A newly uncovered poem by Raymond Chandler is shedding light on what is believed to be the only attempt by the famed British-American crime novelist at writing poetry as an adult.
Published on Monday in the 25th-anniversary issue of the Strand magazine, the poem, titled Requiem, dates back to 1955 and was discovered by the magazine’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.”
Believed to have been written four years before Chandler’s death, the poem is dated shortly after the death of his wife, Cissy, which left Chandler in a state of severe depression. During the same year the poem is dated, Chandler attempted to kill himself.
Grappling with loss, grief and what it describes as the “long innocence of love”, Requiem opens with: “There is a moment after death when the face is beautiful / When the soft, tired eyes are closed and the pain is over.”
For two stanzas, Requiem describes the moments after death when the “long innocence of love comes gently in / For a moment more, in quiet to hover”, as well as the fading of “bright clothes” and a “lost dream”. It adds that “silver bottles”, “three long hairs in a brush” and “fresh plump pillows / On which no head will lie/ Are all that is left of the long, wild dream”.
Intertwining first-person and third-person narratives, the poem goes on to describe a tender act of letter reading.
“There is a very murky view about who the main character is, what perspective the poem is coming from, and at the very last sentence, it kind of feels like it’s Raymond Chandler in character, speaking about his wife,” Gulli said.
According to Gulli, Requiem might have been “kind of an idea [Chandler] had for an obituary for his wife”.
“What we do know is he was so distraught that he never even had a chance to have a burial of his wife. Her ashes remained with him for the rest of his life, so that might be a possibility. Maybe he was writing a message to her in a way of this poem,” he said.
Gulli went on to point out the apparent contrast between Requiem and Chandler’s other works, which frequently feature his most notable character, Philip Marlowe, a morally upright detective steeped in cynicism and jadedness as a result of his work.
“To me, that just shows the type of mystical quality of Raymond Chandler who was, one can say, a writer who was empirical in all of his works,” said Gulli, adding: “This is a poem that’s very idealistic. It’s a poem that speaks to a lot of the loss that we experience in life … It’s as if the people who pass away become, from the act of death, purified … What I did love about this message is it kind of shows that if people have passed away, their souls and their memories will survive to those who loved them.”
In recent years, various unseen works by Chandler have been discovered among his archives.
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.
