This started when I began watching Bored to Death on HBO. In the series, the hero--a mystery novelist who becomes a private eye after he can’t finish his second book--is influenced by Raymond Chandler’s 1940 novel, Farewell, My Lovely.
I realized that I hadn’t read that book for a long time, so I dug up a copy--and quickly discovered that it contained lots of material which hinted that Chandler was either a racist or that Los Angeles has changed a lot since 1940.
“Smokes in here, huh?” remarks Moose Malloy, just out of prison and looking for his girl, Velma, who used to work in a place called Florian’s, on L.A.’s Central Avenue. “A dinge ... I just thrown him out. ... You say this here is a dinge joint?” A minute later, when a black bouncer tries to throw him out, the imposing Malloy says angrily under his breath, “Shinebox ...” And a white cop called Nulty complains, “Shines. Another shine killing. That’s what I rate after eighteen years in this man’s police department. ... One time there was five smokes carved Harlem sunsets on each other down on East Eighty-four. ... I go down and outside the house a guy that works on the Chronicle, a newshawk, is coming off the porch and getting into his car. He makes a face, and says, ‘Aw, hell, shines,’ and gets in his heap and goes away. Don’t even go in the house.”
That was 1940. Four years later came a film called (for reasons best known to its producers) Murder, My Sweet, directed by Edward Dmytryk, with a screenplay by John Paxton. Dick Powell played Philip Marlowe, Mike Mazurki was Moose Malloy, Claire Trevor was Velma. If there was a black face or mention, I must have missed it.
Things stayed quiet on the Farewell front until 1975, when director Dick Richards and writer David Zelag Goodman went back to the original title, with Robert Mitchum playing Marlowe, Jack O’Halloran as Moose Malloy, Charlotte Rampling as Velma, John Ireland as Lieutenant Nulty, and Harry Dean Stanton as a grifting cop.
This was more like it: Mitchum was a better Marlowe than Powell (although Bogart still did the character best), and Ireland was a far more believable cop. Much of the tale’s black background had been restored, but the language had a different edge--irony had entered the picture. (Netflix doesn’t seem to have Farewell, My Lovely in its files, but you can watch it on your computer screen or TV set, courtesy of Amazon, for just $9.99.)
So what does all this add up to? As my in-house historian reminds me, America in 1940 was a racist country--not allowing blacks to serve with whites at the start of World War II, for instance. But not many other mystery writers of the period (Dashiell Hammett, for example) used anti-black imagery and language as seriously as Chandler did in Farewell.
Did Raymond Chandler mean his book to be satire, in the tradition of Mark Twain? I don’t think so. He was a British schoolboy who still held beliefs of England über Alles and looked upon other races as suspect. (As Harry Andrews said to Ossie Davis in Sidney Lumet’s The Hill, set during World War II, “You different-colored bastard!”) Chandler wrote from his experience, and his experience was apparently not well integrated.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
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Chandler may have been a racist, I don’t know. But how anyone could suspect so based on what you cite here is beyond me. Chandler was writing realistically. What do you suppose a real-life character like Moose would say on Central Ave. in the 1940’s? “Golly gee, there sure are a lot of African-Americans around here.” ?? You think maybe Chandler should have rewritten Nulty’s dialogue so that it would be more politically correct?
I abhor racism. I’m just not ready to label someone as such based on a few lines from one of their novels. Perhaps many other mystery writers of the period wished they had Chandler’s courage to put real words into the mouths of their characters.
Also, as much as I love him, Bogart was miscast as Marlowe. He was perfect as Sam Spade, but to play Marlowe you need an undertone of innocence/ naiveté. Powell had it. Mitchum and Garner, too. Bogart was far too cynical.
Those elements (and a couple others, like the dusky-lipped alcoholic Marlowe questions with a bottle of hooch) definitely made me squirm a bit reading FML, but for the life of me, I couldn't tease out whether the bias was Marlowe's, or Chandler's, or whether Chandler was merely trying to tell it plain. If I recall, not all black characters in the book are treated with disrespect -- but then, one could claim that's the old, "I'm not racist -- I have black friends!" move, so take it with a grain of salt.
