"Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!"

In anticipation of Pierre Bayard's Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (2008), I spent today reading Conan Doyle's most famous long-form Holmes tale. On opening the novel, I quickly realized that I'd not even looked at it since childhood, when I devoured a poorly illustrated (and quite possibly abridged) edition; all these years later, the very word "moor" still strikes me as sinister.

This time, however, I turned to The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (2006), the beautifully produced and thoroughly wonderful complete edition of Holmes that W. W. Norton published a couple of years ago, about which I've written a bit before.

While I find editor Leslie Klinger's notes, which range from simple explanations of terms and period detail to more abstruse theorizing that draws on the best of Sherlockian scholarship, to be a sheer joy, rocketlass can't quite bear them. When I'm reading Holmes aloud on a car trip, and I start to read her a note like this one--

In "The Railways of Dartmoor in the Days of Sherlock Holmes," B. J. D. Walsh concludes that Watson and company would have taken either the 10:30 or the 10:35 to Exeter, arriving at 2:28 P.M., where they would have had to change for the Coombe Tracey (which Walsh identifies with Bovey Tracey) on the Moretonhampstead branch. Although there was a slower train at 11:45, only by taking the 10:30 or the 10:35 could they have had the chance of obtaining lunch at Exeter.

--rather than admiring the confluence of two areas of intense, nerdy devotion (railroads and Holmes stories), she simply rolls her eyes and asks me to move on.

Sometimes, however, I can't resist. I read The Hound by myself, but I flagged the following note to share, which I'm confident will amuse her. When Watson discovers Holmes's spartan hiding place on the moor, he notes that Holmes

had contrived, with that cat-like love of personal cleanliness which was one of his characteristics, that his chin should be as smooth and his linen as perfect as if he were in Baker Street.

To which Klinger appends the following note, retailing a theory that, though it may be common currency among Sherlockians, surely leaves the more casual fan a bit gobsmacked:

Noting the absence of shaving gear, C. Alan Bradley and William A. S. Sarjeant point to this as one of the strongest pieces of evidence for their thesis that Holmes was a woman. But Wason never mentions a Sherlockian beard, and Ron Miller, in "Will the Real Sherlock Holmes Please Stand Up?," suggests that his jaw was hairless, revealing American Indian ancestry.

Since Klinger has used the term already, I can't help but suggest that, if Holmes is a woman pretending to be a man, his Sherlockian beard would surely be the fascinatrix Irene Adler?

Klinger's notes also do good work in situating each Holmes story in relation to the others, both in a purely Sherlockian sense--where do they fit in the Canon--and in a more general sense, tracking themes, word choices, and images. Klinger even draws, to good effect, from Conan Doyle's non-Holmes work, as in the following passage from Rodney Stone (1896), which Klinger uses to illustrate the dissolute public life of Regency England. In a scene that, were it just a tad more ridiculous, could come from Wodehouse, the title character's uncle explains why he gave up duelling

"A painful incident happened the last time that I was out, and it sickened me of it."

"You killed your man--?"

"No, no, sire, it was worse than that. I had a coat that Weston has never equalled. To say that it fitted me is not to express it. It was me--like the hide on a horse. I've had sixty from him since, but he could never approach it. The sit of the collar brought tears into my eyes, sir, when first I saw it; and as to the waist--

"But the duel, Tegellis!" cried the Prince.

"Well, sir, I wore it at the duel, like the thoughtless fool that I was. It was Major Hunter, of the Guards, with whom I had had a little tacuasserie, because I hinted that he should not come into Brookes's smelling of the stables. I fired first, and missed. He fired, and I shrieked in despair. 'He's hit! A surgeon! A surgeon!' they cried. 'A tailor! A tailor!' said I, for there was a double hole through the tails of my masterpiece. No, it was past all repair. You may laugh, sir, but I'll never see the like of it again."

Having certain poorly suppressed dandyish tendencies myself, I can fully sympathize with the poor man. A wound will heal, but a ruined coat is lost forever.

"I think we should go on living," or, From Compton-Burnett to Conan Doyle

I'm returning briefly to Ivy Compton-Burnett's Manservant and Maidservant (1937) tonight both because I feel it would be wrong to give up before I've convinced each of you to slip one of her novels into the stocking of your favorite witty cynic and because I can't resist sharing the following scene. Set in the schoolroom of the novel's isolated rural family, it tells of the arrival of the long-suffering children's first tutor, Gideon. In the children's grilling of him, Compton-Burnett's dialogue hews closer to realism than usual--perhaps because children tend more towards cruel bluntness than adults do--but it's no less funny or cutting for that.

"You are rather old for a tutor," said Marcus, "I thought they were generally young."

"Some young men begin by being tutors, and pass on to something else."

"Then you are a failure?" said Tamasin.

"I think I should be called one. I paid too much attention to my studies when I was young, and that does lead to people's being tutors."

"How old are you?" said Marcus

"I am forty-one."

"Oh, quite a young man," said Tamasin.

"Does your wife think you are a failure?" said Marcus.

"I am not married. I live with my mother and sister. If they think so, they do not betray it. Women are so loyal."

"What do you do with the money you earn?" said Jasper. "If you have no wife, you can't have children, and you don't seem as if you spend very much on yourself."

"Part of it I subscribe to the family expenses, and part to a fund that is to give me an income when I am old."

"Your hair is gray now," said Marcus.

"Yes, but that is premature. It merely gives me a personality."

