A Reading Diary (9 page)

I first read the Sherlock Holmes stories in a rented summer house in Mar del Plata, on the Atlantic coast south of Buenos Aires, one book after another, unable to stop. I’m not certain what charmed me then; not the plots, since El Séptimo Círculo, the detective series edited by Borges and Bioy, offered far more intriguing puzzles and original solutions; not the words, which seemed to me far less enchanting than those of Stevenson or Kipling. Perhaps it was what Chesterton calls “the thread of irony which runs through all the solemn impossibilities of the narrative,” which he
thought turned the Holmes stories into “a really brilliant addition to the great literature of nonsense.” Perhaps it was the chilly yet reassuring presence of a place that was to become haunted by my daydreams.

For me, no German city (neither Döblin’s Berlin nor Thomas Mann’s Lübeck) ever had the reality of Conan Doyle’s London: the gaslit rooms in Baker Street, the evil winding streets, the genteel foggy squares. Years later I travelled to London, convinced that I would find that memorable geography. My first shilling-metered bed-sitter above a fish-and-chips shop disabused me.

I can’t remember my reaction to the discovery that Sherlock Holmes was a cocaine addict. The opening paragraph of
The Sign of Four
, describing the Master taking the bottle “from the corner of the mantelpiece” and the hypodermic syringe “from its neat morocco case,” and then, “with his long, white, nervous fingers” adjusting the “delicate needle” and rolling back “his left shirt-cuff” and finally thrusting “the sharp point home”—all this in the presence of Dr. Watson—gripped me without scandal. (I was far more scandalized by the intrusion of the demonic ghostly dog in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, for instance.) And yet later, in a far different London than the one I thought I loved, enjoying my first chemical hallucinations,
I remembered that scene above all. Holmes’s comment to Watson’s criticism—“I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendingly stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment”—rang true. Three more times I took LSD. Then I stopped, not for cautionary reasons but because I felt the experience would simply repeat itself, like watching the same film again, for the fourth time.

Graham Greene, on the opening paragraph of
The Sign of Four:
“What popular author today could so abruptly introduce his hero as a drug addict without protest from his public? It is only in one direction that we have become a permissive society.”

Tomorrow I leave for France.

I find it easy to read, difficult to write in trains.

This morning, outside the window of the train on my way home, a short, almost imperceptible snowstorm. In the Book of Common Prayer: “He giveth snow like wool.” And “A joyful and pleasant thing it is to be thankful.” I make a mental list of descriptions of snow in books I’ve read and think that, since there are so many, they would not coincide with those of another reader.

Holmes as tragic hero, feeling trapped in a stifling world, suffering from the pain of existence. Instances of
Weltschmerz
.

What is
The Sign of Four
about? The search for balance as a cure for ennui. Balance is, perhaps, the main theme of every detective story. Revenge (a form of balance). Cause and consequence (another). Justice (another).

P. D. James: “What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.”

Back home. The cat who has decided to take up residence here seems offended that I have left her that long, and walks away when I approach her. I leave the door of the library open to tempt her to come in.

Long ago I discovered a remarkable book by a certain Samuel Rosenberg,
Naked Is the Best Disguise
. Rosenberg worked as a literary consultant for major motion-picture studios, which hired him when they were sued for plagiarism. His job was “to analyze the embattled scripts, and
when the resemblances between ‘theirs’ and ‘ours’ were too close for comfort, I tried to get my employers off the litigious hook by searching for common literary ancestors of both properties.” Using the Holmes canon as his starting-point, Rosenberg manages to link Nietzsche, Melville, Mary Shelley, Boccaccio, Racine, Flaubert and many others to the Sherlockian saga. Rosenberg sees the character of Thaddeus Sholto, in
The Sign of Four
, as a parody or portrait of Oscar Wilde, including the Habsburg lip. (In 1889, Wilde and Conan Doyle met at a dinner given by the American representative of
Lippincott’s Magazine
. As a result, both men became contributors: Wilde with
The Picture of Dorian Gray
and Conan Doyle with Sholto’s adventure.)

