Jennifer Howard Washington Post Book World Contributing Editor Thursday, July 31, 2003; 3:00 p.m ET
Welcome to the online meeting of The Washington Post Book Club, a monthly program presented by the editors and writers of Washington Post Book World. Post Book World Contributing Editor Jennifer Howard will be leading the discussion on this month's selection, 'The Long Goodbye' by Raymond Chandler. The transcript follows. Editor's Note: washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.
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Jennifer Howard: Hello, and welcome to the WashPost Book Club's online discussion of Raymond Chandler's "The Long Goodbye." Thanks for bearing with the scheduling change; the website was having some techno-difficulties at noon, so we pushed the time back. Glad you found us.
So it's a good day here in DC to be talking about Chandler: a little gloomy, a little grim. Even the weather's a little world-weary. Looking at the novel again the past few days, I noticed how much the sun-and-smog-drenched L.A. locales play against Marlowe's outlook, which tends to be a rainy-day one. Chandler doesn't hit it too overtly, but it comes up time and again. The sunnier-seeming the person or place--the "blonde dream" Eileen Wade, the playground-of-the-rich Idle Valley where she and Roger live--the more the shadows collect around them.
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Lenexa, Kan.: Ms. Howard: Enjoyed the novel, your write-up, and the Knopf (Alfred and Blanche were the original "superstars") letters. Some reactions (your comments? Thanks much):
o Great story line, characters (Marlowe as morality's "final arbiter", the shadowy Lennox, the lusty Potter daughters/Eileen Wade), witty dialogue, biting sarcasm, the LA milieu.
o Chandler's incomparable phrasing: "I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split." (Auden famously said Chandler's "Great Wrong Place" criminal milieu corpus should be judged "not as escape literature, but as works of art.").
o Marlowe's learned presentations of the publishing magnate (quoting Bagehot), the alcoholic novelist (quipping about great drunken writers), the Howard-educated Loring chauffeur (quoting Eliot).
o The Hawks' film "The Big Sleep" was much more satisfying than Altman's (love Altman in general) "The Long Goodbye". Also, Chandler--for all his Hollywood sarcasm--wrote great screenplays: "Double Indemnity", "Blue Dahlia", "Strangers on the Train".
Jennifer Howard: Greetings, Lenexa! Nice to have you back again. Very glad you liked the book--it's one of my favorites, but I'm a sucker for almost anything by Chandler (though I haven't read all of them).
People sometimes complaine about Chandler that his plots can be too hard to follow and that there are too many loose ends that don't get tied up. I think it was Chandler who said that when you didn't know what to do with a story, have a man come into the room with a gun.
"The Long Goodbye" suffers less from that than some of the other books do. I think that's because of the book's strong emotional engine--Marlowe's loyalty to and betrayal by Terry Lennox, which plays out against the half-personal, half-professional relationship he develops with the Wades.
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Jennifer Howard: Lenexa, you also mention those great Chandler lines. (I love the line you quoted.) We could talk about them all day--even when they're completely over the top, they're great. "The Long Goodbye" is one of his late books, so he'd had time to work over his style (like the cops work over Marlowe) and let it run.
Here's a comment on that, from a letter he wrote in 1952:
"You [meaning himself] write in a style that has been imitated, even plagirised, to the point where you begin to look as if you were imitating your imitators. So you have to go where they can't follow you. The danger is that the reader won't either."
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Jennifer Howard: Mostly the reader *does* hang in there with him.
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Washington, D.C.: First of all, Terry Lennox isn't a "case" that falls into Marlowe's lap--he's a stranger Marlowe runs across and befriends. When Terry disappears and sends the $5,000 bill, it's the apparent end of a friendship (or maybe the end of an apparent friendship), not the end of a job. Babysitting Roger Wade is the only "case" Marlowe undertakes in the novel, and it's not really a worthy job for an investigator.
The Long Goodbye was Chandler's only attempt to write a novel that goes beyond his chosen genre, replacing the exagerated pulp fiction characters with equally damaged types from the real world. But it falls short of standing alone as a non-mystery novel. That's not really because of its mystery elements, which are sparse, but because much of its effect depends on knowledge of Marlowe and the evolving tone of the novels that went before. If you don't know them, you can't put Marlowe's mental fatigue into context.
