IRREGULAR MEMORIES OF THE ’THIRTIES Published 1990 by Fordham University Press, 267 pp. Out of Print. This second volume of the Archival History series startled us: we had printed 500 copies of the first volume, and 500 of this one, announcing its publication in October. Less than three months later the entire run was sold out, with none for sale at the BSI dinner in January where many Irregulars had expected to purchase it, making it the scarcest volume of the entire series. We upped the press run to 750 copies with the next one. This volume most closely resembles a scrapbook, and was probably the most fun to do, but it made clear to me how naive my original view of this undertaking was. I had imagined that I could probably find enough material to do a decent 250 pp. book covering my objective years of 1934-1960. This book was that length and only got through 1940, and I’d already begun to find far more contemporary correspondence than I had ever dreamed. But it was fascinating, and I settled in the for long haul. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: “FOR IT IS ALWAYS 1934” 1. “AN AGREEABLE AMUSEMENT” An unpublished memoir by Christopher Morley. — Notes. — “Clinical Notes of a Resident Patient,” by Morley — Notes. 2. THE IRREGULAR UPBRINGING AND TASTES OF CHRISTOPHER MORLEY Essay, by Steven Rothman. — Notes. 3. THE ORIGIN OF 221B WORSHIP Reminiscences, by Robert K. Leavitt: Part I, The Chaldean Roots; Part II, Our own Dear Little Girlie Becomes a) Legitimate, b) the Subject of Unmitigated Bleat. — Notes. 4. BEFORE THE RISE: THE GRILLPARZER BOOK Essay, by George Fletcher: The Relic; On the Record; A Bit of Prehistory; Written History; The Evidence; A Tally; Conclusion. — Notes. 5. “OUR ORGAN IS THE SATURDAY REVIEW OF LITERATURE” Essay, by Peter E. Blau. — including excerpts from “The Bowling Green,” and the Constitution and Buy-Laws of the Baker Street Irregulars. — Notes. 6. THE SHERLOCK HOLMES CROSSWORD Essay, by Albert and Julia Rosenblatt. — Notes. (See also the back cover for the Crossword itself, as solved in 1934 by Katherine McMahon.) 7. THE SHERLOCK HOLMES SOCIETY Report, by R. Ivar Gunn. — Notes. 8. THE FIRST BSI ANNUAL DINNER: A COMPENDIUM OF REPORTS Preprandial correspondence by Logan Clendening and Vincent Starrett. — The dinner programme. — An A.P. dispatch, by Charles Honce. — Further remarks by Mr. Honce. — Excerpts from an article by Edmund Pearson. — An anecdote by Bennett Cerf. — Reminiscences by Frederic Dorr Steele, from “Sherlock Holmes in Pictures.” — Postprandial correspondence by Creighton Barker, M.D., Gray Chandler Briggs, M.D., Vincent Starrett, and Frederic Dorr Steele. — Report from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 9. THE BAKER STREET IRREGULARS Condescension (Christopher Morley’s term), by Alexander Woollcott. — An anecdote by Laurence P. Dodge. — “Woollcott and the Baker Street Irregulars,” by Vincent Starrett. 10. MOST IRREGULAR MEMBERSHIP Christopher Morley’s 1935 list. — Editorial analysis, and tally of the Missing. 11. THE BSI BRANCHES OUT “The Five Orange Pips of Westchester County,” by the late Richard W. Clarke. — Notes. 12. THE 1936 BSI DINNER: SOME HISTORY, MARGINALIA AND FANTASY Brief historical speculation. — The 1936 dinner programme. — Correspondence by Christopher Morley. — Excerpt from The Saint in New York, by Leslie Charteris. — “The Column Habit,” by Anonymous — “archy goes to a bsi dinner,” by Jean Upton. 13. BAKER STREET IRREGULARITIES Sub-titled “The Sacred Cult of Philo-sherlosophism,” by Henry Morton Robinson. — Refutation, by “Jabez Wilson. — Notes. 14. ENTER EDGAR W. SMITH Correspondence by Edgar W. Smith, Vincent Starrett, and Christopher Morley. — Notes. 15. 221B AND ALL THAT Editorial remarks. — Pre-publication correspondence by Christopher Morley, Frederic Dorr Steele, Edgar W. Smith, and Vincent Starrett. — “221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes,” remembered by Robert G. Harris. — Notes. 16. THE 1940 BSI DINNER! Editorial remarks. — Preprandial correspondence by Edgar W. Smith. — Edgar Smith’s notice of the dinner. — Smith’s minutes of the dinner. — The dinner programme. — Anecdotes by Frederic Dorr Steele. — Denis Conan Doyle at the dinner, by Will Oursler. — Postprandial correspondence by Edgar W. Smith and Vincent Starrett. — Attenta. 17. THE SPECKLED BAND OF BOSTON The scion’s tenth-anniversary history, by Anonymous (Boston branch). — Notes. 18. THE CASE OF THE BAKER STREET IRREGULARS Some passing epistolary curiosity by Edgar W. Smith. — Some excerpts from the novel by Anthony Boucher. — Contemporary review by the New York Times Book Review. — Post-publication correspondence by Edgar W. Smith. — Editorial remarks and Note. 19. THE ’THIRTIES BOW OUT. Correspondence by Edgar W. Smith. — A modern comment on Irregular zeal. — Correspondence by Vincent Starrett, Edgar W. Smith, Christopher Morley, and Denis Conan Doyle. 20. A FINAL WORD “The Baker Street Irregulars,” by Vincent Starrett. — Editor’s Farewell. INDEX Frank Morley’s Sherlock Holmes Crossword, published in the Saturday Review of Literature in May 1934 by Christopher Morley as the BSI’s first entrance exam, and as solved that month by Katherine McMahon, then of Elgin, Ill., who was invested in the BSI as “Lucy Ferrier”— in 1991. “For It Is Always 1934” “The whole matter is now hopelessly delightfully and permanently confused. Long may it so remain.” — Christopher Morley “Cut out the poetry, Watson. I note that it was a high brick wall.” — Sherlock Holmes How many readers know when the very first Sherlockian society was founded? It was not in 1934. The earliest of which we know was at the turn of the century, long before the Baker Street Irregulars. Fifty years later, its ringleader, a twelve-year-old called Kit at the time, recalled the “four schoolboys in Baltimore about the year 1902. They called themselves then, and still do, The Sign of the Four. One is now the senior professor of Greek at Harvard; one is a physicist of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, and knows more than anyone needs to know about undersea explosions; one is a renowned physician in Baltimore; and the last is your reporter.” (Some reminiscences of those turn-of-the-century Sherlockian days are contained in Kit’s semi-autobiographical novel Thorofare, published in 1943 by Harcourt, Brace.) Young Kit also indoctrinated his two younger brothers with a love for Sherlock Holmes, through secretive readings and quizzes in the attic of their parents’ home. Eventually Kit — Christopher Darlington Morley (1890-1957) — at-tended Haverford College outside Philadelphia, graduated with high honors, went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and was there in 1912 when a young don named Ronald Knox made himself a campus celebrity with a witty paper on a subject dear to Kit’s heart: “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes.” Returning to America, Morley began a double career. One was in literature: he was already a published poet, and now he began to write novels as well. And he took up journalism for a living, joining the New York Evening Post in 1920 with his own column of literary criticism and gossip, “The Bowling Green.” By the mid-’Twenties, Christopher Morley was nationally known and quite busy. He helped found the Saturday Review of Literature in 1924, serving as an editor along with his “Bowling Green” column (later joined by a second one about the publishing world, “Trade Winds”). He had made a splash in 1917 with his bestselling novel Parnassus on Wheels, and was following it up every year with one