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The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved
Raymond Chandler was 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 mystery. In this compelling, wholly original book, Judith Freeman sets out to solve the puzzle of who Chandler was and how he became the writer who would create in Philip Marlowe an icon of American culture.
Freeman uncovers vestiges of the Los Angeles that was terrain and inspiration for Chandler's imagination, including the nearly two dozen apartments and houses the Chandlers moved into and out of over the course of two decades. She also uncovers the life of Cissy Pascal, the older, twice-divorced woman Chandler married in 1924, who would play an essential role in how he came to understand not only his female characters - and Marlowe's relation to them - but himself as well.
A revelation of a marriage that was a wellspring of need, illusion, and creativity, The Long Embrace provides us with a more complete picture of Raymond Chandler's life and art than any we have had before.
Freeman uncovers vestiges of the Los Angeles that was terrain and inspiration for Chandler's imagination, including the nearly two dozen apartments and houses the Chandlers moved into and out of over the course of two decades. She also uncovers the life of Cissy Pascal, the older, twice-divorced woman Chandler married in 1924, who would play an essential role in how he came to understand not only his female characters - and Marlowe's relation to them - but himself as well.
A revelation of a marriage that was a wellspring of need, illusion, and creativity, The Long Embrace provides us with a more complete picture of Raymond Chandler's life and art than any we have had before.
353 pages, Hardcover
First published November 6, 2007
18 people are currently reading
333 people want to read
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January 20, 2020
When I checked this book out of the library, the librarian said quietly “Oooh, Raymond Chandler.” Then she saw the inside of the front cover and added “With maps!” and, in a low, confidential tone, “I’m excited for you!” I was excited for me too.
The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved is less a biography of Raymond Chandler and his wife Cissy than a memoir of novelist Judith Freeman’s obsession with them and her project of visiting all the places they called home between 1913 and his death in 1959. There were 36, which is enough to be weird. She describes each place they lived in Southern California, and the chapters take on an essay-like quality as she weaves together observations about the Chandlers’ lives at each juncture, Los Angeles past and present, their friends and associates, the various influences on Chandler’s work, how the places he lived or frequented showed up in his novels, the relationship between Raymond and Cissy (18 years his senior), and Freeman’s own impressions of the city and the couple. I’m familiar enough with many of the neighborhoods to be able to picture them clearly and sense the atmosphere that some them still exude, which gave the book a certain immediacy for me. The emphasis here is definitely on the noir side of town, rather than the sunshine and noir paradoxes that make this area – to me – so intriguing. But it is a book about Chandler, after all.
Freeman had read the collected letters of Raymond Chandler and went through all 82 boxes of archived material on him at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, so this book is certainly well-researched. She does quite a bit of amateur psychoanalysis on Chandler and how his stories may have reflected certain aspects of his character, not all of which I bought, but she had some interesting ideas. As a fan of Chandler and student of Los Angeles history, I enjoyed this. There are photos throughout and I also appreciated the maps on the front inside covers of the book with each Chandler address plotted.
A good companion piece for this might be Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles: A Photographic Odyssey Accompanied by Passages from Chandler’s Greatest Works,” by Elizabeth Ward and Alain Silver. All photos black and white, of course.
The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved is less a biography of Raymond Chandler and his wife Cissy than a memoir of novelist Judith Freeman’s obsession with them and her project of visiting all the places they called home between 1913 and his death in 1959. There were 36, which is enough to be weird. She describes each place they lived in Southern California, and the chapters take on an essay-like quality as she weaves together observations about the Chandlers’ lives at each juncture, Los Angeles past and present, their friends and associates, the various influences on Chandler’s work, how the places he lived or frequented showed up in his novels, the relationship between Raymond and Cissy (18 years his senior), and Freeman’s own impressions of the city and the couple. I’m familiar enough with many of the neighborhoods to be able to picture them clearly and sense the atmosphere that some them still exude, which gave the book a certain immediacy for me. The emphasis here is definitely on the noir side of town, rather than the sunshine and noir paradoxes that make this area – to me – so intriguing. But it is a book about Chandler, after all.
Freeman had read the collected letters of Raymond Chandler and went through all 82 boxes of archived material on him at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, so this book is certainly well-researched. She does quite a bit of amateur psychoanalysis on Chandler and how his stories may have reflected certain aspects of his character, not all of which I bought, but she had some interesting ideas. As a fan of Chandler and student of Los Angeles history, I enjoyed this. There are photos throughout and I also appreciated the maps on the front inside covers of the book with each Chandler address plotted.
A good companion piece for this might be Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles: A Photographic Odyssey Accompanied by Passages from Chandler’s Greatest Works,” by Elizabeth Ward and Alain Silver. All photos black and white, of course.
November 21, 2021
If you think of Raymond Chandler as a God and have a love for LA circa 1920-1940, then you'll probably like this book as much as I did. If not, well, then you are probably a numbskull.
March 3, 2008
A few months ago, I went to visit the duplex on Highland Avenue where Raymond and Cissy Chandler lived in 1929 (though I called her Pearl, her given name). After reading Judith Freeman's The Long Embrace, a highly intimate biography of Ray and Cissy, I learned that, of the approximately two dozen homes they shared in Los Angeles and Southern California, this one may have marked the lowest point in their marriage.
During the years this was listed as their address in the Los Angeles city directories, Ray rarely lived there. Instead, he was in the process of drinking himself out of a job, dividing his time between a room at the Mayfair Hotel, and an apartment he'd rented for a secretary at Dabney Oil, with whom he was having an affair.
Finally, the affair and the job came to a nasty end, and Ray returned home. He would spend the next few years learning how to be a writer, and trying to make it all up to Cissy.
Before Freeman's book, little was known about Cissy, other than the fact that she was 18 years older than her third husband. And only a few tangible scraps remain of her -- Chandler insisted that all their letters be destroyed (Ray hinted that a few of them were "rather hot"). However, Freeman embarked on the book hoping to piece together what little remained, and to discover something about what Cissy was like.
The result is as much an account of Freeman's literary sleuthing as it is a biography of the Chandlers. At first, I bristled at Freeman's insertion of herself into the story, her accounts of the places in Los Angeles where she'd lived, the apartment buildings and bungalows she visited while tracking down the elusive Cissy through the homes around the city where the Chandlers lived.
However, it was in a passage about an evening Freeman spends at the HMS Bounty, my favorite bar in Los Angeles, that I realized what she was up to.
Not only was her description of an elderly waitress who worked at the bar when I began going there (and who was rumored to have once roomed with Jane Russell) entirely accurate, it was also reminiscent of Chandler in one of his careful, incisive character studies, given to even incidental characters. And suddenly, I realized that Freeman's trips back and forth across the city, and her descriptions of them, mirrored Philip Marlowe's own.
Of course, this is the only way the book could have been written. And of course, it works beautifully -- it just took me a little time to see it.
And Freeman does find Cissy, in a manner of speaking. She was beautiful, sensual, charming, and gracious. She read Ray's books and stories, and made notes on them, but wasn't really a fan. After a happy and relatively sober decade with her husband in the 30s, her health began to decline; however, shortly before her death in 1954, she mustered the strength for a trip with Ray to England. She may have enabled his drinking to a certain degree, but in this trip, she also enabled him to leave California after she died -- which I suspect is what allowed him to live as long as he did without her (even so, less than five years).
