Who2 Editorial Blog

Notes and Commentary from the Editors

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Sherlock Holmes Was Not Really a Cocaine Addict

"He doesn't do cocaine in our movie."

That's producer Lionel Wigram, talking to The New York Times about the habits of Sherlock Holmes in his upcoming movie of the same name. The film comes out later this year and stars Robert Downey, Jr. as the famous detective.

The movie is "meant for a family audience," says The Times, which apparently is why this new Holmes is given a gambling problem instead. (Those family-friendly crap-shooters!)

The question is, why are drugs being discussed at all with Holmes? How has it become part of assumed literary wisdom that Holmes was a cocaine fiend?

There is little proof for this notion in the stories themselves -- at least, not in the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Let's do a quick review.

The modern Holmes-as-addict meme can be traced back to the 1974 novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, in which Nicholas Meyer reimagined Holmes as a troubled cocaine addict who is cured by Sigmund Freud (!) before going on to do his usual mystery-solving thing.

(Not that it matters, but cocaine wasn't illegal in the London of Holmes's era. It wasn't always regarded even as a vice -- some doctors, Freud included, thought it might be a useful stimulant. It took awhile for its nastier properties to be recognized. Here's a primer.)

Meyer got the title of his book from a moment in the second Sherlock Holmes story, The Sign of Four, published in 1890. This is the only story where Holmes actually touches cocaine, and indeed, he does more than touch it: he injects it (in "a seven-per-cent solution") as his sidekick Dr. Watson looks on. Furthermore, Watson says he has watched Holmes do it "three times a day for many months."

Watson has been holding his tongue on the topic but finally states his case:

"But consider!" I said, earnestly. "Count the cost! Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process, which involves increased tissue-change, and may at last leave a permanent weakness."

Holmes waves him off:

"My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation."

The moment is revisited on the book's very last page, with Watson again narrating after Holmes has (naturally) solved the crime:

"The division seems rather unfair," I remarked. "You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit; pray what remains for you?"

"For me," said Sherlock Holmes, "there still remains the cocaine-bottle." And he stretched his long, white hand up for it.

So that does it: Holmes is an addict, right?

Not quite.

For one thing, those are the only two times cocaine is mentioned in the entire book. Holmes doesn't get the jitters, doesn't rush around looking for a fix, doesn't mention the drug at all. Neither does anyone else. The cocaine has nothing to do with the actual tale.

Beyond that, the opening scene in The Sign of Four is the only time Holmes actually uses cocaine in the 60 stories and novels written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The drug is mentioned only five more times in all of those 60 stories.

In the very next Holmes tale, A Scandal in Bohemia (1891), Watson has married and moved out of their bachelor flat, but "Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature."

In The Five Orange Pips (1891), Watson describes Holmes humorously as a "violin player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco." (Notes Watson, "Holmes grinned at the last item.")

In The Man With the Twisted Lip (1891), Watson discovers Holmes in an opium den, posing as an addict while he chases a criminal. ("I suppose, Watson... that you imagine that I have added opium-smoking to cocaine injections and all the other little weaknesses on which you have favoured me with your medical views.") Holmes only poses as a user here -- he doesn't smoke opium or use any other drugs in this tale.

In The Adventure of the Yellow Face (1894), Watson describes his friend this way: "...his diet was usually of the sparest, and his habits were simple to the verge of austerity. Save for the occasional use of cocaine he had no vices, and he only turned to the drug as a protest against the monotony of existence when cases were scanty and the papers uninteresting. "

Finally, in The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter (1904), Watson describes a Holmes who is no longer a user: "For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career. Now I knew that under ordinary conditions he no longer craved for this artificial stimulus, but I was well aware that the fiend was not dead, but sleeping."

Doyle went on writing Sherlock Holmes stories for another than two decades after The Missing Three-Quarter, but never mentioned cocaine again. (By contrast, Holmes's habit of playing the violin when thinking is mentioned in 14 different stories. Why no violin questions, New York Times?)

Doyle himself seemed to rethink the cocaine use as he went -- from the "three times a day" in The Sign of Four to "occasional use" in Yellow Face.

Hardly the sign of an addict, especially since Holmes drops it whenever he has a job on.

(A nit-picker could also note that Holmes himself never mentions any problems with his use of the drug. We see the anxiety and dismay only through Dr. Watson.)

All that said, the discussion of Holmes and his drug use is not a new one. It's been touched on biographers and fans many times, and even The Journal of the American Medical Association published an article in 1968 titled "A Study in Cocaine: Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud." In Teller of Tales, his 2001 biography of Conan Doyle, author Daniel Stashower notes that "George Bernard Shaw once called Holmes 'a drug addict without a single admirable trait.'"

Here's the thing: the issue seems to have grown in the past few years from an amusing and minor sidelight discussion to a giant part of the Holmes personality. That ain't right. It seems fair to call cocaine an unhealthy diversion for Holmes. Maybe even a habit, though a habit he drops whenever he's working. But it's no addiction. In fact, you could take cocaine out of all the Holmes stories without affecting his character at all.

So, good for Nicholas Meyer for a clever reimagining. But bad for him for starting up the modern meme of Snortin' Sherlock.

(Note: The Searching for Sherlock database was quite useful in researching this post.)

Labels: George Bernard Shaw, Robert Downey Jr., Sherlock Holmes, Sigmund Freud, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 2:25 PM Share on Facebook

1 Comments:

While I agree that cocaine is not a major part of the Holmes character. Almost all the evidence given for why he is not an addict are classic symptoms of someone with a cocaine problem. Was he a full-on coke fiend? No i agree he was not, when you can buy it for pennies a dose from any corner druggist it is easy to maintain. But your argument was so convicingly refuting your own thesis that I assumed until the end that you were actually making the arguement he was an addict and were going to pull a switcheroo. Confusing, you say he ain't and prove he was.

Posted by  Anonymous at 4:23 PM  

Post a Comment

» Blog home

See all blog posts from: