44
PARTISAN REVIEW
their long life together, which he was soon to lose. His letters and
London conversations so strikingly resembled the dialogue of all three
characters in turn, that one feels his endeavor to impose fictional roles
upon us also was part of this urgent involuntary bid for his American
continuity, amid the bewildering though enjoyable impact of an alien
English style. Troubled memories of gruelling tests of nerve in the
1914-18 war were frequently followed by patriotic approval of the
immense current military strength of America.
Like Terry Lomax, Raymond was a young ex-soldier in the early
twenties, battle-scarred and scared, whose pride was that "of a man who
has nothing else." Lomax, when castigated by Philip Marlowe for
being a moral defeatist, says that his life is all "an act." Raymond often
acknowledged his own tendency to fantasize and play-act, and once
wrote to me in apology for having distorted the truth: " I have such an
endless sense of the dramatic that 1 never seem to play any part quite
straight. My wife always said 1 should have been an actor. " To an
American friend, referring to his two London visits which, possibly out
of pride, he had presented as romantically spectacular when in truth
they had been consumed in mourning, he wrote "All the rest had been
p lay-acting. "
Like that of Roger Wade, the successful, middle-aged, alcoholic
and egocentric writer, Raymond's drunken stream of consciousness
cou ld also at bad moments be full of self-hatred, writer's angst and
sarcastic hostility. Wade says: "I have a lovely wife who loves me, and a
lovely publisher who loves me, and 1 love me best of all." Wade 's wife
echoes Cissy in saying "He was a good actor-most writers are." Like
Raymond himself, Wade is chi ldl ess and says:
"If
I had a ten-year-old
kid, which . God forbid, the brat would be asking me 'What are you
running away from when you drink, Daddy?'"
Again in apology Raymond wrote to me of himself: " It's as if 1 had
two natures, one good, one bad.... A man who 's been an alcoholic
and has lived all his life in the shadow of an alcoholic father (even if he
never saw him) so much so that he was glad he could not have
children-they might be tainted-can never rid himself of the contempt
for his failings which that ensures, and that sometimes, however
wrongly, he transfers to others who do not in any way deserve it. "
Marlowe, of course, represents Chandler's ideal self, the conscience
which punished the Roger Wade within him though not without
commendation for achievement (for Wade in the book is "a bit of a
bastard and maybe a bit of a genius too"), and befriended the Terry
Lomax, not without censure. Marlowe describes this friendship by
