This is the seventh time that I will post this essay only to re-post the work due to New Jersey's criminal censorship.
At 9:27 A.M. today I received calls from 402-727-2510; at 10:40 A.M. I received calls from 352-357-4151; I am blocking: http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90xWBCBRB00110msn/direct;wi.728;hi.90/01 (How was the weekend?)
December 5, 2007 at 12:33 P.M. I was obstructed earlier this morning in accessing my msn group, "errors" were inserted in several of my essays. My cable signal was blocked, again, obstructing my access to the Internet, illegally, on my home computer.
I wish to express my sympathy to the guys following me and standing around waiting for me to exit a department store. The cold weather makes your job difficult. Bundle up.
December 3, 2007 from 8:00 A.M.-12:20 P.M. I was denied access to the Internet. My cable signal was blocked illegally. Calls received from 866-333-0388.
November 27, 2007 at 12:13 P.M. telephone calls from 352-357-4151. More defacements of my writings. Spacing may be affected in this essay. ("Alina Falcone?" of Univision?)
November 28, 2007 at 12:20 P.M. I am blocking: http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90xWBCBR0011msn/direct;wi.728;hi.90/01 (How kind of you to join me.)
November 29, 2007 at 9:00 A.M. repeat phone calls from 877-835-7778. I am blocking: http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90xWBCR0011msn/direct;wi.728;hi.90/01 (Back again? "Maritz Research"?)
November 30, 2007 at 12:06 P.M. phone calls from 303-395-2345. I am blocking: http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90xWBCBRB00110msn/direct;wi.728;hi.90/01 (comfy?)
I am thrilled to be photographed at bookstores and while waiting for the subway train.
I will try to smile, charmingly, and wave next time.
Does the OAE have any knowledge concerning these matters? Anne Milgram? Bob Menendez? Stuart Rabner?
Shame on you New Jersey. ("Have you no shame Mr. Rabner?")
"Come inside," I said, "and you can be witty sitting down."
Something important is being lost today by barely literate young men that is also affecting others around them. Pervasive illiteracy among young men, especially, is not healthy for society.
How can we translate the linguistic imagination that is so often blunted in academic settings into literary efforts and professional success for talented young people?
These thoughts are so dangerous, evidently, that I must struggle against censorship and destruction efforts to set them down.
If you lack words for certain emotional experiences you simply can and will not have those experiences: Empathy, sensitivity, imaginative identification are words that many urban young men cannot define nor, therefore, can they describe experiencing such things in their lives as most people do.
To deny words to people -- to take away language -- is to condemn victims either to inventing their own language (black English?) or to force them to accept silence and violent attempts at self-assertion in order to make themselves understood. ("What a Man's Gotta Do.")
Is this attempt by "powerful forces" in our society to deny "sub-humans" (like me) words and speech an explanation for my experiences of censorship and the continuing suppression (or destruction) of written works by many dissidents in the United States and elsewhere?
I suspect so.
At about the time when I discovered Raymond Chandler I read sections of the autobiography of Frederick Douglass whose struggle to read, think, and speak as a free human being has remained an inspiration for me.
Insistence on intellectual autonomy by a man who refused slavery was -- in the eyes of his society it still is! -- an unforgivable offense committed by many of us.
I am not a "thing" to be conditioned by anyone.
Literature is not a luxury.
Art is not decoration.
Religion is not primitive science.
Philosophy, like education, is a universal right. ("Why philosophy is for everybody.")
Paul Robeson's suffering and losses from denials of opportunities to express his genius is one example of the demonic uses to which psychological torture methods and government monitoring has been applied in America.
The silencing of exceptional persons hurts us all. More importantly, the silencing of any human being diminishes the democracy and freedom of all persons in society. How many others have been hurt in similar ways we may never know. At his death, Mr. Robeson (one of our great artists in the twentieth century), was a shattered man.
There is something about the silence, flow of time, elegance of thought development -- that unique perceptiveness which is developed or cultivated as a side-effect of reading -- that can make a man, especially, more aware of the feelings of others and of his own emotions, making him both more "attractive" and "interesting" (these words can mean the same thing for women who usually associate them) to the special woman that he wants to know a little better. This seems to be true even if that desired woman doesn't read much herself.
I am sure that reading and other aesthetic experiences, accordingly, will make you a more "sensitive" guy.
Being sensitive is a good thing according to women.
Who knows why women feel this way? Women are so bizarre. ("David Stove and the Intellectual Capacity of Women.")
It doesn't help that minority men often receive a less adequate education than their suburban counterparts and are more frequently discouraged from literary expression. There is a lot of untapped literary talent out there. True, publishers don't want to publish minorities, but the talent exists. And getting the books out there, somehow, is easier now than ever before thanks to modern technology.
We must find a way to communicate. Society needs to understand the often angry and confused young people drawn to extremist ideologies in the world. There is no shortage of such ideologies right here at home.
There are plenty of potentially violent or "terroristic" young people in America of all political persuasions.
A social explosion is always possible and, at the moment, it seems likely to arrive. ("'This is totally amazing!' -- Donald J. Trump.")
Sexism -- the bullshit you've been taught about how men and women are supposed to "behave" or "be" -- hurts people. That's why it is bad. ("Master and Commander.")