When I say "falls short," I don't mean that in a negative way. Who needs another nondescript maintstream novel when you can have a new, and much deeper, Marlowe novel?
One last comment: Chandler allows Marlowe to make fun of T. S. Eliot in The Long Goodbye, but I believe that Chandler himself was beginning to empathize a little with Mr. Prufrock.
Jennifer Howard: Thanks for the reaction. You misread the tone of my writeup. I was playing with the lingo of the genre, whose lesser examples do reduce people and situations to cases and jobs. As you say, Lennox is much more than that to Marlowe--and yet he's also a case in the sense of case study of humanity, through which some very complicated philosphical stuff gets worked out. Marlowe took a shine to him, sure, but if some other guy in trouble had crossed his path, Marlowe would have probably helped him too. People, in a sense, are his mission, his job, though he'd never admit it.
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Alexandria, Va.: Quite a Long (378 pg.) Goodbye to Terry Lennox! What I liked about the book:
1. The flowery prose - "An hour crawled by like a sick cockroach" (but I prefer Hammett's action).
2. The visits to the quack Doctor V's.
3. Roger Wade's death - I didn't see that one coming! I was holding out for Randy Starr to be the murderer - he was the shoe that didn't drop. Chandler nicely handled the sex games between Eileen and Phillip - who was playing who?
My wife contributes that Marlowe is an exitentialist hero, who exists to provide a counterpoint to evil. This explains to me why he didn't collect any money along the way - he was a puzzle solver. Best paragraph in the book:
"The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have styed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss's daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich--small-town rich, an eight room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Porland cement. You take it friend. I'll take the big sordid dirty crowded city."
I imagine many Washington Post readers would agree!
Jennifer Howard: Yeah, it's very much a city dweller's book--Idle Valley, which is the rich end of suburbia, is about as close to hell as Marlowe gets. He prefers the city jail, where at least they do their jobs and don't make noise about it.
The Doctors V are outrageous, all 3 of them. Makes you wonder whether Chandler had had some bad encounters with the medical profession or whether he just paid attention to what was going on in L.A., a town where pill-popping seems to be a recreational sport, at least if you believe the accounts of Chandler and other social critics.
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Crofton, Md.: Was Wade himself, the alcoholic writer, based on a real person?
Jennifer Howard: Good question. I don't think so, but maybe someone out there has other information. I'm trying to think of the big historical bestsellers of the 1950s--Irving Howe, maybe? Let's hope he had a happier life than Roger Wade did.
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Alexandria, Va.: Rather than a question, this is a comment for the general population of Chandler fans. I addresses a curio that some might be interested in.
A few years ago I purchased a "Raymond Chandler Mystery Map" showing the locations of significant actions in the seven novels, from The Big Sleep through Playback. The map covers Los Angeles, Hollywood, Santa Monica (Bay City) and other areas. It shows over 90 points of interest, including various places where Marlowe lived and where he had his office. I don't know if the map is still available, but interested parties could check.
I got it from:
Raymond Chandler Mystery Map
1800 S. Robertson Blvd #130
Los Angeles, CA 90035.
Jennifer Howard: Thanks for letting us know about it. Makes me want to get back to L.A. and take a Chandler tour.
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Crofton, Md.:
I'm a huge Raymond Chandler fan, having read the High Window and The Big Sleep, both classics. This novel contained all the chandler trademarks; his great wit, wonderful metaphors and tough guy cynicisim.
Also his compassion for Terry Lentz the underdog. Compassion wasn't always present
in the other stories.
Jennifer Howard: You get flickers of that compassion in some of the earlier books, but it's not as highly developed. I'm thinking of the unlikely soft spot Marlowe has for the big guy who, in the opening bit of "Farewell My Lovely," tears up a bar looking for information on his gal, who's taken off.
