Dulwich College Letter: Fill & Download for Free

Raymond Chandler published his first novel at fifty-one. The Big Sleep (1939) established Chandler’s reputation as a supremely graceful prose stylist, albeit one who happened to write hardboiled crime fiction.Other novels followed The Big Sleep, all featuring the private detective Philip Marlowe—Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), The Lady in the Lake (1943), The Little Sister (1949), The Long Goodbye (1953), and Playback (1958).Chandler was an accidental novelist. An accountant by training, he was a vice president at Dabney Oil when his career went off the rails. The company fired him for drinking and chronic absenteeism.It was 1932, the height of the Great Depression, and Chandler was forty-four. He needed to find a way to support himself and his wife Cissy. So he took to writing pulp fiction, studying the work of Dashiell Hammett and other writers of the hardboiled school who published their stories in Black Mask magazine.Chandler brought something fresh to the genre—a pleasing style (“She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight”) and a sense of humor (“I’m an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard”).Chandler owed his literary sensibility to his classical education, and said as much in letters to his friends.Born in Chicago in 1888, Raymond Thornton Chandler grew up in Nebraska. When his parents divorced, his Irish-born mother took him to England to live with relatives.This was in 1900, when Chandler was twelve. His mother enrolled him in Dulwich College, an elite public school founded in 1619. It was at Dulwich that Chandler learned to write the syntactically elegant sentence that became his trademark.Raymond Chandler returned to the United States in 1912. The U.S. entered the First World World in April 1917. In August of that year, Chandler traveled to Victoria, British Columbia, and enlisted in the Canadian Army. He was shipped overseas and saw combat in France with the 50th Regiment (Gordon Highlanders of Canada, since redesignated the Canadian Scottish Regiment).He was wounded but made it back alive, and eventually settled in Los Angeles. Chandler had a complicated relationship with the City of Angels—much like his complicated relationship with alcohol. He loved it, hated it, and made it an indelible part of his books.Raymond Chandler died at seventy in La Jolla, California, in 1959.What author starting writing novels at fifty years old?Credit: admiral.ironbombs | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Chandler wrote some of the most lucid letters I’ve ever read. On balance I’d say that Chandler was better educated than Hemingway, and wrote more compulsively readable letters.If you liked The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast, you’ll enjoy Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961. The tone of Hemingway’s letters reveal the chest-thumping bully he often was. But he wasn’t afraid to admit when he felt humbled, as he did in this letter to Maxwell Perkins after reading Beryl Markham’s West With the Night:She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen.I have three collections of Raymond Chandler’s letters. There’s some overlap between the books, but I’ve enjoyed reading all three of them.Raymond Chandler Speaking, edited by Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker, was the first. This book has a useful timeline of Chandler’s life and work.Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, edited by Frank MacShane, is the most complete. It too has a chronology, and also tells you a bit about who the recipients of Chandler’s letters were.The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959, edited by Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane, came out in 2000. It features new material Hiney unearthed after Professor MacShane’s death in 1998.Here are snippets from the three books, starting with an excerpt from a letter Chandler wrote Mrs. Robert J. Hogan, a teacher in New Jersey (March 8, 1947):Preoccupation with style will not produce it. No amount of editing and polishing will have any appreciable effect on the flavor of how a man writes. It is a product of the quality of his emotion and perception; it is the ability to transfer these to paper which makes him a writer, in contrast to the great number of people who have just as good emotions and just as keen perceptions, but cannot come within a googol of miles of putting them on paper.Raymond Chandler was an unabashed anglophile, as is evident in this excerpt from his January 6, 1953, letter to H.F. Hose, his form-master at Dulwich College:There is a fundamental decency about the English people and a sort of effortless sense of good manners which I find very attractive.Chandler had this to say about Luftwaffe bombing raids on London (from his June 27, 1940, letter to George