"My Revered HJ": Raymond Chandler and the Lesson of the Master

Author(s): James O. Tate

Source: The Sewanee Review , Winter, 2006, Vol. 114, No. 1 (Winter, 2006), pp. 129-138
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27549783

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 THE STATE OF LETTERS

"MY REVERED HJ": RAYMOND CHANDLER

AND THE LESSON OF THE MASTER

JAMES O. T?TE

Among the writers whom we can name as models for Raymond Chandler's
achievement in bringing together in his novels the worlds of low and high
culture, we can cite Shakespeare, Prosper M?rim?e, T S. Eliot, Ernest
Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dashiell Hammett. Chandler worked
four of these names into his novels, alluded to them prominently, and even
addressed them critically To the list of those authors who were imaginatively
indispensable to Raymond Chandler, Henry James must be added, and I
want to show why. Before I proceed, however, let us relish the seemingly
incongruous juxtaposition of Henry James and Raymond Chandler. Do I
mean to suggest that the hard-boiled tough guy takes tea with the duchess?
That the thriller is cerebral, or that the cerebral is thrilling? That excitement
is refined, or that refinement can be exciting? That we should imagine Henry
James in Los Angeles, or Raymond Chandler in Bloomsbury? Indeed I do
mean to suggest all of those things?and more.
For now that Raymond Chandler has been published in the Library of
America cheek by jowl with Henry James (among many other distinguished
authors), we are no longer in a position to be surprised by the juxtaposition
of those names. The veteran of the pulps is on the shelf side by side with the
Master of the novel and the nouvelle?where, for many discriminating read
ers, he had been for over fifty years. There are many reasons why this is so,
and should be so. But perhaps the best reason of all, aside from matters of
literary quality, is that Raymond Chandler aspired precisely to that position.
He was keenly aware of Henry James, and said so.
He said so more than once. His most public and familiar citation of James
was in his introduction to The Simple Art of Murder (1950), later published
as the introduction to Trouble Is My Business (1988?not to be confused with
his essay "The Simple Art of Murder"). There he listed one of James's works
in a display of literary classics that was mounted to deny that there were any
classics of crime and detection: "It is a good deal more than unlikely that any
writer now living will produce a better historical novel than Henry Esmond,
a better tale of children than The Golden Age, a sharper social vignette than
Madame Bovary, sl more graceful and elegant evocation than The Spoils of
Poynton, and wider and richer canvas than War and Peace or The Brothers
Karamazov."
Chandler also referred to James in his letters?James was part of his

? 2006 by James O. T?te

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130 THE STATE OF LETTERS

consciousness in more ways than one. When he was at Paramount in 1945

dictating a screenplay, he made a parenthetical reference to James in a let
ter to Charles Morton: "My revered HJ rather went to pieces a bit when he
began to dictate." In a letter to his English publisher, Hamish Hamilton, in
1949, he criticized Elizabeth Bowen in terms of Henry James:

I regret to say I find Elizabeth Bowen's last book [The Heat of the
Day] entirely unreadable; in places an absolute parody of Henry
James. When you read HJ, however tenuous the web he spins, you
do at last and at least realize that he is trying to say something
precise, almost too exquisitely precise. But poor dear Elizabeth is
falling into the sad error of thinking that the involution of language
necessarily conceals a subtlety of thought. It doesn't; it conceals a
vacuum. I used to do this sort of thing myself in my thirties, but
God gave me too much sense of humor to carry on with it. ... I
should be grateful that I went through the arty and intellectual
phase so young and grew out of it so completely that it always
seems a little juvenile in others, whatever their ages.

We must notice here, whatever we may think of Chandler's estimation of

Bowen's novel, that he imagines in terms of James and even that he was once
in some way an imitator of James himself.
Again in 1949 and again to Hamilton, Chandler included James in a list of
literary classics: "A classic in any manner appeals to me more than the large
canvas. Carmen, as M?rim?e wrote it, 'Herodias,' 'Un Coeur Simple,' The
Captains Doll, The Spoils of Poynton, Madame Bovary, The Wings of the
Dove, and so forth and so on (A Christmas Holiday by God too), these are all
perfect. Long or short, violent or still, they do something that will never be
done as well again. The list, thank God, is long, and in many languages."
In a letter the next year to Somerset Maugham, Chandler referred again to
James in a way that connects him with Chandler's own work: "I have your old
piece from the Post and I've never forgotten the picture of Edith Wharton.
Wouldn't she have been embarrassed if you had mentioned The Turn of the
Screw to her? She would have had to like that, being a sort of road company
Henry James herself. And if it isn't a thriller, I'd like to know what is." Here
Chandler shows his understanding of the vital relation between literary aspi
ration and melodrama. If Chandler had once been a Jacobite, James had had
his innings as a Chandlerian writer of thrillers. Chandler also had himself on
his mind when he reflected on the problem of cutting novels: "I quite agree
with Wodehouse that most novels would benefit by being cut; and yet there
is a sort of writing, which one might call peripheral writing, which cannot be
cut without destroying the whole effect of a book. You couldn't cut Proust or
Henry James for example, because the things you would be apt to cut would
be the very things that make these men worth reading."

