In IT terms, I am an asynchronous reader. I frequently read two or three books simultaneously, and that can sometimes lead to strange juxtapositions. I’m currently reading Kathleen Norris’s Acedia and Me and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. It’s the monastic tradition and seedy L.A. detective grit. And it’s creating some fairly bizarre cognitive dissonance in my mind, although it’s pretty much an unbeatable combination:
“Hand over the nun, abbot,” I shouted. “And the copy of St. Benedict’s Rule while you’re at it. Come on, I don’t have all day.”
The murderous monk hesitated, and I didn’t blame him. Sister Betty had a beatific face, the kind of mug that would make a papal nuncio swear off diplomacy. Frankly, I was tired of rescuing the dames. I needed a good, stiff drink. I needed a vacation in Assisi. I needed a weeklong silent retreat. What I had was a mitre, a signet ring, and a Snubnose Colt .44.
“Not so fast, gumshoe,” the abbot countered. “Look, a stigmata!”
I looked. I knew immediately that I shouldn’t have looked. The monstrance cracked against the back of my head, and I saw stars. And I was nowhere near Hollywood.
This is the way my mind works, God help me.
Nothing against Kathleen Norris, whose books I greatly admire, but it is hard to compete against Philip Marlowe. Chandler’s iconic detective endures precisely because of the contradictions that define his character. He is a cynical idealist, a highly principled smartass who ignores the rules, a tough guy with a heart of gold. He acts like real human beings act.
Except he shoots guns, he solves mysteries that baffle the police, and he always gets the dame.
What is it about this hard-boiled detective? No less than a dozen actors, some of them fairly iconic themselves, have portrayed Marlowe in film and on television: Dick Powell, James Garner, Lloyd Nolan, Robert Mitchum, Robert Montgomery, Philip Carey, George Montgomery, Van Heflin, Powers Boothe, James Caan, Elliot Gould, and, most famously, Humphrey Bogart.
The BBC just staged adaptations of all seven Chandler novels, seventy-two years after Philip Marlowe made his first appearance in print.
What is the longstanding appeal? Aside from the undeniable deliciousness of Chandler’s prose, what is it that prompts otherwise sedentary, pudgy, balding men, slouching toward senility, to imagine themselves in trenchcoats and fedoras?
Ironically, it is Kathleen Norris who posits some answers to those questions. Marlowe is no stranger to the acedia that Norris considers in her latest book; that creeping malaise that spreads vague dissatisfaction and boredom into every nook and cranny of day-to-day life. He grouses about the weather, drinks too much, suffers from insomnia, and cracks wise about every exhibition of sentimentality or nostalgia he encounters.
Marlowe has seen too much blood and betrayal and squalid depravity to engage in wistful thinking about the perfectibility of humankind. He knows better. But he resolutely trusts his own peculiar moral compass that permits killing, but balks at the notion of charging a dime more than he is due, that feels nothing when eradicating his definition of human scum, but which inexplicably finds hidden wells of compassion when he encounters grifters down on their luck.
He tries to efface the image of God, and he cannot do it. And I love him for that.
On the days when it is easy for me to drift into spiritual torpor—typically Mondays through Sundays—I envision myself in trenchcoat and fedora, prowling the streets of Hollywood and Santa Monica.
I have trouble solving the mysteries of my own conflicted heart, I haven’t touched a revolver since I was eight years old, and that one squirted water, and the only dame I’m interested in has been married to me for almost thirty years.
In other words, the analogy is inexact on multiple levels. But I persist in this foolishness because Philip Marlowe still has a thing or two to teach me, and none of it has to do with detective work:
What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill. You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now.
That’s the way Marlowe expresses the quintessential conundrum that confronts every human being sooner or later, the sleepless-3 a.m.-staring-at-the-ceiling crater in the depths of the soul.
He is a man’s man, but in the end he is just a man, a mite of dust in a universe of unfathomable vastness, one of six billion striving, brawling fools who think they are important because they manage to climb slightly higher up the pile of doomed, depraved humanity.
As it happens, I add a little twist to the nihilistic tale. I am infinitely loved by God, and this world is not the end. But Marlowe is not fundamentally off in his assessment. If you haven’t yet experienced that dark night of the soul, just give it time. You will.
And then he gets up and goes to work. Day after day, every time. It’s the same solution that Kathleen Norris advances, the only solution that resolves the metaphysical stalemate that paralyzes our spirits and numbs our souls.
You know your complicity in the nastiness. And you get up and go to work. You fight through the lethargy, the yawning abyss of despair and uncertainty, and you do the right thing. You show up and punch the clock, whether it is a literal clock at a factory or the figurative clock of the artist: the blank canvas, the white piece of paper, the empty screen.
You fill up the day with meaning as best you can. It’s a lesson I have to learn, again and again, because I am a poor student.
And I learn it from world-weary poets and fictional detectives.