ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: HARD-BOILED ANXIETY
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ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: HARD-BOILED ANXIETY HAMMETT,CHANDLER, AND MACDONALD Karen Huston Karydes, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Dissertation directed by: Professor David M. Wyatt Department of English Between 1946 and 1976 Ross Macdonald produced eighteen Lew Archer novels, the heart of his achievement. The Archer series also extended the work begun by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Together these three writers invented the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction, gave it romantic voice, and used it to increasingly adaptive purposes. For Macdonald, writing his books got him to the far side of pain – to a place where he could make the best of the rest of his life. He had experienced childhood as full of predatory secrets and sexual shame. As soon as he could – and by 1936 both his parents had died – Macdonald reinvented himself and prevailed in this willed performance for twenty years. In 1956, when his own child was in terrible trouble, Macdonald got help for her and, finally, for himself. “Notes of a Son & Father” is the keystone of my project: an unpublished, confessional, harrowing accounting of Macdonald’s childhood, marriage, and fatherhood, written for his psychiatrist. I was lucky to find it in the Kenneth and Margaret Millar Papers at the University of California at Irvine Libraries’ Special Collections & Archives. A dime-store spiral notebook with 39 pages of small, tightly penciled handwriting: an anguished exercise in courage for Macdonald to write and then give over to readers like me who might come along. In the course of his psychoanalysis, Macdonald began to hope that he could, finally, write about his past in the guise of Freudian fables. In this effort, he extended the hard-boiled genre into emotional territory that Hammett and Chandler anticipated, but never occupied. This new work culminated in the last twelve Archer novels, the best of which are The Galton Case, The Chill, and The Underground Man. In these three works, Macdonald transforms the detective figure into a listener, a man devoted to uncovering not crime but rather the power and logic of archetypal complexes, family romances, folie a deux, the repetition compulsion, and the inversion theory. HARD-BOILED ANXIETY IN HAMMETT, CHANDLER, AND MACDONALD by Karen Huston Karydes Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2010 Advisory Committee: Professor David M. Wyatt, Chair Professor Richard K. Cross Professor John Auchard Professor Howard Norman Professor Charles F. Wellford © Copyright by Karen Huston Karydes 2010 ii for George iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS John Utley, M.D., Ph.D. Talbot County Free Library, Easton, MD Christine Riddiough, M.S. Rachel Kristy, M.S. Jill Wellman, Ph.D. Jane Larsen, M.L.S. iv Table of Contents Dedication……………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………iii Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………..iv Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: Sons and Fathers…………………………………………………….13 Chapter 2: Sons and Mothers…………………………………………………….54 Chapter 3: Sons, Wives, and Mistresses………………………………………..91 Chapter 4: Sons and Would-Be Lovers………………………………………..127 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………...162 Footnotes………………………………………………………………………….172 Bibliography……………………………………………………..........................194 1 Introduction Between 1946 and 1976 Ross Macdonald produced eighteen Lew Archer novels, the heart of his achievement. The Archer series also extended the work begun by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Together these three writers invented the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction, gave it romantic voice, and used it to increasingly adaptive purposes. For Macdonald, writing his books healed him and got him to the far side of pain - to a place where he could make the best of the rest of his life.1 He had experienced childhood as lacking in emotional continuity, full of predatory secrets and sexual shame. As soon as he could - and by 1936 both his parents had died - Macdonald reinvented himself and prevailed in this willed performance for twenty years. In 1956, when his own child was in terrible trouble, Macdonald got help for her and, at last, for himself. He began to hope that he could, finally, write about his past, in the guise of Freudian fables. This new work culminated in twelve more Archer novels, the best of which are The Galton Case, The Chill, and The Underground Man. “Notes of a Son & Father” is the keystone of my project: an unpublished, confessional, harrowing accounting of Macdonald’s childhood, marriage, and fatherhood, written for his psychiatrist. I was lucky to find it on October 16, 2008, in box 49 of the