“I'm a romantic, Bernie. I hear voices crying in the night and I go see what's the matter. You don't make a dime that way.”
Phillip Marlowe, The Long Goodbye
Today I’d like to speak about Raymond Chandler. His genius, his obsessions, and his vital vision of an older America.
That final point is crucial.
There has been a deluge of anti-American commentary across the dissident right recently, in my eyes spawning from the resentments of vanquished and vassalized European (or philo-European) commentators, from de Benoist to Yockey. But something that gets lost in discussions of a “negrified” or hopelessly “judaized” American volksgeist is the memory of other expressions of Americana.
There is a displaced right-wing discourse in the American tradition which should be obvious to any outsider. There’s a discourse in that culture that’s highly inegalitarian, morally old-fashioned, occasionally Puritan but vital.
The Union undoubtedly houses one of the most right-wing electorates in the western world, a homespun coalition of bourgeois and working-class whites reacting against the consequences of the Civil Rights revolution in their own understated ways. The American Left’s power flows from anti-European sources — it is, in essence an alliance, between a spiritually or often ethnically alien intellectual caste and an imported and enfranchised underclass.
But such punditry is outside of the purview of this artistic discussion. In particular, I wish to focus on the romantic or reactionary sentiments inherent in American pulp fiction. Whether we’re talking about H.P. Lovecraft’s New England negrophobia or Robert E. Howard’s odes to the intense Protestant extremism of a Solomon Kane, the most celebrated pulp writers did present a discernibly right-wing worldview.
When it comes to the American crime story specifically, most hardboiled pulps were published through Black Mask magazine — an outlet founded by H.L. Mencken, that old right gadfly who gave Ayn Rand her lucky break and was a pro-German Nietzschean to the hilt.
Most importantly for our purposes, this pattern extends to those who crafted works of crime fiction often lauded by progressives for their ostensibly subversive subject matters.
As the 20th century progressed, these romantic, pre-modernist modes, these rugged American traditions were not destroyed but in fact were displaced into the realm of popular culture.
Which brings us to Raymond Chandler.
Chandler had something of an unusual background, which allowed him to straddle the boundary between Britain and America. Born in Chicago, but moved to South London by his Irish mother, Chandler ended up with a classical education from Dulwich, before a short-lived flirtation with a civil service career. Next was a stint as a journalist and some service in the First World War, before he found himself in L.A.
Cultural critic Frederic Jameson — famous for his work on Postmodernism — raised a comparison between Chandler and another favourite of mine, the aristocratic White-Russian expatriate Vladimir Nabokov, himself a self-indulgent aesthete. To Jameson, both emigrants were stylists “hymning and mocking in {their} new tongue the weird textures of {their} new home.” As both had to adopt the American Language — a distinct semiotic entity as revealed to us by H.L. Mencken’s seminal work — “Language {could} never again be unselfconscious.” All writers of an adopted language are stylists “by force of circumstance.”
In Chandler’s own words:
“I had to learn American just like a foreign language. To use it I had to study it and analyze it. As a result, when I use slang, colloquialisms, snide talk or any kind of off-beat language I do it deliberately. The literary use of slang is a study in itself. I've found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language, and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be passe before it gets into print…”
In a truly modernist fashion, the aesthetes were the vanguard of a rebellion against the supremacy of plot — murders were tools with which to paint social scenes.
The detective story, sans any ideological motivation, was a form fit for pure stylistic experimentation.
“My theory was that the readers just thought they cared about nothing but the action; that really, although they didn't know it, the thing they cared about, and that I cared about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description. The things they remembered, that haunted them, was not, for example, that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. He didn't even hear the death knock on the door. That damn little paper clip kept slipping away from his fingers.”
To Jameson, Chandler could best be described as “a painter of American life: not as a builder of those large-scale models of the American experience which great literature offers, but rather in fragmentary pictures of setting and place, fragmentary perceptions which are by some formal paradox somehow inaccessible to serious literature.”
Now, the Americans may have invented the detective story with Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, but it took British stylists like Doyle to really define the form. That all being said, the genre was not quite ready to be the basis for the bleak atmospherics of noir — that sort of “forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown” pessimism — before depression-era American pulp writers tried their hands at telling mystery stories.
With all of the authority of a man raised in the UK, Raymond Chandler declared that:
“The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.”
That tension between the discursive and stylistic purposes of art and the ever-present importance of a mysterious plot animated all of Chandler’s future writing.
In Chandler’s eyes “the perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.” Consequently, the type of protagonist who can effortlessly solve the perfect problem is not the kind of protagonist conducive to creating the most immersive and artistic tale.
