Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  For some time, Louisa’s health had been fragile. Her second pregnancy left her considerably weakened, and following the trip to Switzerland she developed a persistent cough and complained of pains in her side. Conan Doyle sent for a local doctor. “To my surprise and alarm,” he wrote, “he told me when he descended from the bedroom that the lungs were very gravely affected, that there was every sign of rapid consumption and that he thought the case a most serious one with little hope.” Conan Doyle brought in a Harley Street specialist to confirm the grim diagnosis: Louisa had contracted tuberculosis. Worse yet, he identified the strain as the particularly virulent form of the disease known as “galloping” consumption. His wife, Conan Doyle was told, would not live more than a few months.

  Conan Doyle did not subscribe to the Victorian notion of consumptives as romantic, tragic figures. At the time, tuberculosis amounted to nothing less than a death sentence, and Conan Doyle knew this better than most. Moreover, he could not deny, once the diagnosis had been confirmed, that his own rugged pursuits—foul weather cycling, outdoor sports, travels to cold climates—must have played a role in undermining his wife’s health. Now, as Louisa’s cough grew worse, and traces of blood began to appear in her handkerchief, Conan Doyle must have felt a mixture of horror and self-recrimination.

  Some commentators have called it “unfortunate” and “disagreeably ironical” that Conan Doyle failed to notice the onset of his wife’s fatal illness. Only three years had passed since he visited Berlin to examine Robert Koch’s findings on the illness, so one must regard this oversight as more than passing strange. There are several possible explanations for the lapse, and the one that springs most readily to mind is that Conan Doyle must have been a fairly shoddy medical man after all. On the face of it, the evidence appears overwhelming: not only had his London practice been a notable failure, but he remained blithely ignorant while his wife reached an advanced stage of consumption. If one acknowledges, however, that Conan Doyle’s medical training was the best available, and that his struggles in practice owed more to poor decisions than inept doctoring, then one must look elsewhere to explain the missed diagnosis.

  For nearly two years, ever since that fateful hour when Sherlock Holmes made him an instant sensation, Conan Doyle had been struggling to regain his balance. He had become suddenly, colossally famous, but famous for something he held in low esteem, and thought to be a poor reflection of his true aspirations as a writer. In his effort to climb out from under the burden of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle imposed a punishing work schedule on himself, producing three novels and various other stories and pieces of journalism, along with two dozen Sherlock Holmes adventures. In this same stretch of time, he traveled to Norway and Switzerland, gave lectures in Scotland and elsewhere, and made room on his calendar for sporting junkets at home and abroad. Added to this were his rollicking times with The Idler crew, his hobnobbing at various other authors’ societies and—for good measure—the ill-starred collaboration with James Barrie. For most authors, this roster of activities would fill a lifetime. Conan Doyle managed to pack it all into eighteen months. Not surprisingly, the strain began to show. He suffered from bouts of moodiness as his fame grew, which occasionally erupted into bursts of temper. He began to experience periods of insomnia, and complained to his mother that he was troubled by nerves “more than most people know.” Something, amid all this frantic activity and the attendant sense of disorientation, had to fall through the cracks. That something, it appears, was his wife.

  Not surprisingly, the diagnosis had a galvanizing effect on Conan Doyle. He abandoned his crowded slate of activities in order to devote all of his formidable energy and resources to attacking his wife’s illness. His most urgent priority, at the end of 1893, was to get her away from the chill and fog of London. As a younger man, he had set great store in the “marvellous invigorating properties of the Arctic.” With this in mind, he took Louisa to a famous sanatorium resort at Davos, a valley high in the Swiss Alps, where it was believed that a combination of altitude and crisp, clear air offered some hope of a cure. Institutions such as this one, intended for the improvement or maintenance of health, had become prominent over the previous twenty years as tuberculosis spread across Europe and America. They not only provided a healthful atmosphere but also segregated the afflicted from the rest of the population. Among such places, Davos was perhaps the most beautiful, a small community of picturesque chalets sheltered between two mountain ranges, with horse-drawn sleighs and carriages carrying visitors from the hotels to the restaurants, sporting facilities, and concert plaza. Robert Louis Stevenson had taken the cure there ten years earlier, and the view so impressed Thomas Mann, who would visit in 1912, that it suggested a resonant phrase—“The Magic Mountain.” The charming scenery aside, Conan Doyle believed that Davos offered his wife “the best chance of killing the accursed microbe which was rapidly eating out her vitals.”

