In a lifetime there are myriad refused lovers who become ghosts. Societies have their prohibitions, and in the American days of Hammett and Chandler, homosexuality was illegal, unnatural, and not discussed. Remember that, according to Freud, humanity’s basic unit is not the single person but that person’s family; thus, what that family thinks about homosexuality matters to that gay individual, who is checking his impulses and staying in the closet, internalizing the taboo and hence loathing that aspect of himself that his family and community hates.
It was a little easier for Macdonald: he was a generation younger than Hammett and Chandler and he agreed with Freud’s thinking on sexuality. That Macdonald’s lover was a woman makes sense for his orientation later in life. Yet for all Macdonald’s courage as a confessional writer, he only briefly admitted to homosexuality and barely acknowledged his suicide attempt in “Notes of a Son and Father.” Certainly, he never circled back to either subject, nor did they appear more than fleetingly in his fiction. The number of gay men in Macdonald’s work probably can be counted on one hand. And what happened to the pattern of homosexuality in Macdonald’s youth? He gained self-control over the behavior and then it stopped. What apparently troubled him most was his bullying of other boys and taking sexual advantage of a retarded maid more than once. Still, this was a frequently occurring, urgent-feeling activity and yet Macdonald didn’t elaborate.
It’s useful to know what the thinking on sexual orientation was in the 1950s when Macdonald began analysis. Freud’s “inversion theory” postulates that all babies are born bisexuals and then influenced by biological and environmental factors in their early childhoods eventually to become predominantly homosexual or heterosexual. William Masters, of Masters and Johnson renown, building on the findings of Freud and Alfred Kinsey, believed that
[w]e are not genetically determined to be homosexual and we are not genetically determined to be heterosexual. We are born man and woman and sexual beings. We learn sex preferences and our orientations, be it homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, and, not infrequently, we change voluntarily our sexual preference.1
Macdonald appears to have shared similar views. “For whatever else he may be”—says Edward Margolies in his study of the private eye in Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald, and Chester Himes—“Macdonald is a child of the post-World War II neo-Freudian zeitgeist that has posited that human beings of either sex are composites of so-called masculine and feminine traits.”2 Sexual orientation, then, is a continuum. Being bisexual, or owning up to having homosexual experiences in his youth, may have been a label with which Macdonald could live.
Maybe Raymond Chandler could too, but very privately. In just one letter, Chandler talked about bisexuality as “a matter of time and custom.”3 If he was bisexual or homosexual, he was fully engaged in repression as a defense mechanism against lifelong anxiety. Michael Kahn outlines the underlying mindset of that repression:
The erotic desire for a forbidden person is dangerous. If the person I desire is . . . a person of my gender, being aware of that desire would put me in danger of painful guilt feelings. Were I to disclose the desire I would be in further danger, that of being shamed or punished. If I am aware of the impulse and manage to keep it entirely hidden, I must deal not only with the guilt but also with the frustration of a strong need that can never be satisfied. It seems clearly to my advantage not to be aware of the desire.4
Is Marlowe gay? Chandler doesn’t mean for him to be, yet Marlowe delivers erotic descriptions of men—for instance, gushing when he describes Red Norgaard in Farewell, My Lovely:
His voice was soft, dreamy, so delicate for a big man that it was startling. It made me think of another soft-voiced big man I had strangely liked. . . . He had the eyes you never see, that you only read about. Violet eyes. Almost purple. Eyes like a girl, a lovely girl. His skin was as soft as silk. Lightly reddened, but it would never tan. It was too delicate. . . . His hair was that shade of red that glints with gold.5
The details Chandler uses to describe Chris Lavery in The Lady in the Lake are in that same vein:
He had everything in the way of good looks the snapshot had indicated. He had a terrific torso and magnificent thighs. His eyes were chestnut brown and the whites of them slightly gray-white. His hair was ratherlong and curled a little over his temples. His brown skin showed no signs of dissipation. He was a nice piece of beef.6
In 1950 Chandler was commissioned by director Alfred Hitchcock to write the screenplay for Patricia Highsmith’s novel Strangers on a Train. Hitchcock came daily to check on Chandler’s progress, and they drove each other nuts. Donald Spoto wrote about Hitchcock’s own “inner experience of division” and suggests that the two men “were surprisingly similar; the tension between them derived not from a confrontation between complementary talents, but from a smoldering suspicion that each knew the other’s soul rather more fully than either desired.”7 Certainly, Highsmith’s book is all about doubleness and duplicity, as the following passage signals.