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 THE STATE OF LETTERS 131

Chandler was of course aware of the literary source behind the film Th
Heiress?James's Washington Square. He acknowledged that he had o
been "a desperately ardent admirer" of Henry James, and was shre
enough to know something about what had happened to James in his late
years: "There are writers who look at the situation squarely in the face a
decide that they are willing to be poor if they can write well enough to sat
their souls. I respect them, but a lack of appreciation is narrowing. Henr
James felt it. It tends to make a writer exaggerate the very things that k
the public away from him."
But Chandler's awareness of James had taken him farther than even th
references would indicate. As Frank MacShane has shown, Chandler m
than once went so far as to imitate James elaborately. James was to him
powerful model of writing itself. At least three times, in trying to writ
Chandler explicitly imitated Henry James. To Chandler writing meant cu
vating the Jamesian mode.
After his second return to America in 1919, Chandler attempted so
thing he himself called Jamesian: "I had another feeble fling at writing
almost sold the Atlantic a Henry James pastiche, but I didn't get anywh
We also know from Frank MacShane's Life of Raymond Chandler (1
that when Chandler tried to write again after his business career was ov
what emerged was again a Henry James pastiche:

The one completed story from this period is about a writer's visit to
a famous duchess, who utterly fails to live up to his idea of aristoc
racy because she herself is a would-be author. It is a Jamesian pas
tiche, even a parody, and Chandler has his hero utter remarks like
"One can only?don't you think??write with passion about what
one has never experienced." It has verbal ease: "Polished leather
curved to his delicate instep. He was silk-hatted almost to the eye
brows and, for the rest, swallow-tail-coated admirably." But there
is little real life, even for a sketch with the perverse point of show
ing that there is not much reality in fiction. It is witty and clever,
but it lacks substance and style.

In the next paragraph of his account of Chandler's life, MacShane show

Chandler turning toward a parodie imitation of Hemingway ("Beer in
Sergeant Major's Hat, or the Sun Also Sneezes," 1932), which was piv
for the achievement of his own style. But the dialectic, the tension betw
the style of James and the style of Hemingway, was to remain with Chan
for the rest of his life. The example of James and even touches of the V
rian/Edwardian literary atmosphere were always to remain with him?Bl
Mask, Hammett, and Hemingway notwithstanding.
As late as 1957 Chandler was still thinking about Jamesian pastic
The unsuccessful result, "English Summer, a Gothic Romance," wa

