In mid-December I opened my computer to find a large number of emails from friends. They all sent the same Guardian article, with the headline “[R]are a poem by Raymond Chandler discovered by an American publisher.” A long-lost poem had been unearthed by the Strand magazine’s editor-in-chief Andrew Gulli, who found it in a shoebox in the Chandler Archive at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.
Chandler is one of my literary passions. In 2007 I published a biography of him, “The Long Embrace,” a book that was not only a portrait of a writer but of a city, Los Angeles, where he had lived in almost 40 different residences, and of a marriage.
Chandler was completely devoted to his wife, Cissy Pascal. He called her “the beat of my heart.” As a writer, he said that “I never thought I was anything more than a fire for Cissy to warm her hands”, even though she had not been much interested in her hard-boiled novels, finding them too hard for her to feel deeply. romantic of her. susceptibility.
The poem Gulli found was written a few months after Cissy’s death in 1955, when Chandler was so distraught over losing his wife that he became suicidal. Titled “Requiem”, it is a lyrical cry that comes from the heart: it begins, There is a moment after death when the face is beautiful / When the soft tired eyes close and the pain ends, / And the long, long innocence of it gently enters / For one more moment of silence to float. and then the chorus begins, But there are always the letters.. It is his letters that he will treasure, letters that “shall not die.”
When I started reading the lines quoted in The Guardian, I had an instant sense of recognition. I knew this poem! I had also seen it in Chandler’s archive at the Bodleian Library; in fact, I had quoted it in “The Long Embrace” in its entirety, although I did not note its title. The long-lost poem was not lost at all.
I kept getting more emails. I was surprised at how quickly and widely the story was picked up by Smithsonian Magazine, ABC News, NPR, and the New York Times.. It lit up the Internet.
“Exciting stuff, huh?” wrote a friend of the remarkable “find.” No, I thought irritably. (In the end, many of the stories were corrected to indicate that the poem was in my book.)
One of my correspondents, a Chandler fan, explained the whole dizzying fuss this way: “Ray is the Elvis of the literary scene. There is the same eternal level of interest.”
The Elvis of the literary scene … Wow. How true, I thought. Chandler, the literary figure, had the same kind of iconic appeal that Elvis, the rock star, or Marilyn, the actress, had. They all fall into that club of special people that we can never get enough of.
Books have been written, movies have been made, analyzing why certain cultural figures become icons and continue to wield such power in our collective consciousness (think “Priscilla,“Elvis” and “Marlowe”, all recent films), and yet, for all the love they receive and all the attention they attract year after year, they remain subjects beyond conclusive reading, inexhaustible and irresistible . Why do they capture our attention so strongly, cutting across all levels of society and cultures?
Chandler once said that only he and Marilyn Monroe had managed to “reach all the eyebrows” (educated, intellectual and middle-aged), an observation echoed by director Billy Wilder. “It’s kind of peculiar,” Wilder said, “you know, in the 40-plus years that I’ve been in Hollywood… the two people that I’ve been connected with and that everyone is most interested in are Marilyn Monroe and Raymond.” . Sailboat. There is a kind of fascination, and there may be, because they were both enigmas.”
What Gulli really discovered, and what December’s news avalanche reminded us of, is the lasting power of Raymond Chandler’s appeal, the charm of his stories. How powerfully his personality and his extraordinary novels continue to speak to readers, with their darkly humorous vision of a violent and corrupt America. He was a great stylist who generated generations of imitators. He put Los Angeles on the literary map and made the humble mystery a respected literary form. He captured the spirit of the times. His appeal goes beyond an easy explanation. In fact, he is the Elvis of the literary scene.
And he has the press to prove it.
Judith Freeman is the author of a collection of short stories, five novels, two works of nonfiction, and numerous essays and articles in the Los Angeles Times and other publications.
