The Genius of Raymond Chandler: An Interview with Judith Freeman
Raymond Chandler is the most influential mystery writer since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His leading advocates, including W. H. Auden, Clive James, and even, grudgingly, Edmund Wilson, have argued that he transcends the genre of detective fiction and that his books should be simply considered literature.
No one denies that Chandler’s influence on popular culture has been enormous: The Big Sleep, the Bogart-Bacall vehicle directed by Howard Hawks, is still regarded (along with John Huston’s film from Dashiell Hammett’s book The Maltese Falcon) as one of the two greatest American detective movies ever made, and Chandler’s books and film scripts (most notably for Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train) helped define the concept of film noir, which continues to influence writers as diverse as the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami and the graphic novelist Frank Miller, who is set to direct a film version of Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business.
Judith Freeman’s The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, just published by Pantheon, is the first book to examine in depth the strange relationship between Chandler and his much older wife, Cissy, as well as their peripatetic life together in and around Los Angeles. Ms. Freeman answered questions for us from her home in California.
This interview first appeared on the American Heritage Blog.
Raymond Chandler has been imitated, parodied, and practically plagiarized for so long that his style of detective story has almost become a cliché. Yet somehow the work not only survives but stays fresh. Just about all his books have been in print continuously since they were published. What do you think it is about Chandler that endures?
The short answer is his brilliance, which is a multi-faceted thing. There’s his humor, for starters. As Christopher Isherwood observed, there’s fun in Chandler. He’s an immensely amusing writer, and readers connect with that wit. And yet he says some profound things about American society and the corruption in its institutions, how we’re a big, rough, rich, appetent society, and crime is the price we pay for our gluttony. His books contain that quality he most valued in writing, namely vitality, and it is a hard thing to fake if you don’t have it, which is why so many imitators fail. But in the end I think it’s Marlowe that gives the books their real staying power. Philip Marlowe is an enigma. He says so himself at one point. He’s vulnerable, like us, and we feel his sad good-naturedness. He’s an iconic American male, just as Marilyn Monroe was an iconic American female. And this is interesting because Chandler once said that only he and Marilyn Monroe had managed to reach all the brows—high-brow, middle-brow, and low-brow. This is another reason why Chandler endures. He reaches across the intellectual spectrum with stories that still seem fresh in their telling.
When I was at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival two years ago, the writer whose name was evoked most often when talking about L.A. was Raymond Chandler. This is odd, because Chandler certainly had mixed feelings about Southern California in general and Los Angeles in particular. I think one of his most famous putdowns was that L.A. had “all the personality of a paper cup.” Yet he had many opportunities to move and never did. How would you sum up his strange on-again, off-again affair with the City of Angels?
He had a definite love-hate relationship with L.A. I think he loved it when he first arrived, in 1913, and it must have been a pretty idyllic place then, very different from London, the city where he’d spent much of his childhood. He really took to driving and loved automobiles. But L.A. was a place that got despoiled quite rapidly, and the banality and lack of taste in a population composed increasingly of transplanted Midwesterners—the so called hog-and-hominy crowd—began to disgust him. On the one hand, you had religious nuts of every stripe, and on the other, you had bunko artists bilking the ignorant rubes, as well as gangsters, bad cops, and corrupt politicians. Smog arrived, and stupid fads, and objects with built-in obsolescence. After a while L.A became Paradise Despoiled for him, a grotesque and impossible place to live. California, he said, was the department-store state—everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else. He lost it as a place to set his fiction, because he had to either love a city or hate it to write about it, or maybe both, he said, “like a woman.” Eventually L.A. bored him. It became “just a tired old whore” to him. Still, he put it on the literary map. His relationship with L.A. was very symbiotic. The city gave him his material, and in return he gave it a lasting identity. No one wrote better about L.A. or captured more of its unique essence.
What were Cissy’s feelings about her husband’s writing? Was she supportive or did she feel, as many of Chandler’s contemporaries did, that he should try to write something more “serious”?
Chandler claimed his wife never liked what he wrote. He said her advice to him was to quit writing out of the corner of his mouth. What did she mean by that? I think she meant, drop that tough-guy stuff. Lose the slang and prison talk and violence, write a story that depicts a softer, more romantic world, not one filled with gangsters and crooks and rotten blondes. We should be glad he didn’t take her advice.
So many fine actors have played Philip Marlowe over the years—Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Montgomery, James Garner, Robert Mitchum, Powers Boothe and James Caan in TV productions, even Elliott Gould. Chandler, who died in 1959, lived long enough to see Powell, Bogey, and Montgomery play the part. Which was his favorite, and who else would he have liked to see play Marlowe? And—I presume you’ve seen most of the Marlowes—who is your own favorite?
Chandler initially had Cary Grant in mind as the actor he felt was suited to the role of Marlowe, but that was probably Chandler projecting his own image of himself as the well-dressed, good-looking, debonair guy—and as a young man, Chandler was that. He looks incredibly elegant and handsome in a picture taken in L.A. in the twenties showing him standing under a tree in profile. Cary Grant never played Marlowe, and given the Marlowes we’ve seen, it’s kind of hard to imagine him in the role of hard-boiled dick.
