Reflections on Raymond Chandler and Farewell, My Lovely
“A good story cannot be devised, it has to be distilled.”—R. Chandler
Raymond Chandler worked on what would become his second Philip Marlowe novel, Farewell, My Lovely, for six months or so in 1939 before trashing it and starting over from scratch. He finished the rewrite in a few months and it was published in 1940. The novel is a mashup of three pre-existing short stories, more or less integrated into a whole. At any rate, the many-headed plot converges well enough, and we get a satisfactory resolution at the end.
In his famous critical essay from The Simple Art of Murder (1944), Chandler argues for fiction set in the actual world we live in—which for detective fiction means in the spirit of Dashiell Hammet, who “gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.” In other words, Chandler wasn’t a big fan of English parlor murder mysteries.
At the end of Farewell, My Lovely, one of Chandler’s good-hearted characters, Anne Riordan, who has befriended and helped Marlowe in this multi-pronged case, and whose last line is, “I’d like to be kissed, damn you!” says:
“You ought to have given a dinner party . . . Gleaming silver and crystal, bright crisp linen—if they’re still using linen in the places where they give dinner parties—candlelight, the women in their best jewels and the men in white ties, the servants hovering discreetly with the wrapped bottles of wine, the cops looking a little uncomfortable in their hired evening clothes, as who the hell wouldn’t, the suspects with their brittle smiles and restless hands, and you at the head of the long table telling all about it, little by little, with your charming light smile and a phony English accent like Philo Vance.”
The novel we’ve just read has been nothing like that, and Marlowe, in the company of the charming, anti-alcohol Irish girl but needing a drink, can only answer Marloweishly:
“Yeah,” I said. “How about a little something to be holding in my hand while you go on being so clever.”
Chandler is a master of the “way leads on to way” plot. He starts out on a simple line, then Marlowe gets curious, has hunches, meets people, takes unexpected phone calls, and the next thing you know, the story’s going down a dozen alleyways off what seemed the main road. Just like life. Chandler said he wasn’t as concerned with plot mathematics as with style. He knew detective fiction is more or less formulaic, but for him it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. It’s how you fill in the spaces between plot points. And his novels do have that quickly-written, go with your first instinct feeling—like a one-take garage band recording. Chandler makes the point somewhere that all fiction is “escapist,” really. He just doesn’t draw too strong a line between what we’re escaping and what we’re escaping from. The fictional world must have a certain level of credibility for there to be a story.
That world is neither predictable nor pretty. Moral matters are rarely black and white, and in Chandler’s world you can find a rotten heart or a heart of gold in the least likely places. As for the absence of prettiness, Marlowe is one the great fictional exemplars of the weariness of evil. You look at this world sometimes and can’t help but think how much better it would have been if humans had never contaminated it. Toward the end of the book, as Marlowe heads dockward to take a ride out to the gambling ship Montecito to try and confront Laird Brunette, he reflects:
“After a while there was a faint smell of ocean. Not very much, but as if they had kept this much just to remind people this had once been a clean open beach where the waves came in and creamed and the wind blew and you could smell something besides hot fat and cold sweat.”
Representing the corrupt world we actually live in is imperative in Chandler’s ethic, but it means nothing without the thematic core that informs all his work: the need to recognize and resist it. Shortly before the above passage, Marlowe thinks back over the ugliness of his recent life:
“I thought of dead eyes looking at a moonless sky, with black blood at the corners of the mouths beneath them. I thought of nasty old women beaten to death against the posts of their dirty beds. I thought of a man with bright blond hair who was afraid and didn’t quite know what he was afraid of, who was sensitive enough to know that something was wrong, and too vain or too dull to guess what it was that was wrong. I thought of beautiful rich women who could be had [Mrs. Grayle/Velma]. I thought of nice slim curious girls who lived alone and could be had too, in a different way [Anne Riordan]. I thought of cops, tough cops that could be greased and yet were not by any means all bad, like Hemingway [Sgt. Galbraith]. Fat prosperous cops with Chamber of Commerce voices, like Chief Wax. Slim, smart and deadly cops like Randall, who for all their smartness and deadliness were not free to do a clean job in a clean way. I thought of sour old goats like Nulty who had given up trying. I thought of Indians and psychics and dope doctors.”
Marlowe gets up, splashes his face, and delivers this gem:
“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”
The hero of Chandler’s fiction is this attitude. It is the attitude of a person who knows something is wrong, and they know they can’t change it, but between doing what they can, and nothing, they’ll do what they can. A person who knows how hard it is, after being out there in that world, to just sit up from the bed and swing their feet onto the floor. How hard and how necessary.
Today, like any day, we need all the Marlowes we can get.
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”—L. Tolstoy
July 23, 2024