Our Enduring Fascination with Sherlock Holmes

I was sitting around the other night, smoking cocaine and playing my violin and, finally, after those got boring, watching Benedict Cumberbatch portraying the great detective Sherlock Holmes on my computer. Few fictional characters have managed to exert such a hold on the public imagination as the eccentric detective. Well more than a century later, we have Holmes’s progeny running around all over the TV screen, descendants as different in their quirks as Monk and House, but who still share the monomaniacal desire to solve the puzzle of man, for “the proper study of man is man,” as Holmes himself says in A Study in Scarlet. From just before the turn of the 20th century until past the turn of the 21st the great Holmes has loomed large in the imagination. Why?

Great fictional characters are supposed to be both timeless and universal. Holmes has been translated into every language on earth, practically, and has been portrayed by everyone from Christopher Plummer to Basil Rathbone, even Robert Downey Jr., Holmes’s brother Mycroft has had his own movie (Mel Brooks’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’s Smarter Brother).

It is inarguable that the man with the deerstalker hat, pipe and magnifying glass has endured (even his customary accoutrements have displayed a staying power in the public imagination). So why has his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, been condemned to the status of second-rate writer, a scribbler of sensational tales, a genre writer, a boys’ adventure writer (a condemnation Jack London and Joseph Conrad get sometimes, too), someone who transformed the Victorian Penny Dreadful , which as literature was surely dreadful, into mass literature as literarily tasty as cotton candy, and about as nourishing?

And so, the two-headed question I ask in this piece—why has Holmes endured, and does Doyle deserve more credit for the creation of the famous detective? Indeed, if the reason he has endured is because Holmes is excellent literature, then Doyle does indeed deserve that credit.

Part of the backlash, I am sure, comes from the very fact of Holmes’s popularity. Stephen King has suffered from the same treatment—to a critical elite, anyone that popular can’t be good, which is a kind of oblique swipe at the average Joe, who would rather read a ripping good yarn than some postmodern meditation, or rather rumination, about the life of the mind, in a self-reflective stream of consciousness that contemplates literature more than it is literature.

Everyone loves plot, mystery, murder and puzzles, action, mayhem, intrigue, and danger. So why is it
seen as an over-indulgence to indulge in these things at all? Does real literature have to be character-driven and, for that matter, are not Holmes and Watson fully realized characters? They are not cardboard or two dimensional, not to me. And not to an adoring public. Holmes’s utter uniqueness, and Watson’s capable Everyman, are drawn vividly enough to have stayed popular down all the ladder of years.

Ironically, although Holmes is drawn with depth, it is his shallowness that is so fully depicted. As Watson says in A Study in Scarlet, Holmes has no knowledge of Philosophy, Literature, Astronomy or Politics (apparently the curriculum for a learned man in those days, a gentleman), but has an immense knowledge of sensational literature, Anatomy, chemistry, and knows “every detail of every horror perpetrated in this century.”

Watson exists as the Everyman, a good and capable and ordinary fellow, but one who is damaged by war and sickness and loneliness, and who sits by the proverbial fire with Holmes in their little outpost just beyond the community of man. Holmes can’t make himself part of that community, or does not care to, and Watson no longer knows how to.

And so we have our two heroes, each one perfectly suited to the other, down to the not inconsiderable detail that Watson plays Boswell to Holmes’s Johnson. We can be fascinated along with Watson at the sheer megalomania of the man, and long for Watson to achieve the real affection from him that Watson hopelessly yearns for (even after getting married, Watson is forever dropping by to see Holmes and getting happily tangled up in another case).

If Holmes were around today, he would be diagnosed as anti-social, or at least asocial, possibly as autistic, and Watson as having PTSD and depression. Holmes forms no other close ties than with Watson, and Watson tells the reader he has no one in London. When the plot is not thickening, when the game is not afoot, Watson morosely examines what he considers his failed life, and Holmes seeks solace in the violin and cocaine. It is the thrill of the hunt that brings these two disaffected souls back to life.


Doyle lived in a time of great upheaval. In his lifetime he witnessed industrialization and urbanization, the rise of modernism in the arts, jazz, the Great War, the criminalization of drugs and homosexuality, the rise of the Police Force, the Union Movement, the passage of Queen Victoria into history, the gradual destruction of the peerage’s control of England and, on the Continent, political violence and the explosion of printed material in the form of periodicals, newspapers and books.

It was an exciting but frightening time, and Doyle manages to play on people’s fears about change. Xenophobia, the city as a place filled with barbaric, godless foreigners, and also as a place of conmen and organized crime, prostitution, swarthy anarchists, grifters and hucksters and flim-flam men, pimps, opium dens and, most frightening of all, secret societies—all these are portrayed as great threats to the good old British Gentleman’s Code that had supposedly built the empire. Man was no longer connected to the land, he was a wage slave, women turned to prostitution to survive in the metropolis, no one’s word was good anymore, and the city was a place of anomie, of alienation, of danger and despair. Like Chandler’s Los Angeles, London is a night-time place even in the day, physically and morally polluted, and the danger is all the more frightening for lurking in that darkness.

