Top Bananas

By R.Z. Sheppard

Only yesterday we were up to our erogenous zones in joy and on our way to that ultimate sensuous bestseller, the Japanese vibrator cookbook. Yet a look at the current bestseller list makes clear that the overwhelming new theme in nonfiction is survival. The variations include plane-crash survivors in the Andes, the avoidance of heart attacks, how to drive the moths of "stagflation" from your wallet and preserve your business through better management, not to mention ways and means of hanging on to your marbles by being your own best friend. In addition, there are big books about three of the most durable survivors of the century: Rose F. Kennedy, Harry S. Truman and William O. Douglas.

Despite such glum uniformity, literary oddities, spectacular unsellers, and even books that are totally bananas continue to appear. Here are three of the season's riper exotics.

> Samuel Rosenberg's Naked Is the Best Disguise: The Death and Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes (Bobbs-Merrill; $8.95) is one of the more ingenious rummagings through the great detective's lodgings at 221 B Baker Street. Rosenberg is an amateur literary bloodhound who once made his living heading off plagiarism suits for a film company--by proving that both plaintiff and defendant had stolen from older sources. He now makes a most convincing case that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the ex-eye doctor who created the world's most famous sleuth, was really "a compulsive self-revealing allegorist." Rosenberg unearths both hard and agreeably circumstantial evidence that Conan Doyle modeled the evil Professor Moriarty on Friedrich Nietzsche --not because the philosopher was a criminal but because Doyle's Vic torian conservativeness was offended by Nietzsche's ideas about Ubermenschen who were beyond good and evil.

In The Final Problem, Rosenberg argues, Holmes' description of Moriarty's academic achievements are thinly disguised parallels of Nietzsche's attainments. A later Conan Doyle criminal, Col. Sebastian Moran (see The Adventure of the Empty House), is given Nietzsche's physical characteristics (a high forehead, "the brow of a philosopher," and a huge grizzled mustache. With the vitality of a dog grinding a juicy bone, Rosenberg goes on to extract from the 60 Sherlock Holmes stories strong influences from Oscar Wilde, Catullus, Robert Browning, Racine, Poe, Mary Shelley, George Sand and even Jesus Christ.

> In Who Lies Here? (Putnam; $6.95), Author Thomas G. Wheeler picks bones of a more literal sort. His quite confident contention is that Napoleon's tomb at the Invalides never contained the body of the Emperor. The corpse reburied there in 1840 was a look-alike named Eugene Robeaud. This impostor, an infantryman chosen by Napoleon's secret police to stand in for the Emperor at various ceremonial and public functions, was eventually smuggled onto St. Helena in 1818 and substituted for the exiled Napoleon as a British prisoner. According to Wheeler, Robeaud soon died of arsenic poisoning. The real Napoleon secretly sailed to Rio de Janeiro and eventually returned to Europe, where he lived as a diamond merchant in Verona.

Much of Wheeler's argument is based on folk legend, alleged intrigues and half-formed plots to free Napoleon yet another time. But what is convincing is Wheeler's enthusiasm for a subject in whose name nearly as much ink has been spilled as blood.

> In The Beginning Was the End (Praeger; $7.95), the enthusiasm of Author Oscar Kiss Maerth spills over in red ink. The book, subtitled Man came into being through cannibalism--intelligence can be eaten, bears all the markings of pristine eccentricity: a big theme, a closed system of self-perpetuating logic, a disdain for accepted thought, no specific scientific references, no index and no bibliography. Kiss Maerth, who is described as a man born in Yugoslavia who spent many years in a Chinese Buddhist monastery and now lives at Lake Como, seems never to have heard of Lamarckian biology, T.D. Lysenko's bogus theory that Communism could be inherited as an acquired characteristic, or even about the lowly planarian worms, which were forced to cannibalize their siblings in hope that their modest laboratory lessons would be passed on to future generations.

Like a placard bearer of apocalypse, he foretells man's doom from his bloody beginnings. The thesis: man evolved from perverted apes who ate the brains of other apes. Brains being an aphrodisiac, they increased the sex drive, which in turn increased the need for more brain food. This diet increased the size of the ape man's brain and his intelligence. Unfortunately, the skull did not increase as fast as the brain, and the resulting pressure distorted man's view of himself as a part of nature. The squeezed-brain syndrome gave rise to man's Faustian saga in which cannibalism became the way to knowledge and power.

Kiss Maerth binds his ideas together with a most inventive use of scattered, fragmentary data and his own obviously passionate conviction. It is quite a read, though persons on a low cholesterol diet might care to pass it up.

sbR.Z. Sheppard

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