Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  Conan Doyle knew by the example of his own father that insanity was not a term to be bandied about lightly. He had been exposed to psychiatric patients during his medical training, and had a better understanding than most men of his time what it meant to be mentally ill. “What a satire an asylum is upon the majesty of man,” he had written in a story called “A Medical Document,” “and no less upon the ethereal nature of the soul.”

  Yet he had no hesitation in pronouncing Casement insane—at least to the extent that he could not be held wholly responsible for his actions in Germany. Conan Doyle’s certainty on this point bears some examination. He was not a man who admitted his mistakes lightly, nor did he have much use for opinions that did not correspond with his own. In the months leading up to the war, Casement had elaborated his views on a possible Irish-German alliance in clear and cogent terms. To him, collaboration with Germany was preferable to British rule. These views seemed so radical to Conan Doyle, and differed so sharply from his own, that it seemed impossible that a man such as Casement could hold them. “When you have eliminated the impossible,” Sherlock Holmes often said, “whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” For Conan Doyle, then, the only remaining explanation, however improbable, was that Casement was insane. Once he had reached this conclusion, his conscience demanded that he argue for leniency.

  Many who saw Casement in London agreed with Conan Doyle’s assessment. The prisoner had been transferred to a vermin-infested cell in the Tower of London to await trial. He still wore the brine-stained clothing in which he’d been captured, but his suspenders had been taken away after a suicide attempt, leaving him to hold up his trousers by hand. Visitors reported that he seemed “wild-eyed” and had difficulty remembering words and names.

  When it was decided that Casement would have a civil trial rather than a military tribunal, he was transferred to Brixton prison and given a change of clothing. His trial on the charge of high treason opened at the Old Bailey on June 26. It lasted three days and it took the jury less than an hour to return a guilty verdict. In trials such as this one, the convicted prisoner had the right to address the court from the dock before sentencing. Casement spoke at great length, addressing his remarks “not to this Court, but to my own countrymen.”

  “I am being tried,” Casement said in part, “not by my peers of the live present, but by the peers of the dead past; not by the civilization of the twentieth century, but by the brutality of the fourteenth; not even by a statute framed in the language of an enemy land—so antiquated is the law that must be sought today to slay an Irishman, whose offence is that he puts Ireland first.”

  Were these the words of a madman? One commentator was to compare Casement’s eloquence favorably with that of Plutarch. Another believed that his words would be read and remembered by the Irish for generations to come. The judges, however, were unmoved. The extreme sentence of the law was to be enforced—death by hanging.

  Conan Doyle immediately drafted a petition to the prime minister, asking that Casement’s life be spared. He fully acknowledged Casement’s guilt and the justice of the sentence but asked for the opportunity to set out some reasons why the execution should not be carried out. First, Conan Doyle reiterated his earlier sentiments about Casement’s “pains in the head,” calling attention to the “violent change” in Casement’s attitude toward Great Britain. Casement had been exposed to severe strain during his long career of public service, Conan Doyle stated, and had also endured several tropical fevers. Furthermore, his investigations into the abuses in both the Congo and Peru had been of a “peculiarly nerve-trying character.” For these reasons, Conan Doyle concluded, “some allowance may be made in his case for an abnormal physical and mental state.”

  More important, he continued, Casement’s execution would prove “helpful to German policy, by accentuating the differences between us and some of our fellow subjects in Ireland.” It would be used, “however unjustly,” as a weapon against Britain in the United States and other neutral countries. A magnanimous response, on the other hand, would heal some of the wounds in Ireland and make a favorable impression abroad. By way of an object lesson, Conan Doyle pointed out that the United States had shown clemency to the officers of the Confederacy at the conclusion of the Civil War. This “policy of mercy,” he maintained, “was attended by such happy results that a breach which seemed to be irreparable has now been happily healed over.”

  It was a careful, well-modulated document that wisely kept clear of the emotions excited by the trial. Conan Doyle simply made his case and warned of the consequences of hanging Casement. “A brave race can forget the victims of the field of battle, but never those of the scaffold,” he had written in his Boer War history. “The making of political martyrs is the last insanity of statesmanship.”

  With the help of Clement Shorter, Conan Doyle circulated the petition among a small circle of influential citizens, gathering the signatures of scientists, politicians, and literary figures such as G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, John Masefield, and Jerome K. Jerome. George Bernard Shaw withheld his signature, on the grounds that others might refuse if they saw his name on the document, and composed his own petition instead. H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling refused to sign either one.

  It is often reported that Conan Doyle contributed £700 to Casement’s legal defense, which would have been nearly half of the entire amount required. Such generosity would have been very much in character, since he had freely subsidized the legal expenses in other cases, but in this instance there seems to have been some confusion over names. An Irish-American lawyer by the name of Michael Francis Doyle, who came from America to assist in the case, appears to be the actual source of the donation usually ascribed to Conan Doyle.