Continuing with Jameson’s argument, he observed that Gertrude Stein said the key to English literature was the portrait of the rituals of “daily life.” By contrast, most American ways-of-being are unstable and formless.
“Hence the murder in the placid English village or in the fog-bound London club is read as the sign of a scandalous interruption in a peaceful continuity; whereas the gangland violence of the American big city is felt as a secret destiny, a kind of nemesis lurking beneath the surface of hastily acquired fortunes, anarchic city growth and impermanent private lives. Yet in both, the moment of violence, apparently central, is nothing but a diversion: the real function of the murder in the quiet village is for order to be felt more strongly; while the principal effect of the violence in the American detective story is to allow it to be experienced backwards, in pure thought, without risks, as a contemplative spectacle which gives not so much the illusion of life as the illusion that life has already been lived, that we have already had contact with the archaic sources of that Experience of which Americans have always made a fetish.”
“European literature is metaphysical or formalistic because it takes the nature of the society, of the nation, for granted and works out beyond it. American literature never seems to get beyond the definition of its starting point: any picture of America is bound to be wrapped up in a question and a presupposition about the nature of American reality. European literature can choose its subject matter and the width of its lens; American literature feels obliged to put everything in, knowing that exclusion is also part of the process of definition, and that it can be called to account as much for what it doesn't say as for what it does.”
(This is probably why the definitive “Great American Novel” has yet to manifest.)
“For Los Angeles is already a kind of microcosm and forecast of the country as a whole: a new centerless city, in which the various classes have lost touch with each other because each is isolated in its own geographical compartment.”
In our position as revolutionary right-wingers, I find Chandler’s stories of confused underdogs imposing order on a world in chaos to be more compelling than the enforcers of the status quo who narrate English mysteries.
Wyndham Lewis called America a “human laboratory for the manufacture of cosmic man.” It was the “antechamber” of the presently developing “world-state,” with the exception of the “problem child” that was Dixieland. Lewis believed that it was “the destiny of America to produce the first of a new species of man,” and that “we can read our own future by an imaginative scrutiny of what is occurring, and what is so plainly destined to occur there in America.”
Goethe, very much a liberal, was similarly attracted to America’s youth. He expressed his fascination with the nascent States’ distance from history in his poem “Amerika, du hast es besser” — literally “America, you are better off.”
Oswald Spengler, representing the pessimistic side of the German soul, described the situation in his Hour of Decision:
“In spacious, thinly peopled areas revolutions have necessarily a different form from that which they take in West-European cities. The Latin American revolutions give incessant proof of this. Here there is no powerful State to be overthrown by fighting an army of old traditions, but neither is there one which can guarantee the existing order by the respect inspired by its existence. What is called “ government ” is here liable to melt away suddenly…
“In the “ Land of Liberty ” there is only the resolve of free men to help themselves — the revolver in the hip-pocket is an American invention.”
In multiracial postmodernity, we are all Americans now.
“Since there is no longer any privileged experience in which the whole of the social structure can be grasped, a figure must be invented who can be superimposed on the society as a whole, whose routine and life-pattern serve somehow to tie its separate and isolated parts together.”
This in my view, is why a proper study of Homo Americanus — the real kind, not the materialist slob sketched by Tomislav Sunic — is important. The Protestant White Man, walking alone, a minority on the ground at all times, bearing culture and civilisation. Now of course, in real life, most ran from the urban jungle into the suburbs — but one hopes a reconquest may be in order, now that there is nowhere left to run to. Since Huckleberry Finn, Americans have been the self-creating creatures of modernity. It’s why they drift towards stories of caste-hopping confidence men like Jimmy McGill, DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can or the protagonists of Herman Melville.
Raymond Chandler’s protagonists blew apart British traditions.
The tradition he inspired, the tradition of the anti-Holmes, of a foolish out-of-the-loop detective as confused as the reader, continues to this day with modern homages like the fantastical Dresden Files (not the David Irving kind). For a filmic example, one needs only to reference Dick Powell’s superb turn as Philip Marlowe at his most wisecracking and disoriented in 1944’s Murder My Sweet.
His goal was to prove to readers who “just thought they cared about nothing but the action; that really, although they didn't know it, the thing they cared about, and that I cared about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description.”
The popularity of his novels was a challenge to the received wisdom of the “puzzle merchants, the people who have timetables and ground plans and pay the most meticulous attention to detail, {who} can’t write a lick.”
To Chandler, a detective pulp story was more than a mere entertainment product. He published The Big Sleep when he was 50, a few years after he lost his gig as the executive of an oil company for his alcoholism — at the height of the Great Depression. As a result, he came to the form with a degree of artistic maturity following a life of contact with the profane.
