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Sherlock Holmes, a Study in Sources by Donald A. Redmond

1984; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 10; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1984.0052

1913-4835

Lauriat Lane,

Short Stories in Global Literature

In conclusion, William Arthur Deacon. A Canadian Literary Life achieves two things: it provides a critical assessment of a man who from the 1920s to the 1960s was at the centre of Canadian letters, and it offers penetrating critical insight into the literary history of Canada — or at least central Canada — during the period. The reader gains a fair and balanced under­ standing of Deacon as a man and as a critic, and knowledge of the institu­ tions, personalities, philosophies, and political and economic forces that shaped the Canadian literary world in the decades from 1920 to i960. Carrie Ma c m il l a n / Mount Allison University Donald A. Redmond, Sherlock Holmes, a Study in Sources (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1982). xviii, 357. $24.95 Among the bound volumes of periodicals with which George Orwell had “some happy half-hours” were “ the Strand in its great Sherlock Holmes days” (hi, 94)-1 Orwell added the Holmes stories to “Raffles and Miss Blandish” (in, 246-60) as another point of comparison between crime stories of 1900 and 1939. In “The Art of Donald McGill” he wrote that “ the Don Quixote/Sancho Panza Combination, which of course is simply the ancient dualism of body and soul in fiction form . . . comes up again and again, in endless variations, Bouvard and Pecuchet, Jeeves and Wooster, Bloom and Dedalus, Holmes and Watson (the Holmes-Watson variant is an exceptionally subtle one, because the usual physical characteristics of [the] two partners have been transposed). Evidently it corresponds to something enduring in our civilization,. . . ” (11, 192). Finally, in “Good Bad Books” Orwell grouped the Holmes stories with other, mostly forgettable and for­ gotten works, as “what Chesterton called the ‘good bad book’ : that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished” (iv, 37). And at the end of this essay: “How about the frankly escapist writers, the purveyors of thrills and ‘light’ humour? How about Sherlock Holmes, Vice Versa, Dracula, Helen’s Babies or King Solomon’s Mines? All of these are definitely absurd books, books which one is more inclined to laugh at than with, and which were hardly taken seriously even by their authors, yet they have survived, and will probably continue to do so. All one can say is that, while civiliza­ tion remains such that one needs distraction from time to time, ‘light’ litera­ ture has its appointed place; also that there is such a thing as sheer skill, or native grace, which may have more survival value than erudition or intel­ lectual power” (iv, 40). Orwell saw; but only partly did he observe. 501 Allusions to Holmes and Watson, direct, indirect, or conjectural, abound throughout every English-speaking culture. They can be verbal or visual, based both on Doyle’s words and on his illustrators — especially the skilled Sidney Paget. Informed recognition of one or both of the immortal pair is assumed: assumed, I would guess, even more readily than for either Quixote and Panza or Pickwick and Weller. Or take the following: He had been meantime taking stock of the individual in front of him and Sherlockholmesing him up, ever since he clapped eyes on him.2 But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble, On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold, And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,3 In the first example, one of at least three in Joyce’s Ulysses, the allusion is explicit and, as Hugh Kenner has shown,4 the sign of a complex cultural resonance. In the second, the allusion is more conjectural; but Eliot has other, more obvious allusions to the Holmes stories,5 and Frank Morley has recorded Eliot’s and his circle’s familiarity with the Canon.6 For one more example, what are we to make of the curiously mingled Hamlet-Prufrock harmonics of the following, from “The Sign of Four” : “ Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-coloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and...