A Great Heart, Revisited by Madeline Quiñones

Let’s start with this: I fully expect this blog post to be greeted with torches and pitchforks. I expected it when I first broached my ideas at the virtual October meeting of the Parallel Case, and I still expect it now. 

One does not simply utter heresies in this fandom, after all.

The story up for discussion in October was “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs,” and we had gotten as far as Watson’s gunshot wound at the hand of Killer Evans. The passage goes thus:

“In an instant he had whisked out a revolver from his breast and had fired two shots. I felt a sudden hot sear as if a red-hot iron had been pressed to my thigh. There was a crash as Holmes's pistol came down on the man's head. I had a vision of him sprawling upon the floor with blood running down his face while Holmes rummaged him for weapons. Then my friend's wiry arms were round me and he was leading me to a chair.

“‘You're not hurt, Watson? For God's sake, say that you are not hurt!’

“It was worth a wound — it was worth many wounds — to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation.”

This is a passage so beloved by thousands of Sherlockians, and yet when I read it, I can only wish I felt about it the way that others do. For me, this moment does not stick the landing.

Watson says “for the one and only time” he saw a “great heart as well as a great brain”... And I have to call him out on it. It’s a beautiful bit of writing, and it is also patently false.

Sherlockians talk a lot about Watson as an unreliable narrator — favorite vectors for this topic include case dates and his wives. But we talk far less about something arguably more important: how unreliable he is when it comes to Sherlock Holmes himself.

Consider, if you will, that Watson is reasonably open and honest in his first two published stories, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four. He describes a young Holmes as a complete oddball in the first story and does not shy away from depicting Holmes’s drug use in the second story, despite his disapproval of it. He’s also open about his own thoughts and emotions.

Then comes The Strand Magazine, and “A Scandal in Bohemia.” And Watson opens that story with a commentary about Sherlock Holmes and romantic love, and closes the story by circling back to that commentary. This is Watson spin-doctoring, and though he’s rarely quite so blatant about it again, we do see more spin-doctoring moving forward.

Watson tells us that he comes to think of Holmes sometimes as “an isolated phenomenon, a brain without a heart” (“The Greek Interpreter”). In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Watson also says, “[Holmes] burst into one of his rare fits of laughter as he turned away from the picture. I have not heard him laugh often, and it has always boded ill to somebody.”

Watson wants us to think of Sherlock Holmes in a certain light. Holmes is “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen,” as described by his friend in SCAN. Watson wants us to think of Holmes as coolly logical and unemotional (which is most certainly how Holmes wants himself to be perceived).

And yet, as recorded by Watson himself, Holmes is no stranger to emotions. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes Vol. II bears witness the work done by Charles E. Lauterbach and Edward S. Lauterbach to document the number of times Holmes smiles, laughs, jokes, or chuckles, etc., for a total of 316 instances across 60 stories, as originally presented in the The Baker Street Journal Christmas Annual No. 5.

In short, Watson tells us one thing, and shows us another.

And by the publication of 3GAR, he has been doing this for a very long time — more than thirty years. The popular image of Holmes as serious and unrelentingly rational has been solidified.

But here, Watson is shot, an event that triggers a massive reaction in the Great Detective. Now, Watson has to reckon with the image that he’s built up.

“For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain.”

This is demonstrably false.

Watson would have to have been obtuse in the extreme — fully the embodiment of his pop-culture duffer persona — to miss the glimpses of Holmes’s heart which he shared with us himself. 

Consider when Holmes lets James Ryder off the hook in “The Blue Carbuncle” — “I suppose that I am commuting a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul.” Or in “The Devil’s Foot,” after an ill-conceived drug trip: “I owe you both my thanks and an apology. It was an unjustifiable experiment even for oneself, and doubly so for a friend.” Or back in The Sign of the Four, when Holmes realizes how tired Watson is: “Look here, Watson; you look regularly done. Lie down there on the sofa, and see if I can put you to sleep”

In “The Final Problem,” Holmes writes to Watson, “I am pleased to think that I shall be able to free society from any further effects of [Moriarty’s] presence, though I fear that it is at a cost which will give pain to my friends, and especially, my dear Watson, to you.” And after Watson has both fainted and come to in “The Empty House,” Holmes cautions: “Wait a moment! Are you sure that you are really fit to discuss things? I have given you a serious shock by my unnecessarily dramatic appearance.”

Our hearts are not revealed in big moments of drama but in the little things, the small moments that add up to a full picture of who we are. Watson is observant enough to know exactly how large his friend’s heart really is, long before they ever meet Killer Evans.

“It was worth a wound,” but he already knows. He knows with every case Holmes has invited him to join, with every person his friend has helped who is more, always, than a “mere unit, a factor in a problem.” 

However, likely for Holmes’s safety as much as his reputation, Watson prefers that we think of him as being as invincible as possible. And so, rather than acknowledge the many small moments of revelation, he plays up a big moment to fit the narrative he’s crafted.

But, of course, Watson has known his friend’s heart all along.