Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  “She was not mad,” Jerome continued. “She protested her love both for her father and her mother. She could offer no explanation. The thing seemed as unaccountable to her as it did to Doyle. On the understanding that the thing ended, secrecy was promised. The noises were never heard again.”

  If Jerome’s account is true, it places a serious strain on Conan Doyle’s credibility as a psychic researcher. For this reason, one must examine Jerome’s motivations as carefully as those of Conan Doyle. Jerome’s autobiography, My Life and Times, appeared in 1926. Two years earlier, Conan Doyle had published his own autobiography, in which he pronounced Jerome to be “hotheaded and intolerant in political matters”—a judgment that astonished Jerome. “It is precisely what I should have said myself concerning Doyle,” he retorted.

  It is also apparent that Jerome had a low opinion of his friend’s interest in psychic research, as the two had disagreed publicly over the subject in the letters column of Common Sense. It does not necessarily follow, however, that Jerome decided to take his revenge by torpedoing one of Conan Doyle’s most cherished tales of psychic adventure. Jerome’s tone reveals a certain exasperation with his colleague, but he is hardly vindictive. To the contrary, it seems that Jerome intended to present his friend in a flattering light—a sharp-eyed Sherlock Holmes, rather than a gullible ghost hunter.

  If one takes Jerome at his word, it suggests that Conan Doyle deliberately obscured the facts of the case to support his own agenda. His motives for doing so are difficult to gauge, especially since he altered details of the story with each repetition. In one version, for instance, the family is comprised of an “elderly mother, a grown-up son and a married daughter.” In another he speaks of the “young master of the house,” a phrase unlikely to describe an officer of a war that ended fourteen years previously.

  Possibly Conan Doyle’s ancient promise of silence to Colonel Elmore’s daughter inspired him to change the details and conceal her part in the incident. If so, it must be taken as rather disingenuous that he should have troubled to relate the story at all, much less attribute the events to the restless spirit of the unhappy ten-year-old. In his autobiography, Conan Doyle acknowledges that Frank Podmore filed a report attributing the noises to a “young man,” but he goes on to say that this was not plausible since the young man was with them when the disturbances broke out. “I learned from this,” he wrote, “what I have often confirmed since, that while we should be most critical of all psychic assertions, if we are to get at the truth, we should be equally critical of all negatives and especially so-called ‘exposures’ in this subject. Again and again I have probed them and found them to depend upon prejudice or upon imperfect acquaintance with psychic law.”

  Unfortunately, the prejudice in this instance seems to have been entirely on the part of Conan Doyle. Frank Podmore spent most of his life gathering accounts of psychic phenomena and examining their veracity. His reputation as a thorough and exacting researcher was one that Conan Doyle himself might have envied. This had not always been the case. In his early career, Podmore came in for many of the same charges of gullibility that were to plague Conan Doyle’s later years. In 1894, the year of the haunted house episode, no less a figure than H. G. Wells published a review of Podmore’s Apparitions and Thought Transference, and accused the author of being too credulous. Podmore’s response, to the despair of some of his colleagues, was to become even more rigid in his standard of what constituted psychic evidence. In Conan Doyle’s view, this made Podmore an adversary. One can chart the increasing vehemence of Conan Doyle’s feelings in his descriptions of Podmore over the years. In Conan Doyle’s autobiography, Podmore is described as “a man whose name was associated with such investigations.” Only a few years later, Podmore had become, in Conan Doyle’s view, “a determined and very unreasonable opponent of Spiritualism.” Writing of Podmore’s research in his two-volume History of Spiritualism, published in 1926, Conan Doyle was even more damning: “Mr. Frank Podmore brought together a large number of the facts, and, by ignoring those which did not suit his purpose, endeavoured to suggest the worthlessness of most of the rest, especially the physical phenomena, which in his view were mainly the result of fraud.” By this time, unfortunately, Podmore could no longer defend himself or dispute Conan Doyle’s version of the events in Dorset. Podmore had drowned in 1910, amid whispers of a homosexual scandal.