or two new books, some of them bestsellers as well: The Haunted Bookshop, Three’s a Crowd (with Earl Derr Biggers, later the creator of Charlie Chan), Where the Blue Begins, Pandora Lifts the Lid (with Don Marquis), Thunder on the Left, Seacoast of Bohemia, and others. But what Chris Morley liked to do best, it seemed, was to eat lunch. Long lunches, with lots of friends from the worlds of books and art. Morley, unlike some bookish people, was the most gregarious of men, and drew others to him irresistibly. He soon turned his lunches into an institution called the Three Hours for Lunch Club, and spread its fame through his column, which reported on the club’s personalities, peregrinations through Manhattan eateries, and cross-table banter about books and plays and the people who wrote them — often the very same people lunching and yakking with him on a given day. A good many other bookish and artistic types were regular members of Morley’s breezy club: Gene Tunney the Shakespeare-quoting prizefighter, Buckminster Fuller, America’s Twentieth-Century Renaissance Man, Jo Davidson the sculptor, Don Marquis the humorist, Stephen Vincent Benét the poet — even T. S. Eliot, when he was on these shores (in London, he shared publisher’s offices at Faber & Faber with Chris Morley’s brother Frank). Sherlock Holmes may not have been much on Christopher Morley’s mind when he was starting his career, but by the mid-’Twenties his interest was beginning to revive. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was writing new Holmes stories, and everyone was reading them. Morley once more found, as he wrote later, that “one of the blissful ways of passing an evening, when you encounter another dyed-in-the-blood addict, is to embark on the happy discussion of minor details of Holmes-iana”; evidence that Morley’s old exegetical spirit was picking up — the impulse to treat the Canon as historical truth, and revel in its details — began to appear in his Saturday Review of Literature columns from 1926 on. Then in 1930, the Irregular Decade began: soon after Conan Doyle’s death in July, Morley was commissioned to write a preface for Doubleday, Doran’s forthcoming Complete Sherlock Holmes. The deal was struck in a Manhattan speakeasy “somewhere in the Fifties,” as Morley stood at the bar with a few fellow Holmes-devotees from Doubleday. (I like to think it was the speakeasy on 52nd Street where Nick and Nora Charles rendezvoused on the opening page of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man.) Morley agreed to write the preface if the fee were enough for him to go to London and revisit Baker Street. It was, and his preface, “In Memoriam: Sherlock Holmes” still graces the volume. The early ’Thirties were exciting years for devotees of Sherlock Holmes, and not for the Complete edition alone. There was also William Gillette, performing his deathless melodrama Sherlock Holmes one long last time, as his Farewell Tour was cheered across the country. There was Sherlock Holmes on the radio for the first time, and Sherlock Holmes on screen with Arthur Wontner and others portraying him. And for the truly devoted, books about Sherlock Holmes began to appear — best of all, Vincent Starrett’s immortal Private Life of Sherlock Holmes in 1933. It was clear that the great detective was indeed what Chris Morley, in “In Memoriam,” had called him, “the triumphant illustration of art’s supremacy over life.” By now the Three Hours for Lunch Club had spun off another, smaller luncheon club, the Grillparzer Sittenpolizei Verein — the Grillparzer Morals Police Association — so-called because Morley had deployed an old book about Franz Grillparzer the Austrian dramatist, picked up at a bookstall, as the club’s record-book: members and guests would open it at random, underline likely looking passages, write appropriate remarks in the margins, and sign, and Morley would endorse it by affixing to the spot some handy if incongruous seal. (At least this has been the theory; we shall see that the practice was somewhat different.) The Grillparzer Club’s habitueés were more often than not Holmes fans, and the GSPV luncheons became more and more Sherlockian — until finally the Baker Street Irregulars spun out of it, centrifugally, and into life on their own, at a cocktail party at the Hotel Duane, on Madison Avenue, on January 6, 1934; called by Christopher Morley (in his column in the Saturday Review of Literature) to celebrate Sherlock Holmes’s birthday. That cocktail party, in the large sense, is still going on today. But it is startling to realize that in 1934, the founders of the Baker Street Irregulars were considerably closer to the Victorian era, in which they had all been born, than we are to them today. It was just a youthful thirty-one years from Sherlock Holmes’s retirement from practice in 1903 to the BSI in 1934; it has been a middle-aged fifty-six years since Christopher Morley and his cronies created the whisky-and-sodality in which we continue to imbibe today. Most Sherlockians have a certain sense for the Victorian era, since for us it is always 1895, but perhaps less, at this remove, for the more recent decade in which the BSI was born. Let us try, then, to recall the ’Thirties, and the Founding Year of 1934, before proceeding with this history. I was born half a dozen years after that decade, in 1946, growing up in a world immeasurably changed by World War II and its aftermath. But I inherited a nostalgic fascination for the ’Thirties from my parents, who had loved that decade, and communicated that love to me. My father was thirty years old at the beginning of the ’Thirties, my mother twenty-six. They were well positioned by age and rising professional standing to enjoy the good things that the ’Thirties had to offer, in a city a bit notorious at that time for its nightlife, its speakeasies, its genially corrupt government (and, thanks to the song “Kansas City,” its crazy little women, of whom Jean Harlow was a fine ’Thirties example). It wasn’t that they were oblivious to the unhappy aspects of the ’Thirties. They had worked their way through the Depression’s hard times; they were conscious of intractable economic and social problems through the rest of the decade, and beyond; and they watched with foreboding the march of the dictators in Europe and Asia. But they loved the ’Thirties nonetheless. They were young and independent and unencumbered. For a few years they actually enjoyed moving from apartment to apartment every six months, for the fun of living in different neighborhoods, until in 1935 they built their dreamhouse. They shared the self-confidence and optimism that FDR gave the nation, that the worst was past and things were on the upswing again. They celebrated the reopening of the banks and the end of Prohibition. (Probably they had not paid much attention to it prior to Repeal anyway.) They enjoyed traveling, in the era’s comfortable cars and elegant trains, boarding the Zephyr several times a year to winter in Florida and summer in Colorado. They admiringly recalled the trains especially, with their cozy sleeping cars, spotless gleaming dining cars, and smart club cars — travel that speaks volumes about a way of life we have all but lost in our hectic, utilitarian, ulcerous modern world. They were young and fashionable and knew it, and made the most of it. They loved music, and loved to dance. They lived in a city famous for its jazz, and they never missed an engagement when Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, the Dorsey brothers, and other national bands came to town. They