SOURCE: "The Longest Goodbye: Raymond Chandler and the Poetry of Alcohol," in Armchair Detective, 18, 4, Fall, 1985, pp. 392-406.

[In the following essay. Tate studies the symbolic and autobiographical role of alcohol in Raymond Chandler's novel The Long Goodbye.]

A host of legends and biographies maneuver us into difficulties about the intentions of writers who were more than familiar with Demon Rum. The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and Sanctuary are harder to "read" than we would like to admit. Who is not aware of Fitzgerald's love for Keats, and the source of his most evocative title, Tender Is the Night? Remembering Fitzgerald's life may lend a certain chill to such warm lines as those of the second stanza of Keat's Ode to a Nightingale. The "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" of an imaginary glass of wine are a defining quality of an object of unique poetic totality. But consider the stanza as perceived by an alcoholic, and the bloom is off the rose.

Raymond Chandler's references to drinking are part of the hardboiled ethos parodied by S. J. Perelman and Woody Allen: the hardboiled dick must have his office bottle. But at least once, Chandler followed Fitzgarald in pursuit of a poetic suspension which we may think of as poetic if not Keatsian. And, like Fitzgerald as an artist and possibly as a man, he found bitterness in the dregs. But he would not, could not have come to such knowledge without first exploring the lambent golden greenness—the translucent green goldenness—the chartreuse astringency of a cocktail around which he structured his greatest and most personal work. The Long Goodbye (1954) is a ninety-proof revelation of self, an articulated fantasy, and a novel of manners written by a man who resented nothing so much as not being taken seriously as a writer.

John Houseman's well-known memoir "Lost Fortnight" tells perhaps the most dramatic story of Chandler's drinking. An aggrieved Chandler (whom Houseman, himself a veteran of the English public school system, portrays as an inhibited victim of his stay at Dulwich College many years before) demands and receives elaborate secretarial and medical support for a prolonged jag so that he can finish the shooting script of The Blue Dahlia (1945)—drunk. When the deal was struck, says Houseman, "We left the studio in Ray's open Packard and drove to Perino's where I watched him down three double martinis before eating a large and carefully selected lunch, followed by three double stingers." Chandler lived on intravenous injections and bourbon and water, and finished the job.

The whole story is illustrative of Chandler's pride, his professionalism (!), and his peculiar relationship with alcohol. But the longer one considers the story, the more one sees: there's a connection demonstrated, in Chandler's mind and behavior, between alcohol and creativity, a "controlled" drunkenness and an ideal of gentle-manliness, which, for Chandler, was somehow specifically English. In Chandler's mind, this was, or could be, connected with the work of creation, the craft of writing. Chandler and Houseman were both in Hollywood trying to make a living, but, to Chandler, their English public school background was most important. One cannot imagine such an absurd but serious proposal being made to anyone else—or, perhaps, to any other kind of person. A similar fusion of pride, self-regard, friendship, Anglophile snobbery, and alcohol is the ostensible subject of Chandler's most ambitious, longest novel, The Long Goodbye—his last strong work.

Another memoir, Natasha Spender's "His Own Long Goodbye," offers a sophisticated analysis of an older Chandler, alcoholic and suicidally depressed by the death of his wife. Natasha Spender's comments and analysis are the most insightful we have:

He wrote The Long Goodbye as Cissy lay dying, and we who tried to see him through the subsequent "long nightmare" recognize in the book three dis-tinct self-portraits. It may well reflect the interior dialogue between facets of his own personality as he looked back upon their long life together, which he was soon to lose. Afterwards his London con-versations … strikingly resembled the dialogue of all three characters in turn.…

Like Terry [Lennox], Raymond was a young ex-soldier in the early twenties, battle-scarred and scared, whose pride was that "of a man who had nothing else." [Lennox], when castigated by Philip Marlowe for being a moral defeatist, says that his life is all "an act." Raymond often acknowledged his own tendency to fantasize and playact.…

Like that of Roger Wade, the successful, middle-aged, alcoholic and egocentric writer, Raymond's drunken stream of consciousness could also at bad moments be full of self-hatred, writer's angst, and sarcastic hostility.…

Marlowe of course, represents Chandler's ideal self, the conscience which punished the Roger Wade within him though not without commendation for achievement (for Wade in the book is "a bit of a bastard and maybe a bit of a genius too"), and befriended the Terry [Lennox] within, not without censure…

All three characters were drinkers, like Raymond himself, two of them disintegrating and despairing, for only the ideal-self Marlowe shows a disposition towards integrity. As aspects of Raymond's own character their dominance veered with his mood, Roger Wade his "bad self," Philip Marlowe his "good self and Terry [Lennox] his anxious one. These three, often in conflict, were in good times subordinated to a fourth, the genial, generous, and benevolently paternal friend.

Natasha Spender speaks from a knowledge of Chandler the man and from a psychological insight into his work. Her identification of the three leading male characters as a splitting of their creator's personality is a key to the structure and meaning of The Long Goodbye which I aspire to employ to unlock further of its secrets. Her specific identification of the fragments of self out of which characters are created has the power to remind us of works of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Poe, Dostoievski, and Conrad. But I wish to emphasize, not the splitting of the selves, but the alcoholic obsession of all three. The Long Goodbye, like many if not most fictions, may be a form of wishful thinking; but if so it is uniquely a picture and sublimation of wishful drinking.

