America has no classic diction—at least not in the mainstream of its literature. Its “Great Styles”—the gothic paragraphs of Faulkner, or the experiments to capture the cadences of “real speech” of Stein and Hemingway (significantly, both had to leave America before the experiments became successful, and Hemingway’s return to this country seems to have thrown his method into self-parody), the balanced play-at-refinement of Fitzgerald, or even the earlier, self-conscious Britishisms of Henry James (James’s British, like his Britain once he moved there, was very much a British of the mind) are all artificial, individually architected, and essentially romantic dictions. They are the opposite of classic. They are all brilliantly suited for the presentation of a region, geographic, psychological, or social; at the same time, none of them could be the language of a people. Even the naturalists who tried to capture the language the people spoke—Farrell, Dos Passos, the Dahlberg of Bottom Dog—were bent on an innately personal task. What Chandler did, even more than Hammett, was to take the language the people read and refine it—purify it, bring it to pitch, crystallize it. Chandler, and writers like him, took the language of journalism and the pulps as their basic material and honed from it a verbal tool that was as close as American could come to a classic diction. What were its hallmarks? It was easy; it was graceful; it did relate, and relate closely, to the language people spoke—not in a slavish imitation of individual quirks and angularities, but in the sane and measured way speech and writing must relate if both are to remain alive. It could absorb immense colloquialism without strain. There was nothing in the real world of things and actions it could not describe. But Chandler’s letters are written in the same language: in them, you will find the most fine and subtle critical concepts put as clearly as any of Philip Marlowe’s descriptions of Southern California manners and mores. By the use of idiom (essentially a product of speech—as distinct from cliché, primarily a manifestation of writing), it could be witty, concise, or cutting. (And using idioms is a very different process from accurately recording them to lend color and verisimilitude to a reproduction of regional speech.) Above all, it had the classic virtue of clarity. Unlike Faulkner’s, James’s, or Stein’s (or even Hemingway’s), you never had to ask of Chandler’s prose: “But what does this sentence mean?” While the grammar was often that of informal speech, the substance was never ambiguous on first hearing to a native American speaker. You never had to track back through even more of his sentences or paragraphs to untangle the antecedent of a lost pronoun, or to discover what some dangling, baroque clause was actually modifying. This meant the aesthetic effects in fictions built of such language had to be achieved by formal means. It was certainly a visual language, but visual with a clear, sharp light, rather than a murky, glossalized glimmer. The fictive effects arose from the resonances set off in the mind of the reader between objects, situations, emotions, and actions, clearly limned and significantly placed.