went to the movies constantly, particularly to see, when the stars were all fresh and new, William Powell and Myrna Loy, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, Katherine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart, Laurel & Hardy and W. C. Fields, among others. They listened to Amos ’n’ Andy, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Fireside Chats, Lights Out, and Inner Sanctum on the radio; read the American Mercury and The New Yorker; and picked up new novels by Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Rex Stout as they appeared in the bookshops. They loved the look and feel of the decade, too. Art Deco was the style, and “Eberson Amber” light bathed the interior of theaters, clubs and restaurants in a dreamy golden glow. They played tennis and golf. They drove streamlined convertibles with running boards. They spent a good deal to dress smartly — double-breasted suits and silk frocks, de rigeur gloves and hats, in a time when people dressed up just to go out shopping. They embraced the happy illusion that the entire world could make itself comfortable and elegant and entertaining for everyone, and that it intended to do exactly that. They lived a kind of Nick-and-Nora style in the ’Thirties (minus the airedale) that one might give a great deal indeed to recapture today, if only it were possible. Even their names, Jack and Jessie, echoed Nick and Nora’s debonair approach to life. In that long-lost setting the Baker Street Irregulars were born. 1934 was, for most people, a welcome year of recovery after trying times. FDR had been President for a year. Fiorello LaGuardia was mayor of New York. Open betting was legalized at New York racetracks. Prohibition ended in December ’33, some ten thousand pre-Repeal prohibition cases were stricken from court dockets in ’34, and the cocktail was out in the open again. The Queen Mary was launched. John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Bonnie & Clyde were tearing up the countryside, but all would fall before the end of the year. A wave of new aviation records were being set, and the United States could now be crossed in barely more than twelve hours. Serious literature, led by writers like William Faulkner and Robert Frost, was jostling with a surge of popular culture whose best works have also endured the changing times and tastes of decades. George Gershwin and Cole Porter were in their prime. P. G. Wodehouse was going strong. Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert swept the Oscars. Mystery fans had Dashiell Hammmett’s The Thin Man, Rex Stout’s first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, S. S. Van Dine’s Casino Murder Case, Ellery Queen’s Chinese Orange Mystery, and James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice to chose from (not to mention three Perry Mason novels by Erle Stanley Gardner that year). Perhaps the movies are the best artifacts of the ’Thirties for fantasists like ourselves, capturing on film the look, spirit, and hopes and dreams of the decade: William Powell and Myrna Loy paired up as Nick and Nora Charles for the first time in 1934 in The Thin Man, Carole Lombard and John Barrymore gave birth to Screwball Comedy as they sped across the country in Twentieth Century, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers glided across the screen in The Gay Divorcee, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi chilled everyone’s blood in The Black Cat, and Ronald Colman personified the English Clubland Hero in Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back. The history of the Baker Street Irregulars’ first decade is hard to piece together. In the ’Forties and ’Fifties, Edgar W. Smith would keep minutes of the BSI annual dinners, but in the ’Thirties they seldom bothered. In fact, between 1936 and 1940, the BSI did not even bother to call a dinner — not that that meant the end of Irregular fervor. But for the ’Thirties we have scant records, mainly memories, fragile and fugitive things. I have done my best to assemble and comment on them in this volume. They include Chris Morley’s and other Irregulars’ memoirs of the BSI’s origins and early days; correspondence during the ’Thirties between Morley, Vincent Starrett, Frederic Dorr Steele, Logan Clendening, Gray Chandler Briggs, and Edgar W. Smith; some contemporary newspaper and magazine articles (with all too typical errors and omissions); plus some original works of Sherlockian scholarship and imaginative writing. Readers will find that the account provided by this book jumps in and out of chronological order, makes occasional dashes into the ’Forties, and even the ’Fifties, and is occasionally repetitious, when events are discussed by more than one participant. I tender my apologies. I could have cut here and snipped there to avoid such things, but the result would have been a thinner broth. The one proffered here is, I believe, the richer for ignoring such blemishes. I trust that readers will make the best of it. They may find that it goes down best to the accompaniment of clinking ice cubes in highball and Oldfashioned glasses. There is a good deal we don’t know about the BSI of the ’Thirties, and many unanswered questions will be obvious. Readers are therefore reminded that a central purpose of these BSI archival histories is to assist further research by others, and not to stand as the final word on the subject. Answers to many questions no doubt exist Out There somewhere, in unexamined newspapers and correspondence and diaries. It was not possible, for example, to go through Vincent Starrett’s papers, now at the University of Minnesota Library; they are likely to be a treasure trove of material. Another very important Baker Street Irregular of the era, Elmer Davis, was a public figure, and his papers may rest in some library or archive. Buckminster Fuller’s, I believe, are somewhere in Los Angeles. And so on. I hope, therefore, that the game will be afoot for many Sherlockians. Within six months of the publication last year of “Dear Starrett—”/“Dear Briggs—”, the first volume in this series, I received from its readers enough related material for a companion volume; and we hope to publish it also in this series, in due course. The present volume would hardly exist at all, were it not for the generous assist-ance of others. I am especially grateful to those who contributed original essays to this volume (and for much appreciated assistance of other kinds!): Steven Rothman, George Fletcher, Peter Blau, Jean Upton, and Robert G. Harris. In addition, John Bennett Shaw, Glen Miranker, Dan Posnansky, Tom Galbo, Hugh T. Harrington, Bjarne Nielsen, and Thomas L. Stix, Jr., made available for publication in this book rare, often unique, materials from their collections. Wayne B. Swift, William I. Howe, and my wife provided invaluable technical assistance and advice of various kinds. Ronald B. De Waal’s Bibliographies have been, as always, absolutely vital to the effort. And many others helped me in many ways: William R. Cochran, Catherine Cooke, Joseph Eckrich, Ted Friedman, Robert S. Gellerstedt, Jr., Paul Gitlin, Mrs. William S. Hall, Stanley MacKenzie, Allen Mackler, Andrew Malec, Katherine McMahon, Karl E. Meyer, W. T. Rabe, Albert M. Rosenblatt, William P. Schweickert, Paul Singleton, Bruce Southworth, Peter L. Stern, Michael F. Whelan, Mrs. Phyllis White, and Burt Wolder. My apologies to anyone I have forgotten among the many Sherlockians who have helped me. From the book: Ch. 12, The 1936 BSI Dinner: Some History, Marginalia, and Fantasy The HISTORY