Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Introduction

  1: The Empty Chair

  2: The Cobbler’s Lapstone

  3: The Great Northern Diver

  4: A Man of Doubtful Antecedents

  5: Three Pounds of Furniture and a Tin of Corned Beef

  6: “You Have Been in Afghanistan, I Perceive”

  7: A Traveler from Slattenmere

  8: A Singularly Deep Young Man

  9: Reams of Impossible Stuff

  10: The Two Collaborators

  11: The Tremendous Abyss

  12: A Skeleton in the Garden

  13: Mr. Irving Takes Paregoric

  14: Duet with an Occasional Chorus

  15: Thoughts He Dare Not Say

  16: The Helpful Mud Bath

  17: The Footprints of a Gigantic Hound

  18: The Bondage of Honor

  19: A Perfectly Impossible Person

  20: The Ruthless Vegetarian

  21: England on Her Knees

  22: An Audible Voice

  23: The Flail of the Lord

  24: Is Conan Doyle Mad?

  25: Away with the Fairies

  26: Pheneas Speaks

  27: The Ectoplasmic Man

  28: A Packet of Salts and Three Bucketfuls of Water

  29: The Case of the Missing Lady

  30: The End of the World

  Epilogue: A Well-Remembered Voice

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Also by Daniel Stashower

  Copyright

  For Miss Corbett—one last Conan Doyle anecdote

  Perhaps the greatest of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries is this: that when we talk of him we invariably fall into the fancy of his existence. Collins, after all, is more real to his readers than Cuff; Poe is more real than Dupin; but Sir A. Conan Doyle, the eminent spiritualist of whom we read in Sunday papers, the author of a number of exciting stories which we read years ago and have forgotten, what has he to do with Holmes?

  —T. S. ELIOT

  PREFACE

  Not long ago, in the London showroom of a dealer in rare books, I asked to have a look at a first edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles. No price was posted, but I knew that a “bright and unrubbed” copy could go for £600, so my interest was largely theoretical. The assistant manager—an indulgent, friendly sort of person—opened the glass display case and waited patiently as I fingered the brittle volume. After a moment, when I handed it back, she mentioned that there might be some other Conan Doyle material in the back room. If I could wait a moment while she helped another customer, she would check with the manager. After five minutes or so, when my scan of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves brought me as far as Thackeray, I happened to find myself outside the manager’s open door. “There’s a customer out front,” I heard the assistant say. “He’s interested in Conan Doyle.”

  “Oh, God,” came the answer. “It must be an American.”

  I freely confess to being an American. But I’m not entirely sure why an interest in Conan Doyle should reveal this to a rare book dealer. Was it because only an American could afford the prices he was asking? Or was it, as his tone suggested, that only an American, with an American’s suspect tastes in literature, would be interested in a second-rater like Conan Doyle?

  It was not the first time I’d had this reaction. Many times over the past five years I’ve presented myself at British book shops and auction houses as a collector of Conan Doyle material—always taking care to look under D for Doyle, but also C for Conan Doyle, the compound surname he preferred. The response is invariably polite, but it generally carries a quiet note of sympathy, as though I’d just confessed some exotic intestinal complaint. “Conan Doyle? Well, Sherlock Holmes was brilliant, but Doyle went a bit potty at the end, didn’t he? Fairies, ghosts, and that.”

  “Fairies, ghosts, and that” have been the millstone of Conan Doyle’s reputation for the better part of a century. Toward the end of his life, Conan Doyle came to believe that communication with dead souls was possible. His efforts to spread this message, which he considered the most important work of his life, proved to be his undoing. The British public watched with growing incredulity as he made one foray after another into the spirit realm. On any given day he might pronounce upon a ghostly photograph of fallen World War I soldiers, or speculate on a possible literary collaboration with the late Charles Dickens. In America, where such reports were less frequent, it was possible to remain sympathetic, if bemused. In Britain, the general public’s tolerance began to fray. “Poor Sherlock Holmes,” ran one headline, “Hopelessly Crazy?”

