 1949 until May of 1952, at which point he turned it in to his agents—finished, he thought. They didn’t like it. They said Marlowe had become too sentimental.
Chandler went back to his typewriter for a couple more months.
He did, in fact, work on a typewriter, but the sheets Coggins saw were not standard typing paper. Chandler used small yellow sheets 5.5 inches wide and 8.5 inches high. Coggins says this was to limit the amount of retyping he had to do if he revised a page. Coggins was not permitted to photocopy the pages, since he could not secure permission from the Chandler estate, but he described the pages and even made mock-ups, which can be viewed in his article.
Chandler apparently rewrote drastically, underlining on a page only the material he wanted to keep, then retyping a largely new take on the scene. Whole scenes were eliminated entirely.
But to get to my example, the book’s closing words:
Coggins compared two versions of The Long Goodbye, June 24, 1953, and July 9, 1953, and the published ending, and found four different versions.
FIRST VERSION -- June 24, 1953:
Coggins finds this too abrupt and believes in writing it this way Chandler may have been responding to his agents’ objections to Marlowe having become too soft and sentimental.
SECOND VERSION -- July 9:
THIRD VERSION – also July 9:
Coggins notes that the second July 9 version was written in pen, which Chandler did not often use. He believes this indicates the difficulty Chandler was having striking the right tone. Coggins says “After rereading this [version three], Chandler must have felt he had overcompensated. The final sentence, ‘But he didn’t’ almost comes across with a catch in the throat.”
FOURTH VERSION -- AS PUBLISHED:
Coggins’s view is that the extra description in the final, published version “slows the narrative and adds weight to what is occurring. It also manages to convey an appropriate depth of feeling at the parting, while at the same time retaining Marlowe’s cynical worldview.”
Okay. What do you think of his choices? I hesitate to admit I prefer the first version. It seems clean and straightforward to me. My feeling at that point in the book would be that if the reader didn’t get it by now, tying a ribbon on it wouldn’t help.
The “don’t ask me why” in the second version has a whiff of begging for sympathy.
To me, he certainly did overcompensate in version three. It’s a bit too self-pitying.
The final version ties it up nicely, but why add the cops? A late attempt to return to the tough-guy persona?
If I’d been writing the book, I would have gone with version one. Probably that shows why I’m not Chandler. But I would be really interested to know what other people think.
This is the last of The Outfit’s postings on Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Our attention to it was inspired by the Chicago Public Library’s choice of the book for their One Book One Chicago program.
After posts on Chandler himself and the book’s content, I thought it would be appropriate to ask, “How does Chandler get his effects?” And to focus this question, we could examine Chandler’s revisions of the very end of the novel, the last couple of sentences of The Long Goodbye. The changes they passed through tell something about Chandler’s thinking and demonstrate his care for his craft.The late Hugh Holton, a police officer who wrote thrillers centered on the Chicago Police Department, was often asked at lectures how long it took him to write a book. He would say, “Six weeks,” and when the gasping stopped, would add, “And eleven months to rewrite.” Chandler’s rewrites are so meticulous, they remind me that he began his writing career as a poet.
Mark Coggins is the Shamus and Barry-nominated author of The Immortal Game, Vulture Capital and Candy from Strangers, featuring private eye August Riordan. Bleak House Books published his fourth book, Runoff, last November. In addition to writing fiction, he is a Chandler scholar, author of the article, “Writing the Long Goodbye.” In it Coggins says, “I recently had the opportunity to examine some 200 pages of original typescript with excised or rewritten scenes while visiting the special collection of Raymond Chandler papers at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.” What he found gives fascinating insight into how Chandler wrote.
He worked on The Long Goodbye intermittently from 1949 until May of 1952, at which point he turned it in to his agents—finished, he thought. They didn’t like it. They said Marlowe had become too sentimental.
Chandler went back to his typewriter for a couple more months.
He did, in fact, work on a typewriter, but the sheets Coggins saw were not standard typing paper. Chandler used small yellow sheets 5.5 inches wide and 8.5 inches high. Coggins says this was to limit the amount of retyping he had to do if he revised a page. Coggins was not permitted to photocopy the pages, since he could not secure permission from the Chandler estate, but he described the pages and even made mock-ups, which can be viewed in his article.
Chandler apparently rewrote drastically, underlining on a page only the material he wanted to keep, then retyping a largely new take on the scene. Whole scenes were eliminated entirely.
But to get to my example, the book’s closing words:
Coggins compared two versions of The Long Goodbye, June 24, 1953, and July 9, 1953, and the published ending, and found four different versions.
FIRST VERSION -- June 24, 1953:
He turned quickly and walked out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going along the hall.They died.Then I just listened.Slow curtain.
Coggins finds this too abrupt and believes in writing it this way Chandler may have been responding to his agents’ objections to Marlowe having become too soft and sentimental.
SECOND VERSION -- July 9:
He turned away quickly and went out. I watched the door close and listened to his steps going away. After a little while I couldn’t hear them, but I kept on listening.
