The Problem of Thor Bridge

Most men have a little private reserve of their own in some corner of their souls where they don't welcome intruders.

A fortune for one man that was more than he needed should not be built on ten thousand ruined men who were left without the means of life.

We wonder at times why it seems so easy for certain people to devote their lives to money while so many go on at subsistence or below-subsistence levels. Occasionally, at dark moments of my day, I will espy a garish object and covet it, or, I should say, my imagination will create a future or alternative world in which I and that object – however useless and expensive it may be – co-exist happily. The most obvious candidates for such daydreaming are luxury items guised as useful appurtenances: clothes, cars, televisions, kitchen appliances, linens, or other everyday, unnoticeable things that suddenly need to be as beautiful as a sonnet or painting. In some quaint corner of my mind, this object and I sit and stare at one another in mutual understanding: I own the object and the object owns me because it has brought me to value it when what I really want in life – love, friendship, passion, learning, joy – cannot be purchased, lent, stolen, or leased. But these are just moments. Moments in which the basic ease of a materialistic approach to the world becomes as clear and smooth as the diamond bevels that define its status. When I awake from these small journeys into a lesser realm, I become immediately aware of the need for something heartening, a repair of pure artistic delight that is best found on a page or screen. It is clear looking at the motives of men that only a minor percentage of us share these ideals, and that most of us are urged forth by that primordial fear of going backward. Which brings us to this rather unusual entry in a famous collection of stories.

Watson begins his tale on "a wild morning in October," when his peerless companion is found at the breakfast table in a state of "sinister cheerfulness." Connoisseurs of the Holmes tales will already remark that the eponymous sleuth rarely if ever eats in the morning unless he has been up the whole night pondering the intricacies of a case, and agree with Watson that bad weather often affects Holmes in the most dire fashion, "for, like all great artists, he was easily impressed by his surroundings." Yet Holmes is in a fabulous mood because a most bizarre case has been foisted upon him by the police force in Winchester, and it involves the American robber baron J. Neil Gibson:

This man is the greatest financial power in the world, and a man, as I understand, of most violent and formidable character. He married a wife, the victim of this tragedy, of whom I know nothing save that she was past her prime, which was the more unfortunate as a very attractive governess superintended the education of two young children. These are the three people concerned, and the scene is a grand old manor house, the centre of a historical English state.

What is remarkable about this description is its unswerving accuracy: the vast majority of domestic tragedies find their reasoning in a love triangle that is seldom equilateral. That Gibson, a cutthroat industrialist with hardly a gram of pity for the less economically evolved, would be the fulcrum of such a balance beam is not unlikely given the sway that a life of ease can have on a sequacious mind. And Gibson himself is a gunnysack of sorry clichés (a "successful man of affairs, iron of nerve, and leathery of conscience"; "a tall gaunt figure [that] had a suggestion of hunger and rapacity," reminiscent of a line in this play; a man "with a lot of firearms of one sort and another [who] .... sleeps with a loaded revolver in the drawer beside his bed"), unsurprising given his unimaginative ambition to be very rich and to make his competitors very poor. Throw in the typical Americanisms – adjectives used as adverbs, rapid speech, aggressive and colorful language – that Conan Doyle tended to inflict upon all his characters from across the pond apart from the titular heir in this sublime novella, and Gibson cannot but talk with a ferocious overfamiliarity that makes every word sound like a threat (witness the first quote at the beginning of this entry). He is the "Gold King," and bears great resemblance to the figure incused on America's smallest coin if "keyed to base uses instead of high ones." And his attentions will be divided between two women – his wife, Maria Pinto, the daughter of a government official at Manaus and "tropical by birth and tropical by nature," and that "very attractive governess," Grace Dunbar, author of the second quote, who has another end in mind for Gibson's money.

Some details of the crime that should not hint or allege anything in particular: Maria Pinto is dead, "a bullet through her brain and no weapon near her"; a gun was found in the room of Ms. Dunbar, "on the floor of her wardrobe"; and, after a bit of coaxing on our detective's part, Gibson admits that he grew enamored with Ms. Dunbar and swore to leave his wife for her if that's what it would take. Then there is the matter of that bridge:

This bridge – a single broad span of stone with balustraded sides – carries the drive over the narrowest part of a long, deep, reed-girt sheet of water. Thor Mere it is called. In the mouth of the bridge lay the dead woman. Such are the main facts.

