The Literary Blood Feud between Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald

[Admin_99]

In the United States in the year 1949—when the country, having survived the ravages of a second world war, was hurtling and hustling its American way toward the middle of a bloody century—it had been six long years since Raymond Chandler, successor to Dashiell Hammett as the Crime Boss of the hard-boiled boys, had published his last detective novel, The Lady in the Lake (kind of a highfaluting title, that). During that lengthy intermission between novels, Chandler had gone to work in Hollywood, writing scripts for two classic American crime films: Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, based on the James M. Cain crime novel, and The Blue Dahlia, for both of which he received Academy Award nominations. Then in 1950 Chandler toiled on scripts for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic suspense flick Strangers on a Train, based on Patricia Highsmith’s recent debut thriller. However, the prickly, temperamental crime writer was a notoriously difficult collaborator. “I’m a man who takes very little lightly,” he once informed a correspondent, and it would seem that truer words had never been spoken.

Raymond Chandler’s sensitivities drove to distraction Billy Wilder, with whom Chandler collaborated on the Double Indemnity script. At one point Chandler submitted a list to the film’s producer explaining why he could no longer work with Wilder. Here is Wilder’s bemused recollection of his colleague’s parade of horribles: “I was rude; I was drinking; I was fucking; I was on the phone with four broads, with one I was on the phone—he clocked me—for twelve and a half minutes; I had asked him to pull down the Venetian blinds—the sun was streaming into the office—without saying please.” Against all odds, the two men somehow managed to abide each other for long enough—ten whole weeks—to finish the script. “There was a lot of Hitler in Chandler,” Wilder, recalling the ordeal, commented years later, not entirely facetiously.

Yet even the mutual antagonism of Chandler and Wilder paled compared with the enmity that developed between Chandler and Alfred Hitchcock when Chandler was working on the screenplay for Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train in 1950. (Intriguingly Hitchcock’s team had first approached Dashiell Hammett for the job.) Chandler, who loathed having story conferences with the famed director—“god-awful jabber sessions,” he derisively termed them—went so far as to sneer, as Hitchcock struggled to emerge from his limousine when paying a visit on Chandler at his home in La Jolla: “Look at that fat bastard trying to get out of his car!” (Hitch was within earshot at the time.) Fed up with Chandler’s arrogant attitude and primo dono antics, Hitchcock fired him from the project and found another, more amenable and amiable screenwriter. In his first meeting with Chandler’s replacement, Hitch ostentatiously pinched his nose and dropped the hard-boiled author’s script into a wastebasket. “Our collaboration was not very happy,” Hitchcock later admitted, with impressive, indeed astounding, self-restraint.

In a testament to Raymond Chandler’s “star” value, Warner Brothers insisted on leaving the crime writer’s name in the credits when Strangers on a Train premiered in 1951, even though little or nothing from his original script survived on film. While Chandler’s books did not enjoy the sales that their author believed they merited, his name had currency. Between 1942 and 1947, no fewer than six films had been adapted from his novels, including director Howard Hawks’ classic The Big Sleep, co-scripted by another literary great, novelist William Faulkner, and starring Humphrey Bogart as Chandler’s hard-fisted, hard-drinking detective hero, Philip Marlowe.

Famously the plot of the novel was deemed confusing by the filmmakers. Chandler amusingly recalled in correspondence how Howard Hawks and Humphrey Bogart “got into an argument as to whether one of the characters [the chauffeur] was murdered or committed suicide. They sent me a wire…asking me, and dammit I didn’t know either. Of course I got hooted at.”

Film reviewers found The Big Sleep perplexing as well, although they praised the flick for its style, action and dialogue and it scored a hit with the public. Bosley Crowther complained that “the complex of blackmail and murder soon becomes a web of utter bafflement” and that “the cunning scriptwriters have done little to clear it at the end.” James Agee recommended the film as “wakeful fare for those who don’t care what is going on, or why, so long is the talk is hard and the action harder.” As Agee foresaw, audiences responded to the movie’s style and did not worry overmuch about its substance. It was around this time that Raymond Chandler himself, in his notoriously polemical Atlantic essay “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944; rev. 1946) scornfully characterized structured whodunit plotting as performing “coolie labor.”

