While a student at the University of California–Davis, Linda Millar started drinking again. In May 1959 she disappeared into the streets of Stateline, Nevada with two unknown men and later was reported seen in Los Angeles. Ross Macdonald was a reticent man, but he went before television cameras to plead with his daughter to come home. He coordinated a massive search, working with the police in California and Nevada and hiring private detectives who found her in Reno two weeks after she went missing. Linda made an odd, evasive statement about what had happened. By leaving school and drinking, she had violated her ongoing probation, so she was given a suspended sentence for probation violation and the probation was extended. When it was all over, Macdonald collapsed and was hospitalized: severe hypertension with heart damage and kidney stones. His whole family was sick and he felt culpable, convinced that he had “acted as a carrier of neurosis from his own ruined youth to his daughter’s.”1
Macdonald believed what Freud did: that humanity’s basic unit is not the individual but the family and that pathologies in families create pathologies in individuals.2 Fathers in Macdonald’s novels tend to harm their sons by leaving them to their mothers; mothers scar their sons by staying too close and using them as husbands.
Macdonald’s The Underground Man features three son/father and two son/father/mother configurations. But the novel’s fulcrum is the Snows: a low-IQ, cleft-lipped, man-child, Frederick (“Fritz”), and his unstoppable mother, Edna. She makes uncomfortable hints early on, telling Archer: “I’m afraid you don’t understand. Frederick and I are very close”3 and brightly reminds Fritz, “I’m your girlfriend and you’re my boyfriend.”4 Edna has killed three men across two generations—all to deny her damaged son’s sexuality. She has isolated him, spoken for him, and thwarted his pitiful attempts to “chase the chicks.”5 The husband/father is dead before the novel starts and is mentioned briefly but memorably: “Mrs. Snow put her fingers to her mouth. A gold wedding band was sunk in the flesh of one finger like a scar.”6 Macdonald also writes, “Her late husband was very much like Fritz.”7 The implication is that Edna treated her husband like a son and her son like a husband. Macdonald is pushing beyond Freud’s Oedipus complex: he’s positing a mother’s damaged longing to be erotically victorious over the other women her son desires, perhaps because it is a way for her to “get back at” a husband by cuckolding him with his son.
It is in The Chill that Macdonald looks dead-on at what happens when the incestuous impulses of sons and mothers go wholly unchecked. A close reading of The Chill’s last chapter raises the question: if the son/mother desire is acted upon, what might that look like?
Twenty years passed between Macdonald’s mother’s death and his daughter’s drunken manslaughter and twenty-two years between Tony Galton’s disappearance and his son’s reappearance in The Galton Case: Macdonald is tracing generations. In that same way, The Chill’s plot juxtaposes two marriages, one new and the second a generation old, connected by three wrongly solved murders over twenty-two years. In present time Alex Kincaid marries Dolly McGee and the next day she goes missing; Alex hires Archer to find her. Archer hears that Thomas McGee saw Dolly’s wedding picture in the paper, recognized her as the daughter he hadn’t seen in ten years, went to the hotel where the couple were staying, talked to Dolly, and disappeared with her.
Ten years earlier, McGee was convicted of murdering his wife. Dolly had found her mother’s body and, as a preadolescent, had been pressured into testifying against her father at his trial. Now Dolly is old enough to get married but emotionally stalled exactly at the point where she “won” the Electra-like battle with her mother when the latter was murdered. Still in love with her father, Dolly was then forced to testify against him—effectively killing him. When McGee—who ought to have “given her away” on her wedding—reappears the day after, Dolly chooses her father over her groom, demonstrably stuck in her childhood love.
Dolly is a student at Pacific Point College and works as Dean Roy Bradshaw’s mother’s driver. Archer learns that Bradshaw is involved with two women: Laura Sutherland, the dean of women, and a newly arrived professor, Helen Haggerty; he has secretly married the former and is being blackmailed by the latter. Helen is murdered; Dolly finds the body, suffers a psychotic break, and is hospitalized. Eventually Archer learns that Bradshaw was having an affair with Dolly’s mother at the time of her murder ten years ago.
A third murder, this one twenty-two years earlier, is brought forward. At that time, one of Senator Osborne’s daughters, Tish, had an affair with her sister’s husband, Luke Deloney. Deloney surprised Tish in bed with a student named Roy Bradshaw. While trying to pistol-whip the two, Deloney was killed when Tish grappled with the gun and it went off. Tish then married Bradshaw, twenty-five years her junior, and paid for his Harvard education. They are living as mother and son in Pacific Point.
It is all too late for Bradshaw: he participated in the cover-up of the Deloney murder twenty-two years ago and again ten years ago when his wife killed Constance McGee. Given that he took no action to stop Tish twice, he is caught for good, a party to murder—and frozen as the adolescent he was twenty-two years ago. So now he sneaks around like a bizarre teenager, manipulating a very sick “mother.”
Going into The Chill’s final chapter, then, there are two ostensibly grown characters, Dolly Kincaid and Roy Bradshaw, whose maturations were cut off in late childhood as a result of traumatic events beyond their control, and they have suffered or caused suffering ever since.
Archer sees Tish speeding away from her home in her Rolls Royce; she is unable to brake quickly enough to avoid crashing into her son, who is parked in his car in order to block the driveway. Archer observes,
Old Mrs. Bradshaw had climbed down out of her high protected seat. She seemed unhurt. I remember thinking at that moment that she was an elemental power which nothing could ever kill.
“It’s Roy, isn’t it? Is he all right?”
“In a sense he is. He wanted out. He’s out.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m afraid you’ve killed him, too.”
“But I didn’t mean to hurt him. I wouldn’t hurt my own son, the child of my womb.”
