Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  If the scenario seemed familiar, the circumstances had changed. Nearly a quarter of a century had passed since A Study in Scarlet. With the creation of Professor George Edward Challenger—whose own wife describes him as “a perfectly impossible person”—Conan Doyle hoped to fashion a character who would challenge Holmes for the public’s affections.

  The idea evolved slowly. In a rock quarry near Windlesham, Conan Doyle had noticed the imprint of some “huge lizard’s tracks” in the stone. The fossils so intrigued him that he alerted the British Museum, who dispatched an expert to take impressions.

  Earlier, while cruising the Aegean with Jean on their honeymoon, he spotted a creature that looked exactly like a “young ichthyosaurus”—roughly four feet long, with a thin neck and tail, and four large side-flippers. “This old world has got some surprises for us yet,” he remarked. These incidents, which added fuel to a growing interest in paleontology, may have provided the spark for Professor Challenger’s first adventure.

  At the time of his second marriage, Conan Doyle had spoken of waiting for inspiration before he attemped a new novel. That wait may have been longer than he intended. In his disappointment over the critical reception of Sir Nigel, he had allowed himself to be distracted by the call of the footlights. His crusades on behalf of George Edalji and Oscar Slater absorbed still more of his time, as did his work for the Divorce Law Reform Union, of which he had become president in 1909. The birth of his sons—Denis Percy Stewart in 1909 and Adrian Malcolm in 1910—also diverted his attention away from fiction.

  Apart from his plays and pamphlets, Conan Doyle’s name remained before the reading public through a series of other works. Through the Magic Door, an affectionate tribute to his literary influences, appeared in 1907, while The Crime of the Congo, a diatribe against Belgian oppression of Congolese natives, followed in 1909. A final Brigadier Gerard story entitled “Marriage of the Brigadier” was published in The Strand in 1910.

  None of these approached the scope and ambition of his earlier works. By the time The Last Galley, a collection of stories, appeared in 1911, Conan Doyle had not published a new novel in five years. As he turned his energy back toward fiction, the critical indifference to his historical novels inspired him to attempt something new. “My ambition,” he wrote to Greenhough Smith, “is to do for the boys’ book what Sherlock Holmes did for the detective tale. I don’t suppose I could bring off two such coups. And yet I hope it may.”

  The result was The Lost World, a vivid adventure tale that stands with The Hound of the Baskervilles and the Brigadier Gerard stories as the most thoroughly enjoyable of all Conan Doyle’s works. Narrated by an agreeable Irish journalist named Edward Dunn Malone, The Lost World introduces the irascible Professor Challenger just as he is mounting an expedition to South America. Challenger and Malone are joined by Professor Summerlee, an academic rival of Challenger’s, and Lord John Roxton, a globe-trotting sportsman. After many hardships and internal disputes, the four adventurers arrive at a remote Amazonian plateau, where a combination of isolation and unusual atmospheric conditions have created a kind of living time capsule. Here, the explorers discover, the world has been preserved just as it was in prehistoric times, and dinosaurs walk the earth.

  The Lost World owed a great deal to Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Daniel Defoe—as many commentators have been eager to point out—but its greatest strengths were unique to Conan Doyle. His passion for research brought the prehistoric flora and fauna to life, while the engaging narration of Edward Malone made both Challenger and his adventures accessible to the reader, just as Dr. Watson had done for Sherlock Holmes.

  Conan Doyle’s reference to “boys’ books” in his letter to Greenhough Smith gave a clear picture of his intent. He would not have used the term in a disparaging sense, but rather to identify the “ripping yarn” school of fiction that he hoped to nudge toward the mainstream. It would not have occurred to Conan Doyle that he was writing science fiction, as that phrase had not yet come into common use, but The Lost World can now be seen as an early masterpiece of the genre. In many ways, The Lost World is comparable to A Study in Scarlet as a milestone of its field, though Conan Doyle’s influence as a writer of science fiction is seldom acknowledged.

