Chandler's Early Poetry & Prose
Raymond Chandler's writing pulp fiction in the 1930s was not his first attempt to be a professional author. In his early twenties, just after completing his schooling
and returning from a year's study on the Continent, he tried to make a
living as a London man of letters. Chandler's early poems, twenty-seven of which have been located, show
little literary merit. The forms are fixed and rigid, usually in quatrains
or sestets. Chandler had a particular fondness for repeated rhymes; his
poems frequently make use of such schemes as aaaab and abab cbcb
dbdb. The resulting rhymes are often awkward and simplistic. In his
later detective writing, Chandler would use an objective style with a strong
sense of place and careful eye for detail. The early poems have none of
these qualities. The writing is abstract and distant, focusing on grand
concepts such as art, love, beauty, and loss. The diction and syntax are
formal and somewhat stilted, showing little of the verbal ease and crisp
vernacular style that would characterize the Philip Marlowe novels.
The poems, though, are important for what they show of Chandler's temperament
as a young man. The themes of loss and alienation run throughout his verse.
The poems project a speaker who is at odds with an oppressive, materialistic
world and wants to escape to a distant, ideal land. They show as well a
strongly Romantic conception of art as the most noble human pursuit and
of the poet as a suffering, tormented recorder of life. Chandler's mind,
furthermore, was drawn toward chivalric images and themes: kings and knights
appear repeatedly in his poems.
The sensibility behind Philip Marlowe is also present in the essays
Chandler wrote for the Academy. In "The Genteel Artist" and "The Literary
Fop" he rails against wealthy, dilletante painters and writers who are
concerned only with poses and style, not substance and quality. Two other
pieces contain the germs of ideas Chandler would develop more fully three
decades later in his celebrated essay "Simple Art of Murder." In the "Remarkable
Hero" he criticizes the tendency in modern literature to create bizarre,
eccentric heroes, and singles out the genteel mystery in particular. The
mystery reader, he writes, "is unaware that the great detective whom he
so much admires is as unlike any possible great detective as he is unlike
a Patagonian anteater." In "The Tropical Romance," Chandler mourns the
decline of the adventure novel and "those somewhat shop-soiled heroes with
tarnished morals and unflinching courage." In "The Simple Art of Murder,"
he would use almost identical terms in his exposition of the ideal hardboiled
detective hero.
Absent from these early essays is a concern for realism in fiction.
In "Realism and Fairyland," Chandler explicitly rejects the realistic mode
that had been developing since the mid-19th century. Such writers, he argues,
document only the seedy side of life, blind to all but the weakness and
nastiness of human beings. The purpose of art is not to kill hope and cheer
but rather to provide support and inspiration; it should take the reader
to "fairyland"--a realm where Romance and ideals provide succor from mundane
unhappiness. The desire for Romance and escape would remain a strong part
of Chandler's artistic temperament, but until he learned to integrate it
with concrete, objective realism, his writing would remain only second-rate.
He had artistic ambitions and attitutes but had yet to find his material.
In 1912, Chandler decided he had no future as a London writer. He borrowed
five hundred pounds from his uncle and sailed to the United States. He
stayed briefly in St. Louis and Omaha, then moved to Los Angeles. 
He worked briefly as a reporter for the Daily Express, from which
he was fired, then took a position on the staff of the Westminster Gazette,
contributing poems, satirical sketches, and short articles on European
affairs. The low pay--about three pounds a week--was hardly enough to support
him. In 1911 he began contributing essays and reviews to The Academy,
a London literary weekly.
