Graham Greene, on the opening paragraph of The Sign of Four: “What popular author today could so abruptly introduce his hero as a drug addict without protest from his public? It is only in one direction that we have become a permissive society.”
Tomorrow I leave for France.
MONDAY
I find it easy to read, difficult to write in trains.
This morning, outside the window of the train on my way home, a short, almost imperceptible snowstorm. In the Book of Common Prayer: “He giveth snow like wool.” And “A joyful and pleasant thing it is to be thankful.” I make a mental list of descriptions of snow in books I’ve read and think that, since there are so many, they would not coincide with those of another reader.
LATER
Holmes as tragic hero, feeling trapped in a stifling world, suffering from the pain of existence. Instances of Weltschmerz.
Holmes: I cannot live without brainwork. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was there ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-coloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material? What is the use of having powers, doctor, when one has no field upon which to exert them?
Faust: God, how these walls still cramp my soul,
This cursed, stifling prison-hole. …
And can you still ask why your heart
Is pent and pining in your breast,
Why you obscurely ache and smart,
Robbed of all energy and zest?
For here you sit, surrounded not
By living Nature, not as when
God made us, but by reek and rot
And mouldering bones of beasts and men.
(David Luke’s translation)
Prufrock: The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the
window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on
the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the
evening. …
What is The Sign of Four about? The search for balance as a cure for ennui. Balance is, perhaps, the main theme of every detective story. Revenge (a form of balance). Cause and consequence (another). Justice (another).
P. D. James: “What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.”
TUESDAY
Back home. The cat who has decided to take up residence here seems offended that I have left her that long, and walks away when I approach her. I leave the door of the library open to tempt her to come in.
Long ago I discovered a remarkable book by a certain Samuel Rosenberg, Naked Is the Best Disguise. Rosenberg worked as a literary consultant for major motion-picture studios, which hired him when they were sued for plagiarism. His job was “to analyze the embattled scripts, and when the resemblances between ‘theirs’ and ‘ours’ were too close for comfort, I tried to get my employers off the litigious hook by searching for common literary ancestors of both properties.” Using the Holmes canon as his starting-point, Rosenberg manages to link Nietzsche, Melville, Mary Shelley, Boccaccio, Racine, Flaubert and many others to the Sherlockian saga. Rosenberg sees the character of Thaddeus Sholto, in The Sign of Four, as a parody or portrait of Oscar Wilde, including the Habsburg lip. (In 1889, Wilde and Conan Doyle met at a dinner given by the American representative of Lippincott’s Magazine. As a result, both men became contributors: Wilde with The Picture of Dorian Gray and Conan Doyle with Sholto’s adventure.)
Coincidences:
Conan Doyle’s description of Thaddeus Sholto: “Nature had given him a pendulous lip, and a too visible line of yellow and irregular teeth, which he strove feebly to conceal by constantly passing his hand over the lower part of his face. In spite of his obtrusive baldness, he gave the impression of youth.”
Hesketh Pearson’s description of Wilde: He “had thick, purple-tinged sensual lips, uneven discoloured teeth. … it was noticed that when talking he frequently put a bent finger over his mouth which showed that he was conscious of his unattractive teeth.”
Says Chesterton: “We have to consider not only what is improbable, but what is probable; and especially the coincidences that are overwhelmingly probable.”
THURSDAY
Spent yesterday rearranging the detective fiction. We’ve put it up in the guest bedroom, now to be known as the Murder Room.
The Sign of Four: The phrase as it appears in the story is “the sign of the four,” but only someone deaf to cadence would use it in a title, as Conan Doyle did in Lippincott’s Magazine in February 1890. Someone or something told him to drop the second “the” when the story was published in book form.
List of my favourite detective novels:
Nicholas Blake, The Beast Must Die
Reginald Hill, Bones & Silence
Ruth Rendell, A Judgement in Stone
Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
John Dickson Carr, The Black Spectacles
Marco Denevi, Rosaura a las diez
Margaret Millar, How Like an Angel
Fruttero & Lucentini: La Donna della domenica
James Cain, Mildred Pierce
Philip Kerr, A Philosophical Investigation
Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night
Leo Perutz, The Master of the Day of Judgment
John Franklin Bardin, Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly
Ellery Queen, The Tragedy of X
Anthony Berkeley, Trial and Error
Sebastien Japrisot, Compartiment tueurs
James McClure, The Steam Pig
Raymond Postgate, Verdict of Twelve
Georges Simenon, Les fiançailles de Monsieur Hire
Patrick Quentin, My Son the Murderer
Chester Himes, Cotton Comes to Harlem
FRIDAY
We hear this morning that our postwoman’s husband has committed suicide. It suddenly seems obscene to be entertained by brutal deaths in fiction.