We have to start thinking in new ways about how to relate to one another as men and women. This will not be easy. We really do not have models of identity for this brave new world that is blessedly free of sexist ideology. However, we do have traditional models of what is acceptable "masculine" and "feminine" behavior that are both admirable (in some ways) and not so good (in other ways), models that are subject to eternal reinterpretation in our rapidly changing contemporary world.
These roles (or forms of identity) for men and women can never be discarded entirely because they are far too deeply ingrained in all of us long before we think seriously about these matters.
To do that "reinventing" of archetypes it may help if we read great books and see good films. ("The Art of Robert Downey, Jr." and "The Art of Melanie Griffith.")
I will examine one writer's books to illustrate what I mean. I discovered this author when I was very young. I've always enjoyed films based on his stories. His words have had a profound impact on American culture for good and ill. They have helped to define our dominant notions of masculinity in the twentieth century and beyond. There are unexplored tensions in those stories and a fascinating as well as ambiguous artist to be found between the lines of these texts.
I am referring to Raymond Chandler and the quintessential American "hard boiled" detective Philip Marlowe.
Asked to define good writing Jimmy Breslin said: "I have to like the silences between the sentences."
I like the silences between Chandler's sentences.
I begin with some biographical information about Chandler. I then focus on one essay "The Simple Art of Murder" which will serve as a launching point for an examination of problematic ideas of masculinity also found in Hemingway and in the writings of Fitzgerald and Mailer as well as several major novelists in the twentieth century.
With the transition from an essentially literary culture in which the novelist was at the center of cultural power (early twentieth century) to a cinematic-televisual culture (twenty-first century) in which directors and actors hold the major cultural power the source of cultural (or anthropological) indentity-definitions is altered and responsibility for the misuse of power to damage persons shifts from identifiable individual artists and thinkers to a much more diverse and amorphous groups of cultural workers.
I am more likely to write of movies and television these days even if I am still a voracious reader of novels. ("'Westworld': A Review of the T.V. Series.")
Many of the early twentieth century American modernists influenced Chandler, but it is also true that Conan-Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" and Dashiell Hammett's "Sam Spade" shaped Chandler's literary sensibility. A dirty word for Philip Marlowe is "sensibility." ("Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author.")
Marlowe's tough (and feminine) sensitivity as well as his detective's intuition are among the most important aspects of his persona, along with wit and charm, setting him apart from his rivals.
The so-called "feminine" quality in Marlowe -- who is also the archetype of the masculine -- makes him the best and most complex of the American "tough guy" detectives adding to his charm for readers today.
Despite Chandler's American nationality he attended schools in England, notably Dulwich College, Marlowe House (his hero is named for that prep school house). For financial reasons, after studies in France and Germany, Chandler could not go on to Cambridge University.
Undetected influences on Chandler's hero are also the idealist philosophy of John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart which dominated English culture during Chandler's boyhood, the Romantic poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson ("The Charge of the Light Brigade"), and others "outgrown" by Chandler after his experiences in World War I when he served with the Canadians before U.S. entry into the war.
Chivalry is an important value underlying the American detective as "knight errant" reaching a kind of apotheosis in Marlowe.
The following paragraph is found on the first page of Chandler's best book. It is one of the few times when Chandler resorts to a symbol:
"The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor" -- very dark! -- "rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the visor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere."
The Big Sleep (New York: Random House, 1939), p. 3.
Women in these stories are paradoxical and controversial. We'll get to the "femi-Nazi" stuff, I promise. These books, as I continue to insist, are also about changing gender roles in a century of social and cultural upheavals. ("William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.")
Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allen Poe, H.G. Wells, Mark Twain are all found in Chandler's elegant, spare, metaphorical prose -- if you look for them -- so are Dickens and (this may surprise you) Jane Austen (Marlowe's sense of the absurd and comic), Jack London and Thomas Hardy's dark vision, Joseph Conrad, and even William Somerset Maugham, for whom Chandler expressed contempt, despite reading all of Maugham's novels.
Raymond Chandler was indisputably well-versed in the Anglo-American literary tradition.
Pico Iyer's ["Jennifer Shuessler"?] comments concerning Somerset Maugham's hero in Of Human Bondage embodying the chivalric ideal are somewhat ludicrous in light of Maugham's homosexuality and explicit use of the waitress character in the novel to disguise the author's "shameful" passion for a young male "gigolo."
Maugham was only passionate about "boys" and, eventually, even adopted one young male lover to the amusement of the British press and dismay of his make-believe wife who was counting on Maugham's millions and nice palazzo in the south of France ("a large house built in the Italian style") filled with priceless art. Pico Iyer, "The Knight of Sunset Boulevard," The New York Review of Books, December 6, 2007, at p. 31.
Maugham had no interest in women. Most women are depicted in Maugham's books as -- in his famous upper class stutter -- "bitches."
For a comparison, see Judith Freeman, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (London: Pantheon, 2007).
An exception when it came to women was made by Somerset Maugham for his pal Dorothy Parker -- Ms. Parker in turn described Maugham as a "bitch." Brendan Gil, ed., The Portable Dorothy Parker (New York & London: Penguin, 1944 original), pp. 599-603.
