Farewell, My Lovely was Raymond Chandler’s second novel, following The Big Sleep, and I suppose I wouldn’t have read it this week, having read The Big Sleep last week, if it didn’t come in a two-novel edition issued by the Modern Library. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely, I just tend to let a writer cool off a bit before picking up his or her next book.
But in this case I didn’t do that. Here’s what I thought: Farewell, My Lovely sustains Chandler’s uncanny gift for physical descriptions, similes, quick, idiosyncratic dialogue, and ability to toss plot(s) up in the wind early in a novel and then weave some elements together while discarding others toward the end.
Here’s a sample of Chandler’s distinctive style:
“Outside the narrow street fumed, the sidewalks swarmed with fat stomachs. Across the street a bingo parlor was going full blast and beside it a couple of sailors with girls were coming out of a photographer’s shop where they had probably been having their photos taken riding on camels. The voice of the hot dog merchant split the dusk like an axe. A big blue bus blared down the street to the little circle where the street car used to turn on a turntable. I walked that way…”
One of my friends says writing like that is enough to keep him reading regardless of Chandler’s characters, themes, or plots. I don’t know if I’d go that far. I like the physical quality of the writing, the unnecessary bit about the sailors, their girlfriends and the camels, the characterization of the hot dog merchant’s voice, and the big blue bus, but I look for more in a novel, and there is more to Farewell, My Lovely.
The principal characters, led by Philip Marlowe, the detective, all get the Chandler treatment in two senses: what they look like (features, clothes, style of walking) and how they talk. They are vivid if tightly gathered around a thin slice of underworld life.
Then there is Marlowe’s crazy curiosity and emblematic sense of ethics: time and again he turns away or gives back money when he feels he hasn’t performed a job to his employer’s specifications. This is a quirk that distinguishes him from almost everyone else in the novel. Either they have tons of money and money isn’t an issue for them (Marlowe doesn’t have tons of money, far from it) or they will do anything to get it.
The paradox of Marlowe is the juxtaposition of his curiosity and his sense of ethics: he takes risks that, no, you wouldn’t take, and neither would I, in order to fulfill his verbal contracts with people who, in the end, prove to be “beneath” him.
This makes him predictably maddening and interesting, and probably makes the reader wish he or she also lived such an untethered life, able to act on any thought, travel here or there in an interesting city, drink at odd hours, recover quickly from being sapped, and able to consistently accept criticism and indulge in self-criticism. In Marlowe’s world, you often lose, but that’s in the nature of things. Shakespeare must have said something like that, and somewhere or other, Marlowe has learned enough Shakespeare to quote him from time to time.
Does it matter that many of Chandler’s vivid characters are fundamentally caricatures, lacking depth? Does it matter that the contortions of the plot, when they come unsprung, make glancing sense? It’s impossible not to say yes, it matters. But even bit players in Chandler possess an almost Chaucerian humanity, which is to say they are compelling moral portraits, conditioned by bad luck, bad friends, bad enemies, and the ravages of time. Even outside the narrative framework, these figures possess a certain alluring authenticity. Chandler’s artistry lies in constructing that authenticity with his quirky details, the snap in his dialogue, the sordid fragmentary back stories that have wrapped them up in the mysteries Philip Marlowe is determined to crack between drinks.
For more of my comments on contemporary and classic fiction, see Tuppence Reviews (Kindle).
Robert Earle
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