But more than anything, what comes across is that the Chandlers' marriage was a complex one. It was like nothing out of a storybook, the couple had their troubles -- the age difference between them, their reclusive habits, the moves from one furnished apartment to another, Ray's drinking and Cissy's health problems, and Ray's movie work, which probably took a steeper toll on the marriage than even his days with the Dabney Oil Syndicate.
Still, through Freeman's research, we also see a portrait of a couple who loved, understood, and nurtured one another very deeply throughout their 30-year marriage. Their need for one another is both touching and terrifying.
Of Cissy's last year, which he spent mostly caring for her in their La Jolla home, Ray wrote,
I watched my wife die by half-inches and I wrote my best book in the agony of that knowledge, and yet I wrote it... And late at night I would lie on the eight-foot couch reading because I knew that around midnight she would come quietly in and that she would want a cup of tea, but would never ask for it. I always had to talk her into it. But I had to be there, since if I had been asleep, she wouldn't have wakened me, and wouldn't have had her tea.
Do you think I regret any of this? I'm proud of it. It was the supreme time of my life.
During the years this was listed as their address in the Los Angeles city directories, Ray rarely lived there. Instead, he was in the process of drinking himself out of a job, dividing his time between a room at the Mayfair Hotel, and an apartment he'd rented for a secretary at Dabney Oil, with whom he was having an affair.
Finally, the affair and the job came to a nasty end, and Ray returned home. He would spend the next few years learning how to be a writer, and trying to make it all up to Cissy.
Before Freeman's book, little was known about Cissy, other than the fact that she was 18 years older than her third husband. And only a few tangible scraps remain of her -- Chandler insisted that all their letters be destroyed (Ray hinted that a few of them were "rather hot"). However, Freeman embarked on the book hoping to piece together what little remained, and to discover something about what Cissy was like.
The result is as much an account of Freeman's literary sleuthing as it is a biography of the Chandlers. At first, I bristled at Freeman's insertion of herself into the story, her accounts of the places in Los Angeles where she'd lived, the apartment buildings and bungalows she visited while tracking down the elusive Cissy through the homes around the city where the Chandlers lived.
However, it was in a passage about an evening Freeman spends at the HMS Bounty, my favorite bar in Los Angeles, that I realized what she was up to.
Not only was her description of an elderly waitress who worked at the bar when I began going there (and who was rumored to have once roomed with Jane Russell) entirely accurate, it was also reminiscent of Chandler in one of his careful, incisive character studies, given to even incidental characters. And suddenly, I realized that Freeman's trips back and forth across the city, and her descriptions of them, mirrored Philip Marlowe's own.
Of course, this is the only way the book could have been written. And of course, it works beautifully -- it just took me a little time to see it.
And Freeman does find Cissy, in a manner of speaking. She was beautiful, sensual, charming, and gracious. She read Ray's books and stories, and made notes on them, but wasn't really a fan. After a happy and relatively sober decade with her husband in the 30s, her health began to decline; however, shortly before her death in 1954, she mustered the strength for a trip with Ray to England. She may have enabled his drinking to a certain degree, but in this trip, she also enabled him to leave California after she died -- which I suspect is what allowed him to live as long as he did without her (even so, less than five years).
But more than anything, what comes across is that the Chandlers' marriage was a complex one. It was like nothing out of a storybook, the couple had their troubles -- the age difference between them, their reclusive habits, the moves from one furnished apartment to another, Ray's drinking and Cissy's health problems, and Ray's movie work, which probably took a steeper toll on the marriage than even his days with the Dabney Oil Syndicate.
Still, through Freeman's research, we also see a portrait of a couple who loved, understood, and nurtured one another very deeply throughout their 30-year marriage. Their need for one another is both touching and terrifying.
Of Cissy's last year, which he spent mostly caring for her in their La Jolla home, Ray wrote,
I watched my wife die by half-inches and I wrote my best book in the agony of that knowledge, and yet I wrote it... And late at night I would lie on the eight-foot couch reading because I knew that around midnight she would come quietly in and that she would want a cup of tea, but would never ask for it. I always had to talk her into it. But I had to be there, since if I had been asleep, she wouldn't have wakened me, and wouldn't have had her tea.
Do you think I regret any of this? I'm proud of it. It was the supreme time of my life.
October 6, 2008
While I really liked this book, I didn't love it. I think because the narrative had a kind of split-personality, and I really wanted it to be one or the other. The split-personality was: a narrative of Chandler's highly mobile home life and a narrative of Freeman's obsession with Chandler. Frankly, I got bored with her ruminations on LA and how it had gone up or gone down or disappeared. I liked some of it, but it got old and a bit too long-winded for me.
I thought the parts she could do better was her obsession with him. I wanted to know more about why she was obsessed with him. I wanted her to be more obsessed with him, with his language and his plots. But I kind of felt like she had one foot in each without committing to either.
Overall, I feel a bit lukewarm about the book. I learned more about him, but I'm not sure I buy the repressed homosexuality thing. Mostly I guess I feel sorry for him, that he had such a drinking problem.
And I want to read all of his books.
I thought the parts she could do better was her obsession with him. I wanted to know more about why she was obsessed with him. I wanted her to be more obsessed with him, with his language and his plots. But I kind of felt like she had one foot in each without committing to either.
Overall, I feel a bit lukewarm about the book. I learned more about him, but I'm not sure I buy the repressed homosexuality thing. Mostly I guess I feel sorry for him, that he had such a drinking problem.
And I want to read all of his books.
Read
January 4, 2016Disclaimer: I gave up on this book about halfway through chapter 2. That's why I'm not giving it a rating.
I've had this book on my Kindle for a very long time. I love Raymond Chandler's fiction, so naturally I found the alleged premise of The Long Embrace intriguing. It's ostensibly about the mostly private relationship between Chandler and his wife, and how this relationship impacted his life and work.
The first chapter tossed up a couple of red flags: first, it's almost entirely about Judith Freeman. I was willing to forgive that, because it's the first chapter of the book, and maybe she thought an explanation of why she wrote it would be illuminating for readers. Next red flag: her only source material would be a few scant references to Cissy Chandler in Raymond's letters to others (Freeman explains that, after flirting with publishing his correspondence with his wife, he instead had it burned) and whatever she could extrapolate from the numerous apartments they lived in throughout Los Angeles. That's pretty thin soup.
Chapter 2 begins with a surface-skim explanation of what Los Angeles was like when Raymond Chandler arrived in the teens, followed by a first-person account of Freeman snooping around L.A.'s rundown Union Station, comparing it in her mind to Chandler's descriptions of it in Playback and her assumptions of how it must have looked when Chandler first stepped off the train. Fluidly written, but at this point it became apparent that Freeman was beginning to invent the genre of speculative nonfiction. When the next section of the chapter began with Freeman arriving at one of Raymond and Cissy's apartment buildings, I decided this was not the book I thought it was.
Before reading any further, I poked around for some reviews, on Goodreads and professional news/review sites, and confirmed my suspicion: this book is about Freeman researching a puzzle about other people that teaches her more about herself. I've never read any of Freeman's novels, so I know nothing about her other than the fact that she wrote this book. I don't care about her journey of self-discovery; she is not the reason I'm reading it. I would guess many people interested in this book will feel the same way. You stand warned.
I've had this book on my Kindle for a very long time. I love Raymond Chandler's fiction, so naturally I found the alleged premise of The Long Embrace intriguing. It's ostensibly about the mostly private relationship between Chandler and his wife, and how this relationship impacted his life and work.