Dorothy Parker was clearly absolutely right about "Willie." Also, it takes one to know one. Ms. Parker certainly should have known whereof she spoke. After sitting next to Maugham for hours at a fancy dinner she improvised some timeless doggerel for Maugham's benefit:
"Higgledy Piggledy, my white hen;
She lays eggs for gentlemen.
'Yes, I've always liked those lines,' [Maugham] said. She gave a thin, cool smile and without an instant's hesitation, added:
You cannot persuade her with gun or lariat
To come across for the proletariat." (The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 600.)
Mary McCarthy's critical intelligence is something that Chandler envied and not only admired. Chandler also read and disapproved of Edmund Wilson's Left-wing literary criticism and commentary.
Chandler was defensive and sometimes angry about the condescension expressed by British writers and critics for American detective fiction:
"Priestly was in La Jolla a couple of months ago, and was kind enough to tell me that I wrote well, and that I should write a straight novel. Of course I have heard this before in other connections. If you write well, you should not be writing a mystery. Mysteries should only be written by people who can't write. I regard this as vicious propaganda from the Edmund Wilson crowd. Obviously you can't expect detective fiction to be anything but sub-literary, to use Edmund Wilson's word, if you insist on weeding out from the field anyone who shows any pretensions to skill or imagination."
Chandler's letter to Somerset Maugham, 4 May, 1951, quoted in Tom Hiney & Frank McShane, eds., The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Non-Fiction (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000), p. 163.
Those interested in the long and fascinating life of Mr. Maugham are directed to Ted Morgan's biography depicting the elegant and acerbic novelist ending his days as a senile character fond of defecating on the expensive carpets of his Gold Coast neighbors (preferably) in the midst of a fancy party.
In the words of Truman Capote: "You would not believe that old queen!" [referring to Maugham] Prophetic? Or autobiographical for Mr. Capote? Black-and-white balls indeed.
I will do my best to bring Philip Marlowe up to date without losing what is best about him, by assessing his importance for American manhood in the Age of Political Correctness (PC) and/or "inclusiveness". ("Guerrilla Aesthetics and the Lobotomizing of the American Mind.")
Chandler was immersed in English literature and especially Romantic poetry. His gift for imagery and vivid similes should not be underestimated. Here is an example from Playback:
"On the dance floor half a dozen couples were throwing themselves around with the reckless abandon of a night watchman with arthritis." (p. 44.)
I will be happy if young men discover Chandler's books and learn to enjoy them while reading these books critically in light of (preferably sane) contemporary values. For a start I suggest Chandler's short stories or The Big Sleep.
"... platinum will not melt under 3000 degrees F., but it will melt under a pair of deep blue eyes."
"The facts, mam, just the facts ..."
"Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) American novelist, born in Chicago. He was brought up in England from the age of seven" -- the forced journey to another country along with separation and loss of parental figures is something I understand --"educated at Dulwich college and in France and Germany, and worked as a 'freelance' writer in London. In 1912, he went to California, then served with the Canadian army in France, and in the RAF during World War I. After a variety of jobs during the Depression he began to write short stories and novelettes for the detective story pulp magazines of the day. On such stories he based his subsequent full-length 'private eye' novels The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), and The Lady in the Lake (1943), all of which were successfully filmed. Chandler himself went to Hollywood in 1943 and worked on film scripts. He did much to establish the conventions of his genre, particularly with his cynical but honest anti-hero, Philip Marlowe, who also appeared in such later works as The Little Sister (1949), The Long Goodbye (1953) and Playback (1958)."
Magnus Magnusson, ed., Chamber's Biographical Dictionary (London: Chambers-Harrap Pub., Ltd., 1990), p. 288.
During the summer of my fifteenth year I travelled to California by bus. It was a three day bus journey with few stops for meals and no television on the bus. No portable CD or DVD viewing or listening was available for the excellent reason that none of these devices or technology yet existed. For that matter, there was no VCR machine in anyone's home. This was before most people had cable television, certainly before I had cable "service" at home. And there were no I-Phones or Internet service of any kind.
I purchased about five or six paperback books for the bus journey. All of Raymond Chandler's novels, biographies of movie stars from the thirties and forties (including the lives of George Raft and Humphrey Bogart), Dashiell Hammett's complete works in a single volume, maybe also a volume of poetry, I seem to recall, and a collection of Dorothy Parker's writings. I associate Victorian verse with that summer.
I read all of those books "punctuated" by long glances from the bus window at the enormous and indescribably beautiful landscapes -- the stark and powerful colors of the desert are other-worldly -- revealing a country that became something much larger and more mysterious than the depressed northern industrial city I knew from my impoverished childhood.
My bus journey took a southern route on the way to California then a northern route in returning to New York.
I realized immediately the vastness and dream-like quality of America that is usually concealed by the friendliness of residents of the various towns in the many states that we traversed on our way to L.A. The U.S. was a friendlier and more accepting nation then:
"How are ya? This is my son, Bill, that's our cousin Jessica, and that's good old Henry. He just had an operation for his appendix, almost killed him. Ain't that right, Henry?"
A long bus journey is soothing, also disconcerting, both relaxing and shaking up one's mind.
