Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (70 page)

The jobs were, as in his novels, easier than the dames. Cissy had raised Chandler’s sights beyond the creamery. As the roaring twenties took off, Los Angeles was a city of opportunity: the West was wild again. Chandler went into the oil business and shot to the top. Within a couple of years he was earning a grand a month. In
a few years more he was a Vice President earning a whopping (for the mid-1920s) $40,000 p.a. It beat stringing racquets. Other things fell neatly into place. Florence died in 1924 and within days Chandler was able to marry Cissy. There would never until many years later be anything that could be called a home for the couple: just apartments, hotels, and, of course, no children. He loved the patter of little feet, Chandler said – running in the opposite direction.

The early years of the marriage were good. But as he rose up the executive ladder boozing, absenteeism and misconduct with secretaries led to Chandler’s being fired in 1932. It coincided with the Depression and what would be decades of semi-invalidism for the fast-ageing Cissy. For reasons that are mysterious, Chandler decided, close on forty-five, to give up drink and become a professional writer. He cocooned himself in cheap lodgings with Cissy, who seems, nobly, to have gone along with a suddenly hard life. For several years Chandler imposed a gruelling writer’s apprenticeship on himself. He chose crime writing, he said, because it was ‘honest’. Poverty, too, was ‘purifying’. The Chandlers scraped by on savings and what was left of her alimony.

He had set his sights on
Black Mask
, the magazine that had launched Dashiell Hammett, pioneering in its pages ‘hardboiled’ detective fiction and a classier product than was purveyed in the pulps. The hardboiled genre originates in one short story of Hemingway’s, ‘The Killers’. Nothing happens in the story. A couple of gangsters come into a ‘greasy spoon’ restaurant, engage in wisecracking, but laconic, badinage with the guy behind the counter. They’ve come to kill someone. That’s it. Chandler realised there was space in this new crime fiction genre (which Hemingway had immediately moved on from) to establish a whole new style, and over the late 1930s created a niche as a regular contributor to
Black Mask
. But he was not prolific; he could never turn stuff out at the speed of, for example, his new friend Erle Stanley Gardner. He cultivated a specialism in the Los Angeles-based ‘Private Eye’. By this point he knew LA, the canyons, boulevards, beaches and hills, as well as Hammett had known Baltimore – with the difference that his city was more interesting.

Hammett’s Sam Spade is the progenitor of Marlowe, although the Private Eye pedigree can be tracked at least as far back as 221b Baker Street. The name – tempting to literary critics as the supposition is – owes nothing to Conrad. Marlowe was one of the house names at Dulwich College. What Chandler perfected was voice. His favoured narrative mode is autobiographical – the tone is laconic, wise cracking, seen-it-all, reminiscential. His rhetoric can be categorised as a love of litotes, hyperbole, extravagant simile, zeugma. But above all he aimed at what he called ‘cadence’ – a quality which American literature (unlike English) sadly lacked. An
opening paragraph of his finest novel,
Farewell, My Lovely
(1940), will indicate the packed cadenzas (sudden falls) in his prose:

It was a warm day, almost the end of March, and I stood outside the barber shop looking up at the jutting neon sign of a second floor dine and dice emporium called Florian’s. A man was looking up at the sign too. He was looking up at the dusty windows with a sort of ecstatic fixity of expression, like a hunky immigrant catching his first sight of the Statue of Liberty. He was a big man but not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck … he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

Marlowe is, as usual, a
flâneur
, drawn in, not diving into, events. He is, by the end of
Farewell, My Lovely
, revealed as the only decent thing in LA, a city which, as in Nathanael West’s vision of it, is ripe for wrathful destruction. Chandler anatomised Marlovian Man in an essay, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1944) and its famous imperative: ‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.’ And why ‘must’?
Noblesse oblige
. Marlowe, as Chandler put it, is a ‘shop-soiled Galahad’ (and, like Galahad, sexually pure) in a world beyond salvation and whose filth he can never quite shake off and whose mean streets he can never leave. There is nothing west of the West Coast – no frontier left in which to exercise true American values.

