These are excerpts from the bio in the back of the current Vintage Crime edition of Raymond Chander's The Simple Art of Murder:
Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago..,but spent most of his boyhood and youth in England, where he attended Dulwich College and later worked as a free-lance journalist for The Westminster Gazette and The Spectator.... In 1919 he returned to the United States, settling in California, where he eventually became director of a number of independent oil companies. The Depression put an end to his business career, and in 1933, at the age of forty-five, he turned to writing....
I've read too much about Chandler lately, so that I've become as woozy from his difficult life as I was by Katherine Mansfield's that time I endured D.H. Lawrence's love/hate insults, her family's coldness, her husband's what's-his-deal-ness, her lost pregnancy in a German pension, Ida's mule-like devotion, and fatal TB with her. It's too much, is what I'm saying.
With Chandler, it's too much booze and too many moves from house to house and too many years between him and his wife and too many worries and too few friends and too much of his beloved elderly wife fading away. And then more alcohol. And some shots to round it off. How could a man who loved his cat so much have such a rough time of it?
So this bio struck me as odd because it made him sound too normal and his transitions in life too smooth, when in fact it was all a fucking mess. By his own admission he worked as a "free-lance journalist" in England for about a week. I'm sorry to admit that I've exited jobs after a week or two, and I wouldn't want my bio to read "worked as a free-lance contractor at the Mustang Ranch." Look, I was barely there long enough to get herpes!
And though he was a director of oil companies, at the end of his time there he was skipping work to have sex vacations with secretaries, and when he did show up, he was drunk. So you could argue that a depression "put an end to his business career", but not The Depression.
Why sugar-coat it, Vintage? We love dissolute geniuses!
1 comment:
Also, Dulwich College is not a college. It's a public school (i.e., a Hogwarts for Muggles). I went there, but only for a year. Probably if I had stayed longer, I could have gotten into the drinking and secretarial pool diving in later life.
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