Each was what the other had not chosen to be, the cast-off self, what he thought he hated but perhaps in reality loved. . . . there was that duality permeating nature. . . . Two people in each person. There’s also a person exactly the opposite of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush.8
The finished movie starring Robert Walker and Farley Granger added its own secrets. Patrick McGillian, another Hitchcock biographer, explains that
[t]he director got Walker; the studio got Granger—but Granger’s casting changed a key idea of Hitchcock’s. Bruno’s homosexuality is implied in the script, but there’s no question of Guy’s heterosexuality; he’s in the middle of a messy divorce and has a girlfriend. . . . But as it was, the director had to accept an odd crisscross in the casting: a straight actor (Robert Wagner) playing a homosexual, who comes on to a “super straight” (to borrow Robert L. Carringer’s word) played by a homosexual (Granger).9
Hitchcock later said that the casting saved him a reel’s worth of storytelling because audiences would sense hidden qualities in the actors that wouldn’t need to be spelled out. There is available now a prerelease British print of Strangers on a Train in which Bruno is flamboyantly attracted to Guy.
The Long Goodbye is Chandler’s last solid fiction and his most honest. “I wrote this as I wanted to because I can do that now,” he said.10 It includes the self-loathing suicide note of Roger Wade, a novelist: “I was lying like that once in bed and the dark animal was doing it to me, bumping himself against the underside of the bed, and I had an orgasm. That disgusted me more than any other of the nasty things I have done.”11 The more crucial relationship is Marlowe’s with Terry Lennox, a drunk with Chandler’s war experience whom Marlowe helps get to Mexico when Sylvia Lennox is murdered. Safely there, Lennox writes to Marlowe in farewell:
So forget it and me. But first drink a gimlet for me at Victor’s. And the next time you make coffee, pour me a cup and put some bourbon in and light me a cigarette and put it beside the cup. And after that forget the whole thing. Terry Lennox over and out. And so goodbye.12
Marlowe finally beds a woman and gets a marriage proposal from Linda Loring, but he demurs. That scene, however, is not the long goodbye. Afterward Marlowe goes to see Lennox one more time, telling him, “It was nice while it lasted. So long, amigo. I won’t say goodbye. I said it to you when it meant something. I said it when it was sad and lonely and final.”13 And that’s the long goodbye.
In his introduction to Trouble Is My Business, Chandler writes: “The fictional detective is a catalyst, not a Casanova.”14 In The Long Goodbye, Marlowe is inarguably more Casanova than catalyst, with the argument being, whom does he love?
Chandler is at pains to make Marlowe homophobic: for example, in The Big Sleep he has him brag: “I took plenty of the punch. It was meant to be a hard one, but a pansy has no iron in his bones, whatever he looks like.”15 Openly gay men are repeatedly the victims of sadistic brutality: to wit, Marlowe’s “butchering of the homosexual youth, Carol Lundgren, in The Big Sleep”16 and, in Farewell, My Lovely, Mrs. Grayle’s pounding “Lindsay Marriott’s head until he has ‘brains on his face.’”17 Stephen Knight states, “As far as men go, Marlowe is very hostile if they are effeminate.”
