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Re: RARA-AVIS: Hello
Thanks for the response re: MacDonald, Bill. I am far more familiar w/
MacDonald/Millar's earlier stuff (the stuff I happen to have collected)
than the later stuff. I think Generally Hammett is a better writer,
though I was blown away by the first Millar book I read (Trouble Follows
Me), mostly bec. it was SO well-written, that is, SMOOTH: I was on page
100 before I ever looked up, and I am normally a slow reader, reading bits
at a time. I will stand by my assertion that Millar is more morally
complex than Hammett, at least in his early work. Hammett is wryer and
funnier and tougher, but his books don't probe moral issues very well. Nor
should they, necessarily. I was really disappointed w/ Red Harvest, for
instance, bec. it started out so hard and mysterious and entertaining and
devolved into a gang war I cared nothing about. All the extraneous
characters detracted (IMO) from the genuinely complex and intriguing
interaction between the main players. Just a thought, Michael
====================== ===================================
Michael D. Sharp "Lis, when you get a little older
msharp@umich.edu you'll learn that Friday's just an-
Department of English other day between NBC's Must-See
University of Michigan Thursday and CBS's Saturday-Night
Crap-o-rama." -- Bart Simpson
On Thu, 16 Jan 1997, William Denton wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Jan 1997, michael david sharp wrote:
>
> : I don't see Ross MacDonald as having the same world view as either
> : Hammett or Chandler (keep in mind I haven't read the Entire corpus
> : of any one of these authors, so . . .). RM's world, though
> : "hardboiled" in the sense that toughness rules, is more morally
> : complex than that of either of his eminent predecessors.
>
> Morally or psychologically? One of the things I don't like about Ross
> Macdonald is all the psychoanlytic stuff. The book I have on him says
> he underwent psychotherapy from 1956-57. All the Freudian things, and
> the way there's always some event from 25 years ago that is the key to
> the current mystery, I find rather tiresome. His earlier works aren't
> like that, though, and neither do they stray into being overly
> literary. I read all the Archers about a decade ago, and re-read a
> couple last year. They didn't seem very morally complex to me, but I
> may have missed some finer points due to skimming.
>
> A quote I noticed: "My wider and more conscious vocabulary reflects a
> change in our living speech ... Chandler's hardboiled proletarianism
> has elements of self-stultification."
>
> : It's thus somewhat ironic that RM later named his own detective (Lew
> : Archer) after this dead partner, as if MacDonald were recuperating
> : someone (or some ideal . . . something) for which Hammett had little
> : or no use.
>
> According to this book, Macdonald said he did not consciously choose
> the name Archer after Spade's partner. Lew he got from Lew Wallace,
> who wrote _Ben-Hur_ - apparently he liked the name.
>
> : Perhaps I should be comparing Hammett's work to MacDonald's Lew
> : Archer novels, rather than to MacDonald's early work. I'm not
> : denying a kinship betw. RM and DH (or RC). Such a connection is
> : patently clear. I think that RM adds, for better or worse, a humane
> : dimension to his fiction. "Politics" and "feelings" prove much
> : harder for the protagonist to shake off.
>
> I think you'd find a lot more in common between Hammett and
> Macdonald's earlier works than his later ones. But does he add a
> humane dimension, or is he more wishy-washy? Anyway, Hammett's a far
> better writer than Macdonald, IMO.
>
> Bill
> --
> William Denton : buff@vex.net <-- Please note new address.
> Toronto, Canada <-- I'm not at io.org any more.
> http://www.vex.net/~buff/ Caveat lector.
>
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