The opening chapters of Judith Freeman's The Long Embrace annoyed me. Freeman's quest to discover Chandler's L.A. quickly took on the silhouette of her own distaste for L.A. On her quest to visit all of the homes Chandler had lived in, she sees how unkind time has been to many parts of Los Angeles. I don't dispute this. It is true, many of the neighborhoods where Chandler lived have now fallen into terrible disrepair. Yet in Freeman's attempt to link Chandler's crumbling former homes with his own inevitable crumbling, her distaste for Los Angeles was palpable. It made me wonder, throughout much of the first half of the book, if you hate it so much, why don't you just leave? This would have been an easy position for me to hold onto, had many of her descriptions of Los Angeles not been so spot-on. Yet even in the perfectly captured nuances of L.A., I sensed a bit of character assassination going on (L.A. is, after all, a character here, isn't she?):"The other thing I realized about L.A. was how everyone created their own little private paradise within this greater garden, a refuge that, if you were lucky, you didn't have to leave too often. I remember meeting a well-known screenwriter at a party a few months after I settled in and how, when someone asked how she was doing, she answered she'd had a terrific week because she hadn't had to leave her house for five straight days." p. 33
"I realized at that moment, and not for the last time, what a city of architectural disposability L.A. really was, how quickly one thing was turned into another, buildings torn down, replaced by something else. The rather short history of the city was constantly being erased, like a throwaway metropolis, ensconced in happy amnesia." p.36
"The morning I left for New York, it was one of those days in L.A. when the sunlight bleaches the color out of everything it touches. The rains had stopped just short of breaking an all-time record, and we were back to the overexposed world of blistering brightness." p.107
"There were people with dogs and people with guitars, people with briefcases on their way home from work, children with their parents, people of all ages and races, and I was struck by the vivid and vibrant public life of New York City and the graceful little neighborhood park that served as a magnet for gatherings. In L.A. people would be stuck in their cars at this hour, creeping slowly forward down crammed freeways, ensconced in a deadening state that alternated between boredom and anxiety. One person to a car, four, six, eight lanes in each direction, everyone trapped, alone in their humming metal carapace." p. 111
"Chandler once said that when a civilization is in the process of going rotten, you will always find the symbols of this rottenness in the suburbs, in the lives and homes of supposedly decent people. Los Angeles was (and still is, as the trope goes) nothing if not a vast collection of suburbs (all that rottenness in search of a center)." p.129
Chandler was not, for the most part, an overly happy man. Los Angeles was not an overly welcoming place for him. It seems not to have been/or be so for Freeman either. To read this book and live in this town is to chafe at every slight, to cringe at every accusation that this town is empty, facile, mail-order-esque and in shambles. While much of the description was accurate, her underlying disdain for L.A. weighed on me. Bothered me.
You might easily say, "But the book is about Raymond Chandler and his relationship with his much-older wife Cissy, not about L.A." True. True. But they lived in close to 30 houses in Los Angeles over the course of their years together. Thirty! Chandler spoke of the L.A. climate and the people and the houses and the neighborhoods incessantly in both his letters and his fiction. L.A. usurps Marlowe in every story that counts. And so while the book is ostensibly about Chandler and his wife, it is also about Los Angeles. It is about how the constantly-changing city enabled Chandler's own need for constant scene-changes, how it provided the get-to-know-your-new-surroundin
As for the "biography" itself, on the whole, Freeman's careful research and organization of Ray & Cissy's life hangs together well. It serves as an excellent way to revisit Chandler's work and offers a primer on the history of L.A. At times, though, it feels as if Freeman is guessing, taking a shot in the dark. All biographies traffic in this gray area...in the guessing that must come when the documents don't offer the facts you seek. All biographies have holes, places where the writer must extrapolate, I guess. Some of Freeman's early guesses -- about Chandler's foot fetish and Cissy's addiction to painkillers -- seemed a little off-kilter to me. These didn't feel like gaping holes that needed to be filled. I'd prefer she not address them at all instead of offering speculation.
