Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  From Drayson’s perspective, then, any spirit phenomenon that did not stand up to close examination could simply be put down to “naughty” behavior. Furthermore, because the spirit realm mirrored our own world, any blatant deception on the part of a medium must also be excused. This uniquely pallid rationalization would be restated and embroidered by Conan Doyle for the rest of his life, enabling him to overlook countless shams and inconsistencies on both sides of the spirit divide.

  Not all spiritualists subscribed to Drayson’s views. In later years he would draw a fair amount of ridicule over his accounting of a strange psychic “apport”—a term used to describe the materialization of solid objects during a séance. In Drayson’s case, these apports took the form of eggs, fruit, and vegetables reputed to have arrived by way of Brooklyn, New York. This spirit produce appeared with such regularity, Drayson claimed, that “none had to be bought for the household.” Such phenomena were regarded with extreme suspicion even by the most sympathetic researchers. No less an authority than Frank Podmore, a leading light of the Society for Psychical Research, was to declare that “the history of materialisation, as far as professional mediums are concerned, is practically one unbroken line of fraud.”

  There is no evidence that Conan Doyle ever witnessed an apport in Drayson’s household, and when he learned of the claim he was frankly skeptical. “So amazing a phenomenon,” he wrote, “and one so easily simulated, was too much for a beginner, and it retarded rather than helped progress.”

  By this time, however, Conan Doyle had achieved independent results that convinced him of the underlying justice of Drayson’s beliefs, if not all of its manifestations. At Drayson’s urging, he continued to attend table-turning séances whenever possible. At one of these, a spirit who identified herself as Dorothy Postlethwaite came through, telling of her death five years earlier in Melbourne, Australia, at the age of sixteen. Miss Postlethwaite claimed to have been at school with one of the female sitters present at the séance, and proved her claim by spelling out the name of the headmistress of the school. Conan Doyle found this evidence extremely persuasive. Unfortunately, he gave no information at all about the other sitters at this gathering, as it would never have occurred to him to question their truthfulness. Since Miss Postlethwaite went on to reveal that the planet Mars is inhabited by a race far more advanced than our own, her testimony must be regarded with some degree of suspicion.

  At about this time, Conan Doyle had a second experience that he found even more convincing, since he could verify it personally. A pair of friends invited him to attend a demonstration with an elderly gentleman who was said to possess “considerable mediumistic power.” This, he declared, was the first time he had ever been in the presence of an actual medium, rather than a group of novices like himself. “On sitting,” Conan Doyle reported, “our medium came quickly under control, and delivered a trance address, containing much interesting and elevating matter. He then became clairvoyant, describing one or two scenes which we had no opportunity of testing. So far, the meeting had been very interesting, but not above the possibility of deception. We then proposed writing. The medium took up a pencil, and after a few convulsive movements, he wrote a message to each of us. Mine ran: ‘This gentleman is a healer. Tell him from me not to read Leigh Hunt’s book.’”

  It may seem odd that a spirit would manifest such concern over a sitter’s reading habits, but Conan Doyle attached remarkable importance to this message. For some days he had been debating with himself whether or not he should acquire a copy of Comic Dramatists of the Restoration, by the controversial essayist Leigh Hunt, which he would undoubtedly have seen as a source of background material for Micah Clarke. The fact that a medium he had never before met could make reference to his private thoughts, no matter how trivial those thoughts may have been, seemed to him to be a final, incontrovertible proof of spirit intervention.

  The incident so impressed Conan Doyle that he wrote a long account of the matter and sent it to Light, the journal of the London Spiritualistic Alliance. “I can swear that no one knew I had contemplated reading that book,” he wrote, “and, moreover, it was no case of thought-reading, for I had never referred to the matter all day. I can only say that if I had had to devise a test message I could not have hit upon one which was so absolutely inexplicable on any hypothesis except that held by Spiritualists.”

  He had now declared, publicly and without equivocation, that “it was absolutely certain that intelligence could exist apart from the body.” Having reached this conclusion, Conan Doyle found himself moved to new heights. “Let me conclude,” he wrote, “by exhorting any other searcher never to despair of receiving personal testimony, but to persevere through any number of failures until at last conviction comes to him, as come it will.… Above all, let every inquirer bear in mind that phenomena are only a means to an end, of no value at all of themselves, and simply useful for giving us assurance of an after-existence for which we are to prepare by refining away our grosser animal feelings and cultivating our higher, nobler impulses.”

  It may seem a dramatic leap from Leigh Hunt to the redemption of humankind, but this was precisely the leap Conan Doyle was preparing to take. He had abandoned the Catholic Church because he could not accept, as he said at the time, anything that could not be proved to him. Now, a two-line message from an unnamed medium gave him a form of proof he could accept. “After weighing the evidence,” he told the readers of Light, “I could no more doubt the existence of the phenomena than I could doubt the existence of lions in Africa, though I have been to that continent and have never chanced to see one.”

