My ten great books #1: The Annotated Sherlock Holmes

Note: Four years ago, I published a series of posts here about my ten favorite works of fiction. Since then, the list has evolved, as all such rankings do, and this seems like a good time to revisit it. (I’m not including any science fiction, which I hope to cover in a separate feature later this year.) I’ll be treating them in the order of their original publication, but as it happens, we’ll be starting today with the book I love the most.

I first encountered the best book in the world in the library of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. At the time, I was seventeen, and of course I was already in love with Sherlock Holmes—I’d even been exposed to the subculture of obsessive Holmes fans through the wonderful anthology A Baker Street Dozen, which I still think is the most inviting introduction to the subject for the general reader. What I found in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes by William S. Baring-Gould was something much more: an entire universe of speculation, whimsy, and longing grown from the rich soil of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories. As the narrator relates in Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”:

Two years before I had discovered…a superficial description of a nonexistent country; now chance afforded me something more precious and arduous. Now I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet’s entire history, with its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy. And all of it articulated, coherent, with no visible doctrinal intent or tone of parody.

The rules of the game were simple. Holmes, Watson, Mycroft, and the other vivid figures who populated their slice of London had been real men and women; Conan Doyle had been Watson’s literary agent; and the stories were glimpses into a larger narrative that could be reconstructed with enough patience and ingenuity. Given the scraps of information that they provided, you could figure out which building had been the model for 221B Baker Street; piece together the details of Watson’s military record, the location of his war wound, and the identities of his three, or perhaps four, wives; determine the species of the speckled band and whether “The Adventure of the Three Students” took place at Oxford or Cambridge; and pin down, with considerable accuracy, when and where each of the other adventures took place, even as Watson, or Conan Doyle, tried to divert you with “mistakes” that were deliberate misleads or red herrings.

The result of Baring-Gould’s work, which collects nearly a century’s worth of speculation into one enormous, handsomely illustrated volume, is the first book I’d save if I could own only one, and for years, it’s been living on my desk, both as a source of inspiration and as a convenient laptop stand. (Leslie Klinger’s more recent edition is lovely as well, but Baring-Gould will always be closest to my heart.) And it’s taken me a long time to realize why I care about this book so much, aside from the obvious pleasure it affords. It represents a vision of the world, and of reading, that I find immensely seductive. Each story, and often each sentence, opens onto countless others, and if Conan Doyle didn’t mean for his work to be subjected to this level of scrutiny, that’s even better: it allows us to imagine that we aren’t following a trail of clues that the author meant for us to find, but discovering something that was invisibly there all along. “Never has so much been written by so many for so few,” as the great Sherlockian Christopher Morley once said, and it’s true. All these studies are spectacularly useless, and they’re divorced from any real academic or practical value—aside, of course, from the immense benefit of allowing us to spend more time in this world and in the company of two of the most appealing characters in fiction. It’s a way for the story, and the act of reading, to go on forever, and in the end, it transforms us. In the role of a literary detective, or a tireless reader, you become Holmes, or at least a Watson to more capable investigators, thanks to the beauty of the stories themselves. What more can we ask from reading?

Reading while writing

When Norman Mailer was working on The Naked and the Dead, still in his early twenties, he fell back on a trick that I suspect most novelists have utilized at one time or another. Here how he described it to his biographer Peter Manso:

I had four books on my desk all the time I was writing: Anna Karenina, Of Time and the River, U.S.A., and Studs Lonigan. And whenever I wanted to get in the mood to write I’d read one of them. The atmosphere of The Naked and the Dead, the overspirit, is Tolstoyan; the rococo comes out of Dos Passos; the fundamental, slogging style from Farrell; and the occasional overreach descriptions from Wolfe.

I haven’t looked into this in any systematic way, but I have a feeling that a lot of writers do much the same thing—they select a book by another author whom they admire, and when they start the day’s work, or feel their inspiration starting to flag, they read a few pages of it. If you’re like me, you try to move straight from the last sentence of your chosen model to your own writing, as if to carry over some of that lingering magic. And if you’re lucky, the push it provides will get you through another hour or so of work, at which point you do it again.

