On the Trail of the Hound

These are some notes I wrote up for a discussion of The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, part of the Bryant Park Word for Word Series, July 30, 2013

I came late to the Sherlock Holmes books. I was already in my thirties, working for Oxford University Press in New York City, when the Press produced a handsome new hardcover edition of the Holmes stories. I had been in the States for a few years, long enough to contract a serious case of sad-expat nostalgia, and Sherlock seemed just the thing to feed that particular condition. Still, I started reading the first of these books, A Study in Scarlet, more out of curiosity than anything else. Soon enough, I was through the first volume and on to the second, by which time I was firmly gripped by a page-turning obsession. I was finished with the complete series of nine volumes in an embarrassingly short space of time.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective was not entirely new to me, of course. From childhood, I had an innate familiarity with a certain Sherlock Holmes stereotype who did things that never actually happened in the original stories (such as wearing a deerstalker hat in the city, and saying, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’). This was the Basil Rathbone version of Holmes in the two famous films made in 1939, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, wartime favourites of my parents’ generation and watched avidly on our dysfunctional little black and white TV whenever the BBC deigned to show them, usually at Christmas-time.

Then there was Jeremy Brett, who played Holmes in the Granada Television series in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I fell immediately for Brett’s portrayal of Holmes, with his intellectual intensity, his short violent bursts of laughter and dramatic hand-gestures and little facial tics. When I came to read the books, Brett formed my natural mental image of the protagonist. I found myself at first congratulating Conan Doyle on his fidelity to Brett’s portrayal.

But it was the escapist power of the books themselves that drew me inexorably in. There’s something immediately compelling about the vividly drawn antic behaviours of Holmes, the suggestion of a deeply internalised psychological life that is never properly elucidated, the idea that we would be frightened at what we might find inside his head if we were to look too closely. This is layered on to a backdrop of cosy familiarity, razor-sharp description and cleverness in plotting, the always one-sided give and take between Holmes and Watson. Here’s a favourite example of that, taken from the opening scene of The Hound of the Baskervilles. We picture Holmes and Watson in the famous study at 221B Baker Street:

I stood upon the hearth-rug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before…

“Well, Watson, what do you make of it?”

Holmes was sitting with his back to me, and I had given him no sign of my occupation.

“How did you know what I was doing? I believe you have eyes in the back of your head.”

“I have, at least, a well-polished, silver-plated coffee-pot in front of me,” said he. “But, tell me, Watson, what do you make of our visitor’s stick?”

[Holmes goes on to give his analysis…]

“Really, Watson, you excel yourself,” said Holmes, pushing back his chair and lighting a cigarette. “I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light…”

“Has anything escaped me?” I asked with some self-importance. “I trust that there is nothing of consequence which I have overlooked?”

“I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth.”

Conan Doyle began serialisation of the Hound of the Baskervilles in the Strand magazine in 1901. The central idea of the story had been suggested to him by a friend who had grown up in the West Country and knew something of the mythology of Dartmoor. The intriguing case of the Hound seemed to require the talents of Sherlock Holmes, and so it was a reincarnation of sorts for the great detective, who had ostensibly been killed off at the Reichenbach Falls in 1893 in ‘The Final Problem’. (There are many very serious Sherlockians who debate to this day the fictional chronology of the stories.)

From the charming opening scene, in which Dr. Mortimer’s walking-stick is comprehensively analysed, the author gradually weaves a sense of disquiet into the story, beginning with the reading by Dr. Mortimer of the tale of Hugo Baskerville (who is described as ‘a most wild, profane, and godless man’) and his dreadful fate in the jaws of the Hound. A later Baskerville, fearful of the curse, advises his own children thus: ‘I counsel you by way of caution to forebear from crossing the moor in those dark hours when the powers of evil are exalted.’

Conan Doyle uses landscape to great effect as a co-conspirator with the Hound in the sense of dangerous otherness that begins to pervade the story. A nervous Watson, charged by Holmes with the protection of the new heir to the Baskerville estate, makes a pleasant enough journey with Sir Henry by steam-train from London to Devonshire. But his mood begins to change with the landscape:

Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of a wood there rose in the distance a gray, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some fantastic landscape in a dream. Baskerville sat for a long time, his eyes fixed upon it, and I read upon his eager face how much it meant to him, this first sight of that strange spot where the men of his blood had held sway so long and left their mark so deep.

The wagonette swung round into a side road, and we curved upward through deep lanes worn by centuries of wheels, high banks on either side, heavy with dripping moss and fleshy hart’s-tongue ferns. Bronzing bracken and mottled bramble gleamed in the light of the sinking sun. Still steadily rising, we passed over a narrow granite bridge, and skirted a noisy stream which gushed swiftly down, foaming and roaring amid the gray boulders. Both road and stream wound up through a valley dense with scrub oak and fir. At every turn Baskerville gave an exclamation of delight, looking eagerly about him and asking countless questions. To his eyes all seemed beautiful, but to me a tinge of melancholy lay upon the country-side, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year.