of the 1936 dinner is perforce brief, because we know very little about it. At least we are certain that it took place, for a programme survives, signed by a good number, if not necessarily all, of those who attended. It is reproduced in the following pages. It is interesting to speculate about how Christopher Morley obtained the envelope addressed to Sherlock Holmes [depicted on the programme]. Richard Lancelyn Green’s book Letters to Sherlock Holmes (Penguin, 1985) says that the Abbey National Building Society in Baker Street had begun to receive mail addressed to Holmes the year before, and it may be that this particular specimen was sent to Morley by Archie Macdonell, of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, or by his brother Frank, working in that city at Faber & Faber. Of the signatures in the programme, a few are hard to make out, but most are familiar to us. Joining the expected crowd of Morley’s Irregulars were a few other favorites of his, Don Marquis the humorist, Stephen Vincent Benet the poet, and Isaac Mendoza the bookseller, kinsprits all, we can be sure. A representative number of the Crossword Puzzle winners were present again as well. While we know nothing about the program that night, Henry James Forman was present, and it is not too much to suspect that the 1936 dinner was the occasion for his paper “The Creator of Holmes in the Flesh” which appeared a few years later in Vincent Starrett’s BSI anthology 221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes (Macmillan, 1940). MARGINALIA: This turned out to be the last BSI dinner held at Christ Cella’s restaurant. By the time the BSI called another dinner, several years later, a new venue had to be found. As Chris Morley put it somewhat unchronologically in his acerbic 1949 essay “On Belonging to Clubs”: “The quiet speakeasy where we met was trampled into covercharge by runners and readers and their dames . . . our simple punchinello (Christ Cella) died of ambitious hypertension”—though that was sometime later, after Cella had moved his restaurant to different quarters. We have already heard, in Robert K. Leavitt’s essay, about the important role that Christ Cella’s restaurant played in the story of Chris Morley’s luncheon clubs. Morley reminisced about Cella in a late 1947 letter to Edgar W. Smith: I should like to say something, when appropriate [at the next BSI dinner], about old Christ Cella, in whose speakeasy on 45 Street the earliest mtgs of the BSI were held. He died some time while I was abroad, maybe in October. He is part of the Blue Carbuncle saga because it was he who provided the Goose which was cooked for our 1st Xmas dinner, 1935 or whenever it was [December 7, 1934], and how baffled he was when (after hunting all over town) I found in a Woolworth’s on Nassau Street (down town) the exact sort of blue-glass star-jewel, an awful thing with pseudo-iridiumpointillists which he was to cook, inside the goose. That certainly shook him. He pleaded and promised himself to do do it, and he got it inside the entrails of the Goose somehow, so that when it was carved (by me) it appeared as phaenomenon. But I never could explain to old Christ why it had to be done . . . . I feel to remind you-all sometimes, that those who have known the BSI since they became so throngy and thrombotic, must sometimes remember the humble origins of the fathers of the Church. From Baker Street Miscellanea, No. 66, Summer 1991, reviewed by W. T. Rabe: Irregular Memories of the ’Thirties An Archival History of the Baker Street Irregulars’ First Decade 1930-1940. A Compendium of Old and New Essays, Newspaper and Magazine Accounts, and an Unsolved Mystery or Two Having said thus, and noting further that the 267 page, indexed paperback’s press run of 500 copies, published in mid-October 1990, was already sold out by the 1991 BSI dinner in New York last January, what is left for this reviewer to say? His Holiness the Pope, when speaking ex cathedra, need consult only four primary sources to get at The Truth. Jon Lellenberg, to bring us The Word of the beginnings of the Baker Street Irregulars, must plow through scores of “eye-witness” accounts — letters, newspaper clippings, and magazine articles — and ex post facto reports: all subject to the alcoholic haze and morning-after indigestion common to those who gather to celebrate Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson. For years we have heard how Alexander Woollcott attended the BSI’s first annual dinner on December 7,1934, and gained the scorn of many members —but not why; how Christopher Morley ignored (some say crumpled up and discarded) successful workings of that famous Saturday Review of Literature Sherlock Holmes Crossword submitted by members of the female sex — or did he?; and how the Doyle Boys came to hate, despise, and otherwise disapprove of the Baker Street Irregulars and all its pomps and works. Now, we say, opening this volume, let us learn The Truth. Alas: such is not to be. As Lellenberg murmurs at the conclusion of his eighth chapter, “we shall probably never have all the answers.” But, do we want The Truth? Do we need The Truth? The whole Truth was not to be found in writings about Sherlock Holmes by Dr. Watson, whose cover-ups, uncorrected typographical errors, lapsa lingua, and fumbling-stumblings are the very meat and bone that have made the Higher Criticism possible for Sherlockians of all scions, races, creeds, and colors. Without these lapses in Sherlockian reportage we would be lost on a sea of fact. Can we expect more of Lellenberg’s sources? No, I say. What he has given us is enough. It is enough to read Woollcott’s New Yorker report of that first BSI annual dinner, and emendations by Vincent Starrett and Christopher Morley. It is enough to learn — however great the shock upon first seeing the word — that Edgar W. Smith addressed Morley as “Porky.” It is good to hear how Christ Cella’s restaurant, the BSI’s earliest venue, looked, felt, and smelled; how the Murray Hill Hotel later matched the spirit of the BSI; how that great milestone in Sherlockian scholarship, 221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes, came to be; how Edgar Smith, Rex Stout, and Julian Wolff, M.D., slipped into the BSI to become giants. There are many contributors, living and dead: Morley, Steve Rothman, Robert K. Leavitt, George Fletcher, Peter Blau, the Rosenblatts, R. Ivar Gunn, Charles Honce, Frederic Dorr Steele, Smith, Starrett, Jean Upton, Robert G. Harris, and many others. But it is Lellenberg who ties this melange together, whose annotations are indeed copious, and also informative, witty, and exhaustive. And it is to Series Editor Jon Lellenberg, through the mouth of Vincent Starrett, that we give our last word: “let us speak, and speak again, of Sherlock Holmes!” (Lellenberg will do so again later this year in No. 3 of this series. He announced at the most recent Birthday Dinner that he has gathered so much material from archives and Irregulars everywhere that the next volume may not span a decade in the history of the BSI, perhaps not even half a decade, or not yet a year: maybe — with luck — the first month.) The late Bill Rabe (“Colonel Warburton’s Madness”) was the founder of The Old Soldiers of Baker Street (The Old SOBs), creator of the BSI annual dinner weekend institution of Mrs. Hudson’s Breakfast, devisor and first promulgator of Voices of Baker Street, editor of the Sherlockian Who’s Who & What’s What, and author of many other works, including We Always Mention Aunt Clara (1990). Return to Books Return to the Welcome page