  If the American backing gave Casement any thoughts of a reprieve, however, his hopes were quickly extinguished. Soon after Casement’s capture, police discovered a trunk filled with personal journals in his Dublin lodgings. These journals, according to the head of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department, contained material so shocking that it could never be printed “in any age, in any language.” Casement, it emerged, was a homosexual. This was not exactly a closely guarded secret, especially after Casement brought a young Norwegian sailor along to Germany as his “servant,” but the discovery of the so-called black diaries gave Casement’s prosecutors a tool with which to head off the campaign for a stay of execution. The king, the archbishop of Canterbury, the pope, and the president of the United States were all made aware of the contents of the diaries. Copies were circulated in Parliament. No one who saw them, according to the News of the World, would “ever mention Casement’s name again without loathing and contempt.”

  Being a traitor had been fairly serious. Chronicling one’s homosexuality, it seemed, was a true hanging offense. Many who had signed the petitions for a reprieve now withdrew their support. At a stroke, said the editor of The Nation, the diaries “entirely killed any English sympathy there might have been for Casement.” This campaign appears to have met with the approval of the government. When the American ambassador to London informed Prime Minister Asquith that he had seen a copy of the diaries, he was told, “Excellent; and you need not be particular about keeping it to yourself.”

  Conan Doyle stuck to his guns. When Foreign Office officials revealed the existence of the diaries to him, he would not withdraw his petition. “They told me that his record for sexual offenses was bad,” he wrote to Clement Shorter, “and had a diary of his in proof of it. I had, of course, heard this before, but as no possible sexual offense could be as bad as suborning soldiers from their duty, I was not diverted from my purpose.” It is tempting to conclude that Conan Doyle’s views on homosexuality were more advanced than those of his peers, but in truth he saw Casement’s diaries as further evidence of insanity, just as he had in the case of Oscar Wilde.

  Not surprisingly, Casement preferred to think of himself as an Irish patriot rather than a lunatic or a de
generate. For this reason, Casement expressed resentment at Conan Doyle’s intervention—referring to him with sarcastic derision as “my friend.” Conan Doyle shrugged off this show of contempt. As with Oscar Slater, he drew a clear line between the justice of the case and the personality of the man.

  Conan Doyle had accurately predicted that Casement’s sentence would bring protests from America at the worst possible time, since President Wilson was still maintaining a policy of neutrality in the war. The American newspaper editor William Randolph Hearst used his influence to urge clemency for Casement—comparing him to America’s own revolutionary war heroes—and grumblings were heard on the floor of the Senate.

  The foreign pressure came too late. Sir Roger Casement was executed at Pentonville Prison on August 3, 1916. “He marched to the scaffold,” wrote Father Carey, the prison chaplain, “with the dignity of a prince.”

  “I hope I shall not weep,” Casement himself had written a few days before, “but if I do it shall be nature’s tribute wrung from me—one who has never hurt a human being—and whose heart was always compassionate and pitiful for the grief of others.”

  * * *

  To the end of his life, Conan Doyle would maintain that Casement had been “a fine man afflicted with mania.” In his autobiography, he would remember the “noble work” Casement had done in the Congo and Peru, and express regret over his “tragic end.” It was not a popular view. The government had been placed in the unfortunate position of hanging a British knight, knowing full well that the execution would create an Irish martyr. Conan Doyle’s articulate protests aggravated an already sensitive situation. It was one thing for an iconoclast like Shaw to embarrass his government, but quite another for a pillar of the establishment such as Conan Doyle. This single act, set among Conan Doyle’s extraordinary record of service during the war years, is thought to have cost him a seat in the House of Lords.

  Once again, Conan Doyle put his principles ahead of personal expedience. There were many who felt as he did; all but a few kept a discreet silence. Conan Doyle’s conscience did not allow for discreet silences, nor did he submit easily to the will of others. Early in the war, while trying to enlist for active duty, Conan Doyle admitted as much to his brother. “I should love the work,” he told Innes, “and would try to be subordinate—which is my failing.”

  It was also his greatest strength. In many ways, the Roger Casement affair had been a trial run. By the time Casement went to the gallows, Conan Doyle was preparing to embark on the last and greatest of his public crusades—spiritualism. The “psychic question,” which had been gathering force from his earliest days in Southsea, now emerged as the most important thing in his life, and he was to become its most eloquent spokesman. “It is the thing,” he would write, “for which every preceding phase, my gradual religious development, my books, which gave me an introduction to the public, my modest fortune, which enables me to devote myself to unlucrative work, my platform work, which helps me to convey the message, and my physical strength, which is still sufficient to stand arduous tours and to fill the largest halls for an hour and a half with my voice, have each and all been an unconscious preparation. For thirty years I have trained myself exactly for the role without the least inward suspicion of whither I was tending.”

  It was to be—as Dr. Watson remarked of the giant rat of Sumatra—a tale for which the world was not yet prepared.

  24

  Is Conan Doyle Mad?

  Remember he believes it himself. Of that you may be assured. A more honest man never lived.

