Mr. Chandler & Mr. Himes

It's been just over a week now since my new book, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, came out and today is the first day I haven't felt I've had to rush around and there's time to wrwite a new blog. It's hot today in LA. Nice to spend a morning home alone with Barney cat.

Last night I took a walk around the neighborhorhood, down to Third Street and over to Rampart, and then along Sixth Street to MacArthur Park. I walked round the lake, which had a ruby sheen on the water from the setting sun. Lots of black ducks with white bills, and a few long-necked geese. The lake smells awful, seems pretty foul, but the ducks looked happy. I love to see the neon signs of all the old apartments rising up against the sky---The Bryson, The Ansonia, The Asbury, The Royale---places that have been here since Chandler's time. The Bryson turns up in The Little Sister as the place where Dolores Gonzoles lives. My own street, Carondelet gets play in a couple of Chandler's stories, including Pearls Are A Nuisance. It was a ritzy part of the city then, known as Carondelet Park. Now it's grown much shabbier, an emigrant neighborhood, but I still love it for its liveliness and the way I can still feel Chandler here.

I'm reading James Sallis's biography of Chester Himes and am knocked out by Sallis's writing. He not only has a wonderful prose style, but he's so erudite, quoting other writers so liberally. Here are a few quotes I pulled out that I liked.

Ralph Ellison on James Joyce:
"Stephen's problem, like ours, was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face; our task is that of making ourselves individuals."

Beware of coming to the surface,
And using for apparel what was meant
to be the curtain of the inmost soul.
Robert Frost

(aren't blogs a form of surfacing?)

After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future of the world depends.
Wallace Stevens


The malaise of writing---and it is of no consequence whether the writer is talented or otherwise---is that after a time a man writing arrives at a point outside human relationships, becomes, as it were, ahuman."
Frederic Exley

Chester Himes and Raymond Chandler---I think they both arrived at that point, yet both needed their women and had intense relationships. Both, in fact, felt the need to rescue women. "I am completely blind to my own welfare," Himes wrote, "if there is a damsel in distress." Ditto Chandler. It didn't matter if the distress was real or imagined.

Here's another quote I love, this one from Nabokov: "A good reader must fondle the details. A good writer makes details to fondle."

Love that word fondle. I've always felt that fiction lives in details.

And now, a nap....