The use of light and dark in The Big Sleep is just one example of the many contrasts that exist within the novel, which are all extensions of the examination of the American underbelly: for every mansion there is a slum, for every crook a cop (though often with little to choose between them), and for every millionaire there is a penniless grifter: "I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate," says Joe Brody, despite the fact General Sternwood had signed a cheque to him for five thousand dollars "about nine or ten months ago." Clearly money doesn't last long for a gambling crook in Los Angeles. Marlowe may make an effort when he first calls on the Sternwood mansion - "neat, clean, shaved and sober" - but his office is shabby, full of "venerable magazines" and "net curtains that needed laundering". And at their mansion the Sternwoods "could no longer smell the stale sump water or the oil, but they could still look out their front windows and see what had made them rich. If they wanted to." Other than a nod towards his former career, Chandler is drawing attention to how the rich have attempted to protect themselves from gritty reality. The General sits in his orchid-filled greenhouse and despatches Marlowe to solve his problems. And yet, even in respectable places, something rotten lurks just beneath the surface. The General may be rich, but he clearly is not without trouble, mainly it seems created by his daughters. As Vivian says, "We're his blood. That's the hell of it... I don't want him to die despising his own blood. It was always wild blood, but it wasn't always rotten blood." And as Marlowe comments on Geiger's street, "It seemed like a nice neighbourhood to have bad habits in." To reverse the contrast, where corruption predominates there is a reminder of a faded nobility. Eddie Mars' Cypress Club is in a "rambling frame mansion" that was once a rich man's home, became a hotel, and ended up as an illegal casino. The club has about it "a general air of nostalgic decay"; the ballroom is "still a beautiful room," but there is a "roulette in it instead of measured, old-fashioned dancing."
At the root of all of this is, of course, money, which Marlowe has a certain contempt for. "I take twenty- five a day and expenses - when I'm lucky," says Marlowe - very reasonable, considering the situations he puts himself in in the service of his employer. He regards the General's payment of five hundred dollars as "more than generous", and doesn't hesitate to spend two hundred of it on information that could lead to finding Regan - despite not being directly asked to do so by the General. Getting the job done properly is far more important to Marlowe than the financial reward. Indeed, he even offers to return the five hundred to the General at a point where he feels he has done an "unsatisfactory job... It may mean noting to you. It might mean something to me." Essentially, he has little time for the money and the attitudes of the rich, which only seem to bring trouble. When Vivian offers him fifteen thousand dollars to keep quiet about Carmen's murder of Regan, he is unimpressed, despite the fact that with that money he "could own a home and a new car and four suits of clothes". "That would be about right. That would be the established fee. That was what he had in his pockets when she shot him. That would be what Mr Canino got for disposing of the body when you went to Eddie Mars for help. But that would be small change to what Eddie expects to collect one of these days." Unlike the crooks, Marlowe cannot be bought so easily. And, after encountering Carmen for the third time, Marlowe is scornful of what money has allowed her to become: "A pretty, spoiled and not very bright little girl who had gone very, very wrong, and nobody was doing anything about it. To hell with the rich. They made me sick." Chandler later wrote that "Philip Marlowe and I do not despise the upper classes because they take baths and have money; we despise them because they are phoney."
Will the Real Philip Marlowe Please Stand Up
So much of the world Marlowe inhabits is 'phoney': beneath the surface people are not what they purport to be. But within all this, Marlowe manages to maintain a certain, though certainly not total, integrity about him. However, the exact nature of the character is sometimes hard to pinpoint - often due to the lack of direct information we receive about him, and sometimes because of the apparent contradictions in his character.
Physically, we know that he is tall - as Carmen repeatedly observes: "Tall, aren't you?" "I didn't mean to be," he replies. However, the physical image of Marlowe as Chandler envisaged him, has been affected by his screen representations. For many, Humphrey Bogart became the archetypal Marlowe after the 1946 movie of The Big Sleep. Even Chandler was of the opinion that for the rest of his career Bogart retained "something of Marlowe. He never lost it." And indeed vice versa. It was fitting that Bogart should have played Marlowe, as he was the screen incarnation of Sam Spade - a character Marlowe owes some debt to - in The Maltese Falcon (1941). However, Bogart was not the first to portray Marlowe on screen. That honour went to Dick Powell in 1945's Farewell, My Lovely (a.k.a. Murder, My Sweet), and he was perhaps closer to Chandler's creation. (For the far from lofty Bogart, the Carmen/Marlowe exchange had to become: "You're not very tall." / "I try to be.", and Bogey became 'thirty-eight' rather than Marlowe's 'thirty-three') The problem of Marlowe's appearance and perspective is innovatively approached in the 1946 film of The Lady in the Lake which is shot using Marlowe as the subjective camera, and the audience sees his face only once in a mirror. Just as in the novels, this allows the reader to imprint himself partially onto the character, to imagine himself in the role - which is one of the enduringly appealling elements of the character.