Harmon Coxe, pulp fiction writer and fellow contributor to Black Mask magazine):The English civilian population is the least hysterical in the world. They can take an awful pounding and still keep on planting lobelias.Here are some of Chandler’s observations on the mystery novel (written in 1949):A half-guessed mystery is more intriguing than one in which the reader is entirely at sea. It ministers to the reader’s self-esteem to have penetrated some of the fog. The essential is that there be a little fog left at the end for the author to blow away.Finally, here’s Chandler writing to the Canadian journalist Alex Barris (March 18, 1949):As you may know I am a half-breed. My father was an American of a Pennsylvania Quaker family originally and my mother was Anglo-Irish, also of a Quaker family. She was born in Waterford where there is still, I believe, a famous Quaker school--famous to Quakers anyhow. I grew up in England and I served with the 1st Canadian Division in the first war. As a boy I spent a lot of time in Ireland and I have no romantic ideas about the Irish.Raymond Chandler’s letters have loving references to his wife, Pearl Eugenia (Cissy) Pascal Chandler, a beautiful woman eighteen years his senior. But I won’t spoil that treat for you.Image: Raymond Chandler, American man of letters | Photo: David Graham

The appeal of P.G. Wodehouse’s work is very difficult to explain to anyone who’s never read him.I mean, arguably the appeal of any good writer is hard to explain to anyone who’s never read that writer, but Wodehouse is a particularly interesting case, because of all writers, he’s the one I can think of whose work most fulfils the statement by the Victorian essayist Walter Pater, that All art constantly aspires to the condition of music.What I mean by this is that, in what I regard as his best and most characteristic work, Wodehouse’s fiction is almost free of connection to the real world, and relies for its effect almost entirely on the manipulation of conventional elements abstracted from reality, and his brilliant sense of structure, rhythm and ornament.This, I think, is why it’s possible for Wodehouse to be so beloved by such diverse people as the conservative English writer Evelyn Waugh, the crusading left-wing journalist Alexander Cockburn, the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the Irish nationalist politician and almost-certainly-even-though-he-always-denies-it-former-leader-of-the-IRA Gerry Adams.Regarding the latter, English journalists often profess to be sceptical of Adams’ often-stated fondness for Wodehouse, but I completely believe him, even if he usually couples it with a wisecrack about how, like Jeeves, he’s spent his life clearing up after Englishmen. If Adams is able to appreciate Wodehouse, it’s because Wodehouse wasn’t like Waugh, who felt a deep emotional attraction towards the upper-class, longed to belong to it and wrote books that were seriously marred by his sentimentality about the aristocracy.Wodehouse too wrote about the upper classes, but didn’t have especially deep emotional feelings about it.Or about much else, for that matter. Except writing well.Wodehouse’s life was spent almost entirely in the service of his writing. He was born into a family with a history of colonial service, and he spent his first two years in Hong Kong being raised by a Chinese amah before being brought to England and being raised by an English nanny, Emma Roper. Wodehouse remembered his upbringing as being mostly happy, but the truth is that he hardly knew his parents.He spent summers with various relatives. At the age of 12, in 1894, he went to Dulwich College, where he spent some of the happiest years of his life. He was an expert cricketer and was good at Greek and Latin, which goes some way to explaining the way that, as an adult, he wrote English with all the flexibility of someone who knew that there were a lot of ways to cast a sentence.At the age of 19, his father regretfully informed him that he wasn’t going to be able to send young Pelham to Oxford, and instead the boy would have to get a job, specifically in the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank (yes, the same HSBC that’s one of the biggest financial institutions in the world.)Wodehouse was deflated, but took the job. Almost immediately, he set about trying to earn extra money as a writer.He started out writing school stories, which he was good at, still being little more than a talented schoolboy himself. When he wasn’t in the bank, he was writing and flogging stories to every editor he could get access to. By the time he was 22 he’d written his first novel, The Pothunters.Some writers burn out, apparently from doing too much of what they don’t want to do. Wodehouse found that there was a market for what he did want to do. In 1904 he went to New York City for the first time, and found himself regarded as a talented