Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  “Frankie, you have not kissed me yet.”

  She turned her smiling face upwards and sideways, and for an instant he leaned forward towards it. But he had himself in hand again in a moment. It gave him confidence to find how quickly and completely he could do it. With a laugh, still holding her two hands, he pushed her back into the chair by the table.

  “There’s a good girl!” said he. “Now we’ll have some tea, and I’ll give you a small lecture while we do so.”

  “You are a nice one to give lectures.”

  “Oh, there’s no such preacher as a converted sinner.”

  “You really are converted then?”

  “Rather. Two lumps, if I remember right.”

  Few of today’s readers will require smelling salts to get through this passage, but with this setting and situation, Conan Doyle was testing the limits of Victorian propriety. Only one year later, publication of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie would be halted and delayed by twelve years because of the novel’s frank portrait of a “fallen” woman. Conan Doyle’s treatment of the subject seems naive in comparison, but it was enough to excite charges of needless and offensive prurience. In subsequent editions, Conan Doyle revisited the episode and “softened down some crudities.” Again, these crudities emerge today as winningly quaint; there is some minor business about a cigarette to help Frank control his passions, and some ungentlemanly outbursts—“Oh, bother the tea!” he shouts at one stage, and then urges Violet to “go to the devil!”

  Though he did some minor tinkering, Conan Doyle insisted that the scene be allowed to stand. “I did not set out to write a fairy tale,” he declared, “but to draw a living couple with all the weaknesses, temptations, and sorrows which might come to test their characters and to overshadow their lives. Frank is no ideal hero, but an everyday youth no better than his fellows.” Conan Doyle’s insistence on this point bears examination, and naturally raises the question of whether he had drawn on experiences of his own in establishments such as Mariani’s. Subsequent events render this unlikely, and though his familiarity with the setting is provocative, throughout his career he also demonstrated a familiarity with opium dens, the court of Louis XIV, and the lost city of Atlantis. There is no reason to assume that he drew on firsthand experience in any of these instances.

  Even so, A Duet would always stand apart from his other books. Conan Doyle turned down large sums for the serial rights, in the belief that it would be diminished in that form, and bitterly regretted that the publisher, Grant Richards, took a heavy loss on the novel. He found some consolation in letters of praise from Swinburne and H. G. Wells, but the critical consensus—even apart from William Robertson Nicoll—was overwhelming. One reviewer found the novel “quite unworthy of Mr. Conan Doyle’s reputation” and “a rather daring experiment on the docility of his public.” Even Andrew Lang, who had been instrumental in the publication of Micah Clarke, could not find a kind word for A Duet. “We cannot pretend to be interested in Frank and Maude,” he wrote a few years later. “It may be a vulgar taste, but we decidedly prefer the adventures of Dr. Watson with Sherlock Holmes.”

  Conan Doyle took these criticisms very much to heart. He could acknowledge, he told his mother, that he had failed with The Mystery of Cloomber, The Firm of Girdlestone, and even the more recent Uncle Bernac, but in his “innermost soul” he could not dismiss A Duet so easily. He believed that the effect of the book had less to do with a collection of incidents than with a general sensibility. In the preface to a later edition he wrote, “It is atmosphere—the subtle, indefinable, golden-tinted atmosphere of love—which I have wished to reproduce.… It is on these points that I have succeeded or failed, for I have attempted no other.”

  In light of this remark, A Duet may be seen as a mood piece, a love letter of sorts. In that spirit, one begins to understand the depth of his feeling for it, especially when he had the manuscript specially bound as a present for the woman who, as he told his mother, “kept my soul and my emotions alive.”

  Unfortunately, that woman was not his wife.

  15

  Thoughts He Dare Not Say

  I had an intuition that I should marry you from the first day that I saw you, and yet it did not seem probable. But deep down in my soul I knew that I should marry you.

  —FRANK CROSSE IN A DUET WITH AN OCCASIONAL CHORUS

  Conan Doyle met Jean Leckie on March 15, 1897. For the rest of his life, he would always mark the anniversary by presenting her with a single white flower—a snowdrop.

