“Near this was a square brick building called the Aquarium, and serving, as the name implies, as a place of seclusion for habitual drunkards”
—
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Narrative of John Smith (1883)
“There’s
clearly no one new in your life, otherwise you wouldn’t be spending your Friday
nights in an aquarium. That probably accounts for the drink problem, too—the
slight tremor in your hand, the red wine stain ghosting
your top lip.” (The Six Thatchers)
“On 30 August 1889 at a dinner party in the Langham Hotel given by Joseph M. Stoddart (1845-1921), managing editor of Lippincott’s Magazine (Philadelphia), Arthur Conan Doyle met Oscar Wilde. At this legendary meeting, both men came away, promising to submit stories to the publication. There is really no record of what was discussed. Wilde went on to pen a salacious, and controversial tale in the Faustian tradition of a man who trades his soul for immortality, and Doyle of course, wrote The Sign of Four.
On the surface, the narrative of SIGN is pretty straight-forward. A young woman comes to Holmes for help, about the disappearance of her father and the appearance of mysterious jewels. Watson steps up, as usual, to assist Holmes with the case, facing off in the story with thieves and murderers. Pretty standard Doyle. But beneath the surface, lies romance, desperation, revenge and intense heartbreak. Woven into the narrative of The Sign of Four is also a Faustian tale. There is a very rich thread of Subtext and References mixed throughout that speaks not just to the epic play, but also the writer, Johann Von Goethe, and his experiences. There are direct quotes, parallels of the narration, direct tie-ins through other pieces of Literature. Even the clouds are in on it.
It is my theory that Arthur Conan Doyle made use of the epic in SIGN, as a homage to Goethe, a possible signal to Wilde (maybe an in-joke or Literary nod? Perhaps a challenge) plus other writers that he admired, also, perhaps to really imprint upon those who wish to see, the underlying story between Watson & Holmes. To help with context, I have included excerpts from Nekomuse, who does excellent work at stripping away the overlaying narrative, and bring better focus to the dialogue between Holmes & Watson. Hennessey’s book focuses on some of Arthur Conan Doyle’s supposed philosophical and literary influences. I attempt to take a closer look at what he has found and see how well it fit’s with my own research. I hope the reader will find much to enjoy in this work.”
A Sherlock Holmes Commentary, D. Martin Dakin, 1972.
I also struggle with this. There are very few things that could cause it, but two spring to mind in particular. One is that Holmes was so distressed by Watson’s marriage that he had to cut ties – he simply couldn’t bear the torment of having to watch his friend be married. The other is a deeply significant task similar to that detailed in ‘His Last Bow’.
Yeah, I tend to go back and forth on thinking of ways to justify it vs. deciding that it’s not completely true. Sometimes I imagine that Holmes managed for at most a few months, but ended up writing after all, and in EMPT Watson is just fabricating or exaggerating when he quotes Holmes as saying that he wanted to write but didn’t. When Holmes says he wanted Watson to write a convincing account of his death, I think that could be true, but I think initially Holmes was running away from his feelings and he’s just telling himself that getting Watson to write a convincing account was his plan, when really it’s just a convenient consequence. Sometimes I imagine that none of it happened and they both were in on it and Holmes faked his death for entirely different reasons. But then the idea of an epic top secret mission which he really couldn’t reveal to Watson is pretty tempting to believe, too.
My fic has the Hiatus happening for a mix of reasons, but I confess it is so hard to write it. I have actually reversed Holmes’ statement ‘I feared lest your affectionate regard for me should tempt you to be indiscreet’ to Holmes saying ‘I feared lest my affectionate regard for you should tempt me to be indiscreet’ which puts a whole new slant on the matter.
Honestly I am so curious to see where your fic takes this!
This is an enigma that needs to be solved… I think the idea of Holmes simply not communicating with Watson is an impossibility requiring us to ferret out improbable truths. Naomi Novik’s short story, “Commonplaces,” follows @artemisastarte‘s hypothesis about Watson’s marriage being a source of deep distress to – and something of a crisis for – Holmes. And I myself have yielded to the temptation of hypothesizing indirect contact during the Hiatus.
