THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES

MY DARTMOOR DÉRIVE

Last October Katherine suggested that we spend a few days of her leave visiting Dartmoor. What I knew about Dartmoor came from reading “The Hound of the Baskervilles” by Arthur Conan Doyle. I instantly became that boy, aged ten, who conjured in my imagination a gothic something called a moor as I read and pictured Sherlock Holmes and the Hound. I had no idea what a moor was, but reading this novel I knew them better than arid, smoggy Riverside, California where I read to survive.

Katherine wasn’t surprised by my enthusiasm. Growing up, she would visit relations in Dartmoor and ride horses. I tried to describe the vivid shadows the name ‘Dartmoor’ summoned to mind. I saw my first moor when I came to Cornwall, rugged brown grass, jumbled stones punctuating an empty landscape stretching in all directions without much in the way of houses or people. 

The West Penwith Moors, near Zennor, have this ancient prospect. The neolithic stone altars or village remnants still stand there. Our ancient ancestors left them behind with no explanations. It’s the stuff that feeds imagination. It’s also an officially recognised Dark Sky sanctuary so on a clear night you see nothing but stars. We live on the edge of all that, and often when I step out early to check on the world and all that’s in it, the sky remains bright with stars finishing up their night. 

I first read “The Hound” in a paperback edition I found in the spinning rack at the pharmacy. Later, I owned a hard-bound collection of the entire Sherlock Holmes stories and novels. My Uncle Lou Feck in Manhattan illustrated some of the covers of paperbacks published by Bantam and Dell. Here are three I like.

Dartmoor might as well have been the other side of the moon. One day, I thought, I would like to see Dartmoor. Now I was going to spend a few days there. The images in my mind were not those of that boy. My mind was clear to accommodate new experience. I’ve become a veteran traveler. I prefer to see what I encounter untinged by expectation.

We traveled with books and no itinerary to Tavistock, an old stannary town where tin mining operations brought their ore to be weighed and taxed, a market town. It features the ruins of an abbey ransacked by order of Henry 8th, where monks ran a going concern making medicines and I presume drams from herbs. Present day Tavistock is quite proud of its fairly recent construction of a weir on the Tavey River.

Tavistock is situated about ten miles from the start of Dartmoor National Park. The Visitors’ Centre occupies what was the Duchy Hotel in Princetown where Conan Doyle stayed in 1905 on a trip to Devon to visit at the invitation of Betram Fletcher Robinson, editor of “Vanity Fair“. They met onboard a ship from South Africa where the Boer War was raging and where Conan Doyle had spent a troubling time volunteering his services as a doctor.

Too old for active duty, Conan Doyle, a doctor in practice before he achieved wealth and renown with Sherlock Holmes, volunteered to work in a hospital for British soldiers as a private citizen. He had by this time killed off Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls. Holmes had become a brake on his ambition to write ‘serious’ literature. But nothing had clicked. His wife was dying. He had a mistress. It seems that the Boer War was a place where under the guise of serving his country he could chase boyhood dreams of glory under the guise of national service and escape the complications of adult life.

On the ship, Robinson told Conan Doyle legends from his native Devon, a county teeming with spectres, witches, demons, and hell hounds. He doubtless hoped Conan Doyle would resurrect Sherlock Holmes. He certainly encouraged him to write a story set in Devon.

Conan Doyle and Robinson golfed but Conan Doyle began to form a story, a gothic one, like the kind that were in fashion at the time. A story started to form around the true story of a local squire, Richard Cabell. So cruel was Cabell that a legend told after his death swore that at the moment of his death demon dogs fetched his soul straight to hell, returning that black soul to Cabell’s Master, Satan. Villagers and the Vicar fortified his tomb to prevent his ghost from wandering.

A walk from the Visitor’s Centre makes a six mile circuit through the moor. Along it, Conan Doyle would have seen Fox Tor Mire and Grimspound, site of a Bronze Age settlement (pictured below). Conan Doyle transformed Fox Tor Mire into Grimpen Mire when he wrote the novel.

(Dartmoor Magazine)

It was raining. We did not retrace Conan Doyle’s walk. Fresh in my mind is the practice Guy Debord used to imagine this world into another one, the dérive, the long walk wherein what you see before your eyes your imagination transforms into something else. That, of course, is what a writer does. But why?

