The Naval Treaty

What has become of the news?  Once upon a distant time, things occurred, events took place that evoked interest, pity, outrage, fear – all the common mantras of the common mind – and yet remained shrouded in mystery.  Details were not forthcoming; differing reports came to differing conclusions; and the news reader, the receptacle of emotion that was not quite his, participated in the story's development.  A robbery or other crime of greed had a thousand and one motives and perpetrators; an affair to remember was not quickly forgotten by half the country, and never forgotten by the other half; and the worst of all acts, the extinction of a human life, kindled in every heart remorse, anger, and thoughts of cruel vengeance because there are few things more exhilarating than avenging a stranger (one definition, I suppose, of a hero).  And no better vigilante for the victims of nefarious plots and abominable miscarriages of justice can be found than the protagonist of this classic tale.

As usual, Watson, that "stormy petrel of crime" brings what he deems to be a noteworthy case to his famous friend's attention.  In this instance Percy Phelps, an old school chum sufficiently well-connected in the Diplomatic office to have landed a plum position with his uncle, a "future premier of England," writes Watson in utter terror and desperation.  His plight?  To have become the unwitting accomplice to a most disastrous felony: that of a naval treaty that will realign two sets of triple powers – and since we are about a year away from the centennial of those trials of trust, I will say no more.  Tasked with copying the French-language treaty in the isolated confines of his office, Phelps's own description of that fateful eve is terrible enough:

I was feeling drowsy and stupid, partly from my dinner and also from the effects of a long day's work.  A cup of coffee would clear my brain.  A commissionnaire remains all night in a little lodge at the foot of the stairs, and is in the habit of making coffee at his spirit-lamp for any of the officials who may be working over time.  I rang the bell, therefore, to summon him.  To my surprise, it was a woman who answered the summons, a large, coarse-faced, elderly woman, in an apron.  She explained that she was the commissionnaire's wife, who did the charing, and I gave her the order for the coffee …. It is of the utmost importance that you should notice this point.  I went down the stairs and into the hall, where I found the commissionnaire fast asleep in his box, with the kettle boiling furiously upon the spirit-lamp.  I took off the kettle and blew out the lamp, for the water was spurting over the floor.  Then I put out my hand and was about to shake the man, who was still sleeping soundly, when a bell over his head rang loudly, and he woke with a start .... 'I was boiling the kettle when I fell asleep, sir.'  He looked at me and then up at the still quivering bell with an ever-growing astonishment upon his face.  'If you were here, sir, then who rang the bell?' he asked.  'The bell!' I cried.  'What bell is it?'  'It's the bell of the room you were working in.'  

That "a cold hand seemed to close round" the heart of Percy Phelps cannot shock us, for his life and career shall never be the same.  He retreats to the loving arms of his betrothed Annie Harrison, "a striking-looking woman, a little short and thick for symmetry," yet possessed of "a beautiful olive complexion, large, dark, Italian eyes, and a wealth of deep black hair."  By the handwriting ("a woman's, and a woman of rare character") Holmes divines that it was Annie who loved her future spouse enough as to call upon the most famous detective in England; it is also Annie whose presence and devotion have maintained Percy Phelps among the quick.  The duo proceeds with its usual methods, with the mystery of the telltale bell providing the most puzzlement.

If you know even a little about our story's author, you would not be surprised at the soliloquy interposed in The Naval Treaty, although among these tales it remains the only one of its kind.  Conan Doyle was routinely mocked for his spiritualist espousings, some of which waft into the rather dubious realm of necromancy; by and large, however, he was a Christian, if a very imaginative one.  Yet due to the preeminence allegedly allotted to physical science by his most famous fictional creation, as well as his own medical background, Conan Doyle wisely omitted his own personal religious views from these texts (and since his era was as befouled by skeptical hogos as is ours, such a tactic avoided another critical missile).  Instead, the reader may gather and arrange his own assumptions as to what Holmes and Watson, two inexorably moral minds, might have thought about such topics as the otherworld.  Which makes the former's odd non-sequitur all the more curious:   

'What a lovely thing a rose is!'  He walked past the couch to the open window, and held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose, looking down at the dainty blend of crimson and green.  It was a new phase of his character to me, for I had never before seen him show any keen interest in natural objects.  'There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion,' said he, leaning with his back against the shutters.  'It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner.  Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers.  All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance.  But this rose is an extra.  Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it.  It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.'

