Through a Glass, Darkly

by Stefan Bechtel

  Everyone there had a different take on the evening, but all agreed that a wreath had been placed on Mrs. Browning’s head. The wreath of clematis had been woven by D. D. Home and the Rymers’ daughter earlier that day. So what’s controversial about that?

  We know that Robert Browning came away from the evening in a peevish mood. In a letter written shortly thereafter, he mocked the voice of the Rymers’ dead child, disparaged the banalities of the spirit voices, and didn’t trust any of the physical manifestations—the spirit hand, the tipping table, the self-playing accordion. “On reviewal the exhibition seems the sorriest in my recollection,” he wrote to a friend.

  We also know that Elizabeth Barrett Browning came away thinking she’d just met “the most interesting person in England.” On August 17, she wrote to her sister Henrietta with a fairly gushing description and a warning: “When you write to me don’t say a word on the subject—because it’s a tabooed subject in this house—Robert and I taking completely different views, and he being a good deal irritated by any discussion of it.” She proceeds to tell her sister,

  We were touched by the invisible, heard the music and raps, saw the table moved, and had sight of the hands. Also, at the request of the medium, the spiritual hands took from the table a garland which lay there, and placed it upon my head. The particular hand which did this was of the largest human size, as white as snow, and very beautiful. It was as near to me as this hand I write with, and I saw it as distinctly. I was perfectly calm!…

  I think that what chiefly went against the exhibition, in Robert’s mind, was the trance at the conclusion during which the medium talked a great deal of much such twaddle as may be heard in any fifth rate conventicle. But according to my theory (well thought-out and digested) this does not militate at all against the general facts. It’s undeniable, and has been from first to last, that if these are spirits, many among them talk prodigious nonsense, or rather most ordinary commonplace.

  For my own part I am confirmed in all my opinions. To me it was wonderful and conclusive; and I believe that the medium present was no more responsible for the things said and done, than I myself was.

  Clearly she’s trying to let Home off the hook for something there at the end. What had Home done that was so terrible? As it turns out, the wreath was a poet’s crown, and Robert Browning was jealous that the spirits were crowning Elizabeth, not him!

  Here’s Home’s version of the incident, told years later in his memoir Incidents in My Life:

  During the séance this wreath was raised from the table by supernatural power in the presence of us all, and whilst we were watching it, Mr. Browning, who was seated at the opposite side of the table, left his place and came and stood behind his wife, towards whom the wreath was being slowly carried, and upon whose head it was placed, in full sight of us all, and whilst he was standing close behind her.…

  It was the remark of all the Rymer family, that Mr. Browning seemed much disappointed that the wreath was not put upon his own head instead of his wife’s, and that his placing himself in the way of where it was being carried, was for the purpose of giving it an opportunity of being placed upon his own brow.

  Making matters worse, the spirits then asked everyone to leave the room, including the Brownings, while a private message was given to Mr. Rymer. Mr. Browning seemed quite hurt by this, and he supposedly said he “was not aware that spirits could have secrets.”

  Two days later, Robert Browning wrote to Mrs. Rymer requesting a second séance, but it didn’t fit into the family’s schedule. When they visited the Brownings a few days later, hoping to make amends, it went very, very badly, according to Home.

  We were shown into the drawing-room, and he, advancing to meet us, shook hands with Mrs. Rymer; then, passing by me shook hands with her son. As he was repassing me I held out my hand, when, with a tragic air, he threw his hand on his left shoulder, and stalked away. My attention was now drawn to Mrs. Browning, who was standing nearly in the centre of the room, and looked very pale and agitated. I approached and she placed both her hands in mine, and said, in a voice of emotion, “Oh, dear Mr. Home, do not, do not blame me. I am so sorry, but I am not to blame.”

  What sort of domestic hell had they wandered into? Robert Browning had a brief argument with Mrs. Rymer, during which he rocked back and forth in his chair “like a maniac.” They got up to leave, and Home again shook hands with Mrs. Browning, “who was nearly ready to faint.”

  Robert Browning carried on a vendetta against D. D. Home for the rest of his life. Shortly after Mrs. Browning died, in 1861, he published the poem Mr. Sludge, “the Medium,” a thinly veiled attack on Home; it’s about a medium who’s been caught producing fraudulent manifestations. Conan Doyle called it “a long poem to describe an exposure which had never taken place.” As for the incident in the drawing room, Browning’s own version of it years later portrayed himself as the dashing hero, telling Home, “If you are not out of that door in half a minute I’ll fling you down the stairs.”

  D. D. Home left England later that year, traveling to Florence, where he exorcised a ghost in a haunted house and was attacked by an assassin with a knife that struck his door key rather than his heart. He was warned by the spirits that he would lose his powers for a year, and he did. In Paris, the gifts came back redoubled; the emperor Napoleon III was convinced of Home’s powers. Home then returned to England in 1859, the same year in which a Mary Doyle of Edinburgh gave birth to a rather large infant whom she named Arthur.

  The fantastic success of Sherlock Holmes as a literary creation was something Conan Doyle came to hate. He thought Sherlock would be forgotten, but spiritualism would live forever.

