“THE BSI AT SEVENTY” published originally in the Sherlock Holmes Journal, Winter 2003; included in “Certain Rites, and Also Certain Duties,” ch. eleven. The Baker Street Irregulars were born in a speakeasy, a fact which may hinder British understanding of the BSI’s boisterous nature – its proclivity for strange rites, ribald song about the Canon’s characters, opaque management procedures, denying the authorship of A. Conan Doyle, and so forth. Because Britain never inflicted anything as grotesque as Prohibition upon itself, it never had to resort to illicit devices like bootleggers, bathtub gin, and the BSI in order to preserve the world as it should be. When Elmer Davis’s Constitution and Buy Laws for the BSI appeared in Christopher Morley’s Saturday Review of Literature column for February 17, 1934, the month after the BSI’s debut, they assigned an officer to provide “ice, White Rock, and whatever else may be required and available,” and devised a canonical trivia game for determining who buys the next round of drinks. Everyone in America who read it got the joke. But when Morley’s brother Frank – then sharing an office with T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber (and commissioning S. C. Roberts to write Doctor Watson, by the way) – read the Davis Document at the first Sherlock Holmes Society dinner in June 1934, it fell upon baffled ears. This was only the immediate part of the BSI’s origins, though. Its intellectual roots went back to near the turn of the century, when the precocious “Kit” Morley and his brothers Felix and Frank (“the Second and Third Garridebs”) were growing up in the pleasantly provincial city of Baltimore, Maryland. It was then that Morley created the Irregular Game and the rules by which the BSI still plays it today. Later at Oxford, Ronald Knox conceived much the same thing, but for satirical purposes. Morley made it part of his life, and inflicted it upon a captive audience of siblings and school-chums. Sherlock Holmes was pushed aside later by college, a Rhodes Scholarship, and the demands of a budding career as a writer and editor, in Philadelphia and then in New York. But Morley’s zest for the stories returned in 1926, and was grafted onto some of the impromptu luncheon clubs of “kinsprits” (kindred spirits) that he created at whim, like his Three Hours for Lunch Club. They met at various Manhattan establishments in those days, but particularly at Christ Cella’s speakeasy on East 45th Street. Devotees of Leslie Charteris may recall it in The Saint in New York – the author having been taken to one of these lunches in 1933 by Malcolm Johnson, head of Doubleday Doran’s Crime Club Books. By that time, things were reaching critical mass with the completion of the Canon in 1927, Conan Doyle’s death in 1930, the first U.S. Complete Sherlock Holmes later that year, for which Morley wrote the splendid preface gracing the Doubleday edition to this day, and Sherlock Holmes on stage, screen and radio, notably William Gillette’s Farewell Tour in his melodrama Sherlock Holmes over 1928-32. Books about Holmes had also begun to appear, especially an instant classic by Chicago newspaperman Vincent Starrett, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, in October 1933. So the time was ripe for such a sodality as the BSI, Morley reminisced later – “even whisky and sodality.” Christopher Morley on the way to England in September 1947, having declared that there would never be another BSI dinner. (Looks happy, doesn’t he?) But Morley’s vision of Baker Street Irregularity never welcomed the public. It did not even require the regular annual dinners mentioned in Davis’s Constit-ution, and after 1936 there were none for four years. Morley was content with occasional informal get-togethers with his own cronies, even if membership had also been conferred upon some solvers of a Sherlock Holmes Crossword de-signed by his brother Frank, which Chris had published in the Saturday Review in May 1934. (Male solvers, and not all of them. One female solver of the Crossword in 1934 did become a member of the BSI as well – but not until 1991.) No, the inclusive vision of a BSI reaching out with regular meetings, news-letters, chapters (“scion societies”) in cities and towns across America, a quarterly journal plus a plethora of other publications (what Morley once called “a province of pulp”), belonged to someone else entirely: to Edgar W. Smith, a New York businessman who entered the scene at the end of the 1930s. And de-spite an equal love of language, Edgar Smith could scarcely have been more different from Christopher Morley. Morley and his brothers were the sons of an English-born mathematics prof-essor. All three became Rhodes Scholars, an unmatched record, and all became distinguished in their fields, Felix in journalism and political philosophy, and Frank in publishing. Chris, deeply versed in the classics and British and Ameri-can literature, became one of the best-known bookmen in America: a poet, novelist, essayist, critic, and editor, and a publisher as well, spending early years at Doubleday, the begetter of that first Complete Sherlock Holmes. He oozed erudition, and could also write for the public at large; his 1939 novel about a working-girl, Kitty Foyle, was a bestseller, with Ginger Rogers winning the Oscar for best actress in the movie. But through his critical work, and as one of the judges for the immensely successful Book of the Month Club created in the mid-1920s, Christopher Morley became an important shaper of literary taste in America. By contrast, Edgar W. Smith came from educationally modest circumstances. His father was a hatter in Bethel, Connecticut, and his education was desultory and directed toward a career in commerce. He embarked upon it young, took business courses at New York University while he worked, served as a staff officer in the U.S. Army during World War I, and joined General Motors at the outset of the spectacular growth that, during his years