Juri wrote:
> But the conversation is
>going nowhere - just because Chandler spent his early
years in England,
>does that make him an English writer? This is absurd
to me.
Imagine, then, how I feel. You're arguing a point I'm not
making.
I'm not saying that I think Chandler is a British writer,
though I do think someone might try to make a case for it (it
wouldn't be me, though). But I am saying that to jam him into
one tidy, narrow slot as simply an American writer is to
simplify him beyond belief. Hence my suggestion that he's a
hybrid, neither unmistakably British nor unmistakably
American, but almost always unmistakably Chandler. Hence my
crack about breaking out the hyphens.
It doesn't (or shouldn't) diminish Chandler (or the United
States) to say that his formal education and early writing
influences were mostly British, that he thought of himself
for many years as British-American, and that that background
and those influences played a large part in his writing later
on in life.
I'm not sure why (beyond flag-waving purposes) anyone would
feel so threatened by what's pretty much accepted wisdom
here, that were Chandler to never have left the United States
(to school and later, to war) he would have been a very
different writer, and maybe even one we would have never
heard of.
> > And if there is some sort of American style,
what is it? And how does
> > it correspond with such different "unmistakably
American" writers
> > as,say, Norman Mailer, James Fenimore Cooper,
Erica Jong, Mark Twain,
> > Anne Tyler, John Updike and Danielle
Steele?
>
>One could argue about Cooper and his roots in the
European Romantic
>philosophy, but I'll pass...
So now Chandler's an American writer, but Cooper isn't? What
are you, the Literary Immigration Police?
>If Chandler, like other writers, is a sum of his
experience, then how
>can he be unmistakably him/herself? In the human
experience other voices
>come forward so forcefully that it's sometimes pretty
hard to tell
>what's one's own.
It's basic math, which is something I understand a whole hell
of a lot better than European Romantic philosophy, or why
Cooper having his roots in it would disqualify him from being
considered an American writer.
1 + 3 = 4 4 is unmistakably 4 You're trying to say 4 is 3,
but not 1. I'm saying 4 = 1 + 3.
That's all. If this gets anymore complicated, I may have to
take off my shoes and socks to count higher....
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