Reliable Essays (47 page)

Carmen is the first in a long line of little witches that runs right through the novels, just as her big sister, Vivian, is the first in a long line of rich bitches who find that Marlowe is the only thing money can’t buy. The little witches are among the most haunting of Chandler’s obsessions and the rich bitches are among the least. Whether little witch or rich bitch, both kinds of woman signal their availability to Marlowe by crossing their legs shortly after sitting down and regaling him with tongue-in-the-lung French kisses a few seconds after making physical contact.

All the standard Chandler character ingredients were there in the first novel, locked in a pattern of action so complicated that not even the author was subsequently able to puzzle it out.
The Big Sleep
was merely the first serving of the mixture as before. But the language was fresh and remains so. When Chandler wrote casually of ‘a service station glaring with wasted light’ he was striking a note that Dashiell Hammett had never dreamed of. Even the book’s title rang a bell. Chandler thought that there were only two types of slang which were any good: slang that had established itself in the language, and slang that you made up yourself. As a term for death, ‘the big sleep’ was such a successful creation that Eugene O’Neill must have thought it had been around for years, since he used it in
The Iceman Cometh
(1946) as an established piece of low-life tough talk. But there is no reason for disbelieving Chandler’s claim to have invented it.

Chandler’s knack for slang would have been just as commendable even if he had never thought of a thing. As the
Notebooks
reveal, he made lists of slang terms that he had read or heard. The few he kept and used were distinguished from the many he threw away by their metaphorical exactness. He had an ear for depth – he could detect incipient permanence in what sounded superficially like ephemera. A term like ‘under glass’, meaning to be in prison, attracted him by its semantic compression. In a letter collected in
Raymond Chandler Speaking
, he regards it as self-evident that an American term like ‘milk run’ is superior to the equivalent British term ‘piece of cake’. The superiority being in the range of evocation. As it happened, Chandler
was
inventive, not only in slang but in more ambitiously suggestive figures of speech. He was spontaneous as well as accurate. His second novel,
Farewell, My Lovely
(1940) – which he was always to regard as his finest – teems with show-stopping metaphors, many of them dedicated to conjuring up the gargantuan figure of Moose Malloy.

In fact some of them stop the show too thoroughly. When Chandler describes Malloy as standing out from his surroundings like ‘a tarantula on a slice of angel food’ he is getting things backwards, since the surroundings have already been established as very sordid indeed. Malloy ought to be standing out from them like a slice of angel food on a tarantula. Chandler at one time confessed to Alfred A. Knopf that in
The Big Sleep
he had run his metaphors into the ground, the implication being that he cured himself of the habit later on. But the truth is that he was always prone to overcooking a simile. As Perelman demonstrated in
Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer
(a spoof which Chandler admired), this is one of the areas in which Chandler is most easily parodied, although it should be remembered that it takes a Perelman to do the parodying.

‘It was a blonde,’ says Marlowe, looking at Helen Grayle’s photograph. ‘A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.’ I still laugh when I read that, but you can imagine Chandler jotting down such brain-waves
à propos
of nothing and storing them up against a rainy day. They leap off the page so high that they never again settle back into place, thereby adding to the permanent difficulty of remembering what happens to whom where in which novel. The true wit, in
Farewell, My Lovely
as in all the other books, lies in effects which marry themselves less obtrusively to character, action and setting. Jessie Florian’s bathrobe, for example. ‘It was just something around her body.’ A sentence like that seems hardly to be trying, but it tells you all you need to know. Marlowe’s realization that Jessie has been killed – ‘The corner post of the bed was smeared darkly with something the flies liked’ – is trying harder for understatement, but in those circumstances Marlowe
would
understate the case, so the sentence fits. Poor Jessie Florian. ‘She was as cute as a washtub.’

And some of the lines simply have the humour of information conveyed at a blow, like the one about the butler at the Grayle house. As always when Chandler is dealing with Millionaires’ Row, the place is described with a cataloguing eye for ritzy detail, as if F. Scott Fitzgerald had written a contribution to
Architectural Digest
. (The Murdock house in
The High Window
bears a particularly close resemblance to Gatsby’s mansion:
vide
the lawn flowing ‘like a cool green tide around a rock’.) Chandler enjoyed conjuring up the grand houses into which Marlowe came as an interloper and out of which he always went with a sigh of relief, having hauled the family skeletons out of the walk-in cupboards and left the beautiful, wild elder daughter sick with longing for his uncorruptible countenance. But in several telling pages about the Grayle residence, the sentence that really counts is the one about the butler. ‘A man in a striped vest and gilt buttons opened the door, bowed, took my hat and was through for the day.’