Chandler synthesised his diverse experiences, overcoming the contradictions between them. If not for his time as the Vice President of Dabney Oil, I do not think he would have grasped the sleaze of the City of the Angels. And were it not for his time at an English public school, I do not think he would have been such a stylist, such an Elizabethan Romantic, such a Tory in spite of it all.
The best way to understand Chandler is to place him up against his predecessor Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon. To Chandler, Hammett “made the detective story fun to write, not an exhausting concatenation of insignificant clues.” Both Americans, consciously or otherwise, rebelled against the stodgy fact-finding enterprise that was a British detective story.
In the place of Conan Doyle’s cooly commanding Holmes, they offered a procession of drunkards, cynics or company men. One of Chandler’s more amusing judgements came from when he reduced Sherlock Holmes to “mostly an attitude and a few dozen lines of unforgettable dialogue,” in his withering critiques of the British school of mystery writing.
On a personal note, that particular quip struck a chord with me. As I was doing time in a Shanghainese boarding school, one of my closest friends worshipped Holmes’s omnipotence — and I couldn’t understand it. Got really into the Epic Rap Battle and all, but I digress. For my own part, it was not until I snatched a copy of the all-American Dresden Files out of the library that I found my way into crime fiction. Needless to say, my tastes were radically different.
Now Hammett was a quintessential man of the Left, and would be fêted by the literary establishment for it. His breakout novel Red Harvest was built around a labour dispute, and he toed the Communist Party line on foreign policy through the 1930s, suspending his usual antifascist proclivities while the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was in operation.
Hammett’s personal evolution from Pinkerton to Pinko coloured the cynicism of his books. Red Harvest‘s journey through the crudely named “Poisonville” functioned as an indictment of industrial capitalism. The novel’s gang-war plotline paints a Hobbesian scene, as lives are nasty, brutish and short. Hammett is very much the source of noir’s laconic quality, its pessimism and its intrigue.
It is no wonder that the late Sam Francis, a political theorist obsessed with realpolitik and power games, found it in himself to invoke a quote from The Maltese Falcon. Inspired by the conservative theorist James Burnham, who in turn ripped his conflict-model materialism from the pages of Trotsky, Francis’s refusal to believe in the sincerity of his multiculturalist opponents can be reflected in Hammett’s endlessly cynical worldview.
Hammett was also a pioneer when it came to his recognisably stylistic realism.
“{He} gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He had style, but his audience didn’t know it, because it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements.”
The classically Marxist, materialist developers of the communistic computer role-playing game Disco Elysium publicly expressed their admiration for Hammett’s The Glass Key, a tale of political corruption. That’s not to say that liking Hammett makes you a commie. It’s just to say his materialistic mode of thinking appeals to the Machiavellian left more, and to be honest, that could be our loss as right-wingers. For my own part I think Red Harvest was his most engaging story, while The Maltese Falcon is almost not expressionistic enough to be a true noir.
Hammett’s modern-day successors — men like James Ellroy — have further remarked on how he was able to capture the “sensibility of the goon and the political fixer and the bagman and the hatchet man strike-breaker” — the eternal tragedy of “Homo Americanus,” a man bound to his miserable job.
But Chandler’s protagonists set themselves apart from the pack once more. Phillip Marlowe operates with a considerably more romantic attitude, when put up against Hammett’s “Continental Op.” Chandler’s prose is more poetic, his dialogue more acerbic. Reading Chandler reveals that so many of the conventions we are told are essential to the noir genre are entirely mythological stereotypes. Chandler was not a critic of modernity from its materialist Left, but through Marlowe’s narration typified a reactionary eulogy concerning the death of romance in midcentury America.
Contemporary Chandler critic Barry Day, who edited a volume on Chandler’s world “in his own words” had much to say about Marlowe’s knight-errant nature:
“In retrospect one can see that from the outset Marlowe had a dimension that {Sam} Spade and the others lacked. He was a realist instead of a cynic, and he was cursed with a brand of idealism that would draw him irresistibly down the meanest of mean streets.”
“Even Joseph Shaw, the editor Chandler and Hammett had in common, could observe that Hammett never really cared for any of his characters, whereas it became increasingly clear that Marlowe was a Chandler alter ego. The “anti-romantic romance hero,” as one critic put it; “the American mind,” as Chandler himself once said.”
Attempts to remove the romance from Marlowe stories were largely conceits of later critics, who wished to read into Chandler a socially critical intent.