Chandler well knew about such labor because it was over several of the scriptwriting years that he struggled as well to complete his fifth hard-boiled detective novel, The Little Sister. The novel drew effectively (and characteristically sourly) on the author’s recent Hollywood experiences, but as far as plotting was concerned, it was deemed weak by prominent critics. Influential New York Times crime fiction reviewer Anthony Boucher, himself a mystery writer and a stickler for coherency, outright panned The Little Sister when it was published in the fall of 1949, writing that it presented the unpleasant “spectacle of a prose writer of high attainments wasting his talents in a pretentious attempt to make bricks without straw—or much clay, either.”

In correspondence that same year with a thirty-four-year-old, up-and-coming Canadian-American hard-boiled crime writer named Kenneth Millar, who a few months earlier had published the first of what would become a series of eighteen Lew Archer private detective novels, Chandler’s former publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, wrote that “Chandler’s last was just as well written as ever, but it exposed clearly his weakness and satisfied me that there were quite sound reasons why we never sold him as he thought he ought to be sold. He just can’t build a plot; in fact, I don’t think he even tries. The result is that the book sparkles and is brilliant in parts, but simply doesn’t hang together or build up to the necessary climax.”

Another reader of The Little Sister, columnist Malcolm W. Bingray, editorial director of the Detroit Free Press, observed, after perusing the novel in bed while convalescing from a medical operation: “I have just finished reading Raymond Chandler’s latest opus….His wisecracks are gorgeous. Cleaned up, it will make another big movie hit [like The Big Sleep]. He has everything but a plot, but does that matter? Even at the finish you don’t know who did what and you could[n’t ] care less.” Yet other readers, like Anthony Boucher and Alfred A. Knopf, were of the opinion that even a tough fictional shamus could not live by sneers alone.

For his part Chandler, who could be brutal not just with others but with himself too (which probably helps explain why he was so tempted by drink), agreed that his latest novel was not plotted worth a damn, though, contrary to what Knopf thought, he had in fact tried to do so and indeed had much bedeviled himself with it. In August 1948 Chandler assured his English publisher, Hamish Hamilton: “I am trying desperately to finish The Little Sister and should have a rough draft done almost any day I can get up enough steam,” adding ruefully (and characteristically colorfully): “The fact is, however, that there is nothing in it but style and dialogue and characters. The plot creaks like a brown shutter in an October wind.” Four months later he wrote critic James Sandoe: “From a severely technical point of view [The Little Sister] is not a good mystery. It is easy for me to say I don’t care, but I really do, because I should like to write one that was if I could have all the other things in it too.”

To his publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Kenneth Millar wrote a letter around this time suggesting, with the bright, brash confidence of youth, that the Old Man, Chandler (sixty-one at the time), was perhaps getting tired and rather past it, giving him a golden opportunity to prove his own worth as a series private eye crime writer. “I hear on all sides, though I refrain from reading Chandler myself, that [The Little Sister] wasn’t very good,” he related hopefully, “which leaves a bit of a vacuum in the field.” Chandler likely never learned about this dismissive Knopf-Millar correspondence concerning him, but he did know about—and deeply resented—the unenthusiastic notice which his new novel had received from Anthony Boucher.

Ross Macdonald

Especially galling, in light of that pan, must have been the rave review which Boucher had afforded Millar’s first Lew Archer detective novel, The Moving Target, which had been published a few months earlier than Chandler’s book in the spring of 1949, under the name “John Macdonald.” (This eventually became “John Ross Macdonald” and then just “Ross Macdonald” after another hard-boiled crime writer named John Macdonald—his real name in his case—became popular in the early Fifties.) Boucher admiringly pronounced that as a weaver of words and observer of others Kenneth Millar—I will call him Ross Macdonald henceforward—stood head and shoulders over his competitors, presumably including Chandler. In something of a slap in the face to the elder man, Boucher included Macdonald’s Moving Target on his list of the best crime novels of 1949, while pointedly snubbing Chandler’s Little Sister.

