Raymond Chandler and the Case of the Split Infinitive

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Early in 1948, Raymond Chandler had two main gripes. One was with the Oscars; the other was with The Atlantic’s editorial department. The famous detective novelist and screenwriter had written an essay for the magazine excoriating the motion-picture industry and its tolerance for—indeed celebration of—mindless mediocrity. Chandler had hoped to call it “Juju Worship in Hollywood.” (“Bank Night in Hollywood,” “All It Needs Is Elephants,” and “The Golden Peepshow” were his other suggestions.) Edward Weeks, The Atlantic’s editor, wanted something less pointed. “Oscar Night in Hollywood” would have to do.

In the course of drafting his story, Chandler was no less annoyed by Hollywood than by a new unlikely foe: an Atlantic copy editor, who’d shown the temerity to fix a split infinitive in his text. Chandler instructed Weeks to kindly relay to the “purist who reads your proofs” that “I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes open and the mind relaxed but attentive.”

The purist in question was Margaret Mutch, a longtime copy editor and proofreader. Her job at the magazine involved correcting writers’ grammar and prose before publication, a role to which Chandler took offense. In Mutch, he saw a perfectly schoolmarmish villain to chastise. And so he did, in a poem that he sent back to Weeks, “Lines to a Lady With an Unsplit Infinitive.” Language, Chandler protests, lives and flourishes in bent rules, vernacular expressions—the unruly stuff of life. The Mutch of the poem is utterly indifferent. After taking out one of Chandler’s eyes, she kills him with an icy frown.

“O dear Miss Mutch, leave down your crutch.”
He cried in thoughtless terror.
Short shrift she gave. Above his grave:
HERE LIES A PRINTER’S ERROR.

In the poem, Chandler boasted that “the infinitive with my fresh-honed shiv / I will split from heel to throat.” In its final form, “Oscar Night in Hollywood” had exactly one split infinitive: “It is the only art,” Chandler writes of filmmaking, “at which we of this generation have any possible chance to greatly excel.” There is no evidence to prove that this was the phrase that moved him to verse; if that was the infinitive he wished to split, it hardly seems the hill on which to die or write doggerel. Nor does it appear to be the purest form of grammatical transgression. Yes, some sticklers would insist that greatly should never stand between to and excel. But even H. W. Fowler, the author of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, agreed in 1927 that each case was unique, and that splitting infinitives was sometimes acceptable, even necessary.

Mutch was likely made aware of Chandler’s mocking verses, as some of Chandler’s biographers suggest. Little else is known about her: She grew up Catholic outside of Boston, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe in 1920, and her resumé included D. C. Heath; Little, Brown; and The Atlantic. She worked in an industry in which women were often relegated to supporting roles. In his essay, Chandler spoke up for the “small-fry characters” in the movie world—the unseen and unsung camera operators, musicians, editors, sound technicians, and, of course, writers. But he extended no such grace to the small-fry characters of publishing. For Miss Mutch, there was only a crutch.

Chandler framed himself as an alienated artist persecuted by arbitrary strictures. His grudge against Hollywood is akin to his grievance against Mutch—except in Hollywood, what kept him down wasn’t the rules of grammar, but the gravitational forces pulling everything toward mediocrity: production codes, the tyranny of the box office. Movies were bad, he claimed, because the good stuff—presumably his stuff—“is a little too virile and plain-spoken for the putty-minded clerics, the elderly ingénues of the women’s clubs, and the tender guardians of that godawful mixture of boredom and bad manners known more eloquently as the Impressionable Age.”

By Chandler’s analysis, one would have expected Miracle on 34th Street to have won Best Picture in 1948. It was precisely the kind of Hollywood production he despised—a film that fit his take on the 1946 Best Picture winner, The Best Years of Our Lives: “It had that kind of sentimentality which is almost but not quite humanity, and that kind of adeptness which is almost but not quite style. And it had them in large doses, which always helps.”

But Miracle did not win; the honor went instead to a serious film by a serious director, Elia Kazan’s Gentleman’s Agreement. At least on this occasion, the award system that Chandler distrusted produced a different result. Whatever its artistic merits now, Gentleman’s Agreement took on the rampant anti-Semitism of postwar America with no small amount of controversy. Based on Laura Z. Hobson’s runaway best-selling novel, it told the story of a journalist who goes undercover posing as a Jewish man in the closed, WASPy confines of Darien, Connecticut.

Margaret Mutch worked her own kind of undercover job, quietly tending to the words of others. Apart from her brief place in the lore of The Atlantic and her ventriloquized voice in Chandler’s poem, her side of the story is untold. She died in 1997, at the age of 99. Whatever she thought of the verses written at her expense, the record is silent. All that remains are her notes in the margins.