For myself, I can’t see Holmes leaving Watson to grieve for three years as justifiable, either for the protection of his own feelings or because he thought Watson couldn’t safely be trusted with the truth. I’ve tried several times to make it more palatable to myself, I’ve written around it, I’ve read around it, and there are many beautiful ways of approaching the problem. But in my heart of hearts, I just can’t stomach it and prefer to imagine that the account Watson gives of the hiatus and his years of ignorance in “The Empty House” is not a true one. Heaven knows it’s full of plot holes anyway. It’s not a piece of the canon worth keeping, IMO, if it requires Holmes to treat Watson as though he can’t be trusted, or to place his own emotional safety above the most basic respect he owes to Watson’s feelings and friendship.
But I should add that I tend to opt out of this canon storyline as much because of my personal aversion to angst as anything else, and I know that many beautiful and wonderful stories do use this plot to delve deeply into both characters. I’m sorry, I wouldn’t want my own feelings about it to come off as dismissive of the other great approaches to the story that are out there in the fandom. I applaud everyone who writes about this, however they decide to handle it!
This is one of the things that I treasure about Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven Per-Cent Solution: it has Holmes go away with Watson’s full knowledge in order to get well again after he kicks cocaine. Everyone who cares about Holmes knows why he’s gone and that he intends to come back. Watson isn’t stuck mourning him, nor is Mrs Hudson stuck keeping a masoleum for the man for three years. And while he hasn’t left a detailed itinerary behind him, he’s not in deep hiding, either, which means it’s conceivably possible for his loved ones to get in touch with him, if they need to. (Gratuitous plug for my own fic, because I can.) It’s still terribly sad and worrisome – it’s not a parting anyone asked for, and there’s plenty of reason to fear for his safety while he’s gone – but it is stomachable as the ordinary kind of grief that happens between people who love and respect each other.
Which I suppose is the long way round of saying that I, too, prefer reading FINA and EMPT as being at least partially untrue. Because as @educatedinyellow says, the degree of distrust and/or disrespect shown to Watson is EMPT as written is… untenable.
I like the way Granada Holmes handled it; but still, yes, it’s hard to think about poor Watson kept in the dark for so long for such insufficient reasons. On the other hand, if you think about this in real-life terms: the *actual* gap in time between the publication of “Final Problem” and the publication of “Empty House” is about ten years. Up until the Return series, Holmes’s cases generally took place pretty close to the year in which they were published. If he were really being consistent with his previous MO, Doyle should have brought Holmes back to life 10 years after he disappeared. Just IMAGINE. From that point of view, setting “Empty House” only 3 years after “Final Problem” seems like an act of mercy–as if Doyle was thinking, OK, what’s the minimum number of years of separation I can get away with and still make Holmes’s ‘death’ have an impact? In retconning his own story, if you look at it that way, Doyle was subtracting 7 possible years of loss and grief. So if you look at it that way, everyone who then reworks the Hiatus in their heads to be shorter or less painful for Watson is just following in Doyle’s footsteps.
But if you have scruples about playing fast and loose with canon, there are many reasons Holmes might have done this which are left unstated in EH:
1) From a brutally utilitarian point of view, contacting Watson and letting him know what’s going on would probably have been extremely dangerous for Holmes. If you want to kill Sherlock Holmes, and you’ve decided you’re in this for the long haul, what are you going to do? Play whack-a-mole all over the globe while he stays one step ahead of you? No; you find Watson and put him under surveillance because one of these days, when Holmes thinks it’s safe, he’s going to drop him a line and then eventually come back. We tend to forget when we think about all this that a) Holmes went into that confrontation with Moriarty fully expecting to die, b) the plan to pretend to be dead comes to him in a flash while Moriarty is falling, c) he comes under attack from Moran and his goons almost immediately and d) he escapes with nothing but the clothes he’s standing in. He had no time to arrange this with Watson in advance, and no easy way of contacting Watson while he was still in the vicinity. So a certain amount of time would have to pass before he would even have been able to contact Watson.
2) Try to imagine Holmes sitting down to write to Watson, say, six months into this escapade, at a point when he’s reasonably safe and has fabricated another identity for himself and thinks he might be able to risk a letter, perhaps delivered in some ingeniously secret way by Mycroft. Exactly how does one write that letter? “My dear Watson, You will no doubt be surprised to hear from your old friend, who is not actually dead, even though he did watch you coming to that conclusion and allowed you to believe it for six months in order to save his own skin…” The worst of the damage is already done. Grief is at its most intense in the months right after the loss. He can’t save Watson from that. And what guarantee does Holmes have that Watson will even believe the letter is genuine? If you got a letter right now from a dead loved one, would your first thought be, “THEY’RE ALIVE! THANK GOD!” or would it be, “What sick son of a bitch is tormenting me with false hope?” When Holmes finally DOES come back, Watson has to grab him to satisfy himself that Holmes isn’t a ghost. (Yes, possibly also for other reasons, moving on.) Without Watson there in front of him, I can easily see how it would be much, much, much easier for Holmes just to go on, day after day, deciding not to write that letter than to face up to what he’s done.