Yet Frank MacShane, in his brilliant biography of Chandler, has made it clear that, at the time of the composition of The Long Goodbye, Chandler had "mastered his desire for [alcohol]." Yet the novel is at least superficially about drinking. It is what the characters do. Drinking is the basis of the relationship of Marlowe and Lennox. Drinking causes the acquaintance of Marlowe and Wade. Marlowe meets Linda Loring (his bride to be) at a bar. Marlowe meets Howard Spencer at a bar, and Mrs. Wade at that same bar. Chandler had mastered his desire for alcohol, at least temporarily; but alcohol was on his mind.

Chandler wrote his first draft worn down by his wife's declining health and his own self-doubt, yet carrying on. He sent the draft to his agent in May 1952. The reaction touched a nerve and led to a break between Chandler and the firm of Brandt and Brandt; the reaction also led to Chandler's revisions, which were interrupted by a trip to England. In a letter to Hamish Hamilton, his English publisher, Chandler declared

I wrote this as I wanted to because I can do that now. I don't care whether the mystery is fairly obvious, but I cared about the people, about this strange corrupt world we live in, and how any man who tries to be honest looks in the end either sentimental or plain foolish.… You write in a style that has been imitated, even plagiarized, to the point where you begin to look as if you were imitating your imitators. So you have to go where they can't follow you.

As MacShane puts it, "There is no doubt that Chandler intended to put all of himself into The Long Goodbye." As Natasha Spender suggests, "all of himself" means, in effect, three selves—three drinking selves. But let MacShane advance the story of the composition of Chandler's most ambitious work:

When Chandler returned to La Jolla in 1952, he announced that he had learned how to drink on the Mauretania returning from his first trip to England since 1918. He had discovered the gimlet, a cocktail made with gin and Rose's lime juice. In the evenings before dinner Chandler and his wife would have a single gimlet and that would be all. It was the first time he had done any drinking in his own house for six years. Gradually, as Cissy grew weaker and the situation more obvious, Chandler began to increase the amount he took.

A year after he had first sent out his draft, he was fourfifths of the way through his revision of the novel—and the gimlet was a substantial part of that re-vision.

And another year later, after Cissy's death, Patrick Doncaster interviewed Chandler in England for the Daily Mirror in a piece that

was never published because of a newspaper strike. They talked about Hollywood girls, and then

Doncaster changed the subject:

"Mrs. Chandler," I said gently.

He put down his gimlet, a gin and lime drink you associate with pukka sahibs and outposts of Empire rather than a Hollywood thriller writer whose chief character swigs Scotch.

"What about Mrs. Chandler?" he said edgily. "She's dead. Died last year." He looked away across the bar. He twitched a little, jumpy. Then something chocked in his throat.

"I've not got over it yet," he said quietly. And a big tear rolled down his cheek.

Doncaster's anecdote sends a chill up the spine because it not only portrays Chandler the suffering man but also gives a glimpse into the imagination of Chandler the haunted artist. We must notice here the association of alcohol with sentiment, even if that sentiment is a deeply felt and genuine grief. In The Long Goodbye, it is the gimlet which is the image of a certain sentiment. That potent and noble cocktail is the emotional solvent, the emblem of Marlowe's love for Lennox, and the connection by which Marlowe meets the woman who (in the unfinished Poodle Springs Story—1958) was to become his wife. If The Long Goodbye is a novel about drinking, then it is a novel about drinking gimlets. But what does drinking gimlets mean? Well—why did Daisy cry about Gatsby's imported English shirts? What do such shirts mean? As an image in context, everything. I do not compare Terry Lennox's gimlets—or Jupiter-Jowett—to Gatsby's brilliant collection of various commodities casually.

One measure of the seriousness with which Chandler addressed the composition of The Long Goodbye is its sturdy structure. The gimlets mentioned at the beginning, middle, and end of the novel are emblems as firmly placed (though not so meaningful) as the scaffolding/pillory scenes similarly placed in The Scarlet Letter. Chandler's firmness of design clarifies for us the unraveling of a tangled skein of action and emotion. The scenes with Lennox at the beginning and end enfold the interior episodes involving Roger Wade; at the end we understand the relationship between the two. Between the Lennox material at the beginning and the introduction of the Wade episodes are a number of lesser actions involving Endicott the lawyer, Morgan the reporter, Peters the private detective, the police, and Menendez and Starr, the gangsters. After Wade's death, these same people and connections are recapitulated before Marlowe finally sees Lennox again. This symmetry, a "geometric structure" or "framing device", strongly resembles the "ring composition" known to classicists.

Chandler's self-consciousness can be appreciated also by his self-inflicted criticism. The taunts of the gangster Menendez, placed about one-fifth of the way into the novel, are not idle street chatter but cunningly devised insults designed to preempt the reader. The well-heeled Menendez sneers at Marlowe's relative poverty and then strikes at the heart of the novel. Saying early what Chandler doesn't want the reader to think later, the criminal tough guy effectively discredits an intelligent position by taking it. He puts his finger on a sentimentality of which Chandler was aware.

"You got cheap emotions. You're cheap all over. You pal around with a guy, eat a few drinks, talk a few gags, slip him a little dough when he's strapped, and you're sold out to him. Just like some school kid that read Frank Merriwell. You got no guts, no brains, no connections, no savvy, so you throw out a phony attitude and expect people to cry over you." (Chapter 11)

Menendez's—that is, Chandler's—citation of Frank Merriwell is an acute piece of literary and even moral analysis. Gilbert Pattern's dime novels (signed by the pseudonymous Burt L. Standish) sold millions of copies from 1896 on. Frank Merriwell, that "wholesome college athlete," was a popular reduction of prep-school fantasy, whose sporting adventures may lie behind Marlowe's reference to a football injury (Chapter 8). Such a connection not only mocks but clarifies Marlowe's, and by extension Chandler's, romantic, even adolescent, code of honor. We may associate this further with Owen Johnson's Dink Stover, or better with a British tradition of boy's books by such writers as Thomas Hughes and R. M. Ballantyne. Chandler, that public school boy, never forgot Dulwich College.

