Raymond Chandler - Early Life

Early Life

Chandler was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1888, but spent his early years in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, living with his mother and father near his cousins, aunt (mother's sister) and uncle. After Chandler's family was abandoned by his father, an alcoholic civil engineer who worked for the railway, and to obtain the best possible education for Ray, his mother moved them to London, England in 1900. Another uncle, a successful Quaker lawyer in Waterford, Ireland, supported them, while they lived with his maternal grandmother. Chandler was classically educated at Dulwich College, London (a public school whose alumni include the authors P.G. Wodehouse and C. S. Forester). He spent some of his childhood summers in Waterford with his maternal family. He did not go to college, instead spending time in Paris and Munich improving his foreign language skills. In 1907, he was naturalized as a British subject in order to take the civil service examination, which he passed, and then took an Admiralty job, lasting just over a year. His first poem was published during that time. Chandler regained his US citizenship in 1956.

Chandler disliked the servility of the civil service and resigned, to the consternation of his family, and became a reporter for the Daily Express and the Bristol Western Gazette newspapers. He was an unsuccessful journalist, published reviews and continued writing romantic poetry. Accounting for that time he said, "Of course in those days as now there were … clever young men who made a decent living as freelances for the numerous literary weeklies" but "I was distinctly not a clever young man. Nor was I at all a happy young man."

In 1912, he borrowed money from his Waterford uncle, who expected it to be repaid with interest, and returned to America, visiting his aunt and uncle before settling in San Francisco for a time, where he took a correspondence bookkeeping course, finishing ahead of schedule, and where his mother joined him in late 1912. Eventually they moved to Los Angeles in 1913. Along the way he strung tennis rackets, picked fruit and endured a time of scrimping and saving. Once in Los Angeles he found steady employment with The Los Angeles Creamery, both in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. In 1917, when the US entered World War I, he enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, saw combat in the trenches in France with the Gordon Highlanders, and was undergoing flight training in the fledgling Royal Air Force (RAF) when the war ended.

After the armistice, he returned to Los Angeles by way of Canada, and soon began a love affair with Cissy Pascal, a married woman 18 years his senior, and the step-mother of Gordon Pascal, with whom Chandler had enlisted. Cissy amicably divorced her husband Julian in 1920, but Chandler's mother disapproved of the relationship and refused to sanction the marriage. For four years Chandler supported both his mother and Cissy. When Florence Chandler died on September 26, 1923, Raymond was free to marry Cissy, and did so on February 6, 1924. Having started in 1922 as a bookkeeper and auditor, Chandler was by 1931 a highly paid vice-president of the Dabney Oil Syndicate but a year later, his alcoholism, absenteeism, promiscuity with female employees and threatened suicides contributed to his being fired.