That she "was a creature of the tropics, Brazilian by birth," is a revelation akin to one made of a female in another famous Holmes tale – and here cease, alas, the revelations. This story is also noteworthy for its casual mention of three "unsolved cases" that are brought to light in this book penned jointly by the author's son and one of the most famous mystery writers of all time. "Thor Bridge" has long been considered the best tale from Doyle's last collection of stories published shortly before his death in 1930, thanks in no small part to the detail of character and the explanation that seems, upon retrospect at least, both perfectly plausible and perfectly ingenious. Is it significant that, in this case more than in any other, Holmes becomes the moralist we always suspected he might be and reprimands Gibson with the admonition, "some of you rich men have to be taught that all the world cannot be bribed into condoning your offences"? Perhaps the corners of some men's souls do not merit close inspection.

A Little Cloud

The author of this story is split in two: Ignatius Gallaher, the cosmopolitan rake who has no interest in anything and his hand in everything; and our title character, the meek and pious Thomas "Little" Chandler who loves the night and melancholy poetry. Normally, such a dichotomy would beget deep sighs of disdain from the literary-minded who want their figures clear but not clear-cut. Yet in this case the debate is far more fundamental: it is the debate between those who choose to live for their families and those who only live for themselves. Joyce, a man who by most accounts never really decided between these two life paths, only succeeded in one facet of his existence, that of art. His methods were hardly novel, albeit well-chosen. At the age of twenty-two, Joyce selected his bride from among the fairest maidens of Dublin − she not being one of them − because it was she whom he was destined to love and it was she who would accompany him to Trieste, to Switzerland, to Paris so that he would never be completely alone. It is common for literary biographers to overextend the influence of their subject's work into the personal and intimate banalities that lead to practically every coupling on earth as well as every inhabitant. Perhaps we are fools for supposing that a great artist can separate his identity from his reality, his dreams from the contagious mist of mediocrity that swirls about him on every corner, his physical and emotional handicaps from the weaknesses of all men at all times. Yet this is precisely what Joyce attempted, and he tried harder at it than any other major writer of the twentieth century. He failed and failed badly and almost became a footnote within Irish literature. Now we can imagine it: Here lies James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, b. 1882.  Addio terra, addio cielo. 

Around the age of thirty-two, however, when, like Little Chandler's, "his temperament might be said to be just at the point of maturity," and after ten years of Bohemian uprisings that nearly resulted in his family's perdition, Joyce opted to wed the everyday and the elevated, and in so doing showed us the full contour of his soul. Rarely had such an educated man such a filthy sense of humor; among the truly great (this doesn't mean you, Mr. Sterne) only Mozart's and Goethe's seemed to be on the same base plane. It is this hedonistic, selfish, scatological Joyce that cradles the Petri dish that is Ignatius, both a famous saint and a name rooted in fire and the diabolical pursuits of the Greatest of Pleasure Seekers. Ignatius does not possess a single redeeming quality, and Joyce would have it no other way. Conceding some elements of humanity to this despicable lout would deprive him completely of his relevance as a symbol and the more-than-rare occurrence of someone slowly becoming the poster child for the vice he or she embodies (in Ignatius's case, the vices are a collective). 

Is Ignatius simply a wastrel in a primitive allegory about values? Most certainly; yet he is also representative of the need of modern humanity − even though the need has surfaced time and again for centuries − to justify its instincts by praising the beauty of youth, of frivolity, of unaccountability, of meaninglessness. I think the majority of young men of privilege, myself included, have fought through the phase which Ignatius endorses as truth itself. Take for example Chandler's worries about the City of Lights:

− Tell me, is it true that Paris is so ... immoral as they say?

Ignatius made a Catholic gesture with his right arm.

− Every place is immoral, he said. Of course you do find spicy bits in Paris. Go to one of the students' balls, for instance. That's lively, if you like, when the cocottes begin to let themselves loose. You know what they are, I suppose?

− I've heard of them, said Little Chandler.

