Quick, Watson, the Needle
Taylor, Mark
There is a remarkable irony in the recent blossoming of the Sherlock Holmes industry, replete with annotated editions, studies of source and analogue, conjectures about the relationship...
...We know from Poe that the hardest place to find something is the easiest place to conceal it...
...Rosenberg quotes Sherlock: "I could read all that in the dust" (Mr...
...There is, then, much sloppy scholarship in Naked is the Best Disguise, but to say so is to repay boundless energy with pedantry, for the mind of its author, swinging indiscriminately and joyfully from the trivial to the astute, is the real protagonist of the book, and anyway, why go after an 800-pound gorilla with a fly swatter...
...Is it all true...
...Rosenberg's own, discovery following upon discovery, trivia upon trivia, anti-climax upon anticlimax...
...And that, of course, is the irony (or is it, rather, presumption...
...Impressed by Freud's treatment of one patient Holmes says, "Do you know what you have done...
...On pages 100I01, for instance, the date of Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, 1567, is given as 1565, and Frankenstein, .4 Study in Scarlet, and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus are forced into uneasy association by their making much of ancient Roman authors-but only because the Greek MARK TAYLOR teaches in the English Department at Manhattan College...
...But as Doyle (Mr...
...The birds bow down & crickets kneel in/inexplicable knowledge & wind/ flowers/little animals hush into ~vaiting for the trumpets & tambourines & drums of the resurrection/its oncoming light...
...The book is simply there for the humble...
...You know, Doctor, I shouldn't be surprised if your application of my methods proves in the long run more important than the mechanical uses I make of them...
...So is Mr...
...the valuable is mixed indiscriminately with the misleading and the valueless...
...Neither is there proportion, or order--except insofar as one senses the author's mounting excitement--in the organization of the book, and it jumps from Switzerland to India, from Frankenstein's Monster to William Morris, arriving shaken at each station, never quite sure how it got there...
...The subject of these pages is the coalescence of reading or writing with dust in Doyle and other writers...
...Samuel Rosenberg's book is, surely, most unlike any other work of biography or literary criticism--I'm not quite certain what the term for it i s - - ever written...
...Now there is a thesis worth pondering...
...His method is less argument than assault...
...Watson) reaped, so did he sow--a rich field harvested by James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Franz Kafka, whose works draw variously and ingeniously from the adventures of the great detective...
...Alas, yes...
...Conan Doyle, be then the grandfather of psychoanalysis...
...A new manuscript of Watson's appears, indicating that The Final Problem, the story in which Holmes and Moriarty fight (apparently) to their mutual death, was only "'a fiction," a smokescreen put up so that the despairing Watson could spirit Holmes off to Vienna, in 1891, to have his cocaine addiction treated by the young Dr...
...Rosenberg's italics), and avers that Shakespeare uses the same image," "expressed in identical words...
...However, Doyle, both borrower and lender, is still true to his own self, for beneath the myriad disguises of Holmes, his associates, and his antagonists stands, in challenging nakedness, the writer, inviting us always to find him there by seizing, as Mr...
...The book's gestalt resembles that of a metaphysical poem...
...As these two books clearly show, the simple equation of Holmes with the Edinburgh physician Joseph Bell, Watson with Doyle, and the rest with the imagination no longer works...
...Rosenberg offers a dazzling deduction, only to say to the bemused reader, "My reasons for believing so cannot be given at this moment of my narration...
...As two geniuses who are denigrated by the dull establishments of their respective disciplines, Holmes and Freud get along smashingly, and not only does Freud cure Holmes, the two men collaborate in preventing, or at least delaying, a really big crime...
...Rosenberg continue as an elemental force of nature): a description of the book's flaws, or, indeed, of its virtues, tells us no more about its real nature than a seismograph reveals about the experience of an earthquake...
...Rosenberg does to a turn the canard that the stories weft really written by Dr...
...You have succeeded in taking my methodsu observation and inference--and applied them to the inside of a subject's head...
...Rosenberg quotes Professor Hugh Kenner on Holmes: "The sleuth's [intellectual] bric-a-brac is notorious...
...But Nietzsche is only one recognizable prototype since Doyle also borrows liberally from Shakespeare, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Oscar Wilde, assorted pederasts in the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and much else...
...Rosenberg's finger, a "sin-drome," Doyle's "personal myth or allegory" revealed in clusters of ideas that "routinely associate normal and deviant sexuality with crimes of passion and with murder especially mass murder," and also with inveterate hermaphroditism and with tell-tale books--all in the service of outlining Doyle's curious psychosexual orientation...
...Here is a riddle everyone knows: Q. If you had an 800-pound gorilla in your house, where would he sleep...
...Meyer doesn't expose Doyle's intentions, he adjusts them...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 WINSTON WEATHERS POEM FOR THE RESURRECTION So night ends/darkness thins toward this indefinite moment: the city stands motionless in temporary beauty & the small gardens come together in silence/expectation...