And we must not forget—he never got over it—that Chandler began the career for which he is remembered as a pulpwriter himself, in Joseph R. Shaw's Black Mask magazine. Menendez's cutting phrase, "Tarzan on a big red scooter," is not only an effective sneer at Marlowe but a stinging rebuke written by the man whom it hurt most, Chandler himself. Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan, the son of a British nobleman, was a popular fantasy-figure of imperial association not as distant from Marlowe as it is comfortable to think. Switching from the vein of prep-school gentility to that of the street-wise tough guy, Marlowe expresses a profound ambivalence between English good manners and an American vernacular, the tension of which drives Chandler's novel. In an unsportsmanlike gesture that indicates a nerve has been touched, Marlowe punches Menendez in the stomach, which action is in effect Chandler lashing out at his own critical sense, setting an example for the reader to suppress the nay-sayer within. Such are the requirements of masculine romance, as written by an elegant and despairing artist of that genre. (The association of public school honor and the composition of "thrillers" is not so dated as it seems, surviving literally and healthily in Gavin Lyall's Blame the Dead [1973] and John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.)

Another measure of the seriousness with which Chandler addressed the project (the working title of which was Summer in Idle Valley) is its richness of literary allusion and reference. We find Walter Bagehot (Chapter 13), T. S. Eliot (Chapters 32 and 49), Keats (Chapter 34), Shakespeare (Chapters 26 and 47), Marlowe (Chapter 24) and Robert Frost/Blaise Pascal (Chapter 38), Sir James Frazer (Chapter 35), Flaubert (Chapter 23), Coleridge (Chapter 14), and William Inge (Chapter 23). If Marlowe's name repeats Christopher Marlowe's, it also encapsules Sir Thomas Malory's, for Marlowe was first named Mallory. Similarly, the publisher Howard Spencer conjures Edmund Spenser. But I think that the most important of these references—the most meaningful, the least incidental or decorative—is to F. Scott Fitzgerald, in Chapters 13 and 14.

For Chandler, that sensitive man, critical reader, and professional writer, was well aware of Fitzgerald and, I think, to some extent identified with him. He too labored in the sour vineyards of Hollywood, after Fitzgerald did (and as others such as Faulkner, Hammet, O'Hara, West, and McCoy did). Like Fitzgerald, he wrote a Hollywood novel (The Little Sister, 1949), and he had highly developed opinions about Fitzgerald's unfinished The Last Tycoon.

One example of Chandler's awareness of Fitzgerald's achievement (in a letter dated May 2, 1949) is stated at the expense of lesser writers:

But somehow [Marquand's] successful, oh-so-successful soufflés always make me think of little lost books like Gatsby and Miss Lonelyhearts—books which are not perfect, evasive of the problem often, side-stepping scenes which should have been written (and which Marquand would have written at twice the necessary length) but somehow passing along, crystallized, complete, and as such things go nowadays, eternal, a little pure art—great art or not I wouldn't know, but there is such a strange difference between the real stuff and a whole shelf of Pulhams and Forsytes and Charlie Grays.

Not that I class myself with any of these people …

Again, in a letter to Dale Warren of November 13, 1950, while he was working on The Long Goodbye, Chandler wrote that

Fitzgerald is a subject no one has a right to mess up. I think he just missed being a great writer, and the reason is pretty obvious. If the poor guy was already an alcoholic in his college days, it's a marvel that he did as well as he did. He had one of the rarest qualities in all literature, and it's a great shame that the word for it has been thoroughly debased by the cosmetic racketeers, so that one is almost ashamed to use it to describe a real distinction. Nevertheless, the word is charm—charm as Keats would have used it. Who has it today? It's not a matter of pretty writing or clear style. It's a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite, the sort of thing you get from good string quartettes. Yes, where would you find it today?

I think that to a degree Chandler here identifies, in effect, with Fitzgerald: alcoholism, charm, the magic of style, music. The alcoholic identification needs no comment, except to note that alcoholism is associated with both literary accomplishment and failure. The word magic Chandler used about good writing—and about his own writing. "All good writers have a touch of magic." Or again: "But a writer who hates the actual writing, who gets no joy out of the creation of magic by words, to me is simply not a writer at all … How can you hate the magic which makes of a paragraph or a sentence or a line of dialogue or a description something in the nature of a new creation?" Thinking of himself, he wrote that "[A] writer to be happy should be a good second rater.… He should definitely not be a mystery writer with a touch of magic and a bad feeling about plots."

In The Long Goodbye, the word "charm" is used by Marlowe about Lennox: "[H]e had charm." "Music" he used eloquently and elegiacally about his wife, who had been a fine pianist: "She was the music heard faintly at the edge of sound." At the end of Playback, Marlowe has received a long-distance proposal from Linda Loring. The last sentence is: "The air was full of music."

"Charm" and "magic" are directly related. The word charm is derived from the Latin carmen, meaning song. A charm is a poem or song, an incantation that may ward off evil spirits or bring good luck. By extension, a charm may be a talisman, hence "charm bracelet." This identity of terms—charm, magic, poetry—through the persona of Fitzgerald, or through his legend, is connected by Chandler with alcohol, a distilled magic, a bottled poetry, both the lift of inspiration and the subject of poetry itself. Edward Fitzgerald's arbitrary, antiquarian translations of Omar Khayyám remove us to an ancient world; through the poetry of Callimachus and Anacreon, the tradition reaches further back.

