42
PARTISAN REVIEW
what a fine dive it had been. As a schoolboy his strong desire for
achievement was rewarded with academic success; for him as for many
writers, his mastery of words gave him a sense of power; the written
word, unlike the human being, can't hit hack. How interesting that in
a life so lonely and bare of lasting friendships, some of his most
enduring and rewarding ones were with pen-pals, a "safer" form of
communication, for the delay of reply provided a cushioning of
impact. His correspondence with Hamish Hamilton, which was a
source of great amusement and pleasure to them both, had lasted well
over a decade before they ever met.
His rigid use of his own idiosyncratic moral judgments as a stick
to beat others with was part of that same powerful self-punishing
super-ego, with which he strove for perfection of the life (perforce
secluded) and of the work, and from which struggle his on ly refuge was
the bottle.
It
made him feel anx ious and "threatened" if he realized that
there was opposition to his code, which was then energetically used to
destroy the reality of other people's, with accusations of "sham,"
"hypocrisy," "snobbery," or whatever. This persecution from within
was kept at bay by projection and denial of reality in fantasy, which
suggests that Chandler may have had to pay a very high price for the
novels we enjoy.
He felt sustained compassion for those whom he could regard as
"victims"
LO
be resuced; about more fortunate people with ordinary
problems and human failings he cou ld often be scathing and censori–
ous. He was genera ll y courteous and gentle
to
women, and liked to see
himself as their active protector, but what he really sought was their
protection in the helpless condition to which illness had so dismay–
ingly reduced him. When this need made him at times as demanding as
an anxiously bullying child, one wondered how much the idolized
saintly mother had given to
him
of the warmth and reassurance he had
needed in ch ildhood.
It
appeared that he had always tried, amidst
dangers, to win the approva l of his elders, and valiantly to protect her,
the first "victim" (or even perhaps martyr? One doesn't know). He used
to regret her never having remarried (as
she
put it, for
his
sake); he said
he had not regarded possibly acquiring a step-father as the hazardous
step she saw it to be. He lived with her until she died of cancer when he
was in his mid-thirties. Like D. H. Lawrence he had to contend with
her total disapproval during her terminal illness, and two weeks after
her death he married Cissy who was then still a beautiful woman, in
her mid-fIfties, much nearer to his mother's age than to his own. They
led a devoted and (for long stretches of time) secluded life until her
