The Hound of the Baskervilles

An egregious mistake was rectified with the publication of this novella, one of the finest in the English language.  In it returned the most renowned of all fictional detectives, and with him, we are told, thousands of readers.  All to a man were relieved that one of their constants in life was back from, well, the dead.  Yet if you are familiar with the arc of this story you know that Conan Doyle was more than a little reluctant to resurrect his immortal.  This hesitation was caused in part by his wish to become more than a “writer of detective stories,” an honorable calling, doubtless, although not literature’s highest.  In the felicitous creation of Holmes and Watson, Conan Doyle ensured that readers would celebrate the  quadricentennial of his birth as they once feted the centennial.  Sure enough, Conan Doyle forayed into other fields, including some books on spirituality that I will probably never bring myself to read, and we can definitely respect his literary ambitions.  But his genius lay in his development of an art form that seems lesser but was actually superior.  Superior because it had no peers, and perhaps its most glorious manifestation remains the tale of the evil hell–hound on the moors.

The setup will be old hat to mystery buffs: an aged millionaire dies under mysterious circumstances and his young heir pays no heed to warnings about a family curse.  To make matters even worse, the heir is an American and untrained in the ways of his British ancestors, rendering him even less suitable to handle the situation, the mansion, and, of course, the beast that allegedly scared his relative to death.  Since the family Baskerville is a known commodity, Holmes monitors the developments.  He is initially delighted to be consulted on the matter by Dr. Mortimer, the family doctor of the recently deceased Charles Baskerville.  Holmes’s enthusiasm wanes, however, when Mortimer argues for the hound’s supernatural origin, to which Holmes suggests that he might make better use of a priest than of the residents of 221B.  Nevertheless, a personal meeting with the heir, Henry Baskerville, and another series of what could not possibly be coincidences motivate Holmes to venture out into the granite upland of Dartmoor.  There he meets a few more characters who will be pieces in the puzzle and begins his investigation in typical Holmesian fashion by retreating, masquerading, and for a long time leaving Watson as befuddled and uninformed as his readers.

Holmes’s other three novellas share one fatal flaw that escapes The Hound of the Baskervilles: a wholly unnecessary back story that, while thorough in its explanation, casts the meat of the novel in a rather superficial light.  The most unfortunate of these devices can be found in this novella written after The Hound of the Baskervilles, but inferior in every way imaginable, although the methodology of the crime itself is ingenious.  But the tale of the padfoot might also be the best Sherlock Holmes tale by virtue of its freshness and observation of the fundamental rules of suspense, character development, and plot.  One occasionally gets the feeling in other stories that many of the barbs and details are throwaways for the sake of atmosphere and propriety (this later adventure is one example of too much talk, not enough snooping).  Nothing of the kind here.  We get instead an allegory, which when done garishly is one of the lowest forms of literature, and when done with great artistry sublimates into the stratosphere of the magnificent.  The fact that we are uncertain about the nature of the beast, or even of its ambitions (Dr. Mortimer relates the gory legend with great relish), whether it be flesh at all or simply a maudlin ruse in animal form, makes the book a late cloudy afternoon one–sitting classic.  And let us not forget the moor, because after this experience, you never will.             

Despair

There are some literary themes that will always seem well–worn, perhaps because they are so essential.  Love in its myriad forms; betrayal, the greatest of all sins; nostalgia for a lost opportunity, a lost childhood, or a lost homeland.  In fact, love, betrayal, and nostalgia could very well form the essential triptych of human journeys.  When we love unrequitedly, we are betrayed.  And when our love is returned, rare is it that such a sensation lasts more than a few weeks or months of actual time.  Love is unique in that it cannot be fully realized until  much later in the future.  The perspective that love brings in relation to all the other petty details of life is one of richness, unending richness, and is the feeling that comes closest to giving us a sense of what consciousness beyond all these buildings and clocks might be.  Not everyone gets the chance to be truly, madly, and deeply in love; some wallow in the grim, sadistic dungeon of quelled lusts and voyeuristic itches.  No surprise then that some of our society's most resentful souls (let us leave aside for the moment the pathologically and maniacally ill) are those who believe they should be loved, believe also they have much to offer prospective partners, and then shun the world because all the world's lovers have shunned them.  This vicious cycle may, in some circumstances, lead to crime.  But more often than not it leads to misanthropy, bitterness, and a need to channel this frustration into something productive like work or art.  And this last observation should inform our reading of this brilliant novel.
 
