THIS WORD AIN’T BIG ENOUGH FOR BOTH OF US: SO STYLE IT OUT

It’s a cliché that says we live in a style obsessed culture and, like all the best clichés, it’s only a cliché because it’s kinda true.
Hairstyle, street style, music style, catwalk style, style guru, style slave, stylist, lifestyle, style over content…

You name it, there’s a style for it, but I guess it’s only natural that the first thing that pops into my mind when presented with this desperately overused word is the style that’s closest to what I do all day – and ultimately the style that dictates whether my rent gets paid or not. Yup, you’re in it, your reading it, the first thing I think of is: writing style.

Raymond Chandler, the American genius author of The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye and Double Indemnity wrote:
“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.”

Now the thing about Ray is that he was a stylist supreme. His Phillip Marlowe books are filled with lines so sharp you could shave with them.

Try this on for size, the opening paragraph of Red Wind:
"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."

Or this:
"Tall, aren't you?" she said.
"I didn't mean to be."
Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.” ‘The Big Sleep’ (Chapter 1)

Your man Chandler was able to take a type of book that was then still considered the preserve of the cheap paperback and the sort of thing you read on a long train journey – hard-boiled detective fiction – and turned it into an artform. Or at least that’s what I think – to many he was a cheap writer of cheap books and to some of those who love detective fiction he committed the cardinal sin: he didn’t really give a shit about the plot.

In one of his books, the Big Sleep, at the end when Marlowe wraps up all the loose ends astute observers have noticed that there is still one unexplained murder. “Who killed the chauffer?” telegrammed John Ford to him as he prepared to direct the classic noir movie version of the book, starring Humphrey Bogart.

“Oh,” replied Chandler. “I forgot about him.”

If you’ve got enough style – and I mean a whole skip full and enough left over to fill a squash court up to the ceiling - then the content really isn’t so important – and the content in a detective novel, arguably, is plot. “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.” Said Chandler, in a word of advice that should be handed out to all writers, whether they’re penning detective fiction, or writing a recipe book.

As Kingsly Amis (father of Martin and author of such ‘angry young man’ classic books of post war Britain as the Lucky Jim series) said, “If you haven’t got anything new to say then at least try and say it in a new way.” In other words, style will get you through times of no content far better than content will get you through times of no style.

Of course, if we think about what most people mean by style then we are in the realms of wardrobes and whores’ drawers, in other words – the world of clothes and hair and make up and striking a pose and making the outside seem as attractive as you desperately hope the inside is.

As the king of stylish film making, Jean-Luc Godard said: “To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the inside and the outside of the human body – both go together, they can’t be separated.”

So, in other words, most of the time it is not enough to live like Chandler, it is not enough to have a skin without muscle and tissue and organs inside because, if you do then you will not hide your inner bore – if anything you will just draw attention to it in the way that a label queen with no personality is more conspicuous in her King’s Road finery than she would be if she dressed in sweats and trainers.

Style is a matter of making your clothes and your look reflect the coolest part of the best bit that you’ve got inside. If your style is just hollow, an attempt to look good, when you yourself are less cool than a toasted sandwich filled with magma, then no amount of labels or expert styling will hide the fact. And if you inside are cooler than a fridge full of frozen fish fingers dumped at the North Pole during a sudden cold snap then you can turn up at a fashion week party in a used bin liner and you will still out style the style slaves. It’s all about what you’ve got on the inside – and making the outside reflect that inner confidence that you are the coolest thing in the deep freeze section. Because you love yourself and everyone loves a self-lover. Within reason.

Amidst all the anecdotes and tales of horror, sexual avarice, pithy putdowns and actorly tantrums which haemorrhaged into the press from the bloated corpse of Marlon Brando after his recent demise, one stuck in my mind. Describing a meeting with the young star, as a young method actor sleeping on the floorboards of random acquaintances in the late nineteen forties, long before he became a name to be genuflected at, one of his contemporaries remembered that, “Marlon was dressed in the style that was then the uniform of the street bum or destitute - denim and a T shirt – but he looked great, and of course, within ten years the style he had adopted had become the chosen one of every teenage boy in America.” So, if you dress like a bum, but you carry it off then who knows? In ten years time the whole of youth culture might be beating a path to your wardrobe door.

The American artist Willem de Kooning said, “Style is fraud.” But he is wrong. Style is everything, as long as you can back it up – and though Chandler couldn’t back up his detective fiction with a watertight plot, what he could back it up with was something far more satisfying: emotion. Cos that, at the end of the day, ain’t never goin’ outta style. Have emotion and you have ‘a look’, without it, you ain’t got shit.

Raymond Chandler said,
"My theory was that readers just thought that they cared about nothing but the action; that really although they didn't know it, they cared very little about the action. The thing they really cared about, and that I cared about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description."

He also wrote, "Plausibility is largely a matter of style." Later in the same essay, he added, "It takes an awful lot of technique to compensate for a dull style, although it has been done, especially in England."

“In the final analysis, ‘style’ is art.” Remember those words of Susan Sontag next time you try and decide which look to go for – it doesn’t matter if you’re picking shoes or writing the first classic novel of the twenty first century, style and emotion are where it’s at baby, and without those two you might as well just resort to cliché. And, as we know, clichés may be true, but what makes ‘em clichés is that they lost their style a long, long time ago.