Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler
Teachout, Terry
moderate Times was moved by this to pose the editorial question: "Is Mr. Foot a Fascist?" Foot's association with what Labour (now SDP) moderate Shirley Williams once called "the fascism...
...The Don died in his bed, tragically reconciled to God and forswearing his illusions...
...ALSO: Ronald Reagan...
...t~ Payment enclosed C,ty "~ Bill me later State Zip X91 integrated (though not always deftly) into a prose texture so rich and persuasive that Chandler's novels, flaws and all, have earned the standing of minor masterpieces...
...He shares the illusions of the class war which are swirling up from Labour's grass roots to dominate the party,~ most of whose Sancho Panzas have taken their common sense and their retreaded "moderate" policies into the ranks of the SDP...
...He really belongs in another more literary frame, one carved about 400 years ago by Miguel Saavedra de Cervantes...
...Brock Yates, Ray Price, James Wechsler, James Glassman, John Roche, John Chamberlain, Wdl~am Sabre, Neal Kozodoy, Henry Salvatorl...
...Jean-Franqois Revel, Lu=gi Barzini, Tom Charles Huston, Clay La Force...
...Charles Homer, Edward Banf~eld, Victor Lasky, Raymond Aron, Roy Cohn, Joseph Hazan...
...T. John Jamieson is a Paul Elmer More scholar restding in Livonia, Michtgan...
...the whole adds up to an outstanding piece of work and a highly readable volume in its own right...
...Despite its formidable accumulation of detail, Frank MacShane's Chandler biography was oddly unsatisfying...
...Patton, llI, Fred lkl$, Philip Crane...
...how successful businessmen were assimilated into the aristocracy, ostensibly to keep them from conspiring to overthrow it...
...Now Frank MacShane--who wrote the biography and edited one of the unpublished prose collections--has produced a new volume of letters to supplant the 1962 Raymond Chandler Speaking, one which bears the imprint of no less august a firm than the Columbia University Press...
...What is perhaps more surprising, however, is the extent to which Chandler has been posthumously taken up by the academic machine...
...They had nothing to do with the Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie type of superb plotting...
...They weren't even as well plotted as Dashiell Hammett...
...16.95 T. JohnJamieson Protessor Mayer wishes to establish that World War I, the "war of the mas~es," was not a venture in capitalist expansion, but an attempt by the ancient feudal aristocracy of Europe to recover its ebbing political and economic hold...
...He himself insists that office has made him not less but more of a socialist, and he has shown a curious passivity to left-wing extremists in his party...
...Malcolm S. Forbes, Jr., Thomas J. Lescher, Norman Mailer, Clare Boothe Luce, Gerald R. Ford, Melvin Lasky, Nelson Polsby, Roger Mdhken, Randolph Richardson, Thomas Sowell, S~dney Hook, J~m Fallows, Edith Efron, Gen...
...Those who, over the years, have had cause to regret the fact that Chandler wrote so little will want to add Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler to their shelves at once...
...Patrick Buchanan...
...Paul Laxalt...
...writing to Charles Morton about the reason why Dashiell Hammett stopped writing, Chandler simply suggests that "he may have come to the end of his resources in a certain style and have lacked the intellectual depth to compensate for that by trying something else...
...Foot's association with what Labour (now SDP) moderate Shirley Williams once called "the fascism of the Left" has not loosened with the passage of time...
...GeorgeS...
...Alan Reynolds...
...Exactly as Don Quioxte was swept away by fancies of knighterrantry culled from the reading of too many books (which overheated his brain), so Foot has been carried off on a torrent of Romantic nineteenth-century socialism, tilting with pen and Parliamentary lance against a cigar-smoking cabal of bosses who live now only in the scenes and pages of left-wing melodrama, and on behalf of an oppressed working class which no longer exists...
...Bismarck's phrase for his kind was "intellectual proletarian," what Paul Elmer More called "a nouveau inte/lec!uel, bearing the same relation to the man of genuine education as the nouveau fiche to the man of inherited manners...
...Professor Mayer, who received his doctorate at Yale, and taught at Columbia, Brandeis, and Harvard before arriving at Princeton, is a Marxist historian...
...None of this has been disavowed by Foot, who has in fact been a unilateralist for more than two decades...
...George W. Ball, Tom Stoppard, William F. Buckley, Jr., Joseph E. Coberly, Jr., Albert Shanker, Lewis Lapham, Rowland Evans, Robert Novak...
...and how classical education kept down budding Marxist historians...
...Auden wrote in 1948, adding that "his powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged . . . as works of a r t " ; and Edmund Wilson, in his 1945 essay "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?," took time out from a withering salvo directed at the entire detective story genre to confess grudgingly that Chandler had the power to "invent character and incident and to generate atmosphere _9 . . a malaise conveyed to the reader, the horror of a hidden conspiracy that is continually turning up in the most varied and unlikely forms...
