Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  The publicity for A Story of Waterloo made much of its being Conan Doyle’s first venture into drama, as opposed to the light comedy of Jane Annie. The opening in Bristol, then, was a matter of “considerable importance in the dramatic world,” Bram Stoker wrote. “The chief newspapers of London and some of the greater provincial cities wished to be represented on the occasion; the American press also wished to send its critical contingent. Accordingly we arranged for a special train to bring the critical force.”

  The judgment of this critical force was nearly unanimous: Irving had scored another triumph. “New play enormous success,” Stoker wrote in his diary. “H. I. fine and great. All laughed and wept. Marvellous study of senility. Eight calls at end.”

  If Conan Doyle intended to tug at the heartstrings of his audience, he succeeded brilliantly. Irving brought a forlorn dignity to his portrayal of the aged Corporal Brewster, the last survivor of a regiment that had fought at Waterloo. The old soldier, whose health is failing rapidly as the curtain rises, spends much of the play reliving his former glories for a visiting sergeant. The audience soon learns of his uncommon bravery in driving a cart loaded with gunpowder through a flaming hedge to reach his stranded unit. “Why I sees it afore me, every time I shuts my eyes,” he declares. “Lordy, sir, you wouldn’t hardly believe how clear it is to me. There’s our line right along from the paregoric bottle to the inhaler, d’ye see! Well then, the pill box is for Hougoumont on the right, where we was, and the thimble for Le Hay Saint … and over here, where the cough drops are, was the Proosians a comin’ up on our left flank. Jimini, but it was a glad sight to see the smoke of their guns.”

  Finally, as his condition worsens, Brewster is lost to his visions of the past. “The Guards need powder!” he shouts, struggling to his feet. “The Guards need powder, and, by God, they shall have it!” That said, he falls back into his chair and expires. “I think,” says the visiting sergeant gravely, “that the Third Guards have a full muster now.”

  However mawkish, Conan Doyle’s play was perfectly suited to its times and to the skills of Henry Irving. The actor, according to one review, had created “one of the most remarkable stage pictures of our time, perfect in its verisimilitude, infinitely touching in its human pathos … a signal achievement even in Mr. Irving’s long roll of dramatic triumphs.” The critical consensus very nearly matched the lavish praises of Stoker himself, who found Irving’s performance to be “the high-water mark of histrionic art.”

  Conan Doyle’s role in the triumph was not so universally acknowledged. “Several critics went out of their way to explain that the merit lay entirely with the great actor and had nothing to do with the indifferent play,” the author noted. In truth, the playwright appears to have been overly sensitive on this point. “Dr. Conan Doyle’s little play,” said London’s Daily News, “carried all before it with its perfectly symmetrical and balanced art.” Several other reviewers expressed pleasure that so renowned a literary figure should turn his energies to the stage.

  There was, however, one voice of dissent. George Bernard Shaw, who had expressed himself so energetically on the subject of Jane Annie, addressed the new production with even greater venom. “Shaw was always a thorn in Irving’s side,” Conan Doyle admitted, “and was usually the one jarring note among the chorus of praise which greeted each fresh production. At a first night at the Lyceum—those wonderful first nights which have never been equalled—the lanky Irishman with his bloodless face, his red beard, and his sardonic expression must have been like the death’s-head at the banquet to Irving.”

  Shaw’s review, titled “Mr. Irving Takes Paregoric,” appeared in The Saturday Review in May of the following year, after the play had transferred to London. For all of the scorn that followed, Conan Doyle must have derived some measure of satisfaction from the opening lines of Shaw’s review: “Anyone who consults recent visitors to the Lyceum,” Shaw began, “or who seeks for information in the Press as to the merits of Mr. Conan Doyle’s Story of Waterloo, will in nineteen cases out of twenty learn that the piece is a trifle raised into importance by the marvellous acting of Mr. Irving as Corporal Gregory Brewster. As a matter of fact, the entire effect is contrived by the author, and is due to him alone. There is absolutely no acting in it—none whatever.”

