Edinburgh was no longer big enough to hold him.
4
A Man of Doubtful Antecedents
Wear flannel next to your skin, my dear boy, and never believe in eternal punishment.
—MR. STARK MUNRO’S MOTHER IN THE STARK MUNRO LETTERS
“I am beginning to see,” Conan Doyle wrote to his mother during his medical training, “that I have certain advantages which, if properly directed and given a fair chance might lead to great success, but which it would be a thousand pities to nullify aboard ship or in a country practice. Let me once get my footing in a good hospital and my game is clear. Observe cases minutely, improve in my profession, write to the Lancet, supplement my income by literature, make friends and conciliate everyone I meet, wait ten years if need be, and then when my chance comes be prompt and decisive in stepping into an honorary surgeonship.”
This measured, intensely practical view of his prospects grew out of Conan Doyle’s impoverished background, but already his larger ambitions could scarcely be contained. “We’ll aim high, old lady,” he told the Ma’am, “and consider the success of a lifetime, rather than the difference of a fifty pound note in an annual screw.”
In August of 1881, Conan Doyle received his Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery qualifications. He came through without any great distinction—hardly surprising given his compressed schedule of studies—and the whaling adventure delayed his graduation by one year. Even so, he felt considerable elation over the achievement, and drew a giddy sketch of himself waving his diploma aloft. The caption read: “Licensed to Kill.”
At home, matters had grown worse. Charles Doyle now resided in a nursing home called Fordoun House, which specialized in the treatment of alcoholism, placing yet another strain on the family resources. Bryan Waller, the Doyles’ lodger, had taken on an ever larger share of the burden, and Conan Doyle’s lifelong silence on the matter suggests that it was a painful memory. The only thing explicit in his writings was a profound longing to make something of himself.
Few avenues were open to him. The conventions of the day required him to gain experience in practice before he could claim the title of doctor. In order to do so, he would either have to buy into an existing practice or set up one of his own. Virtually penniless, Conan Doyle could do neither.
Restless, he visited his mother’s relatives, applied for hospital posts, and served another brief apprenticeship with Dr. Hoare in Birmingham. He considered going out to India as a government doctor, or perhaps joining the navy. Either prospect would have brought a steady income, allowing him to send money home from abroad, just as his sisters had done.
For all the uncertainty about his future, Conan Doyle seemed well pleased with himself in the wake of his voyage aboard the Hope. Brimming with confidence, he turned his attentions toward the opposite sex, and began falling in love with a regularity that alarmed his mother. At one stage he confessed to being in love with five women at once—honorably, he insisted—though he eventually confined his attentions to a pretty, if slightly stout Irish girl named Elmore Welden. “Such a beauty!” he exclaimed. “We have been flirting hard for a week, so that things are about ripe.”
The dark-eyed Miss Welden, whom he nicknamed “Elmo,” would entrance him for some time to come. Conan Doyle recognized, however, that he had nothing to offer her, and must first secure some sort of future for himself before their relationship could progress. The hopeful suitor soon had his chance. A telegram arrived from the African Steam Navigation Company, offering a position as a shipboard medical officer at a salary of £12 per month. With this promise of steady income, Conan Doyle appears to have considered marrying Elmo and bringing her along on his travels. Whether the proposal was ever tendered is a matter for speculation. By the time Conan Doyle presented himself at the port of Liverpool in October of 1881, he and Elmo had temporarily parted company.
The steamer Mayumba, battered and creaky after twenty years in service, ran a regular route from Liverpool to the west coast of Africa. For the most part she carried passengers, general goods, and Royal Mail sacks on the outbound journey, and brought back palm oil, nuts, and ivory on her return. Conan Doyle had about thirty passengers under his care when the ship set sail at the end of October. The twenty-two-year-old doctor appeared to have found an ideal berth. Life aboard an African steamer would satisfy his taste for adventure, while providing a good income and medical seasoning. Conan Doyle had every reason to feel he had landed on his feet.
