Ronald Knox reviews Gertrude Stein in the Dublin Review, 1927:

There is oddly not nearly so much difficulty about reading the beginning of a book by Gertrude Stein like this book of hers called Composition as Explanation (Hogarth Essays) as there is in reading it later on when it gets nearer the end. It is all written like this with no punctuation of course but it does sound as if it meant something. Every now and then a word or two is written twice over twice over but of course that may be the printer. It is a little confusing to be told that people are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living, but probably it all works out somehow. She goes on like this for about thirty pages and then she says now that is all. But it isn’t it isn’t it isn’t. It’s only about half. She starts putting in headlines after that to symbolically no doubt make her meaning clearer, but it isn’t clearer. It is ever so much not clearer. SITWELL EDITH SITWELL.

She says that quite suddenly in capitals as if it were a line of Onward Christian Soldiers. And in this part of the book all the parts of speech get mixed up anyhow as if she had been taking a lesson in typewriting. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog lazy dog lazy fox the quick jumps jumps brown. There is only one sentence in this part which is English, it says toasted susie is my ice-cream, and that is not sense, is it? So awfully not sense. I suppose she must either think it looks pretty or think it sounds pretty when you read it but it doesn’t it doesn’t either it really doesn’t.

“At dinner I sat next to James Branch Cabell who asked me, Is Gertrude Stein serious?” remembered Alice B. Toklas. “Desperately, I replied. That puts a different light on it, he said. For you, I said, not for me.”

Late in life Arthur Conan Doyle pursued an interest in the possibility of spiritualism and existence beyond the grave. He was widely criticized for this, but a writer to the Graphic raised a redeeming point:

Although we may misbelieve mediums and
With doubt and suspicion our minds may be filled,
Sherlock Holmes, we must grant, reappeared in the Strand
A number of times after having been killed.

Indeed, Holmes had returned against his creator’s wishes. “I never thought they would take it so much to heart,” Conan Doyle once wrote of Holmes’ death. “I got letters from all over the world reproaching me on the subject. One, I remember, from a lady whom I did not know, began ‘You beast’.”

Edward Lear once overheard a gentleman in a railway station saying that his children had been reading the Book of Nonsense. He maintained that Edward Lear did not exist, and said that Lord Derby had written the book.

Says I, joining spontaneous in the conversation — ‘That is quite a mistake: I have reason to know that Edward Lear the painter and author wrote and illustrated the whole book.’ ‘And I,’ says the Gentleman, says he, — ‘have good reason to know, Sir, that you are wholly mistaken. There is no such person as Edward Lear.’ ‘But,’ says I, ‘there is — and I am the man — I wrote the book!’ Whereupon all the party burst out laughing and evidently thought me mad or telling fibs. So I took off my hat and showed it, with Edward Lear and the address in large letters — also one of my cards, and a marked handkerchief: on which amazement devoured those benighted individuals and I left them to gnash their teeth in trouble and tumult.

Related: In October 1812, Trinity and St. John’s Colleges, Cambridge, ordered that students appearing in hall or chapel in pantaloons or trousers should be considered absent.

Visitors to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London can see a plaque commemorating the location in which John Watson first met Sherlock Holmes. The occasion of Holmes and Watson’s meeting there led Tokyo’s Sherlock Holmes Appreciation Society to contribute £650 to the “Save Bart’s Campaign” in 2006.

Holmes is astir elsewhere as well. A passage in T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral runs:

THOMAS: Who shall have it?
TEMPTER: He who will come.
THOMAS: What shall be the month?
TEMPTER: The last from the first.
THOMAS: What shall we give for it?
TEMPTER: Pretence of priestly power.
THOMAS: Why should we give it?
TEMPTER: For the power and the glory.
THOMAS: No!

A writer to John O’ London’s Weekly in August 1937 noted that this is strikingly similar to a passage in “The Musgrave Ritual”:

“Whose was it?”
“His who is gone.”
“Who shall have it?”
“He who will come.”
“Where was the sun?”
“Over the oak.”
“Where was the shadow?”
“Under the elm.”
“How was it stepped?”
“North by ten and by ten, east by five and by five, south by two and by two, west by one and by one, and so under.”
“What shall we give for it?”
“All that is ours.”
“Why should we give it?”
“For the sake of the trust.”

The writer asked, “Can you tell me what the connection is between the two?”

The editors replied: “We are informed that Mr. Eliot makes no secret of the fact that occasionally in order to obtain a special effect certain passages from his works are taken from the writings of other authors, and that the passage in question was actually adapted by him from the Conan Doyle story.”