A comment in my wondrous annotated volume deems Holmes ignorant of the usefulness of flowers and their pollen, but there is a certain caliber of mind which will never be able to comprehend beauty and practicality's eternal dissonance.  It is also upon this passage that ever-pragmatic Annie Harrison, "with a touch of asperity in her voice," enjoins Holmes to predict his success, to which he replies that he already has seven clues.  I count five or perhaps six, because I fear Holmes subsumes in his reckoning a clue that has actually yet to appear.  Or maybe he simply deduced the clue's existence in that fine manner already related.  You know, the one involving faith and reason and beauty.  And hope.    

From Hell

We are in the most extreme and utter region of the human mind.  A radiant abyss where men meet themselves.

Whatever we may believe of life and its aftermath, we all have some concept of damnation.  The nightmare may be as simple as a lonely, almost impeccably dark jail cell, or as complicated as a repetition of our mistakes over the course of thousands of years until a horrific realization comes upon us; it may even be the bottomless fire-and-brimstone mortar pit evoked by the soapbox preacher.  When someone claims to have no conception of hell or heaven, we should wonder whether he has ever really felt anything more than blood coursing through his veins.  I for one can picture hell in a variety of ways, because although the devil is supposed to be in the details, there are also varieties of inhuman experiences that attend our deepest fears.  We fear death, surely, but we fear repeated, agonizing, inextricable death even more.  Which is why you might never quite forget the images of this film.

While its title was famously used in a letter from this killer, a star in the pantheon of that nebulous arena known as "true crime," our film, despite its drawings from standard Ripperology, has little in the way of documentary.  We begin with an opium pipe, decadence, and the notion that everything we are about to witness could be nothing more than a mad dream.  It is but moments later that we descend into the filth that comprises certain parts of late nineteenth-century London, the lack of hygiene, morals, or hope.  In this case we speak of Whitechapel.  On every corner stands a pinch-prick or bang-tail (or in a perfect Victorian euphemism, an "unfortunate"); on every corner opposite looms a trick or handler.  Between them totter drunks and beggars, pickpockets and slowly dying workers that, were it not for the restraint of the directors, could have made for a scathing exposé on industrial poverty.  Our killer fits right in with all this, of course, "as quiet as the devil's laugh."  Hell could be Whitechapel; or it could be the opium den where we keep returning to that handsome fellow who probably thinks he's in heaven.  What is worse, knowing you are in hell, or being in hell and all the while thinking you are saved?   Both are suggested; and both, perhaps, are parts of the same nefarious realm.

The plot, as an interpretation of the events, is frighteningly simple.  An erstwhile unfortunate, Ann Crook (Joanna Page) has married and had a baby with someone of the upper class by the name of Albert.  A violent gang of operatives linked to his family gets wind of it, destroys their apartment, carries Albert off and makes Ann confess all names of those with knowledge of the baby.  Since these operatives are of a very persuasive brand, we are not surprised to learn that within a few short days of Ann's abduction one of her former colleagues is murdered in broadest darkness.  But she is not just murdered, she is butchered, and in spectacular fashion, the gruesome result suggesting a suspect well-versed in anatomy.  The flashes of steel on an otherwise black screen when the first victim is corralled will remain one of the great vignettes in the history of thrillers.  We then are provided with another view of what took place in a rapid reel so commonly incident to hallucinations and the wild daydreams of the addict, taking us back to that handsome man lying in the shape of a question mark on an opium den futon.  That man is Inspector Frederick Abberline (Johnny Depp), and he possesses what is known as second sight, if blurred by a rather virulent craving for laudanum and absinthe.  He is revived by his sidekick Godley (Robbie Coltrane), an immense bag of Shakespearean quotes and embarrassed gestures, and informed of the task at hand – which, as it were, has just begun to assume its diabolical contours. 