The author turns up the intensity by placing armed soldiers on the hilltops, on the look-out for the vicious murderer Selden, escaped from a remote moorland prison.

[We] had topped a rise and in front of us rose the huge expanse of the moor, mottled with gnarled and craggy cairns and tors. A cold wind swept down from it and set us shivering. Somewhere there, on that desolate plain, was lurking this fiendish man, hiding in a burrow like a wild beast, his heart full of malignancy against the whole race which had cast him out. It needed but this to complete the grim suggestiveness of the barren waste, the chilling wind, and the darkling sky. Even Baskerville fell silent and pulled his overcoat more closely around him.

The game is afoot. How could one not want to find out what happens next?

How to Write an Ancient Celtic Poem

This post was originally published on the Qwillery blog, December 12, 2012.

“Just grab a bottle of scotch, hide yourself away somewhere for a couple of days, and write the bloody thing.” This was the sage advice dispensed by a friend of mine as we were discussing the practical challenges of composing ancient Celtic verse. At the time, I had been working on my debut novel for well over a decade—it had already been through numerous cycles of rewriting and revision—and I was ready to try a different approach. At the heart of my new concept for the novel was to be a poem called The Song of Lailoken, an imagined literary discovery on which crucial aspects of the narrative would turn. These verses were to tell the story of certain battles fought in a distant time by a hero known as Arthur. If I could not get them right, the novel would begin to feel hollow and implausible.

So, how does one write a poem that is to be ascribed, fictionally speaking, to an ancient Celtic bard? I turned first to Aneirin and Taliesin, the famous poets of dark-age Britain whose work has miraculously survived in certain rare Welsh manuscripts. I tried to channel some essence of the old British mythology through my brain. In my mind’s eye, “I flew north to Plynlimon Hill, where Cai and Bedwyr sat on a cairn in the strongest wind the world had ever seen.” I read and reread the bleak lines of Aneirin’s Y Gododdin, a series of elegies to the men of the Brythonic kingdom of Gododdin who died fighting the Angles of Deira and Bernicia at a place called Catraeth in or around the year 600 AD.

Men went to Catraeth, keen their war-band.
Pale mead their portion, it was poison.
Three hundred under orders to fight.
And after celebration, silence.

I went back still further than this, to the Irish epic called the Táin Bó Cúailnge, which tells of a war waged against the people of Ulster by Queen Medb of Connacht, opposed only by the teenage hero Cú Chulainn. I imagined my own poem, like the Táin, as a work transmitted over many generations through the Celtic oral tradition, and wondered how much of the bard’s original language might have been preserved. I spent some time with Homer, whose work was first captured in just such a fashion. I worried excessively over questions of meter and alliteration and rhyme. At one point, I tried an interdisciplinary approach, formulating the poem as a kind of inverse problem such as one finds frequently in physics and engineering. If we knew what impression my lost poem had made on later readers, what might we infer about its original content?

At this point, it was time to return to the whisky bottle. I recall that it was Lagavulin, or perhaps Ardbeg: something appropriately peaty, anyway, redolent of windswept western shores and the slow, earthy accretions of the years.

Solvitur Ambulando

This essay was originally published on the Powell’s Books Blog, January 17, 2013.

When I am suffering from writer’s block, I usually try to solve the problem by going for a long walk. My habitual route takes me through an area of parkland in the center of my town, then up a steep hill, climbing through leafy residential streets to a sharp ridge that affords fine easterly views of New York City glimpsed through the trees. On the way up, I am in serious hiking mode, head down into wind or rain or snow, holding as best I can to a constant rhythmic stride. My thoughts become dulled, as if there is no room in my brain for anything beyond the physical mantra of placing one foot doggedly in front of the other.

Once I reach the top of the ridge, I pause only briefly to acknowledge my modest accomplishment before turning for home. As I set off down the hill at a more relaxed pace, I find that the meditative state is broken, and a special kind of satisfied calmness enters in. Ideas start drifting through my mind: not just random thoughts, but concepts that are almost fully formed. Troublesome sentences begin to complete themselves in my head; possible resolutions to obscure plot challenges come clearly into view. How can I get my fictional version of Geoffrey of Monmouth, a famous medieval scholar, to a remote valley in Wales in the year 1154? How will my modern archaeological protagonist use his professional skills to prove that Geoffrey was there? As I lengthen my stride, cutting easily across the brow of the ridge on my way back down towards the park, the solution suddenly seems obvious.

Well, it sometimes works this way. I don’t want to give the impression that there is something magical in this process, that it is a foolproof cure for the common literary afflictions; but it does seem to be a real neuropsychological phenomenon. After all, the creative potential of a good walk has long been recognized. “It is solved by walking,” asserted St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430 AD), perhaps borrowing the phrase from the Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (c. 412–323 BC). Friedrich Nietzsche’s version of this axiom, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking,” does not quite achieve the perfect brevity of St. Augustine’s Latin formulation, but the sentiment is the same.