But Lennox really gets to Marlowe, who in "The Long Goodbye" is 42 years old and has had plenty of reasons to be disappointed in people. He's a sensitive guy, Marlowe, and he picks up on Terry's weakness and vulnerability, as well as some decent quality in him, and wants to protect him from the rottenness in the world. Maybe Terry's a proxy for some softer qualities of Marlowe's that Marlowe usually can't show, as well as a reason to demonstrate some old-fashioned virtues like loyalty.
It bothers me a little that Marlowe is so hard on Terry at the end of the book. Granted, Terry's betrayed his trust, but it doesn't feel exactly right or fair that Marlowe should turn on his friend's weakness after trying to protect it from and explain it to everybody else. If, as he says, Terry suffers from some sort of essential rather than chosen weakness of character, can't he be forgiven a little?
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Alexandria, Va.:
Speaking of the publishing magnate, I kept
reading Harlan Potter and thinking Harry Potter.
Jennifer Howard: Hey, maybe that's where J.K. Rowling got the idea! Who knows? She culls things from all over the place. Although Harlan's more Voldemort than boyish hero....the quintessential evil capitalist.
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Falls Church, Va.: Just wondering how/why you chose this book for this month's discussion and how you choose Book Club selections in general.
Jennifer Howard: We pick books we like and want to reread and talk about--it's as whimsical as that. And they have to be in print, so that readers can get their hands on copies. Other than that, no criteria.
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Washington, D.C.: Was Chandler the first of his genre -- hard-boiled -- or just the best of his genre?
Jennifer Howard: Not the first in the genre, but you could call him one of its founding fathers, one of the guys who established it as a real literary form. If you look at the contributors to the pulp magazine of the '20s and '30s--outfits like Black Mask, Argosy, Detective Fiction Weekly--you see the seminal names: Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raoul Whitfield, Carroll John Daly and others. And of course Chandler, who published a bunch of short stories in Black Mask beginning in 1933 before he moved on to novels. You can find some of the stories in "The Simple Art of Murder," which Vintage republished recently.
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Arlington, Va.: Were any Chandler books turned into movies?
Jennifer Howard: Lots of them, most famously "The Big Sleep" (with Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe) and infamously "The Long Goodbye" (with--wince--Elliot Gould as Marlowe.) Chandler worked in Hollywood for a while too, on movies like "The Blue Dahlia" with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. He also collaborated with Billy Wilder on the "Double Indemnity" screenplay.
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Elgin, S.C.: Chandler makes an interesting contrast between Phillip Marlowe and the alcoholic writer Roger Wade.
Marlowe often talks about what a rotten, hypocritical town L.A. is, but he chooses to live there, deliberately chooses not to pursue the American Dream of a house with five kids and a mortgage. That kind of life, he seems to say, is not only a dead end, but one which avoids the real challenge of facing this glorious hellhole of despair headon
Roger, on the other hand, is a resident; he lives the good life by writing historical romances about a world which he knows never existed: a fanciful past that was actually far less sanitary and sensual than he claims. The real world of the esteemed past was, of course, as much of a cesspool as the world he lives in. He's a liar and a fake, and he's been one so long that he has to wash away the nightmare of what he has become with booze – but of course, as we learn, there’s another memory he’s trying to wash away as well. He lives that L.A. dream people want, and it has exhausted him.
Marlowe's life, for all its shortcomings, isn't lived dishonestly. His ethics can be slippery, but there's a moral core to him which keeps him from falling victim to the allure of the easy way out.
Jennifer Howard: Very astute points you make. Roger Wade has the makings of a tragic hero; Eileen pulls the trigger, but he's already undone himself. It breaks my heart when he says to Marlowe: "I'm a writer. . . . I'm supposed to understand what makes people tick. I don't understand one damn thing about anybody." And then there's his assessment of his work: "All writers are punks and I'm one of the punkest. I've written twelve bestsellers . . . not a damn one of them worth the poweder to blow it all to hell. . . . I'm an egotistical son of a bitch, a literary prostitute or pimp--choose your own word--and an all-around heel. So what can you do for me?"
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Lenexa, Kan.: Not that it would affect the Rowling hypothesis, the publishing magnate may have been "Howard Spencer." "Potter", like the general in "The Big Sleep", was the unfortunate father of two tarts.
