With the appearance of The New Revelation and its sequel The Vital Message, Conan Doyle was soon receiving the attention he had hoped for, with headlines and leading articles in everything from Psychic News to The New York Times. It was clear that he enjoyed the publicity, and equally clear that he would soon come a cropper. He showed his familiar self-confidence and tendency to see even the most complicated issues simply in black and white terms. As a result, Doyle’s effusions on spiritualism could sound insufferably pious. ‘Psychic knowledge is not a question of proof,’ he informed the readers of one American paper. ‘I know it to be true.’ ‘Theories of fraud or of delusion will not meet the evidence,’ he insisted in a public lecture. ‘It is absolute lunacy, or as I am convinced, it is a revolution in human thought.’
Among those who inclined to the former view, there was the anonymous critic in the London Times, who accused Doyle of an ‘incredible naiveté’. Even this was mild compared to James Douglas, writing in the Sunday Express, whose capsule review of The New Revelation posed the same question as Captain Anson at the time of the Edalji case ten years earlier. ‘Is Conan Doyle mad?’ he asked.
In time, even Doyle’s mother, now in her eighties but as plainspoken as ever, came to worry that her headstrong son’s latest sense of mission would make him a laughing stock – a fear seemingly realised by the Express when it gave the headline ‘Wines and Spirits’ to a report of one of Doyle’s psychic speeches where liquor was served.
Why, for all that, did so many people, not all of them believers, sit up and listen to Conan Doyle when he announced to the world that he and others suddenly had the ability to communicate with dead souls, and that this was the greatest spiritual revelation of the past 2,000 years? The answer surely lies in the fact that, however ludicrous he might sometimes seem to be, Doyle possessed one great virtue not in endless supply in British public life as a whole: integrity. Even the sceptical James Douglas conceded this point when he wrote in the Sunday Express:
If ever there was a well-balanced mind in a well-balanced body, it is Doyle’s … It is not easy to reconcile these facts with the hypothesis that [he] is stark, staring mad on the subject of the dead … He has established his right to be heard, and we may be wrong in refusing to hear him. There may be oceans of fraud and folly in spiritualism, but there may be a grain of truth in it.
John Dickson Carr, among the first and most respected of Doyle’s biographers, later wrote, ‘Did the war affect his judgement? Did it turn him into a moonstruck visionary credulous and incapable of seeing clearly?’ It did not, Carr believed, arguing that Doyle’s achievements as a military historian and his practical contributions in areas such as the improved design of body armour and the adoption of tactics to counter the U-boat menace to British shipping were hardly the neurotic ravings of a religious maniac. ‘He may have been right about Spiritualism. He may have been wrong about Spiritualism. But nobody can say he was far wrong about anything else,’ Carr concluded.
In fact, Doyle retained his essentially pragmatic approach both to spiritualism, and to the more extravagant claims advanced by its propagandists, right up to and beyond November 1918. Indeed, he often reprimanded those whose actions seemed to him to compromise the message in the eyes of the general public. A curious example of this came in the weeks and months following the Allied withdrawal from Mons in late August 1914, and the subsequent widespread belief that the British troops had enjoyed some form of divine protection in their retreat. On 5 September of that year, Brigadier John Charteris, chief military intelligence adviser to General Douglas Haig, wrote of a story ‘spread[ing] through the 2nd Corps, of how the angel of the Lord on the traditional white horse, and clad all in white with flaming sword, faced the advancing Germans at Mons and forbade their further progress’. He added, ‘Men’s nerves and imagination play weird pranks in these strenuous times. All the same, the vision at Mons interests me. I cannot find out how the legend arose.’
Most historians now agree that Charteris himself was the man responsible for the myth of the Angel of Mons, which he saw as part of a continuing one-man campaign to spread morale-boosting propaganda and disinformation. A few months later, the same officer transmitted back a report about the Germans having allegedly butchered and cannibalised one of their own men. (In other accounts, it was a Canadian who was eaten.) Charteris passed an adapted version of the story to The Times, adding the detail that the unfortunate victim had first been crucified and later returned in spirit to torment his murderers. Several more such ‘rumours, distortions and outright fairy-tales’ followed from the same source during the war, The Times reported.