Our narrator, Hermann Karlovich (his Russian patronymic; no surname is ever provided) sells chocolates in Berlin.  He is, much like the protagonist of this classic Russian tale, a bilingual Russo–German equally at home in both cultures.  And like the German of Pushkin's story, Hermann is Russian in his social circles but German in his thoughts.  This means, in general terms, the company and culture he keeps are Russian and russophone, but his philosophizing and emotional limitations suggest a more austere upbringing full of rules, regulations, and harmony.  Before I am castigated for espousing such multicultural rot, you should consider the author of Despair and his view on the matter (better yet, read Nabokov's scathing reflections on German culture in this book reviewed earlier on these pages).  The whole point is that Despair is about cultural clichés, romantic clichés, even the much–belabored thematic cliché of the double, resulting in a monstrous parody of all these approaches.  Not that all critics of the novel agree with this assessment.  Their summary (and the one furnished by Hermann himself) would read as follows: a man, frustrated by a boring job, an unfaithful wife and, perhaps, unrealized literary aspirations, finds his Doppelgänger in a Prague park, and plots his own murder so as to abscond with the insurance money, thereby altering his tedious lifestyle.  Now if you know anything about Nabokov you know he is a master stylist and a master plotter – a rare combination in the annals of literature.  While Despair injects some of the "rhetorical venom" (Nabokov’s own comment in his introduction) that would be found in two later works, if this were indeed the plot and sequence it would be as worthless as the pulp novels that so fascinate Hermann’s airhead wife Lydia.  Critics retort that Hermann, a "failed artist," is raving mad and unable to conjure up anything more than the most recycled of plots, see the whole endeavor as Nabokov’s critique of bad writers with evil intentions, and gladly write off the work as one of the grandmaster’s least successful gambits.        

Yet they are, I say in all modesty, completely wrong.  The description that Hermann provides – indeed, the ostensible events of the novel itself – are mired in a deception so fantastic and ingenious that every cell of my being wants to reveal at least one card of Nabokov’s hand.  But I cannot.  I cannot say what numerous readings of this novel indicate might be the true storyline, the true motivations of Hermann, of his double Felix, and of his wife and her perfidious cousin, Ardalion.  If I were to hint at the trick that Nabokov plays on his unsuspecting readers, I would direct your attention to Hermann's treatment of one subject in particular: that of art.  Art for Nabokov is the pinnacle of human achievement, God's work refashioned and regurgitated in the finest form our earthen clay can muster.  If someone in Nabokov's world is a friend and champion of art, true art, it is likely that his negative character traits will be offset by a bit of favoritism from his creator (as in this novel, Nabokov's best).  Keep this in mind when judging Hermann's and Felix's discourse in the country inn, or Ardalion's letter, or Hermann's bizarre machinations in a Berlin post office that so reminded me, for some reason, of the Berlin post office which I would frequent.  There are so many layers of suggestion in Despair that, if you are in the mood for a murderous allegory of revenge, you cannot put it ... And there, I fear, I have said too much already.

Damage

Love and war are old pastimes; obsession brings forth much more interesting data.  Some may reply that love itself is an obsession, a maniacal urge to experience life’s greatest reward regardless of the personal cost (and as you can see, that last sentence makes as much sense as love).  True enough, obsession often comprises many facets of love, but it is a selfish love, a bitter, corrosive lust that lurks in both the good and the wicked.  Love is always nauséabond; obsession cannot lead to anything good.  We know this and yet, as we watch this magnificent film unravel, as so many reviewers have put it, like a slow-motion car wreck, we cannot look away although (or maybe because) doom for all is veritably assured.

