Self-Portrait: Ceaselessly into the Past

Rating:
Summary: An author's introspection.
Review: This slim volume is comprised of 21 short nonfiction offerings from Ross Macdonald, with the overwhelming majority dating from the 15 years between 1964 and 1979. One is a transcript of an interview given by Macdonald. The remaining 20 are essays that were written as magazine articles, book forewords and the like.
Because this is a collection of individual works written over a number of years there is a certain amount of repetition and redundancy.

Three essays are devoted to one of Macdonald's lifelong passions, ecologic conservation. The rest of the book, however, is devoted to writers and writing. The topics addressed include: the history of the American crime novel starting with Poe, the function crime fiction fulfills to society, the author's relationship to his best known character Lew Archer, an analysis of Hammett's Sam Spade as he appears in the Maltese Falcon and the critical importance of narrative unity in crime novels. It is on the latter point that Macdonald found himself at odds with Raymond Chandler.

But by far the most compelling theme to be found in this book is the profound relationship between Macdonald's early biography and the fiction he created.
When Macdonald was 4 years old, his parents separated. He rarely saw his father after that. And, perhaps even more disturbingly, he went on to spend his formative years being shuttled like a hot potato from the household of one relative to that of another. This horrid childhood took quite a psychological toll on the young Ross Macdonald, who was then known as Kenneth Millar.
It is therefore no coincidence that so much of Macdonald's fiction revolves around dysfunctional families and absent or inadequate fathers. And Macdonald in Self-Portrait: Ceaselessly into the Past spells this out in no uncertain terms. He freely admits that his books are, in the final analysis, a means for him to work through the lingering effect of his unhappy early years.

How sad it is to realize that the many entertaining stories Ross Macdonald brought to an appreciative readership were in fact born as a result of the torment experienced by a lonely, traumatized child.