Is Marlowe a Racist (or even homophobic)?

[Paul Mackin]

Thanks for this useful quote, which I think puts the notion of Marlow and 
Chandler as sexist, racist, sexual orientationist, and even fascist in its 
chronological  context.

Truly the word police of the 80s and thereabouts was a scourge. (to 
characterize a phase of societal development at its simplest level)

The topic of "political correctness" is quite a complex one so I won't 
embarrass myself by trying to go into it.

P.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Carvill" <johncarvill at gmail.com>
To: "Paul Mackin" <mackin.paul at verizon.net>
Cc: <PYnchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 20, 2009 3:15 PM
Subject: Re: Is Marlowe a Racist (or even homophobic)?


>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