“I know this world is killing you. Alison, my aim is true.” (Elvis Costello)
For his birthday one year, my brother got a copy of the Everyman’s Library edition of the Raymond Chandler’s Collected Stories. It was a beautiful gift of a beautiful book. I should know: I gave it to him. Ironically, though, it’s probably spent more time in my possession than it has in his. He lent it to me a couple of years ago for vacation reading and I’ve yet to return it to him. Call me irresponsible, but this is what happens when your city eliminates all late fees, forever.
Everyman’s Collected Stories includes all of Chandler’s twenty-five short stories, from the 1933 “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” to the posthumous “English Summer” (1976). If I had to pick a favorite, it would be neck-and-neck between “Goldfish,” “Red Wind,” “Trouble Is My Business,” and “I’ll Be Waiting”—but I think “Goldfish” might pip them all at the post. But picking a favorite Chandler is a moot exercise. They are all excellent. In his authoritative essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Chandler wrote that the “detective story, even in its most conventional form, is difficult to write well.” Au contraire, mon frère shamus: he makes it all seem so easy. Those four stories, certainly—but also the other twenty-one (each taken on its own merits) equally so—are written with seemingly effortless competence, their characters and settings described with a confidence only matched by their originality.
These talents are in their full glory, in my judgment, in Chandler’s first novel: The Big Sleep (1939). From the Library of America description: “The classic private eye finds his full-fledged form as Philip Marlowe: at once tough, independent, brash, disillusioned, and sensitive—and man of weary honor threading his way (in Chandler’s phrase) ‘down these mean streets’ among blackmailers, pornographers, and murderers for hire.” Hired by the Los Angeles millionaire General Sternwood to rid the family of a blackmailing problem, Marlowe quickly finds himself up to his neck in the trouble of keeping Sternwood’s femme fatale daughters from wandering too far off the straight and narrow.
I think what makes the The Big Sleep tick and tick so well (and ditto for all of Chandler’s work, really) is its primordial themes. By this, I’m not “just fooling around trying to be clever,” as Marlowe says. A story’s themes are the basis of its power to inspire or depress us, to amuse or terrify us, to thrill or chill us. The more primordial the theme, the more powerful the story can be which addresses it. The relationship between theme and power is direct, as Chandler notes in “A Simple Art of Murder”: “Other things being equal, which they never are, a more powerful theme will provoke a more powerful performance.”
Limiting ourselves for now simply to The Big Sleep, these themes include honor and courage; love and trust; greed and sacrifice; fear and desperation; tragedy and redemption. The fact that these themes are in no way made explicit as themes only serves to deepen their power. Implicit in the drama, they are made explicit strictly in and on the terms of the action of the story. What happens in the story, what the characters say, where the story takes place—these are what throw the themes into sharp relief.
Take honor and courage as examples, two concepts apparently absent from The Big Sleep. How does Chandler bring them out? Honor is announced by the absence of “embarrassment” and “ruttishness” in Marlowe’s glance over the naked form of Carmen Sternwood: “As a naked girl she was not there in that room at all. She was just a dope. To me she was always just a dope.” Courage is evidenced by Marlowe’s persistence in the plot, a persistence belying his own words, uttered in reference to his chess game: “Knights had no meaning in the game. It wasn’t a game for knights.” As unwelcome and meaningless as his knightly role may appear, it is a role Marlowe fulfills all the same. His vehemently ironical diatribe at the novel’s end to Mona Mars is telling of this fact.
I’m a very smart guy. I haven’t a feeling or a scruple in the world. All I have is the itch for money. I am so money greedy that for twenty-five bucks a day and expenses, mostly gasolene and whisky, I do my thinking myself, what there is of it: I risk my whole future, the hatred of the cops and of Eddie Mars and his pals, I dodge bullets and eat saps, and say thank you very much, if you have any trouble, I hope you’ll think of me, I’ll just leave one of my cards here in case anything comes up. I do all of this for twenty-five bucks a day—and maybe just a little to protect what little pride a broken and sick old man has left in his blood, in the thought that his blood is not poison, and that although his two little girls are a trifle wild, as many nice girls are these days, they are not perverts or killers. And that makes me a son of a bitch. All right. I don’t care anything about that. I’ve been called that by people of all sizes and shapes, including your little sister. She called me worse than that for not getting into bed with her. I got five hundred dollars from your father, which I didn’t ask for, but he can afford to give it to me.… Now you offer me fifteen grand. That makes me a big shot. With fifteen grand I could own a home and a new car and four suits of clothes. I might even take a vacation without worrying about losing a case. That’s fine. What are you offering it to me for? Can I go on being a son of a bitch, or do I have to become a gentleman, like that lush that passed out in his car the other night?
