The Black-Eyed Blonde

[alice malice]

'I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel
Proust,' a waiting femme fatale says when Philip Marlowe hits his
office in The Big Sleep (1939). Marlowe's response: 'Who's he?' 'A
French writer,' she says, 'a connoisseur in degenerates. You wouldn't
know him.' She couldn't have said the same to Philo Vance, S.S. Van
Dine's famous aesthete-sleuth - polo player, expert in Chinese
ceramics, former student of William James - whom Raymond Chandler
regarded as 'the most asinine character in detective fiction', and on
some level that's probably the point. ('I'm not Sherlock Holmes or
Philo Vance,' Marlowe says later on.) Even so, it's surprising that
Marlowe doesn't know who Proust is: he's usually more knowingly
dismissive when it comes to cultural matters, especially when they
touch, as they often seem to do, on his complicated feelings about
highbrow tastes and 'degenerate' sexuality. 'An interesting bit ... Asta
Dial's Spirit of Dawn', a shady gigolo type says 'negligently' of a
modernist sculpture in Farewell, My Lovely (1940). 'I thought it was
Klopstein's Two Warts on a Fanny,' Marlowe says. Interior decoration
'in the latest sub-phallic symbolism' meets his disapproval too, and a
catalogue of types of blonde in The Long Good-Bye (1953) features

the pale, pale blonde with anaemia of some non-fatal but incurable
type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out
of nowhere and you can't lay a finger on her because in the first
place you don't want to and in the second place she is reading The
Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or
studying Provençal. She adores music and when the New York
Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the
six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late.

Khachaturian isn't let off the hook either: 'He called it a violin
concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it.'

Chandler, in his letters, took a similarly hardboiled stance towards
'the fancy boys', as he called the writers whom critics - all of them
sterile phonies - said they liked. They could be divided, he wrote in
1957, into 'the subtle-subtle ones ... the stream-of-consciousness
ladies and gents ... the editorial novelists ... and finally all the
clever-clever darlings with the fluty voices', who showed 'that
cleverness, like perhaps strawberries, is a perishable commodity'. Yet
Chandler wasn't, or wasn't only, a pulp craftsman embittered by the
faint praise he'd been lobbed by Edmund Wilson before [...]

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n07/christopher-tayler/there-are-some-limits-marlowes-just-wont-cross
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l