3) Let’s say Holmes writes to Watson to let him know what’s going on, but doesn’t give Watson his location because a meeting would be too dangerous and asks Watson for his word of honor that he won’t try to find him. Watson gives it because he wants Holmes to be safe. So Watson’s next move is what? To try to take out the people who are threatening Holmes. And the result is what? Dead Watson.
So if you take all that into consideration…you don’t have to see Holmes as an inhuman machine to see why this situation is allowed to drag on for a few years, especially considering the fact that some of that time was spent exploring unknown regions. (Which in itself may have been an attempt at covert communication. Holmes says “You may have read” of Sigerson’s explorations, as if he’s expecting it…did he want Watson to read about them? Did he put clues in them? Did Watson just not read of Sigerson’s exploits, or miss the clues?) It’s also easy to see how Holmes would have mentioned precisely none of this to Watson, because knowing any of this wouldn’t make it any better. “I was afraid of dying,” “I was afraid to be honest with you about what I had done to you,” and “I was afraid to put myself through the grief and loss I put you through” are all things that don’t reflect particularly well on Holmes and wouldn’t bring Watson a lot of comfort. Watson, by this point, has been through the entire cycle of grief and the damage is done. I can see Holmes deciding, as he heads up to Watson’s study, that he’s not going to stoop to self-justification. Or maybe he does tell Watson all these reasons, and Watson decides they can’t go in the narrative because they show Holmes as being too human and too vulnerable.
Canon Watson is incredibly nuanced, which is why Martin’s acting style was perfect for the modern role. Any warping or diminishment of the modern character is the fault of the writers, not the actor.
oh sorry let me clarify – this post is 100% intended as a defense of the modern bbc character, not as a renunciation of it. i am basically short-handing the “john” version of this post: sherlock holmes would be a boring character without flaws.
acd’s stories are written from john’s perspective, and therefore he is at the advantage with himself – he can edit, basically, and leave out that which makes him look weak or ill-tempered or what have you. he can scoot over the depth of his emotions and hide the call of his heart simply by skating over events relying on dialogue between characters instead of inviting us into an inner dialogue with himself. he is, in short, the quintessential unreliable narrator, and the most successful one of all time: he tells us what he wants us to know, and for the last hundred+ years, sherlockians have been satisfied with his interpretations of self.
not so with bbc. moftiss has previously been lauded for this “catching out” of the character, specifically in asip – that while acd’s john takes sort of a clinical, self-recriminating approach (lumping himself in with those “idlers and lounger” which are irresistibly drained into london, etc etc), and almost laughs at himself (that same paragraph: “I was as free as air – or as free as eleven shillings and sixpence a day will allow a man to be.” but the modern character confronts what john watson must really have been going through at the time – lost, alone, broke, without work, without health, without purpose. our john watson has nightmares, our john watson cries, our john watson contemplates suicide. and it is into this dark, grief-stricken truth that sherlock holmes comes crashing in.
so that tells us right from the off that this adaptation is an interrogation of character, and of the canon. first step to bbc is to really dig in and see what acd’s john failed to say. and that continues throughout – the fall, for example. acd’s john basically writes himself, in the face of holmes’ revelations of betrayal and deception, basically clapping his hands and saying “goodness! how wonderfully smart! right on chap!” bbc’s john feels the full weight of the consequence. he is allowed to be betrayed. he is allowed to be angry. feelings which acd’s john must have felt and which have been denied him. the audience basically is left to fill in the gaps with acd john’s emotional state, because characters who don’t feel betrayal when betrayed, who can’t feel righteous anger when appropriate, are one-dimensional dullards and a bore.
we have also previously lauded moftiss – and before them, granada holmes’s watson – for bringing john’s intelligence and competence to light. many adaptations over the years have basically reduced john to cartoonishly buffoon-ish sidekick (tplosh, howard, etc), and we recognise now that of course this interpretation is not supported by the canon. and yet the canon does contain elements of exclamation and wonder – john writes himself as being stunned and shocked by holmes’ brilliance, even as he allows holmes to tell him that he discounts himself and never gives himself credit.
