Rohase Piercy's Blog, page 10
July 12, 2017
'Lost Without My Boswell' - Holmes & Watson
Without Watson, Holmes as we know him would not exist. As Fr Ronald Knox put it, 'Watson provides what the Holmes drama needs – a Chorus'. We see Holmes through his companion's eyes; the stories are presented as the personal reminiscences of a close friend. The two narrated by Holmes himself - Sherlock Holmes: Adventure of the Blanched Soldier and The Adventure of the Lion's Mane - and the two related in the third person - The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone and His Last Bow - bear witness in their relative unpopularity to the supreme importance of seeing Holmes from a Watson-eye view.
But in the course of his narratives Watson also presents himself to our view, and we get to know a fair bit about him: he's just two years older than his friend, in his early thirties when they first meet; he has been a soldier, invalided out of the Army following an injury sustained at the Battle of Maiwand; he is not lacking in courage, and often carries firearms in order to protect Holmes, who carries none; he's handsome, attractive to women; and he is totally and utterly devoted to Holmes. He agonises over his friend's mental and physical health; he's ready at a moment's notice to follow him anywhere, even when it means leaving his wife and marital home; he's devastated by his supposed death at the Reichenbach Falls and so overcome by his unexpected re-appearance three years later that he faints, and has to be revived by brandy. Is it any wonder that the nature of such a friendship has been the subject of speculation?
Look at Sidney Paget's original depictions of Watson, published in 'Lippincotts' and 'The Strand'. This handsome young man with the slightly foppish demeanour could hardly be further from the geriatric buffoon portrayed by Nigel Bruce in the 1930s movies starring Basil Rathbone. This is the man who lives on intimate terms with Sherlock Holmes for seven years prior to his marriage, and returns to him with alacrity as soon as he is widowed. And that marriage is interesting in itself – a rushed, unconvincing affair in which Mrs Watson so obviously takes second place to Holmes in her husband's list of priorities that as far as the stories are concerned she might as well not exist. So why marry Watson at all? One wonders whether Doyle did, after all, consider the implications of such a close relationship between two good-looking men in their thirties, and felt impelled to try and diffuse speculation. He was not above reacting to public sensitivities – consider how in the later stories, some of which were written after the passing of the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920, he plays down Holmes' drug use, hinting instead at a manic-depressive streak in his nature.
It's within these later stories that Doyle finally allows Watson to wonder whether his devotion is in any way reciprocated by Holmes.
'The relations between us in those latter days were peculiar', writes Watson inSherlock Holmes: Adventure of the Creeping Man. 'He was a man of habits, narrow and concentrated habits, and I had become one of them. As an institution I was like the violin, the shag tobacco, the old black pipe, the index books, and others perhaps less excusable. When it was a case of active work and a comrade was needed upon whose nerve he could place some reliance, my role was obvious. But apart from this, I had uses. I was a whetstone to his mind. I stimulated him. He liked to think aloud in my presence. His remarks could hardly be said to be made to me – many of them would have been as appropriately addressed to his bedstead – but nonetheless, having formed the habit, it had become in some way helpful that I should register and interject.'
It seems a rather sad state of affairs; but the following famous passage from The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, set in the same year (1902), suggests that this bitter view is exaggerated:
'"You're not hurt, Watson? For God's sake, say that you are not hurt!" It was worth a wound – it was worth many wounds – to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time, I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation.'