The scene is also unusual in that it develops along more typically comedic lines than most of Compton-Burnett's scenes: there are no surprise interruptions from a character who's not even been announced as entering the room, no unexpectedly murderous asides, not even a sense that the participants are scrapping for points. Given the freedom that comes from the natural inquisitiveness of children confronted with a new tutor, Compton-Burnett runs with it.

One technique that does tie Compton-Burnett to other English satire is her employment of negative constructions as a way of both softening and improving a joke. Born, presumably, of a real usage reflecting British reticence, the negative construction--"not entirely unexpected," "not particularly," "not without its charms," and the like--works as a way of tiptoeing up to a barb; it focuses the attention, and, in the case of a skilled satirist, reveals unexpected degrees of denial and diffidence. It is the stiff upper lip incarnate. Anthony Powell was a master of negative constructions, as was Evelyn Waugh, who employs it simply but to good effect in this line about the dictatorship of Neutralia in "Scott-King's Modern Europe":

"[They were] led to the reception hall which with its pews and thrones had somewhat the air of a court of law and was in fact not infrequently used for condemning aspiring politicians to exile on one or the other of the inhospitable islands that lay off the coast of the country.

But I've yet to encounter a writer whose employment of negative constructions is more effective than Compton-Burnett's. The following lines describing the role of a village shopkeeper, Miss Buchanan, as a receiving station for clandestine letters capture the understated effectiveness of the technique:

On this secondary traffic Miss Buchanan turned an equivocal eye, that did not add to the ease, already not complete, of those who availed themselves of it.

At its best, the negative construction works sort of like a hand brought to the mouth to hide the scurrilous details we're being told; its pretense to authorial reluctance make the bulk of the satire, expressed in positive, straightforward terms, seem even more viciously pointed.

And viciousness is unavoidable in Compton-Burnett; life in her novels is richly red in tooth and claw. Late in Manservant and Maidservant, two of the boys, on seeing their father headed for a bridge they know to be dangerously faulty, willfully neglect to issue a warning to him. After he passes, they reflect on their failing:

"We are worse than we have ever been. We are not meant to kill people, whatever the reason. We might meet him in a future state, and know that he knew about it. It would be what is called poetic justice."

"That would not be for a long time."

"It might be soon. Some people would die of remorse."

"I think we should go on living," said Jasper.

That scene came to mind the other day when I was reading Michael Dirda's appreciation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes in his Classics for Pleasure (2007). Dirda describes a feeling I've written about before, the sense of returning home that one gets every time one slips into the familiar world of a Holmes story:

[W]e discover a quiet refuge from our crowded lives as we glance again around the familiar flat with its chemical retorts, blazing fire, the bullet holes in the wall forming the initials V. R. Outside the fog rolls in and the rain beats down, but Mrs. Hudson is even now bringing up a cheering supper. Soon, there will be a knock on the door and a distressed gentlewoman will enter, or a puzzled policeman or a disguised nobleman, and the next grand adventure will begin. As Vincent Starrett observed: "they still live for all that love them well: in a romantic chamber of the heart, in a nostalgic country of the mind, where it is always 1895."

In Compton-Burnett's novels, it is always the early Edwardian era, a few years into the new century at best, and as I read Dirda's description, I began to picture Compton-Burnett's country houses, and the spite and viciousness they contain, as the flip side of Holmes's rationality: these are the locations, the people, the crimes, the competing hatreds and passions, that Holmes is called on to put to rights.

Conan Doyle provides us with answers and comforts us; Compton-Burnett provides us with unruly darkness and distaste. Perhaps an appreciation of both is a sign of emotional health?

Elementary, my dear Vladimir

When Stacey and I travel by car, we read Sherlock Holmes aloud during the drive. One story on the way there, and one on the way back. When packing, I sometimes wonder whether it's worth lugging the large hardcover of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes rather than a more manageable paperback. It's the same stories, after all, and since you can't really enjoy the illustrations while driving, all you gain are the notes, written from a Sherlockian perspective--the Sherlockians being the branch of fans that treats the Holmes stories as history rather than fiction. Today I was reminded why it's always worth the extra weight.

The reminder took the form of an editorial note near the end of "The Speckled Band." (If you've not read the story and would like to avoid learning about its solution, you should immediately go somewhere else--perhaps here--instead of continuing to read). One of the most popular Sherlock Holmes stories, "The Speckled Band" is also one that has over the years generated some questions among Sherlockians about its solution, in no small part because of some minor questions about the details of the case. (How could the adder live in the safe if there were not ventilation holes? Why would the Doctor whistle to recall the snake when it hadn't had time to perform its murderous duty? etc.) The note rounding up all these alternative theories--note #44 for this story--convinced me that this edition is worth lugging to the ends of the earth; even if you're not a Holmes fan, you might find it worth your time to read through to the end.

44There are some revisionist theories respecting "The Speckled Band." Several argue that Helen Stoner murdered Julius and Dr. Roylott, and probably her mother as well. Vivian Darkbloom, in the self-described "somewhat revisionist" essay "Holmes Is Where the Heart Is, or Tooth-Tooth, Tooties," suggests that Holmes murdered Dr. Roylott, to clear the way for an illicit liaison with Helen Stoner. Roylott's behaviour, the essay contends, was not that of a murderer, but of a man attempting to scare off a suitor. The essay appeared in the December 1976 issue of the Sherlockian journal Baker Street Miscellanea, and the editors reported that "the anagramatically pseudonymous Vivian Darkbloom has not seen fit to furnish us with any personal data, and consdering the scandalously icononclastic thrust of her principal thesis, we are not surprised. The author appears to be California-based, also engaged in medical studies, and a student of the works of Vladimir Nabokov as well as John H. Watson's . . . " A character named "Vivian Darkbloom" appeared in Stanley Kubrick's 1961 film adaptation of Nabokov's Lolita, for which Vladimir Nabokov wrote the screenplay, and in "Vladimir Nabokov: In Tribute to Sherlock Holmes," Andrew Page analyses references and images in Nabokov's Lolita,The Defense, Pnin, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Despair, and Pale Fire that demonstrate the author's familiarity with and affection for the Canon.