  The circumstances of their meeting are not known, and Conan Doyle kept the details deliberately vague. In his autobiography, Jean Leckie would not be mentioned until the chronicle had moved ahead another ten years, and she was then presented as “the younger daughter of a Blackheath family whom I had known for years, and who was a dear friend of my mother and sister.” By that time it was certainly true that the Leckies and the Doyles had become intimates, but this was the result, rather than the cause, of the relationship between Conan Doyle and Jean.

  “There are some things which one feels too intimately to be able to express,” he declared, gracefully sidestepping any closer examination of the issue. The reason for his ambiguity is clear enough. The early years of his romance with Jean Leckie had been the most wrenching period of his life. He claimed to have fallen in love with Jean at the moment he saw her, but at the time, he was still very much a married man. His rigid sense of honor, the code of chivalry that guided his life and shaped his fiction, now faced its sternest test. “I have asked myself,” said the beautiful young heroine of The White Company, “if the best which can be done with virtue is to shut it within high walls as though it were some savage creature.” No doubt there were times in those years when Conan Doyle asked himself the same thing.

  By all accounts, Jean Leckie was a remarkable woman. The daughter of well-to-do Scottish parents, she had a striking appearance, with curly dark-blond hair and bright green eyes. Quick-witted and widely read, she was also a skilled horsewoman and a trained mezzo-soprano. Even her lineage seemed calculated to appeal to Conan Doyle; her family claimed descent from the Scottish hero Rob Roy. At the time of their meeting, she was twenty-four years old. Conan Doyle was thirty-seven.

  Three and a half years had passed since the diagnosis of Louisa’s tuberculosis, and her condition precluded any sexual relations with her husband. For all its surface of rectitude, Victorian society offered any number of ways in which Conan Doyle might have gratified his impulses, had he chosen to do so. The Violet Wright episode in A Duet demonstrates that he was familiar with at least one of his options, but Conan Doyle held himself to a different standard. He had pledged himself to Louisa, as he wrote in A Duet, “until the coffin-lid closed over one or the other.” In his view, her illness changed nothing, and he remained determined to honor his marriage vows. There is every reason to suppose that Conan Doyle remained celibate for the rest of Louisa’s life.

  The circumstances had been difficult enough up to this point. Now, having met and fallen in love with Jean, the conflict between duty and desire became a torment. From the first, he told Jean that he would not divorce Louisa and would not be unfaithful to her. Jean accepted this, and in the early stages they were careful not to spend too much time together, possibly for fear of yielding to temptation. “I fight hard against all the powers of darkness” he declared, “and I win.”

  Conan Doyle felt no hesitation in discussing his dilemma with the Ma’am. It may seem odd that a man in his situation should take the problem to his mother, but Conan Doyle took all of his problems to his mother. There were few decisions in his life—his marriage to Louisa, his career changes, the death of Sherlock Holmes—that did not first get an airing in Masongill. He felt no shame in having fallen in love with Jean and was confident that his mother would approve of the virtuous path he had chosen. Moreover, Mary Doyle’s own marriage had presented a set of challenges that were not entirely dissimilar. Whatever her relationship with B
ryan Waller may have been, her marriage to Charles Doyle had been sorely tested through the long years he spent in custodial care.

  Very early, Conan Doyle arranged to introduce Jean to his mother. Mary Doyle not only gave her approval but even went so far as to chaperone the couple on visits to the country. As a sign of the Ma’am’s favor, Jean was given a family heirloom, a bracelet that had belonged to Conan Doyle’s Aunt Annette. Gradually, other members of the family were informed of the relationship. By the end of 1899, Conan Doyle’s sister Lottie had become friendly with Jean. In a letter to his brother Innes, Conan Doyle gave assurances that Touie—as Louisa was still known—would be shielded from any pain or dishonor. “She is as dear to me as ever,” he wrote, “but, as I said, there is a large side of my life which was unoccupied but is no longer so.”

  Also by the end of 1899, Jean’s parents and her brother Patrick had also been apprised of the situation. One gathers that they gave their approval; Conan Doyle received a pearl and diamond stud-pin from the Leckies as a Christmas present. Incredibly, even Mrs. Hawkins, Louisa’s mother, seems to have been aware of the arrangement and condoned her son-in-law’s behavior.

