Andrew LYCETT
CONAN DOYLE
The man who created Sherlock Holmes
527pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £20.
978 0 297 84852 3
Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley, editors
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
A life in letters
687pp. Harper Press. £25.
978 0 00 724759 2
It is odd that so much comfort is to be had from Sherlock Holmes, given the
brutal violence of his adventures. Not only are those who cross his path
routinely shot, bludgeoned, or knifed, they run the risk of being starved,
buried alive, attacked by huge and frenzied hounds, killed by horses,
jellyfish, or venomous snakes, asphyxiated with toxic vapours, afflicted
with foul diseases, or crushed in giant iron presses. They might lose a
thumb or an ear; occasionally they lose their minds. Yet Holmes is the most
consoling of literary icons. He cannot always prevent crime or punish the
criminal, but he never fails to explain what has happened, and how, and why.
The prosaic Watson likes to claim that his hero is infallible because he
scorns the emotional baggage that befuddles the judgement of lesser men. In
fact these stories are tense with feeling, for Holmes’s hatred of wrongdoing
is a passion rather than an intellectual commitment.
This personal resonance is strengthened by the bond between the detective and
his biographer. In “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans”, Watson
steels himself to accompany Holmes on a particularly dangerous enterprise:
“‘I knew you would not shrink at the last’, said he, and for a moment I saw
something in his eyes which was closer to tenderness than I had ever seen”.
When Watson takes a bullet in “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs”, Holmes
reveals his distress:
"It was worth a wound – it was worth many wounds – to know the depth of
loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were
dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only
time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my
years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of
revelation."
These are late tales, and such glimpses of emotion are not characteristic of
Holmes’s first appearances. But the earlier relation between the two men in
their shared quarters in Baker Street is like a settled marriage between
widely different partners. The extraordinary success of the stories depends
on a continued dialogue between opposites. Restless intelligence is
contrasted with stolid conventionality. Mundane details of daily life, with
regular meals, railway timetables, newspapers, tobacco and blazing fires,
are juxtaposed with Holmes’s taste for cocaine, melancholy music and the
excitement of his bizarre detective chases. The language is as plain as the
cases are grotesque. These divisions, where hidden strangeness constantly
disrupts commonplace habits, mirror Arthur Conan Doyle’s own life. Andrew
Lycett’s lively and illuminating biography has much to say about the
fissures that split Doyle’s apparently conservative existence from top to
bottom. Insecurity hovered over his childhood. Though he later became the
most patriotic of Englishmen, he was brought up in Edinburgh, and the family
was Irish in origin. They were devoutly Catholic. Arthur’s uncle Richard
(“Dicky”) Doyle, the most famous member of the clan, was a celebrated
cartoonist and illustrator; his grandfather John was a prominent political
caricaturist. His father, Charles Doyle, was also a talented artist, but he
lacked the family’s distinctive self-assurance. Charles’s Irish wife, Mary
Foley, was more capable and forceful. When Charles became a mentally
unstable drinker, and had to be confined in institutions, it was Mary’s
tenacity, together with the practical support of the Doyle family, that held
ruin at bay. Arthur’s disciplined education at Stonyhurst, the leading Roman
Catholic boarding school, and his medical training at Edinburgh, would have
been impossible without his family’s backing. He knew what he owed to them,
but he also knew what was expected in return, and was haunted by the need to
find success, make money and re-establish the family’s respectability. His
mother’s devotion was essential to his self-esteem and sense of purpose; it
also imposed paralysing burdens which Doyle persistently tried to shed.
A liking for romance and fantasy was one symptom of this tendency, but it
often took more hazardous forms. Doyle never lost his boyish inclination to
take risks. He was almost shot as an intruder when he found himself locked
out of a house where he was staying, and clambered up a drainpipe. Having
signed up as a ship’s surgeon on an Arctic whaler, he repeatedly fell into a
freezing sea as he pursued seals. The captain called him the “Northern
Diver”. Doyle could very easily have drowned. He became a pioneer skier,
eagerly took the chance to try out a hot-air balloon, owned motorcycles and
cars as soon as they came on the market (and drove them as fast as he could,
sometimes with unfortunate consequences). A founder member of Portsmouth
Football Association Club’s team, he also played cricket well into middle
age. Other ventures were more serious. He volunteered to help with a field
hospital in the Boer War, where he worked tirelessly to combat the typhoid
that was killing more soldiers than died in battle, and later involved
himself as an observer and historian of military action in the First World
War. These activities were partly inspired by Doyle’s belief that only
perpetual conflict could keep a red-blooded man in good heart, but his
obsessive pursuit of danger also signals a reluctance to accept the
oppressive responsibilities of maturity. Though he did not participate in
the contemporary cult of childhood, he shared many of its impulses. The
epigraph to his high-spirited novel The Lost World, describing Professor
Challenger’s racy adventures on a dinosaur-infested plateau near the Amazon,
makes the point:
I have wrought my simple plan
If I give an hour of Joy
To the boy who’s half a man,
Or the man who’s half a boy.
