Raymond Chandler comments on Alice's prose......

[Dave Monroe]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 10:18 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Best putdown of a copy editor ever award goes to Raymond Chandler, who, in a
> 1947 letter to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, wrote: "By the way, would
> you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him
> or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like
> the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn
> it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety
> smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of
> barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind
> relaxed but attentive."

http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2010/12/i-be-waiting.html