The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved

by Judith Freeman

Book Overview

Raymond Chandlerwas one of the most original and enduring crime novelists of the twentieth century. Yet much of his pre-writing life, including his unconventional marriage, has remained shrouded in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375423516
• ISBN13: 9780375423512
• Release Date: November 2007
• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Length: 353 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

LOS ANGELES EMBRACED

This book captured me on many levels. I found in this book, not only a love and reverence for Raymond Chandler, but also for Los Angeles. I think that the Long Embrace is really the embrace of Los Angeles. An embrace that impacted Chandler and Freeman and readers. I am a native of Los Angeles and in the age bracket beyond midlife. I understand the journey and searching for a person's and a city's history. I enjoyed her almost tangible manipulations of Los Angeles sights, sounds, textures and smells. I recognize her experiences as my experiences lovingly put into words. I recognize many of the streets and areas. Also, my own memories of a Los Angeles with oil wells pumping, where we did not have to lock our car or house doors at night! Of a time when the building of the Music Center downtown showed that we were not a "hick town". A city where some of the best places are hidden away from the traffic and the tourists still to this day. Freeman's research intertwines Chandler and Los Angeles. She brings up questions and presents answers about the impact on Los Angeles of the automobile, oil, films, police corruption and the unlikely heroes that reveal themselves in the midst of it all. (as Chandler did) It is interesting to finally learn about Chandler's wife, Cissy. As to her giving the incorrect age- all the women friends of my mother and grandmother's did not give their true age. I remember them telling me " a woman never gives her true age". Children and men were not supposed to ask. I know of women who refused to use Medicare benefits because they did not want to reveal their true age. It was not unusual(among some circles) for creative women to have real loving relationships with younger men or gay men. (i.e. Neysa Mcmein-artist). Judith Freeman has real skill at blending research, fiction and her own interpretations on her lovingly selected subjects. She continues in the same vein in this book. If you are familiar and enjoy her writing you will love this one. If you are a Los Angeles native (whether born here or relocated here) you will enjoy learning more about your city.

Down these mean streets a woman must go

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid", Raymond Chandler wrote of his knight-errant protagonist Phillip Marlowe in a famous essay titled "The Simple Art of Murder". Like Marlowe, Judith Freeman takes us down those mean streets and the decay of Los Angeles since Chandler lived there from the 1930s into the 1950s. So little is known about Cissy (Pearl) Eugenie Pascal, Chandler's wife 18 years his senior, that this work obviously required a great deal of rumination on Freeman's part about the strange relationship between this odd couple. Despite the dearth of material about her, the author has been extremely thorough and unrelenting on her research and the book will rest significantly on its laurels as the most definitive work on the subject. As she acknowledges, she is greatly indebted to both Frank MacShane's biography of Chandler and his edited collection of Chandler's letters. In her seeking out the 30-plus known residences of the Chandlers over the years, Freeman's search for the real Cissy has a "Waiting for Godot" type quality to it, often finding the addresses no longer existed as the structures that stood there had been demolished. Freeman is driven by a complusion and obsession to uncover a past she knows she cannot fully present but her persistence is admirable. One senses that a great weight must have been lifted from her when she finally completed the book. "Embrace" also delves heavily into Chandler's personality with a few pages on the question of whether he had latent homosexual feelings which at times bled over into his work, although this is minutiae of small significance. I thought I was long done with Raymond Chandler and would probably have passed this one up but I'm glad I didn't. I know all too well searching the streets of southern California for places and people that no longer exist or existed only in my youth. In the early 1970s I went looking for 77 Sunset Strip, only to learn that no such address ever existed, and then learned the exteriors for the early '60s TV show were shot at Dean Martin's pizza joint in the 8000 block. I remember searching for an apartment building 35 years later formerly on Gower off Hollywood Boulevard then but now just a chain-linked parking lot. Sometimes I wonder whether Chandler, like Ross Macdonald, will withstand the test of time, the Chandler LOA editions notwithstanding. Some of Chandler's work didn't make a whole lot of sense ("The Blue Dahlia" screenplay in particular) and while writing he often didn't know where his plot turns would end up. The last decade's new generation of noir has far superceded their works. But the steaming sidewalks of L.A. and other Southern California towns still haunt me to this day, as do the writers present at The Creation.

If you love Raymond Chandler ...