Her voice cracked with maternal grief. I think she half-believed she was his mother, she had lived the role so long. Reality had grown dim.8
Bradshaw wanted to stop his mother, but his prudently worn seat belt doesn’t save him from Tish’s “elemental power” and the fast, slamming force of collision. For her part, Tish has climbed down out of her “high, protected seat” and seems unhurt. In a way, it is her money that has shielded her: money for a bigger, safer car and money that has provided Roy Bradshaw an education. In the larger sense, though, she hasn’t ever had the emotional safety she was so bent on. All she has been able to buy was his grudging presence in her bulwarked house. Earlier in The Chill, Archer describes that college dean’s residence: “The walls of books around me, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.”9 As Tish states,
“I was only protecting my rights. Roy owed me faithfulness at least. I gave him money and background, I sent him to Harvard, I made all his dreams come true.”10
“Most of his killers are women,” Matthew Bruccoli says in Ross Macdonald, and “they kill not for love, but for security.”11 Archer continues,
We both looked down at the dreamless man lying in the road. . . . The jagged lines of blood across his face resembled cracks in a mask through which live tissue showed.12
Bradshaw indeed has been leading a masked life. Had he been able to remove it, he would have had a shot at an adult life. Instead, he is dead.
When he writes, “But she had a doubleness in her matching Roy’s, and there was element of playacting in her frenzy,”13 Macdonald is deploying a Freudian trope to advance his fictional purposes.
The psychiatrist in Macdonald’s The Barbarous Coast asks:
“Are you familiar with the newer interpersonal theories of psychiatry? With the concept of folie à deux? Madness for two, it might be translated. A madness, a violence, may arise out of a relationship even though the parties to the relationship may be individually harmless.”14
Psychiatrist John Utley explains that folie à deux, now called “shared psychotic disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, “refers to shared delusion with an unalterable and psychotic state of belief agreed on by two people.”15 It’s an apt description of Bradshaw and Tish in The Chill: Bradshaw is mentally healthy enough to have succeeded academically and professionally. Had Tish respected the boundaries between mother love and woman/wife love, Bradshaw might have been able to “grow up” sexually. As things stand, Archer tells Tish, “The two of you put on a pretty good act—Godwin [the psychiatrist in The Chill] would probably say it fitted both your neurotic needs—but it’s over.”16
Bradshaw’s illness may have started as neurosis twenty-two years ago. By the night of his death, he has careened to the other end of a continuum into astounding self-entitlement:
“And even I deserve something more than I’ve had. I’ve lived my entire adult life with the consequences of a neurotic involvement that I got into when I was just a boy.”17
Roy Bradshaw stands in telling contrast to Alex Kincaid because Bradshaw remains an aging adolescent while Kincaid comes of age. Earlier in The Chill, Alex’s father shows up and uses the young man’s love for his mother to persuade his son to annul his one-day, unconsummated marriage:
“It’s true, isn’t it, Alex, you want to come home with me and Mother? She’s terribly worried about you. Her heart is kicking up again. . . . I’m only doing what’s best for you, son. You don’t belong with these people. We’ll go home and cheer up Mother. After all you don’t want to drive her into her grave.”18
The reader is privy almost to the moment when Alex performs the necessary task of a boy’s displacement of his erotic desire for his mother onto another, appropriate woman: Alex goes with his father but returns to his wife on his own later the same day. He tells Archer that when he was home with his parents, he felt “as though I wasn’t a man any more.”19
But Bradshaw never completes the displacement; instead, he “loves” an inappropriate woman—inappropriate because she acts as his mother. Tish makes sick, teasing asides early in The Chill: “‘Roy is a bit of a mother’s boy, wouldn’t you say?’ She looked up at me with complex irony, unembarrassed by his condition or her complicity in it.”20 Later she also contends, “Roy has always been attracted to women who are obviously mammals.”21 Macdonald creates a juvenile Bradshaw who becomes “erotically victorious” with Tish, a woman old enough to be his mother. Here is an example of a young man fixated on his mother—fixation meaning “an arrest of psycho-sexual maturation”22—marrying a woman like his mother, thereby “winning” the Oedipal struggle he actually lost as a boy. He then unconsciously recreates his adolescence: his wife calls the shots, and he manipulates her in a mother/son, wife/husband scenario playing out through long years of marriage. For her part, in a flailing attempt at imposed innocence, Tish offloads her sociopathy onto an imaginary, blatantly sexy Letitia Macready:
She wore very heavy makeup, more appropriate for the stage than the street, and she was hideously overdressed. . . . she had on a leopard-skin—an imitation leopard-skin coat, as I recall, and under it something striped. Sheer hose, with runs in them. Ridiculously high heels. A good deal of costume jewelry. . . . Like a woman of the streets. A greedy, pushing, lustful woman.23
There is a lot of sex here: at The Chill’s start, Bradshaw is involved with three women. He has had affairs before, as has Tish, who twenty-two years ago bedded her sister’s husband and an adolescent student. For the two of them, sex has been both “just sex” and the driving force behind multiple murders. It ends in tragedy, of course, all around. The clutching, ruined, old woman, “an elemental power which nothing could ever kill,” is simply shrieking:
“I wouldn’t hurt my own son, the child of my womb.” . . . Her voice cracked with maternal grief. . . . She flung herself on the dead man, as if her old body could somehow warm him back to life and rekindle his love for her. She wheedled and cooed in his ear, calling him a naughty malingering boy for trying to scare her. “Wake up! It’s moms.”24
Freud first identified family romances in 1897, wrote about them in 1908, and published an essay by that name in 1909. Family romances are conscious childhood fantasies fueled by feelings of frustration with faulty parents, rivalry with the parent of the same sex, and competition with siblings. In these romances, the child comforts himself by imagining that he is adopted—that his real parents are of a higher social class, braver, and love him more and exclusively. It is a way of dealing with the inevitable, private disappointments of childhood; Freud calls such daydreams “vents.” The romances have at their core the child being erotically victorious. Literature, Freud proposes, works like family romances and neuroses do, consisting “of the imagined, or fantasized, fulfillment of wishes that are either denied by reality or are prohibited by the social standards of morality or propriety.”25
“Notes of a Son and Father” records four family romances in the Macdonald household: first, Linda was five or six years old when she “couldn’t grasp the meaning of what her parents, both full-time writers since the war, were doing alone all day. In search of concrete meaning, she attached herself for awhile to the family of a local postman.”26 Second, the summer she was eleven, Macdonald went back to Ann Arbor to finish writing his dissertation, and “the child expressed a wish to go along and ‘keep house’ for him.”27 In both of her family romances, Linda’s desire to “correct” her “actual life”—to see her wishes fulfilled—is clear.
