Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry 3030883701, 9783030883706

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Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry

Anthony Dean Rizzuto

Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry

Anthony Dean Rizzuto

Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry

Anthony Dean Rizzuto Sonoma State University Rohnert Park, CA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-88370-6    ISBN 978-3-030-88371-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88371-3 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is for Hassey, and for Harper, and for Aviva Marlowe Rose: the best flower that grows.

A little investigation will teach us not to regret these monstrous mummeries of the middle ages. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Addition to the Preface to Cantos I-II (1813) Laces and ruffles, swords and coaches, elegance and leisure, duels and gallant death. All lies. They used perfume instead of soap, their teeth rotted because they never cleaned them, their fingernails smelled of stale gravy. The nobility of France urinated against the walls in the marble corridors of Versailles, and when you finally got several sets of underclothes off the lovely marquise the first thing you noticed was that she needed a bath. I ought to write it that way. Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953)

Acknowledgments

So many thanks to my sharp-eyed not -tongued colleagues and friends who read the manuscript: Owen Hill and Noah Ross (twice!), Rebecca Hyman, and Elliott Smith (on a dime). Reverberating thanks to Allie Troyanos at Palgrave Macmillan, and to the two anonymous reviewers who provided invaluable feedback. And most of all thank you to Hassey Gascar Rizzuto, the most generous and acute of editors.

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Contents

1 Introduction: The Elusive Game 1 Sir Philip Marlowe  4 References  7 2 A Sense of the Past: A Brisk Overview of Chivalry and Romance11 The Medieval Imaginary 1: Actually Existing Chivalry 13 The Medieval Imaginary 2: Actually Existing Romance 18 The Imaginary Middle Ages 21 References 32 3 The Long Goodbye: World War I, Romantic Nostalgia, and Chivalry’s Endless Death41 Anything but Romantic 42 The Dream Continues 45 Isn’t It Pretty to Think So? 49 References 52 4 Games with Knights: Philip Marlowe, Hardboiled Masculinity, and the Ungentle Negation of Romance57 The Big Morte 60 The Ill-Made Knight 1: Sex and Violence 61

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The Ill-Made Knight 2: Class and Race 72 Love and Dialectics 77 References 82 5 Conclusion: The Mean Streets of the Dialectic89 References 95 Index97

About the Author

Anthony Dean Rizzuto  teaches English at Sonoma State University. He has a PhD in English from the University of Virginia, and degrees in History and Literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz.Rizzuto spearheaded The Annotated Big Sleep, a critical edition that places Chandler’s first novel in its original historical, cultural, and literary contexts. He is working on an essay about the romantic derivation and present functioning of the idea of “race,” and on a personal essay reflecting on his own Jewish identity.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Elusive Game

Abstract  This chapter establishes the argument that the cultural reproduction of Chandler’s iconic protagonist Philip Marlowe as a chivalric knight misunderstands knighthood, chivalry, and Marlowe. The chapter outlines the book, and kicks off the investigation by surveying some key moments in the reception and reproduction of Chandler’s celebrated hero. Keywords  Raymond Chandler—reception • Philip Marlowe • Knights and chivalry • Romantic ideology • Popular culture Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights. —Marlowe/Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939)

This book elaborates a line of thinking that I began as part of my work on The Annotated Big Sleep (Chandler 2018).1 It sprouted in the notes to that work, tracing the complexity of what exactly is going on with all of that allusion to the romance genre and specifically with the trope of the knight in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. When I presented my drafts of 1  References to The Big Sleep (originally published in 1939) will be to this edition of the novel.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. D. Rizzuto, Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88371-3_1

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those notes, my co-annotators politely suggested that my running commentary might do better in a critical introduction. When I was done drafting that essay, my co-annotators politely suggested that it might do better in a work of its own. The concern was that it was too academic, too theoretical, and altogether too much thinking about these questions of genre and cultural politics for our general audience. So I fit (in the Procrustean sense) its basic argument into a paragraph of the introduction and sprinkled the rest throughout in various notes to the novel.2 My argument responds to an existing interpretation. We regularly hear that The Big Sleep (hereafter TBS) offers a version of a “romance,” and yet more frequently that its leading character, Philip Marlowe, represents a version of a knight errant, or medieval wandering knight. This is the going interpretation, and it’s everywhere: I’ll provide numerous examples shortly, but if you know TBS, you’re familiar with this way of speaking about it. My thesis is that Philip Marlowe is no knight, nor was meant to be. But it’s an easy mistake to make. Countless intelligent readers think that Chandler’s protagonist represents an archetypal knight because something very complicated is going on with the genres of hardboiled and romance: an intergeneric dialogue unfolds wherein each play off of and give meaning to the other. The result does not make TBS the romance à clef it’s often taken to be, but neither is it simply a work of straightforward hardboiled fiction. It is something more interesting altogether. I would like to explore this interplay in order to bring out what is going on in this novel. My argument requires a genealogy of knighthood, chivalry, and romance, for two crucial reasons. First, my response to the prevailing interpretation requires a deeper understanding of those central, symbiotic concepts than is habitually displayed. In discussions of Chandler across the critical spectrum, from the popular through the literary to the scholarly, “knights” and “chivalry” and “romance” are often invoked, seldom defined, and virtually never examined in detail. Critics deploy them as ready-made, self-­evident terms, and therein lies the rub. In fact, they are false familiars: deceptively tidy abstractions of protean and polyvalent phenomena that change over the course of their longue durée. They require not just definition, but some care and consideration in their use. But what 2  Although I will occasionally refer to the annotations in The Annotated Big Sleep here, this book represents an exponential expansion and fundamental reworking of that already-­ published work.

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gives them that air of false familiarity in the first place? Why do those terms function so incantationally, luring us into cozy misrecognition? The answer leads me to my second reason for beginning with cultural genealogy: those terms are often used uncritically not because of any failing endemic to Chandler readers and commentators, but because such totemic usage already carries the day in our culture at large. The terms comprise an ideological cluster that glows with cultural benediction, and the glare of that genial glow blinds us to certain troublesome ideas and assumptions, values and biases, embedded therein. Thus, an effort to historicize what Jerome J. McGann (1983) has powerfully called our own “romantic ideology” is necessary in order to enable a critical distance from the entrenched but invisible framework within which our interpretations are typically generated. Accordingly, the next two chapters of this book present a cultural history of knighthood, chivalry, and romance that might seem to take us far afield of TBS, but which in fact leads directly into the literary mindscape that houses Chandler’s novels and the discourses swirling around those novels as well. Our investigation will lead us into a veritable dragon’s lair of typologies born in the fires of class, gender, race, and sexuality, which all too frequently remain tacit when discussing knights and chivalry. The knight is a hallowed figure in our cultural imaginary: he’s been archetypalized and thereby ensconced within an apparatus of values which, like the armor that encases him, masks what lies within and wards off interrogation. We must look closely in order to see the tendentious ideological links in the seemingly seamless chain mail.3 Thus, Chap. 2 explores the medieval derivation and modern reproduction of the core concepts of knighthood, chivalry, and romance. Chapter 3 looks at how the attendant constellation of images, tropes, and values fares in the first half of the twentieth century in response to the globe-shattering assault of World War I and its modernist offspring. (The outcome might surprise you.) Only after taking this investigative journey, with this transatlantic panorama in place, can we rejoin TBS in Chap. 4 to consider what precisely is going on in that novel, and in the Marlowe Cycle generally. We will find, as Chandler alerts us in 3  Throughout this book I will use the terms “ideology” and “ideological” to describe the ways that lived reality is thought, and that such thinking in turn (re)creates lived reality. Thus, to quote Annales historian Michel Vovelle (1990, following Louis Althusser 1971), ideology is “a collection of representations, but also a collection of practices and forms of behavior” (2). Depending on the context I will use other terms—such as “literary mindscape”—which work locally but which risk losing the material, environmental dimension of “ideology.”

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the passage quoted in the epigraph to this Introduction, a game; and we will see whether knights do have meaning in this game—or better, since invoking them already means something, what kinds of meanings they have, and the tricksy ways that they signify what they do. (Here again we will find a twist on the accepted pattern.) Chapter 5 will sum it all up and offer some thoughts about why Chandler plays his elaborate and intricate game—what it may have meant for him, and what it means for the rest of us.

Sir Philip Marlowe Let’s start with the prevailing interpretation: Philip Marlowe is a modern-­ day knight. No year passes without this interpretation being collectively restated. It begins not with Chandler, but in Chandler: in his third novel, The High Window (originally published in 1942), the sardonic Dr. Carl Moss calls Marlowe “[t]he shop-soiled Galahad” (Chandler 1992, 209). In that moment, Marlowe is caring for an emotionally shattered woman. Note that this comment doesn’t come from Chandler himself, on one of the many occasions when the author discusses his protagonist in his correspondence and essays, but from a minor character making a wry quip. This is a key difference, but evidently there’s enough supporting evidence for Dr. Moss’s characterization to boost it out of Chandler’s fiction into literary criticism, and thence to the common understanding. Leading the charge was Philip Durham’s 1963 study, Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go: Raymond Chandler’s Knight. For Durham, Marlowe was a “chivalric hero” “crusading through the streets of Los Angeles and the surrounding towns looking for ladies to rescue” and performing other knightly activities like dispensing justice and helping the little guy (Durham 1963, 147, 32). Chandler heir Ross Macdonald seconded Marlowe’s “knight-errantry” in his 1965 essay “The Writer as Detective Hero.” A decade later, in his groundbreaking typological study of American popular genres, John G.  Cawelti found a resemblance of Chandler’s leading man to “the chivalrous knights of Sir Walter Scott” (1977, 151); shortly after, Geoffrey O’Brien followed suit in his fun survey of pulp paperbacks Hardboiled America, calling Marlowe “unmistakably chivalrous, a quixotic figure” (1981, 77). By now it’s become axiomatic, a shibboleth among Chandlerians and those in the know, to drop some version of a “tarnished” or “modern

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knight” when discussing Marlowe.4 While I was writing this book, Seattle journalist and crime fiction blogger J. Kingston Pierce published an online article calling Marlowe “not so much a hard-boiled character as a romantic figure surviving in a hard-boiled world” and, tweaking Dr. Moss, a “gumshoe-­Galahad” (2018). Meanwhile, Colette Bancroft, book editor at the Tampa Bay Times, calls Marlowe “a romantic, a modern knight errant” (2018). Importantly, the author of the latest authorized Marlowe novel, Lawrence Osborne, calls his protagonist “a thinly disguised version of the hero knight” (2018). In fact, Osborne is following in the tracks of Chandler’s first authorized epigone, Robert B. Parker. Parker’s continuation of Chandler’s unfinished Poodle Springs (published in 1990) incongruously has Marlowe call himself a “moonlight knight” (176) and a “Galahad of the gutter” (209). It’s an intriguing pattern, from minor Chandler character through literary criticism and the popular gestalt, into the reincarnated Marlowe himself and the current revivifier of the now-­ iconic character. Thus we come full circle, and the wheel continues to roll. The scholarly commentary in this line has grown prodigiously since Durham and Cawelti. Let me attempt a brief run through the voluminous critical commentary. Subsequent academic writers agree that Marlowe incarnates a knight from chivalric romance, though this argument now receives more qualification than it did earlier, and than it currently does from popular writers. For example, where Ross Macdonald had seen Chandler taking a full backward step into the terrain of “sentimental romance” (1965), Jerry Speir and Ernest Fontana following him see TBS staging a “failure of romance” (Speir 1981, 30) within which Marlowe soldiers on anachronistically as a “detective-knight” on a “chivalric quest” (Fontana 1984, 180). On the other hand, Paul Skenazy agrees with Macdonald, finding in Chandler a “contemporary version of the medieval romance tradition” (1982, 32). John Scaggs joins Fontana in seeing Marlowe as an adherent to pre-capitalist chivalry in conflict with modern consumer culture, “a questing knight of romance transplanted into the mean streets of mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles” (2005, 62; see also Scaggs 2015). Charles Rzepka likewise sees Marlowe as a “‘true’ knight”— even, like Galahad, a “‘son’ of Lancelot”—deploring the “debasement of 4  For a “knight of sorts—tarnished, to be sure, a knight errant,” see novelist Ian Rankin’s introduction to the British Penguin reprint of TBS (2008, xi). For a “modern knight par excellence,” see Baker and Nietzel (1985, 46). For an “up-to-date knight errant,” see Knight, who could already say in 1980 that this was “noted by many critics” (137).

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chivalric convention” and on a “quest … to find a liege lord worthy of his fealty” (2000, 704, 707; 2005, 209, 210). Rzepka calls attention to a fascinating dissertation in which Sharon Devaney-Lovinguth challenges the overwhelming critical consensus that Chandler is a nostalgic proponent of the conventional chivalric ideal, but instead sees Marlowe as a “modern knight” who refashions “knightliness” itself (qtd. in Rzepka 2000, 696; 2005, 204). In their varied analyses of chivalry in Chandler, these scholars add crucial considerations of gender, sexuality, and consumer culture—though seldom specifically of class itself, and this is a key oversight.5 At the end of the day, these and countless other critics fundamentally agree with Dr. Carl Moss that Marlowe represents some form of a knight, and further, that Chandler’s fiction venerates chivalry and deplores its social supersession.6 I’d like to offer a new way of pulling that sword from its stone. One might have expected that the most recent developments in academic criticism, offering more rigorously theorized and sociologically embedded maps of class, race, gender, and sexuality—not to mention more historicized genre considerations—would have offered a critique of the venerable Marlowe-as-knight meme, profoundly imbricated as it is with all of those critical concerns. Not so. The major twenty-first century works on Chandler that embrace these pressing social approaches either absorb the knight-chivalry-romance complex or don’t mention it at all. I count but three in the latter group: indispensable works by Fredric Jameson, Erin A.  Smith (2000), and Sean McCann (2000). Actually, Jameson’s Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality (2016) comprises three essays that date back to 1970, so we can credit him with opening the lines of materialist-theoretical inquiry on the mystery writer and his form. Jameson, Smith, and McCann decline to take up the gauntlet thrown down by the discursive figure of the knight. And there it lies, glinting incongruously in the

5  Rzepka and Knight are notable exceptions. Knight is great on Marlowe’s liminal class identity (1980, 161). 6  Skenazy (1982, 37) and Kevin O’Reilly (1981, 39) mistakenly attribute the “shop-­ soiled” quote to Marlowe himself, symptomatic slips that misleadingly authorize the appraisal. O’Reilly is one of the few who, like Devaney-Lovinguth and Trott (2016), complicates the knight thesis, although in my view not enough. Trott receives further consideration in note 1 in Chap. 3, below.

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realist, hardboiled environs that those critics describe so skillfully.7 At the other extreme, the equally brilliant critic Gill Plain sustains some damage in her encounter with the knight, allowing the stock idea of Chandler’s “chivalric conception of romance” (2001, 61) to poke a hole in her otherwise invaluable Sedgwickian-Butlerian analysis of homoeroticism chez Chandler. Megan E. Abbott jostles up against the “anachronistic knight” trope in her magisterial The Street Was Mine (2002, 6; cf. 48, 62, 146), while Leonard Cassuto nods briefly toward “a chivalric past” (2008, 85) and “hard-boiled knight-errantry” (2008, 12; cf. 82) in his perceptive Hard-Boiled Sentimentality. The latter two bow to these now-­axiomatic formulations more or less in passing, parrying further analysis; their considerable strengths lie elsewhere.8 It is time for a direct engagement with that knight and his host culture: chivalry and romance to start; later, the cognate congeries of chastity, honor, errantry, and ultimately, “Chandler’s own romantic ideology,” as Jameson puts it. Let us disturb “the tranquility of axioms,” in Rodney Needham’s apt phrase (1983). For I believe that we assume too much when we blithely toss these words around—“knight,” “chivalry,” “romance.” I think that if we start by investigating the terms we’re using, rather than taking them as given and starting with Chandler, we’ll end up in a radically different place. And I believe that if we don’t investigate this romantic ideological cluster directly, we allow it to play games with us.

References Abbott, Megan E. 2002. The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Althusser, Louis. 1971. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation). In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, 127–186. New York: Monthly Review Press.

7  In fact, Jameson comments on not picking up the gauntlet at the beginning of the second essay in Raymond Chandler, identifying an established hermeneutic cluster that includes the notion of honor, the stained-glass art at the beginning of TBS, and “Chandler’s own romantic ideology,” and brusquely consigning it to the dust-bin of “interpretation as such” (2016, 31). We will need to dust that cluster off and reappraise it: it wasn’t what we thought it was. 8  Let me make clear that I have benefitted enormously from the works referenced in this paragraph, and consider them kin to this study in terms of our shared literary-sociological problematic.

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Baker, Robert A., and Robert T. Nietzel. 1985. Private Eyes: One Hundred and One Knights: A Survey of American Detective Fiction 1922–1984. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Bancroft, Colette. 2018. Despite His Thorny Place in Culture, Raymond Chandler Remains a Great Love. Tampa Bay Times, 2 August 2018. tampabay.com/ features/books/Bancroft-­D espite-­h is-­t horny-­p lace-­i n-­c ulture-­R aymond-­ Chandler-­remains-­a-­great-­love_170359256/. Cassuto, Leonard. 2008. Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories. New York: Columbia University Press. Cawelti, John G. 1977. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chandler, Raymond. 1992. The High Window. New York: Vintage. ———. 2018. The Annotated Big Sleep. Edited and annotated by Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Dean Rizzuto. New York: Vintage. Chandler, Raymond, and Robert B. Parker. 1990. Poodle Springs. New York: Berkley. Durham, Philip. 1963. Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go: Raymond Chandler’s Knight. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Fontana, Ernest. 1984. Chivalry and Modernity in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Western American Literature 19 (3): 179–186. Jameson, Fredric. 2016. Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality. New York: Verso. Knight, Stephen. 1980 ‘A Hard-Boiled Gentleman’—Raymond Chandler’s Hero. In Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction, 135–67. New York: Macmillan. Macdonald, Ross. 1965. The Writer as Detective Hero. In The Stacks Reader, ed. Alex Belth. thestacksreader.com/the-­writer-­as-­detective-­hero/. McCann, Sean. 2000. Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McGann, Jerome J. 1983. The Romantic Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Needham, Rodney. 1983. Against the Tranquility of Axioms. Berkeley: University of California Press. O’Brien, Geoffrey. 1981. Hardboiled America: The Lurid Years of Paperbacks. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. O’Reilly, Kevin. 1981. The Shop-Soiled Galahad: Raymond Chandler’s Knight. AJAS 1 (2): 39–52. Osborne, Lawrence. 2018. Impersonating Philip Marlowe. New York Times, 20 September 2018. nytimes.com/2018/09/20/books/review/lawrence-­ osborne-­only-­to-­sleep.html. Pierce, J. Kingston. 2018. The Many Faces of Philip Marlowe. CrimeReads, 26 July 2018. crimereads.com/the-­many-­faces-­of-­philip-­marlowe/.

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Plain, Gill. 2001. When Violet Eyes are Smiling: The Love Stories of Raymond Chandler. In Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body, ed. Twentieth-Century Crime, 56–84. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rankin, Ian. 2008. Ian Rankin on The Big Sleep. In The Big Sleep, ed. Raymond Chandler, x–xii. London: Penguin. Rzepka, Charles J. 2000. ‘I’m in the Business Too: Gothic Chivalry, Private Eyes, and Proxy Sex and Violence in Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Modern Fiction Studies. 46 (3): 695–724. ———. 2005. No Game for Knights. In Detective Fiction, 201–217. Cambridge: Polity. Scaggs, John. 2005. Crime Fiction. New York: Routledge. ———. 2015. Romance Narratives, Blackmail, and the Price of Knowledge in the Novels of Raymond Chandler. In New Perspectives on Detective Fiction: Mystery Magnified, ed. Casey Cothran and Mercy Cannon, 173–186. New  York: Routledge. Skenazy, Paul. 1982. The New Wild West: The Urban Mysteries of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Boise, ID: Boise State University Press. Smith, Erin A. 2000. Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Speir, Jerry. 1981. Raymond Chandler. New York: Ungar. Trott, Sarah. 2016. War Noir: Raymond Chandler and the Hard-Boiled Detective as Veteran in American Fiction. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Vovelle, Michel. 1990. Ideologies and Mentalities. Trans. Eamon O’Flaherty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 2

A Sense of the Past: A Brisk Overview of Chivalry and Romance

Abstract  This chapter starts by defining the terms by which the iconic character Philip Marlowe is considered chivalrous and knightly. As a corrective, it then considers the reality of medieval knights and the functioning of actual medieval chivalry. Next it considers the representation of knights and chivalry in medieval romances, and then in the medieval revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It establishes these as successive iterations (different, but sharing terminology) of our core concepts. It shows that idealizations of knighthood and chivalry are rooted in idealized but violent masculinity and whiteness; and it reminds us that the medieval origin of these concepts and social positions emerge from a constitutive class exclusivity as well. Keywords  Knights, chivalry, and romance—class analysis • Cultural politics of whiteness, masculinity, and gender • Medieval romance and medievalism • Transatlanticism • Romanticism • Toxic masculinity I like a conservative atmosphere, a sense of the past, I like everything that Americans of past generations used to go to look for in Europe. —Chandler, 1939 letter

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. D. Rizzuto, Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88371-3_2

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In Chapter 1, we established the pervasiveness of the view that Philip Marlowe represents a knight out of romance. Let’s begin this chapter by considering what everybody means when they dub Marlowe a knight. Generally speaking, they mean that Marlowe is brave, strong, and good. He faces adversaries who are clearly value-coded bad and are often more powerful than him. He does not back down; after overcoming many challenges, he prevails. So far there isn’t much difference between Marlowe and any other P.I., and this way of saying so makes it strikingly obvious that the mystery genre itself grows out of the romance tradition: an episodic structure focused on action; a strong central hero set in motion against morally odious opponents; a mystery that impels a quest.1 So what makes Marlowe different from Sam Spade, or the Continental Op, or Carroll John Daly’s hardboiled Übermensch Race Williams, or Sherlock Holmes for that matter, that he gets singled out for the knight comparison? Well, Marlowe is also considered gallant. He has accrued a reputation of chastity: in The Big Sleep, each Sternwood sister throws herself at him and is rebuffed in turn; in the meantime he has protected the vulnerable and naked Carmen. (It’s a sad commentary that protecting a defenseless young woman should be considered particularly “gentlemanly” rather than simply expected decent behavior, but there it is.) On top of that, he’s unfailingly loyal to his clients. And throughout the Marlowe novels, our hero is distinctly ethical: he consistently turns down the spoils of his office, refusing the “graft” or additional private gain he could easily accrue if he sacrificed his personal integrity like everyone around him seems to be doing. It’s as if he has a personal code that provides clear boundaries of behavior. Seems mighty knighty! Reinforcing this interpretation is the knightly symbolism scattered throughout The Big Sleep. Knights appear in stained glass and on a chess board. It’s as if the text is nudging us, as The High Window’s Dr. Carl Moss seems to when he calls Marlowe a “shop-soiled Galahad,” to consider the knight (Chandler 1992, 209). Where most commentators have assumed that the text is symbolically telling us that Marlowe is a knight, I 1  For considerations of overlapping formulaic features, see Cawelti 1977 (esp. chs. 1 and 2), following the typology established by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Cawelti considers modern romance novels rather than chivalric romance, but there are interesting overlaps at 37, 42, and 161. Frye insightfully considers the mystery in line with chivalric romance in The Secular Scripture (1976, 40, 44–5, and 60). Skenazy builds on both critics, considering how “The tough-guy writers presented the traditions of romance in new dress” (1982, 9). The established literary-historical link between the chivalric romance and mystery genres is the Western: see Skenazy; Slotkin 1973, esp. ch. 6; and Klein 1994.

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believe that something more complicated is going on—something trickier, more kinetic. I’ll provide a dissenting interpretation of these knightly cameos in Chapter 4. But before I do, I want to look closer at the terminology that is being deployed, and the ideologies embedded in that terminology’s history.

