The Case of the Fickle Reader

My wife recently started rereading our two-volume edition of the complete Sherlock Holmes. I gave it to her several years ago and she downed it like ice water on a July afternoon here in Houston. Most of Conan Doyle’s stories are brief enough to be read conveniently before sleep, at the end of the workday, and that’s how she takes them -- in prescribed, soporific doses. About the time she recently re-immersed herself in the Victorian twilight, my oldest son underwent an emergency appendectomy. He’s 18 and a college freshman in upstate New York, many states away. He’s recovering uneventfully, but the confluence of these events – one trivial, the other nerve-wracking – revived the memory of the most intense reading experience of my life, an event so involuntarily violent it reminds me of falling in love, and yet it involves a book which no longer interests me. .

I was in ninth grade. This was early in 1967, a transitional time in my reading life. I was already reading Beckett and Sartre but was still a waning fan of science fiction. I collected Doc Savage reprints and Edgar Rice Burroughs, but my favorite poet was Karl Shapiro. How such incompatible tastes coexisted surpasses my understanding. I had another of my recurrent earaches, coupled with fever and persistent coughing. I stayed home from school and started reading the Holmes stories, which I knew only through the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce movies on Saturday afternoon television. Maybe it was the fever or Holmes’ icy ratiocination. Whatever it was, I entered and chose to dwell in another -- and in many ways preferable -- reality. I could not stop reading the stories. When I started to feel better after a day or so, I feigned symptoms so I could stay out of school for a full week and not interrupt my obsessive reading. I stuck a pencil up my nose to make myself sneeze and complained of ersatz headaches and chills.

These memories are weirdly visual. I can see myself propped on pillows and wrapped in blankets in my childhood living room, but somehow I’m also in Holmes’ cozy lodgings on Baker Street. I remember almost nothing of the plots of the four novels and 56 stories. What I recall is a sense of comfort, an optimistic hunch that this is what life as an adult would be like – not the danger or adventure, but setting things right in the end. Sherlock Holmes as a model of domestic maturity? I could have done worse – say, Tarzan.

Despite the comfortable glow I still associate with the Holmes corpus – a symptom I’ve come to recognize, with great skepticism, of middle-age nostalgia -- I have never reread it in toto. Several years ago I took from the library a Holmes selection with illustrations by Barry Moser, a master illustrator (see his Arion Press edition of Moby Dick). I enjoyed the pictures more than the text. Not since my teenage years have I felt the attraction of genre fiction, except for the novels of Raymond Chandler. I don’t much care who killed whom -- and neither did Chandler, for that matter. I don’t read fiction with the expectation of suspense, and mystery seems tedious. I’ll go to a movie for those sorts of things. This is not snobbery but a recognition of what compels me and what leaves me bored. But how I wish I could recapture that sense of self-forgetting enchantment Conan Doyle gave me, briefly, almost 40 years ago.

And what was my son reading in the hospital? Kafka’s stories.