The only sincere statement in this whole exchange is Chandler's first question, a fear of missing out on the best that life has to offer, if that's really what one defines as the best. For every girl that becomes part of our past, there are a dozen that can only populate our speculative dreams. And for Chandler, married two years ago at the uncoincidental age of thirty, life consists of refraining from the poetry that his soul desperately wishes to express in favor of a bourgeois home of wife, child, and unambitious job. There is little wrong to such a scenario apart from the great injustice it inflicts upon the artistically minded. Those select few may have other jobs in which they support themselves while spending evenings and weekends on their true passion; and they may manage a personal life that needn't be a series of mistakes, regrets, or distractions. Chandler would be the person to strike such a balance if he weren't, in his own words, "timid." That is why, after his futile evening in Gallaher's shadow,  "he [still] wished to vindicate himself in some way, to assert his manhood," the silliest and most juvenile of male instincts, even at the somber age of thirty-two.

The end of A Little Cloud has been much discussed, but it is not as significant as the rest of the story. As is unfortunate in tales of simple characters that gain in importance owing to the smoothness of their correspondence to people we know, we are prone to manufacture our judgments from our last impressions, from fateful cracks in the armor of otherwise solid citizens who have perhaps just lost their way. Once Chandler determines that "Gallaher was only patronizing him by his friendliness just as he was patronizing Ireland by his visit," the mood shifts from hopeful expectation to resentment to a brief acknowledgement of the greatest ill of our modern society − selfishness. Never before has man been so capable of forging his own destiny − without anyone else, without country, without God − and transforming himself into who or what he desires regardless of "birth and education," two factors in which Chandler is actually Gallaher's superior. But with this freedom comes a concomitant responsibility that is far harder to embrace. As hard in fact as Chandler's infant child − a boy and little cloud who, like his father, continues to pass unnoticed through the twilight sky.

The Duel of Dr. Hirsch

Dr Hirsch, though born in France and covered with the most triumphant favours of French education, was temperamentally of another type – mild, dreamy, humane; and, despite his sceptical system, not devoid of transcendentalism. He was, in short, more like a German than a Frenchman; and much as they admired him, something in the subconsciousness of these Gauls was irritated at his pleading for peace in so peaceful a manner. To their party throughout Europe, however, Paul Hirsch was a saint of science. His large and daring cosmic theories advertised his austere life and innocent, if somewhat frigid, morality; he held something of the position of Darwin doubled with the position of Tolstoy. But he was neither an anarchist nor an antipatriot; his views on disarmament were moderate and evolutionary – the Republican Government put considerable confidence in him as to various chemical improvements. He had lately even discovered a noiseless explosive, the secret of which the Government was carefully guarding.

It is not without merit to wonder about the humanities and their value to a modern education; what is without merit is to wonder about doing away with them. Humanities, so poor a choice of words that it is trumped in this poverty only by nebulous gangs calling themselves "humanists," has very little to do with being human. Most properly it has to do with things that are not human – gods, arts, theories, impressions, and speculations. We earthfast apes are constructed of none of these; in fact, science, in its endless altruism, an altruism that resembles the endless black holes it worships, continues to inform us that we are hewn of flesh, bone, liquid, and some other, more delicate substances. At some point, perhaps through the end of the seventeenth or eighteenth century, there lived a type of man who could aggregate all fields of knowledge into some constellation of our thinking; who could blend and break all necessary components into what we may not inaccurately term a world-view. Alas, science has done away with the generalist and replaced him with a horde of specialists who know better than anyone about the breathing patterns of field mice and the varying palpability of seaweed. And while we may rightly mourn the loss of such paragons of excellence, we can instead celebrate the small – indeed the microscopic or atomic. Which brings us to this famous tale.   

Dr. Hirsch has already been described in the paragraph beginning this review, so only a little more about him should be mentioned. As a "scientist, publicist, and a moralist," he may be safely pigeonholed as a pedantic glory hound with an advanced degree in applied mathematics; but let us not get ahead of ourselves and, more importantly, of Dr. Hirsch. Like other would-be demagogues, Dr. Hirsch's most telltale qualities are best reflected in his acolytes, in this case, a certain Monsieur Brun and another, no less certain, Monsieur Armagnac:

They were both short, brisk and bold. They both had black beards that did not seem to belong to their faces, after the strange French fashion which makes real hair look like artificial. M. Brun had a dark wedge of beard apparently affixed under his lower lip. M. Armagnac, by way of a change, had two beards; one sticking out from each corner of his emphatic chin. They were both young. They were both atheists, with a depressing fixity of outlook but great mobility of exposition. 

