“Requiem” is the title of a rare poem written by Raymond Chandler in 1955, presumably after he was widowed, and published for the first time on Monday, 68 years later, by Strand magazine, after its editor-in-chief, Andrew Gulli , you will find it misplaced in the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford, United Kingdom.
Gulli, who came to that library following the clues and traces of the possible unpublished work of Chandler, one of the greatest American crime novelists, told the British press that the text, which he defined as a poem, “was written four years before the writer’s death and shortly after the death of his wife, Cissy, which plunged him into severe depression.” 1955, the year Chandler attempted suicide.
“There is a moment after death, when the face is beautiful / when the soft, tired eyes close and the pain ends,” reads the first lines written by Chandler (1888-1959), published by Strand and reproduced by The Guardian, part of a text that seems an attempt to deal with loss, pain and the end of what its author describes as the “long innocence of love.”
In the text “there is a very murky vision about who the main character is, what perspective the poem comes from,” but “in the last sentence it seems as if it were Chandler’s character talking about his wife,” Gulli noted. According to the editor, “Requiem” could have been “kind of an idea Chandler had for an obituary for his wife.”
Interweaving first- and third-person narratives, Chandler describes the moment immediately after death as “the long innocence of love” that “gently enters” and that, “for a moment longer, floats silently”; speaks of the fading of “shiny clothes,” of a “lost dream,” of “three long hairs on a brush,” and of “cool, fluffy pillows/ on which no head can fit/ are all that remains of the long and wild dream”.
For Gulli, this text “shows Chandler’s mystical quality. “What I loved about this message is that it shows that if people have died, their souls and their memories will outlive those who loved them,” the editor concluded.
In recent years, several unpublished works by Chandler have been discovered: in 2020, a parody of corporate culture also published by Strand after being found in the Bodleian library.
Source: Ambito
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