Happy Birth Day to The Long Goodbye

[alice wellintown]

On this day in 1953 Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye was published.
Many say it is his best novel, and the biographers trace many
connections to Chandler's personal life, none of them happy ones. Nor
would any of them have been encouraged by Chandler:

Yes, I am exactly like the characters in my books.... I do a great
deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes. I am
thirty-eight years old and have been for the last twenty years. I do
not regard myself as a dead shot, but I am a pretty dangerous man with
a wet towel. But all in all I think my favorite weapon is a
twenty-dollar bill.
Chandler had a similar warning to those who looked for the literary
craftsman in the writing: "It just happens, like red hair." But The
Long Goodbye did not just happen. One letter to his agent in 1952
explains his three-year struggle with the book this way: "My writing
demands a certain amount of dash and high spirits -– the word is
gusto –- and you could not know the bitter struggle I have had in
the past year to achieve enough cheerfulness to live on, much less to
put into a book." In the novel, such despair has Marlowe so low that
he takes women he dislikes to bed; for Chandler, it was caused by the
last, long illness of his wife, Cissy. While reworking his final draft
Chandler slept on a couch outside her room, gave up drinking and had
to punch two new holes in his belt. When she died, a year after The
Long Goodbye was published and eight weeks short of their thirty-first
wedding anniversary, Chandler himself drew the connection: "No doubt
you realize this was no sudden thing," he wrote to a friend, "that it
has been going on for a long time, and that I have said goodbye to my
Cissy in the middle of the night in the dark cold hours many, many
times." She was eighty-four years old, eighteen years older than
Chandler, and "For thirty years, ten months and four days, she was the
light of my life, my whole ambition. Anything I did was just the fire
for her to warm her hands at. That is all there is to say. She was the
music heard faintly on the edge of sound."

Chandler's last years without her were spent more or less in
breakdown, the drunken suicide attempts of the months after Cissy's
funeral turning to five, eventually fatal, years of alcoholism. In his
last months he was having desperate, disinterested affairs and
drinking gimlets again, now all too much like Marlowe in The Long
Goodbye: "Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is
intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes
off." In this state he proposed to three different women -- one from
Australia, one from England, and one sent to California by the one
from England to check into what the one from Australia was up to.

On the last page of Chandler's last finished novel, Playback, we see
Marlowe coming back to his empty apartment, mixing a drink and staring
at the end of love:

Wherever I went, whatever I did, this was what I would come back to. A
blank wall in a meaningless room in a meaningless house. I put the
drink down on the side table without touching it. Alcohol was no cure
for this. Nothing was any cure for this but the hard inner heart that
asked for nothing from no one.
But then he gets a call from Linda Loring -- the one he had bedded in
The Long Goodbye, and would marry in the never-completed Poodle
Springs.