Since this tale was composed precisely one century ago, right before Europe raged against itself in the most hideous internecine that continent had faced in the Christian era (only to be outdone by even greater strife, but we are, again, laps ahead of the competition), it is here that we call upon the modern reader to extrapolate this pithy portrait to the current day. Transpose their beards to the tops of their heads with equal vim: the age is still young; the belief is still nothingness upon nothingness; the outlook is still rigid, morbid, and vapid; and the exposition is most definitely mobile, because their lives will be as short, brisk, and bold as their gaits (and for that "horrible green absinthe, which they could drink apparently in any weather and at any time," you may substitute another green intoxicant, not drunk). That Monsieur Armagnac adheres to a militarized form of pacifism – in other words, shooting his superiors and whoever else gets in his way – and Monsieur Brun has suggested that, "the common expression 'Adieu' should be obliterated from all the French classics, and a slight fine imposed for its use in private life," should not surprise the careful reader because extreme zealotry tends to resort to violence and censorship. And there is no fouler example of a militant religious zealot than one who demands that everyone believe in nothing or, more specifically, that everyone believe in the particular nothing he happens to fancy.  

I fear we have forgotten all about Dr. Hirsch, but that's just as well. In the works of this author, it is easy to overlook the parade of pundits and focus on the simple expressions of a country priest who is neither simple, nor very partial to rustic mores. What happens to Dr. Hirsch – from our title, apparently a combatant – will have to wait as we examine some of the pearly asides: "The Duke, however stimulated, had the instincts of an aristocrat, and desired rather to stare at the house than to spy on it"; "I cannot speak like Clemenceau and Déroulède, for their words are like echoes of their pistols"; "The lane down which they followed him was one of those that seem to be at the back of things, and look like the wrong side of the stage scenery"; "He was a forked radish of a fellow, with just enough bulb of a head to make his body insignificant." Yet the most devastating of all observations has to do with our acolytes, whom Father Brown sizes up efficiently: 

They have no instincts. I mean those things that make a woman refuse to dance with a man or a man to touch an investment. They've been taught that it's all a matter of degree.

Instinct is one word, but we can think of several others. And as much as nuance can be important in explaining anything of value, such as gods, arts, theories, impressions, and speculations, we would be well-served to trust in something greater still, something that can and cannot be explained. Something that has absolutely nothing in common with a noiseless explosive.

Spring in Fialta

I am fond of Fialta; I am fond of it because I feel in the hollow of those violaceous syllables the sweet dark dampness of the most rumpled of small flowers, and because the altolike name of a lovely Crimean town is echoed by its viola.

It is, one supposes, of paramount importance that the town named in the title of this story does not exist; well actually, if you subscribe to the opinions contained therein, that's not entirely true. Fialta represents the loving combination of geography and memory, the extirpation of a pleasant scene from a place now long forsaken to a greener pasture where real, forceful, and elegant life can bloom anew. And what time could be better to regain a lost love than amidst the fragrant fog of spring? That would depend, it seems, on the mnemonic forces at your disposal.

Our year is 1932 and our protagonist is a Russian-born businessman by the name of Victor. He may be handsome, obsequious,  wealthy, or intriguing – we're not quite sure. The only information available summarizes his family life ("I had left my wife and children at home, and that was an island of happiness always present in the clear north of my being," one of the greatest sentences in the English language) and his intermittent fling with a thin, dark girl he calls Nina. Nina and he meet, he recalls with some certitude, amidst the upheaval of the year 1917, astride a wintry red barn belonging to nobility and the nineteenth-century storytellers that had poised Russia on the brink of becoming the world's greatest literary tradition. In that first encounter caresses are exchanged before names, their soundtrack being "that crunch-crunch-crunch which is the only comment that a taciturn winter night makes upon humans." The second tryst is at a Berlin cocktail party years later; Victor is now almost married, whereas Nina has left her "incredibly well-bred and stolid" fiancé. The third and fourth encounters are so boilerplate (a German train station where they barely touch; a Paris hotel room where they barely speak) that some readers might be repulsed by the treacly nature of the whole affair – and, as it were, they would not be wrong. Hints are generously sprinkled as to the fate of poor Nina, and among the imaginative hindsight is almost invariably clairvoyant. It is for that reason that, in Fialta, Victor takes Nina "back into the past, back into the past, as I did every time I met her." The past remains the only explanation for their intimacy ("How familiar to me were her hesitations, second thoughts, third thoughts mirroring first ones, ephemeral worries between trains"), for the difference between their interaction and that of two verbal strangers. Victor's recollections have at once the sheen of fiction and romanticized truth, a dichotomy that does not have to be as disparate as it sounds – but we will return to that point. And in that past, and sadly in the present as well, lurks a Franco-Hungarian writer, Ferdinand, who just so happens to be Nina's husband. 