Coincidences:

• Conan Doyle’s description of Thaddeus Sholto: “Nature had given him a pendulous lip, and a too visible line of yellow and irregular teeth, which he strove feebly to conceal by constantly passing his hand over the lower part of his face. In spite of his obtrusive baldness, he gave the impression of youth.”
  
• Hesketh Pearson’s description of Wilde: He “had thick, purple-tinged sensual lips, uneven discoloured teeth. … it was noticed that when talking he frequently put a bent finger over his mouth which showed that he was conscious of his unattractive teeth.”
  

Says Chesterton: “We have to consider not only what is improbable, but what is probable; and especially the coincidences that are overwhelmingly probable.”

Spent yesterday rearranging the detective fiction. We’ve put it up in the guest bedroom, now to be known as the Murder Room.

The Sign of Four:
The phrase as it appears in the story is “the sign of
the
four,” but only someone deaf to cadence would use it in a title, as Conan Doyle did in
Lippincott’s Magazine
in February 1890. Someone or something told him to drop the second “the” when the story was published in book form.

List of my favourite detective novels:

• Nicholas Blake,
  The Beast Must Die
  
• Reginald Hill,
  Bones & Silence
  
• Ruth Rendell,
  A Judgement in Stone
  
• Agatha Christie,
  The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
  
• John Dickson Carr,
  The Black Spectacles
  
• Marco Denevi,
  Rosaura a las diez
  
• Margaret Millar,
  How Like an Angel
  
• Fruttero & Lucentini:
  La Donna della domenica
  
• James Cain,
  Mildred Pierce
  
• Philip Kerr, A
  Philosophical Investigation
  
• Dorothy L. Sayers,
  Gaudy Night
  
• Leo Perutz,
  The Master of the Day of Judgment
  
• John Franklin Bardin,
  Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly
  
• Ellery Queen,
  The Tragedy of X
  
• Anthony Berkeley,
  Trial and Error
  
• Sebastien Japrisot,
  Compartiment tueurs
  
• James McClure,
  The Steam Pig
  
• Raymond Postgate,
  Verdict of Twelve
  
• Georges Simenon,
  Les fiançailles de Monsieur Hire
  
• Patrick Quentin,
  My Son the Murderer
  
• Chester Himes,
  Cotton Comes to Harlem
  

We hear this morning that our postwoman’s husband has committed suicide. It suddenly seems obscene to be entertained by brutal deaths in fiction.

At the end of Chapter 6, Holmes quotes (in German) a line from Goethe
(Faust
, I):
“Wir sind gewohnt dass die Menschen verhöhnen was sie nicht verstehen.”
(“We are accustomed that men will mock what they don’t understand.”) The detective story elicits the possibility of mockery but at the same time prohibits it; the reader is already converted to the faith, wants
not
to know, wants to be deceived in order to be better entertained.

Questions that in themselves delight: Why and how has this happened? Who is responsible? What plan lies behind this confusion of facts? The reader assumes the role of a detached Job, in which sentiment is a mere adornment or distraction. Aware of this, Holmes accuses Watson of introducing sentiment in his account of the puzzle: “You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.”

And yet, as one of the characters in the novel remarks,
The Sign of Four
“is a romance!” She sums it up: “An injured lady, half a million in treasure, a black cannibal, and a wooden-legged ruffian. They take the place of the conventional dragon or wicked earl. …”

To plot the adventures of his hero, Conan Doyle builds on the social conventions of his age. Since in the classic detective story nothing must seem unexpected except that which is deliberately put forward as unconventional, the adventures must follow society’s expected behaviour according to class, sex, etc. and implied responsibilities, codes of honour and such among “ladies and gentlemen” and what Holmes calls “people of that sort.” One shudders to read the condescending tone of the hero towards his “lesser” fellow human beings. Observing workers emerging from the dockyards after their day is over, Holmes commerits,
“Dirty-looking rascals, but I suppose every one has some little immortal spark concealed about him. You would not think it, to look at them.”