I’ve followed this routine ever since I started writing seriously, and it isn’t hard to figure out why it helps. One of the hardest things about writing is starting again after a break, and reading someone else’s pages has the same effect as the advice, often given to young writers, as retyping a paragraph of your work from the day before: like the running start before the long jump, it gives you just enough momentum to carry you past the hardest part. I’ve also developed a set of rather complicated rules about what I can and can’t allow myself to read while working. It needs to be something originally composed in English, since even the best translations lose something of the vitality of a novel in one’s native language. (Years ago, I saw one of Susan Sontag’s early novels described as being written in “translator’s prose,” and I’ve never forgotten it.) It has to be the work of a master stylist, but not so overwhelming or distinctive that the tics begin to overwhelm your own voice: I still vividly remember writing a few pages of a novel shortly after reading some Nabokov, and being humiliated when I went back to read the result the next day. I stay away from such writers for much the same reason that I avoid listening to music when I write these days. It’s all too easy to confuse the emotional effects produced by proximity to another work of art with the virtues of the writing itself. When you’re reading in parallel, you want a writer who bears you forward on the wave of his or her style without drowning you in it.

This also means that there are books that I can’t allow myself to read when I’m writing, out of fear that I’ll be contaminated by their influence, for better or for worse. Obviously, I avoid bad writers, but I also steer clear of great writers whom I’m afraid will infect my style. In practice, because I’m nearly always writing something, this means that I’ve avoided certain books for years. It took me a long time to read Cloud Atlas, for instance, because it seemed like exactly the kind of overwhelming stylistic experiment that could only have a damaging impact. Mailer makes a similar point:

I was very careful not to read things that would demoralize me. I knew that instinctively. There’s a navigator in us—I really do believe that—and I think this navigator knew I wanted to be a writer and had an absolute sense of what was good for me and what wasn’t. If somebody had said, “Go read Proust,” I’d say, “No, not now.”

Or as the great Sherlockian scholar Christopher Morley noted: “There is no harm in reading any number of unimportant books for pastime, but the significant books must be taken cautiously. You don’t want them to get in the way of what might perhaps be growing and brooding in yourself, taking its own time.”

And this search for books in English that have a great style, but not too much of it, has led to some curious patterns in my reading life. Usually, when I’m working on something and need a helping hand to get me over the rough patches, I go with Ian McEwan. I’m not sure that I’d describe him as my favorite living writer, but he’s arguably the one whose clean, lucid, observant prose comes closest to the ideal that I’d like to see in my own work. You can’t really go wrong with an imitation of McEwan, whereas there are other writers in the same vein, like Updike, who are more likely to lead you astray. With McEwan, at worst, you’ll end up with something boring, but it probably won’t be outright embarrassing. (It reminds me a little of what T.S. Eliot once said along similar lines: “If you follow Dante without talent, you will at worst be pedestrian and flat; if you follow Shakespeare or Pope without talent, you will make an utter fool of yourself.”) McEwan is the closest I’ve found to a foolproof choice, which is why I’m currently reading The Children Act, a few pages at a time, while I’m working up a new short story. James Salter and J.M. Coetzee are two other good options, and if I’m really stuck for inspiration, I’ll often fall back on an old favorite like Deliverance by James Dickey, or even Mailer himself, for early drafts when I’m pretty sure that I’ll have a chance to pare away any excesses of style. Every writer eventually develops his or her own personal list, and there aren’t any wrong answers. You just listen to your navigator. And maybe you don’t read Nabokov.

Guilty pleasures and other travesties

I’ve occasionally written on this blog about the music that I like, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever admitted that the song from the last decade that I’ve probably played the most is Jason Derulo’s “Whatcha Say.” It’s as close to indefensible as I can imagine without being actively offensive: it’s a sonic trifle that gains its appeal entirely from a hefty sample from Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek,” a legitimately good song to which “Whatcha Say” attaches itself like a remora. Take away that load-bearing sample, and the rest of it would fall apart. Yet that’s part of the reason I like it. Derulo—who wasn’t even twenty years old at the time—and his collaborators saw something in the original track, with a big assist from a famous scene from The OC and its even more famous parody by the Lonely Island, and rode it to the top of the Billboard charts. I’m not even mad; I’m impressed. “Whatcha Say” wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for a moment of opportunistic ingenuity that took Heap’s moody vocoder vocal and remixed it into the core of a mercenary radio hit. And as much as it pains me to say it, I like it better than “Hide and Seek.” It isn’t as lugubrious or self-important; it’s about nothing except for itself, and I could listen to it forever. I could conceivably use it as a case study in the power of sampling, and I’ve occasionally thought about writing a post on the subject, if only to have an excuse to talk about it. But I can’t really defend it to anyone.

