Quote of the Day (Arthur Conan Doyle, on His Exceedingly Eccentric, ‘Untidy’ Genius Detective)

“An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction. Not that I am in the least conventional in that respect myself. The rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan, coming on the top of a natural Bohemianism of disposition, has made me rather more lax than befits a medical man. But with me there is a limit, and when I find a man who keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin to give myself virtuous airs. I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humors, would sit in an arm-chair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.”—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), “The Musgrave Ritual,” in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894)

(The actor in the image accompanying this post is Basil Rathbone, who set the template for subsequent cinematic depictions of Sherlock Holmes.)

Quote of the Day (Arthur Conan Doyle, on Mediocrity and Genius)

“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.”— British mystery writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), The Valley of Fear (1915)

(The image accompanying this post shows Basil Rathbone as Doyle’s great literary creation: Sherlock Holmes. Countless others have played the great detective, but—perhaps because I grew up knowing him first in the role—nobody embodied him so well as Rathbone. Need I say that Inspector Lestrade symbolizes mediocrity and Holmes genius?)

Quote of the Day (Sherlock Holmes, on Dogs and Family Life)

“A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones.” — Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), “The Adventure of the Creeping Man,” in The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (1927)

(I can’t imagine how many actors have played Sherlock Holmes on stage, radio, film and TV. But I find it hard to think of anyone else in the role of the Victorian detective besides the peerless character actor Basil Rathbone, shown here in costume.)

This Day in Literary History (Trollope Ices Favorite Reader Character)

Sept. 15, 1866—Anthony Trollope, well into the serialization of his latest novel, overheard two readers carping about one of his most popular characters. Now in her fifth book, Mrs. Proudie, the domineering wife of the Bishop of Barchester, struck this pair of clergymen as tiresome and clichéd. The big, bearded, bellowing author walked across the drawing room of the Atheneum Club to assure the astonished ministers that he would “go home and kill her before the week is over.” And so he did.

One of the most feared mob hit men was nicknamed “The Ice Man” for his lack of emotion in dispatching victims. I’m afraid that many Victorians felt that one of their favorite authors had displayed similar callousness toward a character they looked forward to reading about in The Last Chronicle of Barset.

Trollope would not be the last Victorian author to kill off a popular character. When Arthur Conan Doyle tired of Sherlock Holmes, he sent the detective hurtling off the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, helplessly entangled in a seemingly fatal fall with arch-villain Professor Moriarty.

But the manner of the passing allowed Doyle to revive his creation when readers demanded Holmes’ return: The fall, it was revealed nearly a decade later, in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, had all been staged for Dr. Watson’s benefit, to allow his friend to evade Moriarty’s still-at-large, dangerous confederates.

No such plausible way out existed for Trollope: The death of Mrs. Proudie was irrevocable, the result of a heart attack. Her demise robbed readers of coming to grips with the kind of domineering, annoying, but all-too-human character they were likely to encounter in real life. 

Trollope had enjoyed a highly popular run with his series about the imaginary county of Barset (which previously had included The Warden, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage and The Small House at Allington). But Mrs. Proudie possesses such intrinsic power—a moral busybody still utterly convinced that her actions will benefit her more restrained husband, Dr. Proudie—that her end can lead to only one logical conclusion: the last installment of this novel sequence.

What made Mrs. Proudie so compelling? It strikes me that certain aspects of Trollope’s gift for characterization are shared by Leo Tolstoy. In Anna Karenina, for instance, the Russian sets the stage for the title character's infidelity by contrasting her warmth and spontaneity with the cold-blooded intelligence and ironic speech of her husband Alexei, then tops it off with a detail that captures perfectly why she now finds him tiresome: he cracks his knuckles.  Yet, when she appears to be on her deathbed, Tolstoy allows Alexei an unexpected dimension: the cuckold forgives Anna for her adultery.