SUNDAY
At the end of Chapter 6, Holmes quotes (in German) a line from Goethe (Faust, I): “Wir sind gewohnt dass die Menschen verhöhnen was sie nicht verstehen.” (“We are accustomed that men will mock what they don’t understand.”) The detective story elicits the possibility of mockery but at the same time prohibits it; the reader is already converted to the faith, wants not to know, wants to be deceived in order to be better entertained.
Questions that in themselves delight: Why and how has this happened? Who is responsible? What plan lies behind this confusion of facts? The reader assumes the role of a detached Job, in which sentiment is a mere adornment or distraction. Aware of this, Holmes accuses Watson of introducing sentiment in his account of the puzzle: “You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.”
And yet, as one of the characters in the novel remarks, The Sign of Four “is a romance!” She sums it up: “An injured lady, half a million in treasure, a black cannibal, and a wooden-legged ruffian. They take the place of the conventional dragon or wicked earl. …”
To plot the adventures of his hero, Conan Doyle builds on the social conventions of his age. Since in the classic detective story nothing must seem unexpected except that which is deliberately put forward as unconventional, the adventures must follow society’s expected behaviour according to class, sex, etc. and implied responsibilities, codes of honour and such among “ladies and gentlemen” and what Holmes calls “people of that sort.” One shudders to read the condescending tone of the hero towards his “lesser” fellow human beings. Observing workers emerging from the dockyards after their day is over, Holmes commerits, “Dirty-looking rascals, but I suppose every one has some little immortal spark concealed about him. You would not think it, to look at them.”
“A historian of the future will probably turn, not to blue books or statistics, but to detective stories if he wishes to study the manners of our ag
e,” wrote C.H.B. Kitchin some forty years later.
Note: As an example of this reliance on social conventions, the message sent to Mary Morstan (the damsel in distress who is to become Watson’s wife): “Be at the third pillar from the left outside the Lyceum Theatre tonight at seven o’clock. If you are distrustful, bring two friends. You are a wronged woman, and shall have justice. Do not bring police. If you do, all will be in vain. Your unknown friend.” Even here, the note requires the happy coincidence of allowing for two friends (not just one) in order for both Holmes and Watson to be able to accompany the lady without breaking the code of honour. (Later Miss Morstan will have to give her word to the “unknown friend” that “neither of your companions is a police-officer.” As she is a lady, her word, of course, suffices.)
MONDAY
Tender scenes of male friendship in Conan Doyle’s staunchly macho world. Holmes to Watson: “Lie down there on the sofa and see if I can put you to sleep.” He then takes up his violin from the corner, while Watson stretches himself out. “I have a vague remembrance,” Watson says, “of his gaunt limbs, his earnest face, and the rise and fall of his bow. Then I seemed to be floated peacefully away upon a soft sea of sound, until I found myself in dreamland, with the sweet face of Mary Morstan looking down upon me.”
That “sweet face of Mary Morstan” seems tagged on, as a precautionary afterthought.
TUESDAY
Last Sunday, at the flea market in Chinon, I found a first edition of Boris Vian’s L’écume des jours.
It occurs to me that L’écume des jours depicts a French version of the Holmes-Watson relationship in the characters of Colin and his friend Chick. Holmes’s demand that there be no vagueness in the narrative is taken literally in this Surrealist fantasy. So if someone says, “Poussez le feu” (literally, “push the fire”), he can add “et, sur l’espace ainsi gagné …” (“and, in the newly gained space …”); if someone is “planté là” (“rooted there”) he will indeed sprout roots.
Vian even lends exact words to Holmes’s Weltschmerz: “I spend my brightest hours darkening them because light bothers me.” Because of phrases like this one, I understand why Cortázar told the poet Alejandra Pizarnik that, after finishing L’écume des jours, he felt too sad to leave his room.
WEDNESDAY
I explore my library like someone returning to his native land after an absence of decades. Every time I leave on one of my book junkets, I have to chart its geography all over again, establish paths from shelf to shelf, remembering titles I have not thought about for weeks.
Like a man finding his bearings in a library, Holmes can trace his way through the labyrinth of London by reciting the names of the streets seen from a cab: “Wandsworth Road … Priory Road. Larkhall Lane. Stockwell Place. Robert Street. Coldharbour Lane.” And later, the districts through which he pursues his quarry: “Streatham, Brixton, Camberwell … Kennington Lane … The Oval … Bond Street and Miles Street … Knight’s Place.” A city reduced to the titles it contains.
Imaginary libraries:
A library of books never written: Sherlock Holmes’s “small works,” such as “a curious little work upon the influence of a trade upon the form of the hand, with lithotypes of the hands of slaters, sailors, cork-cutters, compositors, weavers, and diamond polishers,” his monograph on the tracing of footsteps, and the celebrated Upon the Distinction between the Ashes of Various Tobaccos, illustrated with coloured plates.
A library of real books read by imaginary characters: Holmes reads the German classics and, in order to support a Romantic view of the smallness of man in the universe, refers Watson to Jean Paul. Even more surprisingly, Watson replies that he has read him: “I worked back to him through Carlyle” (which elicits Holmes’s comment “That was like following the brook to the parent lake”).
