Towards Chandler.

I’ve been thinking about American versus English spellings. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about whether the British are attached to their variants because they offer what is felt to be the right spelling by virtue of its complexity; this is the old, difficult spelling, and therefore it must be the authoritative one. A word such as favour, for example, presumably keeps the ‘u’ as a relic of the time when it was pronounced with a more Frenchified, courtly inflection. We Brits like this history, as well as the fascination of what’s difficult. The Americans, however, prefer favor because it is a phonetically accurate rendering of how contemporary English speakers pronounce the word today, thereby evincing the American preference for efficiency and modernity over the complexities of too much history. This perhaps crystallises the psychology undermining a fundamental tension between British and American culture - a tension which is most commonly played out in our fiction. That is, we think of American fictive style as lean, muscular and liberated from the high style and linguistic adornments of the old world. British English writing, on the other hand, is profoundly aware (some would say too aware) of its debt to the Germanic and Latin languages of which it is the happily miscegenated mongrel; old etymologies and forgotten uses stick out of the loam of our language like the spars of old ships. This is both a blessing and curse: we love our relics and history, but it's often asked why the Brits can’t write the kind of epic everyman story produced by Bellow, Roth, Updike, etc. Maybe this is the reason. Maybe we’re simply too self-conscious of our predecessors to write new epics; it seems like imposture. American writers don’t suffer from this inhibition because they are a newer nation determined to write its own history in defiance of any antecedent, hence their writing is so vigorous and direct. The first person we think of in this capacity is Hemingway, I suppose, but you could just as well talk about Auster or Salinger.

And yet there are some wonderful exceptions to this rule (which is a clumsy and reductive rule, as all such generalisations are). Most notable of these is Raymond Chandler. Having been raised and schooled in England and then living most of his life in America, Chandler embodies a simultaneously dual awareness of English and American style. He knows very well what the English consider to be good style, and rejects the excessive fussiness of approved literary stylings for the lean angularity of the hardboiled prose style which he perfected. It is this unorthodox and iconoclastic spirit which helped emancipate American writing from its thrall to the English masters and create the Great American Novel™. And yet what makes Chandler remain the unrivalled master of his particular form is that he chose to salt the harsh, macho actuality of Marlowe’s adventures with a tightly controlled yet highly original substrate of metaphor. The great achievement of these metaphors is that they don’t, by virtue of their minimalism, disrupt the grainy texture of Chandler’s writing, yet nonetheless succeed in interspersing the text with sudden vertiginous drops into the dark swirl of despair and heartbreak which lingers beneath the brittle surface of life for all Chandler’s characters. This underworld is the feminine obverse to the masculine linearities of Marlowe’s mean streets, it is undeniably the creation of someone with a profound respect for the high and precious vagaries of poetry and rhetoric espoused by the ‘old masters’, and it is, I would venture, this dual sensibility which enables Chandler’s writing to eschew cliché and retain its ability to captivate a broad audience across the years. Would it have been possible without that Anglo-American consciousness? Maybe. But it sure as shit didn’t hurt, honey.