So, what is it about walking? In a brief survey of the prevailing popular psychology, I found an abundance of earnest hypotheses. Focus the mind on some vigorous, repetitive activity, and the “subconscious” will go to work to solve the more difficult problems (in other words, get yourself out for a good walk, stop thinking so hard, and the answer may just come to you). Walking exposes us to a constantly changing environment, provoking novel associations and connections. The natural rhythms of walking produce alpha waves in the brain, establishing a mental state that allows for deeper creative thinking. Exercise causes the brain to become awash with exotic chemicals—serotonin, endorphins, endocannabinoids—that elevate the happy walker to new creative heights.

At some level, I suppose, these explanations have the ring of truth. But they are not quite satisfying in a scientific way; they do not seem to explain the detailed characteristics of the experience. Turning to the research literature, I found a few more clues, though not necessarily more clarity. The overall message seemed to be an appropriately guarded one, that the neural processes involved in the phenomenon we call creativity are highly complex, and science has not yet succeeded in properly elucidating them.

Then I noticed an intriguing comment tucked away in a research paper on the biochemistry of creativity: “EEG studies show that creative individuals exhibit transient hypofrontality when engaged in the solution of creative problems.” A bibliographic search duly led me to a review paper describing recent research on something called the transient hypofrontality hypothesis. Conceptually, this idea is relatively simple. Altered mental states arising from activities such as meditation and strenuous exercise are associated with a reduction in activity of the higher cognitive centers of the prefrontal cortex. In the case of meditation, the individual’s attention is self-controlled in such a way as to prevent the conscious processing of extraneous information. In sustained exercise, the demands of the physical workload force the redistribution of neural resources in the brain.

It all seems quite believable. My vigorous uphill walks are a kind of meditative exercise that sends me into a transient state of reduced cognition, which in turn assists the creative process.

I must confess, however, to a feeling that this is merely common sense dressed up as cutting-edge neuroscience. In plain English, I think the message goes something like this: get yourself out for a good walk, stop thinking so hard, and the answer may just come to you.

The Art of Transportation

Back in the days when I first thought of writing a novel, I had visions of working in a grand author’s study, a large square room with book-lined walls, an elegant Victorian hearth, sweeping views across the Wessex heath. There I would be at my most inspired, conjuring bold and evocative scenes to the sound of crackling oak-logs in the fireplace, the wind gusting and sighing about the eaves of the house.

Fast forward a few years, and I find myself not in rural Dorsetshire, but on the 6:30 AM to Hoboken with a warm laptop open on my knee. This, of all places, is where I do much of my writing these days. Some ironic person once sent me a little book on feng shui for writers, but its advice on floral arrangements and watery sound effects is scarcely applicable to the interior space of this crowded train car. Instead, I am obliged to absorb the literary yin and yang of a fake leather bench seat and a grime-windowed view of industrial New Jersey passing by, derelict warehouses silhouetted against the glowing easterly sky.

The morning’s writing goals are clear enough. In my novel “Finding Camlann,” I am striving to establish a strong sense of place, to carry my readers off to a richly imagined British landscape. The scene I am trying to write has my protagonist, Donald Gladstone, walking across an English greensward decked with ancient ruins, musing on the origins of the King Arthur stories. The conductor’s strident announcement meanwhile informs me that we are approaching Newark Broad Street station, where passengers bound for New York must change trains. The sharp-eyed fellow sitting next to me takes a call on his cell phone, confidently asserting his position on some complex issue of probate law.

How, in such challenging surroundings, to accomplish the necessary feat of imaginative transference? First, I do not allow myself to despair; I know from past experience that it can be done. Then, as I begin to feel a prickling sixth sense that someone is watching me, I tell myself this: in the same way that my travelling companion does not care if I overhear his important lawyerly conversation, it’s perfectly fine if he wants to read over my shoulder. Have at it, my friend. Just don’t try to correct my grammar.

Stifling a yawn, I try to force my way past my gritty-eyed morning tiredness. There is a positive aspect to this partially somnolent state of mind, or so I like to think. I have become convinced over the years that exhaustion can promote a special kind of disconnected inventiveness. While sleep deprivation may not be conducive to analytical tasks (let’s say, stress testing the financial model I’ve been working on for my day job), I know by now that the cognitive space occupied by my creative mind is so very distant from the spreadsheet part that it can be wide awake while the other is fast asleep.

Now I just need to shock this artistic region of my brain into full alertness by launching myself assertively into the world of my novel. I am instantly immersed, side by side with Donald as he strides across the dew-damp grass, the jagged remnants of Glastonbury Abbey rising up before him. He happens upon an aged gardener in a patched tweed jacket wielding a pair of rusty clippers on a twisted old thorn tree. As the old man prunes expertly away at last year’s dead wood, he looks up at Donald with a gap-toothed conspiratorial smile.

“Hoboken, final stop,” comes the brash declaration. I am the last passenger to leave, typing frantically to capture one more sentence before I lose the flow. The conductor comes by, taps me on the shoulder. I want to ask him whether I might stay here a little while longer, maybe ride the train back home again.