The Little Professor

Murder by Decree

Sherlock Holmes pastiches, whether in print or on film, usually bear a secret label that reads "Caution: Handle with Care."  Murder by Decree (1979), one of the better-known film pastiches, is a decidedly odd brew.  It takes a premise beloved by pastichers--what would happen if Sherlock Holmes squared off against Jack the Ripper?--and adds liberal dollops of radical anarchism ("in Scotland Yard!" Watson huffs), Freemasons, and misbehaving royals.  The final result is a conspiracy theorist's paradise, to be sure, but is it Holmes?

One thing cripples the film from the start: it has a hole where it needs a Holmes.  Christopher Plummer's Holmes is strangely soft and squishy, without much in the way of intensity or (dare one say it) basic detective skills.  I spent most of my time wondering at Holmes' unbelievable incompetence, which inadvertently leads to the death of two women and one inspector.  In many ways, Plummer's Holmes is upstaged by James Mason's fine Dr. Watson; granted, some Nigel Bruce-isms occasionally creep in, but this Watson is appropriately patriotic, protective of his Holmes, and perfectly capable of taking care of himself in a fistfight.  Fortunately or unfortunately, Watson also carries out the most significant bit of detective groundwork in the entire film (which leaves Holmes in a most bizarre position). 

The plot itself is not entirely coherent, although it draws on the popular legend that the Duke of Clarence may have been responsible for the  Ripper killings.  Since I'm about to spoil the ending, I'll put the rest of this post below the fold. 

Not helpful

A note to GoogleBooks: I understand that "snippet view," no matter how annoying, is at least intended to tell the reader where a given search term appears.  May I point out, however, that if the snippet is linked to the wrong book or journal title, and the right title appears nowhere in the aforementioned snippet, then this "feature" becomes (shall we say) somewhat less than useful?

This Week's Acquisitions

• Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (Penguin, 1996).  It has recently occurred to me that I ought to remedy the Wharton gap in my collection.  As an undergrad, I read a fair bit of Wharton's fiction; unfortunately, most of my copies of her work perished, thanks to an onslaught of brown rats.  You don't want to know.  Really. 

Close

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik reports that Jane Gallop, among others, is worried about the decline and fall of close reading:

English professors have become “wannabe cultural historians,” yet they lack the training of their colleagues in history departments, she said. She repeatedly called her colleagues “amateurs” for the tendency to focus on history, rather than actual text. She said she worried that while her generation of scholars knew how to do close reading, many others today do not.

Believe it or not, I generally sympathize with Gallop, even though I write about fiction (or--sigh--sermons) that often qualifies as paraliterary at best and subliterary at worst.  There's a reason I don't consider myself any sort of "historian," despite some online confusion about my professional identity: when I start a project, I think in terms of the questions asked by literary critics, not by historians.  I've quipped here before that literary critics think about what goes on in texts, whereas historians think about how and why those texts exist in the first place; this is an exaggeration, to be sure, but I think it does get at what separates an English professor faced with a sermon from a historian faced with a sermon. 

In the classroom, I do all close reading, all the time.  In my written work, I've sometimes done very extensive close readings (the literary chapters in my book are a case in point), but I usually write about novels that don't encourage close reading.  Emily Sarah Holt (still correcting those proofs...), for example, responds very well to historicist, narrative, or thematic analysis, but rarely to the kind of close interpretation invited by, say, George Eliot or even Elizabeth Gaskell.  The verbal, syntactic, and structural complexity simply isn't there, let alone any sophisticated play with imagery or rhetorical figures.  As a publishing phenomenon, ESH is quite interesting, but she intended her work to fulfill didactic, theological, and (yes) historical projects that militated against any sort of literary richness. 

Huntington blogging

Just dropping in from the main reading room of the Huntington Library, where--wonder of wonders!--the temperature is actually comfortable.  (When I was working in here as a graduate student, my fingernails actually turned blue on a couple of occasions.  A monastic experience, so to speak.)  I'm about to set out in search of Henry Knighton's Chronicle, seeing as how one word in the ESH article strikes me as...well...not altogether plausible.  (It's one of those "it's just a word, but it changes the whole meaning of the sentence" things.)  Unfortunately, the online catalog is being temperamental; also unfortunately, the rare books room is only partially functional.  Nevertheless, it's always a delight to see an up-to-date periodicals collection. 

