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| Review Essay |
| Henry David Thoreau meets Raymond Chandler, Two American Eccentrics, Pt. I
Introduction and review of Searching for Thoreau: On the Trails and Shores of Wild New England, by Tom Slayton, illustrated by Ethan Slayton, Images of the Past, Bennington, Vermont, 2008 (Paperback) 240 pp.
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| Michael Miller |
February 12, 2008 |
| Two books about great American literary eccentrics have captured my imagination recently. They are not only exceptionally good books in their different ways, but they also discuss themes which have occupied me particularly in my recent travels and readings: wandering, exile, and walking, the unfathomability of human relationships, particular places and people, notably New England and Southern California, and what Pope, Durrell, and others have called “the spirit of place,” following the ancient concept of the genius loci. Henry David Thoreau and Raymond Chandler, who in their individualism—alienation even—were both exiles in their own country (in Thoreau’s case his own home town), have more in common than would appear on the surface, just as Los Angeles, the city with no past, has as powerful a genius loci as Walden Pond, now skirted by a constantly roaring Route 2 and a parking lot for tourists: today a cheap and convenient resort for any family with an S.U.V., a boat, and a gaggle of raucous children. Both men were grounded in the Greek and Roman classics, and both made significant and interesting use of their learning in their writings; both men were attracted to much older women, not that Thoreau ever did much about it; both men lived with or close to forceful mothers well into maturity; both men have been thought to be closet homosexuals; and both Thoreau the teetotaler and Chandler the alcoholic could be intensely priggish in their own veins. And both men would have been horrified at the thought of all those little brats pissing in Walden Pond.
Tom Slayton, editor emeritus of Vermont Life, has brought his incomparable knowledge of the trails and landscapes of New England to a thoroughly engaging commentary and practical hiker’s guide to Thoreau’s haunts in nature, all within a morning’s drive of the Berkshires, if not within the county; and novelist Judith Freeman has brought off a brilliantly successful tour de force in her account of her peregrinations—mostly be car, of course—around Chandler’s and her own adoptive home town, with the appendage of a research trip to Oxford (where a part of Chandler’s papers rests in the Bodleian Library) in search of an understanding of his obsessive devotion to his wife Cissy, who was eighteen years his senior. Both books are particularly fruitful explorations of the relationship between literature and the physical experience of place enjoyed by the reader who travels in search of whatever intangible goal his reading has planted in his mind. After all, reading is a kind of locomotion: one walks with one’s eyes, as, walking, one sees with one’s feet. 
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| Judith Freeman, The Long Embrace, Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, New York, Pantheon, 2007, 368 pp. |
| Michael Miller |
February 12, 2008 |
| Both the subtitle of Judith Freeman’s The Long Embrace: “Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved,” as well as its author’s stated purpose, lead us to believe that its primary subject is Chandler’s enigmatic older wife, Cissy. Freeman’s obsessive interest in Chandler led her to read selections from his letters, and from that she became obsessed with Cissy, with whom Chandler himself was clearly obsessed. Part of her fascination is the very paucity of information which has come down about her, only a handful of photographs and a few notes. However, Raymond Chandler himself comes first, both in the subtitle and in Freeman’s obsession, and, while Cissy is most prominently the leitmotiv which holds the book and its various themes together, we get more exposure to Chandler’s other love (in what was most definitely a love-hate relationship, as was the possibly other) the city of Los Angeles, since much of Freeman’s research consisted of finding and motoring to the many furnished houses and flats in which they lived over their forty mostly reclusive years together, and much of her text consists of personal, even intimate narrations of her experiences in these visits. In her work Freeman could not help becoming more deeply immersed in the city, which she and Chandler made their adoptive home. |
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