Greetings, class of 2012. A few words of wisdom from Raymond Chandler before you hit the mean streets. In the story, "Trouble Is My Business," Chandler writes, "Anna Halsey was about two hundred pounds of middle-aged, putty-faced woman in a black tailor-made suit. Her eyes were shiny, black buttons, her cheeks were as soft as suet and about the same color. She was sitting behind a black glass desk the size of Napoleon's Tomb and she was smoking a cigarette in a black holder that was not quite as long as a rolled umbrella. She said, 'I need a man.'"
Beginnings are important. They can tell us a lot about the rest of the story, even determine it to a certain extent,but no one should presume to guess the end from the beginning. Especially with a mystery. The same is true of you. It's fine to have ambitions and feel you have a grip on the future, but not too tight. A relaxed grip is best.
"I need a man good-looking enough to pick up a dame who has a sense of class, but he's got to be tough to swap punches with a power shovel. I need a guy who can act like a bar lizard and backchat like Fred Allen, only better, and get hit on the head with a beer truck and think some cutie in the leg-line topped him with a bread stick."
This passage is both prescriptive and descriptive. It prescribes the kind of man that Anna Halsey claims to need. Indeed, the sort of person that any man would proudly be. Right down to knowing who Fred Allen is. But this passage also describes Anna as a woman who knows what she wants. Not literally, of course, but vividly and explicitly. That's a good quality. Have goals, but don't get hung on specifics. Note that Anna never says why she wants this man or even if she expects to find him.
"'It's a cinch,' I said, 'You need the New York Yankees, Robert Donat and the Yacht Club boys.'"
Don't ever take yourself too seriously. Who was Robert Donat? He was a lot of people, he was an actor.
"'You might do,' Anna said, 'cleaned up a little.'"
You might, too. Congratulations. And good luck.
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Clearly, you don't hold a grudge. Chandler once said: "Chess is the most elaborate waste of human intelligence outside of an advertising agency." Of course, he could be pretty harsh: "To say she had a face that would have stopped a clock would have been to insult her. It would have stopped a runaway horse."
ReplyDeleteI prefer Steven Leacock's definition of advertising,"The science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it."
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