There are no ugly people, scenery, or moments in Damage, as the film itself is obsessed with obsession, with caring about something so much that it slowly engulfs everything else.  For an aesthetic project, this means beauty, and often what accompanies beauty – youth, lust, irreverence, irresponsibility, betrayal, and pain.  Stephen Fleming (Jeremy Irons) is a rising deputy minister who will likely be promoted to the cabinet.  His life has everything a plain, material mind could wish for as well as those things that most every soul needs: a loving spouse (Miranda Richardson), two well–adjusted children (Rupert Graves and Gemma Clark), and a solid marriage based on admiration, respect, and love.  But he has been a responsible and driven workaholic for too many years, ever since he was a "young doctor, doing simple things well."  One day, his son Martyn, a young, handsome newspaper editor, announces he has a new girlfriend, apparently nothing more than the flavor of the month.  This woman is Anna Barton (Juliette Binoche), whose alphabetic name already suggests her primordial importance, and before Martyn can even introduce her to his parents, she approaches Stephen at an official reception.  The look they exchange is one of the most impressive bits of understatement in recent cinematic history.  It says absolutely everything about their relationship, about Anna’s mind and personality, as well as about Stephen’s hard-won position of influence and what he has had to give up to get there.  Their first physical encounter is wordless, the phone call that abets their urges almost as taciturn, and we understand the weird chemical processes programmed into each of us, for many never to be truly unleashed.  This is brute force, animalistic and unstoppable, but there is also much more to this than meets the eye.

For Anna, Stephen is safe.  Apart from being twenty years her senior and married, he is the father of her boyfriend, so they cannot possibly have a relationship glazed with sweet nothings.  He also allows her to indulge her lifelong therapeutic need of fighting possessiveness by cheating.  If you don’t see this unbelievably selfish streak, and how she instigates everything then wants no responsibility for her actions because of the cruel fate of her young brother (a back story that I will not spoil), your ethical standards may need some ironing.  "Damaged people are dangerous," she says with some gusto, "they know they can survive."  Throughout the film, Anna thinks of herself as a tragic figure even though she has enjoyed a privileged if itinerant life, and her mother’s numerous marriages do nothing to dispel her cynicism.  No less culpable but much more idealistic, Stephen is taken by her for reasons we can and cannot understand.  Surely Martyn is reveling in the freedoms of youth that presumably eluded Stephen owing to his career and long marriage, and Stephen is sentimental for those times when his whole life lay before him, unread, undetermined, but very promising.  The less transparent reason is his own, something that he makes light of at the end of the film, and has to do with Anna as the person he was always meant to covet, to have, and perhaps to keep.  The two of them conspire on an affair that only gets more heated once Martyn and Anna announce their engagement.

Reviews of the film tend to sprinkle their compliments on the fine acting (Irons and Richardson in particular are more than perfect, they are unforgettable), beautiful decor, and straight road of destiny that each of the characters follows.  Yet among these same reviews, one finds numerous concerns about the plausibility of the whole endeavor.  Anna is not the type of woman that drives a man to passion or obsession say a few critics, apparently experts on both subjects;  there are, others point out, additional character issues apart from the extramarital affair that remain unexplored (a valid observation were it not for the fact that the movie is about monomania and the extinction of everything else); then there are the numerous sex scenes which critics tell us, with no small disappointment, are simply not sexy; finally, since this is a film about passion, an emotion to which Stephen is famously accused of being immune, the alleged sparks between the two main characters are, they are sorry to say, decidedly cold and, well, passionless.  All in all an attractive picture if a fairy tale. 

How curious it is that the same reviewers who suspend their disbelief for giant extraterrestrials, ghosts, talking animals, vampires, werewolves, and sharp-witted, benevolent teenagers find the circumstances in Damage, as well as the particular casting, unlikely.  True enough, there are certain assumptions made of artistic melodramas that confine them to the realm of the real and preclude supernatural or otherworldly intervention.  Yet how can we judge what is, in essence, a fairy tale with modern princes and princesses living in the upper echelon of early 1990s London?  This is hardly a realistic slice of life for the majority of viewers.  Why should their tastes and emotions (and the strange way in which they express these emotions) be any more familiar to us than their lifestyles?  They are not.  Nothing seems real because the whole film is a wild dream that sees its end in its beginning and rambles forth undeterred hoping that it will survive.  It is Stephen’s second youth and his death, although we pity him more than anyone else in the film.  He is lost, utterly lost, utterly without a center or a pole or gravity itself.  He cannot crash down to earth, and because he cannot let go of one woman who doesn't seem so different from anyone else, he is exiled to hover forever in space and watch his innermost desires from afar.  And, unlike Anna, he does not know whether he can survive. 

