The Isaacson Spectrum
Plus: "The Adventure of Silver Blaze!"
Thanks for reading Big Reader Bad Grades! This is another installment in my “Reading Sherlock” series, in which I’m reading chronologically through Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories and responding to each one with an essay. If you like the work here, you can check out my new/debut novel Cubafruit, which as of this week is finally available both as an ebook ($4.99) and in paperback ($15)!
1.
In the past five or six years most of my closest friends have begun to wonder if, and then usually made the decision that, they are autistic.
“Most of my closest friends” means exactly six people.
They all, in conversation, have used the phrase “my autism,” and then given it verbs, agency:
“keeps me from”
“allows me to”
“makes it so that”
I realize it sounds suspicious, everybody doing this at once, but I’ve known them long enough to see the rationale. To remember those formative episodes they cite as explanation; the compulsions, fixations, hardships and habits.
It certainly brings them solace, having a name for this thing, this experience, that’s become increasingly acute as they’ve gotten older, but always kinda there, even as kids in school; this thing, seemingly inside them, that made other people feel so remote.
2.
A different close friend of mine, in his 70s, has confided over the years some of the generational travails he’s seen among his own close friends; his contemporaries; people born in the 1940s and ‘50s; a generation for whom the word “alcoholic” sounded like squishy lib sensitivity.
One day over lunch he told me about being frustrated with the junior employees at his company. I won’t mention the industry but it’s notorious for destroying its workers’ lives. Hustle culture.
They have to get continuing education credits about how to recognize alcoholism in their own behavior.
He was annoyed at his millennial colleagues because of what he said was an obsessive preoccupation with their own mental health. He hated that they spoke casually about antidepressants, ignored emails after 6 p.m.
He said these are Ivy Leaguers from the top 1—3% of their graduating class. They work 50 hours a week. He knows they’re not bullshitters but there’s something self-coddling about them that he just can’t stand. The way they talk.
What he implied was that his generation wasn’t like this; isn’t like this; that they’re not only more discreet about mental health, but have fewer issues altogether.
I mentioned some of his peers that he’d told me about in the past, floored with depression. Electroshock treatments, antipsychotics, two-month stays in “resorts” with tall iron fences. I mentioned that he personally experienced a week of distracted shock after one of his jovial contemporariess showed up to work one day, said hello to everyone and gossiped in the break room, performed five dutiful hours at his desk and then went home for lunch, to his high rise apartment, where he set his briefcase and phone on the kitchen counter before walking off the balcony.
He told me it was different and we left it at that.
3.
Steve Jobs might have been on the autism spectrum, and there’s literature saying that Albert Einstein was on the spectrum, and Elon Musk says the same of himself—all of which might suggest at least one commonality among Walter Isaacson’s biography subjects.
I tried to interview Isaacson about his book The Codebreaker. I told him I was doing a readthrough of his biographies, beginning with his huge, forgotten, scholarly Kissinger (1992), and then on through Benny Frank and Einstein and Jobs and Da Vinci. I said that I would love to have him on the podcast to discuss his work.
He wrote back one sentence:
“Allow me to decline,”
which I’d never heard before. Couldn’t tell if it was gallant or offputting. Still can’t.
4.
I wrote to Pamela Paul (then of The New York Times) after reading her book My Life with Bob. I really liked the book and I mentioned that there’d been a sentence in the middle that I could not get out of my head.
I kept repeating the sentence at work and then my friends started saying it.
This was the sentence:
“We lumbered back to the yurt.”
Pamela Paul did not respond.
Pamela Paul does not seek allowance before declining.
5.
Some have speculated that Sherlock Holmes is on the autism spectrum while detractors have argued that Sherlock Holmes cannot be autistic because he does not exist.
Whatever the case, “The Adventure of the Silver Blaze” (1892) is one of my favorite Holmes stories to date, despite some discouraging early pages in which Watson—Holmes’s assistant and the narrator of all these adventures—hands him what millennials like myself call “the aux,” meaning a platform for burdening a captive audience with stuff you want to hear. Holmes is thinking aloud in a monologue that’s incredibly boring—but it’s interesting from the perspective of authorial choice; i.e., why does the author want to hurt us?; because this glimpse of Holmes’s internal monologue reveals a practical element of Conan Doyle’s storytelling that I hadn’t considered: it might be fun to watch a genius do genius work, but to hear a genius think would naturally be quite foreign and incomprehensible to us.
The monologue is just very systematic and droning and computational—which, again, to Conan Doyle’s credit, provides an honest-seeming idea of what it might be like to inhabit Sherlock Holmes’s mind: awful.
This is perhaps another thing Isaacson’s subjects have in common.
6.
The story involves a horse that’s gone missing on the eve of a high-stakes race, and one of the horse’s trainers/keepers, John Straker, who’s found dead on the…farm? Ranch?
The grounds. His skull is caved in; he’s been stabbed in the thigh with his own pocket knife.
It’s been a while, at this point, since Conan Doyle wrote a Holmes mystery in which
a dead body is found,
the evidence and circumstances are analyzed,
a culprit pursued/apprehended.
and so it feels like a return to form; and I suspect Conan Doyle knew that, because “Adventure of Silver Blaze” is the opening story of a whole new collection, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, despite the fact that, like the previous eleven stories, “Silver Blaze” was published in 1892. December, thank God.
The end of a cycle.
7.
It’s also the start of a new one. I’m going off Wikipedia here but it looks like Conan Doyle committed to another cycle of monthly Holmes stories for The Strand magazine as soon as the 1892 cycle ended.
This is the cycle where he reaches the end and says fuck it: kills Sherlock Holmes in “The Final Problem.”
I’d heard, anecdotally, about ACD killing off Holmes. At the time, I thought it was a choice born of resentment about Holmes’s popularity. The vibe I get from simply reading these stories, however, and knowing he was churning them out monthly, is that he must’ve simply been zapped of energy by the time he finished this 1893 cycle. He wanted to write other stuff.
Anyway. It turns out the killer in this story, again, is an animal!
An interesting new development in the canon, however: our victim is also the villain! He was leading the horse to a private spot on the property and planning to use his tiny knife to discreetly nick a tendon or something—-Conan Doyle’s vague about it, which is fine, since the point is conveyed well-enough.
He probably didn’t know the actual anatomical slice that this villain would’ve had to make on the horse but, if he did, there might’ve been some editorial discretion against publishing the details.
Allegedly, as producer on the remake of The Hills Have Eyes (2004), Wes Craven told the young French director, Alexandre Aja, that he couldn’t film a scene from the script in which the mutant killers (aka the titular “Eyes” in the “Hills”) were going to put a kitten in a blender and then drink the mess.
Craven got agitated when pressed about it. He said, “If you put that on screen, I’m telling you, someone will do it.”
He was afraid someone would actually blend up a kitten and drink it.
Would that’ve happened? Probably not. But Craven was traumatized by the murder of Cassie Jo Stoddart, a teenager who was stabbed to death by two classmates who said they were inspired by Craven’s ‘96 movie Scream.
Anticipating the nightmares of Craven and Salinger, Conan Doyle kept mum on how best to hinder a horse.
Focused, instead, on telling a good story.
We lumbered back to the yurt. So weirdly satisfying.
My kids have all self-diagnosed themselves as autistic. We've got a whole lot of sexual and gender stuff, some ADHD, a gym bro, some budding bipolarity and now autism. Gen Z is busy. Humans are messy. And labels do seem to make the mess a little more bearable.
Great read.