Prior Investigations

In 1915, critic Arthur Guiterman addressed a poem “To Sir Arthur Conan Doyle”:

Holmes is your hero of drama and serial;
All of us know where you dug the material
Whence he was moulded — ’tis almost a platitude;
Yet your detective, in shameless ingratitude —
Sherlock your sleuthhound with motives ulterior
Sneers at Poe’s “Dupin” as “very inferior!”
Labels Gaboriau’s clever “Lecoq”, indeed,
Merely “a bungler”, a creature to mock, indeed!
This, when your plots and your methods in story owe
More than a trifle to Poe and Gaboriau,
Sets all the Muses of Helicon sorrowing.
Borrow, Sir Knight, but be decent in borrowing!

Conan Doyle responded with “To an Undiscerning Critic”:

Sure there are times when one cries with acidity,
“Where are the limits of human stupidity?”
Here is a critic who says as a platitude
That I am guilty because “in ingratitude
Sherlock, the sleuth-hound, with motives ulterior,
Sneers at Poe’s Dupin as very ‘inferior’.”
Have you not learned, my esteemed commentator,
That the created is not the creator?
As the creator I’ve praised to satiety
Poe’s Monsieur Dupin, his skill and variety,
And have admitted that in my detective work
I owe to my model a deal of selective work.
But is it not on the verge of inanity
To put down to me my creation’s crude vanity?
He, the created, would scoff and would sneer,
Where I, the creator, would bow and revere.
So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle:
The doll and its maker are never identical.

May 19, 2012May 18, 2012 | Literature

“Clothes”

In Shakespeare’s plays
Nobody knows
For days and days,
Till the very end,
His closest friend
If he’s changed his clothes.

Prospero has
But to put on his hat
And he’s what he was,
A duke, like that!

They gladly aver,
Who knew him before,
“You are what you were
When you wear what you wore.”

— Henry G. Fischer

May 16, 2012May 15, 2012 | Literature · Poems

The Paradox of Fiction

How can we be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina when we know she’s not a real person?

In order to have an emotional response to a character or event, we must believe that it really exists. We know that this belief is lacking when we read a work of fiction. Yet we’re commonly moved by such works. Why?

It can’t be the case that we’re simply “caught up” in a story and forget that it’s fiction. If that were true then the fear, sadness, and pity we feel should be unpleasant rather than enjoyable. (Also, we’re not moved to intervene and help a fictional character.)

University of Kent philosopher Colin Radford concludes that our emotional responses to fiction are ultimately irrational, that “our being moved in certain ways by works of art, though very ‘natural’ to us and in that way only too intelligible, involves us in inconsistency and so incoherence.”

See Push and Pull.

May 10, 2012May 9, 2012 | Literature

Ghost Writer

[Theodore] Dreiser said that when he was living in New York, on West Fifty-seventh Street, John Cowper Powys came occasionally to dinner. At that time Powys was living in this country, in a little town about thirty miles up the Hudson, and he usually left Dreiser’s place fairly early to catch a train to take him home. One evening, after a rather long after-dinner conversation, Powys looked at his watch and said hurriedly that he had no idea it was so late, and he would have to go at once or miss his train. Dreiser helped him on with his overcoat, and Powys, on his way to the door, said, ‘ I’ll appear before you, right here, later this evening. You’ll see me.’

‘Are you going to turn yourself into a ghost, or have you a key to the door?’ Dreiser laughed when he asked that question, for he did not believe for an instant that Powys meant to be taken seriously.

‘I don’t know,’ said Powys. ‘ I may return as a spirit or in some other astral form.’

Dreiser said that there had been no discussion whatever during the evening, of spirits, ghosts or visions. The talk had been mainly about American publishers and their methods. He said that he gave no further thought to Powys’s promise to reappear, but he sat up reading for about two hours, all alone. Then he looked up from his book and saw Powys standing in the doorway between the entrance hall and the living room. The apparation had Powys’s features, his tall stature, loose tweed garments and general appearance, but a pale white glow shone from the figure. Dreiser rose at once, and strode towards the ghost, or whatever it was, saying, ‘Well, you’ve kept your word, John. You’re here. Come on in and tell me how you did it.’ The apparation did not reply, and it vanished when Dreiser was within three feet of it.

