Our friend, Jean, read To Kill a Mockingbird when she was in high school. She won’t read Harper Lee’s recently published Go Send a Watchman because of its portrayal of Atticus Finch.
Call me an old curmudgeon, but Atticus was always a hero of mine. In this day and age where the national pastime seems to be tearing down our childhood heroes or making sure there is no such thing as a hero, I prefer to live in ignorance and remember Atticus the way I was first introduced to him.
I thought to myself, “Isn’t that rather extreme? After all, Atticus is just a fictional character.” Then I reconsidered. I intensely disliked a recent performance of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles at the Indiana Repertory Theater because they camped it up and virtually turned it into a comedy. Also, no other actors have surpassed Gregory Peck’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Atticus or Basil Rathbone’s Holmes.
The Holmes stories were a sensation when they were published in “The Strand” magazine during the 1890s. When the magazine serialized The Hound of the Baskervilles readers lined up outside the magazine’s London office, waiting for each installment to come off the press. Conan Doyle grew tired of Holmes and had him killed off by the horrible Professor Moriarity in a fall from a Swiss mountain. The public was so irate that he had to miraculously have Holmes return from death, much to Watson’s surprise.
Old Granny, Daddy, my mother and I loved the stories. The very titles of the tales were exciting and bespoke of mystery: “A Scandal in Bohemia,“ “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb,” The Adventure of the Dancing Men” . . . Harper Lee and Truman Capote enacted the stories when they were kids. One of our friends belongs to The Baker Street Irregulars, a group of Holmes aficionados.
Arthur Conan Doyle cleverly created excitement when he’d have Holmes say something like, “We haven’t a moment to lose! We must hurry to Waterloo Station! And, Watson, put your revolver in your pocket.”
Watson wrote in his journal that the baying of the hound that was the nemesis of the Baskervilles turned him cold with horror: There rose suddenly out of the vast gloom of the moor that strange cry . . . It came with the wind through the silence of the night, a long deep mutter, then a rising howl, and then the sad moan in which it died away. Again and again it sounded, the whole air throbbing with it, strident, wild and menacing . . . A hound it was, but not such a hound that mortal eyes had ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smoldering glare, its muzzle and hackles were outlined in flickering flame. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain was there anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish . . .
I won’t bore you with a he-said, he-did synopses of the plot or give away the ending. Do read it! Conan Doyle wrote to the reader’s senses by using adjectives lavishly, vividly describing the scene and providing details about the characters. The setting of The Hound of the Baskervilles was Dartmoor which is located in Devonshire.
I had been fascinated by Doyle’s description of the great moor — its heavy fog and how the ground shook beneath one. Bill’s aunt and cousin lived on the edge of Dartmoor. Friends took Bill and me on a long hike. Hills called “tors” rise up from grassy flats where free-range cattle browse. The scene looks the same in every direction so that escapees from Dartmoor prison are quickly caught as they wander around in a circle. Our guides carried water and a compass in case a heavy fog such as Conon Doyle described rolled in. Oh, how I longed for that! That didn’t happen, but the ground did shake when we jumped from tussock to tussock.
Holmes lives! wclarke@comcast.net