fs I assemble

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Chapter
Style
in1America
Material
these
andretheections
King James
on theVersion
presence of the King James Version in Amer
ican writing, the fourth cen tennial of the 1611 translation stands on the horizo
n. A great deal has changed in American culture since the third centennial was c
elebrated in 1911. At that junc ture, the King James Version was extolled by lead
ing public gures such as Theodore Roosevelt and Wood row Wilson as America s nat
ional book and as the text that more than any other had affected the life of Eng
lish speaking peoples. My guess is that the 2011 milestone will be marked more in
academic circles than in the pub lic domain. In the century since the previous c
entennial was celebrated, two major shifts have taken place: the practice of rea
ding the Bible aloud, of reading the Bible at all, and of memorizing passages fr
om the Bible has drastically diminished; and the King James Bible has ceased to
be the almost universally used translation as readers have been encouraged to us
e more accessible
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10
versions,
Chapterwhich
1Material
also happen to be stylistically inferior in virtually all respec
The decline of the role of the King James Version in American culture has taken
ts.
place more or less simultane ously with a general erosion of a sense of literary
lan guage, although I am not suggesting a causal link. The reasons for this latte
r development have often been noted, and hence the briefest summary will suf ce
for the pur pose of the present argument: Americans read less, and read with less
comprehension; hours once devoted to books from childhood on are more likely to
be spent in front of a television set or a computer screen; epistolary English,
once a proving ground for style, has been widely displaced by the highspeed shor
tcut language of email and textmessaging. The disappearance of a sense of style eve
n makes itself felt in popular book reviewing. Most contemporary reviewers clear
ly have no tools to discuss style, or much interest in doing so. One unsettling
symp tom of the general problem is that in the country s most in uential reviewin
g platform, the New York Times Book Review, when a critic singles out a writer f
or stylistic brilliance, it is far more often than not the case that the proffer
ed illustrative quotation turns out to be either at and banal writing or prose
of the most purple hue. Obvi ously, there are still people in the culture, includ
ing young people, who have a rich and subtle sense of language, but they are an
embattled minority in a society where tone deafness to style is increasingly prev
alent. That tone deafness has also affected the academic study of litera ture, but
there are other issues involved in the university setting, and to those I shall
Inturn
sharp
in contrast
due course.
to our current condition, American
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culture
ininAmerica
the
Material
midnineteenth
11
century, where my consid erations of the biblical str
and in the novel begin, culti vated the adept use of language in a variety of way
s. The relish for language was by no means restricted to high culture: the vigor
and wit of the American vernacular were prized qualities that were widely exerc
ised, and one can see their literary transmutation in the prose of Mark Twain an
d the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. The thorough familiarity in th
is period with the strong and eloquent language of the King James Bible provided
an important resource, beyond the vital inventiveness of spoken American Englis
Ah,case
thatinnour
pointished
is the
theprose
general
of one
senseofofthestyle.
nest stylists of nineteenthcentury Am
erica, Abraham Lincoln. He was, we recall, a man who had virtually no formal sch
ool ing. Just as he taught himself law through his own studi ous efforts, he devel
oped a powerful and nuanced sense of English through his own reading. It is not
easy to imagine comparable instances in our own time in which such mastery of la
nguage could be acquired through the sheer dedication of an autodidact. The forc
e of Lincoln s speeches derives from a number of different sources, one of which
was biblical. He had a wonderful native sense for the expressive use of cadence
, repetition, antithesis, and for the cinching effectiveness of a periodic sente
nce. Especially in the formal architecture of his speeches, he also registered t
he in uence of oratory inspired by the American Greek Revival.1 At times the per
suasive
1On
the background
force
of the Greek Revival, see Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), pp. 41 62. A more elaborate and probing st
ylistic analysis of the Gettysburg Address is offered
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12
of
Chapter
his
public
1Material
rhetoric was altogether lawyerly, which is hardly surprising. His
First Inaugural Address, for ex ample, deploys lawyerly language from one end to
the other because it is an argument to the nation on the question of whether the

re is a right of secession and whether the Union can continue without civil war.
If the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States
in the nature of contract only, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade by le
ss than all the parties who made it? Here, as throughout the Ad dress, one hears
the voice of Lincoln the Illinois lawyer, sorting out in plain and precise lang
uage issues of con tract and constitution and consent as the Republic faced a fat
eful juncture. This language, too, is a kind of rheto ric. The stylistic plainnes
s, as Gary Wills, looking at Lincoln s revisions, has shown,2 is a quality that
Lincoln labored to perfect over time, especially against a back ground of America
n oratory
We
more typically
that favored
remember
highly
Lincoln
wrought
s speeches
ornamentation.
for their eloquence. Much of this,
as I have suggested, is achieved through his intuitive feel for appropriate dic
tion and rhythmic emphasis, manifested, most famously, in every phrase of the Ge
ttysburg Address, as in the grand concluding sweep of we here highly resolve th
at these dead shall not have died in vain, moving on to the climactic anaphora,
that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish
byfrom
Stephen
the earth.
Booth inOnly
Precious
a single
Nonsense
phrase(Berkeley:
in the Address
University
is explicitly
of California Press,
2Wills,
1998). Lincoln at Gettysburg, especially pp. 157 60.
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biblical,
in America
though
Material
13 might argue that the very use of a language that is both pl
one
ain and digni ed, resonant in its very ordinariness, is in part inspired by the
diction of the King James Version. Many people, I suspect, assume that the openi
ng phrase, Four score and seven years ago, is explicitly biblical, though in f
act it is merely modeled on the three score and ten of the King James Version,
a phrase that, given the sacred status of the formulaic number seventy, appears
111 times in the 1611 translation. The Hebrew actually has no equivalent ex pres
sion and simply says seventy, as does Tyndale s translation, which was a princ
ipal source for the King James translators. Their decision to use this compound
form would seem to re ect a desire to give their version a heightened and delibe
rately archaic ourish (it seems unlikely that this is the way ordinary Englishm
en said seventy in the seventeenth century), and Lincoln clearly responded to
this aim in adopting the form. The differ ence between eightyseven and four sco
re and seven is that the former is a mere numerical indication whereas the latt
er gives the passage of time since the founding of the Republic weight and solem
nity. This effect in part is a consequence of breaking the number into two piece
s, forcing us to slow down as we take it in and compute it. But it also has some
thing to do with the archaic charac ter of the phrase, and in this regard the bac
kground of the King James Version has a direct relevance. The 1611 translation,
as has often been observed, was in general a little archaic even in its own time
. By the middle de cades of the nineteenth century, much of its language was sure
ly felt to be archaic (and even then, perhaps not always perfectly understood),
and yet the text was,
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14
paradoxically,
Chapter 1Material
part of everyday life, a familiar xture of hearth and home. In t
his way, the sheer dissemination of the King James Version created a stylistic p
recedent for the American ear in which a language that was elabo rately oldfashion
ed, that stood at a distance from con temporary usage, was assumed to be the vehi
cle for ex pressing matters of high import and grand spiritual scope. Thus, four
score and seven years ago, a bibli cizing phrase that is not an actual quotatio
n, sounds a strong note of biblical authority at the beginning of the Gettysburg
The
Address.
concluding ourish, by contrast, shall not perish from the earth, is a dir
ect citation from the Bible. It appears three times, always without the not, a
nd only in the Hebrew Bible: His remembrance shall perish from the earth (Job
18:17); The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall
perish from the earth (Jeremiah 10:11); The good man is perished out of the ea
rth (Micah 7:2). (Although the 1611 translation uses a different preposition fo
r the verse from Micah, the original uses the same preposition, min, from, in
all three cases.) The borrowing of the biblical phrase is not really an allusion
to a particular scriptural intertext but rather the use, in the perorational n
al gesture of the Address, of a familiar biblical idiom that gives the speaker s
own language the breadth and moral gravity of the Bible. The Bible begins with
God s creation of heaven and earth. It includes repeated grim intimations, both
in this particular phrasing and related ones, of individuals, nations, humankind