THURSDAY
Holmes is a devotee of the now forgotten Winwood Reade, African explorer and unsuccessful roman-à-clef novelist whose Martyrdom of Man Holmes so enthusiastically recommends to Watson as “one of the most remarkable ever penned.” Its bleak conclusion states, “But a season of mental anguish is at hand, and through this we must pass in order that our posterity may rise. The soul must be sacrificed; the hope in immortality must die.” Like Winwood Reade, and in spite of the apparent duplicities in his creations—Holmes and Watson, Holmes and Moriarty—Conan Doyle seems to have believed in an integral unified world. (In one of his science fiction stories, “When the World Screamed,” Professor Challenger proves that the planet is a single living animal by thrusting a gigantic needle deep into the earth, forcing it to scream.)
SUNDAY
Our neighbour, Mme M., tells us that the ghost of a certain mademoiselle haunts the Place de la Mairie, but that she has regrettably never seen her.
Holmes (unlike his creator) doesn’t believe in ghosts. Perhaps Conan Doyle’s faith in the supernatural doesn’t intrude in the world of Holmes because (in Conan Doyle’s mind) it did not need to show itself in order to prove its existence. Solid flesh and ghostly presence, paladin and criminal, good man and evil were for Conan Doyle part of the same indistinguishable mesh, so that (in spite of Watson’s scandalized bleatings) Holmes can burgle a safe or counterfeit a note, impersonate someone or lie to obtain the information he needs, and remain in the reader’s view wholly trustworthy and heroic. These acts are transgressions of manners more than morals, and Holmes is willing (the reader accepts this) to break the social code.
De Quincey: “For if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing: and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.”
Artificiality is of the essence. The vision of empire given through a clichéd description of the city—genteel London, London of the docks, London of the wicked foreigners—lends a fairy-tale quality to the Holmes saga. London or Baghdad, Holmes’s city (that London I looked for when I first came to England and of course never found) is perfectly fictional, the reflection of an unreal reality. It is the London over which Peter Pan flies off to Never-Never-Land, the London through which Dr. Jekyll seeks Mr. Hyde, the red-brick maze of Chesterton’s nightmares, the decadent London of Beardsley and Wilde.
Thaddeus Sholto’s Wildean apartment: “The richest and glossiest of curtains and tapestries draped the walls, looped back here and there to expose some richly mounted painting or Oriental vase. The carpet was of amber and black, so soft and so thick that the foot sank pleasantly into it, as into a bed of moss. Two great tiger-skins thrown athwart it increased the suggestion of Eastern luxury, as did a huge hookah which stood upon a mat in the corner. A lamp in the fashion of a silver dove was hung from an almost invisible golden wire in the centre of the room. As it burned it filled the air with a subtle and aromatic odour.”
In the October evening light, my garden looks outrageously artificial.
MONDAY
Dickens’s Mr. Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend rules Conan Doyle’s class-conscious world. What is unfamiliar is evil, and must be rejected because it isn’t English. It amuses me to read, in Naipaul’s Enigma of Arrival, how he wants us to believe that a West Indian living in southern England in the 1950s would not be the butt of racial prejudice. I remember meeting for the first time my daughter’s headmaster at her school in Kent, in the early nineties, and being greeted with a condescending “So you’re the foreigner!”
Holmes picks up the poisoned dart that has killed Thaddeus Sholto’s brother and hands it over to Watson. “Is that an English thorn?” asks Holmes. “No,” answers Watson (and the reader can hear his indignation at the suggestion), “it certainly is not.”
Watson’s own character was defined around 1650: “The true Heroick English Gentleman hath no Peer,” Sir Thomas Browne wrote in Christian Morals.
Note: According to Sir George Sitwell, “the first English gentleman” was a certain Robert Erdeswick of Stafford, who in 1413 had to declare his social position at a trial in
which he was accused of “housebreaking, wounding and incitement to murder.”
TUESDAY
The world seen from the vantage point of London: “The Hindu proper has long and thin feet,” says Holmes. “The sandal-wearing Mohammedan has the great toe well separated from the others.” Then he describes the inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, according to “the very latest authority” of a recently published gazetteer: “They are a fierce, morose, and intractable people, though capable of forming most devoted friendships when their confidence has once been gained. … They are naturally hideous, having large, misshapen heads, small, fierce eyes, and distorted features. Their feet and hands, however, are remarkably small. So intractable and fierce are they that all the efforts of the British officials have failed to win them over in any degree.”
Marco Denevi: “Recently expelled from paradise, Adam made a spectacular appearance among the animals. They all immediately recognized in him someone stronger than any creature in the sea or the sky or on earth. But while some, to free themselves of the obligation to seek their own sustenance, ran up to bow before him, others, proud of their freedom and their individuality, preferred to keep themselves apart. These latter ones Adam called the wild beasts.”
A Reading Diary Page 7