Date of Meeting: 9th March 2024 - two days before INTERNATIONAL HUG-A-HOLMESIAN DAY (11th March every single year!)
Location of Meeting:
The Sherloft, My House, Portsmouth, UK
Attendees:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)
Apologies:
Apologise. Fraternise. Double fries. Deep blue eyes.
Toast:
Paul Thomas Miller (The Entire Canon) rather pathetically toasted Silver Blaze:
If the cravat Fitzroy he may wear it.
But young Simpson did not really bear it.
It was Straker, you see,
Tied it 'round a horse knee
And attempted, thenceforth, to injair it.
Presentation:
Paul Thomas Miller (The Entire Canon) presented the following absurdity:
Construction For Noble Batchelors
A close reading of The Canon can leave no doubt that Sherlock Holmes is an artist. In GREE he referenced the fact that his family has “art in the blood”. I count five times that Watson called Holmes an artist (EMPT, BLAC, VALL (twice), THOR), twice that Holmes described himself in such terms (VALL, DYIN) and once that a client described him so (RETI). Make no mistake, these are not oblique references or hints – Holmes is quite clear that he considers himself an artist and Watson definitely concurs.
But Holmes was far from a conformist. We see no evidence of him painting Romantic, Realist or Impressionist masterpieces. Nor would we expect to from one “who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul” and had “Bohemian habits”. Note that when Watson used the term “Bohemian” to describe Holmes he was invoking the following definition: “a person who is interested in artistic and unusual things, for example art, music, or literature, and lives in an informal way that ignores the usually accepted ways of behaving”. Watson is reinforcing the notion of Holmes as an artist, but he also very clear that Holmes was not one for anything as mundane as the norm. So, what sort of artist was Holmes? I believe he struck out on his own, paving the way for a new form of avant-garde art, which wouldn’t receive a name until two years after his last recorded adventure. I believe Holmes was the godfather of Dada and we might retroactively title his one-man art movement Proto-Dada.
To explain, I should start by giving some idea of what Dada is (or was – as some believe the movement to be dead). Now, I am no artist myself. Nor am I any kind of art critic or art historian. In fact, when it comes to knowledge of art, I would be lucky if Watson rated me as highly as “Nil”. Everything I think about art should be treated with, not just doubt, but outright disdain. But I’m not going to let that stop me.
Dada is difficult to separate entirely from the Surrealist movement it later morphed into. Origin stories are numerous, and it is difficult to say for certain where and when Dada was born, but it is tolerable to suggest it first took form at the Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich in 1916. It was a reaction to the insanity of the world outside Zurich, in which war, hatred and destruction were tearing everything apart. Dadaist Hans Arp later put it rather neatly:
“Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell.”
(Incidentally, this quote was the cause of the essay you are now reading. The Dada reaction to the chaos of war by writing poetry immediately made me think of the poem 221b by Vincent Starrett. In 1942, when Starrett wrote the poem, he referred to "the world went all awry" and "though the world explode", indicating the insanity of World War Two tearing the world apart. Holmes, for Starrett, was the art form he turned to for comfort in the chaos of world war. The artists at Cabaret Voltaire turned to Dada. Surely there must be some link between the two…)
Exactly what makes something Dada remains impossible to define as it was consciously trying to be indefinable. Indeed, they made the world question what art itself was, let alone any specific movement. Any description of Dada will ultimately fail to describe Dada. But I’m not going to let that stop me.
The Dadaists blamed much of the insanity of the world on the bourgeoisie, the status quo, the conventional. They absolutely despised the bourgeois concept of art – pretty things for people with money, that did little more than match the sofa. Moreover, if doing things the accepted way was responsible for the state of the world, it made sense to stop doing things the accepted way. They felt art should affect people’s lives – make them see and experience things differently. Dada art, then, embraced absurdity and the shocking. It revelled in the chaos of human life instead of ignoring it. It was dedicated to erasing the distinctions between art and life. The result of this was that Dada art itself was absurd, shocking, unconventional and chaotic. It embraced juxtaposition and the irrational collision of ideas, sometimes satirically or wittily, but not always.