  Conan Doyle first experimented with science fiction in early stories such as “The Great Keinplatz Experiment,” featuring a professor and a student who exchange bodies, and “The Los Amigos Fiasco,” in which a botched electrocution transforms a condemned man into a superhuman being. Now, with The Lost World, he brought his mature powers to bear, creating a character who would not be overwhelmed by the hectic twists of the plot. “I was prepared for something strange,” declares Malone at his first meeting with Challenger, “but not for so overpowering a personality as this. It was his size which took one’s breath away—his size and his imposing presence. His head was enormous, the largest I have ever seen upon a human being. I am sure that his top-hat, had I ventured to don it, would have slipped over me entirely and rested upon my shoulders. He had the face and beard which I associate with an Assyrian bull; the former florid, the latter so black as almost to have a suspicion of blue, spade-shaped and rippling down over his chest. The hair was peculiar, plastered down in front in a long, curving wisp over his massive forehead. The eyes were blue-grey under great black tufts, very clear, very critical, and very masterful. A huge spread of shoulders and a chest like a barrel were the other parts of him which appeared above the table, save for two enormous hands covered with long black hair. This and a bellowing, roaring, rumbling voice made up my first impression of the notorious Professor Challenger.”

  After his trials as a playwright, The Lost World seemed to provide some relief for Conan Doyle. His high spirits and sense of humor are evident on every page, especially in a gleeful episode at London’s Queen’s Hall, where Professor Challenger produces a caged pterodactyl as proof of the success of his expedition: “Peering down into the box he snapped his fingers several times and was heard from the Press seat to say, ‘Come, then, pretty, pretty!’ in a coaxing voice. An instant later, with a scratching, rattling sound, a most horrible and loathsome creature appeared from below and perched itself upon the side of the case. Even the unexpected fall of the Duke of Durham into the orchestra, which occurred at this moment, could not distract the petrified attention of the vast audience.”

  As he fleshed out the character of Challenger, Conan Doyle drew on his memories of William Rutherford, a professor of physiology from his University of Edinburgh days. “He fascinated and awed us,” Conan Doyle wrote of his old professor. “He would sometimes start his lecture before he reached the classroom, so that we would hear a booming voice saying: ‘There are valves in the veins,’ or some other information, when the desk was empty.”

  From Rutherford, Challenger received his arresting physical characteristics—the “Assyrian” beard, the rafter-shaking voice, the squat figure, the barrel chest. It cannot have displeased Conan Doyle that these characteristics made Challenger the physical opposite of Sherlock Holmes. Other members of the Edinburgh faculty also made their presence felt. The pioneering expedition of Sir Charles Wyville Thomson aboard the corvette Challenger gave Conan Doyle’s hero his name, while the tall and somewhat imperious Sir Robert Christison, known to his students as “Dignity Bob,” influenced the character of Professor Summerlee, Challenger’s prickly rival-turned-colleague.

  After running serially in The Strand, the book version of The Lost World appeared to enthusiastic reviews in October 1912. “It is decidedly the most imaginative of the author’s works,” declared The Athenaeum. “[H]e has produced a highly interesting tale of outlandish adventure of a sort to stir the pulses and arouse the wonder of even the ‘jaded’ novel reader,” wrote the Times.

  From the first, Conan Doyle showed a fondness and enthusiasm for Challenger that contrasted sharply with his feelings for Holmes. To publicize The Lost World, Conan Doyle even allowed himself to be photographed as Challenger in an expl
orer’s outfit, wig, and long, dark beard. Shortly thereafter, Willie Hornung was surprised to find a black-bearded stranger on his doorstep, who introduced himself as a German friend of Hornung’s famous relation, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Hornung, who was nearsighted, gave a cordial reception to the voluble German visitor, but turned angry when, after a few minutes, he recognized his brother-in-law behind the beard. Incensed by the prank, he showed Conan Doyle to the door.