Writing allowed Doyle to express both sides of his nature. It was not his
first ambition, for the family plan was that he should make his way as a
doctor, and he toiled for years in a profession that was never congenial. He
practised in Southsea, sometimes sitting up late at night so that he could
slip out and polish his name-plate unobserved. Who would trust a
practitioner too poor to employ a servant? Lonely and downcast, Doyle was
joined by his stalwart younger brother Innes, and together they established
an unorthodox male household that was one of the seeds of the ménage at
Baker Street. An adequate living began to take shape, but it was clear that
Doyle did not have the makings of an eminent doctor. Yet his efforts were
not wasted. As he strained to discover accurate diagnoses and effective
cures, he conceived the image of Sherlock Holmes. The scarcity of patients
gave him time to write, and he was plying journals, sometimes successfully,
with a copious supply of the apprentice work that sharpened his storytelling
skills. Literature became more rewarding, personally and then financially,
than medicine. Doyle the doctor, and Holmes the detective, grew up together.
They have much in common, for close observation was the chosen weapon of
both men. One of Doyle’s prototypes for Holmes was his old professor at
Edinburgh, Dr Joseph Bell, austere and analytical. But Holmes was primarily
modelled on Doyle himself, with bursts of mental and physical energy
interspersed with the attacks of depression that would sometimes bring the
great detective low: “But is not all life pathetic and futile? . . . We
reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or
worse than a shadow – misery”. Holmes was a reflection of Doyle. He was also
his antithesis – solitary, always confident of victory, and impervious to
sexual temptation, while Doyle feared defeat, needed company and was
extremely susceptible to attractive women. Every reader wants to possess
Holmes’s powers, but most of us, like Doyle, are a good deal closer to
Watson: “Facts are facts, Watson, and, after all, you are only a general
practitioner with very limited experience and mediocre qualifications”. It
was a fair estimate of Doyle’s position as a young doctor.
Sherlock Holmes rescued Doyle, but it did not happen overnight. The sleuth’s
first appearance, in “A Study in Scarlet” (1887), attracted little notice,
and it was only when Doyle had begun to make his name with more substantial
fiction that Holmes’s exploits caught the attention of publishers and
readers. The real breakthrough came with Micah Clarke (1889), a vigorous
historical novel describing the events of the Monmouth Rebellion. Doyle’s
protracted struggle to find a publisher for this work shows him at his best
– indomitable, but not so convinced of his own gifts that he would be
offended by repeated rejections, or refuse to take advice as to how his work
might be improved. The novel had a good reception, and was soon followed by
The White Company (1891), set in the Hundred Years War. These books secured
the reputation that opened the way for Holmes’s prominence. But it was
characteristic of Doyle’s self-distrust that it took an alarming bout of
illness, when his life seemed threatened, to liberate him from earlier ties:
"For a week I was in great danger, and then found myself as weak as a
child and as emotional, but with a mind as clear as crystal . . . . I
determined with a wild rush of joy to cut the painter and to trust for ever
to my power of writing . . . . It was one of the great moments of exultation
of my life."
The detective stories in The Strand Magazine rapidly became a literary
sensation, and almost as swiftly turned into yet another trap. Having
abandoned the safety of his consulting room for Holmes’s fictional version,
Doyle soon found it as claustrophobic as the one he had left behind in
Southsea. With his mild and accommodating wife, Touie, he moved to London,
and began to live as a prosperous gentleman. There were children to provide
for, a household to maintain. The clamour for more Sherlock Holmes
adventures was hard to resist, for nothing else paid as well. But Doyle felt
that the repetition of the formula had become a professional liability. As
early as 1892 he was hoping to be rid of him for good: “I am in the middle
of the last Holmes story, after which the gentleman vanishes, never to
reappear. I am weary of his name”. The desperate contest on the brink of the
Reichenbach Falls kept the brilliant detective quiet for a while, but failed
to finish him off. He was resurrected in The Hound of the Baskervilles
(1901–02), and Doyle was closely followed by his own creation for many years
to come. Others beside himself had come to depend on the wealth created in
Baker Street, and though Doyle produced a steady stream of inventive and
popular works, he could not repeat the scale of his triumph with Holmes.
Hemmed in by literary celebrity, Doyle also found himself imprisoned in his
domestic life. Faithful Touie, who had never wavered during the precarious
early years, contracted tuberculosis and became an uncomplaining invalid.
