A Recently Discovered Poem by Raymond Chandler Published in “The Strand Magazine”
Also: Historians against history, the reopening of Notre Dame, Michel Houellebecq’s disappointing latest book, and more.
The Strand Magazine has published a poem that Raymond Chandler wrote in 1955 in memory of his wife, who died in 1954. Chandler himself would die a mere five years later. The poem starts like this:
There is a moment after death when the face is beautiful
When the soft, tired eyes are closed and the pain is over,
And the long, long innocence of love comes gently in
For a moment more, in quiet to hover.
The Guardian reports that the poem was discovered by The Strand’s managing editor, Andrew Gulli:
About the discovery, Gulli said: “I read years ago that there was a treasure trove of works by Chandler at the Bodleian [library at the University of Oxford] and it seems that it was just delivered to add to the collection in a shoe box.”
Gulli adds that Chandler didn’t have the chance “to have a burial of his wife. Her ashes remained with him for the rest of his life . . . Maybe he was writing a message to her in a way of this poem.”
This isn’t the only previously unpublished work of Chandler to be discovered recently. The Guardian reports:
In 2020, an unseen spoof of corporate culture by Chandler was published in Strand magazine after it was found at the Bodleian library. In 2017, a never-seen story by Chandler revealed a searing rebuke of the American healthcare system, while in 2015, a 48-page unpublished comic opera was discovered in Washington DC’s Library of Congress, nearly 100 years after it was first registered.
This issue of The Strand also includes a story by Alexander McCall Smith on “a party of backstabbing academics” gathering for “a weekend in the Scottish Highlands” and interviews with Bob Odenkirk and Fight Club author (and fellow Substacker) Chuck Palahniuk.
In other news, Chilton Williamson, Jr. writes about his friendship with Edward Abbey and his 1968 Desert Solitaire:
It is a literary work on the order of Walden or Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: an intensely personal account celebrating nature through adventure and description, and only secondarily a social and political “statement.” Desert Solitaire is not a book written for policy people but for outdoorsmen, and then not in the sense of sportsmen but of men and women for whom nature is not just their second home but in a very real sense their first one—far more so, indeed, than Walden was for Thoreau.
None of this prevented Abbey from developing into a cult figure of the biocentric environmentalists in general, and Earth First! and Dave Foreman in particular. Flattered by their adulation, Abbey tolerated and even enjoyed them, while refraining from endorsing their more extreme ideas and behavior. The explicit rule of his heroes and heroines in his monkey-wrenching novels about dam-blowing and other joyous acts of environmental sabotage was “Nobody gets hurt.” It was by no means clear to anyone, including itself, how far Earth First! was prepared to observe this rule.
For two decades Abbey had a literary and personal following whose devotion was unshakeable, admirers for whom he was nothing less than a prophet. There is no one like him today, the environmentalist movement having devolved over the thirty years since his death into a collection of leftist ideologues and propagandists who, if they think of him at all, remember Edward Abbey—a Jeffersonian democrat and old American republican—as an anti-feminist, anti-immigrant, and racist reactionary.
Ian Leslie explains how academic historians are destroying the discipline in The Ruffian:
The Black Death, a bubonic plague, devastated Europe between 1346 and 1353. It reached England in 1348 and proceeded to wipe out between a third and a half of the population in about a year. Spread by flea-infested rats, it tore through the densely populated area of London, reducing the city’s population from about 100,000 to about 20,000. (The longer-term upside is that it raised the wages of labourers in years to come, though I guess that might not have been much comfort at the time.
It’s difficult to uncover new insights into an event that happened so long ago and which has been so well studied. But anthropologists associated with the Museum of London have done just that, according to a report from the BBC this week. It says: “Black women of African descent were more likely to die of the medieval plague in London, academics at the Museum of London have found.”
Notre Dame will open for worshippers in December 2024: “The date was confirmed by the French President Emmanuel Macron during a visit to the site on 8 December, according to the French newspaper Le Monde. Macron added that he hoped Pope Francis would attend the event and crucially also announced the creation of a museum in central Paris dedicated to Notre Dame, its history, its art and its reconstruction. The French Ministry of Culture was contacted for comment about the new institution . . . The complete restoration of the building, accompanied by a revamp of the surrounding area including the front square, is due to continue until 2028.”
David Hockney’s clumsy late style: Michael Prodger argues that his “recent portraits reveal an artist whose skills are fading.”
Helen Barrett reports on a renewed interest in the art of Pauline Boty:
Is Pauline Boty a forgotten artist? The short life of the bright star of the British Pop movement, who dazzled swinging London and died from cancer at 28, is certainly framed that way. A new exhibition, Pauline Boty: A Portrait, which opened last week at Gazelli Art House in London, has been accompanied by a round of write-ups of the Boty story — headlined without exception with a “forgotten” tag, often with “tragic” thrown in for extra emotive pull.
Yet Boty is anything but forgotten. The Only Blonde in the World, her best-known and most accomplished 1963 painting, hangs in Tate Britain alongside work by her friend and contemporary Sir Peter Blake. As well as the Gazelli show, this year has seen a definitive biography, Pauline Boty: British Pop Art’s Sole Sister, by the US writer and historian Marc Kristal. There was also a blue plaque unveiled at Boty’s former flat in Holland Park, and a dizzying round of Boty talks and events.
Cambridge University Library asked to return Book of Deer to Scotland: “The 10th-century book contains the gospels in Latin, with Gaelic annotations in the margins added in the 12th century. The annotations related to the monastery of Deer in Aberdeenshire, giving the book its name. In November, the exact location of the monastery was discovered during an archaeological dig. Reid said that the book, which was used by monks, is ‘hugely significant to the Gaelic-speaking community’ because it ‘proved that Gaelic was the common language’ in Aberdeenshire.”
Laurent Lemasson reviews Michel Houellebecq’s latest book, which is an attempt to make “amends” for critical comments he made about Islam and to blame a pornographic filmmaker for supposedly duping him: “For anyone who appreciates Houellebecq’s work, Quelques mois dans ma vie is a pretty painful read. Everything that makes his novels or articles so interesting is conspicuously absent: there is no finesse, no humour, no interesting observations, no self-mockery, nothing but a dull and slightly repulsive account of the trials and tribulations of a libidinous sexagenarian who presents himself as a victim but who, in reality, is largely punished by where he has sinned.”
A very unmodern Rossetti: “When Rossetti is remembered, it’s most often as a painter given to lush works of fancy, which some find overwrought. Yet Rossetti burned for verse. It was a supreme sacrifice when, upon the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal in 1862 from an overdose of laudanum, he placed in her coffin the manuscript of his unpublished poems. ‘I have often been writing at those poems when Lizzie was ill and suffering, and I might have been attending to her,’ he told Ford Madox Brown, ‘and now they shall go.’ Years later, at the urging of friends, he dug up the work he had buried in that black mood and brought it into print, thereby playing Max Brod to his own Kafka.”
Desert Solitaire is definitely not a novel.
Max Brod to his own Kafka- good line!