Ah, Marlowe, you cool cat.
One of the things you realize when you live in Los Angeles, or rather grow up in the city, you either love it, or hate it. It’s an ephemeral city, a joyous city, and for some a place where innocent ambitious dreams died. Today, I suppose we can’t think of Los Angeles without thinking of Hollywood, the Academy Awards, or Harvey Weinstein. But I’m gonna try to tell you a different story, one you may or may not know--a tale about a gumshoe detective, a murder, and a city.
First, we’re gonna talk about Marlowe. Philip Marlowe, what is the creation of an author by the name of Raymond Chand Chandler. You may know him from the movies, the big sleep, starring Humphrey, Bogart, and Lauren Bacall, but he really comes to life in the books, written by Chandler. My favorite, one of the series has to be "The Lady in the Lake," and I can’t forget my other ultra favorite "The Long Goodbye."
I read my first Chandler almost thirty years ago, and my god was it good. I never realized how beautiful the city like Los Angeles could be when it was portrayed in poetic prose. Chandlers' treatment of the city, as a mutable place, was truly remarkable. His books dealt with corruption in the Police force, corruption in Hollywood, and corruption within the monied elite. Yet, he wrote about all of it with a kind of hard boiled synergy, that has been pretty hard to beat. Let me give you an idea of what I mean--years ago, when I had read through the Marlow series, ending in "Playback," I started to read what I thought was the last book "Poodle Springs." Half way through, the entire style changed into really accessible, easy throwaway stuff. I pouted, but plowed through it. When I got to the ridiculous ending, I was outraged. I immediately went to my Dad (who turned me on to Chandler in the first place), and whined. I said that I recognized the style change, etc. He just laughed, and told me to look at the cover: I did, and saw that the book had also been written by modern crime writer, Robert Parker--a man who said that he was an aficionado of Chandler and Marlowe.
Take it from me, he was not. What he did do, was to put all of the characteristics of his main Joe, Spencer, into Marlow. I sorry to say this, Mr. Parker, but it was an abomination. That's what my Dad was laughing about. The end result, was that I knew I only had a limited number of books in which to enjoy the work of what became one of my favorite authors. Oh well.
Chandler's treatment of Los Angeles, as a place, I always thought was truly remarkable. His books dealt with corruption in the police force, corruption in Hollywood, and corruption within the monied elite. Operating within this matrix, was Marlow--a character rich with a complex mixture of honor, intelligence, and brutality. Here was someone who was as comfortable re-playing famous chess games, as he was pulling a gun on some guilty schmuck. But, then that always struck me as an accurate analogy of Los Angeles--two prominent faces of the city.
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen.From "Murder is My Business".
It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
-- The Big Sleep (1939), ch. 1, opening paragraph
Frankly, I find these glorious passages. Here's a guy who knows. He's lived there. He's felt the Santa Ana's. He's experienced a wet October in Southern California. But, he was never overly romantic about the city. He both loathed it, and loved it, I believe in equal parts.
A big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.-- Of Los Angeles, in: The Little Sister (1949), ch. 26
For me, from these pages, there emerged the complex ecosystem of Los Angeles in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. A place of murder and starlets. These 'mean streets' informed Marlow's character, and those with whom he came into contact.
When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn't have one. I didn't care. I finished the drink and went to bed.-- The Long Good-Bye (1953)
I guess you have to have a certain appetite for irony and violence. I do. I have developed a lasting appreciation for the city of my childhood. Hell, I adore it so much, I've never left.
In the post war era, the work of Chandler reflects the polarized atmosphere of the time--paranoia vs. innocence. In California, it was a place where Hollywood churned out cheap dreams, while the blueprint of America in the twentieth century was being laid. But, I've always thought that there was a kind of dry poetry to be found in this place, if one has the patience to look. What I loved about Chandler, is that he could find beauty anywhere--even in a dead body.
The depths cleared again. Something moved in them that was not a board. It rose slowly, with an infinitely careless languor, a long dark twisted something that rolled lazily in the water as it rose. It broke surface casually, lightly, without haste. I saw wool, sodden and black, a leather jerkin blacker than ink, a pair of slacks. I saw shoes and something that bulged nastily between the shoes and the cuffs of the slacks. I saw a wave of dark blond hair straighten out in the water and hold still for a brief instant as if with a calculated effect, and then swirl into a tangle again....The thing rolled over once more and an arm flapped up barely above the skin of the water and the arm ended in a bloated hand that was the hand of a freak. Then the face came. A swollen pulpy gray white mass without features, without eyes, without mouth. A blotch of gray dough, a nightmare with human hair on it.”