Confessions of a Justified Sinner

We are no longer naive enough to believe in an evil force that could manipulate our actions and cause our damnation.  I fear that some readers may not bother to venture past that last sentence, and may think impatiently to themselves what other fringe topics divert my attention (there are indeed others).  Malevolence in the human soul is considered by many theologians to be the wage of weakness and indulgence, of giving in to the primeval, selfish and often highly destructive desires that besiege us from all corners of our fallen world.  Yet we should not forget that while evil may or may not involve free will, it is necessarily an active force.  It cannot exist in a vacuum, nor lack an object upon which it may direct its action; in other words, if you were alone on a desert isle, you could not be evil.  You may injure or mutilate yourself, or subject your body and mind to deprivation and fatigue, but could you be justly charged with anything more than self–loathing or masochism?  To inflict woe you need another soul or another body, which brings us to this lesser-known masterpiece.

You will be surprised to learn, as was I, that the author became literate at a rather late age.  The only advantage of such a delay is the chance to devote oneself to a mastery of the colloquial language quite out of sorts with a school education, as well as an intimate knowledge of the objects of a bookless life.  Obviously, reading and writing are so essential to the development of the soul that it is hard to imagine an existence without their joys.  But sometimes, in rare cases of outstanding genius, one will find a mind that has been broadened not shrunk by its lack of exposure, dimensions which then increase exponentially once pen and paper are befriended.  Hogg’s interspersion of Scots dialect is not forced.  This is, one assumes, exactly the tone and delivery that these characters would have used.  That does not prevent it, however, from becoming somewhat of an annoyance and something gladly skipped in favor of Hogg’s magnificent normal style.  Look at how a street brawl comes to life in his able hands:

The unnumbered alleys on each side of the street had swallowed up the multitude in a few seconds; but from these they were busy reconnoitring; and, perceiving the deficiency in the number of their assailants, the rush from both sides of the street was as rapid, and as wonderful, as the disappearance of the crowd had been a few minutes before.  Each close vomited out its levies, and these better armed with missiles than when they sought it for a temporary retreat.  Woe then to our two columns of victorious Whigs! 

To the modern ear this style goes above the rich conversational language that contemporary writers use and which, unless the writer is staggeringly talented, tends to commix with plain talk.  Hogg is rehearsing the battle for a soul, split as it were in half.  Following these guidelines, the book folds into two parts: the first describes events mysterious and sinister in nature with no immediate explanation; the second part details a horrible alliance.

 

The soul in question belongs to Robert Wringhim Colwan, the adopted son of a Scottish clergyman and a beautiful if tortured youth.  The title tells us that he will fall hard upon the materialist wickedness of the world, but to what degree he has repented, if repentance is at all an option, makes us read on.  Robert has a half—sibling, George, and it is a dark day when Robert becomes his brother's shadow and keeper.   He lurches in his proximity at every corner and stretch of the gloomy, dour Edinburgh streets until George cannot believe that a mortal could know all his moments and move with such alacrity.  Soon enough, he is provoked into crime, or that is at least what the first narrative states plainly while hinting otherwise.  Then something even worse happens to George, and Robert is, well, somehow both implicated and perfectly alibied.  Yet when Mrs. Logan (the helpmeet of George's father) and Mrs. Calvert (a prostitute) travel to the country:

Mrs. Calvert sat silent, and stared the other mildly in the face.  Their looks encountered, and there was an unearthly amazement that gleamed from each, which, meeting together, caught real fire, and returned the flame to their heated imaginations, till the two associates became like two statues, with their hands spread, their eyes fixed, and their chops fallen down upon their bosoms.  An old woman who kept the lodging-house, having been called in before when Mrs. Logan was faintish, chanced to enter at this crisis with some cordial; and, seeing the state of her lodgers, she caught the infection, and fell into the same rigid and statue-like appearance. 

