Books in Brief

Conan Doyle, by Hesketh Pearson (Walker, $5.00). Robinson Crusoe and Sherlock Holmes share a breadth of reputation so universal that the few Tuaregs who don’t yet recognize them as permanent furniture of the imagination do little to spoil the fact. Some years ago John Dickson Carr, the collaborator of Adrian Conan Doyle (the Master’s son), in writing up further adventures of Dr. Moriarty’s exterminator, gave us a gossipy, thoroughly satisfying life of Sir Arthur. Now Hesketh Pearson gives us another, tidier biography. If so polished a book can have a fault, it is one of omission. Where is all the melodrama of the first Lady Doyle that Mr. Carr made such hay with? Where, to go alongside the new archetype for Holmes which Mr. Pearson puts forward somewhat unconvincingly, is the fascinating correlation of Holmes and his real archetype, Walter Pater? Mr. Pearson is of that calm. neat school of writing which the American with his two-volume literary biography, the articulation of note-cards which yellowed with the greying of the author’s hair, can only envy. Yet Georgian reticence and sweet irony, however superior to the American simultaneous arrival at unchallengeable thoroughness and senility, are not exactly the disciplines for approaching the enigma of a man who swelled with Tennysonian patriotism to see English youth crawling in its own gore in South Africa, but went faint at the sight of a stuck pig; who left the church to spend a fortune convincing the world that the soul, he’d discovered, is immortal; and who called himself “the man in the street,” a despiser of writer and artist blokes, but created Holmes, the most exquisite aesthete of all the Nineties.

G. davenport

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Conan Doyle, by Hesketh Pearson (Walker, $5.00). Robinson Crusoe and Sherlock Holmes share a breadth of reputation so universal that the few Tuaregs who don’t yet recognize them as permanent furniture of the imagination do little to spoil the fact. Some years ago John Dickson Carr, the collaborator of Adrian Conan Doyle (the Master’s son), in writing up further adventures of Dr. Moriarty’s exterminator, gave us a gossipy, thoroughly satisfying life of Sir Arthur. Now Hesketh Pearson gives us another, tidier biography. If so polished a book can have a fault, it is one of omission. Where is all the melodrama of the first Lady Doyle that Mr. Carr made such hay with? Where, to go alongside the new archetype for Holmes which Mr. Pearson puts forward somewhat unconvincingly, is the fascinating correlation of Holmes and his real archetype, Walter Pater? Mr. Pearson is of that calm. neat school of writing which the American with his two-volume literary biography, the articulation of note-cards which yellowed with the greying of the author’s hair, can only envy. Yet Georgian reticence and sweet irony, however superior to the American simultaneous arrival at unchallengeable thoroughness and senility, are not exactly the disciplines for approaching the enigma of a man who swelled with Tennysonian patriotism to see English youth crawling in its own gore in South Africa, but went faint at the sight of a stuck pig; who left the church to spend a fortune convincing the world that the soul, he’d discovered, is immortal; and who called himself “the man in the street,” a despiser of writer and artist blokes, but created Holmes, the most exquisite aesthete of all the Nineties.

G. davenport