  Shaw went on to fulminate about the makeup and “cheap and simple mimicry” that constituted Irving’s performance, claiming that half of the work had been done in advance by the “suggestive effect” of sympathetic program notes, and the other half by Fuller Mellish and Annie Hughes in the supporting roles. In Shaw’s view, so much had been done to rouse the expectations of the audience that it could hardly fail to go into raptures when the great man made his entrance:

  “Enter Mr. Irving, in a dirty white wig, toothless, blear-eyed, palsied, shaky at the knees, stooping at the shoulders, incredibly aged and very poor, but respectable. He makes his way to his chair, and can only sit down, so stiff are his aged limbs, very slowly and creakily. This sitting down business is not acting: the callboy could do it; but we are so thoroughly primed by the playbill, the scene-painter, the stage-manager, Miss Hughes and Mr. Mellish, that we go off in enthusiastic whispers, ‘What superb acting! How wonderfully he does it!’… He gets a bronchial attack and gasps for paregoric, which Miss Hughes administers with a spoon, whilst our faces glisten with tearful smiles. ‘Is there another living actor who could take paregoric like that?’”

  At the time, this degree of disdain seemed inconceivable to Conan Doyle, though in time he grew resigned to Shaw’s obstinance. “Irving ascribed this animosity to Shaw’s pique because his plays were not accepted,” he wrote, “but in this I am sure that he did an injustice. It was simply that contrary twist in the man which makes him delight in opposing whatever anyone else approved.”

  Shaw’s views aside, A Story of Waterloo quickly became a staple of Irving’s repertoire, and a recurring feature of his twilight years. Within weeks of the play’s London opening in May 1895, Irving received word that Queen Victoria was to confer a knighthood upon him, making him the first actor ever to be awarded this honor. Two years later, to mark Victoria’s diamond jubilee, Irving performed the play—“with Royal Assent”—before an audience of two thousand colonial troops.

  In all, Irving would perform A Story of Waterloo 343 times over the next decade, and Conan Doyle reported that he received a guinea from Irving after each performance. “It was a good bargain for him,” Conan Doyle remarked, “for it is not too much to say that Corporal Gregory Brewster became one of his stock parts and it had the enormous advantage that the older he got the more naturally he played it.”

  The success of A Story of Waterloo did much to erase the memory of Jane Annie. Conan Doyle would see the production many times in the years to come, but as it happened, he was forced to miss the triumphant opening night in Bristol. A new series of lecturing commitments found him entertaining audiences of his own—in America.

  Before the onset of Louisa’s illness, Conan Doyle had gone out on a handful of small lecture tours in Britain and discovered that the “movement and bustle was not distasteful.” Now, as he began spending more time back in England, he found himself “strongly pressed to go to America on the same errand.”

  Writing of these events thirty years later, Conan Doyle was careful to justify his decision to undertake an American lecture tour. The nursing skills of his sister Lottie, he wrote, and the steady improvement of Louisa’s health had combined to give him “renewed liberty of action.” Despite his assurances that “no sudden crisis was thought at all possible,” Conan Doyle’s readiness to leave his ailing wife’s side for several months is surprising.

  It is not too much to say that visiting America had been a lifelong dream, and one that, as a struggling doctor, he despaired of ever realizing. As a boy, Conan Doyle had been fascinated by the frontier tales of Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid, and as a young writer he drew inspiration from Poe, Mark Twain, and Bret Harte. Throughout his l
ife he cherished a hope that the United States and Britain might one day merge to form a joint empire. In that spirit, the title page of The White Company bore the words: “To the Hope of the Future, the Reunion of the English Speaking Races, This Little Chronicle of Our Common Ancestry Is Inscribed.” Sherlock Holmes also expressed a hope, in “The Noble Bachelor,” that the two countries might one day join together “under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.”

  It is also true that Louisa’s illness—and the attendant worry, guilt, and sexual abstinence—had placed a huge strain on Conan Doyle. For the most part, he channeled this worry and nervous energy into his work, and for a time he returned to his prior schedule of literary gatherings and sporting events in London. Life could not go on as before, however; there would have been reminders of Louisa’s condition at every turn. Possibly the trip to America, which he could justify to himself as a business obligation, offered a respite from his troubles and self-recriminations, though he would not have admitted as much to himself. “Work is the best antidote to sorrow, Watson,” Sherlock Holmes once declared.