Gore Vidal says that one sure stimulus for any writer (or reader) is a change of scenery.
I entered Chandler's books with a special intensity by disappearing from the "real" world for hours. I changed my mental scenery. I felt myself strolling down those mean streets wet with yesterday's rain wearing a classic raincoat, forties hat, living in a black-and-white universe searching for that ... dame. ("Out of the Past.")
Regrettably, I never found her on that journey. ("Out of the Past.")
Women are like that in these novels. They appear then disappear only to destroy one's peace of mind.
Is this claim "demeaning to women"? ("Metaphor is Mystery.")
Like a child taken to Disneyland -- which I also discovered on this trip, or maybe on an earlier one to California, along with Knotts-Berry Farm and Universal Studios -- who is then forced to return to what is laughingly called "the real world" most men have experienced the unsettling effects of a woman in their lives together with the displacements of "journeys."
Whether these journeys are mental or physical in nature is irrelevant.
Women bring technicolor intensity to our black-and-white masculine world. (Ernest Hemingway was fond of a similar quote that I cannot reproduce here.)
Something in the human spirit baulks at the acceptance of death-in-life that most people call living. All of the magic of living -- also for good and ill -- is associated with women in Chandler's literary works and in most men's lives.
Later I read Sartre on Genet, Gide on the "gratuitous act," Ricoeur on evil and authenticity in the language of symbols -- all of whom are relevant to Philip Marlowe and to his creator's world view as well as to the ambiguous role he assigns to women in male adventures.
It is frightening to imagine that men may be assigned far more humble roles in women's adventures by female authors.
Gide's fascination with the "reality piercing" essence of malignancy is also Marlowe's discovery in each of his adventures and mine every morning when I find new "errors" inserted in my writings.
If you doubt this Chandleresque observation about women, incidentally, take a look at this photo and tell me, honestly, does any man deserve such a woman's company?
http://www.born-today.com/Today/pix/lake_v2.jpg (See what I mean about magic?)
"In every Philip Marlowe novel the action seems driven by a woman, usually an easy, alluring woman who at once attracts and unnerves Marlowe," Pico Iyer writes.
Sam Spade was all about the facts. Spade studiously avoids even the slightest display of emotion or rumination. Spade was Hemingway without deep feelings or tragedy, but with honor. There was a stark and cold or brutal reductivism in the view of the universe found in Hammett's books.
Marlowe was much more like the nineteenth century heros of authors I was reading in my local public library -- Stevenson, Dickens, Dumas, Hugo, Wells and Conan-Doyle.
There is a delightful lyricism about Marlowe's ruminations and philosophical asides, usually, these observations are also about women. Naturally, however, Marlowe never would use the word "philosophical."
Real men don't eat "Quiche" or admit to reading Tennyson. Curiously, Chandler clearly had read Tennyson and Byron, Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe's Faust hover in the background of several Marlowe stories.
Chandler was immersed in existentialist angst. I already knew the word "existentialist" and was amazed to encounter people who did not know the word, including teachers and dentists, or other so-called "successful" and "educated' persons -- like lawyers -- who were proud of their illiteracy and ignorance because stupidity was somehow felt to contribute to their incomes.
I first realized at that point in my life that most people are shockingly ignorant by design and in opposition despite all efforts to educate them. Not stupid. Most people are smart and capable enough. Ignorance in America is a matter of choice especially for men.
This bizarre "choice" to be ignorant on the part of so many people still baffles me.
Why don't you want to know things? Are you conditioned not to be curious? Too busy? ("'Total Recall': A Movie Review.")
There is something about American culture that is hostile to intelligence and genuine aesthetic feeling, original thought, or wide experience of other cultures.
This "something" is found even in our schools. The worship of dullness is connected to the world view emerging from those novels and our notions of masculinity that Chandler and his anti-hero react against in an effort to construct a more complex idea of manhood.
There must be a connection between this cultural phenomenon of studied and achieved imbecility and the election of Mr. Trump.
There is also an amazing aesthetic genius in Americans that is often forced underground.
Does "anti-intellectualism" have something to do with the attacks on my writings? Should good old American anti-intellectualism be associated with racism, sexism, our home-grown "know-nothing" tradition? Populism? Isolationism? Fear of migrants?
I am sure of it.
I discovered Richard Hofstadter and the well-diagnosed phenomenon of America's eternal "anti-intellectualism."
I recognized early in my life both the necessity of adopting the hard persona taken for normal among men and my need to transcend its limitations through a colossal imaginative effort. (Again: "What a man's gotta do.")
The weariness in Marlowe, the exhaustion and Beckett-like determination to carry on, nevertheless, because we must -- because it is right and good that we struggle not only against evil, but also in opposition to this spiritual weariness called acedia -- is one of the most theological aspects of these stories.
The struggle against lethargy is only successful, however, when it is identified by Marlowe with a quest for the feminine. http://www.chaaban.info/wp-content/beyonce.jpg ("'The American': A Movie Review.")
Here is Mr. Iyer's roughly accurate summary of Chandler's lyricism in prose:
"The sound that Chandler made his own was a mix of incantatory lyrical poetry and the rude vernacular of people who mocked all that such poetry traditionally described. His predecessor in hardboiled writing, Dashiell Hammett, was a former detective; Chandler, much more dangerously, was a romantic poet with a gun." (p. 32.)
