Cultural Cohesion (27 page)

Which settles the question of why Agee joined Luce in the first place. Nevertheless, Macdonald is surely right in arguing that the Luce ambience did Agee crippling damage by offering him the illusion of being able to do serious work. The years clocked up and words went down the drain in thousands—nothing to be much ashamed of, but nothing to be proud of either. It was the state, familiar to all young writers in harness, of doing well without doing anything properly. Perhaps Hollywood would have been better, but he was without bargaining power and without that you stood an excellent chance of getting yourself killed. It took prestige like Faulkner's to be able to use Hollywood: failing that, Hollywood used you. As it was, Agee became the supreme critic of the period's films, and began to participate only after the industry had embarked on its long and agonizing modification of the studio system.

Even then, results were not robust. Apart from the charming
The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky
, there is nothing substantial except the largely unknown and fiercely underrated
The Night of the Hunter
, one of the key works in the whole Agee canon. The one and only film directed by Charles Laughton (who in his last years was reprising Captain Bligh opposite Abbott and Costello and who stands with Peter Lorre as an example of what the Hollywood mill could do to the European intellectual), it incarnates Agee's conception of the struggle between love and hate—Robert Mitchum, as the homicidal preacher, has the letters of these two short words inscribed on his knuckles, and stages a wrestling match between his two hands to mesmerize his victims.

It is a unique film, a taste of what Agee might have done. But he spent too much of his time and hopes involved with John Huston, a semi-artist of overwhelming personal charm who launched Agee's career as a script-writer by getting him to “lick the book” of
The African Queen
, which as a Bogart-Hepburn vehicle won its Oscars but did not add up to very much. Reputedly it was an early morning, killer-diller tennis match with Huston that first put a strain on Agee's heart. Certainly it would be neat symbolism: Agee was not equipped to stay in the running with men like Huston, whose lives were geared to turning out work just above (never too far above) the Hollywood norm and who put their real creativity into the lifestyle that stuns and the pace that kills. Creatively, Agee had no gear except top—he could never have worked Faulkner's trick of giving them nothing but a refined and characteristic version of what they wanted. Sometimes they were right, too. In a film like
The Big Sleep
, some of the most memorable Chandler dialogue isn't Chandler's but Faulkner's written with his left hand: of Bogart's famous line “She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up,” the first half is Chandler and the second half—which precisely fits the lightened, racy tone Hawks gives the film visually—is Faulkner. Faulkner, who took the money and ran, got more out of Hollywood and put more back than Chandler, who gave it everything he had as a writer, saw little on the screen to show for it and was well-nigh consumed by bitterness.

In a cooperative enterprise you play percentages or lose all. The difference between the two men (a temperamental difference in the ability to see what was likely and possible) is worth drawing, since Agee was a larger and more complete example of Chandler's type—all artist and nothing but an artist. Hollywood ate men like that for breakfast. It's remarkable, given Agee's psychology, that he got as much done out there as he did.

Closing these two books with that mixture of gratitude and regret which any writing by Agee seems invariably to call from us, we can vary Tolstoy's question and ask—how much talent does a man need? “He could get magic into his writing the hardest way, by precise description,” says Macdonald, and quotes this passage from
A Death in the Family
:

First an insane noise of violence in the nozzle, then the still irregular sound of adjustment, then the smoothing into steadiness and a pitch as accurately tuned to the size and style of stream as any violin . . . the short still arch of the separate big drops, silent as a held breath, and the only noise the flattering noise on leaves and the slapped grass at the fall of each big drop. That, and the intense hiss with the intense stream; that, and that same intensity not growing less but growing more quiet and delicate with the turn of the nozzle, up to that extreme tender whisper when the water was just a wide bell of film.

