The Cimbrian Friends of Baker Street


at their fiftieth-anniversary dinner,

Aalborg, Denmark, July 17, 2010


It is a great pleasure to be here with you tonight, and to speak to you. I fear my remarks will be very personal ones, for when I thought about what to say after Jens Byskov Jensen was kind enough to invite me to be tonight’s speaker, I was flooded with memories of past visits here, and what they have long meant to me.


    In early 1946, just about the time I was being born, Edgar W. Smith, then and still the best and wisest man the Baker Street Irregulars have ever known, wrote an editorial called “The Implicit Holmes” for the brand-new Baker Street Journal. In it he asked, directly and unblushingly: “What is it that we love in Sherlock Holmes?”


    He had answers for that question, and they were very good, very eloquent ones, even as I abbreviate them here. 


    “We love the times in which he lived, of course,” Smith said. “And we love the place in which the master moved and had his being, the England of those times.” But more than that, he said, “Not only there and then, but here and now, he stands before us as a symbol — a symbol, if you please, of all that we are not, but ever would be.” 


    Sherlock Holmes was, he continued, “the personification of something in us that we have lost, or never had. For it is not Sherlock Holmes who sits in Baker Street, comfortable, competent, and self-assured; it is we ourselves who are there, full of a tremendous capacity for wisdom, complacent in the presence of our humble Watson, conscious of a warm well-being and a timeless, imperishable content.”


I had read the Sherlock Holmes stories repeatedly for years before I first learned there was such a thing as the Baker Street Irregulars. And I still remember the excitement of that discovery — that there were others as besotted with the Sherlock Holmes stories as I was. It was longer still before I read those words of Edgar Smith’s, but they remain as true for me today, decades later, as they were the first time I read them. The Sherlock Holmes stories are immortal, and the sentiments they arouse in us are what Smith said — timeless, and imperishable.


    I began to make many new friends when I joined the BSI in the early 1970s, in America, of course, and also in England and Canada, great English-speaking nations of the world. It made sense to me that societies raised in the English language, rooted in English common law, and sharing the British literary heritage, would find common ground in the Sherlock Holmes stories. It’s true that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had been notably deficient in appreciating Sherlock Holmes, but what did he know? He was only the Literary Agent. We knew better, and embraced the spirit and inner truth of the stories.


    Then in 1979 I began to travel not only to England, but also other countries in my work at the Pentagon, and a secret of my professional life is that I always considered the Pentagon to be a personal extension of the National Endowment for the Humanities. So one of the first places I headed for that year, 1979, was Copenhagen. That was fortuitous, but not entirely accidental. I had done my homework. I knew there was a big Sherlock Holmes following in Scandinavia, and I also knew the lion’s share of it was in Denmark. 


    So I arranged to meet some of the Sherlock Holmes Klubben members in Copenhagen during that visit,  and others that followed in the 1980s. I spent a good deal of time with Niels-Jorgen Haagerup, with whom I had a professional as well as a literary link. I liked Kristian Hasle Cordtz, whose recent death I was startled to learn of, from the last issue of Sherlockiana, and I was positively charmed by his elderly and courtly father Eigil Cordtz. I went dancing with May Christianssen. I drank Bjarne Nielsen under the table one night, in a session that began at eleven p.m. and didn’t end until eight the next morning. I always had a wonderful time in Copenhagen, though perhaps that time with Bjarne was pushing things a bit. He didn’t seem that used to the stuff, and I didn’t want to kill the lad.


    But something special happened the first time I came out to the Jutland Peninsula. I had Pentagon business at NATO’s Baltic Approaches Headquarters in Karup, and to me it seemed perfectly reasonable to stay in Aalborg, a scant 112 kilometers away.  Karup had the NATO HQ, but Aalborg had Henry Lauritzen. And Henry was
everything I could have hoped for, devoted to Sherlock Holmes, welcoming to all who shared that devotion, utterly charming, and hospitable to a fault. He seemed to me a delightful Danish mixture of Mr. Pickwick and Winston Churchill. 


    I learned about The Cimbrian Friends of Baker Street, and we got together with Hanne and Aage Rieck-Sørensen as well. This was a long time ago, that first visit in 1980 — thirty years ago, but I am still enchanted by my memories of that visit. I don’t remember a thing about the BALTAP part of it, except that one or two more visits there seemed called for, during the next few years, always staying in Aalborg, of course. I valued the U.S.-Danish alliance very much.


