2014 BIRTHDAY CHALLENGE
Each year we provide an essay topic in a special birthday edition of the Muse which is distributed at the BSI dinner and the Gaslight Gala and published in the last issue of the Muse.
This Year’s Assignment
Many Sherlockians are also aficionados of Jane Austen, A.A. Milne, and/or P.G. Wodehouse. Rewrite a short excerpt from Dr. Watson’s writings in the style of one of these authors. Your entry should not exceed 300 words.
Birthday Challenge Winner
This year’s winner is S. Subramanian whose two submissions we found irresistible. He chose a text near and dear to Adventuresses’ hearts, the first paragraph of SCAN, to rewrite.
The Conan Doyle Original
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen; but, as a lover, he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer – excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.
A Wodehousean Version
Irene Adler was the only pebble on Sherlock Holmes’ beach. The pebble, he believed, was the mot juste for her – ‘mot juste’ being an expression invented by a silly ass named Flaubert who, as is often the case with these ghastly outsiders, spoke French instead of English. Far be it from me to suggest that he—Holmes, I mean, not the blighter Flaubert—suffered any symptoms of being smitten. He was a pretty cold fish when it came to things like love and what one might, in a general way, shove under the rubric—if that’s the word I want—of Romance and Sentiment. All brain and no heart, so to speak. Love was all very well as a clue to what might make a bozo tick, but it had no other interest for him. It clogged the mind, he believed, just as sand clogged the engine of the old two-seater. He viewed it as a treacly, cloying sherbet, the kind of awful mush that could make sane men lose their bally heads over girls who believed that stars were God’s daisy chain. A calculating bird, if ever there was one. Reminds me of one of those gags Jeeves is forever trotting out, about ‘a levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind that never looked out of the eye of a saint or out of drunkard’s eye’. (That, Jeeves tells me, is by an Irish cove by the name of Yeats. Speaking of which, remind me to tell you sometime the story of those two Irishmen Pat and Mike.) Where was I? Oh, yes. Holmes and his poppet Irene Adler. He had no use for her as an Object of Desire, even if he had no doubt that that frightful young half-portion (now sadly deceased) was a Queen of her Species.
An A. A. Milne Version
For Sherlock Holmes, Irene Adler was always a Very Special Popsy. He wasn’t, of course, in Love With Her (or Anything Quite So Silly). He was too busy, you see, Thinking Rational Thoughts and Arriving at Logical Conclusions to have much time for such things as Love. When you come to think of it, he had a good deal more use for Stoutness Exercises than for Sentimental Romance. Love, for him, was a Waste of Time, except when it helped him to Infer Motives and Unearth Reasons and—er—those Sorts of Things, which had to do with Detection, or Deduction, or Matters Along Those Lines. When anyone mentioned Love to him, he would say “Oh, help!” or “Oh, bother!” or “Oh, help and bother!” He was sometimes given to Breaking Out Into Song, when he would hum a little verse, such as this one (set to a tune composed by a man with a Prodigistically Long and Protractory name, Pablo Martín Melitón de Sarasate y Navascués):“Love can be a Pain in the Neck
When you’re attempting hard to think.
It’s a feeling that you should try and check
If you wish to swim instead of sink.
Umpty-tumpty-tiddly-pum,
Tra-la, la-la, la-la, la-la!”
Sherlock was a Bear of Very Considerable Brain and No Heart At All. He had a Dim View of Women, being a Misogenius. Still — and though she was Quite Notorarious when she was alive — Sherlock always thought that Irene was the only Popsy that could come anywhere near a Dollop of Honey.