“Critics have argued—as critics will inevitably argue in an attempt to create a sociological context—that the rise of the private eye was an attempt to personalize the individual’s rejection of the social and political corruption of the 1920s and ’30s, but that is to miss the real point of Marlowe and to misunderstand the author. Chandler had no—what we might now call—“political agenda.” He was a man out of time and place, to all intents and purposes an uprooted Edwardian Englishman attempting to make sense of an alien land and culture, “a man who loved England well when his heart was young and has never loved in the same way since, nor ever shall.”
He did not strive to be a political ideologue, like Hammett could be at times:
“I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.”
Chandler’s protagonist embodied the fading romance of an old Anglo-American ethic, at once erudite and laconic, internally torn between idealism and cynicism. But it is the tension between both traits, and not the dominance of either that drives the emotional content of noir stories.
“His hero, Marlowe, is—among many other things—a knight errant on a crusade in a strange land, charged to uphold the eternal values or lay down his life and honor in the attempt.”
In fact, Chandler explained his vision of the ideal detective protagonist in his iconic essay The Simple Art of Murder, sketching out a man meant to be as chivalric as he was cynical.
“In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.
He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks—that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”
A man among the ruins, you see. The heroic personage locked in a battle with the entropic forces of modernity. The best films show Marlowe surviving not because of his sidearm but due to his masculine wits. As Chandler himself put it, “Bogart can be tough without a gun.”
Key to Chandler’s poetic style was an exaggeration of several of Hammett’s innovations, “an effect of movement, intrigue, cross-purposes and the gradual elucidation of character, which is all the detective story has any right to be about anyway. The rest is spillikins in the parlor.” The idea is to ask questions, not to answer them. As the 1946 adaptation of The Big Sleep was being filmed, Chandler was asked whether the deceased driver Owen Taylor was murdered. In response he claimed “Dammit, I didn't know either!”
Depicting the surrender to a mystical, irrational world is a tradition admirably kept up by Neo-Noir luminaries like David Lynch. I'd posit that Twin Peaks's fascination with the lingering mystery, leaving cases cold — which was the plan for Laura Palmer’s murder before the studio got involved — in favour of aesthetic experimentation is an innovation that can be credited to Chandler.
To Chandler, the great innovation of American fiction was its vitality! You even see this in the advice he gives young writers: “when in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand!”
Hand in hand with noir’s vitality came the genre’s wit. There’s an art to the laconic noir aphorism, and Chandler was its unparalleled professor.
“From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”
“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”
“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”
“She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.”
“I gave her a drink. She was a gal who'd take a drink, if she had to knock you down to get the bottle.”
Following from that last quote, what must also be noted is the pervasive influence of alcohol, typical not only of the era but Chandler’s own fallibilities. A wise man once said that “inside every drunk there's a detective, there has to be.” The hard-drinking lifestyle of Chandler’s hardboiled protagonists contributed to their narrative disorientation, relative to Holmes or the professionals who flowed from Hammett’s pen. Chandler describes drinking as a damaging, but ultimately entrancing passion.
“Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.”
And in large part because of the influence of alcohol, that substance that induces the experience of oblivion, the Marlowe novels are shot through with a tragic sensibility. See the ending of The Little Sister.
“The Hippocrates smile,” the ambulance intern said, and sighed. “On her it looks good.”
He glanced across at Dr. Lagardie who saw nothing and heard nothing, if you could judge by his face.
“I guess somebody lost a dream,” the intern said. He bent over and closed her eyes.”
Noir is about a mood of entrapment above all. And the genre was not necessarily as subversive as both its critics and its fans gave it credit for. Most classic-period noir films lack Jazz soundtracks, detective protagonists or even sometimes the genre’s much-lauded moral ambiguity. The Big Sleep has an orchestral soundtrack. Double Indemnity has an orchestral soundtrack — unlike its sultry successor Body Heat. The moralism of The Big Combo was exceptional for its time, in that regard.
The Hays Code ensured conservative moral messaging in films like The Big Combo too, which brought justice to the baddies in the end. Femme Fatales are a convention, but they are far from the only female type in the genre, frequently paired against a “good girl” archetype who leads the protagonist away from evil. One can see this in Ann the ingenue in Robert Mitchum’s masterful Out of the Past, or if you’d like a modern analogue David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. To the uncharitable, it’s the old madonna-whore dichotomy. To noir devotees, it was an innovation in female agency.
The noir genre also served as a reaction to a world in transition. Behold the opening of Farewell My Lovely, as Marlowe prepares to enter a coloured speakeasy.
“It was one of the mixed blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro.”
