Wry, Ironic, and Resonant

Raymond Chandler, c. 1945

Let me muse for a moment on Raymond Chandler, who was born on this day in 1888. He is someone I often turn to when I’m hungry for something beautiful. I go to him to settle myself in an atmosphere of balance, rhythm, and tone. His prose is vernacular, the purest American language I know, but it is shaped in the graceful classical style Chandler learned reading Latin as an English schoolboy. Ann Patchett calls his writing “flat-out gorgeous.”

Consider the quick, panned-in moment from Farewell My Lovely when Philip Marlowe first encounters Anne Riordan:

I put the light on her face and she blinked.  It was a small neat vibrant face with large eyes.  A face with bone under the skin, fine drawn like a Cremona violin. A very nice face. 

The moment is electric, and cinematic like most of Chandler’s prose. “Blinked” is the critical word. Like the click of a camera, it freeze-frames Miss Riordan’s face, locking her eyes on Marlowe.

The violin is a characteristic Chandler simile, and a good one, but it is not facile wordplay.  The violin vibrates with the taut strength of Miss Riordan’s face, alive in the airy delicacy of curved bone beneath it, as resonant as the singing of the violin.

And it’s not just any violin. It is a Cremona violin, an elegant 16th century artefact, probably a Stradivarius, whose wood and varnish sang Monteverdi, Gabrieli, and Gluck to the Medici 400 years ago–  a classical perfection of tone from the old masters which is treasured and sought-after today.

That’s Anne Riordan’s face.

Even more exciting is “fine drawn,” which extends the simile’s reach into the tight, astringent drawing of a bow across the violin’s strings, vibrant with life and beauty– or perhaps in Marlowe’s world, a knife across the throat.

The scene momentarily stuns Marlowe, as surely as it does Riordan, and it fires Marlowe’s innate Romanticism.

But then Marlowe steps back, adding a wry and ironic caesura:

“A very nice face.” 

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