there, made it the world’s leading corporation. Smith’s organizational talents were prodigious, and while still fairly young he became a senior executive of GM’s Overseas Operations, headquartered in New York. And his work’s underlying purpose, to put the nation, if not the world, onto the road in mass-produced products, was far from Morley’s instincts – if not totally alien to them. But Smith was an autodidact of rare ability, and when it came to literature, he could keep up with most people, especially where Sherlock Holmes was con-cerned. His boyhood interest in Holmes had been rekindled in 1936 by The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and when he wrote to Vincent Starrett about it, proposing theories of his own about the date when Holmes and Watson met, Starrett directed him to Morley. It was a while before another BSI dinner was called, but when it approached, Smith became its active organizer, and thereafter the BSI’s as well, as “Buttons-cum-Commissionaire” to Morley’s “Gasogene.” Things went swimmingly the next half dozen years, with annual dinners regular as clockwork, newsletters linking the faithful to the Mother Church the rest of the year, and publications bringing word of the BSI to countless Sherlock Holmes fans across America. When the BSI resumed its annual dinners in 1940, it was as a publication party for 221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes, a collection of Irregular writings edited by Vincent Starrett (including Smith’s voluminous reference work, “Appointment in Baker Street”). 1944 produced three more: Profile by Gaslight, Smith’s editing of new Writings About the Writings; Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: A Textbook of Friendship, Morley’s pioneer annotating of the Canon; and The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes, Ellery Queen’s stellar collection of parody and pastiche. Then 1946 saw the founding of the Baker Street Journal, edited by Smith. So busy were Smith and Morley with all this, that they actually incorporated the BSI, in order to manage the future business they expected. But beneath all this activity, their visions of the BSI were very different, and these finally collided in 1947. Morley was already growing restive about the BSI’s increasing size and increasingly structured life, and when the 1947 dinner was a large noisy affair at which he recognized fewer old friends than he liked, and was repeatedly buttonholed by a newcomer he considered a boor, he rebel-led. “The little group that first met back in 1934 had no intention of starting a mass movement,” he declared to a supplicant, in a letter to which we will return – and he swore that there would be no more BSI dinners. Smith was aghast. Though their visions clashed, Morley and Smith themselves never did. They had great regard and affection for each other, despite their differences. Both were personable, gregarious men who loved Sherlock Holmes, and while Morley could be mercurial and occasionally volcanic, Smith possessed patience in addition to great powers of diplomacy and persuasion. During the autumn of 1947, while Morley sulked, Smith gradually talked the BSI’s founder into agreeing to a smaller “committee in camera” meeting in January to review the situation. That event – indistinguishable from a typical annual dinner of the era except in its reduced size – tided things over until Morley relented, and the annual dinners resumed officially in 1949 with a currycombed invitation list. To achieve this, Smith did not merely cater to Morley’s prejudices. He believed himself that the dinner had become swollen in recent years. (70 in 1947, com-pared to 35 at his first one, in 1940.) In letters to Morley, he divided the BSI’s lengthy invitation list into categories valid at any time in the BSI’s history: Solid Core, Scionists, Apocryphals, Riff-Raff, and Impossibles who could be excluded – and by 1949, some had been. Smith had already created a membership system denoting those who were in, and by implication those who were not, with devotion to the Canon and clubbability as the unstated criteria – reflecting the Constitution’s statement that “All persons shall be eligible for membership who pass an examination in the Sacred Writings set by officers of the society, and who are considered otherwise suitable.” But where Morley wanted to re-establish the BSI on its old footing, as a coterie of New Yorkers, Smith argued long and successfully in favor of preserving it on a national basis. Smith, before he joined the BSI, had been a member of The Five Orange Pips, an exclusive band which for its first decade was a wholly independent club; and he avidly trained up and down the Eastern Seaboard to attend meetings of The Speckled Band of Boston, The Dancing Men of Providence, The Six Napoleons of Baltimore, The Sons of the Copper Beeches of Philadelphia, and later others. When business took him to GM’s headquarters in Detroit, Michigan, he attended Amateur Mendicant Society meetings there. Occasionally he went even further afield – as far west as San Francisco, with its Scowrers & Molly Maguires. Edgar W. Smith, circa 1954. Edgar Smith died in 1960 (with Morley preceding him in 1957), but during his lifetime the BSI and its scion societies continued to expand to the borders of his vision – and since then beyond it. If Smith wandered into New York’s Union League Club this January, just as attendees were sitting down to the annual dinner, he might not realize at first that it was the BSI. For one thing, the annual dinner is no longer the mass-meeting of 70 that so affronted Christopher Morley in 1947 – now it is more than twice that in size, requiring a banquet hall to seat it. Morley would take one look at today’s Irregular mob scene, and head for the exit. But Smith would recognize it if he lingered a while, because today’s BSI fits inside the frame he designed. The centerpiece of its affairs continues to be the annual dinner, by invitation only, held in New York on