Pursuit of the Master

With everything else I’ve got going at the moment (a photographic history of San Francisco, my never-ending first novel project), I haven’t been able to get very far yet in Judith Freeman’s new biography, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, by Judith Freeman. However, Richard Rayner (The Associates, The Devil’s Wind) has already delivered a ceaselessly absorbing assessment of the book in the Los Angeles Times, which traces the detective novelist’s 30-year marriage to Cissy Pascal, a twice-divorced woman, 18 years older than he (though she’d lied to him about being younger), whom Chandler married less than two weeks after his mother--a critic of their union--perished of cancer.

In getting to the heart of Freeman’s book, Rayner begins by quoting another well-known crime writer on the subject of Chandler’s complicated marriage:

“All this is the stuff of passion and novels,” noted Patricia Highsmith, whose first book, “Strangers on a Train,” Chandler would help adapt for the 1951 Hitchcock movie of the same name. “But little of the formidable emotional material that Chandler had at his disposal actually found its way into his writing.”

That’s not quite true. All his life, Chandler was a divided soul. He was an American, born in Chicago in 1888, yet he grew up mostly in England and received an education at snooty Dulwich College. He longed to live freely yet had a strict moral code. He was too troubled ever to be truly happy, and too inhibited and mannerly to be a freely autobiographical writer.

And yet, this worked for him, in its own way. His heightened sense of his own pleasures and dismays passed into how he caught the atmosphere and moods of L.A. His marriage to Cissy endured, and Los Angeles became a metaphor for the torture and disappointment he sometimes felt.

“The Long Embrace” is an exploration of these two relationships--Ray and Cissy, Chandler and L.A. It is a beautiful and original book, in which Freeman becomes a double detective, telling the story of this strange yet loving marriage while also tracking down and visiting everywhere that the Chandlers lived in Southern California. That’s no small task because Chandler needed movement like he needed air to breathe.

Meanwhile, Denise Hamilton--the editor of Los Angeles Noir, and author of both the Eve Diamond series (Prisoner of Memory) and the standalone novel The Last Embrace, loosely based around the 1949 disappearance of starlet Jean Spangler and due out next summer--took a stroll not long ago through the City of Angels with biographer Freeman for the purpose of writing about it in L.A. Observed. It is a rather sad commentary on the changeability of Los Angeles that results from this experience. Writes Hamilton:

In her book ... Freeman examines her obsession with Chandler, his reclusive, much older wife, old Los Angeles, love, longing and the passage of time. They became Ray and Cissy to her. She felt their physical presence, imagined the world through their eyes.

She also visited the dozens of places in Southern California where they lived--the couple moved every two to six months. Many are gone. Others are shabby and rundown. Some of the current residents had never heard of Raymond Chandler. Often, Freeman had to cast her eyes upward to catch glimpses of Marlowe’s city.

“It was in the trees that I felt the history of the landscape, the only continuity connecting my age with Ray’s,” Freeman wrote. “Looking at them I thought, I am seeing what he saw--trees. And everything else is different.”

How Raymond Chandler saw the world, and what he didn’t see of himself, sounds like the stuff to fascinate anyone (like me) who’s long been enamored of his prose. I might have to concentrate on The Long Embrace a bit more in the near future.

READ MORE: “Novelist Serves Cold Leftovers of Chandler’s Marital Mystery,” by Charles Ardai (New York Observer).