Verse
Weathers, Winston
single bit of data would convince, a dozen daze, and it is a dozen, or two dozen, we get. There is no proportion in the proofs adduced; the valuable is mixed indiscriminately with the...
...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...
...Identical" is a very favorite word of Mr...
...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...
...Meyer doesn't expose Doyle's intentions, he adjusts them...
...Rosenberg quotes Sherlock: "I could read all that in the dust" (Mr...
...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...
...Altick was thinking of Holmes when he dubbed Browning...
...Rosenberg quotes Professor Hugh Kenner on Holmes: "The sleuth's [intellectual] bric-a-brac is notorious...
...The subject of these pages is the coalescence of reading or writing with dust in Doyle and other writers...
...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...
...Plutarch conveniently becomes a Roman for the occasion...
...So is Mr...
...These are petty matters, but they raise doubts and invite a sustained inquiry into the larger argument...
...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...
...Conan Doyle, be then the grandfather of psychoanalysis...
...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 authorsbut only because the Greek MARK TAYLOR teaches in the English Department at Manhattan College...
...Is one to infer that Mr...
...Rosenberg's italics), and avers that Shakespeare uses the same image," "expressed in identical words...
...You have succeeded in taking my methodsu observation and inference--and applied them to the inside of a subject's head...
...Rosenberg's own, discovery following upon discovery, trivia upon trivia, anti-climax upon anticlimax...
...The book's gestalt resembles that of a metaphysical poem...
...I hesitate to chart the provenance of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Might Conan Doyle, Dr...
...He continues, "Remarkable...
...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...
...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...
...To vary the metaphor (while letting Mr...
...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...
...Sigmund Freud...
...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...
...25 October 1974:86...
...the valuable is mixed indiscriminately with the misleading and the valueless...
...And at the end of an especially breathless chapter Mr...
...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...
...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...
...Now there is a thesis worth pondering...
...But there are, in fact, errors everywhere...
...The book is simply there for the humble...
...Impressed by Freud's treatment of one patient Holmes says, "Do you know what you have done...
...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...
Vol. 101 • October 1974 • No. 4
