So barren, and so mysterious - out on the moors with The Hound of the Baskervilles

A note on The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902).  I just want to acknowledge that it is a good book.  The two earlier novels featuring Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of Four (1890) are among the very worst books I have read in the last ten years – or the bad parts of them are among the very worst parts of books I have read – so it is a pleasure to read a good example.

I write this as someone who is not a fan of Sherlock Holmes.  I mean that in the positive, rather than colloquial, way.  A “fan,” in this case the Holmesian, is a specific kind of reader.  She is well aware of the problems with the Mormon half of A Study in Scarlet but values the novel for its Holmes lore, for the violin and the first meeting of Holmes and his sidekick Dr. Watson.

Or, in later stories, other Holmes motifs –  the cocaine, or Irene Adler  (“To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman”).  That is the first line of “A Scandal in Bohemia,” found in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892).  Does Irene Adler ever appear again in anything written by Arthur Conan Doyle?  Doesn’t matter; it has been an imaginatively productive idea for later incarnations of Sherlock Holmes.  Fans knew what to do with it.  Fans are creative.

By the writing of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle was working with a mature concept and well-known characters, perfected in the 1890s in what became two volumes of short stories.  He knew them so well that he could make the daring move of dropping Holmes out of much of the novel.  He knew that Watson was an interesting enough character on his own, and that the tension created by Holmes’s absence – when and how will he return to the book? – would be enjoyable.  I found it enjoyable.

The use of the Devonshire landscape, or a little sliver of it, was original and interesting.

“It is a wonderful place, the moor,” said he, looking round over the undulating downs, long green rollers, with crests of jagged granite foaming up into fantastic surges.  “You never tire of the moor.  You cannot think the wonderful secrets which it contains.  It is so vast and so barren, and so mysterious.”  (Ch. 7)

A good place to set loose a gigantic demon dog on a cursed family.  That last line is amusingly blunt, Doyle’s character directly telling me how to feel.

Barren and mysterious worked for me, but it always felt quite small.  Near the end of the novel,  delaying a dramatic moment, Watson reviews the landscape:

Outside the sun was sinking low and the west was blazing with scarlet and gold.  Its reflection was shot back in ruddy patches by the distant pools which lay amid the great Grimpen Mire.  There were the two towers of Baskerville Hall, and there a distant blur of smoke [etc., etc.]…  (Ch. 11)

As if Doyle has sketched it out on a map, which he likely did.  This moor is in Devonshire, bordering Thomas Hardy country; the novel is one of many examples of contemporary novelists who had gotten interested in the people living in some of the more unusual landscapes of England.  The prehistoric stone huts that dot the moor were a Hardy-like feature, a way to give the setting some temporal vastness.

Easy to understand why later writers, real fans of Holmes and Watson, would want to pilfer from, imitate, and rewrite this novel.

I see it, I deduce it - in which I am more complimentary to Doyle and Holmes

With "The Scandal in Bohemia" (1891), the first Sherlock Holmes short story, Arthur Conan Doyle instantly eliminates the worst parts of the two early Holmes novels, while retaining the best parts.

The version I have with me, in the 3rd edition of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, is eighteen pages long.  Watson visits Holmes, and they do their little Holmes-Watson minuet (W: "Then, how do you know?"  H: "I see it, I deduce it.").  A client appears, and the mystery is established.  This is all fine, the usual stuff, but fine.  It fills about eight pages.

That's the solution, right there.  An eight page setup, nine pages of action, a one page denouement, with a juicy reward for the Holmesians, and we're done.  Doyle's not enough of a polisher for me to call the story elegant, exactly, but it is pretty efficient.  No, even better - it is efficient in the right places (the action, the minimal, trivial, mystery), but also lingers in the right places (the Watson-Holmes interactions).  This problem is not solved at all, but we can't have everything, except in all of the great books where we can.

All of this is well-known and obvious to anyone who has read any of these stories.  It was not well-known to me, in part because the diehard Holmesians are more interested in the various tics and props associated with Holmes than in the literary quality of Doyle's writing.  Many of them play an odd game in which Doyle does no writing at all. 

After finishing, barely, The Sign of Four, I was completely sick of Doyle and Holmes.  There was just too much bad writing.  I have been reading a lot of Robert Louis Stevenson, perhaps too much, and worrying that I have been wasting too much time with second-rate books.  And this is with a real craftsman!  To turn from Stevenson to those early Doyle novels was no help.  From the point of view of the Scottish Reading Challenge, if I'm all done with Holmes for now, I won't complain, although a fellow reader would be just the thing to jumpstart my enthusiasm.

I knew, though, that I was not being fair to Doyle or Holmes.  The stories, the better ones, had to be superior, and I assume that the much later Hound of the Baskervilles (1901) is good, too.  Thus, a rereading, after many years, of "A Scandal in Bohemia," and this more complimentary post.

Advice to new readers of Doyle:  Go for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes first, or a short story best-of (not a Complete collection).  Then Hound.  The more stories.  If you discover that you really like the Whole Holmes Thing, that you are or may be a Holmesian, go back to the beginning, see how Holmes and Watson met, witness the introduction of the Holmes props (the violin, the cocaine).  Skip the Utah chapters of A Study in Scarlet.  Don't do what I did.

Reading "A Scandal in Bohemia" in a big anthology created new problems.  The story immediately following is Ralph Ellison's "King of the Bingo Game."  Now that, I tell ya what, is a piece of writing.  And look, there's "The Dead."  There's Alice Munro, and Eudora Welty, and Chekhov.  More advice: do not read any of these writers immediately before or after Arthur Conan Doyle.  Ramp down, then ramp back up.