Now, perhaps more serious fans of Nabokov than I already knew about this revisionist theory--and, granted, it's not even certain that the article is by Nabokov--but I didn't know about it, and it made my day. Of course Nabokov is a Holmes fan, and of course he would have enjoyed sitting around thinking up alternate solutions to Holmes's cases!



His solution to this particular case is, you'll note, insane.

[Correction, 11/28/07, 12:10 AM: Ed at the Dizzies notes, quite sensibly,

I don't think it's VN's handiwork—I don't think he'd be so obvious as to offer that "Vivian Darkbloom"—an anagram he's dropped into several of his novels—was a fan of Nabokov...i.e., of himself!

That seems likely. Even the title of the article seems a bit too blunt an instrument for Nabokov. I think my critical sense was overwhelmed by my joy at immediately recognizing the Vivian Darkbloom anagram--that, and my fervent desire to imagine Nabokov scribbling out articles for Sherlockian publications under pseudonyms! A Holmes fan can dream, can he not?]

Elementary, my dear Wilson

To follow yesterday's post about crime novels that are all far more about the people involved in the crime than about the solution to the mystery, I'll turn to a pair of pieces about standard detective stories. First, there's interwar puzzle novelist Anthony Berkeley musing on the popularity--and future--of the genre in "Why Do I Write Detective Stories?", collected in The Avenging Chance:

The reason why detective stories are so popular is simple enough. They are, after all, only a glorified puzzle; and everyone enjoys a puzzle. To read a detective story as it should be read is really a test of intelligence; in fact one might say that whereas the ordinary novel appeals only to the emotions, the detective story appeals to the intellect, which surely should be the more important. . . . How long can the detective story expect to maintain its present popularity? Always, I think, provided that it moves with the times. This is, so long as those who write them will recognize that the convention of yesterday will not suit the requirements of tomorrow. In other words, the days of pure puzzle story, without living characters, an interesting setting, or some kind of resemblance to real life are over. Already, without sacrificing the puzzle element, authors are paying more attention to character and atmosphere. Already the detective story is becoming altogether more sophisticated.

Berkeley's clockwork puzzle stories would seem exactly the sort that would irk Edmund Wilson, who in a late 1944 article called "Why Do People Read Detective Novels?" argued--with reference specifically to Agatha Christie--that

You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out; and you cannot become interested in the characters, for they never can be allowed an existence of their own even in a flat two dimensions but have always to be contrived so that they can seem either reliable or sinister, depending on which quarter, at the moment, is to be baited for the reader's suspicion.

The dozens of dissenting letters he received about that article led to the wonderfully titled follow-up "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" Wilson gave no ground to the mystery lovers in that piece, saving the sharpest sting for near the end:

[M]y final conclusion is that the reading of detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles.

Ah, but maybe Wilson was not so immune as he thought. Mere weeks later, he was admitting that,

I have myself become addicted, in spells, to reading myself to sleep with Sherlock Holmes.

Though he tries to argue that Conan Doyle's stories are different from typical detective stories, closer to fairy tales than puzzles, that seems like nothing more than an ex post facto justification for the pleasure he derives from the Holmes tales. It's that sort of half-admission of enthusiastic fallibility, turning up occasionally in Wilson's writings, that humanizes him for me, transforming him from a distant statue of expansive critical acumen into an actual person, experiencing and thinking about literature as he encounters it.

Wilson will thus be a silent passenger later today in the car, as Stacey and I continue our traveling tradition of reading Sherlock Holmes aloud. I believe that "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" is up next. May your Thanksgiving contain at least as much satisfyingly solvable mystery as that.

Now, you cannot ask a man to meet a ghost, because ghosts are not to be counted on.

{Robert Boursnel, "Self-Portrait with Spirits" (1902)}

From a 1958 lecture, "Experience and Fiction," by Shirley Jackson

I have always been interested in witchcraft and superstition, but have never had much traffic with ghosts, so I began asking people everywhere what they thought about such things, and I began to find out that there was one common factor--most people have never seen a ghost, and never want or expect to, but almost everyone will admit that sometimes they have a sneaking feeling that they just possibly could meet a ghost if they weren't careful--if they were to turn a corner too suddenly, perhaps, or open their eyes too soon when they wake up at night, or go into a dark room without hesitating first.

Shakespeare's ghosts have distracted me for a few days from my efforts to convince every single one of you to go to your nearest used bookseller and buy a copy of D. J. Enright's The Oxford Book of the Supernatural, from which I've taken Shirley Jackson's dead-on assessment of shaky skeptics. I've also drawn today's headline from the book; it appears in Oliver St John Gogarty's As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1936) in a description of a haunted evening with the Yeatses, during which Yeats, unflappable, makes the following 2 a.m. demands of a ghost:

1. You must desist from frightening the children in their early sleep.
2. You must cease to moan about the chimneys.
3. You must walk the house no more.
4. You must not move furniture or horrify those who sleep near by.
5. You must name yourself to me.

That doesn't leave a ghost much scope for activity. I suppose he could blow on Yeats's tea and make it cool extra-quickly.