It has been rightly urged that the Sherlock Holmes Canon is pre-Freudian, and that Doyle would not, in the climate of his day, have deliberately implied a homoerotic relationship between the two men. Just before the first stories were published, the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1886 had laid down a penalty of up to two years' imprisonment with hard labour for any sexual act between men, whether committed in public or in private. It was under Section 11 of this law that Oscar Wilde was tried and condemned in 1895, and passages from The Picture of Dorian Gray were quoted at his trial. Doyle later defended 'Dorian Gray' in writing, and also made it clear that he viewed Wilde's homosexuality as a medical rather than a criminal matter – a liberated view for its time, but he would hardly have deliberately saddled one of his own heroes with such a dangerous tendency. Nevertheless, there's an inner dynamic to the stories, and to the development of the Holmes/Watson relationship, which is all the more potent for not having been deliberately manufactured. It grows out of the creative tension between the two fictional characters themselves, and from a post-Freudian viewpoint that tension is definitely homoerotic. It lights the spark which enlivens the stories from the reader's point of view; by its development we can trace the growth of intimacy between Holmes and Watson, and the post-Freudian reader has the advantage when it comes to observation and deduction in these sphere. Consider how frequently Holmes touches, grasps and pinches Watson - 'His cold fingers closed around my wrist'; 'He drew me back into the shadows … the fingers which clutched me were quivering' – as well as the numerous references to Holmes' physical appearance, his long nervous fingers, pale face and penetrating gaze. Watson's intimate knowledge of his friend is stressed: he alone, he assures us, knows the fierce energy that slumbers beneath the languid exterior.
So to answer the question asked of me all those years ago when My Dearest Holmes caused such outrage amongst the Sherlock Holmes Society and such concern to the Conan Doyle Estate: yes, I do think I had a right to present Holmes and Watson as potential lovers. Charlie Raven, original author of A Case of Domestic Pilfering, obviously felt the same but employed a little more subtlety, which I've preserved in the recently published version: Holmes and Watson are clearly assumed by their young admirers, Max and Guy, to be an item but their relationship (unlike Max and Guy's) is never made explicit.
And no, I don't think Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, if he were alive today, would mind one bit. In my next blog, I'll take a look at Doyle's own attitude to his most famous literary creation, and at the ways in which the character of Sherlock Holmes has been altered and adapted to suit the changing fashions, morals and expectations of the reading public...
But in the course of his narratives Watson also presents himself to our view, and we get to know a fair bit about him: he's just two years older than his friend, in his early thirties when they first meet; he has been a soldier, invalided out of the Army following an injury sustained at the Battle of Maiwand; he is not lacking in courage, and often carries firearms in order to protect Holmes, who carries none; he's handsome, attractive to women; and he is totally and utterly devoted to Holmes. He agonises over his friend's mental and physical health; he's ready at a moment's notice to follow him anywhere, even when it means leaving his wife and marital home; he's devastated by his supposed death at the Reichenbach Falls and so overcome by his unexpected re-appearance three years later that he faints, and has to be revived by brandy. Is it any wonder that the nature of such a friendship has been the subject of speculation?
Look at Sidney Paget's original depictions of Watson, published in 'Lippincotts' and 'The Strand'. This handsome young man with the slightly foppish demeanour could hardly be further from the geriatric buffoon portrayed by Nigel Bruce in the 1930s movies starring Basil Rathbone. This is the man who lives on intimate terms with Sherlock Holmes for seven years prior to his marriage, and returns to him with alacrity as soon as he is widowed. And that marriage is interesting in itself – a rushed, unconvincing affair in which Mrs Watson so obviously takes second place to Holmes in her husband's list of priorities that as far as the stories are concerned she might as well not exist. So why marry Watson at all? One wonders whether Doyle did, after all, consider the implications of such a close relationship between two good-looking men in their thirties, and felt impelled to try and diffuse speculation. He was not above reacting to public sensitivities – consider how in the later stories, some of which were written after the passing of the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920, he plays down Holmes' drug use, hinting instead at a manic-depressive streak in his nature.
It's within these later stories that Doyle finally allows Watson to wonder whether his devotion is in any way reciprocated by Holmes.