Chandler decidedly felt Boucher’s burn, bitterly referring in correspondence the next year to the “stinking” review “I got from Anthony Boucher.” In turn he dismissed Boucher as a “pipsqueak” and a hack novelist who wrote poor detective fiction of the puzzle variety that he, Chandler, regarded—or so he claimed—as a “crashing bore.” Chandler asserted that with his pan of The Little Sister, Boucher simply had been pettily retaliating for Chandler’s own brutal hit on classic-style puzzle mysteries in “The Simple Art of Murder.”

In marked contrast with Anthony Boucher, Raymond Chandler pronounced himself distinctly unimpressed with Ross Macdonald’s books. In a letter to James Sandoe, Chandler scorned The Moving Target as both repellently affected—he famously mocked Macdonald’s description of a deteriorated automobile as being “acned with rust”—and synthetic in its emotions.  The author, he declared, was just another one of the fancy pants intellectuals, slumming “literary eunuchs” who imitate others and show off with surface cleverness because they themselves “feel nothing.”  When Macdonald’s second Lew Archer detective novel, The Drowning Pool, appeared in 1950, Chandler derided the book in a letter to crime writer James M. Fox, declaring that much of it was “pure parody” of his own writing, though he loftily allowed: “The man has ability. He could be a good writer.”

Three years later, as Ross Macdonald’s own hardcover sales with Knopf stagnated, continually tallying fewer than 4000 hardcover copies per title (only somewhat better than the average for hardcover mysteries of 3000), Alfred A. Knopf wrote a letter to Chandler querying whether the elder hard-boiled author had “gone on strike” against the publishing industry. (Indeed he had not, for 1953 would see the publication of Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye.)

Chandler replied:

No, I am not on strike….in a way I regret that I was ever persuaded to leave you, although I realize I was no great financial asset to your publishing house.  But I did, and a man can’t keep jumping from publisher to publisher.  Anyhow, you have your hard-boiled writer now, and for a house of your standing, one is enough.  I’m a little tired of the kick-‘em-in-the-teeth stuff myself.  I hope I have developed, but perhaps I have only grown tired and soft, but certainly not mellow.  After all, I have fifty per cent Irish blood.

In his biography of Ross Macdonald, Tom Nolan speculates that with this missive “the Irishman” was hinting to Knopf that he would be willing to return to Knopf’s fold, were the publisher figuratively to rub out that upstart Macdonald. Whatever Chandler’s intention may have been, however, no whacking of Ross took place at Knopf, though Chandler himself made a decided comeback with The Long Goodbye, which any other mystery writer might have envied. Although its sales in both the United States and United Kingdom were only comparable to those of The Little Sister, the book earned the doyen of hard-boiled detection the highest praise of his career and in 1955 the Mystery Writers of America awarded it their Edgar for best novel, an honor which Ross Macdonald would never achieve.

Poignantly just a month before his death in 1959, Chandler was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America, another honor Macdonald never achieved. Even Anthony Boucher, while reiterating how disappointed he had been with The Little Sister, pronounced The Long Goodbye “one of the best” private eye novels–though his comment that Goodbye made him wish that “Chandlers were as frequent as [Erle Stanley] Gardners,” probably set Chandler’s teeth on edge, Chandler having no great estimation as a literary artist for Erle Stanley Gardner, the factory assembly line producer of a seemingly endless succession of Perry Mason mysteries.

Chandler’s success with The Long Goodbye notwithstanding, in 1958, just a year before his death, he was still sniping at his younger rival, whom that same year Anthony Boucher, in a rave review of Macdonald’s Archer novel The Doomsters, officially anointed as part of the holy hard-boiled trinity, along with Hammett and Chandler. “[I]n the hands of these three writers, the hard-boiled private detective can become literature,” Boucher pronounced, “as satisfying (and as subtle) as any less violent, more ‘literary’ study of character as revealed in crime.”

