War Noir: Raymond Chandler and the Hard-Boiled Detective as Veteran in American Fiction

By Sarah Trott

The conflation of the hard-boiled style and war experience has influenced many contemporary crime writers, particularly in the traumatic aftermath of the Vietnam War. Yet, earlier writers in the genre, such as Raymond Chandler, remain overlooked when it comes to examining how their war experience affected their writing. Sarah Trott corrects this oversight by examining Chandler alongside the World War I writers of the Lost Generation as well as highlighting a melding of very different styles in Chandler's work.

Based on Chandler's experience in combat, Trott explains that the writer created detective Philip Marlowe not as the idealization of heroic individualism, as is commonly perceived, but instead as an authentic individual subjected to very real psychological frailties from trauma during the First World War. Inspecting Chandler's work and correspondence indicates that the characterization of the fictional Marlowe goes beyond the traditional chivalric readings and can instead be interpreted as a genuine representation of a traumatized veteran in American society. Substituting the horror of the trenches for the corruption of the city, Chandler formed a disillusioned protagonist in an uncaring America. Chandler did so with the sophistication necessary to straddle genre fiction and canonical literature.

The sum of this work offers a new understanding of how Chandler uses his war trauma, how that experience established the traditional archetype of detective fiction, and how this reading of his fiction enables Chandler to transcend generic limitations and be recognized as a key twentieth-century literary figure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Nov 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9781496808653

Sarah Trott

Sarah Trott, Brigend, South Wales, United Kingdom, is a lecturer in American studies at Swansea University. She has published in the edited collection Men After War and the journal Comparative American Studies.

Book preview

1

WAR’S TRAUMATIC IMPACT

I should guess that all in all he has had a lonely life … He’s a lonely old eagle.

—CHANDLER, QTD. IN MACSHANE, LIFE

The impact of war upon American hard-boiled fiction is a topic that is rarely discussed. While many works in the crime genre touch upon the more disagreeable aspects of peacetime society—corporate greed, political dishonesty, a corrupt police force—the psychological and emotional impact of war upon the genre has remained relatively unappreciated. Utilizing the crime genre to express their disillusionment arising from war and the subsequent treatment of American veterans, many contemporary writers expose a society ignorant of their characters’ traumas. They focus their discontent upon a government that routinely abandons its soldiers after their return from combat. While in combat they are hailed as heroes, but on their return they are quietly forgotten and left to survive on their own. As a form of protest, many embittered writers who belonged to the generations lost to conflict consciously incorporated a new, more extreme vision into their work. By embedding a war-traumatized protagonist, an unforgiving portrayal of violence, a seething undercurrent of frustration and resentment, and the insensitivity of an uncaring society into the story-line, the hard-boiled novel and the war genre became inextricably fused to produce a unique hybrid. This distinctive war noir absorbed the anger, discontent, and brutality of both genres and came to symbolize the bitter criticism directed against an unsympathetic American culture and a cynical and corrupted state.

Yet while the impact of war upon crime fiction, particularly since the Vietnam War, has received some consideration, the influence of war upon the writers themselves has received less attention. American hard-boiled crime writers were directly involved in the numerous wars that have occurred throughout the twentieth century, including Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Charles Willeford, Robert B. Parker, Elmore Leonard, and James Crumley. As well as those directly involved in war, many other writers have been exposed to war’s destabilizing influence upon society, especially during and immediately after Vietnam. As a result of this destabilization, biographical studies of many of these writers reveal a new and greater forcefulness in their work that, in many cases, necessitates a reevaluation of the complexity of the literature produced in the crime genre.

As one of the principal proponents of the advancement of American hard-boiled fiction, an examination of Raymond Chandler’s life is especially relevant to the task of establishing the impact of war—in this case, the First World War—not only on the author’s life and work, but more importantly on the origins of the distinctive subtleties in Chandler’s style. It is these subtleties, this book argues, that would inspire later generations of crime writers to establish more nuanced and multifaceted characters that resonate with the era’s wartime generations. Understanding the nuances and idiosyncrasies of Chandler’s life is important because they reveal not only the impact of war upon the intimate construction of his work, but also how he achieved his place within the American literary landscape as a writer of traumatic literature.

While many of the peculiarities and character traits described in this chapter may be interpreted as simply the qualities of an eccentric personality, when considered collectively and placed within the psychological framework of Chandler’s biography, something more significant starts to emerge, demonstrative of the symptoms of severe emotional stress. In light of the damaging aftermath of the First World War, Chandler’s own behavior and symptoms become a fundamental factor in creating the potential for the veteran status of his detective protagonist. By recognizing the symptoms of trauma in Chandler himself it becomes plausible to see how these same symptoms became a central facet of the idiosyncrasies bestowed upon Philip Marlowe.

