Fireside Fiction

On days when terrible events fill the news, which on a global basis is every day, the mundane events in a quiet life seem trivial. Yet, they also make one grateful for the chance to be trivial.

One such unimportant event was the covering of the pool a few days ago, a moment that always makes me wistful. I’ve written before on the impracticality of swimming pools in this part of the country (see Closing Time). Affordability issues aside, were I to build a home from scratch I would not include one. (My current home was built decades ago by my parents for themselves, and they did want one.) The amount of trouble and labor outweighs the fun – and there is the cost. However, it is there, so I make the most of it. Since early-May I’ve started every morning, including many of less than 50 degrees (10 C), with a dive in the unheated water. (Yes, the pool has a heater but, except on rare occasion for company, I never use it; the heater wasn’t lit once in 2017.) The dive is an effective wake-me-up. By October, however, it’s courting hypothermia. So, the cover goes on and my personal autumn begins. I balanced the pool closing with a flue opening: the first use of the fireplace since April. There are worse ways to initiate a season than a quiet evening with a fire and a good book. The book was a classic mystery novel: The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, chosen for a title that seemed appropriate for an extended goodbye to summer.

All of us have an anarchist streak. In many of us it is subdued and in a few it is dominant: it’s the part of us that regards the law as something well-suited for the constraint our neighbors. We ourselves, on the other hand, chafe under the same constraints. Hence the popularity of antiheroes so long as they are not actually sadistic and have enough likable qualities for us to identify with them. We applaud Dirty Harry even though we oppose allowing police really to act like that. We admire the crew of the Firefly class ship Serenity even though they are insurrectionists and thieves. James Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance strives to bring the rule of law to a Western territory, yet he achieves this by extra-legal means and we’re OK with that. We like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, too. The point is not that these characters go out of their way to violate the rules, but rather that they live by their own. In practice, many folks willingly trade such independence of thought and action for security, but not without regrets. The Grateful Dead are not normally the first philosophers I reference, but they did lyricize poignantly about traveling one’s own way (besides, the tune is playing on my stereo): There is a road, no simple highway/Between the dawn and the dark of night/And if you go no one may follow/That path is for your steps alone.

The Long Goodbye was Chandler’s favorite novel. Few critics agree with him, but this is to be expected. Artists of any kind are always fondest of the creation that is most personal to them, which seldom is the one that appeals most to others. I side with Chandler on this one, but that too is for personal reasons. Published in 1953, fourteen years after The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye features a detective Philip Marlowe whom time has not mellowed. On the contrary, he is older, more jaded, more tired, and more cynical than ever before. He believes corrupt politics, corrupt police, and organized crime are the inescapable price of civilization, and he shrugs at this. He considers the law to coincide only infrequently with ethics, and he ignores it when it is inconvenient. Yet despite appearances Marlowe is not a misanthrope. Marlowe explains his seemingly inexplicable actions to a frenemy cop, “I’m a romantic, Bernie. I hear voices in the night and I go see what’s the matter.” It’s a telling statement for the character and for Chandler himself: while it may not be obvious on the surface, both character and author ultimately are romantics.

Basic premise of The Long Goodbye: Marlowe befriends a man named Terry Lennox and puts himself on the wrong side of the law by helping him. He then puts himself on the wrong side of the powers-that-be when Lennox seemingly is murdered and Marlowe investigates. He simultaneously is plied by a beautiful and complicated woman to help in a case involving her husband, the commercially successful but alcoholic hack writer of thrillers Roger Wade, an ironic caricature of Chandler himself. There are side plots as well, but in Chandler novels they always tie together in the end. We often are punished most for our good deeds, and that is the case here. Yet even though the people Marlowe tries most to help prove in the end not to have been worth it, he doesn’t regret having tried. It’s that romantic thing again.

There is of course a difference between living by one’s own standards and killing by them. While the fellow currently in the news might be no more than a nut (we don’t yet know), true believers and idealists are most often the most dangerous; they justify their mayhem as a means to a better world. Better to be cynical but romantic.

The Grateful Dead – Ripple