  Was this message really as definitive as Conan Doyle seemed to think? It is not possible to know how much digging the medium may have done in anticipation of the séance, or what sort of unconscious cues Conan Doyle may have given. Poe’s Monsieur Dupin had a similar knack of breaking in on private thoughts, and the year before, in A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes dismissed this talent as “showy and superficial.” Could Holmes have explained away the Leigh Hunt warning? Possibly.

  As for the medium’s other revelation—that Conan Doyle was a healer—Sherlock Holmes would have made short work of it. Not four years later, the detective was able to tell at a glance that Dr. Watson had returned to active practice: “[I]f a gentleman walks into my rooms smelling of iodoform, with a black mark of nitrate of silver upon his right forefinger, and a bulge on the right side of his top hat to show where he has secreted his stethoscope, I must be dull indeed if I do not pronounce him to be an active member of the medical profession.”

  “When I hear you give your reasons,” Watson remarked on that occasion, “the thing always appears to me to be so remarkably simple that I could easily do it myself.”

  8

  A Singularly Deep Young Man

  There’s money in ears, but the eye is a gold mine.

  —JAMES CULLINGWORTH IN THE STARK MUNRO LETTERS

  “Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirtcuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.”

  With these words, perhaps the most notorious in all of detective fiction, Conan Doyle revived the career of Sherlock Holmes and touched off an enduring controversy. Was Sherlock Holmes a drug addict, as the opening passage of The Sign of the Four appears to suggest? If so, to what extent were his abuses based on those of Conan Doyle himself?

  Much has been written about Sherlock Holmes and his seven-percent solution of cocaine diluted in water. The subject has been raised in the pages of The Lancet and the American Journal of Surgery, and no less a critic than George Bernard Shaw was moved to dismis
s the detective—albeit privately—as “a drug addict without a single admirable trait.”

  Perhaps the most vocal commentator was Dr. Watson himself, who never missed an opportunity to offer a rebuke to his friend. “Surely the game is hardly worth the candle,” Watson would declare in The Sign of the Four. “Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed?”

  In several of the early stories, Conan Doyle makes it clear that Holmes requires artificial stimulants to combat the “dull routine of existence.” So long as he has a case to occupy his mind, all is well. During idle periods, he falls into a black depression or a lengthy period of lethargy. “My mind is like a racing engine,” Holmes declares at one point, “tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built.” At such times, at least in the early stages of his career, Holmes required the “mental exaltation” of cocaine. His creator, whether by accident or design, never allowed these abuses to descend into actual addiction, as evidenced by the fact that Holmes could easily dispense with the drug when absorbed in a new problem. Once the case had ended, however, Holmes soon returned to the drug, as the final lines of The Sign of the Four remind us: “‘For me,’ said Sherlock Holmes, ‘there still remains the cocaine-bottle.’ And he stretched his long white hand up for it.”

  Conan Doyle wrote The Sign of the Four in 1889, at a time when cocaine was the subject of intense interest in the medical community. A leading researcher was Professor Robert Christison of Conan Doyle’s own University of Edinburgh, who had obtained a supply of coca leaves by way of Professor Thomson’s famous Challenger expedition. Commonly used as an anesthetic, especially in eye surgery, cocaine also came highly recommended as a “nerve tonic.” Easily and legally obtainable, the drug and its derivatives could be found in lozenges, sherrys, and gargles.

  To Conan Doyle’s original readers, then, the use of cocaine would not have seemed as jarring, or as worthy of reproach, as it does today. In fact, though Dr. Watson’s censorious warnings about the drug may have struck some readers as priggish, the admonitions suggest that Conan Doyle regarded cocaine with greater suspicion than did the general public. By the end of the century, as the drug’s addictive nature became more widely acknowledged, Conan Doyle communicated this information to his readers in a pointed fashion. “For years,” Watson declared in a later adventure, “I gradually weaned him from that drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career. Now I knew that under ordinary conditions he no longer craved for this artificial stimulus; but I was well aware that the fiend was not dead, but sleeping.”

  The question remains, did Conan Doyle himself ever experiment with cocaine? We know that he was not averse to testing medications upon himself. In 1879, before he had even finished his medical training, he reported to the British Medical Journal on the effects of a drug called gelseminum, an extract of jasmine root. Conan Doyle had been using gelseminum to treat a persistent neuralgia and decided to use himself as a guinea pig to “ascertain how far one might go in taking the drug, and what the primary symptoms of an overdose might be.”

  However reckless this type of self-experimentation may appear, it was an accepted practice at the time. Conan Doyle knew that Professor Christison had charted the effects of coca leaves by chewing them himself under controlled conditions. For the twenty-one-year-old medical student, the methods of a much-admired professor would have provided a clear model. For several days, then, Conan Doyle took increasing doses of gelseminum, and offered a candid account of the “extreme giddiness and weakness of the limbs” he experienced under its influence. The experiment ceased, he reported, only when a “persistent and prostrating” diarrhea made further doses undesirable.

  Clearly, then, Conan Doyle had no objection to self-experimentation with the drugs he used in practice. It does not follow, however, that he did so with every medication available to him, nor do we have any evidence that he ever prescribed cocaine to a patient. It is not possible to say definitely that Conan Doyle never used cocaine or any of its derivatives. However, his long life and robust health offer some assurance that he did not indulge liberally, if at all. The high-minded young man who turned his back on the “unbounded cocktails” of colonial Africa seems unlikely to have gratified himself with narcotics.