― The Lady in the Lake
In Chandler's books, there were always women, who were both nasty and sweet:
There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo’s rapier or Lucrezia’s poison vial. There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn’t care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them. And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent-mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.
The Long Goodbye.
Just gorgeous, but not all of his prose was this playful. Women could morph into a very dark, nasty something, really fast:
At eleven o'clock I was sitting in the third booth on the right-hand side as you go in from the dining-room annex. I had my back against the wall and I could see anyone who came in or went out. It was a clear morning, no smog, no high fog even, and the sun dazzled the surface of the swimming pool which began just outside the plateglass wall of the bar and stretched to the far end of the dining room. A girl in a white sharkskin suit and a luscious figure was climbing the ladder to the high board. I watched the band of white that showed between the tan of her thighs and the suit. I watched it carnally. Then she was out of sight, cut off by the deep overhang of the roof. A moment later I saw her flash down in a one and a half. Spray came high enough to catch the sun and make rainbows that were almost as pretty as the girl. Then she came up the ladder and unstrapped her white helmet and shook her bleach job loose. She wobbled her bottom over to a small white table and sat down beside a lumberjack in white drill pants and dark glasses and a tan so evenly dark that he couldn't have been anything but the hired man around the pool. He reached over and patted her thigh. She opened a mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn't hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed.
The Long Goodbye
Ouch. But, you can see what I mean, right? These passages have stayed with me for decades--literally stopped me in my tracks when I first read them. Somehow, they became for me, a way to conceptualize the city, or "the big nowhere" as James Ellroy once called it.
Chandler himself was hard to define. Always, his life was a mixture of being lost--never quite finding satisfaction with himself, or with his writing. Maybe it’s enough to just admire and appreciate his work. He spent the early part of his life in England before coming to America as a very young and innocent kid. He had various jobs, working once as a fairly successful executroid in an oil and gas company, but was fired when he kept coming into work drunk. This was to be a recurring theme in his life--the drinking I mean. Personally, I think too many people get caught up in the fact that he had a drinking problem. But people are more than their addictions, you know? There was also the relationship with his wife, who was so much older than he was (over a decade). But who cares?
She would be the belle of his ball, and he, the gin in her ginger. Or, so the story goes.
He began writing for pulp crime magazines, like "The Black Mask" it was the kind of magazine that paid a penny a word. It must have been quite an education for him. You can see echoes of the future Marlowe in many of these stories, but it was to be in his novels that I think one can appreciate him fully.
It was so quiet in Victor's that you almost heard the temperature drop as you came in at the door. On a bar stool a woman in a black tailormade, which couldn't at that time of year have been anything but some synthetic fabric like orlon, was sitting alone with a pale greenish-colored drink in front of her and smoking a cigarette in a long jade holder. She had that fine-drawn intense look that is sometimes neurotic, sometimes sex-hungry, and sometimes just the result of drastic dieting.
I sat down two stools away and the barkeep nodded to me, but didn't smile.
"A gimlet," I said. "No bitters."
He put the little napkin in front of me and kept looking at me. "You know something," he said in a pleased voice. "I heard you and your friend talking one night and I got me in a bottle of that Rose's Lime Juice. Then you didn't come back any more and I only opened it tonight."
"My friend left town," I said. "A double if it's all right with you. And thanks for taking the trouble."
He went away. The woman in black gave me a quick glance, then looked down into her glass. "So few people drink them around here," she said so quietly that I didn't realize at first that she was speaking to me. Then she looked my way again. She had very large dark eyes. She had the reddest fingernails I had ever seen. But she didn't look like a pickup and there was no trace of come-on in her voice. "Gimlets I mean."
"A fellow taught me to like them," I said.
---The Long Goodbye.
"825 pm: Woman screamed. Woman screamed again. It should be noted that [woman] did not scream again."
What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill. You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.
Obviously, that was from The Big Sleep.
These were the mean streets of LA, no romance, but a lot of grubby business inside these buildings. It was a dangerous environment, but oh so rich in it's history.
But right now, we are speaking of endings--
Closure is a preposterous concept worthy of the worst aspects of American daytime TV.
James Ellroy
