But for the war, Conan Doyle might have settled for Balfour’s “undue meed of honour.” Now, as the nation mourned its dead, he resolved to bring the entire world around to his way of thinking. A single episode from those early years of lecturing illustrates the depth of his conviction. En route to Nottingham to deliver an address, he received a telegram informing him that his son Kingsley, weakened by injuries at the Somme, had died of influenza. The news left Conan Doyle staggered, but only momentarily. Mastering his emotions, he decided to carry on with his lecture. “My duty,” he declared, “is to other sufferers.”
“Had I not been a spiritualist,” he told a friend afterward, “I could not have spoken that night. As it was, I was able to go straight on the platform and tell the meeting that I knew my son had survived the grave, and that there was no need to worry.”
The modern reader may disagree with him, and perhaps think him foolish, but no one can doubt the strength and sincerity of his beliefs. Only four months later, the same epidemic of influenza would also claim his beloved brother Innes. Some two years later, the Ma’am would also pass away at the age of eighty-three, having outlived three of her children. “Thank God,” Conan Doyle would write, “that I have since found that the gates are not shut, but only ajar, if one does show earnestness in the quest.”
That earnestness lay at the heart of his faith. “[S]piritual truth does not come as a culprit to a bar,” he later wrote, “but you must rather submit in a humble spirit to psychic conditions and so go forth, making most progress when on your knees.” In other words, one must already believe in order to find proof. For many skeptics, this precondition of faith rendered Conan Doyle’s testimony worthless. By his standard, anyone who came away from the séance room unconvinced had only themselves to blame. Any shadow of doubt, he argued, created a climate of hostility in which no spirit could appear. Even his most sympathetic readers found it difficult to suspend disbelief so entirely. Conan Doyle was unmoved. “It is not a question of proof,” he often stated, “I know it to be true.”
In this uncritical frame of mind, Conan Doyle now encountered one apparent proof after another. Then, on September 7, 1919, a lecture in Portsmouth led to a breakthrough he had long desired. Sharing the platform that night was a medium named Evan Powell, whom Conan Doyle described as “a colliery clerk and an amateur but a very powerful medium.” Afterward, Powell agreed to hold a séance for Conan Doyle, Jean, and two others. It was the custom at the time to subject the medium to a rigorous search, and then tie him or her securely to a chair so as to rule out the possibility of deception. “We treated Powell as if he were a pro,” Conan Doyle said, “stripping, searching and binding him with six separate lengths of string. We had to cut him loose afterward.”
Nevertheless, when the lights were put out and the room plunged into darkness, Powell produced a remarkable manifestation. Afterward, Conan Doyle described it in a letter to Oliver Lodge:
We had strong phenomena from the start, and the medium was always groaning, muttering, or talking, so that there was never a doubt where he was. Suddenly I heard a voice.
“Jean, it is I.”
My wife cried, “It is Kingsley.”
I said, “Is that you, boy?”
He said in a very intense whisper and a tone all his own, “Father!” and then after a pause, “Forgive me!”
I said, “There was never anything to forgive. You were the best son a man ever had.” A strong hand descended on my head which was slowly pressed forward, and I felt a kiss just above my brow.
“Are you happy?” I cried.
There was a pause and then very gently, “I am so happy.”
Conan Doyle would repeat this description many times in the coming years. “I have had several communications since,” he wrote many years later, “but none which moved me so much as this first one.”
Much deception can be practiced on a willing subject in the darkened confines of a séance room. A confederate may move about freely, while any telltale sounds are masked by the groaning and muttering of the medium. The intense whisper of a spirit voice, no matter how passionate, does not invite positive identification. There is even such a thing as a “séance chair,” long available in specialty catalogs, which features a collapsible armrest, so as to allow a medium to slip in and out of any inconvenient restraints.
Conan Doyle knew all of this and more, but he chose to believe anyway. For many years he had spoken of finding a greater meaning to his life, “some big purpose” for which he had been placed on earth. The Congo, George Edalji, divorce law reform, Oscar Slater, the Channel tunnel, civilian rifle ranges—there had been dozens of causes, and they all faded to insignificance when set against this. Years earlier, he had lost his Catholic faith, but the need for faith remained. At last, he believed.
“People ask me, not unnaturally, what is it which makes me so perfectly certain that this thing is true,” he wrote in his autobiography. “That I am perfectly certain is surely demonstrated by the mere fact that I have abandoned my congenial and lucrative work, left my home for long periods at a time, and subjected myself to all sorts of inconveniences, losses and even insults, in order to get the facts home to the people.… I may say briefly that there is no physical sense which I possess which has not been separately assured.… I have seen my mother and my nephew, young Oscar Hornung, as plainly as I ever saw them in life—so plainly that I could almost have counted the wrinkles of the one and the freckles of the other.… All fine-drawn theories of the subconscious go to pieces before the plain statement of the intelligence, ‘I am a spirit. I am Innes. I am your brother.’”
Many others felt as he did; all but a few kept quiet about it. Conan Doyle’s sense of duty would not permit him to keep quiet. He had found solace in the face of devastating loss, and felt he must share it with others.
