IV - chapter 19 - politics / Chandler

[Bekah]

Because politics is a big issue between Fenway and Doc, I'll digress  
into Chandler and a comparison.

Imo, Chandler's politics don't much resemble Pynchon's and certainly  
not Coy's  (whatever that is).   Chandler stayed away from all of it  
during the McCarthy era which almost destroyed his counterpart,  
Hammett.    Chandler believed that all "systems" were corrupt,   
Catholicism, Communism,  etc.

"... although I have no sympathy with them (the Hollywood Ten),  and  
don't think anything very awful will happen to them, except that they  
will spend a lot of money on lawyers, and the worst kind of lawyers, I  
reserve my real contempt for the motion picture moguls who in  
conference decided to expel them from the industry.   A business as  
big as the motion picture industry ought to be run by a few men with  
guts."
1948 -
Google books - "Raymond Chandler: A Biography"   By Tom Hiney

He once rebuked his leftist friend, James Sandoe: "You and I had  
better leave politics alone, since I am the reactionary type, who  
thinks that the only reason Uncle Dzhugashvili has no extermination  
camps is that he is still trying to find out how to get 50,000 miles  
out of a truck without greasing it."
http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.731/article_detail.asp

"Although Chandler did not share the Red sympathies of Hammett
(believing that there was ‘hardly a hair’s breadth’ between capitalism
and communism), his novels assume that little is as it appears on the
surface (something which always appealed to an old Marxist such as
me), probing the conflicts between right and wrong, truth and
falsehood, love and hate, passion and power that shape our lives. "
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.rawilson/browse_thread/thread/d059bc96e661d501


Meanwhile,  we don't know all that much about Pynchon's politics  
(there are a couple expensive books out there)  but I think one could  
glean a few tid-bits from his intro to Orwell's 1984.  (We have gone  
well beyond what Orwell feared but remained optimistic about the  
ability of humans - proles - to change it.)  Of course this is in  
addition to the fact that Pynchon's protagonists and narrators  
frequently live on the leftish side of the spectrum but more opposed  
to the capitalist/ fascist state than promoting anything specific.

Bekah
My little reading habit:
http://tiny.cc/gQ72E