Suddenly, things are moving rather fast in this household. The change in pace and tenor is easily enough explained. Melanie and our two Canadian grandchildren, John Henry and Hazel, arrived in their big Dodge van from Montreal. And Luke, of course, is already here. That whole family is fresh off a fairly extensive trip in Sri Lanka and Kerala state in southern India, the kids still full of excitement at what they had been seeing and doing. Both of them have grown considerably since we last saw them in Canada, which was at Christmas. We have already been able to get up to the Stonebridge Medical Center with them a couple of times, where Joan is making very slow but still perceptible progress; and the extra vehicle, plus the perhaps even more important extra drivers will make my life more efficient while they are all here. And no grandfather has greater joys than his grandchildren.
Connected to all this in ways in ways that are technically explicable though too complex actually to explain without making the explanation the subject of this essay, is the topic I am in fact going to pursue briefly. Amazingly, perhaps, I do have a subject in mind. A whim encouraged me, in my escapist reading, to pick up a copy of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, and the literary achievements of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle suddenly seemed relevant. Don’t ask. Please just take my word for it. It seemed a plausibly logical turn at the time. Conan Doyle, of course, was the literary inventor of Sherlock Holmes, who by any reckoning has to be one of the most widely known invented literary characters in world literature. Just recently, seated beside my slumbering spouse, I had the occasion to reread, slowly and pensively, one of the longer of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, A Scandal in Bohemia (1891). I think this was one of the very first of the stories featuring the legendary detective. It is gripping in its highly fantastic plot and very probing in its psychological and sociological motivations. But I find it particularly impressive in its unexpected dimension of social criticism. I won’t say it is founded on the principle of social equality, but it certainly finds a target in the social rigidities of Victorian middle-class life. And it does all this while being a mysterious page-turner. It helped to create the vogue for “detective literature”, and it invented what I will call the iconography of detection: calabash pipe, deerstalker hat, all-purpose magnifying glass, snappy, barbed dialogue, and so on. The novella is of course misnamed. It is not about scandal in Bohemia, but about how one was avoided there. Nor is its fantastic plot much more fantastic than the actual chain of historical events that would lead to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. And there are reasons other than its historical premonitions to admire the plot. Its heroine, who outwits Sherlock Holmes and everybody else, is a brilliant American woman, indeed a New Jersey girl, Irene Adler. I’d like to think she is from Mercer or Hunterdon counties. She has "the face of the most beautiful of women and the mind of the most resolute of men." Sort of like Saint Augustine’s mother. There is no reason such a woman might not have achieved fame in London as actress or singer.
Here, briefly, is the plot. Holmes’s friend and roommate, Dr. Watson fears that Holmes, out of boredom, is set to go on one of his cocaine benders. Actually, Holmes is animated by the challenge of a potential case. He is expecting the arrival of a visitor, who turns out to be the youthful hereditary king of Bohemia. His Majesty soon arrives at the famous Baker Street flat in mufti with a delicate (and ignoble) mission. He is set to marry some unidentified noblewoman of the highest degree back home. The marriage is properly motivated by sound dynastic reasons. He fears that this arrangement could be ruined, with disastrous implications, were his previous friendship with the American beauty Irene Adler to come to light. And that might possibly happen because of the existence, somewhere, of a photograph in which the Bohemian king and the beautiful American expatriate make a joint appearance. He is in short not merely a royal pain but a royal cad, and he wants Holmes to fix all this. However, Ms. Adler, as brilliant as she is beautiful, outsmarts them all, marries a Mr. Right of her own, and blows town, leaving even the formidable detective in the dust. Vague historical parallels of the “high society actress”—such as Lola Montez or Sarah Bernhardt—offer plausibility to her fictional presentation.
We shall never know where Irene Adler went, but this single literary appearance alone is enough to have made of her something of a feminist heroine. Allusions to her in other stories show that she stuck in her inventor's mind. Conan Doyle has seldom been credited with progressive social thought, and one can doubt that he himself would recognize or claim such a strain in his own work. Yet a sympathetic reader of the Sherlock Holmes stories may find numerous hints of exactly that throughout the body of the work. I seem to find some social criticism vaguely adumbrated also in his neglected novel The White Company. That book, set in the Hundred Years War, though hardly too scrupulous in historical details, shows evidence of serious historical research and makes some attempt to imagine the Middle Ages in a rather different way from that favored by so many romantic Victorian medievalists. For years I was wont to underestimate Conan Doyle, largely I think because of his flirtations with the cookiness of Spiritualism. But every historical age has its aberrant obsessions, and our own no less than others. If we can overcome our temptation to judge the writers of a past century by the dogmatic certainties of current cultural whim—a very big if, of course—we might be able to see Conan Doyle as I believe we are able to see Rudyard Kipling—as a kind of genius in, and of, his long historical moment. So this royal dilemma is basically another case of hot pants in high places, one of my special fields of interest. (I wrote a whole book about Chaucer’s Troilus.) But the ingenious American lady outsmarts them all, marries a Mr. Right of her own, and blows town, leaving even the formidable detective in the dust. By a wonderful contrivance—and readers of the Sherlock Holmes stories have to forgive many such—Holmes himself (heavily disguised as a proletarian rough) manages to get himself dragooned to be the necessary civil witness at her wedding! The art of disguise is frequently implausibly employed by the Grandfather of the Private Eye. But a reader gets used to this sort of thing, and actually to lapping it up, in Conan Doyle’s stories.
Medical report on Joan: Improvement, agonizingly slow but still measurable. Much gratitude from us all for many kind and prayerful thoughts.