There is nothing at all new to me in the latter part of your narrative - in which I complain about a Sherlock Holmes novel

Well, I found something in the Scottish Literature Challenge that really challenged me.  It was the last chapter of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four (1890), the worst chapter of a mediocre book.  I would pick up the book, read a page, and a great weariness would descend upon me, at least until I picked up a better book.  It's only sixteen (then fourteen, then twelve) small pages, I would tell myself.  Just finish it. 

The Sign of Four is the second appearance of Sherlock Holmes, who was introduced in the similarly bad A Study in Scarlet three years earlier.  Doyle still had only the barest idea of what he had created.  Both short novels are mishmashes of detective fiction (Poe, Wilkie Collins, Émile Gaboriau,* I'll bet), and adventure fiction in the vein of the H. Rider Haggard, a worse writer than Doyle, and Robert Louis Stevenson, a far better.  Both novels have enjoyable setups and bad payoffs.  Both end, more or less, with non-Holmesian backstory about the killers, terrible sections, dull and clichéd, dull because they're nothing but rearranged clichés.

The Sign of Four contains one really appalling character, "the unhallowed dwarf with his hideous face,"  his features "so deeply marked with all bestiality and cruelty," a "savage and distorted creature."  I have met this character before, in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," where he was an actual beast.  Doyle's novel is basically pilfered from The Moonstone and Poe, and I wish he had gone ahead and kept the orangutan.  Making the character a human, a native of the Andaman Islands, is much worse.

Nymeth, over at Things Mean a Lot, recently wrote a bit about the problems with The Sign of Four.   She points out that however sophisticated we might be, however well we understand that we're dealing with the received ideas and prejudices of a hundred years ago, Doyle's beast-man is an unavoidable part of the plot.  The reader can't - this reader couldn't - simply brush aside the ugliness.**  Although if this had been the only thing wrong with the novel, who knows, I might have been more forgiving.  This had nothing to do, for example, with how dull that last chapter was.

There's one good Holmesian joke there, actually.  After the villain goes on and on and on with his life story - "To begin, the earth cooled" - Holmes says "There is nothing at all new to me in the latter part of your narrative, except that you brought your own rope."  Hey, that's how I felt! 

Now, the first two novels do contain the not-so-minor achievement of inventing Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.  This is a long way from nothing, and the interaction between the characters is often pretty good.  And I am well aware that the first two novels are not representative Holmes.  Tomorrow, some better Holmes, and better Doyle.

I should note, for Challenge bookkeeping purposes, that I am reading The Sign of Four, in some sense, along with A. K. Palmer.  So that's, along with Boswell, two for the Challenge.  All right!

*  Anyone read Gaboriau?  How are those? 

** Note that here I am dragging people into the Scottish Reading Challenge whether they want to participate or not.

The Wuthering Expectations Best of 2009

Three extra-large Humiliations were crossed off my list: Walden, The Scarlet Letter, and The Flowers of Evil, all highly rewarding.  Let's set those aside, though. 

Some fleeting highlights:

1. Thoreau recommends the "rich sweet cider" of the frozen-thawed apple.  "Your jaws are the cider-press."  ("Wild Apples").

2.  Charles Baudelaire smashes an itinerant glass saleman's backback of samples with a flower pot, just to hear the smash ("as of lightning striking a crystal palace"), to introduce some beauty into this ugly world of ours. "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!"  (Paris Spleen, "The Bad Glazier").

3. We spend eighteen hours or so sitting next to Judge Pyncheon.  Hawthorne tells us about the Judge's big day.  They're going to nominate him for Governor!  Why won't Judge Pyncheon move?  "Rise up, Judge Pyncheon!" (Chapter 18 of Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables).

4. A Kazakh railroad worker battles his prize bull camel.  We gaze upon a sturgeon; the sturgeon gazes upon us.  (Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years).

5.  All that Yiddish literature, so much, so good.  The futile attempt of I. L. Peretz's poor student to come up with a story that's not about the blood libel. ("Stories").  Hodl's farewell to her father, Tevye the Dairyman.  "Let's talk about something more cheerful.  Have you heard any news of the cholera in Odessa?" (Sholem Aleichem, "Hodl," Tevye the Dairyman).

6.  Arthur Hugh Clough can't get milk for his coffee.   ("Amours de Voyage").

7.  Cranford, Silas Marner, Villette.  Three perfect novels, allowing for some variety in one's standards of perfection.  The methods varied, too: Eliot compressed, Gaskell tied up loose ends, and Brontë pushed, hard.  If I end up marvelling more at Villette, it's because it is so complex, and because after just a bit of looking at secondary souces I have developed the crackpot notion that I possess an original idea about the novel.  Forthcoming in 2010, if I can bring myself to do the work, which I mightn't.

8.  The moment in Flaubert's "A Simple Heart" when they put the stuffed parrot - no, you'll have to go see for yourself.  Is this story the best thing Flaubert ever wrote?  Talk about perfection.

I just want to keep going.  The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan.  Edouard Mörike's  Mozart's Journey to Prague.  Gérard de Nerval's Sylvie.  "The benediction of the air."  John Galt!

I should skip this last part.  No, it's eating at me, since I just read it.  Worst of the year:  the second half of A Study in Scarlet (1887), the first Sherlock Holmes novel.  The Holmes-free Utah section is so, so bad, an undramatic jangle of clichés.  It's not only terribly written on its own, but once we return to Holmes, its dreadfulness has somehow even soaked into Watson's journal, tainting the rest of the novel.  The first half was all right!