Dada experimented in different mediums – there were performances of poetry, spoken word, music and dance as well as the production of sculpture, collage and painting. The performances were nonsensical and chaotic. Often several performances would take place at once, each drowning out the others so that no meaning could be pulled from the maelstrom of activity. Actual artworks ranged from the Readymades of Duchamp (for example, an upturned urinal signed “R. Mutt” which was titled “The Fountain”) to confusing vibrant photo collages like Max Ernst’s “The Word” – a headless woman stood in a giant chestnut case with birds tucked under her arms and legs.
However, I’m not here to catalogue the works of Dada, so I shalln’t attempt to describe many of its works to you. If you want to get a better idea of it, I politely suggest you Google Dada and see which rabbit holes attract you. What I want to do is compare the behaviour and artistic output of Sherlock Holmes with that of the Dadaists. And I’d like to start with poetry. Dada poetry is predominantly represented by one of the early Dadaist’s – Tristan Tzara. In 1920 he published the following suggestion on how to produce Dada poetry:
TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
This wasn’t the only method used to write a Dada poem. André Breton (who eventually moved from Dada to Surrealism) used a method known as automism, or automatic writing, to try to get words down on paper directly from his subconcious without the involvement of rational thought. What you get from these methods is something disjunctive, moving and nonsensical. Here’s an extract from a typical work of Tzara (Proclamation Without Pretension):
At this moment I hate the man who whispers
before the intermission-eau de cologne-
sour theatre. THE JOYOUS WIND
If each man says the opposite it is because he is
right
Get ready for the action of the geyser of our blood
-submarine formation of transchromatic aero-
planes, cellular metals numbered in
the flight of images
above the rules of the
and its control
Compare this with Holmes’s poem you can pick out of the text of The Dying Detective:
Indeed, I cannot think why the whole bed of the ocean is not one solid mass of oysters,
So prolific the creatures seem.
Strange how the brain controls the brain!
No doubt there are natural enemies which limit the increase of the creatures.
You and I, Watson, we have done our part.
Shall the world, then, be overrun by oysters?
No, no; horrible!
While the chaos of Holmes’s piece is, perhaps, not fully realised, certainly the proto-Dada flavour must be evident to any reader.
Next consider Dada music. Some music of the scene was tonal and classical, some was mocking and satirical, but the type that interests me is the experimental improvised music which they produced – discordant messes which the Parisian Dada movement termed “anti-music”. We have no direct evidence of this music as Dada performances set out to be transitory and incapable of being captured, but accounts mention unskilled but enthusiastic drummers and erratic bell clanging among other auditory assaults. It is difficult not to see the following testimony from Watson as almost predicting this art form:
“When left to himself, however, he would seldom produce any music or attempt any recognized air. Leaning back in his arm-chair of an evening, he would close his eyes and scrape carelessly at the fiddle which was thrown across his knee. Sometimes the chords were sonorous and melancholy. Occasionally they were fantastic and cheerful. Clearly they reflected the thoughts which possessed him, but whether the music aided those thoughts, or whether the playing was simply the result of a whim or fancy was more than I could determine.”
In terms of Dada performance, though, I think Holmes’s greatest moment came in the back shop of Allardyce’s. During his preliminary research in Black Peter, Holmes parades through the streets of London with a barb-headed spear tucked under his arm, he then rocks up at the local butchers where he purchases a whole pig, has it hung in a back room and then, in gentleman’s garb, furiously stabs at the pig with his spear. Now, this was not pointless activity – he was gathering data about how easy it is to transfix a body with a harpoon – but Holmes is aware that it is absurd behaviour, and this appears to delight him. Indeed, we see him chuckle as he relates his activities to Watson. I feel sure that, given the opportunity, Holmes would have loved to repeat this activity on the stage of Cabaret Voltaire.