As the man that Nina chooses, at least legally, as her companion, Ferdinand wallows in the ephemeral fame so commonly incident to the second-rate writer. In fact, the description furnished by Victor suggests that this needn't have been his fate:

At the beginning of his career, it had been possible perhaps to distinguish some human landscape, some old garden, some dream-familiar disposition of trees through the stained glass of his prodigious prose ... but with every new book the tints grew still more dense, the gules and purpure still more ominous; and today one can no longer see anything at all through that blazoned, ghastly rich glass, and it seems that were one to break it, nothing but a perfectly black void would face one's shivering soul.

For those steeped in Nabokov's categories, the compartmentalization is painfully clear. Which makes an article on Spring in Fialta from an allegedly prominent source averring that – and here I paraphrase to throw off the Google hounds – we are supposed to sympathize with Ferdinand, that Victor is insanely jealous of this amazing writer who greatly resembles Nabokov, and that Victor might have concocted the whole affair with Nina in his mind, one of the most unfortunately misinformed reviews in recent memory. As it were, Ferdinand epitomizes the "healthy second-rater" whom Nabokov always lambasted for the former's intrusion into every possible field except literary excellence. His entourage is composed solely of other such frauds, in books and society, and his most recent publication exemplifies his lack of sincerity:

After a brief period of fashionable religious conversion, during which grace descended upon him and he undertook some rather ambiguous pilgrimages, which ended in a decidedly scandalous adventure, he had turned his dull eyes toward barbarous Moscow. Now, frankly speaking, I have always been irritated by the complacent conviction that a ripple of stream consciousness, a few healthy obscenities, and a dash of communism in any old slop pail will alchemically and automatically produce ultramodern literature; and I will contend until I am shot that art as soon as it is brought into contact with politics inevitably sinks to the level of any ideological trash. In Ferdinand's case .... he didn't care a damn for the plight of the underdog; but because of certain obscurely mischievous undercurrents of that sort, his art had become still more repulsive.

One wonders what could possibly induce anyone to think kindly of such a beast, much less compare him to the staunchly anti-trend, anti-scatological, anti-communist Nabokov – but I fear that last reviewer has already effectively obliterated himself. 

What the tale accomplishes in its saltatory excuse for a plot cannot be retold or repenned: in terms of fluidity and sheen, it ranks among the finest short stories of the twentieth century. Nina is both as real as her body is real, and as fake and evanescent as any hope may be of owning her spirit. She is the perfect and the most dreadful of affairs, one that means everything because it always meant nothing, because it was always a matter of happenstance that congress or affection occurred. Victor reminisces about what appears to be his only extramarital activity, justifying it implicitly by the fact that its kernels antedated his wedding, and trying, with one feeble and belated attempt, to apotheosize the experience into something it could not possibly become. Memory, "that long-drawn sunset shadow of one's personal truth," will have to suffice; but Victor and we know that, for all its triumphs, memory is rarely enough. Nina, on the other lonely and now horribly withered hand, never seems to have bothered with such detail.

"I am fond of Fialta; I am fond of it because I feel in the hollow of those violaceous syllables the sweet dark dampness of the most rumpled of small flowers, and because the altolike name of a lovely Crimean town is echoed by its viola."

An Episode of Cathedral History

Superstition reveals its advantages, I suppose, in finding creative ways to manipulate younger souls. The logic behind such an assumption is quite primitive: these souls are deemed too callow to remain within reason's boundaries, and must be scared into doing unwittingly what they would not do if they had their wits about them. Hence the little child placing a tooth beneath his pillow, the avoidance of leaning, forty-five degree ladders, and that old chestnut about a nosey cat. Superstition is not coterminous, however, with the notions of faith lumped together unceremoniously under the rubric of organized religion. In part because organized religion for all its faults was never meant to scare anyone except those who fear things they cannot know (we have other terms for these miscreants), and in part because religion and its edifices, when used correctly, are supposed to imbue us with hope not frighten us into slavery. Which brings us to this splendid tale.

