Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon Read Free Book Online Page A

volume’s publication (and subsequent piracy). And the opening lines of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn display the same sort of post-publication self-awareness. The difference, and the innovation, is in Dr. Watson. Unlike the singer of the Iliad, or the narrator of Don Quixote, Watson is at once an active participant in the adventures and their recorder. And unlike Huck Finn, he deliberately presents himself, over and over, as an author preparing accounts for immediate publication, as the man charged with translating Holmes’s notes and his own recollections into stories that will, as Holmes sourly puts it, “pander to popular taste.” He serves as the guarantor of the stories’ “factuality” by experiencing them firsthand, by faithfully transcribing them, and finally by taking the heat for the supposed difficulties and annoyances their publication causes for Holmes. Watson’s repeated insistence on his own active part in the stories’ finding their way into the hands of the reader—fully half begin with some kind of recognition of their own published status—encourages us to confuse the two doctors, Watson and Conan Doyle, who seem physically and even in their appetites to resemble each other.
    Conan Doyle’s decision to play this particular fictional trick—to confuse the boundaries between fact and fiction, to write a disguised version of himself into the stories, to have Watson insist on the literal truth of the accounts—had consequences, like all the best tricks, that he did not foresee. On the one hand it produced the thousands of people who have written letters toSherlock Holmes over the years and mailed them hopefully to 221B Baker Street (where they are read and answered, to this day, by a specially designated employee of the Abbey National Bank, which has offices at that address). It produced a sense of happy confusion in at least one discerning reader over the years: “Perhaps the greatest of all the Sherlock Holmes mysteries,” T. S. Eliot wrote, “is this: that when we talk of him we invariably fall into the fancy of his existence.” The pleasure to be derived from pretending to take fiction as fact was also one of the necessary conditions for the rise of the Sherlockians.
    The other necessary condition for the rise of that alternately amusing and tedious tribe (not always alternately; to be honest, not always amusing) was the haste and. carelessness that so often attended Conan Doyle’s writing of the tales. The first twenty-four Holmes stories were written in a period of twenty-nine months, and they are replete with all the contradictions, lacunae, and interesting mistakes of inspiration working under deadline. After the first batch there followed a ten-year interval, corresponding to two years in the world of Holmes and Watson (after the “death” of Holmes, in Moriarty’s arms), during which time Conan Doyle forgot a lot of things he had already written about Watson and (the now resurrected) Holmes, producing further contradictions and errors. The perennially thorny question of Watson’s wife, Mary, who may or may not have been his first or second wife, and may or may not have died, is the best-known example of this kind of authorial haste.
    Conan Doyle, who always wrote quickly and claimed not to revise, seems to have been almost willfully careless when writing his Holmes stories, as if the act of disregarding each story’s predecessors and the assertions made therein about Holmes and Watson somehow mitigated their cumulative importance. Or perhapsConan Doyle simply could not bear to reread them.
    Thus the Holmes stories are constructed around a series of gaps. Some of these gaps are introduced only to be filled by the intuitions and inferences of the Great Detective: they are mysteries to be solved, as when the plans for the Bruce-Partington submarine have disappeared. Then there are the gaps deliberately introduced by Conan Doyle and deliberately left unresolved, in order to