writer who could earn serious money.He pushed on, quickly learning the value to a writer of having established characters that he could bring back from book to book. The first of these was the bungling scrounger Ukridge (Love Among the Chickens, 1906); then came the dapper, oh-so-polite, calls-everyone-’Comrade’ Rupert Psmith (Mike, 1909.) For context, 1909 was also the year of Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, and Franz Kafka’s article ‘The Aeroplanes at Brescia’, the first description of aircraft in German literature.Psmith is the first of Wodehouse’s running characters who I think still has legs today. He’s also the first time Wodehouse pits an amiable, ordinary Everyman protagonist against a devious, brilliantly intelligent sidekick. Psmith first appears in the company of Mike Jackson, a schoolboy hero whose only defining characteristic is his love for and skill at cricket.In Something New (1915), Wodehouse introduced Blandings Castle, with its oblivious Lord Emsworth and his hawk-eyed secretary, Rupert ‘The Efficient’ Baxter. 1915 was also the year of the first Jeeves and Wooster story, ‘Extricating Young Gussie’, but Jeeves didn’t really come into his own until the 1919 collection My Man Jeeves, much of which later reappeared in rewritten form in the collection Carry On, Jeeves, which is by far the best way of introducing oneself to Jeeves and Wooster.Also in 1915, Wodehouse met Ethel Wayman, an English widow with a ten-year-old daughter, Leonora. Wodehouse and Ethel married, and remained happily married until his death. They never had children of their own; Wodehouse had had mumps, which may have made him sterile, but in any case he seems never to have been all that interested in sex. Their marriage was based on mutual support and companionship, which suited both of them, and Wodehouse was very fond of Leonora, who he legally adopted and considered his daughter.Robert McCrum, in his excellent 2004 biography of Wodehouse, notes a change in Wodehouse’s writing around the end of the First World War.Wodehouse spent much of the war in America, and in any case he was exempt from conscription because of his poor eyesight. Before and during the war, he had made his name in the USA as one of the founding fathers of modern musical comedy: he was the lyricist in the enormously successful musical-writing team of Guy Bolton (book) and Jerome Kern (music), and his genius for lyrics was paid homage to by later masters of the form such as Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein.But when the team broke up, Wodehouse concentrated on fiction. McCrum notes that the early Jeeves and Wooster stories are recognisably set in the same world as the other books Wodehouse had been writing, featuring a cast of hard-up writers, chorus girls with literary ambitions, and people who were generally scuffling for money and struggling to make it. Bertie is depicted as a hard drinker who habitually wakes up hungover. Many of his friends aren’t nearly as wealthy as him.In 1920, still not fully committed to Jeeves and Wooster, Wodehouse began to write stories about a character named Archie Moffam, which he later worked up into the 1921 novel Indiscretions of Archie.Archie is an interesting character, because he’s what Bertie Wooster would be like if he’d been a WW1 veteran. He’s handsome, well-meaning and a nice guy, but foolish and bumbling, yet when a character turns a gun on him, he doesn’t bat an eyelid:A dangerous light flickered in Miss Silverton's eyes.“That'll be all of that!” she said, raising the pistol. “You stay right where you are, or I'll fire!”“Right-o!”“I mean it!”“My dear old soul,” said Archie, “in the recent unpleasantness in France I had chappies popping off things like that at me all day and every day for close on five years, and here I am, what! I mean to say, if I've got to choose between staying here and being pinched in your room by the local constabulary and having the dashed thing get into the papers and all sorts of trouble happening, and my wife getting the wind up and—I say, if I've got to choose—”“Suck a lozenge and start again!” said Miss Silverton.“Well, what I mean to say is, I'd much rather take a chance of getting a bullet in the old bean than that. So loose it off and the best o' luck!”Archie only lasted one book. Wodehouse returned to England in the early 20s and found it a country traumatised by the experience of war.He responded not by trying to become a deeper, more realistic writer.He was already a rich man, and he spent much of his time in the company of other rich people. He knew that he wasn’t the sort of writer who could hope to reflect the war itself, or its real impact:I believe there are only two ways of writing a novel. One is mine, making the thing a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right down deep into life, and not caring a damn.He cut his fiction off