perishing from the earth, wiped out from the face of the earth. The idea of per
sisting in or desisting from existence is given, one
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Style
could
in America
say,
aMaterial
cosmic
15 perspective and a certain precarious ness in the biblical lan
guage. Imagine the different effect if Lincoln had concluded his speech with a p
hrase like shall not come to an end or shall not cease to exist. The meaning
would have been approximately the same, but the sense of magnitude, the idea of
the nation real izing a new and hopeful destiny under God, as Lin coln wrote, w
ould have been diminished. The sternly grand language of the King James Bible, a
s Melville had already demonstrated more than a decade earlier and as Faulkner a
nd others would demonstrate in different ways later, was a way of giving America
n Englishs greatest
Lincoln
a reach and
speech
resonance
besidesitthe
would
Gettysburg
otherwiseAdnotdress
haveishad.
his Second Inaugural
Address. It begins by af rming that the historical moment the Union in still te
nse expectation on the verge of successfully conclud ing four years of bloody con
ict invites brevity. It is in fact a fth the length of the First Inaugural Add
ress (though still twice as long as the breathtakingly concise Gettysburg Addres
s). The rst half of the speech, into the middle of the third of its four paragr
aphs, is a factual review of the course of the war and its origins in the disput
e over slavery. There is nothing biblical in this rst section. Instead, Lincoln
displays his ability to use plain and precise language for example, To strengt
hen, per petuate, and extend this interest [of slavery] was the ob ject for which
the insurgents would rend the Union even by war. His gift for emphatic antithes
is in succinct par allel clauses is also in evidence here. The Bible is explic itl
y mentioned at the midpoint of the Address: Both read the same Bible and pray t
o the same God, and each
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invokes
Chapter
His1aid
Material
against the other. (One wonders whether in this wry awareness o
f the competing uses to which Scripture and deity are put Lincoln may have been
re membering the passage from Voltaire s Candide in which both warring armies cel
ebrate a Te Deum to thank God for permitting them to destroy their enemies.) Onc
e the Bible has been introduced in this fashion, biblical quota tions and weighte
d phrases drawn from the language of the Bible are predominant for the rest of t
he Address. It may seem strange, Lincoln now goes on to say, that any men sho
uld dare to ask a just God s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat o
f other men s faces, but let us judge not, that we may not be judged. The rst
clause, of course, gives a vigorous homiletic twist to God s curse of Adam in Ge
nesis 3:19, pointedly and concisely suggesting that slavery is a fundamental per
version of the divine moral order. The second clause, a slightly modi ed quotati
on of Luke 6:37, strikes at least a rhetorical balance in a gesture of conciliat
ion to the South (though it is hard to dismiss that telling image of wringing br
ead from the sweat of other men s faces). The verse from Luke occurs in the mids
t of the Beati tudes and immediately after the injunction to love your enemies,
so we can see how Lincoln is making the ut most use of his scriptural sources wi
th a kind of preach erly canniness. The only other explicit quotation from the Bi
ble appears at the end of the extraordinary sen tence that concludes this long pa
Yet if God wills that it [the war] continue until all the wealth piled up by the
ragraph:
bondsman s two hundred and fty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and unt
il
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every
in America
drop
ofMaterial
blood
17 drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the swor
d, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, the judgment
s ofwethe
As
shall
Lordhave
areoccasion
true andtorighteous
see, Faulkner,
together.
too, will use biblicizing language t
o represent the full historical gravity of the sin of slavery, linking the blood
shed of slavery to Cain s murder of his brother Abel. Lash is a very immediate
synecdoche for the violence perpe trated through slavery, whereas sword one ag
ain observes the power of Lincoln s antitheses is a reiter ated biblical synecdoc
he for warfare. The citation of Psalm 19:9 about the judgments of the Lord stron
gly af rms that the devastation of the slave states is an act of divine retribut
ion. ( Let us judge not, that we may not be judged is no longer much in evidenc
e here.) Else where, the second half of the Address is punctuated by biblical loc
utions that are not quite quotations. Ameri can slavery is said to have been perm
itted by God to continue through His appointed time. The appointed time is a
n often recurring biblical idiom, especially in Hebrew Scripture and particularl

y in the Prophets, where it indicates the unfolding of a divine plan in human ev

ents. A few lines later, Lincoln writes, Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pra
y, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. The rst two clauses
vividly illus trate the effectiveness of parallelism in Lincoln s rhetoric. The
scourge of war is a strongly expressive biblicism: it is a word that occurs in
a variety of biblical contexts, al most never in its literal sense of whip, bu
t, as here, in the metaphorical sense of devastating punishment. The
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18
concluding
Chapter phrase
1Materialmay speedily pass away does not occur as a collocation in th
e Bible, but both speedily and pass away are biblicisms that, coupled with
this mighty scourge of war, give the whole clause its strength. (Again, had Lin
coln written rapidly instead of speed ily, much of the effect would have been
lost.) Finally, the brief onesentence paragraph that ends the Address begins wit
h another of Lincoln s splendid parallelisms, With malice towards none, with ch
arity for all, and then moves into two additional biblical locutions, to bind
up the nation s wounds and to care for him who shall have borne the battle and
for his widow and his orphans. The addition of up to bind gives the verb a
biblical coloration, evoking, without speci c allusion, a variety of prophetic
promises of healing and restora tion. And though it may seem perfectly logical to
men tion the widow and orphans of the man fallen in battle, this, too, is a coll
ocation that occurs again and again in the Hebrew Bible as exemplary instances o
f those swhoprose
Lincoln
are powerfully
helpless andillustrates
in need ofthe
support.
semantic depth and stylistic gravity
that American novelists as well would often tap in drawing on the language of th
e King James Bible. His writing, as we have seen, is by no means pervasively bib
lical, but at the appropriate junc tures it mobilizes biblical diction both to ef
fect a stylistic heightening and to bring into play an element of moral or expli
citly theological vision. The grand concluding movement of the Second Inaugural
Address aims to en gage the audience in a vision of justice and healing and peace
after four years of devastating warfare, and the vehicle that makes this possib
le is the language of the
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Bible.
inAtAmerica
a cultural
Material
19 moment when the biblical text, verse and chapter, was a con
stant presence in American life, the idioms and diction and syntax incised in co
llective memory through the King James translation became a wellspring of eloque
Eloquence, of course, is an attribute we readily associ ate with oratory, but not
nce.
with the novel. The prominence of biblical motifs or allusions in certain major
American novelists has often been observed, but what I should like to consider
is whether the language of the English Bible made a difference in the texture of
the prose, enabling crucial shifts or heightenings of perspective, as it did in
Lincoln s speeches. The general insistence of this inquiry on the importance of
style may itself seem anachronistic to some, a mere indulgence in an aesthetic
aspect of prose ction that is of dubious relevance to what novels are really ab
out, style
Does
and soina the
few novel
comments
in fact
are incount
orderforabout
much?theTherole
evidence
of style
of the
in novelists
ction.
th
emselves is somewhat mixed. A few prominent novelists, such as Dreiser, have bee
n wretched stylists. Trollope s prose was no more than ser viceable, yet with it
he produced an abundance of genu inely engaging novels, a good many of which are
ne representations of class and character in Victorian En gland. Balzac was not
at all a brilliant stylist, and on occasion he could be bombastic, especially in
his han dling of gurative language, but The Human Comedy is among the most gran
d and enduring achievements of the genre. Stendhal famously announced that he wa
nted to fashion a factual, understated prose that would compete with the languag
e of the civil registry, but style makes a
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20
difference
Chapter in
1Material
his novels, and anyone who has read him in French is likely to sen
se a sad diminution of his light ness of touch and his worldly tone in the Englis
h transla tions. At the other end of the spectrum, many great nov elists have been
exquisite, and in some cases, painstaking, stylists: Fielding (whom Stendhal gr
eatly admired); Flau bert, the inaugurator of the modern idea of the novelist as
fastidious arti cer; Joyce, Kafka, and Nabokov, all of them in varying ways emul
ating the model of Flaubert; and, among many possible American instances, Mel vil
le, a wildly energetic improviser whose prose we shall consider in detail, and H
enry James, whose stylistic dis position is in its idiosyncratic way Flaubertian
rather
The
question
than biblical.
of style in the novel that animates the present study urgently need

s to be addressed because it has been so widely neglected, especially in academi

c circles, since the 1970s. More recently, there have been some encouraging sign
s of a renewed interest in close reading and the formal aspects of literature, b
ut the leg acy of the neglect of style is still with us. The principal reason for
this neglect is quite evident: in departments of literary studies, the very ter
m and concept of style even of language itself have been frequently displaced b
y what is usually referred to as discourse, a notion that chie y derives from Mi
chel Foucault. Discourse in the sense that has generally been adopted is a manif
estation, or perhaps rather a tool, of ideology. It ows through the circuits of
society, manipulating individuals and groups in the interests of the powers tha
t be, manifesting itself equally, or at least in related ways, in ction and in
po etry, in political speeches, government directives, manu
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Style
als
ofinmental
America
Material
and21physical hygiene, advertising, and much else. This orientation
toward discourse was at the heart of the New Historicism (now a fading phenomen
on), and it is instructive that one of its founders, Stephen Greenblatt, in the
preface to his admirable Hamlet in Purgatory, should have felt constrained to sa
y that there is no point in talking about Shakespeare if you do not respond to t
he magic of the language, thus implicitly repudiating many of his followers and
perhapsthesome
After
NewofHistoricism,
his own earlier
thoughinclinations.
sometimes draw ing on it, at least indirectly,
literary scholars have been busy pursuing a variety of purportedly political age
ndas with sometimes no more than illustrative reference to literary texts race,
class, gender identity, sexual prac tices, the critique of colonialism, the excor
iation of con sumerism and of the evils of late capitalism and globaliza tion. The
re has scarcely been room in such considerations for any attention to style, for
the recognition that it is literary style that might make available to us certa
in pre cious perceptions of reality and certain distinctive plea sures not to be f
ound elsewhere. When one encounters intelligent appreciations of style these day
s, they tend to come from practicing novelists, or from a few critics who have n
o moreis,
There
thanletonemefoot
hasten
in to
academic
say, nolife.
logical contradiction between attention to st
yle and attention to ideology. At least in the more extreme instances of ideolog
ically mo tivated writing, virtually the opposite is true. Ideology may impel a w
riter to certain stylistic choices or, since this is a chickenandegg phenomenon, t
he fondness for certain stylistic gestures may conceivably predispose a
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22
writer
Chapter
to embrace
1Material
a particular ideology. There are cer tainly cases in which styl
istic analysis could illuminate the role of ideology in a literary work in fresh
and in structive ways. Thus, the fascinating Hebrew modernist poet Uri Zvi Green
berg (1896 1981), who became a mili tant Zionist extremist and a kind of Jewish r
acist, de ploys a wild and disruptively aggressive language in his strongest poem
s from the 1920s onward that is inti mately connected with his politics, and a ju
st account of such a writer would have to consider style and ideology together.
Greenberg has clear af nities with German Expressionism (born in the Hapsburg Em
pire, he ab sorbed German as his rst European language after his native Yiddish)
, and if one recalls that the eminent Ex pressionist poet, Gottfried Benn, was at
least until 1936 an ardent supporter of Nazism, some correspondence between the
Expressionist aesthetic and fascist values may be worth investigating. Most wri
ters have views on political questions, even if such views are no more than obli
quely implicit in their work, and I am not suggesting that either the implied or
the explicit politics of a writer should be ignored. What has happened too ofte
n, how ever, in American literary studies is that the focus on ideological consid
erations has tended to reduce the liter ary work to its inferable propositional c
ontent, the anal ysis, bent on unmasking the text, looking past the articulatio
ns of style that are compellingly interesting in their own right and that might
in fact complicate the understanding of the propositional content. The claim I m
ake in this study for the importance of style is not an attempt to cut off liter
ature from its moorings in history and politics but rather an argument that we w
ill be bet
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Style
ter
served
in America
byMaterial
looking
23 with a ner focus at the very lin guistic medium writers us
e to engage with history and politics and perhaps in some instances to transform
Aour
recent
vision
bookofthat
bothdoes
thoseconcentrate
realms. on style in the novel is Adam Thirlwell s Th
e Delighted States.3 Thirl well, a young British novelist who has read widely and