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132 THE STATE OF LETTERS

published until many years after his death, yet it still shows the powerful hold
of James on Chandler's imagination. For our purposes the point about "Eng
lish Summer," no matter its shortcomings, is that in Chandler's mind it was a
Jamesian work and one he had meditated for decades. In his plans for work
in 1939, Chandler described "English Summer" as a "dramatic novel"?"a
short, swift, tense, gorgeously written story verging on melodrama, based on
my short story. The surface theme is the American in England, the dramatic
theme is the decay of the refined character and its contrast with the ingenu
ous honest utterly fearless and generous American of the best type." This
plan shows explicitly how Jamesian were the terms Chandler thought in, for
"English Summer" was conceived as a variant of James's international novel.
Chandler's moral sense of melodrama was Jamesian as well: the narrator
and protagonist of "English Summer" "has, according to his code and mine,
incurred an obligation, and we Americans are a sentimental and romantic
sort of people, often wrong of course, but when we have that feeling we are
willing to destroy ourselves rather than let someone down." So, as late as
1957, Chandler was still tinkering with "English Summer" and thought about
trying to make a play out of it, not unlike James himself. We will return to the
point of the international novel and other Jamesian connections, but for now
we will continue to account for affinities in life, not letters.
In 1952 Chandler returned to England with his wife, and after her death
in 1954 he returned repeatedly. He hobnobbed with the literary set and was
treated as a writer and even as a celebrity. He enjoyed the recognition and
the friendships, and perhaps even more returning to the scene of his early
days, for, like Henry James, Raymond Chandler had been born in America
and taken to Europe in childhood. To picture Chandler living in St. John's
Wood or Chelsea, or dining at the Ritz or the Connaught, is to imagine per
haps something of what remained in the 1950s of the London that James had
known. There had been a time before the wars, of course, when Chandler
knew that world much more directly.
The young Chandler's contributions to various journals?poems, essays,
and reviews, as published in Chambers Journal, the Westminster Gazette, the
Academy, and the Spectator?have been gathered by Matthew J. Bruccoli so
that we may see the evidence of Chandler s first writing career. Chandler's
poems are simply bad verses of fuzzy romantic yearning, but his essays and
reviews, emphasizing the contradictions of romanticism and realism, more
clearly anticipate the Chandler we know. However feckless such writings
may be, they were written and published from 1908 to 1912 in the London
that knew James, and that James knew. In however modest a way, the youth
ful Chandler tried to be a man of letters in London, literally walking in some
of James's footsteps. In those days it was even possible that James might have
walked in Chandler's footsteps. They might have passed each other on the
street.
But, if Chandler had lived in James's world, however peripherally, we must

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 THE STATE OF LETTERS 133

hasten to say that James himself had literally been in Chandler s world, or in
what Chandler would soon make his world. Henry James's American tour
of 1905 is remembered today as the source of The American Scene (1907),
but his complete itinerary is often forgotten. If it is hard to imagine Henry
James in Florida, I think it is even harder to imagine him in what soon would
become the Los Angeles of Philip Marlowe as well as the San Francisco of
Sam Spade. But there he was.
Though Henry James had not enjoyed his journey across the desert, he did
like Los Angeles and California. "The great green Pacific, the golden orange
groves, the huge flowers, and Southern California 'manners and human
forms' gave promise of interest," he declared. James was for a while in Coro
nado Beach, near La Jolla, where Chandler was later to settle. Invited by a
"culture club," James lectured to eight hundred ladies in Los Angeles. Then
he proceeded to Monterey and San Francisco, where he met Enrico Caruso
and talked with Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson. Though James deplored the
"poverty of aspect and quality" he found in San Francisco, he also remem
bered "brave golden California, more brave and golden for such possibilities
surely, than any other country under the sun!" James was then off for the
Northwest and back to the East coast and finally England.
The subject of Los Angeles (as in a sense Chandler's subject) may be
deferred while we glance obliquely but pertinently at Hammett's San Fran
cisco. I say so in part because Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1929?first
serialized in Black Mask) was a book Chandler was keenly aware of, and
also because The Maltese Falcon has been seen as a quite Jamesian book. As
such that masterpiece is yet another connection between James and Chan
dler. Expanding brilliantly on suggestions made by James Thurber in "The
Wings of Henry James," George Grella has elaborated on the imaginative
connection between Hammett and James, emphasizing not only the onomas
tic derivations of names like "Miles Archer," "La Paloma" and "Casper Gut
man," but also themes such as renunciation, greed, and deception, as well
as technical discipline. In "The Wings of the Falcon and the Maltese Dove"
Grella has shown much about Hammett's art and ambition, and shown as
well something about the possibilities of hard-boiled fiction seen in the light
of the best tradition of literary accomplishment. Grella has suggested that
"Dashiell Hammett is possibly the most Jamesian of all detective novelists,"
and he has made his point. But his use of the word possibly allows room for
us to see Raymond Chandler as another candidate for that title.
If we think of Raymond Chandler as what Maxwell Geismar called a "liter
ary Jacobite" or as what George Grella called Dashiell Hammett, "the most
Jamesian of detective novelists," his work lights up, his repeated citations of
James make new sense, and we can better understand his desire for liter
ary recognition as a novelist, as a man of letters, rather than as a scribbler
of detective stories. He was never satisfied with his substantial commercial
success. That's why Raymond Chandler wrote all those letters on the subject,