Though Yeats may be the poet best-known for trafficking with spirits, he's not alone by any means. John Donne appears in Enright's collection via a story of a dark vision featured in Izaak Walton's early biography. Having made a trip to Europe despite his (yet again) pregnant wife's "divining soul bod[ing] her some ill in his absence," Donne is found by his patron Sir Robert,

in such ecstasy, and so altered as to his looks, as amazed Sir Robert to behold him; insomuch that he earnestly desired Mr Donne to declare what had befallen him in the short time of his absence. To which Mr Donne was not able to make a present answer: but, after a long and perplexed pause, did at last say, "I have seen a dreadful vision since I last saw you: I have seen my dear wife pass twice by me through this room, with her hair hanging about her shoulders, and a dead child in her arms this I have seen since I saw you." To which Sir Robert replied, "Sure, sir, you have slept since last I saw you." To which Mr. Donne's reply was, " I cannot be surer that I now live, than that I have not slept since I saw you: and I am as sure, that at her second appearing she stopped, and looked me in the face, and vanished."

The vision proves at least partially true: Donne soon learns that the child was stillborn and his wife, though alive, is very ill.

Then there is the poet who is a ghost, as Enright presents Harold Owen recounting in the third volume of his memoir, Journey from Obscurity (1965). On a naval ship during World War I, he enters his cabin to find his brother Wilfred--who should have been at the Western Front--sitting in Harold's chair:

I felt shock run through me with appalling force and with it I could feel the blood draining away from limbs stiff and slow to respond. I did not rush towards him but walked jerkily into the cabin--all limbs stiff and slow to respond. I did not sit down but looking at him I spoke quietly: "Wilfred, how did you get here?" He did not rise and I saw that he was involuntarily immobile, but his eyes which had never left mine were alive with the familiar look of trying to make me understand; when I spoke his whole face broke into his sweetest and most endearing dark smile. I felt no fear--I had not when I first drew my door curtain and saw him there; only exquisite mental pleasure at thus beholding him. All I was conscious of was a sensation of enormous shock and profound astonishment that he should be here in my cabin. . . . . I loved having him there: I could not, and did not want to try to understand how he had got there. I was content to accept him, that he was here with me was sufficient. . . . I must have turned my eyes away from him; when I looked back my cabin chair was empty. . . .

I felt the blood run slowly back to my face and looseness into my limbs and with these and overpowering sense of emptiness and loss. . . . Suddenly I felt terribly tired and moving to my bunk I lay down; instantly I went into a deep oblivious sleep. When I woke up I knew with absolute certainty that Wilfred was dead.

From now on, any time I read about World War I and the swathe it cut through a whole generation I'll remember the sense of deep, ultimately frustrated longing in that passage; whatever hopes or fears in Harold Owen generated that vision, they are of a piece with those that drove the postwar efforts by Conan Doyle and others to search out a spirit world that might reveal some trace of their lost loved ones. So many millions of young men were gone, and the desire on this side of the veil for any contact at all was so powerful that the bereaved of World War I would surely have agreed with this passage that Enright quotes from Margaret Oliphant's A Belaguered City (1879):

Why should it be a matter of wonder that the dead should come back? The wonder is that they do not. Ah! that is the wonder. How one can go away who loves you, and never return, nor speak, nor send any message--that is the miracle: not that the heavens should bend down and the gates of Paradise roll back, and those who have left us return. All my life it has been a marvel to me how they could be kept away.

For as often as we hear stories of ghosts who need something from us, in fact it is we who need them--need them not to forget, not to stop caring for us. It's no wonder that such a strong desire sometimes generates a response, whatever questions we might harbor about its reality.

Notes on such disparate topics as small towns, murder, Dougie Baseball, and predestination

It's a catch-up, notes sort of day.

1. Something I didn't mention when writing about Richard Powers's The Echo Maker (2006) Saturday is how well he captures the mix of hopelessness and comfort that composes life in a small town. Now, the Nebraska town in which he sets his story isn't nearly as small as the town I grew up in, but I recognize the similarities: for some people--especially for anyone wishing to escape pernicious family ties or unsavory aspects of personal history--the gravitational pull of such towns can be astonishing, drawing back even those who've thought themselves long escaped, and crushing those who never reached orbit in the first place. Yet others--smart, capable, interesting people--are able to find complete happiness there, taking real comfort in knowing and being known. A line could be drawn from Hawthorne (if not earlier) through Thomas Wolfe to many a present-day author, in which small towns are depicted as hopeless cesspools of gossip and stunted personalities. The reality is far more complicated, with plenty of goodness, liveliness, and open thought leavening the insularity; Powers gets the combination just right.

2. A similarly strong sense of place pervades Russell Hill's Robbie's Wife (2007), a novel from Hard Case Crime about an American screenwriter who, stymied in both writing and life, flies off to rural England to attempt to get himself and his work going again. He winds up staying at a farmhouse in rural Cornwall owned by a Shakespeare-quoting sheep farmer, Robbie, and his wife and son. I suppose it's not a spoiler if I tell you that in a crime novel named Robbie's Wife--which features the following lines on its cover:

"Come on, Jack Stone, dance with me again," she said. The jukebox was playing another Sinatra song.

"Go ahead, Jack," Robbie said. "Warm her up for me."

I think that, at that moment, I could have killed him.

--the visiting screenwriter does in fact kill Robbie for his wife? And that things go downhill from there? The how and the consequences, of course, are the reason to keep reading, but along the way author Russell Hill draws some memorable characters and strikingly evokes the sheep-dotted Cornish countryside, from its down-at-heel bars to its slashing, chilly rains to its opportunistic tinkers. If there's not quite the full examination of guilt that I might have expected, the plot twists more than make up for it--and if guilt and compulsion are what I'm looking for, there's always some Dostoevsky on the shelf, isn't there?