but competence and intelligence are not the end of watson’s nuance, and bbc has explored that and allowed that. grief, betrayal, irritation and annoyance, anger, even violence. things that the depths and nuance of real people generally allows for, considering background, history, context. we can sit around and say well i’ve never hit my best friend! ya, well, my best friends have also never faked their deaths for literal years and then revealed themselves in a fake french waiter outfit in the middle of my marriage proposal, so i guess i can’t really say how i’d react! extraordinary circumstances beget extraordinary reactions, right? what bbc has allowed john to do is to lean into these reactions, to explore the depth of them, and to disallow john to continue hiding behind his narration. out in the open. bringing the truth of john out into the open.
which brings us to series four, which seems to be the crux of the whole issue. there are a lot of hints about unreality in the series, but even if you don’t buy that and you take the whole thing at face value, there’s really nothing to imply that john and sherlock’s relationship has been irrevocably harmed and that the path john’s character takes is in some way diminished in sherlock’s life. so john pulls away from sherlock when mary dies. if you take it at face value, john reacts not just to losing a wife but also to the exchange of one life for the other – that mary chooses sherlock’s life over her own, when john struggled with that choice and struggled with mary and failed to make a decision himself. so of course he pulls away from sherlock. that makes sense!! that. makes. logical. reasonable. sense. having an emotional reaction to your own life is not a betrayal of your friends. denying help from someone with whom you are currently having some emotional upheaval is pretty normal!! and yet he still comes when sherlock shows up in tld and says that he needs him. follows him. and of course i am of the opinion that taking the morgue scene at total face value is the warm-paste version of watching the show, given that it is preceded generally by one-on-one therapy sessions with a mind-controlling genius that wants to kill and/or harm sherlock and is preceded immediately by an implication that td-12 was ingested and subsequently revealed to be told through john’s statement to police – that is to say, stepping back into the unreliable narrator for a moment. to me, face value must include all these considerations. but even if the morgue scene happened that way, it’s immediately followed by john taking responsibility (admitting it to lestrade in an official statement to police which obviously began as a report of assault), john’s subsequent goodbye to sherlock at the hospital which imo reads as intended to be a permanent “i can’t do this anymore, for either of us” goodbye, and then john’s submission to mycroft’s will – mycroft calls, says for john to get into the car waiting, and john goes, knowing that mycroft could totally be about to black-bag him for crimes against his little brother. and john still saves sherlock’s life, and throughout tfp you have john and sherlock on the same side. john is family. there is never any doubt to sherlock and mycroft that sherlock will choose john. sherlock is desperate to save john throughout. any diminishment of their relationship in tfp is actually on sherlock’s part when he ignores vatican cameos. by series end, face value, they are utterly together – and although it’s platonic, there’s really absolutely nothing in series four that implies that they couldn’t or won’t ever be romantically attached, and plenty to imply that being romantically attached “would complete them as human beings” – that is to say, would bring their characters fully to life.
i’m getting away from myself. the point is: bbc john interrogates the text of acd’s john and brings forth the things that acd’s john didn’t want us to know. to read john watson as always the devoted, always the loyal, always the follower, always the supporter, always the dear watson, is boring. it’s oatmeal. warm paste. it’s a much more interesting story to give that boy some heckening nuance and let him be complicated. that’s when a character passes from stereotypical sidekick into towering, incandescent light. bbc john is an attempt to ease acd’s john out from behind his pages and his edited narration and to breathe life and truth into him. and you have to interrogate his character and interrogate his true depth of emotion in order to discover what is hidden within – that is, that john watson is capable of more than simple warm-paste levels of devotion. he is capable of adoration, and of being adored. he is capable of passion, and passionate love, and being passionately loved. and that’s really one heck of a story.
