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Raymond Chandler on the language he wrote

Posted: January 11th, 2015, 9:47 am
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.