  The doctors had given Louisa only a few months to live. In fact, she would live another thirteen years, thanks in large part to Conan Doyle’s aggressive course of treatment. “The invalid’s life was happy too,” he wrote, “for it was necessarily spent in glorious scenery. It was seldom marred by pain, and it was sustained by that optimism which is peculiar to the disease, and which came naturally to her quietly contented nature.” One hopes that Louisa’s final years were as happy as her husband claimed. For Conan Doyle, the onset of his wife’s illness marked a deepening of his personal unhappiness. Louisa, as he had baldly stated, was now an invalid rather than a wife; a patient rather than a companion. Each fit of coughing can only have sharpened his distress, and reminded him of his culpability.

  This unhappy turn of events signaled the beginning of a long, restless period of travel as Conan Doyle sought various restorative climates to keep Louisa’s illness in check. For the moment, they were installed in Davos at the Curhaus Davos hotel, where Louisa spent much of her time reclining in the cold air beneath a pile of heavy blankets. According to a medical journal of the time, the clean, sharp air of Davos was expected to “purge and rejuvenate” the afflicted lung tissue.

  In the first months, Conan Doyle spent much of his time at his wife’s side. It is not entirely clear whether their two children joined them initially or stayed in South Norwood under the care of Louisa’s mother and Conan Doyle’s sisters. It seems probable that Conan Doyle and Louisa traveled to Davos alone, and were joined by other members of the family as her condition improved.

  Just as Louisa’s illness asserted itself, a second blow fell—Conan Doyle received word from Scotland that his father had died on October 10 at the Crighton Royal Institution, a mental hospital near Dumfries. His health had been weakened by years of alcohol abuse, and he appeared much older than his sixty years. The cause of death was given as epilepsy, though it has been variously reported that he suffered a heart attack or swallowed his tongue during a seizure. He died a lonely and pathetic man, heartsick for his family and believing himself to have been unjustly confined.

  In his confinement, Charles Doyle had spent a great deal of time drawing and painting watercolors. One of his sketchbooks, published many decades later, affords a poignant visual diary of his final years. “Keep steadily in view,” the artist warns in the opening pages, “that this Book is ascribed wholly to the produce of a MADMAN.”

  Charles Doyle began his sketchbook in 1889, the year his son dined with Oscar Wilde and wrote The Sign of the Four. The drawings range from delicate and wistful to dark and macabre, with strange but often self-mocking marginal notes. “Portrait of a gentleman,” he writes beneath one sketch of himself, “and you’d require to be told so.”

  Like his famous brother Richard, Charles Doyle evinced a particular fascination with fairies and other woodland sprites, who can be seen cavorting with alarmingly large and detailed birds and insects. “His brush,” Conan Doyle later wrote, “was concerned not only with fairies and delicate themes of the kind, but with wild and fearsome subjects, so that hi
s work had a very peculiar style of its own, mitigated by great natural humor.”

  “I believe,” the artist himself noted, “I am branded as mad solely from the narrow Scotch Misconception of Jokes.”

  Thoughts of his family run all through the pages, and it is clear that Charles Doyle followed his son’s career with fatherly pride. He makes note of favorable reviews of Micah Clarke in the Scottish newspapers, and quotes at length from a critic’s thoughts on The Mystery of Cloomber. At other times he expresses the forlorn hope of a reunion with his wife. A carefully rendered illustration features a placid Mary Doyle busy with her sewing while the bearded Charles gazes up longingly from a footstool. “Mary, my ideal home ruler,” runs the caption, a sly allusion to the issue of Irish unity. “No repeal of the union proposed in this case.”