Having perfected his instrument in
Black Mask
and conceived his hero (Philip Marlowe grew out of a PI called John Dalmas), Chandler broke into full-length fiction with
The Big Sleep
. The book was taken by a class publisher, Knopf, and sold reasonably. But the opinion-forming critics ignored it. It was the fate of the first four ‘Marlowes’ to be critically disregarded. Between
The Big Sleep
in 1939 and
The Little Sister
in 1949 Los Angeles was transformed from a sleepy little Western town to megalopolis: the city of the future. The same period saw also the massive growth of the film-studio system. Chandler and Cissy had been lifted from years of penury by his book (particularly paperback) royalties but re-entered the ranks of the seriously rich when Hollywood discovered Chandler. More particularly, the director Billy Wilder discovered him after reading
The High Window
(1942).

A short, bitter, marriage ensued, which produced a masterpiece. The two men hated each other: Wilder thought Chandler a pansy; Chandler thought the philandering hard-drinkingWilder a degenerate with the manners of an oaf. Moreover, the film Wilder had recruited him for was based on a short story by James M. Cain. If there was anything Raymond hated more than Billy it was the author of
Double Indemnity
: ‘James Cain – faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a
faux naïf
, a Proust in greasy overalls … Such people are
the offal of literature.’ None the less, out of this raging studio feud came the classic film
noir
for which, as scriptwriter, Chandler deserved an Oscar (he was nominated for a later, less worthy script for John Huston’s
The Blue Dahlia
, 1945). He went on to collaborate with Hitchcock on another classic in the dark genre,
Strangers on a Train
(1950). He had a higher estimate of Patricia Highsmith, although he thought her work overplotted – never a charge which would be levelled against the author of
The Big Sleep
, a work whose plot even the author himself could not explain to the director Howard Hawks, who adapted it with Chandler’s favourite screen Marlowe, Humphrey Bogart.

Hollywood, subsidiary rights, and radio franchise (a medium particularly congenial with Chandler’s style) meant that he would never, after 1945, be poor again. But Hollywood – as with Faulkner and Nathanael West – dismantled the carefully constructed defence systems which had allowed him to become a writer. Wilder, particularly, took a Mephistophelean glee in destroying Chandler. ‘Chandler was typical of a man who was an alcoholic and was on the wagon and was married to a very old lady, and so he had no sex and no booze … But the small revenge I had – because at the very end, he hated me – was that he started drinking again.’ Once again, as in those lost years in the oil business, it was the bottle in the briefcase, the long morning sessions that used up the whole day, and furtive adulteries – Cissy was closing on her seventies, chronically frail, and often seriously unwell. His own health was increasingly poor.

Chandler would grind out two more Marlowes –
The Little Sister
(1949) and the aptly named
The Long Good-Bye
(1953). Neither ranks with his best early work, although, so exiguous is his
oeuvre
, that one is very glad to have them. His fiction was always better thought of in his other home country, England, and positively revered by the French in its Gallimard
Série noire
livery. American critical opinion remained unimpressed and his work was accused of racist and misogynistic taints.

Cissy died in 1954 – she was eighty-four. Keeping her alive had been Chandler’s noblest achievement. With her gone, he fell apart. A few months later he attempted suicide in his shower (to prevent too much posthumous mess), aiming two shots at his head. So drunk was he that he missed. In 1955 he returned to England, enjoyed his fame (‘in England,’ he said, ‘I am an author’). He made a fool of himself – he had a poor head for drink at this stage – with a succession of women. Some of them, Natasha Spender notably, did their best to put him back together again, but all gave up, eventually. As he told Natasha, poignantly, ‘I know what you are all doing for me, and I thank you, but the truth is I really want to die.’