the Friday closest to January 6th. (We are Irregular, and sometimes vary a bit, as we will this January, but when that happens, there are rumblings.) The membership system is the one of canonical investitures that he designed in 1945. Today there are many women at the dinner, where long there were none. But it was Smith who created, in 1942, the cocktail-hour institution of “The Woman” when the first Constitutional toast is offered to a living avatar of Irene Adler; Smith who conferred membership in the BSI upon a woman for the first time, the San Francisco mystery critic Lenore Glen Offord, in 1959. The Baker Street Journal Smith founded still thrives, along with BSI publishing enterprise he would applaud. Finally, the constellation of scion societies that he relished so much, and helped bring into being, is more like a galaxy today. So has Morley’s vision been eclipsed by Smith’s? Well, Baker Street Ir-regularity is still defined by the game Morley invented, in which Holmes and Watson are real and living in Baker Street, the Canon is fact not fiction, and its tantalizing ambiguities and contradictions must be addressed by exegetical scholarship. And in which Conan Doyle is Watson’s literary agent. We have sometimes been harshly reproached for that, by the Agent’s Sons to begin with, but I fear we’re incorrigible. Conan Doyle has a place in Irregular minds, but authorship of the Canon is not it. That causes us no distress, since Irregulars have no trouble holding contradictory thoughts at the same time. Whenever the secular world conflicts with the Canon, we come down on the side of fantasy, and are the happier for it. I’m told psychiatry has a term for this state of mind, and I keep meaning to ask one of the BSI’s psychiatrist members about it, but I doubt diagnosis will make any difference to us. If these Morleyean essentials are still present, some Irregulars do miss the form, though. The BSI dinner is so large today (if smaller, I believe, than the Sherlock Holmes Society’s January dinner) that some are repelled. One Old Irregular, the late curmudgeon Robert G. Harris of Detroit, once explained how growth eventually forced the BSI to give up its U-shaped table in the tight upstairs room at Cavanagh’s restaurant, thirty years ago, for many large round ones in a huge characterless room at the Regency Hotel, altering the dinner’s dynamics in ways Smith would regret and Morley would denounce. In their day, Harris observed, a great deal of the BSI dinner’s charm was in the way Irregulars engaged each other spontaneously around the table in what he called “Disputation, Confrontation, and Dialectical Hullabaloo.” That is long gone now. Any attempt to revive it today would run up against the BSI dinner’s inflexible program, for the madding crowd can be managed no other way. (An attempt to revive it a dozen years ago, by the much-missed Bill Rabe of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, prompted an exhibition of furious gavel-pounding and whistle-tooting by Tom Stix Jr. which, for connoisseurs of BSI history, was worth the price of admission.) Today’s BSI dinners can be fairly characterized as Performance and Audience. Many seem perfectly happy with that, but not all the Audience is that entertained, nor wants to be. Some Audience, and perhaps many Performers, would prefer Disputation, Confrontation, and Dialectical Hullabaloo, for a host of reasons. But options exist for them. There are scion societies, for example, which are unchanged by time, fashion, and political correctness. BSI scion societies are entirely autonomous, and their policies and customs vary infinitely. Edgar W. Smith could sit down at a Five Orange Pips or Copper Beeches dinner today, and detect little change from the last ones he attended in 1960. In addition, some Irregulars find it pleasant to meet over morleyesque three-hour lunches small enough to allow the interaction missing at today’s BSI’s dinners. The oldest of these is New York’s “Sacred Six,” which goes back so far that the origin of its name is lost. I am pleased to belong to two such lunches, the Half-Pay Club of Washington D.C.’s Irregulars, now in its 16th year, and another one meeting on Chicago’s North Shore from time to time. Scion societies and three-hour lunches like these heed, whether they know it or not, the advice that Christopher Morley provided in that previously mentioned letter, written January 2, 1948, to a supplicant who had not made the cut for the “committee in camera” dinner then coming up. Morley wrote reluctantly but honestly to explain why. Its full text is worth reading in Irregular Crises of the Late ’Forties, but two passages from it, in addition to the one quoted above, are pertinent here. The BSI dinners of recent years, Morley said, “had become, as any sensitive man could observe, a burden rather than a privilege and which were, especially for those who had to try to orchestrate them, an ordeal by shouting.” And therefore, “anyone who understood the purpose and emotion behind the B.S.I. must have realized that they could only be fulfilled in smaller and more intimate meetings.” Some are listening anew to his advice about smaller and more intimate meetings, as the BSI approaches its 70th birthday, even if most still show up at the annual dinners in New York. BSI is a hard habit to break, and the source and repository of great reserves of sentiment. But for many Irregulars, no matter how much they love the Sherlock Holmes stories, the heart of the matter is the delight that intelligent kinsprits take in each other’s immediate company. There is no end in sight for the BSI, but Baker Street Irregularity is broader and deeper than the BSI, and continues to be practiced in ways beyond anyone’s power to dictate or control. If this troubles anyone, it should not, since it keeps faith with both Christopher Morley and Edgar W. Smith, the best and wisest men whom the Baker Street Irregulars have ever known. Return to Essays Return to the Welcome page

