Mr.Holmes: Fleshing Out a Most Extraordinary Fiction in His Dotage

Sherlock Holmes became a very real man to me this afternoon.



I have always been a fan of "The Great Detective". As a teenager or young adult I gobbled Conan Doyle's stories as well as the films mostly those starring the late Basil Rathbone. I saw Crucible of Blood on Broadway. The Seven Percent Solution with Nicole Williamson and every half-baked expansion of his character on celluloid. I always have particularly loved the modern day effort to sculpt the personality of the somewhat one dimensional character of the 19th century.  That brilliant mind, that cocaine addiction, the inability to love all came from somewhere I imagined along with many a screenwriter and stage writer. I was not content that he be a sociopath, or victim of Asperger's.  There was too much dynamism and charisma on paper and on stage and on film and television. Jeremy Brett played him fuller and not so quietly tormented. I enjoy the variations of a 21st century Holmes, either on American Television or interpreted by the dreamy Benedict Cumberbatch for the BBC. The only version I have hated, positively hated, was the Robert Downey, Jude Law abomination conceived in an era of CGI, unrealistic action and an iconoclasm that renders interesting characters banal.

I had seen Holmes young and middle aged, and I had never considered that he could be an old man, with a long passed past and an increasingly diminishing capacity. And I never hoped that something of his very soul would be revealed. No one, if he or she lives long enough, is spared the confrontation with death and loss, of our family, and friends, and of course, ourselves.

I forgot as I watched Brian Condon's movie about this previously unconsidered version of Holmes that he was in fact a fiction interpreted by an actor, Ian McKellan.

So much food for thought.

It is 1947. Holmes is 93 and living in the country as a gentleman bee farmer., with mysteriously dying bees. He is attended to by a housekeeper and shadowed by her precocious and admiring son, Roger, to whom Holmes teaches the particulars of bees. There are sparks of the genius remaining. He can still size up people and their whereabouts, a technique he applies to his housekeeper, who is not much fond of him because her son's hero-worship that makes her less in the boy's eyes. But Holmes' body, and worse, his mind, is failing. He has key signs of dementia. He cannot remember most names, a condition that is worsening, such that he has to write them on his shirt cuff. He loses concentration and in trying to retrieve memories, especially of his last case, in 1917, he is given to long stares into space, another hallmark of the shrinking brain. That last case was chronicled by his friend and assistant, Dr. John Watson, but its particulars were changed and exaggerated as Holmes notes was done in all of the stories. After all, they were penny dreadful, stories for the people, like our own movies and their stars, and Watson took liberties, especially in the creation of some of the hallmarks of the Holmesian persona, the deer-stalker cap and the pipe.

That non-fictionalized turn of the last case is what drove Holmes to retirement, but he cannot remember the truth of it any longer. It involved a married woman, who had two miscarriages, and seems to be descending into a madness both natural and induced. In order both to stave off the deterioration and to generate memory, Holmes has tried all sorts of natural remedies, the last of which is something called "prickly ash" that can only be found, apparently, in the Japan post Hiroshima, in Hiroshima.  A young man there seems to be Holmes' facilitator and host, but that young man has an ulterior motive--he blames Holmes for the abandonment by his father to England during the war. Holmes, of course, does not remember the man; he can barely remember the family's surname without prompting. 

Three mysteries of the ordinary kind, the dying bees, the case of the sad wife, and the man who left his wife and child in Japan suddenly and without any further contact, occupy the Holmes sliding into life's sunset. And, worse, his burgeoning relationship with the boy, Roger, may well be interrupted because his housekeeper intends to leave for another position far away. This Holmes can no longer hold in abeyance his emotions. This housekeeper, however much she is at odds with him, and the boy, they are all that he has left. Watson and Mrs. Hudson are long dead; his brother Mycroft has recently died. The solitary is alone.

But there are moments in which he finds clarity, prompted by Roger's questions, and words and an artifact, a single glove belonging to the woman Holmes had followed at the behest of her husband during that last case. Relationship, albeit somewhat rocky, is the potion more effective than bitter tasting jellies in tea.