One day out of harbor, as the ship steamed south along the Irish coast in heavy fog, Conan Doyle noticed the faint glow of a lighthouse off the port side. “I could not imagine how any lighthouse could be on the port side,” he recalled, so he tugged on the sleeve of the ship’s mate and pointed toward the brightening light. Galvanized, the mate shouted to the wheelhouse and sent a frantic signal to the engine room. The ship pulled hard to port, narrowly avoiding a jagged reef.
Matters declined steadily from there. The ship headed into choppy waters as it crossed the Bay of Biscay, and Conan Doyle spent a week lurching across the rolling deck as he tended to seasick passengers. With his own cabin flooded, the young doctor found himself ankle-deep in water until the skies cleared. Eventually, he wrote, when “the angry sea changed into a long, greasy swell, there was a gradual divorce between our passengers and the basins. One of them even had the hardihood to appear upon deck with a sickly look of confidence upon his face, which, I regret to state, suddenly faded away, to give place to an earnest and all-absorbing interest in the appearance of the water alongside of the vessel.”
The weather finally broke as the ship neared Madeira, where a number of passengers disembarked. Conan Doyle now had fewer patients under his care, but as the steamer made for Sierra Leone, he began to feel oppressed by the tropical climate. Dante, he suggested, might well have added another ring to the inferno if he had ever visited an African swamp. “When you feel your napkin at meals to be an intolerable thing,” he wrote, “and when you find that it leaves a wet weal across your white duck trousers, then you know that you really have arrived.”
The Mayumba put into numerous ports in Liberia and Nigeria, including Freetown, Monrovia, and Port Harcourt. Conan Doyle visited with various European colonials, but found little to recommend the expatriate lifestyle. Living under the constant threat of tropical disease, the colonials had a gloomy and fearful existence, and often turned to alcohol for solace. At one stage, Conan Doyle feared that he himself might be falling into bad habits. “I drank quite freely at this period of my life,” he admitted, “having a head and a constitution which made me fairly immune, but my reason told me that the unbounded cocktails of West Africa were a danger, and with an effort I cut them out.” Once again, Conan Doyle’s remarks point to a significant omission. He may well have taken heed of the excesses of the colonials, but surely the example of his own father—tucked away in a treatment center for alcoholics—would have been a more significant factor in his decision. Conan Doyle abstained from alcohol for the remainder of the voyage. For the most part, he would be cautious with drink for the rest of his life.
Other local hazards proved more serious. Before long, several of Conan Doyle’s charges aboard ship began to show symptoms of malaria, which he treated with doses of quinine—the best available treatment at the time. In mid-November, just three weeks out of Liverpool, Conan Doyle himself fell seriously ill. He barely managed to stagger to his bunk before collapsing in a delirium. “I lay for several days fighting it out with Death in a very small ring and without a second,” he would write. “It must have been a close call, and I had scarcely sat up before I heard that another victim who got it at the same time was dead.”
Writing of his experiences to a friend back home, Conan Doyle remarked that he had grown so weak that his pen felt heavy as an oar in his hand. After a week’s convalescence, however, he felt well enough to resume his duties and join in a crocodile hunt. Some days later, he decided to refresh himself with a quick
swim along the length of the ship. Drying off on deck, he noticed the dorsal fin of a shark rise from the murky water. “Several times in my life I have done utterly reckless things with so little motive that I have found it difficult to explain them to myself afterwards,” he declared. “This was one of them.”
In Liberia, a nation that had never known colonial rule, Conan Doyle spent considerable time with “the most intelligent and well-read man whom I met on the Coast.” This was Henry Highland Garnet, the American consul in Liberia. The son of a slave, Garnet had been an influential spokesman of the abolition movement, and was near the end of his life when Conan Doyle met him. “This negro gentleman did me good,” Conan Doyle admitted, and one begins to see the evidence in an article he published the following year. “With the exception of the natives,” he wrote, “who have been demoralized by contact with the traders and by the brutality of the slave trade, the inhabitants of the dark continent are really a quiet and inoffensive race of men, whose whole ambition is to be allowed to lead an agricultural life, unmolested and in peace. That, at least, is the impression I have formed of them.” He went on to express the opinion that a solitary man might travel in safety, but that a large party of heavily armed intruders would naturally be seen as a threat by certain of the warlike tribes. “This is why,” he concluded, “they begin to get their stew-pans and sauce-bottles ready when they see a Stanley or any other modern explorer coming down on them.” It is hardly a modern view, but there can be no doubt that Conan Doyle’s respect for Henry Garnet expanded his horizons. He would spend considerable time in later life speaking out on behalf of oppressed races, and his fiction is largely free of the slurs and stereotypes that mar the work of his contemporaries.