  The events in Dorset marked the young Conan Doyle’s first and perhaps only direct experience of what might be called a paranormal inquiry. Sad to say, he did not cover himself in glory. The disparity between his statements at the time—if Jerome’s account can be trusted—and his later recollections points to a serious measure of self-delusion or outright deception. Moreover, he had harsh words for anyone—especially Frank Podmore—who disagreed with him. It is difficult to reconcile Conan Doyle’s handling of this episode with his otherwise unblemished reputation for honor and probity. As Podmore himself once remarked of a different investigation, “It is easier to find the explanation in a fallacy of memory than in a fallacy of sense.” Possibly Conan Doyle’s memory played him false over the years. If so, such lapses were to prove remarkably persistent. One is forced to conclude that on some level—consciously or not—Conan Doyle manipulated the facts to support his own views. General Drayson, the mentor of Conan Doyle’s early psychic experiences in Southsea, had spoken of the “naughty boys” who might pervert the course of a novice’s belief. In this case, the naughty boy seems to have been Conan Doyle himself.

  Unfortunately, it would not be the last time. On Jerome’s evidence, the young Conan Doyle was a level-headed, open-minded investigator, and had been perfectly happy to admit that this particular case had contained no genuine psychic occurrence. In a few years hence, when his need to believe had overwhelmed his critical faculties, he would revise his earlier conclusions, and that clear-eyed young man would disappear forever. Though it would not become apparent for some time, this contradiction in character would define his later years.

  In time, Conan Doyle would also revise his early admiration for Arthur Balfour, whose interest in psychic research had made such a strong impression. In the early days of his infatuation with spiritualism, however, Conan Doyle considered Balfour’s knowledge of the subject to be far greater than his own. In the January 1894 edition of Transactions of the Society for Psychical Research, Balfour gave a measured assessment of what he called the “recent provoking inquiries” into the subject of mesmerism. There can be little doubt that Balfour’s thoughts were close at hand when Conan Doyle began work on The Parasite, his “mesmeric and hypnotic mystery,” which appeared later that year.

  As it happens, Conan Doyle’s novel was not the only popular fiction to address the subject of mesmerism that year. In George du Maurier’s Trilby, also published in 1894, a young singer rises to greatness under the mesmeric influence of a Hungarian musician named Svengali. Conan Doyle would certainly have been aware of du Maurier, whose long career as a caricaturist for Punch would have made him a colleague of Richard Doyle. In January, just as work on The Parasite began, serialized installments of Trilby began running in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, which had previously published work by Conan Doyle. It is probable, therefore, that Conan Doyle became aware of this influential book at some stage during the writing of The Parasite. Given Conan Doyle’s speed of composition, however, it is unlikely that Trilby registered as anything more than a collateral influence. Both authors had a long-standing interest in mesmerism, and their books captured a contemporary enthusiasm for the subject.

  While du Maurier’s Svengali inhabited a bohemian society, Conan Doyle’s book featured a cunning female mesmerist who worked her wiles against an academic backdrop. The Parasite concerns a skeptical professor named Austin Gilroy who reluctantly attends a demonstration given by a Miss Helen Penclosa, a mysterious visitor from Trinidad. Like Svengali, Miss Penclosa is presented as an older, slightly repellent figure. Gilroy describes her as furtive and sallow
, with an infirm leg that emphasizes her physical frailty. In spite of his reservations, Professor Gilroy is forced to concede Miss Penclosa’s odd power when his fiancée, while hypnotized, is briefly compelled to break off their engagement. Impressed, Gilroy expresses his feelings in terms that echo Conan Doyle’s own pronouncements on the subject. “I had always looked upon spirit as a product of matter,” Gilroy states. “The brain, I thought, secreted the mind, as the liver does the bile. But how can this be when I see mind working from a distance and playing upon matter as a musician might upon a violin? The body does not give rise to the soul, then, but is rather the rough instrument by which the spirit manifests itself. The windmill does not give rise to the wind, but only indicates it. It was opposed to my whole habit of thought, and yet it was undeniably possible and worthy of investigation.”