  The death of Charles Doyle, coming in tandem with the onset of Louisa’s tuberculosis, left Conan Doyle even more despondent. The two events, he admitted to his mother, proved “a little overwhelming,” and Conan Doyle may have felt that he had not done enough to ease his father’s declining years. His late sister, Annette, had bequeathed her estate of some £400 to her father’s care, but it is not known whether Conan Doyle also contributed to Charles Doyle’s maintenance. The relationship between father and son had never been strong, and for Conan Doyle, his father’s condition had become—in the words of Charles himself—“the dreadful secret.” In a society that placed great emphasis on family background, the young Conan Doyle can only have felt at a great disadvantage. Even now, for all his robust health, Conan Doyle would likely have nursed a fear that his father’s infirmities were hereditary.

  With the passage of time Conan Doyle’s feelings would soften, and he later made a concerted effort to restore his father’s reputation as an artist. “My father, Charles Doyle, was in truth a great unrecognized genius,” he would tell an interviewer in 1905. “His mind was on strange moonlight effects, done with extraordinary skill in water colours; dancing witches, drowning seamen, death coaches on lonely moors at night, and goblins chasing children across churchyards.”

  In his autobiography, Conan Doyle carried the sentiment even further, expressing the opinion that his father, though unrecognized, had been “far the greatest” artist of the distinguished family. The passing years allowed Conan Doyle to view his father with greater compassion, but he still took care to obscure the details. “My father’s life was full of the tragedy of unfulfilled powers and of undeveloped gifts,” he wrote. “He had his weaknesses, as all of us have ours, but he had also some very remarkable and outstanding virtues.… I am sure that Charles Doyle had no enemy in the world, and that those who knew him best sympathized most with the hard fate which had thrown him, a man of sensitive genius, into an environment which neither his age nor his nature were fitted to face.” It was an affecting and sensitive tribute, but also somewhat misleading, as Conan Doyle had included it in a chapter entitled “Recollections of a Student,” detailing the family’s hardships during his years at Edinburgh, before the whaling expedition. Though Charles Doyle’s death is truthfully noted as having occurred “a few years later,” the reader is invited to think that the sad event took place while Conan Doyle was still a young unknown, rather than fourteen years later when he had become a world-renowned author. Even at this late stage, thirty years after the actual date of Charles Doyle’s death, his son apparently did not wish to invite undue interest in the family’s affairs.

  For all his ambivalence toward his father, Conan Doyle regretted that he had not been able to travel to Scotland for the funeral, but his concern for Louisa and the arrangements for her care made the trip impractical. Now, in the enforced solitude of Switzerland, he had plenty of time to reflect on his father’s passing. In his early story “The Surgeon of Gaster Fell,” Conan Doyle gave a harrowing portrait of a son’s struggles to contain the “morbid impulses” of a mentally unbalanced father. “He has an intense dread of madhouses,” Conan Doyle wrote in a passage he later altered, “and in his sane intervals would beg and pray so piteously not to be condemned to one, that I could never find the heart to resist him.” In life, however, Conan Doyle and his family had found this resolve. There can be no doubt that the circumstances of Charles Doyle’s lonely death in Scotland weighed heavily on his son.

  Against this background, one begins to understand Conan Doyle’s feelings when, in December, the publication of “The Final Problem” announced the death of Sherlock Holmes to the world. Being away from England, the full force of the public’s indignation did not reach him. Even at a remove, however, Conan Doyle could not help but feel a sense of disbelief. His father was dead and his wife was dying, but the public, oblivious to his personal tragedies, had sent up a howl of protest over the death of a fictional character. Charles Doyle’s passing had not warranted an obituary in any of the London newspapers. The fate of Sherlock Holmes had made headlines around the world. In the circumstances, the Reichenbach backlash struck him as unseemly and entirely out of proportion, and Conan Doyle must be forgiven if some of his disgust came to rest with Sherlock Holmes. At one stage, he let it be known that the pressure of producing so many stories had caused him to neglect Louisa, and that this was a mistake he would not repeat. While this does not ring entirely true, given all the other work and social commitments he managed to fulfill in the same period, it does help to explain his increasingly frosty attitude toward Sherlock Holmes.