The Medieval Imaginary 1: Actually Existing Chivalry Let’s start by establishing some basic definitions. As everybody knows, the idea of the knight that Marlowe is supposed to represent derives its character from the attendant notion of chivalry. Chivalry, like knighthood itself, is a complex and vast subject, both social and literary, which changes over time and across territories. But some general attributes apply. We’ll need a working definition rooted in a basic understanding in order to proceed.2 The term derives from the Old French chevalerie, “horse-soldiery” (OED), and the mounted warriors themselves (singular chevalier). Eventually, “chivalry” describes and invokes a code of conduct or a set of ideals, but it’s also a social role, one that is synonymous with elevated class status.3 Sir Thomas Malory alerts us to the earlier sense in his Morte Darthur (1485), when the newly-minted King Arthur is told that to 2  The subject sustains book-length considerations, exploring the varieties of knighthood and chivalry across historical periods and geographical regions: I have particularly benefitted from Maurice Keen’s exhaustive Chivalry (1984), Richard Barber’s eminently readable The Knight and Chivalry (2000), and Richard W. Kaeuper’s magnificent Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (1999). I shall quote other sources as I go. For an impressively concise overview of the nuances of the knight’s changing social status across five hundred years, see Constance Brittain Bouchard, chief consultant, Knights in History and Legend (2009, 14–17). 3  Knights are noble by the twelfth century (Kaeuper 1999, 189–90; Keen 1984, 4, 27–9, 143; Barber 2000, 3–46, esp. 27 and 37; Bouchard 2009, 15–16). Of course, “noble” describes varying degrees of wealth and status; particularly good on this is Bouchard’s Strong of Body, Brave and Noble: Chivalry and Society in Medieval France (1998). A lively discussion of the disagreement among historians about the class of knights can be found in John Gillingham’s essay “Thegns and Knights in Eleventh-Century England: Who Was Then the Gentleman?” (2003, esp. 168–172). Gillingham concludes that English knights are gentry even in the eleventh century, if not before. To put aside distracting hair-splitting about the categories of nobility, aristocracy, and gentry, and to generalize in a fair and useful way: knights occupied privileged social status relative to the mass of society. This was in fact true even of the warriors in pre-Latinized Germanic tribes.

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defend his claim to the throne he must have “more chivalry with him than he may make within the bounds of his own realm”: that is, he doesn’t have enough high-born men for an adequate fighting force, and thus must make an appeal for foreign aid (1985, 16; bk. 1, ch. 10).4 This is a critical consideration absent from popular discussion of knights, and most often from the Chandler commentary as well, so let’s put a fine point on it. Medieval knights were not some free-floating do-gooders with shining armor and big hearts. Knights themselves were aristocrats—they were “lords,” the privileged sons of the ruling class (literally)—and the rituals of chivalry were “essentially an aristocratic business” (Gillingham 2003, 226). As Richard Barber says, what “mattered was inherited status, pride in descent” (2000, 43). No reader of Malory (to retain him as a representative example) can have missed this: blood and kin and lineage and gentle condition are the necessary hereditary (and so physiological) conditions of both courtesy (manners befitting a court) and great deeds.5 This is an ideological iron triangle—blood-status-worth—which chivalry invokes and which knights quite literally embody. Equally biological and social, this iron triangle of blood-status-worth—too clunky to be known as that, the triad goes by the zingier name of “honor”—also carries an epistemological imperative: it must be known. The knight proves/shows his honor in his manner(s) and his deeds. Crucially, the word nobilis itself (also Old French from Latin, akin to noscere) describes that which is known: meaning an established family name, tied to landholdings and thus 4  The edition of Malory I shall quote is the 1893 Dent edition, based on Strachey’s 1868 Globe edition, with modernized spelling. My copy is a facsimile of the Dent edition, and since neither this nor the original are the easiest editions to come by, I will provide, in addition to page numbers, book and chapter numbers for ease of reference to other editions of the Morte Darthur (the most convenient of which is the digitized Strachey-based edition available online at Google Books [Strachey 1868]). The Dent edition was reprinted by Everyman’s Library in 1906, so it was the one that would have populated the shelves of most schools, bookshops, and home libraries in the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, making it the most likely candidate to have been Chandler’s edition. 5  Malory’s blood, kin, and lineage are obviously biological and less obviously social for us now, but they were both in the Middle Ages. We can see this sociobiological double helix in the telling two-fer gentle: deriving from the Old French gentil = high-born, it comes from the Latin ge n ̄ s, race or clan, from the root Latin word gignere “to beget” (Barnhart 1995, 314). Thus “gentle” uses biology to rationalize the social order: high-born (“gentle”) people naturally have superior (“gentle”) qualities. It is instructive to compare two other English words from the same root: the biological generate and the social (class) gentry. We will see what Chandler does with “gentlemen” in Chapter 4.

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to place names, which everybody (who’s anybody) knows.6 Thus the critical function of name and reputation in medieval aristocratic societies. So “knight” names a class, in fact a caste designation, and chivalry, as a code or set of ideals, expresses the duties but also trumpets the greatness of a hereditary ruling class. Following and indeed embodying the dictates of chivalry distinguishes the man of superior status and reaffirms that superior status: it is a self-replicating (and self-venerating) aristocratic ideology.7 There is another essential element of medieval chivalry absent from our current meme of it: religion. Again to put a fine point on it: medieval chivalry was “specifically Christian,” as Keen puts it (1984, 44), to the extent that it effectively represented “the aristocratic form of lay piety,” in Kaeuper’s words (1988, 187; see also the latter’s Holy Warriors [2009]). Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee provides an editorializing gloss: “I will say this much for the nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous, rapacious, and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and enthusiastically religious” (2018, 129).8 “Morally rotten” is the only part of Twain’s bon mot that is arguable. The truth of the matter is that there was plenty of repugnant behavior among even the most chivalrous. In reality, medieval warfare had less to do with the kind of honorable hand-to-hand combat that is most typically visualized with knightly battle than it did with sieges and their brutal aftermaths, and with bloody chevauchées. These were organized raids which laid waste to town and country, “typified by burning, pillage, rape, and murder.”9 This brutality toward common folk leads to an essential point: 6  See Keen 1984, ch. 8, “The Idea of Nobility.” Keen thinks that commissioned histories of noble families should be considered alongside romances and chansons de geste in the selfmythologizing of the period (32–4). As Barber points out, the “most visible expression” of this aristocratic self-obsession is in heraldry (2000, 43). 7  I borrow the potent phrase “aristocratic ideology” from Richard McKeon, who uses it to describe the way in which “honor as virtue” gets represented as “an inherited characteristic” so that the ruling class may naturalize its rule (1987, 131–33; quote on 131). For a full exposition of how the mechanism of self-distinguishing works in the field of class dynamics, see Pierre Bourdieu’s masterwork Distinction (1984). 8  Kaeuper tempers Twain in a scholarly paraphrase: “Their lives may have featured showy acts of violence, but knights were thoroughly pious” (2004, 104). Kaeuper 1999 inspiredly uses Twain’s satiric novel as its point of departure. 9  For some very grim reading regarding what we might judiciously call knightly terrorism, see John A.  Lynn’s “Chivalry and Chevauchée: The Ideal, the Real, and the Perfect in Medieval European Warfare,” ch. 3 of Battle: A History of Combat and Culture (2008; quote

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when actually existing chivalry functioned, it occurred among a rigorously demarcated aristocratic “brotherhood in arms.”10 As one historian of medieval warfare puts it, “The excesses committed by the marauder against peasants brought no inherent dishonor because the victims were, strictly speaking, of too low a station to be included by the chivalric code that bound aristocratic warriors to respect others” (Caferro 2006, 69). Chivalry was what the nobility practiced among themselves. But even among the “brotherhood,” chivalry was not the simple ideal of pure conduct that we typically imagine today. Its scholars have long recognized in it a fundamentally aggressive, status-insisting, ego-driven masculinity. Keen calls it “exultant joy of battle”: “The chivalrous cult of war” that is inextricably linked to a “cult of honor” (1984, 104). Kaeuper points out that we cannot grasp chivalry unless we understand that it is personal prowess—skill in arms—not courtesy, nor even honor or virtue, that is “the fundamental quality of chivalry” (1999, 130). And prowess displays itself, of course, through acts of violence, whether in conventional wars, or at home in tournaments, duels, or private wars in defense of one’s honor.11 In its constant spoiling for a fight, not as a byproduct or even as a necessary evil, but in its very raison d’être, it is impossible not to see in chivalrous conduct the behavior cluster that we now call toxic masculinity.  Indeed, it is perhaps the historical root of toxic masculinity as we know it. This understanding of chivalry and knighthood places violence at their core.12 This is not revisionist or even recent: criticism of knights as vainglorious marauders ran the duration of their existence throughout the Middle Ages (Barber’s lively Chapter 18 collects many contemporaneous critical voices). Richard Hurd, whose 1762 Letters on Chivalry and Romance pivotally redeemed medieval literature after centuries of on 85). See also Strickland 1996, 176–81 (horrific acts directed at common infantry) and 258–329 (directed at civilians); Kaeuper 1988, 77–116; and Kaeuper 1999, 176–85, which considers the unblushing representation of knightly atrocities in the chansons and romances. 10  For the principle of knights as rival “brothers in arms,” see Strickland 1996, ch. 5. See also Gillingham’s important essay “1066 and the Introduction of Chivalry into England” (2003, 209–31) and Kaeuper 1999, 172–76. 11  Kaeuper 1988, 188; Strickland 1996, ch. 4 on “Honor, Shame and Reputation.” 12  Jennifer G. Wollock thinks that Kaeuper, in deromanticizing chivalry, goes “too far in the other direction,” though she does not refute his historical accuracy (2011, 2). Bouchard et. al. (2009) coolly confirm the centrality of violence, if it needs confirmation: it is, after all, the point of martial horsemanship, swords, shields, and armor, not to mention castles.

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­ isrepute, noted the Hobbesian state of “almost perpetual violence, rapd ine, and plunder” unleashed by tyrannical knights in the Middle Ages (1911, 87). Half a century later, in his “Essay on Chivalry,” medieval revivalist Sir Walter Scott execrated the atrocities committed by both crusaders and conquistadors (Scott 1834, 14–21). Indeed, some historians posit that chivalry was a deliberate strategy of the church to regulate unruly, marauding knights, and while this interpretation might at first blush seem overstated, it simply recapitulates arguments made at the time, for example by St. Bernard of Clairvaux in his early-twelfth-century In Praise of the New Knighthood.13 Thus, with the rise of the chivalric ideal circa 1100, the widespread knightly violence of previous centuries was simply redirected (when in fact it was redirected). But even that redirection (or “canalisation,” as Keen puts it [1984, 47, 48]) simply reclassified knightly violence as sanctified if performed for the church; it didn't do away with it. We must not forget that crusaders’ massacres of Muslims, Jews, and even Christian heretics (especially during the Albigensian Crusade) were perfectly “chivalric.”14 It is clear from this brief historical overview that Marlowe is no knight in any medieval sense. He does not occupy elevated social status; he does not pick fights to defend his honor; he does not terrorize the weak and aggrandize his own possessions; he lacks any religious feeling or identification. The question becomes, Why is it exactly that we wish him to be a knight? How on earth do we still valorize this bloody, plumed pageant today? Well, we don't. Not exactly. Knighthood has gotten a couple of makeovers since its initial appearance. 13  The Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages puts it bluntly: “Chivalry was an important aspect of a broader cultural movement to moderate the violent tendencies of the early knights while maintaining them as fierce opponents of non-Christians” (Cantor 1999, 119–20). For Bernard, see Bouchard 1998, 84, and Keen 1984, 5 and 49. 14  Thus, Marlowe as “crusader” is a particularly infelicitous suggestion (Durham 1963, 32; Cawelti 1977, 152). Regarding crusaders against Muslim civilians: killing civilians is an integral part of besieging towns, both during and after the siege; and sieges were primary in medieval warfare generally and in the Christian invasion of the Middle East specifically. Succinctly stated, “the process was so barbaric that even contemporaries were outraged: the ‘infidels’ were butchered en masse, and women and children were not spared” (Nerlich 1987, 16). For the horrific history of crusaders against Jews, see Eidelberg’s edition of Jewish Crusade narratives (1977), and the extensive work of Robert Chazan, particularly European Jewry and the First Crusade (1987). For crusaders against Albigensian heretics, see Pegg (2008).

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The Medieval Imaginary 2: Actually Existing Romance The first makeover was early.15 The medieval romancers, writing for the aristocratic audiences who venerated the chivalric ideal, sold an idealized form of class behavior back to that class. What we now call “courtly love” joined personal prowess, valor, strength, and courage as hallmarks of the heroic knight. As Northrop Frye once put it: “The rescued damsels and beloved ladies, the giants and helpful or perilous beasts, all form a ritualized action expressing the ascendancy of a horse-riding aristocracy.” Medieval romances “express that aristocracy's dreams of its own social function, and the idealized acts of protection and responsibility that it invokes to justify that function” (1976, 56–7; for a sustained exploration of this point, see Michael Nerlich 1987, chs. 1–3). In other words, the chivalry found in the romances represents the self-glorifying ideology of the medieval power elite.16 Chrétien de Troyes receives widespread credit as the greatest of the medieval romancers, partly because of his enormous influence in the early elaboration of Arthurian romance, and partly because of his delicate staging of courtliness in love and battle. But Malory is undoubtedly the most important for Chandler and for the Anglo-American literary tradition generally. Three hundred years after Chrétien, Malory provided a compendium of the massive corpus of Arthurian stories for the first time in English. Here is Malory’s version of the chivalric code: “never to do outrageousity nor murder, and always to flee treason; also, by no means to be 15  So early that “makeover” may be too strong a word, since chivalry was coterminously written into existence and enacted during the twelfth century. Bouchard thinks that chivalry is primarily a literary phenomenon (1998, esp. ch. 4), but I am more persuaded by the narratives depicting the mutual interaction of the literary and the lived given by Barber, Keen, and Kaeuper. For a thoroughgoing exploration of the two-way relation of romantic art and aristocratic life in this period, see historian John W. Baldwin’s eloquent study, Aristocratic Life in Medieval France: The Romances of Jean Renart and Gerbert de Montreuil, 1190–1230 (2000). 16  Not just romances, but chronicles and biographies as well: Kaeuper’s Chivalry explores a continuum between “imaginative” and ostensibly historical literature, while Barber shows how the great chronicler Froissart adheres to romantic literary conventions. For demonstrations of the intertwined lives of romance and historiography, see Heng’s Empire of Magic (2003) and Stein’s Reality Fictions (2006). For a penetrating analysis of how romantic literary artistry embodies aristocratic class fantasy, see Erich Auerbach’s classic essay “The Knight Sets Forth,” in Mimesis (1953).

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cruel, but to give mercy unto him that asketh mercy … and always to do ladies, damosels, and gentlewomen succour, [and never to enforce them], upon pain of death. Also, that no man take no battles in a wrongful quarrel for no law, nor for no world’s goods” (1985, 104; bk. 3, ch. 15).17 Seems fairly simple: don't kill randomly or when another knight surrenders; be loyal to your lord; defend noble-born women (common women are left to shift for themselves18); don't rape them. (More on this below.) Even this is not so simple, however. The romancers themselves were not entirely whitewashers. As literary historian Thomas G.  Pavel notes, early plots of chivalric idealism revolved around knightly failures (2013, 47).19 For example, Chrétien’s The Knight of the Cart concerns two failures: Lancelot’s hesitation to degrade himself in defense of the Queen’s honor, and of course his adulterous love for her. Chrétien's later Story of the Grail follows the consequences of Perceval’s error, which creates the Waste Land and instigates the quest for the Holy Grail, all of which would have been avoided had the simple, well-meaning knight just asked the right question at the right moment. The most intricate of these investigations into knightly failure, the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, teases out the titular hero’s failure to live up to his reputation as the most courteous of knights. Again, Malory is the most important in our context, and in the Morte, there’s plenty of problematic behavior from the knights of the Round Table. In Malory, the Waste Land proceeds from the “dolorous stroke” delivered by Balin, banished from Arthur’s court after shamefully murdering a lady (bk. 2). Malory’s Gawaine commits various knightly atrocities: he kills a lady in a kind of berserker fit while he is attempting to finish off a surrendering knight; in penance, he must wear her severed head around his neck (1985, 90–93; bk. 3, chs. 7–8). This is supposed to be the origin 17  The clause in brackets is not in the Caxton printing that has been the basis for most printed editions of the Morte, but is in the earlier-state Winchester manuscript, discovered in 1934, which is the text used for Stephen H.  A. Shepherd’s remarkable Norton Critical Edition (Malory 2004, 77). 18  At one point in the Morte, a damsel petitions Arthur to help her mistress, whose castle is being besieged. The supplicant assures the court that her mistress “is a lady of great worship and great lands.” However, because the fair unknown won’t divulge her lady’s name, and thus her bona fides, Arthur refuses the aid of his knights (1985, 222–23; bk. 7, ch. 2). Even when the aid is granted, it turns into a martial game of rescue: it’s not about the endangered lady, but the knights. 19  Elspeth Kennedy explores the primarily narratological but often thematically religious functions of this topos in her excellent essay “Failure in Arthurian Romance” (1991).

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of his great courtesy, but he subsequently betrays Sir Pelleas by sleeping with his fellow knight’s beloved Ettard (1985, 140–46; bk. 4, chs. 21–2). Later still, Gawaine leads his brothers in the killing of King Pellinore, which violates his oath of loyalty to all knights of the Round Table (1985, 499–500; bk. 10, ch. 21). More examples could be given of knights behaving badly.20 Let us not forget that Galahad achieves the Grail because of all the knights, he is the only one pure enough to do so. There is another problem with those medieval romances. Feminist scholars have long pointed out that the flip side of all that wonderful protection of women from being violated is the widespread necessity of such protection in the first place. As Joan Ferrante powerfully noted in 1975: “The world outside and sometimes inside the court is filled with men trying to rape virgins or seduce other men's ladies, plotting to steal their lands or marry them in order to control the lands. Women seem to be at the mercy of society, pawns in power plays, with little control over their holdings, their destinies, or their bodies” (120). Kathryn Gravdal puts an even finer point on it: “rape (either attempted rape or the defeat of a rapist) constitutes one of the episodic units used in the construction of a romance” (1991, 43).21 In other words, the medieval romance is structured by rape (or its threat), and by the concomitant abduction and false imprisonment of women. Perhaps it should not go without saying that just as it is knights who threaten unlawful violence in general, it is knights again who pose the biggest threat to women: it is they who are putting those proverbial damsels in distress in the first place. Raping, marauding, the ceaseless imperative to prove one's worth at sword-point: this is hardly what anyone means when they call Marlowe a knight. Why then do we intend the characterization as such an unvarnished compliment? Because of a second makeover.

20  For a compelling reading of Malory as a revivalist of a bygone courtly idealism riddled with ambivalence, see Pochoda, Arthurian Propaganda: Le Morte Darthur as an Historical Ideal of Life (1971). 21  Besides Gravdal’s foundational Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (1991), see her 1992 essay “Chrétien de Troyes, Gratian, and the Medieval Romance of Sexual Violence.” For the unavoidable issue of rape in Malory’s biography, see Catherine Batt’s now-classic “Malory and Rape” (originally published in 1997, and reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition of Le Morte Darthur [Batt 2004]).

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The Imaginary Middle Ages We would not expect an ideology as historically embedded as chivalry to endure almost a millennium unaltered. And yet here we are, centuries removed from feudalism and its caste system, and chivalry as a cultural trope maintains a ferocious power in our culture industry. Just think of the knights and ladies cavorting through medieval-like landscapes from Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones; the lineage-fetishism of the Star Wars franchise, with its Jedi knights exclusively inheriting the power of the Force; and the Round Table-revisionism of the Justice League of America and Avengers superhero fellowships, among innumerable less spectacular exemplars thriving in our pop-cultural landscape. For us, of course, the most relevant example of the continued purchase of the chivalric ideology is the insistent discourse of Philip Marlowe’s honorary knighthood, in the ongoing reception of Raymond Chandler’s novels. We seem to be dealing with a “magical ideology which [has] outlived its feudal host,” to lift an apt phrase of E. P. Thompson (1981, 252). How do we get from Malory's pure and perfect Galahad to Dr. Carl Moss’s “shop-soiled Galahad,” four hundred and fifty years later? And as importantly, why do we so eagerly jump to the conclusion that Moss is cluing us into a key feature of Marlowe’s character? Put another way: Why are we still bowing to knights in the twenty-first century? It was not a continuous, linear process. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, chivalry as an ethos had run its course—Or was it murder? Marx and Engels told it that way in The Communist Manifesto (1848), fingering as the culprit capitalism and its callous cash nexus, which, they alleged, “drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of … chivalrous enthusiasm . . . in the icy water of egotistical calculation” (1992, 20). There wasn’t just a lady in the lake; according to Marx and Engels, the knight and the horse had been chucked in there as well. No less improbable a political theorist than Edmund Burke prefigured the Manifesto (albeit without the latter’s piquant irony, as if dutifully staging the first time as tragedy) when he wailed, at the end of the previous century, that “[t]he age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of England is extinguished forever” (2014, 78). We will return to Burke’s lament. The ascendant bourgeoisie displaced the aristocracy literarily no less than economically and socially. Don Quijote universally receives the credit for applying the death-strokes (first in Spanish in 1605 and again in 1615;

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in English, 1612 and 1620) to the aristocracy’s encomiastic form, chivalric romance. But, pace Borges’s Pierre Menard, Don Quijote was inevitable: if Cervantes hadn’t written it, someone else would have.22 What tends to be remembered from Cervantes’ masterpiece is that it made mincemeat of the tropes and tricks of romance—doughty knights, beautiful ladies, noble steeds, magic, monsters, and the like. What tends to be forgotten is the novel’s savage ridicule of the aristocratic pretension underwriting its protagonist’s sallies. Woven into the humble hidalgo’s mad act of self-­ reinvention is the claim of higher noble status than he in fact occupies. From his self-bestowed lofty vantage, the make-believe knight sees not just windmills as giants and barber’s basins as enchanted helmets, but himself as a great lord deserving proper obeisance—even though (and this is part of the joke) the narrator is not even sure of his real name. Most of the delusional Don’s defeats come from trying to overlay the demands of honor and courtesy onto the lives of innkeepers, servants, shepherds, and criminals across the Manchegan countryside. When time after time his haughtiness is derided, with our “hero” receiving many more blows than he dispenses, the whole apparatus of the aristocratic ideology is undermined as well. An entire class is made the butt of Don Quijote’s humor, as Lord Byron shrewdly pointed out with his famous witticism, in the thirteenth canto of Don Juan (1823), that “Cervantes smiled Spain's Chivalry away.” Byron means “chivalry” in the older sense of a valorized aristocracy: “A single laugh demolished the right arm / Of his own country; — seldom since that day / Has Spain had heroes” (1986, 768).23 Of course, the poem housing that allegation furthers the ironic displacement of the

22  In fact, maybe someone else did: see the anonymous “Ballad Farce,” which preceded the Quijote by a decade or so and contains its basic idea; it is helpfully reprinted in the first Norton Critical Edition of Cervantes’s novel (1981, 841-48). For a view of the Quijote as pallbearer to romance rather than its executioner, see Thomas 1920, 178–79; cf. Eisenberg 1982, 50–53. For the historical context of the decline of romance in pre-Cervantine Spain, see Sieber 1985. Borges’s droll invention Pierre Menard claims that Don Quijote is not “inevitable,” and is even “unnecessary,” in the puckish “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1983, 41). Despite all this, it should be said that few works play their games so delightfully, and on so many fronts, as the Quijote. 23  Byron was a reader of Hurd, who sixty years earlier had beat him to the trope: Hurd wrote that Spain’s decline on the world stage resulted from Cervantes “laughing away” what remained of his country’s aristocratic “prowess” (1911, 62).

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chivalric hero. Byron’s own myth-busting serves as an epigraph to this book.24 It would not have been surprising had Cervantes’s burlesque put the terminal nail in the coffin of chivalric romance. After all, Marx and Engels (and, in this instance, Burke) were right: as capitalist modernity progressed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, new social modalities like instrumental reason, disenchantment, and alienation replaced the (ideal) feudal order and the (retrospectively) genial wet cement of romantic belief.25 Aristocrats went from being laughed at in Spain to losing their heads on the other side of the Pyrenees. With the “diminished charisma of crown and aristocratic rank,” as E. P. Thompson put it, the veneration of the feudal lords would have seemed to be over (1981, 252). But a funny thing happened on the way to the twentieth century. The Middle Ages, which had been scorned by subsequent movements of Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment rationalism, became the object of a highly mediated process of revival. Simply put, the Middle Ages staged a comeback! And “staged” is the right word, because their return was as theatrical as it was historical. The roots of Chandler’s “sense of the past” are here (Chandler 1981, 11). The comeback began in the second half of the eighteenth century and continued through (and helped inspire) various strains of British Romanticism.26 The Middle Ages became not just a fascinating object of knowledge but a resonant “site of cultural production,” as Alan Sinfield 24  The short prose piece from which the epigraph is taken, Byron’s 1813 Addition to the Preface to Cantos I and II of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is a brisk critique of medieval chivalry and its reception to that point (1986, 21–2). 25  I say “ideal” and “retrospective” to avoid conventional reductivism: the “feudal order” was never so orderly, and the world that modern theorists since Weber have retrospectively called “enchanted” probably seemed less than enchanting to the masses of slaves, peasants, and myriad other subaltern subjects (a point made by the Quijote!) For an excellent brief overview of the thematics of the transition to modernity relevant to our discussion here, see Löwy and Sayre 2001, 18; elaborated 29–39. For more extended genealogies, see Berman’s classic Reenchantment of the World (1981) and Nerlich (1987). For the concept of desengaño (disenchantment) specifically, see the wonderful overview given by Mercedes Allendesalazar in the Dictionary of Untranslatables (2014). 26  For an in-depth look at what I can only briefly glance at here, see, in addition to the sources in the next note, Arthur Johnston’s Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century (1964) for the original (eighteenth-century) scholarly construction of the Middle Ages as “romantic,” and, for the poets, Elizabeth Fay’s Romantic Medievalism (2002).

