![]() ![]() Chandler nursed her himself during their own long goodbye, and her death drove Chandler ever deeper into alcoholism, and a depression severe enough for him to make several attempts at suicide. His wife Cissy was seriously ill, and she died the year after the book was published. Chandler wrote it at a pivotal time in his life. ![]() Inner turmoil had always dogged Chandler – it was one of the reasons he first took up writing, having been fired for drunkenness from his job as an oil company executive – and it is very much in evidence in The Long Goodbye. Both make The Long Goodbye the most autobiographical of Chandler’s books. Philip Marlowe may very well have been the man Chandler wanted to be, but his penultimate novel features two other characters that the author feared he really was. In 2009 James Ellroy was quoted in The Paris Review thus: ‘Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he wanted to be, Hammett wrote the kind of guy that he was afraid he was.’ I used to agree until I read The Long Goodbye, which blows this interpretation out of the water. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. ![]()
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