Charteris, one of life’s inveterate optimists, if one whose military forecasts were to be sorely tested by later events at Ypres and the Somme, has been described as an ‘unkempt officer’ who ‘drank brandies before breakfast’. He was also the younger brother of Archibald and Francis Charteris, who in Conan Doyle’s view – an opinion shared by many – had conspired to rob Marion Gilchrist on the night of her death. Doyle thought the professional soldier’s tales of heavenly battlefield manifestations ‘hogwash’, and was still saying as much to Harry Houdini when he entertained him to lunch at Windlesham in April 1920.
Then aged 46, the famous magician was a stubby, Chaplinesque figure, thickening around the waist, with patches of receding grey hair rather too prominently dyed black. He had come to England for a performance tour that combined several of his most celebrated escapes with a critical commentary on the now widespread and often highly lucrative business of contacting the spirits of the dead. Houdini remarked in his diary that in visiting Windlesham he had clearly come to the enemy stronghold. ‘The worldwide Spiritist church,’ he wrote, was now ‘controlled by a single group, and that group controlled by a single man who, in turn, is possessed by a dream’.
Houdini’s own disbelief in the occult owed something to the fact that he had known a number of society’s most fashionable post-war mediums when, like him, they had been content to operate on the early twentieth-century American vaudeville circuit in the guise of ‘bearded ladies, singing clowns, limbless violin players, ape-man hybrids’, and, in the case of a latterly popular ‘seer’ named Madame Thardo, a morbidly obese New York housewife who subjected herself to repeated rattlesnake bites. Houdini’s failure to reach his mother Cecilia following her death in 1913 had since served to turn his scepticism about the paranormal into a crusade.
Always drawn to literary figures, he had called on Conan Doyle that April day hoping to make a friend of this ‘poetic titan [as] justly famous as myself’. Even at this early stage, there was some spirited intellectual jousting between the two men, neither of them a martyr to false modesty. ‘When you say there are 96 volumes on your desk,’ Houdini wrote in one letter, ‘it may interest you to know that I travel with a bookcase containing over one hundred volumes, and recently, in Leeds, I bought two whole collections on Spiritualism.’
‘If you ever index your psychic library, I should like to see the list,’ Doyle replied. ‘I have 200 now – and have read them too!’
At Windlesham, Doyle had wanted to discuss not so much spiritualism per se, but how the ‘little chap’ affected his legendary escapes. In particular, he was curious about whether Houdini enjoyed the ‘divine’ gift of being able to waft in and out of confined spaces. Before long Doyle was convinced that the ‘great self-liberator’, as his visitor called himself, could arrange and rearrange his molecules at will. ‘My dear chap,’ he would write:
Why go around the world seeking a demonstration of the occult when you are giving one all the time? Mrs Guppy [a Victorian mesmerist] could dematerialise, and so could many people in Holy Writ, and I do honestly believe that you can also … Such a gift is not given to one man in a hundred million.
Up close, Doyle was forced to admit, Houdini was ‘a little disappointing’ when measured against this superhuman ideal. He had appeared for lunch dressed in a typically ill-fitting cream-coloured suit and a frayed st
raw hat, which he had courteously lifted when ringing the front doorbell. He made a striking physical contrast to his host, who was a foot taller and some 80lb heavier. Later that night Houdini wrote in his diary:
Visited Sir A. Conan Doyle at Crowborough. Met Lady Doyle and the three children. Had lunch with them. They believe implicitly in spiritism. Sir Arthur told me he had spoken six times to his dead son. No possible chance for trickery.
Even so, it’s possible Houdini already had doubts about Doyle’s critical faculties. ‘Sir Arthur saw my performance Friday night,’ he wrote to his friend Harry Kellar a few days later. ‘He was so much impressed, that there is little wonder in his believing in [the] mystic so strongly.’
There was justification in this charge, and the gentleman in Conan Doyle was always reluctant to acknowledge that there were those in the spiritualist camp who were more adept at performing certain magic tricks than they were at heavenly communion. As a rule, Houdini was less inhibited in his judgements. All that most mediums were offering was ‘stagecraft’ rather than any ‘supernatural wit’, he told one London audience. Much of the ‘so-called skill known as mentalism’, for instance, was merely a question of bombarding the unsuspecting subject with subliminal messages. If you exposed them to enough pictures of black and white parallel lines, as well as mentioning the words ‘striped’ and ‘animal’ several times, ‘you might well find that they just happened to be thinking of a zebra’.