enthusiastically in several languages, lays out a playful tour through the hist
ory of the novel that has consider able charm and poses some important questions
about style in the novel, even if it is not altogether conceptually satisfying i
n the answers it provides. Although the de scriptive ourish of Thirlwell s lengt
hy comic subtitle mentions four continents as the setting for this story about
the novel, his attention is mainly devoted to Euro pean writers, with the United
States represented only by Saul Bellow (unless one wants to allow Nabokov as an
American writer). One reason for the particular engage ment in European and to a
lesser extent, Latin Ameri can novelists is that they exhibit more toandfro move me
nt from culture to culture, usually through the agency of translation, than one
nds among North American writers, and the question of novels in translation is
at the heart of Thirlwell s book. Its most valuable contribution to the discussi
on of style in the novel is to have put forth the phenomenon of translation as a
3Adam
kind Thirlwell,
of test caseTheabout
Delighted
the role
States:
of style
A Book
in ofction.
Novels, Romances, and Their Unk
nown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, and Accompan
ied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, and a Variety of Helpful Index
es (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
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24
Novels
Chapter
are famously,
1Material or perhaps notoriously, translat able. That very translatabi
lity poses a challenge to any one who thinks, as I do, that lexical nuances and p
at terns of sound and subtleties of syntax are crucial to the sense of reality ar
ticulated in novels. There is something scandalous, Thirlwell suggests, though h
e does not use that term, about the manifest translatability of the novel. Let m
e mention two rather different examples that he also invokes, Don Quixote and Ma
dame Bovary. I would assume that what linguistically informed readers char acteri
ze as the pungency and energy of Cervantes Span ish is not fully conveyed by any
of his translators, and yet Don Quixote has had an immensely fructifying ef fect
on many different English, French, German, Rus sian, and Yiddish novelists whose
only access to it was through translation. Perhaps this is not altogether sur pr
ising. The arresting archetypes of the endearingly daft emaciated Don and his pr
agmatic rolypoly sidekick grab the imagination, even when the language of the tra
nsla tion may be a somewhat anemic approximation of the original. But the other n
ovel in question that has had a widespread effect on later writers is Madame Bov
ary (which of course itself displays Cervantes paradigm of a delusional sense o
f reality imbibed through reading). Flaubert, unlike Cervantes, is a novelist fa
natically de voted to stylistic re nements, aspiring to a prose, as he says in on
e of his letters, that will perform the high func tion in literary culture that w
as once the domain of po etry. Nevertheless, even with many of these re nements s
carcely visible in the sundry translations, this story of the frustrated wife of
a provincial doctor, her two disas trous love affairs, and her suicide has been
compelling
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Style
for
countless
in America
Material
readers
25 and has given many writers a strong precedent for their ow
n ction.
There
is a tricky balance between the sheer weight of the represented world of a
novel and the force of the lan guage in which it is conveyed. Novels, one must c
oncede, are urgently about a whole variety of things that are not made up of wor
ds: events, individual character, relation ships, institutions, social forces, hi
storical movements, material culture, and much more. If the translator in evitabl
y substitutes other words, and usually less ade quate ones, than the novelist s t
o point to all these dis parate elements of the represented ctional world, the m
ere act of pointing often proves to be ef cacious enough. There are no doubt all
sorts of effects in the Russian of Anna Karenina that are lost on those of us w
ho read it in English, yet when we follow Kitty, in the company of her mother, o
n her way up the grand staircase to her rst ball, we get a perfectly vivid sens
e of her delighted self consciousness in her own appearance, the sound of the orc
hestra ltering down from the ballroom, the parade of people in formal dress on
the stairs, and the general excitement of the moment. Tolstoy s subtle handling
of the narrative point of view, his wonderfully strategic choice of descriptive
detail, and his ability to enter so convincingly into Kitty s thoughts and feeli
ngs,something
Yet
all make happens
this possible,
in novels
andthrough
none ofthe
it elabo
is strictly
ratelydependent
wrought medium
on lanofguage.
style
that resists translation, even as the large represented world of the novel is co
n veyed well enough in another language. How that some thing manifests itself in

the American novel through a

biblical
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26
Chapterin1ection
Materialwill be the subject of the chapters that follow. A second iss
ue of translation is involved in this question of American prose style. The King
James Ver sion is itself a translation, one in which some of the con tours of Eng
lish were reshaped mainly in accordance with a Hebrew original. Though I can att
est that read ing Genesis or Job in the 1611 translation is by no means the same
as reading it in the Hebrew, much from the themes and imagery and characterizati
on of the Hebrew is nevertheless preserved, and has deeply affected untold numbe
rs of English readers, among them major writers. A language stretched and bent f
or the purposes of trans lation thus became a primary model of English style that
American writers in particular have been drawn to em brace. But if translation c
an be the engine of stylistic cre ativity, merely competent (or less than compete
nt) trans lation as a vehicle for conveying the represented world of the ction h
as the effect of diluting or obscuring many of the most deeply engaging aspects
of the
Let
me propose
original.a partial list of attributes of style that make a difference in o
ur experience of the work of c tion, that generally resist translation, and that
are ne glected in literary studies to the peril of our understand ing of literatu
re. These are: sound (rhythm, alliteration, assonance, and so forth), syntax, id
iomatic usage and divergences from it, linguistic register (that is, level of di
ction), and the cultural and literary associations of lan guage. I would like to
consider some instances of how these attributes of style make themselves felt in
ction, keeping in mind the instructive test of translatability. My initial exa
mples are from Melville, to whom I shall direct more sustained attention in the
next chapter.
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If
youintryAmerica
toMaterial
imagine
27 Moby-Dick in French or Chinese or Hindi, you can readily c
onceive that the tale of Ahab s monstrous monomania and of the exotic crew of th
e Pequod, the tremendous evocations of the great white whale as a virtually myth
ological presence, would all come across to far ung readers in different language
s. All this constitutes what I have referred to as the repre sented world of the
novel, the powerfully imagined ma terial of ctional mimesis. This represented wo
rld, as I noted in connection with Tolstoy, is not entirely depen dent on the lan
guage in which it is conveyed, and one may grant the contention of many theorist
s of the novel that it is the represented world that is primary. But if style is
in some sense secondary, it nevertheless has elec trifying importance, as I shal
l try to illustrate. Consider even a brief sentence from Melville s novel: The
sea was as a crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.
4 A translation could easily reproduce the simile of molten gold and the vigor
of the verb leaps, but the deliberate oddness of the adverbial bubblingly th
at focuses, by a small swerve from established English usage, the movement of th
e water, and the alliteration and assonance of leaps with light and heat that
lock the clause together these are another matter. All these small stylistic eff
ects help create the lyric intensity of this moment of the sea perceived from th
e moving ship, and they would necessarily be diminished in translation. They con
stitute what Stephen Greenblatt calls the magic of the language, and that to a l
arge degree
4Herman
Melville,
is whatMoby-Dick
makes the(New
experience
York: W.ofW.reading
Norton,this
1967),
bookp.so423.
mesmerizing.
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different
Chapter 1operation
Material of the force of style may be seen in these words from a dr
amatic monologue by the black cabinboy Pip. Here, as so often in Melville, charac
teris tics of the canonical English Bible come into play to gether with other elem
ents of style: Oh, thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, ha
ve mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have
no bowels to fear! (p. 155). The artful shaping of the language may be less spe
ctacular in this sentence than in the previous one quoted, but it is no less dec
isive. The dense cluster of monosyllabic words gener ates a clenched power. Inste
ad of any gesture toward AfricanAmerican dialect, Pip is made to speak a high regi
ster poetic language that in its pronounced iambic cadences is reminiscent, like
much else in this novel, of Shakespeare. (In the lines just before the words I
have quoted, Pip utters disjointed syllables that sound rather like the Fool in
Lear.) The archaic yon is ancillary to this Shakespearian impulse, though at t
he same time it may be nautical language, like aloft. The use of bow els in t
he sense of deep feelings or compassion is drawn directly from the King Jame