IRREGULAR MEMORIES OF THE ’THIRTIES

Published 1990 by Fordham University Press, 267 pp.

Out of Print.

This second volume of the Archival History series startled us: we had printed 500 copies of the first volume, and 500 of this one, announcing its publication in October. Less than three months later the entire run was sold out, with none for sale at the BSI dinner in January where many Irregulars had expected to purchase it, making it the scarcest volume of the entire series. We upped the press run to 750 copies with the next one.

This volume most closely resembles a scrapbook, and was probably the most fun to do, but it made clear to me how naive my original view of this undertaking was. I had imagined that I could probably find enough material to do a decent 250 pp. book covering my objective years of 1934-1960. This book was that length and only got through 1940, and I’d already begun to find far more contemporary correspondence than I had ever dreamed. But it was fascinating, and I settled in the for long haul.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: “FOR IT IS ALWAYS 1934”

1. “AN AGREEABLE AMUSEMENT”

An unpublished memoir by Christopher Morley. — Notes.

— “Clinical Notes of a Resident Patient,” by Morley — Notes.

2.THE IRREGULAR UPBRINGING AND TASTES

OF CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

Essay, by Steven Rothman. — Notes.

3. THE ORIGIN OF 221B WORSHIP

Reminiscences, by Robert K. Leavitt: Part I, The Chaldean Roots;

Part II, Our own Dear Little Girlie Becomes a) Legitimate,

b) the Subject of Unmitigated Bleat. — Notes.

4. BEFORE THE RISE: THE GRILLPARZER BOOK

Essay, by George Fletcher: The Relic; On the Record; A Bit of

Prehistory; Written History; The Evidence; A Tally; Conclusion.

— Notes.

5. “OUR ORGAN IS THE SATURDAY REVIEW OF LITERATURE”

Essay, by Peter E. Blau. — including excerpts from “The Bowling

Green,” and the Constitution and Buy-Laws of the Baker Street

Irregulars. — Notes.

6. THE SHERLOCK HOLMES CROSSWORD

Essay, by Albert and Julia Rosenblatt. — Notes. (See also the back cover for the Crossword itself, as solved in 1934 by Katherine McMahon.)

7.THE SHERLOCK HOLMES SOCIETY

Report, by R. Ivar Gunn. — Notes.

8. THE FIRST BSI ANNUAL DINNER: A COMPENDIUM OF REPORTS

Preprandial correspondence by Logan Clendening and Vincent Starrett.

— The dinner programme. — An A.P. dispatch, by Charles Honce. — Further remarks by Mr. Honce. — Excerpts from an article by Edmund Pearson. — An anecdote by Bennett Cerf. — Reminiscences by Frederic Dorr Steele, from “Sherlock Holmes in Pictures.” — Postprandial correspondence by Creighton Barker, M.D., Gray Chandler Briggs, M.D., Vincent Starrett, and Frederic Dorr Steele. — Report from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

9.THE BAKER STREET IRREGULARS

Condescension (Christopher Morley’s term), by Alexander Woollcott.

— An anecdote by Laurence P. Dodge. — “Woollcott and the

Baker Street Irregulars,” by Vincent Starrett.

10. MOST IRREGULAR MEMBERSHIP

Christopher Morley’s 1935 list. — Editorial analysis,

and tally of the Missing.

11. THE BSI BRANCHES OUT

“The Five Orange Pips of Westchester County,”

by the late Richard W. Clarke. — Notes.

12. THE 1936 BSI DINNER: SOME HISTORY,

MARGINALIA AND FANTASY

Brief historical speculation. — The 1936 dinner programme. — Correspondence by Christopher Morley. — Excerpt from The Saint in

New York, by Leslie Charteris. — “The Column Habit,” by Anonymous

— “archy goes to a bsi dinner,” by Jean Upton.

13. BAKER STREET IRREGULARITIES

Sub-titled “The Sacred Cult of Philo-sherlosophism,”

by Henry Morton Robinson. —

Refutation, by “Jabez Wilson. — Notes.

14. ENTER EDGAR W. SMITH

Correspondence by Edgar W. Smith, Vincent Starrett,

and Christopher Morley. — Notes.

15. 221B AND ALL THAT

Editorial remarks. — Pre-publication correspondence by Christopher

Morley, Frederic Dorr Steele, Edgar W. Smith, and Vincent Starrett. — “221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes,” remembered by Robert G. Harris.

— Notes.

16. THE 1940 BSI DINNER!

Editorial remarks. — Preprandial correspondence by Edgar W. Smith. — Edgar Smith’s notice of the dinner. — Smith’s minutes of the dinner.

— The dinner programme. — Anecdotes by Frederic Dorr Steele. —

Denis Conan Doyle at the dinner, by Will Oursler. — Postprandial correspondence by Edgar W. Smith and Vincent Starrett. — Attenta.

17. THE SPECKLED BAND OF BOSTON

The scion’s tenth-anniversary history, by Anonymous (Boston branch). —

Notes.

18. THE CASE OF THE BAKER STREET IRREGULARS

Some passing epistolary curiosity by Edgar W. Smith. — Some excerpts from the novel by Anthony Boucher. — Contemporary review by the New York Times Book Review. — Post-publication correspondence by

Edgar W. Smith. — Editorial remarks and Note.

19. THE ’THIRTIES BOW OUT.

Correspondence by Edgar W. Smith. — A modern comment on

Irregular zeal. — Correspondence by Vincent Starrett,

Edgar W. Smith, Christopher Morley, and Denis Conan Doyle.

20. A FINAL WORD

“The Baker Street Irregulars,” by Vincent Starrett.

— Editor’s Farewell.

INDEX

Frank Morley’s Sherlock Holmes Crossword, published in the Saturday Review of Literature in May 1934 by Christopher Morley as the BSI’s first entrance exam, and as solved that month by Katherine McMahon, then of Elgin, Ill., who was invested in the BSI as “Lucy Ferrier”— in 1991.

“For It Is Always 1934”

“The whole matter is now hopelessly delightfully and permanently confused.

Long may it so remain.” — Christopher Morley

“Cut out the poetry, Watson. I note that it was

a high brick wall.” — Sherlock Holmes

How many readers know when the very first Sherlockian society was founded? It was not in 1934. The earliest of which we know was at the turn of the century, long before the Baker Street Irregulars. Fifty years later, its ringleader, a twelve-year-old called Kit at the time, recalled the “four schoolboys in Baltimore about the year 1902. They called themselves then, and still do, The Sign of the Four. One is now the senior professor of Greek at Harvard; one is a physicist of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, and knows more than anyone needs to know about undersea explosions; one is a renowned physician in Baltimore; and the last is your reporter.” (Some reminiscences of those turn-of-the-century Sherlockian days are contained in Kit’s semi-autobiographical novel Thorofare, published in 1943 by Harcourt, Brace.)

