Dead Men are Heavier Than Broken Hearts

My first run-in with Philip Marlowe and Raymond Chandler. Having recently seen the film for the first time, it hard to shake thoughts of Bogart's crackling delivery. It seems like a role he was born to play.

Although I enjoyed every word of the novel, in some ways perhaps the film is more interesting, or at least more complicated. The mystery of the novel is almost straightforward when compared to the opaque twists and turns of the film - a lot of that is due to the limitations of the Production Code, and the fact many of the subtleties used to get around those limitations are lost on a modern audience (ie, me). Still, I find it interesting the film is able to create a shadowy, almost occult noir-land of organised (and disorganised!) crime and ultimately ends with Marlowe all loved-up, whereas the novel is much less... spooky? But it concludes in rather a different way. Maybe I'm overstating this; of course the film would've been less useful as a Bogart/Bacall vehicle had they not wound up together in the end. I don't think it rings false though, their deadpan "I suppose I'm in love with you"s seem true to Chandler's form.

Get up angel, you look like a Pekingese.

It can be difficult to overcome the book/film obstacle - whichever you have encountered first will likely inform your experience of the other. In this instance, my reading of the novel had a little more Bacall in its Mrs Regan, a little more smoke and fog, and no doubt my next watching of the film will seem a little less romantic, if it was romantic at all.

I think my current studies have seeped into my reading so that I can't think about this novel without thinking about what its implications are for the idea of the American social order. There's plenty to say on that note, but I'll save that for the essay.

None of This Is Made Up

The Age of Innocence

"The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergences as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation."

Edith, you slay me! And everyone else, for that matter. It has been about eight years since I last read this book. When thinking of it since I've been mostly preoccupied with that melancholy final scene and I had entirely forgotten how funny and brutal she is.