  Following this change of heart, Gilroy begins to submit to Miss Penclosa’s mesmeric experiments, and gradually becomes an instrument of her will. In his brief moments of clarity, he conceives of her as a “monstrous parasite” who has insinuated herself into his mind as completely as the “hermit crab does into the whelk’s shell.” Matters take an even more sinister turn as the professor, helpless to resist Miss Penclosa’s commands, attempts to rob the Bank of England. At the critical moment, as he menaces his fiancée with a vial of vitriol, Gilroy breaks free of the malign influence. The shock of severing the mesmeric link proves fatal to Miss Penclosa.

  This was yet another novel written in haste and repented at leisure. The Parasite recorded only modest sales, with two limited reprintings in Britain and a single edition in the United States. Once again Conan Doyle had failed to sever the apparently mesmeric hold that Sherlock Holmes exerted on the public. In time, he would relegate the effort to a “very inferior plane” and have it removed from future listings of his collected works. Meanwhile, George du Maurier’s Trilby had become a spectacular best-seller, inspiring what one newspaper described as a “maudlin mania” for its young heroine and her distressing tale. The novel’s success inspired a flood of plays, songs, and dances, and created a market for Trilby-themed merchandise, which included jewelry, clothing, ice cream, a “Trilby sausage,” and, finally, the “Trilby” hat. London had not seen a sensation on this scale since Sherlock Holmes burst onto the pages of The Strand, a fact that cannot have been lost on Conan Doyle.

  At least part of the appeal of Trilby lay in the novel’s rather daring portrayal of the heroine’s bohemian lifestyle. As an artist’s model, Trilby not only posed “in the altogether”—a phrase apparently coined by du Maurier—but also surrendered her virtue. Strange to say, the normally chaste Conan Doyle also explored sexual themes in The Parasite. At one stage, Professor Gilroy’s “craving for the society” of Miss Penclosa grows so intense that he must lock himself away in his own bedroom.

  Conan Doyle did not broach such topics lightly. When The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes appeared the previous year, he withheld one of the stories—“The Adventure of the Cardboard Box”—on the grounds that it was “rather more sensational than I care for.” The offending story contained “a gruesome packet” of two severed human ears and touched on the theme of adultery, which apparently served to give the author second thoughts. Having established this standard of decorum, his portrait of a character in the throes of sexual desire is worthy of attention.

  It must be remembered that Conan Doyle’s wife had now fallen victim to a terminal illness, and that medical wisdom of the day forbade any further sexual relations between them. Conan Doyle did not subscribe to the notion that all fiction is autobiographical, and one hesitates to assign literal meaning to a story that features evil hypnotists, bank robberies, and an aborted vitriol-throwing. Even so, it seems notable that the author’s enforced celibacy should have been followed so closely by a scene in which a character claws his way out of a locked bedroom to hurry to the side of a potential lover.

  The portrait of Gilroy’s “monstrous temptation” is virtually unique among Conan Doyle’s works. Though a period of illness had briefly relaxed Miss Penclosa’s power, her recovery has apparently strengthened her hold over Gilroy. “A peculiar double consciousness possessed me,” the professor relates. “There was the predominant alien will, which was bent upon drawing me to the side of its owner, and there was the feebler protesting personality, which I recognized as being myself, tugging feebly at the overmastering impulse as a led terrier might at its chain.”

  Irresistibly drawn to the mesmerist’s boudoir, Gilroy finds her reclining on a sofa, covered in a tigerskin rug. Taking a seat on a low stool beside her, the professor seizes her hand and presses it to his lips: “She lay quietly looking down at me with imperious eyes and her provocative smile. Once I remember that she passed her hand over my hair as one caresses a dog; and it gave me pleasure—the caress. I thrilled under it. I was her slave, body and soul, and for the moment I rejoiced in my slavery.”

  Only then, as he stands at the “brink of perdition,” does Gilroy experience a sudden deliverance. “As I looked up at her,” Gilroy records, “I was conscious of a change in her. Her face, which had been pale before, was now ghastly. Her eyes were dull, and the lids drooped heavily over them. Above all, the look of serene confidence had gone from her features. Her mouth had weakened. Her forehead had puckered. She was frightened and undecided. And as I watched the change my own spirit fluttered and struggled, trying hard to tear itself from the grip which held it—a grip which, from moment to moment, grew less secure.”