Young Kit also indoctrinated his two younger brothers with a love for Sherlock Holmes, through secretive readings and quizzes in the attic of their parents’ home. Eventually Kit — Christopher Darlington Morley (1890-1957) — at-tended Haverford College outside Philadelphia, graduated with high honors, went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and was there in 1912 when a young don named Ronald Knox made himself a campus celebrity with a witty paper on a subject dear to Kit’s heart: “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes.” Returning to America, Morley began a double career. One was in literature: he was already a published poet, and now he began to write novels as well. And he took up journalism for a living, joining the New York Evening Post in 1920 with his own column of literary criticism and gossip, “The Bowling Green.”

By the mid-’Twenties, Christopher Morley was nationally known and quite busy. He helped found the Saturday Review of Literature in 1924, serving as an editor along with his “Bowling Green” column (later joined by a second one about the publishing world, “Trade Winds”). He had made a splash in 1917 with his bestselling novel Parnassus on Wheels, and was following it up every year with one or two new books, some of them bestsellers as well: The Haunted Bookshop, Three’s a Crowd (with Earl Derr Biggers, later the creator of Charlie Chan), Where the Blue Begins, Pandora Lifts the Lid (with Don Marquis), Thunder on the Left, Seacoast of Bohemia, and others.

But what Chris Morley liked to do best, it seemed, was to eat lunch. Long lunches, with lots of friends from the worlds of books and art. Morley, unlike some bookish people, was the most gregarious of men, and drew others to him irresistibly. He soon turned his lunches into an institution called the Three Hours for Lunch Club, and spread its fame through his column, which reported on the club’s personalities, peregrinations through Manhattan eateries, and cross-table banter about books and plays and the people who wrote them — often the very same people lunching and yakking with him on a given day. A good many other bookish and artistic types were regular members of Morley’s breezy club: Gene Tunney the Shakespeare-quoting prizefighter, Buckminster Fuller, America’s Twentieth-Century Renaissance Man, Jo Davidson the sculptor, Don Marquis the humorist, Stephen Vincent Benét the poet — even T. S. Eliot, when he was on these shores (in London, he shared publisher’s offices at Faber & Faber with Chris Morley’s brother Frank).

Sherlock Holmes may not have been much on Christopher Morley’s mind when he was starting his career, but by the mid-’Twenties his interest was beginning to revive. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was writing new Holmes stories, and everyone was reading them. Morley once more found, as he wrote later, that “one of the blissful ways of passing an evening, when you encounter another dyed-in-the-blood addict, is to embark on the happy discussion of minor details of Holmes-iana”; evidence that Morley’s old exegetical spirit was picking up — the impulse to treat the Canon as historical truth, and revel in its details — began to appear in his Saturday Review of Literature columns from 1926 on. Then in 1930, the Irregular Decade began: soon after Conan Doyle’s death in July, Morley was commissioned to write a preface for Doubleday, Doran’s forthcoming Complete Sherlock Holmes. The deal was struck in a Manhattan speakeasy “somewhere in the Fifties,” as Morley stood at the bar with a few fellow Holmes-devotees from Doubleday. (I like to think it was the speakeasy on 52nd Street where Nick and Nora Charles rendezvoused on the opening page of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man.) Morley agreed to write the preface if the fee were enough for him to go to London and revisit Baker Street. It was, and his preface, “In Memoriam: Sherlock Holmes” still graces the volume.

The early ’Thirties were exciting years for devotees of Sherlock Holmes, and not for the Complete edition alone. There was also William Gillette, performing his deathless melodrama Sherlock Holmes one long last time, as his Farewell Tour was cheered across the country. There was Sherlock Holmes on the radio for the first time, and Sherlock Holmes on screen with Arthur Wontner and others portraying him. And for the truly devoted, books about Sherlock Holmes began to appear — best of all, Vincent Starrett’s immortal Private Life of Sherlock Holmes in 1933. It was clear that the great detective was indeed what Chris Morley, in “In Memoriam,” had called him, “the triumphant illustration of art’s supremacy over life.”

By now the Three Hours for Lunch Club had spun off another, smaller luncheon club, the Grillparzer Sittenpolizei Verein — the Grillparzer Morals Police Association — so-called because Morley had deployed an old book about Franz Grillparzer the Austrian dramatist, picked up at a bookstall, as the club’s record-book: members and guests would open it at random, underline likely looking passages, write appropriate remarks in the margins, and sign, and Morley would endorse it by affixing to the spot some handy if incongruous seal. (At least this has been the theory; we shall see that the practice was somewhat different.) The Grillparzer Club’s habitueés were more often than not Holmes fans, and the GSPV luncheons became more and more Sherlockian — until finally the Baker Street Irregulars spun out of it, centrifugally, and into life on their own, at a cocktail party at the Hotel Duane, on Madison Avenue, on January 6, 1934; called by Christopher Morley (in his column in the Saturday Review of Literature) to celebrate Sherlock Holmes’s birthday.

That cocktail party, in the large sense, is still going on today.

But it is startling to realize that in 1934, the founders of the Baker Street Irregulars were considerably closer to the Victorian era, in which they had all been born, than we are to them today. It was just a youthful thirty-one years from Sherlock Holmes’s retirement from practice in 1903 to the BSI in 1934; it has been a middle-aged fifty-six years since Christopher Morley and his cronies created the whisky-and-sodality in which we continue to imbibe today. Most Sherlockians have a certain sense for the Victorian era, since for us it is always 1895, but perhaps less, at this remove, for the more recent decade in which the BSI was born. Let us try, then, to recall the ’Thirties, and the Founding Year of 1934, before proceeding with this history.

I was born half a dozen years after that decade, in 1946, growing up in a world immeasurably changed by World War II and its aftermath. But I inherited a nostalgic fascination for the ’Thirties from my parents, who had loved that decade, and communicated that love to me. My father was thirty years old at the beginning of the ’Thirties, my mother twenty-six. They were well positioned by age and rising professional standing to enjoy the good things that the ’Thirties had to offer, in a city a bit notorious at that time for its nightlife, its speakeasies, its genially corrupt government (and, thanks to the song “Kansas City,” its crazy little women, of whom Jean Harlow was a fine ’Thirties example). It wasn’t that they were oblivious to the unhappy aspects of the ’Thirties. They had worked their way through the Depression’s hard times; they were conscious of intractable economic and social problems through the rest of the decade, and beyond; and they watched with foreboding the march of the dictators in Europe and Asia.

But they loved the ’Thirties nonetheless. They were young and independent and unencumbered. For a few years they actually enjoyed moving from apartment to apartment every six months, for the fun of living in different neighborhoods, until in 1935 they built their dreamhouse. They shared the self-confidence and optimism that FDR gave the nation, that the worst was past and things were on the upswing again. They celebrated the reopening of the banks and the end of Prohibition. (Probably they had not paid much attention to it prior to Repeal anyway.) They enjoyed traveling, in the era’s comfortable cars and elegant trains, boarding the Zephyr several times a year to winter in Florida and summer in Colorado. They admiringly recalled the trains especially, with their cozy sleeping cars, spotless gleaming dining cars, and smart club cars — travel that speaks volumes about a way of life we have all but lost in our hectic, utilitarian, ulcerous modern world.

