The Private Eye as Man off Letters

By Stefan Kanfer

SELECTED LETTERS OF RAYMOND CHANDLER Edited by Frank MacShane Columbia University; 501 pages; $19.95

It is almost always a mistake for readers to confuse the first person singular with the novelist. Almost. Conan Doyle was not John H. Watson, M.D. Samuel Clemens was not Huckleberry Finn. And Raymond Chandler was not Philip Marlowe. But, as his letters reveal, no author ever verged closer to his creation.

In The Life of Raymond Chandler (1976), Frank MacShane, a Columbia University professor, revealed his subject as a reconciliation of opposites. Chandler's fictive cast talked out of the sides of their mouths; the author was raised in England and given a classical education. His shamus was a magnet for oestrous women; Chandler married Cissy Pascal, 17 years his senior, and remained faithful. Businessmen in his novels are embodiments of venality or sloth; until middle age, Chandler was gainfully employed as a West Coast oil executive. Yet he had much in common with Marlowe, the incorrodible private eye who knew that "down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid." As MacShane observed, "Instead of his adored England, Chandler lived in a place where values seemed to shift with the tides. No wonder he clung to the code of the public school gentleman and applied it to his fictional hero as well."

The code elevated Chandler's work and enlivens this collection of letters, meticulously compiled by his biographer. In some 330 communiques to friends, publishers and film executives, a life passes in review. There are references to young Raymond who wrote "clever and snotty" critiques for an English periodical. That occupation later made him suspicious of all critics, including W.H. Auden, who praised his works as art, and Edmund Wilson. At the age of 51, the schoolboy raised on Latin and Greek becomes a novelist (The Big Sleep, 1939), trying to make the detective story "respectable and even dignified." It grew so respectable that Chandler could laugh when S. J. Perelman parodied Marlowe's hard-boiled approach in "Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer": "Her eyes narrowed. I shifted my 200 Ibs. slightly, lazily set fire to a finger, and watched it burn down." He combats a compulsion for the bottle, wrangles with Alfred Hitchcock over the script of Strangers on a Train ("If you wanted something written in skim milk, why on earth did you bother to come to me?"), watches Cissy die by agonizing degrees, attempts suicide, and each time revives to go a few more rounds with a new book. In between he analyzes, complains and rejoices on stationery. "I don't know why the hell I write so many let ters," he reflects. "I guess my mind is just too active for its own good."

The activity is contentious and acute. To an editor: "When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split." On James M. Cain (Double Indemnity): "Every thing he writes smells like a billy goat." On Somerset Maugham: His gift "belongs to the great judge or the great diplomat ... He would have made a great Roman." On John P. Marquand: "Beautiful detailed observation and the total effect of a steel engraving with no col or at all. I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday." On Hemingway: "I suppose the weakness of writers like Hemingway is that their sort of stuff demands an immense vitality; and a man outgrows his vitality without unfortunately outgrowing his furious concern with it." On Ross Macdonald: "Here is a man who wants the public for the mys tery story in its primitive violence and also wants it to be clear that he, individually, is a highly literate and sophisticated character." On actors: "Alan Ladd is hard, bitter and occasionally charming, but he is, after all, a small boy's idea of a tough guy . . . Bogart can be tough without a gun."

Without resentment, he watches a generation of writers imitate his style and similes. Without vanity, he tries to fer ret out the reasons for his own success: "There are better plotters than I am, and much better idea men, but it doesn't seem to matter. When they write the scene, there is no magic. Why?"

The "Why?" was to haunt him until his death in 1959. This posthumous volume of fers some vital clues, among them a letter to an editor: "A long time ago when I was writing for pulps I put into a story a line li ke 'He got out of the car and walked across the sun-drenched sidewalk until the shadow of the awning over the entrance fell across his face like the touch of cool water.' They took it out when they published the story. Their readers didn't appreciate this sort of thing: just held up the action. And I set out to prove them wrong."

In that paragraph are the seeds and the secrets of a career. With only seven novels, Raymond Chandler became one of the most influential writers in American literature, and literature is what he wrote. This selective volume of his correspondence is a revelation of that singular, conflicted talent. Who touches this book touches a detective.

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