Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #10. Arthur Conan Doyle

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the Providence Detective Agency at an age as late as 13! Our force had very rigid regulations, & carried in its pockets a standard working equipment consisting of police whistle, magnifying glass, electric flashlight, handcuffs (sometimes plain twine, but “handcuffs” for all that!), tin badge, (I have mine still!!!), tape measure (for footprints), revolver, (mine was the real thing, but Inspector Munroe (at 12) had a water-squirt pistol while Inspector Upham (at 10) worried along with a cap-pistol) & copies of all newspaper accounts of desperate criminals at large—plus a paper called The Detective, which printed pictures and descriptions of outstanding “wanted” malefactors…. We shadowed many desperate-looking customers, & diligently compared their physiognomies with “mugs” in The Detective, yet never made a full-fledged arrest. Ah, me—the good old days!”2

      * * * *

      It is just as well that Detective Lovecraft a.k.a. “S.H.,” did not show off his quite genuine pistol while stalking a suspect. Those were indeed more innocent times, when parents did not think too seriously about letting their 13-year-old play with a real pistol, even one which was (presumably) in less than working order.

      This great fascination with Sherlock Holmes and with mystery fiction was, quite clearly for Lovecraft, a phase. In both letters, the larger context is a discussion of juvenile tastes and former habits. Lovecraft’s fascination with detective stories was not restricted to the Sherlock Holmes stories either. He read an enormous amount of general pulp fiction between about 1905 and 1914, including virtually every issue of Argosy and All-Story during this period, which contained much detective fiction. As a child he had been by all indication an avid reader of dime-novels and other juvenile mysteries of the period (some of which was published in a format similar to a modern comic book, although mostly text), following the exploits of Nick Carter, King Brady, and other largely-forgotten heroes. Many of his earliest attempts at fiction were detective stories of a sort, such as “The Mystery of the Grave-yard” (1898 or 1899, i.e., written when Lovecraft was eight or nine) which is nothing less than a miniature dime-novel, with very short chapters, some no more than fifty words.

      But, certainly as he grew a little older, Sherlock Holmes was his favorite, and he definitely (as is clear from his letters) read the first three Holmes novels, and the collections The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and The Return of Sherlock Holmes. He did not read the later Canon, as far as we can tell, ever. He read some of Doyle’s supernatural work, though affording him no more than one sentence, a longish sentence in “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” singling out “Lot No. 249” and “The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’” for praise. Overall, despite his dismissing Doyle’s later Spiritualist writings as “senile drivel,” Lovecraft seems to have regarded the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories as a very competent storyteller, and particularly good reading for younger folks.

But detective fiction, by and large, was something he felt he had outgrown as he reached adulthood. In a 1929 letter to Derleth he expresses doubt that S.S. van Dine’s Philo Vance would have much appeal for him, remarking, “I hate these laboriously whimsical & artificially mannered fiction-heroes—they are so mechanical that these lose all touch with reality & become grotesque bores.”3 He does promise to look into Father Brown sometime, though there is no indication he ever did. In other letters, mostly to persons other than Derleth, he expresses less than complete enthusiasm for Derleth’s detective novels, although he does courteously praise Derleth’s Holmes-pastiche Solar Pons series.

      * * * *

      If it were merely the case that H.P. Lovecraft enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes series in his youth and then lost interest, there would be no point in writing this article. The only question is what this circumstance—the early enthusiasm for Holmes on the part of HPL—means.

      Essentially, Lovecraft and detective fiction had a philosophical parting of the ways. In 1914, as a result of letter exchanges between Lovecraft and other readers in the pages of The Argosy, Lovecraft discovered amateur journalism, and for the first time in his life came into wide contact with other literary-minded persons. This broadened his tastes and outlook enormously. But more to the point, Lovecraft’s interest had always been toward the cosmic. Another of his boyhood obsessions was astronomy, and it was the intensive study of this subject, together, no doubt, with the experience of staying up nights peering into the depths of infinity through his telescope that convinced Lovecraft that, ultimately, mankind had only a very small, even trivial role to play in the cosmos at large. As if that were not enough, at precisely this time astronomers had just determined that those swirling “nebulae” they had been observing were in fact other galaxies, made up, not of clouds of gas, but of billions of stars, and located much further away than previously thought. So, if anything, the depths of infinity had just gotten considerably larger.

      For Lovecraft, then, the fascination (and the aesthetic attraction) was in the vast sweep of time and space. He sought the cosmic in fiction, in his own and in what he read. Lovecraftian horror stems largely from the characters’s realization of their own helpless and trivial role in the cosmic scheme of things. It is as if anyone could say abstractly that the history the Earth might be written out as a 300-volume encyclopedia, and the history of mankind occupies only the bottom half of the last page—but Lovecraft genuinely felt this. As a consequence, for all he might admire Holmes’s brilliance and rationality and the deft artistry of the Doyle stories, which clearly stood for him head and shoulders over most other such fiction, the actual plots of detective stories failed to hold his interest.

      * * * *

In that same 1931 letter to Derleth, a couple of paragraphs earlier, he had explained, “I never acquired an interest in the peep-show contrasts & ignominies empirically classified as ‘scandal’—perhaps because of a cosmic perspective which felt no vast difference betwixt one sort of inane behavior and another sort of inane behavior on the part of terrestrial puppets.”4 In other words, if organic life itself is to be seen, as Lovecraft saw it, as a chemical-electrical phenomenon which may have occurred briefly on one particular fly-speck planet in a vast and chaotic universe, then it didn’t particularly matter who politely poisoned whom in an English country-house or made off with milady’s jewels. The mature Lovecraft didn’t find mere crime to be of sufficient dramatic interest.

      So the matter narrows down to what Lovecraft carried away from his youthful Sherlock Holmes enthusiasm. Things we do or read in childhood do go on to shape the adults we become, even if we “outgrow” them. Scholar Peter Cannon has written about the Holmesean influence on Lovecraft at some length. There are the motifs and the parallel passages, as to be expected, and one easily recognizes the source of the spectral, baying creature in Lovecraft’s story “The Hound.”

      But it’s more than that. What would have appealed most to Lovecraft, and remained consistent with his philosophical outlook throughout his life, was Holmes’s rationality, as summed up by the Great Detective’s famous statement (in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”) that “This Agency stands flat-footed upon the ground…. No ghosts need apply.” Holmes is making an explicit rejection of the supernatural, or at least of his interest in it. “The world”—meaning the material plane—is “large enough” for him.

      Lovecraft, too, completely rejected the supernatural in any “spiritual” sense. There are no ghosts in his fictions. Human beings, who are bio-chemical phenomena of random Nature, have no “souls.” Even in “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” which deals with the resurrection of the dead, this resurrection is achieved by material means, a matter of “essential salts” collected from the dust of the grave and processed through arcane alchemy. His monsters, Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, et al., are immensely powerful cosmic beings, the products of a broader universe of which mankind knows virtually nothing, but they are not “gods” СКАЧАТЬ