They were young and fashionable and knew it, and made the most of it. They loved music, and loved to dance. They lived in a city famous for its jazz, and they never missed an engagement when Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, the Dorsey brothers, and other national bands came to town. They went to the movies constantly, particularly to see, when the stars were all fresh and new, William Powell and Myrna Loy, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, Katherine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart, Laurel & Hardy and W. C. Fields, among others. They listened to Amos ’n’ Andy, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Fireside Chats, Lights Out, and Inner Sanctum on the radio; read the American Mercury and The New Yorker; and picked up new novels by Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Rex Stout as they appeared in the bookshops.

They loved the look and feel of the decade, too. Art Deco was the style, and “Eberson Amber” light bathed the interior of theaters, clubs and restaurants in a dreamy golden glow. They played tennis and golf. They drove streamlined convertibles with running boards. They spent a good deal to dress smartly — double-breasted suits and silk frocks, de rigeur gloves and hats, in a time when people dressed up just to go out shopping. They embraced the happy illusion that the entire world could make itself comfortable and elegant and entertaining for everyone, and that it intended to do exactly that. They lived a kind of Nick-and-Nora style in the ’Thirties (minus the airedale) that one might give a great deal indeed to recapture today, if only it were possible. Even their names, Jack and Jessie, echoed Nick and Nora’s debonair approach to life.

In that long-lost setting the Baker Street Irregulars were born. 1934 was, for most people, a welcome year of recovery after trying times. FDR had been President for a year. Fiorello LaGuardia was mayor of New York. Open betting was legalized at New York racetracks. Prohibition ended in December ’33, some ten thousand pre-Repeal prohibition cases were stricken from court dockets in ’34, and the cocktail was out in the open again. The Queen Mary was launched. John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Bonnie & Clyde were tearing up the countryside, but all would fall before the end of the year. A wave of new aviation records were being set, and the United States could now be crossed in barely more than twelve hours. Serious literature, led by writers like William Faulkner and Robert Frost, was jostling with a surge of popular culture whose best works have also endured the changing times and tastes of decades. George Gershwin and Cole Porter were in their prime. P. G. Wodehouse was going strong. Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert swept the Oscars. Mystery fans had Dashiell Hammmett’s The Thin Man, Rex Stout’s first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, S. S. Van Dine’s Casino Murder Case, Ellery Queen’s Chinese Orange Mystery, and James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice to chose from (not to mention three Perry Mason novels by Erle Stanley Gardner that year). Perhaps the movies are the best artifacts of the ’Thirties for fantasists like ourselves, capturing on film the look, spirit, and hopes and dreams of the decade: William Powell and Myrna Loy paired up as Nick and Nora Charles for the first time in 1934 in The Thin Man, Carole Lombard and John Barrymore gave birth to Screwball Comedy as they sped across the country in Twentieth Century, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers glided across the screen in The Gay Divorcee, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi chilled everyone’s blood in The Black Cat, and Ronald Colman personified the English Clubland Hero in Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back.

The history of the Baker Street Irregulars’ first decade is hard to piece together. In the ’Forties and ’Fifties, Edgar W. Smith would keep minutes of the BSI annual dinners, but in the ’Thirties they seldom bothered. In fact, between 1936 and 1940, the BSI did not even bother to call a dinner — not that that meant the end of Irregular fervor. But for the ’Thirties we have scant records, mainly memories, fragile and fugitive things. I have done my best to assemble and comment on them in this volume. They include Chris Morley’s and other Irregulars’ memoirs of the BSI’s origins and early days; correspondence during the ’Thirties between Morley, Vincent Starrett, Frederic Dorr Steele, Logan Clendening, Gray Chandler Briggs, and Edgar W. Smith; some contemporary newspaper and magazine articles (with all too typical errors and omissions); plus some original works of Sherlockian scholarship and imaginative writing. Readers will find that the account provided by this book jumps in and out of chronological order, makes occasional dashes into the ’Forties, and even the ’Fifties, and is occasionally repetitious, when events are discussed by more than one participant. I tender my apologies. I could have cut here and snipped there to avoid such things, but the result would have been a thinner broth. The one proffered here is, I believe, the richer for ignoring such blemishes. I trust that readers will make the best of it. They may find that it goes down best to the accompaniment of clinking ice cubes in highball and Oldfashioned glasses.

There is a good deal we don’t know about the BSI of the ’Thirties, and many unanswered questions will be obvious. Readers are therefore reminded that a central purpose of these BSI archival histories is to assist further research by others, and not to stand as the final word on the subject. Answers to many questions no doubt exist Out There somewhere, in unexamined newspapers and correspondence and diaries. It was not possible, for example, to go through Vincent Starrett’s papers, now at the University of Minnesota Library; they are likely to be a treasure trove of material. Another very important Baker Street Irregular of the era, Elmer Davis, was a public figure, and his papers may rest in some library or archive. Buckminster Fuller’s, I believe, are somewhere in Los Angeles. And so on. I hope, therefore, that the game will be afoot for many Sherlockians. Within six months of the publication last year of “Dear Starrett—”/“Dear Briggs—”, the first volume in this series, I received from its readers enough related material for a companion volume; and we hope to publish it also in this series, in due course.

The present volume would hardly exist at all, were it not for the generous assist-ance of others. I am especially grateful to those who contributed original essays to this volume (and for much appreciated assistance of other kinds!): Steven Rothman, George Fletcher, Peter Blau, Jean Upton, and Robert G. Harris. In addition, John Bennett Shaw, Glen Miranker, Dan Posnansky, Tom Galbo, Hugh T. Harrington, Bjarne Nielsen, and Thomas L. Stix, Jr., made available for publication in this book rare, often unique, materials from their collections. Wayne B. Swift, William I. Howe, and my wife provided invaluable technical assistance and advice of various kinds. Ronald B. De Waal’s Bibliographies have been, as always, absolutely vital to the effort. And many others helped me in many ways: William R. Cochran, Catherine Cooke, Joseph Eckrich, Ted Friedman, Robert S. Gellerstedt, Jr., Paul Gitlin, Mrs. William S. Hall, Stanley MacKenzie, Allen Mackler, Andrew Malec, Katherine McMahon, Karl E. Meyer, W. T. Rabe, Albert M. Rosenblatt, William P. Schweickert, Paul Singleton, Bruce Southworth, Peter L. Stern, Michael F. Whelan, Mrs. Phyllis White, and Burt Wolder. My apologies to anyone I have forgotten among the many Sherlockians who have helped me.