But Chandler and Fitzgerald have a bit more in common than alcohol, charm, and magical writing—which Chandler implies were the same thing, both in Fitzgerald as the other, and in himself as a conscious self. There's the Hollywood connection already mentioned; their membership in the same World War I generation; the profound romanticism that expresses itself variously in both writers as a complex social snobbery, both conscious and unconscious; there's an infatuation with the dialectic of class; an ambivalent "idealization" of woman; a shaky adherence to a prep-school idea of manliness. All of these qualities and themes, rich material for the writer of talent, are present in The Great Gatsby. My contention is that The Long Goodbye is in part a fond farewell to, a criticism of, an homage to, and a pastiche of The Great Gatsby.

Fitzgerald is loudly mentioned in The Long Goodbye, through the alcoholic, writerly bitterness of a character Natasha Spender has identified as a projection of Chandler himself: "I do not care to be in love with myself and there is no longer anyone else for me to be in love with. Signed: Robert (F. Scott Fitzgerald) Wade. P.S. This is why I never finished The Last Tycoon." Eileen Wade's comments extend the identifications: "Just attitudinizing. He has always been a great admirer of Scott Fitzgerald! He says Fitzgerald is the best drunken writer since Coleridge, who took dope. Notice the typing, Mr. Marlowe. Clear, even and no mistakes." Marlowe himself suggests that "the Scott Fitzgerald allusion might merely be an off-beat way of saying goodbye." A long goodbye, indeed.

Wade's (and Chandler's) allusion to Keats in Chapter 34 mixes the contemplation of suicide with alcoholism in a blend fixed by the aesthetic mode. "A pretty color whiskey is, isn't it? To drown in a golden flood—that's not so bad. 'To cease upon the midnight with no pain.' How does that go on? Oh, sorry, you wouldn't know. Too literary …" Chandler's Keats is filtered through Fitzgerald, and anticipates his own feeble, alcoholic attempt at suicide after The Long Goodbye was published and his wife was dead.

I think that Gatsby's seemingly fraudulent "Oxford education," English shirts, Rolls-Royce and pseudo-English diction ("old sport") were latterly reincarnated in Lennox, with his English suitcase and automobile, his British war experience, gangster friends, and mysterious identity. This is a projection of Chandler's self through Fitzgerald's lyricism. Chandler served in the Great War in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Lennox was born in Canada. To further show the connection between Chandler and Fitzgerald, I must also point out that Frank MacShane has demonstrated the imaginative connection between "the girl with the cornflower-blue eyes" from Chandler's poem "Nocturne from Nowhere" (1932) and such later blond incarnations as Eileen Wade in The Long Goodbye. In emphasizing the connection with Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby, I do not at all mean to deny the truth of MacShane's assertions but to amplify that truth. In the first place, Chandler's fantasy about the girl was written well after The Great Gatsby (1925). When Marlowe meets Mrs. Wade, we have a lush outpouring:

[A] dream walked in … She was slim and quite tall in a white linen tailormade.… Her hair was the pale gold of a fairy princess. There was a small hat on it into which the pale gold hair nestled like a bird in its nest. Her eyes were cornflower blue, a rare color, and the lashes were long and almost too pale.

Thereafter, this blonde is called "the golden girl" three times. She has a low voice "like the stuff they used to line summer clouds with." We must be reminded of Fitzgerald's Daisy Fay Buchanan, with her "low, thrilling voice" which is "'full of money.'"

That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it.… High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl.

When Chandler's Eileen pays the waiter at the Ritz-Carlton, "he looked as if he had shaken hands with God."

As for Gatsby: "He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God."

Joseph Louzonis has suggested that Philip Marlowe's lengthy digression or disquisition on blondes (Chapter 13)—a polished excursus—is inspired by Semónides of Amórgos's satire On Women, written around the middle of the seventh century B.C. Considering Chandler's background in classics, this may be so; but I think that this aria is also indebted to Fitzgerald, and matched by Lennox's set-piece on gimlets.

Ernest Lockridge has written that "Gatsby's dream divides into three basic and related parts: the desire to repeat the past, the desire for money, and the desire for incarnation of 'unutterable visions' in the material earth." Lennox wants to repeat the past by re-marrying Sylvia; in so doing, he seizes wealth. The unutterable vision of The Long Goodbye is incarnated in such emblems of wealth as British automobiles, stories of the spoiled rich, and English manners incarnated in the gimlet. Besides: Eileen Wade wants to repeat the past by recovering her first love for Paul Marston; Linda Loring is for Marlowe a sexual lure associated with wealth; the whole novel is a circular gesture of futility less over-reaching, less grand, and less tragic than The Great Gatsby.

The Long Goodbye has in common with The Great Gatsby the elements of adultery and desire, alcohol in profusion, various forms of violence (including fatal gun-fire and violence at cocktail parties), an attempt to recapture the past, Anglophilia, ineffable effusions, a beautiful blonde, an investigative structure, a studied contrast between the low and the high, the squalid and the glamorous, the world of work contrasted with a corrupting and irresponsible wealth, a display of status symbols (automobiles, mansions, etc.), and an inarticulate friendship or male bonding or love or identification or sympathy, the displacement of which excites and explains the writing of both first-person narratives. No more imagination is required to see The Long Goodbye as a "lyrical novel" than is required to see The Great Gatsby as a detective story.