...But Chandler has long been taken seriously by a wide variety of authors and critics ranging from Somerset Maugham and Elizabeth Bowen to Anthony Burgess and Wilfrid Sheed...
...He has also accepted quite cheerfully a reshaping of Labour's selection procedure for Parliamentary candidates which will enable party apparatchiks to dominate MPs in the "disciplined" manner of certain prewar parties in Germany and Italy, or of the "socialist" parties in Eastern Europe today...
...Yet Chandler, in spite of everything, evokes a response far different from that given to such authors as Hammett or Rex Stout...
...He had made his share of mischief, as a man fighting alone--not just for comically obsolete rituals, but as an embodiment and celebration of that saving grace which makes an individual hold out, ~ l'envers et contre tout, against those who reject his dreams of better things...
...which is perhaps just another way of saying that he was a writer, not just an entertainer, and one whose work seems likely to outlast many a contemporary with apparently more serious pretensions...
...R,chard Whalen, Richard Lugar...
...The election of Denis Healey as his deputy is just such a cosmetic gesture in a party whose grass roots are now ruled largely by the raging Left...
...Sometimes the opinions come wrapped inside a patented Chandler simile...
...His dreams are now on the verge of being cast into the corrupt forms that occur when hope is hardened into a diktat and a selective compassion is imposed--by force if necessary...
...Malcolm Muggerldge, Ben Wattenberg, Peregrine Worsthorne...
...The difference is an open secret: It is a function of style...
...in some elusive way he is a real writer while they are merely superlatively competent entertainers...
...Fred Sdverman, John Lofton...
...It also leaves out the peculiar affection which Foot can inspire even among those who oppose him most fiercely...
...so it is a pleasure to report that the present volume is first-rate, not as good a job of editing as (to cite a model example) Carl Bode's The New Mencken Letters, but infinitely better than, say, Carlos Baker's recent Hemingway collection...
...THE AMERICAN SPEC'I'ATOR...
...No political power was ever put into his hands to spoil the perfection of those dreams...
...Hayakawa, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Henry Kissinger, Clayton Fritchey, Milton Friedman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Midge Decter, James Q. Wdson, David Brinkley, Woody Allen, Joseph Coors, Irving Kristol, Henry Fairhe...
...he wrote to a friend...
...yet few have gotten to the point as neatly as Billy Wilder, reminiscing in an interview about his collaboration with Chandler on the screenplay for Double Indemnity...
...Chandler is interested in writing, not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu," W.H...
...How often do you read a description of a character who says that he had hair growing out of his ear long enough to catch a moth...
...Dana Andrews...
...been so lucky...
...William Randolph Hearst, Jr , Shmuel Moyal, Huntington Ca=ms, Eric Holler, Anne Armstrong, Norman Podhoretz, Jeff MacNelly, Dor.s Grumbach...
...Martin Peretz...
...popular culture is big in English departments these days...
...how museums discriminated against avant.garde artists...
...Alexander Haig, Tom Wolfe, James Jackson Kilpatnck, George Gilder, Jack Paar, Donald H. Rumsfeld, George WilI,J Peter Grace, Maj...
...Eugene V. Rostow, Michael Novak...
...As a writer," Miriam Gross has said, " h e owes everything to his style...
...It isn't another The Long Goodbye, but it will do...
...and Chandler's complete output (like T.S...
...how "rotten boroughs" mitigated the effects of universal suffrage...
...I read two or three of his novels," Wilder recalled_9 "They were no great structural things...
...Whenever possible, MacShane has returned to the original letters instead of using the edited versions reprinted in Raymond Chandler Speakmg-a commendable decision...
...We understand too that Waugh spoke of "university-nurtured cultural barbarians...
...THE PERSISTENCE OF THE OLD REGIME: EUROPE TO THE GREAT WAR ArnoJ...
...The letters tell us much about the life of a troubled, difficult, and uncertain man, and so they will interest anyone curious about the details of Raymond Chandler's career...
...Henry Regnery...
...To some extent, the current interest in Chandler is a product of exclusively academic concerns: Hemingway and Fitzgerald have been pretty thoroughly worked over by now...
...activity perfectly reasonable, but readers less familiar with the progress of Philip Marlowe down the" mean streets of Los Angeles may be wondering just what all the fuss is about...
...The book ~6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR .JANUARY 1982...
...Ernest van den Haag, Paul McCracken...
...John Lukacs, Leonard Garment, M=chael Kmsley, Tom Winter, Nathan Glazer...
...C handler's virtues as a writer are equally apparent in the letters Frank MacShane has chosen for his new collection, and they are joined by something not found in the novels: the literary opinions of a widely read, unusually perceptive correspondent...
...Such jolts of verbal electricity light up Chandler's pages from beginning to end, and they are THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1982 35 Who reads The American Spectator...