The third and fourth instances, though, show that in 1956 Macdonald was already puzzling out an extension of Freud’s concept. Macdonald and his wife, as parents, also played at family romances: an unmarried aunt who sometimes lived with the Macdonalds and cared for Linda eventually married and had a daughter of her own. Macdonald acknowledges that his and Margaret’s “loving treatment of the new child contrasts with their early treatment of their daughter.”28 Then a “neighbor’s daughter became almost a foster-daughter of the family especially of the mother”29; the girl was, for example, invited along on a family trip to Yosemite several weeks before Linda’s catastrophic drunk driving.
The parents’ “foster daughter,” the neighbors’ daughter, has been perhaps a little too overtly dear to the mother; and this girl is a little prettier in the Hollywood sense, and more sought-after by boys, as well as a “boy-stealer.”30
Surely her parents’ affection for their niece and “foster-daughter” must have felt to Linda like wishes on their part for a better daughter than she was. “The stage was set for a regressive crisis,”31 Macdonald admits.
In 1964’s The Far Side of the Dollar, Archer recognizes the unfairness and uselessness of parents and children trying to fulfill each other’s wishes.
I’d just like to change the emphasis slightly. People are trying so hard to live through their children. And the children keep trying so hard to live up to their parents, or live them down. Everybody’s living through or for or against somebody else. It doesn’t make too much sense, and it isn’t working too well.32
Macdonald and his readers saw and knew this: parents believe they are acting out of genuine sacrifice when what is really fueling their behaviors are unexamined wishes.
In Macdonald’s The Instant Enemy, published in 1968, Bernice Sebastian, the mother of a runaway daughter, eventually recognizes the unfairness of parent-imposed, impossible-to-live-up-to fantasies forced upon a child. “We started a game of let’s pretend,” she tells Archer, “without ever admitting it to each other.”
Keith was to be the rising young executive and I was to be his model homemaker, making him feel like a man, which is hard for Keith. And Sandy was to make us both feel good by doing well in school and never doing or saying anything wrong. What that boils down to is exploitation. Keith and I were exploiting each other and Sandy, and that’s the opposite of loving each other.33
Macdonald used the inverse of his relationship with his mother (a mother who becomes a wife, a son who becomes a husband) and exaggerated it when he wrote The Chill (a wife who becomes a mother and a husband who becomes a son). Tish’s dominance comes from her conscienceless, implacable focus on her husband, who on some level she believes is also her son. Anna (“Annie”) Moyer Millar, Ross Macdonald’s mother, was fragile and scattered, alternately grasping at her son or railing against him—as though he were her husband. Freud’s theory of anxiety applies:
Anxiety is the response to helplessness in the face of danger. If the danger has struck, the anxiety is automatic and immediate. If the danger is still in the offing, anxiety is the anticipation of helplessness in the face of danger. The overwhelming preponderance of anxiety falls into the category of anticipation.34
Annie must have felt helpless while waiting for Macdonald’s birth: she had had three late-term miscarriages, was forty years old, and in a shaky marriage with Jack Millar. She and Jack fought, Macdonald later said, “about the things that poor people argue about.”35 It was the beginning of Macdonald’s lifelong worry about having enough money. By forty-five, Annie looked like an old woman and her married life in California was effectively over, although there would be widely spaced and brief reconciliations and never a divorce. She and her son were back living in her native, cold Canada with her dour Mennonite mother and sister. Annie was childlike, seeing reality in absolute ways: they were indeed poor, but she did not need to sell homemade dusting cloths door to door or beg for food on the street with her uneasy little boy at her side. There was a falling out at the house that Macdonald didn’t understand, and he and his mother had to move out. He felt guilty in the face of circumstances he could not possibly have been responsible for, much less controlled: his father’s leaving, his and his mother’s ouster from his grandmother’s house, and his mother’s hysteria.
Then Annie gave way altogether: “she brought the six-year-old to an orphanage and filled out papers to have him admitted,” Macdonald remembered. “The iron gates of the orphanage were branded in his memory like the gates to the Mennonites’ hell.”36 At the last moment Macdonald’s sobs weakened Annie’s resolve. She didn’t know Rob Millar at all, a cousin of her husband’s who stepped in and took the boy. Macdonald had been given proof: the world was dangerous, and he could not trust his mother to protect him.
When Macdonald was sixteen, he made a count: he had lived in more than fifty houses “and committed the sin of poverty in every one of them.”37 He shuttled between relatives with interim stays with his mother in rooming houses, where they shared a bed “far past a proper age.” Annie “was devoted to him in ways that seemed unhealthy.”38 Certainly Macdonald was afraid of his mother. Annie couldn’t check her own impulses in her relationship with her son. A boy who desires his mother but senses that this is proscribed is reassured by a mother who can be trusted. But in the case of a mother who might do anything, that’s free-fall territory. And so Macdonald alternately fled from Annie and tried to “manage” her. In “Notes of a Son and Father,” Macdonald describes her and himself:
Her devotion to this child was hysterically intense; periodic hysteria was the keynote of her last twenty years. Her relationship to her son swung between passionate love and violent upbraiding. He came to know her weaknesses very young, and tempered the wind to her as much as he could, loving and hating her.39
“He’s very good at deceiving people,” Archer says of Roy Bradshaw in The Chill, “living on several levels, maybe deceiving himself to a certain extent. Mother’s boys get that way sometimes.”40
“Mother’s boys” are the unfortunate norm. The template for ancient Greek families in myth was still there, in play, in how Macdonald experienced his childhood and in how he structured his later fiction. As Phillip Slater puts it, ancient family systems “intensify the mother-son relationship at the expense of the husband-wife relationship.”41 Mid-twentieth-century Western cultural patterns lent lip service to that husband-wife connection but gave mothers little support, especially when there was no extended family nearby and no work outside the home.
