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4.0 out of 5 stars
How Chandler Extended the Limits of a Genre, October 4, 2011
A glance at the chapter notes of THE LIFE OF RAYMOND CHANDLER reveals that this biography's primary source is Chandler's letters. This has its advantages, since Chandler was an entertaining correspondent, making this biography fun to read. His letters, sent primarily to his associates in publishing, also show Chandler to be wryly self-deprecating, idealistic about the writer's quest, bristling and pugnacious in business, and restless.
At the same time, this reliance on Chandler's letters poses problems. MacShane, for example, gives relatively little space to THE BIG SLEEP or THE LADY IN THE LAKE, which published before Chandler's prolific letter writing went into high-gear. In contrast, he gives many pages to Chandler's time in Hollywood, for which there are abundant (and querulous) letters. Certainly, this unevenness in the record is a common problem for biographers. Even so, THE LIFE OF RAYMOND CHANDLER sometimes feels driven by the information at hand, not by the experiences that pertain to the creation of Ray's wonderful novels.
In the first nine chapters of the eleven-chapter THE LIFE, the face that Chandler presents to the world through his letters doesn't seem quite real. But in chapter ten, Chandler's wife Cissy dies at 84 and Chandler, 18 years her junior, falls apart. Then, his chronic drinking problem becomes suicidal and his arm's length relations with women--the elderly Cissy retired early to her own bedroom while Chandler wrote his letters--becomes a desperate search for another unsuitable partner. At this point, the craziness that Chandler contained as a married and friendless loner manifests. In retrospect, this reader is amazed that Chandler could achieve so much with such profound inner turmoil.
MacShane produces several excellent chapters in THE LIFE. My favorite is "Black Mask", which describes the so-called pulp writing business of the 1930s, where Chandler, in his mid-forties, got his start. MacShane observes: "There were about 300 pulp writers in New York, with another 1,000 spread around the country. Their task was to supply the nearly 200 million words that were needed to fill these magazines annually. It was an awesome industry, not unlike television today." (FYI: Today is 1976.)
MacShane also provides many interesting observations about Chandler's writing, many lifted directly from the correspondence. For example:
o Ray: "I guess maybe there are two kinds of writers; writers who write stories and writers who write writing."
o Ray: "The thing is to squeeze the last drop out of the medium you have learned to use."
o MacShane: When at last he began to write stories for the pulps and published his own novels, he pulled together the opposed aspects of his nature and created something extraordinarily vital and original. ... He knew that his writing held him together.
A solid four-star read.
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