Bowling Green State Universitylibrary

Mo. 24 3 9 IA BETWEEN THE MOUNTAINS AND THE SEA: ROSS MACDONALD'S LEW ARCHER NOVELS SAMUEL L. GROGG, JR. A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY March 1974 Approved by Doctoral Committee _Advisor Dejrartmentxsf Ænglish Graduate SchooV%epresentative BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY (c) 1974 SAMUEL L. GROGG, JR. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED il ABSTRACT Ross Macdonald has stated that his primary goal in writing is to capture the sense of contemporary life. He goes on to point out that the detective form has been the most useful for accomplishing this goal. This study examines Macdonald's use of the popular detective form, and defines how he has made it a singularly appropriate form in which to represent the "sense" of physical and mental life in America's present. The study traces the early development of the de tective form and its ability to mirror cultural attitudes and values, defines Macdonald's narrator-hero Lew Archer in reference to his predecessors and to his own peculiar characterization, and discusses the major themes and subjects of the Archer novels. Macdonald's repeated insistence on the recognition of moral and physical limits, the continuity©f time, and the idea of "wholeness" in everything is the major thrust of the entire Lew Archer series. The study concludes that Macdonald, in the Lew Archer novels, has provided an accurate reflection of America in a time of cultural transition from an agrarian dream to an urban nightmare and beyond. Ill ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For Sam, Sr., Hazel, Linda and Brady, loving kibitzers who have watched the whole game and kept me honest. And for Ray B. Browne and Kenneth Millar, pioneers who have marked marvelous paths for me to explore. S. L. G. IV TABLE OP CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT................................................ ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT.......................................... iii INTRODUCTION ............................................ vi CHAPTER 1................................................ 1 CHAPTER II....................... 29 CHAPTER III............................................ 56 CONCLUSION.............................................. 78 FOOTNOTES.............................................. 84 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................ 91 APPENDIX ................................................ 109 V The man who can address an audience of one hundred and fifty thousand people—unenlightened—who believe what he says has a heavy duty to perform and tremendous responsibil ities to shoulder; and he should address himself to his task not with the flippancy of a catch-penny juggler at the county fair, but with earnestness and soberness, with a sense of his limitations, and with all the abiding sincerity that by the favour and mercy of the gods may be his. Frank Norris, from "The Responsibilities of the Novelist. vi INTRODUCTION "I'm really trying to write about contem porary life. I've found the detective form useful for this." Kenneth Millar/Ross Macdonald After completing his twenty-third novel, the seven- teenth featuring detective Lew Archer, Kenneth Millar who writes under the pseudonymn of Ross Macdonald called attention to the broad parameters of the Gothic tradition out of which he writes and good-humoredly confessed a secret teenage ambition to finish Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 2 incomplete Christabel. The aspiring young poet soon rec ognized his "limitations," however, and turned his admira tion of Coleridge into a Ph.D. dissertation while his cre ative energies were directed into the writing of popular mystery stories. "For a long time," says Millar, "indeed, for the greater part of my adult existence, I was made to feel by my friends and colleagues that these two departments of my mental life, the scholarly and the popular, were schizo- x phrenically at odds with each other." But Millar persisted in keeping his balance amidst the protests of his academic colleagues against his mys tery writing and the snickerings of his writer friends over his scholarly endeavors. And the persistence has led fin ally to the confident self-acknowledgement: "I am persuaded vii to believe that the double enterprise has made some kind of sense." Exactly what that "kind of sense" is, how it is manifested throughout the Lew Archer novels—the bulk of Millar's writings—and the implications it has regard ing the tradition of detective fiction, and popular liter ature in general, make up the admittedly broad focus of this study. Kenneth Millar/Ross Macdonald, scholar-teacher/popular writer, are handcuffed together in a kind of ying-yang re lationship that provides the dynamic structure for the Lew Archer novels. And it is within these novels that Millar/ Macdonald attempts to realize both a private and a public ambition and responsibility: "I’m really trying to write about contemporary life."