Do you ever have one of those moments when you think, “Oh my lord I
just made the most amazing discovery”? And then two minutes later you think,
“Wait, everybody but me probably knew this already.” I just had this experience with Raymond
Chandler.
“Everybody” knows his passage from “The Simple Art of Murder,” the one
that runs “down these mean streets a man must go who
is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is
everything …” and so on.
Now (and stick with me on this) I happened
to be reading
Gore Vidal’s review of Robert
Calder’s Willie: The Life of Somerset
Maugham.
Maugham trained as a doctor in London at the end of the 19th
century, and Vidal says this was “still Dickens’ great monstrous invention,” and then he quotes Maugham, “The messenger led you through the dark and
silent streets of Lambeth, up stinking alleys and into sinister courts where
the police hesitated to penetrate, but where your black bag protected you from
harm."
Much of the world, and certainly much of the literary world, seems to
have fallen out of love with Maugham (to be fair, Gore Vidal seems never to
have been much enamored) but I think that’s rather a good sentence. It’s from Liza
of Lambeth, Maugham’s second-written, first-published novel, from 1897,
when Maugham would have been 23 or so.
Vidal writes, “Maugham raised the banner of Maupassant and the French
realists but the true influence on the book and its method was one Arthur
Morrison.”
And if you wonder who this “one Arthur Morrison” was (that's him above), it turns out he
was the author of a book published three years before Liza of Lambeth, titled (hold on to your hat) Tales of Mean Streets. Did Chandler read Morrison? Well, it seems perfectly possible, doesn't it?
Morrison went on to write detective novels, his hero was named Martin
Hewitt, but Tales of the Mean Streets is a series of short stories, sometimes described as "slum fiction" though there’s
plenty of anthropological interest there.
His East End of London doesn’t sound much less daunting than Maugham’s,
or indeed Chandler’s Los Angeles. But I
do wonder whether Morrison and Chandler would have had the same understanding
of the word “mean.” Morrison would
surely have favored the sense of poor or paltry; Chandler would have favored
cruel and nasty; but maybe both senses are there in both.
Well that’s pretty much the extent of my great “discovery” except to
note that there’s a certain amount of walking in Morrison’s mean streets. In a piece titled “A Street” he writes, “When love's light falls into some corner of the street, it falls at an
early hour of this mean life, and is itself but a dusty ray. It falls early,
because it is the sole bright thing which the street sees, and is watched for
and counted on. Lads and lasses, awkwardly arm in arm, go pacing up and down
this street, before the natural interest in marbles and doll's houses would
have left them in a brighter place. They are 'keeping company'; the
manner of which proceeding is indigenous—is a custom native to the place. The
young people first 'walk out' in pairs. There is no exchange of
promises, no troth-plight, no engagement, no love-talk. They patrol the street
side by side, usually in silence, sometimes with fatuous chatter. There are no
dances, no tennis, no water-parties, no picnics to bring them together: so they
must walk out, or be unacquainted. If two of them grow dissatisfied with each
other's company, nothing is easier than to separate and walk out with somebody
else.”
It sounds to me as though he’s being
unnecessarily mean to his characters.