from reality, and let his verbal imagination go nuts.The defining quality of the Jeeves and Wooster story is that, in spite of them having the feel of taking place some time between 1920 and 1935 or so, they are not a realistic or even nostalgic portrayal of the life of an inter-war English gentleman and his valet.What Wodehouse is doing with these characters is in fact a kind of intertextual riffing on stock characters from an earlier period, the 1900s.He liked the stock character of the ‘knut’: the Edwardian gentleman who lives off a comfortable but unearned income. Guys like the one that this advert is aimed at:As we’ve seen, Wodehouse had already written about characters with money troubles. But it was convenient for his purposes that Bertie didn’t have them, because he knew all too well that when you have money troubles, you don’t have time to worry about other stuff. Being comfortably-off enabled Bertie to have sillier and funnier problems than the necessity of earning a living.Because above all, Wodehouse wanted to make people laugh.The central joke of Jeeves and Wooster is that Jeeves is ostensibly Bertie’s employee, but he is able to manipulate Bertie into doing basically anything, even if it takes him a whole book to do it. What stops the joke from being cruel is that Jeeves understands Bertie, and likes that Bertie doesn’t want to get married, and will take action to prevent that from happening, and Bertie will always be grateful to Jeeves for consistently looking after his (Bertie’s) best interests.There is a Jeeves novel where Jeeves manipulates things so that the hero does get married, but it’s the only one in which Bertie doesn’t appear, Ring for Jeeves (1953), in which the nominal hero at any rate is yet another Alternative Bertie, this time one who wants to get married: Bill Belfry, Lord Rowcester. (Ring for Jeeves is a very weird novel as Wodehouse novels go, for various reasons that I’m not going to go into now.)As a result, Jeeves and Wooster stories resemble works of music, in that they assume certain formal conventions which the reader knows will be obeyed:Bertie must not get married, but it can look as though he’s going to;Bertie must at some point make things worse by pointedly not following Jeeves’ advice;Jeeves must not f*** everything up, but he should be at a loss for what to do for at least a few pages;Aunt Agatha, if present, must look like she’ll succeed in ruining Bertie’s life, although she must not be allowed to;No matter which secondary characters tie the knot, everything about Bertie’s life must be reset at the end so it’s as if it never happened, or at least matters must be resolved enough to know that things aren’t going to be a disaster.The fun lies in noting the skill and imagination within which Wodehouse manages to obey these conventions without making the book predictable. If the conventions were broken, if there was an attempt to make them more realistic, the books would be less fun. It’d be like picking up a delicately constructed mille-feuille, only to notice on the side that it had a rice-paper sticker saying Now with added Omega-3! Omega-3 is a fine thing, but if I want a shot of the stuff, I’ll have sardines on toast, thanks.Writers from Douglas Adams to Stephen Fry, which come to think of it isn’t a very long distance, have noted that one of the most enjoyable things in Wodehouse is his sheer virtuosity with language. In this respect, Wodehouse is the inverse of many writers. With a lot of writers, we put up with clumsy construction or lack of story because we get a satisfying sense that the writer knows the material. It feels authentic.With Wodehouse, we put up with the absence of material—the basic unreality of the situation—because of the skill with which the story is told and elaborated.Wodehouse loved plotting his books, and took immense pains to do so. Early in his career he did this by making a few notes about how he wanted the story to go and then using them as a basis for how he would proceed, but in the 1920s he adopted the habit of first writing a 30,000-word scenario of the plot—basically, the entire story in skeleton form—and then, working from that foundation, he would write the finished book. He would stick each page low on his study wall and, as he redrafted and polished them, he would move the page higher up the wall. When all the pages were at the same high level, he would consider the job done.His acquired expertise in plotting came in especially useful when writing the Jeeves and Wooster stories. The central technical problem facing him was that they are almost entirely written from the perspective of one character: Bertie Wooster himself.This was a problem because Bertie quite often doesn’t know what’s going on, and only finds out later when Jeeves tells him. Bertie is not, technically speaking, an unreliable narrator, because unreliable narrators are consciously