Politically too, Chandler was an anti-Communist, dwelling in particular on the “utterly abominable rape of Berlin by Mongolian divisions” in the wake of the Second World War. This fact is only incidentally relevant to his largely non-political body of work, but it is more evidence of his old-fashioned disposition. Unusual, given how his novels’ progressive form was balanced out by his reactionary prose-style.
The intellectual process of the dialectic helps one to rationalise and to overcome these seeming contradictions. Noir is a modernist art form, and as mentioned before, Chandler was something of a modernist writer. But this does not mean that men of the right can take nothing from him, or modernism at large.
It would be a tremendous own-goal if we did pass over that opportunity. In their anti-white mania progressives have essentially conceded every genuinely moving American symbol to the right, giving us powerful rhetorical tools. As noir is still praised for its boundary-pushing qualities and the occasionally censored depiction of smut, the genre is condemned for its sexism, as leftists lose their ability to historicise.
I, for one, reject the idea of rejecting modernity. Westerners created 90% of all that is valuable about modernity — I think Camile Paglia said that once. Most of the period’s detritus can be credited to another ethnosectarian group (pause for applause).
A forward-looking universalist ethic, though suicidal to some, is inherent to the Janus-faced Faustian spirit, torn between a conservative, particularist immune system, and imperial universalism dedicated to the eternal and the divine, expressed through holy wars ancient(religious) or modern(liberal).
This digression warrants an analysis of the modernist right, in relation to noir.
Comparisons can be drawn between the Noir genre and Nietzscheanism as a philosophy. Common elements abound, from an infatuation with the vitalistic forces of an “active nihilism” to the centrality of amor fati — the love of fate — in both. Like Nietzsche’s lebensphilosophie, Noir can be right-wing, but it is rarely traditionally conservative. Nietzscheans, like the heroes of noir, “live dangerously,” building their “cities under Vesuvius.”
Nietzsche’s biological method, highly sensitive to aesthetic judgements, sought to judge things by what they produced. He judged modernity from within, still scorning the levelling fruits of modernism as a philosophy.
This distinction is revealed in Kevin Coogan’s Dreamer of the Day, a superlative treatment of the postwar Fascist Internationale and the connections between diverse strands of far right thought.
“Evola believed that Nietzsche’s great mistake was his uncritical acceptance of the modern age, as evidenced by his materialism. Nietzsche had confused Being (nous), the spirit of man, with biological energy and vitalistic life forces, and mistakenly glorified “blood, soil, the body, and its animal characteristics” while only seeing metaphysics and religion as parts of the social infrastructure that “hinder the realisation of the destiny of the Übermensch.” Concerned only with maximising his individual “will to power,” the modern Übermensch was the nihilistic plutocrat or stock manipulator out to increase his personal wealth at all cost.”
I believe this distinction lies at the heart of Bronze Age Pervert’s contemporary feud with the traditionalists, especially on issues of sexual morality and the regulations placed on Man’s lustful character.
For an example of Nietzschean noir, think of comic book writer Frank Miller’s pugilistic Sin City or his pioneering run on Daredevil, and the romantic depiction of “knights in blood soaked armour” within his graphic novels.
For an example of the “passive nihilism” that Nietzsche so loathed, one needs simply to turn to an examination of modern noir.
Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye is one of the most subversive films ever made — not surprising from the mind behind M*A*S*H, or McCabe and Mrs Miller.
The source text was Chandler’s darkest story, composed as his wife was on her deathbed. The inebriated author Roger Wade was to be a surrogate for Chandler, in the throes of a suicidal melancholy. I think Wade’s self-loathing reflects something of Chandler’s own insecurity — a man with the vocabulary for writing serious literature confined to producing junk fiction. But while Chandler tried to elevate his form, Wade simply stews in his fate.
“You know something? I'm a liar. My heroes are eight feet tall and my heroines have callouses on their bottoms from lying in bed with their knees up. Lace and ruffles, swords and coaches, elegance and leisure, duels and gallant death. All lies. They used perfume instead of soap, their teeth rotted because they never cleaned them, their fingernails smelled of stale gravy. The nobility of France urinated against the walls in the marble corridors of Versailles, and when you finally got several sets of underclothes off the lovely marquise the first thing you noticed was that she needed a bath. I ought to write it that way.”
So The Long Goodbye was his most sociological work. And it was a great achievement. But Altman rewrote the bleak story to draw out Marlowe’s drunkenness and pathetic qualities.
It’s amazing to me how many of the anti-Noir tropes went on to be taken as the essence of the genre. Cynicism replaced fatalism, and the movie is scored with discordant Jazz — music originally used as a TORTURE-WEAPON in The Big Combo — which once again is a modern conceit. But the film had a cultural impact. Connoisseurs of Japanese anime will doubtlessly notice that Elliot Gould(stein)’s informal Marlowe provided the likeness for Cowboy Bebop’s playful Spike Milligan.
