Tag Archives: Raymond Chandler

Additions to the archive of Raymond Chandler

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Chandler’s private detective, Philip Marlowe, features on a set of stamps to mark the 50th anniversary of Interpol, 1973. MS. Chandler 107. © Raymond Chandler Limited.

Raymond Chandler is best known for hard-boiled crime novels including The Big Sleep (1939) and The Long Goodbye (1953) and as a screenwriter for some of the biggest motion pictures of the 1940s, including The Blue Dahlia. Since the start of the year, work has been underway to enhance and expand the original catalogue of the Chandler archive and to integrate and make accessible later accessions. These new additions cover papers and correspondence created by Chandler in his lifetime, as well as a vast afterlife of papers showcasing the legacy of the great mystery writer.

New additions to the archive largely focus on correspondence and papers concerning the Chandler estate, stewarded by his literary agent and heir, Helga Greene. These demonstrate a wealth of interest in Chandler’s work by filmmakers and biographers, largely covering a period from 1960-1990. By the 1970s, small and big screen adaptations of his novels and short stories were becoming apparent as a major focus of interest for the estate. Greene’s defence of Chandler’s work and legacy is evident in the papers, through her diligent renewal of copyright and selective choices over permissions for adaptations, anthologies and new publications. The papers also go into detail over a will contest and include material concerning Greene’s legal fight to be recognised as heir, in a suit brought by Chandler’s former secretary, MS. Chandler 112-113.

Extract of a letter touting Chandler’s special recipe ‘Swordfish Mascagni’ and apples baked in cider, MS. Chandler 107. © Raymond Chandler Limited.

Amongst the papers generated by the estate following Chandler’s death are snippets of original writings that demonstrate his natural humour and wit, as well as leisurely pursuits and interests, including cookery and darts. In the final year of his life, whilst working on ‘The Poodle Springs Story’ (the last and unfinished novel, in which Marlowe marries heiress Linda Loring), Chandler and Greene were also collaborating on an idea for a cookery book with a provisional title of ‘Cooking For Idiots.’ Although the book never came to fruition, the collection does hold remnants of the early development of this work. As well as the above letter teasing recipes such as apples baked in cider (‘vociferously admired by anyone who owes me money’), the collection includes an assortment of handwritten recipe cards featuring the culinary creations of Chandler’s late wife Cissy, including ‘Cissy’s Ham Goodbye’ and ‘Pancakes for Raymio,’ MS. Chandler 102 & 106.

© Raymond Chandler Limited.

Alongside the cookery ‘specials’ of the Chandler household, a glimpse of Chandler’s humour is found in this unsent letter marked ‘For Posterity’ to Los Angeles department store Bullock’s Wilshire (in its heyday a glitzy haunt of famous clientele), where he conjures an elaborate narrative in an effort to return an unwanted sports jacket.

Additionally, original prose such as drafts and typescripts for short stories including ‘The Pencil’ (published as ‘Marlowe Takes on the Syndicate’ in the Daily Mail, 1959) and the fantastic story ‘Professor Bingo’s Snuff’ are now available, along with a selection of assorted notes, prose and unpublished writings in MS. Chandler 7. The material featured in this blog post, along with all other newly catalogued additions to the archive can now be consulted in the Weston Library. The new and enhanced catalogue for the Archive of Raymond Chandler is searchable here.

The Natasha Spender archive is now available

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Programme for a piano recital by Natasha Litvin (later Spender) in 1944, from MS. 6647/54The archive of Natasha Spender, concert pianist, academic, and wife of the poet Stephen Spender, is now available.

Natasha Spender, Lady Spender, née Litvin (or Evans), was born on 18 April 1919, the illegitimate daughter of Ray Litvin and Edwin Evans, who was a well-respected (but married) Times music critic.

Ray Litvin (d. 1977) was from a family of Lithuanian Jewish refugees and grew up in Glasgow. She became an actress and was by 1915 a regular with Lilian Baylis’s Old Vic theatre company but in 1926 her career was crushed when she caught typhoid fever and became profoundly deaf.

Young Natasha, who had been fostered out during her early years, went on to spend her holidays with the wealthy and very musical family of George Booth (son of the social reformer Charles Booth) and his wife Margaret at their home Funtington House in West Sussex. A gifted pianist, Natasha trained at the Royal College of Music and following graduation, studied with the musician and composer Clifford Curzon and the pianist Franz Osborn before starting her professional career. During the war, she gave concerts for ENSA and in 1943 she, along with the actress Dame Peggy Ashcroft and the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, founded the Apollo Society which presented poetry with a musical accompaniment. She appeared often on television and radio including as the soloist in the very first concert televised by the BBC. She also gave recitals in the UK and abroad, including a concert for former prisoners in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In the 1960s Natasha made a move into academia after earning a degree in psychology and from 1970 to 1984 she taught music psychology and visual perception at the Royal College of Art. She later contributed to the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Natasha met the poet Stephen Spender in 1940 at a lunch party hosted by Horizon, a literary journal that Stephen was co-editing at the time. They married in 1941. For decades, the Spenders were central figures in the London (and international) literary scene, with Stephen Spender’s career as a writer, professor, lecturer, editor and delegate taking them all over the world, with long periods in America.

In the 1950s, Natasha became friends with the terminally alcoholic, noir author Raymond Chandler, who fell in love with her. The exact nature of their relationship became an ongoing source of speculation among his biographers. This, along with controversies over unauthorized biographies and interpretations of Stephen Spender’s life led to Natasha fighting hard for the rights of biographical subjects and particularly for her husband’s reputation. Following Stephen Spender’s death in 1995, Natasha founded the Stephen Spender Memorial Trust, which continues to promote poetry in translation, and she collaborated first with John Sutherland on an official biography of her husband (published in 2004) and then with Lara Feigel on an updated edition of Spender’s journals (published in 2012). Natasha also published articles about friends and associates, including Dame Edith Sitwell and Raymond Chandler, and her archive includes an unfinished memoir covering the early years of her life and marriage. She died on 21 October 2010 at the age of 91.

The papers will be of interest to readers researching the history of early twentieth century theatre and performance, the academic field of visual perception, and the literary circle of Stephen Spender.

Raymond Chandler catalogue now online

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Cover of Chandler's novel The Big Sleep.
Cover of Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep.

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”

In these few words Chandler conjures up the atmosphere of romantic urban noir in which his quintessential Private Investigator, Philip Marlowe, operates as a modern knight errant. Now, as part of the Bodleian’s programme of retrospective conversion of its finding aids, the formerly in-house catalogue of the Library’s Chandler collection has just gone online.

Cover of Chandler's novel The Long Goodbye.
Cover of Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye.

At the time of his death in 1959, Chandler’s British literary agent was Helga Greene, and it is from the Helga Greene Literary Agency that the majority of the papers derive. They give unparalleled information about the author’s business transactions, but also include some important literary and personal papers. Of particular interest are Chandler’s working notebooks; drafts and fair copies of poems and short stories; three hundred discarded leaves from The Long Goodbye, and three film scripts of an acrimoniously failed collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock for Strangers on a Train. In 2009-10 the Bodleian mounted a small exhibition commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Chandler’s death, which featured some of these manuscripts and a selection of the archive’s 140 photographs of Chandler from babyhood until the last year of his life.

The collection was placed on long-term deposit in the Bodleian by Helga Greene’s son, Graham Carleton Greene. Chandler aficionados already know that a small but significant archive is also held by The Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA. Both the Bodleian and Charles Young have been involved in recent research enquiries which have speculated on the identification of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade with a real life private eye called Samuel Marlowe, one of the first black PIs.