Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  It was a time when a favorable impression counted for a great deal. Conan Doyle later declared that he could scarcely pick up a newspaper in America without reading some negative comment about Britain, much of it centered on the question of Irish home rule. One night in Detroit, at a dinner held in his honor, Conan Doyle listened with growing distress as one of the speakers, who was well in his cups, launched an outspoken attack on Britain. Affronted, Conan Doyle rose from his seat and asked if he might be allowed a response. His remarks, as he later recounted them for Bram Stoker, expressed his hopes for the future of the Anglo-American alliance: “You Americans have lived, up to now, within a ring fence of your own. Your country has become so vast, and you have had so much to do in peopling it and opening it out, that you have never had to think seriously of outside international politics, and you have lived to some extent in a world of prejudice and of dreams. This period is now drawing swiftly to an end. Your country is filling up, and soon you will have surplus energies which will lead you on into world politics and bring you into closer actual relations with other powers. Then your friendships and your enmities will be guided not by prejudice nor by hereditary dislikes, but by actual practical issues. When that day comes, and it is coming soon, you will find that the only people who will understand you—who will see what your aims are and who will heartily sympathize with you in them—are your own people, the men from whom you are sprung. In a great world crisis you will find that you have no natural friend among the nations save your own kin; and to the last they will always be at your side.”

  Whether Conan Doyle spoke these words precisely is a matter for speculation; there would be many revisions of the tale in years to come. The underlying sentiment remained unchanged, however, and clearly it meant a great deal to him. With the benefit of hindsight, Conan Doyle’s concerns over a “great world crisis” were remarkably prescient.

  Conan Doyle hoped to have occasion to meet American writers on his travels. “Met Bret Harte once at dinner,” he told a reporter, “but have never had the good fortune to run across Mark Twain.” To his lasting sorrow, he had arrived in New York just five days before the death of Oliver Wendell Holmes in New England. At the end of October, he traveled to Cambridge and made a pilgrimage to the Mount Auburn Cemetery, where Holmes was buried. “It was one of the ambitions of my lifetime to look upon his face,” he wrote, “but by the irony of Fate I arrived in his native city just in time to lay a wreath upon his newly turned grave.” Not surprisingly, while visiting Baltimore the following month, Conan Doyle also found time to visit the grave of Edgar Allan Poe.

  Toward the end of November, an invitation came from Rudyard Kipling and his American wife, Caroline, who were then living near Brattleboro, Vermont. Not yet thirty years old, Kipling had published The Jungle Book that year, and Conan Doyle ranked him as “England’s best novelist since Dickens.” Under normal circumstances, Conan Doyle would have leapt at the invitation. At the time, however, he felt uncomfortable about Kipling’s vocal responses to America’s anti-British posturing. “Kipling pulled a few feathers out of the Eagle’s tail in retaliation,” Conan Doyle wrote. “The result at the time was to add oil to flames, and I, as a passionate believer in Anglo-American union, wrote to Kipling to remonstrate.”

  Apparently Kipling took these remonstrances in good humor; he responded by inviting Conan Doyle up to Vermont for Thanksgiving. Conan Doyle and Innes traveled by train from Buffalo, and enjoyed “two great days in Vermont.” Ever resourceful, Conan Doyle managed to scare up a set of golf clubs to offer Kipling a few pointers, “while the New England rustics watched us from afar, wondering what on earth we were at.” Later, Conan Doyle would arrange to share another of his sporting enthusiasms when he had a pair of skis sent to Kipling from Norway.

  The two authors parted on good terms, having agreed to disagree on some of the baser aspects of American culture. As a final word on the subject, Conan Doyle is supposed to have urged Kipling to “stop talking about spittoons.” These differences aside, they would correspond for years to come. “He is a wonderful chap,” Conan Doyle told the Ma’am.

  Having promised to spend Christmas with his family, Conan Doyle and his brother sailed from New York aboard the Cunard liner Etruria on December 8. The tour had been an enormous success; Major Pond had tried to persuade Conan Doyle to extend his stay, and offered a record-breaking sum if he would agree to an even more rigorous return engagement. Conan Doyle sidestepped Pond’s offer but told a newspaper he would be back the following year. In fact, it would be twenty years before he saw America again.