  The result was inevitable. Though Sherlock Holmes remains a colossus among cultural icons, Conan Doyle, once the most popular author of his generation, has been sharply downgraded. In Edinburgh, where Walter Scott is commemorated with a towering Gothic monument, Conan Doyle’s birthplace is marked by a statue of his fictional detective. The White Company and Sir Nigel, the books Conan Doyle regarded as his finest work, are seldom read. Conan Doyle’s portrait is not currently displayed at London’s National Portrait Gallery. Though such decisions owe something to the quality of the portraits involved, it seems curious that Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Daphne du Maurier are all on view while Conan Doyle remains in storage.

  Conan Doyle once declared that he would gladly sacrifice whatever literary reputation he enjoyed if it would bring about a greater acceptance of his spiritualist message. To a large extent, he made the sacrifice without achieving the objective. The critic Sherman Yellen, writing of Conan Doyle’s spiritualist novel The Land of Mist in 1965, offered a view shared by many: “The Land of Mist demonstrates that Conan Doyle had made his greatest sacrifice to his Spiritualist beliefs; he had relinquished his literary power to it.”

  Any writer who would address this delicate topic must first declare a position on the paranormal. I should admit, then, that I have never had any traffic with the spirit realm, that I am a supporter of the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, and that it has been some years since I believed in fairies. At the same time, I also belong to the Society for Psychical Research, I once shook hands with Uri Geller, and some of my closest friends claim to be psychic. I consider myself, then, a cordial disbeliever.

  None of which diminishes my regard for Conan Doyle in any way. Like most of his admirers, my introduction came through Sherlock Holmes. In fact, at the age of eleven I sported a deerstalker hat, carried a magnifying glass in my pocket, and was much given to declarations of “Brilliant deduction!” and “Elementary!”—which greatly endeared me to teachers, friends, and family. Some time later, as I was rereading The Valley of Fear for perhaps the ninth time, I noticed on the title page that the author had some twenty or thirty other books to his credit. I found a copy of The Lost World at my local library and never looked back.

  Sooner or later, though, every Conan Doyle fan bumps up against The Vital Message or The Edge of the Unknown or one of the author’s many other spiritualist works. Most readers simply shrug and look elsewhere, and only a very singular taste would prefer Conan Doyle’s two-volume History of Spiritualism to The Ad
ventures of Sherlock Holmes. In my own case, after dutifully slogging through The Wanderings of a Spiritualist, I found myself wondering about the author’s state of mind. As John Dickson Carr wrote in 1949, echoing the popular attitude of Conan Doyle’s contemporaries, “For a quarter of a century he had loomed thick-shouldered as the sturdy Briton, with no damned nonsense about him. What was wrong? What ailed the man?”

  The answer, like the man himself, was far more complicated than it first appeared. Yes, Conan Doyle lost a son in the First World War and, like so many others, sought consolation in the séance room. This was not, however, where his involvement began. Conan Doyle’s interest in the spirit realm took root some thirty years earlier, well before his son’s birth. This interest was by no means unique; the Society of Psychical Research was already a going concern when Conan Doyle joined in 1893, and its members included prominent scientists, philosophers, members of Parliament, and a future prime minister. For many years Conan Doyle was a mere dabbler in psychic research. He experimented with table-tipping and automatic writing as possible methods of contacting the spirits, and had a short-lived interest in mesmerism and thought transference. Only later, when the testimony of those closest to him erased his lingering doubts, did he become a zealous crusader. For many, he became the living embodiment of the spiritualist craze, rather than its most vocal proponent. His outspokenness, weighed against the cool logic of Sherlock Holmes, seemed to invite public scorn.

  “We who believe in the psychic revelation,” he wrote near the end of his life, “and who appreciate that a perception of these things is of the utmost importance, certainly have hurled ourselves against the obstinacy of our time. Possibly we have allowed some of our lives to be gnawed away in what for the moment seemed a vain and thankless quest. Only the future can show whether the sacrifice was worth it.”

  “Personally,” he added, “I think it was.”

