Reading Chandler in Gyeongju

One of my goals for the year is to read more fiction instead of only non-fiction, so when I took a short, digital-device free trip to the city of Gyeongju in the south-east part of South Korea last week, I decided to bring along a few novels in paperback form. Although I love using e-readers for non-fiction and academic works, I have never adjusted to the form for fiction. I had a few options: American Pastoral by Philip Roth, My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. But the book that ultimately gripped me and which I finished over a two-day period was The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, written in 1953, the sixth of Chandler's seven completed novels.

Most people today, I suspect, know Chandler (if they do) through film, both for his contributions as a screenwriter (co-writing the adaptations of Double Indemnity and Strangers on a Train) and for the adaptations of his novels (two versions of The Big Sleep, and one for each of the other novels except his last, Playback). The two most well-known are the 1946 Howard Hawks/Bogart-Bacall version of The Big Sleep and the 1973 Robert Altman version of The Long Goodbye. Neither is exactly faithful as an adaptation, but The Big Sleep is closer to the Chandler source and the Philip Marlowe character, with Bogart an ideal performer for the role. The film ends more happily than the novel and with the union of the Bogart/Bacall couple, but it feels like the hard-boiled detective genre for which Chandler was known.

The Long Goodbye, however, has very little relation to the original source. The setting is now the early 70s, when the film was made, and has only the bare basics of Chandler's original plot, and even makes major changes to these elements (especially the rather shocking finale). Most dramatically, Marlowe is played by Elliott Gould, who gives a comic and seemingly improvised performance that has little of the hard-boiled dialogue of the original, despite being written by one of the co-screenwriters of The Big Sleep, Leigh Brackett. Even the noir stalwart Sterling Hayden gives a very un-classical, Method-style performance that differs significantly from his tough-guy persona. In short, this is a Robert Altman film, and has little connection to Chandler, other than getting at, in its own way, the rotten core of glamorous Los Angeles. It is a great film, maybe even a masterpiece, and in its way even a great adaptation, but I think it is unfortunate that it now dwarfs the original novel, because this book is literature of the highest order.

I say this is great literature in the sense that, although this is genre fiction that is trying to tell a good detective story, it is also a finely crafted piece of writing and construction, with many poetic moments that equal F. Scott Fitzgerald, who clearly influenced Chandler's style. In terms of structure, there are 53 chapters over the course of a novel less than 400 pages. Thus, few chapters last longer than 10 pages and many are less than 5. Each chapter feels pared down to its very essence, with the language and voice reaching a kind of perfection. It is the rare novel where you are constantly highlighting lines and paragraphs because they are so striking. Partly this is because Chandler, for all his cynicism, is basically a romantic, and given to this heightened use of words (which is why a pure cynic like Altman eliminates almost all of them). But I think it is also something more, in which Chandler by 1953 had come to know this genre and this character so well that he can concentrate on working over the expressive use of metaphor to the point where almost every sentence is a delight to read. And beyond the single sentence gems, there are also paragraph fragments that evocatively convey a worldview, one that shows Chandler's distrust of promises of the American Dream and, even more radically, the Dream's emptiness once achieved.

As much as I love Altman's film, my love of the book is such that I would be very enthusiastic about a more faithful adaptation. Given that there has been no Chandler novel adapted in almost 40 years, perhaps the time has come.

As a way to give a sense of Chandler's writing and some of his ideas, here are the sentences and passages I found most memorable (I've bolded the best of the best):

It's excitement of a high order, but it's an impure emotion -- impure in the aesthetic sense. I'm not sneering at sex. It's necessary and it doesn't have to be ugly. But it always has to be managed. Making it glamorous is a billion-dollar industry and it costs every cent of it. (23)

Tijuana is not Mexico. No border town is anything but a border town. (37)

There are places where cops are not hated, Captain. But in those places you wouldn't be a cop. (48)

He is the stage manager of a play that has had the longest run in history, but it no longer interests him. (53)

Like playing cards with a deck that's all aces. You've got everything and you've got nothing. (79)

It was exclusive in the only remaining sense of the word that doesn't mean merely expensive. (98)

The dialogue was stuff even Monogram wouldn't have used. (99)

There are one hundred and ninety ways of being a bastard and Carne knew all of them. (112)

His eyebrows waved gently, like the antennae of some suspicious insect. (125)

"There are more unpleasant ways to die," he said. "I think yours will be one of them." (148)

He could have twisted the hind leg off of an elephant. (154)

It seemed louder than before, if possible. About two drinks louder. (177)

Around here we only hit our wives in private. (178)

The house was leaking guests out into the evening air now. (180)

A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before. (181)

I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency. (187)

That's the difference between crime and business. For business you gotta have capital. Sometimes I think it's the only difference. (188)

There is something compulsive about a telephone. The gadget-ridden man of our age loves it, loathes it, and is afraid of it. But he always treats it with respect, even when he is drunk. The telephone is a fetish. (200)

Chapter Twenty-Eight (203-207)

Idle Valley was a perfect place to live. Perfect. Nice people with nice homes, nice cars, nice horses, nice dogs, possibly even nice children. But all a man named Marlowe wanted from it was out. And fast. (220)

"Who built this place?" I asked her. "And who was he mad at?"

Mass production couldn't sell its goods next year unless it made what it sold this year look unfashionable a year from now. (234)

I went on out and Amos had the Caddy there waiting. He drove me back to Hollywood. I offered him a buck but he wouldn't take it. I offered to buy him the poems of T.S. Eliot. He said he already had them. (237)

I might have even gotten rich -- small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city. (249)

A hotel room is a pretty sharp indication of the manners of the guests. The Ritz-Beverly wasn't expecting them to have any. (291)

There is a kind of silence that is almost as loud as a shout. (304)

Dead. What a cold black noiseless word it is in any language. (318)

I always find what I want. But when I find it, I don't want it anymore. (342)

In one way cops are all the same. They all blame the wrong things. If a guy loses his pay check at the crap table, stop gambling. If he gets drunk, stop liquor. If he kills somebody in a car crash, stop making automobiles. If he gets pinched with a girl in a hotel room, stop sexual intercourse. If he falls downstairs, stop building houses. (351)

"Do you have something against marriage?"
"For two people in a hundred it's wonderful. The rest just work at it." (362)

The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right.
To say goodbye is to die a little. (365)

I never saw any of them again -- except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them. (final line, 379)