In other words, it’s the definition of a guilty pleasure. I think it’s best to start with a purely legalistic reading of the word “guilty,” which hinges on the idea that you’re a free agent who can choose between right and wrong, and you deliberately chose wrong. A guilty pleasure should be a violation of your own high standards, not those of society at large. You might not like, say, Stephen King’s It, which is my favorite American novel published in my lifetime, but that doesn’t make it a guilty pleasure for me: I think it’s legitimately great in a way that “Whatcha Say” isn’t. A guilty pleasure is also something different from a flawed masterpiece. When I put together my alternative canon of movies last month, I deliberately avoided guilty pleasures: I wanted to write about films that I think everyone should see. A true guilty pleasure is inherently autobiographical and personal: it resonates with you in particular in a way that it might not for anybody else. A list of my guilty pleasures may not tell you more about me than a ranking of my favorite movies or books, but it’s a crucial part of the picture. And it provides an indispensable sort of balance to my inner life, as the critic Christopher Morley once observed:

There is no harm in reading any number of unimportant books for pastime, but the significant books must be taken cautiously. You don’t want them to get in the way of what might perhaps be growing and brooding in yourself, taking its own time.

So what are my guilty pleasures? Aside from “Whatcha Say,” they include the first season of the MTV reality series The Hills, which I can watch for hours on end with the same detached contentment that I once felt with the screensaver on my old desktop Mac; Kevin Spacey’s directorial debut Beyond the Sea, in which he channels the late singer Bobby Darin in a performance that goes beyond impersonation into something like demonic possession; the movie of Angels & Demons, but not the book; the 1973 musical remake of Lost Horizon; true crime books like Fatal Vision or Perfect Murder, Perfect Town, as long as they’re at least five hundred pages long; the airplane novels of Arthur Hailey; the video for Taylor Swift’s “Wildest Dreams.” None falls into the category of “It’s so bad, it’s good,” except maybe for Lost Horizon. Most are professional pieces of work, at least within the limits that they’ve set for themselves, and even the ones that fall short of their own standards, like Beyond the Sea, make me feel oddly protective, almost paternal: I can’t condescend to them, because I understand them. I know what Spacey was trying to do, and I respect him for it, even if the result is less a good movie than an ode to the genial fakery that he brings to even his best roles. Spacey always seems to be impersonating someone else, and he does the best impersonation of a great actor that I’ve ever seen. I love Beyond the Sea because it’s literally about nothing else. But that doesn’t mean you will.

Another factor that many of these works have in common is that they’re travesties—imitations, remakes, or derivations of earlier, obviously superior efforts. Kevin Spacey is a travesty of Bobby Darin, no matter if he sings as well or better; Lost Horizon is a travesty of the novel and classic movie; “Whatcha Say” is nothing if not a travesty of “Hide and Seek.” This means that they dramatize, in particularly stark terms, something fundamental about the guilty pleasure: the idea that we’re choosing to indulge in something bad, instead of a world of better options. That’s where the guilt comes in. It operates under the assumption that our lives as readers, viewers, and listeners amount to a zero-sum game, and that every minute we spend on junk is a minute that we can’t devote to something more worthwhile. This might be technically correct, but it misses the larger point. There may not be world enough or time for us to take in every great work of art, but we can experience pretty much all of it, if we’re so inclined, and it leaves us ample room for the mediocre, or worse. You could even argue that works that leave us unchanged, and that do nothing more than fill a pleasant five minutes or an hour, are part of a balanced diet, as Morley noted. The nice thing about “Whatcha Say” or The Hills is that it doesn’t get in the way of anything else, and it satisfies me in uncomplicated ways that leave me available later for more complex pleasures. And at the end of my life, if you ask me if I’m happy with how I spent my time, I’ll gladly quote Imogen Heap: I only meant well. Well, of course I did. And it’s all for the best.

