A Reading Diary (10 page)

Holmes is a devotee of the now forgotten Winwood Reade, African explorer and unsuccessful
roman-à-clef
novelist whose
Martyrdom of Man
Holmes so enthusiastically recommends to Watson as “one of the most remarkable ever penned.” Its bleak conclusion states, “But a season of mental anguish is at hand, and through this we must pass in order that our posterity may rise. The soul must be sacrificed; the hope in immortality must die.” Like Winwood Reade, and in spite of the apparent duplicities in his creations—Holmes and Watson, Holmes and Moriarty—Conan Doyle seems to have believed in an integral unified world. (In one of his science fiction stories, “When the World Screamed,” Professor Challenger proves that the planet is
a single living animal by thrusting a gigantic needle deep into the earth, forcing it to scream.)

Our neighbour, Mme M., tells us that the ghost of a certain mademoiselle haunts the Place de la Mairie, but that she has regrettably never seen her.

Holmes (unlike his creator) doesn’t believe in ghosts. Perhaps Conan Doyle’s faith in the supernatural doesn’t intrude in the world of Holmes because (in Conan Doyle’s mind) it did not need to show itself in order to prove its existence. Solid flesh and ghostly presence, paladin and criminal, good man and evil were for Conan Doyle part of the same indistinguishable mesh, so that (in spite of Watson’s scandalized bleatings) Holmes can burgle a safe or counterfeit a note, impersonate someone or lie to obtain the information he needs, and remain in the reader’s view wholly trustworthy and heroic. These acts are transgressions of manners more than morals, and Holmes is willing (the reader accepts this) to break the social code.

De Quincey: “For if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing: and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.”

Artificiality is of the essence. The vision of empire given through a clichéd description of the city—genteel London, London of the docks, London of the wicked foreigners—lends a fairy-tale quality to the Holmes saga. London or Baghdad, Holmes’s city (that London I looked for when I first came to England and of course never found) is perfectly fictional, the reflection of an unreal reality. It is the London over which Peter Pan flies off to Never-Never-Land, the London through which Dr. Jekyll seeks Mr. Hyde, the red-brick maze of Chesterton’s nightmares, the decadent London of Beardsley and Wilde.

Thaddeus Sholto’s Wildean apartment: “The richest and glossiest of curtains and tapestries draped the walls, looped back here and there to expose some richly mounted painting or Oriental vase. The carpet was of amber and black, so soft and so thick that the foot sank pleasantly into it, as into a bed of moss. Two great tiger-skins thrown athwart it increased the suggestion of Eastern luxury, as did a huge hookah which stood upon a mat in the corner. A lamp in the fashion of a silver dove was hung from an almost invisible golden wire in the centre of the room. As it burned it filled the air with a subtle and aromatic odour.”

In the October evening light, my garden looks outrageously artificial.

Dickens’s Mr. Podsnap in
Our Mutual Friend
rules Conan Doyle’s class-conscious world. What is unfamiliar is evil, and must be rejected because it isn’t English. It amuses me to read, in Naipaul’s
Enigma of Arrival
, how he wants us to believe that a West Indian living in southern England in the 1950s would not be the butt of racial prejudice. I remember meeting for the first time my daughter’s headmaster at her school in Kent, in the early nineties, and being greeted with a condescending “So you’re the foreigner!”

Holmes picks up the poisoned dart that has killed Thaddeus Sholto’s brother and hands it over to Watson. “Is that an English thorn?” asks Holmes. “No,” answers Watson (and the reader can hear his indignation at the suggestion), “it certainly is not.”

Watson’s own character was defined around 1650: “The true Heroick English Gentleman hath no Peer,” Sir Thomas Browne wrote in
Christian Morals
.

Note: According to Sir George Sitwell, “the first English gentleman” was a certain Robert Erdeswick of Stafford, who in 1413 had to declare his social position at a trial in which he was accused of “housebreaking, wounding and incitement to murder.”

The world seen from the vantage point of London: “The Hindu proper has long and thin feet,” says Holmes. “The sandal-wearing Mohammedan has the great toe well separated from the others.” Then he describes the inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, according to “the very latest authority” of a recently published gazetteer: “They are a fierce, morose, and intractable people, though capable of forming most devoted friendships when their confidence has once been gained. … They are naturally hideous, having large, misshapen heads, small, fierce eyes, and distorted features. Their feet and hands, however, are remarkably small. So intractable and fierce are they that all the efforts of the British officials have failed to win them over in any degree.”

Marco Denevi: “Recently expelled from paradise, Adam made a spectacular appearance among the animals. They all immediately recognized in him someone stronger than any creature in the sea or the sky or on earth. But while some, to free themselves of the obligation to seek their own sustenance, ran up to bow before him, others, proud of their freedom and their individuality, preferred to keep themselves apart. These latter ones Adam called
the wild beasts.”

Point of view: When Watson is reflecting on the mysterious murder and looks back at Miss Morstan’s house, it isn’t
only the thought of the woman he loves that consoles him. “It was soothing,” he writes, “to catch even that passing glimpse of a tranquil English home in the midst of the wild, dark business which had absorbed us.” The adjectives are significant.