Both family systems tend to produce male children who are highly Oedipal. The systems are alike in depriving women of contact with and participation in the total culture, and in creating a domestic pattern peculiarly confining and unfulfilling. They thus encourage a vicarious involvement of the mother in the life of the son. Both systems, furthermore, place an emotional overload on the mother-son relationship: the Greek system by forcing the mother to put the son in the father’s place, the American by making child rearing a full-time occupation and removing the child in its earliest years from other socializing agents.42
“My mother was without resources,”43 Macdonald told an interviewer many years later. It was a sadly true summation of Annie’s life. She was an utterly unfit mother, but it was hellish being her too. “It was a bad night for mothers,” says Archer in The Underground Man. “And a bad night for sons.”44
“My mind had been haunted for years by an imaginary boy whom I recognized as the darker side of my own remembered boyhood,” writes Macdonald about The Galton Case. “I couldn’t think of him without anger and guilt.”45 In his sixteen years, Macdonald’s anxiety had been manifest in myriad behaviors: bullying, theft, fighting, early drinking, and the repeated physical seduction of a mentally retarded maid. He was shamed by what he did, making no connection between his overt behavior and its underlying sources.
Kreyling delineates those sources in psychoanalytic terms:
Freudian theory, of course, is dominated by sex; our development of consciousness is not possible without the somatic, or bodily, development of sexualized anatomies, the realization of desires that grow with them, and the guilt that inevitably comes with learning the rules. Nor do we develop in isolation; for better or worse we develop in families.46
Over and over again in Macdonald’s fiction, the killers are parents who consciously or not use a child’s sad confusion over knowing-without-knowing that he sexually desires that parent. As a boy, Macdonald was both aware of societal taboos and absent patterning from his parents. Taboos—including the one against incest—are the stuff of rigid self-discipline; and Macdonald’s rules for himself—no fighting, stealing, sexual bullying, or homosexuality—are not so different from Hammett’s of no fighting, driving, shooting and, later, sex.
Sometime in his late adolescence there was an endpoint to Macdonald’s criminality: he did some last wrong thing, and whoever caught him made Macdonald run while tied to a moving car. After that, for whatever combination of reasons, he was able to forgo criminal behaviors. Macdonald biographer Tom Nolan stresses how much this self-mastery mattered to Macdonald, who
dealt with the worst impulses of his own personality—rage, self-pity, the urge to do harm—by suppressing them. He’d keep himself under rigid control. This was as serious to him as life or death, for he knew he had the strength and anger to kill. Thoughts of succumbing to evil terrified him.47
This was the beginning of a remarkably “successful” willed performance on Macdonald’s part. It lasted for one generation of Macdonald’s family.
In 1932 Jack Millar died, leaving a life insurance policy payable to Annie, who gave it to Macdonald, which enabled him to enroll in college. During his sophomore year at the University of Western Ontario, “the boy was strong enough and had ‘forgiven enough’” to invite his mother, who “was gradually breaking up,” to live with him. He came home one day in December 1935 to find her naked and helpless; she died of a brain tumor before Christmas. Fifteen years and some fifty houses after those iron gates, Macdonald was now an actual orphan.
Macdonald’s fear of failure was a fear of the failure to love his father, mother, and daughter enough:
[His father was] visited by the son, who was ashamed of him and also loved him, but not enough. . . . [I]n her last days as she lay dying of a brain tumor, he loved her as one loves a child, but failed to love her enough. . . . [T]he baby [Linda] was very beautiful and bright, but her parents could not love her enough.48
What would “enough” have looked like? Would it have been the ability on Macdonald’s part to make his father, mother, and daughter “okay”? That inability, that “not loving enough,” engendered misplaced guilt. And because the guilt was misplaced, it couldn’t be resolved. Moreover, with the death of his parents, he lost any opportunity to go back and, this time, do the right thing and “love them enough.” So, he did what he could do now that Jack and Annie were dead; he turned his back on his past and fully reinvented himself.
But when his adolescent daughter fell apart in terrible ways, Macdonald realized that his refusal to look at his own childhood had stunted his daughter’s. It all felt too late: as Helen Haggerty cries in The Chill, “Everything important—it was all over before I knew it had started.”49 First, Macdonald couldn’t start all over, so of course his willed performance hadn’t worked: twenty-two years after his mother’s death, Macdonald still felt guilty when he was writing “Notes of a Son and Father”:
He blames himself still for spending too little time with her on her deathbed, and when the time came ignorantly allowing her to die without his presence. Perhaps it was his twenty-year-old revenge on her for her failure to make a marriage and a home. Anyhow, the fact and circumstances of her death remain among his recurrent and most monumental images, sleeping and waking.50
Second, in turning his back on his mother, he cut himself off from future intimacy with other women. Therapist Terrence Real, who writes about male depression, argues against such disconnection in “The Loss of the Relational”:
[T]he true meaning of psychological “separation” is maturity, and we humans stand a better chance of maturing when we do not disconnect from one another. . . . what maturity truly requires is the replacement of childish forms of closeness with more adult forms of closeness, not with dislocation.