Don’t ask me why. I couldn’t tell you.
THIRD VERSION – also July 9:
He turned and went out. I watched the door close and listened to his steps going away. Then I couldn’t hear them, but I kept on listening anyway. As if he might come back to talk me out of it. As if I hoped he would.
But he didn’t.
Coggins notes that the second July 9 version was written in pen, which Chandler did not often use. He believes this indicates the difficulty Chandler was having striking the right tone. Coggins says “After rereading this [version three], Chandler must have felt he had overcompensated. The final sentence, ‘But he didn’t’ almost comes across with a catch in the throat.”
FOURTH VERSION -- AS PUBLISHED:
He turned and walked across the floor and out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept on listening anyway. What for? Did I want him to stop suddenly and turn and come back and talk me out of the way I felt? Well, he didn’t. That was the last I saw of him.
I never saw any of them again—except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.
Coggins’s view is that the extra description in the final, published version “slows the narrative and adds weight to what is occurring. It also manages to convey an appropriate depth of feeling at the parting, while at the same time retaining Marlowe’s cynical worldview.”
Okay. What do you think of his choices? I hesitate to admit I prefer the first version. It seems clean and straightforward to me. My feeling at that point in the book would be that if the reader didn’t get it by now, tying a ribbon on it wouldn’t help.
The “don’t ask me why” in the second version has a whiff of begging for sympathy.
To me, he certainly did overcompensate in version three. It’s a bit too self-pitying.
The final version ties it up nicely, but why add the cops? A late attempt to return to the tough-guy persona?
If I’d been writing the book, I would have gone with version one. Probably that shows why I’m not Chandler. But I would be really interested to know what other people think.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
The Long Goodbye
by Michael Dymmoch
My first encounter with Philip Marlow was in school. Chandler’s work wasn’t on any reading list, and I didn’t know crime fiction from newspaper filler. But I knew I liked the prose. I was an ugly duckling of a writer then, wondering why I wanted to hang out with art majors instead of other science geeks. I didn’t know a simile from sansemilla or a metaphor from a metronome. I still thought writers were inspired by God.
Years later, when I discovered I wasn’t a duck at all—or a chemist for that matter—I read Chandler again. And as a writer, I like the prose even more because I know how hard it is to write well. And to write beautifully. And to say more with metaphor than with mere description. Now, I know Chandler should have been on my schools’ reading lists.
Take, for example, his description of a man too far gone into the bottle: “He was leaning against a store front. He had to lean against something. His shirt was dirty and open at the neck and partly outside his jacket and partly not. He hadn’t shaved for four or five days. His nose was pinched. His skin was so pale that the long thin scars hardly showed. And his eyes were like holes poked in a snowbank.”
After Marlow rescues and feeds this individual, “His face now had a little color and the eyes were not so far back in his head that you had to grope for them.”
The beauty of metaphor is that it says so much more than the literal meaning of the words—paints the story and the subtext. Chandler was the master. His prose is elegant the way a great mathematical proof is elegant, or a tersely written bit of computer code. It does what’s needed without wasted words. And what a pleasure The Long Goodbye is to read.
Chandler was pretty good at suspense, too. Take the opening of chapter five: "The gun wasn’t pointed at me, he was just holding it.” Or the ending of chapter eight: "'Guess you won’t be with us long, if you’ve got Endicott,' he said pleasantly as he locked me in. I said I hoped he was right." Chandler was, after all, the man who advised, “In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns."
While it’s true the plot of The Long Goodbye rambles a bit, it covers a great deal of ground. Chandler managed to get in social commentary, a great shot at corrupt cops, and a portrait of California that made me feel I’d been there.
For the reader who loves words, following the story is like discovering wonderful sights when you’ve strayed from the Interstate.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
A Long Hello to The Long Goodbye . . .
by Sean Chercover
"Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say." - Raymond Chandler
That quote always kills me. Sad as hell, and although I don’t think it is necessarily true, it was true enough about Raymond Chandler’s writing life.
THE LONG GOODBYE (TLG) is commonly regarded as Chandler’s finest work – the apex from which he descended very quickly. With this book, he’d mastered the “art or craft of fiction” . . . and after this book, it seemed that he had little else to say.
I first came to Raymond Chandler as a teenager. Already a fan of Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane and John D. MacDonald, it was Chandler’s use of language that first knocked me back on my heels. Those magic similes; those perfect observational paragraphs. Upon later readings, I was taken by the strident (and often prescient) social commentary.
And those preeminent qualities still jump off the page and grab me by the throat . . .
But THE LONG GOODBYE now also moves me as a novel of naked self-assessment. Not only was it Chandler’s last great work, but it foretold his sad decline.
Much has been made of TLG’s value as a work of social criticism, and I do think that is where its major strength lies. (I also recommend Chandler’s previous novel, THE LITTLE SISTER in this context.) The Long Goodbye and The Little Sister both take on the big issues that previously had been almost exclusively the domain of literary fiction.