He could write, all right. But Macdonald didn't draw attention to the underlying pathos of paragraphs—stanzas?—like this. “Words cannot embody,” Agee wrote in
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
, “they can only describe.” Yet he poured torrents of energy into making them embody. He was beyond words. Everything he wrote, and not just the scripts, was the work of a frustrated director: the page was a wrap-around screen with four-track stereophonic sound. Fundamentally anti-economical, it was the approach of a putter-in rather than a leaver-out, and all too frequently his prose had a coronary occlusion right there in front of you. It's the reason why even his famous essay on the silent comedians is somehow debilitating, and by extension the reason why his film criticism as a whole was finally less influential than Parker Tyler's (who couldn't write half so well): too much of his effort went into making the prose re-create, point for point, what he had seen.

Agee's inability to be narrowly professional was part of his humanity. He was versatile in an age that doesn't understand versatility. Yet it's possible to imagine him getting more things finished—or would be possible, if it weren't for the suspicion that something was wrong from the start. Half the reward of being an artist is becoming one. Agee missed out on that.

Times Literary Supplement
, 1972

POSTSCRIPT

Agee was one of my heroes as a critic. At Cambridge, Sonny Mehta had Agee's collected film criticism in his unique private library. I borrowed the book, practically memorized it, and added Agee to the long list of modern American critical journalists—it started with James Gibbons Huneker, although further in the background there was always Mark Twain—whose colloquial verve gave me support for writing about serious art in a conversational manner, and about unserious art as if it counted. So I was already an admirer of Agee before I read his short fiction. I had no warrant for calling O'Hara and Cheever “middlebrow”—a word I would never countenance now, because it is good for nothing except to define the sort of person who would use it. At the time I was still in the process of being bowled over by Dwight Macdonald, and especially by his collection of pieces
Against the American Grain
: the word “middlebrow,” if not actually coined by him, was wielded by him to some effect, although in the long run it left him in too splendid an isolation.

On the evidence of Agee's short stories, it is now plain, he could have found a way ahead by writing very short novels, or linked novellas, in the manner later exemplified by Andre Dubus and Raymond Carver. The lure of the big novel led him astray, and eventually to nowhere. But in any case of unfulfilled promise there are usually personal factors operating to make nonsense of critical analysis. For example, Agee drank as heavily as Faulkner, but without Faulkner's canny knack of husbanding his strength. I was taking a chance, by the way, when I ascribed that line in the movie of
The Big Sleep
to Faulkner: one of Hawks's hack cronies might have supplied it during a poker game. There are no prizes for spotting that I had myself in mind when I said Agee was versatile in an age that doesn't understand versatility. What I neglected to add was that no age ever has. Leonardo had people telling him that he was spreading himself thin.

The Metropolitan Critic
, 1994

POSTSCRIPT (II)

Has anyone noticed how the lawn-watering scene from
A Death in the Family
sounds like Nicholson Baker? The same droplets fall on the same lawn in
The Fermata
. Smart critics looking for antecedents of Baker's miraculously micrometric registration might care to take a look. It won't change anything, but it is always salutary to have further evidence that even the most extreme originality is usually an inherited event.

Agee, if he had known how to work in solitude like Baker, might have left us a longer shelf of fully realized books. But Agee needed a context. The Luce magazines merely wasted his time, but Hollywood would probably have ruined him even had he been more in demand. Later on, Terry Southern, a comparably innovative writer, was led to destruction after cracking Hollywood at top level. Living up to his new income even after it disappeared, he slaved on a succession of doomed projects, assiduously dissipating the lustre of his gift as he worked his way towards oblivion. In that respect, he and Agee can be mentioned in the same breath, but we should be slow to interpret their inability to work the system as an exalted dedication to their calling. It wasn't as if they didn't know they were being tempted. They just weren't canny enough when they succumbed. Today, a writer as individual as David Mamet can survive and flourish in the context of the movies, and do much to raise their standard: but it takes a nose for business on a level with his ear for dialogue. Thus equipped, he can express everything that's in him. Taken together, Agee and Southern expressed only a fraction of what was in either: a bad way for artists to be joined in kinship. Both of them, however, resist being patronized. They did enough to show us what they could do. Hence our disappointment that they didn't do more of it. Let us now praise famous men: it's a harder exhortation to obey when they waste their gifts, but praise is still what they are owed, for having expressed the gift to the extent that we became aware of it at all.

