Sat 26 Sep 2009
A Review by Dan Stumpf: RAYMOND CHANDLER – The Big Sleep.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[11] Comments
RAYMOND CHANDLER – The Big Sleep. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1939. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and paperback, including Avon Murder Mystery Monthly #7, 1942; New Avon Library 38, 1943; Pocket 696, 1950; Pocket 2696, 4th printing, 1958.
Film: Warner Bros., 1946 (Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall; scw: William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman; dir: Howard Hawks). Also: United Artists, 1978 (Robert Mitchum, Sarah Miles; scw & dir: Michael Winner).
Speaking of Film Adaptations of Classic Mysteries, Howard Hawks used to reminisce to interviewers about the scene in a book shop in The Big Sleep (Warner Bros., 1946) to the effect of: “I said to Bogart, ‘This scene is awfully ordinary; can’t we do something to liven it up?’ and he put on a pair of glasses and started lisping and camping it up, and it was funny, so I said, ‘Great! Let’s go with that.'”
Which is a good story, except that the passage in Chandler’s novel is written just like that: glasses, obnoxious effeminacy and all. Granted, the scene in Chandler’s book isn’t as funny as the one in Hawks’ movie, but ’tis there and ’twill serve.
The Big Sleep (Knopf, 1939) was another book I read in High School, but I reread it my senior year in College, and I revisit it every ten years or so since then, always finding something fresh and readable to make me glad I came back. The plot is a mess, and the quality of Chandler’s prose is sometimes strained when it should drop like the gentle rain from heaven on the place beneath, but when it works well, there’s nothing like it, and Sleep brings a colorful cast of bit players to pulp-life with energy delightful to behold.
Again, there’s room to carp. Chandler’s handling of gay characters is hysterically unsympathetic (“… I took plenty of the punch. It was meant to be a hard one, but a pansy has no iron in his bones whatever he looks like.”) and describing an over-decorated house, Marlowe says it “…had the stealthy nastiness of a fag party.” Well how would he know?
And again, that’s just carping about a classic. The Big Sleep works on several levels, and offers some happy surprises along the way. I particularly liked the passage cataloguing the detritus of a shabby office building where Marlowe notes, “against a scribbled wall a pouch of ringed rubber had fallen and not been disturbed.”
Nowadays of course, a writer would just say “used condom” and be done with it, but Chandler’s coy self-censorship offers the kind of unique charm that seems lately to have gone the way of all flesh.
Damn. Two references to Shakespeare and one to Samuel Butler in a single review of The Big Sleep; that’s gotta set some record for pretentiousness.
September 27th, 2009 at 3:36 am
Great as this book is, it has one of the oddest damn scenes in the entire Marlowe canon, the one where Marlowe shreds his bed after Carmen has shown up in it and been thrown out. Critics have been analysing Chandler and Marlowe ever since.
Between the admitted homophobia and that scene you really have to wonder what Chandler was thinking — but then if we drank as much as he did there is no telling what me might have written. And I don’t think most of us could ever get drunk enough to write as beautifully as Chandler at his best.
Even a classic can be flawed — just ask Shakespeare about the seacoast of Bohemia.
September 27th, 2009 at 9:00 am
I recently reread THE BIG SLEEP and my reaction to the scene where Marlowe shreds the bed after throwing Carmen out, was completely different from alot of readers. I didn’t find it odd at all because Chandler makes it clear that Marlowe sees Carmen as something unclean, scummy, disgusting. And it turns out he was absolutely right as the ending of the novel shows.
And concerning the homophobia, most of the population in the 1940’s felt there was nothing wrong in poking fun at homosexuals. Even in the 1960’s, I remember a NJ Transit bus driver kicking a guy off the bus because he looked and acted gay. All the riders on the bus cheered and clapped in support. And one of my final acts in the army was to guard a guy in the process of being discharged as a homosexual. Why a guard? Because the other soldiers were beating him up and there was some concern they might kill him.
Chandler was a product of the times and the prejudices that existed in the early part of the century. In fact if he had kissed Carmen or gone to bed with her, the scene would have felt wrong. Same thing if he had shown support for gays.
I know this is an old subject that we are talking about. And we have just about all agreed that if we are easily offended by certain prejudices, then we certainly shouldn’t be reading popular fiction of the first half of the 1900’s. I try not to judge another period by today’s standards. I know most of us who read Steve’s Mystery*File feel the same way. I’m sure the world will look on us in amazement and disbelief 50 or a 100 years from now.
September 27th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Walker
I agree 100% in regard to the homophobia in Chandler and prejudice in much popular fiction of earlier times, but we can still note Marlowe and Chandler seem a little hung up on the subject without condemning them for being creatures of their times.
As for the scene with Carmen your point is well taken, but Marlowe’s reaction is still a bit over the top all things considered. For some reason is strikes a false note when I read it, as if we got a glimpse at something Chandler the man let slip in the wrong place and time.
And certainly what we consider to be enlightened now will likely be seen as reactionary and backward in a century or two. Either that or things will be so different they won’t be able to even fathom our behavior and thinking just as the behavior of people in the distant past sometimes seems alien and bizarre to us, but probably made perfect sense at the time.
September 28th, 2009 at 4:21 am
The condom line actually is quite poetic. You can always tell Chandler worked hard on the writing.
Chandler was a very bright guy, so it’s a bit disappointing to read some of that other material, however.
Hardboiled’s rather insistent masculinity underlies a lot of the material about women and gays we find troubling today, I think. Golden Age British detective novels usually stereotype gays and lesbians (gay man = flamboyant queen, lesbian = butch dyke), but they often are humorous characters, without the rather nasty edge in hardboiled. Of course, a lot of things are harder-edged in hardboiled. It’s a tough world!