And both books display Chandler’s breathtaking use of language, at a time when his skills were at their peak. The masterful similes and perfect paragraphs that have been noted in previous Outfit posts (scroll down for more on this).
No, plots were not Chandler’s forte (to put it very mildly). And I agree that he did not write women well. But damn, did he ever give us a couple of complex and damaged men in The Long Goodbye.
It is clear that two of the major characters – Terry Lennox and Roger Wade – are Chandler himself, at different points of his life.
Terry Lennox is a damaged war veteran, drinks too much and doesn’t like himself much at all. He is pathetic and ineffectual, but he hasn’t given up, not completely . . . and despite the wreck that his life has become, he is still looking for a chance at reinvention. We like him for that, and Philip Marlowe does too. Marlowe is uncharacteristically sentimental about Lennox and sacrifices a great deal, to support the man Lennox could’ve been / should’ve been / could’ve become.
Like Terry Lennox, Chandler was a veteran of WWI, left scarred and insecure by his war experiences, who lived the high society life of big money and fancy cars and marital infidelity . . . before he burned out and lost his job in the oil industry and reinvented himself as a writer of hardboiled detective fiction.
The other major autobiographical character, Roger Wade is a bestselling novelist struggling to finish his latest novel, struggling with alcoholism . . . and losing. Marlowe bristles at Wade’s ego and self-pity.
Chandler, like Roger Wade, had become a bestselling novelist who felt that he deserved more respect than he got. Like Wade, he had a complicated marriage, no children, many readers, and a growing problem with booze.
Philip Marlowe is the lens through which we see these very different self-portraits. Marlowe clearly favors Terry Lennox – Chandler’s younger self – and who wouldn’t? But he also comes to acknowledge a redemptive quality about Roger Wade.
To Eileen Wade, Marlowe says, “Your husband is a guy who can take a long hard look at himself and see what is there. Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had.”
Reading THE LONG GOODBYE, one might say the same thing of Chandler.
If THE LONG GOODBYE is Chandler’s last great work, it is also his most complex, and it rewards multiple readings. Every time you read this book, it reveals more of itself. This may be, in the end, what marks it as literature.
"Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say." - Raymond Chandler
That quote always kills me. Sad as hell, and although I don’t think it is necessarily true, it was true enough about Raymond Chandler’s writing life.
THE LONG GOODBYE (TLG) is commonly regarded as Chandler’s finest work – the apex from which he descended very quickly. With this book, he’d mastered the “art or craft of fiction” . . . and after this book, it seemed that he had little else to say.
I first came to Raymond Chandler as a teenager. Already a fan of Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane and John D. MacDonald, it was Chandler’s use of language that first knocked me back on my heels. Those magic similes; those perfect observational paragraphs. Upon later readings, I was taken by the strident (and often prescient) social commentary.
And those preeminent qualities still jump off the page and grab me by the throat . . .
But THE LONG GOODBYE now also moves me as a novel of naked self-assessment. Not only was it Chandler’s last great work, but it foretold his sad decline.
Much has been made of TLG’s value as a work of social criticism, and I do think that is where its major strength lies. (I also recommend Chandler’s previous novel, THE LITTLE SISTER in this context.) The Long Goodbye and The Little Sister both take on the big issues that previously had been almost exclusively the domain of literary fiction.
And both books display Chandler’s breathtaking use of language, at a time when his skills were at their peak. The masterful similes and perfect paragraphs that have been noted in previous Outfit posts (scroll down for more on this).
No, plots were not Chandler’s forte (to put it very mildly). And I agree that he did not write women well. But damn, did he ever give us a couple of complex and damaged men in The Long Goodbye.
It is clear that two of the major characters – Terry Lennox and Roger Wade – are Chandler himself, at different points of his life.
Terry Lennox is a damaged war veteran, drinks too much and doesn’t like himself much at all. He is pathetic and ineffectual, but he hasn’t given up, not completely . . . and despite the wreck that his life has become, he is still looking for a chance at reinvention. We like him for that, and Philip Marlowe does too. Marlowe is uncharacteristically sentimental about Lennox and sacrifices a great deal, to support the man Lennox could’ve been / should’ve been / could’ve become.
Like Terry Lennox, Chandler was a veteran of WWI, left scarred and insecure by his war experiences, who lived the high society life of big money and fancy cars and marital infidelity . . . before he burned out and lost his job in the oil industry and reinvented himself as a writer of hardboiled detective fiction.
The other major autobiographical character, Roger Wade is a bestselling novelist struggling to finish his latest novel, struggling with alcoholism . . . and losing. Marlowe bristles at Wade’s ego and self-pity.
Chandler, like Roger Wade, had become a bestselling novelist who felt that he deserved more respect than he got. Like Wade, he had a complicated marriage, no children, many readers, and a growing problem with booze.
Philip Marlowe is the lens through which we see these very different self-portraits. Marlowe clearly favors Terry Lennox – Chandler’s younger self – and who wouldn’t? But he also comes to acknowledge a redemptive quality about Roger Wade.