3. Speaking of plotting, the newest book from Hard Case Crime, Gil Brewer's The Vengeful Virgin (1958), which I read today in the hours that I didn't spend watching a snowy Opening Day at Wrigley Field, is tightly plotted throughout. It's a flawless crime novel, starting with a simple story--take an old man dying of a respiratory ailment, his hot young stepdaughter, and a television repairman, stir--and adding plenty of unexpected complications. I was reading in the rocking chair in the front room, and as the final plot twist unfolded, I actually stopped cold in my rocking--the equivalent of gasping with my rocker--unable to pay attention to anything but the book. Now that's good crime writing.

4. The Vengeful Virgin features a scene wherein characters have sex on an absurdly large pile of money, something that happens also in Scott Smith's A Simple Plan (1993), another novel that gets small-town life just right. The narrator and his wife are doing all right in their rural midwestern town until, by sheer accident, they see their chance at escape. One simple decision, easily reversed, leads to another, irreversible, and Smith sets his contraption of a novel in motion. Along the way, he ratchets up the opressive small-town claustrophobia--it's yet another goad to his characters, another indicator that, as they commit bad act after bad act, the doors behind them are now slammed shut, while the doors ahead are not ones that any right-thinking person would ever contemplate opening. Though Smith's view of causality, and even destiny, can seem mechanistic, both here and in his follow-up, The Ruins, A Simple Plan, is, like The Vengeful Virgin, not a book you can easily put down once you've started it.

5. Returning to baseball: Sam Walker's Fantasyland (2006), which I wrote about briefly a few weeks ago, is exactly the sort of fun that I look for in a season-opening baseball book. It tells the story of Walker's finagling his way into the nation's toughest fantasy baseball league, then spending a summer doing nothing but trying to win it. He hires two assistants and makes shameless use of his sportswriting connections in an attempt to get inside dirt on players' health, attitudes, and prospects. The best parts of the book are when he talks to actual players about their roles on his team. At one point, he accidentally upsets Jacque Jones by letting on that he doesn't think Jones is all that good a player; at another, he makes Jones's day by giving him a t-shirt and a Player-of-the Month trophy. But my favorite scene in the book is this exchange with then-Twins first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz:

Most players, when I tell them they're on my Rotisserie team, respond with a nod or a smirk or something diplomatic like "cool." But after listening to my standard spiel, Mientkiewicz says something unusual.

"Sorry to hear that."

I laugh, assuming it's a joke. It's not.

"I tell everybody the same thing when they say I'm on their fantasy team," he says. "I'm like, 'Well, you're an idiot.' There are so many guys I'd take over me."
. . . . .
"I'm going through a stretch right now where I look out from the plate, and I see a big glove," he tells me. "Unless I hit it over the fence, it seems like everyone's catching it." Still, he says, he's sixty points ahead of where he was this time last year when he finished at .300, "so let's not panic."

A this I dig through my notes and pull out something I never intended to show him: a list of possible Mientkiewicz trades that I've been kicking around. In general, the idea of asking a professional athlete to help you expunge him from your fantasy roster seems like a good way to get smacked in the head. But for some reason I get the feeling Mientkiewicz is the exception.

I hand him the list.

"What do you think," I ask, tentatively.

"If you want power, Jody Gerut's a good one, he's going to hit twenty homers," Mientkiewicz says, scanning the list. "Jose Cruz is going to hit, too, not for average but a lot of pop. Lawton's having a great year, too, as long as he stays healthy."

When he's finished, I hand him a jersey.

"Team T-shirts? All right!"

As I turn to go, Mientkiewicz returns to his Gatorade spittoon but not before shouting out some parting advice. "Hopefully you'll get me traded sooner rather than later."

Up to that point, I'd never been a Mientkiewicz fan, but how can I not be one now? Go, Dougie Baseball!

6. Finally, appropos of nothing, two bits from Penelope Fitzgerald's biography of her father and his brothers, The Knox Brothers (2000). Fitzgerald's father, Edmund Knox, was a longtime editor of Punch, while his brother Dillwyn was a classicist and codebreaker who figured out the German's Enigma machine and his brothers Wilfred and Ronald were, respectively, prominent Anglican and Catholic clergymen. Her joint biography of the four is a wonderful, loving portrait of lives and times, a celebration of both particular people and of a deeply intellectual and questing way of life that seems, at this remove, to have been surprisingly common in the Edwardian era.

I thought I'd share two parts that stood out for me. The first is a limerick written by Ronald, later to be a Catholic priest, when he was young:

There was a young man who sad: "Damn!"
I have suddenly found that I am
A creature that moves
On predestinate grooves,
Not a bus, as one hoped, but a tram.

According to Fitzgerald, Ronald, a railfan as a boy, "used to say later that he supposed he must have written this, but regretted the implied betrayal of the Birmingham tram system."

And then there's a story about Arthur Conan Doyle that I think you Holmes fans might enjoy. The boys, when young, developed

a keenly critical spirit, [and] they detected a number of inaccuracies, even downright contradictions, in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and sent a list of them to Conan Doyle in an envelope with four dried orange pips, in allusion to the threatening letter in The Sign of Four.

