‘The Long Goodbye’: The End of Illusions
A review of ‘The Long Goodbye’, by Raymond Chandler; Houghton Mifflin, 1953.
There is a story told in A.E.’s Hotchner’s book on Hemingway that deals with his subject’s ongoing row with Faulkner. Faulkner had been slating Hemingway for his prose, saying that he never used a word that ‘might send the reader to the dictionary’. Hemingway replied like this:
‘Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use. Did you read his last book? It’s all sauce-writing now, but he was good once. Before the sauce, or when he knew how to handle it.’
Many people think style is complexity. Or — much, much worse—that quality is complexity. The opposite is true: simplicity, as Leonardo is supposed to have said, is ‘the ultimate sophistication’. Coco Chanel, a true innovator of fashion, called simplicity the ‘keynote of all true elegance’. But simple is not the same as easy. The great Dutch footballer Johan Cruyff said he played football simply, but that ‘it is very, very hard to play football simply’.
I tell you this because Raymond Chandler wrote simply, and because I think he is one of the greatest prose stylists of the twentieth century. Like James M. Cain, he was one of the writers who developed the hard-boiled style, now much-parodied, that helped raise the detective genre to the level of real art. For Raymond, The Long Goodbye was his finest book , and most would say it is rivalled only by The Big Sleep and perhaps, at a stretch, Farewell, My Lovely.
Like James M. Cain, he was one of the writers who developed the hard-boiled style.
The plot is simple to begin with. Marlowe, a hard-drinking, tough-talking private eye, befriends Terry Lennox, a drunk with a faced scarred from the war. Then Lennox’s wife turns up dead and Lennox vanishes. Marlowe fast finds himself in a maze of lies, corruption and betrayal. The story moves from the seedy bars of ‘20s L.A. to the gilded estates of the wealthy. Secrecy, blackmail, addiction and tattered lives abound. As Marlowe muses: ‘There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.’
Beneath Marlowe’s wisecracking, world-weary air is a deeply moral man who resists the advances of femme fatales, enjoys chess and poetry, and waxes philosophical. The story is as much about his struggle to hang onto his picture of the world as it is about murder. ‘I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars,’ he says. Chandler takes a genre too often brushed off by critics as colour-by-numbers fiction and fills it with a cosmic melancholy.
The prose, as I have suggested above, is lean and mean and luminous. Chandler gives us just enough to see everything. Like Hemingway, who followed him, he is not a minimalist. Rather, he leaves gaps that our imagination fills. The art is to include just enough for us to build a picture in our minds. You might remember that in The Sun Also Rises, we never learn in any detail what the love interest looks like. All we know is that Lady Brett Ashley has a boy’s haircut, wears a hat, has ‘curves like the hull of a racing yacht’, smokes, and doesn’t wear stockings. Chandler will tell us that a magazine ‘had a Martian on the cover’ or that a woman spoke ‘in a stainless-steel voice’.
Like Hemingway, who followed him, he is not a minimalist.
Chandler puts loyalty on trial in The Long Goodbye. He plays with the tension between allegiance and survival. Such is his sense of honour that Marlowe is almost irrationally loyal to Lennox, which sets him apart in a world of mistrust and double-crossing. In this world, no one is good and no one is happy. Even the rich rot in the prison of their own privilege. Marlowe’s unusual integrity exacts a cost: he is drawn ever-deeper into the pit of others’ misery and sins.
Critics have drawn attention to the labyrinthine plot of The Long Goodbye, which starts so simply and becomes so elaborate. They have a point. We sense the story getting lost from time to time in its own subplots, like a clause that devolves into sub-clauses and never finds its way back. This plays with the pacing, as do the frequent detours into the philosophical. A generous critic would say that the twists and turns, the convolution of the thing, reflect Marlowe’s bewilderment, and the philosophy points to the threats posed to his worldview. That might be too generous, like saying the length of The Wolf of Wall Street mirrors the excess it critiques.
It is still a good book, though: not just a mystery but a meditation on truth and goodness and the price of holding onto our ideals in a compromised world. There are no neat and tidy resolutions or unambiguous heroes in The Long Goodbye. Chandler gives us shades of grey instead, and a bitter draught of cold, hard reality.