It’s easy to understand when you stand in the middle of this moor. You don’t have to walk far to depart from the modern world. When you do, it’s possible to imagine the rocks becoming something else. The landscape breeds metaphors and stories. One of the most dramatic stone outcroppings in Dartmoor is Bowerman’s Nose. Bowerman was a hunter who with his dogs hunted hares. One day the hare led Bowerman and his hounds into a valley inhabited by witches. On this occasion, he interrupted a sabbath. The vengeful witches turned him to a stone.

I imagine Conan Doyle on this dérive conjuring from the stones the spirit of the supernatural that makes his novel mysterious. I’m reading it again and it’s thrilling. I find Conan Doyle’s style pedestrian. But maybe that’s what it needs to be to anchor the reader in this world.

Maybe that’s what Conan Doyle needed after his time in South Africa. While he was there he witnessed another kind of war.

There were no brave or tragic cavalry charges. This war featured a new style of fighting. The Dutch settlers, the Boers, outnumbered, turned to guerrilla warfare. Brutal, ruthless, terrorism in the Imperial narrative becomes a survival tactic in the counter-narrative of anti-colonialism. Conan Doyle witnessed a war that was a precursor to the US imperial exercise in Vietnam, in tactics, and in the moral pollution that infects the aggressor.

The British response to the deadly guerrilla war waged by the Boer against the much larger, conventional British force saw the establishment of 45 internment camps for Boer men, women, and children. 64 separate camps were built to intern black Africans. From the start, food and medical supplies were inadequate, conditions squalid. Prisoners over-crowded the camps resulting in widespread death and disease. When the British public learned about these ‘concentration camps’, public opinion turned against the Conservative War policy. Liberal MP David Lloyd George led the opposition.

Conan Doyle went to South Africa to lend a hand in executing the British Imperium. I can only speculate about his state of mind, but after his time in South Africa, Conan Doyle authored no more jingoistic pamphlets supporting the War as a jolly good show. 

Holmes’ success can be traced to his methods: the application of reasoning to make sense of murder. The reading public rewarded Conan Doyle for inventing a champion who specialised in finding rational solutions to mysteries so baffling that we reach for supernatural explanations. Holmes always returned from these excursions into darkness with solutions that restored reason and order. He reassured the public that there were answers to any mystery.

But what if there aren’t? Another feature of this landscape is the ease with which you lose your way. What do you do if you become lost?

In my imagination, I see Conan Doyle getting lost. A rational man who clerked while a medical student with Dr. Joseph Bell, Doyle’s pattern for Holmes, an originator of medical forensics, Conan Doyle excelled in rational procedure. He made his fortune by embodying reason in the heroic and reassuring figure of Sherlock Holmes. But here, in Dartmoor, he was surrounded by demons he usually kept locked away.

His father in a mental institution was one such secret he kept locked away. A scientific education like Conan Doyle’s would expose him to eugenics and the full throttle reliance on a primitive evolutionary medicine that traced inherited characteristics well before the discovery of DNA. Ibsen’s “Ghosts” turned on the story of a son who inherited his father’s syphilis and so madness. When Conan Doyle thought of his father, if he thought of his father, but if he did, was it to imagine his father’s madness in his blood? “The Hound of the Baskervilles” after all hinges on an inherited curse.

But I can imagine more proximate causes for any anxiety running through Conan Doyle’s mind as he imagined his new story. He hadn’t worked for awhile. His new writing didn’t sell the way the Holmes’ stories did. He’d killed off Holmes. He had expensive tastes, and a mistress. But he did leave the door open: Holmes’ body was never found.

Also, it’s possible his rational mind with its boy’s own beliefs in good-show heroism and the probity of the British Empire choked on what he saw in South Africa: a colonial war dubious in conception and immoral in execution to which there was no rational solution. Perhaps, his certainty shaken, the dark tales and shadowy legends of Devon stirred to life demons lurking at the edges of his rational mind. The rationality that Conan Doyle embodied in Holmes perhaps mirrored the rationality he deployed to restrain the demons he imagined preying on his mind.

This tale was unlike what he’d written before. It was gothic. Its setting and situation invoked the supernatural and demonic. If it’s stirring uncomfortable images, his native instinct is to suppress them, as we see with his marriage and his father. But that’s life. A novel is art. Art offers a trackless landscape where you must get lost to explore your imagination. Unless you’re Conan Doyle. Then you must stiffen your will and find your way back to civilisation. But he needed help.