Conan Doyle, to their dismay, did not respond. But years later, after Ronald published Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes (1911), which began the Sherlockian study of the Holmes stories, he did write:

I cannot help writing to tell you of the amusement--and also the amazement with which I read you article on Sherlock Holmes. That anyone should spend such pains on such material was what surprised me. Certainly you know a great deal more about it than I do, for the stories have been written in a disconnected (and careless) way, without referring back to what had gone before. I am only pleased that you have not found more discrepancies, especially as to dates. Of course as you seem to have observed, Holmes changed entirely as the stories went on. In the first one, the "Study in Scarlet," he was a mere calculating machine, but I had to make him more of an educated human being as I went on with him. He never shows heart save in the play--which one of your learned commentators condemned truly as a false note.

One point which has not been remarked by the learned Sauwosch . . . is that in a considerable proportion of the stories--I daresay a quarter--no legal crime has been committed at all. Another point--one of the few in which I feel satisfaction but which I have never seen mentioned--is that Watson never for one instant as chorus and chronicler transcends his own limitations. Never once does a flash of wit or wisdom come from him. All is remorselessly eliminated so that he may be Watson.

On days when insight seems far or fleeting, perhaps it would be good to remember that even Watson, artificially stunted as he was, got to enjoy going along with Holmes on his investigations. There are certainly worse ways one could spend one's days.

Isaac Asimov

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a little about re-reading and the ways that books can strike you differently each time you open them. That seems particularly true for books you first read as a child. The combination of inexperience and susceptibility to new ideas can make even a mediocre book seem fresh and exciting, and a truly good one can seem world-changing.

Knowing that, I put off for a long time re-reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. When I read it as a teenager, I thought it was the best thing I’d ever read. I pressed it on my friend Ryan, who, if I remember correctly, agreed. It was thoughtful and smart and exciting, the product of a mind so ambitious that he needed to stretch the story over millennia.

But as the years went by, I started to wonder. Was it really that good? Could Asimov possibly have made such a silly concept as “psychohistory”—the prediction of the future from sociological and psychological premises about the behavior of large masses of people—even remotely plausible? Was Asimov actually a good writer? I suspected that I might find Foundation wanting, which is part of why I waited nearly twenty years to read a Foundation book again. And, sad to say, my older self was right. Each question gets answered with a pretty resounding “no.”

The first problem that makes itself evident with Foundation is that it is abruptly episodic, more a set of short stories than a novel, each story concerning a crisis about to strike the Foundation, a think tank engineered by late genius Hari Seldon to replace the failing Galactic Empire. More than a hundred years ago, Seldon through the science of psychohistory foresaw these crises—and in his planning he used each successive crisis, which he predicted would become so acute that only one solution would be possible, to nudge the Foundation closer to the future he imagined for it. Hours after each crisis, a sealed vault reveals a hologram image of Seldon, congratulating the members of the Foundation on making it through the crisis—but offering them no hints of the ones to come, for foreknowledge would ruin the predictions of psychohistory.

As you can see, this is all fairly preposterous. Which would be fine, if Foundation offered other charms. But between the pedestrian prose, the constantly changing cast necessitated by the lengthy timespan of the narrative, and the fact that the smart-mouthed, iconoclastic, and insightful heroes are more or less interchangeable—each, I suspect, bearing a more than passing resemblance to Asimov’s own image of himself—there’s little here to make me willing to put up with the pseudo-science or the idea of a purportedly heroic (but actually creepily god-like) all-knowing super-scientist watching from beyond the grave as his puppets act out his secret plans.

Foundation might have at least been somewhat rewarding if the solutions to any of the crises had been foreseeable, if there’d been any point in trying to guess what the best course of action might be. But instead, the solutions, though obvious (even inescapable) to the heroes, appear to the reader to come out of nowhere—and in the non-Asimovian universe seem unlikely to actually work. Trying to play along with Asimov’s plotting in Foundation is a bit like reading a set of Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, but ones with impossible-to-discern solutions and where the generally inoffensive Brown has been replaced by an arrogant, self-absorbed know-it-all who is astonished at your lack of perception. Or like sitting in on a lecture by the least forthcoming scholar ever, one who simultaneously proclaims that he’s the only person to have ever studied this topic and makes fun of you for not knowing the answers already. It’s the heart of Asimov: he’s smarter than you, just like he’s smarter than everyone—deal with it.

When I discussed Foundation with my friend Bob on Sunday, he pointed out that Asimov’s mysteries share that tone, too—and, looking back, I think his Robot stories are probably the same way. Which actually may have brought me back to thinking of a way that I could still enjoy Asimov. I mentioned to my coworker John how disappointed I’d been in this re-reading, and he said he’d felt the same way when he read Conan Doyle as an adult. Now, I’m a Conan Doyle fan, but I do see that some of my complaints about Asimov could be applied to the Holmes stories. Holmes, after all, is exceedingly arrogant, and the mysteries are almost always unsolvable without the benefit of Holmes’s esoteric knowledge—and even then, the solutions aren’t necessarily as clear-cut as Holmes presents them. They’re not, after all, elementary; you can’t really play along at home.

But with Holmes that’s not a problem for me and Stacey, because the solution of the mystery isn’t where the fun lies. For us, the joy of Conan Doyle comes in Holmes’s very arrogance and absurdly overdrawn personality—it’s in knowing that every story will allow Holmes to be himself, in full, unfettered and unapologetic glory, and that we’ll get to ride along, like Watson. We spend the stories marveling simultaneously at Holmes and at the creator willing and able to unleash him. It’s a different joy than what comes from being caught up in the reality of a story, but it can still be a real pleasure.