The world of The Great Gatsby, like the world Chandler imagined in The Long Goodbye, is both an underworld of the sinister and sleazy and an overworld of glamour and glory. The overworld is chiefly embodied in commercial talismans, advertising emblems, the obvious emblems of status, the thrice-familiar clichés of mass-cult entertainment, the stuff of a thousand B-movies. Both Gatsby and Lennox—and by extension, Nick and Marlowe—are involved with blondes, booze, big bucks, and guns. In context, the underworld and the overworld are hardly distinguishable. The Great Gatsby is a dolcissimo expostulation, a legato apostrophe, and a vulgar tragedy. Both novels are "novels of manners" set in an unmannerly country and a rude century. But The Long Goodbye ends not with a bang, but a whimper. Fitzgerald's prophetic, apocalyptic masterpiece still has the power to excite.

Chandler's effort is an elegy to his own lost energy, a plaint for his illusions. Gatsby has two names and dies. Lennox has three. He dies as a man, but is still walking at the end. The Long Goodbye is a ponderous farewell to illusion, a laid-back Californian revision of Fitzgerald's fable of East and West. The profoundly shallow elements of these fictions, their superficial depths, are so much a part of the American imagination that it is difficult for us to see them, much less to evaluate them. But Norman Mailer, demonstrating both the power and his knowledge of the power of these cultural symbols, in his underrated An American Dream, shuffled a well-worn deck and again dealt us familiar cards—the blonde, the booze (and prohibited marijuana), the bucks, the gun, and so forth. These are (must be?) the stuff of a modern, specifically American melodrama. Not for nothing did Chandler suffuse his mysteries with the imagery of medieval romance so often commented on. His knightly, chess-playing narrator is obsessed with honor, chivalric behavior, the chastity of women and the gentillesse of men. When Chandler mounted his greatest production, he made his Anglophile version of good manners and proper behavior the subject of his novel in the most complex way he ever achieved. Marlowe's empathy with Lennox had been foreshad-owed, I think, in his sympathy with Moose Malloy in Farewell, My Lovely (1940). The opening scene presents Moose staring at the defective neon sign denoting Florian's, where his "little Velma" used to work. This image of irrecoverable romance is highly reminiscent of Gatsby and the green light on Daisy's dock. Like Nick, Marlowe must sympathize with and admire the forlorn, doomed romanticism of such a gesture. Moose is murdered by his dream-girl at the end, as Gatsby was betrayed by Daisy. "Little Velma," who was "cute as lace pants," remakes herself into "Mrs. Lewin Lockridge Grayle" and disastrously ends a career of self-transformation not unlike Gatsby's transmogrification from James Gatz. Like Nick, Marlowe is the narrator-witness who uniquely knows.

Farewell, My Lovely also anticipates the "double plot" of The Long Goodbye, wherein two seemingly unrelated adventures are related in the very unknotting of their covert relationship. In Farewell, My Lovely, the Moose Malloy-Velma-Jesse Florian business is revealed to be causally, not casually, related to the Lindsay Marriot-Mrs. Grayle episodes. This is the "mystery" which is solved. Similarly, in The Long Goodbye, Marlowe finds that the Lennox matter is causally, not casually, related to the Wade material: he would not have been hired by Mrs. Wade if he had not kept faith with Lennox; but also, Mrs. Wade, as the real murderer, has ulterior motives. The synthesis of the novel is its resolution in the person of Linda Loring, Sylvia Lennox's sister, and Marlowe's attachment to her both in and out of the text of that novel.

For Chandler, the Fitzgerald "magic" and "charm" and "music" required a relaxation into a spontaneity. The poetry of glamour and glory must, in a fallen world, be charged with alcoholic inspiration. Now when I say that The Long Goodbye is "about" drinking, I mean what I say—literally, but not exclusively. Perhaps a précis—an alcoholic one—will reinforce the point.

Ch. 1 Marlowe rescues the "plastered" Lennox and takes him home, where there's a half-empty Scotch bottle. The words drunk and booze hound are used.

Ch. 2. Marlowe rescues Lennox again; the drunk tapers off on beer, and later they sit over "a couple of very mild drinks." Marlowe leaves Lennox alone with a whiskey bottle, which goes untouched.

Ch. 3 Lennox, remarried, takes Marlowe to Victor's for gimlets and talk. The gimlets become a ritual of friendship. They discuss Sylvia's drunk/hung over friends.

Ch. 4 Marlowe and Lennox sit in a bar, drinking, discussing drinking. They exchange words.

Ch. 5. Lennox appears suddenly. He must go to Tijuana. Marlowe serves coffee and Old Grand-Dad. He puts a pint of bourbon in Lennox's suitcase. Lennox refers to Sylvia as "dead drunk."

Ch. 6 Tijuana and back. The cops are waiting. "We had a drink together once in a while."

Ch. 7 Marlowe stands up to two police beatings rather than betray a friend.

Ch. 8. Marlowe behind bars. The drunk tank. Visit from Endicott. Marlowe says, "I'm not here for him, I'm here for me."

Ch. 9. Grenz of the D.A.'s office exhales the smell of whiskey. Marlowe challenges him to "Take another quick one."

Ch. 10. Lonnie Morgan of the Journal takes Marlowe home. He refuses Marlowe's offer of a drink.

Ch. 11. Phone call from Endicott. Visit from Menendez. Call from Spencer: "Let's discuss it over a drink." Menendez's war story: Lennox "hit the bottle."

Ch. 12. Letter from Lennox with portrait of Madison (a $5,000 bill): "So forget it and me. But first drink a gimlet for me at Victor's. And the next time you make coffee, pour me a cup and put me some bourbon in it."