Reading these seven prior reviews, it stands out that all of them are pretty much right. The strengths of this book are its strengths and the weaknesses are its weaknesses. But that isn't the whole story. The Long Embrace is a subjective account of a subjective experience that in turn requires a particular frame for the subjective experience of the reader in relationship to Raymond Chandler. If you love Raymond Chandler and his work as much as Freeman, you will love this book. It you don't like Chandler or are neutral to his work, you might not like it. It's a homage, and a reverie, and a critical work, and above all, the projection of an author in search of both objective and subjective correlatives for her vision and life experience. Objectively she is struggling to map her own biography and history with the history and the landscape of Los Angeles, but not just any Los Angeles - it's the Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler's fiction that constitutes her quest, an imaginary landscape more real to her than the smoggy basin she inhabits. That makes the search doubly difficult. So she spends energy and time driving the city streets in search of markers for the many way-stations with which Chandler and his wife Cissy mapped their own erratic trajectory through life, his career, and a city that devours itself daily. Because Chandler's vision seized Freeman's heart and soul as well as her agile and creative mind, she needed to build a three-dimensional tic-tac-toe-like representation of all this, and as I say, if you too have loved Chandler and his special gift to us, you will appreciate, savor and understand the compelling necessity of her quest. Young people who have not experienced the constant destruction of the markers of our histories as American cities bulldoze the external signs of our past may not appreciate the emotional impact of Freeman's journey, her attempt to overlay transparencies of the current physical city in which she lives on the even deeper emotional landscape of Chandler's fiction. Maybe only middle-aged people and older ones can really appreciate why this book exists. And people who do not intuitively understand why noir is the appropriate lens for those of us who grew to maturity in post World War 2 America may not resonate with this quest. When Freeman cites the film Chinatown as the "most brilliant movie of them all," either you know exactly what she means, or not. You sit up and quack like a duck, or you don't. Since I cite in my own work - my speeches and my non-fiction collection, Islands in the Clickstream, in particular - Chinatown and Blade Runner, another LA-noir classic, more frequently than any other two films, I think I do understand. If you know what I mean when I say that, if you smile with recognition, you will love reading this book. Yes, there are passages you might scan, when Freeman indulges herself in her own experiences and observations on site, but that might also be because her existential journey wh

Fey Ray

"The Long Embrace" is not a conventional biography of Raymond Chandler. Instead, Judith Freeman embraces the writer's right to tell her story the way she wants to, and focuses instead on the marriage between Chandler and Cissy Eugenie Pascal, and a quest to visit all of the places they lived in. Both prove to be daunting journeys. Cissy is an enigma. Little is known about her. As a young woman, she was an artist's model who sometimes posed nude. She was a concert pianist, twice-married, and after her marriage to Ray, she vanishes. They did little socializing and she rarely let herself be photographed. As if to finish the job, Ray burned their letters. We know so little about her that one wonders if she were fated to bind herself to the English-raised oil company executive with ambitions of writing. Ray, on the other hand, is easy to figure out. He had a thing for taking care of women, a trait he passed on to his detective hero Philip Marlowe. He took care of his ailing mother, until she died. Two weeks later, he married Cissy. He was 35. She said she was 43, but she was actually a decade older. Ray may not have known her true age, but as the years passed, he probably guessed. That he was deeply attached to his wife, there's no doubt. After she died, he lasted only five sad years. "The Long Embrace" is a labor of love. Freeman trolls through the two collections of Chandler's papers, split between California and Oxford, and comes up with some evocative items, among them the passport photo and the list, in Cissy's writing, of the animal knick-knacks they collected, with their cute names. As part of her research, she follows the Chandlers in their frequent moves. Except for one period, when they spent eight years in a house overlooking the sea in La Jolla, outside of San Diego, they moved yearly among a series of furnished apartments. The list of addresses reads like an atlas: Redondo Beach, Santa Monica, Silverlake, Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, Big Bear Lake, Cathedral City. Not surprisingly, time has not been good to the Chandler residences. Some have fallen to the bulldozers. Others were occupied by people who never heard of Chandler and wanted nothing to do with this strange white woman with her camera. But she comes across the house in LaJolla, the only one they bought, just before it was destroyed. This was the one they stayed in the longest, the one in which Cissy died, and miraculously it had changed little since then. Here, Freeman's quest was worthwhile. But with that exception, it's not the houses that tell us something about the Chandlers, it's the fact that they were never willing to put down roots. This is the sort of discussion "The Long Embrace" generates. I read this book more than a month ago, and I still catch myself reflecting on Ray and Cissy's peripatetic life. In her roundabout way, Freeman created a very human Raymond Chandler, who knew that life was 6 to 5 against, but placed his bet anyway.

Meandering all over L.A.

An excellent book. Five stars, nice job. Freeman meanders all over L.A. (and elsewhere) in search of uncovering the key to two of the more enigmatic words in the English language, "Raymond Chandler". The top layer of grime that is the current century turns out to be a layer an inch or so above the grime that was 1930's L.A. (I think I learned more about the city of L.A. from this book than 20 years of happy, in-depth reports on "Good Morning, America" and "Nightline".) Freeman walks the walk and follows the footsteps above this layer that is one inch down and occasionally pokes through to it. Chandler himself paid the price that all good writers pay, and Freeman pays it too, in the same way. Raymond Chandler was a guy who could write about depressing stuff, sentence upon sentence, without ever making you depressed-- an achievement in itself-- try it-- and end up with a kind of optimism, of a sort-- a relentless forging on of the present. Finally, in a series of commonplace, nondescript bungalows lived a husband/wife team that would hardly catch your eye if you saw them in the street, but was actually a great, inspiring love story in progress. Every Chandler fan needs to read this book, and frankly every fan needs to become a Chandler fan. --Larry W. Phillips www.larrywphillips.com