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once perfectly said of Shakespeare (2003, 154). That is, the period was not just intellectually revalued in literary-critical pieces like the Hurd and Scott essays referred to above; it was gussied up and re-enacted with full poetic license in various arenas of literary performance: in glowering Gothic novels beginning with The Castle of Otranto in 1764; in medievalesque masquerades like Thomas Chatterton’s “Rowley” poems (1768/1777); and most spectacularly, after decades of successful callbacks, in the historical imagineering of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe: A Romance (1819). Ivanhoe is the flash-point of our idea of chivalry: it flattened all of the nuance out of Scott’s own “Essay on Chivalry,” and split the knights into gallant good guys (flowers of chivalry Ivanhoe and Richard I) and dastardly bad guys (haughty and cruel Norman knights). Set in an idealized twelfth century, Ivanhoe’s medieval pantomime was so successful that it established the frame for virtually all such imaginings to come. If Ivanhoe was the flash-point of “chivalry” as we have it, Victorian medievalism is the wildfire.27 A whole medievalish world populated by knights and ladies unfolded in novels and poetry, most prominently in Tennyson’s sensationally popular Idylls of the King, published incrementally from 1859 to 1885—if you add his meme-inducing “Lady of Shalott” (1832), that’s over half a century of prestigious Arthurian production. But it wasn’t just in literature that the king and his knights came galumphing back: the medieval revival flowed into virtually all artistic expressions, from music to decorative and applied arts. This included the luscious paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, the exquisite productions of author-craftsman William Morris and book illustrators like Aubrey Beardsley, and countless public tableaus adorning college halls and library walls on both sides of the Atlantic. Media utilized in the medieval revival included tapestries, 27  Another vast but endlessly fascinating subject. For Scott in nineteenth-century British and European medievalism, see Alice Chandler’s 1965 essay as a base text; Girouard 1981, chs. 3 and 4, for more color; and Ragussis 1993 for a recent study of the ethnoracial politics of Ivanhoe’s revivalism in particular. (I will consider Scott’s American context below.) For medievalism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British culture generally, see both Girouard and Michael Alexander 2017. For Arthur specifically in both American and British literature since 1800, see Taylor and Brewer 1983; for a look at the racio-national work that Arthur does in nineteenth-century Britain, see Barczewski 2000. For visual art and multiple media, see the work of Debra N. Mancoff. Finally, for a medieval historian’s consideration of “the Victorian misconstruction of the Middle Ages,” see Cantor 1991, 27–9 and 374–75 (quote on 29).

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embroidery, carvings, sculpture, engravings, tiles, and my personal favorite, garden follies.28 Readers of The Big Sleep will be gratified to find that stained glass was well  represented among the myriad forms manifesting the return of the King and his knights. As Mark Girouard puts it in his survey of the revival, “the influence of chivalry in this period” pervades Anglophone culture: it is present “in almost embarrassingly large quantities” (1981, [i]). We reproduced two particularly apt paintings in The Annotated Big Sleep: Sir Frank Dicksee’s 1885 Chivalry, depicting a victorious knight rescuing a bound maiden (2018, 403), and Sir John Everett Millais’ 1870 The Knight Errant, which sure looks a lot like the scene depicted in the stained glass of the Sternwood estate’s entry: “vizor back to be sociable” and “fiddling with the knots,” the knight unbinds a naked lady with “conveniently placed hair” (2018, 10). The re-romanticization of knights and chivalry takes place here. Sir Edward Strachey rhapsodizes, in the introduction to his 1868 edition of Malory: “chivalry is one of those words, like love, duty, patriotism, loyalty, which make us feel their meaning” rather than allowing themselves to be defined. Whatever it is, Strachey avers, chivalry is “sparkling and flashing,” “the humaniser of society” (1868, xix). Two generations later, on the eve of the Great War, American college president W. W. Comfort could confirm, in the introduction to his widely read translation of Chrétien, that “[t]he debt of our own social code to this literature of courtesy and frequent self-sacrifice is perfectly manifest” (2018, 7). When a bank clerk in Boston named Thomas Bulfinch publishes his own selected anthology of medieval stories in 1858 and names it The Age of Chivalry, he is really naming his own age—and helping to produce it. Is Victorian chivalry (on both sides of the Atlantic) just medieval chivalry with a fresh coat of paint? No: its resurrection was predicated on meeting the demands and desires of a new set of historical circumstances.29 28  See Howey and Reimer (2006), section F: Fine Art and Graphic Design (606–718). To be precise, the garden follies were created in the eighteenth century (by William Kent for the Royal Gardens at Richmond: see Howey and Reimer 2006, 664, items F-331–332). 29  Nor should we forget that this was the function of Arthurian romance from the beginning. Keen speculates that the Arthurian mythos allowed more freedom than the other two most well-known “matters” of medieval romance, classical and Carolingian, because those carried greater expectations of historicity (1984, 114). This accords with Auerbach’s thesis that the fantasy element of medieval Arthurian romance, liberated of any compulsion to social realism, singularly accommodated projections of class fantasies (1953). Perhaps the protean capacity of the matière de Bretagne, originally so amenable to aristocratic mytholo-

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Victorian chivalry is an entire revisioning of knighthood, evacuated of its formalized class exclusivity, its militant zealotry, its rituals of courtesy, its troublesome history of violence and rape. It is transfigured and transformed, at once flattened out and redirected. It becomes a nebulous collective memory—a false memory, in fact—but accuracy is not its point, any more than it had been for the twelfth-century romancers who raised the specters of Arthur, Charlemagne, and Alexander in their transposition of a legendary past into their medieval present. As Paul Connerton has succinctly stated in his study of collective memory, “our images of the past commonly serve to legitimate a present social order” (1989, 3).30 What was the social order served by the sense of the past conjured in the Anglophone transatlantic of the long nineteenth century? Simply put, modern medievalism motivated the politics of idealized masculinity in the service of a new racial-imperial order. As alluded to above, the Crusades had underwritten a European identity defined in opposition to Muslim, Jewish, and various monstrous Others, an identity ratified by medieval romance.31 This binary identity formation, inscribed within what Stuart Hall has  incisively called the “fateful triangle” of ethnicity, race, and nationality in the conceptualizing of both “Us” and “Them,” was forcefully put to work in the creation of a colonialist identity in Britain, an expansionist identity in the United States, and a courtly identity in the American South, where a “cult of chivalry” helped ideologically validate the caste system that undergirded slavery.32 W. E. B. Du Bois takes direct gization, also accounts for its improbable ability to reemerge in the particularly unromantic era of the steam locomotive, urbanization, and industrial capitalism. 30  Keen 1984, ch. 6, “The Historical Mythology of Chivalry,” is wonderful on the uses to which the past was put in twelfth-century writing. 31  The limitations of the current work did not allow me to dwell on the constitutive Othering practices of romance as much as I would have liked. However, there’s little left unsaid by Geraldine Heng’s magisterial Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (2003); see also her recent, equally compelling The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (2018). The classic articulation is Fredric Jameson’s 1975 essay “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre” (esp. 140–41), later incorporated into The Political Unconscious. The foundational frame for delineating the Othering of the Muslim world is of course Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978); for recent considerations of medieval Orientalism specifically, see Calkin 2005 and Akbari 2009. In an American context, Toni Morrison has powerfully argued for an Africanist Other to American identity in Dancing in the Dark (1992): see esp. ch. 2, “Romancing the Shadow,” for the key role of romance. 32  See Stuart Hall 2017 for a dynamic theory of the sliding signifiers of race, ethnicity, and nationality. For an excellent consideration of the “white chivalric masculinity of the

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aim at this racialized romantic figuration in his pointed question, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903): “Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America?” (2007, 76).33 Du Bois’s precise you/us opposition calls out the unspoken assumption of whiteness giving “knightly” discourse its shape, or its hue, as it were. Half a century later, James Baldwin would similarly interrogate William Faulkner’s deployment of the “gallant South” trope (2010, 30).34 Mark Twain derided such self-conceptions in the decades after the Civil War, providing a thoroughgoing subversion of the recently-­ canonized Malory in his 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (2018), and going so far as to blame the war itself on Sir Walter Scott for teaching the South to fetishize honor and self-regard. Although of course Twain was unleashing his distinctive ironic humor against the much-revered romance revivalist, he also meant it, and his assessment, overstated though it clearly was, seemed persuasive enough on the surface to find substantial support throughout twentieth-century scholarship.35 But we shouldn’t think that the cult of chivalry was confined to the South: one commentator in 1847 blamed the United States’ expansionist war with Mexico on “the age of American chivalry,” an accusation fully justified according to historian Robert W. Johannsen.36 Likewise, the brutal “Indian Wars” of the nineteenth century mobilized the romantic U.S. South,” see Tison Pugh’s Queer Chivalry (2013), esp. ch. 1 (quote on 5). “Cult of chivalry” is Johanssen 1985, 71. 33  For one exposition of what Du Bois is talking about, see Nancy MacLean’s Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (1994). 34   See too Baldwin’s eloquent deconstruction of the honorable-lost-cause trope in Faulkner’s writing—“the image of ruin, gallantry, and death”—in his 1956 essay “Faulkner and Desegregation” (1956, quote on 572). 35  The original can be found in Twain’s 1883 romp Life on the Mississippi, esp. ch. 46, “Enchantments and Enchanters,” though Twain ridicules Southern “grotesque ‘chivalry’ doings and romantic juvenilities” throughout (1982, quote on 468). For scholarly discussion of Twain’s critique, see Dekker 1990, ch. 8 and especially 365n2. For substantive scholarly support of Twain’s general point about the South’s chivalrous self-regard, see the work of Wyatt-Brown (2001 and 2007). On American medievalism generally, see Mathis 2002; for Scott’s central place in the American revival, see Orians 1932, and Kenney and Workman 1975. 36  See Johanssen 1985, ch. 4 (“Visions of Romance and Chivalry”). The critic quoted is Freeman Hunt, qtd. in Johannsen 1985, 77. For the racial Othering that underlay this “romantic” war, see (among many) Johannsen 1985, especially 289–93, but also 22–3, 167, 260, and 278. Historian Amy S.  Greenberg makes the point that the call for war against Mexico was loudest in the South, among those who referred to themselves as “the chivalry” (2012, 97).

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rhetoric of heroism, honor, and noble cause, with gunfighters figured as modern knights.37 One of the most striking things about modern Anglo-American medievalism is how Malory becomes a children’s author. When in 1817 Robert Southey brought out the first new edition of Malory in almost two centuries, he called for it to be “modernised and published as a book for boys” (qtd. in Hahn 2015, 37). Après lui, le déluge. Later in the nineteenth century, Le Morte Darthur and other stories of chivalric “adventure” like Jean Froissart’s fourteenth-century Chronicles (think Malory but “true”) magically transform into a royal treasury of juvenile fiction.38 This is key: children’s literature fashions and dramatizes collective memory in a way that professional histories never can.39 Kids’ lit also catapulted Malory from Victorian fad to modern perennial. Both Bulfinch’s 1858 Age of Chivalry (Malory was its source) and Strachey’s 1868 Globe Edition of the Morte were geared to younger readers, and they proliferated through innumerable reprintings. They received stiff competition in the holiday and birthday trade from Malory’s first American appearance, in the form of Sidney Lanier’s modernized and bowdlerized The Boy’s Own King Arthur (1880; 1881 in England), which Scribner subsequently reissued in a series entitled “The Boy’s Library of Legend and Chivalry.” (Lanier and Scribner had already issued The Boy’s Froissart in 1879.) Another expurgated retelling was issued in both London and New  York in 1884 by juvenile adventure author Henry Frith: “Writing for boys,” he offered, “we have preserved all the vigour and valour of the action, . . . with due regard to good taste and their improvement” (n.d., i–ii). Frith’s edition was reprinted many times until the 1950s. And there were many others, newly embellished with moral platitudes and splendid illustrations by masters such as Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, Arthur Rackham, and scads of

37  The classic accounts are Henry Nash Smith 1950, Slotkin 1973, and Barnett 1975. For the Western as a species of romance, see Cawelti 1999, esp. 39–41 and 47–49. 38  As chronicler of the Hundred Years War, Froissart was a “self-appointed ‘Secretary of Chivalry,’” romanticizing nobility and single combat as much as Chrétien or Malory ever did (Barber 2000, 147). Scott loved him. To give an indication of Froissart’s class politics: in his account of the Peasant Uprising of 1381, the benighted commoners rise up because they are spoiled by their “abundance and prosperity” (1978, 211). 39  On this point, see Leonard S. Marcus’s recent study, The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter (2019).

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others.40 These book illustrators bountifully embroidered Anglo-American boyhood, linking disparate subjects like King Arthur and his knights, the American Revolution, pirates, the Crusades, and the “winning of the West” in a great panoply of romantic historical idealization. Millions of children (including Raymond Chandler) were raised within this chivalric-industrial complex. Howard Pyle’s paean to knighthood, Men of Iron (1892), for example, remained “required reading in public schools for two generations,” among other texts full of chivalric propaganda that were written and published exclusively for use in schools.41 At the start of his four-volume reboot of Malory (1903–10), Pyle lauded “the high nobility of spirit that moved these excellent men to act as they did,” and enjoined his readers “to follow after their manner of behavior” (1933, v). And follow they did: as the introduction to a popular children’s edition of Froissart put it, such books “aroused the spirit of adventure and prompted young men to resort to the border lands of civilization” (Singleton 1900, x).42 Thus did dreams of knighthood and chivalry underpin British “adventures” in India and Africa, and thus could such “adventures” seem like the patrimony of Americans in their own conquest of the West over Native and Mexican adversaries. Chivalry and adventure united under one banner (the metaphor is exact) “slavery, Manifest Destiny, Indian killing, and what it meant to prove one’s manhood in the nineteenth century” (Greenberg 2012, xiii).43 The standard bearer was a new ideological creation, the racial “Anglo-Saxon,” uniting one idea of “American” with one idea of “British.”44 Harvard and Radcliffe Professor Howard Maynadier clearly framed it thus in his 1907 survey of the Arthurian legacy: transatlantic Anglo-Saxonism was about “the English 40  For an overview of one group of these artists, the Brandywine School, see Dell and Reed 2000. For Pyle in particular, see Pitz 1965. 41  Quote about Pyle: Dell and Reed 2000, 24–5; general point about Arthuriana in school textbooks: Hahn 2015 37. My phrasing owes to Pochoda’s Arthurian Propaganda (1971). 42  This was written by U.S. Commissioner of Education William T. Harris, general editor of the Appletons’ [sic] Home Reading Series designed to get such books out of the school and into the home. Commissioner Harris was not wrong: for an overview of the ideology of chivalry and romance among the European explorers, see Jennifer R. Goodman, Chivalry and Exploration, 1298–1630 (1998). 43  Greenberg is speaking about the war with Mexico specifically here. Also relevant in this context is her important study of gender in mid-nineteenth-century America, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (2005). 44  For more on these constructions of whiteness, see Nell Irvin Painter’s History of White People (2010).

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race, both in the British Empire and in the American Republic” (1907, 5). Or as the introduction to the 1900 edition of The Chronicles of Sir John Froissart Condensed for Young Readers put it: “The whole purpose of the present volume is to put an American child in possession of a history which is his birthright. He should feel that these warriors are his ancestors. They are not Greeks, they are Englishmen” (Singleton 1900, xvi–xvii). Of course it wasn’t just in children’s literature that romance staged its return: the literary marketplace in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was awash in retro-chivalric adventure novels—the great cavalcade of Prisoner of Zendas, Scarlet Pimpernels, Scaramouches, and Captain Bloods—which were read by adults young and grown, even if they have been pretty well ignored ever since. We tend not to recall how popular they were because they align on the wrong side of the scholarly literary-­ critical register: popular versus high culture, mass production versus artistry, escapism versus realism, eager comprehensibility versus experimentalism. These artists, modes, and themes—indeed, this whole zone of literature—dovetail neatly into the pulps (and onto the silver screen!), where we tend to stop classifying them as “literature,” if indeed we ever did. But we distort the past by skewing toward the canon. G. A. Henty’s crusader tale A Knight of the White Cross (1895) may never have been taught in an English literature class, but it was reprinted at least eight times through 1930—a resounding success for a novelist, and a mere hoofprint in the stampede of chivalresque adventure pervading the reading of generations of English and American boys, including Raymond Chandler’s generation.45 This is the cultural context of knights and chivalry in which Raymond Chandler comes of age. There was even a painting of Sir Galahad hanging in the library at Dulwich College in London which he and his classmates could look up to (literally): an armored icon emblematizing a model of behavior, a set of ideals, a sense of the past.46 45  It’s no coincidence that in addition to his crusader titles, Henty wrote historical adventures like With Clive in India: Or, the Beginnings of an Empire (1883), With Lee in Virginia (1889), and By Right of Conquest; Or, With Cortez in Mexico (1890). (Chandler refers to him in his letters.) The same racialized chivalro-imperialist logic that traverses Henty’s corpus also conjoins the medievalist tableaus of painters like Dicksee and Millais (referenced above) with their Orientalist productions. For a thorough and bracing overview of the continued Orientalizing logic of modern medievalism, see Ganim 2005. 46  The painting, Sir Galahad by George Frederic Watts, is reproduced in The Annotated Big Sleep (Chandler 2018, 325). The editors learned about the painting from Tom Williams’s enjoyable biography of Chandler (2012, 26).

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The young Raymond Chandler gloried in this trend, and though he was no imperialist ideologue, he began his professional writing career as a card-carrying member of the romantic revival. He wrote wistful, sighing poems about “true Romance” with titles like “The King,” “The Quest,” and “The Unknown Love.” He even contributed a literary manifesto entitled “Realism and Fairyland,” in which he waxes Wildean in defending art from demands of realism.47 Critics have not been kind to these writings, when they have deigned to notice them at all. Biographer Judith Freeman tactfully terms the early poems and essays “unremarkable,” but in our context they are very remarkable (2007, 17).48 They are suffused with the period’s “romantic sensibility and chivalric themes” that we surveyed above (Moss 2003, 24). Chandler himself later denigrated the fruit of this stage of his literary career as “Grade B Georgian,” a comment I have seen quoted many times but never explained (1981, 380). It is far from common knowledge that a broad swath of poetry from the first decades of the twentieth century went under the eponym for George V, so dubbed by a series of poetry anthologies published by The Poetry Bookshop in London (and Putnam’s in New  York) from 1912 to 1922. As always, Chandler spoke precisely: his early writings would fit right in with other “Georgians” like Rupert Brooke, Edmund Blunden, and Walter de la Mare. The Georgian Poetry collections gather together thematically traditional and formally conventional poetry. Paul Fussell calls it “dreamy Keatsian and Tennysonian verse” regarding one of the Georgians, Siegfried Sassoon (1975, 91). We will return to Georgian poetry, and to Fussell, in the next chapter. Before we do, let’s sum up. We can see how knights and chivalry and romance form a constellation of concepts that also evoke certain kinds of feelings and a certain sense of the past, claiming a “higher code,” an ideal of life. There are two common denominators in medieval and modern figurations of chivalry. First, an idealized masculinity that is “honorable,

47  The period in question is 1908–12: Chandler wrote poetry, essays, and his earliest known story (sadly, still unlocated), entitled “The Rose-Leaf Romance.” See Robert F. Moss’s indispensable Raymond Chandler: A Literary Reference (2003), which reprints a selection of the early material, and provides facsimiles, illustrations, and commentary (23–32). Moss follows Matthew J. Bruccoli’s work collecting the items in Chandler Before Marlowe (1973). The unlocated story is noted by Bruccoli in Raymond Chandler: A Checklist (1968), 17. 48  In fact, Freeman does some insightful remarking herself: see 44–5.

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nationalistic, courageous,” as David M.  Earle puts it (2016, 136). “Nobility” slides from class to character, but manliness remains at the core of what it’s about: “all that is pure and noble in manhood,” in the words of one nineteenth-century American proselyte of chivalry.49 It goes without saying (literally: it is tacit) that “man” in this formulation is Jeffersonian: “Anglo”/white, and heterosexual.50 This is the second common denominator of medieval and modern chivalries: a binary ethno-racial-national identity that constructs heroic white masculinity in opposition to its Others. There simply are no Black knights, female knights, or out gay knights: the identitarian space opened by the knight is constitutively exclusive and excluding. Such racialized, gendered, and heterosexed fantasies of “pure” and “noble” masculinity marched right up to and into World War I, as millions of young men rushed to enlist in order to preserve, as Lord Baden-Powell put it in 1914, “the manliness of a people” (qtd. in Girouard 1981, 282).

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Ferrante, Joan M. 1975. Woman As Image in Medieval Literature, from the Twelfth Century to Dante. New York: Columbia University Press. Freeman, Judith. 2007. The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved. New York: Pantheon. Frith, Henry. n.d. King Arthur and His Knights. Philadelphia: McKay. Froissart, Jean. 1978. Chronicles. Ed. and trans. Geoffrey Brereton. London: Penguin. Frye, Northrop. 1976. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fussell, Paul. 1975. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ganim, John. Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture, and Cultural Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gillingham, John. 2003. The English in the Twelfth-Century: Imperialism, National Identity and Political Values. Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: The Boydell Press. Girouard, Mark. 1981. The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Goodman, Jennifer R. 1998. Chivalry and Exploration, 1298–1630. Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: The Boydell Press. Gravdal, Kathryn. 1991. Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1992. Chrétien de Troyes, Gratian, and the Medieval Romance of Sexual Violence. Signs 17 (3): 558–585. Greenberg, Amy S. 2005. Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico. New York: Vintage. Hahn, Daniel. 2015. The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, Stuart. 2017. The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heng, Geraldine. 2003. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2018. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howey, Ann F., and Stephen R.  Reimer. 2006. A Bibliography of Modern Arthuriana (1500–2000). Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Hurd, Richard. 1911. In Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance with the Third Elizabethan Dialogue, ed. Edith J. Morley. London: Henry Frowde. Jameson, Fredric. 1975. Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre. New Literary History 7 (1): 135–163.

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Johanssen, Robert W. 1985. To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnston, Arthur. 1964. Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century. London: The Athlone Press of the University of London. Kaeuper, Richard W. 1988. War, Justice, and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1999. Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2004. The Societal Role of Chivalry in Romance. In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Kreuger, 97–114. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ———. 2009. Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry. U Pennsylvania P, 2009. Keen, Maurice. 1984. Chivalry. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kennedy, Elspeth. 1991. Failure in Arthurian Romance. Medium Ævum 60 (1): 16–32. Kenney, Alice P., and Leslie J.  Workman. 1975. Ruins, Romance, and Reality: Medievalism in Anglo-American Imagination and Taste, 1750–1840. Winterthur Portfolio 10: 131–163. Klein, Marcus. 1994. Easterns, Westerns, and Private Eyes: American Matters. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Löwy, Michael, and Robert Sayre. 2001. Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lynn, John A. 2008. Chivalry and Chevauchée: The Ideal, the Real, and the Perfect in Medieval European Warfare. In Battle: A History of Combat and Culture, 73–110. New York: Basic Books. MacLean, Nancy. 1994. Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malory, Sir Thomas. 1985. The Birth Life and Acts of King Arthur of His Noble Knights of the Round Table Their Marvellous Enquests and Adventures the Achieving of the San Greal and in the End Le Morte Darthur with the Dolorous Death and Departing out of This World of Them All. [Dent, 1893.] Facsimile edition. Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: The Boydell Press. ———. 2004. Le Morte Darthur. Ed. Stephen H. A. Shepherd. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton. Mancoff, Debra N. 1990. The Arthurian Revival in Victorian Art. New York: Garland. ———., ed. 1992. The Arthurian Revival: Essays on Form, Tradition, and Transformation. New York: Garland. ———. 1995. The Return of King Arthur: The Legend through Victorian Eyes. New York: Abrams.