s Version, where the word appears as a literal rendering of a Hebrew idiom, and
like the hints of Shakespeare, it points back to the early seventeenth century.
The high solemnity of Pip s address to God could presumably be conveyed in a lan
guage other than English, but it is the speci c biblical resonances (perhaps esp
ecially of Psalms) and also those of Shakespeare (as usual in this novel, especi
ally point ing to Lear) that give these words their peculiar meta physical dignity
.Let us look at a more elaborate example from MobyCopyrighted
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Dick
ininwhich
America
Material
repetition
29
of sound, poetic rhythm, and interplay of dictions with
reminiscences of the Bible are beautifully orchestrated. Here are the last thre
e para graphs of Ahab s apostrophe rst to savage nature and then to a dying whal
eOh,
thatthou
occurs
darklate
Hindoo
in half
the novel
of nature,
(chapwho
terof116).
drowned bones has builded thy separ
ate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas; thou art an in del,
thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the wide slaughtering Typhoon, and th
e hushed burial of its after calm. Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his he
adOh,without
treblyahooped
lessonand
to welded
me.
hip of power! Oh, high aspiring rainbow jet! that
one striveth, this one jetteth all in vain! In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek in
tercedings with yon allquickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it n
ot again. Yet dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith.
All thy unnamable imminglings oat beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of o
nce
Thenliving
hail,things,
for everexhaled
hail, Oassea,
ash,inbutwhose
watereternal
now. toss ings the wild fowl nds h
is only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea, though hill and valley moth
eredlanguage
The
me, ye billows
of Ahabare
s elevated
my fosterbrothers.
speech is all(pp.
at once,
409 10)
or alternately, Shakespea
rian, Miltonic, and biblical. Some of the turns of formal apostrophe sound more
like the epic invocations of the muse in Paradise Lost than like anything in Sha
kespeare ( Then hail, for ever hail ).
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The
Chapter
formal poetic
1Material
character of the passage is strongly reinforced by the iambic
cadences it repeatedly uses and then gone round again, Oh, trebly hooped and
welded hip of power, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Syn
tactic inversion is another marker of poetic formality this thy whale sunwards
turned his dying head, Yet dost thou. Alliteration under scores the emphatic f
orce of the language Hindoo half, bones . . . builded, buoyed by breath,
hooped hip. (The use of Hindoo as an adjective illustrates Melville s disposi
tion to turn references to the exotic into rhetorical terms here, the word refer
ring to what is alien, unknown, inscrutable perhaps, as some have suggested, wit
h Kali, the goddess of destruction, in mind.) The invented adjective unverdured
is probably a con scious emulation of Shakespeare, who, for example, coined the
verb incarnadine in Macbeth. The archaic verbal form builded, on the other
hand, is a borrow ing from the King James Version, as, most memorably, in Proverb
s 9:1, Wisdom has builded her house, she has hewn out her seven pillars. Equal
ly biblical is the fond ness for semantically parallel clauses a stylistic trait
that we will explore in greater detail in the next chap ter as in that one striv
eth, this one jetteth all in vain. ( Strive in particular is a recurrent term
in the biblical lexicon.) Hip, because it is linked to power, proba bly recal
ls the biblical he smote them, hip and thigh with a giant slaughter (Judges 15
:8). Counterpointed to the taut, intermittently biblical diction are two poly syl
labic and abstract word choices intercedings and the wonderfully alliterative
coinage, unnamable im minglings. The concluding sweep of Ahab s apostrophe
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signi
in America
cantly
Material
invokes
31 reminiscences of the Bible without actual allusion. The wi
ld fowl shows a trace of the fowl of the air of the Creation story in Genesis
1. Born of the earth yet suckled by the sea is a neat replication of antithet
ical parallelism in biblical poetry (with the rst phrase also pointing to the m
aking of the rst human in Genesis 2), while nds his only rest recalls a vari
ety of biblical locutions involving rest and resting place. Finally, the billow
s are King James language for waves, as in Jonah s psalm (Jonah 2:3), all th
y billows and thy waves passed over me. In all this, one palpably feels that th
e texture of Melville s language is decisive in shaping what he wants to say abo
ut the whale, the sea, the natural world, and the nally antibiblical nature of r
eality
To
applyasthe
he test
conceives
of translatability
it.
one last time, it is instructive to compare
Melville s prose here with a re cent French version. The French is elegant, idio
matically smooth, and in most respects relatively accurate. It does a good job i

n catching the formal side of Ahab s apostro phe. Thus, Then hail for ever hail,
O sea works quite well as Salut, donc salut a jamais, mer 5 (even if more th
an a little is lost rhythmically) because French has its own tradition of elevat
ed literary language and lofty forms of address. Not surprisingly, Melville s ex
plosive alliterations have entirely vanished in the French rendering along with
all the iambic cadences. What is robustly odd in the English is regularized in t
he French: et Pierre ou les Ambiguites, under the editorial supervision of Philipp
5Moby-Dick
e Jaworski, with the collaboration of Marc Amfreville, Domi nique Mar ais, Mark N
iemeyer, and Hershel Parker (Paris: Gallimard, 2006) p. 539.
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Hindoo
Chapterbecomes
1Material
lIndienne; wideslaughtering is simply destructeur; and unverdu
red is interpretively translated and sadly attened as infertile. Melville s pr
ose is improvisatory, exuberantly unruly in its inventiveness, and in this regar
d inaugurates a tradition in American style; the French smoothes all this out. P
erhaps most strikingly, because there is no canonical French transla tion of the
Bible that can be tapped as Melville taps the King James Version, the strong sen
se of grand biblical language used to shape a vision of the world counter to tha
t of the Bible is entirely absent. The terri c force of who of drowned bones ha
s builded thy separate throne in the heart of these unverdured seas is diluted
in the unbiblical qui t es construit, quelque part au coeur de ces mers inferti
les, un tr ne fait des os des noy s. A reader of this perfectly competent Frenc
h version will no doubt pick up a good deal of the grandeur in Ahab s ad dress to
destructive nature and to the whale, but it is bound to be a paler experience t
han is offered by the original s constellation of stylistic effects, including t
he potent
There
is nobiblical
real contradiction
background they
in myincorporate.
underscoring the failure of translation to
convey the stylistic complexity of the original and my expressed admiration for
the 1611 English rendering of the Hebrew Bible. There are surely moments in lite
rary history when a translation, whatever its closeness to or distance from the
original it represents, becomes an achievement in its own right. For reasons tha
t we cannot entirely explain three that come to mind are the mining of William T
yndale s brilliant version of the Bible, the richness of English literary cultur
e at the be ginning of the seventeenth century, the peculiar and pro
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ductive
indecision
America
Material
33 follow the contours of the Hebrew in idiom and often in synt
to
ax the translators convened by King James shaped an English version that introdu
ced a new model of stylistic power to the language. What usu ally happens, howeve
r, in translation, as in the instance of the French rendering of Moby-Dick, is t
hat a dutiful, more or less semantically faithful version of the original, emplo
ying a rather conventional set of stylistic proce dures, erases a good deal of wh
at is is
There
mostonecompelling
aspect ofinstyle
the in
original
the novel
text.that deserves special highlighting, wh
ich is the interplay of different levels and provenances of diction, because it
is particu larly relevant to the effect of insets of biblical language that will
be examined in the remainder of this study. Language in the novel is quite often
an intricate game of high and low, for reasons that are probably best ex plained
by the Russian theorist M. M. Bakhtin, who de nes the generic distinctiveness o
f the novel as a colli sion of and dialogue among different languages in the same
culture, each embodying its own values and out look. In Lincoln s oratory, there
are different elements of diction, including biblical turns of speech, but one
gets the sense that they have all been integrated into a single oratorical style
. In the novel, on the other hand, as Bakhtin suggests, the disparateness of the
different lan guages is preserved as they are played against each other builded
thy separate throne and unnamable imminglings belong to different linguistic
Not
realms,
much critical
and each attention
even has its
these
owndays
musicisand
devoted
its own
to levels
associations.
of diction, and perh
aps many critics do not even
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34
hear
Chapter
the nuances
1Material
of difference. This inattention may in part re ect broad social
changes, though one also sus pects a consequence of the decline of reading. The
liter ary deployment and recognition of levels of diction are rooted in social hi
erarchy: what is perceived as low or even vulgar, as educated speech, or as loft
y literary lan guage, depends, at least in origin, on class distinctions. Contemp
orary American society exhibits a notorious and increasing economic gap between
the rich and the poor, but class differentiation is less formally marked here th
an it has been earlier and elsewhere. The lack of such differentiation surely he

lps foster some insensitivity to levels of diction among American readers. Yet a
ne glect of the game of high and low that has been going on in the novel for thr
ee centuries dulls the perception of style and deprives readers of one of the ke
en pleasures in the reading experience. Thus Fielding in Tom Jones, in a charact
eristic ploy, describes Tom s dive into the bushes with the accommodating Molly
Seagrim in the most highfalutin Latinate language while, with professed re luctan
ce, introducing the term rutting to identify the activity in question. The con
trast between the two dic tions not only is amusing but also makes a moral point:
a young man s acting on an impulse of lust may be hyp ocritically disguised by e
uphemistic language, but it be longs, perhaps quite appropriately and healthily,
to English,
In
the realmthe
of great
animalsource
behavior.
of stylistic counterpoint is the two dictions deriv
ing respectively from the Greco Latin and the AngloSaxon components of the languag
e: the former, polysyllabic, learned and sometimes even re condite, often tending
to abstraction; the latter, phonet
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ically
incompact,
America
Material
often
35 monosyllabic, broadly associated with everyday speech, and
usually concrete. The lan guage of the King James Version falls by and large on
the AngloSaxon side of this divide, though there are abundant elements of the Ang
loSaxon stratum of the language that have nothing to do with the King James Versi
on. The counterpointing of the two strata has been a feature of English prose si
nce the seventeenth century, and we have already seen one striking instance of i
t in one of the excerpts quoted from Melville. But it is Faulk ner, clearly a kin
d of neoBaroque stylist, who is the great master of this strategy of contrapuntal
dictions. A spectacular example is evident in the two paragraphs that begin the
Dilsey chapter in The Sound and the Fury. There is nothing obviously biblical i
n the language of the passage, though it contains one freighted, paradoxi cal ima
ge that has a thematically important biblical background. In any case, as I shal
l argue in relation to Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner s writing is not biblical in
texture or syntax but rather in its marshalling of key words from the biblical le
xicon, and I think three such words occur here. As readers will recall, this con
cluding section of The Sound and the Fury switches from the use of the character
s points of view employed in the three previous sections to a resplendently omn
iscient
The
day dawned
narratorbleak
deploying
and chill,
high aFaulknerian
moving walllanguage:
of gray light out of the northeast
which, instead of dissolv ing into moisture, seemed to disintegrate into minute
and venomous particles, like dust, that when Dilsey opened the door of the cabin
and emerged, needled laterally
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36
into
Chapter
her esh,
1Material
precipitating not so much a moisture as a substance partaking of
the quality of thin, not quite congealed oil. She wore a stiff black straw hat p
erched upon her turban, and a maroon velvet cape with a bor der of mangy and anon
ymous fur above a dress of pur ple silk, and she stood in the door for a while wi
th her myriad and sunken face lifted to the weather, and one gaunt hand acsoled
as the belly of a sh, then she moved the cape aside and examined the bosom of h
.er.gown.
. She had been a big woman once but now her skel eton rose, draped loosely in
unpadded skin that tight ened again upon a paunch almost dropsical, as though mu
scle and tissue had been courage and fortitude which the days or the years consu
med until only the indomi table skeleton was left rising like a ruin or a landmar
k above the somnolent and impervious guts, and above that the collapsed face tha
t gave the impression of the bones being outside the esh, lifted into the drivi
ng day with an expression at once fatalistic and of a child s astonished disappo
intment,
The
passage
until
begins
she with
turneda chain
and enoftered
monosyllabic
the housewords
againofand
AngloSaxon
closed theprovenance
door.6 wh
ich, in accordance with the natural rhythms of English, also constitute an iam bi
c cadence. The counterpoint to this pattern is rst as serted in the initial subo
rdinate clause, where there is an array of Latinate terms dissolving, moistur
e, disFaulkner,
6William
integrate,The Sound
minuteand
andthe
venomous
Fury (New
particles.
York: Vintage,
Faulkner,
1990), pp. 265 66.
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with
ainkind
America
Material
of
stylistic
37
relish, delights in emphatically bracketing terms that
re ect the contrasting dictions: mangy and anonymous fur, myriad and sunken f
ace, a paunch almost dropsical, somnolent and im pervious guts. The strong e
ffect of these doublebarreled formulations is simultaneously to give Dilsey s pre
sence a gritty physical concreteness an aging black woman with a sagging face an
d a protuberant belly wearing a motheaten cape and to imbue her gure with meta ph
ysical complication, representing her under the aspect of eternity the wrinkles