Arthur Geiger in The Big Sleep and Lindsay Marriott in Farewell, My Lovely are clearly homosexual and they both die grotesquely, immediately after being examined with disfavour by Marlowe. Intriguingly, he also disliked men who are fully dependent on women, gigolos such as Chris Lavery in The Lady in the Lake and Louis Vannier in The High Window. They also die in ugly ways. Evidently feminine power over men is not enjoyed at all, and sexual unease comes strongly through all Marlowe’s encounters with men and women. None of these feelings, it is interesting to notice, is in the least related to the unveiling of urban corruption.18
The man who wrote Marlowe may have needed to insist that he was like Marlowe. Without doubt, Chandler was an unapologetic homophobe too:
[P]ansies, queers, homos, whatever you want to call them. . . . These are sick people who try to conceal their sickness. My reaction may be uncharitable: they just make me sick. My dead wife could spot one entering a room. Highly sexed women invariably seem to have that reaction.19
Chandler was given to blustering heterosexual bravado, telling a friend in 1956, “The most strict and puritanical woman I had ever met had been in bed with me a week after I met her,”20 and informing another friend in 1957, “Thank God I can still copulate like a thirty-year-old.”21
One of Chandler’s doublenesses was that he was both an Englishman and an American. There were ramifications beyond geography: in the United States, he was professionally regarded as an adept, popular, genre writer; in England, he was lionized as a mainstream, literary novelist. In the United States he was considered to be heterosexual but, within his circle of English friends, the usual assumption was that he was in the closet. Patricia Highsmith said, “Maleness sat uneasily on him.”22
“The English public school system had left its sexually devastating mark upon him,” John Houseman commented. He, likewise a graduate of that same system, thought Chandler was “too inhibited to be [outwardly] gay.”23 Natasha Spender—who was Chandler’s friend in his last years and whose husband, Stephen Spender, was bisexual—remembers in her essay, “His Own Long Goodbye,” that “we all, without a second thought, assumed that he was a repressed homosexual.”
His mother had divorced his drunken and violent father, taking her seven-year-old son to England to live with her mother and sister in Dulwich—in a middle-class household of high Victorian rectitude.
. . . Raymond always talked of his own schooldays at Dulwich College with pride . . . for his character of exceptional sexual purity. . . . Clinically this pattern of childhood situations is often recognized as a determining factor for later homosexuality.24
Upon hearing that Chandler had claimed, yet again, “My wife hated them [homosexuals] and she could spot one just by walking into a room,”25 Don Bachardy, Christopher Isherwood’s lover, remarked: “Well, it’s perfect, isn’t it? He married his mother. A woman who hated queers. It’s the perfect cover. How much more protective can you get?”26
Yet Chandler incontrovertibly loved his wife. He had bought her the house in La Jolla in 1946, and in 1952, when Cissy was eighty-two and very sick and they had been recluses for years, they took a trip to England and New York City. He wanted to show her where he had come of age and to see where she did. That is more than reverence; that is curiosity born of wanting to understand and be understood better. “She was the beat of my heart for thirty years. She was the music I heard faintly at the edge of sound,”27 he wrote at the time she died. Dilys Powell, the film critic of the Sunday Times, and her husband, Leonard Russell, literary editor of the same newspaper, had had a dinner for the Chandlers. In a gentle essay written after their deaths, “Ray and Cissy,” Powell remembers her first impressions:
Looking back now, I realize that, leaving aside the brilliant literary gifts which first seduced me, I liked Raymond best in his relationship with Cissy, that smiling propitiatory figure whom he guarded and defended. . . . In a world with Cissy he showed another kind of gallantry; he shielded her.28
If gay was Chandler’s place on the continuum, then the sexually knowing and sophisticated Cissy would have figured that out somewhere in the years of their marriage. She may have accepted her husband’s complete nature, even as he forgave her own lie; they may have protected each other’s secrets. As Wyatt indicates: “If the novels were a product of the marriage, they grew out of its darkness and secrets as well as its love. Love and marriage become, in Chandler’s novels, the site of secrecy itself.”29 Maybe the story of Cissy and Chandler’s marriage is as simple and complicated as this: that they came to love, forgive, and shield each other.
Weakening a societal taboo is like turning a barge—it takes a long time. But it happens: it’s easier to be gay today than in Chandler and even Macdonald’s time. Incest, however, long has been held abominable, and psychoanalytic thinking about it has not changed in the 102 years since Freud wrote Totem and Taboo, wherein incest and patricide are the two practices held incompatible with the very definition of civilization. Yet the ghost lovers are there.
