Down these mean streets

I recently relocated from the Metro DC area to Metro Seattle. This move involved being housed in a corporate apartment for the past two weeks with nothing but what I brought with me on the flight from Dulles.

I had less than three weeks to organize this move. I did my best in the circumstances, but for some reason I only put four books in my luggage. (If you’re interested, they were Strapless, a “history” of John Singer Sargent’s “Portrait of Madame X”, which I do not recommend; Final Salute: A Story of unfinished Lives, based on Jim Sheeler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of notifications of families of service members killed in the current wars—also over-written, but still worth a read; The War Works Hard, by Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail—recommended without reservation; and Trouble Is My Business, a collection of four short stories by Raymond Chandler.)

This aggregation barely lasted three days. Fortunately, it turns out that my corporate apartment is a block away from the largest branch of the King County Public Library. And they’ll let you get a card on your say-so that you live in the area (two-book limit on checking things out until you prove your bona fides). And so I had a card within a day of arriving.

On the back of Trouble, I felt like reconnecting with Chandler—when you are uprooted and plonked down in an alien environment, comfort reading is a bit like comfort food. It gets you over the hard parts. I’m not a fan of meatloaf and I gag at mac and cheese; but favorite books are like Moët Brut Imperial—they go down silky and leave you lighter when you’re done. So I checked out Volume I of the Library of America’s collection of Chandler’s stories and novels, and have been wallowing in blood, bruises and bourbon for a week.

It’s a blast from many pasts.

I discovered Chandler as a junior in college—introduced by a gentleman caller who lived smack in Philip Marlowe’s Hollywood territory. At that time (cusp of the 80s), the streets around Cahuenga, Franklin, Gower and Sunset were still pretty mean. A lot of the buildings there dated from the 20s and 30s, so Marlowe could well have known them.

I read most the oeuvre over a summer and picked up the left-over bits within a couple of years. I revisited one or two of the stories in the intervening years; but this is the first time I’ve delved deeply back into that world for 20 years. (I’ve not been back to Hollywood for about that time span; I wonder what’s changed there?)

I have to say—no one can open a story like Chandler. He uses language like a diner uses the smell of bacon and coffee to lure you into his world. One of my favorites:

"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. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."

That’s from “Red Wind”. Anyone who’s ever experienced a Santa Ana—even in the age of air conditioning and the ubiquitous water bottle—will recognize the condition. You can’t read that story without feeling your skin cracking with dryness.

One that I’ve always loved is the beginning of Farewell, My Lovely—not, technically, the opening graf, but this description of Moose Malloy comes on the first page, and once you read it, he’ll be ingrained in your cortex:

“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 was about ten feed away from me. His arms hung loose at his sides and a forgotten cigar smoked behind his enormous fingers.

“Slim quiet negroes passed up and down the street and stared at him with darting side glances. He was worth looking at. He wore a shaggy borsalino hat, a rough gray sports coat with white golf balls on it for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated gray flannel slacks and alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes. From his outer breast pocket cascaded a show handkerchief of the same brilliant yellow as his tie. There were a couple of colored feathers tucked into the band of his hat, but he didn’t really need them. Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”

Moose—like so many of us—is looking for love in the wrong place, and within a few pages he’s murdered the manager of Florian’s in his search for little Velma, who used to sing and dance there—eight years ago.

But my all-time favorite is from The Long Goodbye:

“The first time I saw Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox's left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and for no other.

“There was a girl beside him. Her hair was a lovely shade of dark red and she had a distant smile on her lips and over her shoulders she had a blue mink that almost made the Rolls-Royce look like just another automobile. It didn't quite. Nothing can.”

I picked up my copy of The Long Goodbye at Gatwick Airport on my way back to LA from following the pilgrim route from Paris to Santiago de Compostela the autumn after I graduated. I’m not sure whether I love it the best of Chandler’s works because it’s superbly plotted and written (as Ross MacDonald described Chandler) as by a slumming angel; or because I associate it with that particular trip and time in my life. But I’m looking forward to rediscovering it again.