on her face are myriad, as much a manifestation of the multiplicity and variet
y of life experience as of decay; the shabbiness of the fur trim becomes, wonder
fully, anonymous just as the guts are mysteriously impervious ; and, most evi
dently, Dilsey emerges through all this energetic activity of style as an image
of courage and fortitude, stubbornly continuing with the chores and trials of ca
ring for those around her despite the body s decay and the most maddening cir cum
It must be said that this metaphysical complication of the physical description
stances.
becomes, in the second para graph, a little disorienting, though this may well be
the intended effect: one does not readily visualize the image of the bones bein
g outside the esh. What drives that paradoxical image is Ezekiel s vision of th
e dry bones revived: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring esh upon y
ou, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live (Ezekiel
37:6). Although Eze kiel s original prophecy is actually an allegory of na tional
rebirth after the metaphorical death of exile, in its later reception it became
the source text for the idea of
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38
the
Chapter
resurrection
1Material
of the dead, and its dissemination in the popular Negro spiritu
al is surely relevant to Faulkner s representation of Dilsey. Her chapter is set
on Easter Sun day, 1928, and at the church service she will be granted a vision
of the true resurrection ( I ve seed de rst en de last [p. 297]). Faulkner, of
course, is transposing Chris tian theology into a moral and untheological perspec t
ive on human nature: Dilsey, unlike the members of the Compson family, each deade
nded in a different way, is the one gure in the novel capable of regeneration,
of bearing
The
word skeleton
up under does
life not
s burdens
occur in
andEzekiel
enduring.
or in any other biblical text, but
after it is put forth twice here, we get bones, which is at the center of the
pas sage in Ezekiel and also part of a more general idiomatic pattern in the Bib
le. Three monosyllabic terms that g ure signi cantly in the Bible form a constel
lation here: dust, esh, and bones. (In chapter 3, we will have occa sion to trac
e the importance of these very terms in the thematic lexicon of Absalom, Absalom
!) It may at rst seem something of a stretch to link dust in the rst sentenc
e of this passage with any biblical usage. It oc curs here, after all, as a simil
e meant to convey the con crete look and feel of the gray light and moist air of
dawn on this early April morning. In the Bible, dust is sometimes a metonymy for
human mortality, for man who was made from dust and is fated to return to dust.
But as the metaphysical complications of the representa tion of Dilsey accumulat
e in these two paragraphs, with the theme of resurrection emerging, and as esh
and bones make an appearance, which in biblical idiom are a collocation that
indicates kinship and the sheer
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physicality
in America
Material
of
mortal
39 human life, dust at the begin ning seems not only a rende
ring of the weirdly particu late quality of the morning light and driving mist bu
t also an intimation of the ephemeral material substance of human existence. Dil
sey, like all of us, is from dust, and to dust she will return; the integument o
f esh man ifested in her physical appearance begins to fall away, as it must; bu
t the bones rising from the slack esh invoke Ezekiel s promise that new esh wi
ll be laids prose
Faulkner
on theisdrya limit
bones case
and they
for the
willdecisive
live again.
pres ence of the King James Ver
sion in a long line of Ameri can writers. His rhythms and syntax and the spectacu
larly recondite vocabulary he often favors are not in the least biblical. He is
far removed from the biblical rhe torical sweep of Lincoln s oratory and from the
our ishes of biblical poetic style that mark some of the grander moments of Mel
ville s narrative prose. Yet, he was a writer steeped in the 1611 rendering of S
cripture, and he found in it a thematic vocabulary that met the large measure he
sought in his novels for the representa tion of the human condition. Stylistical
ly, these compact keyterms that he drew from the Bible were, in their very concre
teness, as I shall try to show later, a ballast, like the rest of his AngloSaxon
vocabulary, against the soar ing abstractions that were also vitally important fo
r him:study
This
dustisandan attempt
esh and to
bonethrow
overlight
against
on the
myriad
abiding
and indomitable
role of theand
Kingfortitude.
James Ve
rsion in the shaping of style in the American novel and at the same time an effo
rt to re animate, through this particular instance of the biblical
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40
component,
Chapter the
1Material
sense of the importance of style in the novel. Especially because
borrowings from the King James Version are always one element among many in Ame
rican prose, it is worth stressing that language itself comprises highly heterog

eneous elements, and hence the constituents of style in general are themselves h
eteroge neous and their combinations and permutations intrin sically unpredictable
. The sound and length of the words (as we have just seen in Faulkner), their sy
ntactic order ing, the cadences in which they are arranged, the levels of diction
they manifest, the antecedent texts (biblical and others) they evoke explicitly
or obliquely, their de ployment of gurative language all combine in shift ing pa
tterns to put an indelible stamp on one moment after another and on the entire
ctional world consti tuted from those moments. To revert to the question of what
is lost in most translation, I would say that reading the untranslatable text is
ultimately what departments of literary studies ought to be about, but in the p
eculiar atmosphere that has dominated the academy for several decades, the rever
se has often taken place: the original has been read almost as though it might a
s well have been a translation. Too often, though surely not invari ably, teacher
s of literature and their hapless students have tended to look right through sty
le Itohave
As
the already
purportednoted,
grounding
I am by
of no
themeans
text proposing
in one ideology
that the
or context
another.of ideology
is irrelevant to the study of literature. Literary works are made of words, but
they emerge from and address issues in the real world, and so politics, social
history, biography, material culture, tech nology, and intellectual history are a
ll worthy of atten
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tion
ininthe
America
Material
effort
41to attain a fuller understanding of lit erature. What I would
like to argue is that none of these considerations of context should entail an a
verted gaze from the artful, inventive, and often startlingly original use of la
nguage that is the primary stuff of literature, the very medium through which it
takes in history, politics, society, and everything else. The play of style in
ction is not only a source of deep pleasure, sometimes even rapture, but also a
process that enables thought, inviting the perception of complex associative li
nks, compelling ne discriminations and quali cations, leading us to see one fra
me of meaning in connection with another, or with several others. The King James
Version of the Bible, once justi ably thought of as the national book of the Am
erican people, helped foster, at least for two centu ries, a general responsivene
ss to the expressive, digni ed use of language, to the ways in which the rhythms
and diction of a certain kind of English could move readers. Against this gener
al background, I would now like to explore some eminent instances in which novel
ists drew on the resources of the King James Version to fashion different versio
ns of a distinctive American style for prose ction.
irishtimes.com
Detective fever: why we are addicted to Sherlock Holmes and Victorian crime
In Wilkie Collinss The Moonstone (1868), famously described by TS Eliot as the fir
st and best English detective novel, over and over again characters become infected
with what they call the detective-fever. Detective-fever causes the novels head of h
ouse, Gabriel Betteredge, a man for whom the novel Robinson Crusoe normally prov
ides all the worldly excitement he needs, to abandon his duties and plunge headl
ong into the case of a missing diamond along with Sergeant Cuff.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, when Arthur Conan Doyle revived detec
tive Sherlock Holmes, star of two commercially and critically disappointing nove
llas, for the monthly family magazine, The Strand, detective-fever engulfed the Vi
ctorian reading public. The periodicals already decent sales figures boomed at ov
er 500,000 copies per issue; in his memoir, former editor Reginald Pound describ
es how libraries opened late on the Strands publication day the third Thursday of
the month so great was the clamour for the latest Holmes instalment.
Doyle famously killed off Sherlock at the height of his
-Victorian reading public. In the December 1893 edition
sappeared over the Reichenbach Falls, swallowed up by a
ing water and seething foam during a struggle with his
arty.