'The relations between us in those latter days were peculiar', writes Watson inSherlock Holmes: Adventure of the Creeping Man. 'He was a man of habits, narrow and concentrated habits, and I had become one of them. As an institution I was like the violin, the shag tobacco, the old black pipe, the index books, and others perhaps less excusable. When it was a case of active work and a comrade was needed upon whose nerve he could place some reliance, my role was obvious. But apart from this, I had uses. I was a whetstone to his mind. I stimulated him. He liked to think aloud in my presence. His remarks could hardly be said to be made to me – many of them would have been as appropriately addressed to his bedstead – but nonetheless, having formed the habit, it had become in some way helpful that I should register and interject.'
It seems a rather sad state of affairs; but the following famous passage from The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, set in the same year (1902), suggests that this bitter view is exaggerated:
'"You're not hurt, Watson? For God's sake, say that you are not hurt!" It was worth a wound – it was worth many wounds – to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time, I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation.'
It has been rightly urged that the Sherlock Holmes Canon is pre-Freudian, and that Doyle would not, in the climate of his day, have deliberately implied a homoerotic relationship between the two men. Just before the first stories were published, the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1886 had laid down a penalty of up to two years' imprisonment with hard labour for any sexual act between men, whether committed in public or in private. It was under Section 11 of this law that Oscar Wilde was tried and condemned in 1895, and passages from The Picture of Dorian Gray were quoted at his trial. Doyle later defended 'Dorian Gray' in writing, and also made it clear that he viewed Wilde's homosexuality as a medical rather than a criminal matter – a liberated view for its time, but he would hardly have deliberately saddled one of his own heroes with such a dangerous tendency. Nevertheless, there's an inner dynamic to the stories, and to the development of the Holmes/Watson relationship, which is all the more potent for not having been deliberately manufactured. It grows out of the creative tension between the two fictional characters themselves, and from a post-Freudian viewpoint that tension is definitely homoerotic. It lights the spark which enlivens the stories from the reader's point of view; by its development we can trace the growth of intimacy between Holmes and Watson, and the post-Freudian reader has the advantage when it comes to observation and deduction in these sphere. Consider how frequently Holmes touches, grasps and pinches Watson - 'His cold fingers closed around my wrist'; 'He drew me back into the shadows … the fingers which clutched me were quivering' – as well as the numerous references to Holmes' physical appearance, his long nervous fingers, pale face and penetrating gaze. Watson's intimate knowledge of his friend is stressed: he alone, he assures us, knows the fierce energy that slumbers beneath the languid exterior.
So to answer the question asked of me all those years ago when My Dearest Holmes caused such outrage amongst the Sherlock Holmes Society and such concern to the Conan Doyle Estate: yes, I do think I had a right to present Holmes and Watson as potential lovers. Charlie Raven, original author of A Case of Domestic Pilfering, obviously felt the same but employed a little more subtlety, which I've preserved in the recently published version: Holmes and Watson are clearly assumed by their young admirers, Max and Guy, to be an item but their relationship (unlike Max and Guy's) is never made explicit.
And no, I don't think Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, if he were alive today, would mind one bit. In my next blog, I'll take a look at Doyle's own attitude to his most famous literary creation, and at the ways in which the character of Sherlock Holmes has been altered and adapted to suit the changing fashions, morals and expectations of the reading public...
June 28, 2017
Sherlock Holmes - a Decadent Detective?
It's hard to believe that a hundred and thirty years have now passed since a young doctor living in Southsea with time on his hands due to a less than thriving practice put pen to paper and introduced Sherlock Holmes to the reading public! It's also hard to believe, in the era of Sherlock and Guy Ritchie's 'bromance' movies, how outraged the mainstream media was by the publication of my short, non-explicit romance My Dearest Holmes a mere thirty years ago!
1987 marked the centenary of the first publication of A Study in Scarlet, and the bookshops were full of Holmesiana – spin-offs, scholarly analyses, scrapbooks, shiny new editions. Jeremy Brett was camping it up in the Granada TV adaptations, and I was as hooked as everyone else. I bought myself The Complete Sherlock Holmes and got stuck in to the original stories. The homoerotic subtext between Holmes and Watson, so immediately apparent to me and yet so ignored by every mainstream study of the 'Holmes Phenomenon', was inspiration enough: I set out to write 'the story behind the stories'.