2003

15

THE SHERLOCKOLOGISTS

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote little about Sherlock Holmes compared with what has been written by other people since. Sherlock has always been popular, on a scale never less than worldwide, but the subsidiary literature which has steadily heaped up around him can't be accounted for merely by referring to his universal appeal. Sherlockology—the adepts call it that, with typical whimsy—is a sort of cult, which has lately become a craze. The temptation to speculate about why this should be is one I don't propose to resist, but first there is the task of sorting the weighty from the witless in the cairn of Sherlockiana—they say that, too—currently available. What follows is a preliminary classification, done with no claims to vocational, or even avocational, expertise. Most decidedly not: this is a field in which all credentials, and especially impeccable ones, are suspect. To give your life, or any significant part of it, to the study of Sherlock Holmes is to defy reason.

.    .    .

It is also to disparage Doyle, as John Fowles pointed out in his introduction to
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, one of the four Sherlock Holmes novels handsomely reissued in Britain early last year, each as a single volume. This is an expensive way of doing things, but the books are so good-looking it is hard to quarrel, although the childhood memory of reading all the Sherlock Holmes “long stories” in one volume (and all the short stories in another volume), well printed on thin but opaque paper, dies hard. Still, the new books look splendid all lined up, and the introductions are very interesting. Apart from Fowles, the men on the case are Hugh Greene (
A Study in Scarlet
), his brother Graham Greene (
The Sign of Four
) and Len Deighton (
The Valley of Fear
). What each man has to say is well worth hearing, even if not always strictly relevant to the novel it introduces. When you add to this four-volume set of the novels the five-volume reissue of the short story collections, it certainly provides a dazzling display.

To follow the order in which Doyle gave them to the world, the short story collections are
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
(introduced by Eric Ambler),
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
(Kingsley Amis),
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
(Angus Wilson),
His Last Bow
(Julian Symons) and
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
(C. P. Snow). The dust-wrappers of all nine volumes are carried out in black and gold, a colour combination which in Britain is supposed to put you in mind of John Player Specials, a ritzy line in cigarettes. Doing it this way, it will set you back £21.20 in English money to read the saga through.

A less crippling alternative would be to purchase the Doubleday omnibus introduced by the old-time (in fact, late) Sherlockian Christopher Morley, which reproduces the whole corpus—four novels and fifty-six short stories—on goodish paper for slightly under nine bucks, the contents being as nourishing as in the nine-volume version. The question of just how nourishing that
is
is one that begs to be shirked, but honour demands I should stretch my neck across the block and confess that Holmes doesn't seem quite so fascinating to me now as he once did. Perhaps only an adolescent can get the full thrill, and the price of wanting to go on getting it is to remain an adolescent always. This would explain a lot about the Sherlockologists.

.    .    .

The best single book on Doyle is
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, l'homme et l'oeuvre
, a thoroughgoing monograph by Pierre Nordon which came out in its original language in 1964 and was translated into English as
Conan Doyle
a couple of years later. By no coincidence, it is also the best thing on Sherlock. In his chapter on “Sherlock Holmes and the Reading Public” Nordon says most of what requires to be said about the basis of Sherlock's contemporary appeal. On the sociological side our nine introducers can't do much more than amplify Nordon's points, but since all of them are working writers of fiction (with the exception of Hugh Greene, who has, however, a profound knowledge of the period's genre literature) they usually have something of technical moment to add—and disinterested technical analysis is exactly what the Sherlock saga has for so long lacked. The Sherlockologists can't supply it, partly because most of them are nuts, but mainly because the deficiencies of Doyle's stories are what they thrive on: lacunae are what they are in business to fill, and they see Doyle's every awkwardness as a fruitful ambiguity, an irrevocable licence for speculation. The professional scribes, even when they think highly of Doyle, aren't like that. They haven't the time.