The city is a place of deception, of disguise, of the excesses of civilization, of man as far away from the Garden as one could possibly get. It is no coincidence that Doyle has Holmes continually wearing disguises, for in the city there is always something malevolent lurking under a thin and cheap veneer of goodness.

And who is there to save us from all this, who will keep the Empire safe for patriots and gentlemen, but Sherlock Holmes? Holmes is, luckily for us, on the side of good, although that is not his motivation for solving crimes. It is ego and the need to solve puzzles that drives him. One shudders to think what Holmes would become had he turned his mind to crime, but we have our dear Watson to save us from that. He and Holmes are saved from themselves by one another, and they live a life of grim fairy tale adventure in the evil city, always equal to the Moriarty’s of the world, and we live vicariously through them and are glad to not be them.

If some of Doyle’s characters are less than fully realized, that can’t be said about the duo. And what author is above using stock characters? The storytelling power of the buddy tale is not lost on Doyle, either, as he follows in a lineage that includes King Arthur and Lancelot, Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, and many more.

If Doyle is heavy on plot, if his villains are one-dimensional, if he is sentimental, so what? Aristotle himself privileged plot over character, and Doyle knew that character was best revealed in action, through plot. And he knew both what scares us and thrills us (anyone who has ever ridden a rollercoaster knows how closely related these two things are). So what if his prose was purple? Someone said that the purpose of literature is to entertain and instruct. Well, Doyle goes heavy on the entertainment, and light on the educating. Again, so what? There is literature in a well-articulated vision, in the skillful rendering of the famous friendship, in the believable eccentricity of Holmes. If the plots are somewhat outlandish, if Holmes deductions are far-fetched and fanciful, I don’t mind. If Middlemarch and Proust are heavy literary nourishment, weighty and serious, some of what is called literature is just self-important and starchy, not real sustenance. While Holmes is lighter fare, it has an appeal and an art all its own, and Doyle, in creating timeless characters we still love, is a genuine literary talent.

Mike Welch

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes and the Memoirs of Mike Welch

And the Return of Mike Welch...

Robert Knightly

---

I have just finished reading three of the four novels that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about Sherlock Holmes: A STUDY IN SCARLET, THE SIGN OF THE FOUR, and THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES. I’m halfway through THE VALLEY OF FEAR, and would like to finish it before I write this, but I can’t because I have to be done before my writing class tomorrow, and I am getting sleepy.

Anyway, reading the three and one-half novels has created two major impressions in me. One is that the real hero of the novels is Watson, in that he, through his devotion, provides a heart, and gives a heart for and to his friend Holmes. The real hero is certainly not deductive logic (a kind of old and ugly fellow who does not look too dashing in a deerstalker hat). I mean, who remembers how Holmes gets to the bottom of all these tangled cases? I don’t. I lose the thread usually before I am halfway through, and anyway, I kind of think deduction, what Holmes calls looking at effects and thinking backwards towards causes, has got severe limitations on it. I mean, causes can have many effects, and therefore (am I reasoning deductively here?) effects can have many causes. How does Holmes always know his backward reasoning is correct? Isn’t he just taking a stab in the dark, looking at evidence, at building blocks of a structure he calls a solution, and constructing a building in only one of many ways it could be built?

I don’t know, but without Watson, we have the 17th Century Enlightenment figure of Holmes with no Romantic relief, no yin for yang, so to speak. And Watson certainly is a romantic (he is always falling in love with some beautiful woman that comes calling on Holmes for help, and he certainly loves Holmes), and it is he, after all, who tells the stories. And they are romances, adventures, ripping good yarns (saving the Empire from rogues and rascals with a gentleman’s code of honor, with a little of Kipling’s White Man’s burden thrown in, along with a pro-capital stance so partial that the hero of “FEAR” is a Pinkerton), to be sure. And thank goodness Watson tells them! I mean, how stirring would Holmes’s description of the dreaded Hound be compared to that of Watson’s? Or the gloom on the Moor, or the city of London itself—diseased, miasmic, debauched: “the great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained,” a city which threw “monster tentacles” into the surrounding suburbs.

And so Watson, stalwart (and less bumbling than as betrayed by Nigel Bruce in the series of 1940s British movies I remember watching on WOR, WPIX, and PBS on rainy Saturday afternoons as a kid) and loyal, gives us the romantic portrayal of the adventures.

Now, my memoir, the story of my depression, partakes of both Holmes and Watson. It certainly is a romance, or at least is concerned more with the heart than the brain, but telling it has required me to examine evidence and construct a theory or story of my experience.