  In any event, Conan Doyle allowed himself to be persuaded to undertake the tour, and sailed for New York aboard the German liner Elbe on September 23, 1894. His brother Innes, now a twenty-one-year-old subaltern in the Royal Artillery, joined him on the journey. “I needed some companion,” Conan Doyle wrote, and “thought that the change would do him good.”

  On the ten-day crossing, the brothers got a taste of anti-British feeling among the vessel’s predominantly German passengers and crew. At a dinner party given onboard, Conan Doyle noticed that the Union Jack had been excluded from a display of flags of the world. He and Innes promptly fashioned one of their own and proudly hung it aloft, “where its isolation drew attention to our grievance.” Not all of the tour’s discords would be handled so easily.

  On October 2, the Elbe steamed into the New York harbor, where Conan Doyle would have paused at the rail to admire the Statue of Liberty, erected only eight years earlier. While hundreds of hopeful immigrants were taken by barge to Ellis Island, Conan Doyle disembarked to face a circle of reporters eager to interview the creator of Sherlock Holmes. His open, agreeable manner made a highly favorable impression, as did his sturdy appearance. “He is tall, straight, athletic,” observed the New York Times, “and his head that his blue eyes make radiant with affability must have been modeled by Energy herself, so profoundly impressed is it with her mark. His forehead is not colossal, yet it is as if it were built of the same marble as the Titans. His look is merry, quick, curious, inventive, and resolutely fixed on the things that happen, and not on an invisible star.” With such descriptive powers at its command, it hardly mattered that the New York Times did not yet carry photographs.

  Major James Pond, who organized the tour, was also present when the Elbe docked. A veteran of the Civil War, Pond had been a lecture agent for more than twenty years, and a central figure in promoting the “improving talk” as a form of entertainment in America. His clients had included the late Henry Ward Beecher, who generally read from his renowned Seven Lectures to Young Men; James Whitcomb Riley, author of the dialect poem “Little Orphant Annie”; and Mark Twain, whose Pudd’nhead Wilson appeared while Conan Doyle was in New York. With “a goat’s beard and a nasal voice,” the large, gangly Pond seemed to Conan Doyle to be the very embodiment of an American. What Conan Doyle did not know was that Pond had a reputation for being something of a slave driver. Pond would run his star attraction through more than thirty cities, many of them more than once. One typical stretch found Conan Doyle giving lectures in three different cities—New York, Princeton, and Philadelphia—in only twenty-four hours. Worse yet, Conan Doyle’s agreement with Pond had him paying his own expenses, which mounted quickly as he caromed from one city to the next. The ambitious itinerary included Boston, Washington, D.C., Amherst, Buffalo, Toronto, Niagara Falls, Toledo, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Milwaukee. Conan Doyle often had to sleep aboard trains to stay on schedule. What little free time he had was given over to literary soirees and society events, where “the exuberant hospitality of those pre-prohibition days” once again tested his resolve concerning alcohol. “It was all done in kindness,” he wrote, “but it was dangerous for a man who had his work to do.”

  Unlike other authors who fell into Major Pond’s orbit, Conan Doyle never said an unkind word about the “considerable programme” that had been imposed on him, though he admitted he was “forced to do rather more than to pay my expenses, and rather less in the way of seeing the country.”

  Originally, Conan Doyle intended to offer a selection of three different lectures to his American audiences. The first concerned the “Tendency of Fiction in England,” and drew on the works of Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and others. The second would address the work of George Meredith, whom Conan Doyle regarded as “the Novelist’s Novelist.” And finally there would be a lecture entitled “Readings and Reminiscences,” in which he would draw on his own life and works. In the end, Conan Doyle dropped the first two speeches and limited himself almost exclusively to the third. At the tender age of thirty-five, he had misgivings about holding forth on his own achievements, which struck him as unseemly. “It is naturally repugnant for a man to stand up on a public platform and to talk about himself and his own work,” Conan Doyle told his audiences, “for never until a man attempts to do so before an audience does he realize how very insignificant both himself and his own works are, and how very difficult it is to make either the one or the other interesting to any third person. It would be more pleasant for me to speak of the work of my friends and contemporaries. Before I came to this country, however, it was pointed out to me that if anybody should come to hear me lecture, it would not be because they want my criticism on this or that, but because something I have written has come in their way and they want to make a bond of sympathy between us.”

