Imposture
Benny Green
Sherlock Holmes: thoMan and his World H.R.F. Keating (Thames and Hudson £5.50)
By far the most revealing thing about this latest biography of Sherlock Holmes is the flag under which it flies. The Thames and Hudson . . . and his World' series, that excellent sequence of introductory illustrated lives of famous men, has, in its 36th instalment, departed from the strict letter of its own law, which is to confine itself to real people, who once passed through the real world. Ha straw vote had ever been taken as to which fictitious character would be the first to force a departure, then the odds must have been on Holmes. But they would have been very long odds indeed, and I am not sure if the aberration of the Great Detective keeping company with those who used to read about him is a stroke of publishing originality or a self-inflicted wound which reduces the credulity of all the previous items in the series.
But it is certainly fascinating, and tells us perhaps more about the current predicament of Holmes than Mr Keating intended. There is really no need for a new biography of Holmes for the obvious reason that nothing startling has been discovered about him since the last one. As someone once remarked about an earlier work of biography, there are some new things and some true things in this book but the new things are not true and the blue things are not new. Mr Keating seems determined to see Holmes as the great defender of Victorian stability, the knight who does what he can to stand across the path of Edwardian degeneracy, modern technology, the new utilitarianism and a great many other things. As there is just as much evidence to suggest that Holmes welcomed most of the changes, and as Mr Keating is too honest not to admit this, and even to give copious examples, the case for Holmes as a kind of cultural Luddite soon collapses.
Great pains have been taken to enmesh Holmes in the coils of history. He is compared, rather ludicrously, with General Gordon, than whom I can think of no hero less inclined to evoke thoughts of deductive reasoning. He is also likened to George Meredith; Moriarty is seen to be a sort of Nietzsche; the various Holmes cases involving royalty are seen to stem from the sort of Tranby Croft scandals which distinguish the career of Edward VII, and so on. Poor Miss Lottie Collins is cast as the harbinger of the New Decadence because of Ta-Ra-RaBoom-De-ay', a conclusion which the ribald Marie Lloyd would have drowned in a barrage of raspberries, and the old myth of a Victorian England busily sublimating its sexual drive gets brought off the shelf and dusted down.
It is all mildly amusing to read, and for Holmes fanatics no book about their hero is so predictable that it need not be read. But it is the very existence of such a book which diagnoses the sickness now threatening the Great Detective. In the last 20 years there have been two developments of profound Holmesian significance. These are the proliferation of counterfeiters who produce lame imitations with the excuse that they found the manuscript in an old trunk belonging to a now-dead relation; also the pretence by writers, of whom Keating is only one among many, that Holmes was a real person, who moved through the streets of Victorian England just as surely as did Gladstone and Disraeli, or, as Keating suggests, Gordon and Meredith. And applying Holmes's own methods of deductive reasoning to the problem, it seems certain that in future, both these trends will continue to flourish.
Those two trends, however, would appear to be different aspects of the same process. The fictitious Holmes is now being hounded by literary opportunists who keep foisting off on him not only encounters with Freud, Shaw, Wilde, Jack the Ripper and Theodore Roosevelt, which is bad enough, but hobbling him with literary infelicity, which is much worse. It has always been assumed that fictitious characters remain, by definition, supine in the face of such outrages. Nobody has yet considered the possibility that this assumption might be misguided, although Woody Allen recently suggested new routes of investigation with his fable of the disenchanted amorist who invades the world of Flaubert in order to consummate his passion for Emma Bovary. The contingency which Allen's tale left unmentioned was the emergence of Emma Bovary into our world as a reprisal.
That is what appears to have happened with Holmes. The Great Detective, hounded by usurpers, jostled by imposters, the pure gold of his currency debased by counterfeiters, has fled from his persecutors into the real world. Every day it becoines clearer that Holmes is determined to abrogate his imaginary status in favour of a Place among the Eminent Victorians, an aspira-. tion now underlined by his inclusion in the Thames and Hudson series. For that reason, it is a pity that the publishers lost heart just a little and omitted their customary list on the inside cover of other heroes in the series. There is one final fact of vast significance about Mr Keating's book. It is the first on Holmes which makes no mention of Conan Doyle. If ever there was a dog which failed to bark in the night, this is it. It would be impossible to write a life of Doyle which never mentioned Holmes, and yet Keating has published a life of Holmes which never mentions Doyle. This, it seems to me, is the final proof we have all been waiting for that Conan Doyle was a figment of Sherlock Holmes's imagination.
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