Two years before he died Chandler gave an illuminating summation of his troubled life in a letter to his London solicitor, Michael Gilbert. Writing, I have lived on the edge of nothing (qtd. in Hiney and MacShane 242), Chandler described a life marred by torment and lacking lasting contentment. He lived, as Frank MacShane says, a tortured and lonely life only temporarily relieved by moments of happiness, when he would, like his fictional detective Philip Marlowe, become an effective Galahad (Life 268, 246). Like many war veterans Chandler was never able to fully erase the memory of his wartime experience, which troubled him throughout his life. To fully understand the theory that Philip Marlowe is a character born from the traumatizing impact of war it is essential to recognize the intensity of Chandler’s own experiences in France. Only by doing so can we appreciate how his trauma seeped into cultural representations, thereby creating war noir.

Judith Lewis Herman makes the assertion that while the normal response to atrocities is to banish them from [the] consciousness, quite often these horrors refuse to be buried, and in time the story of the traumatic events surface not as verbal narrative but as a symptom (1). Chandler’s postwar life is a catalogue of unpredictable behavior, mood swings, alcoholism, oscillating swings between intimacy and loneliness, attempted suicide and recklessness, all of which are symptomatic of psychological neurosis. Although not recognized institutionally as a medical condition at the time, it now seems plausible that Chandler suffered combat-related PTSD, the debilitating psychological condition prevalent in veterans of war. For Chandler, this neurosis would reemerge during times of stress throughout the rest of his life.

Born in Chicago on 23 July 1888, Raymond Thornton Chandler was the only son of Maurice and Florence Chandler. Living in England for his most informative years after his parents’ divorce, he quickly became accustomed to the dominance of his female relatives, social isolation, and an extreme sense of loneliness. Tom Hiney notes, In both suburban South London and Quaker Waterford, Chandler was an anomaly—an American-sounding boy with a pretty Irish mother about whom people, including her own family, gossiped [ … ] In late Victorian England, he was without a clear social class, nationality or male role model (11). The solitude and seclusion of his early life caused Chandler to develop an extraordinary sense of loyalty [ … ] and a sense of justice that became a central part of his character and gave him the attitudes he was to express later through his character Philip Marlowe (MacShane, Life 5).

Chandler attended Dulwich College from the age of twelve, where he was educated until 1905 under the tutelage of Arthur Herman Gilkes, a published novelist. Under his guidance Chandler developed a passion for literature and language, and acquired the belief that a man of honor was one who was capable of understanding that which was good (qtd. in MacShane, Life 9). It was a quality that Chandler eagerly embraced and which would later become the thread that links all of his fictional detectives. Intent on a literary career, Chandler began writing poetry and articles for London newspapers and magazines, such as Academy and the Westminster Gazette. His poetry was highly romanticized and conventional, and invariably explored the theme of knights and ladies, nobility and honorable sacrifice. Although MacShane believes The less said of Chandler’s poetry the better (Life 16), these verses were the first expression of the individualistic code of chivalry that would later develop into an important facet of Philip Marlowe’s character.

In the five years that followed, Chandler wrote twenty-seven poems, seven essays, and numerous reviews. But despite this achievement he felt restless and unfulfilled; yearning to return to the land of his birth, declaring that, America seemed to call to me in some mysterious way (qtd. in Gardiner and Walker, 25). Initially, however, his experience of America was a disappointment that precipitated a rude awakening when he quickly realized that contrary to his expectation he had no feeling of identity with the United States and no feeling of identity for England either. Chandler felt as though he had become a man without a country (qtd. in Gardiner and Walker, 24, 25) and would later proclaim that to be homesick for a home you haven’t got is rather poignant (qtd. in Hiney and MacShane 206). Unsurprisingly, this acute sensation of a lack of identity later emerged as a prominent feature of the personality that Chandler gave to Marlowe, and although Chandler always denied any direct autobiographical connection, years later he would admit, there’s a lot of him in me, especially his loneliness (qtd. in MacShane, Life 253).

