My first encounter with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came when I was about ten or eleven years old. I was reading lyricist Alan Jay Lerner’s autobiography (what was a ten year old doing reading the autobiography of the man who wrote My Fair Lady and Brigadoon? I was a musical theater kid. That should say it all) and he opened with an anecdote about how when he was twelve and going to school in England, he read an announcement that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was going to give a speech about the existence of God. Lerner was about eleven or twelve and full of fears about death and God and all that kind of thing, and therefore was thrilled by the notion that the creator of Sherlock Holmes had discovered the truth about God. But Doyle died before the lecture, leaving the poor kid left with nothing but an enduring interest in psychic phenomena and a life in the theater.
I haven’t read Lerner’s book since that summer, but back then I read it over and over. It may seem odd that I remember this so clearly, and I don’t know why, other than that my mind is full of other useless bits of knowledge accumulated during too many other trips to the library. Nevertheless, ever since, I have always associated Doyle with psychic phenomena as much or more than with Sherlock Holmes. And I have always wondered why the same person who created the hero of rationality would also be so swayed by mediums, psychics, and other charlatans.
Last year, right about this time, I read a biography of Harry Houdini that detailed the relationship, or rivalry between Houdini, a fierce debunker of all things psychic and Doyle, the true believer. And again, I wondered how Doyle, who seemed the picture of the late Victorian Gentleman, could fall for all this nonsense. Andrew Lycett’s The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, attempts to answer this question.
Doyle’s father came from an artistic family; Charles Doyle’s father and brothers were successful illustrators, and Charles had some talent for drawing himself. However, he left London and went to Edinburgh, where he worked on designing public projects. Arthur Conan Doyle’s mother, Mary, came from a genteel family and was a self-taught intellectual, who regularly read the French newspapers and sought out salons and fellow thinkers. Charles became a hopeless alcoholic, trading sketches in taverns for drink. Eventually he was committed to an asylum. Needless to say, Arthur grew up heavily influenced by his mother, reading the classic novels she loved. He was sent to a Jesuit school by a rich uncle, and was as devout during that time period as you would expect, but eventually abandoned his Catholicism.
Doyle trained as a doctor at the prodding of a peculiarly influential boarder his mother had taken in to earn some extra money. Doyle seemed to have an ambivalent, uncomfortable relationship with Bryan Waller, the doctor who became very close to his mother. Lycett never comes right out and says she and Waller had an affair—in fact, he goes to great pains to try to prove that Mary’s last of many children (to be honest, I lost track) was not Waller’s child. However, Mary seemed to go wherever Waller wanted her to go, and lived wherever he lived. Doyle and the other children seemed reluctant to defy him, as if they didn’t want to ever do something that would hurt their mother, but also appeared to outright dislike him. But Doyle was never the type to reveal all. If he knew or suspected something was going on between his mother and Waller, he never was going to write it anywhere.
Waller’s idea of steering Doyle towards medicine was a good one, though. Edinburgh was a center of medical training and Doyle had the luck to run into Dr. Joseph Bell, a doctor who was on the forefront of forensics; Doyle later acknowledged that Bell was a model for Holmes.
Doyle became a successful doctor, who wrote on the side, getting stories published here and there. He married, had two children, and established a pleasant household. He became a gentleman, the type of Victorian who would have thought of himself as the sporting type; he was constantly playing golf or soccer, or his favorite pastime, cricket (Lycett must be a serious cricket fan, as he seems to have found the scores of every amateur cricket match Doyle ever played). He was a tall, stout man, which either says a lot about the lack of aerobic benefits of cricket or the heft of the Victorian diet, or both.
In the middle of this eminent Victorian life came Sherlock Holmes. Doyle enjoyed writing the first Holmes book, A Study in Scarlet, and liked the character he had invented. He was pleased by their success, but seemed to care much more about the big, historical novels he wrote afterwards. Of course we all remember Holmes and few people outside of Doyle obsessives, can even remember titles such as Micah Clark or The White Company.