  PICTORIAL PRESS LTD / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Invention of Sherlock Holmes

  In the late summer of 1881, at the age of twenty-two, Arthur Doyle graduated from Edinburgh Medical School. His diploma somewhat pompously conferred the title “Master of Surgery,” although, being a temperamentally modest man, he was quick to admit that his surgical skills were far from masterful. As if to acknowledge his lack of proficiency, he sent his mother a sketch of himself holding up his newly minted diploma with the sinister caption “License to kill!”

  In the rush to finish up his medical studies, he almost forgot that he’d applied for a berth as ship’s surgeon on another voyage, this one a trip to West Africa on a dirty old tub called the Mayumba. At the last minute, he got a telegram accepting his application, hastily packed, and once again found himself at sea, ministering to the medical needs of thirty passengers. The voyage lasted three months, during which time he learned enough details about the sailor’s life to fill a few more salty short stories, such as “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” and The Firm of Girdlestone. He also penned a pithy little ditty called “Advice to a Young Author”:

  First begin

  Taking in.

  Cargo stored,

  All aboard.

  Think about

  Giving out.

  Empty ship

  Useless trip!

  It was in the spring of 1882, when he was back in England, that he received an intriguing telegram from a remarkable man he’d met in medical school. George Turnavine Budd was half genius, half scoundrel, a formidable rugby forward who came from a famous medical family. He was a man, Doyle later wrote, “born for trouble and adventure” whose life was filled with alarming explosions and wild escapades that often landed him in a fight or in jail. For some reason, the two men had always hit it off, and now Budd wanted to know if Doyle would care to join him in his new medical practice in the seaside town of Plymouth, on the south coast of Devon. Budd said he had a fabulously successful practice going, promising Doyle a guaranteed salary of three hundred pounds (about fifty thousand dollars in today’s money) a year. Though it all sounded too good to be true, it was the best offer Doyle had on the table, so he moved to a small rented flat in Plymouth to become a real, practicing doctor.

&nbs
p; But he soon discovered that Budd’s “practice” revolved around a simple, misleading idea: The consultations were completely free; patients just paid for their medicines. So crowds of patients were flocking to his door for “free” medical care, then being sold overpriced drugs in what Doyle described in his memoirs as “a heroic and indiscriminate manner.” In effect, Budd was running what would now be called a pill mill. His medical practice was just another wild escapade, though this one was highly lucrative. Doyle lasted a couple of months as Budd’s medical partner (much to his mother’s relief; she had always been suspicious of the man). Mulling over this bizarre, two-month-long joyride, Doyle mentally began turning the whole thing into a novel, and in 1895 The Stark Munro Letters told the whole crazy story in thinly fictionalized form, as a series of letters.

  Now, casting about, Doyle decided to move to another coastal town, Southsea, a charming little Victorian seaside resort on the southern coast of Portsea Island. He knew absolutely no one there, but he decided to establish a practice of his own—this time, an honest one. He rented another tiny flat with one spare room for examinations, furnished it with battered yard sale furniture, and hung out a shingle. Then he waited for the occasional patient to show up at his door. Most of the time, though, he simply waited—his “waiting room” became the place where he waited—so in the meantime, as was to become his lifelong habit, he began filling up the hours by writing stories and selling them to London magazines such as The Cornhill and The Strand.

  He later admitted that most of these stories were “feeble echoes of Bret Harte,” an American writer he admired, but he was able to sell them without much trouble, and his output was prodigious. Over the next several years, his published stories began bringing in a modest supplemental income, though he never dreamed they would ever produce an actual living wage. Eventually, though, it dawned on him that because he sometimes sat in his office for the entire day with “never a ring to disturb my serenity,” he was in an ideal situation. “As long as I was thoroughly unsuccessful in my professional venture there was every chance of improvement in my literary prospects.”

  Shortly after his arrival, he invited his nine-year-old brother, Innes, to come live with him, and the two bachelors, almost like father and son, shared Doyle’s cozy flat at Bush Villas until Innes went on to boarding school.

  In March 1885, Conan Doyle was asked by a medical colleague to examine a twenty-five-year-old man named Jack Hawkins, who was having convulsions due to cerebral meningitis, at the time an incurable disease. Young Hawkins had been living in uncomfortable circumstances with his twenty-seven-year-old sister, Louise, and another younger sister, after the death of their father. Because of the seriousness of the young man’s case, because Conan Doyle was a sort of gentleman’s gentleman who could not bear to see someone suffer, and because he had a spare upstairs bedroom, he offered to let Jack Hawkins stay in his house while he attempted to alleviate his suffering. The young man moved in, but in spite of all Doyle’s efforts within a few weeks he died. The funeral was held out of Doyle’s house. As it happened, in the course of this grievous loss, for which Doyle took personal responsibility, he began to develop a tender relationship with the boy’s sister Louise, known as Touie. She was a soft-spoken woman with wispy brown hair and green eyes who was two years older than Conan Doyle.

  They began taking long walks together, discovering each other and the many things they had in common. One was that she had an older brother, named Jeremiah, who had been in a mental institution for seventeen years and was also a gifted artist. Just about this same time, Arthur got the news that his own father had been transferred to another asylum, euphemistically called Sunnyside, that he had smashed a window and tried to escape, and that he claimed “he was getting messages from the unseen world.”

