EYES WIDE OPEN AND THE MIND RELAXED

I received a friendly advice from my dinner guest the other day that name-dropping is not a becoming feature of a calendar entry no matter how short it is. He thought I should at least attempt to explain why I waste my time reading pulp fiction instead of wasting other peoples’ time just admitting to the sad fact. My friend is right, of course, so I’ll try to make amends for it, being not as pressed for time as he obviously is.

Raymond Chandler’s letters can be extremely caustic and pugnacious or very sentimental, but they are always interesting and often very funny, I think. Having barely survived the trenches of the First World War, he seems to have been unable to make peace with the world after the experience. In many ways, Chandler’s outlook on life is much like that of Wittgenstein, an avid reader of his, who also had a most exacting war, fighting at the Austrian front with the manuscript of Tractatus in his back pocket. ‘The Hell with it’ seems to sum it up fairly well. Except books that is. They were both highly interested in the writer’s voice, it’s pitch, clarity, charm, motivation and what have you, sensing hollowness like bloodhounds and discarding it with as much grace as a yob with a bit of lead pipe. In a letter to Bernice Baumgarten (1948), Chandler comments on Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions.

“It looks phony as hell in spots. And how do you do something ‘with careful deliberation’? And, ‘But the girl’s expression hadn’t changed. She had broken off a twig from a bush and was absently running it along the stone fence, as though she were pondering what he had just said.’ The last clause and the ‘absently’ throw away the effect. You either describe an action and let the reader make the deduction of the inner reaction it expresses, or else you describe the inner reaction and view what she does from within. You don’t do it both ways at the same time. A small thing, but it places the stuff for me. I guess I’m just being a stickler. And enjoying it.”

Reading the novels, I sometimes thought that Chandler was too well educated for his choice of trade. I had some difficulty swallowing the omniscience of Marlowe, for example that a private dick like him should be able to spot a bogus rare book dealer by asking for a “Ben Hur, 1860, Third Edition, the one with the duplicated line on page 116” while knowing quite well that it doesn’t exist. Maybe I’m just being prejudiced against American dicks in not seeing them as the obvious connoisseurs of rare books. I do appreciate Marlowe’s unsophisticated impertinence in laying out the state of the world. Annoyance put well can be a great vehicle in humorous writing, I think, and Chandler was most annoyed with many things. In the course of time, though, I’ve come to prefer naïveté to nastiness in literature or at least a blend of the two. Large doses of unalloyed cynicism leave me as cold as the perforated corpses that crowd the genre.

In a letter to Alfred Knopf, Chandler discusses a review that expressed a similar objection to a book of his, strongly rejecting to being regarded as ‘a connoisseur of moral decay’.

“I was aware that this yarn had some fairly unpleasant citizens in it, but my fiction was learned in a rough school, and I probably didn’t notice them much. I was more intrigued by a situation where the mystery is solved by the exposition and understanding of a single character, always well in evidence, rather than the slow and sometimes long-winded concatenation of circumstances.”

That he was highly concerned with his writing style can perhaps be seen in an indignant note he wrote to his publisher about the sweetly rigid Miss Mutch’s correcting of his orthographic errors.

“Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell her that I write a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.”