Duchamp’s “The Fountain”, described above, is possibly the best-known piece of Dada art. It comes from a category of Dada known as the Readymade (a term invented by Duchamp). These are ordinary, prefabricated objects which the artist takes and presents as a piece of art. While it isn’t necessary, the artist may make some alterations to the object or present them in a certain way (E.g. combining a wheel and a stool, writing on a urinal, or creating collages out of litter). I won’t insist upon this one, but I would like to point out that the use of busts made by other people may be seen as Holmesian Readymades which he used in interactive Dada performances. One example is the performative interaction with a bust at the conclusion of the Six Napoleons:
Finally, he picked up his hunting-crop and struck Napoleon a sharp blow on the top of the head. The figure broke into fragments, and Holmes bent eagerly over the shattered remains. Next instant, with a loud shout of triumph, he held up one splinter, in which a round, dark object was fixed like a plum in a pudding.
“Gentlemen,” he cried, “let me introduce you to the famous black pearl of the Borgias.”
Lestrade and I sat silent for a moment, and then, with a spontaneous impulse, we both broke out clapping as at the well-wrought crisis of a play.
It’s difficult not to see this as an absurd performance piece. But the more convincing examples are the busts of himself he keeps having made just to invite their destruction at the hands of his enemies. The bust which Monsieur Oscar Meunier, of Grenoble spent days crafting is left on display for Colonel Sebastien Moran to destroy and the one by Tavernier, the French modeller, is set up for a similar fate at the hands of Count Sylvius, albeit one that never transpires. It’s silly behaviour which involves Holmes taking the craftsmanship of other people and incorporating it into his own artistic performances. Again, not fully formed Dada behaviour, but very much laying a foundation for it.
In terms of the visual arts, one of the most well-known branches of Dada was the photocollage or photomontage. Using the inherently Dada medium of prefabricated photographs – a type of Readymade – these images were cut up, mixed together and reformed to make something new. The result was not typically beautiful – as bourgeois art had been until then – but disjointed, absurd and often involving an unexpected mixture of ideas. I am not suggesting that Holmes ever went so far as to produce collages but I would point out the way that he decorated his own bedroom as described by Watson:
“I walked slowly round the room, examining the pictures of celebrated criminals with which every wall was adorned.”
This was not normal décor. Watson’s selections for their shared space were far more typical – a portrait of Henry Ward Beecher and a picture of General Gordon. These were attractively made portraits of people to admire. Holmes’s selection of ugly criminal portraits covering every wall is a kind of simple photomontage which juxtaposes the normally hidden murky nasty side of London with the on show nature of a genteel Victorian gentleman’s walls. He is breaking convention and defying expectation.
Other Dada performative arts also seem to have pre-empted by Holmes. The Dadas were known for their eccentric costumes, cubist/tribalist masks and multiple identities. Absurd costumes (such as the bizarre cardboard bishop-esque costume Hugo Ball would wear to recite his poem Karawane) were visually striking, as were the masks made by Marcel Janco which performers would wear at the Cabaret Voltaire. Holmes never really went in for this level of absurd costuming, but we can see parallels with the behaviour of Arthur Cravan. Arthur Cravan, nephew of Oscar Wilde, was born in Lausanne, Switzerland but was part of the New York Dada scene, rather than that of his home country. While he was an artist and a writer, it was in his style of living that he most embodied the spirit of Dada. He would announce himself as all kinds of things he was not - a sailor in the Pacific, muleteer, orange-picker in California, snake charmer, hotel thief, logger in the great forests, former French boxing champion, grandson to the Queen’s Chancellor, Berlin automobile chauffeur, gentleman thief, and much else besides. This penchant for false identities was quintessentially Dada. In developing alternative personae, the Dadists implied that, rather than being fixed, identity is in a state of flux. And the development of alternative personae is something Holmes was all over. From Altamont – the Irish-American secret society agent to Escott the romantic plumber, Holmes had a skill for adopting alternate personalities. As Watson put it:
“It was not merely that Holmes changed his costume. His expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed. The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime.”
