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A Splendid Association: Raymond Chandler's Copy of 1984

 

ORWELL, GEORGE. Nineteen Eighty-Four. A Novel. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, [1949]. First American Edition. 8vo. 314 pp. Orig. cloth, with blue American dust jacket. Fine condition, the jacket showing minute wear. Not price clipped. $7,500.00

 

Fenwick A.12b. The book was published in America on June 13, 1949. An entirely favorable  review of the book appeared in the New York Times the previous day.

On the free front endpaper is the blue ink stamp of "Raymond Chandler/ 6005 Camino del la Costa/ La Jolla, California." Beneath this is a black ink stamped date, "Jul 9, 1949."

Within two weeks, in a letter to Carl Brandt, his literary agent in New York, dated July 22, 1949, Chandler wrote: "...if I were to write what is called a straight novel (e.g. not a detective/ crime novel), it might or might not be a success, but it would not succeed on the strength of anything I had written before....In straight novels the public is more and more drawn to the theme, the idea, the line of thought, the sociological or political attitude, and less and less to the quality of the writing as writing. For instance, if you were to consider Orwell's 1984 purely as a piece of fiction you could not rate it very high. It has no magic, the scenes are only passably well handled, the characters have very little personality; in short it is no better written, artistically speaking, than a good, solid English detective story. But the political thought is something else again and where he writes as a critic and interpreter of ideas rather than of people or emotions he is wonderful."

Chandler had moved from Los Angeles to La Jolla in 1946, the year Warner Brothers filmed The Big Sleep. He wrote about his new home in La Jolla in a letter of March 18, 1949, to Alex Barris, a correspondent for New Liberty Magazine. "La Jolla is built on a point north of San Diego, and is never either too hot or too cold....Our living room has a picture window which looks south across the bay to Point Loma, the most westerly part of San Diego, and at night there is a long lighted coastline almost in our laps. A radio writer came down here to visit me once and sat in front of this window and cried because it was so beautiful. But we live here, and the hell with it."