1973’s The Long Goodbye is an artefact of the post-cultural revolution era of filmmaking. It was a satire, with the violence dialled up as in the scene where a glass bottle is smashed across a woman’s face. There is no longer a witty voiceover to console you, to make the world make sense to you. That kind of Protestant inner witness, a source of Chandlerian witticisms — was outright removed from the story.
To Altman, "it was supposed to get the attention of the audience and remind them that, in spite of Marlowe, there is a real world out there, and it is a violent world".
"Chandler fans will hate my guts," he continued, "{but} I don't give a damn."
As a work of cinema it sinned against the commandments of noir too. In lieu of beautifully framed camera angles that “painted with light,” in noir-cinematographer John Alton’s words, Robert Altman specifically TOLD the cameraman to move “the camera with as little motivation as possible.”
The vital drive of a film noir script, an hour-and-a-half B-film jam-packed with action, was neutered. The Long Goodbye deliberately opens with Marlowe waking from a nap, a 1950s man in a 1970s scene, though he is not the man Humphrey Bogart was. Then, there is a drawn out segment where he smokes and feeds his cat.
In the place of a plot summary, the lyrics to the jazzy John Williams title track should give you a good idea of the movie’s general vibe.
“There's a Long Goodbye,
And it happens every day.
When some passerby,
Invites your eye, to come her way.
Even as she smiles a quick hello,
You let her go,
You let the moment fly.
Too late you turn your head,
You know you said the Long Goodbye
…
Don't you try to be nice to me now I'm leaving and it’s goodbye.
I ain't running after you in the rain when you're catching a plane no more.
Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye.
I'm through, I'm through this time and I mean it.
In fact, I don't know if I ever even did like you — except for your body.
Your body was good.
Well, let's say so long.”
Contra Altman’s cynicism, we could all profit from a retrospective examination of the ending of The Big Sleep, still a morally grey novel with powerful aesthetics expressed in Chandler’s poetic language. It was an example of fatalism, not cynicism.
The epochal differences between the 1930s, when most of the source texts for future films noir were composed, and the 1970s, when the stories were revived on the silver screen, are important to keep in mind.
Film Noir wasn’t some radical response to the horrors inflicted upon the white western mind by the Second World War. For the most part, the films were adaptations of prewar pulp stories. Noir films were originally B-movies, not arthouse features with a built-in audience of pretentious foreign critics. It is why they were the perfect medium for adapting pulp novels, cheap works of dime fiction that represented the depression-era anxieties of the American Volk. In Robert Mitchum’s words: “We didn’t have the money, we didn’t have the sets, we didn’t have the lights, we didn’t have the time. What we did have were some pretty good stories.”
Noir pulp stories were more of a reaction to the depravity of the Great Depression — that was my thought when reading about “the first time {Marlowe} laid eyes on Terry Lennox” when “he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.”
In response to the excess of the Jazz age, noir was Americans declaring that “that which does not kill us makes us stronger.” This ethic compares favourably to the maudlin introspection that followed America’s vacation in Vietnam.
Marlowe’s journeys were different to those associated with the detectives or knights of old Europe. Sociability and a genuine communion with history is baked into the European way-of-being. Heidegger called it Mitsen, being-together-with-others. But modern Americans exist separated from one another, requiring external forces to bind them together.
Francis Parker Yockey made this point, claiming that “America always did fill me with a terrible feeling that I didn’t know where I was, a feeling of being on the edge of the world, of being isolated.”
There is something fundamentally necrotic about the American city, which, as the cliche goes, is itself a character in the ideal noir tale. And this can be as true of the Miami of Vice fame, as it is of a place like Thomas777’s Chicago. Chandler’s Los Angeles, a city of lost dreams, is at base a place which degrades people.
“Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer.”
Nevertheless, Los Angeles in the works of Raymond Chandler preserves the promise it was once so renowned for. The sunbelt city of the 20th century integrates the presence of nature far more than Hammett’s hilly San Francisco.
“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.”
It is a place that remixes the old and the new, imaginatively pairing Sternwood’s manor with Arthur Geiger’s smut shop. That quarrel between the ancients and the moderns animates noir.
Philip Marlowe was not so much an urban cowboy as much as he was a modern-day knight, from his chess-playing to his pursuit of damsels in distress. In Chandler’s first Black Mask stories, he was called “Mallory” and not Marlowe, perhaps a reference to Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d'Arthur.