A year or so later, courtesy of The Gay Men's Press, I found myself in print. I also found myself on Page Three of the Sun, next to the lady with the boobs: 'Sherlock Homo!' screamed the headline, 'He's gay in new book!' Captain Bill Mitchell, then Secretary of the Sherlock Holmes Society, was positively apoplectic: 'Just because two chaps share digs, doesn't mean they're queer!' 'So dangerous, this urge to update the past!' warned A N Wilson in a page-long Daily Mail rant, complete with illustration of an outraged-looking pair of geriatric old buffers in tweeds. How dare I interfere, I was asked, with Conan Doyle's original representation of the relationship between Holmes and Watson? What gave me the right to present them as potential lovers? Doyle, I was assured, must be turning in his grave.
Well, if he is, I thought, it's more likely to be because his iconic creation has been well and truly interfered with already by the twentieth-century media. The healthy, square-jawed hero striding purposefully around London with pipe clenched between his teeth beloved by film makers from the 1930s onwards bears no more relation to Doyle's languid, ennui-ridden, cocaine-using original than his senile, slow-witted sidekick does to the handsome, soldierly, energetic Dr Watson of the Canon. I found myself driven to question and explore, if only for my own satisfaction, how the character of Sherlock Holmes would have been viewed by his contemporaries, in his own late Victorian context. What would The Strand's readership have made of him, and how does this differ from what we have made of him since? What sort of character did Doyle originally mean to present to the world, and what conclusions did he expect his readers to draw about him? I wrote an essay entitled 'Sherlock Holmes – Some Points Of Interest', laying my out findings. Unpublished, the typescript lay mouldering in a drawer until 2015, when an updated, spruced-up version appeared in 'The Baker Street Journal' under the title I've used for this blog.
It's important to recognise, I began, that Holmes had his predecessors. As regards real-life influences, Doyle admitted to endowing him with the gifts of observation and deduction he'd observed in Dr Joseph Bell of Edinburgh University as a young medical student. But there were literary precedents too.
'You remind me of Edgar Allen Poe's Dupin', says Watson in A Study in Scarlet; 'I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories.' 'No doubt you think that you are complimenting me', responds Holmes; '… in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow … he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine'.
'Have you read Gaboriau's works?' asks Watson; 'Does Lecoq come up to your idea of a detective?' Here Holmes' reaction is even more scathing: 'Lecoq was a miserable bungler … that book made me ill … I could have done it in twenty-four hours, Lecoq took six months or so!'
Obviously Doyle anticipated the comparison of his character with Auguste Dupin in Edgar Allen Poe'sThe Murders in the Rue Morgue and Emile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq, and wished his readers to be left in no doubt as to Holmes' superior powers (to say nothing of his superior arrogance!)
Like Dupin, Doyle's detective displays startling eccentricities. His devotion to his profession is obsessive; he pours over crime reports and agony columns, and owes the solution of many cases to the ease with which he is able to put himself in the place of the criminal, and imagine what he would do in similar circumstances. He alternates between feverish activity when engaged upon a case and black depression when he is not. He lounges on the couch in his dressing gown in the middle of the day. He uses cocaine (not at that time illegal, but certainly viewed askance by mainstream society). He smokes to excess – not only pipes and cigars, but also cigarettes, viewed at the time as a rather foppish method of consuming tobacco. He keeps this commodity in the toe of a Persian slipper! He plays the violin – an instrument traditionally favoured by the Devil (a view gleefully exploited by Holmes' hero Paganini, whose abandoned virtuosity on the instrument was viewed by many as proof of supernatural and unsavoury antecedents). He indulges in obscure chemical experiments, which ever since the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein some seventy years earlier had been regarded as rather worrying. His rooms at Baker Street, in true Bohemian fashion, are untidy, littered with papers, overflowing ashtrays and discarded syringes. He has small regard for the social niceties; indeed he 'loathes all forms of Society with his whole Bohemian soul'. He is tall, thin and pale, with dark hair and hawk-like features, piercing grey eyes, nervous, long-fingered hands; he is clean-shaven at a time when a moustache at least was de rigeuer. He is not a churchgoer; he does not even possess a Bible. What did Doyle mean to imply by all this?