As far as I know, Chandler never weighed in on Robert Montgomery’s performance for the record. He is on record as saying that he thought Dick Powell (in Murder, My Sweet, an adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely) made the best Marlowe, but I’m a little uncertain about when exactly he made that comment—before or after he saw Bogart in The Big Sleep. (The Big Sleep came out in 1946, two years after Murder, My Sweet.) He definitely appreciated Bogart’s performance, though to my knowledge he never actually said he thought Bogart was the best Marlowe. What he said was that Bogart was “the genuine article”—so much better than any other tough-guy actor that he made bums of the Ladds and the Powells, and perhaps that can be interpreted as crowning him as the ultimate Marlowe. Or it could be an indication of Chandler’s appreciation of a film performance. Bogart, he said, could be tough without a gun, which Powell never could. But I think Chandler was really talking about Bogart’s acting ability, that he was the genuine article as an actor. He recognized that Bogart was great, better than Powell, and he brought a charged quality to the role, even though he was quite wrong physically for the part. It was the quality of Bogart’s performance, that sense of humor that contained a grating, rather misogynistic undertone of contempt, especially for the women in the story, that Chandler found compelling. All that Bogart had to do to dominate a scene, he said, was to enter it.
In contrast, Dick Powell was a much softer guy, more ordinary, a less cynical, less harsh and jaded Marlowe. He seems more human in many ways, more vulnerable, and you see this in his scenes with women. He doesn’t snarl at Claire Trevor, who plays Mrs. Grayle (alias Velma), or try to outwit her with force, but sort of bats the ball around with her, sometimes uncertainly plays cat and mouse, and he almost gets a naughty schoolboy-caught-in-the-act look on his face when he’s caught staring at her legs. He was closer, I think, to the true Marlowe, to the spirit of the man that Chandler created on the page and who arose out of his own fantasies. But I can understand how he’d be seduced by the brilliant Marlowe that Bogart created.
It’s a tough call for me as to which Marlowe I prefer, but I’d have to say that the Dick Powell Marlowe is my favorite because I feel he’s the truest, closest incarnation of the literary Marlowe, though I loved Bogart in The Big Sleep and laughed out loud in scene after scene and was mesmerized by his acting. I also loved Robert Mitchum in a later adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely, not because he convinced me he was Marlowe but because he was Robert Mitchum, filling the screen with his great brooding presence. The Marlowe I least liked was Robert Montgomery, in Lady in the Lake, who, even though he may have been the father of that perky “Bewitched” Elizabeth Montgomery, made a really nasty Marlowe, so snarling and misogynistic I could hardly watch his film. I thought Elliott Gould was great, the first actor to capture that sense of Marlowe’s sexual ambivalence, but he never became Marlowe for me, he was always Elliott Gould, and the completely changed ending of the movie had him behaving in ways Marlowe never would.
It’ll be interesting to see what Clive Owen does with the role in an adaptation of Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business, to be directed by Frank Miller. In any case, it’s clear that Marlowe will never die, and that he provides a very malleable suit of armor for an actor to slip into.
Chandler once wrote a letter to the effect that “over there [England] I’m an author, over here just a writer of mysteries.” Why do you suppose it was that British critics discovered Chandler so much earlier than their American counterparts?
The rest of that quote in the letter is, “Don’t know why,” meaning Chandler himself couldn’t figure out why he was viewed so differently in England from America. And I don’t know why either. He knew a lot more about England than I do, and he couldn’t figure it out. But it’s possible that Americans felt defensive about how their society was being portrayed, didn’t like the fact that those early Chandler novels depicted a pretty corrupt culture, from cops to politicians, whereas the British were fascinated by the sordidness of that sun-filled world that had been so hyped. It could also be the puritanical streak coming out: Some American critics talked about the “nastiness” of the characters, how no one except Marlowe was decent, and the language was so bad. Even the critic for the New York Times complained that the publisher had to resort to the dash in The Big Sleep, so degenerate was the language, and complained that Chandler had created a world of moral defectives—pornographers and blackmailers and homosexuals and gangsters. This sounds so prudish now, but then Americans are kind of prudish compared with Europeans. Can you imagine a European politician draping a nude statue before he’d stand in front of it for a press conference? Could be the British were just so much more curious about these remarkable books, so uninvested in a self-serving image, more interested in the otherness of the settings, and more willing to be amused by a really brilliant writer.
You introduce an idea about Chandler that few have ever dared to investigate, namely the possibility that he was homosexual. No doubt this is going to enrage a great many of his long-time fans, but I think your case is well made. Can you summarize?
Actually I’m not the first to raise the question of homosexuality in connection with both Chandler and his work, and specifically Philip Marlowe. The subject came up in both Frank MacShane’s and Tom Hiney’s biographies, and also in essays written before and after Chandler’s death, including a very moving one by his close friend Natasha Spender, wife of the poet Stephen Spender, who knew him very well at the end of his life and whom I interviewed for my book. But you are right in saying that I look at the subject more closely than others have, because I felt it had a place in the discussion of his marriage. The truth is we’ll never know if Chandler harbored homosexual inclinations. I found nothing in my research to indicate he ever had a relationship with a man. What is clear is that both Chandler and his creation Marlowe harbored very complex feelings when it came to women (and men) and their sexuality. There’s an anxiety, a feeling they are sliding along a slippery slope of attraction and repulsion, mistrust and anxiety, a kind of boyish prurience as well as an impossibly strict code of morality, in a world where women are the villains and men long for friendship. I’m not going to repeat all the arguments I make in the book, or the discoveries that came from my readings and interviews; they’re there for the reader to discover. Any discussion of an iconic hard-boiled writer, and an iconic male literary figure, that even dares to bring up the question of homosexuality is bound to raise certain hackles, but I like to believe that I handle the subject with a certain sensitivity and respect, and I stress that there’s no clear answer to the question.