The Electra complex, as formulated by Freud and used in psychoanalysis in the 1950s in the United States, is axiomatic in the sexual development of girls. Its stages parallel the Oedipus complex and begin with a little girl’s attraction to her mother. Soon, though, she comes to believe that her mother already has castrated her and therefore the child turns against her, becoming libidinously attracted to her father and fantasizing about being impregnated by him. In a later stage achieved if all goes well, the complex is successfully resolved: the girl, not wanting to give up her mother’s love, allows her hostility to ease; in fact, she both “internalizes” her mother and becomes attracted to other, appropriate males. But things don’t always go well: “The mother may simply lose interest in the father,” Michael Kahn summarizes,
and send the message that she would like the daughter to take over for her.
[U]nconsciously the daughter passionately desires the victory. That is the reason the victory is so terribly costly. We recall once again that in the realm of primary process the wish is equivalent to the act: “I wanted to take him away from her and I have done it.” Now the daughter unconsciously believes that she has willfully committed what may be the two most terrible sins: incest and matricide. She is certainly better off if the incest has only been symbolic, but psychic incest and matricide it is nevertheless, making her prey to consuming guilt.30
Eleven-year-old Linda Millar wanted to go with her dad to Ann Arbor for the summer of 1952, just the two of them. She would, she said, “keep house” for him. “This in spite of a long history of what can only be described as emotional neglect where it counted most, an inability to love enough, to father his own flesh,” Macdonald sadly writes in “Notes of a Son and Father.”
Macdonald turned Linda down and went alone to the University of Michigan. When he came back home in August, he
found wife and child in a bad way, and “attempted suicide.” The wife . . . suggested that he should have himself committed, but nothing was done. The husband resisted any thought of help, and is not sorry, except for the child’s sake.31
When Macdonald was twelve, his father had invited him to come along on a last, West-wandering adventure, and the boy had turned him down. It was at about that same time that Macdonald stopped sleeping in his mother’s bed and that she talked to him about her marriage, referring to “‘incompatibility’ with sexual implications.”32 Thereafter, the almost-adolescent boy’s anger ratcheted up.
When sixteen-year-old Linda drank two quarts of wine and started driving, the dynamic equation of Macdonald, Margaret, and Linda was sexually precarious. In “Notes of a Son and Father,” Macdonald refers to
the wife’s real need for a jealous and exclusive love (the father was half her world; the converse is less true) and I think hyper-awareness of the fairly normal incestuous content in the father-daughter relationship. This has its other side: the daughter has been perhaps unhealthily aware of her parents’ sexual life and jealous of it. But it is hard to know where normality ends.
Shortly thereafter, Macdonald composed an essay, “Memorial Day,” which includes this assessment of the family dynamic:
On the eve of Memorial Day, I stared at my wife in helpless pride and longing. . . . She railed at me, saying I was sick, would always be sick. I held myself in silence for the most part, but there was trouble and the shadow of blackmail. Linda slammed a door.33
Margaret Millar’s canon is full of angry families. In Beast in View, the father says to his adolescent daughter, “Your punishment, Helen, is being you and having to live with yourself.”34 The mother in Vanish in an Instant, written presciently years before Linda Millar’s troubles, has given up:
All my life I’ve done everything possible for her. She’s been hard to raise, terribly hard. It’s been one crisis after another ever since the day she was born, and I’ve met each one with all the strength I had. Now I don’t have enough left to go on with. . . . Virginia’s on her own now. When she makes a mistake she must correct it herself. I won’t be here to help her.35
Many of her plots have children overhearing what their parents really think of them or forceful women choosing emotionally weak men.
A different man might have witnessed his adolescent daughter’s self-destruction in shocked surprise, but Macdonald admitted recognition; he had been here before. Knowing without knowing gave way to knowingness, and his canon turned a corner.