As devastating as the disconnection from the mother may be, it is merely the beachhead of a larger social mandate, the instruction to turn away, not just from the mother but from intimacy itself.51
What Macdonald is arguing in his best fiction extends psychoanalytic thinking: Macdonald believes disconnection is not only ill advised but impossible. Psychoanalysis, classic myths, and fiction: all are about the connections among family members. Novels are really identity quests, exercises in connection-realization, organized by archetypes-in-common in the minds of writers, characters, and readers. In her essay, “Finding the Connections,” published after Macdonald’s death, Eudora Welty analyzes how his novels work:
Where, and from how long ago, out of what human fissure, did this crime start, and why at this moment did it erupt? What connections will lead us back to the source? The identity of the man or woman there to be found can be reached only through following this network of connections. It’s the connections that absorb the author and magnetize his plots into their intricate and daunting patterns.52
Macdonald describes his detective this way:
His actions are largely directed to putting together the stories of other peoples’ lives and discovering their significance. He is less a doer than a questioner, a consciousness in which the meanings of other lives emerge.53
Thus Macdonald straightforwardly chose to be an identity-quest novelist, and he redesigned Archer to suit that purpose. The journey in each Macdonald novel is Archer’s coming to understand, sympathize with, and forgive the connections among the other characters. Moreover, Macdonald’s readers participate in that adventure; they are on identity-quests of their own, seeing themselves not in Archer, who is only the explainer, but in the other characters.
Hammett and Chandler were unintentional self-realizing writers, and their detectives share their unease with human connections. The posed question in Hammett and Chandler’s work is: can the detectives do the jobs at hand without compromising their personal code—that is, without getting close enough to other people to be changed by them? Readers hoping to be changed by the experience of reading a Hammett or Chandler novel have to puzzle out the connections and meanings because nobody’s forthcoming: not the authors and not their alter egos. Connections and concomitant meanings are there, but they are harder to find, hidden by Hammett and downright lied about by Chandler.
The Smart Set published Hammett’s first fiction in its October 1922 issue. “The Parthian Shot” is about Paulette Key, who realizes that her six-month-old son is as stupid and obstinate as her irritating husband. So Paulette gets the baby christened “Don,” sends him home from the church with the baby nurse, and then boards a train heading west. The clever part, of course, is that the child’s name is now “Don Key.” The iconoclastic Hammett probably appreciated the guts it took for a mother to light out for the territory. He and Jose, living with a baby in a tiny apartment, would have known how thrilling what Paulette did was. But it is hard to read much meaning into a 100-word, flippant story for which Hammett was paid $1.13.
A dozen years later, Hammett invented a mother for The Thin Man: Mimi Wynant beats her nearly grown children, who are terrified of her; reflexively lies; and has collaborated for money with her ex-husband’s murderer. As he does with the other deadly females in his canon, Hammett describes Mimi’s psychopathic rage in inhuman terms:
Mimi made an animal noise in her throat, muscles thickened on the back of her neck. . . . Mimi’s face was becoming purple. Her eyes protruded, glassy, senseless, enormous. Saliva bubbled and hissed between clenched teeth with her breathing, and her red throat—her whole body—was a squirming mass of veins and muscles swollen until it seemed they must burst. Her wrists were hot in my hand and sweat made them hard to hold.54
It sounds like penile arousal, yet it is a description of a woman. The obvious reference is to the “phallic mother”—one of Freud’s stages in a little boy’s development wherein he assumes his mother has a penis; and when he finds that she does not, he is horrified and begins fearing his own castration. Did Hammett study Freud? They shared Blanche Knopf as their editor. Was he consciously aping Freud in The Thin Man? It almost doesn’t matter: what is telling is that when Hammett wanted to describe a very scary woman, he unconsciously knew that a phallic mother would be terrifying.
There is a famous sexual reference to the above scene in The Thin Man: Nora afterward asks her husband, “Tell me something, Nick. Tell me the truth: when you were wrestling with Mimi, didn’t you get excited?”55 “The New York Times carried an ad reading, ‘I don’t believe the question on page 192 of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man has had the slightest influence upon the sale of the book,’ followed by Alfred A. Knopf’s signature.”56 Hammett biographer and Englishman Julian Symons later wrote: “The question was omitted from the English edition. Erections did not exist in English fiction at that time.”57 Humor aside, it is revealing that Nick Charles is asked about arousal from a physical fight with an angry, out-of-control mother and admits, “Oh, a little,” to which his wife laughs and says, “If you aren’t a disgusting old lecher.”58
In the twelve years between “The Parthian Shot” and The Thin Man, there are no mothers in Hammett’s fiction. It is striking, really, and particularly so for an author who first and steadily loved his mother, and thereafter found three mother figures.
His full name was Samuel Dashiell Hammett, but it was the “Dashiell” that mattered; it was his mother Anne’s maiden name. Which came first: Anne’s belief that the Hammetts were inferior to the Dashiells or her husband’s failure to keep jobs and marriage vows? In either event, Annie told her son, “All men are no good.”
Then she added, if you couldn’t keep your husband with love, do it with sex. She told him that a woman who wasn’t good in the kitchen wouldn’t be much good in any of the other rooms either, words he would remember all his life.59
It is hard to know how to take this: Anne clearly thought that her male child Dashiell was “good” and she wasn’t able to “keep” her husband faithful via love, sex, or cooking. Moreover, after he left Jose, Hammett espoused neither domesticity nor monogamy ever again. In any event, all his life Hammett was closer to his mother than his father. Partly it was appreciation and admiration: Anne, more than Richard, was the hardworking, reliable parent, despite her tuberculosis and the status of women. Hammett was scrawny and whip smart, a quirky little kid only a mother could love, and Anne did; she championed him.