The first chapter tossed up a couple of red flags: first, it's almost entirely about Judith Freeman. I was willing to forgive that, because it's the first chapter of the book, and maybe she thought an explanation of why she wrote it would be illuminating for readers. Next red flag: her only source material would be a few scant references to Cissy Chandler in Raymond's letters to others (Freeman explains that, after flirting with publishing his correspondence with his wife, he instead had it burned) and whatever she could extrapolate from the numerous apartments they lived in throughout Los Angeles. That's pretty thin soup.
Chapter 2 begins with a surface-skim explanation of what Los Angeles was like when Raymond Chandler arrived in the teens, followed by a first-person account of Freeman snooping around L.A.'s rundown Union Station, comparing it in her mind to Chandler's descriptions of it in Playback and her assumptions of how it must have looked when Chandler first stepped off the train. Fluidly written, but at this point it became apparent that Freeman was beginning to invent the genre of speculative nonfiction. When the next section of the chapter began with Freeman arriving at one of Raymond and Cissy's apartment buildings, I decided this was not the book I thought it was.
Before reading any further, I poked around for some reviews, on Goodreads and professional news/review sites, and confirmed my suspicion: this book is about Freeman researching a puzzle about other people that teaches her more about herself. I've never read any of Freeman's novels, so I know nothing about her other than the fact that she wrote this book. I don't care about her journey of self-discovery; she is not the reason I'm reading it. I would guess many people interested in this book will feel the same way. You stand warned.
September 16, 2008
My love of Raymond Chandler and his gut-punching dialogue was very well fed as I read this book. And being an Los Angeles native, it not only reconnected me to the lost parts of town from my own childhood, but took me through the city with new eyes. One of his many residences I discovered was 3 blocks from where I live today, and now get to walk by it and peer in to a bit of noir history.
June 22, 2010
For those of you who don’t know who Raymond Chandler is, he wrote The Big Sleep, the novel on which the movie of the same name, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, is based. Good as the movie is, it was more a vehicle for Bogart and Bacall than for William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman’s screenplay, and so the novel is recommended over the film.
Chandler, along with Dashiell Hammett, creator of Sam Spade, is responsible for creating the genre of the hardboiled detective. Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is a complex character—wisecracking and hard drinking; he’s also a loner. Contemplative, he enjoys chess (usually playing against himself) and poetry. He smokes cigarettes but lights up an occasional pipe. A tough guy, Marlowe refrains from fisticuffs, besting his rivals through his sharp repartee. He’s not the womanizer Mickey Spillane later portrayed in Mike Hammer. In fact, he’s never taken in by the femmes fatale Chandler created. Marlowe rarely seduces the women with whom he crosses paths, and he is immune to the predatory advances of women such as Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep.
When I came across The Long Embrace, Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, a biography written by novelist Judith Freeman, I was intrigued. Chandler passed away when I was but two years old, and I knew little of him other than he created Philip Marlowe and was himself a hard drinker.
Painstakingly researched, Freeman pulls few punches as she reveals many of Chandler’s weaknesses—notably the bottle, as well as women.
Don’t be taken in by the subtitle of the book. And the Woman He Loved would seem the subtitle of a storybook romance. Chandler was 35 when he married Cissy Pascal, who was 53, despite listing her age as 43 on their marriage certificate. The marriage was unconventional to say the least, and others have put forth, as Freeman does, that Chandler never knew that Cissy was fully 18 years his senior.
As Cissy aged and battled respiratory disease, Chandler dutifully took care of her, as he did his mother in her last years. His father abandoned Chandler and his mother when Chandler was a boy. A telling point in the biography is that Chandler would not wed Cissy until after his mother had passed away.
That Chandler loved Cissy is never in question, as evidenced by the poems he wrote to her throughout their marriage. When he worked from home, he was the doting husband; yet there were times when he was flagrantly unfaithful to her. Like Pon Farr, the Vulcan blood fever, Chandler often binged on women while he was drinking, usually when working in Hollywood on a screenplay, when he was surrounded by young assistants.
The more he binged on women the more he drank, as if to hide his shame. Whether that shame was the result of his infidelity or over a wife old enough to be his mother (and the anger he might’ve felt over Cissy’s deliberate deception) is never fully explored. Did he marry Cissy as a sort of surrogate mother (she took care of him as a mother would a son) and compartmentalize younger women for their body parts? A question, even if it were put forth, we can never answer.
Freeman endeavors to visit each of the more than 30 homes in which the Chandler’s lived in and around Los Angeles; sadly, many no longer exist. Or as Freeman, in her best imitation of Chandler, writes of L.A.: “If there was such a thing as Chandlerland this was it, and each day I felt surrounded by a kind of shabbier version of that era, a strangely eviscerated ghost of the world I was trying to imagine. When you constantly change a landscape, you erase the collective memory of a city. How can you live without memory?”
Letters, poems, and excerpts of Chandler’s novels lend Freeman’s text credibility. Included is a letter he wrote to a publisher that revealed his frustrations as a writer: “The thing that rather gets me down is that when I write something that is tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, I get panned for being tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, and then when I try to tone down a bit and develop the mental and emotional side of a situation, I get panned for leaving out what I was panned for putting in the first time.”
At times, however, Freeman veers dangerously close to hero worship, once describing her feelings while standing in a room in which he’d written one of his novels. I’d feel equally awed standing in the house in which Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness, but does it belong in a biography? It does if the biographer wishes to lend to the text the feel of a journal, which is what Freeman endeavors in The Long Embrace. At times it works; while other times it detracts.
For example, why should Chandler’s decision to destroy the letters he exchanged with Cissy while she was married to another man (to whom she also lied about her age) and he was in the Canadian armed forces be questioned? With no family to whom to leave them, one need not possess Marlowe’s sagacity to deduce that Chandler would wish to keep their private exchanges from the prying eyes of a biographer and readers alike. Despite our curiosity, it was Chandler’s choice, and his right, to destroy the letters.
An interesting read, if slightly subjective, about a fascinating writer considered by some as one the greatest stylists of the 20th century, although some may be put off by Freeman’s conjectures interspersed throughout. Sometimes we want the facts, ma’am, just the facts. Does the reader really care which woman in a photograph is Freeman’s best guess as the one with whom Chandler had an office affair? I may read supermarket tabloid headlines while standing in line, but I never give credence to their authenticity.
Still, it’s intriguing to consider that Marlowe may have been Chandler’s alter ego—his personal letters to publishers, agents and friends alike might well have been written by Marlowe, the man Chandler wished he could be himself: honorable, wise, faithful. The knight in tarnished armor.
The Long Embrace was better than I’d hoped, even if I found it lacking in some places; but I suspect the subject was what made it better.
Chandler, along with Dashiell Hammett, creator of Sam Spade, is responsible for creating the genre of the hardboiled detective. Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is a complex character—wisecracking and hard drinking; he’s also a loner. Contemplative, he enjoys chess (usually playing against himself) and poetry. He smokes cigarettes but lights up an occasional pipe. A tough guy, Marlowe refrains from fisticuffs, besting his rivals through his sharp repartee. He’s not the womanizer Mickey Spillane later portrayed in Mike Hammer. In fact, he’s never taken in by the femmes fatale Chandler created. Marlowe rarely seduces the women with whom he crosses paths, and he is immune to the predatory advances of women such as Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep.