By 1916 Chandler’s mother joined him in California, but the tranquility of their new life together was cut short when a year later Chandler decided to return to Europe following America’s entrance into the First World War. Choosing to enlist with the Canadian Army, he traveled to Victoria, British Columbia, where he joined the Fiftieth Regiment of the Canadian Army, declaring that it was still natural for me to prefer a British uniform (qtd. in MacShane, Life 27). He received a brief induction before sailing to Liverpool on 7 November 1917. After training in Seaford, Sussex, Chandler was assigned to the Seventh Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, which was ordered to the French front line in March 1918. It was a shocking experience. For the young Chandler, as for most soldiers brought so quickly to the front, his experiences were too overwhelming to digest (MacShane, Life 28–9) and the carnage around him would have soon shattered the illusion of manly honour and glory in battle (Herman 20). This reaction was, however, not unusual among new recruits. According to psychiatrists J. W. Appel and G. W. Bebbe, There is no such thing as ‘getting used to combat.’[ … ] Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down (1470). It is incredible to think, that in every war in which American soldiers have fought in [the twentieth century], the chances of becoming a psychiatric casualty—of being debilitated for some period of time as a consequence of the stresses of military life—were greater than the chances of being killed by enemy fire (qtd. in Grossman 43). Similarly, in a study conducted by R. L. Swank and W. E. Marchand on the psychological effects of World War Two, it was found that at least 98 percent of soldiers suffered some form of psychological breakdown. They noted that when it came to combat, One thing alone seems certain: Practically all infantry soldiers suffer from a neurotic reaction eventually if they are subjected to the stress of modern combat continuously enough (21).

Throughout the First World War and for most of the twentieth century the political and military establishment denied the connection between psychological disorder and combat, and the complaint remained undiagnosed and unaccepted as a legitimate injury. Viewed by the military as the male counterpart of female hysteria, it became regarded as a sign of weakness and cowardice, treated with a brief rest period, or in more severe instances a so-called treatment based on shaming, threats, and punishment (Herman 21). In 1941, Abram Kardiner and Herbert Spiegel published a comprehensive clinical and theoretical study of war neuroses, in which they protested: The subject of neurotic disturbances consequent upon war has, in the past twenty-five years, been submitted to a good deal of capriciousness in public interest and psychiatric whims. But the public does not sustain its interest … and neither does psychiatry. Hence these conditions are not subject to continuous study … but only to periodic efforts which cannot be described as very diligent (1). They further maintained that to incorrectly diagnose patients suffering from war neuroses as hysterical could be extremely injurious in its own right, essentially feminizing sufferers and impeding recovery. Furthermore, they also asserted that when the word is used, its social meaning is that the subject is a predatory individual, trying to get something for nothing. The victim of such a neurosis is, therefore, without sympathy in court, and … without sympathy from his physicians, who often take … ‘hysterical’ to mean that the individual is suffering from some persistent form of wickedness, perversity, or weakness of will (406).

It was not until the years following the Vietnam War that it finally became institutionally acceptable to recognize posttraumatic injury and psychological trauma as a permanent and unavoidable legacy of war (Herman 27). In 1980, psychological trauma became a real diagnosis when the American Psychiatric Association incorporated a new category, called post-traumatic stress disorder in its official manual of medical disorders (Herman 28).

This of course was too late for many veterans of the First World War who were aware of their psychological illness but unable to obtain help, and subsequently articulated their predicament in their work. Writers such as Chandler and also Ernest Hemingway, who committed suicide in 1961, would die before the causal relationship between combat and psychological trauma could be established, and before PTSD would gain social recognition as an injury equally as damaging as the severest of physical injuries.

According to the biographies by MacShane and Hiney, Chandler’s military service came to an end in June 1918. MacShane states that Chandler’s service in France ended abruptly when an artillery barrage of eleven-inch German shells blew up everyone in his outfit, leaving him the sole survivor (MacShane, Life 29). And Hiney notes that Chandler was knocked unconscious [ … ] He was concussed and taken behind lines. The bombardment so depleted his outfit that it was disbanded and survivors, including Chandler, were transferred back to England (43). They both note that Chandler was evacuated to Britain concussed and shell-shocked (Hiney 43) where he began drinking heavily. In all likelihood Chandler’s experience of war caused the author psychological injury, yet because the existing biographical material is vague it does not allow us to comprehend the gravity of Chandler’s war experiences. As such, the biographers’ account will be reexamined in the next chapter.