The task would absorb him for the rest of his life. If this makes him a madman, so be it.
25
Away with the Fairies
Her wings would scarcely carry her now, but in reply she alighted on his shoulder and gave his chin a loving bite. She whispered in his ear, “You silly ass.”
—J. M. BARRIE, PETER AND WENDY
By December of 1920, readers of The Strand had grown accustomed to reading odd dispatches from Windlesham. The previous month, Conan Doyle had published a lengthy article about ectoplasm, defined as “the substance of spirit emanations and thought forms,” which was accompanied by photographs of unsightly gelatinous material oozing from the nose and mouth of a medium. “The pictures are strange and repulsive,” he admitted, “but many of Nature’s processes seem so in our eyes.” Earlier, he paid a glowing tribute to the Fox sisters as the “handmaidens of Spiritism,” while a later article would speculate on the potential for posthumous collaboration with Oscar Wilde, Jack London, Charles Dickens, and Joseph Conrad.
Even so, nothing had prepared the readership for the revelation that awaited them in the pages of the Christmas issue. “Fairies Photographed” declared the headline. Though the article adopted a cautious tone, the implication was clear—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, now believed in fairies: “Should the incidents here narrated, and the photographs attached, hold their own against the criticism which they will excite, it is no exaggeration to say that they will mark an epoch in human thought.”
This, for many people, was the last straw. Up to a point, even his skeptics had been willing to listen to Conan Doyle’s exhortations with detached interest, and those who had not yet made up their minds on spiritualist matters came away impressed by his lucidity. Earlier that year, he had dealt with a highly publicized attack on his beliefs in a manner that even his critics had to admire. A man named Joseph McCabe, representing the Rationalist Press Organization, had let it be known that he regarded Conan Doyle as a well-intentioned fool. In an address entitled “Sir A. Conan Doyle’s Ghosts,” McCabe accused the author of using his influence to extend false hope to the families of the dead. He
would like nothing better, McCabe declared, than to meet Conan Doyle in an open debate.
Conan Doyle accepted immediately, and the two men arranged to face off at London’s Queen’s Hall on March 11, 1920. Eager spectators flocked in from all over the country, paying inflated prices to scalpers to obtain tickets. Many believed that the confrontation would mark a defining moment of the spiritualist movement.
Joseph McCabe was an able speaker who felt he had a duty to expose the “overweening fraud” of spiritualism. Because he believed so completely in the strength of his position, he had not reckoned on the power of Conan Doyle’s oratory. If his political adventures in Scotland taught him nothing else, Conan Doyle knew how to handle a hostile crowd. Over the years, he had cultivated a genial, avuncular manner that often took up where his facts left off. On one occasion, after knocking a bottle of water onto reporters during a lecture, he offered a memorable apology: “I may not have converted you, but at any rate I have baptized you.”
Expectations ran high as the two men took the stage that evening. McCabe lost no time in coming to the point. The spiritualist movement, he declared, “was cradled in fraud. It was nurtured in fraud. It is based today to an alarming extent all over the world on fraudulent performances … but whether Sir Arthur Conan Doyle realizes the extent of that fraud I do not know.” McCabe went on to attack the practices of such mediums as Eusapia Paladino, Daniel Dunglas Home, and Eva Carrière, all of whom Conan Doyle had ardently supported in his writings. Where Conan Doyle described their spirit manifestations as genuine, McCabe said he would substitute the phrase “not found out.” He went on to attack Conan Doyle’s insistence that dozens of scientists and scholars supported the spirit cause. “I courteously challenge him,” McCabe declared, “to give me in his first speech tonight the names, not of fifty, but of ten, university professors of any distinction who have within the last thirty years endorsed or defended spiritualism.”
The remark drew cheers from McCabe’s supporters, but it proved to be a grave tactical error. Rising to reply, Conan Doyle began: “Mr. McCabe has shown that he has no respect for our intellectual position, but I cannot reciprocate. I have a very deep respect for the honest, earnest Materialist, if only because for very many years I was one myself.” Turning to McCabe’s challenge over the names of spiritualist supporters, Conan Doyle brandished a small notebook. “I have in this little book,” he told the assembly, “the names of 160 people of high distinction, many of them of great eminence, including over forty Professors. He challenged me to name ten. I do not know why he limited me, but I have here the names of forty Professors.” This drew calls from the audience to provide the names. Conan Doyle ticked off eight before continuing, “I beg you to remember that these 160 people whose names I submit to you are people who, to their own great loss, have announced themselves as Spiritualists. It never yet did a man any good to call himself a Spiritualist, I assure you, and we have had many martyrs among our people. These are folk who have taken real pains and care to get to the bottom of the subject.”
From this point on, the debate belonged to Conan Doyle. In fairness to McCabe, Conan Doyle answered only one of his opponent’s many charges, but he answered it in such high style that it swept the rest of McCabe’s arguments aside, even though Conan Doyle’s own remarks soon deteriorated into a pallid defense of Paladino, Home, and Eva Carrière. In hindsight, it is difficult to know why McCabe should have raised the matter of “professors of distinction.” McCabe had read several of Conan Doyle’s spiritualist works; he should have realized that his opponent liked nothing better than to list the names of prominent adherents to the cause.