    In the process, I discovered that the Cimbrian Friends, along with other members of the Klubben in Copenhagen, were devotees of another addiction of mine, P. G. Wodehouse. This was a fairly new one for me, but one of long standing for Henry and Aage, and to Bjarne and Niels-Jorgen in Copenhagen, and no doubt others. They had Sherlock Holmes collections, of course — Aage’s particularly impressive one included obscure items I wouldn’t have guessed had ever found their way out of the United States. But they all had Wodehouse collections as well. I realized I was among kindred spirits indeed, but was curious about it. Why, I finally asked them, was there such an
obvious affinity for English things in Denmark? Aage’s reply was the best one imaginable, one I’ve never forgotten, and have repeated many times elsewhere: England, he said, used to be a Danish country.


    That year, sooner than he had good reason to, Henry made me an honorary member of the Sherlock Holmes Klubben. I have been a financial drain upon Sherlockiana, and now Bjarne Rother Jensen, ever since. But I appreciate receiving Sherlockiana even if I don’t read Danish: it reminds me, each time an issue arrives, of both absent friends and the universality of Sherlock Holmes. I have not only my Klubben membership card signed by Henry in 1980, but a second one he gave me so I could mount them together, front and back, as you see here. It’s a membership of which I have always been proud.


Henry is gone now, and I realize the Cimbrian Friends knew him better than I. But I want to remember three things about Henry tonight. One was his artwork. What a wonderfully talented cartoonist and caricaturist he was! And how generous with his time and talent! I know he enjoyed drawing Sherlock Holmes subjects, but he never hesitated when asked to do one or two, or even more, for somebody else. In the 1980s when I co-edited Baker Street Miscellanea, he did any number of drawings for our pages, and everyone loved the humor in them. Not only did they amuse in their own right, you could see behind them a highly benevolent spirit in the artist.


    So it meant a great deal to me, on my first visit to Aalborg, when he insisted upon adding me to his galleries of Sherlock Holmes’s and Dr. Watson’s admirers. I used one of his caricatures of me on my personal stationery for years, until its striking resemblance fell victim to my increasing years, expanding waistline, and thinning hair. I used another in this 1980 article for Baker Street Miscellanea called “Sherlock
Holmes in Scandinavia,” which also included Henry’s caricatures of Aage here in Aalborg, Nils Nordberg in Oslo, Ted Bergman in Stockholm, and Henry himself — not to mention his colophon for The Cimbrian Friends of Baker Street. People throughout the Sherlockian world today recognize and prize Henry’s work, and I think always shall. Its charm is too great to be forgotten.


    The second matter is a letter that I and six other American honorary Klubben members — Peter Blau, Ron De Waal, Bill Rabe, Ted Schulz, John Bennett Shaw, and Julian Wolff — sent Henry for his 80th birthday in 1988, after he had announced his retirement as Klubben president at the previous January’s dinner in Copenhagen. He’d sent the Klubben a subsequent letter saying that henceforth he would take it easy at the Klubben’s dinners and meetings, and perhaps enjoy an extra cigar and an extra drink. Our letter congratulating him upon his birthday was accompanied by the best box of cigars and best bottle of cognac our agents in Denmark could buy, for Henry with our compliments and love — perishable gestures of an imperishable affection for him.


    In his reply, he said he knew I had written the letter, and it warmed my heart to know he realized that. But while it had been my privilege and honor to write it, it expressed the view of all seven of us: in fact initially eight, but Bliss Austin — a prince of the realm if ever the Baker Street Irregulars have had one — had died before Henry’s birthday came round. Irregulars Stand upon the Terrace for many comrades, but there have not been many who meant as much as Henry did. I am glad to be here tonight to help keep his Memory green.


    And I hope The Cimbrian Friends have archives, because I want to donate these letters to and from and about Henry to them. They belong here, to be preserved for the benefit of those to come who did not have the good fortune to know him.


    The last thing I want to recall, because nothing has ever taken their place, were the books Henry created and sent to his friends every Christmas — beautiful chapbooks that he took great pains over, about not only Sherlock Holmes but many other interests of his as well, like tobacco, and horse-racing, and of course Wodehouse’s characters and stories. These books took time, effort, care, and expense to produce, each one was a different facet of his personality, they were greatly valued by all who received them, and nothing has ever taken their place in the hearts of those fortunate enough to count Henry Lauritzen as a friend.