popularity with the late

of The Strand, Holmes di
dreadful caldron of swirl
arch-rival, Professor Mori

Ive never found any evidence to support apocryphal stories of city clerks wearing

black armbands after Sherlocks death, but the public (and indeed, the editors of
the Strand) were unhappy with this early departure and Doyle eventually relente
d and resurrected Sherlock, bringing him back in 1901, 1903, 1908, 1914 and 1921.
Our detective-fever for Sherlock and Victorian crime has never really gone away: D
oyles Sherlock Holmes novels and stories remain some of the bestselling books of
all time, alongside the King James Bible, the Koran and now Harry Potter and Fif
ty Shades of Grey. In London, one can take a Sherlock Holmes walking tour, visit
the Sherlock Holmes museum at 221B Baker Street, and have a drink in the Sherlo
ck Holmes pub. And the BBCs knowing new television adaptation, Sherlock, which fi
rst aired in 2010, has spawned new brands of detective-fever, not least with armie
s of female fans, self-styled Cumberbitches. On Sherlocks heels came other neo-Vict
orian detective delights: Ripper Street and Penny Dreadful.
After a year-long hiatus, Sherlock returned to our screens on January 1st for it
s highly-anticipated standalone feature-length Victorian special. The Abominable B
ride was pleasingly replete with hansom cabs, foggy streets, meerschaum pipes an
d deerstalker hats, returning Sherlock (if only temporarily) to the period in wh
ich detection was born and in which he truly belongs. As Watson put it: Youre Sher
lock Holmes, just wear the damn hat!
For fans of Sherlock, once again infected with detective-fever and desperate for t
heir next fix of Victorian detectivism, the good news is that Sherlock was not t
he whole story of crime, but rather just one among hundreds of popular 19th-cent
ury detectives, many of whom which are now coming back into print on the back of
Victorian crime fictions latest surge in popularity. Here are 10 of the best: th
e game is afoot!
The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841); The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842); and The
Purloined Letter (1844), by Edgar Allan Poe
The detective genre is generally taken to have been born in the US of the 1840s,
with Edgar Allan Poes short stories, starring the Parisian investigative hero, C
hevalier Auguste Dupin. These stories showcase Poes aptitude for the bizarre and
outr. They are genre-bending gothic detective stories, often more bloody and gory
than any of their 19th-century detective fiction descendants. And, in a year wh
ere true-crime programmes The Jinx, Serial and, most recently, Making a Murderer
have dominated headlines and obsessed crime fans, Poes The Mystery of Marie Roge
t reminds us that links between crime fiction and true crime were present at the
genres very beginnings. The story was Poes attempt to solve in fiction the real-l
ife murder of Mary Cecelia Rodgers, dubbed the Beautiful Cigar Girl, whose body
was found dumped in New Yorks Hudson River in July 1841.
Bleak House (1852-3) and assorted journalism, by Charles Dickens
Acclaimed novelist and journalist Charles Dickens was engrossed in every aspect
of the world of Victorian crime from the police to the courts to the criminal un
derworld. According to his friend and colleague George Augustus Sala, Dickenss fa
vourite topic of conversation was always the latest trial, police case or murder
. This interest manifested itself in a number of articles such as A Detective Po
lice Party and On Duty with Inspector Field for his magazine, Household Words, i
n which Dickens interviewed and /or accompanied London police officers on their
investigations. (These articles can be read in full at the Dickens Journal Onlin
e website.)
One of the detectives, Charley Field, described by Dickens as a sagacious and vigil
ant man with a shrewd eye, inspired Inspector Bucket, the skilled detective feature
d in Bleak House (1852-3) traditionally recognised as the first English novel fe
aturing a police detective as hero.

The Moonstone (1868), by Wilkie Collins

TS Eliot didnt call this the first and best English detective novel for no reason
. This is a riot of a book: 600-plus pages of red herrings, wild goose chases, a
nd unreliable narrators, loosely based on the real-life 1860 Road Hill Murder Ca
se. This case in turn inspired Kate Summerscales Samuel Johnson Prize-winning boo
k The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008), which interweaves forensic details with a
rollicking read on the rise of the Victorian detective hero. In Collinss novel,
the eponymous moonstone, a priceless yet cursed Indian diamond given to Rachel V
erinder, a spoiled young heiress, goes missing on the night of her 18th birthday
. Suspicion falls on a hunchbacked housemaid, a troupe of Indian jugglers and on
Rachel herself. With the help of manservant Betteredge, boy detective Gooseberr
y and handsome young lawyer Franklin Blake, the grizzled Sergeant Cuff (based on
the real-life Inspector Jonathan Whicher, one of Dickenss interviewees) tackles
the mystery.
The Leavenworth Case (1878), by Anna Katharine Green
American author Anna Katharine Green is often referred to as the mother of the my
stery novel, yet this cracking murder mystery (published by Penguin) is not widel
y known outside of the US, where Yale Law School, among others, assigns it as a
case study in the pitfalls of relying on circumstantial evidence.
A locked-room mystery, of the type pioneered by Poe in The Murders in the Rue Mo
rgue and popularised in stories such as Doyles The Speckled Band, this novel foll
ows the murder of millionaire Horatio Leavenworth, shot through the head in the
library of his New York City brownstone. His two beautiful nieces, Eleanore and
Mary, who will inherit his fortune, are immediately suspected.
Opening with a coroners inquest, and doubtless drawing upon the experiences of he
r prominent New York barrister father, Greens novel follows the labyrinthine lega
l processes, questions of inheritance and ballistic investigations that surround
the Leavenworth Case.
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), by Fergus Hume
In the year before the publication of Doyles A Study in Scarlet, Humes Australian
murder mystery novel sold more than 400,000 copies. The novel pivots around the
discovery of the body of an unknown man, murdered during a hansom cab journey fr
om a gentlemans club in Melbournes city centre. Suspicion falls on members of the
citys social elite, before its revealed that the murder was connected to the black
mail of Mark Frettlby the richest man in the colonies.
Just as Californian hardboiled crime writers like Hammett and Chandler would lat
er suggest, Humes novel shows that success in a land of new beginnings is often f
ounded on dark and disreputable secrets and crimes.
The Big Bow Mystery (1891), by Israel Zangwill
Known as the Dickens of the ghetto, Jewish author Israel Zangwills subversive and
intriguing The Big Bow Mystery was published in the immediate wake of Arthur Co
nan Doyles Sherlock Holmes stories for the Strand. The Big Bow Mystery yokes the
crime fiction formula of a locked-room mystery, pioneered by Poe, on to a fascin
ating tragicomic portrait of life in an East London slum the type of novel for w
hich Zangwill later would come to be known.
The novel tells the story of the murder of a middle-class philanthropist. His bo
dy is found in a locked bedroom which displays no sign of an intruder and contai
ns no murder weapon. The list of suspects is a coterie of East End working-class
residents, including a leading trade unionist, the victims impoverished landlady

, a retired detective from the Mets detective branch and a hack journalist.
The result is an intriguing and often self-conscious experiment with the convent
ions of the detective genre, which offers insights into the many links between c
rime, poverty, policing and the press in the East End.
A Prince of Swindlers (1897), by Guy Boothby
This collection of six short crime stories was first published in Pearsons Magazi
ne in 1897, the year of Queen Victorias diamond jubilee. The series follows the a
dventures of Detective Klimo, the most talked about detective in London. Working
from his Park Lane mansion, his clients include the cream of London society who
consult him when their jewels or paintings are stolen. The twist is that Klimos
alter-ego is gentleman burglar Simon Carne, a master of disguise who has travell
ed to England from India to profit from the wealth collected in the Imperial Met
ropolis for the Queens jubilee celebrations. A new edition of the collection was
published by Penguin in 2015.
The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1894), by Catherine Louisa Pi
rkis
Prim and professional, Loveday Brooke is the first female detective created by a
female author. Appearing more than 25 years before female detectives were offic
ially employed by the Metropolitan Police, Loveday Brooke is frequently asked by
the police to assist with cases where a feminine perspective is required. Pirkiss
gendered twist to the Victorian detective genre sees Brookes female methods such as
gossip and gaining the trust of servants trouncing those of her male contempora
ries and often exonerating wrongly-suspected females.
The Dorrington Deed Box (1897), by Arthur Morrison
Sherlock Holmes often provocatively asserted that he believed he would have made
a highly efficient criminal, an aspect of his character upon which modern adaptat
ions have been quick to expand.
In this collection of short stories, Arthur Morrisons Horace Dorrington takes thi
s notion to its furthest extreme. Dorrington is a charming East End criminal, no
w part of the London establishment, with a very successful private detective bus
iness in the prosperous West End of the Victorian metropolis. He is always on th
e lookout for an opening for any piece of rascality by which he might make more o
f the case than by serving his client loyally and, throughout his adventures, lie
s to, steals from, poisons, blackmails and attempts to kill various clients and
criminals.
The clients Dorrington meets are themselves self-serving, corrupt and often crim
inal and the Metropolitan Police are almost entirely absent. The result is a thr
illingly chaotic and unsettling portrait of a late-Victorian London pervaded by
greed and crime, which foreshadows the hardboiled detective genre.
Paul Beck, the Rule of Thumb Detective (1898), by M McDonnell Bodkin
Invented by Irish barrister Matthew McDonnell Bodkin, Paul Beck has been called t
he Irish Sherlock Holmes. Beck first appeared in Pearsons Magazine and his adventu
res were collected as Paul Beck, The Rule of Thumb Detective in 1898. The rule of
thumb of the title refers to Becks purported common sense, blundering approach: I
just go by the rule of thumb and muddle and puzzle out my cases as best I can. Th
is characteristic is disingenuous in fact, Beck is a master of disguise with enc
yclopaedic scientific knowledge and is an expert in decoding both physical evide
nce and intellectual puzzles. The collections first story, By a Hairs Breadth, see
s Beck utilising his knowledge of the new technology of X-rays.