...There is no proportion in the proofs adduced...
...These are petty matters, but they raise doubts and invite a sustained inquiry into the larger argument...
...But maybe the congratulations are in order, for whatever reservations QUICK, WATSON, THE NEEDLE MARK TAYLOR one might have about Naked is the Best Disguise, they will not include doubt about why the book was written, a doubt that justifiably arises when one finishes reading a large percentage of contemporary literary studies...
...He does not so much persuade as he grinds down and intimidates...
...Plutarch conveniently becomes a Roman for the occasion...
...Personally I can't think of any Victorian novel in which twostory houses don't loom large...
...that the greatest problem-solver of them all left to us, fallible plodding mortals, a legacy of unexpected conundrums...
...The reader wearies and reels under the weight of evidence...
...Is one to infer that Mr...
...Altick was thinking of Holmes when he dubbed Browning...
...Wow...
...There is a remarkable irony in the recent blossoming of the Sherlock Holmes industry, replete with annotated editions, studies of source and analogue, conjectures about the relationship of Sherlock to Victorian propriety and naughtiness, biographies of the urWatson Conan Doyle, and the Royal Shakespeare production of the DoyleGillette Sherlock Holmes opening on Broadway in November...
...But there are, in fact, errors everywhere...
...He continues, "Remarkable...
...But in his own quieter way, I suppose Nicholas Meyer, like Samuel Rosenberg, has something to say about the cultural pertinence of the Sherlock Holmes stories...
...Rosenberg has done, on the transparently obvious equation that the twostory houses where the climactic scenes in Holmes narratives usually occur point irresistibly, if only we will look, to two-story stories, that is, to a personal allegory beneath the simple detective fiction...
...Might Conan Doyle, Dr...
...It's hard for the reader to keep his head up in this tidal wave--to insist on accuracy and logic, to separate the incontrovertible from the merely plausible and the provably specious, where all is characterized by a tone of utter and aggressive certitude...
...A. Anywhere he wanted to...
...Thus, continuously present beneath the Holmes adventure is the Conan Doyle syndrome, really, points Mr...
...Rosenberg is the 800-pound gorilla of scholarship...
...To vary the metaphor (while letting Mr...
...Rosenberg's, one that should allow of little ambiguity: one assumes the only word identical with dust is dust, and so one is disappointed to find that the dust of Doyle is--if one looks at the text of Titus Andronicus--the "earth" or the "sandy plot" of Shakespeare, as in Golding's Ovid it is in the "sande," near misses, to be sure, but ones that undercut the whole point of this chapter...
...All this scholarly activity, confined neither to properly accredited Sberlockians nor to desperate graduate students eager to avoid another dissertation on Faulkner, suggests the present unsolved problem within the canon...
...Evidently he figures to receive more praise still since the work under consideration, so says the blurb on the dust jacket, "enhances his own reputation...
...Sigmund Freud...
...Identical" is a very favorite word of Mr...
...Rosenberg indeed has a great deal to contribute to the Sherlock Holmes industry that has sprung up in the last few years, for example, the "astonishing and hitherto-unsuspected 'recognition' " that Holmes' archenemy, the nefarious Professor Moriarty, derives from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, misread through Victorian Naked is t h e B e s t D|sguise: The Death and Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes SAMUEL ROSENBERG Bobbs-Merrill, $8.95 The Seven-Per.Cent S o l u t i o n NICHOLAS MEYER Dutton, $6.95 eyes, though in another way so does Holmes himself...
...Hence, a demonstration of Doyle's dependence, in A Study in Scarlet, on Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book leads up to the dubious clincher that Richard Altick calls Browning a "connoisseur of crime" in his Penguin edition of the poem, a sobriquet that Holmes surely deserves...
...It is a novel, and a very good one--good in that it tells a snappy, gripping story that everyone will want to finish in a single sitting--and I don't want to say how it comes out, so why say anything except: read it...
...And at the end of an especially breathless chapter Mr...
...Its scope is admittedly, insistently, awesome: it contains, the author tells us, "my more than one hundred discoveries...
...It's excitement and great fun, but I suspect that more than whimsy dictated his imaginary rendezvous of the master of ratiocination and the father of psychoanalysis...
...Rosenberg writes, "I was much praised...
...Where a Commonweal: 8J single bit of data would convince, a dozen daze, and it is a dozen, or two dozen, we get...
...I hesitate to chart the provenance of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution...
...Is it possible that the 60 cases are now to be re-opened, and the true solution to them will depend on the deductive acuity of a host of Inspecter Lestrades...
...25 October 1974:86...
...it is a "book of totally new and revolutionary discoveries," including at least one "astonishing and hitherto-unsuspected 'recognition.'" The techniques that will be applied to the Holmes canon are shown early on as the reader is directed "with the help of my pointing finger" to the allegorical level of Robinson Crusoe, no surprise since for earlier literary investigations, Mr...
Vol. 101 • October 1974 • No. 4
