Chandler, Raymond

A true modern rarity, a remarkable double presentation copy, first edition, of the author's momentous first novel, inscribed first to his wife, the beloved Cissy.

"For my Cissy / Who wants something / much better, but was / pleased even with this / Raymond / La Jolla Jan 1939 / Riverside Feb 1939"

Raymond Chandler's relationship with his wife is perhaps the crucial force behind what propelled him into writing. He met Cissy (then the married Cissy Pascal, she was onto her second marriage) in 1919 upon his return from the War. In spite of the nearly 20 year difference between them, the older woman held a lure that he was unable to shake, pursuing her enough that she divorced her husband in 1920, but he waited until 1924 to marry her (his mother strongly disapproving of the age difference).

By 1932 Chandler was doing well as an oil company executive, but his drinking, promiscuity with secretaries and general dissolution led to his being fired, a circumstance that horrified his wife and left him facing a career change. From reading the pulps to writing for them, the present novel was a distillation of his quick learning and was written over the summer of 1938. It lead to contracts with Knopf then Houghton Mifflin in the U.S., Hamish Hamilton in London and of course the Hollywood work that was the most lucrative paying of all.

But though finances were eventually comfortable, Cissy's health worsened and she began a slow decline, one filled with sedatives and oxygen tents, painkillers and bedrest, one that returned Chandler to drinking and seeking the attentions of studio secretaries; yet he always returned to Cissy, dreading the inevitable for years until it came in 1954.

The end devastated him, but as profoundly as he loved her, he never dedicated a book to her, believing nothing he wrote was fine enough. "She was the beat of my heart for thirty years. She was the music heard faintly on the edge of sound. It was my great and now useless regret that I never wrote anything really worth her attention, no book that I could dedicate to her. I planned it. I thought of it, but I never wrote it." (MacShane, pp. 220-223)

Chandler of course retained this book afterCissy's  death and interestingly, reinscribed it to Vincent Vounder-Davis (formerly Fracasse), the young son of Jean, to whom he became so close in his final years, finding with her a surrogate family that was able to distract him from the grief that was so profound he couldn't bring himself to inter Cissy's ashes. "Dear Vincent / Originally this was for / my wife. Now it is for you. Ray"

Inscribed copies of The Big Sleep are virtually unobtainable, and are among the rarest of all high spots, neither the Reichler or Neville collections contained a copy and only one, a later printing is recorded at auction in the last 30 years.

"Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since." (Paul Auster)