Also, have you looked at Robert B. Parker's Marlowe novels? (Was there one Chandler "completion" and one "in the style of"?) The highly prolific (and talented) Parker is old enough to have known Chandler. Is there a connection or was it just a matter of perhaps the Chandler estate approaching Parker? Just wondering? Thanks again.
Jennifer Howard: There's Howard Spencer, Roger Wade's well-read, oily New York editor who has a strange interest in Eileen, and there's Harlan Potter, who's a newspaper magnate and one not very nice guy. And a bad dad, too.
I haven't read Parker's Marlowe novels. Should I? Usually I'm suspicious of one writer's taking another writer's character--make up your own, you know?
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Alexandria Va.: As Marlowe approaches the Wade house you get the feeling of quiet, silence, broken only by the sound of sprinklers watering the lawns. This is like the opening of the Big Sleep, where the only sound is provided by the oil wells in the distance, pumping wealth for General Sternwood.
Jennifer Howard: Ah, good observation. Idle Valley tends to be as silent as the grave. There's one bit in there where the lake is absolutely, almost unnaturally calm, without a ripple. It's telling.
Marlowe, in keeping with his sensitive side, tends to be aware of his surroundings (it's also a good self-defensive maneuver). At least three times in his own house he notices the mockingbirds singing outside the window--three observations, three variations on a theme.
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Washington, D.C.: About those screenplays: Wilder used much of Chandler's work in Double Indemnity, and The Blue Dahlia was filmed word-for-word, but Hitchcock did not use much of Chandler's work in Strangers onb a Train.
Jennifer Howard: Here's a further comment about Chandler and Hollywood.
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Alexandria, Va.: Doctors - Don't forget the 4th bad one, Loring. Even he couldn't heal a 'ruptured duck'.
Idle Valley slogan: "Absolutely no Central Europeans".
Jennifer Howard: Oh, he's terrible--a prissy caricature, but an effective one. Don't you want to slap him? It's very gratifying that his wife gets free of him and falls into Marlowe's arms (after champagne, natch). Speaking of, she turns up again in the last novel, "Playback," and there's a hint that she and Marlowe might live happily ever after, if you can imagine such a thing in Chandler's world.
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Lenexa, Kan.: Thanks and "hello" back. Re Chandler as a writer of "works of art," I recall in one of the letters to Mrs. Knopf Chandler saying "Because I am not innately a hack writer..."
I liked Marlowe's fascination with chess problems (perhaps solving some of Nabokov's) and his translation of chess gambits into the posturings and opening dialogues he had with the assortment of "blondes" (and with law officials and thugs).
Also, did you enjoy the exchange where the journalists out "hamlet-ed" the politicians?
Jennifer Howard: I'm always in favor of journalists outwitting politicians!
The recurring chesss motif is interesting. I don't think of Marlowe as an intellectual--smart guy, yes--and I associate chess players, perhaps unfairly, with a cerebral way of life that Marlowe doesn't seem to fit into. But he makes it clear he's read the classics, so maybe it fits. As a way of commenting on the action, too, it works.
The soliloquy on blondes is a tour de force but, to tell you the truth, it bothers me too. There's a misogyny in it that I don't usually associate with Marlowe. Not to get too feminista here, but only a man who was bitter about women could deliver that speech. And yet Marlowe does get the (a) girl--a brunette, though, and maybe that makes all the difference.
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Dulles, Va.: You mention in your write-up how this book could have been written very recently. What aspects to you seem most modern? I guess the aspects of corruption are still very familiar to us. Characters who abuse their authority seem to be much on Marlowe's mind in this one.
Jennifer Howard: Hello, Dulles! You put your finger on it exactly--the corruption that spreads through society, from the cops who beat up on prisoners (it didn't start with the Rodney King case), to the rich who try to buy their way out of trouble, to the lapdog lawyers who do their bidding...the list goes on.
There are forces for good, too, who get their due from Marlowe and Chandler: Even some of the cops, like Bernie Ohls. When Marlowe shakes a man's hand, it means something.
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Austin, Tex.: Speaking of Chandler's style, etc., how much do you think he owes (if anything) to Hammett? Do you think there's a lineage there, or are they just sharing the same genre?
