The Narrative of
John Smith
EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
JON LELLENBERG, DANIEL STASHOWER
AND RACHEL FOSS
THE BRITISH LIBRARY
THE EDITORS
JON LELLENBERG, US agent for the Conan Doyle Estate Ltd, is the editor of The Quest for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1995) and co-editor of the award-winning BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters (2007).
DANIEL STASHOWER is a two-time Edgar Award-winning author whose books include Teller of Tales: The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1999); The Beautiful Cigar Girl (2006) and (as co-editor with Jon Lellenberg) Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters (2007).
RACHEL FOSS is Lead Curator of Modern Literary Manuscripts at The British Library.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Editors wish to thank, for their assistance, Catherine Cooke, Alison Corbett, Susan E. Dahlinger, Michael Dirda, Richard Fairman, Dr Robert S. Katz, Randall Stock and Peter Wood.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
The Narrative of John Smith
NOTE ON THE MANUSCRIPT
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
IN AN ARTICLE called ‘My First Book,’ published in The Idler in January 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle, recounting his struggles as an aspiring young author, referred to an early manuscript which was lost in the post on its way to the publishers. With mock dramatic flourish, he wrote:
Alas for the dreadful thing that happened! The publishers never received it, the Post Office sent countless blue forms to say that they knew nothing about it, and from that day to this no word has ever been heard of it.
This work was The Narrative of John Smith, a novel with a ‘personal–social–political complexion’ that Conan Doyle undertook during his early years in Southsea, a suburb of Portsmouth, as he attempted to establish himself both as a doctor and as a writer. In June 1881, after five years of study, he had attained his Bachelor of Medicine (MB) and Master of Surgery (CM) from the University of Edinburgh. One year later, after the second of two stints as a ship’s surgeon and a short-lived venture as a partner in the Plymouth practice of George Budd, a fellow Edinburgh medical graduate, Conan Doyle arrived in Southsea and rented a house at number 1 Bush Villas, intent on finally making a successful independent start in his chosen profession. ‘I took the most central house I could find,’ he told a family friend, ‘determined to make a spoon or spoil a horn,1 and got three pounds worth of furniture for the Consulting Room, a bed, a tin of corned beef and two enormous brass plates with my name on it.’2
In spite of his qualifications, energy and experience, he faced a considerable challenge. He was acquainted with neither the city nor any of its residents, and had practically no money to cover day-to-day expenses while building up his practice. Family circumstances only increased the pressure. His father, Charles Doyle, after suffering failing health and alcoholism for many years, had been admitted to a ‘health resort,’ as Conan Doyle described it, straining the family’s already precarious finances. As the adult son, Conan Doyle was now ‘practically the head of a large struggling family,’ and deeply conscious of this responsibility. ‘Perhaps it was good for me that the times were hard,’ he wrote, ‘for I was wild, full-blooded, and a trifle reckless, but the situation called for energy and application so that one was bound to try to meet it. My mother had been so splendid that we could not fail her.’3 Two of his sisters had taken positions as governesses in Portugal, sending their pay home, and Conan Doyle was also eager to contribute to the family’s welfare, sending for his ten-year-old brother Innes and assuming responsibility for him. Conan Doyle’s letters home meticulously detail his efforts and successes on this score, frequently itemising the particulars of his bills and other outgoing expenses as well as income gained from medicine and writing. These letters paint an evocative picture of how precarious a business it was for him to keep afloat.
By 1884 Conan Doyle was able to report proudly to his mother that there were more than a hundred Southsea families for whom he was sole medical adviser. But in 1882 and 1883, patients were few and far between, and even when an appointment in 1883 as a medical examiner for the Gresham Life Assurance Society provided some badly needed extra funds, it was primarily writing that he looked to for additional income. An 1882 letter home makes clear that, although small at the time, the income from writing was crucial: ‘In the meantime we try to keep the thing going by literature – yesterday I got the proofs of a photographic article – not much but a pound I daresay.’4
A decade later, Conan Doyle was to abandon medicine in order to devote himself solely to writing, a decision he later described as ‘one of the great moments of exultation of my life.’ But in Southsea he divided his labours and loyalties between medicine and writing, which were sometimes complementary and sometimes antagonistic undertakings. (‘It is hard to say which suffered most,’ he later joked.)
He had started writing short stories and poetry as a student and regularly tried his luck with magazine submissions. One story in late 1877 or early 1878 was sent to Edinburgh’s prestigious Blackwood’s Magazine. ‘The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe – a True Ghost Story’ failed to appear in print, its manuscript sitting in the magazine’s archives for many decades unsuspected. His first success came with a story strongly influenced by Edgar Allan Poe: ‘The Mystery of Sasassa Valley,’ which was published in Chambers’ Journal on 6 September 1879, earning him the princely sum of three guineas. ‘After receiving that little cheque I was a beast that has once tasted blood,’ he would tell an interviewer, ‘for I knew that whatever rebuffs I might receive – and God knows I had plenty – I had once proved I could earn gold, and the spirit was in me to do it again.’ He also started publishing articles, some of them unpaid in the British Medical Journal or the Lancet to position himself professionally, but also a few paid ones in the British Journal of Photography.