A few pieces of writing sputtered out along with a stream of lonely long lovely letters to anyone whose address he happened to have in his address book. They were
written in his long insomniac nights when all that comforted him was his typewriter and his extraordinary gift with words. He died exhausted in hospital in La Jolla, California. One knows far too much about the foolish, drink-addled Chandler of the 1950s and far too little about the first fifty years of his life. The big question remains unanswered: why, in the mid-1930s, did he turn to writing crime novels? And how did this man – whose personal life is so pathetic – create such wonderful crime novels?

I intensify the so-called small things.

Few authors’ lives rival Katherine Mansfield’s for chaos. It is as if she were blown into shrapnel reassembled as collections of short stories. She was, she proclaimed, a writer first and a woman second. Ottoline Morrell, the Bloomsbury hostess, said Mansfield was as aware of being a writer as Victoria was of being a queen. She was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp: the variant forenames and surnames she would adopt for herself through life are the bane of biographers. As baneful for those close to her was that with every different name they encountered a different woman. Multiple personality was not with Mansfield a disorder but a vocation. She had, she boasted, ‘hundreds of selves’. Her father Harold had but one and that, by dull colonial standards, admirable. A New Zealand import merchant, he rose to become a magnate and, simultaneously with his daughter’s death, Sir Harold. The title would not have impressed her; the irony might have done.

Harold outlived his daughter to read her published satires on him (most scathingly in ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’). None the less he supported her through life with an annual allowance without which she could never have been a ‘writer first’. The big event in her childhood, chronicled in ‘Prelude’, was the family move in 1893 from Wellington to a rural home at Karori. It is only at such moments – between things – that, for Mansfield, the ‘real self is found’. In ‘Prelude’, written twenty years after the move it chronicles, there is no ‘event’ but central foci on the mother’s dream of the horrors of childbirth, the benign impercipience of fathers, and an aloe growing in the new house’s garden. It is an infinitely slow plant, associated with
bitterness, which flowers every hundred years. It may flower this year – but the bitterness is always present.

In 1903 Beauchamp sent his daughters to be ‘finished’ at Queen’s College, London. Kathleen’s three years at the famously progressive establishment in Harley Street were formative. Here she met the bosom friend, Ida Baker (self-renamed, androgynously, ‘Lesley Moore’) whom she would regard as her ‘wife’. Mansfield read Ibsen and – most momentously – the contaminating Oscar Wilde. She travelled to the Continent and felt cosmopolitan. At this point it seemed her musical ability as a cellist would be her career.

She returned, unwillingly, to New Zealand. By the standards of her class she was now indeed ‘finished’. She should, following the social script written for her, have settled down, had children, and been content, as she contemptuously saw it, sitting on the veranda shelling peas for supper. She rebelliously published some small pieces in local papers and had a couple of lesbian flings – one with a Maori. The first resolution in her infant diary had been to grow up a Maori missionary. Not, of course, an apostle of interracial free love. New Zealand was too small and – paradoxically – too ‘English’ to hold her. ‘My heart keeps flying off to Oxford Circus – Westminster Bridge at the Whistler hour’, she sighed in the privacy of her journal. She finally nagged her father into sending her back to London with an allowance, with the vague expectation that she would pursue a career in music. In her heart she already saw herself as a writer.

She left the colony in July 1908 never to return, other than in her stories. In London, Ida Baker was again her anchor. She needed one. Her life, over the next ten years, was tempestuous. She fell in love with an expatriate New Zealand musician, Arnold Trowell. He did not love her, and she got herself pregnant by his twin brother Garnet. He would not marry her so she persuaded her music teacher, George Bowden (many years her senior) to make an honest woman of her at the Register Office. She wore mourning to the ceremony and spent her wedding night with Ida: the marriage was never consummated. Her mother, on being informed, came over and packed her errant daughter off to a German spa, where she miscarried. On learning that there had also been lesbian entanglements, Mrs Beauchamp disinherited her degenerate daughter. Mansfield put together her first collection,
In a German Pension
(1911), out of the experience. She was now Katherine Mansfield: she disinherited her family.