An announcement: this Saturday, January 18, I will be in Boston, handling the lecture part of a lecture recital on Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, with baritone Randall Scarlata and pianist Tanya Blaich. The performance—part of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Beethoven & Romanticism series—is at 6:00 pm, at the Goethe-Institut. Admission is free, but you need to reserve a ticket. More information here.

There’s a cameo appearance in my talk by Philip Marlowe, the fictional, Los-Angeles-based private investigator invented by Raymond Chandler in the 1930s. Re-reading the Marlowe novels—in particular, The Long Goodbye, published in 1953—I started thinking about the place of music and art in Marlowe’s world.

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It’s interesting that Chandler name-checks two then-living composers in The Long Goodbye, and within a few pages of each other. The first comes just after Philip Marlowe recieves a purported final word from Terry Lennox, the rich, charming wastrel whom Marlowe befriends at the novel’s outset. Later, Lennox will ask Marlowe for a favor—a car ride to Mexico—only for Marlowe to discover, upon his return to Los Angeles, that Lennox’s wife has been murdered. Marlowe spends a few days in jail for his trouble, but is released when the news comes that Lennox has killed himself. Soon a letter arrives for Marlowe, from Lennox, saying goodbye and apologizing by way of an enclosed five-thousand-dollar bill. That night, Marlowe can’t sleep.

At three a.m. I was walking the floor and listening to Khachaturyan working in a tractor factory. He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it.

The next day, Marlowe is waiting in a hotel bar to meet with a new client. A blonde woman walks in, and Marlowe is transfixed: “It seemed to me for an instant that there was no sound in the bar, that the sharpies stopped sharping and the drunk on the stool stopped burbling away, and it was like just after the conductor taps on his music stand and raises his arms and holds them poised.” (The woman will prove to be Eileen Wade, wife of novelist Roger Wade, and and Marlowe’s involvement with the Wades will form the second strand of the novel’s tangled plot.)

This leads into one of the novel’s more famous passages, a taxonomy of blondes, including

the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençale. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them.

The litany of shallow pretension is made more sour by the fact that Toscanini never conducted any music of Hindemith’s; whether the dismissive ignorance is Marlowe’s or Chandler’s is unknown. But Marlowe’s distaste for modern music links the two successive chapters, which prove to be the linchpin of the plot. Even as one element of the story seems to have reached its end, however uneasily, the atmosphere is suddenly flooded with dissonance and the sense of an impending downbeat.

Music is a fairly constant presence in Chandler’s Los Angeles, a consistent element in the novels’ sonic landscape. (A favorite Chandler effect is an only barely perceptible background music, coming into a scene from other spaces, other rooms, through walls, across distances.) But it is only in The Long Goodbye, the sixth of Chandler’s seven novels, that Marlowe/Chandler references the repertoire in such provocative detail. Maybe it’s to hint at how out-of-place Marlowe’s unsentimental chivalry has become in post-World War II America. Later in the novel Marlowe meets Sylvia Lennox’s sister, Linda Loring, who tries to convince Marlowe that their wealthy father was univolved with Terry’s reported suicide, a notion that Marlowe cynically questions. Loring is indignant. Marlowe is unrepentant: “I don’t make the kind of music you like to hear.”

But what kind of music does Marlowe like to hear? We never actually find out. But we can guess. There’s a hint in an early Chandler story called “I’ll Be Waiting.” The Marlowe figure here is named Tony Reseck, a hotel detective. His office doubles as the hotel’s radio room, so when a woman begins to spend night after night there listening to music, it means Reseck can’t sleep. He pays her a visit as a Benny Goodman jam session is being aired.

“Don’t get me wrong,” the girl said. “Goodman makes money, and a lad that makes legitimate money these days is a lad you have to respect. But this jitterbug music gives me the backdrop of a beer flat. I like something with roses in it.”

“Maybe you like Mozart,” Tony said.

“Go on, kid me,” the girl said.

“I wasn’t kidding you, Miss Cressy. I think Mozart was the greatest man that ever lived—and Toscanini is his prophet.”

“I thought you were the house dick.” She put her head back on a pillow and stared at him through her lashes.

“Make me some of that Mozart,” she added.

“It’s too late,” Tony sighed. “You can’t get it now.”

A similar contrast comes via the visual arts in the second Marlowe novel, Farewell, My Lovely. Early on, in his office, Marlowe regards an Old Master. As usual, his eye is precise.

They had Rembrandt on the calendar that year, a rather smeary self-portrait due to imperfectly registered color plate. It showed him holding a smeared palette with a dirty thumb and wearing a tam-o’-shanter which wasn’t any too clean either. His other hand held a brush poised in the air, as if he might be going to do a little work after a while, if somebody made a down payment. His face was aging, saggy, full of the disgust of life and the thickening effects of liquor. But it had a hard cheerfulness that I liked, and the eyes were as bright as drops of dew.

Later, when Marlowe visits the house of a new client, he less likes what he sees.

Mr. Lindsay Marriott arranged himself in the curve of the grand piano, leaned over to sniff at the yellow rose, then opened a French enamel cigarette case and lit a long brown cigarette with a gold tip. I sat down on a pink chair and hoped I wouldn’t leave a mark on it. I lit a Camel, blew smoke through my nose and looked at a piece of black shiny metal on a stand. It showed a full, smooth curve with a shallow fold in it and two protuberances on the curve. I stared at it. Marriott saw me staring at it.

“An interesting bit,” he said negligently, “I picked it up just the other day. Asta Dial’s Spirit of Dawn.”

“I thought it was Klopstein’s Two Warts on a Fanny,” I said.