  Privately, Conan Doyle regretted that his profits from the tour—roughly £1,000—had not been higher. “Thackeray and Dickens made money,” he wrote in a professional journal the following year, “and when we have another Thackeray and Dickens they may do the same; but the British lecturer whose credentials are more modest will find that the margin left over, after his expenses are paid, is probably less than the sum he could have easily earned in his own study.” Be that as it may, Conan Doyle felt comfortable enough at the end of his tour to invest $8,500 in the faltering McClure’s Magazine, rescuing it from near extinction.

  The Etruria docked in Liverpool on December 15. Conan Doyle had spent most of the voyage lying low in his cabin, recovering from the exhausting schedule, while Innes enjoyed the amenities of the ship. The travelers made their way to London, where Conan Doyle promptly set off for Davos to join the family for Christmas. If his spirits lifted at the prospect, they quickly sank again at the grim news that greeted him in London. Driving along the Strand in a hansom cab, Conan Doyle caught sight of a yellow newspaper poster. It read: “Death of Stevenson.” Robert Louis Stevenson, with whom Conan Doyle had been corresponding for many months, had succumbed to a fit of apoplexy at the age of forty-four. In time, Conan Doyle would write at length of Stevenson’s legacy, and of the “strange Stevenson glamour” that gave life to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped, and Treasure Island. Stevenson’s executors, in the meantime, asked if Conan Doyle would consider finishing Stevenson’s last novel, St. Ives, but Conan Doyle did not feel he could do it justice. Arthur Quiller-Couch took over instead.

  At that moment, however, the loss struck Conan Doyle at a far more personal level. “Something seemed to have passed out of my world,” he remarked.

  * * *

  In time, as the fatigue and irritations of Major Pond’s itinerary faded, Conan Doyle looked back on his first experience of America with fondness. “My memories are the confused ones of a weary man,” he admitted, but there was one anecdote he would repeat for the rest of his life. It involved a cab driver who, upon dropping Conan Doyle at his destination, requested a ticket to that evening’s lecture instead of his fare.

  “How on earth did you recognize me?” Conan Doyle asked.

  The cabman replied: “If you will excuse me, your coat lapels are badly twisted downward, where they have been grasped by the pertinacious New York reporters. Your hair has the Quakerish cut of a Philadelphia barber, and your hat, battered at the brim in front, shows where you have tightly grasped it, in the struggle to stand your ground at a Chicago literary luncheon. Your right shoe has a large block of Buffalo mud just under the instep; the odor of a Utica cigar hangs about your clothing and the overcoat itself shows the slovenly brushing of the porters of the through sleepers from Albany. The crumbs of the doughnut on the top of your waistcoat could only have come there in Springfield. And, of course, the labels on your case give a full account of your recent travels—just below the brass plaque reading ‘Conan Doyle.’”

  14

  Duet with an Occasional Chorus

  It is my habit, you see, to talk of that which interests myself, and so I hope that I may interest you.

  —BRIGADIER GERARD IN “HOW THE BRIGADIER CAME TO THE CASTLE OF GLOOM”

  In America, Conan Doyle spoke often of the English novelist George Meredith, who had been one of his “youthful cults.” Originally, Conan Doyle hoped that h
is thoughts on Meredith might constitute an entire evening’s entertainment, much as they had years earlier when he addressed a meeting of the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society. On that occasion, Conan Doyle lamented that Meredith’s dense prose rendered him unpalatable to the general public, and perhaps lesser known than the author of the latest “shilling shocker” might be—a self-deprecating reference to his own recently published A Study in Scarlet.

  Shilling shockers aside, Conan Doyle was aware that his own popularity had now surpassed that of the much-admired Meredith, a fact that caused him some distress. He never missed an opportunity to praise Meredith’s masterwork, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, but regretted the “handicap” of the author’s overly ornate style. “If his own generation finds him hard to understand,” Conan Doyle asked, “what will our descendants make of him?”

  For some time, Conan Doyle had been making regular pilgrimages to Meredith’s home in Surrey. Even at close quarters, he discovered, Meredith could be fairly cryptic. On one occasion, when Conan Doyle had traveled down in the company of fellow authors James Barrie and Arthur Quiller-Couch, the three men listened in dutiful confusion as Meredith read aloud his poem “To the British Working Man.”

  “I don’t know what the British working man made of it,” Conan Doyle remarked, “but I am sure that we three were greatly puzzled as to what it was all about.”