Doyle made enough money writing to give up being a doctor. He wrote more Holmes stories, but in his disregard for the character, casually killed him off so he could pursue more “important” work. He bought an estate, but spent a great deal of time traveling and going off on golfing jaunts. He was the type of father who was very nice when he was there but would have preferred to not be there. His wife Louise became ill with tuberculosis, and after some traveling to find climates more comfortable for their condition, their marriage was essentially over. Doyle knew the prognosis was death, so when he met the attractive and much younger Jean Leckie, he seemed to feel quite free to pursue her.
Doyle and Jean carried on an affair while Louise was slowly dying. It seems as if it was made quite clear to Jean that when Louise died, he would marry Jean. Oddly enough, this seemed to be fine with her parents, as Arthur spent a lot of time visiting with the Leckies, setting them up to be on vacation in the same area as him and his family. He even invested in a business with Jean’s father. You would think in those days that the idea of their daughter being the mistress of a married man would have been horrifying to the girl’s parents, but it seemed that it wasn’t. Were they after Doyle’s money? He was by this time quite rich from his book and story sales and investments. But the Leckies were also wealthy. The only thing I can think of is that either the family was amazingly progressive, so fond of Doyle that they didn’t mind public scandal, or bedazzled by his fame. It may well have been the last choice (it should be noted that Doyle’s beloved mother was also aware of the affair and seemed quite fine with it and very fond of Jean).
There’s no way Doyle comes off well here. It’s obvious that he expected Louise to die a lot sooner than she did (I had to return the book so I can’t verify dates, but her death was at least ten years after her diagnosis) and maybe got involved with Jean thinking that it wouldn’t be long before she would be his wife. He took care of Louise and she lacked for nothing. Nevertheless, she seemed to know about the affair, and the children did too, and this couldnt' have been pleasant for any of them. Doyle appeared to have little regard for their feelings, though. When Louise died and Jean and he finally married, his relationship with his children from his first marriage, Mary and Kingsley, became difficult and distant. They didn’t get along with Jean, either and she seemed to do her best to try to cut them out of the new couple's life. Upon not being invited home from school during the holidays, Mary wrote to Kingsley, “We’re a bit of a mistake now.” Predictably, when Jean had children, Doyle lavished them with attention, taking the time to write down all their clever baby utterances (this all came back at him in a way, as his two sons by Jean turned out to be spoiled, layabout rich brats).
So here we have Doyle, as the 19th century passes into the 20th—successful, diligent, a steady worker who cranked out novels no one remembers (the quite fun The Lost World being the exception), and is occasionally lured back to his one memorable character reluctantly, though profitably. He gets involved in various causes (including trying to free the unjustly convicted in several cases; people typically confused him with Holmes), runs for Parliament twice and loses. He tries to make a career writing plays and finds it a lot harder than it looks (to illustrate his lack of theatrical instincts, he doesn’t initially try to bring Holmes to the stage; an American actor, William Gillette, eventually adapts a Holmes story and makes a success of the character). He serves as a doctor in the Boer War. He is knighted. Doyle is, despite his affair, respectable, wealthy, dignified, culturally conservative; when you look at pictures of him, he looks the typical Victorian gentleman. So why the spiritualism?
The idea of psychics and mediums who could contact “the other side” had been rattling around since the middle of the 19th century. It got a particular boost in the US around the time of the Civil War, when people were looking for an answer to all the death they had had to deal with. During the 1800s, science was becoming a discipline instead of a hobby and by the end of the century, scientists were just beginning to try to study and understand the mind. With all of these things converging, beliefs in psychics and mediums doesn’t seem quite so crackpot. The Society for Psychical Research, which Doyle initially was involved in, attracted numerous respectable citizens. The idea behind the SPR was to investigate psychic phenomena with scientific rigor. For Doyle, with his medical training and his application of science an observation to solving mystery in the persona of Holmes, this all made sense. Doyle periodically participated in séances and “table rapping session.” He looked at “spirit photographs” along with others. He was interested in this “spiritualism,” but not fully sold on it.