By endowing him with the traditional qualities of the Victorian anti-hero – pallor and thinness, dark hair, black depressions and a drugs habit – Doyle liberates Holmes from the limits set by the respectable sphere. Readers of Edgar Allen Poe, Bram Stoker and Mary Shelly would have recognised aspects of the Gothic villain who was still sending a pleasurable shiver down the spine of many a late Victorian reader. And remember: the earlier stories of the Canon were written, and most of the later ones still set, in the last decade and a half of the nineteenth century – a period when the cult of Decadence was unravelling the frayed edges of Victorian society with its pursuit of social, spiritual and sexual ambiguity. Holmes is a child of the 'fin de siecle'. At the end of The Red Headed League he complains of that must-have Decadent affliction, 'ennui'; and his listless pose, so perfectly captured in Sidney Paget's original illustrations, is reminiscent of that champion of Decadence, Oscar Wilde.
Bearing in mind that The Sign of Four was commissioned from Doyle by Lippincotts magazine at the same time as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, it's interesting to compare the opening paragraphs of these stories.
'Dorian Gray' opens with Lord Henry Wotton lying on 'a divan of Persian saddle-bags' conversing with Basil Hallward 'through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whirls from his heavy opium-tainted cigarette'. He throws himself down upon the sofa and complains of ennui.
'The Sign of Four' opens with the famous description of Holmes taking cocaine: 'With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.'
Watson, the medical man, tries to remonstrate with him: 'Which is it today?' I asked, 'morphine or cocaine?' He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. 'It is cocaine', he said, 'a seven per cent solution. Would you care to try it?'
Mention of Watson leads, of course, to the all-important relationship between the great detective and his Boswell; but this is a subject for another blog! Watch this space, and I'll catch up with you all again in a couple of weeks …
1987 marked the centenary of the first publication of A Study in Scarlet, and the bookshops were full of Holmesiana – spin-offs, scholarly analyses, scrapbooks, shiny new editions. Jeremy Brett was camping it up in the Granada TV adaptations, and I was as hooked as everyone else. I bought myself The Complete Sherlock Holmes and got stuck in to the original stories. The homoerotic subtext between Holmes and Watson, so immediately apparent to me and yet so ignored by every mainstream study of the 'Holmes Phenomenon', was inspiration enough: I set out to write 'the story behind the stories'.
A year or so later, courtesy of The Gay Men's Press, I found myself in print. I also found myself on Page Three of the Sun, next to the lady with the boobs: 'Sherlock Homo!' screamed the headline, 'He's gay in new book!' Captain Bill Mitchell, then Secretary of the Sherlock Holmes Society, was positively apoplectic: 'Just because two chaps share digs, doesn't mean they're queer!' 'So dangerous, this urge to update the past!' warned A N Wilson in a page-long Daily Mail rant, complete with illustration of an outraged-looking pair of geriatric old buffers in tweeds. How dare I interfere, I was asked, with Conan Doyle's original representation of the relationship between Holmes and Watson? What gave me the right to present them as potential lovers? Doyle, I was assured, must be turning in his grave.