Though he declared that “Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights,” the opening of The Big Sleep still faithfully captures Marlowe’s Arthurian ethic. At the front gate of the Sternwood manor, Marlowe sees:
“A knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying.”
The passage is emblematic of Marlowe’s perennial pining for a lost world, a lost, knightly American ethos.
Arthurian references continue to abound with the title of a later novel, The Lady of the Lake. In The Long Goodbye, Eileen Wade’s hair is compared to “the pale gold of a fairy princess… she had a voice like the stuff they used to line summer clouds with.” One critic remarks that “this is the language of a knight to his lady fair. There is only one small problem. The lady will turn out to be a double murderer.” In the Altman adaptation, blonde faces are crudely smashed with glass bottles. Danger cohabitates with Marlowe’s romantic worldview.
The stories are shot through with a feeling of loss. Crippled men like Sternwood are forced to “indulge {their} vices by proxy.” I find Marlowe’s Elizabethan nostalgia infinitely entrancing.
By contrast, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer is more overtly right-wing in a crude, Fox News sort of way. Reading his books, I am reminded of an old analysis of the phenomenon of “Pulp Fascism.”
“Left-wing elitists like Theodor Adorno denounced such products of the “culture industry” for their reactionary philistinism. But {a spirit of Right-wing elitism} is the key to {an} appreciation of popular culture. {Popular culture} was rife with Right-wing themes: heroic vitalism, Faustian adventurism, anti- egalitarianism, biological determinism, racial consciousness, biologically based (and traditional) notions of the differences and proper relations of the sexes, etc.”
You see similar tropes in modern attacks on films like Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, which is actually an antifascist franchise, but that is a story for another day.
While Hammett’s heroes, reflecting his left-wing perspective, assailed the robber barons of the prewar era, Mike Hammer was a reaction to the advance of the coloured, communist world if there ever was one. He exists to defend Capital from the commies while demeaning women and minorities. I don’t think these primitive, reactionary instincts are ignoble, but Marlowe represents a more artistically interesting, metaphysical conservative type. In a way, Mike Hammer’s morality parallels Russell Kirk’s caricature of libertarianism.
“The libertarian thinks that this world is chiefly a stage for the swaggering ego; the conservative finds himself instead a pilgrim in a realm of mystery and wonder, where duty, discipline, and sacrifice are required–and where the reward is that love which passeth all understanding.”
The detective story has resultantly sometimes been criticised as a medium where “the law itself is accepted as a given… {where it is} never put on trial.” But Chandler was not a statist reactionary. His books are also laden with the folk-libertarian ethic that comes naturally to Americans.
“As soon as someone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked."
Challenging Marlowe’s romantic sentiments was an ever-present and authentically American tension that animated his interactions with the forces of the state.
The police are not mere cardboard cutouts designed to show Marlowe’s ingenuity, as they are in Conan Doyle’s stories, nor are they the corrupt incompetents of Hammett and Spillane. They are, to some extent, contemptible rule-followers in a world where “a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket.”
When Marlowe is booked in The Long Goodbye, he remarks:
“I was booked on suspicion. What the hell kind of legal system lets a man be shoved in a felony tank because some cop didn’t get an answer to some questions? What evidence did he have? A telephone number on a pad. And what was he trying to prove by locking me up? Not a damn thing except that he had the power to do it.”
There is an unconscious echo of the works of Max Stirner, for it is a world where “The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”
As a man who imposes his private will on a host of criminal situations, Marlowe acts as a social mediator in the tradition of American Pragmatism. He is no Holmes or Hammer, his skill is communication, not deduction or death-dealing.
According to Giles Gunn, pragmatism is “distinguished by the democratic preference for rendering differences conversable.” It is an ethic at the heart of the American civil religion. Marlowe is set apart from his literary fellows by his “willingness to converse with his contemporaries: to discuss, to argue, even to teach and to learn.” Unlike the Continental Op and Mike Hammer, he strives to avoid violent solutions associated with the American Frontier.
This cuts against Dennis Porter’s criticism of the hardboiled crime genre in The Pursuit of Crime.
“The dimension that is missing from formulaic works in the detective genre is, in fact, any recognition that the law itself, with its definitions of crimes and its agencies of law enforcement and punishment, is problematic… {that the genre} effectively remained silent about important aspects of crime by narrowly establishing boundaries for its action”
Comparisons have been raised between the hardboiled private eyes of American fiction and the real-life role of the Klu Klux Klan, an extralegal body dedicated to the regeneration of the racial community.
In Porter’s estimation, private eyes represent “the phenomenon of social protest,” while questing to return society to the antique status of “the innocent young Republic and its frontier.”