“Time pressing, time lapsing, time repeating itself in dark acts . . . is the wicked fairy to troubled people, granting them inevitably the thing they dread,”36 writes Welty in her review of The Underground Man. And, more often than not, a child who needs help now is the emergency that hastens Archer and the reader through Macdonald’s novels. “We find at the center of Ross Macdonald’s complicated novels,” George Grella avers in his New Republic essay “Evil Plots,” “as at the center of Dickens’ complicated novels, a suffering child.”37 Paul Nelson concurs:
Those stories of fractured families, reckless runaways and damaged young people who are haunted by eerie, early memories that something has happened—something terrible, but they aren’t quite sure what—seemed both jinglingly immediate and terrifyingly tribal, daring to fiddle with the fuse of that timeless bomb within us all, planted somewhere in the past and set to go off who knows when.38
It took Macdonald five years to write the apology that is The Ferguson Affair. He wanted badly for Santa Barbara to see that the girl who killed a boy and maimed another was herself wounded by a malfunctioning childhood not of her own making. The novel’s plot involves both a faked kidnapping wherein a young woman claims amnesia afterward and a speeding car that causes mortal injury. The boys whom Linda had run down were Mexicans, and Santa Barbara’s Hispanic community believed there was racism in the light sentence given to Macdonald’s white and comparatively well-to-do daughter. Macdonald acknowledges the truth of this, having his detective say, “No one with strong financial backing is ever executed.”39 Reference is made to there being two towns: “the ambiguous darkness between two towns, two magics.”40 But the concerns of racism in a small and wealthy town are in an outer plot inadequately connected to the underaddressed inner plot of immaturity and personal forgiveness. The novel is sad but not strong, and Macdonald probably knew this, given that he decided to leave Archer out of The Ferguson Affair and use Bill Gunnarson instead, and only in this one novel. Nevertheless, its outward reach toward a community of men is the antecedent to two of the best, last Archer novels, The Underground Man (1971) and Sleeping Beauty (1973).
“[O]ne writes on a curve, on the backs of torn-off calendar sheets,” said Macdonald.
A writer in his fifties will not recapture the blaze of youth, or the steadier passion that comes like a second and saner youth in his forties, if he’s lucky. But he can lie in wait in his room—it must be at least the hundredth room by now—and keep open his imagination and the bowels of his compassion against the day when another book will haunt him like a ghost rising out of both the past and the future.41
Macdonald was right: he had ten more books in him after The Ferguson Affair. “He was like a ghost from the past, you know?” says Archer of a character in Sleeping Beauty. “A poor little roughed-up hammered-down ghost, . . . that shriveled little throw-away of a man without his clothes.”42 Macdonald’s life and work was haunted by his wife, his daughter, his grandson, and himself—all rendered as children in need of good parents—and their real and failed mothers and fathers who were unequal to the task.
Macdonald is able to link the collective unconscious to warnings about our aggregate future in The Underground Man. Two cuckolded spouses, for example, become real estate developers, recklessly over-building tract housing, thereby “raping” the landscape. Not only is Stanley Broadhurst neglecting his wife and son with his obsessed search for his father, but he also distractedly starts a southern California forest fire, and that too is a kind of murder. Archer hears the fire “breathing,” as if it were alive and even somehow human.
Sleeping Beauty focuses on beautiful and missing young Laurel Russo and her parents. “They were one of those couples who don’t pull together,”43 says Archer:
When there’s trouble in a family, it tends to show up in its weakest member. And the other members of the family know that. They make allowances for the one in trouble, try to protect her and so on, because they know they’re implicated themselves.44
Misplaced guilt has damaged the family’s members for generations, now injuring this sad daughter. “He seemed to feel responsible for her death,” Archer says of another character, “But he may not have done what he thought he did. Sometimes a man like Nelson feels terribly guilty simply because he’s been punished so much.”45 The same family is responsible for a gas spill in 1945 and an oil spill in the novel’s present. Remember Michael Kreyling’s contention that, in Macdonald’s novels, dysfunction in the intimate family pushes outward into the wider arenas of past and future, political and natural worlds. Macdonald considered environmental crimes to be moral ones, and his canon’s shift after 1956 from physical to moral engagement made possible twinning familial guilt with ecological culpability. It is an appropriate combination, ecology having to do with the connections of live organisms to one another.
Uncared-for children haunted Macdonald and consistently motivate Archer. Children are rare and unprivileged in Hammett’s canon. Hammett didn’t put his steady attendance to his children into his fictional families; he used his family-of-origin as a template instead. Jo admitted that “the loving family holding hands . . . had not been his experience. That attitude shows in his work, where families have rapacious mothers, wandering daughters, even fathers who kill their sons.”46 True enough, but the more glaring proof is that the combined number of mothers and fathers of little children in all his fiction is so low. One would need to go back to “Don Key” to find one.