Ch. 13. At the Ritz-Beverly bar at 11:00 A.M., Marlowe sees a middle-aged drunk. "There is a sad man like that in every quiet bar in the world." Marlowe has a weak Scotch and water. Enter "the golden girl." Enter Spencer; who orders a gin and orange for himself and one for Marlowe. Spencer broaches the subject of Roger Wade. Marlowe says, "I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things …" Spencer tells the story of Wade's wild drinking. A second round of gin and oranges arrives. "The golden girl" introduces herself as Eileen Wade. Marlowe later has a martini with dinner.

Ch. 14. Coffee with Mrs. Wade reminds Marlowe of coffee with Terry. "A neighbor of ours knew the Lennoxes." Discussion of Wade's drinking problems; mention of Fitzgerald and Coleridge.

Ch. 15. Visit to George Peters at the Carne Organization. Discussion of a "well-heeled alcoholic" at a "sobering-up joint." Mention of Marston: "The guy was drunk all the time …"

Ch. 16. Earl and Dr. Verringer. "The guy's a wino."

Ch. 17. Dr. Vukanich. "He lives on the sauce for days on end." "Shoot yourself in the vein, don't you, Doc?"

Ch. 18. Dr. Varley. "Wade, a well-to-do alcoholic …"

Ch. 19. "Hooch cases." A whiskey sour at Rudy's Bar-B-Q. Marlowe intervenes and retrieves Wade. "I was foul with strong drink."

Ch. 20. Marlowe takes Wade home. "You the guy that was mixed up with Lennox?" "Aren't you coming in for a drink or something?" Eileen: "Don't you want a drink yourself?"

Ch. 21. Eileen invites Marlowe "for a drink the next evening." Reminded of Terry and the gimlets at Victor's, Marlowe heads there.

Ch. 22. A woman at the bar is drinking a "pale greenish-colored drink." Marlowe orders a gimlet—a double; the bartender mentions Rose's Lime Juice. Discussion of gimlets, England, and Terry. "A couple more of the same … in a booth." "A bit of a sentimentalist, aren't you, Mr. Marlowe?" "I reached for my glass and dropped the contents down the hatch." "I need another drink" (third gimlet). Harlan Potter said "Terry was a gentleman twenty-four hours a day instead of for the fifteen minutes between the time the guests arrive and the time they feel their first cocktail." "I came in here to drink a gimlet because a man asked me to." "Three gimlets. Doubles. Perhaps you're drunk." "You had one and a half, Mrs. Loring. Why even that much?" "Maybe I was a little drunk." Scene with Agostino. Big Willie Magoon.

Ch. 23. At the Wades': "It was the same old cocktail party … everybody talking too loud, nobody listening, everybody hanging on for dear life to a mug of the juice, eyes very bright, cheeks flushed or pale and sweaty according to the amount of alcohol consumed and the capacity of the individual to handle it." Scene-setting mention of the bar, drinks, etc. Marlowe: "I got Lennox killed …" Wade: "Let's go get that drink."

Ch. 24. The party is "About two drinks louder." Dr. Loring makes a scene with Wade. Marlowe gets a Scotch. A drunken scene between a man and his wife. Marlowe's thoughts on alcoholism. Discussion with Mrs. Wade concerning Wade's status. Wade enters with drink in hand and accuses Marlowe. Wade: "Drunks don't educate, my friend. They disintegrate. And part of the process is a lot of fun." Marlowe thinks that "Alcohol was no more than a disguised reaction."

Ch. 25. Wade's emergency phone call. Marlowe takes care of the Wades.

Ch. 26. Candy assists. Wade claims guilt.

Ch. 27. Examination of Wade's drinking leading to fall. Marlowe drinks as he reads Wade's "wild" writing.

Ch. 28. Wade's drunken writing jag: self-loathing, drinking.

Ch. 29. A shot. Fake suicide attempt scorned by Marlowe. Erotic confrontation with Eileen. Mar-lowe knocks himself out with a bottle of Scotch.

Ch. 30. Scenes with Candy and Eileen.

Ch. 31. Marlowe decides to kill his hangover with "a tall cold one." Meets Mrs. Loring at office. Heads for Potter.

Ch. 32. Potter rings for tea. He calls Wade a "dangerous alcoholic." Mention of gimlets.

Ch. 33. Calls from Wade and Ashterfelt.

Ch. 34. At Wade's, Marlowe "got that look on my face when a drunk asks you to have a drink." Cokes and sandwiches and beer are ordered. Wade calls for a bottle of whiskey.

Ch. 35. Wade has drunk over half the bottle. He gets another bottle. Wade passes out. Speedboat and lake.

Ch. 36. Webley again. Wade a suicide?

Ch. 37. Olds: "Your friends get dead." Mention of demerol. Marlowe home to a couple of cold drinks.

Ch. 38. Candy's accusations. Marlowe has "a stiff one."

Ch. 39. Inquest. At lunch, Marlowe has "a brown Swedish beer that could hit as hard as a martini."

Ch. 40. Calls Endicott and Menendez and Peters. Date at Romanoff's.

Ch. 41. Meets Howard Spencer at the Ritz-Beverley. Spencer orders Amontillado, Marlowe a rye whiskey sour. Spencer quaffs Marlowe's drink when shocked by Marlowe's suspicion of Eileen.

Ch. 42. Spencer: "A writer needs stimulation—and not the kind they bottle." Marlowe contradicts Eileen's story of the pendant. Spencer: "I need a drink badly.… Straight Scotch, and plenty of it." Marlowe takes a bourbon on the rocks. "She killed both of them."

Ch. 43. Demerol again. "La señora es muerta." Coffee.

Ch. 44. Wade was too soaked with alcohol to have killed himself.