World War I seemed to push Doyle, along with many others, over the edge. Almost everyone in Britain seemed to be personally touched by the war; Doyle’s immediate and extended family was hit hard. He lost his son, brother, and numerous nephews, in-laws, and family friends. Suddenly Doyle came out as a full-blown convert to spiritualism. He wrote about it, investigated mediums, and sick of the SPR’s analytical, fault-finding attitude, founded his own London Spiritualist Alliance. Everyone he knows, it seems, turns out to be sensitive; Jean had a “spiritual guide” named Pheneas, a resident of ancient Egypt, speak through her and advise them on everything from where to vacation to which country house to buy (Pheneas sure seemed to always give instructions to buy or do things that would quite suit Jean…). Dead family members such as Kingsley spoke to the Doyles at séances. Kingsley, a devout Christian who had had no interest in spiritualism in life, magnanimously admitted he was wrong when speaking from beyond the grave. Doyle lectured on spiritualism to packed houses, but didn’t want to be paid for speaking. Instead, he asked for the money to go to his fund for spiritual development that could help needy supporters of the movement (is there nothing more tragic than a needy medium?).
Again, why was Doyle so taken by this? As noted, World War I had a lot to do with it, especially as it occurred late in Doyle’s life when he was undoubtedly thinking of his own mortality. Lycett, though, seems to propose that he was open to the idea throughout his life as he sought to understand his father’s alcoholism. He wanted to find a way to separate the mind from the body and the idea of the mind or spirit surviving the death of the physical body would provide that separation. His father’s mind, the real essence of the man, would not be to blame for the failings of the body that was susceptible to alcohol. When Doyle fell for the fairy photos famously faked by some young girls, Lycett notes that Charles Doyle had a particular bent for drawing fairies and other imaginary creatures (the more talented and famous illustrators in the family had also been known for this). Doyle seemed to believe that if fairies’ existence could be proven, then it would vindicate the fanciful creatures his father constantly drew; he wasn’t mad, he was just drawing what he really saw.
Doyle’s conviction was so strong that when Houdini came along, he didn’t see him just as a debunker, but as a powerful medium who was in denial about his own spiritualist abilities. When Houdini showed him an elaborate trick that was meant to prove how easily psychics could fool people, Doyle simply believed it. The two had a wary, tangled relationship. As Doyle fought to prove different mediums to be real, Houdini fought back to prove they weren’t. When Houdini died, Doyle suggested that his death was the result of spirits angry not just at Houdini’s attempts to disprove spiritualism, but at the denial and misuse of his own great psychic powers.
Lycett’s book is an easy read. He suffers from a rather unremarkable subject, though. For a while the book runs adrift in a Doyle doldrums—between the first dismissal of Holmes and the extramarital affair and Doyle’s final dive into the odd world of spiritualism, there are many pages of cricket scores, names of forgettable stories, and information about Doyle securing copyrights and getting richer. In a note at the end, Lycett tells about the difficulty of researching Doyle’s life at all. After Jean’s death, the estate and Doyle’s papers were split between the three children from his second marriage and they fought about them and the copyrights to his work endlessly. The estate is now controlled by a great nephew, the only survivor, and a large percentage of the quotes Lycett requested to use were refused. Nevertheless, Lycett’s work is admirable (his editors really should have caught the typo of “desert plates” instead of “dessert plates” on one page; I know I’m nitpicking, but that’s just glaring).
Doyle never wanted to be known for Sherlock Holmes, and while he eventually recognized the cash value of the character, he never considered the Holmes stories to be amongst his “important work.” But that’s what we do know him for. He would have been proud to have been associated with the spiritualist movement, but would have been dismayed to see that the real memory is not of him as the founder of a new religion, but of him as just another gullible person taken by the charlatans who always manage to prey upon those so desperate to believe.
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