Well, if he is, I thought, it's more likely to be because his iconic creation has been well and truly interfered with already by the twentieth-century media. The healthy, square-jawed hero striding purposefully around London with pipe clenched between his teeth beloved by film makers from the 1930s onwards bears no more relation to Doyle's languid, ennui-ridden, cocaine-using original than his senile, slow-witted sidekick does to the handsome, soldierly, energetic Dr Watson of the Canon. I found myself driven to question and explore, if only for my own satisfaction, how the character of Sherlock Holmes would have been viewed by his contemporaries, in his own late Victorian context. What would The Strand's readership have made of him, and how does this differ from what we have made of him since? What sort of character did Doyle originally mean to present to the world, and what conclusions did he expect his readers to draw about him? I wrote an essay entitled 'Sherlock Holmes – Some Points Of Interest', laying my out findings. Unpublished, the typescript lay mouldering in a drawer until 2015, when an updated, spruced-up version appeared in 'The Baker Street Journal' under the title I've used for this blog.
It's important to recognise, I began, that Holmes had his predecessors. As regards real-life influences, Doyle admitted to endowing him with the gifts of observation and deduction he'd observed in Dr Joseph Bell of Edinburgh University as a young medical student. But there were literary precedents too.
'You remind me of Edgar Allen Poe's Dupin', says Watson in A Study in Scarlet; 'I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories.' 'No doubt you think that you are complimenting me', responds Holmes; '… in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow … he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine'.
'Have you read Gaboriau's works?' asks Watson; 'Does Lecoq come up to your idea of a detective?' Here Holmes' reaction is even more scathing: 'Lecoq was a miserable bungler … that book made me ill … I could have done it in twenty-four hours, Lecoq took six months or so!'
Obviously Doyle anticipated the comparison of his character with Auguste Dupin in Edgar Allen Poe'sThe Murders in the Rue Morgue and Emile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq, and wished his readers to be left in no doubt as to Holmes' superior powers (to say nothing of his superior arrogance!)
Like Dupin, Doyle's detective displays startling eccentricities. His devotion to his profession is obsessive; he pours over crime reports and agony columns, and owes the solution of many cases to the ease with which he is able to put himself in the place of the criminal, and imagine what he would do in similar circumstances. He alternates between feverish activity when engaged upon a case and black depression when he is not. He lounges on the couch in his dressing gown in the middle of the day. He uses cocaine (not at that time illegal, but certainly viewed askance by mainstream society). He smokes to excess – not only pipes and cigars, but also cigarettes, viewed at the time as a rather foppish method of consuming tobacco. He keeps this commodity in the toe of a Persian slipper! He plays the violin – an instrument traditionally favoured by the Devil (a view gleefully exploited by Holmes' hero Paganini, whose abandoned virtuosity on the instrument was viewed by many as proof of supernatural and unsavoury antecedents). He indulges in obscure chemical experiments, which ever since the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein some seventy years earlier had been regarded as rather worrying. His rooms at Baker Street, in true Bohemian fashion, are untidy, littered with papers, overflowing ashtrays and discarded syringes. He has small regard for the social niceties; indeed he 'loathes all forms of Society with his whole Bohemian soul'. He is tall, thin and pale, with dark hair and hawk-like features, piercing grey eyes, nervous, long-fingered hands; he is clean-shaven at a time when a moustache at least was de rigeuer. He is not a churchgoer; he does not even possess a Bible. What did Doyle mean to imply by all this?
By endowing him with the traditional qualities of the Victorian anti-hero – pallor and thinness, dark hair, black depressions and a drugs habit – Doyle liberates Holmes from the limits set by the respectable sphere. Readers of Edgar Allen Poe, Bram Stoker and Mary Shelly would have recognised aspects of the Gothic villain who was still sending a pleasurable shiver down the spine of many a late Victorian reader. And remember: the earlier stories of the Canon were written, and most of the later ones still set, in the last decade and a half of the nineteenth century – a period when the cult of Decadence was unravelling the frayed edges of Victorian society with its pursuit of social, spiritual and sexual ambiguity. Holmes is a child of the 'fin de siecle'. At the end of The Red Headed League he complains of that must-have Decadent affliction, 'ennui'; and his listless pose, so perfectly captured in Sidney Paget's original illustrations, is reminiscent of that champion of Decadence, Oscar Wilde.