The complications of tracking the serial killer at large need not be spoiled on these pages, even if the story is familiar from urban legend.  Abberline and Godley poke around the crime scenes in the dawning hours of forensic science and suspect that a surgeon might be behind it all, even if some of their superiors recommend they question veterinarians, tailors, and, most of all, butchers.  At the same time, as yet undiscovered by our ersatz Holmes-and-Watson, the friends of Ann Crook and the first victim, Martha Tabram, wander about without fixed domicile or meals.  These include Katherine Eddowes, the mother-hen of the pullets, Liz Stride, the resident Sapphist, Annie Chapman, a particularly unhandsome addition, Polly Nichols, a gullible sort, and the lone Irishwoman in the group, Mary Kelly (Heather Graham).  A brief aside: even if we forget the sequence of crimes, does Mary Kelly really need to be the only one among the group of any attractiveness (highlighted, as it were, by a shock of red hair)?  Does the term "last girl" mean anything to the viewer?  In the horror film code, the last girl is invariably the only one who does not wander off into the darkness by herself looking for some frivolous object, as well as the only one who refuses to mock the imminent danger.  Such is the fate of Mary Kelly, who so outshines her companions – and, indeed, all of Whitechapel – that one would scarcely believe her line of work.  Once Tabram is killed, rumors begin about the foreignness of the matter (even the name "Tabram" is deemed foreign-sounding); Abberline's superior alternatively blames and exculpates the Jews, then makes a joke about "Red Indians indulging their natural inclinations."  A superior, by the way, who just so happens to be a high-ranking member, probably well towards the thirty-third degree, of a Masonic lodge where a great number of surgeons and men of power congregate far too often to be insignificant for our film.   

From Hell has suffered critically from what can be loosely termed great expectations.  That is to say, it is such a visual marvel that the impressed viewer could only be disappointed with a plain plot not unlike any straightforward slasher mayhem flick.  Since the film tries its damnedest to adhere to the historical detail extant – the order and method of the killings, as well as the real persons heading the investigation – there obtains the added unpleasantry of foreknowledge that dampens any real suspense.  I may sit gloriously in the minority, but these are petty obstacles.  Our killer is not so much revealed as summoned from the darkest annals of our nightmares, and given the striving towards known events, we know that our crime will remain to some degree unsolved.  Yet I think what has gained its greatest legion of detractors is an unadorned truth: evil may claim to be ingenious, multifaceted and abstruse, but at its core it wallows in the blandest mud.  How then to interpret the first written line of the film, ultimately its epigraph, as uttered by Jack himself: "One day men will look back and say I gave birth to the twentieth century"?  Perhaps by comparing that assertion with the one that began this essay from the on-screen Ripper's unshown mouth.  As Godley might then have whispered, some rise by sin and some by virtue fall.     

The Terror of Blue John Gap

The inspector entered it all in a large book and bowed me out with commendable gravity.  But I heard a burst of laughter before I had got down his garden path; no doubt he was recounting my adventure to his family.

                                                                                                                            Dr. James Hardcastle

I don't think that as a child I ever believed in unicorns.  Perhaps because their horns were clearly vestigial and served no purpose other than to distinguish them from the plainest of ponies; perhaps because young boys tend to cherish less delicate critters.  Mermaids, fairies, and other soft metaphors of femininity were likewise devoid of appeal.  Common is the child who will reject these earthbound fantasies for the beasts of beyond, for interplanetary spies and spectacles, for impossible odds and still more impossible evens.  But these gimcrack scenes have never attracted me, in no small part because I identified them long ago as shadows of our own melodramas, puppet theater for those who seek the actions but not the morals.  What did fill me with wonderment and joy, however, were the innumerable tales of what we have come to call, faute de mieux, cryptids.  And while I would now be unlikely to deem these creatures possible, some long neck, some claw's print, some unpalatable howl shattering a dark, clear night still revives a childhood fear.  Which brings us to this tale.  