“THE BSI AT SEVENTY”

published originally in the Sherlock Holmes Journal, Winter 2003;

included in “Certain Rites, and Also Certain Duties,” ch. eleven.

The Baker Street Irregulars were born in a speakeasy, a fact which may hinder British understanding of the BSI’s boisterous nature – its proclivity for strange rites, ribald song about the Canon’s characters, opaque management procedures, denying the authorship of A. Conan Doyle, and so forth. Because Britain never inflicted anything as grotesque as Prohibition upon itself, it never had to resort to illicit devices like bootleggers, bathtub gin, and the BSI in order to preserve the world as it should be. When Elmer Davis’s Constitution and Buy Laws for the BSI appeared in Christopher Morley’s Saturday Review of Literature column for February 17, 1934, the month after the BSI’s debut, they assigned an officer to provide “ice, White Rock, and whatever else may be required and available,” and devised a canonical trivia game for determining who buys the next round of drinks. Everyone in America who read it got the joke. But when Morley’s brother Frank – then sharing an office with T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber (and commissioning S. C. Roberts to write Doctor Watson, by the way) – read the Davis Document at the first Sherlock Holmes Society dinner in June 1934, it fell upon baffled ears.

This was only the immediate part of the BSI’s origins, though. Its intellectual roots went back to near the turn of the century, when the precocious “Kit” Morley and his brothers Felix and Frank (“the Second and Third Garridebs”) were growing up in the pleasantly provincial city of Baltimore, Maryland. It was then that Morley created the Irregular Game and the rules by which the BSI still plays it today. Later at Oxford, Ronald Knox conceived much the same thing, but for satirical purposes. Morley made it part of his life, and inflicted it upon a captive audience of siblings and school-chums.

Sherlock Holmes was pushed aside later by college, a Rhodes Scholarship, and the demands of a budding career as a writer and editor, in Philadelphia and then in New York. But Morley’s zest for the stories returned in 1926, and was grafted onto some of the impromptu luncheon clubs of “kinsprits” (kindred spirits) that he created at whim, like his Three Hours for Lunch Club. They met at various Manhattan establishments in those days, but particularly at Christ Cella’s speakeasy on East 45th Street. Devotees of Leslie Charteris may recall it in The Saint in New York – the author having been taken to one of these lunches in 1933 by Malcolm Johnson, head of Doubleday Doran’s Crime Club Books.

