by Clark Blaise
It is not the presence of telegrams or railways that is striking—the technology of both were universal—but rather Holmes’s icy confidence in their deployment. When he observes to Watson, “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,” he was not doubting the 11:15 Paddington departure. He was attacking the complacent reliance on common sense, that lofty reluctance to engage the self-evident—in other words, the ancient enemy of rationality, the “natural.” Its well-regarded American cousin, horse sense, led to faith in the Old Farmer’s Almanac, and, even today, to “creation science” and advice from 900-numbers.
A Briton in 1887 could depend upon rail and telegraph networks not only because the world was unified under a single time, but also because Britain had been functioning under it nearly forty years longer than any other country. British legal, political, and commercial institutions, including Mr. Sherlock Holmes’s forensic methods, had evolved with standard time, the expectation of temporal coherence, embedded within them. Holmes is a model of clear thinking and rationality—but so was British society. Anarchic, chaotic America was still adjusting to its railroad standardization of 1883 and, along with the better-organized Germany, to the prime meridian agreements of 1884.
PROBABLY NO character in literature has been hijacked more often by more critics and polemicists than Sherlock Holmes. (I’m doing it myself.) Holmes the cocaine-taking rebel, Holmes the outsider, Holmes the voice of reason, Holmes the cryptographer, Holmes the last, best chance against international and intergalactic terrorists—Holmes is cocooned from change. The cases he solved were clever for their time, but hardly the source of his interest today. He remains the essential Englishman—any other nationality for him would be unthinkable—but the paradox he represents, minus some of his insufferable attitudes, has been adapted repeatedly and woven into the subtext of any number of American genre films—detective, western, even contemporary space dramas. Any hero who doesn’t get (or even want) the girl has a bit of Holmes in him. So does the incorruptible private eye of film noir, and the brave sheriff, the Lone Ranger, the computer, and the robot, even the android, blessed with every mental and physical power known to science but willing to surrender it all, including immortality, just to become more human. There’s a contemporary feel to Holmes; we can imagine him belonging here and now. New adventures are constantly being written for him, featuring new and worthier opponents; new actors play him, and he creeps closer to us all the time, fighting Nazis, fighting future villains. We want to keep him around, if only to crack his reserve. Maybe this time he’ll open up, find a woman worthy of him, a challenge big enough to engage his full humanity.
When I wrote earlier of time and aesthetics, I’d had no ready category for the quality Sherlock Holmes represents; he’s a category unto himself. Certainly he embodies the late-Victorian Zeitgeist; certainly his character suggests something of oracular timelessness. His salient quality is that of non-representation, he rides above time, even if a plethora of period details speak to the contrary. The truth is, Sherlock Holmes is literally timeless, without a time of his own, still out there, looking. More than a century after his first appearance, his appeal is undiminished and his attitudes seem to apply to more causes and to uphold more positions today than many of our contemporaries, let alone a figure from history. Is there another character from nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century literature with quite his vigor, quite his chameleon nature? Bartleby? Kurtz? Gregor Samsa? Leopold Bloom?
And yet—here’s the paradox—has there ever been a more unpleasant, a less attractive figure than Sherlock Holmes? Of all the heroes in all the literatures of the world, none quite has his singular lack of appeal. He is utterly lacking in humor, in charm, in social graces, and sexuality. He lacks a gentleman’s modesty, and apparently has suffered no inner struggle to achieve the particular pinnacle he occupies. Even his creator came to despise him.
THE PSYCHIC rumblings of locomotion hardly affected Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Trains and telegrams existed simply to shorten the hours or days between the commission of a crime and the commencement of an investigation. Crimes could only be solved rationally by reversing time, returning the crime scene to the moment of murder, the killer still present, the knife raised, the revolver pointing.