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134 THE STATE OF LETTERS

required to say about himself what others were slow in iterating. And he was
right. Only Raymond Chandler would have written, as he did to the associ
ate editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Charles Morton, "I do not write for you
for money or for prestige, but for love, the strange lingering love of a world
wherein men may think in cool subtleties and talk in the language of almost
forgotten cultures."
The surest sense of James in Chandler's work is not in his essays and let
ters or even in his pastiches and imitations, but in his strongest work, his
best stories and his novels. Chandler's three best stories are about pearls,
whether they are real ones alleged to be fakes, as in "Goldfish" (1936), or
fake ones alleged to be genuine and then re faked, as in "Red Wind" (1938).
The explicit allusion to Maugham in "Red Wind" refers to W. Somerset
Maugham's "Mr. Know-All," itself related to de Maupassant's "La parure."
But we must remark in this context Henry James's own exploitation of de
Maupassant in his "Paste," in which what seems to be costume jewelry turns
out to be the real thing, with certain ironic romantic/erotic implications relat
ing to honor and to the stage. Henry James noted this himself explicitly in
his preface to The Author ofBeltraffio (New York Edition)?so explicitly that
his paragraph on the topic sounds for all the world like a description of what
Chandler did in playing with the precedent of Maugham, of de Maupas
sant?and of James.
In "Pearls Are a Nuisance" (1939), the division between the overrefined
narrator and his absurdly tough-talking doppelganger can be seen as a reflec
tion of the split between Chandler's Jamesian aspirations and his coarse
American context, even though it is Jane Austen who is cited. In The Big
Sleep (1939) General Sternwood's nineteenth-century style and his aged vul
nerability are reminiscent of various Jamesian characters, and so is the faith
ful decency of the detective. A modern consciousness speaks back to James
when Marlowe enters the big house at the beginning, and even more when
he observes what has become Eddie Mars s gambling casino, the Cypress
Club: "It was still a beautiful room and now there was roulette in it instead of
measured, old-fashioned dancing." What's more, the missing Rusty Regan, a
leader in the I.R.A., marks the beginning but not the end of the international
theme in Chandler's work.
In Farewell, My Lovely (1940) Mr. Lewin Lockridge Grayle is another
aged man with a Jamesian name, social position, and house, who is being
betrayed?this time partly by Marlowe himself. More extravagantly and
experimentally Chandler played with Jamesian echoes in The High Window
(1942). Elizabeth Bright Murdock is an inversion of General Sternwood who
abuses others relentlesly. A Jamesian monster, Mrs. Murdock has her secre
tary, Merle Davis, trapped in a neurotic lie, and she persecutes her son and
daughter-in-law. Marlowe sets Merle free and lets murderers go in gestures
that repudiate the genre which presents him. Chandler's Merle reminds us

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 THE STATE OF LETTERS 135

of James's Madame Merle, though Mrs. Murdock is closer to her in char

acter. "Murdock" suggests "murder" as well as mer de, and may remind us
as well that merle is French for "blackbird"?a point related to both James
and Hammett. The themes of violation, betrayal, and greed strike Jamesian
sparks. And the detective's refusal to use his knowledge is an unmistakably
Jamesian stroke of renunciation that reminds us of Christopher Newman's
similar action in The American (1877); and that reminds us as well that New
man was a bit of a detective himself.
The Lady in the Lake (1943) can be seen as a Jamesian exploration in the
form of a detective story of the hidden passions of others and of their self
destruction. The narrator/detective is oddly responsive to corruption and
refuses to punish it directly. Contaminated by his case, Marlowe's complicity
is allegorized when he is himself accused of murder and is caught in disguise.
This text alludes not to James, however, but to other Victorian novelists?to
Dickens and to the "sensation novelist," Mrs. Henry Wood.
Though Chandler's references to Hollywood had been continuous, The
Little Sister (1949) is his explicit attack upon the subject. A reflection of his
experience in the film industry as well as upon its great impact upon modern
consciousness, The Little Sister presents an actress as a character, as James
did in The Tragic Muse (1890). Since Marlowe had previously exposed the
role-playing or true identity of various imposters or self-transformed individ
uals, it was time to show the consequences of the institutionalization of self
transformation in a false society. The subject of Hollywood gave Chandler a
setting in which to reveal his perception of the falsification of thought and
the presentation of self. At the end Marlowe burns a photograph that been
a blackmailing device and a MacGuffin throughout. This destruction of the
disputed object and the renunciation of its corrupting influence must remind
us here of Christopher Newman's burning of the incriminating document
at the end of The American; of the revealing, renunciatory, and liberating
burning of the eponymous Aspern Papers (1888); and of the similarly neces
sary though accidental burning of "the old things" in The Spoils of Poynton
(1897). For Chandler as for James, the MacGuffin that moved the story was
vital not in itself but for what it revealed morally and dramatically. That was
one "lesson of the Master." That was one reason why Chandler was, as he
knew, not a scribbler of whodunnits but instead a man of letters working in
the tradition of James.
Diffuse, leisurely, and autumnal, The Long Goodbye (1954) is Chandler's
attempt to turn the detective story into a novel of manners. As such it is
his most Jamesian work?not a pastiche, but a re-creation. The theme of
betrayal, the presence of a novelist within the novel, and the echo of James's
international theme all reflect the example of the Master. Chandler's last and
least novel, Playback (1958), still shows some of his wit and inventiveness,
as well as an appearance by a stand-in for the author, who finally meets his