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———. 1996. Arthurian Revival. In The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, ed. Norris J. Lacy, 22. New York: Garland. Marcus, Leonard S. 2019. The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1992. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Bantam. Mathis, Andrew E. 2002. The King Arthur Myth in Modern American Literature. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Maynadier, Howard. 1907. The Arthur of the English Poets. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin. McKeon, Michael. 1987. The Origins of the English Novel, 1660–1740. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Morrison, Toni. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Moss, Robert F., ed. 2003. Raymond Chandler: A Literary Reference. New York: Carroll & Graf. Nerlich, Michael. 1987. Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100–1750. Volume 1. Trans. Ruth Crowley. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Orians, G.  Harrison. 1932. The Romance Ferment After Waverley. American Literature 111: 408–431. Painter, Nell Irvin. 2010. The History of White People. New York: W. W. Norton. Pavel, Thomas G. 2013. The Lives of the Novel: A History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pegg, Mark Gregory. 2008. A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pitz, Henry C. 1965. Howard Pyle: Writer, Illustrator, Founder of the Brandywine School. New York: Bramhall House. Pochoda, Elizabeth T. 1971. Arthurian Propaganda: Le Morte Darthur as an Historical Ideal of Life. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Pugh, Tison. 2013. Queer Chivalry: Medievalism and the Myth of White Masculinity in Southern Literature. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. Pyle, Howard. 1933. The Story of King Arthur and His Knights. [1903]. New York: Scribner’s Sons. Ragussis, Michael. 1993. Writing Nationalist History: England, the Conversion of the Jews, and Ivanhoe. ELH 60 (1): 181–215. Scott, Sir Walter. 1834. An Essay on Chivalry. First Published in the Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica. [1818]. In Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. 6: Chivalry, Romance, the Drama, 1–126. Edinburgh: Robert Cadell. archive. org/details/essaysonchivalr01scotgoog. ———. 2008. In Ivanhoe, ed. Ian Duncan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Sieber, Harry. 1985. The Romance of Chivalry in Spain: From Rodríguez de Montalvo to Cervantes. In Romance: Generic Transformation from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee, 203–219. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Sinfield, Alan. 2003. Introduction: Reproductions, Interventions. In Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, 2nd ed., 154–157. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press. Singleton, Adam, ed. 1900. The Chronicles of Sir John Froissart Condensed for Young Readers. New York: Appleton. Skenazy, Paul. 1982. The New Wild West: The Urban Mysteries of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Boise, ID: Boise State University Press. Slotkin, Richard. 1973. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Smith, Henry Nash. 1950. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Solomon, Robert C. 1993. The Bully Culture: Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Transcendental Pretense 1750–1850. Lanham, MD: Littlefield Adams. Stein, Robert M. 2006. Reality Fictions: Romance, History, and Governmental Authority, 1025–1180. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Strachey, Sir Edward, ed. 1868. Introduction. In Morte Darthur: Sir Thomas Malory’s Book of King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table, vii-­ xxxviii. London: Macmillan. Google Books, https://www.google.com/ books/edition/Morte_D_Arthur/zjvgivHGq1YC?hl=en&gbpv= Strickland, Matthew. 1996. War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066–1217. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Beverly, and Elisabeth Brewer. 1983. The Return of King Arthur: British and American Arthurian Literature Since 1800. Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: Boydell and Brewer. Tennyson, Alfred Lord. 2004. In Idylls of the King, ed. J.M. Gray. London: Penguin. Thomas, Henry. 1920. Spanish and Portuguese Romances of Chivalry: The Revival of the Romance of Chivalry in the Spanish Peninsula, and Its Extension and Influence Abroad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, E.P. 1981. The Peculiarities of the English. In The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, 245–302. London: Merlin Press. Twain, Mark. 1982. Life on the Mississippi. In Mississippi Writings: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Pudd’nhead Wilson, ed. Guy Cardwell, 217–616. New York: Library of America. ———. 2018. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Ed. Henry B. Wonham. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton. Williams, Tom. 2012. A Mysterious Something in the Light: Raymond Chandler: A Life. London: Aurum.

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Wollock, Jennifer G. 2011. Rethinking Courtly Love and Chivalry. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. 2001. The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1890s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ———. 2007. Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 3

The Long Goodbye: World War I, Romantic Nostalgia, and Chivalry’s Endless Death

Abstract  In this chapter I provide evidence that romance, as both genre and ideology, survived both World War I and the rise of competing modes like modernism and hardboiled. I investigate the commonplace that it didn’t survive these eruptions; survey the cultural field in which it did; and consider the narrative of “lost romance” and “the death of chivalry” as itself an expression of romantic nostalgia that whitewashes the history of warfare and the problematic past generally. I end by considering the new postwar iteration of the chivalric ideology. Keywords  World War I and the historiography of war • Popular Romanticism • Popular literature • Modernism • Arthurianism • Chivalric ideology The war changed all that. —Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory I guess somebody lost a dream. —Chandler, The Little Sister (final words spoken)

Here is the story as it is typically told. Romance lasted until World War I blew it apart. Art historian Debra N. Mancoff states that “World War I dealt the death blow to the last shreds of Victorian idealism and likewise © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. D. Rizzuto, Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88371-3_3

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to the Arthurian Revival” (1990, 22). Mark Girouard’s magnificent Return to Camelot ends with the claim that chivalry “never recovered from the Great War” (1981, 290–93), even though Girouard himself provides significant evidence to the contrary. Most notably, Paul Fussell provides the succinct summation given above in his elegant and now-standard work, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975, 91). In fact, I told the story that way myself, in the introduction to The Annotated Big Sleep, because it parsed more easily in a compressed space, and because it had the buttress of literary-critical consensus. It even bore the stamp of a lovely Virginia Woolf quote that was too perfect to pass up: “Shall we lay the blame on the war? When the guns fired in August of 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other’s eyes that romance was killed?” (qtd. in Chandler 2018, xix). But there are always multiple ways of telling a story, depending on what level of generality we tell it from, and how we choose to place our frame. In fact, our standard literary-critical periodization Romantic–Victorian– Modernist ignores the strong strain of popular Romanticism that persisted unbroken throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Before we can turn to Chandler’s reception of romance and chivalry, we must consider the question of their deaths at the hands of the Great War and its literary accomplice, modernism.

Anything but Romantic Chandler is not a “World War I writer” in the sense considered by Fussell.1 Chandler’s only writing from that period is an unfinished but powerful sketch containing the jarring image of light itself being “white and blind and diseased like a world gone leprous” (first published by MacShane 1976, 29). He later referred to the experience in a much-quoted letter: “Once you have had to lead a platoon into direct machine-gun fire, nothing is ever the same again” (1981, 455). 1  For a thorough and nuanced exploration of the ways in which Chandler actually could be considered a World War I writer, not in terms of explicit subject matter but in terms of the scars of trauma borne by his fiction, see  Sarah Trott’s War Noir (2016). Trott’s view of Marlowe as a WWI vet with PTSD (absorbing Chandler’s own experience) perceptively complicates the view of him as a knight (particularly at 92–3 and 99–101). Unfortunately, the Marlowe-as-knight meme keeps incongruously butting in (see esp. 108–09 for the classic refrain, which recurs throughout). She is strongest—indeed, she is now the authority—on Chandler in the war. For her compelling analysis of my subsequent two quotations from Chandler’s letters, see 8–10 and 58.

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As usual, Chandler chose his words carefully. Machine-gun fire takes direct aim at the chivalric ideal of honorable individual combat: impersonal and unopposable, it cuts down men en masse. A cavalry charge is suicide against entrenched machine guns. Prototypes had been used in nineteenth-century warfare (the Gatling gun, the Maxim), but the machine gun became standard in the Great War. It joined horrors like chemical weapons, newly devastating heavy artillery, and trench warfare— not to mention a sheer mass of combatants2—to assure the obsolescence of individual honor and personal prowess in combat. Fussell addresses the war’s psychological enormity, focusing on the way World War I changed the way of talking about warfare itself. Suddenly, according to Fussell, war seemed horrific and unheroic. He quotes Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms: “abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene” (Fussell 1975, 21). Nor was it just the members of the Allied Powers talking in this way. Austrian General Artur von Bolfras commented in September 1914, only one month into the war, “If war was once a chivalrous duel, it is now a dastardly slaughter” (qtd. in Herwig 2014, 96). The day after the Germans first used chlorine gas, at the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915, Third Army Commander Karl von Einem stated that “[w]ar has nothing to do with chivalry any more” (qtd. in Herwig 2014, 170). Alan Seeger, “the American Rupert Brooke,” seems to sum it up for both sides: “for the poor common soldier,” the war was “anything but romantic” (Seeger 2014, 66). These are moving testaments, but they depend upon a moonshiny “sense of the past”: the idea that war had in fact been “chivalrous” and “romantic” before World War I. In the last chapter, I argued that actual medieval warfare was predominantly neither, regardless of the shape and sheen bestowed by romancers and chroniclers like Froissart. In fact, the medieval chevauchée mobilized the kind of “total war” we associate with World War I.3 And what were the genocidal wars against indigenous American peoples from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries if not “total wars”? Half a century before the Great War, the American 2  One could go on: barbed wire; flamethrowers; tanks; submarines; zeppelins; aerial bombings; the concept of “total war” not limited to combatants. For a concise overview, see Ferro (2002), esp. ch. 10, “Cannon Fodder and the New Art of War.” 3  For “total war” in the Middle Ages, see Strickland (1996, esp. ch. 10), “War Against the Land: Ravaging and Attrition,” and ch. 11, “Total War? The Scots and the Routiers.” The phrase “total war,” coined in 1935 in the memoir of a German World War I general, was new; the phenomenon was not.

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Civil War also saw total war (Sherman’s March is just the most famous example), massive casualties of both combatants and civilians, and widespread terrorism and atrocities growing out of the bedrock terrorism and atrocity of slavery; it also saw the introduction of the prototype machine gun (the Gatling gun) and trench warfare.4 And yet, as late as 1945, in an article entitled “Southern Chivalry and Total War,” we find conservative scholar R. M. Weaver blaming the Union Army for “abjur[ing] the rules of chivalric combat” and thereby clearing the way for modernism and “the decay of civilization” (1945, 276, 278).5 The global conflagration known as the Wars of the Coalitions and then the Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815) also experienced what would later be termed “total war” that embroiled civilians and the countryside, saw new widespread use of artillery, conscripted unprecedented numbers of people, and witnessed a horrifically high casualty rate (Bell 2007). “A battle of this period was a fearsome spectacle,” wrote French historian Henri Lachouque. “No longer a contest of honor, as in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with its rules of elegance and its somber beauty, this was a struggle to the death, often without quarter, a veritable hell” (qtd. in Connelly 1987, 6). Lachouque’s description would fit right into the familiar World War I narrative, but it in fact depicts the world war of a century earlier. So chivalry was killed by World War I—or, following Southern apologists, by the Union Army—or, following Commandant Lachouque, by Napoleon—or, following Burke, by the revolutionaries of 1789. (See Chap. 2 for Burke). We could keep going back. In 1516, Ariosto sang its dirge, telling knights to hand in their swords because of the rise of guns and cannon: O hideous invention! By what means Did you gain access to the human heart? Because of you all glory’s fled long since; No honour now attaches to the art Of soldiering; all valour is pretence; ............................... 4  Trenches were in fact established European military technique. Military historian John Keegan (2009) makes some incisive comparisons between the trenches of the American Civil War and the Great War (132), and between the two wars more generally (43, 50, and 355–57). For Chandler and the trenches, see Trott (2016, 35–6, 50, and 87). 5  It is neither unexpected nor unique to find Weaver dubbing Robert E. Lee “the knight sans peur et sans reproche,” the oft-appropriated moniker of the Chevalier Bayard (1945, 276).

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Gone is all courage, chivalry is gone, In combat once the only paragon. (1973, 351; canto 11, stanza 26)

The same had been said of longbows and crossbows and pikes that ventilated the nobility’s armor during the Hundred Years War (1337–1453).6 As far back as the early thirteenth century, Jean Renart’s Roman de la Rose laid the blame for the demise of chivalry on siege machinery (2015, 20). For such a bellicose ideology, chivalry seems remarkably fragile. It is always dying: we will consider its death throes from another angle below.

The Dream Continues Meanwhile, reports of the deaths of both chivalry and romance were greatly exaggerated. This is the second problem with the “World War I changed all that” thesis. In fact, romance (as a viable literary genre and as a worldview) lived a full and lusty life in the wartime and postwar cultural imaginary. We may be less aware of this vibrant tradition today because most of it lived in a popular literature (sometimes composed by “high” literary authors, sometimes not) that we seldom value or read or even talk much about today.7 For example, the war heralded a boom in works of Arthuriana that lasted decades. Established if nowlittle-read authors tilled these fields: respected figures like American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (Merlin, 1917; Lancelot, 1920; Tristram, 1927—which won the Pulitzer Prize), British Symbolist Arthur Symons (Tristan and Iseut, 1917), and Poet Laureate John Masefield, who explored Arthurian themes from the 1920s through the 1940s. 1917 was a terrible year for the Western world—the United States entered a seemingly interminable war that was reaching new bloody heights—but it was a great year for Malory: Scribner reissued Lanier’s Victorian chestnut The Boy’s King Arthur with slick new 6  On the “Infantry Revolution” of the fourteenth century that changed attitudes to chivalry, see Rogers (1999, 141–44). White (2013, 139) estimates 3.5 to 5 million French people died as a result of the Hundred Years War—as much as a quarter of the total population—most of them, of course, non-combatant commoners. 7  As a related and fascinating point, scholar of the book Andrew Pettegree (2010) says that even in the wake of Don Quijote, chivalric romance escaped to street-level pamphlets and chapbooks (170); literary historian Henry Thomas concurs, adding the popular stage (1920, 179). Of course, such performances and ephemera tend not to live to tell their tales, skewing the record towards the “classics” that survive.

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illustrations by N. C. Wyeth; Macmillan countered with a new abridgement sporting striking artwork by Arthur Rackham; and Wellesley College Professor Vida D.  Scudder published the first scholarly monograph devoted to the medieval romancer. The next year, children’s book publishers Whitman Publishing Co. of Racine, Wisconsin, contributed the pulpy adventure The Boy Knight, Or, In the Court of King Arthur. Among the many reprintings and retellings of Malory proliferating at this time, Ann D. Alexander’s 1927 offering stands out for its lavishly illustrated attention to the often-ignored Women of the “Morte Darthur.” Meanwhile, poet Edna Saint-Vincent Millay dipped her toes into Arthurian waters with her elegant, wistful “Elaine” (1921), as did F. Scott Fitzgerald, with a story in 1922’s The Jazz Age entitled “O Russet Witch!” Deeper dives were taken by Thomas Hardy (The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall at Tintagel in Lyoness, 1923) and John Cowper Powys (A  Glastonbury Romance, 1932). Even future modernist master William Faulkner jumped in at the deep end in 1926, with a novella entitled Mayday that he illustrated, lettered, and bound himself.8 One important figure in the continuing trend was eminent Virginian James Branch Cabell, only peripherally an Arthurian author but notable in this context because he sustained his ultra-romantic pre-war career (Gallantry, 1907; Chivalry, 1909) with dreamy faux-medieval romances like The Music from Behind the Moon (1926). Dashiell Hammett has one of his characters spikily say that Cabell is “a romanticist in the same sense that the wooden horse was Trojan” (1989, 141). Herds of such horses rolled through the postwar imaginary. In fact, Arthurian scholar Raymond H. Thompson makes the point that Arthurian fiction “grew steadily after the first World War,” and notes that the 1920s in particular were “peak years for Arthurian drama” (1996, 136 and 140). But the subject also occupied scholars and critics. G. K. Chesterton valorized the tradition in a 1922 essay, “King Arthur: Myth and History.” Most famously, T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (also 1922) is an exploded modernist retelling of an Arthurian motif based in Jessie Weston’s serious grail study, From Ritual to Romance (1920). Such studies as Weston’s 8  See the thorough essay by medievalist Michael N. Salda, “William Faulkner’s Arthurian Tale: Mayday” (1994). Fascinatingly, John Steinbeck would later replicate this bibliophilic fastidiousness, traveling to London in search of vellum and a scribe that could reproduce fifteenth-century handwriting for the Dedication to his Maloryan The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (posthumously published in 1976). The impressive result can be conveniently viewed online as part of Pamela M. Yee’s online pamphlet for an exhibit at the University of Rochester’s Robbins Library (2013).

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abounded in the postwar period. Arthurian scholar Roger Sherman Loomis published his germinal Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance in 1927, the same year that eminent scholar Sir E. K. Chambers published Arthur of Britain. The following year—even as J. D. Bruce’s two-volume Evolution of Arthurian Romance appeared—Eugène Vinaver founded the Arthurian Society at Oxford; Vinaver’s own full-length study, Malory, appeared in 1929. And there is plenty more. Bottom line: consulting Ann F. Howey and Stephen R. Reimer’s monumental Bibliography of Modern Arthuriana (1500–2000)  (2006), one can readily confirm Thompson’s assertion: Arthurian publications of all sorts increased after the Great War—and as Arthur goes, so goes romance.9 Yet more strikingly, World War I writers themselves used traditionally romantic and even Arthurian themes to make sense of the war, pace both Fussell and Hemingway. British Lieutenant William Noel Hodgson wrote a tremendously moving poem two days before he was killed in action in 1916, calling on “the romantic ages stored / With high endeavor” to inspire him in battle—not before an enemy combatant mowed him down with machine-gun fire, as actually happened, but “Ere the sun swings his noonday sword” (1917, 178). The imagery is chivalric/knightly, and the diction is archaistic in precisely the way that Fussell argues was superseded by the war.10 American writer John Erskine (1922) (who would also contribute the eminently unreadable novel Galahad: Enough of His Life to 9  Howey and Reimer (2006) list a whopping fifty English-language Arthurian publications in the war years 1915 through 1919 inclusive. For comparison, I added up publications during equivalent five-year windows at the height of the Victorian Arthurian revival: 1865 through 1869 saw twenty publications; 1875–1879 saw but nine; and 1885–1889 picked back up with thirty-two—all significantly smaller hauls than during the Great War. In equivalent five-year windows after the war, 1925 through 1929 spiked with ninety-one publications, then 1935 through 1939 dropped back down to wartime levels with fifty-nine. (My count includes parodies and burlesques and significant reprints of previously published texts; it excludes radio programs, films, fine art, and graphic design.) To get a more comprehensive sense of the eras, I also counted publications in the twentyfive-year window preceding the decade of war—1885–1910—and the twenty-five-year window of World War I and after: 1915–1940. I counted 305 Arthurian items published in that pre-war window, and 411 items published in the wartime and postwar window. That’s a 25% increase in Arthurian production during and after the war. My study is hardly scientific, but I believe that it does provide a compelling general sense of the increased viability of Arthurian fantasizing in the face of wartime trauma and its wake. 10  Fussell skips the stanza in which Hodgson invokes romance by name, and overlooks the knightly sword imagery, when he discusses the poem in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975, 61).

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Explain His Reputation in 1926) likened soldiers in the Great War to Lancelot, Galahad, Tristram, and company in a sequence of sonnets entitled “At the Front.”11 Meanwhile, having first appeared in 1912, those “dreamy Keatsian and Tennysonian” Georgian Poetry anthologies marched steadily through World War I and out the other side. The third volume, which appeared at the height of the war in 1917, unabashedly begins with a perfectly dreamy poem entitled “Romance” by W. J. Turner. It ends with Herbert Asquith’s elegy “The Volunteer,” in which the soldier’s death is figured by the chivalric symbolism of a broken lance. The fallen man doesn’t need a stretcher, we will be glad to know, not because he’s been blown to bits on the battlefield, but because he “goes to join the men of Agincourt” (1918, 181). Among such memorials for the fallen, Maurice Baring’s Tennysonian “In Memoriam, A. H.” beckons for our consideration. It has a Royal Flying Corps Captain embarking on a “fatal quest” into the heavens (1918, 174), where he will meet Knights of the Table Round, And all the very brave, the very true, With chivalry crowned; ................................... Where Lancelot and Tristram vigil keep Over the King’s long sleep… (176)

and so forth. (Now that’s a big sleep!) So much for World War I killing romance. Let me cap this consideration with one final example. At the beginning of 1919, as peace terms were being hammered out, Cambridge anthropologist and folklorist Sir James George Frazer (he of The Golden Bough, a work of comparative mythology that fueled studies such as Weston’s) published a propaganda piece in The French Quarterly designed to bolster British–French relations (Frazer 1920). The great mythologist argued that there was one feature shared by the two disparate national identities that could unite them proudly under one ideological banner: chivalry. 11  This was not rare. The same figuration occurs in a poem by Mildred Huxley from 1916—Galahads laid in the graves of Flanders—included in a 1919 volume entitled Inscriptions Suggested for War Memorials (Girouard 1981, 305n20). For a consideration of the Great War as a “new Crusade with ‘knights’ on the front lines,” see Charles Brumm’s 1919 In Quest of the Holy Grail (Howey and Reimer 2006, 46).

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Isn’t It Pretty to Think So? So, to dip into pulp lingo: What gives? Why all the rhetoric of loss: of chivalry, of romance, even of innocence (to tap another trope in the historiography of World War I)? We are in fact at the core of the romantic ideology, which, when it becomes aware of itself, enunciates (in strains that can be contumacious or weepy) a discourse of loss. What is lost is always in a golden past, or more to the point, is the golden past itself: its values, its rituals, its plenitude.12 “It is the sorrow of Gatsby,” James Baldwin wrote with ferocious insight, “who searches for the green light, which continually recedes before him; and he never understands that the green light is there precisely in order to recede” (2010, 30). Similarly, World War I doesn’t kill chivalry; rather, one strain of discourse around the war enshrines chivalry as a romantic ideal so that it may be killed—chivalry is there, as Baldwin says of that famous green light, precisely in order to be killed. This, of course, does not kill romance at all, but rhetorically and performatively perpetuates it. In the lament for lost innocence (“Never such innocence again,” Larkin [1989, 128] movingly ends his famous poem “MCMXIV”—even the title is antique), in the sighs over its loss, romantic nostalgia replicates itself. We can see this dynamic perfectly illustrated in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), pivotal in our context as a postwar novel, as a realist/ modernist cri de coeur, and as a progenitor of the hardboiled form. As such, we might expect to find it entirely bare of romantic sensibility. We find something quite different. Jake Barnes’s war wound “unmans” him, leaving ironic (if not Byronic) detachment and profound, unanswerable longing. Hemingway’s original opening paragraph crystallized the sentiment, projected onto the female lead and onto the setting: This is a novel about a lady. Her name is Lady Ashley and when the story begins she is living in Paris and it is Spring. That should be a good setting for a romantic but highly moral story. As every one knows, Paris is a very romantic place. Spring in Paris is a very happy and romantic time. Autumn

12  For more on this as a constitutive feature of modern Romantic movements, see Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre’s aptly titled Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (2001), esp. ch. 1.

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in Paris, although very beautiful, might give a note of sadness or melancholy that we shall try to keep out of the story. (2014, 273)13

That’s three “romantics” in an ironically knowing dance around their inevitable undoing. (The following paragraph kills her first love off with a “very unromantic form of dysentery.”) F. Scott Fitzgerald, perhaps perceiving the author tipping his hand, convinced Hemingway to cut this opening, but the novel’s ending stayed: “Oh, Jake,” says Lady Brett from across what is represented as an unbridgeable chasm, “we could have had such a damned good time together.” Jake’s response: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” (198). Far from dispelling the romantic vision, this summons it, in loss: a quintessentially romantic move. Nor was this move new. To return to chivalry specifically: by the time Edmund Burke gives it the form in which we know it—“The age of chivalry is gone”—in 1791, that lament was in fact already several hundred years old. Three hundred years earlier, Malory’s printer William Caxton appended an epilogue to Ramón Lull’s Order of Chivalry (1484?), in which regretted that the code “in these late days has been … forgotten and ... not exercised as it had been in ancient time… O ye knights of England,” he swelled, “where is the custom and usage of noble chivalry that was used in those days?” (2010, 121–22; I have modernized the spelling). In his prologue to the Morte, Caxton again enjoined “all noble lords and gentlemen” to recall the former glory that reigned “in those days” (1956, 94; again I have modernized the spelling). In what days specifically, Caxton does not name. This ambient nostalgia might even explain the elegiac title that the printer gave to Malory’s work as a whole, which in manuscript form was eight possibly independent tales, with the “Death of Arthur” appropriately referring only to the final one.14 In fact, Malory himself expresses this dying croak, opposing the glorious customs that reigned “in those days” (a Project Gutenberg e-book search turns up sixteen such usages among its two parts) to the degenerate “nowadays” (six usages), even going so far as to deride the “new fangle” 13  The unpublished entire first chapter, along with Fitzgerald’s commentary, was published in the Spring of 1979 in the journal Antaeus, edited by Daniel Halpern. It was subsequently printed as an appendix in the Hemingway Library Edition of Sun. 14  The great Malory scholar Eugène Vinaver thought that they were independent stories, a still-controversial position. Malory’s own title was likely the more fitting The Whole Book of King Arthur and of His Noble Knights of the Round Table: see Stephen H. A. Shepherd’s concise overview in his Norton Critical Edition (Malory 2004, 1n).