Kenneth and Margaret Millar Papers at the University of California at Irvine Libraries’ Special Collections & Archives. A dime-store spiral notebook with thirty-nine pages of small, tightly penciled handwriting: an anguished exercise in courage for Macdonald to write and then to give over to 2 readers like me who might come along. Throughout this dissertation any unattributed direct quotations come from “Notes of a Son & Father.” Macdonald began writing “Notes of a Son & Father” for his daughter Linda’s analyst, to provide “enough to give a line, at least a line to read between.” Desperate to help his child, he started the notebook to speed her analysis along, to heal her faster. But he found the process of writing “Notes of a Son & Father” helpful to his analyst, to himself, and so Macdonald adapted the experience to create openly self-realizing fiction, and the adventure of doing that made him a less-haunted, more present man. Archer became a very different fellow too, in the twelve Macdonald novels that came after “Notes of a Son & Father.” “I think [my novels] have deepened my understanding of life,” Macdonald said. “Let’s put it this way, my novels have made me into a novelist.”2 “[W]e are interested in the moral mechanisms of family life, and where the machine broke down,” Macdonald wrote. In the figuring out of those processes, “Notes of a Son & Father” becomes an accounting of his own life. What is curious is that what was clear to Macdonald is not what the reader sees: on every page Macdonald judges himself guilty of not loving his mother, his father, his wife, or his daughter enough. But the reader sees that Macdonald’s father was unavailable to his son for years at a time, that his mother was a hysteric, that his wife was angry, and that Macdonald was a successful academic and writer, an effortful husband and father – and that he loved all of them enough. By the time he began psychoanalysis in 1956, Macdonald had written six Archer novels, so he knew what Chandler knew: that Hammett’s hard-boiled 3 detective genre had developed conventions providing a structure that could support any number of themes. In his essay “Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go,” Macdonald describes reading Hammett for the first time: It wasn’t escape reading. As I stood there absorbing Hammett’s novel, the slot machines at the back of the shop were clanking and whirring, and in the billiard room upstairs the perpetual 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 like a second city. For the first time that I can remember I was consciously experiencing in my own sensibility the direct meeting of art and contemporary actuality – an experience that popular art at its best exists to provide – and beginning to find a language and a shape for that experience.3 That “second city” is something like the truth about the factual city that can be found only in fiction – more specifically, only in the direct meeting of art and contemporary actuality. The fiction organizes and thereby makes clear the secret meanings of the factual city. Hammett is doing more than selecting telling details about San Francisco in 1929: he is distilling its rank perfume, using its cock-eyed vocabulary, and inventing the lonely, near-tragic little man going forward day after day through mud and blood and death and deceit – as callous and brutal and cynical as necessary towards a dim goal, with nothing to push or pull him towards it except he’s been hired to reach it.4 4 This first narrating hero, the Continental Op, sprang from the reports Hammett had filed as a Pinkerton National Detective Agency operative and from his essay “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective.” From the Op forward the hard-boiled private eye has been fashioned in his creator’s image, a fact which makes knowing that author’s biography all the more crucial to the study of his canon. In Self-Portrait: Ceaselessly into the Past, Macdonald encourages us to coordinate the work with the life: I can think of few more complex critical enterprises than disentangling the mind and life of a first-person detective story writer from the mask of his detective-narrator. The assumption of the mask is as public as vaudeville but as intensely private as a lyric poem. It is like taking an alias, …and it constitutes among other things an act of identification with the people one is writing for.5 Hammett’s childhood, coming of age, and marriage - including a paternity question that arose in 1980, nineteen years after Hammett’s death – provided those parts-at-hand that he used to assemble a code for both his fictional protagonists and his own behavior, a code that was existentialist, honorable, atheistic and unexplained. This code worked for the lot of them – author and shamuses - but not in a sustained way because it did not address the anxieties that fueled Hammett’s capacity for self-destructive behavior.