UPDATE: Looks like I read Knighton correctly the first time around.  Hooray!  That being said, I must protest the Huntington's decision to eliminate the High Tea sandwiches from the cafeteria menu.  Really, what is the world coming to?

(Brief) scattered musings

• I'm writing this from the local internet cafe, as net access chez Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt and Mom the Retired School Administrator has been temporarily curtailed.  (This is what happens when contractors are busy renovating your father's office.)
• Help! Graduate administrivia has followed me to California.  One student asking me for advice (which is difficult for me to give when I'm here and the files are...there); one bizarre bookkeeping boondoggle (see above); one set of thesis approval pages to sign and send back. 
• Like the poltergeist, Emily Sarah Holt is baaaaack--this time as a set of proofs.  With any luck, she'll be in cold, hard print by the end of the spring semester.
• I'm on track to have the third volume of Gormenghast finished by the end of the day.  As a commenter noted below, Titus Alone doesn't really match the tone or themes of the previous volumes, not least because the actual manuscript had to be jury-rigged by Peake's wife.   Still, I wound up enjoying the second volume, Gormenghast, quite a bit.  People occasionally tell me that they can't abide Dickens because of the grotesques, and I must confess that the "comic relief" offered by characters like Irma Prunesquallor palled with remarkable speed.  Otherwise, though, the brooding atmosphere was absorbing. 

Geographically challenged

UP: I see that Marvin Spevack is a featured guest at the Edinburgh Book History Seminar, where he'll be discussing Disraeli's library at Hughenden Manor.

FURTHER UP: Does this mean that some light might be shed on the mysterious bookplate?

DOWN: Er...Edinburgh? 

Persevering

I'm now working on the second volume of the Gormenghast trilogy, and things are indeed looking up: once the Steerpike plot got underway, the narrative strengthened considerably.  Now, oddly enough, the trilogy reminds me of H. P. Lovecraft--not in terms of its style (er, thank goodness), but in terms of its obsession with decadence.  Everything is rotting, collapsing, imploding; the characters' rituals and habits are all desperate attempts to hide from the unpredictability of change.   

Linking about: Victorian Christmas Books and Tales

(Readers puzzled by some of the contents should recollect that the Victorians thought the Christmas season was an excellent time for ghost and horror stories.) 

• Mary Elizabeth Braddon, "At Chrighton Abbey"
• Wilkie Collins, Miss Dulane and My Lord
• Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
• ---, The Chimes
• ---, The Cricket on the Hearth
• ---, The Battle of Life
• ---, The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain
• ---, other Christmas tales at the University of Adelaide Library (scroll down)
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
• Tom Hood, "The Shadow of a Shade" (PDF)
• Alfred Paxton, "My Cousin, the Ghost, or, Something Like a Christmas Box"
• Mrs. J. H. Riddell, The Uninhabited House (PDF) (See also this image of the original cover.) 
• Robert Louis Stevenson, "A Christmas Sermon"
• W. M. Thackeray, The Christmas Books of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh
• Philip V. Allingham on Dickens' final Christmas Book. 
• The University of Glasgow's online exhibit of A Christmas Carol. 
• Eva Margareta Löfgren's personal collection of annuals. 
• Randall Stock's "Beeton's Christmas Annual 1887: An Annotated Checklist and Census"

Scattered Musings

• My father's office now has a hole where the outside wall used to be, albeit a hole covered with plywood.  Since the wind is blowing through the cracks, I feel as though I'm typing in the wild...
• It's always nice to visit a research library with lots and lots of books.
• Of course, the books I particularly wanted to see were checked out by somebody else, but you can't have everything.
• I quite enjoyed Thackeray's The Newcomes, but there is a vaguely hallucinatory quality to the novel.  Every so often, I would look up from the book, feeling rather dazed, and inquire of myself how I had managed to get there in the plot.  It's one of those novels that unravels, rather than develops.  (The editor notes that Thackeray didn't really have a plan for the book--he just followed the narrative wherever it was going at the time.  Illustrator Richard Doyle was apparently quite exasperated by this mode of proceeding.)
• Speaking of hallucinatory novels, I am doing my best to survive the Gormenghast trilogy.  I fear that Mervyn Peake may be one of those novelists whom the reader needs to "catch" early in life--rather like chickenpox.  (My apologies to any fervid Peake fans out there.) I'm willing to admit that fantasy is rarely my cuppa, but Peake's style strikes me as a bizarre combination of ponderous and arch.  Still, perhaps things will improve as I go along.