What they saw precisely will not be revealed here.  But the novel's second half has sufficient data to spin a thick web of conjecture around these events, if these were really events to begin with and not the ravings of a mad mind.  I would guess that many readers will find the second half too drawn out, each step too ponderous, each stride overextended.  I would also guess that immediate gratification of the type found in popular novels of the supernatural eschews suspense for horror, and deprives the reader of the most terrifying of all revelations:  an evil that knows no bounds and which seems to grow larger the more one knows of it.  This is the quandary of Robert Wringhim, a wretched youth who has little of the hero in him and much of the jackal.  It is here that we realize that the title is not meant to evoke pity, but is taken in all seriousness, and we shudder at the consequences.

The Return of Imray

Thinking of this Englishman as a writer of detective stories sounds strange, although the times and places in which he lived afforded his skills ample opportunity to develop.  What Kipling could not find in his environs in Lahore or Bombay he imported from the birthland of his forefathers, and his whimsy and sense of the nugatory cannot be better expressed than in a quote from this story:

For these reasons, and because he was hampering, in a microscopical degree, the administration of the Indian Empire, that Empire paused for one microscopical moment to make inquiry into the fate of Imray. 

This is undoubtedly one of the finest sentences of English literature: the whole tale, then, is to be a moment in the life of someone who is probably dead and surely unimportant, except to the narrator, who has other ends in mind.  Art at the microscopical degree is still art, and an inquiry into the miniature particles of its construct as commendable as the painting of a chapel ceiling.  And Imray is suddenly as significant as any other fictional character that has ever lived.

Our narrator has few contacts in the world he describes.  There is only another Anglo–Indian, Strickland, a friend and policeman who rents the bungalow formerly inhabited by the Indian Imray, and Strickland’s dog, Tietjens.  What is particular about Tietjens, a bouncy and frisky beast with more personality than just about anyone else in this story, is that she is immediately identified as both a “slut” (a connotation that in 1891 was not quite like today’s use of the word) and a “familiar spirit.”  Now I cannot say I am an expert in the religious traditions of the Indian subcontinent, but this stroke suggests a sympathy with the local tradition that is often missing in “colonial” narratives, for lack of a better term.  Kipling himself was often charged with being too negative about the civilizations his country subjugated and the glee with which he spread his literature suggested a certain pride in the accomplishments of imperialism.  That view, in retrospect, comes off as too politically charged to be of any consequence: Kipling wrote about what he saw and heard, and what he saw and heard was at times appalling and inspiring for entirely different reasons.  True enough, we watch souls through their cages and imagine what they are really like within, and sometimes our guesses are spot–on.  Other times, we gaze smugly at those around us and think that we can read a soul in the vicissitudes of its face.  Perhaps we even chat with these spirits to confirm our suspicions.  But then, one day, these spirits vanish into the crowds we never seem to have noticed and, upon taking inventory of our recollections, we find that nothing will resummon them because all along they were figments or pastiches of our own projections.  We know nothing about them except that at one time they existed, although even that is assailable.  We know nothing about them and would never be able to find them again unless they entered our world on our terms, and so we forget them and find others, more beautiful or more interesting.  And our narrator realizes he knows absolutely about Imray.

It is perhaps understood that Imray is dead or returned in some other form or both.  A shadow accompanies the story line from an appropriate distance, with a reserve that seems unlikely given the beliefs the author ascribes to the natives:

The rooms of the house were dark behind me ... my own servant came to me in the twilight, the muslin of his clothes clinging tight to his drenched body, and told me that a gentleman had called and wished to see some one.  Very much against my will, but only because of the darkness of the rooms, I went into the naked drawing–room, telling my man to bring the lights.  There might or might not have been a caller waiting — it seemed to me that I saw a figure by one of the windows — but when the lights came there was nothing save the spikes of the rain without, and the smell of the drinking earth in my nostrils.

Outside, as “storm after storm came up,” Tietjens is seen howling at something or someone.  And someone tries to call out to the narrator “by name, but his voice was no more than a husky whisper.”  After that long and magnificent description, two snakes slither their way into the story as if dispatched to destroy the interlopers in Imray’s house.  Then we meet one last character who reveals exactly why Imray disappeared, an explanation that you could not possibly expect in a purely “Western” story devoted, as it must be, to dispassionate reason.  And Imray’s strange fate, like the weblike tale in which he is entrapped, is both logical and ridiculous.