THE SITUATION WAS FULL OF PERIL

First manuscript page of A Study in Scarlet

 

When I first ventured out to join a Sherlockian society (The Sound of the Baskervilles, Seattle, 2007) I found out to my relief that I was not the first newbie-Sherlockian that failed to enjoy (or, in all honesty, failed to completely read) the so-called American section of A Study in Scarlet. The SOBs even had an all-in-good-fun name for that part of the book, the LBP (the Long Boring Part). Since then, I've read parts of the novel several times but always gave that LBP less than full attention. After all, I reasoned, how could that part possibly compete with the origin story of the Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson friendship?

However, this week my Sherlockian friend J. mentioned that he was rereading A Study in Scarlet in preparation for a Sherlockian meeting. He then said he planned to read the non-Holmes part of the book first as if it were a stand alone novel. He wondered if he would find it interesting and valuable if read with no consideration of Holmes and Watson.  I decided he was on to something and I wanted to read it that way as well.

We recently read Daniel Stashower's Teller of Tales together and discussed how our understandings of Doyle and his work have changed. I wondered if I could finally appreciate Part II: The Country of the Saints, Chapters I-V?

To my surprise, I did not tire of it and Doyle's deft prose pulled me right along. John Ferrier, Lucy Ferrier and Jefferson Hope are sympathetic characters, and, as in some of Doyle's best work, the location is so vividly drawn as to become a character in the story.

I did not find it perfectly constructed. I did yell "Oh, Doyle, why didn't you have an editor?" when reading the part when Jefferson Hope meets Lucy Ferrier:

Unfortunately the horns of one of the creatures, either by accident or design, came in violent contact with the flank of the mustang, and excited it to madness. In an instant it reared up upon its hind legs with a snort of rage, and pranced and tossed in a way that would have unseated any but a skilful rider. The situation was full of peril. Every plunge of the excited horse brought it against the horns again, and goaded it to fresh madness. It was all that the girl could do to keep herself in the saddle, yet a slip would mean a terrible death under the hoofs of the unwieldy and terrified animals.  Unaccustomed to sudden emergencies, her head began to swim, and her grip upon the bridle to relax. Choked by the rising cloud of dust and by the steam from the struggling creatures, she might have abandoned her efforts in despair, but for a kindly voice at her elbow which assured her of assistance. At the same moment a sinewy brown hand caught the frightened horse by the curb, and forcing a way through the drove, soon brought her to the outskirts.

'You're not hurt, I hope, miss,' said her preserver, respectfully.
She looked up at his dark, fierce face, and laughed saucily. 'I'm awful frightened,' she said, naïvely; 'whoever would have thought that Pancho would have been so scared by a lot of cows?'
'Thank God you kept your seat,' the other said earnestly. He was a tall, savage-looking young fellow, mounted on a powerful roan horse, and clad in the rough dress of a hunter, with a long rifle slung over his shoulders.  'I guess you are the daughter of John Ferrier,' he remarked; 'I saw you ride down from his house. When you see him, ask him if he remembers the Jefferson Hopes of St Louis. If he's the same Ferrier, my father and he were pretty thick.'
'Hadn't you better come and ask yourself?' she asked, demurely.

An editor would have told him that he didn't need to tell me the situation was full of peril, and an editor would have done something about all those -ly adverbs stacked one upon the other. I also thought something was missing in the description of how Jefferson Hope knew where to look for Drebber and Strangerson. Doyle tells us:

Among these had been Drebber and Stangerson; and no one knew whither they had gone.  Rumour reported that Drebber had managed to convert a large part of his property into money, and that he had departed a wealthy man, while his companion, Stangerson, was comparatively poor. There was no clue at all, however, as to their whereabouts.
Many a man, however vindictive, would have abandoned all thought of revenge in the face of such a difficulty, but Jefferson Hope never faltered for a moment.  With the small competence he possessed, eked out by such employment as he could pick up, he travelled from town to town through the United States in quest of his enemies.

The United States is huge, and he certainly didn't have social media or the internet to help him. Even more improbably, he then goes on to tracking them city to city in Europe. How?

Possible plot holes aside, this story is interesting and compelling. Doyle was a young man in his twenties when he penned A Study in Scarlet over a period of several weeks in 1886 but his craftsmanship is already on display here, even in the part formerly known as the LBP.  This paragraph has the same poetic tones I've admired elsewhere in his work:

In the gladness of his heart he put his hands to his mouth and made the glen re-echo to a loud halloo as a signal that he was coming. He paused and listened for an answer. None came save his own cry, which clattered up the dreary, silent ravines, and was borne back to his ears in countless repetitions. Again he shouted, even louder than before, and again no whisper came back from the friends whom he had left such a short time ago.

Jefferson Hope had his heart broken a moment later, and so did I. The situation was full of peril and I'm glad I finally gave Doyle a chance to tell me about it.

