The Boy Detective by Roger Rosenblatt Page B

want to be honest with ourselves, and with others, we write both.
    Archimedes bragged that he could move the world if he had a long enough lever and a place to stand on, with one foot in poetry and the other in prose. Or something like that. Perhaps it’s best to write in the ellipses, when there are no words. I should like to live on those three islands, the Ellipses. Ulysses sailed to the Ellipses, I believe.
    Do I have that right? In the heart of winter, the old men’s season, I listen to Ulysses speaking calmly and judiciously about Scylla and Charybdis, and the Sirens, and the Cyclops, as if they were people of business who simply provided a moment of difficulty for him, a temporary impediment, rather than raising anything life-threatening. To understand him, it may help to remember that it was he who had the brainstorm of a wooden horse, so that the Achaeans could capture Troy. Anyone who can dream up an idea like that needs no help being creative. He might have made it all up—the rocks, the girls, the one-eyed Jack. Of course, there is always the distinct possibility that I may not know my ass from my elbow about any of this. About Ulysses, New York, my work, or you. Or even if I can tell my ass and my elbow apart, I tend toward creative drift myself. Just like Penelope, I lose my thread.
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    B ONG . B ONG . B ONG. Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong. Atop Met Life is a bell tower, inspired by the freestanding St. Mark’s Campanile in Venice, with clock faces on each of the tower’s four sides. The Westminster chimes sound over Gramercy Park. I learned what fifteen minutes meant when I heard the chimes as a child. Also a sense of completeness and incompleteness, as one would wait for all four sets of chimes before hearing the ringing of the new hour. So slow the bells for the new hour. Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong.
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    A ND IN CASE you were wondering—because I certainly was wondering—this may be as good a place as any to talk about Wallace Stevens’s “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon.” Not that you ever mentioned the poem. And not that I am at all sure I have the meaning down cold myself. But in spite of all the ellipses in that poem (four-dotters, if there were such a thing), it seems clear that the poem is about the created self. And a boy detective knows something about the created self.
    So the idea, I think, is that we live with real people and real events, yet we feel like fictions traveling among them. This is because, while the externalities of our lives remain stable, even adamant, we function in a continual state of self-creation, malleable, fluent. When the Hoon poem states at the end, “I was the world in which I walked,” it means that the poet influences the conscious life about him by making an imaginative construction of himself. And that this self, the detective or the writer, though he moves about in “the loneliest air,” is hardly lonely. Indeed, he celebrates (privately), because he finds himself, as a result of his illimitable walks, “more truly and more strange.”
    Yet this is where the detective’s and the writer’s view of things becomes a bit tricky, because the world the detective observes, while not imagined, has all the thrills of an imagined construct. Holmes means it in “A Case of Identity,” when he tells Watson that “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.” And just when we find ourselves agreeing with Holmes, and rooting for nonfiction over fiction, it comes to us that Holmes is himself a fictional creation. So Conan Doyle is playing us here, but also making a point. Holmes, not real, instructs Watson, not real, in the wonders of reality. The wonder is Holmes himself, the fictional detective in pursuit of a fictional crime that he creates the fiction of solving. Truth is, nothing ever is solved in a Sherlock Holmes story because it never happened. If life