At this time English crime writer and critic Julian Symons was then compiling a list of the one hundred best crime stories for the Sunday Times, and he had been urged by his editor to solicit contributions from other crime writers as well, a proposition to which he had reluctantly assented. (Like most writers, Symons was more interested in his own opinions.) One of the authors whom he contacted about a submission was none other than Raymond Chandler, who was living in England at the time, basking in the local adulation and steadily drinking himself to death. Symons solicited a list from the fading tough guy, whom in person Symons was surprised to find was not tough at all, but rather wizened, querulous and “fussy and old womanish.” To Symons’ disappointment, Chandler’s book list consisted mostly of “tough, little known American thrillers.” It also excluded Ross Macdonald. “[S]omething about Macdonald’s work rankled [him],” Symons observed. “When…he sent me his list of books for the ‘100 best crime stories’ (I didn’t use any of them), he remarked that he ‘omitted numerous gentlemen who have paid me the compliment of imitation,’ and this was principally a hit at Macdonald.”

In 1962 Raymond Chandler’s “literary eunuch” sneer at Ross Macdonald was included in a posthumous collection of Chandler’s correspondence entitled Raymond Chandler Speaking, and it flustered the crime writing world like a hail of machine gun bullets fired at avians in a dovecote. From his very grave, it seemed, Chandler had risen like some ghastly revenant to point an accusing finger at Macdonald as an effete intellectual betrayer of the hard-boiled tradition as established by himself and Hammett. Macdonald felt the blow keenly, like a hard sock in the jaw. (A modern equivalent today would be, say, the publication of a letter by Ruth Rendell dissing the novels of Val McDermid as facile imitations of her own writing.)

Years later in 1976, at the twilight of his own crime writing career, Macdonald, while being interviewed by Rolling Stone writer Paul Nelson, suddenly exploded, when Nelson queried him about Chandler and highly praised Chandler’s penultimate novel The Long Goodbye, shouting: “To hell with Chandler! Chandler tried to kill me!” Paul Nelson elaborated that Macdonald after calming down “had me stop the tape then and insisted that I erase that part, and he explained to me all about what Chandler had done: writing negative letters to people about his first book, and so on.” Yet even before he ever knew of Chandler’s harsh criticism of him, Macdonald had given the older man as good as he got—and more.

In a 1952 letter to Alfred A. Knopf, Macdonald methodically dispatched Chandler like the late notorious Boston hitman Whitey Bulger would remorselessly dispose of bothersome bookie Louis Litif. Macdonald lengthily responded to criticism imparted to Knopf by an editor at Macdonald’s paperback publisher (and Chandler’s), Pocket Books, which Knopf had related to Macdonald. “Maybe the author is just too nice a person,” the Pocket editor had mused irksomely, “but his bad characters somehow or other aren’t believably bad. The sharp contrast between good and evil, so noticeable in Chandler’s books and so important to this kind of story, is simply missing, at least for me.”

Stung by the suggestion that he needed to toughen and “Chandlerize” his crime writing, Macdonald—who quite to the contrary had deliberately begun edging away from Chandler and the tough school with his latest novel The Ivory Grin (the book which Pocket had faulted)—fired off a five-page letter to Knopf, boldly declaring his independence from the hard-boiled tradition as represented both by Chandler and more lately the Neanderthal-ish but hugely popular Mickey Spillane, postwar author of I, the Jury, Vengeance Is Mine, My Gun is Quick and other tales that were, like life in the state of nature, nasty, brutish and short:

….For [Chandler] any old plot will do…and he has stated that a good plot is one that makes for good scenes. So far from taking him as the last word and model in my field—which Pocket Books thinks I should do, it would seem—I am interested in doing things in the mystery which Chandler didn’t do, and probably couldn’t.

