The Long Goodbye, Chapter 49

[Robin Landseadel]

On Oct 16, 2009, at 5:42 AM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:

> I guess in some ways IV is a faint echo of COL49.  Jason (despite  
> the Rolls), Coy and Jade represent the preterite, and like the  
> preterite in COL49, they possess some knowledge of a shadowy group  
> (although they don't benefit from it, as do the participants in  
> W.A.S.T.E.) that Doc must ferret out.
>
> Laura

In some ways The Crying of Lot 49 has some not so faint echos of  
Raymond Chandler's "The Long Goodbye." Here is the start of chapter 49:

	FORTY-NINE

	When the car stopped out front and the door opened I went out
	and stood at the top of the steps to call down. But the middle-
	aged colored driver was holding the door for her to get out.
	Then he followed her up the steps carrying a small overnight
	case. So I just waited.

	She reached the top and turned to the driver: "Mr. Marlowe will
	drive me to my hotel, Amos. Thank you for everything. I'll call
	you in the morning."

	"Yes, Mrs. Loring. May I ask Mr. Marlowe a question?"
	"Certainly, Amos."

	He put the overnight case down inside the door and she went in
	past me and left us.

	" 'I grow old ... I grow old ... I shall wear the bottoms of my
	trousers rolled.' What does that mean, Mr. Marlowe?"

	"Not a bloody thing. It just sounds good."

	He smiled. "That is from the 'Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'
	Here's another one. 'In the room the women come and
	go/Talking of Michael Angelo.' Does that suggest anything to 	
	you, SIr."

	"Yeah-it suggests to me that the guy didn't know very much
	about women."

	"My sentiments exactly, sir. Nonetheless I admire T. S. Eliot."

Move on to chapter 51, 12 pages later:

	"Here's the letter, Mr. Endicott, if you care to read it."

	I took it out and gave it to him. He read it carefully, the way
	lawyers read everything. He put it down on the desk and leaned
	back and stared at nothing.

	"A little literary, isn't it?" he said quietly. "I wonder why he did  
it."

	"Killed himself, confessed, or wrote me the letter?" "Confessed
	and killed himself, of course," Endicott said sharply. "The letter
	is understandable. At least you got a reasonable recompense
	for what you did for him-and since."

	"The mailbox bothers me," I said. "Where he says there was a
	mailbox on the street under his window and the hotel waiter
	was going to hold his letter up before he mailed it, so Terry
	could see that it was mailed."

	Something in Endicott's eyes went to sleep. "Why?" he asked
	indifferently. He picked another of his filtered cigarettes out of a
	square box. I held my lighter across the desk for him.

	"They wouldn't have one in a place like OtatocIan," I said.

	"Go on."

	"I didn't get it at first. Then I looked the place .up. It's a mere
	village. Population say ten or twelve thousand. One street partly
	paved. The jefe has a Model A Ford as an official car. The post
	office is in the corner of a store, the chanceria, the butcher shop.
	One hotel, a couple of cantinas, no good roads, a small airfeld.
	There's hunting around there in the mountains-lots of it. Hence
	the airfield. Only decent way to get there."

	"Go on. I know about the hunting."

	"So there's a mailbox on the street. Like there's a race course
	and a dog track and a golf course and a jai alai fronton and
	park with a colored fountain and a bandstand."

	"Then he made a mistake," Endicott said coldly. "Perhaps it was
	something that looked like a mailbox to him-say a trash
	receptacle. "

	I stood up. I reached for the letter and refolded it and put it back
	in my pocket.

	"A trash receptacle," I said. "Sure, that's it. Painted with the
	Mexican colors, green, white, red, and a sign on it stenciled in
	large clear print: KEEP OUR CITY CLEAN. In Spanish, of
	course. And lying around it seven mangy dogs."

	"Don't get cute, Marlowe."

I suppose I could go off on a tear with this sort of data. It should  
suffice to note that Pynchon copped to his awareness of the P.I. genre  
in CoL 49 [probably earlier but I got on the bus with CoL49],  
specifically cites Raymond Chandler in GR and has a major P.I. plot  
thread with Lew Basnight in AtD. Again note that Chandler's books were  
initially dismissed as "plup" only to be posthumously canonized by the  
likes of Joyce Carol Oates. Alice says for us to look at Hawthorne for  
deeper meaning in Pynchon's novels. I say Raymond Chandler is far more  
applicable to Inherent Vice—not simply for the obvious reasons but  
also for the literary echos of "Underground" [preterite] literature as  
presented by the likes of Chandler and Philip K. Dick. The Inherent  
Vice of Genre Fiction is an inherent lack of respectability as far as  
the Lit-Crit crowd's concerned. Chandler turns that around by blowing  
a hole through T.S. Eliot's pretensions.