  As the year turned, some of his gloom began to lift. To Conan Doyle’s relief, Louisa’s condition began to show improvement in Switzerland. “I think one more winter,” he told his mother-in-law, “might really cure her permanently.” Buoyed by the hopeful signs, he found fresh enthusiasm for his new projects. “I was able to devote myself to doing a good deal of work,” he wrote of Davos, “and also to taking up with some energy the winter sports for which the place is famous.”

  One sport that Conan Doyle took up with unusual energy was skiing—or ski-running, as it was known at the time. He had tried the sport in Norway, and was intrigued by the Norwegian explorer Fridjot Nansen’s account of crossing Greenland on skis. At the time, other snow sports such as sleigh-riding, tobogganing, and skating were already well established in Switzerland, but skiing, especially downhill skiing, was still largely unknown. As luck would have it, a local man named Tobias Branger, who ran a shop specializing in sporting equipment and “travelling utensils,” was the nearest thing to a ski instructor in the whole of Switzerland. Together with his brother Johannes, Tobias Branger had been experimenting with ski techniques for a year or so. After months of diligent practice, the brothers had conquered the Furka Pass from Davos to nearby Arosa, a route previously impassable in the winter.

  The Branger brothers were only too happy to instruct their famous British visitor on the rudiments of skiing. “There is nothing peculiarly malignant in the appearance of a pair of skis,” Conan Doyle told the readers of The Strand later that year. “They are two slips of elm-wood, 8 ft. long, 4 in. broad, with a square heel, turned-up toes, and straps in the centre to secure your feet. No one to look at them would guess at the possibilities which lurk in them. But you put them on, and you turn with a smile to see whether your friends are looking at you, and then the next moment you are boring your head madly into a snow-bank, and kicking frantically with both feet, and half rising only to butt viciously into that snow-bank again, and your friends are getting more entertainment than they had ever thought you capable of giving.”

  He may have gotten off to a rocky start, but the Brangers recognized a born skier and invited Conan Doyle to join them in an assault on the Jacobshorn, a 7,700-foot mountain some two and a half miles distant. Though Conan Doyle managed to keep up with his more practiced companions, he spent much of the climb with his face in the snow and his skis in the air. “Whenever you think yourself absolutely secure it is all over with you,” he commented. “Then, if your mouth is not full of snow, you find yourself muttering the names of a few Swiss villages to relieve you
r feelings. ‘Ragatz!’ is a very handy word, and may save a scandal.”

  No doubt the names of many Swiss villages were invoked before the Jacobshorn was conquered, but Conan Doyle persevered. Reaching the summit, he and the Brangers turned to see the flags of Davos dipped in tribute to their achievement. It is thought to be the first time an alpine mountain had been scaled on skis.

  On March 23, 1894, the Branger brothers took Conan Doyle along as they retraced their treacherous route across the Furka Pass. The trio set off in the middle of the night, and did some hard climbing over rough terrain to reach the pass, which they crossed at an elevation of nearly nine thousand feet. On the descent into Arosa, they were able to ski for considerable distances, an experience Conan Doyle wished to share with his readers in The Strand. “But now we had a pleasure which boots can never give,” he wrote. “For a third of a mile we shot along over gently dipping curves, skimming down into the valley without a motion of our feet. In that great untrodden waste, with snow-fields bounding our vision on every side and no marks of life save the track of chamois and of foxes, it was glorious to whizz along in this easy fashion.”

  It wasn’t all smooth powder. For the steeper slopes, the Brangers devised a method of lashing their skis together and making a seated descent, as if on a toboggan. As they approached one particularly sheer drop, the Brangers demonstrated the technique for the newcomer. Conan Doyle prepared to follow when his skis promptly “flew away like an arrow from a bow,” leaving him stuck for a means of joining the Brangers, who were by now hundreds of feet below. “There was no possible choice as to what to do, so I did it,” he recalled. “I let myself go over the edge, and came squatting down, with legs and arms extended to check the momentum. A minute later I was rolling covered with snow at the feet of my guides.” As Conan Doyle had set out for the journey dressed in an author’s tweed knickerbockers, he had to face the consequences of his undignified descent. “My tailor tells me that Harris tweed cannot wear out,” he said. “This is a mere theory, and will not stand a thorough test. He will find samples of his wares on view from the Furka Pass to Arosa.”