deceptive, whereas Bertie doesn’t deliberately keep the truth from us. But he is an uninformed narrator, who manages to keep us interested while being largely in the dark about what Jeeves is doing when Bertie’s not in the same room.Bertie does this because, while he is supposed to be, as Jeeves once put it in a moment of asperity, ‘mentally negligible’, he has an enormous store of half-remembered English literature and scripture, which he has a knack for bringing out at the right moment. Wodehouse loved the bathetic effect of citing poetry for a mundane reason. Take this fairly random extract from The Code of the Woosters (1938)A most unnerving experience all this had been for a man of sensibility, as you may well imagine, and my immediate reaction was a disposition to give Aunt Dahlia’s commission the miss-in-balk and return to the flat and get outside another of Jeeves’s pick-me-ups. You know how harts pant for cooling streams when heated in the chase. Very much that sort of thing.‘As pants the hart for cooling streams’ is a hymn with words by the 17th century poets Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady, based on Psalm 42: As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God.A few pages later he does it again:I have said that that sojourn of mine in the T. bath had done much to re-establish the mens sana in corpore what-not.This is a reference to the tenth satire of the Latin poet Juvenal: orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano, ‘You should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body.’Later still, Jeeves is happy to provide the citation for Bertie:“That is the problem which is torturing me, Jeeves. I can’t make up my mind. You remember that fellow you’ve mentioned to me once or twice, who let something wait upon something? You know who I mean—the cat chap.”“Macbeth, sir, a character in a play of that name by the late William Shakespeare. He was described as letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would,’ like the poor cat i’ th’ adage.”By his constant references to older, classical literature, Wodehouse skilfully varies the verbal texture of his work, so that the only voice we hear is not just that of Bertie and his acquaintances, but also that of the cultural backdrop to which they are presumed to belong. But also, it keeps the music varied.But Bertie can also drop into contemporary slang if he wants to. Again from Code of the Woosters, when he goes on mission to an antiques shop:My entry had caused him to turn and shoot a quick look at me, and at intervals since then he had been peering at me sideways. It was only a question of time, I felt, before the hidden chord in his memory would be touched and he would realise that the slight, distinguished-looking figure leaning on its umbrella in the background was an old acquaintance. And now it was plain that he was hep. The bird in charge of the shop had pottered off into an inner room, and he came across to where I stood, giving me the up-and-down through his wind-shields.‘Hep’, ‘up-and-down’, ‘wind-shields’: this is Wodehouse enjoying himself with 30s American slang. The reference to ‘slight, distinguished-looking figure’ is Bertie referring to himself as if he were the hero of an Edwardian detective novel.And then there’s Berties’ apparent medium awareness, his appearance of knowing the conventions of the kind of book that he happens to be in:The sound of the familiar footstep had brought Jeeves floating out from the back premises. A glance was enough to tell him that all was not well with the employer.“Are you ill, sir?” he inquired solicitously.I sank into a c. and passed an agitated h. over the b.Readers familiar with the conventions, and possibly even readers who aren’t, will recognise the cliché at work here: I sank into a chair and passed an agitated hand over the brow. But Wodehouse abbreviates it, as if Bertie has reached for the nearest stock gesture and can’t be bothered to spell the whole thing out for us.Doing the hard work of plotting in advance meant that when Wodehouse came to write the final book, all he had to work at was finding the right choice of words for the situation. And here, we can pick and choose random lines from his Wikiquote page to illustrate his peculiar genius:He trusted neither of them as far as he could spit, and he was a poor spitter, lacking both distance and control.I once got engaged to his daughter Honoria, a ghastly dynamic exhibit who read Nietzsche and had a laugh like waves breaking on a stern and rockbound coast.'Yes, sir,' said Jeeves in a low, cold voice, as if he had been bitten in the leg by a personal friend.Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror."Beginning with a critique of my own limbs, which she said, justly enough, were nothing to write home about, this girl went on to dissect my manners, morals, intellect, general physique, and method of eating asparagus with such acerbity that by the time she had finished the best you could say of Bertram was that, so far as was known, he had never actually committed murder or set fire to an orphan asylum."A sort of gulpy, gurgly, plobby, squishy, wofflesome sound, like a thousand eager men drinking soup in a foreign restaurant.'There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, "Do trousers matter?"'‘The mood will pass, sir.’’You know your Shelley, Bertie!’‘Oh, am I?’Many a man may look respectable, and yet be able to hide at will behind a spiral staircase.‘Greatness’ in a writer is an elusive quality. Just when you think you’ve got it pinned down, an example occurs to you of a writer who strikes you as having it, but who doesn’t fit your definition at all.Wodehouse has his detractors. The English dramatist Alan Bennett expressed admiration for his powers with language, but admitted to having little patience with Wodehouse’s ‘flippancy’. The literary critic Q.D. Leavis called his humour ‘stereotyped’, although even her own righteous scrutiny had to admit that it was also ‘ingenious’. (That previous sentence has an Easter egg in it, which will only be evident to fans of mid-20th century academic literary criticism.)People who knew Wodehouse often remarked on his ‘innocent’ quality, and I think it’s what distinguishes him from a writer like Waugh, who was tormented by psychological demons that drove him to mental breakdown. It’s possible to imagine Wodehouse being in a bad mood; impossible to imagine him losing his marbles.His stepdaughter Leonora, who he called ‘Snorky’, was one of his favourite people.That’s them in 1919.He travelled a lot for his work and, while Leonora was growing up and going to various boarding schools, he wrote long, affectionate letters to her. He routinely sent her drafts of his work for her opinion, and his 1926 collection of golf stories The Heart of a Goof contains the memorable dedication:To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.In 1944, aged only 39, Leonora died after a routine operation. Wodehouse and his wife Ethel were heartbroken.Yet there’s nothing in his work that reflects this experience. The next novel he published, the Jeeves and Wooster tale Joy in the Morning, is one of his funniest.Wodehouse didn’t believe in digging deep in his writing. This condemns him, for sure, to be a writer in whom you’ll look in vain for penetrating psychological insight or deep feeling. His few semi-serious novels, such as Jill the Reckless and The Coming of Bill, are not his most admired. But as Wilde said, give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth: as soon as Wodehouse stops trying to be serious, his real concerns come out.Wodehouse’s idea of paradise is an escape from everyday worries, and his marriage provided him with that. He and his wife were very fond of each other, but she and ‘Plum’ (as everyone called Wodehouse) preferred to live almost separate lives. She was social and gregarious, and he wasn’t, and she didn’t mind him occasionally checking into a hotel for, literally, days, with a stack of paper and his typewriter, just so he could do what he liked to do best, which was write undisturbed.Indeed, the basic plot of a Jeeves & Wooster novel is that Bertie’s untroubled existence is suddenly troubled by responsibility, which he must discharge before he can go back to being untroubled. The Code of the Woosters actually begins with Bertie waking up from sleep, and ends with him falling asleep again.The ‘greatness’, if there is any, lies in the virtuosity with which Wodehouse manipulates such slender material. He does not make us think differently about the world; what he does do, with immense skill, is give us a holiday from thinking about the world at all. His work is ‘escapist’, if you like, but by not even pretending to be anything more than a ‘sort of musical comedy without music’, it does not try to fool us that it’s about anything. Wodehouse’s basic innocence means that his fiction never feels like a guilty pleasure. This, I think, is why so many people come away from reading him with a feeling of refreshment.If you want to find Wodehouse’s deeper feelings in his work, you’re more likely to find it in his lyrics. This song was written for one of his greatest hits with the Bolton/Wodehouse/Kern team, 1917’s Oh, Boy!:On the other side of the moon,Ever so far,Beyond the last little star,There’s a land, I know,where the good songs go,Where it’s always afternoon;And snug in a haven of peace and rest,Lie the dear old songs that we love the best.It’s a land of flowersAnd April showersWith sunshine in between,With roses blowing and rivers flowing,’Mid rushes growing green;Where no one hurriesAnd no one worriesAnd life runs calm and slow:And I wish some day I could find my wayTo the land where the good songs go.That land is the setting of Wodehouse’s fiction.