Our hero will prove his mettle over the course of a few crazed months in the Derbyshire hills, but he shall pay dearly for this display of courage.  His name is Dr. James Hardcastle, "a man of a sober and scientific turn of mind, absolutely devoid of imagination, and most unlikely to invent any abnormal series of events."  Those of us who can enjoy Conan Doyle's genial phantasmagoria know that it is invariably from among such souls – the smug, the skeptic, the materialist – that his protagonists are selected.  Were incredible events to befall someone already mindful of phenomena beyond man's meager ken, we would have a corroboration, not a metamorphosis, and corroborations, as we know, do not stimulating literature make.  Thus for fairness and fairness alone we should present the man as he saw himself in advance of the happenings of the summer of 1907, which left livestock dead and local residents terrified:

How absurdly easy it is for a legend to arise in a lonely countryside!  I examined him as to the reasons for his weird belief.  It seems that from time to time sheep have been missing from the fields, carried bodily away, according to Armitage.  That they could have wandered away of their own accord and disappeared among the mountains was an explanation to which he would not listen.  On one occasion a pool of blood had been found, and some tufts of wool.  That also, I pointed out, could be explained in a perfectly natural way.  Further, the nights upon which sheep disappeared were invariably very dark, cloudy nights with no moon.  This I met with the obvious retort that those were the nights which a commonplace sheep-stealer would naturally choose for his work.  On one occasion a gap had been made in a wall, and some of the stones scattered for a considerable distance.  Human agency again, in my opinion.  Finally, Armitage clinched all his arguments by telling me that he had actually heard the Creature – indeed, that anyone could hear it who remained long enough at the Gap.  It was a distant roaring of an immense volume.  I could not but smile at this, knowing, as I do, the strange reverberations which come out of an underground water system running amid the chasms of a limestone formation.  My incredulity annoyed Armitage, so that he turned and left me with some abruptness. 

We suspect it is of no small coincidence that the panicked yokel, a staple of such stories, is called Armitage, but I digress.  What we have not mentioned is the "weird belief" itself, which I'm afraid may sound silly to modern ears so accustomed to dismissing rustic rumors.  Possessed of that typical British fortitude that immediately finds caves and lagoons fascinating, Hardcastle betakes himself into the breach – in this case literally, as he enters a canyon from where this mineral is harvested.  Something untimely will happen to his candle, as well as to the matchbox in his pocket, and James Hardcastle will spend an unforeseen period ("it may have been for an hour, it may have been for several") in moist, stony darkness.  And with the sense of sight entirely unavailable, it will be his other senses that will betray him, although betray may not quite be the right word.

Even if he will always be remembered for this magnificent creation, Conan Doyle's other works, apart from some lengthier subscriptions of mystical experiences, should not be ignored.  The world of Holmes and Watson enthralled us because their creator found a way to combine, in a most genteel partnership, the arrogance of science and the faith of the human soul.  The result was the most successful tandem in literary history; yet to have both currents converge, as they do upon the battlements of Dr. James Hardcastle, is perhaps too much for one mortal to handle.  Indeed, after the comeuppance of his cavernal visitation, Hardcastle becomes broken and emotional.  The caption to his hysteria may give away more than we should:

You can imagine that it was not long before I had shaken the dust ... from my feet and returned to the farm, cursing all unimaginative pedants who cannot conceive that there may be things in creation which have never yet chanced to come across their mole's vision.

Other pedants (please read me out of such a congregation) would consider the usually careful creator of Holmes, Watson, and a multitude of other riveting beings, and wonder at the cacophonous echo of "imagine" in this passage.  But then again, we are allegedly absorbing the tale of and by a man of science, and a shaken one at that.  A man of science who may have to choose between spreading "mad alarm over the whole countryside," and facing consignment in a house for those who spread mad alarms that turn out to be mere figments of their alarming minds.  And perhaps it may behoove us to recall that little aside about heaven, earth, dreams, and all our philosophies.   