  When it became clear that The Lost World would be a success, Conan Doyle set to work on a sequel. The Poison Belt, which appeared the following year, begins as Edward Malone receives a strange message from Challenger: “Bring oxygen.” Hurrying to the professor’s home with a canister of oxygen, Malone joins up with Lord John Roxton and Professor Summerlee—his fellow adventurers from The Lost World—who are responding to the same cryptic summons. The professor, it emerges, has noticed a “blurring of Frauenhofer’s lines in the spectra,” which presages the end of humanity. The earth, he explains, will shortly pass through a band of poisonous ether that will extinguish all life on the planet.

  Powerless to prevent the catastrophe, Challenger arranges to postpone the inevitable so as to witness “the last act of the drama of the world.” Sealed in his wife’s dressing chamber with five canisters of oxygen, Challenger and his companions watch in awe as the poison sweeps across the landscape. “No bird flew in the blue vault of heaven, no man or beast moved upon the vast countryside which lay before us,” Malone records. “For a few short hours the knowledge and foresight of one man could preserve our little oasis of life in the vast desert of death, and save us from participation in the common catastrophe. Then the gas would run low, we too should lie gasping upon the cherry-coloured boudoir carpet, and the fate of the human race and of all earthly life would be complete.”

  Conan Doyle was by no means the first novelist to bring the world to an end, but he may well have been the first to play it for laughs. From beginning to end, the author’s finely pitched humor saves the enterprise from gloom—especially in the early stages of the catastrophe, when the poison gas causes the adventurers to lose their inhibitions. “You know me as the austere man of science,” says Professor Summerlee. “Can you believe that I once had a well-deserved reputation in several nurseries as a farmyard imitator? Would it amuse you to hear me crow like a cock?”

  Later, when the poison belt has passed and the atmosphere has unexpectedly refreshed itself, the four men venture forth to view the devastation. Believing themselves to be the only survivors of the calamity, they are surprised to encounter an elderly woman who has been sustained by a store of oxygen used to treat her asthma. “Gentlemen,” she says, “I beg that you will be frank with me. What effect will these events have upon London and Northwestern Railway shares?”

  Conan Doyle has come in for criticism over the years for giving The Poison Belt a happy ending. As the story progresses we learn that humanity isn’t dead at all, but merely sleeping under the effect of a potent narcotic. Challenger and his companions behold a wondrous scene of reawakening as the world stirs and resumes its business. Many commentators have chided Conan Doyle for taking the easy way out, but his business instincts would have admitted no alternative. Conan Doyle had further plans for Challenger. The world, therefore, would have to be spared.

  * * *

  In December 1912, even as Conan Doyle reveled in Challenger’s success, a critic’s barbs turned his attention back to Baker Street. In a rhymed address entitled “To Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,” first published in America in Life magazine, a writer named Arthur Guiterman offered high praise for the “vigor and charm” of Conan Doyle’s work but took exception to the famously outlandish opinions expressed by Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet:

  Faith! as a teller of tales you’ve the trick with you!

  Still there’s a bone I’ve been longing to pick with you:

  Holmes is your hero of drama and serial;

  All of us know where you dug your material

  Whence he was moulded—’tis almost a platitude;

  Yet your detective, in shameless ingratitude—

  Sherlock your sleuthhound, with motives ulterior,

  Sneers at Poe’s “Dupin” as “very inferior”!

  Labels Gaboriau’s clever “Lecoq,” indeed,

  Merely “a bungler,” a creature to mock, indeed!

  This, when your plots and your methods in story owe

  Clearly a trifle to Poe and Gaboriau,

  Sets all the Muses of Helicon sorrowing,

  Borrow, Sir Knight, but be candid in borrowing!

  The suggestion of ingratitude toward Poe, however jocular, must have rankled. “Poe is the master of all,” Conan Doyle had written in Through the Magic Door. “If every man who receives a cheque for a story which owes its springs to Poe were to pay a tithe to a monument for the master, he would have a pyramid as big as that of Cheops.”

  Arthur Guiterman’s poem, then, demanded a response. Conan Doyle’s rebuttal, entitled “To An Undiscerning Critic,” appeared in London Opinion on December 28. The spirit of the holiday season may have moderated his tone, but his poetry had seldom risen to such heights:

  Sure, there are times when one cries with acidity,

  “Where are the limits of human stupidity?”