  These tortured relationships helped to knit Arthur and Touie together, and on August 6, 1885, she and Doyle were married. “No man could have a more gentle and amiable life’s companion,” he later wrote.

  Meanwhile, though he now found himself comfortably nested in a sweet, supportive marriage, and increasingly secure financially, he also felt spiritually lost.

  “I cannot look back on those years with any spiritual satisfaction, for I was still in the valley of darkness,” he wrote in his memoirs, published in 1924. “I had ceased to butt my head against what seemed to be an impenetrable wall, and I had resigned myself to ignorance upon that which is the most momentous question in life—for a voyage is bleak indeed if one has no conception to what port one is bound.” Overall, he described his inner spiritual life at that time as being “conscious of a vague unrest, of a constant want of repose, of an emptiness and hardness which I had not noticed in life before.”

  He had rejected the comforts and rituals of the Catholic Church. The worldly philosophers like Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer did not seem to offer any real hope of meaning in human life, just “survival of the fittest” and agnosticism. He had been trained in the methods of science but found no lasting comfort there either. Even so, he hadn’t abandoned all hope—he did not believe in an anthropomorphic God, a jolly Santa Claus in the sky—but like Thomas Carlyle, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and the American transcendentalists, Doyle turned to Nature as the supreme manifestation of the divine. He believed “in an intelligent Force behind all the operations of Nature—a force so infinitely complex and great that my finite brain could get no further than its existence.” It all seemed rather distant and impersonal, a spirituality of stars and galaxies rather than love and comfort. Wasn’t there something more out there?

  At the time, of course, spiritualism—a religion, a new branch of science, or a woolly-headed mania, depending on one’s point of view—was in the very air. It was discussed and debated in public forums, and everybody knew somebody who was a spiritualist or something close to it. But Doyle wasn’t buying it. He’d read in the papers about the exposure of phony mediums and deplored the simplemindedness of people who got suckered in as much as the venal manipulations of those who exploited them. “I had at that time the usual contempt which the young educated man feels towards the whole subject which has been covered by the clumsy name of Spiritualism,” he wrote. “I found myself, like many young medical men, a convinced materialist as regards our personal destiny.”

  As to whether the human personality might survive bodily death, that he considered “the greatest nonsense upon earth.” “When the candle burns out the light disappears. When the electric cell is shattered the current stops. When the body dissolves there is an end of the matter.” Besides, he added, “each man in his egotism may feel that he ought to survive, but let him look, we will say, at the average loafer—of high or low degree—would anyone contend that there was any obvious reason why that personality should carry on?”

  Even so, Arthur Conan Doyle had a lively, restless intellect, he was deeply alive, and he continued to puzzle over the knottiest of the existential questions: What is this all about? What is the nature and purpose of existence? Can the divine intercede in human life? Are there “principalities and powers,” as the Bible says, at work in our lives of which we have little or no understanding?

  When the young Dr. Doyle met a local Southsea architect named Joseph Henry Ball, who seemed to share his interest in exploring the inexplicable, the two of them set up a small experiment of what would now be called remote viewing. With Ball sitting in front of him and with his back turned, Doyle would draw figures on a piece of paper while attempting to communicate the images mentally through “thought-transference.” The result was that “again and again, sitting behind him, I have drawn diagrams, and he in turn made approximately the same figure.” Here was a curious anomaly that seemed to be outside the known laws of science—action at a distance, without any measurable sensory contact between the two people at all.

  “And if mind could act upon mind at a distance, then there were human powers which were quite different to matter as we had always understood it,” he wrote years l
ater in a book called The New Revelation, thinking back over his early days as a still-skeptical student of spiritualism. “I had said that the flame could not exist when the candle was gone. But here was a flame a long way off the candle, acting upon its own. The analogy was clearly a false analogy. If the mind, the spirit, the intelligence of man could operate at a distance from the body, then it was a thing to that extent separate from the body. Why then should it not exist on its own when the body was destroyed?”

  He decided to keep exploring, because after all “I had always sworn by science and the need of fearless following wherever the truth might lie.” And so, for many years to come, “in the leisure hours of a very busy life,” he continued to devote attention to what he was coming to believe was the most important subject in human history.

  In 1886, Doyle went to the home of Major General Alfred Drayson, one of his patients, a brilliant amateur astronomer who was a fellow member of the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society. General Drayson had been participating in a series of “table tipping” sessions. A small group of people would sit around a dining-room table with their hands lightly on the tabletop. After a time, the table seemed to vibrate or sway, then tap with one leg. Answers to questions were spelled out through the tedious process of reciting the alphabet and then writing down the letter indicated by a table tap. Doyle was sport enough to sit through at least twenty of these sessions, but in the end he was unimpressed, concluding, “I am afraid the only result that they had on my mind was that I regarded these friends with suspicion.” It seemed to him that the sitters were moving the table, whether consciously or not; that the “messages” were mostly empty platitudes; and that he never heard anything that could be considered actual, verifiable evidence of some discarnate intelligence.