I believe Holmes was into Classicism, in another form. “Classicism is a force which is often present in post-medieval European and European influenced traditions; however, some periods felt themselves more connected to the classical ideals than others, particularly the Age of Enlightenment, when Neoclassicism was an important movement in the visual arts.” Now, we know Doyle was heavily involved with the Enlightenment. “In general, classicism can be defined as a style in literature, visual art, music, or architecture that draws on the styles of ancient Greece and Rome, especially fifth- and fourth-century b.c.e. Athens and late Republican Augustan Rome.” Arthur Conan Doyle was a serious student of Greece and it’s history, and during the time of Augustus, there was the famous Romantic poet, Ovid, a huge influence on Shakespeare. I know Holmes is familiar with Shakespeare but I wanted quotes, and found these. “When Doyle himself wrote a play featuring Holmes he first approached two leading Shakespearian actors, Beerbohm Tree and Henry Irving (who both turned it down) before allowing American actor William Gillette to adapt the play…So did Conan Doyle have Shakespeare in mind when he wrote the character of Holmes? According to Ted Friedman, “Sherlock Holmes is familiar with the writings of William Shakespeare … Holmes quoted Shakespeare from 14 of his plays in various cases”. The most famous Shakespeare quote spoken by Holmes, though, is the brief sentence “The game is afoot” which comes in The Adventure of the Abbey Grange, and is from Henry V. It hardly indicates that Shakespeare provided a lot of obvious inspiration for Conan Doyle. Robert Fleissner, though, wrote a serious study that finds many connections between Doyle and Shakespeare in 2003 with Shakespearean and Other Literary investigations with the Master Sleuth (and Conan Doyle) Homing in on Holmes.”
Fantastic commentary. Thanks for the addition! Of course, my own favorite Shakespearean quote Holmes uses is from Twelfth Night, on his return to Watson, though ostensibly addressed to Moran: “Journeys end in lovers’ meetings.”
@marsannay quite right! More classics! Pocket editions needn’t be poetry. I prefer the sonnets because that’s more romantic, but Holmes calls himself an “omnivorous” reader, so it could be either.
Also re: the initial discussion of Mycroft and the Diogenes, club culture wasn’t particularly gay, only very middle/upper class—straight, gay or otherwise. And everyone liked naming things after Greek things. The educated Victorians thought of themselves as the second Roman Empire, which wasn’t too far off the mark. Gay culture drew on majority culture’s love of the classics, not vice versa. The Diogenes COULD have been a gay club—they did exist—but it isn’t obviously one.
@ghislainem70 re: TEH, I never stopped to wonder where he got those books. Do you think they were his or might he have bought them off a corner bookstand on the way to the murder scene? I can imagine he’d enjoy Catullus, but “British Birds” and “The Holy War” sound rather unlike him, “omnivorous” taste in books notwithstanding.
@a-candle-for-sherlock I think it’s a question of why ACD chose those titles. Adding the random “British Birds” and “The Holy War” makes it seem the titles could be random, not something he carried on the hiatus. And yet, Catullus is, and was in ACD’s day, infamous as an explicitly gay, even pornographic text, amongst well-educated Victorian men such as ACD, and Holmes. So it’s a case, in my view, of ACD either deliberately or unconsciously throwing camouflage over an otherwise clearly stated suggestion by Holmes to Watson in TEH that Watson has an empty space (on his bookshelf) that needs filling— with gay pornographic Latin verses.
Or not.:)
OH. Well, that’s notably more interesting than I’d expected.
@a-candle-for-sherlock I’m assuming when discussing ACD’s choice to mention Catullus we’ve all read the pornographic Catullus 16. But there is also the beautiful Catullus 65, “Shall I never see you again, brother dearer to me than life?” Which seems something that Holmes might well have dwelt upon during the Hiatus.
IMO, the queercoding is not in any particular style that Holmes (or Watson) might have preferred, but in a combination of the titles, themes, authors, etc. Rather than use an “atmosphere”, he makes various singular references. The Catullus is so clear an example of this that even Samuel Rosenberg noticed it.
In BBC Sherlock, instead of greeting John with a work by Catullus, Sherlock quotes gay writer Edmund White’s autobiographical novel The Beautiful Room is Empty:
That’s very true, though I wouldn’t say Holmes shows no interest in the classics at all—he does compare Horace and Hafiz, with noticeable appreciation. I’m of the school that believes Doyle wrote Holmes as gay just by recording the traits of men he’d known and loved who were queer (or who he wished were uninterested in any intimacy but his friendship) rather than deliberately queercoding him, and we’re left to fill in the blanks of what he could be. I read Holmes as intersex and gay and mycroft as asexual, but the reading could easily be reversed.
“But for me, the tuxedos (which depersonalize waiters and lend distinction to friends), the banquet, and the toasts all permitted me for two minutes at a stretch to imagine we were a club of lovers…” [x]
… which is slightly more reasonable in 2014 than an armful of Catullus.
*unprintable language aimed at The Empty Hearse’s ability to break my heart again*
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