David Ludman RAYMOND CHANDLER: A BIOGRAPHY by Tom Hiney (Chatto & Windus, R150)
WERE it not for Raymond Chandler’s drunkenness we might never have had The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, The Long Goodbye and the other novels and short stories he gave us. The books Chandler produced in the Thirties and Forties are with us to this day, enjoyed and talked about by a readership that goes far beyond the confines of cultism.
He was more than a mere thriller writer: he was a considerable artist. My knowledge of Chandler country is confined to a brief visit to Los Angeles some years ago, but I felt quite at home there as I went down those streets, mean or otherwise, eerily expecting to run into everybody’s White Knight, that bruised moralist Philip Marlowe.
The name, incidentally, was suggested by Marlowe House at Dulwich College, South London, where Chandler started at 12 and completed his formal education (in classics) during the 17 years he lived in England. His Irish-born mother had taken him there from the American Midwest after divorcing her husband, a drunken railway engineer whom neither she nor her son ever saw again.
When Chandler returned to the United States at the age of 24, he was something of an Edwardian dandy with a penchant for writing poetry (“Georgian Grade B” in his own words), solid connections with literary magazines to which he contributed poems, book reviews and essays, and an attachment to a silver-topped cane, a straw boater, his old school tie and well-cut flannel suits.
It was during World War I that Chandler provided a foretaste of what was to come in the way of drinking: “When I was a young man in the RAF I would get so plastered that I had to crawl to my bed on my hands and knees, and at 7.30 the next morning, I would be as blithe as a sparrow and howling for my breakfast. It is not in some ways the most desirable gift.”
After some false starts and dead-end jobs, Chandler found his feet in a Los Angeles- based oil company where, over 12 years, he rose to become a senior executive with a fat pay packet who spent most of his free time drinking himself into a stupor, either alone or in the company of friends and business associates. Along the way he met and fell in love with the beautiful former model Cissy who divorced her husband to marry Chandler. She was 20 years his senior.
His favoured tipple was the gimlet: two parts gin and one part lime juice. In a jokey sketch written many years later, his reply to a doctor who asked him how much he drank was: “Not a terribly large amount, really. A bottle of scotch, eight or nine cocktails (doubles of course) and various wines at luncheon and dinner.”
By 1932 he was no longer as “blithe as a sparrow” and his boss at the oil company fired him because he was so often absent from work or drunk on the job.
And that was how Chandler, at the age of 44, came to turn his hand to writing. Over the next six years he honed his skills as a contributor of mystery stories to Black Mask, a pulp magazine which numbered Dashiell Hammett among its star attractions. The first of his seven Marlowe novels, The Big Sleep, published in 1939, was largely ignored by critics and met with little success. A similar fate awaited his subsequent books. It was only in 1943, during his spell in Hollywood as screenwriter and play-doctor, that the money began to roll in, not only from his work in Tinseltown but also from sales of his books as word of mouth took effect.
The death of Cissy in 1954 at the age of 84 saw Chandler’s slow and painful decline into an alcoholic wreck. The measure of the love he felt for her can be gauged from these words: “For 30 years, 10 months and four days, she was the light of my life, my whole ambition. Anything I did was just the fire for her to warm her hands at. That is all there is to say. She was the music heard faintly on the edge of sound.”
Tom Hiney is to be commended for his clear- eyed and quite startling account of Chandler the man, the lover, the wit and the artist. And perhaps, rather sadly, we owe a vote of thanks to the demon drink.
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