Although there are few mothers in Hammett’s fiction, there are plenty of tough, disillusioned wives with weak, disappointing husbands—especially in his stories. Hammett used Anne as a wife early in his career, but didn’t transfer her as a mother. Here is LeRoy Lad Panek in Reading Early Hammett: A Critical Study of the Fiction Prior to The Maltese Falcon: “He started out with a caustic look at marriage and ‘The Parthian Shot’ skewer[s] the ways that women and men undermine the institution.”60 Eloise, in “The Joke on Eloise Morey,” is a large woman looming over her puny husband. She’s a hammerer:
You were a genius; you were going to be famous and wealthy and God knows what all! And I fell for it and married you: a milk-and-water nincompoop who’ll never amount to anything. . . . Delicate! Weak and wishy-wash.61
Her husband—appropriately called Dudley—slinks away and kills himself, leaving a final, groveling love letter to Eloise as his suicide note. Unnerved by the note, Eloise destroys it and is thereby undone. Neighbors volunteer recollections of Eloise wishing her husband were dead, and she’s arrested as his murderer—which she is, in some sense.
Margaret, in “The Ruffian’s Wife,” is identified in terms of her husband, Guy (another apt name), and she begins by seeing him as a larger-than-life, romantic outlaw.
What, she wondered with smug assurance that it never could have happened to her, would it be like to have for a husband a tame, housebroken male who came regularly to meals and bed, whose wildest flying could attain no giddier height than an occasional game of cards, a suburbanite’s holiday in San Francisco, or, at the very most, a dreary adventure with some stray stenographer, manicurist, milliner?62
However, when the Bolivian pearl concessionaire who lent Guy money for his latest failed scheme shows up, Margaret’s view of her husband shrinks to realistic proportions. He is just a guy who needs her help. She does help him murder the Bolivian, but the marriage is over: “The plain truth was she had never seen Guy as a man, but always as a half-fabulous being. The weakness of any defense she could contrive for him lay in his needing a defense.”63 It is a recurring progression in what Hammett called his “sex stories”: the bride adores her groom because she inaccurately and unfairly sees him as invincible, only to turn on him when he proves vulnerable. In the long, angry battle thereafter, the wife is the tougher combatant; in Red Harvest, there are “men with the dull look of respectable husbands.”64 Marriage is the big cheat. This all looks like Hammett’s parents’ marriage rather than his own, and it introduces the larger issue of men needing help.
Nevertheless, Anne and Richard were emotionally healthy enough to raise a son able to make his way, however imperfectly and incompletely, through Freud’s developmental steps; and this successful journey rendered Hammett open to mother and father figures too. When Hammett was the father, he gave his daughters permission to conjure family romances of their own, and Jo later wrote about it:
Once when I was ten or eleven, he accused me of being ashamed of my parents. Then not waiting for an answer, he went on to say that it was okay; everyone was ashamed of his parents. When he was little, he said, he liked to imagine that he was adopted, and one stormy night his “real” father would come driving down the road to reclaim him. He didn’t go on to explain what this “real” father would be like, but I imagined he would be very different from the one he already had.65
When Hammett sent the manuscript for “Poisonville” to Alfred A. Knopf in February 1928, it was Blanche Knopf who wrote back: “There is no question whatever that we are keen about the ms. . . . Hoping that we will be able to get together on POISONVILLE (a hopeless title by the way).”66 Hammett’s reply was:
Somehow I had got the idea that “Poisonville” was a pretty good title and I was surprised at your considering it hopeless—sufficiently surprised to ask a couple of retail book sellers what they thought of it. They agreed with you, so I’m beginning to suspect which one of us is wrong.67
Knopf published Hammett’s first novel as Red Harvest one year later. Blanche became his editor, thus moving the pulp-writing Hammett into heavyweight company; in addition to Freud, she also edited Gide, de Beauvoir, Camus, Van Vechten, and Cather. Blanche was one kind of mother to Hammett: a steady taskmaster, hard charging and without subterfuge.
Rose Evans was Hammett’s motherly housekeeper and meddler. Hammett biographer Diane Johnson paraphrased what Evans said in an interview after her boss’s death:
Women came around, tried to get money out of him; Rose tried her best to keep them away, but they came around at night too when Rose had gone home. She didn’t know what went on when she wasn’t there. Gold diggers. She knew what they were.68
When Hammett was about to be released from prison (having run afoul of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York), Rose sent him two suits, two shirts, and two pairs of shoes, “so he’d have a choice.”69 She was there when he was dying, and Hammett scholar Richard Layman subsequently learned that Lillian Hellman “wanted to hire Rose Evans, but Hammett asked her not to take the job because he feared she would not be treated with the respect and affection which he had always felt for her.”70
When Hammett was convicted of contempt of court for refusing to answer questions about the Bail Fund Committee of the Civil Rights Congress of New York, bail was set at $10,000. Hellman later claimed that she tried and failed to raise the money, but it was steady, loyal Muriel Alexander who showed up with $10,000 cash. It did no good: “You couldn’t get bail from just anywhere, you had to say where it came from and the court had to like where it came from.”71 The court decided there was something fishy about a secretary coming up with $10,000 and therefore refused Hammett bail. Fifty-eight years later, Hammett’s granddaughter was emotional and emphatic: “That woman went to her grave without ever revealing where she got the money!”72
As the years played out, Jose became a kind of mother figure for Hammett. She was, after all, a nurse like his mother. Jo remembered:
Papa would come and stay with us sometimes in the thirties—when he was drinking and things were not going well with him. Our house was a refuge from his other worlds. My mother cooked and tended to him, tried to get him to eat.73
When Hammett was in prison, Jose worried.
I think Mother understood better than I did how hard prison would be on him. . . . And she was less deceived by the tough-guy front he always wore. She knew his physical frailty, had nursed him in the San Francisco days when they both thought he was dying. She knew how much he needed his privacy and understood what its loss would mean to him.74
For his part, Hammett tended to tease his mother figures affectionately, including Jose in later years, treating them like kid sisters—which may have been how he treated his mother too. The man who bloomed in male institutions certainly knew how to charm women. Jo marveled at his finesse:
The servants loved him. “Mr. Hammett never asks for anything special,” they said. He didn’t have to. Somehow people were always trying to please him, to give him what he wanted before he asked for it. I’d noticed that before. It was some sort of trick he’d learned. Though I saw that it worked for him, I could never figure out how he did it.75
Chandler never got to Hammett’s kind of ease. Doubleness led to loneliness in Chandler’s writing and life, and most of that loneliness had to do with women, gay men, and sex. Chandler was unable—or at least unwilling—to draw nuanced female characters, much less complicated male/female relationships. This proved a weakness as his work moved from short stories to novels, and from genre to mainstream. It was a startling deficiency in otherwise thoughtful and beautiful work. Nevertheless, there is much to be learned by watching that failing play out.
