The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved [Hardcover]

Judith Freeman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 6, 2007

Raymond Chandler was one of the most original and enduring crime novelists of the twentieth century. Yet much of his pre-writing life, including his unconventional marriage, has remained shrouded in mystery. In this compelling, wholly original book, Judith Freeman sets out to solve the puzzle of who Chandler was and how he became the writer who would create in Philip Marlowe an icon of American culture.

Freeman uncovers vestiges of the Los Angeles that was terrain and inspiration for Chandler’s imagination, including the nearly two dozen apartments and houses the Chandlers moved into and out of over the course of two decades. She also uncovers the life of Cissy Pascal, the older, twice-divorced woman Chandler married in 1924, who would play an essential role in how he came to understand not only his female characters–and Marlowe’s relation to them–but himself as well.

A revelation of a marriage that was a wellspring of need, illusion, and creativity, The Long Embrace provides us with a more complete picture of Raymond Chandler’s life and art than any we have had before.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Novelist Freeman (Red Water) turns her obsession with Chandler and his beautiful wife, Cissy, into a kind of voyeuristic exploration of their unusual but symbiotic marriage. The creator of Philip Marlowe and author of such classics as The Long Goodbye and Farewell, My Lovely, remains an enigma and his much older wife (she lied to him about her age) is even more of a cipher. Freeman describes researching Chandler archives at both UCLA and the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and her pilgrimages to the extraordinary number of homes and apartments (more than 30) where the peripatetic Chandlers lived in California. She also consulted printed resources and interviewed some who knew the Chandlers late in their lives. She effectively uses passages from Chandler's fiction and letters to illustrate his battles with alcoholism, boredom, manuscripts and screenplays. Less effective are the many passages where Freeman tries to read too much from scanty clues (for instance, trying to guess which woman in a photograph is the one Chandler had an affair with). The result is an uneven account, part author's journal, part biography, of an unusual couple whose marriage survived against all odds and may have been the key factor that allowed Chandler to create his tarnished knight, Marlowe. Photos. (Nov. 6)
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Review

“Part biography, part detective story, part love story, and part séance, The Long Embrace takes us on Judith Freeman’s journey to discover the private Raymond Chandler through the lens of his marriage to a woman eighteen years older than himself, a woman he adored and yet whose every scrap of correspondence he destroyed following her death. Lively, quirky, revealing of both author and subject, this is a welcome addition to any Chandler addict’s library.”
–Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander

“This elegant, stirring book plumbs a great mystery, one hidden, from even Chandler’s many devoted readers, in plain sight. Freeman’s book is a meditation on marriage, a persuasive biographical and literary study, and, best of all, one of those rare books, like Nicholson Baker’s U and I or Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, where one writer’s study of another takes the form of a confessional fugue on the writing act itself.”
–Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude

“A compelling picture of present-day Los Angeles and a compelling dual portrait of Chandler and his wife . . .  Ms. Freeman knows the territory as well as Marlowe himself . . . she feels the language and captures the mood. Like Cissy, when she crooks her finger, it’s impossible not to follow.”
–The New York Times

“A beautiful and original book. . . Freeman writes about L.A. with a tender precision and yearning that borders on the religious. . . In "The Long Embrace," magic has occurred. Freeman's identification with her subject is so complete we feel we're there with Chandler too.”
–The Los Angeles Times

"The Long Embrace" may be the essential book on Raymond Chandler. Like his books, it offers a rational solution to a puzzle while at the same time retaining a sense of mystery.”
–The Chicago Tribune

“An invaluable prism to understand Raymond Chandler, his wife and most of all Los Angeles and its environs, of which he became the literary champion . . . Ms. Freeman's intuitive understanding of the writer and his terrain make her the perfect person to ask the right questions . . . Ms. Freeman not only establishes the centrality of Cissy to Chandler's life and art, she actually succeeds in making the reader feel their passion.”
–The Washington Times

“Compelling biography . . . a novelist's nonfiction triumph.”
–The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In this unusual, beautifully modulated study, Judith Freeman gives us a probing look at Chandler and his inspirations . . . [Freeman] is a wonderfully astute critic of Chandler's writing, and poignant explainer of the torments that fed his vision . . . What makes this an exceptional book is the way Freeman merges her own personal obsession with Chandler with a haunting meditation on Los Angeles. Few writers have revealed the essence of this chronically misunderstood city so well.
–Newsday

“A fascinating book”
–The Tuscon Citizen

“An acute and empathic study . . . Freeman does some fine literary detective work.”
–The Guardian

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (November 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375423516
• ISBN-13: 978-0375423512
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #263,284 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dark Duet, December 23, 2007

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (Hardcover)

As soon as people started talking about this book in my book club, I knew I wanted to take a look. What a provocative subject, the long embrace being the decades long marriage between Cissy Pascal and Raymond Chandler, whom she called "Raymio," a takeoff on Romeo I guess. When they met, Raymio was a pretty young guy, raised in England and newly attached to a pair of wealthy Los Angeles friends he had met on shipboard on the way over--glommed onto, it seems, though Judith Freeman makes it seem very natural that he should like these wealthy people, since he was something of a snob--or rather, to escape the class stratification of England, he needed to have middle class friends right away to afford him opportunities he wouldn't have had over there. And Julian and Cissy Pascal, a pair of pianists, lived nearby and were always in the happy circle, right before World War I.