  Amid all these secret meetings and expressions of goodwill, Louisa, whose failing health kept her at home much of the time, appears to have remained oblivious. Conan Doyle intended that she should never know of his divided affections. He may not have loved her with the same intensity of his feelings for Jean, but their marriage had been happy. “I have nothing but affection and respect for Touie,” he wrote to his mother. “I have never in my whole married life had one cross word with her, nor will I ever cause her any pain.” One might well debate whether this course of action was truly in his wife’s best interests, but there is no doubt that Conan Doyle felt he was doing his best for all concerned.

  As for cross words, his children might have remembered matters differently. Conan Doyle loved his children and had been an attentive, affectionate father when he happened to be at home. In this period, however, as the strain of his suppressed desires took its toll, he became distracted and quick-tempered. For much of their lives, Kingsley and Mary had been cared for by relatives. Now, even in the secure atmosphere of Undershaw, their father remained aloof. His work and busy social calendar took him away often. When he returned, he behaved in a gruff and distracted manner. His moodiness became evident in his work habits. In Southsea and South Norwood, he could write in a crowded room. Now, when he entered his study at Undershaw, the children were instructed to tiptoe past the door. If he became a brusque, occasionally frightening figure to his children in these days, Conan Doyle was no different from many men of his time. For Kingsley and Mary, however, who had known great warmth and affection in happier times, the change would have been unsettling.

  One of the books he wrote in the study at Undershaw, while his children crept past the door, was A Duet with an Occasional Chorus. In light of his inner turmoil, this novel of an idyllic courtship and marriage—which drew so heavily on his early years with Louisa—seems a curious choice of subject. Their duet, as he was painfully aware, had now become a trio. Even so, the novel may have presented an opportunity to express himself to both partners. On the one hand, A Duet can be seen as a tender and fitting tribute to his dying wife, who had stood by him through the early years of struggle. At the same time, his decision to present the manuscript to Jean suggests that its pages contained a message for her as well. Possibly Conan Doyle wished to give Jean a taste of a more conventional courtship, one he might have offered if matters had stood differently. Perhaps the novel allowed him to set out, in an acceptable way, his hopes for the future happiness they might enjoy. By doing so in fiction, he did not appear to be longing for Louisa’s death.

  There remains, however, the problem of the scandalous scene at Mariani’s establishment for discreet couples. Conan Doyle had made his feelings on extramarital sex very plain to Jean, and his description of the “dingy little room” at Mariani’s suggests that he had not revised his view. If Frank’s confrontation with Violet did not reflect actual experience, however, it conveyed something to Jean that Conan Doyle wished her to know—that he was a man of honor, a man in control of his urges, but also a man who had lived a full life. He put a great deal of himself into the description of Frank, who had inherited an artistic temperament and literary ambition from his mother. “Strength, virility, emotional force, power of deep feeling—these are traits which have to be paid for,” Conan Doyle wrote. “There was sometimes just a touch of the savage, or at least there were indications of the possibility of a touch of the savage, in Frank Crosse. His intense love of the open air and of physical exercise was a sign of it. He left upon women the impression, not altogether unwelcome, that there were unexplored recesses of his nature to which the most intimate of them had never penetrated. In those dark corners of the spirit either a saint or a sinner might be lurking, and there was a pleasurable excitement in peering into them, and wondering which it was. No woman ever found him dull.”

  If to some extent A Duet had been an exercise in make-believe for Jean, it also carried a warning: Conan Doyle had his demons. He expressed further concern over these “dark corners of the spirit” in a poem he composed during this period. Conan Doyle had been experimenting with poetry for many years, and his first collection of verse, Songs of Action, appeared in 1898. Most of his poems were narrative ballads of fighting men and sporting events, and many revealed the author’s careful study of Rudyard Kipling, his former golfing companion. One of Conan Doyle’s better efforts, a comic poem entitled “Bendy’s Sermon,” told the story of a prizefighter-turned-preacher named Bendigo, whose fighting instincts return when hecklers disrupt a sermon: “He vaulted from the pulpit like a tiger from a den / They say it was a lovely sight to see him floor his men … Platt was standin’ on his back and lookin’ at his toes, / Solly Jones of Perry Bar was feelin’ for his nose, / Connor of the Bull Ring had all that he could do / Rakin’ for his ivories that lay about the pew.”