To return to who Marlowe is in the book of The Big Sleep, Carmen is also under the impression that he is "cute", and Marlowe certainly has no problem attracting the affection of Vivian and Mona. And we know, through his charade in the bookstore, how much he weighs: "If you can weigh a hundred and ninety pounds and look like a fairy, I was doing my best." It is almost as if Marlowe is reassuring us of his masculinity, telling us that he is definitely only acting the role of a camp bibliophile. In Farewell My Lovely (1940) he goes one step further in defining and reassuring his robustness: " 'Okey, Marlowe,' I said between my teeth. 'You're a tough guy. Six feet of iron man. One hundred and ninety pounds stripped and with your face washed. Hard muscles and no glass jaw. You can take it.' "
But Marlowe's exact physical appearance is perhaps incidental to aspects of his underlying character. It is clear that he drinks too much - "I woke with a motorman's glove in my mouth...", stays up late, and isn't very good at getting up in the morning: "Well, you do get up," says Vivian, visiting his office. "I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed..."
The information he imparts to General Sternwood at the beginning of the book is simply this: "There's very little to tell. I'm thirty-three years old, went to college once, and can still speak English if there's any demand for it. There isn't much in my trade. I worked for Mr Wilde, the District Attorney, as an investigator once... I was fired. For insubordination. I test very high on insubordination." This last comment proves very much to be true - Marlowe takes orders from nobody in the pursuit of his goals: not Eddie Mars, not the police, not even at times General Sternwood.
Whether or not Marlowe completed college isn't clear, but one gets the impression that sometimes he plays dumber than he really is:
" 'I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust,'
'Who's he?'
'A French writer, a connoisseur in degenerates. You wouldn't know him.'
'Tut, tut,' I said. 'Come into my boudoir.' "
But, like any man, perhaps Marlowe - reluctantly - reveals his true self through his relationship and attitude towards women. "I am unmarried because I don't like policemen's wives," he says to the General, an obscure and an ambiguous turn of phrase. Marlowe isn't really a policeman, but perhaps he sees married policemen as men who are sacrificing their manhood and giving up full control over their lives to live with women. By extension, policemen are in the same area of work as Marlowe, but he works for himself not for the authority of the police department. (Remember, he was sacked by the D.A. for insubordination.)
But, to return to the matter of Marlowe and his women, whilst he kisses both Vivian and Mona, he attempts to maintain a crucial aloofness from emotional attachments that can only, it seems, bring trouble. In the 1946 film, Bogey admits - albeit with his casual, tough-guy air - that he is in love with Vivian. In the book, Marlowe would never do anything as reckless as allowing himself to fall in love. The closest he gets seems to be his lingering thoughts of 'Silver-Wig' Mona Mars, and he "never saw her again." However, when he sees Geiger's body has been moved, he does comment, "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts." We have to ask how he knows this, and he certainly treats women with a distance that suggests he had his fingers burned before. Of course, we can only guess, as unlike many of the other characters, Marlowe has very little of a 'backstory'. This is in part down to the first-person narration, which though it means we are with him in every waking minute, is the biggest barrier to finding out the truth of Marlowe - his tight-lipped nature means that he isn't inclined to spill the beans on regard to superfluous stories about his past.
Whenever he meets with Vivian, Marlowe is tight-lipped. "You're not much of a gusher, are you, Mr Marlowe?" she says. He certainly doesn't want to give away anything that might compromise the case he is working on, but there is also the impression that he doesn't want to give away anything about who he is. He won't even reveal his real name to Carmen, instead introducing himself as 'Doghouse Reilly' - a pretence he even attempt to maintain. However, when at one point he is explaining the current situation to the General, Sternwood says to him, "You talk too damn much, Marlowe." It is to men that Marlowe is inclined to impart the most information. He trusts men in a way that he doesn't trust women. In fact, lack of trust for women is putting it mildly. After his encounters with Vivian and then Carmen in the same night, "I got up feeling sluggish and tired... with a dark harsh taste of Sternwoods still in my mouth. I was as empty of life as a scarecrow's pockets... You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women. Women made me sick." And he has few qualms about slapping them around a bit if they won't co-operate. Chandler even makes Carmen seem to enjoy it a little: "The giggles stopped dead, but she didn't mind the slap any more than last night. Probably all her boyfriends got around to slapping her sooner or later. I could understand how they might."
However, it is 1939, and in comparison to the average late '30s male, Marlowe is no doubt a positive gentleman. It is the encounter with Carmen in his apartment that reveals perhaps the most about Marlowe and his relationship with women, and indeed other people, and the way he perceives himself. He fails to take Carmen's bate of "I'm all undressed," and replies with "I always wear my rubbers in bed myself, in case I wake up with a bad conscience and have to sneak away from it." Then she pulls back the covers - "She lay there on the bed in the lamplight, as naked and glistening as a pearl. The Sternwood girls were giving me both barrels that night." But, he's not going for it: "I appreciate all your offering me. It's just more than I could possibly take. Doghouse Reilly never let a pal down that way. I'm your friend. I won't let you down - in spite of yourself. You and I have to keep on being friends, and this isn't the way to do it. Now will you dress like a nice little girl... It's a question of professional pride. You know - professional pride. I'm working for your father. He's a sick man, very frail, very helpless. He sort of trusts me not to pull any stunts." And when he kisses Vivian, he has the decency - or perhaps just plain common sense - not to go any further: "Kissing you is nice, but your father didn't hire me to sleep with you... Don't think I'm an icicle... I'm not blind or without sense. I have warm blood like the next guy. You're easy to take - too damned easy."