Every poet has a gun. Some great poets possess the literary equivalent of nuclear devices. Shakespeare's Henry V, played by Laurence Olivier -- shamelessly chewing the scenery! -- held British morale in place during the Blitz. That is the power of poetry and thespian talent.
American life had grown stale and sad, sick, poisoned by the events of the Second World War, darker and more sinister in Chandler's middle years. Eliot's "Wasteland" was another discovery of my first year in high school. The science fiction of the Chandler-era reflected this mood.
Some suggestions for the holidays: Harlan Ellison, Alone Against Tomorrow: Stories of Alienation in Speculative Fiction (New York: Collier, 1971) and Harlan Ellison, Dangerous Visions (New York: New American Library, 1967).
For a great anthology on a bus journey you can't go wrong with Peter Haining, ed., Pulp Fictions (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1996) or Steven King's treatise on American popular writing in horror and other forms Dance Macabre.
King is a great critic of American popular culture as well as our most prolific literary genius.
A miasma had infiltrated our lungs and contaminated our speech and thinking. The horrors of the camps seemed to haunt the Western imagination. They still do. Only now we have a whole list of new atrocities -- mass murders, genocides to add to the story of humanity's moral contamination and despair -- making mephitic the intellectual air that we are still forced to breathe. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
Consider Marlowe's self-description below as referring to an entire culture and not only to an individual:
"...'I lit my pipe and sat there smoking,' he says at one point. 'Nobody came in, nobody called, nothing happened, nobody cared whether I died or went to El Paso. [Same thing?] ... I drove back to Hollywood, bought a pint of good liquor, checked in at the Plaza and sat on the side of the bed staring at my feet and lapping the wiskey out of the bottle. Just like any common bedroom drunk.' ..."
Then:
" ... 'I brushed my hair and looked at the gray in it. There was getting to be plenty of gray in it. The face under the hair had a sick look. I didn't like the face at all.' ..."
Tom Hiney, Raymond Chandler: A Biography (New York: Grove Press, 1997), pp. 128-130.
If you take away a man's religion and thrust him into the horror of war followed by a life of squalor, after a first-rate English public school education which has instilled in him the idealism of Bradley and McTaggart, heroism of Tennyson's verse, courage and passion of Arthurian romance, there are only two options: 1) despair and crawling back to the Church (T.S. Eliot); or 2), a renewal of the "knightly quest" (Chandler's term) for dragons to slay and princesses to rescue.
Maugham may opt for the dragons, of course, while women writers argued (often persuasively) that dragons may be preferable to some or many men.
Happily, Philip Marlowe and Raymond Chandler do not fall into that "sub-dragon" category. Neither do I. Or so I hope.
The experience of evil is usually fatal, but sometimes -- if one prevails against evil -- there is a drive to communicate a sense of what lies out there waiting to pounce on unsuspecting people.
There is a very human malignancy in many persons that feeds on causing misery and pain to others, preferably anonymously, behind-the-back attacks are always preferred by evil persons, especially if such persons happen to be from New Jersey.
A brief encounter with such people will suffice to establish the point. A decades-long encounter with absolute evil may cause one to question whether life is worth living. This eternal question is answered by the need to struggle against evil for the sake of weaker or more helpless others.
"Women and how they get that way."
Chandler lived in a simpler era. At least it was simpler concerning the sexes and their eternal mutual complaints. Men and women, equally, were allowed to say: "You can't live with them; you can't live without them."
Now only women get to say such things, at least publicly.
Privately, I suspect than men are as explicit about female ambiguity and oppressiveness as ever:
"Are you going to stare at that stupid game on t.v. again?"
"No, dear."
Here is Philip Marlowe being "misogynistic" (women love it when you use that word):
"You can have a hang over from things other than alcohol. I had one from women. Women made me sick." (Hiney, p. 100.)
I can't say that I have ever had such a feeling about women (except as regards some individuals).
I have certainly had that feeling of disgust, however, about men or humanity in general.
There is an ambiguity in the depiction of women in hardboiled detective stories that fascinates me. This is not to say that there must be such an ambiguity in men's attitudes towards all women in their lives.
Chandler's literary works are charmingly dated even as they are sure in essence to endure the passage of time as entertainment and much more. ("Good Will Humping" and "Genius and Lust.")
Women are seen by Chandler as sources of power. Mysterious, defying the laws of the universe, inspiring loyalty -- when they need help -- beguiling and bewitching our middle-aged hero, Marlowe, as both erotic images and minds.
By way of comparison examine the final scene in Hammett's The Maltese Falcon then turn to Chandler's "Velma" in Farewell My Lovely.
Women are also (like the wardrobe in C.S. Lewis's "Narnia" stories) the "doorway" to danger and adventure, elusive, almost always escaping all attempts at understanding and definition in the categories of a Hemingwayesque so-called "masculine" logic.