Doyle, to his joy and anguish, fell in love with another woman – Jean
Leckie, an accomplished and beautiful singer. The affair grew into a
lingering distress that Doyle could neither resolve nor avoid. It seemed, at
first, that Touie would die with convenient speed, but instead she faded
through a long decline. Doyle continued to see Jean, though they seem not to
have become lovers. They waited, tormented by their guilty need for a
release that only Touie’s death could provide. Doyle’s family came to terms
with the situation, after some indignant huffing and puffing, but the
relationship had to be concealed from his sick wife. The deception made it
hard for Doyle to see himself as an honourable English gentleman, and no
other model of manhood could earn his respect. The impasse dragged on for
ten years, until in 1906 Touie at last succumbed to her disease, enabling
Doyle to marry Jean the following year. Much of his frantic activity at this
time, and after, seems to have been motivated by the need to live up to the
ideals of an upright masculinity with an unwavering resolve that would
cancel out this one disquieting failure. He earned a generous income for his
fragile wife and numerous dependants, tested himself in manly sporting
activities, experimented (mostly unprofitably) as an investor in ingenious
commercial schemes, campaigned for authors’ rights, and restored his sense
of moral self-worth through championing victims of injustice, like George
Edalji, the lawyer of Anglo-Indian descent wrongly accused of mutilating
sheep, cattle and horses. It was a wearing programme, but it built a life
equipped with enough distractions to keep his corrosive anxieties at bay.
Lycett’s capable work, Conan Doyle: The man who created Sherlock Holmes, gives
a detailed picture of these multiple occupations, despite the frustration of
the dispersal and destruction of significant documents after Doyle’s death.
The surviving letters, newly published in the wake of what seems to have
been a competitive tussle between Lycett and the editors of Arthur Conan
Doyle: A Life in letters, John Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles
Foley (the present executor of the literary estate), are not presented with
the same scholarly expertise. Nor are they consistently stimulating in their
own right, for they do not suggest that Doyle was much given to the
subtleties of introspection. Mostly addressed to his mother, they are brisk,
good-humoured and straightforward. What emerges, however, sometimes with
unexpected force, is his search for spiritual meaning that would transcend
the rationalities of his scientific education, or the orthodoxies of social
custom. He abandoned his parents’ Catholic faith in early manhood, but
continued to hunger for a confirmation of immortality – “infinitely the most
important thing in the history of the world”. At the time that Sherlock
Holmes first emerged in Doyle’s writing, he began to develop what would
become a lifelong interest in spiritualism. This is more than coincidence.
Holmes will have no truck with the supernatural: “This agency stands
flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big
enough for us. No ghosts need apply”. But his omniscience often seems a
little more than human. Holmes’s function, and his appeal, is to supply
unfailing answers, and that sense of a constant dependability was also what
Holmes wanted from his religious life. Perhaps spiritualism, with its
promise of direct communication with the dead, could supply it. Doyle moved
warily for years, experimenting, attending table-rapping sessions, reading
reports and investigations. His stubborn materialism held him back, but he
longed to be convinced that spiritualism could offer solid evidence of the
survival of the spirit after death.
For Doyle, as for many others, it was the First World War that pushed him from
sympathetic inquiry into serious commitment. His family suffered more than
most. His brother-in-law Malcolm Leckie was killed in the retreat from Mons
in 1914; Lily Loder-Symonds, a close family friend, lost three brothers in
quick succession; Doyle’s nephews Oscar Hornung and Alec Forbes were cut
down “with bullets through the brain”; his brother-in-law Leslie Oldham was
“killed by a sniper during his first days in the trenches”. Such butchery
was very different from the bold adventuring Doyle had always celebrated.
What had become of these gallant boys and men, who had lived according to
the codes of honour that had seemed so trustworthy? Had they simply toppled
into a black and silent pit? When Doyle’s conversion came in 1916, it was
complete and final. Spiritualism was a “real thing”, not “a matter of
faith”; it was “founded upon concrete facts”. Like Holmes, it could be
depended on to dispel mystery and put an end to doubt.
As hostilities finally ground to a halt, Doyle’s need for such certainty
deepened. His eldest son, Kingsley, weakened by a throat wound he had
sustained on the Somme, died of flu in October 1918. Four months later,
Doyle’s brother Innes, whose cheerful companionship had made the dreary
years in Southsea tolerable, also fell victim to flu, after fighting with
distinction throughout the war. The loss was unspeakable. Until the end of
his life, Doyle braved derision to spend his energy, his time and his money
on the promotion of spiritualist causes. “I am doing what I feel to be my
plain duty, tho’ not always an easy or pleasant one.” This was, as many have
noted, a matter of some pathos. Doyle’s spiritualism has certainly done his
literary reputation no favours. Yet there is a resolute dignity in his
refusal to retreat, of a kind that is entirely consistent with his blunt and
troubled nature. His zeal was grounded in the sense of shared humanity that
had always made his writing something more than commercial hackwork. Nothing
finally meant more than the loyalty and love that lay behind Sherlock
Holmes’s penetrating reason: “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’”.
Dinah Birch is Professor of English Literature at the University of
Liverpool. She is the General Editor of a forthcoming edition of the Oxford
Companion to English Literature, and her new book, Our Victorian Education,
will be published this year.