Hugh Greene reminds us that the Sherlock stories were head and shoulders above the yellowback norm. This is still an essential point to put: Doyle was the man who made cheap fiction a field for creative work. Greene also says that
A Study in Scarlet
is broken-backed, which it is. Graham Greene calls one of Doyle's (brief, as always) descriptive scenes “real writing from which we can all draw a lesson” but doesn't forget to insist that the subplot of
The Sign of Four
is far too like
The Moonstone
for comfort. (He also calls the meeting of Holmes and Watson in
A Study in Scarlet
unmemorable, an accurate perception denied to the Sherlockians who gravely installed a plaque in St. Bartholomew's hospital to commemorate it.)

Of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, the only successful Sherlock novel, John Fowles gives an unsparing critical analysis, on the sound assumption that anything less would be patronizing. He sees that Doyle's great technical feat was to resolve “the natural incompatibility of dialogue and narration” but isn't afraid to call Doyle's inaccuracy inaccuracy. (He is surely wrong, however, to say that if Doyle had really wanted to kill Holmes he would have thrown
Watson
off the Reichenbach Falls. It is true that Sherlock couldn't exist without Watson, but there is no possible question that Doyle was keen to rub Holmes out.)

Len Deighton, a dedicated amateur of technology, assures us that Doyle really
did
forecast many of the police methods to come—the business with the typewriter in “A Case of Identity,” for example, was years ahead of its time. Since Nordon, eager as always to demystify Sherlock, rather down-rates him on this point, it is useful to have the balance redressed. Unfortunately Deighton says almost nothing pertaining to
The Valley of Fear
, the novel which he is introducing. It seems likely that there was no editor to ask him to.

.    .    .

So it goes with the introduction to the short story collections. All of them are informative, but some of them tell you the same things, and only one or two illuminate the actual book. Kingsley Amis, as he did with Jane Austen and Thomas Love Peacock, gets down to fundamentals and admits that the Sherlock stories, for all their innovations in space and compression, are seldom “classical” in the sense of playing fair with the reader. Eric Ambler talks charmingly about Doyle's erudition; Angus Wilson pertinently about the plush Nineties (1895–1898, the years of
The Return
, were Sherlock's times of triumph); Julian Symons penetratingly about how Doyle shared out his own personality between Holmes and Watson; and C. P. Snow—well, he, of all the nine, it seems to me, is the one who cracks the case.

His personality helps. Lord Snow not only sees but admits the attractions of the high position in society to which Sherlock's qualities eventually brought him, with Watson striding alongside. It might have been Sherlock's bohemianism that pulled in the crowds, but it was his conservatism that glued them to the bleachers. This was Pierre Nordon's salient observation on the sleuth's original appeal, but Lord Snow has outsoared Nordon by realizing that the same come-on is still operating with undiminished force. Sherlock was an eccentrically toothed but essential cog in a society which actually functioned.

The life led by Holmes and Watson in their rooms at 221
B
Baker Street is a dream of unconventionality, like Act I of
La Bohème
. (A Sherlockologist would step in here to point out that Henri Murger's
Scènes de la Vie de Bohème
, the book on which the opera was later based, is perused by Watson in
A Study in Scarlet
.) Although Len Deighton is quite right to say that the busy Sherlock is really running the kind of successful medical consultancy which Doyle never enjoyed, it is equally true to say that Holmes and Watson are living as a pair of Oxbridge undergraduates were popularly thought to—and indeed did—live. Holmes is a maverick scientist who treats science as an art, thereby conflating the glamour of both fields while avoiding the drudgery of either. He is free of all ties; he does what he wants; he is afraid of nothing. He is above the law and dispenses his own justice. As with Baudelaire, boredom is his only enemy. If he can't escape it through an intellectual challenge, he takes refuge in drugs.

Sherlock in
The Sign of Four
was fixing cocaine three times a day for three months: if he'd tried to snort it in those quantities, his aquiline septum would have been in considerable danger of dropping off. Morphine gets a mention somewhere too—perhaps he was also shooting speedballs. Certainly he was a natural dope fiend: witness how he makes a cocktail of yesterday's cigarette roaches in “The Speckled Band.” In
The Valley of Fear
he is “callous from overstimulation.” All the signs of an oil-burning habit. Did he quit cold turkey, or did Watson ease him down? Rich pickings for the ex-Woodstock Sherlockologists of the future. All of this must have been heady wine for the contemporary reader endowed by the Education Act of 1870 with just enough literacy to read the
Strand
magazine, helped out by a Sidney Paget illustration on every page.