He did not allow early rejections of his fiction to discourage him. He took heart from contacts such as James Hogg, editor of the monthly London Society and the first of several magazine editors to take an interest in the fledgling writer’s work. By 1883, the magazines which had published Conan Doyle included All the Year Round, Blackwood’s, London Society, Chambers’ Journal, Temple Bar Magazine, Good Words and Boy’s Own Paper. It was, however, the publication in January 1884 of his story ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement’ in The Cornhill which constituted Conan Doyle’s greatest early success. The Cornhill was Britain’s foremost literary magazine, published by George Smith of Smith, Elder & Co., which had made its name in 1847 with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Conan Doyle’s story’s success cemented a budding association with James Payn, an editor he had long admired, and for the first time brought him into the general orbit of London literary society.
His sense of triumph, however, was mingled with frustration owing to the practice of the time, among journals such as The Cornhill, of publishing contributions anonymously. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, critics attributed Conan Doyle’s story to Robert Louis Stevenson. While proud and flattered by the comparison – Stevenson, like Poe, was a Conan Doyle favourite – it was hardly helpful in his desire to make his name. In Through the Magic Door, a book on writers and writing published in 1907, Conan Doyle called this practice ‘a most iniquitous fashion by which all chance of promotion is barred to young writers.’ With Habakuk he realised that short-story writing would not furnish the means to fulfil any serious literary ambition. ‘What is necessary is that your name should be on the back of a volume,’ he said in an April 1884 letter home: ‘Only so do you assert your individuality and get full credit or discredit of you
r achievement.’5
The Narrative of John Smith represents Conan Doyle’s first attempt to make the transition from short-story writer to novelist. An 1883 letter points to his growing confidence in his ability to succeed in this venture. He is convinced too of a quality of originality in his work, although less certain whether this originality may produce critical approbation or censure:
Why should I not have a future before me in letters? I am conscious … of a well marked style of my own which should single me out among the crowd for good or evil, could I only get my head above water.6
His self-assurance fluctuated, however, with any belief he had in his technical proficiency tempered by doubt. In an April 1884 letter, he confided to his mother:
Sometimes I am confident, at others very distrustful. I know I can write small stories in a taking way, but am I equal to a prolonged effort – can I extend a plot without weakening it – can I preserve the identity of a character throughout – these are the questions which vex me.7
On the evidence of the Narrative, the answer to his questions was a resounding ‘no.’ There is very little in the way of plot or characterisation: the work is essentially a series of lengthy reflections on contemporary debates occupying the young Conan Doyle in his early twenties. They are voiced by John Smith, a man of fifty who, due to illness, is confined to his rooms for a week. These reflections frequently appear as internal monologues; less frequently, in dialogue between Smith and his doctor, and the other characters who also largely function as extensions of himself. The Narrative is not successful fiction, but offers remarkable insight into the thinking and views of a raw young writer who would shortly create one of literature’s most famous and durable characters, Sherlock Holmes.
In 1883, when the 23-year-old Conan Doyle was first writing The Narrative of John Smith, he had already sold a story that had attracted some critical attention. This was ‘The Captain of the “Pole-Star”,’ a ghost story based upon his Arctic experiences. That spring he had started his novel, but then had the idea for his breakthrough story ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,’ based on the Marie Celeste mystery.8 But when he then returned to and finished his novel, and sent it off to the publisher, the manuscript disappeared forever. ‘No I never got poor John Smith,’ he told his mother at the beginning of 1884. ‘I am going to rewrite him from memory, but my hands are very full just now.’9
Smith is presented as a man who has seen much of the world and been many things in life. Now middle-aged, laid up by gout in the boarding-house where he lives, he spends his time conversing with his doctor, landlady, a neighbour and a fellow-lodger who is a retired army major, and ruminating to himself as well, about a variety of matters which constitute the themes of this book. Smith’s illness preoccupies him, a topic that flows into broader considerations of medicine, science and human nature. These also connect to discussions of religion, and all relate in various ways to discussions of literature.
Much is semi-autobiographical in nature, Conan Doyle using Smith and the other characters to expound personal views of his own. He had been raised in an intensely Roman Catholic family, and despite scant means his mother had managed to provide him with a very good Jesuit education at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire in the north of England. But while at Stonyhurst he began to renounce the Church in which he had been raised. ‘Nothing can exceed the uncompromising bigotry of the Jesuit theology,’ he said in his autobiography Memories and Adventures:
I remember that when, as a grown lad, I heard Father Murphy, a great fierce Irish priest, declare that there was sure damnation for everyone outside the Church, I looked upon him with horror, and to that moment I trace the first rift which has grown into such a chasm between me and those who were my guides.
Though he did not become an atheist, he rejected most church doctrine and organized religion itself, continuing to search for religious answers compatible with his scientific and medical education. By the time he was writing The Narrative of John Smith, he had begun to experiment with psychic phenomena, a road that would culminate in his acceptance of spiritualism in 1916.