I’m astonished by the ease with which British xenophobia of the late nineteenth century slips into a particularly nasty anti-Semitism in the twentieth. By the ease with which the Jewish caricature is introduced into the plot of the detective novels of the golden age: Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Dorothy L. Sayers, E. C. R. Lorac. … Even after Hitler, there seems to be, in the British imagination, a fixed caricature of the Jew, often damned with ludicrous praise, as in Anthony Berkeley’s
The Silk Stocking Murders
. The detective is an English gentleman, Roger Sheringham; his assistant, the murdered woman’s sister, Anne; the murderer (revealed in the last pages, of course) is a suave, rich, refined Jew called Pleydell. After meeting him, Anne comments, “I’ve never met a Jew I liked so much before.”

“The real pure-blooded Jew,” Roger tells her, “is one of the best fellows in the world. It’s the hybrid Jew, the Russian and Polish and German variety, that’s let the race down so badly.”

This is England, 1928.

The wind last night broke a branch of one of the sophora trees, the one that is practically hollow. Nothing serious. C. wonders how a hollow tree can still keep on living, sprouting new leaves every year.

I return to this notion of balance. The foreigner (like the criminal) destroys the agreed-upon equilibrium. The world must be restored to a clear-cut vocabulary of white and black. There can be no ambiguity in the detective novel, at least not in the “classic” detective novel. Browning’s lines,

Graham Greene said that the Browning quotation could stand as an epigraph to any of his books. In
The Power and the Glory
he wrote, “When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity. … That was a quality God’s image carried with it … when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the
mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of the imagination.”

Kierkegaard: “Most people really believe that the Christian commandments (e.g., to love one’s neighbour as oneself) are intentionally a little too severe—like putting the clock ahead half an hour to make sure of not being late in the morning.”

Thick, heavy rain. Impossible to see halfway down the garden. I have to imagine what is there: the back wall with the fig tree and the vines, the small cherry orchard (can an orchard contain only four trees?), the large drooping pines, the quartet of white birches where the hedgehogs like to hide.

Doyle quotes Goethe again at the end of the book (the lines are from
Xenian
, which Goethe wrote with Schiller in 1796):
“Schade dass die Natur nur einen Mensch aus dir schuf,/ Denn zum würdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff.”
(“Unfortunately Nature made only one man out of you,/ Although there was material for both a good man and a scoundrel.”)

A variation on the theme of the double: the sleuth as criminal. Numerous detective novels (since Israel Zangwill’s
The
Big Bow Mystery
of 1892) play on this conceit. Perfectly appropriate to describe the balance in Holmes’s double nature (perhaps not far from Wilde’s Dorian Gray), these words spoken by Watson: “So swift, silent, and furtive were his movements, like those of a trained bloodhound picking out a scent, that I could not but think what a terrible criminal he would have made had he turned his energy and sagacity against the law instead of exerting them in its defence.”

Watson marries Miss Morstan. He tells Holmes that “Miss Morstan has done me the honour to accept me as a husband in prospective.” (To which the inveterate bachelor Holmes replies, “I really cannot congratulate you.”) Watson’s romance has always made me uncomfortable—as a child, because I squirmed when I had to witness adult displays of sexual affection; now, because I find the relationship so utterly unbelievable. Maybe that is the reason for the learned confusion regarding Watson’s wedded life in the Doyle canon (whether Watson married Miss Morstan secretly before the events narrated in
The Sign of Four
, whether she died in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” whether Watson married again in “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier” and, if he did, who the second Mrs. Watson was).

The rain has stopped. For several weeks now I’ve followed a certain routine: working on one book in the morning, on another in the afternoon. This is easier now that the days are getting colder. Two different voices or tones: the first tries to be coherent and follows the thread of a narrative or argument; the second (this diary) is fragmented, haphazard. The second allows me to think without an established destination.

The reader contradicts the writer’s method, whatever that may be. As a reader, I’ll follow a carefully plotted story carelessly, allowing myself to be distracted by details and aleatory thoughts; on the other hand, I’ll read a fragmentary work (Valéry, for instance, or Pío Baroja) as if I were connecting the dots, in search of order. In both cases, however, I look for (or imagine) a link between beginning and end, as if all reading were, in its very nature, circular. Maybe Joyce intuited this quality of reading when he decided to lock in the chaos of
Finnegans Wake. The Sign of Four
ends as it begins: with Holmes reaching for the cocaine bottle.

On the door to my library I’ve written a variation on the motto of Rabelais’s Abbey of Thelême:
“LYS CE QUE VOUDRA”
(“Read what you will”).

Back in Canada.

I’m in Calgary for a short visit, to attend a conference at the Banff Centre for the Arts. The city seems to have extended itself in the past few years, allotment after identical allotment, an unstoppable growth, a horrible imitation of the American Midwestern model made up of crowded monstrosities with no urban heart—no squares, no schools, no churches, no small shops. What kind of dialogue or communication can take place in communities like these?

When I first read Goethe’s
Elective Affinities
—twenty-five years ago at least—I did so after a long conversation with Hector Bianciotti on Marivaux’s
La dispute
, which he had seen in Lavelli’s production and which I had had to miss because I couldn’t afford the price of the ticket. Like so many other Marivaux plays,
La dispute
explores the nature of love: Two aristocratic characters wish to resolve the question of who is more likely to be unfaithful, man or woman,
and in order to reach an answer they place four children in solitary seclusion, each looked after by a couple of “savages.” Only once the children reach the age of puberty are they allowed to meet, and the aristocrats, from a scientific distance, can then observe and study the children’s behaviour.