So I was looking over some documents I had stored away years ago. (When you get old you start looking back, as everybody knows who has ever got old.) Well, I came across this fax from my great old friend, the late Carl Weissner.
At first I couldn’t place what he meant by “O’s diary.” But then I realized that “O” was a reference to Orton, the playwright Joe Orton, whose plays I admired and occasionally reviewed, and that I had sent Carl this review, which is what set him off.
It turned out that he ended up using the Raymond Chandler quotation as a motto not for a collection of magazine pieces, which I don’t think he ever published, but for his doomsday-lit novel Death in Paris, which he wrote online and which was published posthumously in paperback and as an ebook. Dear Carl, you are missed.
jan: I know your post is about Carl and the use of the Chandler quote and “Death in Paris” but it’s wonderful to see you enjoyed and admired Orton . That’s a great review and cute observation that the play has no butler in the cast list.
I saw a recent production in London and it reminded me of something that often gets joked at and put to one side in the play as too uncomfortable; that is the way the sophistry of analysts can persuade you that you are mad, just as the arguments of the law tell us we have to live with ‘res ipsa loquitor’. The play has an exquiste balance between tragedy and farce .. too often the productions lean the way that just gets the laughs.
thnx for the comment, jim. i don’t know how anyone could not be thrilled by Orton’s plays, that review was easy to write. but the tragedy that underlies the comedy — balances it, as you say—is something I hadn’t considered, your point strikes me as perfectly right.
PS: I should have mentioned that “The Orton Diaries,” edited by John Lahr (who also wrote the terrific biography of Orton “Prick Up Your Ears”) was published in 1986 and has since been reprinted. Am sure you know that, but anyway … see this: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+orton+diaries&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss_1