“A historian of the future will probably turn, not to blue books or statistics, but to detective stories if he wishes to study the manners of our age,” wrote C.H.B. Kitchin some forty years later.

Note: As an example of this reliance on social conventions, the message sent to Mary Morstan (the damsel in distress who is to become Watson’s wife): “Be at the third pillar from the left outside the Lyceum Theatre tonight at seven o’clock. If you are distrustful, bring two friends. You are a wronged woman, and shall have justice. Do not bring police. If you do, all will be in vain. Your unknown friend.” Even here, the note requires the happy coincidence of allowing for
two
friends (not just one) in order for both Holmes and Watson to be able to accompany the lady without breaking the code of honour. (Later Miss Morstan will have to give her word to the “unknown friend” that “neither of your companions is a police-officer.” As she is a lady, her word, of course, suffices.)

Tender scenes of male friendship in Conan Doyle’s staunchly macho world. Holmes to Watson: “Lie down
there on the sofa and see if I can put you to sleep.” He then takes up his violin from the corner, while Watson stretches himself out. “I have a vague remembrance,” Watson says, “of his gaunt limbs, his earnest face, and the rise and fall of his bow. Then I seemed to be floated peacefully away upon a soft sea of sound, until I found myself in dreamland, with the sweet face of Mary Morstan looking down upon me.”

That “sweet face of Mary Morstan” seems tagged on, as a precautionary afterthought.

Last Sunday, at the flea market in Chinon, I found a first edition of Boris Vian’s
L’écume des jours
.

It occurs to me that
L’écume des jours
depicts a French version of the Holmes-Watson relationship in the characters of Colin and his friend Chick. Holmes’s demand that there be no vagueness in the narrative is taken literally in this Surrealist fantasy. So if someone says,
“Poussez le feu”
(literally, “push the fire”), he can add
“et, sur l’espace ainsi gagné
 …” (“and, in the newly gained space …”); if someone is
“planté là”
(“rooted there”) he will indeed sprout roots.

Vian even lends exact words to Holmes’s
Weltschmerz:
“I spend my brightest hours darkening them because light bothers me.” Because of phrases like this one, I understand
why Cortázar told the poet Alejandra Pizarnik that, after finishing
L’écume des jours
, he felt too sad to leave his room.

I explore my library like someone returning to his native land after an absence of decades. Every time I leave on one of my book junkets, I have to chart its geography all over again, establish paths from shelf to shelf, remembering titles I have not thought about for weeks.

Like a man finding his bearings in a library, Holmes can trace his way through the labyrinth of London by reciting the names of the streets seen from a cab: “Wandsworth Road … Priory Road. Larkhall Lane. Stockwell Place. Robert Street. Coldharbour Lane.” And later, the districts through which he pursues his quarry: “Streatham, Brixton, Camberwell … Kennington Lane … The Oval … Bond Street and Miles Street … Knight’s Place.” A city reduced to the titles it contains.

Imaginary libraries:

• A library of books never written: Sherlock Holmes’s “small works,” such as “a curious little work upon the influence of a trade upon the form of the hand, with lithotypes of the hands of slaters, sailors, cork-cutters, compositors, weavers, and diamond polishers,” his
  monograph on the tracing of footsteps, and the celebrated
  Upon the Distinction between the Ashes of Various Tobaccos
  , illustrated with coloured plates.
  
• A library of real books read by imaginary characters: Holmes reads the German classics and, in order to support a Romantic view of the smallness of man in the universe, refers Watson to Jean Paul. Even more surprisingly, Watson replies that he has read him: “I worked back to him through Carlyle” (which elicits Holmes’s comment “That was like following the brook to the parent lake”).