To Eileen Wade, Marlowe says, “Your husband is a guy who can take a long hard look at himself and see what is there. Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had.”
Reading THE LONG GOODBYE, one might say the same thing of Chandler.
If THE LONG GOODBYE is Chandler’s last great work, it is also his most complex, and it rewards multiple readings. Every time you read this book, it reveals more of itself. This may be, in the end, what marks it as literature.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
What a Lovely Way To Burn
By Kevin Guilfoile
The first time I laid eyes on a Raymond Chandler novel it was late at night in an old country house after my sister tried to poison me.
I was twenty-five and the whole family was back home in Cooperstown for Thanksgiving. The cozy Cape Cod in which I had grown up was overrun with toddling nieces and nephews so I was sleeping around the corner at my friend Nort's house, a beautiful 150-year-old Victorian mansion that, after we graduated, Norton's parents had converted into a stunning bed and breakfast.
Saturday night my sister Ann made lasagna and it was delicious enough that I had seconds and thirds. But she must have picked up some bad garlic at the Great American and around midnight I was sending it all back in one of the Overlook's spacious second-floor bathrooms.
After an hour or more of retching I finally returned to my room but I had the sweaty shakes and my stomach was still spinning around the uneven bars and there was no way I was going back to sleep. There was a shelf with a generous selection of old books and, surely seduced by the title, I picked up a musty hardcover of Chandler's first and most famous novel. I spent the next five or six hours until sunup transfixed and confused and awed and bewildered.
Now as even the most fervent Chandler admirer knows, his plots are a mess. If I spent the next few paragraphs telling you as plainly as I could what The Big Sleep is about (or The Long Goodbye) you would probably reread it six or seven times and then surrender with a chuckle. In fact, there's a famous story about the making of the movie The Big Sleep that I shared at a workshop Marcus and I taught at the Chicago Public Library. (I've heard several versions of the tale and don't know which one is true, but I told the most entertaining one and trust that Chandler scholars will now correct me in the comments.)
The movie starred Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and was directed by the great (Goshen, Indiana native) Howard Hawks and the screenplay was co-written by William Faulkner. During filming, Hawks realized that the screenplay never revealed who murdered General Sternwood's chauffeur and he asked Faulkner to fix that in the script. Faulkner went back to the book and couldn't figure it out so he cabled Chandler. Chandler replied angrily that it's all in the novel and Faulkner should just look it up and see. When Faulkner persisted, Chandler went back to the book and realized, to his shock, that he had just forgotten to resolve the storyline. With the book having gone through several printings, Hawks's question--Who killed Owen Taylor?--was now an unknowable mystery. In six years, no other reader or editor or critic had even noticed.
After I told that story one of the directors of the One Book, One Chicago Program approached with a grin. She told me the library had ordered hundreds of copies of The Long Goodbye in advance of the event. It turns out that due to a binding error one of the several editions sent to the CPL was missing more than thirty pages. Dozens of these inelegantly abridged books had been in circulation for weeks before anyone even noticed.
But the marvelous sting of Chandler's voice, like good whiskey on the nose, is the real reason to read him. He didn't just invent the modern detective novel, he reinvented the first-person narrator. He has been imitated so often that many of the writers influenced by Chandler have never even read him. In fact one of the pleasures of reading Chandler for the first time is how much of it seems familiar. Some sour critics have claimed this has dated the writer, that his style has been so thoroughly appropriated it's rendered his novels irrelevant. Retroactively hack. But to suggest that is to ignore the rhythm and snap of Chandler's prose. There are many authors I admire who have written terrific novels that contain not a single individual sentence that would knock you on your ass. Chandler often has two or three of those a page.
It doesn't include any of Chandler's famous one liners ("She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.") but here's perhaps my favorite passage from The Long Goodbye:
I have opened a lot of taverns in the last twenty years and I promise you no writer--certainly no Chandler imitator--has ever described five o'clock better than that. And if you're up with a bad-garlic fever and you're looking for someone to help you through a long night in an old house full of its own unknowable mysteries, Phillip Marlowe is the guy you want between covers.
If there are a few pages missing, or thirty, it won't even matter.
The first time I laid eyes on a Raymond Chandler novel it was late at night in an old country house after my sister tried to poison me.
I was twenty-five and the whole family was back home in Cooperstown for Thanksgiving. The cozy Cape Cod in which I had grown up was overrun with toddling nieces and nephews so I was sleeping around the corner at my friend Nort's house, a beautiful 150-year-old Victorian mansion that, after we graduated, Norton's parents had converted into a stunning bed and breakfast.
Saturday night my sister Ann made lasagna and it was delicious enough that I had seconds and thirds. But she must have picked up some bad garlic at the Great American and around midnight I was sending it all back in one of the Overlook's spacious second-floor bathrooms.
