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RARA-AVIS: "Red Wind": Never the whole truth.
"Red Wind" revisited: A girl glides up behind an experienced killer about
to do in Dalmas/Marlowe. (Unlikeliness carried off by sheer Chandler
style.) No matter that she has the safety on; she saves his life, he'll do
anything for her, anytime.
No surprise then that he would check out these pearls "of great price,"
that she sets so much store by, representing the one true love of her life,
the memory of which sustains her in a lousy marriage, which is becoming a
divorce. No surprise that he would pull an elaborate switch to allow her
to continue to imagine she had this love, once. (She will never be tempted
to have the pearls assessed.) It's therapeutic for her, too, because in
"losing" the (sham) pearls, she may be able to let go of (sham) Stan
Phillips: "I'm too young to nurse memories," she says. "It may be for the
best." Sure it is.
Reminds me of another Marlowe. Not Christopher, who by most accounts was
no gentleman, but Joseph Conrad's Charlie Marlow, who had a soft spot for
women, even while he believed they didn't live in the real world. That
Marlow pulls a somewhat similar stunt in Heart of Darkness: he goes to a
dead man's Intended with a horrible truth about what that man really was.
He allows a lie; he allows her to believe that Kurtz' last thoughts and
words were of her. (His last words were really "The horror!") Charlie
won't crush her whole existence, centered in remembrance, by telling her
the truth.
Lola is made of slightly different stuff. She'll lose memories of Stan
Phillips, like the pearls from Marlowe's hand, one by one. His lie will
let her lose them in her own time; he won't have been responsible for
killing them with the truth.
Isn't this a consistent theme in hard-boiled fiction? It is never best
that the "whole truth" come out. Anything but the whole truth! End of
"Scorched Face," for instance.
Sorry to be so windy. Nothing more on gulls. That all came out last
night. Semiotician I am not! Just a bit word-crazy. As Eddie Duggan has
testified, this is what happens when English lit. types muck around with
the stuff they love. [Anyone for consolidating all these postings into a
RARA-AVIS article,with names mentioned, to be sent to, say, Clues? We
might as well go for fame, while we're at it.]
Stop me before I say more,
Bill Hagen
<billha@ionet.net>
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