I was reading a little book about the life and works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle the other day when one particular passage leapt off the page and wrestled me to the ground. We had a bit of a scuffle and when I finally managed to get back to my feet, those few little words were so firmly embedded in my mind that I thought that I’d better indulge in a bit of literary self-surgery to get them out of it again and back onto a page where they truly belong.
They were just a few words about good writing extracted from the diaries of the great man himself and they went like this: “The first requisite is to be intelligible, the second is to be interesting, the third is to be clever.”
“Hmmm…” I thought, “Intelligible, interesting and clever, eh…? I think that I can do something with that,”
But then I thought about it a little and thought that perhaps I should seek out some advice.
So, later on that afternoon, I went around to the offices of my very good friend and chronicler, Dr John H Watson, and asked him what he thought about the matter. When I arrived, I could tell just by the state of the hallway carpets that he was busy with one of his several wives, but nevertheless he greeted me with the wary eye of an old friend, which I then put into the Harrogate Toffee Tin I always keep about my person for such eventualities, and promised it that I would examine it later.
“Sounds like a load of old Tommy-rot to me” said Watson, when pressed, after I told him what I had read, “and please stop pressing me.”
I apologised and, rather happily, my biographer released the grip he held firmly around my throat. With that small misunderstanding settled, dear old Watson settled down quietly and said to me “Listen, old friend, this Doyle chap makes a habit of going around pretending that he’s the one writing up your adventures when we all know that it is I who has that unenviable task. I don’t know, but trying to make you sound remotely interesting is the hardest task that I have ever set myself…”
Seeing that he was about to go off on another of his lengthy expositions upon the writer’s lot, I muttered something about “royalties” and made as if to leave, but that one word seemed to trigger a rage in him that refused to be quenched.
“Here I am trying to support at least three wives, and doing all of the work in the turning of your less-than enthralling adventures into something remotely readable and you come here and talk to me of royalties! I ought to have you horse-whipped, you fiend!” and he lunged for me again.
Luckily I had learned a thing or two whilst prize-fighting with “Gentleman” Jack and was able to deftly dodge his feeble and clumsy swing, a weakness brought on, I imagined, by copious amounts of amorous afternoon dalliances with one or all of his many wives, and I was able to make my escape, trying to ignore the squeals and giggles that were already trying to entice my old friend and colleague back into the antechamber adjacent to his surgery.
Later on that evening, back at my lodgings, I was mulling over the events of the day. “Perhaps” I thought, “I could cut out the middleman and write up my adventures myself…?” I thought again about those wise words that I had read of Sir A.C.D.
“Intelligible” I reasoned, “I can do”.
Or at least I know lots of words in the good old English vernacular. Sometimes the order I put those words into, or indeed the ones which I choose to select, can seem overly complicated to those for whom English is supposed to be their native tongue, but I cannot be held responsible for the level of ignorance of the general population.
“Interesting…? That’s slightly more tricky…” but I can only do the best I can with the particular set of beans which I have in my tin. “Good Lord!” I thought as I remembered the Harrogate Toffee tin in my pocket, but when I went to examine its contents, my old friend’s eye had already lost much of what had made it so interesting in the first place. “Interesting”, it seems, is where good old Watson was invaluable, but if a simple, bluff and overly distractable old army cove like him could do it, then surely it can’t be that difficult…?
“Clever…? Hmmm…”
Nobody seems to be all that fond of “cleverness” these days. It makes them wary and suspicious and generally ill-at-ease. It appears that it is much easier to laud the average or the downright dumb because the ignorant feel far less threatened by it. That kind of “dumbing down”, it seemed, was something I was going to have to work on.
I put down my pen and retired for the night. There was something surprisingly exhausting about stringing a few words together that I hadn’t previously realised. When I awoke the next morning, I immediately knew that there had been a visitor to my rooms. I went over to the desk where my papers from the previous evening were still where I had left them.
In the corner, a familiar hand had scrawled a note in a particular shade of ink that could only be found in one place in the whole of the city, the inkwell upon my very own desktop. The note said “Leave the writing to those who know what they are doing, eh, Holmes?” and was signed “J.H.W.”
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