.    .    .

George Orwell thought Britain needed a boys' weekly which questioned society, but Sherlock, for all his nonconformity, set no precedent. He fitted in far more than he dropped out. Sherlock was the house hippie. His latter-day chummings-up with crowned heads (including the private sessions with Queen Victoria which drive card-carrying Sherlockologists to paroxysms of conjecture) were merely the confirmation of a love for royalty which was manifest as early as “A Scandal in Bohemia.” “Your Majesty had not spoken,” announces Holmes, “before I was aware that I was addressing Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein, and Hereditary King of Bohemia.” The language, as so often in the Holmes stories, is part-way a put-on, but the relationship is genuine: Sherlock is as eager to serve as any of his cultural descendants. From Sanders of the River and Bulldog Drummond down to Pimpernel Smith and James Bond, all those gifted amateur soldiers can trace their ancestry to Sherlock's bump of reverence. Physically a virgin, spiritually he spawned children numberless as the dust.

At least 30 per cent of London's population lived below the poverty line in Sherlock's heyday, but not very many of them found their way into the stories. Doyle's criminals come almost exclusively from the income-earning classes. They are clinically, not socially, motivated. There is seldom any suggestion that crime could be a symptom of anything more general than a personal disorder. Doyle's mind was original but politically blinkered, a condition which his hero reflects. When Watson says (in “A Scandal in Bohemia”) that Holmes loathes “every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul,” it turns out that Watson means socializing. Society itself Holmes never queries. Even when he acts above the law, it is in the law's spirit that he acts. Nordon is quite right to insist that Sherlock's London, for all its wide social panorama and multiplicity of nooks and crannies, shouldn't be allowed to get mixed up with the real London. (He is quite wrong, though, to suppose that Orwell—of all people—mixed them up. Orwell said that Doyle did, but Nordon has taken Orwell's paraphrase of Doyle's view for Orwell's own opinion. He was helped to the error by a misleading French translation. Pan-culturalism has its dangers.)

.    .    .

Holmes was a nonconformist in a conformist age, yet still won all the conformist rewards. It was a double whammy, and for many people probably works the same magic today. I suspect that such reassurance is at the centre of the cosy satisfaction still to be obtained from reading about Sherlock, but of course there are several things it doesn't explain. The first of these is the incessant activity of the hard-core Sherlockologists, the freaks who are on the Baker Street beat pretty well full time. Most of them seem to be less interested in getting things out of the Sherlock canon than in putting things in. Archness is the keynote: coyly pedantic about imponderables, they write the frolicsome prose of the incorrigibly humourless. The opportunity for recondite tedium knows no limit. This playful racket has been going on without let-up since well before Doyle died. The output of just the last few months is depressing enough to glance through. Multiply it by decades and the mind quails.

Here is
Sherlock Holmes Detected
, by Ian McQueen. It is composed of hundreds of such pseudo-scholarly points as the contention that “A Case of Identity” might very well be set in September, even though Holmes and Watson are described as sitting on either side of the fire—because their landlady Mrs. Hudson is known to have been conscientious, and would have laid the fire ready for use even before winter. And anyway, Mr. McQueen postulates cunningly, Holmes and Watson would probably sit on either side of the fire
even if it were not lit
. Apparently this subtle argument puts paid to other Sherlockologists who hold the view that “A Case of Identity” can't possibly be set in September. Where that view originated is lost in the mists of fatuity: these drainingly inconsequential debates were originally got up by Ronald Knox and Sydney Roberts and formalized as an Oxford
vs
. Cambridge contest in deadpan whimsy, which has gradually come to include the less calculated ponderosity of interloping enthusiasts who don't even realize they are supposed to be joking. Mr. McQueen's book sounds to me exactly the same as Vincent Starrett's
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
, which came out in 1933 and seems to have set the pace in this particular branch of the industry.