So Conan Doyle turned to his most reliable ally in these matters of finding the way out of the darkness of the mind, the redoubtable Sherlock Holmes. It is certain that in writing “The Hound of the Baskervilles” Conan Doyle resurrected Sherlock Holmes. No one else was equipped to face the Hound and live.

From Princetown proper, it’s possible to see, looming over the valley, the dull mass of Dartmoor Prison. Conan Doyle would have seen it, too. He put an escaped prisoner into the action in “The Hound of the Baskervilles”. You cannot see it from the road coming from Tavistock.

The road from Tavistock into the park makes a sharp ascent. Then the road flattens when the new altitude stabilises. The uncanny landscape lurches to its heights as though a giant force had pushed the ground up like an ancient table angled down onto its side. Sheep graze everywhere. There are no fences. Copses of trees follow rivulets of streams. When you take the junction right to Princetown, signs appear warning drivers not to stop for strangers. You’re nearing Dartmoor Prison.

You can’t see the prison from the road. Trees shield it from view. There’s an eccentric prison museum. Because of my American accent the warden told me first thing that Dartmoor Prison was built to accommodate French prisoners from the Napoleonic Wars, but also a sizeable contingent of American sailors captured during the War of 1812. 

The warden told me, in detail and at great length, how some of my countrymen confined here were gunned down by the British guards during a prison riot. The warden told me their graves were nearby, but said I couldn’t see them; they were off limits within the security cordon of the Prison. 

Walking through the two floors of the museum underscores sad tales of bad men: the axe-wielding giant Frank Mitchell and the Kray Brothers who arranged his escape, and hid him during the nationwide manhunt.  But Frank, being a violent psychopath, grew restive, then unruly. So the Krays arranged with another Frank, in this case the notorious arch-villain Frank Foreman, to murder this behemoth and dispose of the body.

Here too Tomas Castro, sometimes called Arthur Orton, did 14 years of ‘porridge’ after conviction at trial as the Tichborne Claimant. He’s the ostensible subject of Zadie Smith’s recent novel “The Fraud”. 

The road back to Tavistock from Princetown affords a long look at the prison’s granite monstrosity. Its mass concentrates its legacy - misery suffered, inflicted, and punished. All this pain is compressed into a sullen monument to the dim prospects for our species. It makes me inconsolably downcast to look at it and think about all the people suffering there and elsewhere, many of them innocent, many of them mad.

Back in Tavistock, walking our dog Florian, something I saw awakened a memory, and I veered into my past, to something painful I had forgotten. I saw in a school playground during recess a podgy boy in school uniform wedging himself into the triangle made by two lengths of chain link fence meeting at a tight angle. His face showed a rictus smile of fear, as it twitched from side to side, searching the playground. His arms gripped the each section of fence. A mob of 12 year-olds hunted him on the yard. They had not found him yet. But how long before they did? What would happen then? 

Balzac in “Pere Goirot”, in rough translation: 

“The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.”

Mario Puzo shortened the quote, to make a pungent epigraph for “The Godfather”:

“Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”

I couldn’t save that boy. Like all of us, he was on his own. We wish we weren’t. We wish someone would help us, maybe save us, but at least explain why other people of our species want nothing more than to do us harm. I remember Jim Prideaux in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” helping the class weirdo. I wondered why until the end where I saw the entire story come down to the moment when Jim Prideaux shoots Bill Haydon, who when Jim was a lonely school boy showed him compassion and love, then later, as an adult, betrayed him.

I couldn’t help a shudder of empathy for this hunted boy.

Like that I was back in my schoolyard in Tulsa, a lonely boy, no friends. I was four when it was decided I should play with others. So I was installed in a day care where I was taunted, then threatened. I hated it. I just wanted to go home. I never wanted to see other humans again.

Back home, my grandmother emptied  a round container of Tinker Toys and filled it with gravel. 

I went back the next day. It didn’t take long. The tormenters formed their posse, but I was armed. I was disciplined. The gravel became my grape shot.

Did they throw me out? I can’t remember. I know I never went back. Rather like my time in Hollywood.

But the story repeats: a few years later, in first grade, in Las Vegas, four boys my age and older jumped me walking home. They were not efficient thugs, yet. They mostly hit each other, not me, then they ran. 

My dad was home from work. He told me to get in the car. We drove around the neighbourhood. He told me to point out the boys. 

I saw one. Dad stopped the car and opened the door. He meant for me to get the fellow. I did. He ran. So did the other three. My Dad didn’t have to say anything. He’d made his point. I knew then what you do with bullies.