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136 THE STATE OF LETTERS

creation. At the end Marlowe is no longer interested in either detecting or

narrating but is diverted by love. He has in effect repudiated his book as well
as his mission, as in effect certain Jamesian protagonists did.
But, having limned a prime Jamesian element in Chandler's project of
elevating the detective story in terms of plots, themes, images, and values,
I want also to indicate something about the Jamesian presence in stylistic
detail. The first point is that James's fictional discourse itself had been from
the beginning, like Chandler's, rife with self-referential devices and preemp
tive gestures. This essential aspect of the famous Chandler style is an essential
part of the art of fiction, and though it can be found elsewhere, as in Dickens
and even Shakespeare, I think that Chandler learned one of his most striking
effects from Henry James. In The American, for instance, we find certain
stylistic flourishes that Chandler echoed continually. From chapter 7: "He
felt as if he were at a play ... ; sometimes he wished he had a book to follow
the dialogue. . . . She was part of the play he was seeing acted . . . how she
filled the stage." From chapter 8: "Tt was a chapter from a novel.'" "T shall
be an actor, so far as I can as well as a spectator.'" Chapter 17: "Tour duel
itself is a scene. . . . that's all it is! It's a wretched theatrical affair.'" Chapter
19: "He seemed to be playing a part, mechanically, in a lugubrious comedy."
Chapter 21: '"You have a secret?you have a skeleton in the closet.'" Chap
ter 22: "Here Mrs. Bread paused again, and the most artistic of romances
could not have been more effective." "Newman felt as if he had been reading
by starlight the report of highly important evidence in a great murder case."
Thus Henry James showed Raymond Chandler how to deal with a salient
problem of writing melodrama. The difficulty is that stock scenes and clich?s
will inevitably arise; the answer is a technique of preemption by which the
narrator labels as theatrical or melodramatic or romantic what he presents as
he utters it, before the reader does so. Chandler replicates this effect all the
time, as in The Big Sleep. Chapter 6: "At that exact instant, as if somebody
had been waiting for the cue, three shots boomed in the house." Chapter 27:
"Fate stage-managed the whole thing."
The second point is that Chandler's mixed diction sometimes soars so high
that we hear a Jamesian note even from the mouth of the tough guy. Though
the narrator Philip Marlowe is renowned for his witticisms and tough talk, we
would be tone-deaf if we did not also register his elevated tones. In his debut
in The Big Sleep Marlowe tells General Sternwood, "I'm thirty-three years
old, went to college once, and can still speak English if there's any demand
for it. There isn't much in my trade." Marlowe knows enough about English
to reflect on the English of the haughty and feminized Lindsay Marriott, who
has declared (in Farewell, My Lovely, chapter 7), "I should not have called
you, if it were not [legitimate]": "A Harvard boy. Nice use of the subjunctive
mood." Then he immediately regresses to the vernacular, and to Chandler at
his most familiar: "The end of my foot itched, but my bank account was still
trying to crawl under a duck"?to which the reader might mentally respond,