The two men parted in an atmosphere of mutual respect. It is unlikely that anyone who came to the hall with a firm set of convictions was converted by either man’s argument, but Conan Doyle had reinforced his reputation for plain speaking and common sense.
That reputation evaporated in December, when the first of Conan Doyle’s pronouncements on fairies appeared in The Strand. Overnight, Conan Doyle became the spiritualist movement’s greatest liability. “Poor Sherlock Holmes,” ran one headline, “Hopelessly Crazy?”
The story began three years earlier, in the Yorkshire village of Cottingley, when sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright asked to borrow her father’s new Midg camera so that she and her younger cousin, Frances Griffiths, might “take a picture of the fairies.” Elsie’s father, Arthur Wright, had long regarded his daughter’s talk of fairies as a girlish fantasy, but he saw no harm in indulging her whim. The two girls took the camera and wandered off toward the stream at the back of their house, returning an hour later in high spirits. Arthur Wright was astonished when he developed the glass plate negative later that evening to see a strange image emerge: young Frances peering out over a quartet of tiny winged figures. Elsie, who had crowded into her father’s makeshift darkroom with him, shouted excitedly to her cousin as the image began to emerge: “Oh, Frances, the fairies are on the plate!”
This photograph, and another that followed two months later, caused no great stir in the Wright household. The images were copied and circulated among friends as a novelty, but no one placed much store in their authenticity. Arthur Wright made his feelings plain to his daughter and her cousin. “You’ve been up to summat,” he declared, in the manner of a true Yorkshireman.
Two years later, Elsie’s mother became interested in the Theosophical movement, a Western reconstruction of Tibetan Buddhism made famous by Helena Blavatsky and Annie Besant. One night at a meeting of a local Theosophical Society, the subject of fairies happened to be raised. Mrs. Wright mentioned that her daughter had once taken a photograph of a fairy. Soon, copies were made available to members of the chapter. By February of 1920, the photographs had come to the attention of Edward L. Gardner, president of the Society’s Blavatsky Lodge in London.
Edward Gardner was a forty-nine-year-old building contractor. In his spare time, he traveled the country giving lectures on Theosophy. A trim, dignified man who favored a tidy tweed suit and bow tie, Gardner earnestly believed in fairies, goblins, and pixies—creatures he regarded as a primitive link in the evolutionary chain. For him, the Cottingley photographs appeared to confirm his theories. He wrote at once to Mrs. Wright. “I am keenly interested in this side of our wonderful world life and am urging a better understanding of nature spirits and fairies,” he explained. “It will assist greatly if I was able to show actual photographs of some of the orders.” Soon, Gardner’s lectures featured lantern slides of the two images from Cottingley.
By May, Conan Doyle had been made aware of the photographs. By an odd coincidence, he had just completed an article about fairies for The Strand when the images crossed his desk. In this article, which he eventually published as “The Evidence for Fairies,” Conan Doyle cited the testimony of several witnesses of “unimpeachable honesty,” including his own children, all of whom claimed to have encountered mysterious sprites of one sort or another. At this stage, before the Cottingley photographs convinced him otherwise, Conan Doyle did not insist on the existence of fairies, but he hoped that contemplation of the point would impart “an added charm to the silence of the woods and the wilderness of the moorland.”
It seemed remarkable to Conan Doyle that the Cottingley photographs should come to hand just as he put the finishing touches on this article. In time, he came to regard the coincidence as providential. For the moment, he remained cautious. Hoping to learn more, he arranged to have lunch with Edward Gardner at the Grosvenor Hotel in London, and came away impressed. Gardner seemed to him to be quiet, well-balanced, and reserved—“not in the least of a wild and visionary type.”
Conan Doyle’s lecturing commitments prevented him from going to Yorkshire to meet Elsie and Frances. He had accepted an invitation to give a series of talks in Australia and New Zealand, which would take him away from England for nearly six months. In his absence, it was arranged that Gardner would do the legwork of the investigation. The first order of business, they
agreed, would be a trip to Cottingley.
Up to this point, Arthur Wright had resisted the idea of allowing his daughter to attempt any more photographs. Gardner hoped that the interest of the celebrated Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would help to overcome these objections. For Gardner, this was a matter of some urgency. “[A]lmost certainly,” he wrote in a letter to Conan Doyle, “the inevitable will shortly happen, one of them will ‘fall in love’ and then—hey presto!!”
By “hey presto,” we must assume that Gardner believed that falling in love, and the attendant loss of childhood innocence, would dispel that rare and mysterious quality that enabled the girls to see and photograph fairies. “I was well aware,” Conan Doyle later wrote, “that the processes of puberty are often fatal to psychic power.” In any event, Conan Doyle promptly sent a letter to the Wright family, along with the gift of a book for Elsie. This overture had the desired effect. “I can assure you,” Mr. Wright told Conan Doyle in a letter, “we do appreciate the honour you have done her.” The following month, Gardner was invited to Cottingley.
Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle Page 40