Doyle was also convinced that many mediums secreted what he called a ‘miraculous stuff’, or ectoplasm, while in the throes of a spiritualist trance. ‘I have clearly seen it,’ he wrote in the London Chronicle:
The room was in darkness, though there was sufficient light to see all that occurred. The ectoplasm, which seemed to cause great pain in its emission, took the form of slightly luminous patches, produced under complete test conditions. They formed on the floor with an inclination to rise and become more clearly defined. They were quite separate from the medium – in fact they were nearer to me than to her.
Houdini, by contrast, thought this ‘foul muck’ no more than the medium’s saliva or her regurgitated food, a routine she sometimes varied by means of concealing foreign objects elsewhere on her body.
‘This is how she works,’ he wrote of a popular Los Angeles medium who began her séances by standing nude in a bowl of flour so that she was unable to move around without leaving incriminating tracks:
She has a tube for her vagin [sic] in which she stashes a pair of silk stockings … When the lights are out, as it is impossible to quit the floor without leaving footprints, she reaches in and gets the silk stockings, puts them on her feet, steps out of the bowl of flour [and] is able to walk around without besmirching the floor or leaving prints. After the materialization she goes back, takes off her stockings, conceals her load, and – presto! – steps back into the bowl of flour.
Commenting on Doyle’s reluctance to believe the worst of a medium, Houdini wrote in his diary that the more academically gifted a man was, the easier it was to fool him. In London, Doyle predicted a ‘glorious future for those brave ladies who suffer their indignities for our gospel’, while back in New York Houdini and his wife introduced a new double act to debunk ‘charlatan mediums and their wiles’. ‘When one has a chance to expose such people,’ he said, ‘one should do so.’
Houdini nonetheless believed that by the autumn of 1921, ‘the anti-occultism of recent months may have passed its peak’. Conan Doyle knew otherwise. Undaunted by public reaction to the Cottingley fairies, he had spent much of that year promoting the merits of spirit photography as a ‘new and credible’ science. Doyle was soon to take a keen technical interest in the practicalities of capturing a ghost on film, and showed an almost Holmes-like obsession in cataloguing the various chemicals and dyes – such as the coal-tar derivative dicyanin – needed to coat the glass plate for a successful result.
He had become convinced that there was something to the business of ghostly ‘extras’ appearing on film after the Crewe photographer William Hope showed him a picture of his son Kingsley that he said came from the beyond. It was thus something of a further blow to Doyle’s prestige when, in February 1922, Houdini’s friend Harry Price and a fellow SPR investigator seemed to show that Hope produced his results not by ‘spectral manifestation’, as he claimed, but by pre-loading his camera with a plate already equipped with the desired image of a dead loved one, or whomever it was the client wished to see. When Hope then developed the film, the ‘extra’ would be seen apparently floating in the background.
Undeterred by the SPR’s attack, Doyle went on to publicly endorse several more spirit images, including one taken (not by Hope) on Remembrance Sunday that seemed to show the ghostly features of dozens of dead British soldiers looming above the crowd observing the annual two minutes’ silence at the London Cenotaph. It was later established that several of the faces were in fact those of still-living professional football players torn from the pages of a fan magazine. The New York Times was left to remark sadly that by now even Doyle’s fiction was ‘scarcely more than a pulpit for his propaganda’. George Bernard Shaw felt that ‘one might speak almost of mental impairment’ in his fellow author.
While Conan Doyle clashed with living writers such as Shaw and H.G. Wells, both of them sceptics on spiritualism, he continued to fraternise warmly with several dead ones. W.T. Stead, for one, still regularly appeared at séances to ‘keenly endorse’ his friend’s paranormal research. Writing in the SPR Journal, Doyle went on to reveal that the spirit of Joseph Conrad had materialised to ask for his help in completing Suspense, his unfinished Napoleonic novel, and that Charles Dickens had appeared with a similar commission. Doyle later reported that Jerome K. Jerome, author of Three Men in a Boat, had also emerged to join the ranks of the unquiet literary dead. ‘I was wrong,’ Jerome supposedly said, speaking of his earthly materialism. ‘We never know our greatest mistakes at the time we make them. Make it clear to Arthur that I am not dead.’