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people of Arthur’s own day (1985, 959; bk. 21, ch. 1). But even by the fifteenth century, this rhetorical move is old: at the dawn of Arthurian romance in the twelfth century, Chrétien de Troyes subordinates the “now” of his composition to the exemplary better olden days wherein his tales unfold.15 This points to a key feature of chivalric romanticism: as Northrop Frye once succinctly put it, “its extraordinarily persistent nostalgia, its search for some kind of imaginative golden age in time or space” (1957, 186).16 Or, in Chandler’s evocative phrase, “a sense of the past” (1981, 11). This yearning calls forth some of the most misty-eyed phrases in both English and French: “yore,” “long ago,” “the olden days,” “jadis” (once/long ago; “le temps jadis” ≈ “once upon a time”), or in Villon’s inspired formulation, “antan” (with equal inspiration rendered as “yesteryear” by the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti). In Italian, Ariosto favors “d’antiqui,” while in Spanish Cervantes (1967) pointedly has Don Quijote lost in dreams of things “pasados” (pasados tiempos, pasados siglos, caballeros pasados). “The days that are no more,” sighs Tennyson (1961, 177). “This—all this—was in the olden / Time long ago,” sings Edgar Allan Poe (1984, 326). Never such innocence again. Isn’t it pretty to think so? This helps to contextualize the nostalgia that most critics have sensed in Chandler’s novels, from The Big Sleep to the big swoon, The Long Goodbye. Note the precisely nonspecific wording of Chandler’s gesture toward the past that serves as the epigraph to Chap. 2: he admires an “atmosphere,” a “sense,” which “Americans of past generations used to go to look for in Europe” (emphasis added)—even the quest for the past is set in the past. But the trope itself was very much alive. Consider: the year that Chandler voiced that sentiment, a blockbuster movie set new records at the box office and for Academy Award nominations and wins. It was based on a recent historical romance that “both captured and fueled Southern chivalric idealism,” in the words of one Southern scholar, “bringing triumph

15  Chrétien refers to the “siècle qui fu jadis” in the Prologue to Cligés (1994, 291), “a cel termine” in Le Chevalier de la Charrette (1994, 537), and simply “lors” in Le Chevalier au Lion (1994, 711), which modern French translators give as “le temps jadis” and “en ce tempslà,” and American translator David Staines gives as “in olden days” and “in those days” (1993, 87, 186, and 257). 16  For an insightful study of the use of this trope at the birth of romance, see Schwartz (1995). Nerlich thinks that such nostalgia originates in a downward turn in the social conditions of knighthood in the twelfth century (1987, 15; cf. 21 and 36).

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out of defeat as had the Chanson de Roland” (2014, 2).17 (Triumph for whom?) That novel, that movie, that trope: Gone With the Wind. In sum, there are key differences in the successive iterations of chivalro-­ romantic ideology: just as modern medievalism loosened the formal class component constitutive of its original medieval configuration, its postwar version evacuates it of its specifically imperialist content.18 What remains? An idealized masculinity: on the surface, claims to honor, courage; tacitly, assumptions of “Anglo”/white identity, and heterosexuality. The whole thing is infused with a big dose of the “good old days” topos: things sure used to be better for the chivalric, honorable knight. Readers of Chandler will undoubtedly recognize him in this rendering of the modern romantic assemblage. We can now see that the tradition of nostalgia for knights and chivalry that Chandler is inheriting and fashioning for his own purposes has a storied and complex history, in no unmediated way connected to the Middle Ages, nor to any actual knights living, dead, or even fictional. It owes as much to nineteenth- and early-­twentieth-­ century figurations as to Malory, and should rightly be considered a romantic nostalgia for “the days that are no more.” On the other hand, modernist and hardboiled writers alike eschewed the idealizing grand narratives and cultural nostalgia motivating the romantic ideological juggernaut. It is an improbable occurrence, then, when visions of romance reappear in the first novel of seasoned pulp writer Raymond Chandler. But they do not appear in the ways critics have so far identified.

References Ariosto, Ludovico. 1973. Orlando Furioso. Trans. Barbara Reynolds. Part One. London: Penguin. Asquith, Herbert. 1918. The Volunteer. In Georgian Poetry: 1916–1917, [1917], ed. Sir Edward Marsh, 181. London: Putnam’s Sons.

17  The scholar, Velma Bourgeois Richmond (2014), shares: “I was reared in the Deep South where myths of chivalry held sway long after the War Between the States.” This was written in 2014, mind you (1). 18  For more on what this looks like in a British context, see Praseeda Gopinath, Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities after Empire (2013). For an American version, or more precisely Anglo-American, we need look no farther than the critics who see Chandler salvaging chivalry via the lonely knight Philip Marlowe. I will offer a dissenting view in the next chapter.

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Baldwin, James. 2010 [1962]. As Much Truth As One Can Bear. In The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, ed. Randall Kenan, 28–34. New York: Pantheon. Baring, Maurice. 1918. In Memoriam, A.  H. In Georgian Poetry: 1916–1917, [1917], ed. Sir Edward Marsh, 171–77. London: Putnam’s Sons. Bell, David. 2007. The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Caxton, William. 1956. Kyng Arthur. In The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton, ed. W.J.B. Crotch, 92–95. London: Early English Text Society. ———. 2010. Epilogue to The Book of the Order of Chivalry by Ramón Lull, trans. William Caxton, ed. Alfred T. P. Byles, 121–22. New York: Routledge. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. 1967. El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Madrid, Spain: Espasa-Calpe, S. A. Chandler, Raymond. 1981. Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler. Ed. Frank MacShane. New York: Dell Publishing Co. ———. 2018. The Annotated Big Sleep. Edited and annotated by Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Dean Rizzuto. New York: Vintage. Chrétien de Troyes. 1993. The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Edited and translated by David Staines. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 1994. Romans. Ed. Michel Zink. Paris: Livre de Poche. Connelly, Owen. 1987. Blundering to Glory: Napoleon’s Military Campaigns. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books. Erskine, John. 1922. Collected Poems: 1907–1922. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Ferro, Marc. 2002. The Great War. Trans. Nicole Stone. New York: Routledge. Frazer, Sir James George. 1920. French and English Chivalry. In Sir Roger de Coverley and Other Literary Pieces, 278–289. London: Macmillan. Frye, Northrop. 1957. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fussell, Paul. 1975. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Girouard, Mark. 1981. The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gopinath, Praseeda. 2013. Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities after Empire. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Hammett, Dashiell. 1989. The Dain Curse. New York: Vintage. Hemingway, Ernest. 2014. The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway Library Edition. New York: Scribner. Herwig, Holger H. 2014. The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914–1918. 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury. Hodgson, W. N. 1917. Before Action. In A Treasury of War Poetry: British and American Poems of the World War, 1914–1917, ed. George Herbert Clarke, 178. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Google Books, https://www.google.com/

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book s /e dition / A _ Tr e a su r y_ o f _ Wa r_ P o e t r y / Sv x HAQAAM AAJ?h l=en&gbpv=1. Howey, Ann F., and Stephen R.  Reimer. 2006. A Bibliography of Modern Arthuriana (1500–2000). Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Keegan, John. 2009. The American Civil War: A Military History. New York: Knopf. Larkin, Philip. 1989. MCMXIV.  In Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite, 127–28. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Löwy, Michael, and Robert Sayre. 2001. Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. MacShane, Frank. 1976. The Life of Raymond Chandler. New York: Dutton. Malory, Sir Thomas. 1985. The Birth Life and Acts of King Arthur of His Noble Knights of the Round Table Their Marvellous Enquests and Adventures the Achieving of the San Greal and in the End Le Morte Darthur with the Dolorous Death and Departing out of This World of Them All. Dent, 1893. Facsimile Edition. Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: The Boydell Press. ———. 2004. Le Morte Darthur. Ed. Stephen H. A. Shepherd. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton. Mancoff, Debra N. 1990. The Arthurian Revival in Victorian Art. New York: Garland. Nerlich, Michael. 1987. Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100–1750. Volume 1. Trans. Ruth Crowley. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Pettegree, Andrew. 2010. The Book in the Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Poe, Edgar Allan. 1984. The Fall of the House of Usher. In Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn, 317–336. New York: Library of America. Renart, Jean. 2015. The Romance of the Rose or Guillaume de Dole. Trans. Patricia Terry and Nancy Vine Durling. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Richmond, Velma Bourgeois. 2014. Chivalric Stories as Children’s Literature: Edwardian Retellings in Words and Pictures. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Rogers, Clifford J. 1999. The Age of the Hundred Years War. In Medieval Warfare: A History, ed. Maurice Keen, 136–160. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Salda, Michael N. 1994. William Faulkner’s Arthurian Tale: Mayday. Arthuriana 4 (4): 348–375. Schwartz, Debora B. 1995. ‘Those Were the Days’: The Ubi Sunt Topos in La Vie de Saint Alexis, Yvain, and Le Bel Inconnu. The Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 49 (1): 27–51. Seeger, Alan. 2014. Western Front: Life in the Trenches, Autumn–Winter 1914. In A Brief History of the First World War: Eyewitness Accounts of the War to End All Wars, 1914–18, ed. Jon E. Lewis, 66–67. Revised Edition. London: Robinson.

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Strickland, Matthew. 1996. War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066–1217. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tennyson, Alfred Lord. 1961. Tears, Idle Tears. In English Lyric Poems, ed. C. Day Lewis, 177. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Thomas, Henry. 1920. Spanish and Portuguese Romances of Chivalry: The Revival of the Romance of Chivalry in the Spanish Peninsula, and Its Extension and Influence Abroad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, Raymond H. 1996. English, Arthurian Literature in (Modern). In The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, ed. Norris J. Lacy, 136–144. New York: Garland. Trott, Sarah. 2016. War Noir: Raymond Chandler and the Hard-Boiled Detective as Veteran in American Fiction. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Weaver, R.M. 1945. Southern Chivalry and Total War. The Sewanee Review 53 (2): 267–278. White, Matthew. 2013. Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest Episodes in Human History. New York: W.W. Norton. Yee, Pamela M. 2013. Eugène Vinaver’s Magnificent Malory: Exhibit Guide. The Camelot Project: A Robbins Library Digital Project. d.lib.rochester.edu/ camelot/text/yee-­eugene-­vinavers-­magnificent-­malory-­exhibit-­guide.

CHAPTER 4

Games with Knights: Philip Marlowe, Hardboiled Masculinity, and the Ungentle Negation of Romance

Abstract  This chapter explains how Philip Marlowe’s methodically elaborated hardboiled masculinity systematically and categorically rejects romance in its chivalric particulars, but ultimately leaves a patina of romance intact. First I consider the Marlowe-as-knight thesis, and proceed to look at the multiple ways in which the protagonist violates any putative knightly characterization. Most glaring is a pattern of violence against women, including sexual assault. I survey other violations of “the code,” including Marlowe’s fully written but often ignored libido, and his anti-­aristocratic class positioning. Despite this definitive denial, I conclude, resonances of the romantic ideology survive within Chandler’s work. These persist most dramatically in a recurring thematic of love, and also in an indelibly elegiac tone. Keywords  Raymond Chandler • Hardboiled fiction • Medieval and modern romance • Feminism • Rape culture • Toxic masculinity In an intentional novelistic hybrid, … the important activity is not only … the mixing of linguistic forms—the markers of two languages and styles—[but] the collision between differing points of views on the world that are embedded in these forms. —Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–1935)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. D. Rizzuto, Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88371-3_4

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You’ll laugh when I tell you what I write. Me, with my romantic and poetical instincts. I’m writing sensational detective fiction. —Chandler, 1933 letter

The form Chandler is referring to in this epigraph, of course, is what we call “hardboiled.” Many commentators have deemed it a distinctly American genre (e.g., J.  Thompson 1993, 72; Reynolds and Trembley 2001, 562)—if not “America’s only original literary genre,” as Esquire magazine has recently confidently dubbed it (Granger 2011). While the enchanted dreams of romance proliferated between the wars, hardboiled offered an opposing worldview, as Chandler’s contrast indicates (qtd. in Williams 2012, 114). Abiding at the other end of the literary spectrum from the “romantic and poetical” (at least prima facie), hardboiled was kin to other socially immersed genres like proletarian fiction, the protest novel, and modernism.1 It fixated on the material realities of the Roaring Twenties and the ensuing Depression: explosions of crime and criminality, systemic political and economic corruption, social disenfranchisement and insecurity, shifting gender images and hostile reaction to those shifts.2 In a nutshell, hardboiled is the anti-romance: ideals, if they exist at all, get  There are oodles of definitions and overviews of hardboiled: my favorite for brevity, comprehensiveness, and panache is Megan E. Abbott’s in The Street Was Mine (2002, 10–19). James Baldwin (1998) insightfully links hardboiled with the protest novel in his 1949 essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” For an illuminating overview of the surprising conjugation between modernism and the pulps, see David M.  Earle, Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form (2016). For the imbrication of realism, modernism, and hardboiled, see Thompson 1993. And for a wonderful schematic of all of this intergeneric classification, go back to Abbott (2002, 201). 2  For excellent sociohistorical studies of the hardboiled genre in Chandler’s time, see Smith (2000) and McCann (2000). For strategies of Chandlerian realism, see Jameson (2016). Of course, literary genres are fluid and heterogeneous rather than fixed and homogeneous. However, literary markets and movements (or in the case of pre-Gutenberg romance, patronage and audience) tend to encourage replication of recognizable patterns and features. Chandler was writing in the heyday of pulp magazines explicitly codified by genre (detective, adventure, western, love, etc.) That said, there are always artists and texts that challenge and transgress the boundaries: I will return to this in the Conclusion. For some definitions and problematizations of hardboiled even in Chandler’s time, see Macdonald (1971), Bruccoli (2002, 248–9), and Bruccoli and Layman (2002, ix). And for interrogation of the genre of medieval romance, and indeed a theory of how genres are constituted generally, see the classic essay by Jauss (1982). 1

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blurry; good guys get dirty; the damsels in distress are deadly. Novelist and incisive critic Walter Mosley says it best: the genre mobilizes “elegant and concise language … to describe an ugly and possibly irredeemable world,” and it does so “the way a bright and shiny stainless-steel garbage can houses maggots and rats” (2009, 599). This is all that Raymond Chandler’s short stories throughout the 1930s are or aspire to be.3 But Chandler does something extraordinary in his first novel. He taps his “romantic and poetical instincts”—which we now can understand in their full context—and brings them into dialogue with the hardboiled form that he had made his own by 1939. In Bakhtin’s fecund terms, given above, these are not only two different styles, but two contrasting and even antithetical world views colliding with each other (1981, 360). This engagement is even more remarkable when we consider that Chandler was rewriting his earlier, generically more uniform stories into The Big Sleep.4 In Fredric Jameson’s apt terminology, he is taking the “already formed cultural and ideological artifacts” of one form—Victorianized romance, laced with aristocratic allure—and, testing or proofing these against the “already formed cultural and ideological artifacts” of the other form: the proletarian yawp of hardboiled (2016, 15). The stakes of this literary game are heavy, but the game is deft—so deft, it appears, that its upshot has consistently eluded commentators. To see how Chandler plays his game, let’s start by considering TBS as many readers have seen it: as an encoded romance.

3  Of course, exceptions can be found, the most notable of which (to my mind) is “Pearls Are a Nuisance,” from Chandler’s annus mirabilis of 1939. This romp burlesques the contours of hardboiled masculinity, and might quite instructively be read alongside TBS as the novel’s impish doppelgänger (Chandler 2002b). 4  The Annotated Big Sleep (hereafter TABS) provides excerpts from the stories in which many scenes rewritten for The Big Sleep (hereafter TBS) originally appeared. The generic and stylistic differences are remarkable. Part of this may of course be explained by the fact that Chandler was deliberately “raising” the literary level from a pulp to a hardcover market, from Black Mask to Knopf. That said, Knopf also published more straight-hardboiled authors like James M. Cain and works like Hammett’s Red Harvest, so the intergeneric game Chandler enacts cannot entirely be explained by the publishing transposition.

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The Big Morte In Chap. 1 of this book, I surveyed some of the innumerable voices that see Marlowe as a knight out of Malory. I quoted novelist and current Marlowe resurrectionist Lawrence Osborne’s version of this assessment: the full statement is that our estimable protagonist represents “a thinly disguised version of the hero knight of Sir Thomas Malory’s ‘Le Morte Darthur’” (2018). As Malory himself might say, that is overmuch said. Still, Osborne articulates a widespread view: he tilts at this windmill on behalf of a legion of likeminded exegetes. So let’s grant the donné and, for heuristic purposes, follow this line of investigation to see how much of it works. Can we read TBS as a sly, crypto-Morte? The first thing under our noses certainly suggests an affinity: invocations of death in both titles. There is also the history of Marlowe’s name, once upon a time “Mallory.”5 The private investigator goes to work for an aristo-encoded patriarch (General Guy de Brisay Sternwood), and the detective’s extreme loyalty strikes many commentators as a version of the medieval vassal’s duty to his seigneur. Meanwhile, Sternwood resembles the King himself, who for much of the Morte and the Arthurian corpus at large remains in the background as an aging patriarchal figurehead. Heavy fatalism overhangs the Sternwood mansion as well as the foredoomed Camelot. There are other key resonances, especially in the portrayal of the two central female characters. The femme fatale, equally at home in Arthurian romance as in hardboiled, is an inverted damsel in distress: alluring, manipulative, deadly.6 In the Morte, beautiful women sometimes turn out to be devils—literally. Carmen fits the archetypal bill: she is daemonic, possessed by some sort of exaggerated psycho-physiological disorder, in addition to being straightforwardly seductive and violent. Vivian, who shares the name of a Lady of the Lake (“Nimue” in Malory but “Vivien” in Tennyson, where she has become “wily” [2004, 142]), like her sister tries to seduce Marlowe throughout the novel. Marlowe resists both temptations, although like the hero of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 5  Chandler’s writing reverberates with such shout-outs: for a survey of Chandler’s Arthurian echoes, see Andrew E. Mathis’s chapter on Chandler in his The King Arthur Myth in Modern American Literature (2002). 6  See Ferrante (1975) for medieval literature; Dijkstra (1986 and 1996) for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and Doane (1991) for a powerful psychoanalytic, film-based feminist theory of the trope and its cinematic institutionalization.

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he does engage in a kiss. The detective’s resistance to sexual lures appears to many critics to evoke the knightly code of chastity. Undoubtedly most important for this reading—probably its trigger, along with Dr. Carl Moss’s sardonic “shop-soiled Galahad” remark in The High Window (Chandler 1992b, 209)—is the figure of the knight that haunts TBS. He appears in the stained glass of the Sternwood entryway, in the game of chess that Marlowe plays with himself, and even, a bit encoded, in the euphemism “horseman” (the literal translation of chevalier). The latter invocation occurs when Marlowe reflects that Eddie Mars has “the hardness of the well-weathered horseman”; later, Mars “still look[s] like a horseman” in his stately gambling palace in Las Olindas, with his manicured nails, monogrammed cigarettes, sheer lawn handkerchiefs, and jaunty aristocratic airs (Chandler 2018, 164 and 278). “Horseman” jars oddly with its context unless we consider its chivalro-romantic provenance: see the derivation of the term “chivalry” given in Chap. 2, and recall Frye’s pointed definition of romance as the encomiastic form particular to a militaristic “horse-riding aristocracy” (1976, 57). (Horsemen will gallop back into our discussion below.) Mars invokes battle in his very name, while flaunting his status, wealth, and reputation: shout-outs to the medieval knight that we surveyed in Chap. 2. The striking point here is that to Marlowe, Mars is the one exuding a knightly effect—and affect. But what about that other, more straightforward symbolism? Let’s look closer.

The Ill-Made Knight 1: Sex and Violence When Marlowe first enters the Sternwood mansion, one of the first things he notices is a knight in stained glass. In his internal commentary, the detective thinks: “I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying” (Chandler 2018, 10). Much of the commentary has fallen down a rabbit hole in pursuit of the detective’s supposed identification with the knight. But as with the “clue” of Dr. Carl Moss’s oft-­ quoted sobriquet, this reading ignores the sarcasm slathered upon it. It also misses the forest for a tree. The forest—the whole mise en scène—is this: that knight is part of an extravagant piece of faux-medieval art adorning the enormous entryway of a sprawling mansion redolent of decadence and corruption. If this is a Keatsian ut pictura poesis, the effect aims in exactly the opposite direction: rather than calling the speaker into its

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tableau, as Keats falls into his Grecian urn, it draws class lines and makes social distinctions that place Marlowe definitively on the outside of his surroundings. Those surroundings scream economic, cultural, and even nationalistic capital: palatial architecture, dilapidated cavalry pennants, an officer’s portrait “of about the time of the Mexican war”—directly invoking the victors and spoils of the imperial American past (12). Marlowe dismissively shrugs at “another piece of stained glass romance” on display among the stately, patrician trappings (12). It is key to the character of our protagonist that he has no part of the equity embedded in this exclusive chivalric iconography.7 His sarcastic commentary is akin to what he says in the next novel, Farewell, My Lovely, about the sculpture displayed by his dandy employer Lindsey Marriott, who brags, “I picked it up just the other day. Asta Dial’s Spirit of Dawn.” Marlowe counters, “I thought it was Klopstock’s Two Warts on a Fanny” (1992a, 49–50). In the following novel, The High Window, while being kept waiting for admittance to the manor of another wealthy client, he ironically imputes life to a racist lawn sculpture in the same way as he does to the stained-glass knight: “He looked a little sad, as if he had been waiting there a long time and was getting discouraged” (1992b, 4). And in the second paragraph of The Lady in the Lake (1992c), Marlowe enumerates all of the fancy (his word) rugs and sculptures and platinum and gold that greet him as he enters the lobby of his client, Derace Kingsley. (Ponder the chivalric significance of that name!) These repetitions alert us to the functioning of a trope: Marlowe is summoned by wealth and status—by gentility, we might say—and issues streams of Veblenesque wisecracks in its face. In fact, to confirm this, we needn’t look further than the immediate context in TBS, where Marlowe continues the critique of both the habits and the habitus of the “obviously prosperous” (Chandler 1988b, 37) in rapidly succeeding chapters: cloying orchids in a decadently dripping private greenhouse, then Vivian’s too-everything chamber in the next chapter and the “oriental junk” (2018, 60) in the windows of Geiger’s bookshop at the beginning of the next, followed soon after by Geiger’s luscious décor and later by Eddie Mars’s genteel trappings. It’s rather out of keeping with context and character to assume that Marlowe is somehow uniquely 7  This is especially driven home if one reads (as I do) Marlowe’s comment as intended to be racy—a heteronormative wink and nudge to the reader that the lady’s nakedness would motivate him more than it seems to be motivating the presumably chaste knight. I will return to this below.

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i­nterpellated by the stained-glass knight, amid his systematic critique of such conspicuous opulence. Rather, the knight in stained glass is a great white whale of a symbol of everything that Marlowe is not—and it’s there to allow our narrator to articulate that difference.8 Marlowe repeats his move away from the knight in the chess scene, another bit of chivalric iconography that commentators leap upon only to land in the wrong square. It’s rather straightforward in the novel: he moves the knight, and then he moves it back. He tells us: “Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights” (2018, 322). This disavowal might be regretful; it might be wistful; it might gesture mournfully to a lost past. Or it might be a clear-eyed, gritted-teeth assessment. Its tone (or accent, as Bakhtin might say) rather depends on the reader. But one thing that is not open to interpretation is that it is a disavowal. Critics seem not to want to register this surface meaning. Thus Durham: “The irony of the contemplation was, of course, that from the beginning of the novel until its conclusion it was a story being played by a knight” (1963, 92). Or Rzepka: “Chandler’s ‘true’ knights still play as best they can” (2000, 713; 2005, 212). Or Fontana: “Yet though Marlowe recognizes this [that it isn’t a game for knights], he continues to play his game of knighthood; it is the only one he knows and there is no other game in sight” (1984, 181). But there are indeed other games that Marlowe—and Chandler—might be playing. In fact, Marlowe not only tells us that he’s playing another game, he shows us, when he subsequently threatens to throw Carmen into the hallway naked. “By force,” he asserts, underlining his physical superiority (2018, 326). It would be hard to be less chivalric than this. Good knights do not, as a rule, threaten violence against (high-born) women. Could this be strategic, as, say, when Chrétien’s Erec threatens his wife Enide, though he doesn’t mean it (1993, 48)? Perhaps it’s Marlowe’s way of getting Carmen to dress and leave so that he may remain true to his vows of chastity like a good knight? Would that it were. I said it would be hard to be less chivalric than threatening violence against a woman, but Marlowe had already 8  Tellingly, in place of the stained glass, the original version of the mansion’s hallway in “The Curtain” (1936) sports “several suits of time-darkened armor” (2002a, 531), an echo out of the first chapter of Don Quijote. Of course, this aligns the General and not the detective with the hidalgo that time forgot: an interpretation supported by the fact that the General is the only one said to actually ride a horse in the novel. Significantly, he was crippled in a steeplechase—not a propitious bit of symbolism for a proxy knight!