  Nonetheless, Conan Doyle returned to Surrey many times. Once, as the two writers sat down to lunch, Meredith asked “with a very earnest air” if Conan Doyle could undertake to drink an entire bottle of Burgundy. Age and failing health had denied Meredith the wines he collected in his youth, but he enjoyed watching his guests make use of his cellar. “I answered that I saw no insuperable difficulty,” Conan Doyle recalled. “A dusty old bottle was tenderly carried up, which I disposed of, Meredith taking a friendly interest in its dispatch.”

  Perhaps the wine made Conan Doyle particularly attentive when Meredith held forth on the subject of Napoleon’s marshals, a topic of great interest to both men. If so, it led to one of Conan Doyle’s finest inspirations. A new translation of The Memoirs of Baron de Marbot, originally published in Paris in 1844, had touched off a fresh wave of interest in the Napoleonic era. De Marbot, a French baron and officer under Napoleon’s command, had recorded his “hairbreadth escapes and dare-devil exploits” with great verve and a pompous but engaging style. Meredith recommended the memoir highly to Conan Doyle, who came to regard it as “the first of all soldier books in the world.”

  It required a certain “robust faith,” Conan Doyle allowed, to credit all of the Frenchman’s outlandish claims of bravery, but therein lay the book’s charm. De Marbot made such an impression that Conan Doyle transferred the French officer’s verve and vainglorious manner into a new fictional hero, Brigadier Etienne Gerard of the Hussars of Conflans—“gay-riding, plume-tossing, debonair, the darling of the ladies and of the six brigades of light cavalry.”

  It proved to be one of his happier brainstorms. With Brigadier Gerard, Conan Doyle not only indulged his love of historical fiction but also created a new character who could sustain his readers’ interest through a series of episodic tales, in the manner of the late Sherlock Holmes. Where his long historical novels tended to wander or bog down in detail, the new stories hurtled along with the speed of the Brigadier’s own “heroic and admired” saber thrusts.

  Each adventure found the flamboyant soldier thrown into an unlikely situation—and facing impossible odds—only to emerge triumphant through reckless nerve and dumb luck. In “How the Brigadier Slew the Fox,” Gerard becomes lost behind enemy lines and blunders into a foxhunt. Forgetting himself in the excitement, he not only chases down the fox but kills it with a lusty swipe of his saber, much to the dismay of the English huntsmen, whose frantic cries and wild gestures he interprets as cheers of encouragement. “They are not really such a phlegmatic race, the English,” observes Gerard. “A gallant deed in war or in sport will always warm their hearts.”

  “How the Brigadier Won His Medal,” the new character’s debut, appeared in the December 1894 issue of The Strand. Conan Doyle had read it aloud to audiences in America, whose generous responses encouraged him to think he had a success on his hands. As he settled back into the routine of Davos, he quickly turned out another seven adventures. These appeared in The Strand throughout 1895, and were collected in book form as The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard.

  Though Conan Doyle often dismissed this collection as his “little book of soldier stories,” Brigadier Gerard soon emerged as one of his most popular creations. Greenhough Smith was delighted to have another continuing series of stories, and the readership warmed to Conan Doyle’s affable humor. “It is pleasant to see so many people fond of the Brigadier,” Conan Doyle commented, “for I was a bit fond of him myself.”

  In Davos that winter Conan Doyle brushed up on his skiing, often in the company of his sister Lottie, and mapped out trails with the Branger brothers. As the family removed to Maloja for the summer, Conan Doyle began work on Rodney Stone, another historical novel. This time he chose a Regency setting, and focused on the sport of bare-knuckle boxing in the days before the Marquis of Queensberry imposed rules on the sport. “Why that subject,” asked publisher George Newnes, “of all subjects on earth?” For Conan Doyle, whose boxing prowess had won him respect aboard the Hope, the topic seemed natural enough. He loved the sport and had participated in matches for most of his life. “An exhibition of hardihood without brutality, of good-humoured courage without savagery, of skill without trickery, is, I think, the very highest which sport can give,” he wrote. “Better that our sports should be a little too rough than that we should run a risk of effeminacy.” Modern readers may shake their heads at this, but for Conan Doyle the boxing ring offered a present-day equivalent of the knightly tournament, a chance to test one’s mettle in ritual combat.

  As always with his historical works, Conan Doyle surrounded himself with research material. He drew on the life of Beau Brummell and several other period chronicles to capture the flavor of the times, and immersed himself in “pugilistica”—the science and history of boxing.