Hugo, "Je la revois, après vingt ans, l'île où Décembre"

A work ("Again I see that isle, where two score gone) by this French man of letters, written on August 8, 1872, on returning to this island.  You can read the original here.

Again I see that isle, where two score gone, 
Most foul December sought and cast me out;  
That very isle indeed! Pale shipwrecked lout!  
That isle, a room still undisturbed, anon.  

Yes, this is how it was; this sweet isle seems  
To laugh, while I detect the same bird's flight, 
The same lush flowers trembling through all night, 
The same bright sylvan dawn in its mad beams. 

Again one more mirage, how those fields call, 
The orchards and the ripest fruits untorn; 
And in the firmament looms the same storm, 
The same grass at the foot of every wall. 

The same white roof awaits that loves me still: 
Beyond the scolding stream, eternal flow, 
That vision of my Eden, lost I know 
Down where the selfsame dazzling depths run chill.  

I recognize, 'tis true, this magic shore, 
As it appear'd to me in days more sweet; 
Where Acis and Galatea we seek, 
And yet where Booz and Ruth will linger more.

Because no isle, no mountain, and no beach,
Is better made amidst these bitter depths, 
To hide the rose of idyll in its breast, 
Beneath the tragic horror of the sea. 

O Heaven!  O this Ocean!  An abyss 
Of silence, the same nature, and of noise; 
Who knows what crack unfathomable is poised
Against both night and day in mortal vis.

It was these hamlets, yes, it was these beaches; 
It was the same fleet, volatile regard; 
That acrid scent of savage heath discharged,
Into the tumults of that same wind's reaches.  

Those waves, in silver laces ripp'd out, now show
The ruins whence derived their foamy mast.    
In them one finds the same pale shadows cast 
Upon the same eternal, changing flow.

Because the acrid sea's so full of grief,  
These same ignored, eroded paths lose steam;
Waves which still worry in terrific dreams, 
About the shape of those remaining reefs.

The same immense bird flocks weave here their lines, 
Atop the mounts where God makes thunder loud;
Those same trees' peaks, collected in a crowd, 
Have not stopped trembling, trembling all this time.  

I saw again, atop the humble lea, 
The same breath undulating in the ryes;
Those same stray eagles, those same butterflies,  
Above the ocean's boundless vanity.  

The same tide cloaks this isle of foam retread, 
Just like a horse a snaffle soon makes white; 
'Twas the same blue, 'twas the same mist alight. 
How many then once lived who now are dead!

The Portrait of Mr. W. H.

Are most contemporary students of English literature required to discover these works?  Perhaps one hundred years ago we might have answered with a resounding yes; nowadays, however, when everyone allegedly engages in some kind of hidden cultural dialogue with everyone else (on terms to which, it should be said, the authors themselves seem not to have been privy), we can no longer be so sure.  Shakespeare has been lauded as the most liberated of authors and damned as manifesting the typical racist and sexist prejudices of his era.  And if the previous sentence thrills and enthralls you, you may want to find somewhere else to peddle your thoughts.  You may also not particularly enjoy this famous story.

Our protagonist has no name, which is just as well, since in time he will prove to be little more than a filter for the spirit and ideas of others.  The first and dominant spirit will be that, of course, of the greatest playwright in the history of mankind; the third will belong to a man called Erskine, who exists as the typical pseudo-intellectual, to wit, utterly consumed by some backwash of a theory, or in denial of hard and fast facts.  But it will be the second, a spirit which inhabited the forever young body of Cyril Graham, that is destined to capture and hold our interest.  A brief portrait, in Erskine's words, of Cyril will suffice:

