Raymond Chandler on the language he wrote

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cwconrad
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Raymond Chandler on the language he wrote

Post by cwconrad »

I'm currently reading a delightful pieced-together work titled, The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words, http://www.amazon.com/World-Raymond-Cha ... d+chandler. Readers of Chandler's slender corpus of genre novels and short stories know well that what's classic in them is not plot or narrative but rather the style and the character-drawing of Philip Marlowe and others that renders the corpus classic American fiction. This book draws on Chandler's own words -- mostly letters -- to set forth how he understood what he was doing: why he wrote what he did and how he wrote. I thought this item (from two different letters) might be of some interest to some members of this forum:
Raymond Chandler in 1949 on the language of his fiction wrote:To learn it I had to study and analyze it. As a result, when I use slang, I do it deliberately. … It would seem that a classical education might be rather a poor basis for writing novels in a hard-boiled vernacular. I happen to think otherwise. A classical education saves you from being fooled by pretentiousness, which is what most current fiction is too full of. If I hadn’t grown up with Latin and Greek, I doubt if I would know so well where to draw the very subtle line between what I call the vernacular style and what I should call an illiterate or faux naif style.
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
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