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.
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