What is a clue, after all, but something out of place, or out of time, present where not expected, or absent when anticipated? Waste a moment, or let the doltish Inspector Lestrade (another holdover from the natural world) tramp over the evidence, let it rain, and the time-space continuum is broken, or even worse, is re-formed around the anomaly, and the clue (as clue) disappears. Holmes was in a hurry to get to the scene, even checking the evening trains in order to sneak in an interview with the prisoner, and still return for a late dinner. “I say, Holmes, what’s the rush?” asked his faithful companion. Indeed, Holmes might well have answered, a change in the pace of change, my dear Watson.
Reading Holmes after so many years, I am struck not so much by the free application of so much science, so much rationality, and so much agnosticism—those prime Victorian virtues—but by how far they are from the natural-world assumptions of an earlier practitioner of the same trade, “the father of the murder mystery,” Edgar Allan Poe. They write of the same mysteries, but from opposite sides of the standard-time divide. Poe’s investigative assumptions are more atmospheric than logical, procedural, or sequential. Criminals are, in noticeable ways, exogenous to humanity (even at times an ape), not, as Holmes assumed, hospitable tea drinkers just like us. In Poe, we are struck by the murderer’s freakishness, the pallor and nervousness, the trembling fingers. In terms of this book, it could be said that Poe’s “rational” consciousness, like Bartleby’s, was struggling to cope with the imaginative limits of a “natural” world.
Poe did produce one tale (regrettably, pale and didactic), “Three Sundays in a Week,” that directly discusses temporal confusion in a prestandardized world. Without an international date line, one circumnavigator of the world leaving London in an easterly direction “gains” a day in the completion of his journey. Another, going west, “loses” a day. When they return to London on a (London) Sunday, one sailor’s Monday registers in London as a Sunday, as does the other sailor’s Saturday. Thus, Poe earns his title, and one intrepid sailor wins a bet and gains the hand of a desirable woman. Three separate days are all Sunday or, conversely, one day is recorded as three, and all of it happened thirty years before Professor Dowd’s experience with the three separate clocks in the Buffalo train station.
A minor quirk of history reinforces the same point. When the United States purchased Alaska in prestandardized 1867, the Russian Orthodox inhabitants of that far eastern province found themselves suddenly having to observe the sabbath on the American Sunday, which was Monday by Moscow reckoning. In the end they were forced to petition the patriarch for guidance as to when to celebrate mass—the Russian Monday or the American Saturday.
HOLMES’S CERTAINTIES (“The murderer is a tall man, left-handed, limps with the right leg, wears thick-soled shooting-boots and a grey cloak, smokes Indian cigars, uses a cigar-holder, and carries a blunt pen-knife in his pocket”) are almost patriotic outbursts, as reassuring to his readers as Idylls of the King or Bell, Book and Candle. Conan Doyle was well aware of his society’s predilection to dream of vanished glories and to trust in celebrity saviors rather than confront social problems and undergo necessary reforms.
He also understood that Victorian rationality had been purchased at the price of suppressing its natural, darker urges. Accordingly, he created Professor Moriarty, a Victorian Darth Vader, the embittered, excluded twin of progress and enlightenment. Reason and progress had created a pool, of nearly equal depth and expanse, of rejection and reaction. Conan Doyle also understood a commercial truth: a super-sleuth must finally tangle with, or even perversely create, an opponent fully worthy of himself. The Victorian public, however, did not appreciate Doyle’s literary balancing act, nor did they accept the yin and yang of Victori
an popular culture obliterating themselves at the Reichenbach Falls. To his author’s great distress, Holmes was brought back by popular demand; Conan Doyle extracted his revenge by retiring him, eventually, to a life of perfectly sane, perfectly rational, perfectly predictable, beekeeping. In bees, and bee culture, he presumably found his reflection in the world.