Jennifer Howard: I'm ashamed to say that I haven't read enough Hammett to give you an educated answer to that question. Hammett's been on my list for a long time. What do you think? Anybody else out there want to offer up an opinion?
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Waldorf, Md.: Hi. All praise to whoever suggested this book for the chat--great idea.
Can't resist mentioning one of the greatest lines in the book, the last sentence of chapter 24, where Marlow comes home and plays (replays) one of the great grandmasters' chess games, and he praises chess for its great intellectual qualities, and then adds it is "as elaborate a waste human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency."
Terrific! (And of course Chandler works in an ad agency, so ought to know.)
Jennifer Howard: That would be me :). Really glad you're an LG fan, and you hit on one of the best lines--way to dismiss Madison Avenue in one line, as if it's not worth more words than that. I'd forgotten the aside about chess being a grand waste of human intelligence. That puts a spin on Marlowe's intellectual life, doesn't it?
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Lenexa, Kan.: That does seem exactly right about the great lines like "about as conspicuous as a tarantula on a wedding cake." We need to remember he coined the genre. I had a couple other favorites written in one of my notebooks:
"Her whole body shivered and her face fell apart like a bride's pie crust."
"The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show girl uses her last good pair of stockings."
Jennifer Howard: And there's the immortal "She was a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window." (Not sure I've got it verbatim.
I never can get a pie crust right, either.
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Alexandria, Va.: So was the alcoholic novelist Chandler or a portrait of another author?
It amazes me how violent 50s cops were. They weren't chary about roughing up suspects. People keep threatening to make Marlowe missing. I wouldn't want to be his pal - his pals end up DOA.
Other favorite lines, collected from the book:
"trouble is my line of work"
"the surprise was as thin as the gold on a weekend wedding ring."
"the commercials would've sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and beer bottles"
"she opened her mouth and that terminated my interest"
"as naked as a September morning but a darn sight less coy"
the Sheriff was "the Ham that smokes itself"
"At three A.M. I was walking the floor and listening to Khatchaturyan working in a tractor factory. He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it."
Jennifer Howard: I'm coming to the conclusion that it's impossible to run out of good Chandlerisms.
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Elgin, S.C.: Irving Howe or Irving Wallace? I think Howe mostly wrote literary criticism, and Wallace came after the book's time.
Jennifer Howard: I got my Irvings confused, as I so often do. I was thinking of Irving Wallace ("The Agony and the Ecstasy") but there must be others who could have fed into the inspiration for Roger Wade. (Note to Wallace fans: I'm not suggesting he was a wife-beater and a drunk.)
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Washington, D.C.: Me again. I wan't mocking your write-up, just pointing out that this book differs from the earlier ones in that Marlowe becomes involved on a different level in other people's lives. He is not just a knight in tarnished armor, pulling hapless people out of trouble and then fading into the shadows. He gets tangled up, and it bothers him. In fact, it makes him realize that he has always been tangled up, and left with nothing in the end. He doesn't want the money, but now he's not sure if being the fix-it man for stray humans is enough. The finale of Playback is the embarrasing comeupance of this trend in Chandlers's emotions--oops, I mean Marlowe's.
Jennifer Howard: That's an excellent way of describing what happens to Marlowe in this book. You're exactly right--he's tangled up, and the more he feels it, the more tangled up he gets. It is a real evolution in Chandler's work.
Here's another quote, from that same 1952 letter:
"You can write constant action and that is fine if you really enjoy it. But alas, one grows up, one becomes complicated and unsure, one becomes interested in moral dilemmas, rather than who cracked who on the head. And at that point perhaps one should retire and leave the field to younger and more simpler men.. . . Anyhow I wrote this as I wanted to because I can do that now. I didn't care whether the mystery was fairly obvious, but I cared about the people, about this strange corrupt world we live in, and how any man who tried to be honest looks in the end either sentimental or plain foolish."
