This is Time-Travel Thursday’s edition, a trip to Atlanticrecords to set the current environment. Register here.
As early as 1948, Raymond Chandler had two major traps. One had Oscars; another had The Atlanticof editorial department. The famous detective novelist and screenwriter had written an essay for the magazine extolling the motion picture industry and its tolerance for—certainly celebrating—an absurd stillness. Chandler hoped to call it “The Cult of Juju in Hollywood.” (“Bank Night in Hollywood,” “All It Needs Is Elephants,” and “The Golden Peepshow” were his other suggestions.) Edward Weeks, Atlanticeditor, wanted something more obscure. “Oscar night in Hollywood” would have to do.
When writing his story, Chandler was less angry with Hollywood than with an unexpected new enemy: Atlantic copy editor, who showed patience to correct a infinite division in his writings. Chandler instructed Weeks to kindly convey to the “purist who reads your proof” that “I write in a kind of broken patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter speaks, and that when I divide an endless word, God damn it, I divided it so that it remains divided, and when I interrupt the smoothness of my words more or less, it is easy to read and write a little. eyes open and mind relaxed but attentive.”
The proofreader in question was Margaret Mutch, a longtime copy editor and proofreader. His work at the magazine involved correcting writers’ grammar and prose before publication, a role that Chandler resented. In Mutch, he saw the worst criminal to punish. And so he did, in a poem he returned to Weeks, “Verses for an Infinite Woman.” Language, Chandler protests, lives and thrives in the idiosyncratic, vernacular—the oddities of life. Mutch of the poem is completely indifferent. After taking out one of Chandler’s eyes, he kills him with an ice face.
“Oh Miss Mutch, put down your crutch.”
She cried in thoughtless fear.
Short shrift gave. On his grave:
HERE IS A PRINTER ERROR.
In the poem, Chandler boasted that “endless with my new shiv—I’ll split from heel to throat.” In its final form, “Oscar Night in Hollywood” had one endless division: “It is the only art,” Chandler writes about filmmaking, “in which we of this generation have any possible chance. be very good.” There is no evidence to prove that this is the statement that prompted him in the verse; if that was the infinitive wanted to be split, it is difficult to see the hill which die or write doggerel. Nor does it appear to be the purest form of grammatical violation. Yes, some stickers would insist that very much never stand in between for and better. But even HW Fowler, author of A Dictionary of Modern English UsageIt was agreed in 1927 that each case was unique, and that split infinitives are sometimes acceptable, even important.
It’s possible Mutch was briefed on Chandler’s sarcastic lines, as some Chandler biographers suggest. Little else known about him: He grew up Catholic outside Boston, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe in 1920, and his resume included DC Heath; Little, Brown; and Atlantic. She worked in an industry where women were often relegated to supporting roles. In his essay, Chandler spoke for the “minor characters” in the film world- invisible and unsung camera operators, musicians, editors, sound technicians, and, of course, writers. But he extended no such grace to the minor characters of the publication. For Miss Mutch, there was only a crutch.
Chandler positioned himself as an outcast artist tormented by arbitrary taboos. His grudge against Hollywood is similar to his grudge against Mutch—except in Hollywood, what brought him down was not the rules of grammar, but the forces of gravity that pull everything toward mediocrity: the rules of production, the tyranny of the box office. The movies were bad, he claimed, because the good stuff—probably his stuff—”is too little exciting and is addressed to ill-conceived clergymen, bigots of women’s clubs, and the confused patrons of that dull gaiety and misbehavior better known as the Glamourous Age.”
By Chandler’s analysis, one would expect Miracle on 34th Street became the Best Picture winner in 1948. It was the kind of Hollywood production he despised—a film that matched his 1946 Best Picture winner, The Best Years of Our Lives: “It had that kind of feeling that’s almost but not quite human, and that kind of flair that’s almost but not quite fashionable. And it had it in large quantities, which always helps.”
But A miracle he did not win; the honor went instead to a great film by a serious director, Elia Kazan’s Gentleman’s Agreement. At least on this occasion, the reward system that Chandler didn’t trust produced different results. Regardless of his artistic merits now, Gentleman’s Agreement took on the prevalence of anti-Semitism in post-war America with no small amount of controversy. Based on Laura Z. Hobson’s best-selling novel, it told the story of a journalist who pretends to be Jewish in a closed, WASPy neighborhood near Darien, Connecticut.
Margaret Mutch did her own kind of work, quietly paying attention to the words of others. In addition to his brief role in the story Atlantic and his voice in Chandler’s poem, his side of the story is untold. He died in 1997, aged 99. Whatever he thought of the verses written at his expense, the record does not say. All that remains is his marginal notes.