At the island of Fernando Po, now Bioko, the Mayumba turned about and headed for home, stopping at various ports along the way to load the ship’s hold with palm oil and other cargo. By now Conan Doyle had come to regard the unbroken stretches of African coastline as tedious, but the return trip would not be uneventful. As the ship steamed past Madeira, fire broke out in one of the coal bunkers. With nothing but a wooden partition to separate burning coal from flammable cargo, the captain faced a serious risk of losing the ship. For four days the crew battled to contain the “lurid glow” of burning coal, fearing a catastrophic explosion of oil and coal dust at any moment. At one stage a portion of the metal hull glowed red-hot, and choking smoke poured through the ventilators. Lifeboats were readied when it appeared the ship would go down, and the captain charged Conan Doyle with rousing the passengers from their bunks and keeping them calm. The crew’s bravery averted the crisis, however, and the smoldering ship managed to continue her homeward voyage, sputtering into harbor at Liverpool in the middle of January 1882. “Just a line,” Conan Doyle wrote upon arrival, “to say that I have turned up all safe after having had the African fever, been nearly eaten by a shark, and as a finale the Mayumba catching fire between Madeira and England.”
For all of that, he had found the journey unbearably monotonous. Originally Conan Doyle planned to stay with the African Steam Navigation Company for a couple of years, putting money aside to launch his medical career. Three months on the Mayumba were sufficient to change his mind. In contrast to the wonders of the Arctic, he found Africa oppressive and demoralizing. “I don’t intend to go to Africa again,” he told his mother. “The pay is less than I could make by my pen in the same time, and the climate is atrocious. I trust you will not be disappointed by my leaving the ship, but this is not good enough.”
The decision left him with few other prospects, as his pen had not proved quite as lucrative as he suggested. He had sold a modest handful of stories and articles, but seldom for as much as the three guineas he received for “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley.” The African run, however unpleasant, carried a salary he could ill afford to lose.
As he considered his options—or the lack of them—an invitation arrived from his Aunt Annette, the sister of his father and his successful uncles Richard, Henry, and James. If he would come to London, Aunt Annette wrote, she and his uncles would be pleased to discuss his future.
This, Conan Doyle knew, could well be his “main chance.” His uncles had money and influence. If they looked on him with favor, they could easily give him the start he needed. The London Doyles had long since washed their hands of Charles, the drunken wastrel, but his son Arthur had promise. Though they might have preferred that he follow in their footsteps by entering an artistic profession, they could see that Conan Doyle had become a hardworking, diligent young man—worthy, perhaps, of the family’s patronage.
Conan Doyle traveled to London and presented himself at the stately house on Cambridge Terrace, near Hyde Park, that had once belonged to his grandfather John Doyle, the famous artist and family patriarch. For Conan Doyle, London brought happy memories. Eight years earlier, a visit to Uncle Richard provided a welcome release from Stonyhurst. Then as now, however, Conan Doyle felt conscious of his status as the poor relation and intimidated by the power and accomplishments of his uncles.
With his Scottish accent and threadbare clothes, Conan Doyle made a sharp contrast to his elegant, London-bred relatives. He may well have tried to puff himself up with stories of his seafaring adventures, which his straitlaced aunt and uncles would likely have found a trifle unseemly. After a decent interval, the conversation turned to business. The offer was plain enough: once Conan Doyle settled on an area where he would like to practice, the Doyle family would use its influence to put his name around among their social peers. Though no money would be forthcoming, the family prestige would be of greater value in the long term, enabling the young doctor to attract wealthy clients and build a profitable practice.