When I came across The Long Embrace, Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, a biography written by novelist Judith Freeman, I was intrigued. Chandler passed away when I was but two years old, and I knew little of him other than he created Philip Marlowe and was himself a hard drinker.
Painstakingly researched, Freeman pulls few punches as she reveals many of Chandler’s weaknesses—notably the bottle, as well as women.
Don’t be taken in by the subtitle of the book. And the Woman He Loved would seem the subtitle of a storybook romance. Chandler was 35 when he married Cissy Pascal, who was 53, despite listing her age as 43 on their marriage certificate. The marriage was unconventional to say the least, and others have put forth, as Freeman does, that Chandler never knew that Cissy was fully 18 years his senior.
As Cissy aged and battled respiratory disease, Chandler dutifully took care of her, as he did his mother in her last years. His father abandoned Chandler and his mother when Chandler was a boy. A telling point in the biography is that Chandler would not wed Cissy until after his mother had passed away.
That Chandler loved Cissy is never in question, as evidenced by the poems he wrote to her throughout their marriage. When he worked from home, he was the doting husband; yet there were times when he was flagrantly unfaithful to her. Like Pon Farr, the Vulcan blood fever, Chandler often binged on women while he was drinking, usually when working in Hollywood on a screenplay, when he was surrounded by young assistants.
The more he binged on women the more he drank, as if to hide his shame. Whether that shame was the result of his infidelity or over a wife old enough to be his mother (and the anger he might’ve felt over Cissy’s deliberate deception) is never fully explored. Did he marry Cissy as a sort of surrogate mother (she took care of him as a mother would a son) and compartmentalize younger women for their body parts? A question, even if it were put forth, we can never answer.
Freeman endeavors to visit each of the more than 30 homes in which the Chandler’s lived in and around Los Angeles; sadly, many no longer exist. Or as Freeman, in her best imitation of Chandler, writes of L.A.: “If there was such a thing as Chandlerland this was it, and each day I felt surrounded by a kind of shabbier version of that era, a strangely eviscerated ghost of the world I was trying to imagine. When you constantly change a landscape, you erase the collective memory of a city. How can you live without memory?”
Letters, poems, and excerpts of Chandler’s novels lend Freeman’s text credibility. Included is a letter he wrote to a publisher that revealed his frustrations as a writer: “The thing that rather gets me down is that when I write something that is tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, I get panned for being tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, and then when I try to tone down a bit and develop the mental and emotional side of a situation, I get panned for leaving out what I was panned for putting in the first time.”
At times, however, Freeman veers dangerously close to hero worship, once describing her feelings while standing in a room in which he’d written one of his novels. I’d feel equally awed standing in the house in which Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness, but does it belong in a biography? It does if the biographer wishes to lend to the text the feel of a journal, which is what Freeman endeavors in The Long Embrace. At times it works; while other times it detracts.
For example, why should Chandler’s decision to destroy the letters he exchanged with Cissy while she was married to another man (to whom she also lied about her age) and he was in the Canadian armed forces be questioned? With no family to whom to leave them, one need not possess Marlowe’s sagacity to deduce that Chandler would wish to keep their private exchanges from the prying eyes of a biographer and readers alike. Despite our curiosity, it was Chandler’s choice, and his right, to destroy the letters.
An interesting read, if slightly subjective, about a fascinating writer considered by some as one the greatest stylists of the 20th century, although some may be put off by Freeman’s conjectures interspersed throughout. Sometimes we want the facts, ma’am, just the facts. Does the reader really care which woman in a photograph is Freeman’s best guess as the one with whom Chandler had an office affair? I may read supermarket tabloid headlines while standing in line, but I never give credence to their authenticity.
Still, it’s intriguing to consider that Marlowe may have been Chandler’s alter ego—his personal letters to publishers, agents and friends alike might well have been written by Marlowe, the man Chandler wished he could be himself: honorable, wise, faithful. The knight in tarnished armor.
The Long Embrace was better than I’d hoped, even if I found it lacking in some places; but I suspect the subject was what made it better.
January 18, 2011
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, Freeman and readers.
I am a native of Los Angeles and in the age bracket beyond midlife.
I understand the journey and search 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 many of her experiences of L.A. as my own - put into words.
Freeman's research intertwines Chandler and Los Angeles.
She brings up questions and presents answers about the impact on the city by the automobile, oil, films, police corruption and the unlikely heroes that reveal themselves in the midst of it all.
Just as Chandler himself.
It is interesting to finally learn about Chandlers wife, Cissy.
She lived with the truth of her real age hidden.
This was common- all the women friends of my mother and grandmothers - 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 a woman who refused to use Medicare benefits because she did not want to reveal her true age.)
Also it was/is not unusual (among some circles) for creative women to have real loving relationships with younger or gay men. (i.e. Neysa McMein- artist of the 20's).
Judith Freeman has real skill at blending research, 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 or relocated here) you will enjoy learning more about your city and the Chandler connections.
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, Freeman and readers.
I am a native of Los Angeles and in the age bracket beyond midlife.
I understand the journey and search 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 many of her experiences of L.A. as my own - put into words.
Freeman's research intertwines Chandler and Los Angeles.
She brings up questions and presents answers about the impact on the city by the automobile, oil, films, police corruption and the unlikely heroes that reveal themselves in the midst of it all.
Just as Chandler himself.
It is interesting to finally learn about Chandlers wife, Cissy.
She lived with the truth of her real age hidden.
This was common- all the women friends of my mother and grandmothers - 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 a woman who refused to use Medicare benefits because she did not want to reveal her true age.)
Also it was/is not unusual (among some circles) for creative women to have real loving relationships with younger or gay men. (i.e. Neysa McMein- artist of the 20's).
Judith Freeman has real skill at blending research, 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 or relocated here) you will enjoy learning more about your city and the Chandler connections.
January 28, 2014
A Philip Marlowe doesn't come from nowhere, and the man who gave him life -- Raymond Chandler -- was an odd one, indeed. This book is mostly about his long marriage to a woman twenty years his senior who lied to him about how old she was, a fact the author can't quite get out of her teeth, like
a bit of sinew from a lamb chop. They lived a life of Enabling and Co-Dependence, two meaningless terms that Judith Freeman uses to explain everything and that badly date the book. They were both drunks, and nuts; He was a genius, which may have been worst of all. And he was ... without his claiming of Los Angeles as a story worth telling, would it even exist?
The book annoyed me. It is written in a smug Los Angeles Intellectual manner, both faux-Didion and faux-Chandler, and it made me fantasize of that cocktail party that will never happen where, on being introduced to the author, I say "Yesssss ..." and quickly turn-away. She's a Chandler obsessive who tracked him to every place in LA he ever lived, going back again and again to discover that he -- an Enabler, and a Codependent/ Vey iz mir! The plus of having read this is I am going to watch DOUBLE INDEMNITY tonight, for which he wrote a script with Billy Wilder, whom he hated. And I'm going to read one of the books, probably, too.