With Mrs. Proudie, Trollope employed similar details. In church, she wears a “dark brown silk dress of awful stiffness and terrible dimensions.” But at the moment when her husband turns on her with the most awful words he has ever expressed in their marriage—“You have brought on me such disgrace that I cannot hold up my head”—Trollope plumbs her psyche to allow a moment of sympathy:

“At the bottom of her heart she knew that she had been a bad wife. And yet she had meant to be a pattern wife! She had meant to be a good Christian; but she had so exercised her Christianity that not a soul in the world loved her, or would endure her presence if it could be avoided! She had sufficient insight to the minds and feelings of those around her to be aware of this. And now her husband had told her that her tyranny to him was so overbearing that he must throw up his great position, and retire to an obscurity that would be exceptionally disgraceful to them both, because he could no longer endure the public disgrace which her conduct brought upon him in his high place before the world! Her heart was too full for speech; and she left him, very quietly closing the door behind her.”

How hasty and impulsive exactly was Trollope’s decision to knock off Mrs. Proudie? Perhaps the seeds of his decision had been planted for awhile: The Saturday Review, for instance, had made a complaint similar to the two clergymen’s when Framley Parsonage and The Small House at Allington appeared. 

But the novelist could certainly have set the stage for his nasty surprise a bit better. Readers did not even know, for instance, that Mrs. Proudie even had a heart condition before her fatal attack. Moreover, the bishop has already endured so much at the hands of his wife that this breaking point here seems anti-climactic.

In a prior appreciation of Trollope on his 200th birthday, I discussed how the novelist hurt his critical standing by revealing his working method in his Autobiography (writing three hours each day before breakfast, itemizing how many words and pages he produced each hour as well as how much he was paid for his various works). I’m afraid that his discussion in the same memoir of how he came to dispatch Mrs. Proudie reinforced this critical disdain. What careful artist could be so thoughtless as to kill off a character on the mere say-so of two people he overheard in a London men’s club? 

Even the author came to feel pangs of regret over his decision: “I have never dissevered myself from Mrs. Proudie,” he wrote a decade later, “and still live much in company with her ghost.”

No matter how much he rued that decision, however, Trollope was prepared for similar ruthlessness toward a major female character—one a good deal more beloved than Mrs. Proudie—in his next series of books. At the start of the sixth novel in his “Palliser” series, The Duke’s Children, readers learn that Lady Glencora Palliser, the vivacious wife of the reticent politician the Duke of Omnium, has died. 

While the decision to eliminate her from the series allowed Trollope to explore different dramatic possibilities—i.e., how the Duke would cope alone with the coming of age of their three children without her mediation and sympathy—it came at a cost that his most devoted readers could hardly bear.

Movie Quote of the Day (Billy Wilder, on Sherlock Holmes’s Love Life)

Dr. Watson (played by Colin Blakely): “Holmes, let me ask you a question. I hope I'm not being presumptuous, but... there have been women in your life, haven't there?”

Sherlock Holmes (played by Robert Stephens): “The answer is yes...”

[Watson breathes a sigh of relief]

Holmes: “...You're being presumptuous. Good night.”—The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, directed by Billy Wilder (1970)

Bad enough that there’s an implication here (never entirely dismissed through the rest of the film) that this world-famous character might be, as Jerry Seinfeld might say, “not on our team” (or, at minimum, very distrustful of women) or even (anticipating the same point made later in The Seven-Percent Solution) that Holmes’ boredom with everyday life has triggered a fearsome cocaine addiction.

But did Billy Wilder really have to depict Holmes as less than perfect in solving crimes? From all over the world, the groans of the Baker Street Irregulars could be heard.

A year ago, I thought of writing about three great directors who came a cropper with disasters in 1964: John Ford (Cheyenne Autumn), Alfred Hitchcock (Marnie) and Billy Wilder (Kiss Me, Stupid). Ford made only one more film in the last seven years of his life (7 Women), while Hitch only created one work out of his last four that approached his masterworks: Frenzy.

Wilder had the most interesting final laps of the three. Unlike the Master of Suspense, he did not enjoy another hit comparable to Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard or The Apartment. But after Kiss Me, Stupid brought a storm of execration on his head for delivering up such louche work, he made another half-dozen films up to 1981, and kept going to his office, in the vain hope that he could concoct another property that would flourish under Hollywood’s new financing order, for some years after that. (The latter hope, of course, was in vain, and Wilder summed up his dilemma in typically witty fashion, noting that in the old days they made pictures, whereas now they made deals.)