Women are associated with higher values for Marlowe and his creator: beauty, romance, goodness and peace, also eros and danger, rarely evil. They are primarily required to create or become enigmas in Chandler's writings. Chandler said:
"... at the bottom of his heart every decent man feels that his approach to the woman he loves is an approach to a shrine. If that feeling is lost, as it seems to have been lost (in this country at the moment) all of us are lost with it. The glory has departed. All that is left is to die in the mud." (Iyer, p. 32.) ("Nothingness is the worm at the heart of Being.")
All of this seems faintly absurd to women today.
Feminine logic, of course, was traditionally deemed inadequate by men because it was too complex and variable. The entire universe is reduced in male thinking to things that one kills and eats as opposed to entities with whom one has sex like women. This is known as the guys' principle of parsimony: "You either kill 'em or you fuck 'em."
For this reason men are often at a loss in supermarkets. Some men have been known to confuse their reactions to phenomena that are not easily classified in terms of this binary opposition by attempting sexual intercourse with an automobile -- in some tragic instances -- while mistaking females for a steak dinner in other no less lamentable situations. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")
Things must be kept as simple as possible for most men.
Perhaps there was an unheeded warning in this discovery by Chandler of female complexity and -- could it be? equality -- for the young Norman Mailer, an admirer of Raymond Chandler's prose and author of a tribute novel Tough Guys Don't Dance.
If Marlowe is always on a knightly quest that mirrors Arthurian romances it is nevertheless also true that Marlowe is given to levels of brutality and abruptness towards women that are unacceptable these days -- or ever -- except in response to the most heinous evil. And even in dealing with an evil woman violence by men is not permissible in literature or in life.
The sexual power of women in these stories and their new-found, pre- and especially post-World War II independence, must make Chandler's female characters "interesting" to feminist scholars. The man-haters and "femi-Nazis" should be sharpening their knives right about now.
Passive aggressive? Part of the patriarchy? What would "Gloria Anzaldua" say? ("America's Nursery School Campus.")
None of Chandler's favorite adventure writers in the nineteenth century would have created a female character with sexual power and moral ambiguity as the EQUAL and rival of his male protagonist -- characters who are also recipients of hostility -- without judging that imagined female character.
For Chandler it is not that women are dishonest or cruel and filled with sexual appetite; rather, all of us are those things. We are all tainted and fallen creatures in Chandler's Christian-inspired vision. Think Augustine, not Freud. People are shits in Chandler's understanding of life. ("Chits" in Florida.) This explains Chandler's fondness for the seedy and sordid sides of Los Angeles which seems to include the movie business for some reason. You can't expect much from men and women. The images of the concentration camps merely confirmed Chandler's Schopenhauer-like pessimism.
"Scratch the surface of the cynic," according to an old saying, "and you'll find a disappointed idealist." ("'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")
"Aha! That's you!" -- say the femi-Nazis. Yes-and-no.
The duality of women -- no, not the boring "madonna/prostitute dichotomy" -- inspires Chandler's paired women characters: Betty and Linda in Playback, the sisters in The Big Sleep.
Both sides of this duality in feminine nature are sexual, both have power and independence, only one of the two "sides" of "every" woman, in Chandler's view, has a moral component (Linda, not Betty).
Since my most recently read Chandler novel is Playback I'll use that book for illustrations, then I'll discuss Chandler's great and only love, "Cissy Pascal." Cissy's antecedents and even name(s) are shady, to put it mildly.
Compare these two descriptions and see what you come up with, take your time, especially those of you who are slow readers and all lawyers from New Jersey's justly famous "cranberry fields":
"I went to the door and switched the light off in the room. There was still a glow from the hall. When I turned she was standing by the bed as naked as Aphrodite, fresh from the Aegean."
When things get sexy in Chandler's stories he gets all mythological or shifts into references to high culture evoking the mostly dreadful poetry sent to his wife during their courtship. Still, this is pretty racy stuff for the early fifties:
"She stood there proudly and without either shame or enticement."
O.K., "hang on to your hats." Publication date of this novel is 1956. Sex had only recently been discovered in America:
"... 'Dam it,' I said, 'when I was young you could undress a girl slowly. Nowadays she's in the bed while you're struggling with your collar button.' ..."
" ... 'Well, struggle with your goddam collar button.' ..."
That reminds me of somebody!
"She pulled the bedcovers back and lay on the bed shamelessly nude. She was just a beautiful naked woman completely unashamed of being what she was." (Playback, p. 77.)
Let's see what Chandler's aptly-named biographer says about the woman who was way ahead of her time and who captured Chandler's "heart":
"... Cissy certainly did not look fifty-three in 1924. [At least ten years older than Chandler.] Having never had children of her own, she had kept her model's figure and, according to Chandler's colleagues at Dabney's, had the sexual presence of a thirty year-old. Indeed, for the first years of her marriage to Chandler, she even used to do the housework naked." (Hiney, p. 54.)
Honey, look ... you missed a spot!
Here is Marlowe's exchange not with Betty this time, but Linda:
"[Marlowe] How are you?"
"[Linda] Lonely. Lonely for you. I've tried to forget you. I haven't been able to. We made beautiful love together." (Playback, p. 165.)
This is not the scarlet woman. This is the hero's love interest. Clearly, this woman is modeled on Cissy to whom Chandler was faithful until her death, despite meaningless flirtations here and there. In fact, there really was no other woman filling a romantic-erotic role in his life.