Cyril .... certainly was wonderfully handsome.  People who did not like him, Philistines and college tutors, and young men reading for the Church, used to say that he was merely pretty; but there was a great deal more in his face than mere prettiness.  I think he was the most splendid creature I ever saw, and nothing could exceed the grace of his movements, the charm of his manner.  He fascinated everybody who was worth fascinating, and a great many people who were not.  He was often wilful and petulant, and I used to think him dreadfully insincere.  It was due, I think, chiefly to his inordinate desire to please.  Poor Cyril!  I told him once that he was contented with very cheap triumphs, but he only laughed.  He was horribly spoiled.  All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled.  It is the secret of their attraction.  However, I must tell you about Cyril's acting.  You know that no actresses are allowed to play at the [Amateur Dramatic Club of Cambridge University].  At least they were not in my time.  I don't know how it is now.  Well, of course Cyril was always cast for the girls' parts, and when As You Like It was produced he played Rosalind.  It was a marvellous performance.  In fact, Cyril Graham was the only perfect Rosalind I have ever seen.  It would be impossible to describe to you the beauty, the delicacy, the refinement of the whole thing.  It made an immense sensation, and the horrid little theatre, as it was then, was crowded every night.  Even when I read the play now I can't help thinking of Cyril.  It might have been written for him.

If you know a little something about Wilde's biography, this passage, published in 1889, will seem to precurse what the world at large might have long suspected.  But there is, naturally, no need to know anything about Wilde or Shakespeare to enjoy one genius's love affair with the other.  More vital is the understanding that Cyril Graham, who martyrs himself early on, is speaking and thinking only of himself.  Graham gazes upon the sonnets and sees merely a reflection of his own beauty; yet, like in all daydreams, he augments what God has already granted with what God should not have overlooked.  He makes Cyril Graham, who appears womanly enough to pass for many a Shakespearean heroine, into William "Willie" Hughes, who, as opposed to Cyril, can actually do what thespians are called upon to do night after night.

Who is Willie Hughes?  You may read this novel by another Irishman and be presented one opinion, but a long story can be made very short by clarifying that our titular initials appear to belong to the person to whom the sonnets are dedicated.  This unexplained mystery has launched far too many – too many being more than zero – investigations by otherwise respectable literary scholars, utterly unrespectable hacks, and purported dilettantes on the identity behind the dedication, as if the whole matter should have any bearing whatsoever on the quality of the work in question.  For his part, Graham believes that W.H. is an English boy actor by the name of William Hughes, likewise entrenched in Shakespeare's female roles; no proof is offered from any cast list, only textual homophonic clues from the sonnets (hew and hue, and so forth).  His theory, which has never been seriously pondered by Shakespeare's biographers who seem more focused on the "dark lady" and other such nonsense, is fleshed out in almost preposterous details, and slowly but surely our narrator becomes an acolyte of Cyril Graham's vision.  Yet at length these details do not convince Erskine, who initially was just as rabid a Grahamite.  "It is," he tells our horrified narrator, "a perfectly unsound theory from beginning to end."  The two men agree that they will not be unanimous and part in some acrimony, at which point our narrator reflects upon what has come between them, namely great and eternal art:

There was a strange silence for a few moments.  Then Erskine got up, and looking at me with half-closed eyes, said, 'Ah! how you remind me of Cyril!' .... He tried to smile, but there was a note of poignant pathos in his voice that I remember to the present day, as one remembers the tone of a particular violin that has charmed one, the touch of a particular woman's hand.  The great events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal.  Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion.  We regret the burden of their memory, and have anodynes against them.  But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us.  In some tiny ivory cell the brain stores the most delicate, and the most fleeting impressions.

Whether it is noteworthy that the above passage has been excised from many editions of Wilde's narrative we will leave to the literary investigators to determine.  And there is also that nugatory matter about the eponymous portrait, but we have already said enough as it is.

If you know a little more about our story's author, you might not be surprised that a year after composing The Portrait of Mr. W.H., he published his only novel-length work, which just happened to be about the unforgettable power of an unforgettable painting.  It may be of equal non-coincidence that Wilde would become world famous thanks to his stage writings, not his poetry, a logical outcome if one considers the universal acclaim allotted to his improvised wit.  But Wilde was one of the most Romantic of writers, one so in love with literature and the spine-tingling bliss (unmatched by few earthly sensations) it induces as to neglect so many other aspects of our existence.  Which reminds us of that old, late-nineteenth century saying about life's two tragedies.