  For many of the Americans who came to hear him, that bond of sympathy rested with Sherlock Holmes. More than a few were surprised to see the man before them looking so hale and hearty, as opposed to the pale, cadaverous, violin-playing figure they had imagined. Almost from the moment Conan Doyle alighted in New York, he was deluged with questions about the detective. At a group interview, one reporter asked whether he had been influenced by Edgar Allan Poe when he created Sherlock Holmes. Many of the other journalists present, it seems, believed that Conan Doyle would take umbrage at the question. “A hush fell in the room,” wrote the reporter from the New York Times. “It could be heard as distinctly as if the string of a violin had snapped.” As it happened, Conan Doyle wasn’t at all affronted. “Oh, immensely!” he responded, apparently warming to the question. “His detective is the best in fiction.”

  “Except Sherlock Holmes,” another reporter ventured.

  Conan Doyle would not be swayed. “I make no exception,” he answered. In some retellings of this incident, Conan Doyle is reported to have thundered his reply with angry bluster, as though consigning Sherlock Holmes to literary hell. According to the Times, however, he answered the question “very earnestly,” and went on to elaborate. “Dupin is unrivaled,” he stated. “It was Poe who taught the possibility of making a detective story a work of literature.”

  As far as Conan Doyle was concerned, Sherlock Holmes was to remain at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls forever—“I was tired of that sort of thing anyway,” he told one newspaper. Nonetheless, he gave considerable attention to the detective in his lectures. Speaking of his early years in Southsea, he remarked, “At this period a gentleman appeared in my life who certainly has been a very good friend to me, and to whom I think I afterward behaved in a very ungrateful manner—I mean the late Sherlock Holmes, of Baker Street.” Conan Doyle went on to speak of Poe and Joseph Bell before reading two long passages that demonstrated how he had transferred their influence to his own detective. In the first reading, from The Sign of the Four,
Sherlock Holmes conjured a vivid portrait of Dr. Watson’s late brother from a battered pocket watch. In the second, Holmes and his brother Mycroft gazed out a window and constructed the entire life history of a passerby. For Conan Doyle’s audiences, hearing these passages read aloud by the author himself was surely worth the price of admission.

  Many authors took advantage of lecture tours to indulge their theatrical leanings. Dickens, for example, had often appeared in various costumes to impersonate characters from his novels. Conan Doyle, a nervous public speaker, preferred a more straightforward approach. “Indeed,” he wrote, “I read to them exactly as in my boyhood I used to read to my mother.” He had no costumes or props, not counting the large red handkerchief he used repeatedly to mop his brow.

  Conan Doyle’s audiences could not have failed to notice his jitters. On one occasion, his collar popped open as he approached the lectern, in the manner of a stage comedian’s pop-up shirtfront, and Major Pond was obliged to hand over his own collar stud. At another lecture, Conan Doyle tripped on his way to the stage and stumbled toward the audience, throwing books and papers before him. “There was much laughter,” he noted, “and a general desire for an encore.” Without Louisa to look after him, Conan Doyle seems to have cut a somewhat bedraggled figure. One reporter observed that he had tied his tie so carelessly that a laundry mark reading “A. Conan Doyle” protruded below his vest.

  If he lacked polish, however, Conan Doyle compensated with his natural warmth, his self-effacing charm, and his obvious passion for America. “Few foreign writers who have visited this country have made more friends than A. Conan Doyle,” reported the Ladies’ Home Journal. “His personality is a peculiarly attractive one to Americans because it is so thoroughly wholesome … he spoke with undisguised enthusiasm of his early acquaintance with American books and of his delight in them. No American boy could have come more intimately into association with the early American writers than did the boy whose early youth was spent in Edinburgh.”