By that time, things were reaching critical mass with the completion of the Canon in 1927, Conan Doyle’s death in 1930, the first U.S. Complete Sherlock Holmes later that year, for which Morley wrote the splendid preface gracing the Doubleday edition to this day, and Sherlock Holmes on stage, screen and radio, notably William Gillette’s Farewell Tour in his melodrama Sherlock Holmes over 1928-32. Books about Holmes had also begun to appear, especially an instant classic by Chicago newspaperman Vincent Starrett, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, in October 1933. So the time was ripe for such a sodality as the BSI, Morley reminisced later – “even whisky and sodality.”

Christopher Morley on the way to England in September 1947,

having declared that there would never be another BSI dinner.

(Looks happy, doesn’t he?)

But Morley’s vision of Baker Street Irregularity never welcomed the public. It did not even require the regular annual dinners mentioned in Davis’s Constit-ution, and after 1936 there were none for four years. Morley was content with occasional informal get-togethers with his own cronies, even if membership had also been conferred upon some solvers of a Sherlock Holmes Crossword de-signed by his brother Frank, which Chris had published in the Saturday Review in May 1934. (Male solvers, and not all of them. One female solver of the Crossword in 1934 did become a member of the BSI as well – but not until 1991.)

No, the inclusive vision of a BSI reaching out with regular meetings, news-letters, chapters (“scion societies”) in cities and towns across America, a quarterly journal plus a plethora of other publications (what Morley once called “a province of pulp”), belonged to someone else entirely: to Edgar W. Smith, a New York businessman who entered the scene at the end of the 1930s. And de-spite an equal love of language, Edgar Smith could scarcely have been more different from Christopher Morley.

Morley and his brothers were the sons of an English-born mathematics prof-essor. All three became Rhodes Scholars, an unmatched record, and all became distinguished in their fields, Felix in journalism and political philosophy, and Frank in publishing. Chris, deeply versed in the classics and British and Ameri-can literature, became one of the best-known bookmen in America: a poet, novelist, essayist, critic, and editor, and a publisher as well, spending early years at Doubleday, the begetter of that first Complete Sherlock Holmes. He oozed erudition, and could also write for the public at large; his 1939 novel about a working-girl, Kitty Foyle, was a bestseller, with Ginger Rogers winning the Oscar for best actress in the movie. But through his critical work, and as one of the judges for the immensely successful Book of the Month Club created in the mid-1920s, Christopher Morley became an important shaper of literary taste in America.

By contrast, Edgar W. Smith came from educationally modest circumstances. His father was a hatter in Bethel, Connecticut, and his education was desultory and directed toward a career in commerce. He embarked upon it young, took business courses at New York University while he worked, served as a staff officer in the U.S. Army during World War I, and joined General Motors at the outset of the spectacular growth that, during his years there, made it the world’s leading corporation. Smith’s organizational talents were prodigious, and while still fairly young he became a senior executive of GM’s Overseas Operations, headquartered in New York. And his work’s underlying purpose, to put the nation, if not the world, onto the road in mass-produced products, was far from Morley’s instincts – if not totally alien to them.

But Smith was an autodidact of rare ability, and when it came to literature, he could keep up with most people, especially where Sherlock Holmes was con-cerned. His boyhood interest in Holmes had been rekindled in 1936 by The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and when he wrote to Vincent Starrett about it, proposing theories of his own about the date when Holmes and Watson met, Starrett directed him to Morley. It was a while before another BSI dinner was called, but when it approached, Smith became its active organizer, and thereafter the BSI’s as well, as “Buttons-cum-Commissionaire” to Morley’s “Gasogene.”

Things went swimmingly the next half dozen years, with annual dinners regular as clockwork, newsletters linking the faithful to the Mother Church the rest of the year, and publications bringing word of the BSI to countless Sherlock Holmes fans across America. When the BSI resumed its annual dinners in 1940, it was as a publication party for 221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes, a collection of Irregular writings edited by Vincent Starrett (including Smith’s voluminous reference work, “Appointment in Baker Street”). 1944 produced three more: Profile by Gaslight, Smith’s editing of new Writings About the Writings; Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: A Textbook of Friendship, Morley’s pioneer annotating of the Canon; and The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes, Ellery Queen’s stellar collection of parody and pastiche. Then 1946 saw the founding of the Baker Street Journal, edited by Smith. So busy were Smith and Morley with all this, that they actually incorporated the BSI, in order to manage the future business they expected.