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Somewhere, USA -- re: other Marlow/Chandler movies:
Robert Mitchum played him in Farewell My Lovely (and also another version of The Big Sleep), Robert Montgomery played him in The Lady in the Lake, George Montgomery in The Brasher Doubloon (based on The High Window)Dick Powell in Murder My Sweet, James Garner in Marlowe (based on The Little Sister). Bogart's Big Sleep is unquestionably the best; and Garner's Marlowe isn't bad.
A bunch of people played him on television including Dick Powell, Gerald Mohr (and old favorite of mine) and, improbably, Danny Glover, who got an award for his portrayal.
Jennifer Howard: And still more of the Hollywood pedigree. Thanks.
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Alexandria, Va.: I think that Marlowe was driven by his own moral clock, much the way chess pieces are pushed around the board. Terry should've gotten a fair share because he was a fall guy. Terry didn't deserve the fair shake, which Chandler showed at the end.
Jennifer Howard: Good analogy, which Chandler was also making. So you think Marlowe gave Terry what he deserved? I still wouldn't have minded a little more generosity there.
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Somewhere, USA -- Re: who was Roger Wade based on?: Part of me thinks Wade was a variation of Hemingway, the hard-drinking soldier-of-fortune type like Wade. However, Wade is a hack writer who writes bodice-rippers (and hates himself for it). So if he was based on anybody "real," it would necessarily be a hack no one's ever heard of. (Chandler wouldn't have known it, since it didn't happen yet, but Hemingway committed suicide, and Wade gives it a half-assed attempt.)
Jennifer Howard: Funny you mention Hemingway. At points in "The Long Goodbye," Chandler's style is so . . . Chandleresque that if one were unkindly disposed to it, it might seem like a self-parody. Something Hemingway has often been accused of.
I'm inclined to think that Wade wasn't based on any real person in particular but embodies certain things that troubled Chandler about publishing and about what happens when creative people lose track of themselves in pursuit of success. There's an ongoing critique of publishing in the novel--another aspect that feels very contemporary. When Marlowe meets Wade's editor, for instance, Spencer tells him how every publisher needs a blockbuster or two. Some things never change--always the eye on the old bottom line.
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Alexandria, Va.: Final thoughts ... I kept wondering why Marlowe didn't take any money for his work, I would've cashed the Madison and scooted. Does he do this in his other books? ... I'm glad that somebody finally had sex at the end, all that foreplay was giving me "hot pants" ... I've never been to a cocktail party where someone gets a drink tossed in their face - maybe I should move to L.A.!
Jennifer Howard: In the earlier books, if I recall rightly, Marlowe's never real flush with cash. At least he keeps the $500 from the coffe can for expenses. The portrait of Madison, though, really is blood money to him, and he couldn't spend it even if he was down to his last nickel. One of the big themes throughout the story is how much money does and shouldn't matter, which Marlowe's refusal to get paid for his "services" reinforces.
Marlowe has some luck with women in earlier books, too--I guess we go for hard-luck gumshoes with hearts of gold and the right wisecrack.
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Washington, D.C.: I was once a Parker fan, but after he took it upon himself to write about Marlowe, that was it for me. No more Parker.
Jennifer Howard: Then I won't bother.
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Elgin, S.C.:
I’ve seen Altman’s film several times and only this week read the book. I knew before I started that the differences were many, and that Altman’s film was a very revisionist take on the novel, but I never knew how much until I read it. The screenplay for the Altman film totally invents one character named Marty Augustine, who has this horribly violent and spontaneous scene where he smashes a battle against a woman’s face. His Wade, as I remember, actually does commit suicide by drowning himself. And of course the ending is totally different – Marlowe goes to Mexico and kills Terry. But it’s a movie you have to take very much on Altman’s terms. He was refashioning him as a kind of anti-hero, closer to Jean-Paul Belmondo in “Breathless” than Bogart in “The Big Sleep.” Marlowe as played by Elliot Gould spends a great deal of the movie saying “It’s okay with me”; he has the kind of casual air of someone who is cool and accepting of everything. The Lennox case puts him in a situation that is decidedly not “okay” – something he can’t quite shrug off. Very, very different from the book – but it works on its own terms.