After an hour or more of retching I finally returned to my room but I had the sweaty shakes and my stomach was still spinning around the uneven bars and there was no way I was going back to sleep. There was a shelf with a generous selection of old books and, surely seduced by the title, I picked up a musty hardcover of Chandler's first and most famous novel. I spent the next five or six hours until sunup transfixed and confused and awed and bewildered.
Now as even the most fervent Chandler admirer knows, his plots are a mess. If I spent the next few paragraphs telling you as plainly as I could what The Big Sleep is about (or The Long Goodbye) you would probably reread it six or seven times and then surrender with a chuckle. In fact, there's a famous story about the making of the movie The Big Sleep that I shared at a workshop Marcus and I taught at the Chicago Public Library. (I've heard several versions of the tale and don't know which one is true, but I told the most entertaining one and trust that Chandler scholars will now correct me in the comments.)
The movie starred Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and was directed by the great (Goshen, Indiana native) Howard Hawks and the screenplay was co-written by William Faulkner. During filming, Hawks realized that the screenplay never revealed who murdered General Sternwood's chauffeur and he asked Faulkner to fix that in the script. Faulkner went back to the book and couldn't figure it out so he cabled Chandler. Chandler replied angrily that it's all in the novel and Faulkner should just look it up and see. When Faulkner persisted, Chandler went back to the book and realized, to his shock, that he had just forgotten to resolve the storyline. With the book having gone through several printings, Hawks's question--Who killed Owen Taylor?--was now an unknowable mystery. In six years, no other reader or editor or critic had even noticed.
After I told that story one of the directors of the One Book, One Chicago Program approached with a grin. She told me the library had ordered hundreds of copies of The Long Goodbye in advance of the event. It turns out that due to a binding error one of the several editions sent to the CPL was missing more than thirty pages. Dozens of these inelegantly abridged books had been in circulation for weeks before anyone even noticed.But the marvelous sting of Chandler's voice, like good whiskey on the nose, is the real reason to read him. He didn't just invent the modern detective novel, he reinvented the first-person narrator. He has been imitated so often that many of the writers influenced by Chandler have never even read him. In fact one of the pleasures of reading Chandler for the first time is how much of it seems familiar. Some sour critics have claimed this has dated the writer, that his style has been so thoroughly appropriated it's rendered his novels irrelevant. Retroactively hack. But to suggest that is to ignore the rhythm and snap of Chandler's prose. There are many authors I admire who have written terrific novels that contain not a single individual sentence that would knock you on your ass. Chandler often has two or three of those a page.
It doesn't include any of Chandler's famous one liners ("She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.") but here's perhaps my favorite passage from The Long Goodbye:
I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar--that's wonderful.
I have opened a lot of taverns in the last twenty years and I promise you no writer--certainly no Chandler imitator--has ever described five o'clock better than that. And if you're up with a bad-garlic fever and you're looking for someone to help you through a long night in an old house full of its own unknowable mysteries, Phillip Marlowe is the guy you want between covers.
If there are a few pages missing, or thirty, it won't even matter.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
The Long Good-Bye
“I knew the character of Marlowe had changed and I thought it had to, because the hardboiled stuff was too much of a pose after all this time. But I did not realize [he] had become Christlike, and sentimental, and that he ought to be deriding his own emotions.”
Chandler wrote this to his agent, Bernice Baumgarten, after getting her negative comments on the first draft of The Long Good-Bye. He was often bitter, feeling that his work was under-valued. “I might be the best writer in the country,” he wrote to his editor after sending him the second draft, “and with two exceptions I very likely am, but I’m still [considered just] a mystery writer.” He added, “You’d better do a damned sight better with The Long Good-Bye than you did with Little Sister.”
Chandler was near the end of his writing life when he finished The Long Good-Bye. He was ill, from the alcoholism which plagued him much of his adult life, he was in turmoil from the illness of his wife, Cissy, and he fretted, as he constantly did, that his work wasn’t properly appreciated.
Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago on July 23, 1888 and he lived in America until he was seven, when his father abandoned the family for good and his mother returned to her native England. As a young man, Chandler hoped to write urbane aesthetic essays in the manner of Oscar Wilde. He angered the uncle who had supported him by abandoning a promising Civil Service career for literature. After several fruitless years, in which he had a few reviews and essays published, he left England to return to North America. In later life, he looked back on his young self with a kind of bitter mockery: “Like all young nincompoops, I found it easy to be clever and snotty...”
He served with the Canadian Expeditionary Forces during the First World War. After the war, he spent two decades moving from job to job. He became a senior officer at various companies, but between his drinking, his restlessness, and his womanizing, he found it hard to stay anywhere long. And he still longed to make his name in fiction.
In the thirties, at the height of the Depression, laid off from the oil industry, he turned to the pulps. He labored hard over his early stories, determined not to fail a second time at a literary career. An admirer of Hemingway, Chandler outlined Hemingway’s stories and then tried to rewrite them. He finally, in 1935, began selling his own stories to Black Mask. And in 1938, he published the first of his seven Marlowe novels.