I don't want to deprive the reader of how these stories--which I disagree with some critics are slight plot points--resolve. Most mysteries in life turn out to be simple as to their facts, but complicated as to their contexts. Holmes has both succeeded, and failed, in his life, just like all of us.

There is, sort of, a happy ending. His life goes on, and, from my sense of it, he is not alone any more.

As for me, I can't wait for the DVD.

I Did Exist, I Have Existed, I Still Exist

This Fourth of July is a bit of a study in contrasts. This morning and well into the afternoon I spent my time with Veronica, the lady who has become a surrogate mother, or rather, to whom I have become a surrogate daughter, at the nursing home at which she now resides. It was my first, but the home's annual celebration of the founding of this country, complete with music and barbecue and flags and root beer floats. The location of the place at the highest point of Culver City made the afternoon idyllic, for me at least. View, sun and breeze. It was magical.To me, objectively, of course, it means better care in a less crowded atmosphere, and that is good. But to them, the flowers and the breeze are only something that can be enjoyed  only between the moments of pain and confusion. Still, there are those betweens when it becomes clear that who they were still peeks through for the rest of us to see. And they so enjoy those specks of time.

I saw several today. A volunteer played many of the old time tunes, I mean, really old, like "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" or every military anthem that used to make people proud, every Good 'ole American Yankee Doodle Dandy tune.  There was 101 year old Audrey, who seldom speaks, and eats even less (except for nuts that are on her walker's shelf) without prompting, a former ballerina and dance teacher waving her arms delicately to every song layer on the portable piano. And Neal, who actually isn't resident, but is, at 93, a donor and the husband of a woman who used to reside there before she died, showing us pictures of himself and his wife from the 1940s. He still comes and spends dinner time with the residents, though he is able to be independent, and still plays golf and drives. There he is in his Navy uniform looking exactly the same, except for the loss of that heavenly head of hair, next to a woman perfectly dressed and coiffed as all were in those days, the woman he would soon be marrying. Then a picture some 50 years later when they were celebrating either a birthday or an anniversary. They are all in his wallet, these pictures, a little dog eared, but proof of a life well lived, and a past that promised a future now already had and gone.

Then there is Nana. Also 92.  She never speaks at all, and has difficulty swallowing when she eats. Her eyes tell of a woman once articulate, bright and giving, still absorbing the universe around her but not understanding it any more, mostly. And then her daughter brought out a photograph from 1945. Nana was in the Navy. She was one of the rare WAVES during the war. She had even been a pinup runner up. I could not stop darting my eyes from the picture to the woman in the chair, and then I said something about this beautiful girl in the photo, whose eyes still are beautiful, and she smiled so broadly that it seemed the dementia (or whatever) that has ravaged her would retreat, just for a moment. And let her be who she was.

Now I am sure why I like photos and memoirs, or journals, even the most flimsy of them. Because they are a reference point, from then to now, to posterity. If it were up to me, every photograph of every life would be stored in some safe place. I lament privately that photos I have (and many were lost to a damp garage some years ago) I have of my family will end up in a junk heap when I die, since my Father's line ends with me. I have photos of other people not even my family, whose own families are either not interested or gone. Veronica had photos of a woman and her family who apparently are gone now.

Perhaps in the cosmic scheme of things it does not matter if there is proof of our existence in this world after our memories fade, or our lives end, for as a religious person, it is only Eternity and God that make the ultimate difference. But as a human being, here, now, existing today, there seems to be something of a matter of honor to create some legacy of each person here, to prove that they existed, each and every one. And, so many of them away from daily life as it used to be lived, a moment for the rest of us to stop and acknowledge that they had these full lives and are still here to be accounted for. Or something like that.

I said that this day was a study in contrasts. My second Fourth of July event will be to the Hollywood Bowl, Smokey Robinson and Fireworks. Very much in the present. Not so wistful an event, but certainly to be well enjoyed.