Jennifer Howard: The Altman version tends to be much hated among Chandler fans. I watched it a couple of weeks ago and was bored more than angry--it's a very '70s film and asks for a lot of patience from the viewer. I read somewhere that Altman had the cast read "Raymond Chandler Speaking," a collection of letters, so he was certainly aware of what Chandler had in mind. Which means he wanted to take the movie in a very different direction, maybe undermining those old-fashioned virtues Marlowe stands for by making him a figure of fun. If you're an Altman fan, maybe it works. It didn't for me.
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Herndon, Va.: Chandler knew drinks and drinking.
I don’t have the book in front of me and it’s been a while since I read it last but I recall some droll barside exchanges between Marlow and Lennox, Terry talking about taking his first drink of the day, the bartender laying out his implements like a conductor raising his baton to bring on the orchestra’s opening notes.
And another line somewhere where Terry compares that first drink to true love’s first kiss, but the second drink is just taking the girl’s clothes off.
Am I mis-remembering this?
The thing with Chandler is he was able to condense all of the above into ten or twelve words. A rough kind of poetry, outlining the simultaneous dimensions of disgust and decay. An expense of spirit in a waste of shame.
Jennifer Howard: "A rough kind of poetry" is a nice phrase. And yet it's very polished in its way, too.
" 'Alcohol is like love,' he said. 'The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.'
'Is that bad?' I asked him."
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Lenexa, Kan.: Of course I meant "inconspicuous" not "conspicuous" on the wedding cake. That's the trouble with us mere mortals playing above our head. Reminds me of an old J. Wesley Smith cartoon: "Very nice, Rembrandt, but how about a little more color?"
Jennifer Howard: Hah!
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Washington, D.C.: Chandler certainly admired Hammett and was influenced, but I think he felt Hammett remained too hard. Chandler was bothered by the most hard-boiled of his own stories, and when he borrowed from them for his novels, he made things a bit more subtle.
Did you know that Chandler taught himself to write crime novels by making an outline of an Erle Stanley Gardner book, and then rewriting it?
Jennifer Howard: I did not know that. Very cool. Thanks for the info.
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Waldorf, Md.again: Yes, but the chess quote is a double spin--not only does Marlow call chess a "waste" --but he himself indulges in it frequently, even so. Dissing Madison avenue is yet the third layer of this single sentence--and we haven't even parsed the first two-thirds of the line!
Jennifer Howard: Chandler knows how to pack it in.
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Washington, D.C.: "Chandler worked in an ad agency"? I don't think so -- he would have starved first.
Jennifer Howard: According to "Raymond Chandler: A Literary Reference," he worked, among other things, as a bookkeeper at the L.A. Creamery and with Dabney Oil Syndicate, where he eventually became VP--and then got fired in 1932 for drinking and absenteeism. He had better things to do with his time. He also, as a very young man, strung tennis rackets for a sporting-goods company.
I suppose bookkeeping for an oil company is, in some unsavory way, like advertising.
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Washington, D.C.: RE; Parker: Wow, I didn't know I had such influence. My attitude about Parker is like Marlowe's about Terry: loyalty and decency are everything, and other sterling qualities don't make up for them. (I almost miss Parker's Spencer novels, but they were sort of knock-off Chandler imitations, anyway.)
Jennifer Howard: Always stick to the real thing--that's my motto.
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Lenexa, Kan.: Re Elgin's interesting posting, I always assumed that Marty Augustine was based (at least loosely) on Menendez.
Of course, Wade's no Faulkner (Who is?) but surely the great man had a part in inspiring the alcoholic Wade. I always remember Faulkner saying "I only wrote because I couldn't stay drunk all the time." Faulkner, as you know, was one of the screenwriters for "The Long Goodbye."
Jennifer Howard: That's what I figured too. He's a lot nastier in the movie.
Yeah, if you're talking about drunk writers, you have to work Faulkner in somewhere. Where would American literature be without bourbon?
And it's almost happy hour, so we've go to scram. ("I never saw any of them again--except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.") Thanks to everybody for a suitably hard-boiled discussion--provocative thoughts and comments all--and please come visit next month, when my colleague Jabari Asim will be online to talk about "Bombingham" by Anthony Grooms.
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