Conan Doyle himself paid a similar compliment at the end of Holmes’ career. At the conclusion of “The Final Problem,” Watson calls his friend “the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known.” A writer to the Times, March 5, 1941, points out that Plato says the same of Socrates at the end of the Phaedo: “Such was the end, Echecrates, of our friend; concerning whom I may truly say, that of all the men of his time whom I have known, he was the wisest and justest and best.”

Robert Browning spent seven years composing Sordello, a 40,000-word narrative poem about strife between Guelphs and Ghibellines in 13th-century Italy. It was not received well.

Tennyson said, “There were only two lines in it that I understood, and they were both lies: ‘Who will may hear Sordello’s story told’ and ‘Who would has heard Sordello’s story told.'”

Thomas Carlyle wrote, “My wife has read through ‘Sordello’ without being able to make out whether ‘Sordello’ was a man, or a city, or a book.”

Douglas Jerrold opened the book while convalescing from an illness and began to fear that his mind had been destroyed. “O God, I AM an idiot!” he cried, sinking back onto the sofa. He pressed the book on his wife and sister; when Mrs. Jerrold said, “I don’t understand what this man means; it is gibberish,” her husband exclaimed, “Thank God, I am NOT an idiot!”

In Walter Besant’s 1895 novel The Golden Butterfly, one character spends eight hours trying to penetrate Browning’s poetry. “His eyes were bloodshot, his hair was pushed in disorder about his head, his cheeks were flushed, his hands were trembling, the nerves in his face were twitching. He looked about him wildly, and tried to collect his faculties. Then he arose, and solemnly cursed Robert Browning. He cursed him eating, drinking, and sleeping. And then he took all his volumes, and disposing them carefully in the fireplace, set light to them. ‘I wish,’ he said, ‘that I could put the poet there too.'”

Another (apocryphal) story tells of a puzzled friend who asked Browning the meaning of one of his poems. “When I wrote it, only God and I knew,” the poet replied. “Now, God alone knows!”

“I’m glad you like adverbs,” wrote Henry James to a correspondent. “I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect, and I agree with the fine author of your quotations in saying — or in thinking — that the sense for them is the literary sense. None other is much worth speaking of.”

As Somerset Maugham prepared to write Of Human Bondage, “I began with the impossible aim of using no adjectives at all. I thought that if you could find the exact term a qualifying epithet could be dispensed with. As I saw it in my mind’s eye my book would have the appearance of an immensely long telegram in which for economy’s sake you had left out every word that was not necessary to make the sense clear. I have not read it since I corrected the proofs and do not know how near I came to doing what I tried. My impression is that it is written at least more naturally than anything I had written before.”

Edgar Allan Poe bewailed the passing of the dash. “The Byronic poets were all dash,” he complained. “The dash gives the reader a choice between two, or among three or more expressions, one of which may be more forcible than another, but all of which help out the idea. It stands, in general, for these words — ‘or, to make my meaning more distinct’. This force it has — and this force no other point can have; since all other points have well-understood uses quite different from this. Therefore, the dash cannot be dispensed with.”

When a Boston girl took Mark Twain to task for splitting infinitives, he confessed that “I have certain instincts, and I wholly lack certain others. (Is that ‘wholly’ in the right place?) For instance, I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference; it can never give me a pang. … I know thoroughly well that I shall never be able to get it into my head. Mind, I do not say I shall not be able to make it stay there; I say and mean that I am not capable of getting it into my head. There are subtleties which I cannot master at all, — they confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me, — and this adverb plague is one of them.”

J. Joseph Renaud, the French novelist and dramatic author, to test the popularity of Conan Doyle’s stories, recently sent a letter to a friend living in Baker Street. It was addressed as follows:

Miss Compton,
The same street as Sherlock Holmes,
London.

The letter was delivered by the first post the following morning. The conclusion drawn is that Sherlock Holmes is still fresh in the memory of the English and that the English postal authorities are both erudite and conscientious.

— The Morning Post, Feb. 3, 1933

“You write with ease, to show your breeding, / But easy writing’s curst hard reading.” — Richard Sheridan

“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.” — Samuel Johnson

“So did the best writers in their beginnings; they imposed upon themselves care, and industry. They did nothing rashly. They obtained first to write well, and then custom made it easy and a habit. By little and little, their matter showed itself to them more plentifully; their words answered, their composition followed; and all, as in a well ordered family, presented itself in the place. So that the sum of all is: ready writing makes not good writing; but good writing brings on ready writing.” — Ben Jonson