In the early books and novels, before he moved to Laurel Canyon, when he still lived at 615 Cahuenga Building on Hollywood Boulevard, near Ivar, telephone Glenview 7537, Marlowe was fond of Los Angeles. All the bad things happened in Bay City. In Bay City there were crooked cops, prostitution, drugs, but after you came to (Marlowe was always coming to in Bay City, usually a long time after he had been sapped, because in Bay City they always hit him very hard) you could drive home. Later on the evil had spread everywhere and Marlowe learned to hate what LA had become. The set-piece descriptions of his stamping-ground got more and more sour. But the descriptions were always there – one of the strongest threads running through the novels from first to last. And even at their most acridly poisonous they still kept something of the wide-eyed lyricism of that beautiful line in
Farewell, My Lovely
about a dark night in the canyons – the night Marlowe drove Lindsay Marriott to meet his death. ‘A yellow window hung here and there by itself, like the last orange.’

There is the usual ration of overcooked metaphors in
The High Window
(1942). Lois Morny gives forth with ‘a silvery ripple of laughter that held the unspoiled naturalness of a bubble dance’. (By the time you have worked out that this means her silvery ripple of laughter held no unspoiled naturalness, the notion has gone dead.) We learn that Morny’s club in Idle Valley looks like a high-budget musical. ‘A lot of light and glitter, a lot of scenery, a lot of clothes, a lot of sound, an all-star cast, and a plot with all the originality and drive of a split fingernail.’ Tracing the club through the musical down to the fingernail, your attention loses focus. It’s a better sentence than any of Chandler’s imitators ever managed, but it was the kind of sentence they felt able to imitate – lying loose and begging to be picked up.

As always, the quiet effects worked better. The back yard of the Morny house is an instant Hockney. ‘Beyond was a walled-in garden containing flower-beds crammed with showy annuals, a badminton court, a nice stretch of greensward, and a small tiled pool glittering angrily in the sun.’ The rogue adverb ‘angrily’ is the word that registers the sun’s brightness. It’s a long step, taken in a few words, to night-time in Idle Valley. ‘The wind was quiet out here and the valley moonlight was so sharp that the black shadows looked as if they had been cut with an engraving tool.’ Saying how unreal the real looks makes it realer.

‘Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town.’
The High Window
has many such examples of Chandler widening his rhythmic scope. Yet the best and the worst sentences are unusually far apart. On several occasions Chandler is extraordinarily clumsy. ‘He was a tall man with glasses and a high-domed bald head that made his ears look as if they had slipped down his head.’ This sentence is literally effortless: the clumsy repetition of ‘head’ is made possible only because he isn’t trying. Here is a useful reminder of the kind of concentration required to achieve a seeming ease. And here is another: ‘From the lay of the land a light in the living room . . .’ Even a writer who doesn’t, as Chandler usually did, clean as he goes, would normally liquidate so languorous an alliterative lullaby long before the final draft.

But in between the high points and the low, the general tone of
The High Window
had an assured touch. The narrator’s interior monologue is full of the sort of poetry Laforgue liked –
comme ils sont beaux, les trains manqué s
. Marlowe’s office hasn’t changed, nor will it ever. ‘The same stuff I had had last year, and the year before that. Not beautiful, not gay, but better than a tent on the beach.’ Marlowe accuses the two cops, Breeze and Spangler, of talking dialogue in which every line is a punch-line. Criticism is not disarmed: in Chandler, everybody talks that kind of dialogue most of the time. But the talk that matters most is the talk going on inside Marlowe’s head, and Chandler was making it more subtle with each book.

Chandler’s descriptive powers are at their highest in
The Lady in the Lake
(1943). It takes Marlowe a page and a half of thoroughly catalogued natural detail to drive from San Bernardino to Little Fawn Lake, but when he gets there he sees the whole thing in a sentence. ‘Beyond the gate the road wound for a couple of hundred yards through trees and then suddenly below me was a small oval lake deep in trees and rocks and wild grass, like a drop of dew caught in a curled leaf.’ Hemingway could do bigger things, but small moments like those were Chandler’s own. (Nevertheless Hemingway got on Chandler’s nerves: Dolores Gonzales in
The Little Sister
is to be heard saying ‘I was pretty good in there, no?’ and the nameless girl who vamps Marlowe at Roger Wade’s party in
The Long Goodbye
spoofs the same line. It should be remembered, however, that Chandler admired Hemingway to the end, forbearing to pour scorn even on
Across the River and into the Trees
. The digs at Papa in Chandler’s novels can mainly be put down to self-defence.)