Every word is rife with indignation. But the kicker is that, beneath the thick layers of brutal sarcasm and weary cynicism, it’s righteous. It’s as righteous as God’s good justice itself. Don’t let Marlowe’s toying fool you. This is a man at work. And his work is mortally serious. Which is not to say that the story of that work need be altogether lacking comedic relief. “It is not funny that a man should be killed,” Chandler writes in “Simple Art of Murder,” “but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization. All this still is not quite enough.”
Writing around the same time as Chandler’s career was just getting off the ground, C. G. Jung touches on this point about the “implicit” in Modern Man in Search of a Soul:
The novels which are most fruitful for the psychologist are those in which the author has not already given a psychological interpretation of his characters, and which therefore leave room for analysis and explanation, or even invite it by their mode of presentation. Good examples of this kind of writing [include]…that most cherished article of mass-production, the detective story… An exciting narrative that is apparently quite devoid of psychological exposition is just what interests the psychologist most of all. Such a tale is built upon a groundwork of implicit psychological assumptions…
Substitute “the reader” for “the psychologist” in this weighty paragraph and I think Jung is really on to something. The novels and stories of Raymond Chandler are completely barren of anything even resembling “psychological interpretation.” Yet within their dramatic simplicity and stark fatalism rests a moral seriousness that is richer and graver than most claimants to the descriptor of “serious literature.” They rudely, brazenly, even violently intrude upon our quiet complacency. And this complacency is not simply the product of modern comfort, of urban sprawl, of neon glamour. No, this complacency is a constant in the human experience: the inevitable result of our battening down against the risks inherent to living life well, to acting justly, to doing right by our neighbor and by God.
Of course, it could well be the case that we are more prone to this complacency in the pleasant, well-lighted setting of the new millennium. After all, as Jung describes, I am perfectly at ease in the light of day; the daylight and that “certain cleanness and order” of Hemingway’s are all I need to get by. But even my staunchly illumined defense is not completely immune to the “fear of chaos that besets us by night.”
What if there were some living force whose sphere of action lies beyond our world of every day? Are there human needs that are dangerous and unavoidable? Is there something more purposeful than electrons? Do we delude ourselves in thinking that we possess and command our own souls?
The world of Chandler restates these questions in glaringly obvious terms. I might ignore these questions in my daily living, but Chandler won’t let me forget that this is “not a fragrant world…but it is the world you live in.” I have to answer these questions. My very survival depends upon it. And yet, mere survival is never enough. Marlowe is walking proof of that. The Big Sleep ends, not with a bang, but with resignation. Tossing back a Scotch or two can make survival endurable, but its power pretty much ends there. All it really does is whisper to you reminders of what you don’t have.
What does that whisper sound like? To Marlowe, “it was a smooth silvery voice… It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll’s house.” To me, that sounds like Alison Krauss. Sitting in my archives for some time now is an inchoate effort towards an essay on Krauss and the greatness of her music. What I wanted to say in that essay is simple: Over and above all the other obvious reasons, what makes Alison Krauss’s music great is her voice. Easy to say, difficult to explain. That line from The Big Sleep changed my mind. It no longer seemed silly to say this. Because it’s true. Alison Krauss could sing the phonebook and we would sit up in listen.
But there is something more. I believe there is a deep bond of similarity between Raymond Chandler and Alison Krauss. Style certainly has something to do with that. They don’t just deliver the goods; they deliver them with style. Their voices are a critical component of that style. “Inimitable” gets thrown around more than is safe for a word of its weight. In this instance, though, I think it’s fair to say that Chandler’s and Krauss’s voices are just that: inimitable. Others have told their stories and sung their songs, but not in the same way. Ten times out of ten we can pull the copycat out of the bag. Voice is but one part of that style, however; voice is the way they swing the gun up from their pocket: it’s competent and graceful and full of moxy.
But getting the gun up is not enough. You have to aim it, too. And that’s the other component. Their aim is true. Krauss, like Chandler, firmly fixes in her sights the basic stuff of life. Specifically, her songs revolve around what Caroline Gordon once described as the fallout from the clash of “two alien worlds, the masculine and feminine consciousnesses…[and] the agonies and blisses resultant on the union of two lovers…” Gordon called these “primitive astonishments.” I call them “primordial themes.”
