It's Elementary, My Dear Watson

Leslie Fiedler electrified literary criticism in the late 1940s with a single phrase: "Come Back to the Raft Ag'n, Huck Honey." When the Partisan Review published groundbreaking interpretation of the homosexual theme in the classics of our literature in 1948, the following were never the same for me: Huckleberry Finn (Huck and Jim), Leatherstocking Tales (Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook), Moby Dick (Ishmael and Queequeeg), and so on. Think about the Cisco Kid and Pancho. This could go on and on. It's Leslie Fiedler's fault. Now, Fiedlerian criticism is extended globally to Holmes and Watson and Frodo and Sam. If this be (fair & balanced) bemusement, so so be it.

[x NYTimes]
The Swinging Detective
By LAURA MILLER

Everyone already knows, instinctively, that Holmes is homosexual,'' Graham Robb writes in a chapter on early fictional detectives in his new book, ''Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century.'' This was news to me, though not to many other people, as I discovered after asking around. Sherlock Holmes and his companion, Dr. Watson, long ago joined various male duos (among them the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Batman and Robin and even Frodo and Sam) as the subject of smirks, winks and occasionally more earnest efforts at extracting the hidden meanings of pop icons. But Robb -- who offers his speculations on the sexual orientation of Holmes and other literary sleuths in a coda to a book that's mostly about historical figures -- doesn't want his observations taken for mere crude outing. He is not, he insists, engaged in ''a sly attempt to ensnare the great detective in the elastic web of gay revisionism.''

Or is he? On the topic of Sherlock Holmes it's hard to find anyone who can avoid being sly or, for that matter, coy. Coy is just what Robb becomes when he avows that what's significant ''is not that certain characters are or are not homosexual but that gay readers found their likeness in them,'' only later to advance the implausible theory that Holmes's creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, modeled the character on Oscar Wilde. Whether or not Robb is being entirely serious -- can anyone be serious when discussing the savant of 221B Baker Street? -- there is something decidedly unconventional about the sexuality of Holmes and several other popular fictional detectives (Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple and Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe spring to mind). Yet whom these geniuses desire, if anyone, seems less important than what they choose to do about it.

That Holmes was partly based on Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin, hero of the first detective story, ''The Murders in the Rue Morgue,'' no one can deny. The similarities would be embarrassing if Doyle had ever pretended to be writing more than pulp entertainment. Robb, who argues throughout ''Strangers'' that to be homosexual in the 1800's was not always as dire a fate as is commonly believed, explains that Dupin and Holmes are what used to be called ''coded gay.'' References to the love that dare not speak its name were ''carefully encrypted'' in the writings of the time and ''are becoming less decipherable as time passes.'' Some of the more arcane markers of homosexual inclinations, according to Robb, included beating servants and crushing flowers.

Much of what leads Robb to peg Dupin as gay is less obscure. The brilliant amateur sleuth, a man of aristocratic family, lives in reduced circumstances as a result of ''untoward events.'' He is ''enamored of the night'' and frequents the dicier parts of town. The unnamed (but more solvent) narrator immediately perceives that ''seeking in Paris the objects I then sought . . . the society of such a man would be to me a treasure beyond price.'' They set up housekeeping together. By day, they remain indoors with curtains drawn, burning candles and incense -- exactly the sort of behavior that, Robb notes, scandalized a London courtroom when Wilde admitted to it decades later.

These vague but suggestive details, combined with a handful of ambiguous classical references, make up Robb's case for Dupin's homosexuality. His reasoning is ingenious and his style elegant, but he has not quite absorbed Holmes's famous deductive formula: ''When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'' Dupin's habits suggest a secret homosexual life to Robb, but to another reader they might indicate, say, the regular use of recreational drugs, a practice with which Holmes was certainly familiar.

Then there are the ever-present sidekicks: Watson and the narrator of ''Rue Morgue.'' In real life, such attachments do foster suspicion, but Dupin and Holmes are not real men; they are extravagantly fictional. They need their amanuenses narratively, not erotically. ''I am lost without my Boswell,'' Holmes remarks, understating the situation. Holmes requires Watson -- that stand-in for the baffled reader -- to tell the story, and since a person like Holmes can't exist outside of stories, he is far worse than lost without the good doctor.

None of which proves that Holmes isn't ''really'' gay. He very well might be, though any passion for Watson, who is forever ogling the female clientele, probably went unrequited. It hardly matters. We could debate the sexual orientation of Holmes (and Poirot and Marple) forever, but his sexual practices are plain: he's celibate. He has to be. If Holmes were to become romantically involved, the results would be catastrophic. It would ruin the fun. Holmes's celibacy isn't a mask covering some other, secret aspect of his nature, it is his nature, and one of the main reasons we love him.

Great critics have struggled to define the eccentric charm of Doyle's tales. It has so little to do with adult sexuality because it has so little to do with adulthood. Edmund Wilson, a hater of detective novels but a Holmes enthusiast, wrote that ''over the whole epic there hangs an air of irresponsible comedy, like that of some father's rigmarole for children.'' Clive James, in an essay included in the recent collection ''As of This Writing,'' relegates Doyle's work to ''the radiant books of our youth,'' but nevertheless attests to the ''cozy satisfaction still to be obtained from reading about Sherlock.'' The Holmes stories take place in an idyll of perpetual boyhood, at the stage Freudians call ''latent,'' when love scenes are something to retch at and the ambivalence of grown-up life is held at bay. For all its solemnity, ''The Lord of the Rings'' partakes of the same dream. That's why sex is of small consequence in either work and the word ''adventure'' is essential to both.

People still argue over whether or not Tolkien's work constitutes ''literature''; Doyle never presented the Holmes stories as such. Yet even the skeptical James thinks ''Doyle was some kind of great man,'' and like Tolkien, Doyle has inspired a following of near-lunatic devotion. Sex, it seems, doesn't always sell, and the surest path to authorial immortality may be to make sure your hero never gets any.

Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company