His subject is the evilness of evil, his most characteristic achievement the short vivid scene of conflict between (conventional) evil and (what he takes to be) good….I can’t accept Chandler’s vision of good and evil.  It is conventional to the point of occasional old maidishness, anti-human to the point of frequent sadism (Chandler hates all women and most men, reserving only loveable oldsters, boys and Marlowe for his affection), and the mind behind it, for all its enviable imaginative force, is uncultivated and second-rate….I owe a lot to Chandler (and more to Hammett), but it would be simple self-stultification for me to take him as the last word in the mystery.  My literary range greatly exceeds his, and my approach to writing will not wear out so fast.

My subject is something like this: human error, and the ambivalence of motive.  My interest is the exploration of lives.  If my stories lack a powerful contrast between good and evil…it isn’t mere inadvertence.  I don’t see things that way….

In spite of the Spillane phenomenon…I think the future of the mystery is in the hands of a few good writers like myself.  The old-line hardboiled novel with its many guns and fornications and fisticuffs had been ruined by its practitioners, including the later Chandler.  Spillane pulled the plug.  I have no intention of plunging after it down the drain….Some of my fellow mystery writers, and they are the real experts, think that my last two books [The Way Some People Die and The Ivory Grin] are the best that have ever been done in the tradition that Hammett started….When the tough school dies its inevitable death, I expect to be going strong, twenty or thirty books from now.

Ironically, Chandler and Macdonald may have been in more aesthetic agreement than they deigned to realize. (Certainly they both hated the novels of Mickey Spillane.) In May 1952, the same year in which Ross Macdonald composed his letter to Alfred A. Knopf unfavorably contrasting Chandler’s work with his own, Chandler wrote editor and literary agent Bernice Baumgarten about his recently completed draft of The Long Goodbye. His stance on what constitutes good crime writing does not seem markedly different from Macdonald’s:

It has been clear to me for some time that what has been largely boring about mystery stories, at least on a literate plane, is that the characters get lost about a third of the way through.  Often the opening, the mise en scene, the establishment of the background is very good.  Then the plot thickens and the people become mere names….what can you do to avoid this?  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 smacked who on the head.  And at that point perhaps one should retire and leave the field to younger and more simple men.  I don’t necessarily mean writers of comic books like Mickey Spillane.

Anyway I wrote this [novel] 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….You write in a style that has been imitated, even plagiarized, 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….

Cognizant of the creative fires which burned within them, both Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald desired to make the hard-boiled crime novel a vehicle for serious exploration of the human condition, just like in the mainstream novel, yet seemingly neither man was able in this respect to see himself mirrored in the other. Yet as Peter Wolfe put it in his study Something More Than the Night: The Case of Raymond Chandler (1985): “The Long Goodbye gave the American murder mystery a resonance it had never enjoyed before. Taking fictional crime away from the mob and dropping it into the family, the book also anticipated the best work of Ross Macdonald.” After Chandler died in 1959, it was indeed Macdonald who followed him down the path which he had skillfully scored a half dozen years earlier with The Long Goodbye. Is it mere coincidence that Macdonald’s breakthrough bestseller, which he published a decade after Chandler’s death and the publication of his own path breaking novel The Galton Case, was entitled The Goodbye Look?

Yet in “The Writer as Detective Hero,” a 1965 essay later collected in the 1973 Capra Press chapbook On Crime Writing, Ross Macdonald lengthily contrasted Dashiell Hammett’s crime fiction (and his own) with that of Raymond Chandler, arguing that “Chandler’s vision…in spite of its hallucinated brilliance of detail…lacks the tragic unity of Hammett’s.” Citing Chandler’s essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” which he dismissed as “an excitingly written piece of not very illuminating criticism,” Macdonald urged that “a central weakness in his vision” was the starry-eyed Chandler’s romantic belief in his private eye Philip Marlowe as a man who goes down mean streets “neither tarnished nor afraid” and a man who “is the hero, who is everything….the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”

“No hero of serious fiction could act within a moral straitjacket requiring him to be consistently virtuous and unafraid,” countered Macdonald. “The detective as redeemer is a backward step in the direction of sentimental romance, and an over-simplified world of good guys and bad guys.” In Macdonald’s view, Chandler made his books all about Philip Marlowe and Marlowe was merely a romanticized projection of Chandler himself, making for an egoistic approach which Macdonald deemed an artistic failure. Even in The Long Goodbye, Macdonald believed, “Marlowe’s voice is limited by his role as the hardboiled hero….Chandler tried to relax [Marlowe’s narrowly conceived limits as a character]…but he was old and the language failed to respond.  He was trapped like the late Hemingway in an unnecessarily limiting idea of self, hero and language.”