Chandler’s novels have double geographies; the “outer one” is crucially set in Los Angeles. Chandler was masterful and confident in this outer diegesis, with its poetry of place and empathetic characterizations. Nonetheless, he uncomfortably—and perhaps unconsciously—knew that this was not where the fundamental crime’s motivations came from, nor where its solution could be understood. Chandler scholar Stephen Knight writes:
Essentially the novels have double plots. There is an outer structure where what has gone wrong is loosely associated with corruption, gangsters, professional crime. . . . But none of these people or patterns turns out really to have been behind the central crime, and they fade from the action as the inner, personalized plot is steadily revealed, as the actual betrayer and killer becomes exposed.76
These inner narratives reveal their author. “The whole pattern is common in the novels,” says Knight. “The villain is consistently a sexy woman who gets very close to the hero.”77 And the hero—the detective/first-person narrator/Marlowe—is very close to Chandler. The great puzzle in Chandler is that he made Marlowe “a shop-soiled Galahad” who rescues women all over Los Angeles, yet the women are fiends. Marlowe acknowledges in The Big Sleep that the “move with the knight was wrong. . . . Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights.”78
Chandler’s illogical formula is, in fact, fully compatible with Hammett’s espoused conundrum. One of the genre’s descriptors is that the detective never wins: he never gets rich, never makes his mark, and never gets the girl. Richard Layman elaborates:
The burden of the tragedy was borne by the detective, who typically narrated the tale, acting as both chorus and hero. Physically, he was invulnerable; spiritually, though, he was jaded by the awesome knowledge that his job, which was to bring order to a chaotic world, could never be completed. He was a seedy Sisyphus afflicted with an unrealizable moral vision.79
Hammett and Chandler’s narrating heroes simultaneously believe in the power of self-determination and despair that the self had no power in the world. This can function as their definition of hardboiled fiction: an existential man in a nihilistic world.
In Chandler’s The High Window, Jasper Murdock had made advances on Merle Davis, his wife’s neurotic little assistant. Then he was murdered—defenestrated. With his death, a rare category of Chandler monster is created: the widowed mother. “[T]he female threatens the male,” wrote Knight about The High Window, “as a bogus mother rather than a bogus lover.”80 Elizabeth Murdock plays her regrettable son, Leslie, and, acting as a mother figure, overruns her assistant, Merle, then hates them both for their weakness. Elizabeth has rendered her son superficial: his wife has given up and left him, and he gambles extravagantly. Elizabeth tells Marlowe, “I have a damn fool of a son. . . . he is quite incapable of earning a living and he has no money except what I give him, and I am not generous with money. . . . I find him dull myself.”81 Elizabeth is masterful at using the psychological advantages that accrue to a mother: with time and cunning, and without conscience, Elizabeth has convinced Merle that she pushed Mr. Murdock out the window, that she owes her continued job to the forgiveness of her mistress, and that her mistress is so emotionally fragile that she must never be confronted with painful truths. Marlowe shows Merle a photograph of Elizabeth killing her husband and then tells Merle:
You were made to think you had pushed him. It was done with care, deliberation and the sort of quiet ruthlessness you only find in a certain kind of woman dealing with another woman. . . . She had the strange wild possessive love for her son such women have. She’s cold, bitter, unscrupulous and she used you without mercy or pity. . . . You were just a scapegoat to her. If you want to come out of this pallid subemotional life you have been living, you have got to realize and believe what I am telling you.82
And Merle’s response? She tells Marlowe, “You must never show this to Mrs. Murdock. It would upset her terribly.”83
There are sad pieces of Chandler in the novel’s victims. Leslie, the cowed son, “a slim, tall, self-satisfied-looking number,” is similar to the Chandler who showed up at the Lloyds’ Friday evening get-togethers, “an elegant young thing trying to be brilliant about nothing,”84 by his own description. And then there is Merle, with her “pallid sub-emotional life,” overstimulated in the company of any man. She is Chandler-like too. “When it came to women, [Chandler] was highly excitable,” Chandler biographer Judith Freeman describes. “He was drawn to their beauty, but they made him nervous, overly anxious to please; they caused such an excess of emotion, an intense response.”85
Macdonald, Hammett, and Chandler: of the three, Chandler’s childhood was the least amenable to his playing family romances. His mother had implacably appropriated the fantasist role: in her eyes and therefore in her powerless son’s, she was “a sort of saint,” and his father was “an utter swine.” It’s a cruel irony that, of the three, the young aspiring writer most needing a father figure was also the least equipped to recognize one.
When Chandler met Cissy Pascal at the Lloyds’ one Friday night in 1913, she was overtly different from his mother, Florence. Cissy was divorced and remarried, had lived in New York City, where she had posed nude—maybe for a painting over a bar—and may have smoked opium. She was a showy redhead and game for anything. He got the idea that he couldn’t fail her. Hiney thinks that Chandler saw Cissy as
without the fragility he was wary of in women. Her colorful past had given Cissy both a cynicism towards convention and an independent spirit. Having married twice, she had a wit and resourcefulness that Florence Thornton had never quite managed in the face of bad luck. Cissy was a worldly and beautiful woman whom Chandler could talk to on equal terms without worrying that her feelings might be easily hurt, or that she would be in need of constant reassurance.86
Freeman agrees: Cissy had none “of the vulnerability and sadness of his mother—the fragility of an abandoned woman. In her life, it was Cissy who’d done the abandoning, not the other way around.”87
By 1916 Florence Chandler’s son had sent for her. She fit right in with the Lloyds and all their friends, especially Julian and Cissy Pascal. There is an incongruous set of photographs: in one of mother and son together on the beach, she is tentative and a little grim, in a buttoned-up wool coat and hose; and he is in a wool suit and vest, smoking a pipe. In another beach shot—this time his mother isn’t there—Chandler is grinning, lounging in a bathing suit, sporting a tan. Chandler is fully two people: one with his mother and another without her.