The Long Good-Bye is usually considered his most important, fully realized novel. Because it has the fewest elements of a true mystery, critics claim that it “transcends the genre,” that it is a real novel, and that it merit’s Chandler’s assertion that he was one of the great writers of the Twentieth Century.
At its heart, The Long Good-Bye expresses Chandler’s bitterness and his weariness. Although Marlowe is beaten, is sent to prison, and has his life threatened, these action scenes are small punctuations in a novel about men trying to make sense of a world where they don’t feel at home. The first part of the book is an almost dreamlike series of conversations between Marlowe and Terry Lennox, a man scarred by war and by money. The middle, where Marlowe is involved with Roger Wade and his wife, has long passages filled with Chandler’s own torment about the state of his writing.
In a letter to his Hollywood agent, written while he was struggling with the second draft The Long Good-Bye, Chandler said, “I am suffering from...atrophy of the inventive powers. I can write like a streak but I bore myself.” And he added to his British publisher, “If I can do it wrong once, I can do it wrong again.”
Chandler’s doubts, his suicide efforts, his drinking, all bubble beneath the surface of The Long Good-Bye. Perhaps because of them, the novel remains a haunting look at what war and peace do to men, at how hard it is to be creative, and how hard it is to be alone.
Sara Paretsky
Note: The quotations are taken from Allison & Busby's Raymond Chandler Speaking. Biographical data come from Baker & Nietzel's Private Eyes.
Chandler wrote this to his agent, Bernice Baumgarten, after getting her negative comments on the first draft of The Long Good-Bye. He was often bitter, feeling that his work was under-valued. “I might be the best writer in the country,” he wrote to his editor after sending him the second draft, “and with two exceptions I very likely am, but I’m still [considered just] a mystery writer.” He added, “You’d better do a damned sight better with The Long Good-Bye than you did with Little Sister.”
Chandler was near the end of his writing life when he finished The Long Good-Bye. He was ill, from the alcoholism which plagued him much of his adult life, he was in turmoil from the illness of his wife, Cissy, and he fretted, as he constantly did, that his work wasn’t properly appreciated.
Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago on July 23, 1888 and he lived in America until he was seven, when his father abandoned the family for good and his mother returned to her native England. As a young man, Chandler hoped to write urbane aesthetic essays in the manner of Oscar Wilde. He angered the uncle who had supported him by abandoning a promising Civil Service career for literature. After several fruitless years, in which he had a few reviews and essays published, he left England to return to North America. In later life, he looked back on his young self with a kind of bitter mockery: “Like all young nincompoops, I found it easy to be clever and snotty...”
He served with the Canadian Expeditionary Forces during the First World War. After the war, he spent two decades moving from job to job. He became a senior officer at various companies, but between his drinking, his restlessness, and his womanizing, he found it hard to stay anywhere long. And he still longed to make his name in fiction.
In the thirties, at the height of the Depression, laid off from the oil industry, he turned to the pulps. He labored hard over his early stories, determined not to fail a second time at a literary career. An admirer of Hemingway, Chandler outlined Hemingway’s stories and then tried to rewrite them. He finally, in 1935, began selling his own stories to Black Mask. And in 1938, he published the first of his seven Marlowe novels.
The Long Good-Bye is usually considered his most important, fully realized novel. Because it has the fewest elements of a true mystery, critics claim that it “transcends the genre,” that it is a real novel, and that it merit’s Chandler’s assertion that he was one of the great writers of the Twentieth Century.
At its heart, The Long Good-Bye expresses Chandler’s bitterness and his weariness. Although Marlowe is beaten, is sent to prison, and has his life threatened, these action scenes are small punctuations in a novel about men trying to make sense of a world where they don’t feel at home. The first part of the book is an almost dreamlike series of conversations between Marlowe and Terry Lennox, a man scarred by war and by money. The middle, where Marlowe is involved with Roger Wade and his wife, has long passages filled with Chandler’s own torment about the state of his writing.
In a letter to his Hollywood agent, written while he was struggling with the second draft The Long Good-Bye, Chandler said, “I am suffering from...atrophy of the inventive powers. I can write like a streak but I bore myself.” And he added to his British publisher, “If I can do it wrong once, I can do it wrong again.”
Chandler’s doubts, his suicide efforts, his drinking, all bubble beneath the surface of The Long Good-Bye. Perhaps because of them, the novel remains a haunting look at what war and peace do to men, at how hard it is to be creative, and how hard it is to be alone.
Sara Paretsky
Note: The quotations are taken from Allison & Busby's Raymond Chandler Speaking. Biographical data come from Baker & Nietzel's Private Eyes.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
There Is a Tide
by Barbara D'Amato
We’re about to launch into our two-week Raymond Chandler binge, so I thought I’d take a look at one of his predecessors, Agatha Christie. I’ve recently been rereading THERE IS A TIDE . . . . It was first published in 1948, just six years before THE LONG GOODBYE, [1954]. Both books deal with aspects of the post-World War II years. The central question in THE LONG GOODBYE is the character of a man altered by fighting in the war. Christie, not surprisingly, is more embedded in the aftereffects of the war and the changes in British society. The Brits lost close to 400,000 people in military deaths, and that doesn’t include civilians killed in bombing raids, or non-military personnel, like ambulance drivers, medical support, and so on, at the front. There was no town in the U.K., and scarcely any family, without its losses. The war changed British society to a degree Americans couldn’t imagine.