But beneath all this activity, their visions of the BSI were very different, and these finally collided in 1947. Morley was already growing restive about the BSI’s increasing size and increasingly structured life, and when the 1947 dinner was a large noisy affair at which he recognized fewer old friends than he liked, and was repeatedly buttonholed by a newcomer he considered a boor, he rebel-led. “The little group that first met back in 1934 had no intention of starting a mass movement,” he declared to a supplicant, in a letter to which we will return – and he swore that there would be no more BSI dinners. Smith was aghast.

Though their visions clashed, Morley and Smith themselves never did. They had great regard and affection for each other, despite their differences. Both were personable, gregarious men who loved Sherlock Holmes, and while Morley could be mercurial and occasionally volcanic, Smith possessed patience in addition to great powers of diplomacy and persuasion. During the autumn of 1947, while Morley sulked, Smith gradually talked the BSI’s founder into agreeing to a smaller “committee in camera” meeting in January to review the situation. That event – indistinguishable from a typical annual dinner of the era except in its reduced size – tided things over until Morley relented, and the annual dinners resumed officially in 1949 with a currycombed invitation list.

To achieve this, Smith did not merely cater to Morley’s prejudices. He believed himself that the dinner had become swollen in recent years. (70 in 1947, com-pared to 35 at his first one, in 1940.) In letters to Morley, he divided the BSI’s lengthy invitation list into categories valid at any time in the BSI’s history: Solid Core, Scionists, Apocryphals, Riff-Raff, and Impossibles who could be excluded – and by 1949, some had been. Smith had already created a membership system denoting those who were in, and by implication those who were not, with devotion to the Canon and clubbability as the unstated criteria – reflecting the Constitution’s statement that “All persons shall be eligible for membership who pass an examination in the Sacred Writings set by officers of the society, and who are considered otherwise suitable.”

But where Morley wanted to re-establish the BSI on its old footing, as a coterie of New Yorkers, Smith argued long and successfully in favor of preserving it on a national basis. Smith, before he joined the BSI, had been a member of The Five Orange Pips, an exclusive band which for its first decade was a wholly independent club; and he avidly trained up and down the Eastern Seaboard to attend meetings of The Speckled Band of Boston, The Dancing Men of Providence, The Six Napoleons of Baltimore, The Sons of the Copper Beeches of Philadelphia, and later others. When business took him to GM’s headquarters in Detroit, Michigan, he attended Amateur Mendicant Society meetings there. Occasionally he went even further afield – as far west as San Francisco, with its Scowrers & Molly Maguires.

Edgar W. Smith, circa 1954.

Edgar Smith died in 1960 (with Morley preceding him in 1957), but during his lifetime the BSI and its scion societies continued to expand to the borders of his vision – and since then beyond it. If Smith wandered into New York’s Union League Club this January, just as attendees were sitting down to the annual dinner, he might not realize at first that it was the BSI. For one thing, the annual dinner is no longer the mass-meeting of 70 that so affronted Christopher Morley in 1947 – now it is more than twice that in size, requiring a banquet hall to seat it. Morley would take one look at today’s Irregular mob scene, and head for the exit.

But Smith would recognize it if he lingered a while, because today’s BSI fits inside the frame he designed. The centerpiece of its affairs continues to be the annual dinner, by invitation only, held in New York on the Friday closest to January 6th. (We are Irregular, and sometimes vary a bit, as we will this January, but when that happens, there are rumblings.) The membership system is the one of canonical investitures that he designed in 1945. Today there are many women at the dinner, where long there were none. But it was Smith who created, in 1942, the cocktail-hour institution of “The Woman” when the first Constitutional toast is offered to a living avatar of Irene Adler; Smith who conferred membership in the BSI upon a woman for the first time, the San Francisco mystery critic Lenore Glen Offord, in 1959. The Baker Street Journal Smith founded still thrives, along with BSI publishing enterprise he would applaud. Finally, the constellation of scion societies that he relished so much, and helped bring into being, is more like a galaxy today.