  That said, Conan Doyle put down his pen and returned to his invalid wife.

  13

  Mr. Irving Takes Paregoric

  “It is always a joy to me to meet an American.”

  —SHERLOCK HOLMES IN “THE NOBLE BACHELOR”

  In September of 1894, at the Princes Theatre in Bristol, the curtain went up on a play that drew nearly universal praise as “a signal achievement in the history of the stage.” The play came to light two and a half years earlier when Henry Irving, the most celebrated actor of his time, hurried into his office at the Lyceum Theater in a high state of excitement. “He was a little late,” his business manager recalled. “As he came hurrying out to the stage, after putting on the brown soft broad-brimmed felt hat for which he usually exchanged his ‘topper’ during rehearsals, he stopped beside my table where I was writing, and laying a parcel on it said: ‘I wish you would throw an eye over that during rehearsal. It came this morning. You can tell me what you think of it when I come off!’”

  Inside the parcel was the manuscript of a play. “I read it with profound interest and was touched to my very heart’s core by its humour and pathos,” Irving’s manager remarked. “It was very short, and before Irving came in again from the stage I had read it a second time.”

  “What did you think of it?” the actor asked when he returned to the office.

  “I think this,” came the reply, “that that play is never going to leave the Lyceum. You must own it—at any price. It is made for you.”

  “So I think, too!” Irving said. “You had better write to the author today and ask him what cheque we are to send. We had better buy the whole rights.”

  “Who is the author?”

  “Conan Doyle!”

  If the account sounds a bit mannered, it must be remembered that Henry Irving’s business manager was none other than Bram Stoker, soon to be world famous as the author of Dracula. It is likely that some of Stoker’s dramatic flair found its way into his Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving. At the time, the forty-five-year-old Stoker had been in Irving’s employ for many years, and never missed an opportunity to romanticize the life of the man he called “the finest actor who ever trod the boards.”

  Many shared Stoker’s high opinion of Henry Irving. At fifty-four, Irving had become the dominant theatrical figure of the age. “His object was to realize his own perfection as an artist,” wrote Oscar Wilde. “I often wonder, however, whether the public understands that that success is entirely due to
the fact that he did not accept their standard, but realized his own.”

  Conan Doyle had been captivated by the actor since boyhood. He had seen Irving’s legendary Hamlet on a visit to London from Stonyhurst, an experience that left him “quite transported.” When Irving came to Edinburgh a few years later, Conan Doyle somehow found the money for a sixpence ticket night after night to sit in the gallery and marvel at the actor’s skill.

  To this point, Conan Doyle had shown no great promise as a playwright. Jane Annie would resound through the ages as a fiasco, and another early effort called Angels of Darkness, based on the Mormon episode of A Study in Scarlet, was never completed. In the remarkably fertile period that followed his withdrawal from medical practice, Conan Doyle summoned his courage for another attempt. The result was a one-act play called A Story of Waterloo, which concerned the reminiscences of the “gaunt, bent and doddering” Corporal Gregory Brewster, age eighty-six, who had served under Wellington in the Napoleonic Wars. Conan Doyle adapted the play from a short story of his own called “A Straggler of ’15,” which had appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine three years earlier. The story, he wrote, “had seemed to me to be a moving picture of an old soldier and his ways. My own eyes were moist as I wrote it, and that is the surest way to moisten those of others.”

  Having transferred this emotion to the stage, the aspiring playwright, “greatly daring,” sent it on to Irving, who cheerfully paid £100 for the rights. In spite of his initial enthusiasm for the play, Irving would not find occasion to perform it for more than two years. At one hour in length, Conan Doyle’s play was too long to use as a curtain-raiser, but too short to stage on its own. Finally, in the summer of 1894, Irving decided to pair A Story of Waterloo with another one-act play, The Bells, which featured a murderer haunted by his crime.