While some speculated about Conan Doyle’s mental health, the author himself continued to write accomplished new Sherlock Holmes stories, adding twelve more to the series between 1921 and 1926, each of which was widely reported to be the last. To call the detective the Frank Sinatra of the popular fiction world of the 1920s would be to confer a somewhat flattering sense of consistency on a character who seemed to rest, or retire, and then come back again on roughly an annual basis. It’s worth mentioning, if only to refute the idea that Doyle had lost his intellectual faculties altogether as a result of his conversion.
Even in these later years, his analytical powers still spluttered away like a fitful but stubbornly ticking engine. Writing in 1920 to Oliver Lodge, for example, Doyle speaks of a certain medium being ‘dead wrong’ in her predictions. Occasionally, even Houdini and he seemed to undergo a sort of role reversal on spiritualism. In December 1921, the magician wrote an excited letter enclosing a photograph that purported to show ‘something unknown or occult’ wafting from the body of a young actress as she embraced Houdini on the set of his latest film. Conan Doyle was unmoved. ‘The effect is certainly produced by the whisk of the lady’s dress as she rushed into your arms,’ he wrote. ‘It is certainly not ectoplasm!’ A subsequent packet of photographs taken at a Los Angeles séance struck him as similarly ‘hollow’ and ‘very unconvincing … The faces seemed quite absurd.’ Doyle went on to denounce those ‘hoaxers and frauds’ who tried to pervert the course of true psychic knowledge. ‘The rotten twigs must come off,’ he added.
On 2 April 1922, Conan Doyle and his family set off on the White Star liner Baltic to begin a ten-week lecture tour of America. ‘“I know exactly what I am going to get after death – happiness”,’ the New York Times quoted Doyle as saying on his arrival in the city.
‘It is not mere hearsay,’ he continued. ‘I have talked with and seen twenty of my dead, including my son, when my wife and other witnesses were present … Spiritualism is the one great final
antidote to materialism, which is the cause of most of our recent troubles.’
Taking a less elevated tone, some of the reporters who met him at the quayside wanted to know whether the spirits could tell fortunes or predict the movements of the stock market, and if they had access to sex, alcohol, and cigars in the afterlife. Doyle replied with a convoluted hypothesis suggesting that ‘certain familiar pleasures’ would indeed be available (though he made clear his own moral distaste for liquor):
Only the ones we love on this earth [will] be able to meet us in the beyond … People who have led selfish, hard lives here will enter that place on a lower plane and gradually descend instead of going higher and higher until the spirit of Christ is reached.
Synthesising these remarks for its readers, the next morning’s headline in the New York World read, ‘DOYLE SAYS MARITAL RELATIONS OK IN NEXT WORLD. REAFFIRMS BELIEF IN HELL’.
William J. Burns – the self-styled ‘Sherlock Holmes of America’ – again accompanied Doyle on part of his tour. He remained ‘a firm disciple of Sir Arthur’, who had come to believe that ‘his [was] one of the truly great detective minds of the age’. But he shared some uncomfortable feelings about him. Doyle ‘seemed to be much altered [since 1914], and was now guided by an implacable optimism as much as by cold-hearted reason,’ he later wrote. Burns may have had in mind a visit they made on 30 April 1922 to the Washington DC home of Julius and Ada Zancig, a husband and wife sometime vaudeville team who now advertised themselves as ‘astrologers, tea leaf readers, crystal ball seers, diviners and palmists’. As a result of this sitting, Doyle apparently came away convinced that the couple possessed telepathic powers. ‘No word passed at all,’ he assured Houdini, ‘but Mrs Zancig, standing with her face turned sideways at the far end of the room, was able to repeat names and to duplicate drawings which we made and showed her husband.’ In a public testimonial, Doyle wrote, ‘I have tested Professor and Mrs Zancig, and I am quite sure that their remarkable performance, as I saw it, is due to psychic causes (through transference) and not to trickery.’
The Man who Would be Sherlock Page 32