So has Morley’s vision been eclipsed by Smith’s? Well, Baker Street Ir-regularity is still defined by the game Morley invented, in which Holmes and Watson are real and living in Baker Street, the Canon is fact not fiction, and its tantalizing ambiguities and contradictions must be addressed by exegetical scholarship. And in which Conan Doyle is Watson’s literary agent. We have sometimes been harshly reproached for that, by the Agent’s Sons to begin with, but I fear we’re incorrigible. Conan Doyle has a place in Irregular minds, but authorship of the Canon is not it. That causes us no distress, since Irregulars have no trouble holding contradictory thoughts at the same time. Whenever the secular world conflicts with the Canon, we come down on the side of fantasy, and are the happier for it. I’m told psychiatry has a term for this state of mind, and I keep meaning to ask one of the BSI’s psychiatrist members about it, but I doubt diagnosis will make any difference to us.

If these Morleyean essentials are still present, some Irregulars do miss the form, though. The BSI dinner is so large today (if smaller, I believe, than the Sherlock Holmes Society’s January dinner) that some are repelled. One Old Irregular, the late curmudgeon Robert G. Harris of Detroit, once explained how growth eventually forced the BSI to give up its U-shaped table in the tight upstairs room at Cavanagh’s restaurant, thirty years ago, for many large round ones in a huge characterless room at the Regency Hotel, altering the dinner’s dynamics in ways Smith would regret and Morley would denounce.

In their day, Harris observed, a great deal of the BSI dinner’s charm was in the way Irregulars engaged each other spontaneously around the table in what he called “Disputation, Confrontation, and Dialectical Hullabaloo.” That is long gone now. Any attempt to revive it today would run up against the BSI dinner’s inflexible program, for the madding crowd can be managed no other way. (An attempt to revive it a dozen years ago, by the much-missed Bill Rabe of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, prompted an exhibition of furious gavel-pounding and whistle-tooting by Tom Stix Jr. which, for connoisseurs of BSI history, was worth the price of admission.)

Today’s BSI dinners can be fairly characterized as Performance and Audience. Many seem perfectly happy with that, but not all the Audience is that entertained, nor wants to be. Some Audience, and perhaps many Performers, would prefer Disputation, Confrontation, and Dialectical Hullabaloo, for a host of reasons. But options exist for them. There are scion societies, for example, which are unchanged by time, fashion, and political correctness. BSI scion societies are entirely autonomous, and their policies and customs vary infinitely. Edgar W. Smith could sit down at a Five Orange Pips or Copper Beeches dinner today, and detect little change from the last ones he attended in 1960. In addition, some Irregulars find it pleasant to meet over morleyesque three-hour lunches small enough to allow the interaction missing at today’s BSI’s dinners. The oldest of these is New York’s “Sacred Six,” which goes back so far that the origin of its name is lost. I am pleased to belong to two such lunches, the Half-Pay Club of Washington D.C.’s Irregulars, now in its 16th year, and another one meeting on Chicago’s North Shore from time to time.

Scion societies and three-hour lunches like these heed, whether they know it or not, the advice that Christopher Morley provided in that previously mentioned letter, written January 2, 1948, to a supplicant who had not made the cut for the “committee in camera” dinner then coming up. Morley wrote reluctantly but honestly to explain why. Its full text is worth reading in Irregular Crises of the Late ’Forties, but two passages from it, in addition to the one quoted above, are pertinent here. The BSI dinners of recent years, Morley said, “had become, as any sensitive man could observe, a burden rather than a privilege and which were, especially for those who had to try to orchestrate them, an ordeal by shouting.” And therefore, “anyone who understood the purpose and emotion behind the B.S.I. must have realized that they could only be fulfilled in smaller and more intimate meetings.”

Some are listening anew to his advice about smaller and more intimate meetings, as the BSI approaches its 70th birthday, even if most still show up at the annual dinners in New York. BSI is a hard habit to break, and the source and repository of great reserves of sentiment. But for many Irregulars, no matter how much they love the Sherlock Holmes stories, the heart of the matter is the delight that intelligent kinsprits take in each other’s immediate company. There is no end in sight for the BSI, but Baker Street Irregularity is broader and deeper than the BSI, and continues to be practiced in ways beyond anyone’s power to dictate or control. If this troubles anyone, it should not, since it keeps faith with both Christopher Morley and Edgar W. Smith, the best and wisest men whom the Baker Street Irregulars have ever known.

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