“The radicalism of the hard-boiled tradition ... is a radicalism of nostalgia for a mythical past. If any political program is implied at all, it is one that looks forward to the restoration of a traditional order of things, associated retrospectively with the innocent young Republic and its frontier, a traditional order that was destroyed with the advent of large-scale industrialization.”
There is a holistic current in American culture, for better or worse, that prides itself on the binding together of fractured groups. It is what inspired the Federal Constitution. It stretches from the founding documents that established the Union to lone gunslingers in the plains laying down the law and subduing Indians. It is a current in the American mind that I believe influenced their decision to wade into the byzantine politics of the Middle East, that cowboy mentality Bush embodied. I believe it was at the heart of their midcentury assault on Europe too. They love to bind together fractured polities in a sort of left-Hegelian way. Marlowe represents this to a tee.
Marlowe was a social animal. Americans are, in general, social animals, as anyone with experience with American emigres or expats will tell you. They dominate the room with their bluster and banter — Marlowe reflects a joviality seeded deep into their DNA. A passion for the struggle.
“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.”
He goes forth into the world, like the cowboys before him, like the knights errant who presaged them both.
“Though Marlowe does at times recoil from the seediness of the city, and reacts, for instance, to Carmen Sternwood’s sexual overtures in The Big Sleep with a Puritan disgust that harks back to the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, he is nevertheless committed to a tangible social task: he chooses to live in Los Angeles, thrives on its pace and diversity, and perseveres in a job that forces him to confront the worst the city has to offer.”
As a private man, Marlowe is presented with the opportunity to solve social problems in ways the police cannot, sometimes at the cost of his soul.
The best example of this is the ending of The Big Sleep.
The Big Sleep was a famously convoluted novel, but the plot is almost besides the point. Chandler’s belief was that it was the atmosphere that counted, that “the best mystery would still be worth reading if the ending were removed.” This distinguished him from later pulpslingers of a less sophisticated pedigree like Mickey Spillane. Though a perfectly entertaining writer in his own right — who once claimed that Ernest Hemingway hated him because “I sold 200 million books and he didn’t” — Spillane’s assertion that “nobody reads a book to get to the middle” marked something of a departure from Chandler’s discursive style.
In short, Marlowe investigates of the attempted blackmail of the ravishing heiress Carmen Sternwood (for in my opinion Martha Vickers blew Veronica Lake out of the water), and nurses suspicions over the disappearance of the elder Sternwood daughter Vivian’s husband Rusty Regan.
At the end we learn Carmen killed Rusty after she failed to seduce him. Eddie Mars, a Casino Owner, helped Vivian to cover up the murder, acting as if Rusty ran off with his wife. The sordid conspiracies are kept from General Sternwood, the ailing patriarch who hired Marlowe. Carmen is to be institutionalised. Marlowe heads to the bar and commences with the drinking.
Not exactly Faulkner on paper, though the southern sage did help Howard Hawks with adapting it in his capacity as a screenwriter, but the flair of the patter and the intensity of the atmosphere is what put rear ends into seats.
The overwhelming feeling is that Marlowe is brought into the killings, sucked into the intrigue, walking alone through the carnage all the while. He is tarnished by his environment, and that is the tragedy of the tale.
I will read you the final segment of The Big Sleep, to give you the flavour of Chandler at his finest, a fatalistic little passage with the solemn rhythms of a sermon.
“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. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. But the old man didn’t have to be. He could lie quiet in his canopied bed, with his bloodless hands folded on the sheet, waiting. His heart was a brief, uncertain murmur. His thoughts were as gray as ashes. And in a little while he too, like Rusty Regan, would be sleeping the big sleep.
On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn’t do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again.”
That was a taste of the magic of Raymond Chandler. And in his own words…
“Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production.”
I will conclude with a few judgments from Jonathan Bowden on how one should properly appreciate the work of the historic American nation, works informed by integrity. Their art should not be tarnished by any retrospective, fanciful associations between that group and the twisted fruits of the globalist empire that wages a forever war against them.
“When one sees an advertisement for a mobile phone or one sees some egregious Americana that one doesn’t like the look of, you must always remember these other figures, people like Lovecraft, like Poe, like Eliot, like Lewis—although he was Canadian by birth—often ultra-European figures with their dickie-bow ties and all the rest of it, from the early part of the 20th century, and we understand that there are many Americas and that we feel spiritually closer to the one that they represent than the one that Obama represents.”
“The repudiation of parts of American power should never blind ourselves to the cultural excellence of what many white Americans have achieved, both for their group and individually.”
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Raymond Chandler, American Idealist.
Thank you very much!
(Next up, Plath/Hughes!)