The case of the speckled parody
Benny Green
The West End Horror. A Posthumous Memoir of John H. Watson, M.D. Edited by Nicholas Meyer (Hodder and Stoughton £3.50)
In January 1881 Mr Sherlock Holmes, While conducting experiments in the chemical laboratory at Bart's, was introduced by Young Stamford to a pensioned doctor from the Indian Army called Watson. Five Years before, one of the students at the hosPital had been a certain William Gilbert Grace, son of a Gloucestershire doctor. and destined to give as much pleasure to his countrymen, and to influence their behaviour as profoundly, as any man of his epoch. Nf0 doubt it tells us a great deal about the English that the biographies of Holmes. who did not exist, are altogether more comprehensive than those of a man like Grace. Who most certainly did. Conan Doyle, the °ne man in history who was on close personal terms with both men, has left us almost nothing about Grace off the field. Holmes has fared better. Mr Baring-Gould, in his definitive biography, can tell us where Holmes attended grammar school as a dayboy, who taught him fencing, the date of his London stage debut as Horatio in a production of Hamlet, where Irene Adler's son was born, and so on. That posterity has found it necessary for its peace of mind to flesh out Conan Doyle's casual fictional Skeleton in this way, that it finds the passing Of Holmes so terrible to contemplate that it Persists in extending the canon, is partly, of course, a tribute to Conan Doyle, who was hirnself obliged to grant Holmes a permanent stay of execution after an angry uprising among the readership of The Strand. But clearly there is another reason, not 511ite so closely connected to Conan Doyle, ,°r the freakish persistence of Holmes as an active character. It seems that since the end or the Victorian age, the mists of romance and moonshine have settled so profusely about its turrets that a great many people c„an no longer see what they really looked like. Grace, for instance, was there; Holmes wasn't. And yet nobody can tell you how Grace would have treated Holmes's addiction to cocaine, or where he might have srPent his holidays, or what books, if any, he .ead to his children. Holmes, on the other ;and, is more thoroughly documented than cintost any other hero of his time; nobody _arcs much any more whether or not Glad!one installed lavatories at Hawarden, but arutYou should so much as question the th_henticitY of Baring-Gould's claim that kkates 'Adventure of the Naval Treaty' pre
the Adventure of the Engineer's "rnb then harmless screwballs will write you from all points of the compass, denying your sanity, rejecting your logical processes, and accusing you of trespassing on hallowed ground.
The patina of antiquity which has now settled on the Victorian age distorts the perspective and obscures the outlines so cunningly that it has become easy for us to bask in an illusory aura of tranquillity and permanence. Moriarty might machinate, we say to ourselves, but the very idea that the Empire, let alone the planet, could turn out to be a finite institution, is too absurd for words. In hopeless disarray before our own global confusion, we fall back into the warm bath of a lost security, sighing sighs of wishfulfilment as we soap ourselves with the bar of' Pear's Transparent before subsiding beneath the surface with a contented gurgle of abdication. Like all exercises in nostalgia, our pursuit of Victorian fiction is highly selective. The current retrospective taste appears to be for the summer rain pattering down on the laurel bushes of suburban gentility; hansom cabs spinning through murky November twilights are highly popular; flames that sputter in the gas-lamp. bringing out the dim stain on the antimacassar, are also calculated to go down very well; and as for elderly men with a limp, a tropical tan and a weakness for hobbling into the Trocadero or the Gaiety. there to tell tales of recalcitrant tribesmen from hills with unpronounceable names, nobody can get too much of that sort of thing. A world so innocent that it can designate its evil in terms as precise as the fourth, seventh or ninth most dangerous man in London: that is the bromide to give the troops.
The latest recruit to the growing army of surrogate-Conan Doyles is an American called Nicholas Meyer, who made a prestigious debut last year with The Seven-PerCent Solution. As derivative squibs go, it was not at all bad, but the subsequent appearance of a further Holmes adventure entitled The West End Horror leads me. to the awful suspicion that Mr Meyer, having enjoyed vast commercial success with his first effort, is intent on becoming a Holmes factory. Some readers, so addicted to Holmes that they prefer warmed-over ratiocination to no ratiocination at all, will surely thank Mr Meyer for so obligingly ministering to their wants. For my own part, I have to say that in concocting The West End Horror, Meyer has stumbled into one of those areas where errors of judgment become so howlingly apparent that the flimsy tissue of illusion is punctured all over the place.
Had Meyer been content to fling Holmes into the customary laurel bushes, had he seated him in a comfortable seat on the Paddington express, all might have been well. But like a great many Americans, he has instead fallen victim to the great Victorian Confidence Trick, which is to assume that the heroes of a century ago were so heroic that they were just as good as fictitious characters. And so Holmes moves among the bohemians of the London theatre. He casts a fastidious eye on the dissipations of Oscar Wilde; he beholds in awe the military methods which W. S. Gilbert brought to the staging of the Savoy operas; he gazes on the beauty of Ellen Terry; he sits in silent judgment on the conversational bon-bons of Frank Harris.
But Meyer's gravest strategic blunder is to make Bernard Shaw one of the book's principal characters. Meyer's Shaw is all over the place. He frequents the Café Royal; he has fits of jealousy and petulance; he is depicted as ragged and starving at a tide in his affairs when he was already earning a modest living as a critic: he is shown to be a genuine hater of Shakespeare instead of the impish Shakespearean expert with a twinkle in his eye. And he has no idea, in Meyer's book, about Wilde's physical giantism which the real Shaw believed to be at the heart of the tragedy. The result is our rejection, not only of Meyer's Shaw, but also of his Holmes, his Watson, his Baker Street and all the rest of the Instant Sherlock Holmes kit.
But Meyer's book, which leans so heavily on our preconceived ideas about its central character, to say nothing of all the supporting players, does have something to tell us about modern America, if not about late Victorian England—and that is, the degree to which some of the flesh-and-blood victors of that age have succeeded in gatecrashing the pantheon of fiction while others have not. Shaw and Wilde have made it, at least in Californian eyes, while Wells and Bennett have not. Sir Henry Irving is in; Sir Johnstone Forbes-Robertson is out ; Bram Stoker is okay; Thomas Hardy is uncommercial. No doubt students of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution will have had the same thoughts when in that book they learned how, while Dr Sigmund Freud has passed into the company of Holmes. Jung and Adler still await deification. As I waded through Mr Meyer's trackless wastes, trying, and then finally not trying, to reconcile his Shaw with everyone else's, I could not help wondering who among us, here, today, will in future times be given the kiss of eternal life by some romantic citizen of some romantic New World who, finding us so utterly charming, will conceive it his bounden duty to place us inside a fictional frame. Will the time-scale become ever more confused ? And will our grandchildren awake one wonderful, apocalyptic morning to find Mr Sherlock Holmes setting out for the Adventure Of the Umpteenth Im personator in the company of Sir John Betjeman, Denis Compton and James Logie Baird?
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