While I'm on the Subject of Swimsuits . . .

I recently got around to reading my first Raymond Chandler novel, The Long Goodbye, and it was a pretty fair piece of writing all around. Certainly, he conveys attractive women and the way men look at them very well. Here's a couple of passages:

A girl in a white sharkskin suit and a luscious figure was climbing the ladder tot he high board. I watched the band of white that showed between the tan of her thighs and the suit. I watched it carnally. Then she was out of sight, cut off by the deep overhang of the roof. A moment later I saw her flash down in a a one and a half. Spray came high enough to catch the sun and make rainbows that were almost as pretty as the girl.

Marlowe watches her for a little longer, and talks about what ostensibly causes him to lose interest in her, but it's really the spray of water that does it. His carnal interest has been defused by the presence of a different form of aesthetic experience. Interestingly, Chandler chooses to convey the experience of a really beautiful woman quite differently:

There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is a blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that god-damned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo's rapier or Lucrezia's poison vial.

There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn't care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can't lay a finger on her because in the first place you don't want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provencal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them.

And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absentmindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.

The dream across the way was none of these, not even of that kind of world. She was unclassifiable, as remote and clear as mountain water, as elusive as its color.

Chandler gives a description of this woman, too, but he really lets us linger on her by describing what she is not. He knows that you can't take as much time describing a woman as you would gladly spend staring at her in real life. To convey that sensation of being lost in beauty, Chandler utilizes digression and lets our mind wander around her in the way that our eyes would. It's really a nice technique.