Our protagonist is a certain Mr. Lake, "a learned gentleman ... deputed to examine and report upon the archives of the Cathedral of Southminster." Yet this delightful task is mired with difficulties. Upon arrival Lake is immediately shown an unmarked tomb about which his guide, a Mr. Worby, promises him a tale he shall not soon forget. It so happens that as a child Worby and the village of Southminster were plagued by what may be exaggerated into a mild form of the plague. During a span of several rough months, hundreds were stricken with viral infections of every kind, with the most senior residents subdued into the grave. What was the nature of this so-called plague? Something that can only be hinted at:      

The season was undoubtedly a very trying one. Whether the church was built on a site that had once been a marsh, as was suggested, or for whatever reason, the residents in its immediate neighbourhood had, many of them, but little enjoyment of the exquisite sunny days and the calm nights of August and September. To several of the older people – Dr. Ayloff, among others, as we have seen – the summer proved downright fatal, but even among the younger, few escaped either a sojourn in bed for a matter of weeks, or at the least, a brooding sense of oppression, accompanied by hateful nightmares. Gradually there formulated itself a suspicion – which grew into a conviction – that the alterations in the Cathedral had something to say in the matter. The widow of a former old verger, a pensioner of the Chapter of Southminster, was visited by dreams, which she retailed to her friends, of a shape that slipped out of the little door of the south transept as the dark fell in, and flitted – taking a fresh direction every night – about the close, disappearing for a while in house after house, and finally emerging again when the night sky was paling. She could see nothing of it, she said, but that it was a moving form: only she had an impression that when it returned to the church, as it seemed to do in the end of the dream, it turned its head: and then, she could not tell why, but she thought it had red eyes. Worby remembered hearing the old lady tell this dream at a tea-party in the house of the chapter clerk. Its recurrence might, perhaps, he said, be taken as a symptom of approaching illness; at any rate before the end of September the old lady was in her grave.

The time is 1840 and the mood is definitively Gothic; so claims at least Worby, who remembers the Dean of the Cathedral as "very set on the Gothic period." We may conclude from this fixation that the Cathedral, which exists as a monument to an Entity both palpable and intangible, reflects the fears and concerns of the villagers insofar as they are prisoners to their past. And in their past, the fifteenth century to be precise, a tomb was carved, laid, and left unencumbered by an eternal epithet. 

Lake, who has some qualms about the methods of restoration in the village, decides to let Worby keep talking, at which point he relates other disturbing details. Firstly, some of the villagers share the same nightmares. One comments that he slept poorly because of the visual enactment of this Biblical verse; screech-owl, as some versions have it, or not, Worby's parents impute the noises to cats. Secondly, there is the matter of the unrest shimmering under the placid surface of rustic life. One morning in particular remains in Worby's memory:

That was a funny morning altogether: nothing seemed to go right. The organist he stopped in bed, and the minor Canon he forgot it was the 19th day and waited for the Venite; and after a bit the deputy he set off playing the chant for evensong, which was a minor; and then the Decani boys were laughing so much they couldn't sing, and when it came to the anthem the solo boy he got took with the giggles, and made out his nose was bleeding, and shoved the book at me what hadn't practised the verse and wasn't much of a singer if I had known it. Well, things were rougher, you see, fifty years ago, and I got a nip from the counter-tenor behind me that I remembered.

There is also the matter of the dress of the wife of a visiting Fellow of this society, and what happens when a pair of whippersnappers decide to cram some sheet music into one of the shoddy tomb's crevices – but these things can be discovered by the curious reader. 

The setting – an old church, Northern Europe, a hazy countryside of mystagogues and whispered legends – is typical for the stories of this author, long a regular on these pages. James produced tighter and more recondite works, but this thin scrap of fictionalized cathedral lore has all the makings of a cure for restfulness. Particularly unnerving are the description of what is seen emerging from that tomb and what then is finally inscribed on the stone that restrains it tenuously.  Make that very tenuously.