Asimov has no recurring character anywhere near as much fun as Holmes—but Asimov himself is a far more powerful and inescapable presence in his books than Conan Doyle is in his. So maybe it’s possible for me to enjoy Asimov that way: less for his creations themselves than for the overpowering sense of their creator lurking behind them. That’s the way, after all, that Bob and I have always enjoyed Asimov’s laughter-slaughtering Treasury of Humor, from which we’ve derived far, far more fun by using it as a way of thinking about Asimov, the arrogant and self-regarding, than anyone could ever have gleaned from its truly dreadful jokes.

Maybe I’ll have to go ahead and re-read Second Foundation after all. But not, I suppose, until some crisis forces my hand. Asimov has surely predicted no less.

Conan Doyle, Holmes, and copyright

Learning today from Google's front page that it was Conan Doyle's birthday reminded me to post these few, limited thoughts on copyright.

Mitch Cullin is lucky that he was able to work with a character from long ago, before recent changes to U.S. copyright law extended copyright almost indefinitely. No one could seriously dispute that Holmes is a deeply embedded element of our culture, but it's only the result of good timing that he's not recent enough to be fully protected by copyright law and thus unavailable to someone like Cullin, who is far more interested in what Holmes can bring him as a character than what Holmes can bring him as a property.

Yet, due to what I clearly see as congressional malfeasance (through kowtowing to the intellectual property lobby) other, similar characters will, under current law, more or less never become available for later creators to appropriate. Mickey Mouse, for all his . . . boringness . . . could possibly inspire artists working outside the aegis of Disney. But he won't be available. Odysseus, sure. Holden Caulfield, no. Is there sense in that, once Salinger's dead? The Supreme Court has more or less said that current law, though constitutional, is dumb. The U.S. Constitution provides Congress the power to:

promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

I'll be very surprised if anyone can mount a credible argument that copyright lasting well beyond the creator's lifetime is a real inducement to the progress of Science and useful Arts.

Though I know arguments can be adduced in favor of heirs sharing in the bounty created by their ancestors, and for creators having control over their properties, I'm far more easily swayed by the argument that we all, having as a society lavished more than a hundred years of attention on Holmes and Watson, have at least as much claim on them as a long-dead Conan Doyle. They have, regardlesss of Conan Doyle's wishes, become a common property; the fact that only the happenstance of copyright law enables us to use them is of no matter. Luke Skywalker should, within my lifetime, be equally available, though there's almost no chance he will be.

That said, this has pushed me to think more seriously about something I've long meant to do. As soon as I can figure out how to manage it within Blogspot—or as soon as I can figure out how to move this blog to a more congenial site—I'll begin producing this site under a Creative Commmons license. The decision is one of principle, not of effect; after all, no one is clamoring to reproduce my posts. But I agree fundamentally with what Lawrence Lessig and his compatriots are pushing with Creative Commonns, so I should join them. Soon I will.

Sherlock Holmes

I’ve written before about the joy that Stacey and I take from Sherlock Holmes stories, which we read aloud to each other on road trips. Holmes and Watson are the perfect company for such trips, reliable and unchanging. Holmes will always be a bit showy and arrogant, sometimes downright rude, unwilling to bother with the niceties and incidental politeness of human interaction. Watson will be astonished and a bit slow, but loyal, brave, and more human than his calculating friend.

Mitch Cullin’s astonishing novel A Slight Trick of the Mind takes a real Holmes as its central character. Without ever betraying the Holmes we know, Cullin transforms him utterly, leaving us with a man much more interesting, complex, and sympathetic. It is 1947, and Holmes is 93 years old and living in retirement in rural Sussex, having outlived the small circle of people he cared about. He remains famous, due to Watson’s still-popular stories (and embellishments) of their cases, some of which make him uncomfortable through their reminders him of his youthful arrogance. Nowadays, his life is much quieter. He walks in his garden, supported by two canes, tends bees, and makes notes for a new edition of his textbook on detection.

Yet he knows his faculties are beginning to go, and, given that for Holmes, his knowledge has been his person, the realization that loss is inevitable suffuses him—and the book—with melancholy. He puts an unscientific, vain faith in the health-giving properties of a byproduct of honeybees, royal jelly (which echoes Conan Doyle’s embrace of spiritualism late in life), and he keeps thinking, analyzing, and working. But the thoughts are sometimes fugitive:

Once settled in his chair, he stared intently at the handwritten pages covering the desktop, each filled with a multitude of hastily conceived words, inked characters like a child’s scrawl, but just then the strands of his memory began unwinding, leaving him unsure of what those pages might actually pertain to. Soon the receding threads floated away, disappearing into the night like leaves whisked from the gutters, and for a spell, he remained staring at the pages, while not questioning or recalling or thinking anything.

He is old, and for the first time, he has become unsure. An unsure Holmes should be jarring; it is a testament to Cullin’s skill that, instead, Holmes, his doubts, and the melancholy they bring become utterly real. Loss pervades the book—through a trip to Japan, ruminations on beekeeping, and a rudimentary but satisfying recounting of an earlier case—and as Cullin visits and revisits images, ideas, and themes, we are left with a full and surprising portrait of someone we thought we already knew, someone who still notices every little detail but is no longer sure about the larger picture they add up to.

I have little patience for people who would use theory to reduce culture to an impersonal outgrowth of material or cultural conditions, and books like this one are a primary reason. Why did Cullin bring together the strands of thought that he’s chosen? Why Holmes? Why a trip to Hiroshima? Why beekeeping? Why lost fathers, questioning sons? Once Cullin hit upon the idea of a Holmes faced with the crippling loss of the very facts and logic that have enabled him to come to terms with the world, how and why did those other elements become part of the story? The choices are strikingly individual, but they cohere magnificently, the parts weaving into a whole that feels utterly organic, ultimately seeming less like a set of choices than a complete vision, fully realized. It serves as a reminder that art, even when taking up and reusing elements already present in the culture, is a deeply individual undertaking—yet if it’s successful, it communicates powerfully to others.

