There was a tough decision to be made at the Obit niche today: who shall we name as today’s “Dead of the Day”? What made it tough is that two of our favorite writers died today: Walt Whitman—who died today in 1892—is, if not America’s greatest poet, certainly our most American poet, a man whose democratic instincts embraced everything about the America, who could look out across the country and write “I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.” We feel the same for Whitman’s works, and believe that reading “Leaves of Grass” at least once a year does a body good.
The other, and the choice we made, is Raymond Chandler, who died in 1959. Not because he’s a better writer than Whitman—although the hard-boiled prose he crafted for his series of novels featuring the soulfully bruised moralist and Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe puts him in our hall of fame of literary stylists—but because death is a constant presence in his novels. Two of his best even gave us new expressions for death: “The Big Sleep,” and “The Long Goodbye.”
The latter novel, the last book Chandler wrote, is simply one of the best books about post-war America. Marlowe is caught up in web of murders and quack doctors after Terry Lennox, who Marlowe barely knows but drives down to Mexico the night his wife is found dead, and is hired to find Roger Wade, an alcoholic writer who has gone missing. It’s a twisty, absorbing story, with Marlowe looking behind the fences at what we would now call “the 1%.” Robert Altman adapted the book in 1973, updating the story to contemporary Los Angeles, and cast Elliott Gould as Marlowe—brilliant bit of casting—with Sterling Hayden as Roger Wade and baseball pitcher turned author (“Ball Four”) and broadcaster Jim Bounton as Terry Lennox. With a script by Leigh Brackett, it’s up there with the Howard Hawks-directed, Bogart/Bacall starring “The Big Sleep” (also written by Brackett), and Edward Dmytryk’s version of “Farewell, My Lovely,” “Murder, My Sweet,” with Dick Powell as Marlowe.
Also breathing their last today: First governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony John Winthrop (1649), Schroeder’s favorite composer Ludwig von Beethoven (1827), actress Sarah Bernhardt (1923), George Sisler, Hall of Fame First Baseman for the St. Louis Browns and playwright Noel Coward (both 1973), NWA founder Eazy-E (1995), former New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan (2003), and Nikki Sudden, leader of the underrated post-punk band Swell Maps (2006).
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