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accomplished it when he found Carmen at Geiger’s: “I slapped her face. … I slapped her again. … I slapped her around a little more. She didn’t mind the slaps” (2018, 96 and 98). Marlowe’s excuse for this abhorrent display of hardboiled masculinity is that Carmen is drugged. The next time he sees her, she is (presumably) sober, but becomes “hysterical,” so our putative knight not only strikes her again, he issues this commentary: “Probably all her boy friends got around to slapping her sooner or later. I could understand how they might” (158). Three chapters later, he “cracks” Agnes on the head in a scuffle twice (196 and 198). Violence against women is unquestionably part of the hardboiled milieu (as, lamentably and criminally, it is part of the culture at large).9 And, as established in Chap. 2 of this work, aggression against women is also embedded in the romance genre, both as a narratological structuring element and as a fantasy which, while expressly forbidden, is extensively indulged in in its depiction. However, it is important to clarify that violence against women carries opposite valences in the two genres. In chivalric romance, transgressing the prohibition against assaulting a woman becomes part of the encoding of bad or “false” knights: it is not “textually sanctioned,” in Megan Abbott’s apt phrase (2002, 179). At the dawn of Arthurian romance, Chrétien’s Erec establishes that “[i]t is disgraceful to strike a woman” (1993, 14); dastardly characters do strike women and suffer retribution, from the villains in Erec and Enide onward. If an otherwise true knight commits such an act, it becomes a catastrophic plot event so deleterious that it stains the knight’s character and often is inexpiable. As I mentioned earlier, Malory’s Gawaine and Balin are punished for hideous acts of violence against women: the acts are meant to be hideous. A few decades after Malory submits that women should not be “enforced,” Ariosto will add that they shouldn’t be assaulted either: Not only a great wrong, but in God’s sight An outrage against Nature he commits Who … in her face a lovely woman hits, Or harms a hair upon her head. (1973, 197; canto 5)

9

 TABS provides some discussion, the tip of an iceberg, at Chandler (2018, 99n15).

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Marlowe commits both of these “outrages against Nature” to the letter, and I doubt that there has ever been a reader who has thought that Chandler presents this as any kind of failing. To the contrary, slapping Carmen “around”—note that important preposition—shows what a “man” Marlowe is according to the hardboiled fantasy of American masculinity. This alone disqualifies him from consideration as a chivalric hero. But perhaps this expression of violent American “manliness” is simply a function of the genre itself. After all, Marlowe lives in a “tough masculine world,” as Keen says regarding the medieval “matter of France” (1984, 103), and it is no less true in the matter of Los Angeles. We should not forget that the genre once bore the blazon “tough-guy fiction.” The meme Marlowe certainly blends in with his violent surroundings, brandishing a gun in almost every visual representation of him, from paperback covers to film posters. However, if we look closely, we will find another swerve here. Despite the “heaters” and “gats” and “rods” festooning the hardboiled universe, Marlowe himself usually does not carry a gun. Indeed, throughout the novels, the detective’s relation to firearms is consistently downplayed: the narratological and semiotic power of the gun almost always lies in the hands of others. Imagine the knight that declined to ride with a lance or sword! Or even another hardboiled detective without a gun. Marlowe takes it a step further: in TBS in particular, the licensed detective issues a running critique of the gun-wielding mentality: “Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains” (2018, 182). Marlowe’s comment could be a reading of the genre wholesale.10 Indeed, it seems to be a principle of our protagonist to avoid violence—with men. Facing the armed grifter Joe Brody and the “loogan” Lanny, Marlowe calmly and cleverly confiscates their guns; later, facing the novel’s true heavy, Lash Canino, our hero inexplicably fails to act decisively when he has the upper hand. The exception, of course, is with the female-encoded Carol, where Marlowe seems torn: he takes an avuncular tone with the gay youth, but he also engages in violence that bristles with both homoeroticism and

10  As a reminder, some titles: “Three Gun Terry” (Daly), “Gundown” (Cain), “One Shot” (Booth), “Ten Carats of Lead” (Sterling), and so forth. For commentary, see TABS (Chandler 2018) 173n18, 299n1, and 381n38. Pamela Haag’s The Gunning of America (2016) historicizes gun culture in the United States, and makes the point that there was a widespread backlash against gun manufacturers during the twenties and thirties (see ch. 20). Of all the hardboiled works of the period, TBS may be the only one that registers this backlash.

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sadism.11 As the novel goes on, Chandler writes Marlowe affectively registering the violence unfolding around him in a way that verges on hysteria, threatening to effeminize our hyper-masculinized leading man.12 All of this is particularly surprising in a genre where violence is not only accepted, it is expected—in hardboiled no less than romance. So Marlowe inverts the accepted chivalric order of violence: he shuns aggression among other (straight) men—which violates even the hardboiled code of violence—and employs it unhesitatingly against women. This is no minor point. As Geraldine Heng has succinctly said, “gender acts as the special vocabulary of medieval romance” (2003, 43); recent brilliant commentaries such as those by Erin A.  Smith (2000), Sean McCann (2000), Gill Plain (2001), Megan E. Abbott (2002), Christopher Breu (2005), and Leonard Cassuto (2008) profusely illustrate the unmistakable fact that gender is also the “special vocabulary” of hardboiled. Chandler employs a tricky and unexpected form of the hardboiled vocabulary of gender, the complexities of which we will further explore below. But no matter how hard we squint to read it as if it were, it is manifestly not a usage found in romance. Allow me to anticipate a response from the strictest adherent to the Marlowe-as-knight thesis. Perhaps it could be argued, in accordance with the Big Morte reading, that Carmen represents a monstrous femme fatale and Agnes represents a non-noble criminal, and so according to the strictures of medieval romance, violence against them would be warranted. In this view, the misogyny might be deplorable, but it is generically conventional. But there is in fact another category of violence against women in the Marlowe novels that is glaringly present, if generally unregistered, and which complements the slaps and blows. Chandler writes Marlowe regularly forcing kisses on women. This occurs in TBS, which I shall consider below. It—or something creepily like it that results in a kiss—occurs again in The Little Sister, when the hefty P.I. physically dominates the delicate Orfamay Quest (yes, “Quest”), flicking her glasses off and forcing his body against hers. “I’ve been pushed harder by a kitten,” he comments when she resists (1988a, 40–1). None 11  See TABS (Chandler 2018, 214–227) for the full scene and commentary. This too is an established trope in Chandler: Marlowe’s manliness contrasts with effeminate characters with androgynous names like “Carol” (TBS), “Lindsey” (Farewell, My Lovely), and “Leslie” (The High Window). 12  See commentary in TABS (Chandler 2018) 363n28, 373n16, and 405n9; also see Abbott (2002, ch. 2), which inspired the commentary in TABS.

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have dared call it assault, and why not? Marlowe himself isn’t shy about it. Later, he tells Quest, “I ought to slap your face off. … And quit acting innocent. Or it mightn’t be your face I’d slap” (94). In the company of another woman in the same novel, he jokes, “I don’t have any idea of raping anybody. … But I’m sure as hell working up to it” (71). The forced kissing happens again in The Long Goodbye with Linda Loring, after which our leading man spits, “That kiss won’t leave a scar. You just think it will” (1992d, 150–51). And in Playback: “I grabbed hold of her. She tried to fight me off, but no fingernails” (1988b, 124). This panoply of sexualized masculinist aggression is unforgivable in any context, and that includes— by definition—the romantico-chivalric one.13 Perhaps we should recall in full this tenet of Malory’s code: “always to do ladies, damosels, and gentlewomen succour, and never to enforce them, upon pain of death” (Malory 2004, 77). Playback adds this bit of brutality: “What a big strong unbeatable man you are,” she said bitterly. … “Do I take my clothes off now?” I went over and jerked her to her feet and shook her. “Stop your nonsense, Betty. When I want your beautiful white body, it won’t be while you’re my client.” (144)

Sex ensues. It’s easy to say that odious writing like this is why people tend not to read Playback, but in fact it’s not particular to that novel. The above scene, for instance, echoes an exchange in The Little Sister: “I took hold of her arm and yanked her to her feet. Her head went back” (1988a, 95). My 13  It is true that such aggression is written into what Kathryn Gravdal calls “the medieval romance of sexual violence,” as we saw in Chap. 2. But in romance, as Gravdal shows, “literal violence” gets “systematically erased, elided, displaced” in a dance of decorous indirection (1992, 570, 569). There is no such evasion in Chandler, or in hardboiled at large: the domination is both blatant and celebrated. Let us not let romance off the hook too hastily, however. Gravdal’s work authoritatively shows that medieval romance fosters what we would now call “rape culture,” which includes the legal right to claim a woman’s body if one knight defeats another in an individual combat over her possession (1992, 582; see also Kaeuper 2000, 31). This submerges sexual violence into a chivalro-legalistic apparatus that negates and subsumes female volition—which recapitulates in fantasy rules that actually obtained in reality, as Gravdal shows. Repellent as this is, I am arguing that it is qualitatively different from openly exulting in the representation of “literal violence” committed against women by unquestioned heroes—some of whose heroic glow in fact derives from the mastery displayed by such ostensibly admirable acts of violence against women.

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two points about this are simply: (1) We are clearly meant to admire this eroticized display of “manly” domination; and (2) This brutal masculinism is thoroughly baked into the hardboiled clay of Marlowe’s character. Somehow the chivalric cheerleaders miss this. This is a vital point, so allow me to illustrate it by way of a telling comparison to the film script of Playback, which preceded the novel version by about a decade. In the film script, the detective character (named Killaine) does not behave in the manner described in the preceding paragraph. Killaine is called both a “gentleman” (1985, 28 and 129) and “Galahad” (86 and 112), and pointedly does not violate that literary-cultural typology. Chandler dropped both epithets when revising Killaine into Marlowe, and added the sexual assault noted above. Chandler is clearly playing a game of generic masculine typology in which Marlowe represents a hardboiled chess piece, not a romantico-chivalric one. He is a “hardboiled dick,” not a “chivalric knight.” This goes some way toward dispelling the nimbus of Marlowe’s vaunted chastity, or even “celibacy” (Durham 1963, 81; Porter 1981, 185). Knights are supposed to be chaste in principle, refusing “paramours … for dread of God” (Malory 1985, 201; bk. 6, ch. 10). Galahad achieves the Grail because, among other purities, he is a virgin. Marlowe’s putative “chastity” in TBS just isn’t: it’s a professional obligation and a resistance to being played as a pawn. He passionately kisses Vivian and repeats that he “liked” it, and he unilaterally initiates it with Mona. Regarding kissing Vivian (see Chandler 2018, 312–16): the lines that get mass-quoted, in which the detective proclaims his professionalism—“I told you I was a detective. Get it through your lovely head. I work at it, lady. I don’t play at it”—come right after the kissing, as if that strident declaration somehow doubles as an assertion of abstemiousness. In fact the scene gets downright steamy right before that point, and Marlowe is entirely complicit in its staging: “I brought her face slowly up to my face. … I kissed her tightly and quickly. Then a long slow clinging kiss. Her lips opened under mine. Her body began to shake in my arms.” If this is supposed to be a chastity test, Marlowe sure goes out of his way to make it hard on himself! I will go into detail about the scene with Mona below. In the next novel, the detective consensually kisses Helen Grayle (yes, “Grayle”), and later in the Marlowe Cycle, our leading man outright has sex with three women: Linda Loring in The Long Goodbye, and Betty Mayfield and Helen Vermilyea in Playback. When these sexual encounters are registered in the commentary (which, as with the forced kisses, is seldom), critics have tended to

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think that Chandler himself somehow goofed up, violating the iron law of chastity.14 Thus Durham: “The episode [in The Long Goodbye] … was a violation of the previously adhered to code” (1963, 104). Indeed. But the “violation” is not a bug, it’s a feature. The lure that draws the chivalrous troop away from seeing this is a notion of “the code” as some shining ideal that Chandler is trying (and thus is capable of failing) to live up to. The actual code on display would more illuminatingly—and fittingly—be considered a sequence of typological DNA that constitutes “hardboiled American masculinity” built into the character of Philip Marlowe. The misrecognition of our hero’s “chastity” obliges us to overlook a manifest pattern of Chandlerian sexual suggestiveness. I have already noted one example that goes resoundingly unremarked in what is probably the most remarked-upon scene in all of Chandler: the racy overtone of Marlowe’s sardonic comment that he would get to that naked lady in stained glass quicker than the knight (see footnote 7, above). It’s really not complicated: she’s naked, the knight is frozen, and the detective—as Carmen is about to drive home for us—is a strapping, good-looking male. Nudge nudge. Perhaps critics have thought it beneath them to notice this implication, or perhaps they have thought it beneath Chandler to include it. But it is far from out of keeping with the many sexual and sensual episodes in the Marlowe novels, TBS not excepted. Gill Plain accurately states what so often goes unobserved when she notes that “Marlowe’s world is redolent with the erotic” (2001, 61). Consensual romance is also strongly implied toward the end of Farewell, My Lovely. The story establishes Anne Riordan as “Marlowe’s Girl Friday,” in Megan Abbott’s phrase—a perfect description because the interplay between the two characters is tinged with the kind of banter one might expect to find in a screwball comedy like Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday (2002, 82 and several occasions following; also see Abbott 2018).15 In Farewell’s denouement, Riordan throws herself at Marlowe: “You’re so marvelous. … So brave, so determined. … What makes you so ­wonderful?” 14  Other critics note that the liaisons occur off-screen, symptomatic of Chandler’s aversion to the depiction of healthy female sexuality. Perhaps. But that does not negate the unambiguous sexualization of the protagonist. 15  This banter can be found in TBS too: see in particular the scene in the Las Olindas parking lot with Vivian (2018, 302–304). These are great examples of Chandler’s whimsical streak, which also goes virtually unnoticed in the reception. The two aren’t unrelated: in order to register some of Chandler’s suggestiveness, we have to be able to register his wry humor.

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(1992a, 288). Unlike with Vivian, or with Mavis Weld in The Little Sister (1988a, 74), the detective is not on the clock here: the case is concluded, drinks are in hand, the banter is brisk, and Marlowe proposes that they “go riding along the water” (287). (Along the water is also where Marlowe enjoyed kissing Vivian in TBS [2018, 312]). The scene ends with Anne exasperatedly demanding of our leading man, who hasn’t taken the hint, “I’d like to be kissed, damn you!” The chapter ends there, and the next chapter—the novel’s last—jumps forward in time. The effect screams dot dot dot—an elliptical enjambment that prompts the alert reader to fill in the blanks. If this seems like a reach, we needn’t reach too far: sexual suggestiveness was a firmly established cultural idiom at the time. Movies of the period brimmed with such winking sexual signification. Think of the great Ernst Lubitsch film Trouble in Paradise (1932), where a kiss leads to a “do not disturb” sign being hung on the doorknob. That’s just one example of many; the Hays Code, introduced in 1930 and strictly enforced beginning in 1934, spawned an erotic semiotic of hints and allusion that became its own species of storytelling game.16 Chandler had affiliations with two masters of the trade: Howard Hawks and Billy Wilder. It’s even in Hawks’s filmed version of TBS—what exactly happens in that bookstore across from Geiger’s? Of course, the allusiveness also accords with the understated stylistics Chandler adhered to, following Hemingway’s famous “iceberg theory” of saying things without directly stating them (see TABS [Chandler 2018] 43n36 for commentary about this). Unless I have missed it, nobody has ever registered the manifest suggestiveness here—that we are meant to read that Marlowe gives Riordan her kiss. And even … And why shouldn’t we fill in the blanks? Chastity for dread of god, was it?17 Even the talismanic “shop-soiled Galahad” comment demands reconsideration. Dr. Carl Moss delivers the line in reference to Marlowe’s treatment of the fragile Merle Davis, with whom, as with most of the female characters throughout the novels, the detective maintains a steady 16  Joseph McBride’s book on Lubitsch is wonderful on this. He quotes James Harvey’s Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges to make the point that “‘Like nearly all the working filmmakers in the Hollywood of the time, he played the game,’ but Lubitsch was special because he ‘made movies about playing the game’” (2018, 4; Hays Code on 25). I am indebted to my TABS collaborator Owen Hill for this reference. 17  Besides Megan Abbott, Fredric Jameson is the only critic I’ve come across who even comes close to connecting the dots, calling the Marlowe-Riordan relationship an “unresolved episode” which “introduces the possibility of a partnership-romance” (2016, 82).

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flirtation (1992b, 22–3, 170, 171, 199, 256; it all ends with a kiss “on the mouth” at 262). Davis is now at Marlowe’s apartment and has just had something like a nervous breakdown. Marlowe tells Dr. Moss to call a female nurse to care for the mentally hurting young woman. It strikes me as odd to read this as symbolizing chivalrousness rather than manifesting professionalism and decency, as I said at the beginning of Chap. 2 regarding the P.I.’s treatment of the naked and drugged Carmen in TBS. So what spurs Moss’s notorious “Galahad” quip? Well, the doctor has just said that he’s going to give Miss Davis a sedative. “[W]e’ll put her to bed,” he says. (It is Marlowe’s bed, remember.) “And you can walk the floor wrestling with your conscience” (208–09). Maybe this comment is intended to signify the Jewish Carl Moss’s lecherousness (a standard anti-­ Semitic stereotype: there are others in the same novel); maybe it is intended to remind the reader of Marlowe’s formidable virility (which is just as thoroughly belabored in The High Window as it is in the rest of the novels); or maybe it’s just what passed for humor in 1942. Most probably it’s all three of these together. In any case, that coarse comment hardly encourages confidence that the next thing placed in the character’s mouth will be the golden key of literary typology. When Marlowe responds that he has to go out and that he’ll sleep elsewhere, the doctor dubs him “the shop-­ soiled Galahad.” Far from cluing us into a fundamental feature of the protagonist’s character, the comment continues the theme of the doctor’s smirky lewdness: its ironic thrust is that the detective resembles the purest of knights because he is voluntarily foreclosing on his hypothetical ability to have his way with the helpless Merle Davis, full of nembutal in Marlowe’s own bed. Wrenching the doctor’s acerbic wisecrack out of its tangled context and treating it as some sort of blazing character revelation both denatures the articulation and rewrites its original discursive setting, however much we might prefer the starry-eyed revision.18 A final point about Marlowe’s sexualization: our protagonist doesn’t hide his habit of assessing women’s physical allure. (Besides the obvious definition—refraining from sexual intercourse—chastity includes being 18  Another word on that context: Monikers are particularly ironic in The High Window, and commented upon as such (see 1992b, 12 for “Linda Conquest” and 19 for “Lois Magic”). There is even a cocker spaniel named “Heathcliff,” in context a joke about the name’s terrifically incongruous high-romantic provenance. “Heathcliff” also allows us to chuckle at the class that names their dogs so preciously, and at the class that has never heard of Wuthering Heights (42–3). Chandlerian humor intricately embeds itself in webs of social signification— Dr. Carl Moss’s “Galahad” quip not excepted.

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“[p]ure in thought or act; free from lewdness” [Chaste 1953]). It’s not always as subtle as the elbow poke in front of the stained glass, or the allusive frisson with Anne Riordan. One of the detective’s first thoughts upon seeing a picture of the missing Linda Conquest in The High Window is that she has “very kissable lips” (1992b, 18). In The Little Sister, a novel that bristles with inextricably knotted sexual tension and violence, our protagonist observes of Dolores Gonzales, “Sexy was very faint praise for her” (1988a, 69). Regarding Mavis Weld, he says, “I looked down at [her legs]. I could see them all right and the flag that marked the goal line was no larger than it had to be” (74). He details this while refusing to leave her apartment as commanded, and in fact forcing the door shut. The would­be eroticism of this scene—and it would be erotic—recalls the wrestling for sociosexual domination that the P.I. engages in in virtually every one of the novels, not least with each of the three women in TBS. Nor is Marlowe above plain-old garden-variety lust. In The Long Goodbye, the detective ogles “a girl in a white sharkskin suit and a luscious figure” as she goes up a ladder to a diving board. He fixates on “the band of white that showed between the tan of her thighs and the [bathing] suit” (1992d, 87). Too subtle? “I watched it carnally,” Marlowe clarifies. It’s almost as if Chandler is refuting the chastity thesis avant la lettre. This is a lot of overt if problematic sexuality that Chandler goes to great lengths to showcase as a highly charged part of Marlowe’s character, only to be ignored—or repressed—by critics. Thus the ideological power of a seamless meme.19

The Ill-Made Knight 2: Class and Race We have already considered conclusively unchivalric behavior from Marlowe, but the counter-cavalier encoding continues. There is the matter of Marlowe’s patented lack of courtesy—manners befitting a court, remember; handily defined by Kaeuper as “knowing how to talk and act in refined company and especially with ladies” (1999, 7). The detective’s 19  I have barely mentioned the homoeroticism that pervades Chandler’s writing and which provides another dimension of crackling but knotty libido. I will return to this theme in passing below; I don’t analyze it directly because it is eminently covered in the commentary: see, particularly, Plain (2001); and Abbott (2002, 81–8). Also, it probably does not qualify as “overt sexuality,” despite its much less ambiguous presence in the non-Marlowe story “Pearls Are a Nuisance.” And anyway, medieval romances buzz with knightly homosociality and homoeroticism, so it’s no great swerve from tradition—just from our idea of it.

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plebeian sass, harnessed to his agenda of speaking truth to power, spectacularly flouts such snooty etiquette. “I don’t like your manners,” spits high-toned Vivian. “I’m not crazy about yours,” Marlowe counters, piling on, “I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings” (2018, 50). In The Little Sister, when the detective’s soon-to-be client Orfamay Quest chides him for his indelicate manners, suggesting that he “might at least talk like a gentleman,” he responds, “Better try the University Club,” and hangs up on her (1988a, 5). “Peerless of courtesy” this ain’t (Malory 1985, 322; bk. 8, ch. 12). Our hero also manifestly refuses the commission of knighthood in terms of class status and honor. It is perhaps too obvious to state that Marlowe’s humble class identity is a dominant feature of his character. What needs emphasizing is that for Chandler, his P.I.’s proletarian condition is not incidental, but essential to his character: “He is a relatively poor man,” Chandler says in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” “or he would not be a detective at all” (1988c, 18). Detectives are working-class by socioeconomic definition, the author repeatedly insisted, in trenchant opposition to the tradition of genteel British detectives (a tradition, not incidentally, initiated by the Southern aristophile Edgar Allan Poe). Indeed, Chandler seethes with disdain for mystery writers’ veneration of aristocratic pretension and the “affectation of gentility” written into their leading characters, “which does not belong to the job and which is in effect a subconscious expression of snobbery” (1981, 297).20 Knights of romance manifest no such subconscious snobbery simply because their snobbery is entirely, emphatically conscious. The question of honor is related. Much chivalric hay has been made of Chandler’s statement, in “Simple Art,” that his hero is “a man of honor” (1988c, 18), but this does not mean what it meant when trumpeted by the medieval aristocratic ideology (as we witnessed it in Chap. 2). In Chandler’s essay it means honesty and integrity—a kind of archetypalized working-­ man goodness—at the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum from hereditary status and reputation. Marlowe trails no clouds of glory, and demands obeisance of nobody. He does not, as one of Malory’s knights says, fight “to advance my deeds and increase my worship” (1985, 297; bk. 8, ch. 4). There are many “worshipful” knights in the Morte: the word 20  In fact, Chandler was already taking shots at upper-crust smugness as early as 1911: see his early essay “The Genteel Artist” (2003, 25–7).

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means “[d]istinguished in respect of character or rank; entitled to honour or respect” (OED: Malory is one of its examples). This is the very opposite of Chandler’s leading character, who says, in The Long Goodbye, “When I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life” (1992d, 92). Dark alleys and mean streets are topographical topoi far removed from knightly battlefields and tournament grounds, not just by historical contingency but by literary design—indeed, by a literary design that resolutely reflects historical contingency. To talk of the detective as “crusading through the streets of Los Angeles … looking for ladies to rescue” overlays a romantic filter that misses Chandler’s point entirely (Durham 1963, 32). Nor, as a related point, is Marlowe “errant.” The idea of going errant, in the Arthurian tradition as in the folkloric heroic tradition writ large, requires venturing from domestic terrain into an exotically unknown, “foreign” world. This is its point: the hero (not just every knight of the Round Table but virtually every hero since and including Gilgamesh) sets out. It was Chrétien’s innovation to have knights set out with no other goal than to seek adventures.21 The idea of Marlowe venturing out unbidden to “seek adventures” for their own sake is its own species of wrong, but there is an even more important difference: Chandler flips the board by uncovering the exotically unknown, hostile underworld of a “known,” domestic territory. The power of this critique, which all critics have noticed,22 is that it exposes local corruption and institutionalized criminality. It’s as if Galahad found the Holy Grail stashed behind the throne at Camelot, hidden by Arthur himself, and all the other knights were in on the cover-up. This is a keen and incisive reversal of a romantic (and ultimately folkloric) trope. But—I hear chivalry’s champions object—but—how about the embedded symbolism of Marlowe’s first name, “Philip”? In TABS, I myself pointed out that the derivation is from the Greek philippos, lover of horses, which Chandler as a former student of classical Greek undoubtedly knew 21  A point made by Barber (2000, 111; cf. Frappier 1982, 165). For a sociological reading of the introduction of the errant mode, see Nerlich (1987, 4–7). Regarding the folkloric trope, it is number 11 in the great folklorist Vladímir Propp’s registry of functions (“THE HERO LEAVES HOME” [1971, 39]), and became Joseph Campbell’s famous “call to adventure” (1973, 49–58). 22  Most powerful, in my view, are Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1992), ch. 1, “Sunshine or Noir?”; David Fine, Imagining Los Angeles (2000); and Abbott (2002). Cawelti argues that the deromanticization of the city is integral to hardboiled (1977, 140–42).