Holmes and Moriarty’s mutual cancellation would be a closer rendering of the historical record. If Freud and Einstein, the ultimate rationalists, represent the spirit of Sherlock Holmes, then Moriarty is a creature of the clogged drain, that backup in the basement of reason. He represents the backside of science that would give us the twentieth century’s endless supply of monsters and the ideologies that back them up. Though devilishly clever (and himself the subject of innumerable updates), he is the twisted twin of agnostic rationality. Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, The Fundamentals, and Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity all appeared between 1900 and 1905. A hundred years later—and this would have astounded Victorian thinkers like Charles Kingsley, or the grand old apostle of science, Thomas H. Huxley—politicians, the media, and a divided citizenry are having to make greater accommodation for the fundamentalist agenda than for the work of Darwin and Victorian humanism. Faith in progress had suppressed only temporarily the progress of faith.
NEARLY HALF a century after the arrival of standard time in Britain, at Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, England’s supremacy, her wealth and confidence, and certainly the extent of her empire still seemed unchallenged. Her cultural and scientific achievements during those five decades are among the greatest ever recorded.
In the shadows of her monuments, however, stirred the subversive architects of Britain’s coming decline. The ancient, un-addressed evils of the class system collided with the modern imperatives of technological investment and educational opportunity. Never having experienced the hand of destruction, or even significant challenge, England’s institutions were still intact. She had not been forced to confront the extent of her un-preparedness. Predictions of collapse, from the likes of H. G. Wells, seemed excessive.
In the early part of the nineteenth century, Britain had invented most of the world’s technologies, primarily the steam locomotive and the telegraph, along with coal-based dyes and new forms of metal- and glass-working ovens. By the 1880s, however, she was importing German chemicals (the successors to dyes) and delicately calibrated machine tools from America. Britain lost control of the industries and the technologies that she’d created, and along with them, she lost control of her future. The “civilizing mission” of imperialism, so readily subscribed to earlier in the century, so inspiring to thousands of idealistic best and brightest colonial administrator-missionaries, had become a cynical exercise in trade and despotism, a holding action against rapacious exploiters like France, Belgium, Portugal, and Germany. Britain had been exporting her most energetic young men and women to the colonies and the United States (largely her marginalized Scots, Irish, and Welsh) for over a century, retaining a cadre of impeccably trained gentlemen to run its home offices, industries, and colonial outposts. The results were proving disastrous to Britain, and often to her colonies.
No wonder Holmes’s audience clung to his every word. He reembodied Britain’s self-image of no-nonsense authority. He was never kindly (that was the role of the good doctor), but he was always fair. So long as he represented his country’s rational supremacy to the world, society was spared from having to make unpopular and uncomfortable reforms. Even if the implications of his methods are authoritarian in the extreme, Sherlock Holmes is the touchstone of all that was good and decent in that quality universally recognized as English. (And when most needed, Dr. Watson is in attendance to supply a quick dose of humanity.)
“The Boscombe Valley Mystery” turns on a seemingly open-and-shut case of parricide in the west of England. A sure sign of the misreading of evidence is Lestrade’s assurance of the prisoner’s guilt. “Open-and-shut” refers more to the mind of the investigators than the strength of the case against their suspect. A young man will go to the gallows for his father’s murder unless exculpatory evidence can be unearthed (literally) by the celebrated London sleuth.
Holmes is urbanity personified, alien to the outdoors and slightly distressed by it. It’s that distance that allows him to read nature rationally. Watson records: “He drew out a lens and lay down upon his waterproof to have a better view, talking all the time rather to himself than to us.” Victorian forensics might not have had access to fingerprints and DNA, but it did have railways and telegraphs, and magnifying lenses to pick up fibers and cigar ash and traces of mud and bits of extraneous material whose presence (or absence) could speak volumes to a mind prepared to hear their stories. Holmes is the master of drawing out significant presence from apparently absent, or irrelevant, facts. And in the case of the Boscombe Valley murder, the unearthed evidence proves that there had been a lurking presence behind a tree before the son’s appearance, and that in times past the victim and the murderer had both lived, and feuded, in Australia. The simplest shred of evidence eventually unravels the world, and is that not the enduring appeal of Sherlock Holmes?