The First World War was a pivotal moment for the twenty-eight-year-old Chandler. While MacShane believes that the psychological impact of war’s brutality would make Chandler block out the memory of it (Life 29), many have overlooked the experience as a key influence upon Chandler’s formulation of Philip Marlowe. MacShane, Hiney, Jerry Speir and more recently Tom Williams, have all confined their attention to dissecting his complex personality, believing Chandler’s eccentricity to stem either from his upbringing, his education, his relationship with women, or his belief that he lacked a definite sense of identity. Chandler’s only overt depiction of warfare, a short piece of prose titled Trench Raid, has generally been cited as the writer’s only attempt to exorcise his demons. Written between June and December 1918 while supposedly recuperating in England, Trench Raid is the only work in which Chandler explicitly attempted to recount his war experiences. The piece, which is only 352 words long, is direct and displays the first signs of the detachment he employed to manage unpleasant realities. This short section combines the opening and ending of the piece:

As he pushed aside the dirty blanket that served for a gas curtain the force of the bombardment hit him like the blow of a club to the base of the brain. He grovelled against the wall of the trench, nauseated by the din. He seemed to be alone in a universe of incredibly brutal noise … Time to move on. Mustn’t stay too long in one place. He groped round the corner of the bay to the Lewis gun post. On the firing step the Number One of the gun crew was standing to with half of his body silhouetted above the parapet, motionless against the glare of the lights except that his hand was playing scales on the butt of his gun. (Qtd. in Moss 33)

This detached but precise writing style would later be used to great effect in the Philip Marlowe stories.

Because the story is incomplete, MacShane believes that Chandler never felt the need to finish Trench Raid or attempt further work in this style because suffering bombardment was not as unbearable a memory as leading other men to their deaths in an infantry attack (Life 29). By drawing this conclusion, however, MacShane demonstrates the failure of 1970s society to comprehend the variety of experiences that affect soldiers in wartime, and did not have the benefit of more recent scientific and medical evidence concerning the causal relationship between combat and PTSD. It is therefore likely that MacShane did not understand just how devastating warfare could be, whatever a soldier’s location or experience of conflict. With this in mind, Chandler’s failure to complete Trench Raid was not simply a matter of choosing to leave it unfinished, but, as contemporary medical evidence suggests, more likely a conscious decision not to revisit painful memories so soon after the event. As will be shown later in this chapter, it matters little whether a soldier is involved in an infantry attack or an artillery bombardment since each can result in some form of traumatic neuroses. Herman explains, No two people have identical reactions [to a traumatic incident], even to the same event [ … a] traumatic syndrome, despite its many constant features is not the same for everyone (58). It is therefore likely that Chandler (together with countless thousands of soldiers from the Great War) emerged from combat suffering some form of emotional distress. Although MacShane’s biography was published before PTSD became widely accepted as a legitimate injury, critics since have continued to overlook the crucial role that war experience played in the psychological development of his fictional characters, and the style and realism of his work. Such an oversight not only fails to appreciate the intensity of Chandler’s own psychological suffering but fails to discern the motivation for in creating Philip Marlowe as a character who, like himself, was troubled by psychological wounds.

Further insight may be gained from Herbert Hendin and Ann Pollinger Haas’s study, Wounds of War: The Psychological Aftermath of Combat in Vietnam (1984). Discussing a study conducted after World War Two to determine the variables for a person’s susceptibility to PTSD, Hendin and Haas cite various analysts’ discoveries of increased levels of trauma among those who had endured a troublesome childhood. In a study of combat veterans with PTSD, it was argued that each man’s main pattern of symptoms was related to his individual childhood history, previous emotional conflicts, and his method of adaptation (Hendin and Haas 34). It is quite feasible, then, that Chandler’s war experience may have been exacerbated by the tensions and insecurities of his early childhood. Exaggerated moral imperatives and an introverted demeanor had been etched on Chandler’s character as a child, and it is plausible that after his war experiences that these personality traits may well have transformed themselves into periods of extreme depression, despair, and emotional instability.

This altered behavior, which was previously regarded as simple eccentricities, is a symptom consistent with PTSD. However, Hendin and Haas also note in their study that this theory has not been definitively proven, and some analysts have argued that childhood history plays less of a role in the development of trauma than does the severity of the traumatic event itself (34). Kardiner and Spiegel, for example, argued simply that with sufficient stress, war neuroses could affect anyone exposed to combat, no matter what war they fought in, the methods used, or the location of battle (2–7).

Nonetheless, the difficulty in diagnosing PTSD is that [w]ith the passage of time … negative symptoms become the most prominent feature of the post-traumatic disorder, [and] the diagnosis becomes increasingly easy to overlook (Herman 49). Herman continues, Because post-traumatic symptoms are so persistent and so wide-ranging, they may be mistaken for enduring characteristics of the victim’s personality (49). However, simply dismissing these symptoms as merely the peculiarities or eccentricities of an individual’s character can be extremely destructive for the sufferer. Disregarding a sufferer’s symptoms can be a costly error, because, the person with unrecognized post-traumatic stress disorder is condemned to a diminished life, tormented by memory and bounded by helplessness and fear (Herman 49).