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 THE STATE OF LETTERS 137

"Nice switch from social-syntactical analysis to urban sports-page periphra

sis." In The Lady in the Lake Marlowe tells the drunken lowlife Bill Chess
that he will protect his confessions, saying primly, "I can respect a confidence
as much as the next fellow." In answer to the question "She go with some
other guy?" when we would expect Marlowe to say something clipped, he
responds in the subjunctive: "I should think it likely." Needless to say, such
expressions are aligned with Marlowe's improbable chivalry and Jamesian
acts of renunciation. But perhaps we do need to say that such details are
precisely the elements that distinguish Chandler's work from its vulgar back
ground; and that those elements are Jamesian ones.
The vulgar background of hard-boiled literature may cue us to ask an
impossible question: What would James have thought of Chandler's work?
We should remember two things, even hypothetically. First, James did
respond positively to Twain and to Kipling, two masters of dialect. Second,
what brought the hard-boiled style into being was what destroyed James's
world and James himself?the Great War. On the other hand we would have
to note two Jamesian theoretical positions which would make us suppose
that he would have deplored Chandler's novels. James deplores the first-per
son narrative in his preface to The Ambassadors, and dialect in his preface
to Daisy Miller, sweeping away Chandler's two trump cards. Even so, such
objections must be modified, in the first case, by James's refusal to prac
tice his theory?and, in the second, by his acknowledgment of exceptions
(such as Twain and Kipling), and also by his sustained acknowledgment of
the writer's obligation to amuse and entertain the reader. James's awareness
of the problem of managing intelligence and bewilderment (in the preface to
The Tragic Muse) is an acknowledgment of a central Chandlerian concern (as
well as an acknowledgment that James himself was accused of vulgarity by
Robert Louis Stevenson). As R. P. Blackmur puts it, distilling James's mean
ing, "Without intelligence, as without bewilderment, there would be no story
to tell. . . . Bewilderment is the subject and someone's intelligent feeling of
it the story." That sounds like a prescription for a Chandler fiction. And in
those senses I like to think that, somewhere in the fields of asphodel, James
has acknowledged Chandler, however shadowy that speculation may be.
That Chandler more than acknowledged James is my thesis, but it is not
a speculation. James stands with Shakespeare behind Chandler's sense of
aspiration, elevation, and literary finish. James is a standard always present
in Chandler's imagination, as an author of romances, as a stylist who appeals
to the moral sense and to cerebration, and as a criterion of taste that should
never be forgotten even when reversed. James was a strength that Chandler
drew on and returned to, even as Chandler, in his tough-guy tales, reversed
James's standards of diction. The struggle between the high and the low,
as between the English and the American and as between the Victorian/
Edwardian and the modern, was a dialectic in which the opposites implied
each other, because Chandler had lived through all of them, both literally

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138 THE STATE OF LETTERS

and imaginatively. Henry James was for Chandler a permanent resource and
an enduring opposite, remote, even quaint, but necessary. Henry James is
a key figure in Chandler's mind and a resource behind the allegorization of
a cultural conflict. Without James, Chandler could not have known how to
elevate the detective novel and give it a new meaning, one which involved
Jamesian renunciation and even, amid all the tough talk and sleaze, passages
of heightened diction and syntax.
James was a giant, a lion in the path, an anxiety-provoking influence. In
California, Chandler, removed in space, time, and culture, could overturn
the Master's headstone, but he could never forget it. James came to Chan
dler's mind when he thought of England, of achievement, of escaping his
self-imposed literary trap, and of writing for the theater. James was the Mas
ter, and he taught a Lesson. His famous story "The Lesson of the Master"
explicitly opposes the elder man of letters with the young aspirant, and it
ironically displays some home truths about desire for women and for money.
Chandler enacted the Lesson of the Master in his life, reversing the story.
His first novel was published when he was fifty. Trained in business and pri
vation, he exploited his opportunities ruthlessly He didn't want to lose his
audience or access to money, as James did, but he insisted to the end of his
life that he was a man of letters and even that he wrote for art and not for
money. Between the stories of James's and Chandler's careers, the great con
flicts that writers must deal with are summarily demonstrated. Paradoxically
Chandler's insistence that his melodramas were novels, were serious writing,
finds an echo in our recognition that James's writing, his novels, are melodra
mas themselves. Jacques Barzun, who has written on Chandler, made that
point in "James the Melodramatist" (Kenyon Review, fall 1943).
We conventionally suppose that Chandler started with some sort of mix
ture of Hammett and Hemingway in his head, but James was already there,
a part of that mixture from 1908 and on to 1959. What James Thurber and
George Grella have attributed to Hammett, we must attribute in double
measure to Raymond Chandler: an extended and transforming awareness
of Henry James. As Leon Edel has shown, James planned a second volume
of American impressions, including a paper on "California and the Pacific
Coast" to supplement The American Scene, but "the western journey was
never written." I have meant to suggest that the Californian James was writ
ten, not only (pace Thurber and Grella) in The Maltese Falcon, but also in
"Pearls Are a Nuisance" and "Red Wind" and The Big Sleep and The Long
Goodbye?in all the exfoliations of Chandlerism.

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