Clare Clarke is assistant professor of nineteenth-century popular literature at

Trinity College Dublin. Her book, Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of
Sherlock, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015 and won the HRF Keating P
rize. She is currently working on her second book, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
, due out in 2017.
Alex Ross was hired by The New Yawkeh in 1996. He replaced a far more accomplish
ed music critic, the Welsh writer Paul Griffiths, who not only had several books
in print, but had written the libretti to operas by Tan Dun and Elliot Carter.
I wasn t reading the magazine at the time, because it was being restyled by edit
rix Tina Brown into another Vanity Fair, but my guess is that she hired young Ro
ss, because he would put a hipster spin on old music, and he could write about p
op music as well. I ve recently had a look at these old essays of his, none of w
hich --alas-- appear in this book, and they re filled with a youthful enthusiasm
. Some are not even about music, but all match the standard of the magazine s ot
her fine writers -- the top of the nation s literary heap.
I first took notice of Alex Ross in the March 24, 2003 issue of the magazine whi
ch featured a long rant by him titled "Ghost Sonata." I was so astounded by this
piece that I could practically speak of nothing else for weeks. Superficially a
discussion of the German philosopher Theodor Adorno (think of Herbert Marcuse w
riting about music, only worse), "Ghost Sonata" brilliantly explains what went s
o wrong with German music (once generally agreed to be the world s greatest) aft
er World War II, but it also explains much more. Ross was perceptive and insight
ful when he pointed out something I had seen many times but had taken no notice
of: that on television and in the movies, when a serial killer is depicted stalk
ing his next victim, he without exception listens to classical music. When a Maf
ia don orders the murder of a rival family, he does so while listening to Verdi.
Why is this?
In short, Ross s long review of 2003 is the single greatest thing I have ever re
ad about music. It doesn t explain everything which ails classical music, but it
s the best diagnosis yet -- far better than the feeble attempt by Norman Lebrec
ht. Therefore, I m not merely disappointed but enraged that Ross didn t include
or continue the essay in this book.
After I read that piece I felt that I knew who Alex Ross was. He was the voice I
had been waiting for: the Savior, the Redeemer who would start a revolution tha
t would revive classical music. No more overlooking the fact that the concert ha
lls are half-empty and the lingering patrons are geriatric. Vienna, we have a pr
oblem.
I expected Ross to go on in successive pieces to explain why this morbid attitud
e is a perversion and a betrayal. After all, it must be obvious that a symphony
concert is dreadfully similar to attending worship. The audience sits in perfect
stillness as the maestro, the high priest (or rabbi) raises his hands high and
guides his acolytes and deacons to summon the holy spirit of Bach or Mozart, who
were not men like us, but divine spirits from another realm. In this grotesque
ritual, only the priest, who must be a confirmed genius, can summon these spirit
s for us mortals, and he does this by making faces at the orchestra.
Elias Canetti (a far greater writer than Ross s Adorno) won a Nobel Prize for hi
s book Crowds and Power, and in it, he observes that at classical music concerts
,
"All outward reactions are prohibited. People sit there motionless, as though th
ey managed to hear *nothing.* It is obvious that a long and artificial training
in stagnation has been necessary here. People who allow music to affect them in
a natural way behave quite differently, and . . . show unbridled excitement."

Of course, as Ross must know, it wasn t always this grim. In his book The Maestr
o Myth Norman Lebrecht tells of how a London audience became so excited during a
performance of Tchaikowsky s Fourth Symphony, under the baton of Arthur Nikisch
(who never raised his hands above his head), that they began jumping on the Que
en s Hall seats, "stamping and shouting themselves hoarse; many chairs were brok
en."
This is what classical music once was, and in his position of prestige, Ross cou
ld advocate that such "unbridled excitement" and fun return to the concert hall.
But then, instead, a terrible thing happened.
It s quite clear that Ross was practically ridiculing Adorno s belief that "Afte
r Auschwitz" there can and must be no music that people can actually enjoy, but
instead of continuing to mock such buncombe, Ross seemed oddly influenced by Ado
rno. The New Yawkeh, under a new, more traditional editor had hired other men to
write about pop music, and I suppose that Ross was told to focus on being a tra
ditional classical critic. In doing so, Ross jettisoned what gonzo he had and we
nt backward. Back past Winthrop Sargent, regressing into an unpleasant similarit
y to Virgil Thomson, and the last thing classical music needs is another Virgil
Thomson.
Actually, "Listen to This" has much in common with Thomson s collection of colum
ns, Music, Right and Left. Both books contain discussions which admire contempor
ary composers, favorite performers, and tell of a visit to a music colony. (Thom
son goes to Berkshire, Ross goes to Marlboro.) What is most annoying is that Ros
s adopts an aspect of Thomson s style that was common among second-rate writers
of the past-- explaining a piece of music or a performance through the use of ga
udy (and sometimes mixed) metaphors and rancid similes. Such devices have always
been the hallmark of cheap writing, and even ol James Gibbons Huneker would ve
considered it hackneyed.
How can anyone keep from wincing upon reading such phrases as
"The music in Mozart s mind may have been like a huge map of half-explored terri
tories . . ." [pg.76]
(I m trying to picture that -- a huge map in Mozart s mind -- and instead, it lo
oks like a Monopoly board to me.)
"Counterpoint and dissonance are the cables on which Mozart s bridges to paradis
e hang." [pg. 79]
(Have you ever read anything more cringe inducing? If so, please don t tell me.)
" . . . were read with more plain animal warmth than imaginative penetration."
(Whups! That s not by Ross. That s one of Thomson s.)
"Having shot a ray of darkness into a world of light, Brahms recovers light with
out struggle." [pg. 295]
(On second thought, Ross resembles Edward Bulwer-Lytton more closely. No one has
written anything like that in seriousness since the nineteenth century.)
". . . sinewy recordings . . ." [pg. 251] and "In muscular C minor . . ." [pg.25
]
(Does that mean C-minor is a muscular key by nature? Or is this as opposed to a
C-minor that has not been going to the gym?)
"The voice is seared around the edges, raised up like a flaming sword." [pg. 291
]
(Hey, dude. Yer sword s on fire.)
Schubert s music "often inspires a kind of unsafe love in its listeners." [pg. 1

26]
(Leave me out of this, will ya?)
Begone, Alex! Out! Out with your flaming swords! Get thee to the Mikado! And tak
e this banality with you!
"[Mozart s] music is astonishingly well made." [pg. 77]
I ask any normal person who, by some remote chance, happens to be reading this t
o imagine some poor wretch who desperately wants to be respected as an intellect
ual, and who longs to be admitted to the coterie of those who appreciate fine ar
t -- or "aht"-- reading such junk and applying yellow highlighter to such passag
es. It boggles my hippocampus that any adult could take this book seriously.
Seriousness, though, is the altar at which Ross worships. (Whups! Now I m doing
it! I hope copying-out the above passages hasn t scarred me for life.) Instead o
f advocating that unbridled excitement and fun be returned to classical music, R
oss has swallowed the entire Theodor Adorno concept of utter solemnity and putre
faction. This is most evident when he performs painful contortions to try and pr
esent Schubert and Brahms as chronic depressives who wrote mainly gloomy music.
Incredibly, he uses the pastoral Second Symphony of Brahms as an example of this
melancholia. Of course this means that he must pretend that the fourth movement
-- Allegro con spirito -- does not exist, because it is doubtlessly the most jo
yous piece of music ever written. It roars out as a young couple in love running
naked through a field of wildflowers! (This is not like one of Ross s bad metap
hors, because that actually happened.)
But when Ross tries to impale Schubert in the same manner, something is revealed
.
Obviously, Ross must ignore Schubert s fun music like the bubbling Impromptu #2
in E-flat, op. 90 (be certain to listen to my switched-on arrangement of it) or
the silly Rondo of the Trio in B-flat, D.898 (one of my personal favorites). Ins
tead, he spends three pages (131-133) trying, without evidence, to establish tha
t, in addition to being depressed, Schubert was a homosexual. (And I don t wanna
hear no guff about using the H-word. Ross uses it throughout the book, and he u
ses "gay" only when describing a Bob Dylan song.)
Here, I must stop my japes and banter, because it becomes apparent that . . . th
e personality being written about is not Schubert at all, and one discovers the
reason for the book s oppressive solemnity.
I wouldn t think for a moment that a famous writer would stoop to reading the hu
mble Amazon reviews of his book, and I certainly don t think that it was Alex Ro
ss who churlishly demanded that my review of his previous book be taken down, bu
t Alex, if you should read this, Hey! Lighten up, man! You know what they say -As long as you got yer health! And look! You have that sinecure, so yer not goi
ng hungry, and yer on the TV, and as I said, you have written some great columns
. This book is nowhere, but you have years ahead to write more, better books. On
e day, you ll become something far greater than a music critic, and maybe you wi
ll be the savior of classical music, after all. (Jesus didn t wanna be the Savio
r, either.)
What you gotta keep in mind, though, that the goal of life is to experience the
joy of living. Seriousness is a dead end. Forget that Freudian mumbo-jumbo, and
take the advice of Dr. Otis: I expect you can get any kind of dope in New Yawk,
so drop some ecstasy, then go to where people do the polka, and dance the night
away. For six months, listen to nothing but Rossini, Percy Grainger, and the Bon
zo Dog Band. Y got one life to live, and you don t wanna spend it in some dank l
ibrary trying to prove that everyone great was miserable (or vice versa). You go
tta become one of them angelheaded hipsters

burning for the ancient heavenly connection

to the starry dynamo
in the machinery of the night.
todayszaman.com
For Michael Dirda, books are the most lasting pleasure of life
Readers of book reviews are probably very familiar with the name Michael Dirda.
The Washington Post s longtime book columnist, Dirda is one of only several peop
le in the United States whose comments on a new publication are eagerly anticipa
ted, not to mention his write-ups on older books, some of which even the most av
id bookworms have never heard of.
Dirda recently released a collection of mini essays in the form of Browsings: A Y
ear of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books, which comprises 50 of his writi
ngs that appeared online on The American Scholar from February 2012 to February
2013.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Dirda continues reviewing books for the Post on Thurs
days.
In a recent interview with Sunday s Zaman, Dirda tells about Browsings and his lif
elong passion for the written word.
In the Introduction of Browsings, you advise the reader not to read more than two
or three of the pieces in one sitting. Is this a call for slow reading in the ag
e of technology and speed?
Some of the Browsings essays are funny, some touching and a few verge on rants, bu
t they are always highly personal. If you read just a couple of essays at bedtim
e you ll look forward to enjoying some more the next night and the night after.
You won t get tired of hearing me natter on. Anyway, such is my hope. That said,
some readers have told me -- and this is music to the ears of any author -- tha
t they couldn t put the book down and devoured it in just a day or two.
As for the larger question about slowness in reading overall: Thoreau said that
books should be gone through as deliberately as they were written. I do think di
gital media encourages speed-reading, which can be fine if one is simply seeking
information. But a serious novel or work of history or volume of poetry is an e
xperience one should savor, take time over. Yes, many books are fast-food, but t
he best are holiday meals, with family and friends, and they deserve to be linge
red over. Of course, I m a slow reader myself, still moving my lips and silently
mouthing the words on the page.
After earning your PhD in literature, you chose a career in literary journalism.
In retrospect, are you happy with your decision of journalism over the academy?
Every summer, I regret that I didn t become a college teacher. Such a sweet life
! With all that vacation time! You ll never get me to believe that being a tenur
ed professor at a good college is anything but heaven on earth.
Nonetheless, literary journalism has made me engage with the writing of my time
in a way that teaching and scholarship could never do. Working at a great newspa
per like The Washington Post, surrounded by smart reporters and editors, provide
s much of the same intellectual stimulation as a college campus -- coupled with
an intensity and daily excitement seldom found in the groves of academe. It s a
real pleasure to write about a novel or biography and see your review in print t
he next day. Plus, as a weekly columnist, I m always looking forward to the next