When he realized he had fallen for her, and she a married woman, Ray enlisted and saw action overseas (action he would never again refer to except in the obliquest terms), and when he came back he broke his mother's heart by marrying the now divorced Cissy. In fact Flossie died rather than have to witness the wedding--terribly sad. What Raymio didn't know is that Cissy was much, much older than she purported to be. When he began to suspect she had lied about her age, in the late 20s, it sparked a terrible crisis in their marriage. He had become an oil executive, and she a housewife who did all her housework in the nude.

Judith Freeman shows how nearly everything about their marriage was affected by this odd age difference (Cissy was 18 years older than Ray). She was beyond having children when they met, and had already been married twice; she had posed nude for artists and photographers, and apparently he liked that she had this rakish past as a bohemian Trilby. He claimed that she was highly sexed, perhaps to give himself the reputation of a man who had sex often. Freeman has interviewed two people who knew Chandler fairly well, the painter Don Bachardy, and the pianist Natasha Spender, both of whom were convinced Ray was gay, and you'll believe it too after hearing their testimony.

Freeman has independently decided to write a book about how she went and visited every one of the houses and flats Ray and Cissy rented during their long embrace. This is where the book falls flat, for me. They were constantly moving, sometimes often as three times in a year, and so Freeman went to something like three or four dozen Southern California residences, and during all her visits, or stakeouts, which she described in plenty detail, only two or three interesting things ever happened to her. An editor might have advised her, this isn't working, Ms. Freeman. You will find yourself skipping her visits and these take up a good third of the book. On the other hand, she is a fine writer and I can imagine some people really digging her accounts of her travels, even if they shed no light on the people she is purportedly writing about.

I preferred her accounts of her research in the two great repositories of Chandler material--one here in the US, the other at the Bodleian Library in Britain.

Freeman excels at bringing to light odd bits of social and pop cultural material from the far corners of history. She explains why Cissy did her housework naked--she was following a fad developed by an expatriate American woman who inspired a whole cult of nude homemakers in Europe and in the US with her system of body toning anf posture improving. Her name was Bess Mensendieck. "Even putting on and taking off a fur coat," writes Freeman, "provided an opportunity for a woman to exercise and encourage proper body alignment."

Another interesting chapter of California history comes when Freeman discusses (all too briefly) the "state societies." These came about as social gstherings for Los Angelenos transplanted from elsewhere, feeling homesick they would gather together regularly at places like cafeterias and social halls--the "Iowa State Society," the "Kentucky State Society," etc. All too little has been written about this important movement that tried to alleviate the disconnect these western pioneers must have felt in 1920s LA. Cissy remains a mystery alas. In fact now that I know more about her, she has become indescribably dull, like a stained glass window over which a carpet has been installed. Still I would not hesitate to recommend this book to those who wish to know more about the way Chandler was viewed by Bachardy, Natasha Spender, or by Dilys Powell, the film critic who sort of sums it all up in Freeman's opinion.

Illustrated with many rare photographs!

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you love Raymond Chandler ..., December 31, 2007

By 

Richard Thieme (Milwaukee WI) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (Hardcover)

Reading these seven prior reviews, it stands out that all of them are pretty much right. The strengths of this book are its strengths and the weaknesses are its weaknesses. But that isn't the whole story.

The Long Embrace is a subjective account of a subjective experience that in turn requires a particular frame for the subjective experience of the reader in relationship to Raymond Chandler. If you love Raymond Chandler and his work as much as Freeman, you will love this book. It you don't like Chandler or are neutral to his work, you might not like it. It's a homage, and a reverie, and a critical work, and above all, the projection of an author in search of both objective and subjective correlatives for her vision and life experience. Objectively she is struggling to map her own biography and history with the history and the landscape of Los Angeles, but not just any Los Angeles - it's the Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler's fiction that constitutes her quest, an imaginary landscape more real to her than the smoggy basin she inhabits. That makes the search doubly difficult. So she spends energy and time driving the city streets in search of markers for the many way-stations with which Chandler and his wife Cissy mapped their own erratic trajectory through life, his career, and a city that devours itself daily. Because Chandler's vision seized Freeman's heart and soul as well as her agile and creative mind, she needed to build a three-dimensional tic-tac-toe-like representation of all this, and as I say, if you too have loved Chandler and his special gift to us, you will appreciate, savor and understand the compelling necessity of her quest.

Young people who have not experienced the constant destruction of the markers of our histories as American cities bulldoze the external signs of our past may not appreciate the emotional impact of Freeman's journey, her attempt to overlay transparencies of the current physical city in which she lives on the even deeper emotional landscape of Chandler's fiction. Maybe only middle-aged people and older ones can really appreciate why this book exists.