The way of the watercolor

Watercolor is swift and immediate in its expression of the artist’s emotion. The worst fault of beginners is the desire to copy nature slavishly. Before you touch color to paper you should consider composition and selection carefully. Define the shapes. Plan your light and dark masses. Then:

1. Lay in the dark masses, with a full brush. “Only in this manner can you secure a rich bloom.” The dark masses can be made vibrant by flushing rich colors together. Add last the color required to dominate the mass.
2. After establishing the dark colors, develop the middle plan. Keep white and brilliances to the last. Area of white paper held in reserve “is a safety hold on your picture.”
3. The final vital stage is to express your highlights: sunshine and shimmers. Sky; foreground; summing-up.

If there is trouble in parts, lay it aside—or remove the offending parts by sponging. Purple is the only color difficult to remove. It stains and holds on like grim death. A watercolor must be painted without fear or favor, directly, lusciously, with a dripping flowing color. To falter is to fail.

—Christopher Morley, reviewing the book Making a Water-Colour by George Ennis

In praise of mediocrity

Over the last few nights, I’ve been revisiting select episodes from the first season of The X-Files, which was quietly released in high definition earlier this year on Netflix. I started with “Ice,” a germinal effort that still ranks among the best four or five classic casefiles the show ever did, and I was happy to see that it played as well as always. Purists might object to the alterations to the original image, but it looked fantastic to me, and there were only a few moments when I noticed any change in the formatting. It helps that the story sucked me in completely: in terms of pure efficiency, few if any hours of television have ever gotten down to business so quickly. (“Pusher,” the sophomore effort by a young writer named Vince Gilligan, is still my favorite episode of the series, but “Ice” isn’t far behind.) Yesterday, though, when I queued up “Fire,” another installment that I remembered fondly, I discovered that it didn’t hold up as well. My memories of it were colored by a handful of fun guest performances—Mark Sheppard, Amanda Pays, and a nice little vignette by Duncan Fraser as an arson investigator—that still land nicely. Elsewhere, though, the storytelling creaks, and the budgetary limitations of a freshman drama on Fox are woefully apparent, with a roaring hotel inferno represented by a single flame glimpsed from around the corner.

Yet I still enjoyed it. Part of this is due to nostalgia: “Fire” was one of the first episodes of the show I ever saw, and watching it immediately takes me twenty years back in time. But its sheer mediocrity was also endearing. At its best, The X-Files was responsible for some of the greatest episodes of television ever produced—the ones I’ve mentioned above, the four installments written by Darin Morgan, and a handful of other standouts—but it also ground along for season after season with aliens, conspiracies, and miscellaneous boogiemen that failed to make any impression. All the while, the chemistry between the two leads kept things interesting, and there aren’t many episodes from the first five seasons that don’t have flashes of wit and invention. A little mediocrity was to be expected from a series that altered its setting, its supporting cast, and even its tone from week to week, and you could say that the breathing room the middling stories provided made the high water marks possible. And even the more forgettable casefiles are fun. At this point, I’ve long since sucked all the pulp from “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” and “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” so there’s something enticing about going back to revisit, say, “Lazarus” or “Born Again,” which is nothing more to me than a name.

You could even argue that a touch of mediocrity deserves to be a part of any balanced diet, for both creators and audiences, whether it’s in books, movies, or television. I’m not sure I’d want to be friends with someone who read nothing but volumes of the Great Books of the Western World or watched nothing but films from the Sight & Sound poll, any more than someone who had no interest in them at all. If we love great art, as Pauline Kael observed, we need to learn to love great junk as well, or, failing that, at least to appreciate an hour’s diversion on its own merits. Anything else leads to snobbism, cynicism, or worse. There’s something to be said for works of art that leave us untouched, since they allow us to live unimpeded with our own thoughts, while leaving open the possibility of pleasant surprises. As the critic Christopher Morley once wrote:

There is no harm in reading any number of unimportant books for pastime, but the significant books must be taken cautiously. You don’t want them to get in the way of what may perhaps be growing and brooding in yourself, taking its own time.