I do think you've rushed to conclusions a bit, but there's no doubt that the book contains some thorny racial issues. Of course, Hammett's THE MALTESE FALCON portrayed Joel Cairo in a less-than-flattering light as well, so your assertion that Hammett's work was absent racial bias might be painting with a broad brush.
What I find interesting is the head-on way in which Chandler presented race in FML, particularly when race didn't play nearly as large a role as any of his other works. Whether that was because of a flare-up of personal bias, or a purposeful intent to take on issues of race, I couldn't say.
What Anonymous omits to mention is the language used by Nulty and the Chronicle newshawk.
This is something i think about often when reading my old favorites. However, i once read that Chandler was criticized by his writer peers for being pro-Latino (and it seems they were saying he wasn't racist enough for their liking). I think the racism is readily apparent in James Cain, but in Chandler's work, I don't see it. An author isn't necessarily racist if he is capturing racist thoughts/belief of the area he is writing about. Los Angeles was and still is a very racist place. None of the hard boiled writers truly capture that though because it's not their world, they just walk into it sometimes.
Interesting observations & comments on racism.
Right now I am teaching about eugenics in one of my classes. We have started out with two articles about the origins, and what springs to mind is that in the 1930s large parts of the Western world believed in eugenics, white supremacy and sterilization of ´the unfit´. Things did not really change until Nazi-Germany lost the war in 1945. Of course racism should not be excused or defended, but ´anonymous´ has a point: Chandler´s dialogue might just aim at realism.
It's an error, I think, to judge a writer outside of the context of his time. I don't think Chandler was either racist or (as I've heard people posit in the past) sexist but rather very much a product of his moment. I don't think that's reason to criticize, but rather to celebrate. After all, how else, really, can we see how very far we've come? Fiction makes this very vivid: we can live the now and the then. What a gift!
Just to make a note about the title change for the film: Since Dick Powell was reinventing his image from a song and dance man to more serious dramatic actor, and taking on Chandler would be his first role anything like it, the producers decided not to confuse the public by releasing a film that could have been confused as a musical by the title and the public's association with Powell. Hence the name change and inserting the word Murder in there.
And I agree that Chandler himself was probably not racist, it was more a sign of the times. An unfortunate sign.
From his writings, it doesn't appear to me that Chandler/Marlowe was as racist or sexist as his peers in the hard boiled fiction biz. Yes, Blacks and Latinos were usually only house help. Italians ran mortuaries on Bunker Hill and had criminal connections. There was white trash too (Jessie Florian) and house help that came off smarter than their old money employers. Mostly though, "non-whites" are always on the periphery or non-existent, which is also racist to me.
I do think, however, it's ok to judge someone's views even if they are supposedly in sync with the time. Jefferson is my fav example of this. When i was dragged to Montebello, what stood out to me were the slave quarters and the gardens they "worked" in.
There are a couple of anonymous commenters here. i was the first, so I guess Mr. Adler's comments were in reference to mine. I mentioned Nulty's dialogue. I don't see how his language or the newshawk's changes anything. I think you are still holding a 69 year old book to today's standards. Chandler was born in the nineteenth century for cryin' out loud. We should be thankful that documents like FML exist to remind us of how far we have come, and how much we've stayed the same.
There's this exchange in The Long Goodbye between Marlowe and a black chauffeur:
"'I grow old. . . I grow old. . I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.' What does that mean, Mr. Marlowe?"
"Not a bloody thing. It just sounds good."
He smiled. "That is from the 'Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.' Here's another one. 'In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michael Angelo.' Does that suggest anything to you, sir?"
"Yeah--it suggests to me that the guy didn't know very much about women."
"My sentiments exactly, sir. Nonetheless I admire T. S. Eliot Very much."
"Did you say 'nonetheless'?"
"Why, yes I did. Mr. Marlowe. Is that incorrect?"
"No, but don't say it in front of a millionaire. He might think you were giving him the hotfoot."
Chandler is at least playing with peoples' expectations about blacks there (but perhaps dings women in the process!)
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