BY: JERRY P

The Long Embrace is a book by a Los Angeles novelist, Judith Freeman, who had been haunted by the relationship between Raymond Chandler and his wife Cissy for a number of years. She finally decided to write a book about their marriage.

Her modus operandi for the book was rather unusual: Chandler and his wife were nomadic, and over the course of their relationship they moved often and over a period of 30 years lived in 35 different places. Freeman decided to visit every location to check them out and to see if she could get a handle on this eccentric couple. They were all in the Los Angeles area, stretching from Santa Barbara on the north to Huntington Beach on the south, Palm Springs on the east to Pacific Palisades to the west, and everything in between, including Hollywood and La Jolla, the only place where they bought a house. All the rest were rentals and furnished apartments.

Why the Chandlers moved so often is unknown. They must have traveled light with few possessions. Freeman found several places no longer existed but many were still there, not looking much different than how they looked 50 or 60 years ago. One place they lived in decades ago still had the name Chandler on the apartment’s mailbox. At each site she did two things: She got a feel for the neighborhood and that might include going inside the house, if that was possible, and then she’d consider how it fit into Chandler’s chronology, psychology, and creativity. She ended up with a linkage between them and how the daisy chain of places developed an all-embracing overview of L.A. through time, and in particular, how Chandler saw the city and how he came to express an attitude about it, which conditioned his fictional picture of L.A. The city is part and parcel of his hard-boiled fiction, carrying the stamp and identity of the area, for good and ill, mostly ill.

When Ray and Cissy were married in 1925, L.A. was already a sprawling metropolis - a lot of separate parts with non-urban patches in between. People from somewhere else largely populated the various parts and many lonely souls came for the casual style of living and the sunshine. They weren’t necessarily interested in making friends. Ray and Cissy were like that; indeed, they were insular and reclusive, especially as Cissy aged and began to lose her health due to a case of creeping fibrosis of the lungs. Their lifestyle was one of the reasons we know so little about Cissy, and as a result so much that has been written about her ends up being speculation and guesswork. The letters that she wrote Ray might have helped, but for some reason he destroyed them after she died.

Their marriage was troubled at first. Ray found out she had lied about her age. She told him she was 43 when they were married, which was eight years older then he was, but she was actually 53. He started drinking and had several affairs with younger women when he was in the oil business, which lasted ten years. He didn’t start writing his hard-boiled stories until he was 45 and didn’t publish his first novel, The Big Sleep, until he was 50 years old. He was a late bloomer, but his endurance has been very good, as he and Dashiell Hammet are still considered the two best mystery writers of the early period.

Freeman speculates that Ray was so hard on women in his novels - in six out of seven a woman is the killer - because at bottom he feared them and held them in awe, which is, I think, fairly typical of men who have a Madonna/whore complex, and Ray certainly falls within that class of males. Fear is the flip side of misogyny. He grew up in a household of women. His father, an American Civil engineer, took off when he was a little tyke, and his mother took him to live in England where he lived with her, his grandmother and an aunt. In short, he had no role model as a male while growing up, just old ladies in flowery print dresses trimmed in lace. That’s a pretty heavy dose of female dominance.

Cissy fit right in with that past image. He didn’t marry her until his mother died - out of respect, he said - and one of his pet names for his bride was “Momma.” She was an interesting combination for him: a mother figure and a “highly sexed” female, the best of all possible worlds. This image of the dignified old ladies could be turned inside out to get the females that emerged in his stories and novels, a reverse image, young tarts, cheap women who dressed as floozies, who drank, smoked, got high, and who had loose morals, ladies of the night who preferred nightclubs and hunky gangsters to staying home and reading novels by Jane Austen or Anthony Trollope.

John Houseman, who was a friend of Ray’s when he worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood, wrote the following about he and Cissy: “In Hollywood, where the selection of wives was frequently confused with the casting of a motion picture, Cissy was an anomaly and a phenomenon. Ray’s life had been hard; he looked ten years older than his age. His wife looked 20 years older than he did and dressed 30 years younger.” Ray was described as an “all-beige person” in tweeds and flannel, and Cissy as “Shirley Temple in curls and frills” and as “a real snob living in her hermetically sealed life.”

The other side of Ray’s rather schizoid attitude about women was, Freeman argues, as others have, an unconscious homoerotic tendency. His heroic PI, Phillip Marlowe, Ray’s alter ego, was always much more taken with male characters while rebuffing the wiles and seductiveness of almost all the females. Freeman laid out several incidents with men in the novels that betrayed something more than admiration and friendship. Women were to be rescued, but males were really exciting, even some of the bad guys. The same sort of thing has been said about D.H. Lawrence and Herman Melville. It’s interesting speculation, but I can take it or leave it. In Ray’s day being latent was being sound asleep. I suspect all of us are made of male and female components. Carl Jung had argued that for many tears.