There is, in this one's writer's obsession with another genre, a true work of art, which is Geoff Dyer's OUT OF SHEER RAGE, a book that is about his inability to write a book about DH Lawrence that somehow becomes a GREAT book about DH Lawrence and is somehow, mysteriously, Lawrentian. And then there's Janet Malcolm's almost-as-wonderful READING CHEKHOV, which is about her love for Chekhov, and especially his story LADY WITH A LITTLE DOG.
a bit of sinew from a lamb chop. They lived a life of Enabling and Co-Dependence, two meaningless terms that Judith Freeman uses to explain everything and that badly date the book. They were both drunks, and nuts; He was a genius, which may have been worst of all. And he was ... without his claiming of Los Angeles as a story worth telling, would it even exist?
The book annoyed me. It is written in a smug Los Angeles Intellectual manner, both faux-Didion and faux-Chandler, and it made me fantasize of that cocktail party that will never happen where, on being introduced to the author, I say "Yesssss ..." and quickly turn-away. She's a Chandler obsessive who tracked him to every place in LA he ever lived, going back again and again to discover that he -- an Enabler, and a Codependent/ Vey iz mir! The plus of having read this is I am going to watch DOUBLE INDEMNITY tonight, for which he wrote a script with Billy Wilder, whom he hated. And I'm going to read one of the books, probably, too.
There is, in this one's writer's obsession with another genre, a true work of art, which is Geoff Dyer's OUT OF SHEER RAGE, a book that is about his inability to write a book about DH Lawrence that somehow becomes a GREAT book about DH Lawrence and is somehow, mysteriously, Lawrentian. And then there's Janet Malcolm's almost-as-wonderful READING CHEKHOV, which is about her love for Chekhov, and especially his story LADY WITH A LITTLE DOG.
March 13, 2010
I love Raymond Chandler. Really I do and I loved the concept of this book of trying to find the man, and the key to the most important relationship in his life, between him and his wife Cissy, by tracing where they lived. This was interesting because Chandler burned all their letters after she died, leaving biographers no insight into what must have been the most important relationship in his life. I was primed to like this book and so, frankly, it sort of pisses me off that I don't. Some parts work, when she can go to a building that still exists and talks about it, but most is her rambling on about 'Ray' as though she knows him. Annoying!
February 24, 2008
This is a fascinating story of a journalist obsessed with the author, Raymond Chandler, and the story of his marriage to a woman almost 20 years older than him. She does a remarkable job of tracking down their very personal life and piecing together the ups and downs of this odd relationship.
September 5, 2010
A lovely, unique book, part fact, part the author's vivid imagination. Chandler as one might never have thought about him. Worth the read -- history is often just part imagination anyway.
March 6, 2020
A bit too long
June 25, 2021
Any fan of noir-fiction, be it in the film-medium, which includes classics like “Chinatown”, to more modern cross-genres in that medium like “Blade Runner” or “Dark City”, or literature/fiction, or even the interactive medium/games, who’s examples are numerous and innovative, including the recently published “Cyberpunk 2077”, can probably find some common heritage between these modern works and Raymond Chandler.
Chandler’s Phillip Marlow, even more so than Hammett’s Sam Spade, serves as the template for the “hard boiled” detective, and I’ve always wondered whether the character of Marlow reflected at all the author’s own nature. “The Long Embrace” definitively answers this query affirmatively, and shows how specifically Chandler’s long standing romance with his much older wife (Freedman states that she may have been almost the same age as his mother, but my searches seem to indicate the birth year to be somewhere between 1875 to 1880, which would place her a mere decade ahead of Raymond), Cissy Chandler, informed the way he wrote characters in his text.
To pursue this thread Freeman does a lot of leg-work, actually tracing Chandler’s early days in Los Angeles and visiting his haunts to try to get a feel of what it may have been like for Cissy and Raymond in the early 20th century. Given how LA itself has transformed several times in the span of time since Raymond Chandler was alive, much of field work didn’t seem to produce much in terms of material insights. Yet, her visits to old-bars (made new and trendy again) and dives does add more character to the narration. At one point Freeman actually locates and unsuccessfully attempts to enter one of Chandler's old LA apartments and bungalows (the apartment now being occupied by a skeptical owner communicating to Freeman through a screen door). She has more luck with one of the bungalows, which was about to be partially demolished.
As a fan of Chandler’s work it is good to read more on his life. I wasn’t aware that Chandler was a veteran of WWI, and I wondered if the cynicism in his narrative could be traced back to his experiences there. I’m aware of a set of authors referred to as “the lost generation”, which includes Hemingway that had a fairly cohesive set of viewpoints/narrations from this cohort, but haven’t read enough of these writer’s works to comment on those similarities. What is also interesting is that Chandler did not come to writing directly after the war, but was for a time a successful business executive.
Given how shady modern corporate life can be, it’s easy to see how some of Chandler’s plot intrigues in his stories could have been made more “alive” via his firsthand experiences at the nature of corporate life and business/deal making in that era. This element of ‘inside the shadows’ business opacity is a major element of the noir genre, and fans of the fiction will almost surely think of the plot of land-development scheme in the film “Chinatown” as the exemplar case of this plot element.
But the main theme of the book, Chandler’s love life with respect to Cissy is the main draw for the book. I can’t say I many too many direct inferences (or broader connections) from understanding this facet of Chandler other than one of the author’s main points, which is Chandler’s description and writing of the “femme fatale” was almost certainly direclty inspired by his wife, who was a kind of “free soul” at the time, and who both in her youth and her maturity was considered “classically” beautiful. Unfortunately, as the author notes, much of Cissy’s earlier history in LA or her family history in general is lost to history as she apparently guarded her privacy fiercely. According to Freeman, even her exact age is not known to us, as she often claimed to be younger than she really was, though I don’t understand how this could not be obtained via public records.
Cissy’s importance to the enterprise of Chandler’s writing goes much beyond mere inspiration for fictional archetypes, however. As Freeman accounts, Cissy was a sort of shadow editor, and supporter of her husband’s craft. In many ways, she took the place of a surrogate mother figure for Raymond during the early days of his writing. It’s unclear whether Cissy had a more direct hand at the crafting of the stories, but as an honest sounding-board, her voice would have been critical to her husband as he was puzzling through what exactly he was writing (though according to Freeman, she thought his stuff was not that compelling, this could just be a kind of 'tough-love').
This latter point is critical, as the genre of “noir-fiction” was not yet a thing at the time. In fact, Freeman points out that Chandler himself didn’t really want to write a “mystery” novel when was pitching his ideas to publishers. The genre arose piecemeal in Chandler’s mind through a series of back and forths between he and his editors, and no doubt also between he and his wife. This pattern of wife-supporting-husband is a common theme I’ve noticed in many biographies of “great”, accomplished, or noted men, and it’s a real shame that this sort of role is all that was afforded to women of this era at that time. The scene from the recent film “Vice” comes to mind as his wife laments that the only way she will ever amount to anything will be through him.
The last quarter of the book is very heartfelt as it discusses the end of Cissy’s life, and how it affected Raymond (badly). Here we witness how Chandler struggled to keep it together as his wife’s health slowly deteriorated. Their last trip overseas, her subdued lament to friends to take care of him after she was gone. Fans of Chandler's work should also know that this is also the time period when he completes his masterpiece, is opus-magnum, "The Long Goodbye". In fact, as Freeman writes, he wrote this book "as my wife lay dying next to me". Reading the book a second time, I can definitely feel that emotion in the story. It’s very moving and also tragic as after Cissy’s death, Chandler reverted to profound alcoholism, which would along with other elements of poor self-care bring him to an early death
Overall, this book was what I expected, and I got what I needed. I wish there was more content on Raymond Chandler, his life, and specifically his writing philosophy. However, for what it is, Judith Freeman’s book is both an excellent bio and a touching story on the Chandler marriage. Recommended. As a quick postscript, Cissy and Raymond were apparently reunited in death as they were buried in separate plots, in 2011.