Chandler's depiction of "legitimate and appropriate" feminine sexual appetite from a revered woman was unusual for pulp heros in the thirties, forties, or fifties.
Raymond Chandler will not fit into the stereotypes of feminist thesis writers looking for a demonized male target. Inconvenient, isn't it?
Chandler's women "give as good as they get," as it were, often gaining the upper hand on Marlowe (as Betty does in this story).
The Chandler women are strong -- almost always smarter than the men -- more interesting and complex than the male supporting characters who are usually cops or crooks -- sometimes both as in New Jersey and often made to serve the women's interests unknowingly.
Have I run out of standard pulp fiction one-liners and similes?
"Not on your life. Nothing doing, coppers."
"The Simple Art of Murder."
Chandler's greatest essay is the text to read if you are interested in American popular fiction, especially in the hardboiled detective genre. As I say, it is also important if you wish to understand American notions of masculinity and men. This is true even when it comes to men who have never read any book and will be perfectly happy in their lives never to read anything by anybody. In other words, even if a man is a lawyer in New Jersey the ideas in this text may be crucial to your understanding of him.
American detective stories and (although Chandler did not say so also Westerns) constitute "territories in culture" where masculine identity is worked out and understood.
Richard Matheson's Westerns are a future project. I'd love to read a hardboiled detective story by Matheson or King.
Male fantasy and notions of higher purpose are best approached by way of such artistic works. This includes cinema which is the only mirror held up to the American subconscious these days.
Social scientists looking into the mysteries of gender-coding in connection with masculine or feminine "identity" tend to read only one another's books then engage in a scholarly "mutual masturbation" society foolishly ignoring places in literature where America's masculine "collective subconscious" reveals itself. There aren't many of them. American detective stories are perfect for research on so-called "gender issues." ("What you will ...")
"Hemingway says somewhere," Chandler tips his hat to the Master, "that the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer (there must after all be a few) competes not only with the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well. And on almost equal terms; for it is one of the qualities of this kind of writing that the thing that makes people read it never goes out of style." ("The Simple Art of Murder," p. 3.)
The British model for this kind of story is found in the works of Arthur Conan-Doyle, Agatha Christie, and the much-detested (by Chandler) Dorothy Sayers, whose Lord Peter Wimsey (C.S. Lewis) is the antithesis of Philip Marlowe. All of these "dainty" British writers were obsolete according to Chandler. Chandler never lived to appreciate Len Deighton or John Le Carre, Ken Follett or "Robert Galbraith." Chandler did not see that what bothered him about British "puzzle stories" is exactly what many readers love: the absence of gritty realism.
Detective fictions may be elevated to a heightened or surreal level, where they become vehicles for dramatizing ideas or psychological explorations fulfilling any number of other serious goals of an author by making the murder investigation providing the ostensible "plot" secondary or trivial.
I will devote a future essay to G.K. Chesterton's "Father Brown." (See again "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author" then "Faust in Manhattan" also "The Art of Robert Downey, Jr.")
Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose is a masterpiece of the detective genre, but so is The Maltese Falcon. A work combining both sets of objectives, realism and thematic ambition, would be interesting. This sort of thematic complexity can be found in diverse figures, such as G.K. Chesterton and "Dan Cavanaugh" or "Callahan?" Julian Barnes used a pseudonym to write detective stories with a gay hero in San Francisco.
I suggest the much-celebrated novels of P.D. James (for femi-Nazis). Guys can't go wrong with Elmore Leonard, Donald E. Westlake -- not Mickey Spillane -- Pete Hamill, Colin Harrison, Ian Fleming is also good.
For an obscure and fascinating read that I am saving for the holidays, see Michael Gregorio's Critique of Criminal Reason: A Mystery where Immanuel Kant becomes a detective investigating a murder of a David Hume-like figure. Anything by Philip Kerr is recommended.
Chandler objects to the oh-so clever plots and bizarre personality quirks (he should talk!) of British detectives.
What about regular-American-guy Rex Stout's "Nero Wolfe"? You can't be more eccentric than Nero Wolfe.
Chandler's "not buying it":
"The master of rare knowledge is living psychologically in the age of the hoop skirt. If you know all you should know about ceramics and Egyptian needlework, you don't know anything at all about the police. If you don't know that platinum won't melt under about 3000 degrees F. by itself, but will melt at the glance of a pair of blue eyes if you put it near a bar of lead, then you don't know how men make love in the twentieth century." ("The Simple Art of Murder," p. 4.)
Lack of hardboiled quality was definitely a big part of Ms. Sayers' problem since "Lord Peter Wimsey" is her dream-version of C.S. Lewis for whom Sayers had "the hots," as it were, as the only woman member of the famous Inklings.
By placing Lewis-Wimsey on the page and sharing in his adventures Ms. Sayers was able to create a life "together" with a man for whom she felt an unspoken forty-year passion.
Jane Austen? After I finish Ms. Tomalin's biography of "dear Jane," I will devote an essay to the search for Mr. Darcy who is clearly Ms. Austen's response to Shakespeare's "Dark Lady."
