IVIV: Letter from Ray

[Robin Landseadel]

	TO JOHN HOUSEMAN

	[Circa October 1949]

	Your article in Vogue was much admired here. I think it was
	beautifully written and had a lot of style. For me personally it
	had an effect (after-taste is a better word) of depression and it
	aroused my antagonism. It is artistically patronizing,
	intellectually dishonest and logically unsound. It is the last
	whimper of the Little Theatre mind in you. However, I'm all for
	your demand that pictures, even tough pictures, and especially
	tough pictures, have a moral content. (Because The Big Sleep
	had none I feel a little annoyed with you for not realizing that the
	book had a high moral content.) Time this week calls Philip
	Marlowe "amoral." This is pure nonsense. Assuming
	that his intelligence is as high as mine (it could hardly be
	higher), assuming his chances in life to promote his own
	interest are as numerous as they must be, why does he work for
	such pittance? For the answer to that is the whole story, the
	story that is always being written by indirection and yet never is
	written completely or even clearly. It is the struggle of all
	fundamentally honest men to make a decent living in a corrupt
	society. It is an impossible struggle; he can't win. He can be
	poor and bitter and take it out in wisecracks and casual amours,
	or he can be corrupt and amiable and rude like a Hollywood
	producer. Because the bitter fact is that outside of two or three
	technical professions which require long years of preparation,
	there is absolutely no way for a man of this age to acquire a
	decent affluence in life without to some degree corrupting
	himself, without accepting the cold, clear fact that success is
	always and everywhere a racket.

	The stories I wrote were ostensibly mysteries. I did not write the
	stories behind those stories, because I was not a good enough
	writer. That does not alter the fact that Marlowe is a more
	honorable man than you or I. I don't mean Bogart playing
	Marlowe and I don't mean because I created him. I didn't create
	him at all; I've seen dozens like him in all essentials except the
	few colorful qualities he needed to be in a book. (A few even
	had those.) They were all poor; they will always be poor. How
	could they be anything else.

	When you have answered that question, you can call him a
	zombie.


	Love,

	Ray

	From "Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler" edited by Frank
	MacShane. Delta Books, 1981