Lacking Stamina Poem by gershon hepner

Like rotten sweetness of a prostitute
are orchids’ sweetness, as per Chandler, Raymond,
lacking stamina the former can’t be cute,
and orchids lose their sweetness once they’ve been destamened.

Tom Shone reviews “The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, ” in the NYT Book Review, December 30,2007 (“The Big Sleepover”) :
Which 20th-century American writer is this? He listened to Mozart in the evening, loved to waltz and believed in filling a woman’s room with Champagne and roses. Handsome, suave, witty and elegant, he attended the weekly soirees given by a literary set called the Optimists, where he met and fell in love with a concert pianist’s beautiful wife, who went by the name of Cissy. He dashed off a series of poems and slipped them to her over tea:
“The touch of lips too dear for mortal kisses
The light of eyes too soft for common days
The breath of jasmine born to faintly lighten
The garden of ethereal estrays.”
If you haven’t already peeked at the subtitle of this book, here’s a clue: he didn’t like orchids so much, comparing their stalks to “the newly washed fingers of dead men” and their perfume to the “rotten sweetness of a prostitute.” Yes, him. Readers may have a hard time recognizing Raymond Chandler in the fragrant Romeo who pops up in “The Long Embrace, ” Judith Freeman’s book about his 30-year marriage to Cecilia Chandler. Mrs Chandler has long fascinated observers. Originally born Pearl Hurlburt in Perry, Ohio, she moved to New York sometime in the 1890s, where she worked as a nude model for artists and photographers in a fast-track opium-smoking crowd. Already on her second marriage when she met Chandler, she was worldy, sexually wise and 18 years his senior, a fact he apparently didn’t know until after they were married. Trust Chandler to have married a mystery.


12/30/07