^ The "life" Kenneth Millar writes about is at once his own life, its origins, evolution, and personal secrets, while at the same time written under the alias of Ross Mac donald it is the broad physical and mental life of his time and place—the two decades after World War II and America's fabled dreamland, southern California. The romantic emotions of adolescence early inclined Millar to tell his story, following the lead of Coleridge, within the shape of the gothic poem. But those early efforts proved "stillborn." For Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for his time and place, for his private musings and his viii public vision, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or, perhaps, the unfinished Christabel gave the most fitting form and idiom for the storyteller. The vehicle of Millar’s story telling is, on the surface, greatly different from the shape of romantic poetry, but it internally shares common chords and rhythms. Millar found his generic mouthpiece in a Kitchner, Ontario tobacco shop when he picked a copy of Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon off a shelf. It wasn’t escape reading. As I stood there absorbing Hammett’s world, the slot machine at the back of the shop was clanking and whirring and in the billiards room upstairs the perpet ual poker game was being played. Like iron filings magnetized by the book in my hands, the secret meanings of the city began to organize themselves around me. For the first time that I can re member, I was experiencing within my own sensibility the meeting of art and contemporary actuality, an experience that popular art at its best exists to provide, and beginning to find a lan guage and shape for my experience.© As if it were inevitable, and perhaps it was, the pop ular detective story furnished the most intuitively useful form for Kenneth Millar in writing his own story and the story of his time and his place. 1 CHAPTER I THE DOUBLE ENTERPRISE The inevitability of Kenneth Millar's attraction to and eventual exclusive use of the detective form for his writing is closely, if not intimately, linked to his per sistence in the double mental life of the scholarly aid the popular. The detective form has, likewise, a similar nature of duality, and the history of the form's develop ment has been colored by the evolution and mutation of its two-sided demeanor. The classic illustration of the dual temper and sub stance of detective fiction is presented with the vener able stories of the English writer, Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle divided his writing self between the clearly distinguishable and unforgettable characters: Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson. Seldom separated, the two maintain a constant tension of joined opposites. The ten sion results from the binding of a scholar-scientist with a popular storyteller, private intellect with public con science and sentiment. In the various cases, Sherlock Holmes apprehends nothing but curious problems for the exercise of his ra tional processes and deductive abilities. But Dr. Watson views the occurrences with an eye only to their remarkability and wonderfully popular appeal. This essential Holmes- 2 Watson tug-o-war is dramatized at the beginning of Doyle's second published story, The Sign of Four (1890). Alluding to their previous case and Jefferson Hope's struggle with the Mormon angels of death, Watson beams: "'I was never so struck by anything in my life. I even embodied it in a small brochure, with the somewhat fan tastic title of 'A Study in Scarlet.''" Holmes, somewhat perturbed, replies: "’Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it. Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional man ner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.’" Watson is noticeably "annoyed" by his friend's rebuke, but he decides to keep silent and sits quietly nursing his sore leg, wounded sometime previously by a Jezail bullet during military duty in India. Dr. Watson's reticence comes not completely from an inability to counter the pronounce ments of the great detective, but more probably out of the instinctual knowledge of a storyteller that the fifth prop osition of Euclid would be bloody boring reading, and from a passive determination to continue, in spite of Holmes' protests, to recount the cases in the romantic style to which they lend themselves and to do so under as "fantastic" titles as it pleases the good Doctor to conjure up. 3 The exchanges between Holmes and Watson over the "cor rect treatment" of detection are the pointed remonstrances of a dominatingly cool scientific specialist against the romantic enthusiasms and "common" sense of a general prac titioner and popular storyteller who knows what an audience will sit still for. The fact remains, all bickering aside, that Holmes needs Watson (though the followers of Doyle generally failed to notice it) just as Dr. Watson needs Holmes.

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