Mr. Lindsay Marriott’s face looked as if he had swallowed a bee. He smoothed it out with an effort.

One might charitably read this as Marlowe criticizing Marriott more than the statue, prodding a superficial aesthete for whom art is more a matter of acquisition than appreciation. But I rather think that Marlowe simply doesn’t like modern art, doesn’t like Asta Dial, or Hindemith, or Khatchaturian. It doesn’t speak to him, on a level deeper than the usual use of that dismissal. From the few examples we have, it seems that Marlowe doesn’t engage with art in order to have a novel sensory experience, or to shift his perspective. Note how he turns Rembrandt’s painting into his own self-portrait as well. What Marlowe wants out of art is to find a kindred spirit.

It’s escapism, of a sort. Marlowe is a man alienated from his own time, longing (as Chandler did) to find beauty in a place and a milieu he finds ugly and greedy and shallow. Modern art—modern artists—are too much of their own time for Marlowe. He doesn’t want to live in a previous era; he wants to transcend his own, to somehow redeem the messy, granular experience of it. He wants to be like Rembrandt and Mozart, unmoored from the baggage of the past, untroubled by the onrushing future. In other words: Marlowe aspires to the canon.

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For much of his life, Raymond Chandler seemed more destined to be a Lindsay Marriott than a Philip Marlowe. He was born in Chicago and raised in Nebraska, but, at a young age, and following the breakup of his parents’ marriage, he moved to England with his mother to live with her relatives. There, he received a quintessential British public-school education, had brief, unavailing careers in government and journalism, experimented with romantic poetry, and then decided to make his way back to the United States. On the boat, he met Warren Lloyd, a California oilman with artistic tastes and, upon settling in Los Angeles, joined the Bohemian circle of artists writers and musicians that Lloyd and his wife cultivated. Chandler was particularly close to Julian Pascal, a Barbadian-born British composer, conductor and pianist. The two even collaborated on an operetta called The Princess and the Pedlar—libretto by Chandler, music by Pascal—but the piece was never performed, interrupted first by Chandler’s service in World War I, and then Chandler’s affair with Pascal’s wife Cissy, a noted beauty in her time and an accomplished pianist herself. The Pascals divorced and Chandler married Cissy, some eighteen years his senior.

The Chandlers kept a cultured household (most nights, they sat together, listening to classical music on the radio) but Chandler abandoned his literary ambitions for the better part of twenty years, only returning to writing after burning his bridges in the oil industry, where he had advanced from an accountant to an executive. His turn to detective fiction was pragmatic—the style easy enough for him to adopt, the market lucrative enough to make a living—but the tension between the poet Chandler had wanted to be and the hard-boiled writer he became crackles throughout his work.

Chandler was always more interested in atmosphere than the puzzling out of clues (The Big Sleep famously and inadvertently ends with one murder unsolved); in The Long Goodbye, that gap reaches an eloquent peak. Both Marlowe and Chandler’s prose are too engulfed by the dingy, corrupt kaleidoscope of 1950s Los Angeles to give the actual case much more than a professional interest. Strictly as a mystery, The Long Goodbye is casual, diffuse. It’s also Chandler’s best book.

Especially toward the end of the 40s and the beginning of the 50s, the distance between Marlowe and his creator seemed to shrink. Chandler wrote The Long Goodbye with an eye on the exit. He had already been plotting to leave California, to return to England, but Cissy Chandler’s health repeatedly postponed any move. After she died, Chandler was free to go. He spent much of the rest of his life in England, on longer and longer visits. (At least one went on so long that—to his accountant’s dismay—Chandler ended up paying tax to two governments.)

Chandler’s specific dissatisfaction with postwar America comes into focus, I think, through the lens of another Californian, one who was very much a presence in Marlowe’s Los Angeles: Richard Nixon. (The Marlowe of The Long Goodbye would have had Nixon as one of his senators.) I’m sure I’ve written before about Garry Wills’ 1970 book Nixon Agonistes; it remains, still, my favorite book on American politics, the one that best explains How We Got Here, even now. My copy is the 1979 paperback re-issue, to which Wills added a post-Watergate preface:

Naturally, I have been asked if anything in Nixon’s downfall surprised me, and one thing did— the venality he showed in office, the growing importance of the cash nexus in all his dealings. I think that was not pronounced in Nixon’s earlier career; but I should have expected it. The man of the classical liberal marketplace measures other things, and is measured himself, in terms of financial authentication. Worth is established by its symbol, money. Even that would complete the picture of Nixon as the last liberal of the social Darwinian school.

If anything, such venality is even more all-consuming in 21st-century America. After the erosion of safety nets and the hollowing out of every public sphere of community connection, the cash nexus is all that’s left. We’re all stuck in it.

Chandler felt the encroach of this attitude intensely. All of Chandler’s novels are about money, about how money makes its own morality and justice, about people consumed by their pursuit of it to the exclusion of their own humanity. Marlowe resists being defined by his earnings, usually to his financial detriment. He doesn’t keep the five-thousand-dollar bill. No wonder he appreciates the canon. Of course Rembrandt and Mozart worried about money, but in their art, in the the part of them that endures, in the place that the culture carved out for them, money doesn’t matter. Beauty does.

Chandler didn’t quite make it out, dying in California in 1959. But he gave Marlowe an escape. At the end of the last Marlowe novel, Playback, Marlowe receives an unexpected phone call. It is Linda Loring, with whom Marlowe had a brief affair in The Long Goodbye, calling from Paris, proposing marriage. Marlowe can see a new life stretching out in front of him. When the phone rings again—a disgruntled client, this time—it’s already far away. “I hardly heard it,” Marlowe muses. “The air was full of music.”