Chandler’s Phillip Marlow, even more so than Hammett’s Sam Spade, serves as the template for the “hard boiled” detective, and I’ve always wondered whether the character of Marlow reflected at all the author’s own nature. “The Long Embrace” definitively answers this query affirmatively, and shows how specifically Chandler’s long standing romance with his much older wife (Freedman states that she may have been almost the same age as his mother, but my searches seem to indicate the birth year to be somewhere between 1875 to 1880, which would place her a mere decade ahead of Raymond), Cissy Chandler, informed the way he wrote characters in his text.
To pursue this thread Freeman does a lot of leg-work, actually tracing Chandler’s early days in Los Angeles and visiting his haunts to try to get a feel of what it may have been like for Cissy and Raymond in the early 20th century. Given how LA itself has transformed several times in the span of time since Raymond Chandler was alive, much of field work didn’t seem to produce much in terms of material insights. Yet, her visits to old-bars (made new and trendy again) and dives does add more character to the narration. At one point Freeman actually locates and unsuccessfully attempts to enter one of Chandler's old LA apartments and bungalows (the apartment now being occupied by a skeptical owner communicating to Freeman through a screen door). She has more luck with one of the bungalows, which was about to be partially demolished.
As a fan of Chandler’s work it is good to read more on his life. I wasn’t aware that Chandler was a veteran of WWI, and I wondered if the cynicism in his narrative could be traced back to his experiences there. I’m aware of a set of authors referred to as “the lost generation”, which includes Hemingway that had a fairly cohesive set of viewpoints/narrations from this cohort, but haven’t read enough of these writer’s works to comment on those similarities. What is also interesting is that Chandler did not come to writing directly after the war, but was for a time a successful business executive.
Given how shady modern corporate life can be, it’s easy to see how some of Chandler’s plot intrigues in his stories could have been made more “alive” via his firsthand experiences at the nature of corporate life and business/deal making in that era. This element of ‘inside the shadows’ business opacity is a major element of the noir genre, and fans of the fiction will almost surely think of the plot of land-development scheme in the film “Chinatown” as the exemplar case of this plot element.
But the main theme of the book, Chandler’s love life with respect to Cissy is the main draw for the book. I can’t say I many too many direct inferences (or broader connections) from understanding this facet of Chandler other than one of the author’s main points, which is Chandler’s description and writing of the “femme fatale” was almost certainly direclty inspired by his wife, who was a kind of “free soul” at the time, and who both in her youth and her maturity was considered “classically” beautiful. Unfortunately, as the author notes, much of Cissy’s earlier history in LA or her family history in general is lost to history as she apparently guarded her privacy fiercely. According to Freeman, even her exact age is not known to us, as she often claimed to be younger than she really was, though I don’t understand how this could not be obtained via public records.
Cissy’s importance to the enterprise of Chandler’s writing goes much beyond mere inspiration for fictional archetypes, however. As Freeman accounts, Cissy was a sort of shadow editor, and supporter of her husband’s craft. In many ways, she took the place of a surrogate mother figure for Raymond during the early days of his writing. It’s unclear whether Cissy had a more direct hand at the crafting of the stories, but as an honest sounding-board, her voice would have been critical to her husband as he was puzzling through what exactly he was writing (though according to Freeman, she thought his stuff was not that compelling, this could just be a kind of 'tough-love').
This latter point is critical, as the genre of “noir-fiction” was not yet a thing at the time. In fact, Freeman points out that Chandler himself didn’t really want to write a “mystery” novel when was pitching his ideas to publishers. The genre arose piecemeal in Chandler’s mind through a series of back and forths between he and his editors, and no doubt also between he and his wife. This pattern of wife-supporting-husband is a common theme I’ve noticed in many biographies of “great”, accomplished, or noted men, and it’s a real shame that this sort of role is all that was afforded to women of this era at that time. The scene from the recent film “Vice” comes to mind as his wife laments that the only way she will ever amount to anything will be through him.
The last quarter of the book is very heartfelt as it discusses the end of Cissy’s life, and how it affected Raymond (badly). Here we witness how Chandler struggled to keep it together as his wife’s health slowly deteriorated. Their last trip overseas, her subdued lament to friends to take care of him after she was gone. Fans of Chandler's work should also know that this is also the time period when he completes his masterpiece, is opus-magnum, "The Long Goodbye". In fact, as Freeman writes, he wrote this book "as my wife lay dying next to me". Reading the book a second time, I can definitely feel that emotion in the story. It’s very moving and also tragic as after Cissy’s death, Chandler reverted to profound alcoholism, which would along with other elements of poor self-care bring him to an early death
Overall, this book was what I expected, and I got what I needed. I wish there was more content on Raymond Chandler, his life, and specifically his writing philosophy. However, for what it is, Judith Freeman’s book is both an excellent bio and a touching story on the Chandler marriage. Recommended. As a quick postscript, Cissy and Raymond were apparently reunited in death as they were buried in separate plots, in 2011.
October 11, 2018
Having never read any Chandler (gasp) I had flagged this book quite some time ago on a whim, probably based on a review I’d read somewhere. Ten years later, I got around to reading it.
First, the title is a bit misleading, but I suppose titling a book “I Drove Around LA and Southern California to Look at the Places Chandler Lived and Then Wrote My Thoughts About Them and Considered How that Might Have Influenced His Life, His Writings and His Relationship With His Wife Cissy” would have been too long.
That isn't a dig at the book, it is simply more representative of what the book contained. Once I got through the first couple chapters and adapt to the writers style (frequent detours, personal ponderings and speculations) I was able to settle in for an intriguing study of Raymond Chandler, the type of man he was, and how a stability in one part of his life (his wife) did not indicate stability in other areas of his life (constant relocations and fear of failure, not to mention alcoholism).
I ended up enjoying it more than I thought I would at the beginning, but it’s probably best for Chandler fans.
First, the title is a bit misleading, but I suppose titling a book “I Drove Around LA and Southern California to Look at the Places Chandler Lived and Then Wrote My Thoughts About Them and Considered How that Might Have Influenced His Life, His Writings and His Relationship With His Wife Cissy” would have been too long.
That isn't a dig at the book, it is simply more representative of what the book contained. Once I got through the first couple chapters and adapt to the writers style (frequent detours, personal ponderings and speculations) I was able to settle in for an intriguing study of Raymond Chandler, the type of man he was, and how a stability in one part of his life (his wife) did not indicate stability in other areas of his life (constant relocations and fear of failure, not to mention alcoholism).
I ended up enjoying it more than I thought I would at the beginning, but it’s probably best for Chandler fans.
January 5, 2024
Author provides a list of Chandler homes & visits all of them, discovering that many are gone. She goes to two libraries & reads Chandler's letters to others; he destroyed his & wife CISSY's letters. Cissy was 15+ years older than Chandler, but he loved her dearly, just like he loved his MOTHER. When his mother died Chandler married Cissy, who was once a beauty. He works as an accountant for an oil co., but his drinking & the Depression interfere & he turns to writing. The Chandlers move every few months, he likes the variety. As Cissy approaches 80, her health declines & Chandler realizes she is much older than he thought. His novels are a success & he writes the screenplay for DOUBLE INDEMNITY and THE BLUE DAHLIA. Cissy loves La Jolla, so they buy a home where she eventually dies. Chandler sells the house and drinking takes over his life.