The Little Sister
(1949), Chandler’s first post-war novel, opens with Marlowe stalking a bluebottle fly around his office. ‘He didn’t want to sit down. He just wanted to do wing-overs and sing the prologue to
Pagliacci
.’ Ten years before, in
Trouble Is My Business
, John Dalmas felt like singing the same thing after being sapped in Harriet Huntress’s apartment. Chandler was always ready to bring an idea back for a second airing. A Ph.D. thesis could be written about the interest John Dalmas and Philip Marlow take in bugs and flies. There is another thesis in the tendency of Chandler’s classier dames to show a startling line of white scalp in the parting of their hair: Dolores Gonzales, who throughout
The Little Sister
propels herself at Marlowe like Lupe Velez seducing Errol Flynn, is only one of the several high-toned vamps possessing this tonsorial feature. ‘She made a couple of drinks in a couple of glasses you could almost have stood umbrellas in.’ A pity about that ‘almost’ – it ruins a good hyperbole. Moss Spink’s extravagance is better conveyed: ‘He waved a generous hand on which a canary-yellow diamond looked like an amber traffic light.’

But as usual the would-be startling images are more often unsuccessful than successful. The better work is done lower down the scale of excitability. Joseph P. Toad, for example. ‘The neck of his canary-yellow shirt was open wide, which it had to be if his neck was going to get out.’ Wit like that lasts longer than hyped-up similes. And some of the dialogue, though as stylized as ever, would be a gift to actors: less supercharged than usual, it shows some of the natural balance which marked the lines Chandler has been writing for the movies. Here is Marlowe sparring with Sheridan Ballou.

Such an exchange is as playable as anything in
Double Indemnity
or
The Blue Dahlia
. And imagine what Laird Cregar would have done with Toad’s line ‘You could call me a guy what wants to help out a guy that don’t want to make trouble for a guy.’ Much as he would have hated the imputation, Chandler’s toil in the salt-mines under the Paramount mountain had done things for him. On the other hand, the best material in
The Little Sister
is inextricably bound up with the style of Marlowe’s perception, which in turn depends on Chandler’s conception of himself. There could be no complete screen rendition of the scene with Jules Oppenheimer in the studio patio. With peeing dogs instead of hot-house steam, it’s exactly the same lay-out as Marlowe’s encounter with General Sternwood in
The Big Sleep
, but then there was no filming
that
either. The mood of neurotic intensity – Marlowe as the soldier-son, Sternwood/Oppenheimer as the father-figure at death’s door – would be otiose in a film script, which requires that all action be relevant. In the novels, such passages are less about Marlowe than about Chandler working out his obsessions through Marlowe, and nobody ever wanted to make a film about Chandler.

In
The Long Goodbye
(1953) Marlowe moves to a house on Yucca Avenue in Laurel Canyon and witnesses the disintegration of Terry Lennox. Lennox can’t control his drinking. Marlowe, master of his own thirst, looks sadly on. As we now know, Chandler in real life was more Lennox than Marlowe. In the long dialogues between these two characters he is really talking to himself. There is no need to be afraid of the biographical fallacy: even if we knew nothing about Chandler’s life, it would still be evident that a fantasy is being worked out. Worked out but not admitted – as so often happens in good-bad books, the author’s obsessions are being catered to, not examined. Chandler, who at least worked for a living, had reason for thinking himself more like Marlowe than like Lennox. (Roger Wade, the other of the book’s big drinkers, is, being a writer, a bit closer to home.) Nevertheless Marlowe is a daydream – more and more of a daydream as Chandler gets better and better at making him believable. By this time it’s Marlowe
vs
. the Rest of the World. Of all Chandler’s nasty cops, Captain Gregorius is the nastiest. ‘His big nose was a network of burst capillaries.’ But even in the face of the ultimate nightmare Marlowe keeps his nerve. Nor is he taken in by Eileen Wade, superficially the dreamiest of all Chandler’s dream girls.