In his later years Chandler acknowledged the lasting effects of his war experience. In 1957 he wrote, Once you have led a platoon into direct machine gun fire, nothing is ever the same again (qtd. in Moss 32). In this extremely rare insight Chandler acknowledged that his experience of combat had fundamentally changed him. Enduring horrifying events will, therefore, predictably lead to some form of psychological harm.

Likewise, an extreme heightening of cognition and the physiological senses can cause a profound inexpressibility, or as Elaine Scarry observes, it can actively destroy (4) the function of basic human expression. To put it a different way, a person can literally become "scared senseless by certain events that are triggered by an amplification of the central nervous system. Roy Grinker and John Spiegel maintain that the effect of combat is not like the writing on a slate that can be erased, leaving the slate as it was before. Combat leaves a lasting impression on men’s minds, changing them as radically as any crucial experience through which they live" (371). The horror that Chandler observed inflicted psychological scarring that molded his subsequent behavior and profoundly influenced his self-expression.

Officially discharged from the Canadian Army on 20 February 1919, Chandler returned to America, but quickly became restless as he realized that he had progressed little from where he had been in 1913. He traveled the Pacific Coast, becoming particularly familiar with Washington State, a familiarity that he would later use in his short story Goldfish (1936).

Disenchanted with life, it is highly likely that by this time he was suffering the symptoms of PTSD, a condition that was almost certainly aggravated by his introspection and withdrawal from social interaction. Despite his troubles he was considered an eligible bachelor, and his so-called natural shyness (MacShane, Life 31) made him an attractive prospect to the women in his circle. Upon his arrival back in Los Angeles, Chandler renewed and deepened his relationship with Pearl Eugenie Cissy Pascal, the stepmother of Chandler’s friend Gordon Pascal. Their friendship had developed while Chandler had been stationed in France, sharing news of Gordon, with whom Chandler had enlisted. Although Cissy was eighteen years his senior, the pair quickly fell in love and Cissy’s husband, Julian, granted her a divorce in 1920. Chandler’s mother, Florence, disapproved of the match and in compliance with her wishes the couple postponed their wedding. They eventually married on 6 February 1924, two weeks after Florence’s death.

Chandler’s relationship with a woman nearly twenty years his senior has always attracted supposition and speculation. Jerry Speir noted, Inevitably, pseudo-psychological commentaries on Chandler make much of the age discrepancy. The impulse is to say something like ‘Chandler married his mother’ and then to use that idea to try to explain the mind of the novelist (8). Both Speir and MacShane believe that this line of reasoning contains little merit because Cissy was a lively, intelligent, mature, and youthful-looking woman who provided a stable and grounded environment for the troubled Chandler, and was therefore an ideal companion. While there is no doubt that Chandler loved Cissy deeply, we should not entirely dismiss the theory, as Speir noted that, Chandler symbolically married his mother. It is quite conceivable that Chandler’s insecurities may have impelled him to seek out a maternal figure, and certainly adds credence to the belief that he viewed Cissy as someone to protect in much the same way as he had protected and provided for his mother.

At the time of his marriage, Chandler had been employed at the Dabney Oil Syndicate for two years and had risen quickly to the position of company vice-president. Outwardly he seemed relatively contented; he was married, had a good job with an excellent salary, and was enjoying the vitality of the Los Angeles sprawl that he would later describe in his stories. It quickly became apparent, however, that his marriage and newfound stability had seemingly done very little to alleviate the tensions that haunted him. At work colleagues regarded him as a lonely man who did little consulting before he acted and who was always on guard (MacShane, Life 36). His behavior suggests a man who was ill at ease when he was required to interact with others in social situations, and this uneasiness would certainly have heightened his mood swings.

Herman and Dave Grossman have both noted that fluctuating emotions and character disorders can manifest themselves as a result of combat-related trauma and are symptoms commonly associated with PTSD.¹ For most sufferers these emotional swings generally present themselves in more intimate relationships, but may also surface in relationships of a professional and social nature where close interaction with others is required (Herman 56). As an adolescent Chandler had suffered from shyness and a lack of confidence, and even though he grew up surrounded by women he always felt uneasy in female company. As a result he was often frustrated in love, once confessing, When I was about sixteen … I had an infatuation for a girl, but was too shy even to speak to her about it (qtd. in Macshane, Life 11). His poem Nocturne from Nowhere, written as he was beginning to write his successful short stories in 1932, took thwarted love as its theme, and interestingly introduced the image of an unattainable blond with cornflower-blue eyes whom Marlowe frequently encounters but never wins:

There are no women as tender as this woman

Whose cornflower-blue eyes look at me

With the magic of frustration

And the promise of an impossible paradise. (Qtd. in Macshane, Life