Certainly Holmes was not as absurd as the Dadaists – when he dressed as a priest he looked like a priest, not a madman in vibrantly painted slabs of cardboard – but that is not to say he didn’t enjoy certain shocking and even silly behaviour in his alternative personae. I would remind you of his actions while dressed as a book seller in Empty House. First he prattled on about filling a gap on a shelf with British Birds, and Catullus, and The Holy War and then he transformed into Holmes so quickly the shock caused Watson to pass out. Again though, Holmes’s performances in alternate personae were not so much Fully Dada as examples of a man experimenting with ideas they would later build upon.
Principally, Dada was an idea movement rather than a stylistic one. It was a sort of anti-art self-destruction because previous art served the bourgeoisie and their narrative. This anti-art approach meant that Dada was, essentially, an attitude. An attitude of rejecting convention, of embracing chaos and delighting in absurdity. And we see examples of this attitude in Holmes all through The Canon.
The description of Holmes’s housekeeping in The Musgrave Ritual are well known. Holmes was “a man who keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece”. He shoots letters into the wall and his “chemicals and of criminal relics… had a way of wandering into unlikely positions, and of turning up in the butter-dish or in even less desirable places.” This Bohemian mode of living can certainly be seen as a Dada flouting of convention.
Apart from the Dada poem found in Dying Detective above, we see an awful lot of purposely confusing language from Holmes. While his famous “curious incident of the dog in the night-time” conversation with Colonel Ross turns out to have meaning later, it still resembles Hugo Ball’s Dada sound poems in that Holmes seems to be purposely confusing people with language which sounds like it should mean something but means nothing to them.
Like the Dadaists, Holmes is attracted to the weird and bizarre. But, unlike the Dadaists, for Holmes this is because it serves a purpose. He explains this in The Hound of the Baskervilles: “The more outré and grotesque an incident is the more carefully it deserves to be examined, and the very point which appears to complicate a case is, when duly considered and scientifically handled, the one which is most likely to elucidate it.” As a result, Holmes has an eye for the absurd. In The Speckled Band, for instance, Holmes notices the bell pull that doesn’t ring, the misplaced ventilator and the bolted-to-the-floor bed which had all been missed by Helen Stoner – the person actually living with these anomalies. Her response when they are pointed out? “How very absurd!” Time and again we see this affinity for absurdity in Holmes. To be clear though, while this borders on Dada it is not quite the same thing. The Dada’s relished the meaninglessness of the absurd – Holmes relished the meaning he inevitably uncovered in the absurd.
Contradiction and juxtaposition featured heavily in Dada art, to violate expectations and rationality. A reading of pretty much any of the Canonical stories will reveal an instance or two of Holmes behaving in ways which involve contradiction and juxtaposition. Some are small and some are great. Sometimes the contradiction is between his actions in different stories. For example, in The Gloria Scott he is bitten on the ankle by another student’s dog. Instead of berating the owner, he becomes close friends with him. In Abbey Grange and Blue Carbuncle he expends a great deal of effort apprehending a criminal just to let him off, whereas in Five Orange Pips he expends so little effort catching the villains that they get to kill one more person and never face justice. In Charles Augustus Milverton he goes to the ridiculous length of becoming engaged to someone he has no interest in just to get a dog out of the way, when we know he and the doctor had ready access to enough sedatives to do the job far more effectively and easily. In Devil’s Foot, he uses a narcotic to prove that it is incredibly dangerous – despite this predictably being a very dangerous thing to do. As it mounts up throughout The Canon, all his absurd, contradictory, bohemian behaviour points to a Dada heart beating in the chest of the artist Holmes.
In summary, then, I contend that Holmes was a (if not “The”) Proto-Dadaist. While he didn’t quite embody the nihilism and anarchy of proper Dada, he did recognise the chaos of real life and, in many artistic ways, toyed with things absurd and disjointed that reflected this social disarray which the bourgeoisie sought to hide. He more or less lays this bare at the beginning of A Case of Identity:
“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”
Or perhaps Watson put it better when he reviewed The Book of Life (a clear metaphor for actual human life):
“What ineffable twaddle!”
Any Other Business:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) wanted to remind everyone that Monday 11th March is International Hug-A-Holmesian Day. Unfortunately there was no one else present to hug.