 CUTTING OUT THE POETRY

You know that particular quarter, the monotonous brick streets, the weary suburban highways.  Right in the middle of them, a little island of ancient culture and comfort, lies this old home, surrounded by a high sun-baked wall, mottled with lichens and topped with moss, the sort of wall-'
'Cut out the poetry, Watson,' said Holmes, severely.  'I note that it was a high brick wall.' 

Cut out the poetry, Watson

In “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman,” Sherlock Holmes famously tells Watson to cut out the poetry, after Watson waxes a little poetic about a high wall. I’m always disappointed that Watson is cut off at that point as his description of that wall is lovely. Is it poetic? Yes, I think so but then the definition of what is poetry—and especially what is good poetry—is always a definition in flux. 

 Last week when I posted Late to the Party but I Still Want to Dance about the onset of my Doting on Doyle process, Mark Hanson, my favorite Sherlockian linguistics guru and Canadian Cesspudlian, replied with this:

 

the text
the author
the context
percolating
timing
#theattentionspanofagnat
The Lost Art of the Deep Dive
“We realized we had more of a miniseries than a movie"
Let the Music Play
keep your feet moving
dance

I read it aloud and admired the poetic sound of it. The thought of a Sherlockian plus poetry reminded me of an interesting statistic I read recently while researching Doyle’s relationship with The Strand Magazine. As noted by the indispensable Arthur Conan Doyle encyclopedia: “Between 1891 and 1930, The Strand Magazine published no less than 121 short stories, 70 articles, nine novels, two interviews and one poem written by Arthur Conan Doyle.” 

All those words, and yet, only one poem. One. I had to read that poem.

I knew from reading elsewhere that Doyle had penned several collections of poetry and it seemed odd to me that only one made its way into The Strand. After reading “Bendy’s Sermon,” the situation made more sense to me—this is an action story of sorts: a prize-fighter turned minister straightens out a rowdy crowd. It is not my cup of tea but I can see the charm. 

The more I thought about it, I remembered I had read "Bendy's Sermon" before in a scion publication several years ago and then apparently promptly forgot about it. 

The ACD encyclopedia pages include 106 poems by Doyle. I had the rather ambitious idea that I would read them all. As it turns out, “Bendy’s Sermon” is not the only one that is not my cup of tea. To be perfectly honest, I did not get very far before interest and energy waned.

Good poetry is excruciatingly difficult to write, and Doyle’s poetry, like much of his work, reflects his specific interests and events around him. It would be unfair of me to judge its worth only by the metric of how much it holds my interest, with my 21^st century mindset and attention span.

One of the poems I read did give me pause:

The Empire

1902

They said that it had feet of clay,
That its fall was sure and quick.
In the flames of yesterday
All the clay was burned to brick.

When they carved our epitaph
And marked us doomed beyond recall,
"We are," we answered, with a laugh,
"The Empire that declines to fall." 

This piece was first published in the collected volume Songs of the Road in March 1911. I could not find any documentation of when he actually wrote it but the 1902 included in the title could only mean one thing to me: The Boer War. On May 31, 1902, the Boer War ended in South Africa after three and a half years of conflict.  Doyle’s very public and prolific Boer War crusade (to participate in, to influence policy during, to turn public opinion for, and to defend British atrocities after) is well known.

The defense is hardly surprising as Doyle did, after all, put these words in Sherlock Holmes’s mouth in The Sign of Four: “Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them.” I could spend a lifetime attempting to sort out the just proportions of the Boer War and the British Empire. 

He was a man who believed in the British Empire. Was he wrong to do so? I think that he was a man firmly rooted in his time and place.  A quote on this topic from David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism—How the British Saw Their Empire seems to fit Doyle’s efforts: “They [most Britons] saw what they were conditioned, what they wanted, and what they expected, to see.” Perhaps that is a facet of human nature that never changes.

But I digress. Back to the poetry. The actual construction of Doyle’s poetry is not what I expected to see when I first learned he had written poetry. When I had read none of his work other than the Sherlockian canon, I thought of him as having an ability to write lyric poetry because of my favorite passage from The Hound of the Baskervilles:

(Where Watson Walked/photo by Paul Thomas Miller, April 2022)

The sun was already sinking when I reached the summit of the hill, and the long slopes beneath me were all golden-green on one side and grey shadow on the other.  A haze lay low upon the farthest sky-line, out of which jutted the fantastic shapes of Belliver and Vixen Tor.  Over the wide expanse there was no sound and no movement.  One great grey bird, a gull or curlew, soared aloft in the blue heaven.  He and I seemed to be the only living things between the huge arch of the sky and the desert beneath it.  The barren scene, the sense of loneliness, and the mystery and urgency of my task all struck a chill into my heart.

 Should Watson cut out the poetry? No, not Watson. And, therefore, not Doyle. I will read the rest of it over time. Perhaps over a long time, but still.