Chandler was twenty-eight, living with his mother, and queasily in love with a married woman. Life got uncomfortably down to the nub, so Chandler moved. He and Gordon Pascal (Julian’s son and Cissy’s stepson) joined the Canadian army. Florence moved in with Julian and Cissy for the duration. By March 1918 Chandler had been trained as an infantryman and was suddenly on the front lines in France. Casualties mounted fast and Chandler found himself a stunned platoon leader way too soon. It took him thirty-nine years to write about what happened next, and then he did so in just two brief letters to a young Australian correspondent whom he had never met.
If you had to go over the top somehow all you seemed to think of was trying to keep the men spaced, in order to reduce casualties. It was always very difficult, especially if you had replacements or men who had been wounded. It’s only human to want to bunch for companionship in face of heavy fire.88
In June 1918, German artillery shells blew up his entire outfit: every man died except Chandler; he had suffered a concussion and was removed from the front. He had enlisted just ten months before. “I have lived my whole life on the edge of nothing,” he wrote. “Once you have had to lead a platoon into direct machine-gun fire, nothing is ever the same again.”89
Chandler wrote an unfinished, unpublished sketch about that last bombardment called “Trench Raid,” and he transposed that same terrible attack into a fleeting aside about the World War II experience of Terry Lennox in The Long Goodbye, his late and most autobiographical novel. Otherwise, Chandler never spoke of what had happened to him in France. The war increased Chandler’s tendency toward detachment. The subterfuges were there before the wartime slaughters, and the slaughters only strengthened the subterfuges. Marlowe would affect that same stance: “It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is,” Marlowe says in The Long Goodbye. “I didn’t have one. I didn’t care. I finished the drink and went to bed.”90 They both did care.
When Chandler came home from the war, he found his mother sick with cancer and spending increasing hours in her bedroom at the Pascals. A poem that he wrote then, “Lines With an Incense Burner,” includes the stanzas “The secret and silence and perfume . . . in the quiet house of all the dead.”91
Cissy and Chandler wanted to marry, but Florence couldn’t be appeased and Chandler wouldn’t cross her. There was no way around it; he and Cissy would have to wait until Florence died. They would wait four years. Chandler supported two women in two Los Angeles apartments, and he lived with his mother until she died at the end of January 1924.
Chandler’s mother chose her response to her husband’s neglect: she handed over the responsibility for her own life to her son. Of course, this was what women alone often did at that time: divorce was a hard stigma then, and she was frightened. The fact that she made the expected moves doesn’t contradict the truth that her decision damaged her son. In a real sense, she used him.
Without doubt, Chandler saw his mother as the innocent victim and himself as having wanted to rescue her. At sixty-nine he still unreservedly adored her: “I knew that my mother had affairs—she was a very beautiful woman—and the only thing I felt to be wrong was that she refused to marry again for fear a step-father would not treat me kindly.”92
Psychologist John D. Gartner explains the tyranny of what Freud terms the “repetition compulsion”:
Put simply, there is a powerful unconscious drive to recreate in one’s adult relationships the relationships you experienced as a child. In my twenty years of practicing psychotherapy, there is no single idea that I have found to be more useful or universal. . . . It is as if, when we are born, our minds are like wet plaster, and the structure of the relationships we encounter forms an impression that hardens into a mold. . . . What feels right to us, powerfully and compellingly so, are the comfortable and familiar relational patterns of the past.93
Certainly Chandler would frequently misread women, in just such terms. It was as if he saw women in broad categories, as tropes. Given that he had experienced Florence as ostensibly fragile and a “sort of saint,” Chandler would spend a lifetime hell-bent on saving complicated women. And Philip Marlowe did so too; Chandler could not write what he could not understand. Yet Chandler, at some subconscious level, did understand more about his mother, that “more” becoming apparent in his invented female monsters. As Freeman puts it:
Ray’s own mother bullied him, forcing him to wait until she was dead before he could marry Cissy. He never could say anything bad about his mother, certainly not while she was alive, but in his . . . fictional portraits of women—especially older women—what often leaks through is loathing, resentment, revulsion and fear.94
It all made Marlowe and Chandler lonely for and frightened of women. Jerry Speir, who also writes about Macdonald, agrees:
Chandler was strongly affected by and often mistaken about women at various periods throughout his life. . . . Part of the impulse was to protect women, honor them, put them on a pedestal in the manner of the chivalric knight; the other impulse was to separate himself from them lest he be somehow contaminated by a foreignness which he has only vague reasons for fearing.95
In Freud’s version, family romances are the purview of the powerless child’s. The fantasies provide a “vent” to ease the disappointment of having inevitably imperfect parents. As such, fantasies alleviate a little the “bone of my bone” bond between parent and child; family romances are a healthy, necessary stage in a child’s maturation. In Macdonald’s retooled family romances, however, it is the adults who are conjuring perfect children; it is the all-powerful parents imposing their own fantasies on their inescapably disappointing sons and daughters. In Macdonald’s finest novels, “playing happy families” is a deadly game ending in scarred children. Macdonald is writing cautionary tales that ring true, echoing something that readers already, consciously or unconsciously, knew: parents really do impose their unrealistic fantasies on the weakest members of their family—which is to say, they don’t always see, much less celebrate, the actual child.