  If Conan Doyle’s generation was quick to dismiss his queer ideas, our own generation—with its power crystals, White House astrologers, and Area 51—must admit to harboring some queer ideas of its own. It is too much to say that Conan Doyle’s vision of a spiritualist utopia has come to pass, nor is it likely that it ever will. The question is not whether we must accept Conan Doyle’s beliefs to understand the man. The question is whether it is now possible, nearly seventy years after his death, to examine this aspect of his life with sympathy rather than derision.

  Personally, I think it is.

  INTRODUCTION

  One morning in 1930, not long before his death, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle struggled to his writing desk and reached for pen and paper. He had done a great deal of writing in the previous months—mostly personal correspondence and letters to the press—but that morning he decided instead to try his hand at a sketch. He worked at it for some time, squinting intently over a troublesome detail or a tricky bit of lettering, gazing from the window when inspiration flagged. At length he set down his pen and pushed the drawing aside.

  Today, a copy of the sketch hangs in London’s Sherlock Holmes pub. It shows a flea-bitten workhorse pulling a heavy baggage cart. A tall pile of packing cases weighs the cart down, and each case bears the label of a different aspect of Conan Doyle’s life and work. “Medical Practice” is piled alongside “Historical Novels.” “Elections” rests on top of “Psychic Research.” “Tales” and “Drama” prop up “Poems” and “The Great War.” Perhaps the heaviest case in the pile is the one sandwiched in between “500 Lectures” and “Australia 1921.” It reads: “Sherlock Holmes.”

  Self-pity played no part in Conan Doyle’s character. Moreover, his heartfelt belief in spiritualism left him with no fear of death. But though his drawing strikes a lighthearted, self-deprecating tone, there is an unmistakable note of melancholy at its core. Conan Doyle came from a long line of artists—his grandfather was a pioneer of political caricature—and he knew the value of a well-chosen image. This was how he viewed himself as death approached: a draft animal hauling a cart. And Sherlock Holmes, his legendary fictional detective, was just another piece of heavy cargo.

  Conan Doyle had lived long enough to realize that Sherlock Holmes would, in Watson’s phrase, “eclipse and predominate” the rest of his work. Already the historical novels by which he hoped to be remembered had fallen out of fashion, and his poetry, plays, and wartime chronicles had largely disappeared from view. His dedication to spiritualism, and his vigorous campaign to spread his beliefs to others, had taken a heavy toll on his reputation as a serious man of letters. Many found it difficult to reconcile that the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the “perfect reasoning and observing machine,” could have given himself so wholly to a cause that appeared to defy logic. A man who espoused such ideas, it seemed, could not be taken seriously as a writer.

  In person, however, Conan Doyle seemed the very model of reason and sincerity. Interviewers were struck by his easy manner and lack of pretension. As he grew older, and thicker around the middle, Conan Doyle’s heavy eyelids and drooping mustache made him look more and more like a genial walrus. “He was a great, burly, clumsy man,” wrote one friend, “with an unwieldy-looking body that was meant for a farm bailiff, with hands like Westphalian hams, and a nervous halting voice whose burrs recalled the banks and braes of Scotland.”

  His looks were deceiving. Behind the placid, sleepy-eyed demeanor was a man of strong convictions, some of them absurd, all of them deeply felt. Conan Doyle’s life had been a series of hard-fought crusades, of which spiritualism was only the latest. In 1890, he warned against an ill-tested cure for tuberculosis. In 1902, he defended the British government against charges of misconduct in the Boer War. In 1906, he championed the cause of divorce law reform. In 1909, he spoke out against atrocities in the Congo. In 1910, he took up the case of Oscar Slater, a man falsely accused of murder. In 1914, he warned against the potentially devastating effects of a submarine blockade. In each case Conan Doyle fought his corner with skill and resourcefulness, marshaling whatever advantages could be wrought from his fame and natural eloquence. Many of his causes were unpopular, but Conan Doyle’s private sense of honor mattered more to him than public opinion. “He seemed to us,” his daughter Jean once wrote, “to be the very personification of the chivalry of the stories of King Arthur’s Round Table.”

