The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (Vintage) Review

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The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (Vintage) ReviewAs soon as people started talking about this book in my book club, I knew I wanted to take a look. What a provocative subject, the long embrace being the decades long marriage between Cissy Pascal and Raymond Chandler, whom she called "Raymio," a takeoff on Romeo I guess. When they met, Raymio was a pretty young guy, raised in England and newly attached to a pair of wealthy Los Angeles friends he had met on shipboard on the way over--glommed onto, it seems, though Judith Freeman makes it seem very natural that he should like these wealthy people, since he was something of a snob--or rather, to escape the class stratification of England, he needed to have middle class friends right away to afford him opportunities he wouldn't have had over there. And Julian and Cissy Pascal, a pair of pianists, lived nearby and were always in the happy circle, right before World War I.
When he realized he had fallen for her, and she a married woman, Ray enlisted and saw action overseas (action he would never again refer to except in the obliquest terms), and when he came back he broke his mother's heart by marrying the now divorced Cissy. In fact Flossie died rather than have to witness the wedding--terribly sad. What Raymio didn't know is that Cissy was much, much older than she purported to be. When he began to suspect she had lied about her age, in the late 20s, it sparked a terrible crisis in their marriage. He had become an oil executive, and she a housewife who did all her housework in the nude.
Judith Freeman shows how nearly everything about their marriage was affected by this odd age difference (Cissy was 18 years older than Ray). She was beyond having children when they met, and had already been married twice; she had posed nude for artists and photographers, and apparently he liked that she had this rakish past as a bohemian Trilby. He claimed that she was highly sexed, perhaps to give himself the reputation of a man who had sex often. Freeman has interviewed two people who knew Chandler fairly well, the painter Don Bachardy, and the pianist Natasha Spender, both of whom were convinced Ray was gay, and you'll believe it too after hearing their testimony.
Freeman has independently decided to write a book about how she went and visited every one of the houses and flats Ray and Cissy rented during their long embrace. This is where the book falls flat, for me. They were constantly moving, sometimes often as three times in a year, and so Freeman went to something like three or four dozen Southern California residences, and during all her visits, or stakeouts, which she described in plenty detail, only two or three interesting things ever happened to her. An editor might have advised her, this isn't working, Ms. Freeman. You will find yourself skipping her visits and these take up a good third of the book. On the other hand, she is a fine writer and I can imagine some people really digging her accounts of her travels, even if they shed no light on the people she is purportedly writing about.
I preferred her accounts of her research in the two great repositories of Chandler material--one here in the US, the other at the Bodleian Library in Britain.
Freeman excels at bringing to light odd bits of social and pop cultural material from the far corners of history. She explains why Cissy did her housework naked--she was following a fad developed by an expatriate American woman who inspired a whole cult of nude homemakers in Europe and in the US with her system of body toning anf posture improving. Her name was Bess Mensendieck. "Even putting on and taking off a fur coat," writes Freeman, "provided an opportunity for a woman to exercise and encourage proper body alignment."
Another interesting chapter of California history comes when Freeman discusses (all too briefly) the "state societies." These came about as social gstherings for Los Angelenos transplanted from elsewhere, feeling homesick they would gather together regularly at places like cafeterias and social halls--the "Iowa State Society," the "Kentucky State Society," etc. All too little has been written about this important movement that tried to alleviate the disconnect these western pioneers must have felt in 1920s LA. Cissy remains a mystery alas. In fact now that I know more about her, she has become indescribably dull, like a stained glass window over which a carpet has been installed. Still I would not hesitate to recommend this book to those who wish to know more about the way Chandler was viewed by Bachardy, Natasha Spender, or by Dilys Powell, the film critic who sort of sums it all up in Freeman's opinion.
Illustrated with many rare photographs!The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (Vintage) Overview

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