In the Background of Chandler's "The Big Sleep"

Last post, I spoke about Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and class in the novel. Today, I want to briefly return to a subject that I explored in "'Idle White Rich' in Catherine Carmier;" in that post, I talk about the fleeting references in Gaines' novel to the white who own the land and who spend their time involved in leisure activities such as racing along the river in a speed boat. Gaines presents whites in the background of the novel. They are there, they exist, and they have an effect on the characters that populate Catherine Carmier. Likewise, Chandler, and other white American authors, populate their novels with African American, Mexican American, or other characters that appear only fleetingly throughout the text. The presence of these characters, as Toni Morrison argues, cannot be ignored. Morrison, in Playing in the Dark (1993), argues that "canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States" (5). by pushing "minority" groups to they margins of the texts, authors work, as Morrison continues, to define an "Americanness" that excludes those that appear only in passing. With that in mind, I want to look briefly at Chandler's novel and a couple of instances where those on the margins of American society during the 1930s appear, then disappear, while the white characters perform their duties.

When Philip Marlowe enters Eddie Mars' casino in chapter "twenty-two," he begins by describing the "Mexican orchestra" performing on stage. He states:

It was about ten-thirty when the little yellow-sashed Mexican orchestra got tired of playing a low-voiced, prettied-up rhumba that nobody was dancing to. The gourd player rubbed his finger tips together as if they were sore and got a cigarette into his mouth almost with the same movement. The other four, with a timed simultaneous stoop, reached under their chairs for glasses from which they sipped, smacking their lips and flashing their eyes. Tequila, their manner said. It was probably mineral water. The pretense was as wasted as the music. Nobody was looking at them. (135)

This brief passage contains an enormous amount of information, specifically within the final four tightly constructed sentences. The musicians play; however, no one in Mars' joint listens to them. To the patrons, the orchestra remains invisible, blending into the background. Likewise, when the performers take a drink from underneath their chairs, they present an image that the people gathered to gamble away their money expect to see, Mexicans drinking tequila. However, the musicians, according to Marlowe, due this only as facade. They probably only drink "mineral water," thus countering the stereotypes of the patrons who do not even pay any attention to them. The musicians occupy a space in the background, removed from the main plot of Chandler's novel.

Another instance of marginalized characters appearing in the novel, but not in a fully fleshed out manner occurs with the Sternwood's maid. As Marlowe meets with Vivian for the first time, she finishes her drink then rings a bell, calling a servant to come and pour her another drink. Marlowe describes the maid simply by appearance. Later, the butler provides her name: Mathilda.

A maid came into the room by a side door. She was a middle-aged woman with a long yellow gentle face, a long nose, no chin, large wet eyes. She looked like a nice old horse that had been turned out to pasture after long service. (18)

While it is not clear if the maid is African American, Asian American, or white, it is clear that she does not have a large part in the novel. She appears a few times, always being referred to by Marlowe as the maid, performs an action, then disappears. What makes this interesting to me is that the chauffeur and butler both have more pronounced, albeit still small, roles in the novel. What does the maid's removal to the background say?  Can it be seen in the same way as the Mexican orchestra that performs at Eddie Mars' club? Even if the maid is white, we still get into issues of class and standing in society, as I talked about last post.




In regards to all of this, I want to explore how Chandler's portrayal of the orchestra and the maid relate to historical facts regarding Mexican American's, African American's, and Asian American's statuses in Los Angeles during the time of the novel. I'm not sure what this would add to the discussion, especially considering I have not read any other novels by Chandler, but doing preliminary research, it looks like exploring these angles may be useful in examining characters like the ones discussed above. I am also very much interested in how this novel became a major film in 1946. Based on the subject matter in the novel, I find it fascinating that the film got made then.

To see more information of race in Chandler's oeuvre, look at  the Chandler and racism entry in A Reader's Guide to Raymond Chandler.

Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Print.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Print.

