{"id":167248,"date":"2024-04-11T10:15:14","date_gmt":"2024-04-11T14:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=167248"},"modified":"2024-06-03T15:11:05","modified_gmt":"2024-06-03T19:11:05","slug":"sherlocks-double-at-william-gillettes-castle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/04\/11\/sherlocks-double-at-william-gillettes-castle\/","title":{"rendered":"Sherlock\u2019s Double: At William Gillette\u2019s Castle"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Photograph courtesy of the author.<\/p><\/div>\n

Anyone can lay a funerary GIF at one of the 238 million virtual tombstones at findagrave.com<\/a>. A rose JPEG accompanied by the words \u201cim sorry the world did not treat you well\u201d is laid on Kafka\u2019s grave page amidst various uploaded photos of tombstones; \u201cYour statue was unveiled in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol today,\u201d reads a post for Willa Cather. Someone leaves an update on Federico Fellini\u2019s page that tonight they \u201cwill watch La Strada<\/em> in your memory.\u201d Many of these messages seem to have come after a pilgrimage to a physical site. They read like confirmations of an encounter: as though their writers, unsatisfied with what they\u2019d found in the material realm, had taken to virtual channels to yoke a final closeness with the dead.<\/p>\n

The playwright and actor William Gillette\u2019s online grave is littered with notes from recent visitors to his house museum, updating him on his property: \u201cInteresting man, a shame he did not have children to enjoy the castle and train ride,\u201d or \u201cwhen i vist [sic] i always notice something \u2026 deer in your yard, the fawn was nursing from its mother.\u201d Another: \u201cWent to your home today\u2026 You would be proud that it is in impeccable order.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gillette Castle lies up a coily road in East Haddam, Connecticut. I visit on the first hot day of May. An elaborate stone pathway leads me from the parking lot to a gray, cobbly estate that overlooks the Connecticut River. A rabbit passes the entrance sign and disappears into the forest.<\/p>\n

I live nearby, and have developed a chronic wandering habit in my final semester at divinity school. The more direct and pursuant my inquiries of God have become, the greater my conflictual desire to roam has grown. Perhaps my proclivity to wander is a symptom of my frustration with the jigsaw splodge of academia, or of my desire for a single, quiet path of pilgrimage. It has become increasingly apparent to me that one of the key tenets of the spiritual life was imitation: of Christ, of the saints. And so, rather serendipitously, I show up to this castle made by a man whose life was defined so completely by imitation.<\/p>\n

William Gillette looked exactly like Sherlock Holmes\u2014a tall man with a smoking pipe and cape\u2014or, rather, Sherlock, as we imagine him, looks like William Gillette. \u201cThe careers of the master detective, Sherlock Holmes, and the master actor-playwright, William Gillette, are inextricably combined,\u201d writes Ruth Berman in A Case of Double Identity<\/em>. Gillette is best known for adapting Sir Conan Doyle\u2019s stories to the stage, then later playing and perfecting the part of Holmes in more than a thousand performances. \u201cElementary, my dear Watson\u201d was adapted from a line of Gillette\u2019s. The deerstalker hat was his invention. Gillette\u2019s embodied adaptation was so successful that playbill images of Gillette became source images for subsequent book editions of Sherlock Holmes. Certain covers bear Gillette’s exact likeness. Gillette became Sherlock; Sherlock became Gillette.<\/p>\n

Before the two became one, Gillette was a moderately popular playwright and actor from Hartford, Connecticut. An inventor as well, Gillette created a machine that perfectly emulated the sound of a horse\u2019s hooves \u201capproaching, departing, or passing at a gallop, trot, or any other desired gait,\u201d as a way to heighten the realism of the stage. Much of his acclaim was thanks to two Civil War plays, Held By the Enemy<\/em> (1886) and Secret Service<\/em> (1895), written after his beloved wife, the actress Helen Nichols, passed away from a burst appendix at twenty-eight. Gillette withdrew to the woods. He never remarried, and spent six years away from public life.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Sherlock Holmes was dead. Sir Conan Doyle had killed him off in \u201cThe Final Problem,\u201d when he falls into a gorge in Switzerland. Doyle himself wished to resurrect Holmes for the stage, but neither he nor other playwrights were able to get it right. It was Doyle\u2019s agent who eventually recommended Gillette for the project. When the two men met in 1899, Gillette showed up dressed as his interpretation of Holmes and examined Doyle with a magnifying glass.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

