Rohase Piercy's Blog - Posts Tagged "my-dearest-holmes"
The Mystery of Sherlock Holmes' Fitness Regime
Well, the Winter Olympics are in full swing and once again our TV screens are dominated by images of athletes in their prime, running, bounding, leaping and gliding with what appears to be effortless speed and grace towards Olympian glory. I admire them, of course; I take my hat off to the lot of them! As someone whose exercise routine consists of a daily walk with an elderly dog and a weekly Pilates class specially modified for ladies over fifty-five with dodgy backs, I can only shake my head in wonder at the gusto with which these muscled-up young things embrace seemingly inpossible physical challenges.
No, I'm not the sporty type; my energy supply is easily exhausted, and I'm all over the shop on anything less than nine hours' sleep. I'm with Sherlock Holmes – the original, decadent, pre-Rathbone version - who regularly spends days at a time in bed and likes to lounge on the couch in his dressing-gown in the middle of the afternoon. Mental rather than physical exercise is our forte …
… but hang on a minute; whilst proof-reading My Dearest Holmes - Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, I was struck for the first time by the discrepancy between Holmes' account – lifted straight from the Canon- of his struggle with Moriarty on the brink of the Reichenbach Falls, and his ennui-prone, cocaine-addicted lifestyle. He claims not only to have used a Japanese system of wrestling called 'baristu' (a mis-spelling of 'bartitsu'?) to defeat his opponent, but also to have run, on awaking from a spell of unconsciousness, ten miles over the mountains to safety. Did he do this under the influence of cocaine, or desperation? Was his defeat of Moriarty a stroke of luck?
In A Study in Scarlet, Watson famously makes a list entitled 'Sherlock Holmes – His Limits', in which he describes his new flatmate as being 'an expert singlestick player, boxer and swordsman'. (Singlestick, also known as cudgels, was yet another martial art). However as the stories develop, quite when he gets to practise and maintain these demanding skills remains something of a mystery. When does Sherlock Holmes ever visit a gymnasium? Could it be during the long walks which, according to Watson, take him into the 'lowest portions of the city'? Both Watson's description and Sydney Paget's original drawings show Holmes as tall, thin, pale and gaunt – hardly a muscle to be seen. Yes, he has a fierce energy when engaged upon a case – Watson does, on occasion, remind us that he alone knows the full extent of the energy which slumbers beneath his companion's listless facade – but by the time they re-encounter one another in The Adventure of the Empty House, Holmes has 'a dead-white tinge to his aquiline face which told me that his life recently had not been a healthy one' – a reference to the continuing hold of his cocaine habit. If Holmes did once possess the pugilistic skills of which his Boswell boasts in the first flush of admiration, they must surely have been in pretty poor shape by that time.
As I've mentioned before, twentieth-century depictions of Holmes on film (pre Jeremy Brett) did like to present him as fit, healthy, rugged and generally rather more masculine than he is in the original stories; no doubt Watson's list was instrumental in giving them licence to do so. But for myself, I'll always regard the more athletic side of Sherlock Holmes as an example of the 'romanticism' which he accuses his Boswell of indulging in his accounts of their adventures; a romanticism from which he himself was far from immune, if his description of what happened at the Reichenbach Falls is anything to go by ...
No, I'm not the sporty type; my energy supply is easily exhausted, and I'm all over the shop on anything less than nine hours' sleep. I'm with Sherlock Holmes – the original, decadent, pre-Rathbone version - who regularly spends days at a time in bed and likes to lounge on the couch in his dressing-gown in the middle of the afternoon. Mental rather than physical exercise is our forte …
… but hang on a minute; whilst proof-reading My Dearest Holmes - Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, I was struck for the first time by the discrepancy between Holmes' account – lifted straight from the Canon- of his struggle with Moriarty on the brink of the Reichenbach Falls, and his ennui-prone, cocaine-addicted lifestyle. He claims not only to have used a Japanese system of wrestling called 'baristu' (a mis-spelling of 'bartitsu'?) to defeat his opponent, but also to have run, on awaking from a spell of unconsciousness, ten miles over the mountains to safety. Did he do this under the influence of cocaine, or desperation? Was his defeat of Moriarty a stroke of luck?
In A Study in Scarlet, Watson famously makes a list entitled 'Sherlock Holmes – His Limits', in which he describes his new flatmate as being 'an expert singlestick player, boxer and swordsman'. (Singlestick, also known as cudgels, was yet another martial art). However as the stories develop, quite when he gets to practise and maintain these demanding skills remains something of a mystery. When does Sherlock Holmes ever visit a gymnasium? Could it be during the long walks which, according to Watson, take him into the 'lowest portions of the city'? Both Watson's description and Sydney Paget's original drawings show Holmes as tall, thin, pale and gaunt – hardly a muscle to be seen. Yes, he has a fierce energy when engaged upon a case – Watson does, on occasion, remind us that he alone knows the full extent of the energy which slumbers beneath his companion's listless facade – but by the time they re-encounter one another in The Adventure of the Empty House, Holmes has 'a dead-white tinge to his aquiline face which told me that his life recently had not been a healthy one' – a reference to the continuing hold of his cocaine habit. If Holmes did once possess the pugilistic skills of which his Boswell boasts in the first flush of admiration, they must surely have been in pretty poor shape by that time.