It bears mentioning that Alison Krauss has actually never written a song. Instead, she casts herself in the role of interpreter:
I’ve had people mention that about me. There’s something about my interpretation that does bring something to people—or I wouldn’t be getting to have this experience in life. It’s a really interesting process for me with songs I feel I have to sing. The same thing always happens: You see a picture in your mind. You see a picture and a story and it just happens without having to conjure anything up. I don’t have to sit there and wonder, “What was this like?” I just get to have it. It’s a magical thing.
In my mind, this interpretive approach advances the argument that the genius of the songs Krauss sings is the same as the one at work in Chandler’s stories. These songs are devoid of “psychological interpretation.” They “leave room for analysis and explanation, or even invite it”; they are “upon a groundwork of implicit psychological assumptions.” (With apologies here to the famed Swiss psychologist, the better term is not assumptions, but intuitions.) Krauss gives the songs their interpretation; she makes you feel the import of what she’s singing.
Maybe love is just a game you play / This much I do know / It don’t matter now (“It Don’t Matter Now”)
Are you leaving? Are you going? / Did you think you could lose that feeling without me knowing? / Are you wishing you’d never met me? / Does it take some train whistle blowing to forget me? (“Empty Hearts”)
Here all alone and still wondering why / Waiting inside for the cold to get colder / And here where it’s clear that I've wasted my time / Hoping to fly cause it's almost over now. (“Paper Airplane”)
I’m just a whisper of smoke, / I'm all that’s left of two hearts on fire, / That once burned out of control, / You took my body and soul, / I'm just a ghost in this house. (“Ghost in This House”)
Some day I’ll get over you / I’ll live to see it all through / But I’ll always miss / Dreaming my dreams with you. (“Dreaming my Dreams with You”)
When forever’s over / I won’t remember how much / I loved you anymore. (“Forget About It”)
These lines aren’t Shakespeare. But when you hear Alison Krauss sing them, you feel, deep down, that these thoughts have been your thoughts; these fears, your fears; these hopes, your hopes—and then you should pray that those words need never become your words. Like Marlowe’s drinks, many of these songs that wrap around these intuitions are whispered reminders of what you don’t have, and also of what you do have, vis-à-vis relationships. “To have and have not” are the two sides of our coin; they are inseparable, one from the other. As it says in the song, “You can choose the dancer or you can choose the flame / I think you’ll find they’re one and the same” (“Doesn’t Have to Be This Way”).
These songs play upon the ear of our intuitions about those “two alien worlds, the masculine and feminine consciousnesses.” In the beginning (or pretty close to it), God said that it isn’t good for man to be alone. This fact is at the crux of so many of the songs in the Alison Krauss repertoire. And once you allow it, a whole host of attendant questions descend upon you. Alison allows it: “I just can’t stand being alone,” she sings in “Restless.” And in rush the questions. Does love really never fail? If it does fail, can it recover? Is fidelity practicable? Can sacrifice overcome self-interest? Does tragedy ever mean anything? Can suffering be worth something? Can the past ever be exorcised of its demons? Does hope truly spring eternal?
Am I a fool for hanging on?
Would I be a fool to be long gone?
When has daylight gone to dawn (“Crazy Faith”)
As Krauss’s songs play off of each other and the worlds of man and woman collide, as Chandler’s dramas unfold and lives unravel and the more things change the more they stay the same—one thing should be readily apparent: primordial themes rarely resolve. Denouement is a literary device, not an axiom of real life. We want resolution, we crave finality, even though we are so frequently denied them. That’s why we need more than “maybe” as the answers to these questions.
But we don’t find them in the songs or the stories; we find them in ourselves, in our families, in our spouses and children, in our friends and neighbors—and that’s why these songs and stories hit the target. There’s a great deal to be said for the stark picture that Chandler and Krauss give us. Hell is not other people, but this world can be—and we can bring each other down pretty far. Little wonder, then, that Chandler’s private eye gets to feeling pretty low. Yet “feeling pretty low” is when he rises to the occasion and proves himself “a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.”
Who’s to say that we can’t do likewise? Sure, we can’t change what we are. Fallen as we are, there’s no ridding ourselves of either “that ache in our chest” and those “worn-out old songs” of our obeisance to the petty rewards of this other kingdom. But as Alison says in the song, “it doesn’t have to be this way.” We can set our sights and fix our aim truly. We can stand up like Marlowe. If we play our cards right, having ears to hear and eyes to see, we can even do better than that. And if enough of us do, “the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”
Credits: Edward Hopper, Nighthawks (1942), via Wikimedia Commons; Humphrey Bogart, in a still from the 1946 film adaptation of The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks, via Wikimedia Commons; Alison Krauss & Union Station, on the cover of the album New Favorite (2001), via Rounder Records.