"You son of a bitch," is the response he gets from Vivian, and when Marlowe's rejects Carmen, "she called me a filthy name." "I didn't mind that," Marlowe tells us. "I didn't mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much; a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were they had all my memories. I couldn't stand her in that room any longer. What she called me only reminded me of that."
It is a one of the only places in the novel where we are allowed a glimpse of Marlowe's past - or at least a glimpse that he has a past. Whatever situations he gets into, he is fiercely protective of his identity and emotional space. But this is not to say that he is immune to these women, and his reaction when Carmen finally leaves his apartment is a rare glimpse of Marlowe's human frailty: "I went back to the bed and looked down at it. The imprint of her head was still in the pillow, of her small corrupt body still on the sheets. I put my empty glass down and tore the bed to pieces savagely."
There is another crucial reference in the scene with Carmen in the apartment - the allusion to a chess game: "I went... across the room again to the chessboard on a card table under the lamp. There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover. I couldn't solve it, like a lot of my problems. I reached down and moved a knight..." However, pretty soon, as Carmen continues to refuse to leave, "I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights."
By that point in the novel, perhaps it wasn't a game for nights, but it started as one. One of the first things Marlowe notices as he arrives at the Sternwood residence is "a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. [Unlike Carmen, it seems] The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots of the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and though that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying." Marlowe, on the other hand, would make the effort. When he returns to the mansion, he makes a point of noticing it again: "The main hallway looked just the same. The portrait over the mantel had the same hot black eyes and the knight in the stained glass window still wasn't getting anywhere untying the naked damsel from the tree." Unlike Marlowe, who by this point is on the verge of solving the mystery.
Chandler is identifying Marlowe with an old chivalric code - a code that lies at the heart of his motivation to see the right thing done. Chandler was originally even going to give the character the name Mallory - the author of the most famous knights' chronicle - Morte D'Arthur. Other nods to the knights of old can be found in the other Marlowe novels. One (and a short story that influenced it) has the title The Lady in the Lake; in The High Window, Marlowe is a "shop- soiled Galahad"; and characters in his books bear allusive names such as Grayle, Kingsley, and Quest.
Indeed, the detective's journey in The Big Sleep is a quest for the Holy Grail not only the truth, but some semblance of justice and honour. In that respect, Marlowe is far from entirely successful. He begins the novel with his knightly code, it is tested, and though he retains some of his honour, he comes to realise that such a code is out of kilter with the moral degradation of the world in which he lives. By the end he may have got certain people out of trouble, and saved the feelings of the General, but there is a barb to it: "I do all this," he tells Vivian, "for twenty-five bucks a day - and maybe just a little to protect what little pride a broken and sick old man has left in his blood, in the thought that his blood is not poison, and that although his two little girls are a trifle wild, as many girls are these days, they are not perverts or killers." Marlowe is left bitter, alienated, and in trepidation about what the world will throw at him next. He will take his chances with Eddie Mars, but "Outside the bright gardens had a haunted look, as though small wild eyes were watching me from behind the bushes, as though the sunshine itself had a mysterious something in its light... I was part of the nastiness now."
With the respect to Marlowe's character journey, Ray Newman has identified The Big Sleep as possessing elements of a 'Bildungsroman'. The term applies to novels of 'education', in which a well-meaning, but innocent and inexperienced character sets out with either no end in mind or the wrong one, and through a series of false starts and mistakes he reaches maturity and finds his proper profession. Newman writes that, "In each of the novels... stasis manifests itself in a... cycle of futile action, as Marlowe struggles with arbitrarily designed mysteries, never quite finding his solution."
However, a Bildungsroman interpretation fails to take into account that Marlowe is clearly no innocent as he steps through the doors of the Sternwood mansion: we are given evidence throughout that he already knows all about how the seedy world functions. His optimism and knightly code peaks and troughs, and despite his statement that "it wasn't a game for knights"; he never fully abandons his idea of honour in service of his temporary 'King' General Sternwood. Marlowe says to him: "You don't know what I have to go through or over or under to do your job for you. I do it my way. I do my best to protect you and I may break a few rules, but I break them in your favour. The client comes first, unless he's crooked. Even then all I do is hand the job back to him and keep my mouth shut." Whilst Marlowe was part of the nastiness, "the old man didn't have to be."
Though Marlowe has a mysterious past and little in the way of 'backstory', the character had been gestating under various names, but always in the first-person through many of Chandler's short stories (see Further Reading). Throughout these he is a 'knight' whose mission is to protect the weak and to make sure that justice is done.
Of course, one should not attempt to psychoanalyse Marlowe too much, to read too much into him. He, for one, would hate it. For this reason the last word on the subject of who Marlowe 'is' should go to Chandler himself. In his essay, The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler's 'formula' detective is "a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man... He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world... I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things... This story is this man's adventure in search for a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for an adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in."