Yet “a child who needs help now” was the circumstance that had precipitated Hammett’s marriage in 1921 and seemed to repeat itself during an anomalous few months in 1937. Hellman told Hammett she was pregnant and demanded that he divorce Jose after all those years and marry her. Hellman must have known that a baby was the one argument for marriage that would work with both Hammett and Jose. So he did it: he showed up at Jose’s house in Santa Monica with papers and, after hushed conversation, Jose signed them.47 They had a Mexican divorce with no standing in the United States, something Hammett knew and Jose found comfort in. Jose was the little girl who had been a surrendered child and was now a surrendered wife. Hammett—the man who had married a pregnant nurse—was now prepared to marry a pregnant playwright. Hellman subsequently and unilaterally decided to get an abortion. Marriage between Hammett and herself apparently never was mentioned again.48
His daughters drove much of the best of Hammett’s biography: the proof is in how much effortful time he spent with them, in his (posthumously published) letters to them and to Jose about them, and in his long attempt to live with Mary and find her help. After Jose and Hammett’s tacit separation in 1929, the man-about-town saw his children once or twice a week in San Francisco and later brought them to Hollywood and New York City for lengthy visits. Jo remembered baking lemon pies and bread with her dad, his making soap pictures on mirrors and little books of drawings and poetry for them, his taking Mary “to the fights at the old Olympic Gardens and [her] to the races at Santa Anita.”49 Hammett wrote Jo from the Aleutian Islands on her birthday: “So now you’re eighteen and I’m all out of child daughters. My family is cluttered up with grown women. There’s nobody who has to say, ‘Sir,’ to me and there are no more noses to wipe.”50 In 1948 Jo got engaged and wrote Hammett asking if he would give her away. He wrote right back, “Give you away? Why I’ll drop you like a hot potato!”51 When Jo had children, Hammett was a joyful grandpa, once taking a one-year-old granddaughter by himself across country by plane.
They wooed their father differently, these Hammett Electras. Hammett got his young daughters subscriptions to the New Yorker and New Masses; they would pore over “Talk of the Town” because it felt sophisticated in the same way their dad was, and Mary especially would come up with political questions that Hammett carefully answered. “Be in favor of what’s good for the workers and against what isn’t,”52 he told her. He would write to his elder daughter about politics for the rest of his life.
But, as they grew, Jo was still easy to love; Mary wasn’t, and Hammett loved her anyway. Hammett had told them that he “admired people who went too far”53; maybe Mary was aiming to do that. Jo remembered her big sister throwing their mother’s nursing mementos in the gutter and “slugging a nun at the Catholic school.”54
She grew into a beautiful girl—Lillian said that at sixteen she was one of the most beautiful she had ever seen—and the house was always full of boys. In the beginning they were neighborhood kids, but soon they became older and more scary. . . . Her drinking started early, and by fourteen she was a full-blown alcoholic. Later there were pills.55
Mary was nineteen when she and Jo went to New York again to stay with their father for a month. Mary boasted to Hammett about her sexual abandon. “I learned later,” Jo said,
that she had told him all about herself and men. I imagine she sort of bragged about it, thinking he’d understand, admire her daring and to-hell-with-bourgeoisie spirit. Of course, he didn’t. He was terribly hurt. What she never understood was that although he might have lived that kind of life himself, he never approved of it, even for himself, and certainly not for his daughter.56
“We carry invisible templates as ineluctably ourselves as fingerprints,” writes Doris Lessing, “but we don’t know about them until we look around us and see them mirrored.”57
At twenty-four Mary was worse. Jose did what she never did and asked Hammett to come and help. Hammett took Mary with him to New York and got her psychiatric help. She lived with her father intermittently for five years but didn’t get better. Then she came home to Jose permanently. After Mary married feckless Kenny Miller, she and he both lived with Jose. When I asked Jo’s daughter, Julie Marshall Rivett, why her grandmother didn’t make a new life for herself after Hammett, she said simply, “There was always Mary.” Rivett added, “I wonder what Mary would be diagnosed with today.”58 Mary died undiagnosed, obese and vengeful in a nursing home in 1992.