Chandler's "The Big Sleep" and the Issue of Class

I have arrived, at the hard-boiled tradition, through a rather circuitous manner. Starting with the works of African American novelists such as Chester Himes, Donald Goines, Robert Beck, and Ronald S. Jefferson, I have begun to retrace their steps and to read works by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Recently, I completed Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939). Thinking about the novel, I cannot help but recall Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. On the surface, this comparison may not seem to hold much water. While both novels incorporate the first person narrator, they appeared in different milieus: Gatsby during the Roaring Twenties and The Big Sleep near the end of The Great Depression. Even though on novel arose during an economic upsurge and the other during a downturn, both deal with class differences and the ways that, try as one might, an individual has a hard time moving from one class to another.



Chandler's novel focuses on Philip Marlowe, a private eye, and a case he undertakes for the elderly General Sternwood. The general tasks Marlowe with squashing a blackmail attempt involving Sternwood's daughter Carmen. Marlowe takes the case, only asking for twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses. Marlowe does his duties for Sternwood and ends up receiving five hundred dollars, which he did not ask for. Throughout, Marlowe maintains that he tells the truth and that is what he is concerned with, the truth of events. Marlowe appears to be, in a way, the moral compass of the novel, seeking the accurateness of the events that occur during the course of the novel. For my discussion here, I want to focus on what separates the Sternwoods from Marlowe and others in the novel.

The Sternwoods made their money in the oil business, even building their house in Los Angeles on a hill overlooking their investment. As Marlowe leaves the Sternwood mansion after his initial visit, he sees the fields:

On this lower level faint and far off I could just barely see some of the old wooden derricks of the oilfield from which the Sternwoods had made their money. Most of the field was a public park now, cleaned up and donated to the city by General Sternwood. But a little of it was still producing in groups of welsl pumping five to six barrels a day. (21)

By moving up the hill, the Sternwoods escaped the "smell [of] the stale sump water," while still being able to "see what had made them rich" (21). While the Sternwoods made their money through oil, the fields they owned slowed in production, bringing in less and less money to the family. At the end of the novel, Marlowe and Carmen go down the hill to the desolate fields. Marlowe describes the field as a wasteland of machinery; he even notes that "[t]he wells were no longer pumping" (218). No more money came into the Sternwoods through the fields that made them rich.

Now, we do not know, from the novel, what place in society the Sternwoods held before their oil field endeavors. However, we do know that there is a clear disctinction between them and some of the other characters, like Marlowe, in the novel who occupy a lower social strata. What interests me is this separation. In Gatsby, Nick and Jay both come from lower classes. Jay attempts to rise in order to regain the love and Daisy, and Nick just goes with the flow during his summer with Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom. Jay, even though he amasses a large sum of money through nefarious means, never attains the same social level as Tom and Daisy. Watching Jay's attempts to get Daisy back, Nick becomes nauseus and sick of the way that Tom and Daisy act as "they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or thei rvast carlessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess thay had made" (187-188).

Gatsby does not allow for any sort of equality between its characters. Tom and Daisy go on with their lives, Jay dies, and Nick leaves. The Big Sleep, on the other hand, concludes with a poetic comment on the equality of mankind. While differences in class may arise during people's lives, death brings everyone together. Marlowe says,

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. (230)   

Chandler's novel ultimately equalizes the charcaters in the end through a discussion of dust to dust. Gatsby, on the other hand, concludes with Nick lamenting the fact that noone comes to Jay's funeral and urging himself on towards the future stating that we all continue to strive for "the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us" (189).

At this time, I don't completely know what to make of all of this. As stated earlier, I think that looking at these novels in relation to the periods of prosperity or depression they were written within warrants attention. I did a quick search on Chandler's novel and The Great Depression, but I did not come up with any hits. Has anything been written on this? Next post, I will continue looking at The Big Sleep and The Great Gatsby, examining the charcaters that make up the backdrop of each novel.

Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. New York: Vintage Books, 1976. Print.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1992. Print.