Ch. 45. Eileen's note: Paul Marston (Terry) "an empty shell." Lonnie Morgan and photostat. "Remember the night you drove me home from the City Bastille? You said I had a friend to say goodbye to. I've never really said goodbye to him. If you publish this photostat, that will be all. It's been a long time—a long, long time." Mady and Potter.

Ch. 46. Marlowe returns to Victor's; a gimlet with "two dashes of bitters." He has two. Ohls warns him at home. "I wanted to clear an innocent man."

Ch. 47. Calls from Lonnie and Mrs. Loring, who asks for a drink—in Paris. She warns Marlowe. Menendez.

Ch. 48. Beating. Ohls: "Did the nasty man hurt your facey-wacey?" "In a way cops are all the same.… If a guy … gets drunk, stop liquor … Let's have a drink." Marlowe asks Linda Loring to have a drink. Call to Starr.

Ch. 49. Visit from Linda. Two bottles of Cordon Rouge champagne: "A really auspicious occasion would call for a dozen." "The sting of it brought tears to my eyes." Making love to Linda, Marlowe mentions "that first time I met you in the bar at Victor's.… That night belonged to something else." "But liquor is an aphrodisiac up to a point."

Ch. 50. Discussion of marriage. Tears and champagne. "To say goodbye is to die a little."

Ch. 51. Interview with Endicott. Señor Cisco Maioranos turns up with a reference from Starr.

Ch. 52. Maioranos is revealed as Marston/Lennox. "I suppose it's a bit early for a gimlet."

Ch. 53. Lennox takes back the "portrait of Madison." The novel ends bitterly. Lennox says, "Let's go have a drink somewhere where it's cool and quiet. It wouldn't be much risk going to Victor's for that gimlet." "Well, how about that gimlet?"

The gimlets at the beginning, middle and end of The Long Goodbye are its symbol and seal. When Terry takes Marlowe to Victor's for the first time, though the gimlets are not perfected as they will be by the time Marlowe runs into Linda Loring in the same bar:

"They don't know how to make them here.… What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow."

Terry's words are more than a recipe; they are deeply felt exactitudes. The emotion he gets into the little speech makes it an aria or soliloquy. He later has another cri de coeur, a less specific one about the beauty of drinking, the poetry of alcohol:

"I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth, I like the neat bottles on the bar and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar—that's wonderful."

I agreed with him.

We also have to agree with Terry: his description rides on its own energy, sweeping our reason before it. But at least part of Terry's love for the ambience of a saloon is Chandler's, and Terry's gimlet lore Chandler picked up on the Mauretania. I think it's telling that Terry Lennox's most memorable pronouncements are lyricisms devoted to alcohol, bel canto rhetorical swoops that are as moving as they are sincere.

What is a depressant is perceived by the drinker as a stimulant. The special identifying, refined and superior qualities of the gimlet are the property of the gnostic initiated. These qualities exercise connoisseurship. This is the specific image of Marlowe's love for Lennox: the gimlet. That property is "English," a commodity available to any citizen with acceptable clothing and a couple of dollars. Yet the manners—and the charm for Marlowe and Chandler—must go with it, or the magic and the music of love's intoxication are missing. When at the end Marlowe returns for a final gimlet, believing that Lennox is dead, and knowing that Wade is, he is asked by the bartender at Victor's, "You like a dash of bitters in it, don't you?" Marlowe doesn't. He likes the recipe as Terry Lennox gave it. But he says, "Not usually. Just for tonight two dashes of bitters." Two dashes of bitters for the bitter deaths of his two dead Doppel-gängers, his perished shadow-selves. But the next subject mentioned is Marlowe's friend, "the one with the green ice": Linda Loring. Having met through alcohol (gimlets) and loved through more (champagne), Marlowe and Linda will survive as a relationship—though not one that Chandler lived to represent fully.

The history of Rose's Lime Juice, as related in documents sent to me by Mr. John Maher, a vice-president of Cadbury Schweppes, with a letter of April 14, 1983, is perhaps what one would expect. The second Lauchlan Rose (1829-1885), a Scottish descendent of a shipbuilding family from Leith, Edinburgh, founded L. Rose & Co. as "Lemon and Lime Juice Merchants" in 1865. Finding a means of preventing fermentation in the bottle by the use of sulphur dioxide, he was granted in 1867 a patent which made possible the first fruit juice preserved without alcohol. In that same year, the Merchant Shipping Act was passed, dictating that all ocean-going vessels carry sufficient lime juice for a daily issue to ships' companies. Earning the name "Limey" for all Englishmen, the British sailor put scurvy behind him; and the original exporters, outfitting ships, had literally been Chandlers.

The business expanded. Headquarters was moved from Scotland to London in 1875. The company purchased the Bath Estate in Dominica, West Indies in 1895. When the company entered the U.S. in 1901, South Africa was its best market. A lime industry was established on the African Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1924. Suffering in the Blitz, operations were removed from London to St. Alban's in 1940. In 1957, L. Rose & Co. merged with Schweppes and today sells more lime juice than any other company in the world. This history—combining England and Scotland with naval associations—shows Rose's to be an elixir of Empire and Chandler's use of it connected with the themes of adventure, exploration, colonialism, and imperialism as viewed by Martin Green in his Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (Basic Books, 1979), wherein the connections of "adventure tales" and "boy's books" with political and economic developments are firmly drawn.

So a gimlet is a commodity with British associations and provenance and the alcoholic effect, however illusionary, of poetry. Is friendship, affinity, love, magic, or loyalty a commodity which can be condensed and bottled? Symbolically, yes. The fact that a gimlet is a commodity is perhaps most important in The Long Goodbye; this fact offers a key to a code of values. These values are perhaps confused, but their entanglements are human; these values are the ones which Chandler worked into the most personal and deliberate of his works.