Freeman's repeated use of Chandler-esque similes wear thin ("abandoned discos with all the charm of used condoms") - there's no need to write like him when you are writing about him, even if your imitations are good. It reminded me of an American spending time in England and coming back with a faux-accent and inserting words like boot and bonnet and bird and lad into their every day American-speak. Yet, these continued attempts at emulation are as endearing as they are off-putting. Freeman is so in love with Chandler that perhaps she doesn't see it. A sure sign she's absorbed the very essence of her subject - and what can be wrong with that? Isn't that what the reader of a biography demands, in the end?
Chandler's writing, so good in places you can see why Freeman falls into the trap of trying to emulate it, is one of the joys of this book. How nice it is to see bits and pieces of his work all in one place, with context, with only the best parts highlighted for doting over. His terse sentences conjure so much with so few words . A few of my favorites:
"Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town." p. 31
"Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer;...worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cokies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it..." p. 32
"The Sternwoods, having moved up the hills, could no longer smell the stale sump of the oil, but they could still look out of their windows and see what had made them rich." p. 77
It is not Chandler's writing, however, that proved to be most interesting in Freeman's book, but his thoughts on the writing life. His writing wisdom crops up in letters to agents, to editors, to friends. He captures some of the unique difficulties of writing in the blunt, deeply knowing way that only he could:
On how he taught himself to write fiction, in a letter to writer Erle Stanley Gardner: "I forgot to tell you that I learned how to write a novelette on one of yours...I simply made an extremely detailed synopsis of your story and from that rewrote it and compared what I had with yours, and then went back and rewrote it some more, and so on. In the end I was a bit sore because I couldn't try to sell it. It looked pretty good." p. 138
"I began to realize the great number of stories that are lost by us rather meticulous boys simply because we permit our minds to freeze on the faults rather than let them work for a while without the critical overseer sniping at everything that is not perfect." p. 139
"To hear them 'discussing and analyzing stories was a revelation in how much it is possible to know about technique without being able to use any.'" p. 263
"If you have enough talent, you can get by after a fashion without guts; and if you have enough guts, you can also get by after a fashion without talent. But you certainly can't get by without either. These not-quite writers are very tragic people and the more intelligent they are, the more tragic, because the step they can't take seems to them such a very small step, which in fact it is. And every successful or fairly successful writer knows, or should know, by what narrow margin he himself was able to take that step. But if you can't take it, you can't. That's all there is to it." p. 263
Chandler's obsession (or Cissy's expressed through Chandler's?) with "climate" is pervasive throughout his letters and conversations. Freeman's own notations on the crazy storms and fires that plagued L.A. during her time of writing the book provided a nice resonance with Chandler's own experiences. A lovely echo, just the right touch. And perhaps her mirroring here softened the frustration I initially felt at her harsh take on Los Angeles. Perhaps.
Freeman's odd focus on race (where it seemed unimportant to include and so her inclusion caused me to stumble and re-read whole sections) and her unwillingness to delve too deeply into the question of Chandler's homosexuality made me wonder what else might have been left on the table. What information wasn't included because it didn't fit in with Freeman's expected outcomes? I felt certain Freeman had expected things to go a particular way and was unyielding in the face of contradictory evidence (not always, but in some cases). Yet the science of biography is not an exact one and I suspect some of my frustration is misdirected at her and is perhaps more akin to her own frustration - what could we have known if there was more evidence?
Despite these bits that bogged me down, I highly recommend this book for both Chandler fans and those who are only vaguely familiar with his work. It provides a wonderful glimpse into Chandler's life, his work, and his relationship with Cissy. It offers a deep look into his working life and how everything he produced was in some way connected to his wife. It gives context for some of his films that I must see again, now aware of what went on during the writing of their screenplays. (The Blue Dahlia has been added and moved to the top of the Netflix queue.) It delivers both a basic history of L.A. and some of the most erudite, albeit biting, descriptions of this city that I've ever read. I wish that Freeman had been able to champion her own city a bit more...why live here for so long and seem to loathe it as much as Chandler? Or perhaps that's the reason she stayed so long?
In the end: I cried when I read Freeman's rendering of the events surrounding Cissy's death. It had been inevitable from page one, but somehow, Freeman caught me up in the emotion of the moment anyway. Good on her.
