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RAYMONDS_PERCH

                                             November 1, 2020

A round-up of Raymond Chandler quotes
about fiction and writing:


  "I merely say that all reading for pleasure is
  escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy,
  Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten
  Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob,
  and a juvenile at the art of living."

      -- Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder"


  "Nor is it any part of my thesis to maintain that it
  [the detective story] is a vital and significant form
  of art. There are no vital and significant forms of
  art; there is only art, and precious..."

          -- Raymond Chandler

             Essay, first appeared in
             The Atlantic Monthly November, 1945


  "The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he
  knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too
  much to speak with detachment."

          -- Raymond Chandler

             A Qualified Farewell, essay, early 1950's,
             published in The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler (1976)



   "There is something about the literary life that repels me,
   all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the
   long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important
   which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the
   miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the
   cheap gaudiness of popular success."

         --  Raymond Chandler
             Letter, 22 April 1949, published
             in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962)



A general undercurrent throughout Chandler's writing is this
ridiculously corrosive, judgemental refusal to grant that
anything in the world might be worthwhile-- the hero uses his
contempt to show us how much he is above it all.

There's no end to this game though-- the common folk being common
are a bunch of tacky and ignorant fools; the person posturing that
they're above the common run is an elitest snob, putting on airs;
and if you try to steer between both, you risk becoming an
anti-elitist snob, someone who won't ever acknowledge that an
intellectual may really have thought of something the common folks
have thus far missed.

    If you take a stand of any sort on any grounds, if
    you stand up and say "this I believe", there's a risk
    someone will think you're *naive*, you're *corny*,
    you're *pretentious* and you can't have that.
    Who do you think you are, anyway?

                                                NEO-IRONY

                                                    THUNDER


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