Doctor Watson's Xanadu

 Long have Sherlockians puzzled and conjectured over Watson's marital situation, and the wife who is there, but not there, proposed to as "Mary Morstan" and never spoken of by name again. Such mysteries live on for years, decades even, in our minds . . . until some little thing, just one little innocent thing, triggers the answers that were there all along.

I have Max Magee to thank for this. During a recent film festival game of collecting four Sherlock Holmes movies to create a Sherlockian film festival, Max decided to make his film fest be:

1. Hound of the Baskervilles
2. Sherlock Gnomes
3. Xanadu
4. Heaven's Gate

The last two may seem plainly due to Max's roller skating fetish and his desire to make "Prince's Skating Club" from "The Adventure of the Red Circle" of Canonical importance. However the movie Heaven's Gate takes place in 1890, and features Ellen Watson, a Wyoming bordello manager who very well have been a cousin of Doctor Watson's should one remember certain authoritative treatises in The Baker Street Journal on Watson's American origins. But Xanadu, a 1980 musical filled with the fashion and music of the day?

Xanadu is the tale of a pretty blonde woman that skates into a man's life and inspires him to follow his creative dreams. And, it turns out she's a full on daughter-of-Zeus muse, who appears on Earth to with the sole purpose of doing that inspiration, something she's done throughout time.

So let's stop for a moment and think. John H. Watson met Sherlock Holmes in 1881, and worked with him for six years before he thought of writing and publishing his adventures with Holmes. No, that didn't happen until 1887. And what else happened to John Watson in 1887, according to so many notable Sherlockian chronologists?

He met a pretty blonde woman, whom even inspired Holmes as someone "who might have been most useful in such work as we have been doing."

There is a vision in the movie Xanadu of the muse Kira, in another era inspiring another artist four decades before. It makes it very easy to imagine yet another scene missing from the movie of Olivia Newton John in 1887, showing up in Baker Street with some pearls and a fever-dream of a case for Holmes and Watson. A pygmy with poison darts, a one-legged escaped prisoner, a treasure lost in a maritime (well, river maritime) battle . . . why wouldn't anyone start thinking of writing such things down?

But muses do not stay around forever, being magical creatures with a job to do. And after Watson seems to lose his writing spark in the mid 1890s, what is it that brings him back to taking pen in hand? 

"The good Watson had at that time deserted me for a wife, the only selfish action which I can recall in our association. I was alone."

Technically, one always has to wonder over those words "only selfish action," as Watson seems to have deserted Holmes for a wife twice. With a long gap in between which makes it hard to see as a gap in a single marriage to a normal woman in that era. But a muse, who would return to Mount Olympus and then one day return to inspire Watson again when the need seemed dire?

Mary Morstan . . . perhaps not the Terpsichore of Xanadu, but her sister who appears in the opening muse dance, Melpomene, whose name also features the double "M"s . . . the muse of tragedy. For isn't so much of Watson's work inspired tragedy? Murder, loss, love gone wrong?

Sherlockian chronologists have long watched Max Magee try to inspire Sherlockians to mix Back to the Future into the Sherlockian mythos somehow. Perhaps this time, however, he has hit upon the real vein of gold and the movie Xanadu finds ties to the Watson works that really do work . . .