  It was probably not how he would have described himself. The Strand magazine, where the bulk of Conan Doyle’s work first saw print, took a poll of its leading writers in 1927. Of all the characters of literature, the editors asked, which one would you most like to have created?

  H. G. Wells put forward the name of Shakespeare’s Falstaff, as did John Buchan. Compton Mackenzie expressed his preference for Don Quixote. The names of D’Artagnan, Don Juan, and Robinson Crusoe were raised by other prominent writers. Conan Doyle’s answer, as the editors of The Strand were quick to point out, was “characteristic of him as a writer and a man.” Conan Doyle gave the name of Colonel Newcome, a character from a Thackeray novel published shortly before his birth. The reason was simple. This character, Conan Doyle said, was “an ideal English gentleman.”

  Conan Doyle was not English—his family was Irish, and he himself had been born in Scotland—but he was very much a gentleman. In a sense his own character had been molded with greater care and ambition than that of Sherlock Holmes, Brigadier Gerard, Professor Challenger, or any of his other fictional heroes. It projected his natural decency, and expressed a wistful strain of nostalgia for the orderly values of a previous age. Of all his novels, he most prized the historical romances that celebrated the Regency period or the Napoleonic era. In later life, this insistence on old-fashioned values and propriety caused some to regard him as a quaint, if charming, old party, somewhat out of step with the times. Conan Doyle lived until 1930, but he remains fixed in the popular imagination as a figure of gaslight and hansom cabs. The final decade of his life saw the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby, Ulysses, and To the Lighthouse. Conan Doyl
e, by contrast, published a book in which undersea explorers travel to Atlantis.

  And through it all, Sherlock Holmes, whose adventures he considered to be “on a different and humbler plane” from the rest of his books, continued to thrive. “I’ve written a good deal more about him than I ever intended to do,” Conan Doyle said in 1927, forty years after Holmes first saw print, “but my hand has been rather forced by kind friends who continually wanted to know more. And so it is that this monstrous growth has come out, out of what was really a comparatively small seed.”

  Indeed, this “monstrous growth” had long since taken on a life of its own. “Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are household words; both names have passed into the language,” remarked H. Greenhough Smith, Conan Doyle’s editor at The Strand. “This is a feat any author might feel proud of. Sherlock Holmes, without question, is the most familiar and most widely known character in English fiction.” Even the Times of London, celebrating the great detective’s longevity in 1930, felt compelled to offer a word of consolation to Conan Doyle’s other creations: “Those who follow the fortunes of Rodney Stone, of the White Company, of the Brigadier Gerard, of Micah Clarke, and a crowd of others, share momentous events by the side of intimate friends, and this double gift of providing at once good company and stirring deeds is displayed by Conan Doyle in his short stories as well as his books. Seeing what perils they ran, and how nobly, it is easy to understand the resentment of the rest of the Conan Doyle characters that pride of place must always be yielded to a lean and somewhat inhuman scientific student of crime, living not in the brave and brutal fourteenth century or at the heart of the Napoleonic epic, but amid the hansom cabs and street urchins of the London of the later eighties.”

  Today, Sherlock Holmes has become a cultural archetype—like Robin Hood, Romeo and Juliet, or the Three Musketeers. Children in Zaire and Tibet recognize his image as easily as that of Santa Claus or Mickey Mouse. He has been featured in countless books, movies, television programs, musicals, stage plays—even a ballet. The familiar hawk-nosed profile appears on teapots, chess pieces, dinner plates, board games, computer programs, and chewing gum packages. He has acquired a cult of followers whose devotion borders on the mystical. Sherlockians, as they call themselves, can be found in every corner of the globe—and, increasingly, on the Internet—discussing such matters as the depth to which a sprig of parsley might sink in butter on a hot day or the true location of Dr. Watson’s strangely transient war wound. Ask a Holmes buff for news of the giant rat of Sumatra and he or she will answer, gently, that it is a tale for which the world is not yet prepared.