From the book:

Ch. 12, The 1936 BSI Dinner: Some History, Marginalia, and Fantasy

The HISTORY of the 1936 dinner is perforce brief, because we know very little about it. At least we are certain that it took place, for a programme survives, signed by a good number, if not necessarily all, of those who attended. It is reproduced in the following pages. It is interesting to speculate about how Christopher Morley obtained the envelope addressed to Sherlock Holmes [depicted on the programme]. Richard Lancelyn Green’s book Letters to Sherlock Holmes (Penguin, 1985) says that the Abbey National Building Society in Baker Street had begun to receive mail addressed to Holmes the year before, and it may be that this particular specimen was sent to Morley by Archie Macdonell, of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, or by his brother Frank, working in that city at Faber & Faber.

Of the signatures in the programme, a few are hard to make out, but most are familiar to us. Joining the expected crowd of Morley’s Irregulars were a few other favorites of his, Don Marquis the humorist, Stephen Vincent Benet the poet, and Isaac Mendoza the bookseller, kinsprits all, we can be sure. A representative number of the Crossword Puzzle winners were present again as well. While we know nothing about the program that night, Henry James Forman was present, and it is not too much to suspect that the 1936 dinner was the occasion for his paper “The Creator of Holmes in the Flesh” which appeared a few years later in Vincent Starrett’s BSI anthology 221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes (Macmillan, 1940).

MARGINALIA: This turned out to be the last BSI dinner held at Christ Cella’s restaurant. By the time the BSI called another dinner, several years later, a new venue had to be found. As Chris Morley put it somewhat unchronologically in his acerbic 1949 essay “On Belonging to Clubs”: “The quiet speakeasy where we met was trampled into covercharge by runners and readers and their dames . . . our simple punchinello (Christ Cella) died of ambitious hypertension”—though that was sometime later, after Cella had moved his restaurant to different quarters. We have already heard, in Robert K. Leavitt’s essay, about the important role that Christ Cella’s restaurant played in the story of Chris Morley’s luncheon clubs. Morley reminisced about Cella in a late 1947 letter to Edgar W. Smith:

I should like to say something, when appropriate [at the next BSI dinner], about old Christ Cella, in whose speakeasy on 45 Street the earliest mtgs of the BSI were held. He died some time while I was abroad, maybe in October. He is part of the Blue Carbuncle saga because it was he who provided the Goose which was cooked for our 1st Xmas dinner, 1935 or whenever it was [December 7, 1934], and how baffled he was when (after hunting all over town) I found in a Woolworth’s on Nassau Street (down town) the exact sort of blue-glass star-jewel, an awful thing with pseudo-iridiumpointillists which he was to cook, inside the goose. That certainly shook him. He pleaded and promised himself to do do it, and he got it inside the entrails of the Goose somehow, so that when it was carved (by me) it appeared as phaenomenon. But I never could explain to old Christ why it had to be done . . . . I feel to remind you-all sometimes, that those who have known the BSI since they became so throngy and thrombotic, must sometimes remember the humble origins of the fathers of the Church.

From Baker Street Miscellanea, No. 66, Summer 1991,

reviewed by W. T. Rabe:

Irregular Memories of the ’Thirties

An Archival History of the Baker Street Irregulars’ First Decade 1930-1940.

A Compendium of Old and New Essays, Newspaper and

Magazine Accounts, and an Unsolved Mystery or Two

Having said thus, and noting further that the 267 page, indexed paperback’s press run of 500 copies, published in mid-October 1990, was already sold out by the 1991 BSI dinner in New York last January, what is left for this reviewer to say?

His Holiness the Pope, when speaking ex cathedra, need consult only four primary sources to get at The Truth. Jon Lellenberg, to bring us The Word of the beginnings of the Baker Street Irregulars, must plow through scores of “eye-witness” accounts — letters, newspaper clippings, and magazine articles — and ex post facto reports: all subject to the alcoholic haze and morning-after indigestion common to those who gather to celebrate Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson.

For years we have heard how Alexander Woollcott attended the BSI’s first annual dinner on December 7,1934, and gained the scorn of many members —but not why; how Christopher Morley ignored (some say crumpled up and discarded) successful workings of that famous Saturday Review of Literature Sherlock Holmes Crossword submitted by members of the female sex — or did he?; and how the Doyle Boys came to hate, despise, and otherwise disapprove of the Baker Street Irregulars and all its pomps and works. Now, we say, opening this volume, let us learn The Truth.

Alas: such is not to be. As Lellenberg murmurs at the conclusion of his eighth chapter, “we shall probably never have all the answers.” But, do we want The Truth? Do we need The Truth? The whole Truth was not to be found in writings about Sherlock Holmes by Dr. Watson, whose cover-ups, uncorrected typographical errors, lapsa lingua, and fumbling-stumblings are the very meat and bone that have made the Higher Criticism possible for Sherlockians of all scions, races, creeds, and colors. Without these lapses in Sherlockian reportage we would be lost on a sea of fact. Can we expect more of Lellenberg’s sources?

No, I say. What he has given us is enough. It is enough to read Woollcott’s New Yorker report of that first BSI annual dinner, and emendations by Vincent Starrett and Christopher Morley. It is enough to learn — however great the shock upon first seeing the word — that Edgar W. Smith addressed Morley as “Porky.” It is good to hear how Christ Cella’s restaurant, the BSI’s earliest venue, looked, felt, and smelled; how the Murray Hill Hotel later matched the spirit of the BSI; how that great milestone in Sherlockian scholarship, 221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes, came to be; how Edgar Smith, Rex Stout, and Julian Wolff, M.D., slipped into the BSI to become giants.

There are many contributors, living and dead: Morley, Steve Rothman, Robert K. Leavitt, George Fletcher, Peter Blau, the Rosenblatts, R. Ivar Gunn, Charles Honce, Frederic Dorr Steele, Smith, Starrett, Jean Upton, Robert G. Harris, and many others. But it is Lellenberg who ties this melange together, whose annotations are indeed copious, and also informative, witty, and exhaustive.

And it is to Series Editor Jon Lellenberg, through the mouth of Vincent Starrett, that we give our last word: “let us speak, and speak again, of Sherlock Holmes!”

(Lellenberg will do so again later this year in No. 3 of this series. He announced at the most recent Birthday Dinner that he has gathered so much material from archives and Irregulars everywhere that the next volume may not span a decade in the history of the BSI, perhaps not even half a decade, or not yet a year: maybe — with luck — the first month.)

The late Bill Rabe (“Colonel Warburton’s Madness”) was the founder of The Old Soldiers of Baker Street (The Old SOBs), creator of the BSI annual dinner weekend institution of Mrs. Hudson’s Breakfast, devisor and first promulgator of Voices of Baker Street, editor of the Sherlockian Who’s Who & What’s What, and author of many other works, including We Always Mention Aunt Clara (1990).

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