Dear Sherlockians,





It is full-fledged Doorga Pooja here
at Bengal (today is the Maha Saptomi) and I convey my best wishes to every
Sherlockian on this occasion. Thank you, Mr. Singh, for your detailed
introduction. But I have an ardent request to our Society members: please do not
address me as a “Doctor” or a “Professor”! I do not think that I am qualified
enough to become a professor – the professorship is far, far away! Some research
work and a few publications do not make one a professor. I am a mere lecturer.
Besides, I feel burdened to be addressed so! Come on, I am yet to reach thirty,
and so a mere “Pinaki” or “Roy” would do! I would not have followed the
formalities myself had I known the full names of some Sherlockians whose e-mail
identities are only known to us!



With the growing number of members, I feel that it has
become necessary that we established an office – formal or informal – somewhere,
which would be managed by at least one of the older Sherlockians! Please let me
know your comments on this proposal, and of course, your suggestions.



Many readers of critical works have often wondered
whether the author had at all tried to mean what the critics have interpreted in
his/her works, and let me share an interesting and true ‘anecdote’ with you.
While having a tour to one of those famous seminar halls of Oxford University,
the famous Russia-born American science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)
discovered that a discussion on one of his own works was being held there. It
might have been “The End of Eternity” (1955) or “The Naked Sun” (1956) – which
one I have forgotten. Drawn to the discussion, the author somehow managed to
unobtrusively slip into the attentive, gaping crowd and then, to his horror, he
discovered that the critics have interpreted those points in his writing of
which he did not have the slightest intention, if not the idea. He managed to
retain his composure, and when the coordinator invited questions, he stood up
and said that he did not think that the author ever intended
to say what had had been ‘deciphered’. When the astonished coordinator asked
who he was, he said that he was Asimov, the writer of the story. The unfazed
coordinator said, “So what? The moment you have written the text, it has passed
out of your hands. Now it is upon us, the critics, to decide what course we
would give to your stories!” I wholeheartedly agree with that coordinator! In
his influential essay “The Death of the Author”, published in 1968, the French
critic Roland Barthes (1915-1980) had proclaimed how the readers is born at the
cost of the author, and the Sherlock Holmes stories are now for us to interpret
differently, though at different aspects, we should remember and recall Arthur
Conan Doyle as the once-plenipotential author!



Pleas allow me to add some more details to
what I had written about Irene Adler last night. It gives a biographical
connotation to the real identity of Adler. For this I rely on John B. Wolf’s
identification of the King of Bohemia in “Another Incubus in the Saddle” (in
“Exploring Sherlock Holmes”, pp. 66-81) as Crown Prince Wilhelm von Hohenzollern
of Prussia (later Wilhelm II of the German Empire), who was born in 1859. Wolf
points out that that there was a much-publicised and infamous affair between
Wilhelm and an American opera star of the first grade whose “name was
subsequently emblazoned in lights over the Metropolitan in New York.”



Julian Wolff, in “The Adventuress of Sherlock
Holmes: Some Observations upon the Identification of Irene” (The Baker Street
Journal, Volume VII Number I, January 1957-edition), bases his thesis on Irene
Adler’s birth place and year – which are mentioned respectively as New Jersey
and 1858. According to Wolff, the celebrated actress Lillie Langtry or ‘the
Jersey Lily’, who was born in 1852 and married in 1899, could be Adler. Langtry
had an affair with the Prince of Wales and possessed some objectionable
photographs of the Danish king and queen.



However, there is a third popular opinion that
Irene Adler was the professional name taken by Clara Stephens of Trenton, New
Jersey, the aunt of James Montgomery. I, however, personally believe more in
Wolf than in Wolff. It would be very kind of the esteemed Sherlockians if they
register their views on this.



Thanking you,





Yours sincerely,



(Pinaki Roy)









10 October 2005 Monday

03:29 p.m.





























































From:



Pinaki Roy,

Lecturer,

Department of English,

Faculty of Post-graduate Studies,

Malda College,

Rabindra Avenue, Rathbari More,

Post Office + District: Malda – 732 101

West Bengal





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