VARIETY
teriors in which Chandler special–
izes.
We have come a long way
from Holmes to here. The plot is
complex and we are still thrown
a few clues from time to time, but
suspense grows now out of a hu–
man rather than
a
literary situa–
tion; it is continuous rather than
cumulative, like life in a Camus
novel or in modern "crisis" the–
ology. Our hero is "no longer the
wizard, the mental giant, the lat–
ter-day Paracelsus: he is not even
the intellectual master of the situ–
ation. Where Holmes needed all the
glamor he could muster to make
Victorian respectability seem worth
an elaborate defense, Marlowe lives
by the light of his sentimental but
gwuine humanity: he's the fall–
guy,
der reine Narr,
Parsifal-Cas–
sandra whom nobody believes be–
cause he has no aces up his sleeve.
In another of his functions, that
of father-confessor, he departs
radically from the fiction detective
tradition. His goodness is obvious
enough to become a catalyst in a
corrupt society-the great strength
that is intended to compensate for
his lack of subtlety and the con–
ventional insouciance. Everyone
confesses his basic sickness as well
as his immediate troubles to Mar–
lowe. In the current Chandler
film,
Lady in the Lake,
for ex–
ample, the weak capitalist, in
Marlowe's healing presence, is
strong enough to throw over his
vicious secretary and confess his
loneliness; the crooked cop can't
look at Marlowe without a self–
revealing
yen
to "work
him
over" ;
the old people confess their ut-
329
ter exhaustion and fear; the slick
playboy knocks Marlowe cold for
telling
the
truth,
but is soon re–
compensed by being shot full of
holes in his shower by a former
sin; and finally, we have the vicious
secretary herself, still "the superb,
capable American Girl whom we
have come to know so well from
Communitas
By PERCIVAL
and
PAUL GOODMAN
These distinguished brothers, an architect and
a poet, explore community planning, relating
the
way
man works and lives to his hopes and
desires.
A
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knowledge and profound reasoning in whimsy
and Swiftian satire.
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A GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING
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ULYSSES
8y RICHARD
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