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(Chandler 2018, 323). I now believe that as important a derivation stems from cavalier-poet and romantic icon Sir Philip Sidney, “the president / Of noblesse and of chevalree,” as Spenser consecrated him and as he has been remembered since his legendary early death (n.d., 3–4). (Sidney begins his Apology for Poetry with—what else?—a playful analogy to keeping horses, citing his equestrian master’s view that soldiers are “the noblest estate of mankind, and horsemen the noblest of soldiers” [2002, 81]. Chandler knew all this.) Vindication for the Chivalric Order of ShopSoiled Knighthood? Not quite. The biting irony of Mars being dubbed a “horseman” given this context should alert us that a game is afoot. How does this game play out with Marlowe’s nominal knightly association? Well, Chandler brought the pair of “horse-lovers” together in one of his remarkable letters. The author says that he and Howard Hawks brainstormed an ending for the film version of TBS. This ending wasn’t filmed, but it is tremendously significant as a map demarcating the ideological landscape that Marlowe inhabits. In this version, which Chandler says that he preferred to the one in the film, Marlowe and Carmen are trapped in Geiger’s house, surrounded by a cadre of goons poised to fire upon the first person to exit. The detective knows the danger but Carmen doesn’t. He is thus given a splendid opportunity to gallantly sacrifice himself for a young, beautiful woman. Except that, in Chandler’s words, he doesn’t “feel like playing Sir Philip Sidney to save a worthless life” (1981, 76). On the other hand, he also doesn’t want to be directly responsible for Carmen’s death. Does Marlowe default to chivalry to resolve this dilemma? No, he does not. Instead, the detective does what no knight has ever done or would do. He flips a coin. He leaves it to brute chance to decide who lives and who dies. The flip comes up Sidney, and Marlowe bows not to any code of honor but to hard luck. But before he can follow through, the dictates of the hardboiled genre—already dominant, obviously—overmaster the scene. Carmen pulls a gun and insists on going out first. On her way out, she takes aim to gratuitously femme-fatalize Marlowe, but “a hail of machine gun bullets” cuts her down before she can (75). When it comes to women, the hardboiled troposphere really does offer no game for knights. The single area where Marlowe might conceivably get even a foot in the door at the gentleman’s club is in his ethnoracial disdain for sundry Others of color, from the slurs against Filipinos and Italians, to the Black people he cavalierly refers to as “n-words” in Farewell, My Lovely, to the troublesome ethnonyms flung derisively throughout the novels (“the Indian,”

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“the Mex,” “Chinaman,” “Jew,” “Wop,” “Jap,” and so on).23 But white supremacy is a broad inheritance, and although the racially charged chivalric ideology flows from the Crusades through the “honorable” American South, through Indian-killing cowboys in the West and Indian-killing British colonizers in the East, I don’t believe that this alone is enough to win Marlowe his gilt spurs. Rather, in his embrace of whiteness, Marlowe stands alongside knights—and cowboys and colonizers and fellow white P.I.s from “Race” Williams on—but is not identical with them. The sad fact is that the space of white supremacy is large, and contains multitudes.24 If one really wanted to find a “white knight” in TBS, one could argue that it would not be Marlowe at all, nor of course the morally compromised “horseman” Eddie Mars, but Harry Jones. Marlowe thinks that Harry, in sacrificing himself for Agnes, acts “like a little gentleman” —the second instance where Marlowe attributes encoded knighthood to another character (2018, 358). It is significant that the “gentle” encoding for the lower-class Harry Jones resides in his actions, in telling contrast to the wealthy criminal Eddie Mars’s surface-level “affectation of gentility.” For that matter, the true chevalier might be said to be the swashbuckling patriot Rusty Regan, slain for remaining true to his wife. While Marlowe does not call Rusty a gentleman, he does bestow that title upon Eddie Mars’ smooth henchman Lash Canino (2018, 360), and upon the drunkenly passed-out Larry Cobb, Vivian’s well-heeled date at Las Olindas (450). 23  There are also the Latino presences which Chandler shunts into the margins of The Big Sleep’s Los Angeles. For discussion in TBS specifically, see TABS (Chandler 2018) 61n4, 179n3, 287n2 and n4, and, esp., 321n6. For Chandler’s ethnoracial politics in general, see Abbott (2002, chs. 1–2, and McCann 2000, 159–63). See also McCann’s important ch. 1, “Constructing Race Williams: The Klan and the Making of Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction” (with particular reference to Chandler at 68 and 84). 24  For some countervailing voices that make significant reference to Chandler, see Frankie Y. Bailey’s indispensable African American Mystery Writers: A Historical and Thematic Study (2008); Pim Higginson’s Noir Atlantic: Chester Himes and the Birth of the Francophone African Crime Novel (2011); and Scott Bunyan’s “No Order from Chaos: The Absence of Chandler’s Extra-Legal Space in the Detective Fiction of Chester Himes and Walter Mosley” (2003). See also Abbott 2002 for acute analysis, and the valuable anthology of essays edited by Alice Mills and Claude Julien (2005). For Black mystery writers eloquently contending with white supremacy in their nonfiction, see Chester Himes’s autobiographies The Quality of Hurt (1972) and My Life of Absurdity (1976, in which he describes his coming to the hardboiled genre), and Walter Mosley’s Workin’ on the Chain Gang: Shaking off the Dead Hand of History (2000).

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This alerts us to a critical and explosive fact: that word “gentleman”— as we saw in Chap. 2, a constitutively classed term—courses through the Marlowe novels like an electric charge. It is invariably ironized. In The Little Sister, for example, gentlemen are distinguished from commoners by hiring out the killing they want done (1988a, 58). In The Long Goodbye, a legless Terry Lennox is called a “gentleman,” just as the passed-out Larry Cobb had been in TBS (1992d, 10). Later in The Long Goodbye, a prospective client echoes Orfamay Quest in admonishing the detective, “You’re no gentleman” (1992d, 155). Our protagonist shoots back: “Where does it say I have to be?” (Answer: In your posthumous reception, Marlowe.) There are plenty more instances of “gentleman” being gutted. Not surprisingly, its companion word “aristocrat” also rattles adversely in Chandler: see, for example, The High Window’s effete “bored aristocrat” Leslie Murdoch (1992b, 26), or The Little Sister’s rich Hollywood agent Sherry Ballou, who displays “the infinite langour of a decadent aristocrat moldering in a ruined château” (1988a, 113). These are no fleeting wisecracks: they amount to a sustained critique of social class that cuts to the heart of what it means to be Philip Marlowe. Back to TBS: Late in the novel, Chandler playfully offers us yet another knight figure—a third!—that is pointedly not his protagonist; we will turn to this figuration presently. But before we do, it is important to note the payoff of the novel’s running discourse on gentility. For it is made abundantly clear that Marlowe knows all too well where the gallant behavior of both Harry Jones and Rusty Regan gets both of those gentlemen. When the inevitable face-off with Canino comes, our intrepid protagonist—who all along has been doubling as a typological critic—momentarily considers acting “like a gentleman of the old school” (2018, 402). But he definitively overrules this chivalro-romantic consideration, punctuating his rejection of gentility with a blunt hardboiled punchline: “I shot him four times.” Marlowe here again tells us that he is no knight, and I have yet to read the commentary that proposes that he or Raymond Chandler or anyone else regrets this typology, at least in this instance.

Love and Dialectics So what do we have? A nexus of romantic/chivalric discourse—tropes, symbolism, commentary—quite intentionally raised, only to be shot down, as it were. This requires precise elaboration. It is not just that Marlowe is not a knight. It’s that Chandler has him face off with that

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ideologeme and its host culture, its resonances and rituals, its cues and incantations, and explicitly reject them. TBS summons the emblems of that vast but streamlined tradition of chivalric romance which runs from Malory to “Malory”: from the Middle Ages to the medievalesque tradition revived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, running right through Chandler’s childhood and early writing career, and in fact still thriving in a competing zone of the American literary marketplace as he is crafting TBS. It’s as if he is opening a channel of dialogical exchange between that tradition and the hardboiled form in which he is writing. This is why so many people think that Marlowe represents a knight of some sort: the referentiality is manifestly there. But the trajectory of the internal commentary and the depicted behavior runs in the other direction—away from romance. That is, until we get to Mona Mars. Despite seldom being discussed by critics, the episode with Mona is pivotal, and quite complex.25 On the one hand, she is a gangster’s moll, but on the other, she’s a torch singer (and thus a chanteuse of high romantic verse), who insists on blind love for her husband. So she’s encoded hardboiled with an overlay of the romantic. “Romantic” here invokes a different sense that we have considered so far, but which is never far from its general meaning in almost any context: love. But I should write it as “love,” since we are really discussing its discursive signification and, as importantly, its literary legacy. In The Little Sister, Chandler has a character say, seemingly apropos of nothing, “Love is such a dull word. … It amazes me that the English language so rich in the poetry of love can accept such a feeble word for it. It has no life, no resonance” (1988a, 162). But while the word itself may clank dully, the concept behind it in fact has had many lives, and retains many overdetermined resonances. At its source, in distinct but stereophonically overlapping channels, there are the passionate eroticism and lady-worship of troubadour “courtly love,” and the medieval chivalric romance which absorbed it.26 This already polyvocal legacy resounds through European poetry from Dante and Petrarch through the English Renaissance and into the modern-medievalist echo chamber. Like chivalry, its “nearly inseparable companion” (Wollock 2011, 1), “courtly  Rzepka is a notable exception (2000, 713–15; 2005, 212–14).  The classic work is C. S. Lewis’s Allegory of Love (1951). For the long view, see Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World (1983). For a recent reassessment, see R. Howard Bloch’s Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (1991). And for issues with the term and its definition, see Moore (1979). 25 26

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love” becomes a meme with historical sources so deeply embedded that they are forgotten, but which finds itself being transmitted ubiquitously throughout the culture. The meme reverberates throughout the twentieth century in mass-produced forms like pulp magazines, paperbacks, films, songs, and what Northrop Frye dismissively called “the more rudimentary forms of romance represented by … interminable radio and television serials” (1976, 169).27 Marlowe prefigures Frye when he grouses, in The High Window, that “The heartrending dialogue of some love serial … hit me in the face like a wet dishtowel” (1992b, 194). And in TBS, he derides radio generally as so much bleating (2018, 178). But suddenly, in Mona’s presence, the detective acts as if he’s been knocked into another generic universe, delivering the most conventionally “romantic” line in the book—and framing it as such: “Just like a radio program … Kiss me, Silver-Wig” (2018, 394). The notion of romantic love may seem alien to Chandler’s bleak and lonely noir world; it certainly has seldom been discussed in his work.28 Yet every one of the Marlowe novels with the arguable exception of The High Window features love as a key plot element. Farewell, My Lovely revolves around a broken love triangle that ends in the ultimate sacrifice, embellished by a Shakespeare line about loving “not wisely, but too well” (“That’s just sentimental,” cop Randall scoffs [1992a, 292]). The Lady in the Lake features various frustrated amours. The Little Sister revolves 27  For a competing feminist assessment, see Tania Modleski’s Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (2008). And for a brilliant exposition of the “political economy of love” in the early twentieth century that is particularly relevant to Chandler, see Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1997), introduction and chs. 1–2. 28  Even critics who directly consider sentimentalism in Chandler do not consider conventional romantic love: Leonard Cassuto (2008) focuses on fantasies of domesticity and community in Chandler, while Sean McCann (2000) looks at Chandler’s glorification of male camaraderie and populist affiliation. They are not wrong. But there is a yet more obvious sentimentalism at play. Gill Plain’s chapter “When Violet Eyes are Smiling: The Love Stories of Raymond Chandler” (2001) does a great job of delineating Chandler’s homosocial fantasies in three novels. But the work that most fully explores the thematic of love chez Chandler does so as a structuring element of his life. That work is Judith Freeman’s The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (2007). In Freeman’s account, Chandler himself inhabits the role of archetypal knight, interpellated as such by his wife Cissy (this is at the core of the book, but see especially 180–81 and 326). While I am completely convinced by Freeman’s sensitive reading of the life, I think that Chandler was doing something else in his hardboiled fiction.

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around a sublimated love plot (that aforequoted comment about love was only seemingly apropos of nothing: see the exposition at 1988a, 247–48 and the final scene at 250). The Long Goodbye extensively thematizes what it calls its own “sentimentality,” both in Marlowe’s homosocial relationship with Terry Lennox and heteronormatively in its main plotline involving “a wild, mysterious, improbable kind of love that never comes but once” (1992b, 183). And speaking of improbable, love pokes holes in the plot and character motivations of both the film script and novel versions of Playback. Love also features at the core of the more “genteel” mystery story “English Summer, A Gothic Romance,” which Chandler began in the thirties and planned on working into a full-length novel until his death.29 In a telling letter from 1949, Chandler complained that [m]odern outspokenness has utterly destroyed the romantic dream on which love feeds. … The peculiar appropriateness of the detective or mystery story to our time is that it is incapable of love. The love story and the detective story cannot exist, not only in the same book—one might almost say in the same culture. (2000, 117)

This diagnosis might sound familiar, not only because it recapitulates the gesture toward an idealized past that we parsed in Chap. 3, but because here for once Chandler actually does echo Malory. At the end of Book 18 of the Morte, Malory assails the modern way of loving: “so fareth love nowadays. … But the old love was not so” (1985, 877; bk. 18, ch. 25). Meanwhile, Malory is himself parroting his sources: in the very century of romantic love’s birth, Chrétien begins The Knight with the Lion with this same dichotomy: “In olden days Love’s disciples were known for courtesy and bravery, generosity and honor. Now love has become an idle word” (1993, 257; original emphasis). Thus, Chandler’s gripe has a thoroughly romantic pedigree. As if in protest of the depredations of modern culture, the hardboiled maestro wove broken but fully charged love plots into his work. 29  Readers who wish to read what Chandler might have done with the romance motif unimpeded by hardboiled generic and market exigencies should read “English Summer” (published posthumously in 1976). There is horse riding, there is an “Inspector Knight,” and there is a chivalric subordination of the male lead to the female lead. She expresses her gratitude thus: “‘My knight,’ she whispered. ‘My plumed knight. My glistening one’” (1976, 108). Even here, however, the female lead betrays the romantic ideal in the end.

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It gets even more complicated. If Mona is encoded as romantic, that encoding is itself split: Marlowe’s gaze constructs her as a romantic object of desire, a beautiful ingenue, but she gives every indication of possessing agency as a true believer in love in her own right. She also serves as Marlowe’s white (or silver) knight. Their encounter reverses the earlier, normative stained-glass tableau, in which the knight works at liberating a bound woman; instead, in this scene, the damsel not-in-distress cuts the male hero loose from his bonds. Her glance flashes “sharply,” “like the sweep of a sword,” before she retrieves her surrogate sword, a kitchen knife, to cut Marlowe free (2018, 386 and 390). In fact, this reversal is so precise that our hardboiled hero must reject it: he and Mona proceed to engage in a verbal tug-of-war over who will save whom, a gender-­troubling dispute further complicated by the fact that Mona’s hair is cut short, under her etherealizing wig, “like a boy’s” (388).30 Marlowe drops in an oblique comment about the bisexuality of worms (384), which resonates with the homoerotic encounters with Carol and perhaps even Lanny.31 Clearly there is some play with traditional gender images here, as Mona rescues our hero while remaining steadfast to the man she loves. She is the fourth character that the novel presents, quite playfully, as a plausibly more legitimate knight than Marlowe. Make no mistake, however: Mona may represent the return of the romantic repressed, and she might even cut through the rope of heteronormative gender images, but the handcuffs remain in place. TBS stubbornly plants itself within the ideological confines of American hardboiled masculinity, where “men” do not ask, they tell, and take. Here is the passage that precedes that dreamy romantic line, “Kiss me, Silver-Wig”: “I leaned against her and pressed her against the wall with my body. I pushed my mouth against her face” (394). It is as if the scene demanded a hardboiled masculine counterweight to the twin threats of insecure heterosexuality and effeminizing romance. The triumphant register in which this sexual assault is narrated—the positive accent that it receives—does not belong to the literary tradition of romantic love, from the troubadours to Tennyson. It is a twentieth-century interpolation that Chandler finds fully 30  Chandler’s masculinization of Mona, as of Vivian, may be lifted and transfigured from Hammett’s Red Harvest (first serialized in Black Mask in 1927–28), and that novel’s manly Dinah Brand. For an insightful sociohistorical reading of how hardboiled fiction “encourages cross-gender identification,” see Smith 2000, ch. 6 (quote on 165). 31  For the latter moonlight encounter, see TABS (Chandler 2018) 300 and 301n3.

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formed in the hardboiled genre, although it also appeared in Golden-Age Hollywood films and the mass-produced romance novel.32 But it does not appear in “English Summer,” and it is not associated with the “gentlemanly” detective character in the film script version of Playback. Chandler yoked it to Marlowe as part of his hardboiling of the heroic American male. In fact, the discourse of romance fully prevails only in one area in TBS. It comes at the end. Marlowe escapes his predicament in Realito. The plot builds to its climax, shows its cards, settles into its denouement. Marlowe delivers a powerful prose poem about death that gives the book its title: it is a hardboiled apotheosis. But that internal soliloquy doesn’t end the book. It is followed by a three-sentence coda during which Marlowe moons over Mona. I said that “Kiss me, Silver-Wig” is the most conventionally romantic line in the book, but in fact that honor may go to its ending: “…and I never saw her again” (2018, 456). It looks like somebody lost a dream. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

References Abbott, Megan E. 2002. The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2018. Reading Raymond Chandler in the Age of #MeToo. Slate, 9 July 2018. https://slate.com/culture/2018/07/raymond-­chandler-­in-­the-­age-­ of-­metoo.html. Ariosto, Ludovico. 1973. Orlando Furioso. Part One. Trans. Barbara Reynolds. London: Penguin. Bailey, Frankie Y. 2008. African American Mystery Writers: A Historical and Thematic Study. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Bakhtin, M.  M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

32  Male sexual aggression is such an established part of the twentieth-century version of romance that Janice Radway explores the varying degrees of its acceptability in her classic study, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture (1991, 71–6, 141–44, 173–74, and 216). I am aware of the troubadour Raimbaut d’Orange’s song in which he comically defines the rules of love ex negativo by advocating his listener to “menace” ladies (the same word used by Chrétien’s Erec) and “plant your fist across their nose” (1972, 108). The humor of this twelfth-century jeu may be lost today, but it should go without saying that the intent is to shock and amuse by stating the opposite of accepted behavior.

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Baldwin, James. 1998. Everybody’s Protest Novel. In Toni Morrison, ed. Collected Essays, 11–18. New York: Library of America. Barber, Richard. 2000. The Knight and Chivalry. Revised edition. Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: The Boydell Press. Bloch, R.  Howard. 1991. Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Breu, Christopher. 2005. Hard-Boiled Masculinities. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bruccoli, Matthew J. 2002. Excerpt from Ross Macdonald. In Bruccoli and Layman, 248–49. Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Richard Layman, eds. 2002. Hardboiled Mystery Writers: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald: A Literary Reference. New York: Carroll and Graf. Bunyan, Scott. 2003. No Order from Chaos: The Absence of Chandler’s Extra-­ Legal Space in the Detective Fiction of Chester Himes and Walter Mosley. Studies in the Novel 35 (3): 339–365. Campbell, Joseph. 1973. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cassuto, Leonard. 2008. Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories. New York: Columbia University Press. Cawelti, John G. 1977. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chandler, Raymond. 1976. The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler and English Summer, A Gothic Romance. Ed. Frank MacShane. New York: Ecco Press. ———. 1981. Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler. Ed. Frank MacShane. New York: Delta. ———. 1985. Raymond Chandler’s Unknown Thriller: The Screenplay of Playback. New York: Mysterious Press. ———. 1988a. The Little Sister. New York: Vintage. ———. 1988b. Playback. New York: Vintage. ———. 1988c. The Simple Art of Murder: An Essay. In The Simple Art of Murder, 1–18. New York: Vintage. ———. 1992a. Farewell, My Lovely. New York: Vintage. ———. 1992b. The High Window. New York: Vintage. ———. 1992c. The Lady in the Lake. New York: Vintage. ———. 1992d. The Long Goodbye. New York: Vintage. ———. 2000. The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909–1959. Ed. Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane. New York: Atlantic Monthly. ———. 2002a. The Curtain. In Collected Stories, ed. John Bayley, 523–569. New York: Everyman. ———. 2002b. Pearls Are a Nuisance. In Collected Stories, ed. John Bayley, 935–987. New York: Everyman.

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———. 2003. The Genteel Artist. In Raymond Chandler: A Literary Reference, ed. Robert Moss, 25–27. New York: Carroll & Graf. ———. 2018. The Annotated Big Sleep. Edited and annotated by Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Dean Rizzuto. New York: Vintage. Chaste. 1953. Merriam-Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd ed., 455. Springfield, MA: Merriam. Chrétien de Troyes. 1993. The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Ed. and trans. David Staines. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Davis, Mike. 1992. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Vintage. Dijkstra, Bram. 1986. Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood. New York: Knopf. ———. 1996. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doane, Mary Anne. 1991. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. Durham, Philip. 1963. Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go: Raymond Chandler’s Knight. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Earle, David M. 2016. Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form. New York: Routledge. Ferrante, Joan M. 1975. Woman As Image in Medieval Literature, from the Twelfth Century to Dante. New York: Columbia University Press. Fine, David. 2000. Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Fontana, Ernest. 1984. Chivalry and Modernity in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Western American Literature 19 (3): 179–186. Frappier, Jean. 1982. Chrétien de Troyes: The Man and His Work. Trans. Raymond J. Cormier. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Freeman, Judith. 2007. The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved. New York: Pantheon. Frye, Northrop. 1976. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Granger, David. 2011. The Return of the Tough Guys. Esquire, 21 October 2011. esquire.com/entertainment/books/reviews/a11063/ best-­new-­novels-­for-­men-­1111/. Gravdal, Kathryn. 1992. Chrétien de Troyes, Gratian, and the Medieval Romance of Sexual Violence. Signs 17 (3): 558–585. Haag, Pamela. 2016. The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture. New York: Basic Books. Heng, Geraldine. 2003. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Higginson, Pim. 2011. Noir Atlantic: Chester Himes and the Birth of the Francophone African Crime Novel. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Himes, Chester. 1972. The Quality of Hurt: The Autobiography of Chester Himes. Vol. 1. New York: Doubleday. ———. 1976. My Life of Absurdity: The Autobiography of Chester Himes. Vol. 2. New York: Doubleday. Illouz, Eva. 1997. Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2016. Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality. New York: Verso. Jauss, Hans Robert. 1982. Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature. In Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 76–109. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Kaeuper, Richard W. 1999. Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2000. Chivalry and the ‘Civilizing Process’. In Violence in Medieval Society, ed. Richard W. Kaeuper, 21–34. Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: The Boydell Press. Keen, Maurice. 1984. Chivalry. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lewis, C.S. 1951. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Macdonald, Ross. 1971 [2002]. Introduction to Kenneth Millar/Ross Macdonald: A Checklist by Matthew J. Bruccoli. In Hardboiled Mystery Writers: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald: A Literary Reference, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Richard Layman, 244–48. New York: Carroll and Graf. Malory, Sir Thomas. 1985. The Birth Life and Acts of King Arthur of His Noble Knights of the Round Table Their Marvellous Enquests and Adventures the Achieving of the San Greal and in the End Le Morte Darthur with the Dolorous Death and Departing out of This World of Them All. Dent, 1893. Facsimile Edition. Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: The Boydell Press. ———. 2004. Le Morte Darthur. Ed. Stephen H. A. Shepherd. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton. Mathis, Andrew E. 2002. The King Arthur Myth in Modern American Literature. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. McBride, Joseph. 2018. How Did Lubitsch Do It? New  York: Columbia University Press. McCann, Sean. 2000. Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mills, Alice, and Claude Julien. 2005. ‘Polar Noir’: Reading African-American Detective Fiction. Tours, France: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais. Modleski, Tania. 2008. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.

