NATASHA SPENDER
43
death in her eighties, after a long illness. They were of course childless.
We knew from people who had met them a few years earlier that they
both had seemed nervous and lost on their first visit to London, she very
ailing, he very protective towards her. Though knowing his social
nerves one wonders if even then his refusal to dine out without her was
not partly for the maternal moral support he still both needed and
found in her company. His own reminiscences of her were adoring,
irresistibly lyrical and full of delight at Cissy's exploits which showed
her spirit and charm-she managed on one occasion to drive the car
right over an irate policeman's foot, not once, but again in reverse, yet
even then beguiling him into such instant and helpless admiration as
to allow her to escape unbooked .
He would recall the rugged struggle for existence of their early
marriage. There followed a swift rise
to
power and riches in the oil
business attributed to his own "toughness" (a favorite epithet of
approbation possibly arising out of childhood-"identification with
the aggressor" -since he had in fact been a sensitive and not very
strong child, always the introverted intellectual, never the fantasized
extroverted Marlowe type). He recalled the privations Cissy loyally
shared during his late ten-year apprenticeship as a mystery writer, and
again the uncompromising "toughness" with which he out-smarted
the villains and fought his way to success through the corruption and
shifting sands of Hollywood, where he had made the fortune of which
he was now so openly proud, and which in his present euphoric phases
he seemed to be generously jettisoning just as, in his despair, h e was
jettisoning his life.
What we didn't know until somewhat later was that both his oil
business and his Hollywood careers had ended in debacles of alcohol–
ism, though he always presented different explanations, denying
to
himself the true reason for his failures , his inability to cope with
colleagues, and the contrast between their invigorating uninhibited
social life and the isolation of his marriage, retreat into which provided
a therapeutic setting for recovery from these disasters. A healing
maternal presence in the home left him free to pursue the interior
monologue of fantasy which went into his writing, and even through
the agony and apprehension of Cissy's last illness it provided an escape
from intense strain.
He wrote
The Long Goodbye
as Cissy lay dying, and we who tried
to see him through the subsequent "long nightmare" recognize in the
book three distinct self-portraits.
It
may well reflect the interior
dialogues between facets of his own personality as he looked back upon