  Here is a critic who says as a platitude,

  That I am guilty because “in gratitude,

  Sherlock, the sleuthhound, with motives ulterior,

  Sneers at Poe’s Dupin as very ‘inferior,’”

  Have you not learned, my esteemed commentator,

  That the created is not the creator?

  As the creator I’ve praised to satiety

  Poe’s Monsieur Dupin, his skill and variety,

  And have admitted that in my detective work,

  I owe to my model a deal of selective work.

  But is it not on the verge of inanity

  To put down to me my creation’s crude vanity?

  He, the created, the puppet of fiction,

  Would not brook rivals nor stand contradiction.

  He, the created, would scoff and would sneer,

  Where I, the Creator, would bow and revere.

  So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle,

  The doll and its maker are never identical.

  20

  The Ruthless Vegetarian

  THE NOTETAKER: And how are all your people down at Selsey?

  THE BYSTANDER: Who told you my people come from Selsey?

  THE NOTETAKER: Never you mind.

  —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, PYGMALION

  Not all critics, Conan Doyle learned to his sorrow, could be dispatched with such humor and grace. If Arthur Guiterman brought out the best in him, George Bernard Shaw would bring out the worst. “I have known no literary man who was more ruthless to other people’s feelings,” Conan Doyle once remarked of Shaw. “And yet to meet him was to like him.”

  Conan Doyle was by no means the first to remark upon Shaw’s ill temper, but he may have been the first to attribute this ornery nature to a meat-free diet. “It was strange,” Conan Doyle declared, “that all the mild vegetables which formed his diet made him more pugnacious and, I must add, more uncharitable than the carnivorous man.”

  Shaw had been a close neighbor of Conan Doyle’s in Hindhead, and the two men had come to know each other well. Shaw’s remarks on Jane Annie and A Story of Waterloo may have been forgotten, but one particular cruelty of Shaw’s would always stand out in Conan Doyle’s memory. During a charity event at Undershaw, a group of amateur actors came together to stage a few scenes from As You Like It. Conan Doyle enjoyed the presentation thoroughly and congratulated the actors on a job well done. Shaw, on the other hand, went home and wrote a blistering review for the local paper—“spattering all the actors and their performance,” Conan Doyle wrote, “and covering them with confusion, though indeed they had nothing to be ashamed of.” For Conan Doyle, there could be no excuse for such an unwarrant
ed display of spite. “One mentions these things as characteristic of one side of the man, and as a proof, I fear, that the adoption by the world of a vegetarian diet will not bring unkind thoughts or actions to an end.”

  Perhaps it was a bad carrot, then, that accounted for Shaw’s bile in May 1912, one month after the sinking of the Titanic. At a time when the whole of Britain appeared united in its grief over the tragedy, Shaw felt compelled to offer a dissenting opinion. In Shaw’s view, Britain’s press had been guilty of “outrageous falsehoods” in the wake of the disaster. Writing in the Daily News and Leader, he put forward a series of deliberately inflammatory remarks intended to expose this hypocrisy. Under the heading of “Some Unmentioned Morals,” Shaw lashed out at the gentlemen of the press for having lionized the Titanic’s captain and crew on the slender evidence of having gone down with the ship. “Why is it,” Shaw asked, “that the effect of a sensational catastrophe on a modern nation is to cast it into transports, not of weeping, not of prayer, not of sympathy with the bereaved nor congratulation of the rescued, not of poetic expression of the soul purified by pity and terror, but of wild defiance of inexorable Fate and undeniable Fact by an explosion of outrageous romantic lying?”

  A sampling of the newspapers of the time lends considerable weight to Shaw’s view. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, when few details of the ship’s final hours were known, many newspapers in both Britain and America printed rumor as fact, and filled their pages with highly charged accounts of heroism and melodrama. The confusion deepened as survivors arrived in New York aboard the Carpathia, which had responded to the Titanic’s distress calls. The survivors gave sketchy, often conflicting accounts of their ordeal. The press, starved for fresh material, often embroidered these slender facts beyond recognition.