book. Writers keep writing and publishers publishing -- it never grows boring.
You dedicate Browsings to the memory of the great literary critics of the past: Cl
ifton Fadiman, Randall Jarrell, Cyril Connolly and Robert Phelps. What do those
names have in common and what did they teach you?
I dedicated Browsings to the four bookmen from whom I learned the most about writing
reviews and essays. Each possessed an engaging, distinctive voice on the page,
and they all expressed themselves with style, dash and wit. Randall Jarrell is,
in fact, a great critic (of poetry, especially), but the others are primarily li
terary journalists -- and have sometimes been derided as such. Clifton Fadiman t
alked about books in the down-to-earth way of one reader to another, Cyril Conno
lly was wonderfully moody and hedonistic in his tastes (nothing but the best for
him), and Robert Phelps was the first real writer I ever knew, a true man of le
tters, beloved by all who were lucky enough to know him.
Because of these four writers, I recognized early on that a reviewer didn t need
to sound like T.S. Eliot or Erich Auerbach -- two of my favorite critics, by th
e way -- or be as opaque as Jacques Derrida, whose writings often possess the po
wer to cloud men s minds. In other words, there was no need to sound as if you w
ere speaking from behind a lectern. You could loosen up, be personal, talk about
books with humor and passionate enthusiasm.
By the way, the four I mention in my dedication were those I read in my younger
days, those that formed my taste and outlook as a reviewer and essayist. In late
r years I came to value other equally admirable bookmen and women, among them Ed
mund Wilson, Virgil Thomson, Janet Flanner, Joseph Mitchell, H.L. Mencken, Brigi
d Brophy, Kenneth Tynan and John Updike.
Your proposed project The Great Age of Storytelling sounds exciting. Can you elabo
rate on this project a little?

The Great Age of Storytelling will be a survey/appreciation of some of the major p

opular writers and books of the late 19th and early 20th century. In a single li
fetime, roughly from 1865 to 1930, one finds the pioneering and patterning works
of modern fantasy, science fiction, children s literature and detective fiction
, of modern adventure, mystery and romance. What s more, many of our most iconic
themes and characters can be found in these same works. This is the fiction of
lost civilizations and swashbuckling derring-do, of Alice in Wonderland, Captain Ne
mo, Peter Pan, The Prisoner of Zenda, Raffles, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Dr. Fu Manch
rzan of the Apes. Its writers are as wonderful and various as Rider Haggard, E. N
esbit, Arthur Machen, and H.G. Wells. One of my editors described the book, in a
phrase I like, as the reading of adventure and the adventure of reading.
You wrote a lovely monograph called Caring for Your Books years ago and you still
care about the book as an object. How do you see the future of the physical book
?
I think real readers, inveterate readers, fairly soon come to appreciate physica
l books as artifacts, as sources of pleasure in themselves. It s hard to feel af
fection for pixels on a smartphone or e-reader, but that copy of The Adventures o
f Sherlock Holmes you read as a child retains its magic. Pick up that worn volume
and it is again 1895 -- or 1995, when you first unwrapped it on your 11th birth
day. So while people may turn to screens for many kinds of reading, I think book
s will be with us for a long time yet. To have a small library of one s own is - even if it sounds corny -- a source of happiness. To be surrounded by favorite
books and writers subtly enriches your day-to-day existence. Plus, book collect
ing is one of the greatest of all pastimes.
You frequently mention the pleasures of early reading. After years of reading an

d book-reviewing, can you still find the same pleasures as the ones you experien
ced in your teenage years when discovering new worlds?
I m still book-crazy after all these years. It s like entering Aladdin s Cave of
Wonders every time I walk into a used bookshop. Anything might turn up -- and s
erendipity rules! If I could, I d visit used bookshops every day just for the fu
n of poking around. But then I still like discovering new writers (and old ones)
, just as I enjoy learning about the past and the world around me. I open every
novel with anticipation, sit down with a new biography or work of history eager
to be amazed. For me, books have provided the most lasting pleasure of my life.
All in all, I m lucky that I ve been able to make a living from turning pages an
d then writing about what I ve found in them.
You worked as an editor for The Washington Post s Book World for years but it is
no more a standalone section. Now there is only one separately printed newspape
r book supplement in the US. (There are more than 10 in Turkey.) Are you optimis
tic about the future of literary journalism?
All journalism is in flux these days, and newspapers have grown as hungry for hit
s or page-views as teenagers with their first Twitter account. I worry that serious
reporting and serious reviewing will be lost in the quest for Internet attentio
n and that newspapers are succumbing to the meretricious allures of sensationali
sm over substance.
But I try to resist these fuddy-duddy notions and hope that there will still be
a place for witty and lively and authoritative reviewing for a long time to come
. In the meantime, one soldiers on.

bbc.com
What Sherlock Holmes taught us about the mind
David Robson
Soon after Andrew Lees embarked on his medical career at University College Hosp
ital London, one of his superiors gave him a rather strange reading list. Rather
than the usual fusty anatomical volumes, it included The Complete Sherlock Holm
es.
What on earth could the fictional detective teach an aspiring neurologist? As it
turns out, a good deal, as Lees recently wrote in a paper in Brain journal. Wha
tever your expertise, the insights provide a welcome lesson in the art of ration
al thinking.
I thought I would try my hand at writing a story where the hero would treat
crime as Dr Bell treated disease Arthur Conan Doyle
As Lees points out, Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle was a physician himself, an
d there is evidence that he modelled the character of Holmes on one of the leadi
ng doctors of the day, Joseph Bell of the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary. I thought I
would try my hand at writing a story where the hero would treat crime as Dr Bell
treated disease, Doyle recalled in a 1927 interview.
Notice the details
But Lees suspects that as his stories developed, Conan Doyle may have also drawn
some inspiration from other doctors, such as William Gowers, who wrote the Bibl
e of Neurology. (Conan Doyle himself had specialised in neurodegenerative diseas
e as a doctoral student, and he and Gowers had a mutual friend in the author Rud
yard Kipling.)

Gowers often taught his students to begin their diagnosis from the moment a pati
ent walked through the door, as seen in a record of one of his clinical demonstr
ations, later published as A Clinical Lecture on Silver and Syphilis: Did you not
ice him as he came into the room? If you did not then you should have done so. O
ne of the habits to be acquired and never omitted is to observe a patient as he
enters the room; to note his aspect and his gait. If you did so, you would have
seen that he seemed lame, and you may have been struck by that which must strike
you now an unusual tint of his face.
Its remarkably similar to Holmes habit of profiling each person he meets based on
the scantest of clues, as reimagined in the BBCs remake of the classic stories:
It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the
most important Conan Doyle
In particular, it was the importance of the seemingly inconsequential that seems
to inspire both men. It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things ar
e infinitely the most important, Conan Doyle wrote in A Case of Identity.
Both Gowers and Holmes also warned against letting your preconceptions fog your
judgement. For both men, cool, unprejudiced observation was the order of the day
. It is for this reason that Holmes chastises Watson in The Scandal of Bohemia: Y
ou see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. Or in the words of Gowe
rs: The method you should adopt is this: Whenever you find yourself in the presen
ce of a case that is not familiar to you in all its detail forget for a time all
your types and all your names. Deal with the case as one that has never been se
en before, and work it out as a new problem sui generis, to be investigated as s
uch.
Occasionally, Gowers real-life powers of observation appear to have rivalled Holme
s fictional hero. Consider his study of a man initially misdiagnosed with a psych
ological disturbance similar to hysteria:
I looked casually at the bed-card and at once my eye was caught by the record of
his occupation Painter. I looked from the bed-card to his gums, and there I saw wr
itten in equally distinct characters the record of the effect of his occupation
in a conspicuous lead-line. By simply using his eyes to see what others had misse
d, Gowers correctly inferred that the man was being poisoned by his pigments.
There are many other examples: how both men reasoned backwards, for instance, diss
ecting all the possible paths that may have led to a particular disease (in Gowe
rs case) or murder (in Holmes). This line of approach is perhaps best summarised a
s Holmes most famous aphorism: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever r
emains, however improbable, must be the truth.
But perhaps the most important lesson to be learned, from both Gowers and Holmes
, is the value of recognising your errors. Gentlemen It is always pleasant to be
right, but it is generally a much more useful thing to be wrong, wrote Gowers, wh
ile Holmes admits: I confess that I have been blind as a mole, but it is better t
o learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all.
It is always pleasant to be right, but it is generally a much more useful th
ing to be wrong Gowers
This humility is key in beating the curse of expertise that afflicts so many talen
ted and intelligent people. Over the last few years, the cognitive neuroscientis
t Itiel Dror of University College London has documented many instances in which
apparent experts in both medicine and forensic science have allowed their own b
iases to cloud their judgements sometimes even in life or death situations.

Whatever the exact nature of Gowers influence on Conan Doyle, Holmes lessons today
offer a larger lesson in the power of logical thought. Even the most advanced t
echnology can never replace the powers of simple observation and rational deduct
ion. As Lees says, the hospital is still a crime scene and we still need the fines
t minds to solve those mysteries. As he found all those years ago, if you want t
o train your powers of deduction, you could do a lot worse than read (or reread)
Sherlock Holmes.
David Robson is BBC Futures feature writer. He is @d_a_robson on twitter.
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