  Why, then, should he have wanted to make his detective a drug user? For the modern reader, the image of Sherlock Holmes plunging a needle into his arm comes as an unpleasant shock. To Conan Doyle’s way of thinking, however, the syringe would have been very much of a piece with the violin, the purple dressing gown, and the interest in such abstruse subjects as the motets of Lassus. With Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle intended to elevate the science of criminal investigation to an art form. To do so, he needed to cast his detective as an artist rather than a simple policeman. Conan Doyle himself, with his broad shoulders, muscular frame, and ruddy complexion, could easily have passed for a stolid London patrolman. Holmes offered a striking contrast. He was thin, languid, and aesthetic. He easily fit the pattern of a bohemian artist, with all of the accompanying eccentricities and evil habits—one of which, sad to say, was cocaine. “Art in the blood,” as Holmes was to say, “is liable to take the strangest forms.”

  The image of the Victorian habitué would have been very fresh in Conan Doyle’s mind as he sat down to write The Sign of the Four. Only a few days earlier, he had met a young man he regarded as the very “champion of aestheticism.” In August of 1889, Conan Doyle found himself invited up to London for a literary soiree. The editor Joseph Marshall Stoddart, of Philadelphia’s Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, had come to London to arrange for an English edition of his publication. While in Britain, he hoped to commission work from some of the country’s promising young writers. At the time, Conan Doyle’s work was receiving far greater exposure in America than in Britain, owing to the lack of American copyright protection for foreign authors. Several of Conan Doyle’s stories had appeared in pirated anthologies, which, he noted with dismay, “might have been printed on the paper that shopmen use for parcels.”

  Conan Doyle may have regretted the lost profits from these unauthorized printings, but they brought him a substantial American readership at a time when his name was less well known in Britain. Now, with Joseph Stoddart anxious for a meeting, Conan Doyle had reason to feel warmly toward his American audience. “Needless to say,” he later wrote, “I gave my patients a rest for a day and eagerly kept the appointment.”

  The dinner was held in the West End at the prestigious Langham Hotel, a setting that would feature in three future Sherlock Holmes adventures. Two other guests enjoyed Stoddart’s hospitality that night. The first was Thomas Patrick Gill, a former magazine editor who had gone on to become a member of Parliament. The second was Oscar Wilde.

  At thirty-five, Oscar Wilde was already a notorious figure in London society. Though his great plays were still ahead of him, he had made his reputation with his early poetry and with essays such as “The Decay of Lying” and “The Truth of Masks.” From the first, however, his true fame owed less to his literary output than to his celebrated wit and flamboyant personality.

  It would be difficult to imagine two men more unlike each other than Oscar Wilde and Conan Doyle, and their first meeting must have produced raised eyebrows on both sides. The hale and hearty provincial doctor, with his bone-crushing handshake and earnest, direct manner of speaking, had traveled up from Portsmouth in his best professional suit. The world-weary, languorous Wilde cut a rather different figure. “He dressed as probably no grown man in the world was ever dressed before,” the actress Lillie Langtry once wrote of him. “His hat was of brown cloth not less than six inches high; his coat was of black velvet; his overcoat was of green cloth, heavily trimmed with fur; his trousers matched his hat; his tie was gaudy and his shirtfront very open, displaying a large expanse of manly chest.” One assumes that such attire was not a familiar sight in Southsea.


  The two men also differed in their literary views. Conan Doyle, the champion of historical realism, was a born storyteller, and took pride in his clear, unadorned prose style. Wilde, by contrast, had set himself up as the leader of a movement dedicated to “art for art’s sake.”

  Even so, the two writers got along famously. “It was indeed a golden evening for me,” Conan Doyle said of his meeting with Wilde. “His conversation left an indelible impression upon my mind. He towered above us all, and yet had the art of seeming to be interested in all that we could say. He had delicacy of feeling and tact, for the monologue man, however clever, can never be a gentleman at heart.” Only eight years earlier, Conan Doyle had gone up to London to see Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, which featured a thinly disguised parody of Wilde in the character of Bunthorne, the “fleshy poet.” Now he found himself sitting beside the “singularly deep young man” himself, while the pair of them basked in the attentions of a renowned American publisher.

  Wilde impressed Conan Doyle with his “curious precision of statement,” as when he described how a war of the future might be waged: “A chemist on each side will approach the frontier with a bottle.” Not all of Wilde’s remarks showcased his famous wit. To Conan Doyle’s surprise, Wilde had not only read Micah Clarke but expressed enthusiasm for it. One must treat this report with caution. It is frankly difficult to conjure an image of Oscar Wilde, the archetype of Victorian aestheticism, with a lily in one hand and Conan Doyle’s robust epic in the other. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Bracknell expresses her disdain for the “three-volume novel of more than usually revolting sentimentality” that she has found in a perambulator. One imagines that Micah Clarke would have brought a similar reaction from Wilde, though he may not have wished to say so to the author.