Time flies, of course, and leaves its mark upon us all. I no longer look much like the thin young man in Henry’s caricature from 1980. Having lost friends along the way, I am glad to return to Aalborg to see the Rieck-Sørensens again.


    When I first attended the BSI annual dinner in New York in 1973, the custom of Standing upon the Terrace was new to me. That night it was for men I hadn’t known, not even their names. But the years pass, and that changes. Eventually one Stands upon the Terrace for people we have come to know, then soon for people we’ve come to consider friends, and eventually for people we’ve come to love. It is a bittersweet thing, year by year, making you realize that we are part of a great procession of men and women who have at the very least one thing in common, but that that is a very great and wise thing: we all perceive something special in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and not only in them, but in each other.


    It was Christopher Morley who first made explicit that aspect of our pastime, in 1944 in the sub-title he gave to a new book of his, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. It was the first of his many books to be entirely devoted to Sherlock Holmes, and the first attempt by anyone to annotate the Canon for readers less familiar with the Victorian era, which must have seemed very distant in that fateful year of the Second World War. 


    Yet something else besides Victoriana was on his mind: a reflection about the essential nature of the Sherlock Holmes stories, prompting him to give his book the sub-title A Textbook of Friendship. In his introduction to it, Morley called the Canon “a unique portrait of a friendship and of a civilization.”


    That friendship between Holmes and Watson means a great deal to us. You see that in the way we react to Sherlock Holmes movies, for example. A movie’s other positive qualities don’t compensate very much, as far as we’re concerned, if it gets the Holmes-Watson relationship wrong. Nigel Bruce was a likeable old dodderer, and might be all right for the great unobservant public, who can hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, but he was not the Canon’s Watson, no matter how good a Sherlock Holmes Basil Rathbone made.


    And we forgive a lot about a Sherlock Holmes movie if it gets that aspect right. There is much silliness in the recent one with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, but most Sherlockians seem to feel the two actors got the Holmes-Watson relationship right, that the friendship was manifest there, and are ready to accept some more silliness in a sequel in order to see Downey and Law play Holmes and Watson together again.


    Not long ago I needed to deal with this issue of friendship, as applies to Sherlockians themselves, in an historical novel about the Baker Street Irregulars that will be published this autumn. A young man in 1934 has met the Irregulars, and badly wants to be one, but confesses to Christopher Morley that he doesn’t know the Canon as well as Morley and his friends. That’s not the crucial thing, Morley tells him. “Look at the others,” he says: “Everyone discovered Sherlock Holmes in boyhood, striking a chord that vibrates to this day. Nothing in our lives since — careers, experience of war, occasionally crushing family responsibilities — effaces the memory of boyhood wonder and delight. Nor the adult conviction that if Holmes and Watson and 221B Baker Street weren’t real, they ought to have been.” 


    And because the relieved young man had felt that way himself as a boy, he wins the place he wants in the BSI: “It’s not the stories’ details,” Morley tells him: “Some of us know them less well than you. It’s something more. When the Sherlock Holmes stories seize someone this way, it’s because they speak to his fundamental values and ideal of friendship. That’s what the stories are really about, friendship. And in hard times like these, that’s very important to hold onto.”


    Those specific words are mine, not Christopher Morley’s, but the thought was his. I could put those words in his mouth in good conscience because I knew he had felt that way, and because I knew them to be true myself. I knew that because I have seen that Irregular friendship at work around me, and felt it myself, for forty years now. I felt it strongly in Aalborg the first time I came here, a warmth that has never left me. It is why I am here tonight. The principle was as true then, and as true now, as it was in 1944 for Morley, in a world and time far more fractured and troubled than today’s. 


    I am glad to be here tonight, and see old friends from far and near. I’m glad to meet new friends, from lands I have not yet visited, but hope to. I’m glad to be able to speak to you about Henry Lauritzen, my friend still even though long departed. Irregular friendships, drawn from the priceless, timeless one between Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson, exist across geography, cultural borders, and even time. Our devotion to that body of timeless, imperishable literature is an expression of the possibility and value of friendship. It is what abides each time the tales have all been read again, and the book placed back on our shelf, until the time we take it down again for the next reading. It is what brings us together tonight on this occasion, and will again at future times and places.


    Thank you very much, and God bless the Cimbrian Friends of Baker Street and the memory of our dear friend Henry Lauritzen.







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