March 29, 2025
You know that SNL skit called The Californians? This book felt like that skit and was more about the author of the book than the subject. I am a big Chandler fan, having read The Big Sleep, The Lady in the Lake, and Farewell, My Lovely, but this book had little to do with how the various places in which Chandler lived affected his writing. It was interesting to learn about his life and the woman to whom he was married. Disappointing because I thought there was so much potential.
May 29, 2018
Even those who are not fans of the iconic American author might enjoy this fascinating look into the life of Chandler and the early spirit of Los Angeles. The author's eloquent prose creates an irresistible view of his psyche via his many LA dwellings and his unusual marriage. Freeman is well versed in Chandler as a writer, so for those who have read him, the journey is a literary one as well.
February 4, 2025
Great read for those who love Chandler
If you love Chandler books and you are curious about his life; what made him tick, so to speak, this is a deep & thoughtful read. If you're not a Chandler fan, you should give his writing a try. He's a truly original voice of American culture,, set against the backdrop of 1940's Los Angeles.
If you love Chandler books and you are curious about his life; what made him tick, so to speak, this is a deep & thoughtful read. If you're not a Chandler fan, you should give his writing a try. He's a truly original voice of American culture,, set against the backdrop of 1940's Los Angeles.
May 10, 2018
I would recommend this book to any fan of Raymond Chandler. Entertaining and informative
August 8, 2018
I love Raymond Chandler but Freeman's depiction of his life and the woman he loved left me bored.
September 22, 2019
A must read for any Raymond Chandler fan!
September 24, 2020
Stylistically intriguing and Freeman channels and updates Chandler's keen eye for architecture, infrastructure, and neighborhoods in Los Angeles.
June 21, 2010
This book wasn't nearly as terrible as all its bad reviews had led me to expect. It starts off with not at all a bad conceit, of tracking the peripatetic Chandler through his various California (especially LA) residences, most of which are obviously gone by now. The author's journey ends with a poignant trip to the house where Chandler and his wife lived for many years, which is about to be torn down in the book. It's not a biography, but a sort of extended nonfiction riff on a dead author who has himself turned into a kind of literary character -- although despite the blurb on the back, this book is nothing like Geoff Dwyer's Out of Sheer Rage, which is one of my favourite books, or even Nicholson Baker's U & I. For one reason, Freeman doesn't actually analyze Chandler's writing very much; she's much more interested in pursuing the elusive major adult relationship of Chandler's life, his enigmatic marriage. She doesn't actually succeed in giving us a full portrait of Cissy Chandler (although that's not really what she's interested in either) mainly because the biographical detail just isn't there, but she does give a glimpse of what their life together was like through lists of the often elaborately named glass animals they collected, Cissy's recipe cards, an imaginative recreation of their probable nightly routine together, and so on.
However, the book is terribly overwritten in many spots and reads more like a fleshed-out essay than a book-length narrative; it might have been served better if it had been issued as a coffee-table book, with a lot more and better quality pictures. Anyone's descriptions of L.A. are going to suffer next to Chandler's, but Freeman's often feel especially limp. Structurally, it owes a huge debt to Frank MacShane's biography, mentioned passingly in the acknowledgements (the account of Cissy's death is almost straight from the bio), and stylistically, an even huger debt to Joan Didion's writing about Chandler and L.A. Unfortunately, while Didion can turn sentence fragments into poetry, in the hands of the rest of us they just read as....fragments, and this flaw makes the ending of The Long Embrace extremely anticlimactic. There are also more than a few sections where Freeman's apparent lack of research training shows through; she goes through the twelve cartons of Chandler's papers at Oxford but doesn't seem that capable of analyzing them to yield biographical nuances.
People were often amused or taken aback at the difference between the Eton-schooled, quiet author and his tough-talking, gun-slinging dame-kissing creation, but one thing this book does point up is that authors are not likely to be slinging guns or much of anything other than words. Chandler's quiet life with Cissy reads as almost stultifying on the page, but it's what was going on in his head -- which his wife shared and participated in -- that made it possible for him to write his books. Their marriage together was a shared creation, and it's to Freeman's credit that she sees this domestic routine as necessary to a writer's ability to work. It's a kind of collaboration -- not creative necessarily, altho it involves a type of creativity -- which makes the writing possible, and which is all too often provided by women (especially wives) to male writers and simply overlooked, especially in biographies.
However, the book is terribly overwritten in many spots and reads more like a fleshed-out essay than a book-length narrative; it might have been served better if it had been issued as a coffee-table book, with a lot more and better quality pictures. Anyone's descriptions of L.A. are going to suffer next to Chandler's, but Freeman's often feel especially limp. Structurally, it owes a huge debt to Frank MacShane's biography, mentioned passingly in the acknowledgements (the account of Cissy's death is almost straight from the bio), and stylistically, an even huger debt to Joan Didion's writing about Chandler and L.A. Unfortunately, while Didion can turn sentence fragments into poetry, in the hands of the rest of us they just read as....fragments, and this flaw makes the ending of The Long Embrace extremely anticlimactic. There are also more than a few sections where Freeman's apparent lack of research training shows through; she goes through the twelve cartons of Chandler's papers at Oxford but doesn't seem that capable of analyzing them to yield biographical nuances.
People were often amused or taken aback at the difference between the Eton-schooled, quiet author and his tough-talking, gun-slinging dame-kissing creation, but one thing this book does point up is that authors are not likely to be slinging guns or much of anything other than words. Chandler's quiet life with Cissy reads as almost stultifying on the page, but it's what was going on in his head -- which his wife shared and participated in -- that made it possible for him to write his books. Their marriage together was a shared creation, and it's to Freeman's credit that she sees this domestic routine as necessary to a writer's ability to work. It's a kind of collaboration -- not creative necessarily, altho it involves a type of creativity -- which makes the writing possible, and which is all too often provided by women (especially wives) to male writers and simply overlooked, especially in biographies.
May 7, 2014
My condensed review:
If you’re looking for a book that is a biography on Raymond Chandler, this might be a bit too stuffed with extraneous history not about Chandler for your needs. It gives plenty of insight into Chandler’s personal life but Judith Freeman presents her narrative as a person exploring Los Angeles. She visited all of the places where Raymond Chandler lived in the city with his wife Cissy. It’s as if she traveled back in time and was able to see things play out in front of her as if she were an acquaintance of the couple watching and writing about them.
Suzanne Toren’s impeccable performance hooked me and may be the thing that kept me wanting to hear more. Since the book does have a lot of fat about the times and aesthetics of LA rather in between shorter moments about Chandler, I think I made a great choice in getting the audio version of a book I do have at home and hadn’t continued past a few pages.
Chandler had ordered all of the love letters between him and Cissy to be burned. I’m sure they were the sorts of words to make time stop and hearts skip a beat. How could they be anything else? He was young and used words to express himself long before he became a novelist. I do wonder a lot more about Cissy. I wonder what she was like when her husband began to have affairs and wouldn’t come home. Did she get jealous or was she too tired and weak by then? Did she have anyone besides her sister to talk to when things were that bad? All the medication she took seems to have played a role but did that make her unlovable somehow?