And people who do not intuitively understand why noir is the appropriate lens for those of us who grew to maturity in post World War 2 America may not resonate with this quest. When Freeman cites the film Chinatown as the "most brilliant movie of them all," either you know exactly what she means, or not. You sit up and quack like a duck, or you don't. Since I cite in my own work - my speeches and my non-fiction collection, Islands in the Clickstream, in particular - Chinatown and Blade Runner, another LA-noir classic, more frequently than any other two films, I think I do understand. If you know what I mean when I say that, if you smile with recognition, you will love reading this book.

Yes, there are passages you might scan, when Freeman indulges herself in her own experiences and observations on site, but that might also be because her existential journey which this book represents is not your primary interest. That's fair enough. But if you can see yourself vicariously tracing the footsteps of this enigmatic couple in order to under their relationship, so constitutive of the identity and energies of this uniquely American writer, then you will linger over those passages too. It is precisely the ephemeral nature of her observations - who she sees, the time of day, the smell and look and feel of places present to her and to us through her writing and only through her writing through which she attempts to divine the former essence of what was there, once, and is gone forever - that call attention to the ephemeral nature of our own memories, linked to the books or films that meant so much and which have become even more real to us than the places they depict.

What is needed now, of course, is someone who explores Judith Freeman's life to understand her compelling need to understand the dynamics of this relationship, her obsessive pursuit of "Ray," as she calls him; what is needed is someone who visits all the places Freeman lived, explores her relationship to friends, husbands, lovers, and her childhood history. That subjective biographical quest would in turn be imposed on hers, inviting alas another quest, one in search of Freeman's biographer, and on and on, turtles all the way down, as they say, and perhaps that is the crux of this lovely, insightful, well-written book: primary materials, no matter how abundant, never fully explain the mystery of the Other, and when that Other has affected us deeply, we always write as much about ourselves as the one we describe. Memories link, blur, and recede in infinite regress, pointing toward poetic or spiritual writing as the ultimate frame of the illusion of objectivity, an illusion we inherit from the twentieth century, too, and which in fact is the foundation of the detective story in the first place. We solve mysteries vicariously through these books, pretending that a scientific method is all we need, because we know deep in our hearts that we can never solve the real mysteries of life. We are all searching for coherence and meaning and harmony in a symphony hall full of dead spaces, filling in the blanks with the contents of our lives.

(..)

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fey Ray, December 20, 2007

By 

Author Bill Peschel "Writers Gone Wild" (Hershey, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (Hardcover)

"The Long Embrace" is not a conventional biography of Raymond Chandler. Instead, Judith Freeman embraces the writer's right to tell her story the way she wants to, and focuses instead on the marriage between Chandler and Cissy Eugenie Pascal, and a quest to visit all of the places they lived in. Both prove to be daunting journeys.

Cissy is an enigma. Little is known about her. As a young woman, she was an artist's model who sometimes posed nude. She was a concert pianist, twice-married, and after her marriage to Ray, she vanishes. They did little socializing and she rarely let herself be photographed. As if to finish the job, Ray burned their letters. We know so little about her that one wonders if she were fated to bind herself to the English-raised oil company executive with ambitions of writing.

Ray, on the other hand, is easy to figure out. He had a thing for taking care of women, a trait he passed on to his detective hero Philip Marlowe. He took care of his ailing mother, until she died. Two weeks later, he married Cissy. He was 35. She said she was 43, but she was actually a decade older. Ray may not have known her true age, but as the years passed, he probably guessed. That he was deeply attached to his wife, there's no doubt. After she died, he lasted only five sad years.

"The Long Embrace" is a labor of love. Freeman trolls through the two collections of Chandler's papers, split between California and Oxford, and comes up with some evocative items, among them the passport photo and the list, in Cissy's writing, of the animal knick-knacks they collected, with their cute names.

As part of her research, she follows the Chandlers in their frequent moves. Except for one period, when they spent eight years in a house overlooking the sea in La Jolla, outside of San Diego, they moved yearly among a series of furnished apartments. The list of addresses reads like an atlas: Redondo Beach, Santa Monica, Silverlake, Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, Big Bear Lake, Cathedral City.

Not surprisingly, time has not been good to the Chandler residences. Some have fallen to the bulldozers. Others were occupied by people who never heard of Chandler and wanted nothing to do with this strange white woman with her camera. But she comes across the house in LaJolla, the only one they bought, just before it was destroyed. This was the one they stayed in the longest, the one in which Cissy died, and miraculously it had changed little since then. Here, Freeman's quest was worthwhile.

But with that exception, it's not the houses that tell us something about the Chandlers, it's the fact that they were never willing to put down roots.

This is the sort of discussion "The Long Embrace" generates. I read this book more than a month ago, and I still catch myself reflecting on Ray and Cissy's peripatetic life. In her roundabout way, Freeman created a very human Raymond Chandler, who knew that life was 6 to 5 against, but placed his bet anyway.