September 28th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Gays were an easy target for the hard boiled school, and whether he meant to or not Hammett helped set the tone in Falcon with Wilbur and Joel Cairo. A lot of what followed was aping Hammett.
Supposedly a joke Hammett played on Joe Shaw involving slang for a passive gay backfired and became one of the most misused terms in the genre. As the story goes Shaw had given Hammett a tough time for the phrase “on the gooseberry lay,” a harmless hobo term that referred to stealing cooling pies off kitchen windows, so a peeved Hammett used two obscene terms that sounded harmless but were actually prison slang for homosexuals.
Shamus referred to a crooked guard who used his power to blackmail male prisoners at Sing Sing for sexual favors, and gunsel was prison slang for a young passive homosexual. The joke backfired on Hammett and the terms stuck with a new meaning that had nothing to do with their original intent. Shamus and gunsel are among the most familiar terms in the genre — but a careful reading of Hammett shows that he used them correctly, Shaw and the rest of us just interpreted them according to what they sound like — not what they meant.
To that extent Chandler was just following the trend, but I still maintain there is an edge there that is perhaps more revealing than Chandler would have wanted if he had been more self aware. But then to be fair the early hard boiled school wasn’t overly kind to any groups or minorities.
Though there was often an underlying sentimental strain in the genre it was filtered through a jaundiced eye, born out of Mark Twain and Bret Harte, Jack London and the dime novel, the old west and the urban landscape. It was perhaps only natural that the genre spoke a rough language and showed little in the way of tolerance and finer feelings. The miracle is that the genre found within that voice an ability go beyond its simple beginnings and speak to larger issues as it evolved.
September 29th, 2009 at 5:31 am
I’ve always found this subject interesting especially when readers sometimes point out certain things that we frown on nowadays. Tough guys talk tough and they are not really sympathetic to minorities or people with different sexual habits. Even when they are not really tough, they try to act tough and are not particularly sensitive. I guess that is why it’s called hardboiled.
There is a letter buried in the ADVENTURE magazine letter column that addresses this problem in the 1920’s. A black reader wrote in complaining that a Gordon Young sea adventure story had a character in it that referred to minorities with a word that we cannot repeat because someone will take it out of context and bring up racism. The editor, Arthur Sullivant Hoffman, replied he was sorry if the reader objected to the word, but that was simply how many sailors talked. They were tough, insensitive, usually poorly educated, and lived hard lives, working long hours. That was the language.
Later, he also had to defend the use of the word “whore” in a serial. A lady and mother of young boys complained, but again the editor stated that was how sailors talked and it really did describe the girl in the story.
SPOILER ALERT—In Chandler’s THE BIG SLEEP, Marlowe rips up the bed because he can’t stand Carmen and finds her disgusting. She posed for pornographic photos and acted in a lewd manner with Marlowe. Chandler writing the novel at this point knew that Carmen was going to be the murderer at the end. He was simply setting the stage describing a scene with a horrible girl that Marlowe couldn’t stand. And he was absolutely right in hating her guts because she turned out to be an insane killer.
Another private eye in a lesser novel probably would have went to bed with her or treated her nicely. But this is why Chandler is at the top with Hammett. He is not like every other private eye novelist.
September 29th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Walker
Let me be clear, throwing Carmen out of his bed is not the problem for me or any critic, but the way he tears up the bed afterward strikes many — myself included — as an over reaction. If he had changed the sheets, or even simply torn them off in disgust I would agree with you, but the scene goes a bit beyond that to the point is strikes some of us as odd no matter how nasty a piece of business Carmen is.
I’m not alone in finding this scene a little odd.
But you are right about the genre and the language. Ironically Gordon Young whom you mention in relation to Adventure, also wrote the proto hard boiled Don Everhard series.
I have no problem with the language in either so long as it reflects the realism of the genre — I find it less offensive than Sayers snide Anti-Semitism (which is more offensive to me than Sapper or even Horler’s more obvious and childish racism), but I still hold there is something more in Chandler’s homophobia and the scene with Carmen borders on the odd even in context.
September 30th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
The bed sheet ripping:
Hey, maybe he was just horny!
September 30th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Dan
Never thought about that. A new door in Chandler criticism has just opened. Hope the Library of America editions are open to revisiion.
September 30th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
What do you think of the whole femme fatale convention in noir? I was watching Murder, My Sweet and even if you hadn’t already seen The Maltese Falcon (or read Hammett or Chandler, of course), you could guess the guilty party immediately. Very entertaining, but predictable!
October 1st, 2009 at 8:14 pm
The femme fatale was well established before noir raised its head. Whether she was one or not the Roman’s portrayed Cleopatra as one, and the Bible is full of them — Deliah and Bathsheba. Helen and Dido, Circe and Calypso — male desire and fear of women goes back a ways well into classical mythology.
Certainly in popular literature we have Dumas Madame De Winter and Doyle’s Irene Adler, and the greatest if them all, Rider Haggard’s She.
It was a natural for the hard boiled school — even Race Williams had the Flame, and the Op Diana Brand in Red Harvest. But Hammett and Chandler certainly made sure the tradition was cemented in the genre with Falcon and The Big Sleep.
And I suppose in such a male dominated genre that is devoted to masculine aggression and cynicism it is no mystery that fear of women or at least woman as a dangerous and potentially destructive but alluring archetype was bound to happen.
And it is hard to complain since those fatal dames are a memorable lot.