Maev Kennedy “Raymond Chandler given blue plaque in mean streets of Upper Norwood” http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/07/raymond-chandler-blue-plaque-upper-norwood
レイモンド・チャンドラー*1というと、どうしても米国、それもカリフォルニアというイメージがある。しかし彼は少年時代の1900年から1905年まで、倫敦のアッパー・ノーウッド*2に住み、Dulwich College*3に通っていた。
Chandler came to London from the States with his Irish mother after his father abandoned the family: an uncle paid for their accommodation and his school fees, but refused to pay for him to go on to university. Chandler had already tried journalism and poetry, but took up writing again in the Depression after losing his job with an oil company, the last of many failed desk jobs. He published The Big Sleep in 1939 and found his true vocation.
- 作者: レイモンド・チャンドラー,双葉十三郎
- 出版社/メーカー: 東京創元社
- 発売日: 1959/08
- メディア: 文庫
- 購入: 2人 クリック: 13回
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ところで、チャンドラーが通っていたDulwich Collegeはエリザベス朝の役者Edward Alleyn*4によって創立されたが、当時クリストファー・マーロウという劇作家がおり*5、勿論Alleynとも関係があったのだった。
His biographer, Tom Williams, said the connection came as a surprise to many. “Chandler seems Californian through and through but he was born in Chicago and educated in London. He took two very important things from Dulwich: a grounding in the classics that protected him against pretension, which made his writing so very much better than most of his contemporaries, and a chivalric code of patriotism and honour, very much the ethos promoted in public schools of the day, which is at the core of Marlowe,” he said.Chandler described his Marlowe as “a shop-soiled Galahad”, and Williams pointed out that he studied in Dulwich library under a painting of the Arthurian hero by the Victorian artist GF Watts. “Every Marlowe story is essentially a grail quest,” he said.
Chandler kept up the connection with the school long after he returned to the US, making a friend for life in a San Francisco coffee shop because they were both wearing their old school boaters, and sending back food parcels in the second world war to one of his teachers.
*1:See also http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20070321/1174443344 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20091205/1260031366 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20100115/1263542817 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110218/1298054239
*2:See eg. http://www.uppernorwood.com/main/index.shtml http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Norwood
*3:http://www.dulwich.org.uk/ See eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dulwich_College
*4:See eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Alleyn
*5:See eg. http://www.marlowe-society.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Marlowe