As I've mentioned before, twentieth-century depictions of Holmes on film (pre Jeremy Brett) did like to present him as fit, healthy, rugged and generally rather more masculine than he is in the original stories; no doubt Watson's list was instrumental in giving them licence to do so. But for myself, I'll always regard the more athletic side of Sherlock Holmes as an example of the 'romanticism' which he accuses his Boswell of indulging in his accounts of their adventures; a romanticism from which he himself was far from immune, if his description of what happened at the Reichenbach Falls is anything to go by ...
New Holmes for Sale!
A big thankyou to everyone who entered my Giveaway for My Dearest Holmes and congratulations to the fifteen lucky winners - shiny new signed copies should be arriving on your doorstep any day now and I wish you happy reading!
I do hope that readers who enjoyed MDH back in the day will buy and review this newly edited version, now available from Amazon in both paperback and Kindle. It kicks off with a few samples of the reaction it inspired back in 1988 from both mainstream and Gay press - I still have all the original clippings in a very tatty old scrapbook, beginning with Page Three of the Sun (carefully cropped so as not to feature the lady with the boobs; British readers will understand how amused I was to find myself on that particular page, and what fun I had persuading friends to buy a copy), and finishing with a much more sane and balanced piece from The Guardian. Non-explicit as it was, this story exploring the possibility of John Watson's love for Sherlock Holmes, set against the ramifications of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act (Section 11 of which outlawed all acts of a sexual nature between men and brought about the downfall of Conan Doyle's fellow author Oscar Wilde) caused quite an outcry thirty years ago!
In her thoughtful and interesting Foreword, Charlie Raven looks back on the heady days when she and I, at that time a same-sex couple ourselves, first fell under the spell of the man, the myth and the magic that is Sherlock Holmes on the back of a few chance remarks made to her by a work colleague. It's shocking to remember how hostile a decade the 1980s was for gay people, with Section 28 of the Local Government Act outlawing anything that could be seen as a 'promotion' of homosexuality in Britain, the U.S. Court of Appeal ruling that no-one had a 'fundamental right' to be gay, and Pope John Paul II ordering the Catholic Church to withdraw support for gay and lesbian Christian organisations. It's a sobering fact that even today, with equal marriage available in twenty-six countries, homosexuality remains illegal, and in some cases punishable by death, in seventy two others – several of them members of the Commonwealth, as Olympian Tom Daley bravely highlighted at the recent Commonwealth Games.
So can My Dearest Holmes claim a modest place in LGBTQ history? Charlie kindly concludes that it can, pointing out that 'the prominence of its heroes in popular mythology instantly caused readers to think a little harder about the implications of being a same-sex couple living under legal and social restrictions' and asking 'how many of the spin-off novels, fanfics and homoerotically-charged movie or TV interpretations of the Holmes/Watson dynamic would now exist in their current form if it were not for the first step represented by this little book?'
Do give it a read (or a re-read) and let me know what you think - I'm very happy to answer questions, and will reply to any politely-worded comments - and please don't forget to leave a review, however brief, both here and on Amazon!
I do hope that readers who enjoyed MDH back in the day will buy and review this newly edited version, now available from Amazon in both paperback and Kindle. It kicks off with a few samples of the reaction it inspired back in 1988 from both mainstream and Gay press - I still have all the original clippings in a very tatty old scrapbook, beginning with Page Three of the Sun (carefully cropped so as not to feature the lady with the boobs; British readers will understand how amused I was to find myself on that particular page, and what fun I had persuading friends to buy a copy), and finishing with a much more sane and balanced piece from The Guardian. Non-explicit as it was, this story exploring the possibility of John Watson's love for Sherlock Holmes, set against the ramifications of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act (Section 11 of which outlawed all acts of a sexual nature between men and brought about the downfall of Conan Doyle's fellow author Oscar Wilde) caused quite an outcry thirty years ago!
In her thoughtful and interesting Foreword, Charlie Raven looks back on the heady days when she and I, at that time a same-sex couple ourselves, first fell under the spell of the man, the myth and the magic that is Sherlock Holmes on the back of a few chance remarks made to her by a work colleague. It's shocking to remember how hostile a decade the 1980s was for gay people, with Section 28 of the Local Government Act outlawing anything that could be seen as a 'promotion' of homosexuality in Britain, the U.S. Court of Appeal ruling that no-one had a 'fundamental right' to be gay, and Pope John Paul II ordering the Catholic Church to withdraw support for gay and lesbian Christian organisations. It's a sobering fact that even today, with equal marriage available in twenty-six countries, homosexuality remains illegal, and in some cases punishable by death, in seventy two others – several of them members of the Commonwealth, as Olympian Tom Daley bravely highlighted at the recent Commonwealth Games.
So can My Dearest Holmes claim a modest place in LGBTQ history? Charlie kindly concludes that it can, pointing out that 'the prominence of its heroes in popular mythology instantly caused readers to think a little harder about the implications of being a same-sex couple living under legal and social restrictions' and asking 'how many of the spin-off novels, fanfics and homoerotically-charged movie or TV interpretations of the Holmes/Watson dynamic would now exist in their current form if it were not for the first step represented by this little book?'
Do give it a read (or a re-read) and let me know what you think - I'm very happy to answer questions, and will reply to any politely-worded comments - and please don't forget to leave a review, however brief, both here and on Amazon!