And I have been ever aware that what I have deduced from the evidence of my life, the journey I have taken from effects back to (supposed) causes, the story I have told, is a tentative one at best. And others, I am sure, would tell the story differently. My parents, for example. The title of my mother’s story about my life would be: CHRONICLE OF A SELFISH SINNER. My Dad is a bit more verbose, and would have one of those Eighteenth Century titles like Defoe’s (which could take up a whole page and, for some reason, have a lot of semi-colons): Lessons from the Life of a Loser; That life being the callow and craven one of my very own son; Blood of my blood; The supreme disappointment of my life; Which disappointment (among other things) hath led me to the brink of despair.

Anyway, thinking this stuff through is giving me a headache. I am sure a good big bowl of tobacco, some cocaine and a little violin music would help get these rusty synapses firing, but I don’t have access to any of those, so bear with me.

I have an intuition I need to talk about the unconscious. Indeed, it occurs to me that intuition emerges to our waking selves through the unconscious (an intuition I just had about intuition). The unconscious, that place the noir tough guy detective must go to crack the case, is the place where his love for the femme fatale is clouding his vision, unable to see the culprit although she stands right before him (with lipsticked lips [and legs?] slightly parted). It’s her, you idiot, I want to yell, but I know I would be an idiot for a dame like that, too.

Holmes does not trust intuition, pays no heed to the unconscious, relies solely on his sanctified scientific method. It’s the same thing a lot of memoirists do, or tell themselves they are doing—just objectively telling the story (just the facts, m’am, we don’t need a god-damned editorial). Holmes says more than once that he mistrusts women, and if intuition is a female trait (it may not be, but it is instructive that in Holmes’s time most people thought it was) then the ultra-masculine analytical Holmes is no fan of it either.

What I am getting at is this (here’s the cause and effect of my reasoning, the dialectical syntheses of it all, my Holmesian criticism of Holmes himself): If there is always more than one theory that fits the evidence, especially the evidence of personality, and the unconscious exists, then we are biased to look for the evidence that satisfies our hidden desires, or avoids our hidden fears. It would behoove Holmes to give the unconscious some credit, to plumb its depths in himself and his criminals (of course, this may be hard to do with Aspergers). Perhaps as the result of an unconscious fear he has of them, he has a blind spot about women (they are simply creatures not to be trusted, amoral, but predictable like your pet cat who would probably eat you if you died alone with her in the house). Holmes could be seriously overmatched by a female super-fiend, but he never confronts one, because Doyle won’t, or can’t.

And it is my hypothesis that the memoirist also ignores the unconscious, at great risk. It is this kind of neglect that allows the bully to write themselves as a victim and for the victim to write themselves as never having collaborated with their tormentors; allows the grandiose to portray themselves as modest (see Mein Kampf and the autobiography of Arnold Schwarznegger); allows the supposed sinner to make a lurid and sinful display of his or her sinfulness.

Of course, at the base of my theory is a kind of optimism, a belief in the kinds of final solutions Homes is so fond of, a belief that we can plumb the depths of ourselves, to go into the basement where all those gibbering, capering mad things are, and bring them to heel, outwit the archfiend Moriarty in ourselves, once and for all find the thing out. And then have the guts to write about it.

Something of Doyle’s own unconscious is on display for all to see in these stories, I think. He has a need to apologize for the Empire, I think, and does it by creating a world where you are either a gentleman or a blackguard; a Christian or a heathen; an upright thrifty and cheerful capitalist who can tie a double Windsor and owns, never rents, his tux, or a bomb-throwing swarthy anarchist; a boy scout or a pedophile (I know, I see the irony there, believe me).

And still the stories thrill me, I must admit. I know they can be a bit juvenile in their plotting, and the characterizations of the good guys and the villains can be simplistic, and yet I come back to them, to the nighttime world of the “cesspool that is London” to see if Holmes can catch his man, with the help of dear Watson, who, after all, is also trying to catch his. And me, mine.

© 2014 Mike Welch

The Sherlock Birthday Party: Pictures

Here are some photos from the Sherlock Holmes party I described in my post of the week before last.

Himself

Preparing the clues: Diana Dander, Sarah Sahara, and Farmer Fred.

Detective team led by Sherlock puzzling over clues.

Lots of crime tape for decorations.

Africa! The game's afoot!

Many of the kids said it was the "best party they had ever been to!"

Robin Hathaway

Knowing Thyself at Nine

My grandson, Luke, was nine last month. His mother asked him what theme he would like for his birthday party. He quickly said, “Sherlock Holmes.” (I like to think I had some influence there.)

“Fine,” said his mother, and promptly found him a pipe and a magnifying glass. But I provided the topper. I remembered a Deerstalker hat from some long ago Halloween, and after a brief search I found it on the floor of a closet. A bit dusty and moth-eaten but I brushed it off and sent it to Virginia via priority mail.

According to my sources, Luke put the hat on his head the minute it arrived and wore it until bedtime. When his mother insisted he take it off until the next day, Luke said, “It fits me perfectly.”

At that point, his father came in the room and said, “I thought it was a little big.”

“No, no. I don’t mean the size! I mean my personality.”

Robin Hathaway