Is Marlowe a Racist (or even homophobic)?

[Stephen Musgrave]

I think this is a very interesting discussion but I also can't help thinking it's a touch facile to conflate the views of an arguably ironic anti-hero with the (imputed) views of his author. Chandler may have been many things, and held many views, and in this respect is no different from any other author. It shouldn't need pointing out he was writing in a very different time. I'm reading him for the first time (thanks to IV and this list) and whatever the - it seems to me largely glib - observations Marlowe makes which are racist, sexist, or homophobic the intelligence with which his character is drawn leads me to conclude that Chandler was none of those things.

I appreciate that may make me an apologist.........time to dig a bit deeper in any event.

In a TRP-related observation/aside, I've always been put off the whole " 'tec genre". The blanket adverts on the Tube in London (underground not tv......) for the latest 2-D whodunnits only confirm me in this view. In IV I think TRP is doing "The '60s" - late or otherwise - a great service thru Doc Sportello. He's persuading us to wonder - yet again - how we got from there to here.....

> Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:15:15 +0100
> Subject: Re: Is Marlowe a Racist (or even homophobic)?
> From: johncarvill at gmail.com
> To: mackin.paul at verizon.net
> CC: PYnchon-l at waste.org
> 
> A sample, from Tom Hiney's well-regarded biography of Raymond Chandler
> (p281 et seq):
> 
> "The end of the 1980s, however, saw Raymond Chandler's critical
> reputation caught in a backlash. The fashion for psychological and
> 'political' literary criticsm discovered an easy target in Chandler.
> Together with Ernest Hemmingway, he was branded a misogynist,
> homophobe, and a racist; a writer who had effectively created a
> fantastic white male hero in order to compensate for his own
> insecurities. The American crime novelist George V. Higgins, appearing
> in a profile of Chandler on British television in 1988, speculated
> that Marlowe's creator had in fact probably hated his mother and wife,
> and that the emotion that marked his correspondence after Cissy's
> death was 'hogwash'. At about the same time, a rumour began
> circulating Hollywood that Chandler had been a secret cross-dresser.
> 
> [...]
> 
> In America, the backlash centred on what was seen as Philip Marlowe's
> 'fascism'. Representative of this type of criticism were the
> accusations made against Chandler in ['City of Quartz']:
> 
> 'Marlowe, the avenging burgher, totters precariously on the precipice
> of fascist paranoia. Each successive Chandler novel focuses on a new
> target of Marlowe's dislike: Blacks, Asians, gays, 'greasers', and,
> always, women'
> 
> [...]
> 
> The damaging argument that Chandler's books reveal an underlying
> racism in their author carries weight only if passages are quoted from
> them out of context. Chandler wanted Marlowe to be real, and to talk
> 'as the man of his age talks, that is with a rude wit, a lively sense
> of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness'.
> This realsim inevitably included involving the L.A. detective in
> banter where words such as 'wetback' and 'nigger' were spoken. Almost
> all American hard-boiled crime writers (including such black champions
> of the genre as Chester Himes) put racial banter into the mouths of
> their characters, and for the same reason as did Chandler: that it
> would be unrealistic of them to omit it. 'Racism', by contrast,
> suggests hatred, and Philip Marlowe does not hate those who challenge
> the old white order, not least because he does so himself. He hates
> people who annoy him or threaten him, regardless of their colour.
> 
> The opening to 'Farewell My Lovely', sometimes cited as proof of
> Marlowe's racism, in fact shows this."
> 
> http://www.amazon.com/Raymond-Chandler-Tom-Hiney/dp/0802136370

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