I fear that the presence of Holmes in A Slight Trick of the Mind will forever condemn this book to a lesser status, somewhere well above fanfiction, but well below that of literature. It deserves far better. Cullin is an extremely good and thoughtful writer, fashioning occasional sentences of epigrammatic precision, like this one:

In that moment, he doubted if there could be any mental state more relentlessly cruel than the desiring of real meaning from circumstances that lacked useful or definitive answers.

And the elegiac tone of the book, assisted by the restrained, descriptive, and patient prose, creates a true melancholy, far more penetrating and believable than the somewhat affected meanderings of W. G. Sebald, for example. Throughout my life, I’ll keep reading Conan Doyle’s stories of Holmes, but I will never be able to forget the Holmes that Cullin has shown me.

Elementary

From Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" (1891), collected in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes

"And 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 penknife in his pocket. There are several other indications, but these may be enough to aid us in our search."

If you've ever read any Holmes stories, you didn't even need me to identify the quotation. No other fictional creation could be so rapid, certain, and detailed, while at the same time suggesting that what he's revealed is only the tip of the iceberg.

"We have got to the deductions and the inferences," said Lestrade, winking at me. "I find it hard enough to tackle facts, Holmes, without flying away after theories and fancies."

"You are right," said Holmes demurely; "you do find it hard to tackle the facts."

Stacey and I have been reading Holmes stories aloud to each other on car trips for seven or eight years now. We don't read one on every trip—too often on winter trips we're leaving work right before sundown—but we've gotten through a fair number. We were reading from three or four Oxford World's Classics editions, but on the publication a year or so ago of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, we decided to start over at the beginning. We've therefore still got a lot of unread stories ahead of us.

Holmes stories are just about perfect for reading aloud in the car. (My coworker Carrie said she had recently suggested to her husband that they read aloud from Macbeth, but that's of necessity a two-person, home-based activity—too many parts to keep track of with a lone voice. And too much blood for a rental car.) The plots clip along, the dialogue is just stilted enough that one person can read each character's dialogue with reasonable conviction, and Holmes's arrogance rears its charming head often enough that the reading doesn't get monotonous, broken as it is by astonished laughter from reader and listener.

And there seem to be just enough stories, too. Just enough stories that, in fifty, sixty, seventy years of marriage, we could run through them again and again—but not so often that they get repetitive. The plots will become more familiar, but we're really reading for Holmes and Watson, and they, like a good marriage itself, should only become more comfortable—and comforting—with repetition. Watson's wife could be speaking to us all when she argues, in response to his worries that he might be too busy to travel on a case with Holmes:

"You have been looking a little pale lately. I think the change would do you good, and you are always so interested in Mr. Sherlock Holmes's cases."

A writer's purpose

From Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave (1951)

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having drawn the conclusion, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked! Writers always hope that their next book is going to be their best, and will not acknowledge that they are prevented by their present way of life from ever creating anything different.

Every excursion into journalism, broadcasting, propaganda and writing for the films, however grandiose, will be doomed to disappointment. To put our best into these is another folly, since thereby we condemn good ideas as well as bad to oblivion. It is in the nature of such work not to last, and it should never be undertaken . Writers engrossed in any literary task which is not an assault on perfection are their own dupes and, unless these self-flatterers are content to dismiss such activity as their contribution to the war effort, they might as well be peeling potatoes.

From Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” (1891), collected in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes

He had stood behind that tree during the interview between the father and son. He had even smoked there. I found the ash of a cigar, which my special knowledge of tobacco ashes enabled me to pronounce as an Indian cigar. I have, as you know, devoted some attention to this, and written a little monograph on the ashes of 140 different varieties of pipe, cigar, and cigarette tobacco.

From Herman Melville’s "Bartleby the Scrivener" (1853), collected in The Piazza Tales

At first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should have been quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically.

. . . .

[Several days later] I noticed that Bartleby did nothing but stand at his window in his dead-wall revery. Upon asking him why he did not write, he said that he had decided upon doing no more writing.

“Why, how now? what next?” exclaimed I, “do no more writing?”

“No more.”

“And what is the reason?”

“Do you not see the reason for yourself?” he indifferently replied.

From Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave (1951)

The goal of every culture is to decay through overcivilization; the factors of decadence, luxury, skepticism, weariness, and superstition,—are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

. . . .

Yet to live in a decadence need not make us despair. It is but one technical problem the more which a writer has to solve.

Note 40, by editor Leslie S. Klinger, to Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” (1891), collected in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes

Holmes first mentioned his monograph, without disclosing the actual title, in A Study in Scarlet. He refers to it again in The Sign of Four, giving the full title of his monograph as “Upon the Distinction between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos: An Enumeration of 140 Forms of Cigar, Cigarette, and Pipe Tobacco, with Coloured Plates Illustrating the Difference in the Ash,” and remarks that Francois le Villard of the French detective service was translating the work into his native language.

Self-regard

Last night, Stacey and I attended a reading at the Newberry Library by Julian Barnes. Barnes, who was promoting his new novel, Arthur and George, which is about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, began his presentation by saying, "I approached this evening with some trepidation, and that trepidation has greatly increased now that I understand there are likely to be Doyle fans, or even Sherlockians, in the audience."

Right after Barnes said "Doyle fans," a man sitting two seats down from us raised one finger in a humble gesture of self-recognition and said, "Expert."