Conan Doyle listened intently and thanked his uncles for their confidence and generosity. There was, however, something of a problem. The Doyle family remained devoutly Catholic, and it was this connection that they intended to exercise on his behalf—with introductions to other prominent Catholic families and members of the clergy. To accept this sort of patronage, Conan Doyle felt, would be an act of hypocrisy. He had recently undergone what he called a “spiritual unfolding” and considered himself an agnostic.
“My head whirls,” a client of Sherlock Holmes was to say. “Your words have dazed me.” One imagines a similar reaction from the London Doyles, although the topic had already been broached in a letter. To Conan Doyle’s uncles, this announcement would have seemed the worst possible ingratitude, seemingly calculated to give offense.
Many factors contributed to Conan Doyle’s loss of faith—his unhappy religious schooling, his scientific training and turn of mind, and a careful reading of Darwin and his followers. At the University of Edinburgh, he joined in the general admiration of “Darwin’s Bulldog,” Professor Thomas Huxley, who coined the term “agnosticism” only a few years earlier. For Conan Doyle, though, this spiritual crisis was no mere fad. “I remember,” he wrote, “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.”
This chasm would grow wider over time. “Is religion the only domain of thought which is non-progressive,” he would write in an early novel, “and to be referred forever to a standard set two thousand years ago? Can they not see as the human brain evolves it must take a wider outlook? A half-formed brain makes a half-formed God, and who shall say that our brains are even half-formed yet?”
Clearly Conan Doyle had thought deeply on the matter, but no matter how sincere his feelings, and no matter how passionately he expressed them, the London Doyles could not see past the perceived affront. The offer of patronage was withdrawn.
Conan Doyle’s stand against his wealthy uncles—brave, headstrong, and more than a little reckless—set a pattern that would be repeated many times in his life. Another young doct
or might have been more pliant, perhaps adjusting his beliefs to ensure his own comfort, but Conan Doyle had too much scruple and not enough guile for such a deception. His only real concern, as the first cracks appeared in his faith, was that his agnosticism might give pain to his mother. At this period of his life, Conan Doyle seldom formed a thought without expressing it to the Ma’am. Had she wished, Mary Doyle could very likely have persuaded her son to return to the fold and accept the support of his uncles. To her credit, she respected his convictions, and his principles in expressing them as he did. Within a few years she too would fall away from the Catholic Church to become an Anglican. Charles Doyle, meanwhile, remained as devout as ever within the confines of his institution. Charles Doyle’s continued devotion—while everything else in his life had slipped away—can only have hastened the spiritual crisis of his son.
Richard Doyle, who had always been his nephew’s favorite, made a final bid to change Conan Doyle’s mind over lunch at the Athenaeum. The stately opulence of this gentlemen’s club served to emphasize what the young doctor stood to lose by refusing his family’s aid. Conan Doyle would not be swayed. When he left London, his relatives despaired of him.
The breach was never entirely forgotten, though Richard Doyle would make a gesture of reconciliation the following year. Shortly before succumbing to a fatal apoplectic fit, Richard sent his nephew letters of introduction to Catholic worthies. These came at a time when Conan Doyle badly needed a lifeline, but he destroyed them. His other two uncles lived another ten years, and therefore witnessed the dramatic early success of Sherlock Holmes, but they seldom acknowledged their recalcitrant nephew.
“When I first came out of the faith in which I had been reared,” Conan Doyle would write in the autobiographical The Stark Munro Letters, “I certainly did feel for a time as if my life-belt had burst.” This spiritual disorientation, and the attendant freedom of thought and deed, became the anvil upon which his personality was forged. Its effects would be felt immediately and forever. In the short term, he would have to rely on his own skill and cunning to make his way in the world. Once he had done so, his confidence in his own beliefs became absolute. Few men could claim the strength of their convictions with as much justice as Conan Doyle. Having succeeded so dramatically, he would never be troubled by any lack of self-assurance.
Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle Page 6