The story:
Wealthy Gordon Cloade is killed in the Blitz, the house he was in destroyed and four people in it killed. His widow, Rosaleen, stunned by the blast, inherits his estate and moves to his family home in Warmsley Vale. Her former husband disappeared in Africa and was reported dead. Now there are rumors he may have faked his death. Gordon Cloade had promised to help his several strapped relatives financially, but the widow has no reason to do so. However, if her former husband never died, she was not legitimately married to Cloade and cannot inherit his estate.
The characters include Cloade’s niece Lynn who had served in the Wrens during the war. Lynn has seen the world. She has come back to Warmsley Vale much changed, finding her home and tame and small. Her longtime fiancé has stayed at home through the war because as a farmer his production was vital to the war effort. He now feels that the world and his fiancée look down on him for not having served.
There are Christie’s deft, Rembrandt sketches of the possibly-stodgy fiancé, several Cloade relatives, and of Rosaleen’s brother David, a bold, risk-taking young man with a wonderful war record—just the sort who doesn’t do well in peacetime.
The novel has all of Christie’s legendary smoke and mirrors. And mirrors behind mirrors. Chandler and Christie have somewhat similar writing techniques--short, declarative sentences, not heavily reliant on subordinate clauses and flowery touches, although Chandler is much more into simile and metaphor than Christie, despite the fact that the writer character in THE LONG GOODBYE seems to belittle simile.
THERE IS A TIDE . . . is not Christie’s best work. It is somewhat too complicated, a criticism which could be made of THE LONG GOODBYE as well. And a minor flaw is that the resolution of the romance between the lead character and the pre-war fiancé is a little pat. However, it is a wonderful time capsule, a picture of a bomb-blasted culture in the years immediately following the war. And an interesting contrast to THE LONG GOODBYE.
We’re about to launch into our two-week Raymond Chandler binge, so I thought I’d take a look at one of his predecessors, Agatha Christie. I’ve recently been rereading THERE IS A TIDE . . . . It was first published in 1948, just six years before THE LONG GOODBYE, [1954]. Both books deal with aspects of the post-World War II years. The central question in THE LONG GOODBYE is the character of a man altered by fighting in the war. Christie, not surprisingly, is more embedded in the aftereffects of the war and the changes in British society. The Brits lost close to 400,000 people in military deaths, and that doesn’t include civilians killed in bombing raids, or non-military personnel, like ambulance drivers, medical support, and so on, at the front. There was no town in the U.K., and scarcely any family, without its losses. The war changed British society to a degree Americans couldn’t imagine.
The story:
Wealthy Gordon Cloade is killed in the Blitz, the house he was in destroyed and four people in it killed. His widow, Rosaleen, stunned by the blast, inherits his estate and moves to his family home in Warmsley Vale. Her former husband disappeared in Africa and was reported dead. Now there are rumors he may have faked his death. Gordon Cloade had promised to help his several strapped relatives financially, but the widow has no reason to do so. However, if her former husband never died, she was not legitimately married to Cloade and cannot inherit his estate.
The characters include Cloade’s niece Lynn who had served in the Wrens during the war. Lynn has seen the world. She has come back to Warmsley Vale much changed, finding her home and tame and small. Her longtime fiancé has stayed at home through the war because as a farmer his production was vital to the war effort. He now feels that the world and his fiancée look down on him for not having served.
There are Christie’s deft, Rembrandt sketches of the possibly-stodgy fiancé, several Cloade relatives, and of Rosaleen’s brother David, a bold, risk-taking young man with a wonderful war record—just the sort who doesn’t do well in peacetime.
The novel has all of Christie’s legendary smoke and mirrors. And mirrors behind mirrors. Chandler and Christie have somewhat similar writing techniques--short, declarative sentences, not heavily reliant on subordinate clauses and flowery touches, although Chandler is much more into simile and metaphor than Christie, despite the fact that the writer character in THE LONG GOODBYE seems to belittle simile.
THERE IS A TIDE . . . is not Christie’s best work. It is somewhat too complicated, a criticism which could be made of THE LONG GOODBYE as well. And a minor flaw is that the resolution of the romance between the lead character and the pre-war fiancé is a little pat. However, it is a wonderful time capsule, a picture of a bomb-blasted culture in the years immediately following the war. And an interesting contrast to THE LONG GOODBYE.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Chandler, "One Book, One Chicago" and The Outfit
by Libby Hellmann
Last Friday Mayor Daley held a press conference to announce the Chicago Public Library’s spring selection for the One Book,One Chicago program. For the first time since the program’s inception the choice was a crime fiction novel: Raymond Chandler’s THE LONG GOODBYE. Combined with the National Endowment of the Arts selection of THE MALTESE FALCON as their "book to read", this is a very good year for crime fiction, no?