Tellingly Chandler himself had written of The Long Goodbye back at the time of its publication that his goal with the novel had been to portray “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.” The meaning was plain. Chandler might have been describing himself in Hollywood, as he saw it: the heroic, high-minded writer up against the odds and the host of asses, boobs and philistines. Although both authors labored mightily to liberate the hard-boiled novel from the constraints of crime fiction conventions, Chandler continued to center his narratives on self, while Macdonald in his books selflessly put the focus on other individuals besides his sleuth Archer, who in later novels acts as a sort of therapeutic psychic conduit for revelations of tragic family case histories. Yet it seems to me that in his crime fiction, particularly his later works, Macdonald, no less than Chandler, needily channeled his own personal issues. Through his investigations, which might more accurately be labeled interventions, Archer becomes a redeemer of seemingly lost souls, including, implicitly, those of Macdonald himself and his own troubled family.

Despite what he confidently prophesied to Knopf in 1952, Ross Macdonald never quite made it to a full score of additional books, let alone thirty of them, Alzheimer’s Disease cruelly cutting short his writing career and Death enfolding him in its cold embrace in 1983, when he was sixty-seven years old. Notwithstanding his robust physical health (he was an avid swimmer), Macdonald attained fewer years than his debilitated, alcoholic rival Chandler, who had expired (after spiraling downward upon the death of his much older wife Cissy) nearly a quarter-century earlier at the age of seventy-one.

Yet having been buoyed by lengthy, effusively praiseful front-page notices in the New York Times Book Review, Macdonald as mentioned lived to see his books make it onto the American bestseller lists in the late Sixties and early Seventies, a rare feat for a crime writer, particularly one of Macdonald’s cerebral and searching sort. His last four Lew Archer mysteries—The Goodbye Look, The Underground Man, Sleeping Beauty and The Blue Hammer—all sold between forty-five and fifty thousand copies in hardcover for Alfred A. Knopf, a belated reward to the publisher for his longtime faith in his client. These were the kind of hardcover sales that Chandler had fervently desired for himself, but had never achieved in his lifetime.

Two Hollywood films starring matinee idol Paul Newman, Harper (1966) and The Drowning Pool (1975), were adapted from Macdonald’s novels, even as films continued to be made from Chandler’s books too. Somewhat ironically, given all the shots that the two men aimed at each other over the years, a boosting blurb from Macdonald made its way onto Ballantine paperback reprints of Chandler novels in the Seventies, assuring prospective book buyers that the dead man was the real deal. “Chandler wrote like a slumming angel,” Macdonald pronounced poetically on the covers, “and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.” One had to wonder what Chandler would have made of getting posthumous validation from this source. All the while, as he belatedly traveled down this yellow brick road of riches and the highest critical respect, Macdonald withstood with grace and fortitude devastating personal trauma in his private life, before being stricken with the final dehumanizing indignity of Alzheimer’s.

A British friend of Ross Macdonald during those later years, the aforementioned Julian Symons, wrote in 1973 that “Macdonald is a quiet and gentle man, but beneath that gentleness you sense there is a reserve of steel.” He added: “I didn’t feel this in Chandler.” Whatever their strengths and weaknesses as writers and as men, which has been much debated through the years, today both Chandler and Macdonald are deemed to compose, as Anthony Boucher had urged, two-thirds of the so-called hard-boiled crime writing triumvirate, the remaining third being the great begetter Dashiell Hammett—whose merit as a crime writer was one thing, at least, on which that dazzling duo of dogmatically determined disputants, Ray and Ross, could bring themselves to agree.

View the full article