Abandoned by her husband, Raymond Chandler's mother moved her family to London in 1900 when Ray was 12 years old. He became a naturalized British subject [and thus eligible to be today's Brit] and remained so until he regained his US citizenship in 1956.
Chandler's life story makes your heart ache, and that ache is evident in his masterpieces of fiction. Joyce Carol Oates said
“The prose rises to heights of unselfconscious eloquence, and we realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of not a mere action-tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a vision … The reader is captivated by Chandler’s seductive prose.”
I'm reading 'The Long Goodbye' right now. But nothing may be as moving as the last chapter of his life which ends right here in San Diego--
[from Wikipedia]
In 1954 Pearl Eugenie (Cissy) Chandler died after a long illness. Heartbroken and drunk, Chandler neglected to inter Cissy's cremated remains, and they sat for 57 years in a storage locker in the basement of Cypress View Mausoleum.
After Cissy's death, Chandler's loneliness worsened his natural propensity for
clinical depression; he returned to drink, never quitting it for long, and the quality and quantity of his writing suffered.
After a respite in England, he returned to La Jolla. He died at Scripps Memorial Hospital of pneumonial peripheral vascular shock and prerenal uremia (according to the death certificate) in 1959.
Raymond Chandler is buried at
Mount Hope Cemetery, San Diego, California. As Frank MacShane noted in his biography,
The Life of Raymond Chandler, Chandler wished to be cremated and placed next to Cissy in Cypress View Mausoleum. Instead, he was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery because he had left no funeral or burial instructions.
[12]
In 2010, Chandler historian Loren Latker, with the assistance of attorney Aissa Wayne (daughter of
John Wayne), brought a petition to disinter Cissy's remains and reinter them with Chandler in Mount Hope. After a hearing September 2010 in
San Diego Superior Court, Judge Richard S. Whitney entered an order granting Latker's request.
[13]
On
Valentine's Day (February 14) 2011, Cissy's ashes were conveyed from Cypress View to Mount Hope, and interred under a new grave marker above Chandler's, as they had wished.
[14] About one hundred people attended the ceremony, which included readings by the Rev. Randal Gardner, Powers Boothe, Judith Freeman and Aissa Wayne. The shared gravestone reads "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts", a quote from
The Big Sleep. A video of the ceremony is available at
http://raymondchandler.info/reunite. Chandler's original gravestone, placed by Jean Fracasse, is still at the head of his grave, while the new one is at the foot.
This photo from 'Green Zone' has so much to love in it--Matt Damon, whom I love for his mind [remember 'Good Will Hunting'?], an awesome assault weapon, and a bloodied and be-stached Jason Isaacs talking into one of those cool comm thingies like the police wear.
This week's theme was wholly inspired by the discovery of this delightful picture. Here is Alan Rickman with his significant other of appproximately 40 years, Rima Horton.
John Le Carre is one of my favorite authors, and 'The Tailor of Panama' is an outstanding book, so I had high hopes for the movie, but it was a serious disappointment. Among other things, they totally botched the ending. It's a John Le Carre story--it's not supposed to end well.
I'm rather proud of this bit of amateur casting: Eddie Argos as Roger Wakefield and Rebecca Mader [formerly of LOST] as Claire's daughter Brianna. Eddie-as-Roger is the inspiraton for the theme of my posts this week. I've been reading the Outlander series for some time now, and Roger, a professional historian much like Claire's twentieth century husband Frank, is a pivotal character in the second book as well as the third which I'm reading right now. Roger was Eddie in my imagination from the beginning, and once you have a picture in your head of Roger, it follows that you start to wonder who Brianna would be....
Dan Radcliffe photographed by Annie Liebowitz. I'm casting him as Frank Randall, history professor and Claire's husband in the 1940's. I mean, there has to be a reason why she thinks about him so often, right?
OK, work with me here. I'm casting Christian Bale as Bonnie Prince Charles Edward Stuart from the second Outlander novel. I know this picture is anachronistic to the Uprising of 1745, but you know darn well that a would-be Scottish monarch exiled in France would have worn Armani if he could have. And nobody wears an Armani suit like Bruce Wayne.
Diana Gabaldon really isn't going to like this, but this week our ensemble cast will be outfitting some of the key the roles from her Outlander novels. It's kinda like I'm the casting director for a movie that doesn't exist. Keep in mind, however, that I'm only half way through the third book.
I love pairing a photograph with a favorite bit of text. This passage is from "John Thomas and Lady Jane" by D. H. Lawrence. JT&LJ is, historically speaking, an earlier draft of "Lady Chatterley," but as literature, it stands alone and is often described as superior to the final version. I love them both, like fraternal twins. They are indeed very different, but in the end you know that they come from the same place.
James Joyce and Sylvia Beach, the publisher of Ulysses, here as Constance and Clifford Chatterley.
Jason Isaacs.
If you watch 'Lost' and you haven't seen last nights' episode yet, please go away for a little while, okay?
Alex Turner, The Arctic Monkeys.