...Though Tony Benn lost (by a paper-thin margin) the party election for the post of Foot's deputy, the recent Labour Conference did adopt the bulk of the policies which Benn and his supporters have inspired: unilateralism and evacuation of American nuclear bases, withdrawal from the EEC, massive expansion of the public sector and public spending, etc., etc...
...SELECTED LETTERS OF RAYMOND CHANDLER Edited by Frank MacShane Columbia University Press / $19.95 Terry Teachout Though the saga of Philip Marlowe, private detective, drew to an unexpectedly feeble close over twenty years ago with the novel Playback, Raymond Chandler's seven Marlowe books still continue to attract new readers and fascinate old ones...
...Alan Abelson, Charlton Heston, Senator Jake Garn, Gertrude Himmelfarb, James Hitchcock, Gen...
...Roger Starr, Walter Goodman, Harry Jaffa, Jeffrey Hart, David Packard, Robert N,sbeI...
...Perhaps, in that dark place where most men keep their fundamental honesty, Foot is aware of this corruption, and knows well enough how it may end in the most stultifying and cruel tyranny...
...He does seem by fits and starts not a furious and energetic mad scientist, but the wan and rather weary figurehead of a party once possessed, like himself, by a fine madness now going sour...
...but by God, a kind of lightning struck on every page...
...Much has been written about the Chandler style, an iridescent confection of colorful slang, acute observation, and startling juxtaposition...
...Dawd Meiselman...
...Have we, then, the mad scientist after all, intent on building not Jerusalem but a human battery farm in England's green and pleasant land...
...Foot has not "l'The new breed of Labour activist is usually middle class and universityeducated...
...Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County, for example, is dismissed as "indecent e n o u g h . . . and in exactly the most offensive way--without passion, like a phallus made of dough...
...Wedemeyer, James L. Buckley, Elhott Abrams, Lewis Lehrman...
...Mayer/Pantheon Books Inc...
...The image, like a great deal of comment on modern political personalities, leans a little too hard on the cultural icons of comic books...
...Budding thesis scribblers will find their paths smoothed by a checklist, two critical studies, a biography, a collection of critical essays and reminiscences of Chandler, two volumes of uncollected and unpublished miscellaneous prose, and a poorly edited, longunavailable selection of letters...
...Perhaps that is why a Times columnist could ask recently, " I s there a sadder figure in politics today than Michael Foot...
...And the most melodramatic thing about the Philip Marlowe novels was Marlowe himself, a Walter Mitty daydream with a cynical line of backchat and a badly disguised romantic streak, whose ability to step directly from the fantasy life of Chandler into the fantasy lives of his readers was--and is--chiefly responsible for his enormous popularity...
...Chandler buffs, of course, will find all this Terry Teacbout is jazz critic for the Kansas City Star...
...He squirmed at the schoolboy gush implicit in Auden's praise: "Is this a criminal milieu...
...Correspondents and references are identified carefully, and the index is thorough...
...but they also provide innumerable glimpses into the mind of an insightful author who knew his craft, and so they will also interest anyone who cares about literature...
...To this end he furnishes 300 tedious, repetitious pages of generalizations and statistics showing how the ancten re'gt'me conttnued t o own most of the land, thereby controlling the languishing agricultural economy...
...Of course, Chandler's limitations as a serious writer--the soft core of sentimentality at the heart of his work, the infrequent but horrendous purple patches, the implausible characterizations--are hard to overlook, and no one knew this better than the man responsible for them...
...Larry Flynt, M. Stanton Evans...
...Joseph A. Califano, Garry Trudeau, and many others...
...Where Foot has moved against any of this, it has not been to extinguish the policy, but to fard it over and avoid frightening voters...
...how the Papacy "feudalized" religion...
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...R=chard Perlc., Hugh Kenner, Frank Shakespeare, William Proxmire, Patr,ck Cosgrave...
...Jude Wannlski, Jack Kemp, William Rusher, Richard M. Nixon, Wilham E. Simon...
...More often, though, they are delivered straight, and are none the less impressive for it...
...James R. Schlesinger, Thomas Murphy, Suzanne Garment, Roger Rosenblatt, Anthony Harrigan, Robert L. Bartley, David Stockman, R,chard Allen, Ernest Lefever, Sen...
...Charles Peters...
...No, just average corrupt living with the melodramatic angle over-emphasized, not because I am crazy about melodrama for its own sake, but because I am realistic enough to know the rules of the game...
...Antonio Martino, Cohn Welch, Robert Bleiberg, Herb Stein...
...Box 1969...
...The nostalgic glow of Debts o f Honour throws into relief the important difference between the literary and the British "Knight of the Sad Countenance...
...Perhaps that is one reason why he wrote this book--to evoke and preserve in its pages some of the moments when that madness was still a rich source of inspiration and optimism for good men, with Foot himself among the best of them...
...Eliot's) is small enough to be read through in a single week...
Vol. 15 • January 1982 • No. 1