Bearing in mind that The Sign of Four was commissioned from Doyle by Lippincotts magazine at the same time as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, it's interesting to compare the opening paragraphs of these stories.
'Dorian Gray' opens with Lord Henry Wotton lying on 'a divan of Persian saddle-bags' conversing with Basil Hallward 'through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whirls from his heavy opium-tainted cigarette'. He throws himself down upon the sofa and complains of ennui.
'The Sign of Four' opens with the famous description of Holmes taking cocaine: 'With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.'
Watson, the medical man, tries to remonstrate with him: 'Which is it today?' I asked, 'morphine or cocaine?' He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. 'It is cocaine', he said, 'a seven per cent solution. Would you care to try it?'
Mention of Watson leads, of course, to the all-important relationship between the great detective and his Boswell; but this is a subject for another blog! Watch this space, and I'll catch up with you all again in a couple of weeks …
May 30, 2017
Re-encountering Constance Wilde
The highlight of my Bank Holiday weekend was a one-woman show in the Brighton Festival entitled 'Mrs Oscar Wilde', written and performed by talented actress (and fellow Goodreads Author!) Lexi Wolfe It consists of a series of short vignettes in which Constance Wilde writes letters to her brother Otho Lloyd. The research is meticulous, based on real-life correspondence and writing, and it was riveting to see Constance transform before our eyes from star-stuck young girl to newly fledged 'celebrity wife and mother' to passionate, confident political activist and feminist; and then age and diminish as increasing disillusionment with her neglectful spouse and concerns about his dangerous lifestyle take hold. The final scene was particularly moving as Constance, ill and dying in exile, hounded by her husband's disgrace and torn by concern for her boys, wonders what her legacy will be - she hopes to be remembered for her literary and political work, and for her championing of the burgeoning women's movement, but fears she will only ever be remembered as 'Mrs Oscar Wilde'.
It was exactly this sidelined legacy that I was trying to challenge in The Coward Does It With A Kiss - published back in 1990 when there was less biographical information about Constance publicly available, and also consisting of a series of (fictional) letters, written in this case by Constance to Oscar. It's so nice to see that the balance is now being redressed, both by Lexi Wolfe and also of course by Franny Moyles in her 2012 biography Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde (which I'm ashamed to say I have yet to read - I shall remedy the situation over the summer, and post a review right here on Goodreads ...)
I do love to see a neglected, invisible character given a voice, and looking back I can see that writing 'The Coward' gave me the confidence to tackle Anne de Bourgh in Before Elizabeth - the story of Anne de Bourgh - a fictional character in this case of course, but a voiceless, sidelined one in Pride and Prejudice
I'm hoping to republish 'The Coward' in the near future, but in the meantime there seem to be a few second-hand copies knocking around if anyone wants to give it a go! And do try and catch 'Mrs Oscar Wilde' if you get the chance to see a performance - it's off to Leeds next I believe!
It was exactly this sidelined legacy that I was trying to challenge in The Coward Does It With A Kiss - published back in 1990 when there was less biographical information about Constance publicly available, and also consisting of a series of (fictional) letters, written in this case by Constance to Oscar. It's so nice to see that the balance is now being redressed, both by Lexi Wolfe and also of course by Franny Moyles in her 2012 biography Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde (which I'm ashamed to say I have yet to read - I shall remedy the situation over the summer, and post a review right here on Goodreads ...)
I do love to see a neglected, invisible character given a voice, and looking back I can see that writing 'The Coward' gave me the confidence to tackle Anne de Bourgh in Before Elizabeth - the story of Anne de Bourgh - a fictional character in this case of course, but a voiceless, sidelined one in Pride and Prejudice
I'm hoping to republish 'The Coward' in the near future, but in the meantime there seem to be a few second-hand copies knocking around if anyone wants to give it a go! And do try and catch 'Mrs Oscar Wilde' if you get the chance to see a performance - it's off to Leeds next I believe!