As soon as he had recovered somewhat from his astonishment Dreiser picked up the telephone and called John Cowper Powy’s house in the country. Powys came to the phone, and Dreiser recognized his voice. After he had heard the story of the apparation, Powys said, ‘I told you I’d be there, and you oughtn’t to be surprised.’ Dreiser told me that he was never able to get any explanation from Powys, who refused to discuss the matter from any standpoint.

— W.E. Woodward, The Gift of Life, 1947

May 8, 2012May 7, 2012 | Literature · Oddities

Winners and Losers

Harper Lee and Margaret Mitchell wrote one novel apiece. Both won the Pulitzer Prize.

The Turning Point and The Color Purple each received 11 Oscar nominations — and won zero.

April 30, 2012April 30, 2012 | Entertainment · Literature

Nothing Doing

Deluged with mail after his discovery of the double helix, Francis Crick began sending a printed card in response to invitations:

crick demurral

He modeled it on a similar one made by Edmund Wilson:

wilson demurral

In 1976 freelance writer Betty Eppes managed to talk to J.D. Salinger for 20 minutes. “He said he didn’t believe in giving autographs. It was a meaningless gesture. He told me never to sign my name for anyone else. It was all right for actors and actresses to sign their names, because all they had to give were their faces and names. But it was different with writers. They had their work to give. Therefore, it was cheap to give autographs. He said, Don’t you ever do it! No self-respecting writer should ever do it.”

See Pen Fatigue.

April 25, 2012April 25, 2012 | Literature · Society

Blood and Ink

“A propos of dreams, is it not a strange thing if writers of fiction never dream of their own creations; recollecting, I suppose, even in their dreams, that they have no real existence? I never dream of any of my own characters, and I feel it is so impossible that I would wager Scott never did of his, real as they are.”

— Charles Dickens, letter to C.C. Felton, Sept. 1, 1843

“The great characters of fiction live as truly as the memories of dead men. For the life after death it is not necessary that a man or woman should have lived.”

— Samuel Butler, Notebooks

“Only a few isolated figures in letters stand out as real; Sir Roger de Coverley, I suppose, Mr. Pickwick certainly, and, of course, Sherlock Holmes … Such characters, I mean, as create a real illusion; so that a man attaining Heaven might look round him and say, ‘And now, where’s Pickwick? Oh, no, I forgot; of course, he’s only a character in a book.'”

— Ronald Knox, “A Ramble in Barsetshire,” Essays in Satire, 1928

April 23, 2012February 22, 2015 | Literature

Royal Jelly

“Last night Mr. Creston Clarke played King Lear at the Tabor Grand. All through the five acts of that Shakespearean tragedy he played the King as though under momentary apprehension that someone else was about to play the Ace.” — Eugene Field, Denver Tribune, c. 1880

April 21, 2012 | Literature · Society

Worldly Wise

Proverbs from around the world:

A shroud has no pockets. (Scotland)
No one is a blacksmith at birth. (Namibia)
The absent always bears the blame. (Netherlands)
One cannot make soup out of beauty. (Estonia)
Bad is called good when worse happens. (Norway)
When the mouse laughs at the cat, there is a hole. (Gambia)
Under trees it rains twice. (Switzerland)
Everyone is foolish until they buy land. (Ireland)
Every head is a world. (Cuba)
The only victory over love is flight. (France)
Don’t look where you fell, but where you slipped. (Liberia)
Many lose when they win, and others win when they lose. (Germany)

And “It is not economical to go to bed early to save the candles if the result is twins.” (China)

April 14, 2012April 13, 2012 | Literature · Society

Encore

When Polish composer André Tchaikowsky died in 1982, he left his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company in hopes that he might appear as Yorick in a production of Hamlet.

No one felt comfortable fulfilling this wish until David Tennant used the skull in a performance in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2008. He continued to use it throughout the production’s West End run and in a later television adaptation.

“André’s skull was a profound memento mori, which perhaps no prop skull could quite provide,” said director Gregory Doran. “I hope other productions may, with the greatest respect for André, use the skull as he intended it to be used, for precisely this purpose.”

(Thanks, Pål.)

An old Danish jester named Yorick
Drank a gallon of pure paregoric;
“My jokes have been dull,”
He said, “but my skull
Will one of these days be historic.”

— Ogden Nash

April 13, 2012September 21, 2019 | Death · Literature