The Outfit will take part in the THE LONG GOODBYE program by blogging about the book and Chandler for two weeks starting Monday, April 14. In addition to the seven of us, some "friends of the Outfit" will be joining us. We’re pretty excited, and we hope you’ll want to be part of the discussion too.
For now – although we’re not officially starting yet – I wanted to share with you the eloquent comments Sean Chercover made at the press conference. BTw, Sean wanted me to make sure I mentioned that Marcus and Sara contributed to the speech as well.
.
Stay tuned... we'll have more in a few weeks. And Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone.
Last Friday Mayor Daley held a press conference to announce the Chicago Public Library’s spring selection for the One Book,One Chicago program. For the first time since the program’s inception the choice was a crime fiction novel: Raymond Chandler’s THE LONG GOODBYE. Combined with the National Endowment of the Arts selection of THE MALTESE FALCON as their "book to read", this is a very good year for crime fiction, no?
The Outfit will take part in the THE LONG GOODBYE program by blogging about the book and Chandler for two weeks starting Monday, April 14. In addition to the seven of us, some "friends of the Outfit" will be joining us. We’re pretty excited, and we hope you’ll want to be part of the discussion too.
For now – although we’re not officially starting yet – I wanted to share with you the eloquent comments Sean Chercover made at the press conference. BTw, Sean wanted me to make sure I mentioned that Marcus and Sara contributed to the speech as well.
.
On behalf of my fellow members of the Outfit Collection: Libby Fischer Hellmann, Sara Paretsky, Barbara D’Amato, Michael Allen Dymmoch, Kevin Guilfoile, and Marcus Sakey, I’d like to thank Mayor Daley, Library Commissioner Mary Dempsey, the Chicago Public Library Foundation for their strong support of the One Book, One Chicago program. And to the dedicated librarians across Chicago who works so hard to make it a reality. We are truly in your debt.
We came together as The Outfit Collective, in part, to raise awareness about Chicago’s growing reputation as a hotbed for contemporary crime fiction. So we were thrilled to learn that, for the first time, a classic crime novel has been chosen as the featured book.
I think the entire city is in for a treat.
It is often said that crime fiction has taken up the mantle once held by the Victorian Social Novel, and later the American Industrial Novel. That crime fiction offers the best opportunity for writers and readers to examine the society in which we live… to address its ills and take note of its blessings.
Raymond Chandler’s THE LONG GOODBYE was one of the first detective novels to embrace that lofty goal. Here we find the place where genre fiction and literary fiction meet. The crossroads.
Chandler owned Los Angeles like Nelson Algren owned Chicago. Long-time readers of Algren will find much to love the THE LONG GOODBYE. It is Chandler’s most ambitious, most political novel, and it has inspired generations of crime writers to boldly take on the bigger issues.
Ross MacDonald said that Chandler “wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.” And it’s true. Chandler’s stories resonate with a gritty kind of romanticism. And he did write like an angel. He told stories that make you think, and used language that makes you feel.
What sets this book apart, what makes it important, are the difficult truths it tells us about the world. The world then and the world now.
Chandler is at his best when he’s talking about social issues, taking on politics, society, religion, commercialism. Hypocrisy and corruption were Chandler’s favorite targets and he went after them relentlessly, no matter where he found them.
Chandler was a firebrand and his words still burn.
On America’s increased commercialism, he writes, “We make the finest packages in the world… the stuff inside is mostly junk.” He calls a situation “as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.” He writes, “There ain’t no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.:
The issues he raises, and the anger behind them, are as relevant today as they were then. Maybe more so.
Chandler came from the hard-boiled school and wrote hard-boiled stories, but he never succumbed to nihilism. He believed in things like justice and honor and loyalty. Above all, loyalty. And although those vales did not always triumph in his stories, he believed they were values worth fighting for.
In private eye Philip Marlowe, Chandler gave us a modern and complex her. A man not always heroic by society’s standards, and who sometimes fails even by his own standards. Marlowe sees what’s wrong in our world, and he forces himself – and us – to look at it squarely, even when he can’t change it. Marlowe pays a high price for this knowledge, but Chandler insists that the cost of willful blindness would be ever higher still.
Putting all the highfallutin’ stuff aside, THE LONG GOODBYE is a hell of a great read. It’s an enormous amount of fun, filled with twists and tension and action that will keep you up way past bedtime.
Over the coming months, members of the Outfit Collective will be participating in the One Book One Chicago program. We’ll be blogging, conducting workshops, and appearing at libraries across the Chicago area. We hope to share some of our passion for the work of Raymond Chandler.
So dive in, Chicago, and enjoy the ride.
Stay tuned... we'll have more in a few weeks. And Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone.
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