The themes in the Narrative had autobiographical sub-texts as well, instances of which are annotated in the text. Conan Doyle wanted readers to witness the high-mindedness of the physician’s calling, even as he argued the incompleteness of medical knowledge, and inveighed against the smugness of the scientific establishment constantly enthroning its current set of theories as unquestionable fact. He not only praised Pasteur’s new views on microbes and antibodies, he championed theories such as evolution that were very controversial at the time. Against occasional scientific opposition to such views, he saw even worse pomposity and bigotry in organized religion – finding truer religious feeling in a metaphysics of medicine than in the settled doctrines of the churches, and quoting dozens of thinkers against the latter. At one point Smith debates with a cleric calling upon him at home, outraging the latter into departing in high dudgeon, an episode that may be based upon an actual incident in Conan Doyle’s early Southsea days.
Smith may be of middle age, but his opinions and the fervour with which he argues them are those of a young man with insufficient experience of life as yet to have become diffident regarding life, society, human nature and the like. Conan Doyle held some of those beliefs to the end of his life, but not all. In 1910, in a talk at St Mary’s Hospital, London, entitled ‘The Romance of Medicine,’10 he looked back with greater humility at what he and his contemporaries at Edinburgh in the 1870s had believed about science as the answer to everything. In Chapter 5, when Smith turns to human nature again, he calls Woman but a ‘supplement of a man.’ If that was Conan Doyle’s view then, it was not how he presented women in his later fiction. It also seems inconsistent with his view at the time of his mother, Mary Foley, who was better educated than most women in Victorian Britain, and had a strong personality and will of her own. After he had more experience under his belt, some of his later literary heroines were very independent women indeed.
One more major theme arises in Chapter 2 and continues to the end: Empire and Nations. Conan Doyle came to maturity in the heyday of the British Empire, and as a youth read much of the fiction of empire, such as G.A. Henty’s novels, but this had not previously been a particular theme in his work. It is such here, often using the retired Major living upstairs as a foil. The tone of neither is jingoistic, even though the Major at one point is willing, even eager, to resort to force over a perhaps imaginary Russian offence in Asia. Not only Smith but also the Major describe in firm terms the human cost of war and the bureaucratic stupidities accompanying empire. Smith, described as having spent much of his life in the colonies, believes out there is where life is really life, at both its best and its worst. But Conan Doyle also looks into the far future to see the British Empire but third of the world’s four great powers, outranked not only by the kindred United States but also by China. Even so, in Chapter 5, the last complete chapter in the novel, the final few pages are devoted to a poem very Kiplingesque in tone about colonial warfare, ‘Corporal Dick’s Promotion,’ which Conan Doyle would include in other work of his in years ahead.
For all its energy and ideas, The Narrative of John Smith conspicuously lacks the storytelling technique that would distinguish Conan Doyle’s later career. It affords a striking contrast with The Stark Munro Letters, written some ten years later, in which the author made use of many of the earlier manuscript’s ideas and incidents, but with canny revisions demonstrating his growth as a writer. Dr Stark Munro is a young man struggling to find his way in the world, imparting an atmosphere of discovery to its long passages concerning ideas and philosophy. In the hands of the older, becalmed John Smith, these same passages had quickly descended into pedantry. ‘You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales,’ Sherlock Holmes once complained to Dr Watson, accusing himself of ‘pandering to popular taste’ in his accounts of the detective’s cases. By that measure, Holmes might well hav
e preferred John Smith, but most readers will gravitate to the Watsonian romanticism of Stark Munro.
Be that as it may, The Narrative of John Smith affords a rare glimpse of Conan Doyle’s apprentice period, and demonstrates at least one attribute essential to any professional writer: he was not afraid to set aside a failing manuscript – nor to go back to it for elements he could usefully rework for later tales. Conan Doyle’s later comments about the Narrative make it clear that he was well aware of the many shortcomings of this juvenile effort and, indeed, that he was embarrassed by it. In the same article in The Idler – again referring to the lost manuscript and perhaps offering a warning to future scholars and editors of his work – he wrote: ‘I must in all honesty confess that my shock at its disappearance would be as nothing to my horror if it were suddenly to appear again – in print.’
Why, then, did he take the trouble to embark on rewriting a novel of which he had serious doubts at the time? However harsh his retrospective judgement might have been, and although he abandoned it – for reasons unknown – before he completed the rewriting, it seems likely that he at least began to reconstruct the text in the belief that it might yet be a work worth saving. Indeed, his dismissive comments about the work are not borne out by the fact that numerous similar and sometimes verbatim passages from it were retained in some subsequent works of his (including The Stark Munro Letters, Through the Magic Door, and some others noted in the annotations to the text).
Incomplete and in a state of arrested revision, the Narrative remained a work-in-progress for Conan Doyle. Although one which he eventually had second thoughts about publishing, it nonetheless has a significant part to play in allowing a fuller understanding of his development as a writer; and thus, we believe, offers ample justification for us to transgress his wishes and allow it to appear – in print.
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