A figure forms, then repeats, making a pattern. In music, in art, in the stories of our lives. Never since have I felt any great appetite for spending time in groups. The best times in my life have been spent alone or with Katherine. I remember fondly forming that loose assemblage of friends I found at University with whom I’ve carried on. There, and later in New York in the East Village, where I made new friends around art, theatre, film. Then before that, our merry band in Portland dawdled and loved then wrote plays and performed them under our new name, the Archon Players. There were later versions, but disguised as movie work with Ridley Scott and Peter Weir. 

To be an outsider, to stand outside a group organised for purposes having to do with status in a group, admittance to which is strictly maintained with a cold eye and ruthless cruelty, as in Hollywood, or I’m told, as in English Public Schools or American Private Schools, is excruciating. Endogamous and exogamous, let’s call the whole thing off, this singling out of scapegoats, selected for ostracism and cancellation. That master and slave thing, pace Hegel and Rene Girard. It all makes me very angry.

This poor boy’s terrified face illuminates the space I inhabit. I hope this moment does not become the figure that repeats in his life, shaping his circumstances, chiseling into his skin into something fixed, like a destiny.

Could I have intervened? Should I have intervened? In my experience, the greatest hostility is directed toward whomever tries to reform the rules of the game. Renoir, in fact, was punished for his movie “Rules of the Game” both by audiences and by studios. It seems there’s a greater need to let the game go on than to stop the game and allow everybody to step away from their allotted role.  The French didn’t want to see themselves portrayed as selfish, superficial, blithe spirits inflicting cruelty on each other; in less than two years the German Army and the Nazi Occupation did that for them, rather more punishingly.

On my dérive in Dartmoor I traveled far. I found my way into that part of memory where character is formed. And I surmise that Conan Doyle did so, as well. Running from his father’s madness, from his misconceived sortie on behalf of the Empire in South Africa, Conan Doyle was pressed to recall from premature death his fictional champion of rationality, Sherlock Holmes. To maintain his grip on sanity, Conan Doyle needed Holmes to strike a blow at real evil, not the kind costumed in the supernatural, but real evil, the kind that makes us cruel and kill.  

But character is destiny, wrote Heraclitus, in a fragment that repeats often enough that I have come to think it’s all our destiny. World War One came too soon, and swept away all the blithe spirits. It left only unquiet ones. 

Conan Doyle’s son died in that war. A doctor, like his father, he died from typhus, like the many deaths from typhus Conan Doyle witnessed in South Africa, but unlike those, because it was his son that died. There was no consolation. There isn’t, I’m afraid.

If you read Robert Graves’ memoir of WWI and its aftermath, “Goodbye to All That” he visits the mother and sister of one of his comrades in arms in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers who died in combat. The evening went as expected until in bed, cries woke him. He stepped into the hall where he heard downstairs the anguish in the voices of these women as they summoned the spirit of his dead friend.

This scene repeated many many times in many places so great was the loss of life and so vast was the grief after that apocalyptic war. Spiritualism arose from it. Seances summoned the spirit of Conan Doyle’s son. He became a confirmed believer that the dead speak to the living, and appear from behind a very thin veil. Sherlock Holmes, the sceptical spirit, the methodical reasoning mind that compelled Conan Doyle in the past, could not solve the mystery embodied in Conan Boyle’s belief that he could speak to his dead son. Even Harry Houdini tried to prove to Conan Doyle that he was the victim of his own deceptive mind.

But I suspect Conan Doyle did not at this juncture, after reason’s insufficiency was exposed by the most chaotic form of madness, death, want to reason things out. I’m convinced that his belief, like his father’s madness, became his sanctuary from the bloody misery of men killing other men for no good reason. 

A misquotation of Wellington has it that he said “Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton”. One of Wellington’s descendants hunted down the attribution: Wellington went back to Eton in old age with a Frenchman Count Montalembert who remembered Wellington’s actual words, “It is here that the battle of Waterloo was won.” 

https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,815248,00.html 

Like Balzac, Wellington gets edited to make the death and destruction more grand. But the connection remains quite strong. History, and its crimes, have their origin in those moments when play turns serious. It’s only much much later in life, on reflection, that we understand, if we ever understand, how much is lost when we take our silly games seriously.

A case for Sherlock Holmes? Rather, a case for the grad student from Wittenberg, Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

The drive from Tavistock on the edge of Dartmoor National Park to our home in Cornwall takes at best one hour on the clock. In the imagination, the true journey takes much longer.