If you are fortunate to be friends with a successful writer and they hand you a book, you read it. That may take 5, 10 or 20 years, but trust someone who knows you well enough to give you a book that reminds you of your own life.
For my full review: http://www.amberunmasked.com/longembr...
If you’re looking for a book that is a biography on Raymond Chandler, this might be a bit too stuffed with extraneous history not about Chandler for your needs. It gives plenty of insight into Chandler’s personal life but Judith Freeman presents her narrative as a person exploring Los Angeles. She visited all of the places where Raymond Chandler lived in the city with his wife Cissy. It’s as if she traveled back in time and was able to see things play out in front of her as if she were an acquaintance of the couple watching and writing about them.
Suzanne Toren’s impeccable performance hooked me and may be the thing that kept me wanting to hear more. Since the book does have a lot of fat about the times and aesthetics of LA rather in between shorter moments about Chandler, I think I made a great choice in getting the audio version of a book I do have at home and hadn’t continued past a few pages.
Chandler had ordered all of the love letters between him and Cissy to be burned. I’m sure they were the sorts of words to make time stop and hearts skip a beat. How could they be anything else? He was young and used words to express himself long before he became a novelist. I do wonder a lot more about Cissy. I wonder what she was like when her husband began to have affairs and wouldn’t come home. Did she get jealous or was she too tired and weak by then? Did she have anyone besides her sister to talk to when things were that bad? All the medication she took seems to have played a role but did that make her unlovable somehow?
If you are fortunate to be friends with a successful writer and they hand you a book, you read it. That may take 5, 10 or 20 years, but trust someone who knows you well enough to give you a book that reminds you of your own life.
For my full review: http://www.amberunmasked.com/longembr...
February 17, 2014
Here is perhaps the most unconventional biography I've ever read.
In "The Long Embrace", Judith Freeman unearths the previously unknown story of the strange marriage of author Raymond Chandler and his wife Cissy. Chandler knew his wife was older than he -- eight years, he thought. It wasn't until after their marriage that the truth came out: she had lied about her age. Cissy, in fact, was eighteen years his senior, not eight.
In this fascinating biography, Freeman inserts herself as a character, telling the story of Ray and Cissy as though she were Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone, traversing the Los Angeles of the past to seek for clues. She visits many of the places where Ray and Cissy once lived, and editorializes her findings to us.
As it happens, this is *exactly* how this tale should be told, since this case is as unorthodox and baffling as any that Philip Marlowe himself ever tackled. We feel like we're unraveling a great mystery with the author, even though this story is absolutely true.
Filled with rich imagery, and quoting extensively from Chandler's surviving (and surprisingly lyrical) correspondence, "The Long Embrace" is a page-turner which takes the reader inside a powerful, if unorthodox, relationship. It also allows us to get to know the complex motivations and bizarre behaviors of Raymond Chandler himself, whose personality quirks were legion. But through this book I feel as if I got to know not only him, but his enigmatic wife.
I was sad when this book was over, which is the biggest complement I can give it. Highly recommended reading.
In "The Long Embrace", Judith Freeman unearths the previously unknown story of the strange marriage of author Raymond Chandler and his wife Cissy. Chandler knew his wife was older than he -- eight years, he thought. It wasn't until after their marriage that the truth came out: she had lied about her age. Cissy, in fact, was eighteen years his senior, not eight.
In this fascinating biography, Freeman inserts herself as a character, telling the story of Ray and Cissy as though she were Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone, traversing the Los Angeles of the past to seek for clues. She visits many of the places where Ray and Cissy once lived, and editorializes her findings to us.
As it happens, this is *exactly* how this tale should be told, since this case is as unorthodox and baffling as any that Philip Marlowe himself ever tackled. We feel like we're unraveling a great mystery with the author, even though this story is absolutely true.
Filled with rich imagery, and quoting extensively from Chandler's surviving (and surprisingly lyrical) correspondence, "The Long Embrace" is a page-turner which takes the reader inside a powerful, if unorthodox, relationship. It also allows us to get to know the complex motivations and bizarre behaviors of Raymond Chandler himself, whose personality quirks were legion. But through this book I feel as if I got to know not only him, but his enigmatic wife.
I was sad when this book was over, which is the biggest complement I can give it. Highly recommended reading.
October 6, 2013
The subject matter is fascinating, but the author can't get out of her own way. Sorry, Judith Freeman, but while I am extremely interested in Raymond Chandler and his wife, I am not very interested in how YOU feel about them and what you thought about while doing research for this book. I don't care that when you finally found a photo of the couple together you had to go take a walk because you were so overcome. I just wanna see the photo.
The book is at its best when it's giving you excerpts of Chandler's letters, or things people who knew him wrote/said about him and Cissy. The descriptions of the author's emotional odyssey thankfully taper off about halfway through the book, but they're pretty annoying. I almost quit altogether after 30 or so pages, but I really did want to know more about Chandler and his wife, so I kept going. And I'm glad I did, but not enough to recommend that other people read this. I'm fairly confident you can find a better biography.
The book is at its best when it's giving you excerpts of Chandler's letters, or things people who knew him wrote/said about him and Cissy. The descriptions of the author's emotional odyssey thankfully taper off about halfway through the book, but they're pretty annoying. I almost quit altogether after 30 or so pages, but I really did want to know more about Chandler and his wife, so I kept going. And I'm glad I did, but not enough to recommend that other people read this. I'm fairly confident you can find a better biography.
August 30, 2008
Freeman spins an excellent detective story surmising what Raymond Chandler marriage was like to Cissy, his wife of 30 years, and who was 18 woman 18 years older than he. This turns out to be even more remarkable when the reader learns early that Chandler burned nearly all of their correspondence together. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Chandler's life was that he lived in more than thirty apartments and houses during his adult years in Los Angeles, where he spent virtually all those years. Freeman visits every one of them, and correlates what Chandler was writing at each address. Chandler drank himself to death after Cissy died, so the end of this fascinating biography is a heart-breaking love story.
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December 12, 2007Do a google maps street view while reading this and you too can see the neighborhoods in which Chandler lived!
I suppose, as a superfan of someone myself, I can understand the draw of writing a book about that person, but this was just a little creepy stalkerish at points. It wouldn't have been if the author didn't write things about how she could feel his presence in certain locations; or how she started ordering the drink that he drank - I don't know - I just took away some of the seriousness of it for me.
I also realized that when I first got the book, I misread the title and thought it was going to be about Raymond Carver - so about 10 pages in I had to do a total reevaluation of what I was reading.
I suppose, as a superfan of someone myself, I can understand the draw of writing a book about that person, but this was just a little creepy stalkerish at points. It wouldn't have been if the author didn't write things about how she could feel his presence in certain locations; or how she started ordering the drink that he drank - I don't know - I just took away some of the seriousness of it for me.
I also realized that when I first got the book, I misread the title and thought it was going to be about Raymond Carver - so about 10 pages in I had to do a total reevaluation of what I was reading.
June 18, 2008
I'm a big Raymond Chandler geek and really enjoyed learning more about him...even though a lot of what I learned was somewhat morose and depressing. I really enjoyed the subtle intertwining of fact (Chandler's life) and fiction (his stories, novels, and screenplays). Strange that he and his wife--who was 18 years older--lived in dozens of apartments and homes in and around LA. Could definitely see this being turned into a really entertaining movie. Entertaining for big Raymond Chandler geeks, at least.
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