The bartender at Victor's declares, when Marlowe shows up to memorialize his friend, that he has heard that friend talking; he has obtained a bottle of Rose's Lime Juice. Marlowe orders a double and proceeds to meet Linda Loring.

"So few people drink them around here," she said.… "Gimlets I mean."

"A fellow taught me to like them," I said.

"He must be English."

"Why?"

"The lime juice. It's as English as boiled fish with that awful anchovy sauce that looks as if the cook had bled into it. That's how they got to be called limeys. The English—not the fish."

"I thought it was more a tropical drink, hot weather stuff. Malaya or some place like that."

"You may be right."

The bartender set the drink in front of me. With the lime juice it has a sort of pale greenish yellowish misty look. I tasted it. It was both sweet and sharp at the same time. The woman in black watched me. Then she lifted her own glass towards me. We both drank. Then I knew hers was the same drink.

The transference of allegiance from Terry to Linda is through the sign of the gimlet, whose disinihibiting alcoholic dispensation is both an identification and an entrée. Later in the novel, Marlowe and Linda spend the night together. At the end of Playback (1958), Linda calls from Paris and proposes. When Chandler died, he was attempting to write the story of Marlowe's marriage to the wealthy Linda (The Poodle Springs Story).

But it is the first conversation with Linda Loring that gives us our clue to the meaning of the gimlets in the novel. Whether associated with the Home Country of the Empire, it is specifically English, a cousin of the pink gin instead of the American martini. The "sweet and sharp" Englishness of the gimlet represents Chandler's powerfully ambivalent feelings about his return to England in 1952 as well as his ambivalence, his equivocation about his own identity as an American of English education. The potency of the gimlet—not to put too fine a point upon it, it is, like a martini, a glassful of cold gin—dissolves these contradictions, the self-aware inhibitions of self, in a unity of feeling and effect. The drinker, not drinking, writes a novel about drinking. The drinkers in the novel discuss drinking, sometimes not drinking, but usually drinking. The narrator/drinker, having lost his drinking friend, goes off to rescue a drinker, who later dies drunk.

If the gimlet is a commodity of magical properties and British associations, it is not alone. Lennox himself, born in Canada and a veteran of the British Army, is a commodity with redeeming good manners. His wife buys him once, disposes of him, and then buys him again. Otherwise, we must note that Marlowe first meets Terry "drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith" in the first sentence of the novel. When Terry first takes Marlowe to Victor's for a gimlet, he does so in "a rust-colored Jupiter-Jowett with a flimsy canvas rain top.… It had pale leather upholstery and what looked like silver fittings." Another English commodity is Terry's suitcase, which he leaves as a marker in Chapter 2. "The suit case was the damndest thing you ever saw and when new had been a pale cream color. The fittings were gold. It was English made and if you could buy it here at all, it would cost more like eight hundred than two." Eileen Wade's second interview with Marlowe (Chapter 14) ends with her leaving in "a slim gray Jaguar." This automobile is mentioned again in Chapter 42. When Marlowe motors to Idle Valley, (in the first sentence of Chapter 23), he sees another "low-swung Jaguar." Even the sleazy Mendy Menendez claims to own, besides two Cadillacs and a Chrysler station wagon, a Bentley and an MG (Chapter 11). Mrs. Loring drives a humdrum Cadillac, but Roger Wade manages to be killed by an imported British item: a double-action Webley hammerless. George Peters mentions an Upman Thirty cigar; Marlowe, in a tense moment, talks about the virtues of Huggins-Young coffee—but these brand names aren't English.

Imported British luxury items—or other such items—are distinctive in some way, and expensive. In one sense, it is their expense that makes them distinctive. In another sense, for Chandler such items are totems of his own nostalgia and fantasy, emblems of what is fine and refined. Marlowe, the "shopsoiled Galahad," "Tarzan on a big red scooter," is a qualified narrator because he understands about Jaguars and gimlets and Webleys. But even more, this understanding is a necessary qualification for Marlowe to be able to perform the two absolutely necessary functions of The Long Goodbye—to appreciate Terry Lennox and, in the end, to reject him. Lennox betrayed the code and used Marlowe: he is no longer a gentleman, not even a drunken and irresponsible one. Having broken faith, he is nothing. There will be no more gimlets for Marlowe in Playback or The Poodle Springs Story.

The Long Goodbye is Chandler's most revealing because it is his most personal work. Chandler's trouble with plots he tried to finesse by replicating types in a shadowy circle leading nowhere. His highly idiosyncratic vision, his own synthesis of conflicting values, is in this text reflected and refracted into a spectrum of tones that register the stresses of his imagination. The unity of style, like the coherence of personality, begins to fray. No wonder Chandler, old and tired, depressed and lonely, could not pull his act together again. He could not balance the forces within. It was the composition of The Long Goodbye itself, as well as his wife's death, that marked him.

Unlike Gatsby, Lennox does not turn out "all the right in the end." Although Marlowe thought at one time that Lennox was "worth the whole damn bunch put together," Marlowe ruefully admits that he was wrong. In effect, Chandler killed off one weak version of himself, in the form of Wade, and then dismissed the other, in the form of Lennox. Then Marlowe and Chandler had to grow or die. Chandler tried to push his imagination further on in the years remaining to him. His attempts were weak; they were the best he could do. Chandler had already said goodbye at length to the most emotive and fictionally strategic parts of himself in The Long Goodbye.