  Rodney Stone began serialization in The Strand in January 1896, with the book edition appearing later in the year. It not only sold well but did much to revive interest in boxing. The book would be reprinted and serialized many times over the next thirty years, and Conan Doyle came to regard it as one of his notable successes.

  Not all of the critics admired the novel. When the first book edition appeared, no less a figure than Max Beerbohm panned the novel in The Saturday Review. Referring to Conan Doyle’s medical background, Beerbohm commended the author as “the first to have carried the bedside-manner into literature.” The very sight of Conan Doyle’s kindly face and gold-rimmed eyeglasses, Beerbohm continued, filled the reader with confidence. However, in this instance, the critic believed, Conan Doyle had lost the patient. “[S]uch slight plot as there is bobs up only at the beginning and end of the book,” he wrote. “And yet he is quite pleased with himself, this obstinate medico. He hints that he means to perform, shortly, a second operation. No, no, Doctor Doyle! You’re a very good general practitioner, I’ve no doubt. But you’ve bungled the post-mortem. Operations of this kind require great special knowledge and most delicate handling.… You had far better have stuck to your ordinary practice.”

  In the spirit of his novel, Conan Doyle might have preferred to settle the matter with his fists. Instead, he contented himself with a letter of rebuttal to The Saturday Review, pointing out the “historical and social errors” in Beerbohm’s review. “He may be upon safe ground when he refers to my bedside manner and gold-rimmed glasses, but he is very ignorant of the period about which he writes.”

  Conan Doyle felt more charitable toward the writer Grant Allen, a fellow Strand contributor he had met on a business trip to London in October 1895. Allen, whose candidly sexual novel The Woman Who Did had created a sensation that year,
was shortly to become an important figure in detective fiction. His novel An African Millionaire, published in 1897, featured a roguish master of disguise named Colonel Clay. Like E. W. Hornung’s Raffles, who made his debut two years later, Colonel Clay helped to establish the now familiar convention of casting a thief in the hero’s role.

  At their first meeting, Allen and Conan Doyle probably did not discuss detective fiction. As a younger man, Allen had suffered from tuberculosis. He cured himself, he insisted, without the expense and inconvenience of a long stay in a foreign sanatorium. Instead, he found the pure air of Hindhead, a village in Surrey, to be just as beneficial. In Allen’s opinion, Conan Doyle could bring Louisa back to England without danger of a relapse, so long as they took up residence in Hindhead. “It was quite a new idea to me that we might actually live with impunity in England once more,” Conan Doyle wrote, “and it was a pleasant thought after resigning oneself to a life which was unnatural to both of us at foreign health resorts.”

  Eager to investigate, Conan Doyle went down to Hindhead, roughly fifty miles southwest of London. Impressed by the dry conditions and sheltered landscape, he arranged to purchase a large plot of land near the center of the village. Having sold off the house in South Norwood, he commissioned the architect Henry Ball to build a new one in Surrey. Ball, Conan Doyle’s mind-reading partner from Southsea, drew up a set of plans that included a tennis court, horse stables, and modern electric lighting. Louisa, who had despaired of ever regaining any domestic stability, greeted the news warmly. “The thought of it,” Conan Doyle wrote, “brought renewed hope to the sufferer.”

  While waiting for the house to be built, Conan Doyle decided to take Louisa to Egypt for the winter, hoping that the hot, dry climate would finish off her cure before their return to England. Once again they left the children with Mrs. Hawkins as they set off on their travels, though Louisa had reason to hope that these periods of separation were coming to an end. With his sister Lottie as companion and nurse, Conan Doyle and Louisa traveled by stages from Caux to Rome, then sailed from the seaport of Brindisi to Alexandria. Arriving in Egypt, the party established itself amid the potted palms and ceiling fans of the opulent Mena House Hotel, “in the very shadow of the Pyramids,” seven miles out of Cairo on “the most monotonous road in the world.” A bastion of empire, the hotel’s lounges formed a hub of British society, with dashing officers in khaki making themselves charming to the ladies while turbaned waiters circulated trays of cooling drinks. Conan Doyle warmed to the social life of Cairo, as did his sister, who was “just at an age to enjoy it.” This was a gallant thing to say of Lottie Doyle, who at the age of twenty-nine would have seemed a bit long of tooth to many of the young officers stationed in Egypt.