Moreover, though his films never spun box-office gold again, they remained deeply individual and interesting, expanding the notion of what could be called the “Wilder touch” (in the manner of his great mentor who inspired “the Lubitsch touch”).

Case in point: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which premiered in the U.S. on this date 40 years ago. In the grand coffee-table interview book he did with Cameron Crowe, Conversations With Wilder, the venerable director bemoaned this as The One That Got Away, a film originally projected to run three hours and 20 minutes that ended chopped down, by another hand designated by studio execs, to only 125 minutes. (“I had tears in my eyes as I looked at the thing,” Wilder told Crowe.” “It was the most elegant picture I've ever shot.")

What The Magnificent Ambersons was to Orson Welles, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was to Wilder. In fact, Hollywood treated Wilder more criminally at this point than it had Welles. Both were irreverent about Hollywood but worshipful about film, yet one (Welles) was a one-hit wonder whose ego was so immense that thousands in Tinseltown wanted him taken down a peg, while the other (Wilder) was a three-decade veteran who had had box-office misses before (Ace in the Hole) but had rebounded with some of his strongest work.

Gone from The Private Life were entire sequences (and I do mean gone—unless a film reconstructionist of the stature of Ronald Haver or Robert Harris comes along, it’s likely that that excised hour is permanently missing in action).

In a way, it was an appropriate end to a star-crossed production, marked by the following:

* Wilder’s original wish—a musical with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe—had to be shelved when he couldn’t find enough backers.

* Likewise, the original Holmes and Watson, Peter O’Toole and Peter Sellers, became unavailable (Sellers, because, on his honeymoon, he had a heart attack in a futile attempt to give pleasure to his frisky young Scandinavian bride, Britt Ekland).

* The entire, effects-laden “Loch Ness Monster” sequence had to be entirely reshot, in miniature, when a) shooting at dark proved difficult, and b) the “monster” capsized in the lake.

* Bean counters at United Artists, suffering several flops in 1969, got cold feet over Wilder’s ambitious project and forced deep cuts.

Holmes purists, as I’ve indicated, were not happy with the results onscreen. But all kinds of variations have been tried on Conan Doyle’s familiar formula, and in any case this was hardly the worst instance of cinematic violence done to a great literary detective. (That dubious prize, I submit, belongs to Robert Altman’s deconstruction of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, with a woefully miscast Elliott Gould offering an adenoidal Philip Marlowe instead of the hard-boiled knight of the mean streets.)

Beginning in mirth but ending in melancholy, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is utterly unlike anything else in Wilder’s teeming and magnificent filmography. Together with his penultimate film, Fedora (1979), it not only bookends the Seventies but calls for a reassessment of his autumnal works.

Quote of the Day (Arthur Conan Doyle, in the Voice of Sherlock Holmes)

"'You will not apply my precept,' he said, shaking his head. 'How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? We know that he did not come through the door, the window, or the chimney. We also know that he could not have been concealed in the room, as there is no concealment possible. When, then, did he come?'"—Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890)

James Cagney never said, “You dirty rat!”, Cary Grant never said, “Judy, Judy, Judy!”, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never wrote, “Elementary, my dear Watson!” The closest the creator of the great Sherlock Holmes came to writing the latter was, simply, “Elementary”; the last couple of the familiar words we know, from what Holmes experts say, might have come from one of the innumerable productions staged over the years by William Gillette.

What that phrase was really driving at, in any case, was the impatience that the lightning-fast Holmes felt with his partner and good pal, the more plodding reader’s stand-in, Dr. John Watson. I think you get maybe an even more vivid sense of this asperity in the quote above.

Doyle, born 150 years ago today, much preferred his historical fiction, such as The White Company, to his more famous creation, the fellow residing at 221B Baker Street. And, in truth, if you want an example of literary craftsmanship in your detective fiction, then look to Raymond Chandler, P.D. James, Peter Robinson, or even someone who started writing toward the end of Doyle’s life, Dorothy L. Sayers.

But it’s indisputable that Doyle created one of the most indelible creations in all of genre fiction. Even today, many a reader or moviegoer, such as myself, thrills to the sound of “Come, Watson, come—the game is afoot.”