"The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody thought of only two minutes before he pulled it off. But if the writers of this fiction [Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers] wrote about the kind of murders that happen, they would also have to write about the authentic flavor of life as it is lived. [What kind of life?] And since they cannot do that, they pretend that what they do is what should be done. Which is begging the question -- and the best of them know it." (p. 11.) (Compare Richard Rayner's Murder Book with any novel by Dorothy Sayers.)
Chandler's stories aim at a realism inspired by Hemingway's and Hammett's lack of sentimentality, tough and brutal at times, for a generation of men who never recovered from the "Great War" of 1914-1918.
No one during those post-war years (the twenties) walked around saying: "This is World War I" because they did not expect a second World War. ("Images and Death.")
The "first" bloody, tragic, meaningless "world" war began in the mental climate of the nineteenth century. Men rode off to battle on horseback with drawn swords.
The war ended with tanks, airplanes, poison gas and anonymous, very un-heroic deaths in a stagnant military struggle. Sound familiar? 10,000 + American deaths and counting in Iraq along with Afghanistan -- to say nothing of our secret war(s) in Pakistan -- and elsewhere with no end in sight.
Chandler failed to see all of the ways in which his own American "demotic style" and realism was another form of almost medieval fantasy that reflected the transformation of Romanticism's interpretation of chivalry into an existential and moral quest (right word!) for princesses to rescue and the treasure of individuation to be won.
My friend at the Deli likes to say: "You gotta believe something."
All of Chandler's stories are "about" a woman to be won and/or figured out -- Marlowe never fully succeeds at either task, as indeed, no man does -- and a "pot of gold," whether literal or metaphorical, that is to be recovered or earned.
The values of Chandler's antihero are spelled out most clearly in his essay on "The Simple Art of Murder" that is also about the difficulties in writing of our absurd hope for justice:
"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucus laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. [A Parsival worthy of the Grail?] He is a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor -- by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world." (p. 18.)
The challenge that Chandler created for his hero was a symbolized version of the philosophical and moral problem faced by American and European men and women in the aftermath of two world wars as well as the Holocaust: How to find meaning after surviving the living hell of war?
Lindsay Clarke returned to the Parsival legend as an archetypal hero's journey focusing on identical themes concerning masculinity, loss, and meaning in the search for the Grail:
"My generation grew up in an increasingly materialistic society where the standards of masculinity were set by an aggressive patriarchy organized into companies that carried on their trade with martial zeal. (Consider how many knights are now champions of business!) Almost nothing in our education was designed to give us an understanding of the feminine perspectives that might be available to men, [like delight in wit and humor as a response to aggression?] still less of the activity of a masculine spirit within women. We knew almost nothing, that is, of the role of the unconscious in shaping our experience. Nor, for many of us, was there any vital sense of a spiritual dimension to life. The history of industrialized slaughter in both World Wars, together with the ever-imminent possibility of total destruction through thermonuclear conflict, had left most of us convinced that the existence of a benevolent God was beyond belief. The scientific world view seemed to make nonsense of many religious claims and, apart from its use to describe a particularly stirring form of music, the word 'soul' had no apparent referent. If there was any meaning to life -- and this was an open question -- then it was entirely self-created."
Parsival and The Stone From Heaven (London: Thorsons, 2001), p. 216.
Chandler's biographer adds:
"On the surface, Marlowe was as lonely, unsociable and self-persecuting as was Chandler, but beneath that lay a sense of honour and humour, as well as sensitivity." (Hiney, p. 102.) (British spelling.)
Pico Iyer says:
"At the end of his life Chandler said, 'I seem to be the sort of idiot who will sacrifice himself for anyone in trouble, especially a woman." (p. 32.)
This explains Marlowe's weariness and despair:
"What did it matter where you lay your head once you were dead? In a dirty dump or in a marble tower on top of a white hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep ... On the way down town I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn't do me any good." (Hiney, p. 101.)
The solution, once again, is a woman. Cissy's fascination (for Chandler) never fades. Despite the difference in age and infirmities of her later years. Cissy is every one of the women in the novels and stories. Everything, all of the beauty and lyricism is about her in Chandler's art and life.
The things a guy has to do. ("'Diamonds Are Forever': A Movie Review.")
Marlowe concludes that -- for the sake of that "dame" -- those dark streets must be searched and the evil that lingers in a corrupt world must be faced and destroyed.
Like his fictional private eye, Chandler extends, again, at the end of Cissy's life that poignant invitation to her (written before he met her), found in one of his earliest and best poems.
This writer's work is offered for the woman he "dreamed before he met her."
"A Woman's Way"
Westminster Gazette, 22 April, 1909.
Come with me, love,
Across the world,
Ere glory fades
And wings are furled,
And we will wander hand in hand,
Like a boy and girl in a playroom land.
Stay with me love in the city's murk,
Where the sun but dares
Shyly to lurk,
And we will watch life hand in hand,
Like a boy and a girl in a grown up land.
Go from me, love,
If thou'lt not stay;
Follow thy bent,
'Tis the better way.
And I will seem to hold thy hand,
Like a child in dreams of Fairyland.
I must leave thee, love?
'Tis I must go?
Then as thou wilt,
For thou must know.
Let me but think I hold thy hand,
I'll roam content in any land.