A SMALL CASE from the annals of Dr. John Watson, recounting his years with Holmes. Order and reason prevail, under the authority of a posteriori logic and inductive reasoning. Should a white shark have appeared on an English country road, Holmes would not have leapt to a Fleming-like conclusion. Or closer to the point, if a strange-looking skull had turned up in a local bog, near a village called Piltdown, he would have guarded his enthusiasm. He would stretch out in the mud, take out his glass, and declare that nothing is more deceptive than an obvious fact. He would have declared it a fraud, not the missing link.
12
Time, Morals, and Locomotion, 1889
Time travels differently when you’re on a train!
—Advertisement for Amtrak, 1999
WE THINK OF the closing of the frontier as a North American phenomenon, but Europe had an eastern frontier no less formidable than anything in the American West. In 1883, with “time in the air” and American railroads adopting standardization on the Sunday of Two Noons, selected members of the European press, mainly the society columnists, were assembled for the jaunt of a lifetime, the first run of the Paris-to-Constantinople Orient Express. (Regular service for civilians would not start for another five years.) The Balkan region was a minefield of outlaw activity, but the luxury train skittered across it as blandly as a luxury liner through a field of icebergs. The sheer audacity of the enterprise, bringing “the Orient” in touch with Paris, was a dream fulfilled, a link that had eluded Europeans, and their invaders, since the fall of the Roman Empire.
As we already know, however, European railway history did not favor the larger, slower, American cars. But suddenly, a part of Europe opened up that was strangely like North America: the Balkan region was extensive, rugged, and relatively underpopulated. Land was cheap, so there was no need to engineer the shortest and straightest route, which, given the mountainous terrain and its recalcitrant inhabitants, would have been prohibitively expensive. When a pair of return tickets between Paris and Istanbul cost the equivalent of a six months’ lease on a Mayfair house, and many of the passengers were bankers, arms dealers, casino habitués, and their consorts, so long as the champagne and caviar held out, what was the rush? American and European styles of speed and luxury, separate for fifty years, had merged. Europe now had American design and technology. They had adapted it, however, to a class system at perhaps its height of decay.
The Orient Express banished all notions of time and space. The languages of its staff changed with each new border crossing. Turkish effendi roamed the corridors, adept in every language, addressing the desires of every treasured passenger. The result of luxury wedded to speed on both continents was a new form of time reversal. Outside, it might be the wild prairie a thousand miles from civilization, or a Turkish-dominated Europe seething with rebellion, but
inside it was a Chicago saloon or a five-star Paris hotel. After 1881 in America, Pullman cars boasted electric lights (still a rarity in most homes), cold champagne, and WCs with flushing toilets. After 1887 on both continents, the cars were totally electrified. The air was seasonally adjusted and kept circulating. Travelers could move across the continents under the same, or superior, conditions than those at home, bringing only the more benign forms of nature indoors. Just about the only thing that had not been interiorized was time itself.
THE VANDERBILT of southeastern Europe, the major financier of eastward railway expansion, was one of those fabulous visionaries of the nineteenth century who casts a long shadow into the present era, the banker and philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch (or Moritz von Hirsch). One of de Hirsch’s undertakings of lasting significance to history was his scheme for Jewish resettlement, bringing entire shtetls from Russia and the Turkish provinces to the recently opened new lands in Saskatchewan, Argentina, and Brazil (opened as a result of universal railroad expansion). In bringing Western Europe to the East, and relieving intolerable conditions in the East with the freedom of the west, de Hirsch weighed profit against philanthropy much in the way of other mighty barons of industry, the Fords, Rockefellers, and Carnegies.
The baron was driven by a vision of continental unity even before the Russian and Turkish lands were thought of as being connected to Europe at all. He realized that railway expansion had to play the central role in any kind of unification. The negotiations between Turkey and Russia, France and England, Germany and Austria—as well as the attendant dangers posed by outlaws and revolutionaries across that tortured region—stretched on for twenty years, pushed and prodded by de Hirsch, with long recesses for wars and treaty negotiations.