  Poems of this sort suggest that Conan Doyle’s tastes ran toward the likes of Ernest Lawrence Thayer, whose “Casey at the Bat” appeared a few years earlier. Nevertheless, while gathering up a collection of poems with titles such as “Corporal Dick’s Promotion” and “The Farnshire Cup,” Conan Doyle slipped in a deeply personal, highly introspective effort called “The Inner Room.” In it, he conceived of his own personality as a “motley company” of conflicting impulses, each represented by a different character—a soldier, a priest, an agnostic—and all of them struggling for control of his soul. The soldier is “Bluff and keen; / Single-minded, heavy-fisted, / Rude of mien.” The priest is “schism-whole” and “loves the censer-reek / And organ-roll.” Trailing behind the priest is a skeptical “younger brother” who is “Peering forwards anxious-eyed, / Since he learned to doubt his guide.”

  Sitting quietly among these figures is “a stark-faced fellow, / Beetle-browed, / Whose black soul shrinks away / From a lawyer-ridden day, / And has thoughts he dare not say / Half avowed.” This is quite possibly the most personal and revealing line Conan Doyle ever wrote. If the stark-faced fellow represents Conan Doyle’s own guilty conscience, we are left to wonder what the “lawyer-ridden” event might be, and why it has caused him such anxiety. Can it be that in his darkest moments he considered divorcing Louisa, and perhaps removing her to some distant health resort, leaving him free to pursue a new life with Jean? Within ten years he would join England’s Divorce Law Reform Union. His concern over the issue, it must be said, rested with obtaining equal divorce rights for women, since the current system gave an unfair bias toward the husband. Conan Doyle’s convictions on this issue probably owed more to his mother’s unhappy circumstances than his own. Even so, his active role in the Union—he would serve ten years as its president—demonstrates that the notion of divorce was not repellent to him. It is possible, then, that in fleeting moments he contemplated a divorce from Louisa, even if such thoughts were only “half avowed.”


  If so, the “stark-faced” figure was only one of the many warring figures in Conan Doyle’s “Inner Room.” The poem concludes:

  If the stark-faced fellow win,

  All is o’er!

  If the priest should gain his will,

  I doubt no more!

  But if each shall have his day,

  I shall swing and I shall sway

  In the same old weary way

  As before.

  Soon enough, this “motley company” would merge into a single figure, one that combined the unconventional thoughts of the agnostic, the crusading zeal of the soldier, and the unshakable faith of the priest. Conan Doyle had long since started down the path toward psychic belief, but he had not yet made the transition from “anxious-eyed” skeptic to “schism-whole” believer. Once he had accepted this “new revelation,” as he would call it, his doubts and longings would merge into a spiritualist system of belief, and the voices of the inner room would fall silent. “There are strange red depths in the soul of the most commonplace man,” he was to write in The Lost World. Only his absolute conviction in the “serenity of psychic knowledge” would quiet those rumblings once and for all. In the words of his poem, he would “doubt no more.”

  For the time being, however, Conan Doyle continued in the “same old weary way” to struggle with his internal conflicts. He did not bear his burdens cheerfully. His temper flared often. He took offense easily, and could be curt with associates. Friends noticed that he appeared stiff in manner and bearing. “I have lived for six years in a sick room,” he told his mother, “and, oh, how weary of it I am: Dear Touie: It has tried me more than her—she never dreams of it and I am very glad.”

  Desperate for distraction, Conan Doyle seized on any activity that might take him away from home for a day or two. He spent time at the Reform Club in London, accepted lecturing invitations, and set off on numerous sporting junkets. Sometimes he stayed away for longer periods. He traveled through Italy with his brother-in-law, Willie Hornung, in the spring of 1898, meeting up with H. G. Wells and his wife. Wells, whose most recent novels included The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, had come to Siena to visit George Gissing, the author of New Grub Street. The four writers spent several weeks together.