Morley, a legendary scholar of Arthur Conan Doyle, knew the value of mediocrity well. Of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, perhaps a third benefit from constant rereading; another third are fine but unexceptional; and the last third are best forgotten except by completists. Conan Doyle, who could be seen as the showrunner and sole creative force behind the most lasting procedural series of them all, wrote so many stories that it’s unrealistic to expect all of them to be great. The fact that the best of them, from “Silver Blaze” to “The Red-Headed League,” merely rearrange the standard components into a more perfect form suggests that it was his sheer volume of work that enabled the outliers. If Conan Doyle had sought only to produce masterpieces, we might not have any of these stories at all—and certainly not efforts like “The Reigate Squires” or “The Beryl Coronet,” which may not be standouts, but which provide undeniable comfort on a long winter’s evening. And although most of us don’t devour short detective stories on a regular basis these days, their place has been amply filled by television, which depends on a certain dose of mediocrity to survive. A few select shows, like Mad Men, have managed to deliver nothing but high points, but that can be exhausting in itself. Otherwise, it’s best to keep the words of Shostakovich in mind: “The real geniuses know where their writing has to be good and where they can get away with some mediocrity.”

My ten great books #1: The Annotated Sherlock Holmes

(Note: For the next two weeks, I’m going to be chronologically counting down the ten works of fiction that have had the greatest influence on my life as an author. It isn’t necessarily a list of my favorite books, or even my favorite novels—for a slightly dated ranking, please see here. It’s a celebration of the ten books that I’ve found myself unable to forget after a lifetime of reading, and which continue to appear in disguised form in every word I write. And although I’ll be treating them in the order of their original publication, as it happens, we’ll be starting today with the book I love the most.) 

I first encountered the best book in the world in the library of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. At the time, I was seventeen, and of course I was already in love with Sherlock Holmes: I’d even been exposed to the subculture of obsessive Holmes fans through the wonderful anthology A Baker Street Dozen, which I still think is the best introduction to Holmes and his world. What I found in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes by William S. Baring-Gould was something much more, an entire universe of speculation, whimsy, and longing, like the Orbis Tertius of Jorge Luis Borges, built on the rich soil of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories. The rules of the game were simple. Holmes, Watson, and the vivid figures who populated their slice of London had been real men and women; Conan Doyle had been Watson’s literary agent; and the published stories themselves were glimpses into a larger narrative that could be reconstructed with enough patience and ingenuity. Given the scraps of information that the stories provided, you could figure out which building had been the model for 221B Baker Street; you could piece together the details of Watson’s military record, the location of his war wound, and the identities of his three, or perhaps four, wives; you could determine the species of the speckled band and whether “The Adventures of the Three Students” took place at Oxford or Cambridge; and you could pin down, with considerable accuracy, when and where each of the other adventures took place, even as Watson—or Conan Doyle—tried to divert us with “mistakes” that were deliberate misleads or red herrings.

The result of Baring-Gould’s work, which collects nearly a century’s worth of speculation into one massive, handsomely illustrated volume, is the first book I’d save if I could own only one, and for years, it’s been living on my desk, both as a source of inspiration and as a convenient laptop stand. (Leslie Klinger’s more recent edition is lovely as well, but Baring-Gould will always be closest to my heart.) And it’s taken me a long time to realize why I care about this book so much, aside from the huge obvious pleasure it affords. It represents a vision of the world—and of reading—that I find immensely seductive. Each story, and often each sentence, opens onto countless others, and if Conan Doyle didn’t mean for his work to be subjected to such scrutiny, that’s even better: it allows us to imagine that we aren’t following a trail of clues that the author meant for us to find, but discovering something that was invisibly there all along. “Never has so much been written by so many for so few,” as the great Sherlockian Christopher Morley once said, and it’s true. These studies are spectacularly useless, and they’re divorced from any academic or practical value, aside, of course, from the immense benefit of allowing us to spend more time in this world and in the company of two of the most appealing characters in fiction. It’s a way for the story, and the act of reading, to go on forever, and in the end, it transforms us. In the role of a literary detective, of a tireless investigator, you become Holmes, or at least the Watson to so many more capable readers, thanks to the beauty of the stories themselves. What more can we ask from reading?

A Christmas story without slush

From “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which Christopher Morley called “Surely one of the most unusual things in the world: a Christmas Story without slush”:

“After all, Watson,” said Holmes, reaching up his hand for his clay pipe, “I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies…I suppose that I am commuting a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul. This fellow will not go wrong again; he is too terribly frightened. Send him to jail now, and you make him a jail-bird for life. Besides, it is the season of forgiveness. Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and its solution is its own reward. If you will have the goodness to touch the bell, Doctor, we will begin another investigation, in which also a bird will be the chief feature.”

You can find the full text, as originally printed in the Strand Magazine, here.