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Moore, John C. 1979. ‘Courtly Love’: A Problem of Terminology. Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (4): 621–632. Mosley, Walter. 2000. Workin’ on the Chain Gang: Shaking off the Dead Hand of History. New York: Ballantine. ———. 2009. Poisonville. In A New Literary History of America, ed. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, 598–602. Cambridge, MA: University Press. Nerlich, Michael. 1987. Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100–1750. Volume 1. Trans. Ruth Crowley. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Osborne, Lawrence. 2018. Impersonating Philip Marlowe. New York Times, 20 September 2018. nytimes.com/2018/09/20/books/review/lawrence-­ osborne-­only-­to-­sleep.html. Plain, Gill. 2001. When Violet Eyes are Smiling: The Love Stories of Raymond Chandler. In Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body, ed. Twentieth-Century Crime, 56–84. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Porter, Dennis. 1981. The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press. Propp, Vladímir. 1971. The Morphology of the Folktale. Trans. Laurence Scott, 2nd ed. Revised and edited by Louis A.  Wagner. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Radway, Janice A. 1991. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Raimbaut d’Orange. 1972. Song 4. In Songs of the Troubadours, ed. and trans. Anthony Bonner, 107–09. New York: Shocken. Reynolds, William, and Elizabeth A.  Trembley. 2001. Mystery and Detective Fiction. In The Guide to United States Popular Culture, ed. Ray B. Browne and Pat Browne, 561–563. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Rougemont, Denis de. 1983. Love in the Western World. Revised Edition. Trans. Montgomery Belgion. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rzepka, Charles J. 2000. ‘I’m in the Business Too’: Gothic Chivalry, Private Eyes, and Proxy Sex and Violence in Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Modern Fiction Studies 46 (3): 695–724. ———. 2005. No Game for Knights. In Detective Fiction, 201–217. Cambridge: Polity. Sidney, Sir Philip. 2002. An Apology for Poetry (or The Defence of Poesy). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Smith, Erin A. 2000. Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Spenser, Edmund. n.d. The Shepheardes Calendar. [1579.] The Spenser Archive, Washington University in St. Louis. https://talus.artsci.wustl.edu/spenserArchivePrototype/html/calender_to_his_book.html. Tennyson, Alfred Lord. 2004. Idylls of the King. Ed. J. M. Gray. London: Penguin.

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Thompson, Jon. 1993. Realisms and Modernisms: Raymond Williams and Popular Fiction. In Views Beyond the Border Country: Raymond Williams and Cultural Politics, ed. Dennis L.  Dworkin and Leslie G.  Roman, 72–88. New  York: Routledge. Williams, Tom. 2012. A Mysterious Something in the Light: Raymond Chandler: A Life. London: Aurum. Wollock, Jennifer G. 2011. Rethinking Courtly Love and Chivalry. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion: The Mean Streets of the Dialectic

Abstract  This chapter sums up the argument of the book. I conclude that Philip Marlowe is no knight, but that Chandler crafted a startling and possibly unique dialectical relationship between the genres of hardboiled and romance. I speculate about what might have led the author to experiment with such polyvocal play; consider other examples of such dialogism in literary history; and make some inferences about the reception that has ordained Philip Marlowe as a species of “knight.” Keywords  Raymond Chandler • Literary history • Chivalric romance • Romantic ideology • Popular culture • Dialogism • Intertextuality • Dialectics no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old—it is the new combinations that make them new. —Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990, 86)

We have now taken brisk tours of Chandlerian reception; of some scenes in the ideological production and reproduction of chivalry and romance; and of the flashpoints of their operation in Chandler’s work.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. D. Rizzuto, Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88371-3_5

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Let’s add it up and see what it amounts to. By my lights, Philip Marlowe is no knight: not a modernized one, nor a tarnished one, nor a quixotic one. He is a fully formulated hardboiled detective whose figuration explicitly rejects both the literal and the literary heritage of chivalry. That heritage was and is big and bold and is very much alive even today. Neither World War I nor modernism killed it off and graduated us to more mature artistic endeavors, as we like to reassure ourselves: most Hollywood blockbusters and many bestsellers still employ it. Chandler was well aware of the endurance of the romantic tradition: it is the market that Roger Wade, a modern-day Walter Scott, writes for in The Long Goodbye (see his take on it in the second epigraph to this book). Call it historical romance, medievalism, or, as Wade does, “lies” (1992, 250–51). The rejection of this tradition is written into Marlowe’s character, most exhaustively in The Big Sleep (TBS), but we who are rather uncritically steeped in our own version of the romantic ideology—we like those kinds of stories, the market shows—have a hard time seeing this rejection. Just consider how lightly Byron’s critique (excerpted as the first epigraph to this book) landed in 1813, before the medieval revival had even kicked into high gear. There the poet scoffs at the whole fantasmatic apparatus of knights, chivalry, love, honor—“and so forth,” Byron says with a dismissive wave of the hand that reminds me of Marlowe’s eye roll at “another piece of stained-­ glass romance” in the antechamber of TBS (Chandler 2018,  12; see Chapter 4). Funnily enough, Childe Harold had gamely trucked in fashionable medievalish tropes; Byron is pushing back against criticism that he hadn’t done so with the requisite reverence for knightliness. The poet digs in: “Now it so happens that the good old times … were the most profligate of all possible centuries,” he insists, sounding rather like Roger Wade as he pulls the curtain back on the “courtesy” of knights and ladies alike, from Sirs Tristram and Lancelot to Burke’s paragon, Marie Antoinette. “So much for chivalry,” he jeers (1986, 20-1). It is sobering to consider that this critique still articulates a radical view over two hundred years later. We see a knight and we fall into a collective swoon. And “chivalry” still rings with an antique charm in our culture at large; indeed, rings so right through the latest Chandler commentary. I do not conclude that Chandler himself rejected the burnished repository of romance: in fact, the overwhelming literary and biographical

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evidence outside his hardboiled output is that he did not.1 What I am saying is that in the Marlowe novels, and TBS in particular, he is playing a clearly delineable game with knights and with genres, in which the romantic array is summoned but denied in its particulars by surrounding hardboiled exigencies. These exigencies include not just storytelling strategies and established gender ideologies, which are briefly unsettled but then insist on themselves like a fist pounding the table, but the market forces that shaped them. Even “love,” most romantic of all tropes, appears as not just unfulfilled, but broken and violent, a casualty of our debased modernism. If that makes us feel sad, that is probably its point, and that itself is the last vestige of romance that remains: a sense of melancholy or regret; a distinct nostalgia for something lost, which resonates as the last words are read and the book is closed. A question I have left unasked is, What is the point of Chandler’s intervention, this game with knights and genres? I believe that it stems from a deep biographical rift: Chandler remained devoted to a romantic ideology which he could not employ in the “tough-guy” milieu he chose in order to pay the bills. Why not then return to writing in the self-described idealist tradition in which he began his writing career? Why not aspire to become James Branch Cabell, say, rather than Dashiell Hammett? We can’t know the answer to this, but perhaps it is fair to speculate a bit as we close our investigation. The simple fact of the market ascendancy of hardboiled in the year of Chandler’s firing undoubtedly had much to do with it, as the man himself averred.2 We could also posit a complex psychological revisiting of the scenes of his initial literary production on the other side of experiences in both the Great War and a corrupt oil industry. To this I would add a reckoning with his own insecure and alienated upbringing—what sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb have called “the hidden injuries of class” (1973). Chandler grew up financially insecure as he and his divorced mother found themselves dependent on the kindness of wealthier and snobbier relatives. This resulted in an outsider’s view of society that the

1  The excellent biographies by Frank MacShane (1976) and Judith Freeman (2007) make abundantly clear Chandler’s own immersion in what I have shown to be the then-dominant iteration of the romantic ideology. 2  For Chandler’s clear-eyed approach to the writing of pulp stories as an occupation, see MacShane 1976, ch. 3.

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writer wrapped into his iconic character.3 Chandler employed the stark vernacular of hardboiled to deliver cutting dispatches about class, wealth, and status that were unsayable in the romantic first language that he never renounced. He bought in fully enough to his second literary language to mimic its stylized masculinism and misogyny as well. A purely artistic consideration is that perhaps Chandler’s coming to the hardboiled genre from the outside, with less ideological investment in the form, made stylistic experimentation more thinkable. He was essentially learning to play someone else’s game, rather than the one he was raised playing. He must have also suspected an undeniable truth of literary history: chivalric romance has legs. Hardboiled, naturalism, modernism, and even realism are comparatively recent modes. When in 1541 the great Renaissance polymath Elye Bokher (Elia Levita) declares his intention to reprint his complete works, he starts not with his masterly religious or scholarly works but with his parody-romance Bovo d’Antona (incidentally the first non-religious book printed in Yiddish). He knew what he was doing: his other works took a back seat while his larger-than-life romanticky romp captivated Jewish Europe for centuries, picking up the familiar handle Bovo-bukh and entering the general Yiddish lexicon (Frakes 2014, xxxviii and 242; Wex 2005, 32-4). This illustrates what Chandler knew no less than Bokher, and no less than us: people eat these stories up. Chandler did not in fact write such a story—at least not one with Marlowe in it—but by hitching his hardboiled wagon to the chivalric horse at least referentially, he may have cannily suspected that some of the fairy dust of romantic venerability would rub off on him. It worked only too well: the posthumous reception of the Marlowe novels has gone so far as to reclassify the whole series as a species of romance. Even Chandler could not have anticipated this wholesale analgesic rewriting of his novels—though he probably launched it himself with his “Simple Art of Murder” essay, which set the tone with its rousing talk about mean streets and heroism and honor. With that essay, Chandler set in motion a process he vigorously and vociferously pursued (as have innumerable other 3  Such speculation is properly the province of biographers, four of whom cover this territory superlatively: in chronological order, Frank MacShane (1976), Tom Hiney (1997), Judith Freeman (2007), and Tom Williams (2012). To these I’d like to add Sarah Trott’s War Noir (2016), ch. 2, which offers a compelling analysis of Chandler’s experience in the war, based on new research.

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authors before and since, usually with much less success): he redirected the course of his reception. He effectively initiated the process of his transubstantiation from “genre writer” to canonized figure. As Michel Foucault might have said, he activated the sign under which the “Raymond Chandler” author-­function operates today, even if it required some imaginal tweaking of the hardboiled content. The culture took the tweak and ran with it. At all events, it is a fact (noted by a wise anonymous reviewer of this work) that it was in the rapprochement of the two forms that Chandler found his true calling. We know that he harbored strong ambitions to be remembered as an author, and that he felt that there was nothing particularly enduring in his straight romantic writings, nor in his conventional pulp stories either. He arrived at something that sparkled and sizzled— and, just as importantly, that opened the door to more—by playing the game with knights and genres kicked off in his first novel. This is not to say that the Marlowe novels depend only on that intergeneric dialogue: all readers of Chandler know that the novels live in lines of crystalline prose, bewitching characterization, luscious imaging, and stout social critique. The heady experience of reading Chandler is not reducible to an encounter with any single thematic. But I wonder if playing in the field of this intergeneric dialogue catalyzed the process for Chandler in the first place. Of course, Chandler did not invent this field of intergeneric parley: as long as chivalric romance has existed, so has a rich and profoundly fun element of polyvocal play within its midst. Genre-transgressive masterworks such as the Occitan Jaufré, the Old French Aucassin and Nicolette, and the aforementioned Old Yiddish Bovo-bukh (Bovo d’Antona) gleefully parodied the expectations and exhortations of chivalric romance well before Don Quijote definitively did so.4 Geoffrey Chaucer was such an inveterate unraveller of romance that Richard Hurd designated him a Cervantes avant la lettre (1911, 171–76). And on this side of the Cervantine slump, the triumphant return of romance spurred a snarky backlash delightfully embodied in such works as Lennox’s The Female Quixote, Austen’s Northanger Abbey and more profoundly Sense and Sensibility, Byron’s Don Juan, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Balzac’s Lost 4  Indeed, we can see the coming-into-being of chivalric romance itself as just such a game. There was nothing inevitable about the twelfth-century romanciers combining two hitherto antithetical forms, the martial chansons de geste and highly stylized love poetry, let alone setting those into further dialogue with oral legend, Celtic folklore, Eastern tales, classical myth, saints’ lives, and more. To paraphrase Robert Earl Keen: the road goes on forever and the parley never ends.

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Illusions, Hardy’s The Return of the Native … the list goes on. Melville mocks romance (along with everything else) in Moby-Dick, and repudiates it in “Billy Budd.” Virginia Woolf impishly offers us reverse-romance in Orlando. I offer these examples to acknowledge the remarkably well-­ horsed and rollicking troop making inroads against the hegemony of chivalric romance, the majority of them well before the consciously counter-romantic movements of naturalism, modernism, and hardboiled jumped into the fray in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And yet, it seems to me that Chandler does something different. (Of course, each of the aforementioned works does something different.) He doesn’t parody or satirize; he doesn’t undo. Nor does he invite us to laugh at, cry over, or realistically reflect upon the “lost illusions” of romance. (Well, maybe there’s a little bit of laughing at the knight in stained glass.) Hardboiled isn’t a game for knights, so Chandler doesn’t give us a knight. And he declines to give us one precisely by playing a game with knights, seeding his work with chivalro-romantic allusion, encoding, misdirection, denial. I have been calling the entanglement of hardboiled and romance in Chandler’s novels a dialogue, but the payoff is in fact less properly dialogical than it is dialectical, where opposites collide and produce a new third thing. This is Chandler’s elusive game. He presents a materialist view of a world systemically riddled with capitalist dysfunction, and he does so within a definitively hardboiled idiom. Both idiom and worldview—both form and content—ruthlessly negate a romantic idealism that is nonetheless fully thematized. But then romance in turn negates its own negation by hitting that final note, a note that harmonizes with one lonely strain of a hitherto-quashed song. Call it hardboiled with a romantic spin, or perhaps a romantic hue.5 Fredric Jameson has posited that Hammett and Chandler imposed new modes on the detective story (2007, 77). Regarding Hammett, this works especially well for the genre-bending The Dain Curse, a Gothic/hardboiled mashup that includes a running meta-commentary on the result. Chandler, who was so unabashedly influenced by Hammett, may have taken his forerunner’s intergeneric meta-commentary as an inspiration for his own self-conscious treatment of romance in TBS. But where Hammett offers pastiche, Chandler offers dialectic. In 1929, as The Dain Curse was 5  “It is as though light of a particular hue were cast upon everything, tingeing all other colors and modifying their specific features”  – Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1971, 126).

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being serialized in the pages of Black Mask, Walter Benjamin proposed that “all great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one” (2006, 237). We might say that TBS dissolves the romance genre in hardboiled acid, right before our eyes. Indeed, staging the dissolution of romance might be the most romantic thing about it.

References Benjamin, Walter. 2006. On the Image of Proust. Trans. Harry Zorn. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part I: 1927–1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al., 237–247. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Byron, Lord. 1986. In The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chandler, Raymond. 1992. The Long Goodbye. New York: Vintage. ———. 2018. The Annotated Big Sleep. Edited andannotated by Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Dean Rizzuto. New York: Vintage. Frakes, Jerold C., editor and translator. 2014. Early Yiddish Epic. New  York: Syracuse University Press. Freeman, Judith. 2007. The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved. New York: Pantheon. Hiney, Tom. 1997. Raymond Chandler: A Biography. New York: Atlantic Monthly. Hurd, Richard. 1911. In Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance with the Third Elizabethan Dialogue, ed. Edith J. Morley. London: Henry Frowde. Jameson, Fredric. 2007. The Modernist Papers. New York: Verso. MacShane, Frank. 1976. The Life of Raymond Chandler. New York: Dutton. Marx, Karl. 1999. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. S.  W. Ryazanskaya. Marxists.org, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/download/Marx_Contribution_to_the_Critique_of_Political_ Economy.pdf. Rushdie, Salman. 1990. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. New York: Viking. Sennett, Richard, and Jonathan Cobb. 1973. The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: Vintage. Trott, Sarah. 2016. War Noir: Raymond Chandler and the Hard-Boiled Detective as Veteran in American Fiction. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Wex, Michael. 2005. Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Williams, Tom. 2012. A Mysterious Something in the Light: Raymond Chandler: A Life. London: Aurum.

Index1

A Abbott, Megan E., 7, 58n1, 64, 66, 66n12, 69, 72n19, 74n22, 76n23, 76n24 Althusser, Louis, 3n3 Anglo-Saxonism, 29 Annotated Big Sleep, The (Hill, Jackson, Rizzuto), 1–2, 25, 30n46, 42, 59n4, 64n9, 65n10, 66n11, 66n12, 70, 70n16, 74, 76n23, 81n31 Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, 44, 51, 64 Asquith, Herbert, 48 Aucassin and Nicolette (anon.), 93 Auerbach, Erich, 18n16, 25n29 Avengers, The, 21 B Baden-Powell, Lord, 32 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 59, 63

Baldwin, James, 27, 27n34, 49, 58n1 Bancroft, Colette, 5 Baring, Maurice, 47–48 Bayard, Chevalier, 32n49, 44n5 Beardsley, Aubrey, 24 Benjamin, Walter, 95 Bernard of Clairvaux, St., 17 Big Sleep, The (film), 1–2, 12–13, 21, 25, 51, 57–82, 89–95 Billy Budd (Melville), 94 Blunden, Edmund, 31 Bolfras, General Artur von, 43 Booth, Charles G., 65n10 Borges, Jorge Luis, 22 Bourdieu, Pierre, 15n7 Bovo d’Antona (Bokher/Levita), 93 Breu, Christopher, 66 Brooke, Rupert, 31, 43 Bulfinch, Thomas, 25, 28 Burke, Edmund, 21, 23, 44, 50, 90

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. D. Rizzuto, Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88371-3

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Byron, Lord Addition to the Preface to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, vii, 23n24, 89–90 Don Juan, 22, 93 C Cabell, James Branch, 46, 91 Cain, James M., 59n4 Cain, Paul, 65n10 Campbell, Joseph, 74n21 Captain Blood (Sabatini), 30 Cassuto, Leonard, 7, 66, 79n28 Castle of Otranto, The (Walpole), 24 Cawelti, John G., 4, 5, 12n1, 17n14, 28n37, 74n22 Caxton, William, 50 Cervantes, Miguel de, see Don Quijote Chambers, Sir E. K., 47 Chandler, Raymond The Big Sleep, 1–2, 12–13, 21, 25, 51, 57–82, 89–95 The Curtain, 63n8 early romantic writings, 31, 73n20 English Summer, A Gothic Romance, 80, 82 Farewell, My Lovely, 62, 66n11, 68–70, 75, 79 The High Window, 4, 12, 21, 61, 62, 66n11, 71, 77, 79 The Lady in the Lake, 62, 79 The Little Sister, 66–68, 70–73, 77–79 The Long Goodbye, vii, 51, 67–69, 72, 74, 77, 80, 90 Pearls Are a Nuisance, 59n3, 72n19 Playback (film script), 68, 80, 82 Playback (novel), 66–68, 80 The Simple Art of Murder, 73, 92 and World War I, 41–52

Chatterton, Thomas, 24 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 93 Chesterton, G. K., 46 Chevauchée, 15–16, 43 Chrétien de Troyes, 18, 19, 20n21, 25, 28n38, 51, 51n15, 63, 64, 74, 80, 82n32 Civil War (U.S.), 27, 43–45, 52 Comfort, W. W., 25 Continental Op (Hammett), 12 Courtly love, 18, 78–79 Crusades, 17, 17n14, 26, 29, 30, 48n11, 76 D Daly, Carroll John, 12, 65n10 Dante, 78 de la Mare, Walter, 31 Desengaño, 23n25 Devaney-Lovinguth, Sharon, 6, 6n6 Dicksee, Sir Frank, 25, 30n45 Don Quijote (Cervantes), 21–23, 45n7, 51, 63n8, 93 Du Bois, W. E. B., 26, 27, 27n33 Durham, Philip, 4, 5, 17n14, 63, 68, 69, 74 E Einem, Commander Karl von, 43 Eliot, T. S., 46 Engels, Friedrich, 21, 23 Erskine, John, 47 F Faulkner, William, 27, 27n34, 46, 46n8 Female Quixote, The (Lennox), 93 Femme fatale, 60 Ferrante, Joan, 20, 60n6

 INDEX 

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 46, 50 The Great Gatsby, 49 Fontana, Ernest, 5, 63 Frazer, Sir James George, 48 Froissart, Jean, 18n16, 28–30, 43 Frye, Northrop, 12n1, 18, 51, 61, 79 Fussell, Paul, 31, 43, 47–48 G Game of Thrones, A, 21 Gentility, 12, 13n3, 14–15, 18–19, 62, 68, 72–74, 76–77, 82 Georgian Poetry (anthologies), 31 Gilgamesh, 74 Gone With the Wind, 52 Gothic (genre), 24, 94 Gravdal, Kathryn, 20, 20n21, 67n13 Guns, 65–66 H Hall, Stuart, 26 Hammett, Dashiell, 12, 46, 91, 94–95 The Dain Curse, 94 Red Harvest, 59n4, 81n30 Hardy, Thomas, 46, 94 Hawks, Howard, 69, 70, 75 Hemingway, Ernest, 47, 70 A Farewell to Arms, 43 The Sun Also Rises, 49–50 Heng, Geraldine, 18n16, 26n31, 66 Henty, G. A., 30 Himes, Chester, 76n24 His Girl Friday (Hawks), 69 Hurd, Richard, 16, 22n23, 24, 93 I Ideology, defined, 3n3 Imperialism, 26–30, 76

J Jameson, Fredric, 6, 7, 7n7, 26n31, 58n2, 59, 70n17, 94 Jaufré (anon.), 93 Jauss, Hans Robert, 58n2 Jefferson, Thomas, 32 Justice League of America, 21 K Keats, John, 31, 48, 62 Knight, Stephen, 5n4, 6n5 L Lanier, Sidney, 28 Larkin, Philip, 49 Loomis, Roger Sherman, 47 Lord of the Rings, The, 21 Los Angeles, 4, 5, 65, 74, 74n22, 76n23 Lost Illusions (Balzac), 94 Lubitsch, Ernst, 70 Lull, Ramón, 50 M Macdonald, Ross, 4, 5 Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 93 Malory, Thomas, 20n21 See also Morte Darthur, Le Marx, Karl, 21, 23, 94n5 Masefield, John, 45 McCann, Sean, 6, 58n2, 66, 76n23, 79n28 McGann, Jerome J., 3 McKeon, Richard, 15n7 Medievalism Romantic, 23–24 Victorian, 24–28 Millais, Sir John Everett, 25, 30n45 Moby-Dick (Melville), 94

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INDEX

Modernism, 3, 42, 44, 58, 58n1, 90, 91, 94 Morris, William, 24 Morte Darthur, Le (Malory), 13–15, 18–21, 25, 27–30, 45–46, 50–52, 60–61, 64–68, 73–74, 78, 80 Mosley, Walter, 59, 76n24 N Napoleonic Wars, 43–44 Native Americans, 27, 76 Needham, Rodney, 7 Northanger Abbey (Austen), 93 O O’Brien, Geoffrey, 4 O’Reilly, Kevin, 6n6 Orlando (Woolf), 94 Osborne, Lawrence, 5, 60 P Parker, Robert B., 5 Petrarch, 78 Pierce, J. Kingston, 5 Plain, Gill, 7, 66, 69, 72n19, 79n28 Poe, Edgar Allan, 51, 73 Powys, John Cowper, 46 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 24, 51 Prisoner of Zenda, The (Hope), 30 proletarian fiction, 58 Propp, Vladímir, 74n21 Protest novel, 58 Pyle, Howard, 28, 29, 29n40, 29n41 R Race Williams (Daly), 12, 76n23 Racism, 26–28 Rackham, Arthur, 28, 46 Raimbaut d’Orange, 82n32

Rape, 18–20, 26, 67, 67n13 Return of the Native, The (Hardy), 94 Robinson, E. A., 45 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 51 Rzepka, Charles, 5, 6, 6n5, 63 S Sam Spade (Hammett), 12 Sassoon, Siegfried, 31 Scaggs, John, 5 Scaramouche (Sabatini), 30 Scarlet Pimpernel, The (Orczy), 30 Scott, Sir Walter, 4, 17, 24, 24n27, 27, 27n35, 28n38, 76n24, 90 "Essay on Chivalry", 17, 24 Ivanhoe, 23–25 Seeger, Alan, 43 Sense and Sensibility (Austen), 93 Sidney, Sir Philip, 74–75 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 19, 60 Skenazy, Paul, 5, 6n6, 12n1 slavery (U.S.), 26 Smith, Erin A., 6, 58n2, 66, 81n30 Southern (U.S.) chivalric ideology, 26–28, 52, 73, 76 Southey, Robert, 28 Speir, Jerry, 5 Spenser, Edmund, 75 Star Wars, 21 Steinbeck, John, 46n8 Sterling, Stewart, 65n10 Strachey, Sir Edward, 14n4, 25, 28 Symons, Arthur, 45 T Tennyson, Alfred, 24, 31, 48, 51, 60, 81 Thompson, E. P., 21, 23 Trott, Sarah, 6n6, 42n1, 44n4, 92n3 Troubadours, 78, 81, 82n32 Trouble in Paradise (Lubitsch), 70

 INDEX 

Turner, W. J., 48 Twain, Mark, 15, 15n8, 27, 27n35 U U.S. War against Mexico, 27, 27n36, 29n43, 30n45, 62 V Villon, François, 51 Vinaver, Eugène, 47, 50n14 Vovelle, Michel, 3n3

W Watts, George Frederic, 30n46 Western (genre), 12n1, 28n37, 58n2 Weston, Jesse, 46 Wilde, Oscar, 31 Wilder, Billy, 70 Woolf, Virginia, 42, 94 World War I, 3, 25, 32, 41–52, 90, 91 Wuthering Heights (Brontë), 71n18 Wyeth, N. C., 28, 46

101