At the castle, which is open to the public for tours and surrounded by hiking trails, my tour group consists of eight children and three mothers, who at first regard me with enthusiasm, joking that I\u2019ve joined a group of monsters. \u201cOh please, you go,\u201d one mother insists, so I spill ahead, peering at the corners of the wooden staircase. The tour guide notes that Gillette owned fifteen cats. The children gasp. I inspect a Japanese tea set.<\/p>\n

\u201cGillette was very concerned with what other people thought of him,\u201d says the tour guide, pointing to a window that is actually a mirror, an apparatus that allowed for Gillette to see how his guests would act when he left the room. When peering into its reflection from the second-floor master bedroom, I can see what is happening downstairs at the bar\u2014a boy in a Dartmouth sweatshirt stares into his phone while his date, dressed in velour, takes selfies. Stalin, too, had an intricate surveillance system in his home, in order to know who to kill, and though Gillette\u2019s motives were less ideological, \u00a0this self-surveilling house appears as an uncanny reflection of a person fully curled in upon themselves. Like a dog resembles its owner, a house can begin to mirror the neuroses of its inhabitants. \u201cIt is my business to know what other people don\u2019t know,\u201d Holmes declared in the story \u201cThe Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.\u201d<\/p>\n

I pass what looks like a wooden dagger hanging from the ceiling, which I later learn is a fire-extinguishing device. In Viktor Shklovsky\u2019s essay on \u201cSherlock Holmes and the Mystery Story,\u201d he stresses that Doyle never follows the dictum of Chekhov\u2019s gun. Instead, \u201cThe gun that hangs on the wall does not fire. Another gun shoots instead.\u201d The same logic applies to Gillette\u2019s castle. Some of what you see becomes something else. Dead-end staircases, trick furniture, and intricate lock systems abound. Near the main entrance is a secret door that leads from his office so he could \u201cescape unwanted guests.\u201d The castle is thoroughly adorned with furniture pieces with double meanings, trick latches, reflections and deflections. Gillette even refused the word castle<\/em> and often referred to it as \u201cthe pile of rocks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gillette rarely did interviews, didn\u2019t keep a journal, and kept most of his life secret\u2014a pattern of behavior especially fitting for a man whose craft involved the grafting of much of his self into another man\u2019s fiction. Walking through the great hall of the castle, made from white oak, I begin to feel that I am inhabiting an intercessory space between the man and his character; a place where a problem, puzzle, or personality was in the process of being worked out. Perhaps all houses serve this secondary function, an exercise in holding together what is meaningful; like Gillette, we sometimes prefer to obscure this process even to ourselves, in labyrinthine corridors and secret passageways.<\/p>\n

The children at the end of the tour complain that they want to eat hot dogs, and I\u2019m confronted with an unexpected emptiness. Perhaps I\u2019d come to the castle expecting to glean something of Gillette, but I find him impossible to extract from the character who eclipsed him. Perhaps I\u2019d secretly hoped for evidence that Gillette had returned to himself again, in the privacy of his own home. And maybe he had\u2014after all, a man is not his materials. I think of the anonymous people who wander their digital way to findagrave.com<\/a> in order to update Gillette on his estate. When they do so, do they imagine him as a man who spent his life on the stage, practicing his lines? Or do they imagine a detective in his silk robe and violin?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nicolette Polek is the author of <\/em>Bitter Water Opera and <\/em>Imaginary Museums.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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