I first knew Sherlock Holmes from a tattered old anthology that my mother used to read from at night. I loved "Hound of the Baskervilles" for its spooky old house on the moors, and the glowing fangs, but did not really appreciate him until middle school, when I read Sherlock myself. Oh, to have such deductive powers! And, for a boy of that age, to have such nonchalance, such cool! I can't remember, but I may have asked for a deer stalker cap, and wouldn't have minded one of those 19th century capes that the upper crust wore so well.
We know that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created the character for sales, betting on the English middle class to fall for this oh-so-logical, cool, Victorian model of Anglo superiority, and he won his bet big-time, much to his dismay. He came to hate Sherlock's detached, one-dimensional character, and gladly killed him off with nemesis Professor Moriarty, but was forced to exhume him because of the public outcry. He had become a prisoner of his own creation, and I suppose he died somewhat bitter, although more than somewhat wealthy.
But who cares? The character lives on and on, and I had to see him in the latest iteration, the movie "Mr. Homes," with Ian McKellen as an ancient Holmes suffering from the first stages of senile dementia. We first meet him arriving at his country place in Dover from a visit to post-WWII Japan (1947), with a small prickly ash bush tucked under arm. A Japanese scholar had written him suggesting that the tea from this bush would cure memory problems, and he had traveled all the way to Japan for its powers, for there was something that he desperately needed to remember. It had to do with his last case, which had forced him to end his detective work and live in solitude in the country. Dr Watson had written of it ( in the movie, he and Watson are real, but Watson had used liberal license to recreate the cases in what we now read today), but Homes knew that something was wrong about the ending. He simply could not remember, but knew that it had everything to do with his retirement and the empty feeling that lingered in his life.
I will leave much the rest to those who wish to view it, but at last Holmes recalls the last case, of a woman who had had two still- born children, and whose husband coldly could not understand her distress. Through twists and turns, he finds that Watson's conclusion was indeed woefully wrong - on purpose, to save feelings. Rather, Holmes recalls that this woman sought him out, in the end, to share her loneliness, to find mutual relief from loneliness with him. As a decent, stuffy Victorian man, he instead politely rebuffed her and sent her back to her cold husband. It did not turn out well.
This, coupled with the lives of his widowed housekeeper, her son, and the Japanese man, causes him to make the most brilliant deduction in his life: that with the slightest of effort, he could improve other's lives, and in so doing, could improve his own, for the lack he felt came from the loneliness of a man trapped in his acute but emotionless mind. And so he does improve things - and comes to the most beautiful of endings (this, I think, won't spoil it for the would-be viewer): with the housekeeper's boy at his side , he sits out in the green, green grass of the English countryside just beyond the fabled coastal cliffs and circles himself with small white stones, each one being named as he does so - for his brother, for his friends, for other lost relatives. Here he sits in the middle, understanding now that they are what made his life. We know that he forgives himself for his coldness when he stretches his hands out to the sky and then bows in the grass in reverence. In this he acknowledges the supreme logic of love, and how his gifts can still help alleviate - if not solve - the mystery of the human condition, and its ultimate need, and aim.
Brought to the realization with his great mind, he bows down before everything, to others and the world itself, in acknowledgement of the final mystery that can never be solved, but only lived with the heart.
A beautiful fulfillment of the character that Doyle came to hate, and perhaps, with this, would have come to love. FK
We know that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created the character for sales, betting on the English middle class to fall for this oh-so-logical, cool, Victorian model of Anglo superiority, and he won his bet big-time, much to his dismay. He came to hate Sherlock's detached, one-dimensional character, and gladly killed him off with nemesis Professor Moriarty, but was forced to exhume him because of the public outcry. He had become a prisoner of his own creation, and I suppose he died somewhat bitter, although more than somewhat wealthy.
But who cares? The character lives on and on, and I had to see him in the latest iteration, the movie "Mr. Homes," with Ian McKellen as an ancient Holmes suffering from the first stages of senile dementia. We first meet him arriving at his country place in Dover from a visit to post-WWII Japan (1947), with a small prickly ash bush tucked under arm. A Japanese scholar had written him suggesting that the tea from this bush would cure memory problems, and he had traveled all the way to Japan for its powers, for there was something that he desperately needed to remember. It had to do with his last case, which had forced him to end his detective work and live in solitude in the country. Dr Watson had written of it ( in the movie, he and Watson are real, but Watson had used liberal license to recreate the cases in what we now read today), but Homes knew that something was wrong about the ending. He simply could not remember, but knew that it had everything to do with his retirement and the empty feeling that lingered in his life.
I will leave much the rest to those who wish to view it, but at last Holmes recalls the last case, of a woman who had had two still- born children, and whose husband coldly could not understand her distress. Through twists and turns, he finds that Watson's conclusion was indeed woefully wrong - on purpose, to save feelings. Rather, Holmes recalls that this woman sought him out, in the end, to share her loneliness, to find mutual relief from loneliness with him. As a decent, stuffy Victorian man, he instead politely rebuffed her and sent her back to her cold husband. It did not turn out well.
This, coupled with the lives of his widowed housekeeper, her son, and the Japanese man, causes him to make the most brilliant deduction in his life: that with the slightest of effort, he could improve other's lives, and in so doing, could improve his own, for the lack he felt came from the loneliness of a man trapped in his acute but emotionless mind. And so he does improve things - and comes to the most beautiful of endings (this, I think, won't spoil it for the would-be viewer): with the housekeeper's boy at his side , he sits out in the green, green grass of the English countryside just beyond the fabled coastal cliffs and circles himself with small white stones, each one being named as he does so - for his brother, for his friends, for other lost relatives. Here he sits in the middle, understanding now that they are what made his life. We know that he forgives himself for his coldness when he stretches his hands out to the sky and then bows in the grass in reverence. In this he acknowledges the supreme logic of love, and how his gifts can still help alleviate - if not solve - the mystery of the human condition, and its ultimate need, and aim.
Brought to the realization with his great mind, he bows down before everything, to others and the world itself, in acknowledgement of the final mystery that can never be solved, but only lived with the heart.
A beautiful fulfillment of the character that Doyle came to hate, and perhaps, with this, would have come to love. FK
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