Chandler is certainly free with the similes and metaphors, especially in his earlier works. And his plots get pretty convoluted. (I read somewhere that when John Huston was filming The Big Sleep, after one day’s shoot, he realized that no one could understand who killed the chauffeur. So he called Chandler, who had written the screenplay while drinking heavily. And not even he could unravel the threads.) But the man knew how to evoke a sense of place and time like very few other writers.

This time around, freed of the college earnestness and the influence of the gentleman caller (who quite fancied himself built in the mold of Marlowe—in his dreams), I’m struck by a couple of observations about the gender assumptions of the times.

Marlowe is indeed a paladin, a principled man in a world that has lost all honor. Educated well enough to quote [Christopher] Marlowe, Shakespeare and other literary giants, he’s still tough enough to fight literally and figuratively with the forces of corruption that swirl around him.

But he’s also a chick magnet, that quintessential indicator of a protagonist devised by a male. At least 93% of the women in these stories throw themselves at him, the good as well as the bad. He never pursues any one of them; in fact, he has to brush them away like lint off his suit.

He’s somewhere in his forties. Women in that category are “of a certain age”, desperately trying to disguise their years (and Chandler is pointedly cruel about that); but he’s just all the more attractive because of his seasoning. Also, his face is frequently the object of various fists, saps and gun butts. That doesn't seem to discourage the women.

He barely makes a living and spends a considerable portion of his earnings on booze. Mostly bourbon or rye; Scotch when he can get it. (Gin he clearly holds in disdain—you can predict with absolute accuracy that a character has no self-respect or redeeming social value if s/he drinks gin.) He has a shabby office with a reception room always kept unlocked, and an inner office with empty filing cabinets and a desk of uncertain lineage whose primary function seems to be to hold a bottle of rye.

And yet his financial circumstances seem to raise no flag for the women who pursue him with the single-mindedness of a four-year-old determined to stay up past his bedtime.

You can pretty much bet the ranch on the fact that any woman who doesn’t succumb to his charms is going to be a psycho or a drunk; possibly both. Of course, many of the women who do fall for him are bitches or psychos, as well. I guess it was that kind of world.

You can also depend on the “good girls” (and they’re all “girls”) being sent packing, generally sooner rather than later. Marlowe isn’t going to trade in his efficiency with the Murphy bed at the Hobart Arms, his drugstore lunch counter meals and his office desk drawer bottle for domestic happiness.

Finally, you’re going to want to be ready to cherchez la femme: a woman is usually at the root of all evil. Sometimes innocently, but usually decidedly on purpose. Turns out little Velma wasn’t worth Moose’s devotion. Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep is the very Energizer Bunny of psychotic nymphomaniacs. And poor Terry Lennox had good reason indeed to be drunk in that Rolls Royce Silver Wraith. (Then there are The Little Sister and The Lady in the Lake…)

Don't get me wrong--I still love the stories and the writing. And Marlowe does seem to be partial to redheads. I'm just sayin'...

Chandler didn’t write Marlowe a permanent love interest until Playback. Which, BTW, also has a memorable beginning (not the first graf):

"So I went to bed. But not to sleep. At three a.m., I was walking the floor listening to Khachaturian working in a tractor factory. He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it. A white night for me is as rare as a fat postman."

Well, comfort is where you find it, I guess. I’ve now got mail addressed to me at my temp address that will permit the King County Public Library to authorize me to check out the full complement of books (100, they tell me). Plus, now that I think I’ve found a permanent place to live, I can spend my off-time actually, you know, discovering the PNW.

For the moment, however, I may pour just a skosh of the Glenlivet I’ve got in my freezer. I did at least have the presence of mind to tape the daylights out of that bottle, wrap it in bubble pack and put it in my luggage, along with the four books. It's been getting syrupy with cold ever since. I've just been reaching over it to get to the ice cream.

But I think now's a good time to open it. Marlowe deserves the effort.