  —MRS. CHALLENGER IN THE LOST WORLD

  German bombers had struck London only a few days earlier, and near-blackout conditions were in force as Conan Doyle rose to give his lecture on October 25, 1917. Many years had passed since his first attempts at public speaking in Southsea, when his agitation would cause the bench to shake. After many hundreds of literary lectures and campaign stump speeches, Conan Doyle had developed into a polished orator. Nonetheless, he must have felt some of his old nervousness that night in London. Of all the speeches he had ever given, this was perhaps the bravest. The occasion was a meeting of the London Spiritualist Alliance, chaired by Sir Oliver Lodge, in the salon of the British Artists’ Gallery in Pall Mall. After decades of experimentation and equivocation, Conan Doyle was now prepared to declare himself publicly as a dedicated spiritualist. He had crossed the Rubicon.

  “The subject of psychical research,” he told his audience, “is one upon which I have thought more, and been slower to form my opinion about, than upon any other subject whatever. Every now and then as one jogs along through life some small incident occurs to one which very forcibly brings home the fact that time passes and that first one’s youth and then one’s middle age is slipping away. Such an incident occurred to me the other day. There is a column in that excellent little paper, Light, which is devoted to what occurred on the corresponding date a generation—that is, thirty years—ago. As I read over this column recently I had quite a start as I saw my own name, and read the reprint of a letter which I had written in 1887, detailing some interesting spiritual experience which had occurred to me in a séance. This will confirm my statement that my interest in the subject is one of some standing, and I may fairly claim since it is only within the last year or so that I have finally announced that I was satisfied with the evidence, that I have not been hasty in forming my opinion.”

  That said, Conan Doyle went on to review the slow stages of his progress toward belief—his wide reading, his early experiments in Southsea, his long-standing membership in the Society for Psychical Research, and his correspondence with men such as Lodge and Sir William Barrett. He spoke for over an hour, giving a capsule history of the spiritualist movement from the Fox sisters to the present and discussing the manner in which this “new revelation” might be reconciled with conventional religion.

  Like religion, Conan Doyle concluded, spiritual knowledge required belief rather than evidence. “When an inquirer has convinced himself of the truth of the phenomena, there is no real need to pursue the matter further,” he insisted. “The real object of the investigation is to give us assurance in the future and spiritual strength in the present, to give us a clear perception of the fleeting nature of matter and reveal the eternal values beyond all the shows of time and sense—the things which are indeed lasting, going on and ever on through the ages in a glorious and majestic progression.”

  It was crucial to Conan Doyle that his views be taken as the culmination of a lifetime’s deliberation. When his lecture came to be published, it was billed as “The Latest Pronouncement of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle after Thirty Years of Psychical Research.” In many ways, however, his public declaration had come about quite abruptly. Only one year previously, in the International Psychic Gazette, he expressed regret that he could not offer a more tangible form of comfort to the families of soldiers lost in the war: “I fear I can say nothing worth saying. Time only is the healer.”

  This had certainly changed by the time of his address to the London Spiritualist Alliance, and he confirmed his beliefs one week later in the pages of Light. “[D]eath,” he stated, “makes no abrupt change in the process of development, nor does it make an impassable chasm between those who are on either side of it. No trait of the form and no peculiarity of the mind are changed by death but all are continued in that spiritual body which is the counterpart of the earthly one at its best, and still contains within it that core of spirit which is the very essence of the man.”

  Readers of The Strand were also made aware of Conan Doyle’s beliefs that year. “It is treacherous and difficult ground,” he wrote, “where fraud lurks and self-deception is possible and falsehood from the other side is not unknown. There are setbacks and disappointments for every investigator. But if one picks one’s path one can win through and reach the reward beyond—a reward which includes great spiritual peace, an absence of fear in death, and an abiding consolation in the death of those whom we love.
It is, I repeat, this religious teaching which is the great gift that has been granted in our time.”

  No doubt there were members of The Strand’s editorial board who questioned the wisdom of publishing such statements. At this stage, however, Greenhough Smith could hardly refuse anything to his star author. For more than a quarter of a century, Conan Doyle’s name on the magazine’s cover was guaranteed to boost circulation. In years to come, however, as Conan Doyle turned out a steady flow of articles with titles such as “The Absolute Proof” and “The Evidence for Fairies,” Smith’s loyalty would be sorely tested.

  Conan Doyle recognized only too well that many readers would scoff at his assertions, and he tried to anticipate some of their objections. “Theories of fraud or of delusion will not meet the evidence,” he insisted in Light. “It is absolute lunacy or it is a revolution in religious thought.”

  Conan Doyle’s son Kingsley and brother Innes were still alive when he made these statements, but the family had already suffered many losses. Jean’s brother Malcolm was killed at Mons in the early days of the war. Oscar Hornung, Willie and Connie’s son, died in battle the following year, as did Lottie’s husband, Captain Leslie Oldham. These family tragedies would certainly have left Conan Doyle more inclined toward belief, but at that stage he was not prepared to accept spiritualism without some form of proof.

  He soon found all the evidence he needed beneath his own roof. According to The New Revelation, a book he published in 1918, the ultimate confirmation of spirit phenomena came toward the end of 1915. “[S]ince the War,” he wrote, “I have had some very exceptional opportunities of confirming all the views which I had already formed as to the truth of the general facts upon which my views are founded. These opportunities came through the fact that a lady who lived with us, a Mrs L.S., developed the power of automatic writing.”