Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  “Mrs. L.S.” was Jean’s closest friend, Lily Loder-Symonds. Very little is known of her—even her marital status is not entirely clear—except that she had been one of Jean’s bridesmaids in 1907. Since then she had suffered poor health and other reversals of fortune, with the result that she now lived at Windlesham as a companion to Jean, ostensibly to help look after the children. As her health declined and more of her time was spent in bed, Lily came to exhibit a talent for automatic, or “trance”’ writing. As with other forms of spirit communication, such as table-tipping and the Ouija board, this was thought to be a method by which a “sensitive,” such as Lily, could act as a conduit for messages from the spirit world. In many cases, the medium would sit with a pen poised over a sheet of paper and then fall into a form of delirium while the message flowed forth. At other times, the sensitive remained conscious, watching with a kind of detached fascination as the pen moved over the pages, apparently of its own volition.

  Conan Doyle knew enough of the workings of the subconscious mind to be deeply skeptical of automatic writing. “Of all forms of mediumship,” he wrote, “this seems to me to be the one which should be tested most rigidly, as it lends itself very easily not so much to deception as to self-deception, which is a more subtle and dangerous thing. Is the lady herself writing, or is there, as she avers, a power that controls her, even as the chronicler of the Jews in the Bible averred that he was controlled. In the case of L.S. there is no denying that some messages proved to be not true, specially in the matter of time they were quite unreliable. But on the other hand, the numbers which did come true were far beyond what any guessing or coincidence could account for.”

  In Conan Doyle’s view, no amount of guesswork could account for the message Lily produced in May 1915, when the morning papers announced the sinking of the Lusitania. The tragedy was deeply felt at Windlesham, as Charles Frohman, the producer of William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes play, had been onboard. “It is terrible, terrible,” came a message through Lily’s hand, “and will have a great influence on the War.”

  Few would argue that the destruction of a passenger ship, with a loss of some 1,200 lives, was a terrible event. At the time, however, it could not have been obvious that the attack on the Lusitania would help to draw the United States into the war. Conan Doyle believed that it required psychic knowledge to predict such an outcome.

  One must ask whether this incident was really as convincing as he claimed. There is no denying that Lily’s message accurately predicted a “great influence” on the war. It should be recalled, however, that Conan Doyle’s story “Danger!”—published the previous year—had warned of precisely this sort of submarine attack and had produced a great deal of public debate over the vulnerability of merchant shipping. Lily, like everyone else who passed through Conan Doyle’s orbit at that time, would certainly have been aware of his views. As a member of the household, she often listened in when Conan Doyle read his latest manuscripts aloud to Jean. It seems possible, therefore, that the story of Captain Sirius, rather than spirit inspiration, inspired a connection between the war and the Lusitania.

  Similarly, Conan Doyle wrote in The New Revelation, another example of Lily’s automatic writing had “foretold the arrival of an important telegram upon a certain day, and even gave the name of the deliverer of it—a most unlikely person.” This incident is more difficult to prove or disprove, since he provides so little detail. The prediction certainly sounds intriguing, but Conan Doyle went on to say that other, presumably similar messages were quite often wrong. “The lapses,” he wrote, “were notable. It was like getting a good message through a very imperfect telephone.” Nevertheless, “no one could doubt the reality of her inspiration.” Anyone who has ever received an unexpected phone call and uttered the words “we were just talking about you” might argue the point.

  For Conan Doyle, however, Lily’s apparent successes counted for more than her failures. Moreover, he felt enormous sympathy for her circumstances, which gave an added poignancy to many of her messages. Three of her brothers had been killed at the Battle of Ypres in 1915, and much of her automatic writing took the form of communication from them. Often these messages contained insight into military life and descriptions of battle scenes, but Conan Doyle expressed some skepticism over these details. He realized that Lily might have gleaned this information from the newspapers, or from his own writings. At the same time, he understood how her powerful desire to contact her brothers might take the form of self-delusion. Then one day Lily appeared to establish contact with Malcolm Leckie, Jean’s dead brother, who had always been a particular favorite of Conan Doyle’s. The message referred to a private conversation between Malcolm and Conan Doyle that had occurred some years earlier. If any single incident can be said to have crowned Conan Doyle’s progress from acolyte to missionary, this would be it. He believed that no one else could possibly have known of this conversation. The message, therefore, was “evidential.”

  Again, one must take a hard look at this assertion. Few private conversations remain private. Without Conan Doyle’s knowledge, his exchange with Malcolm Leckie may well have been overheard, or shared with others by Malcolm himself. Conan Doyle may have referred to the matter at some earlier stage and forgotten about it by the time of Lily’s message. As in so many instances of this kind, he volunteered no detail that might invite further investigation. Even if he had, the assertion would be impossible to verify. It must be said, in any case, that he had a habit of describing such revelations as “unknowable” or “evidential” when in fact there were other, entirely plausible explanations. In time, perhaps, he might have come to think differently of Lily’s frequent messages, especially if they had continued for any length of time. As it happened, they did not. Lily’s health grew steadily worse, and she died in January 1916. Her early death imparted a sanctity to her mediumship. If at first Conan Doyle regarded her automatic writing as a parlor game of sorts, it now became the pure and unassailable testimony of a dying woman. He came to regard her as having been a “high soul upon earth.”

  A sad affirmation of Conan Doyle’s flowering beliefs came from his friend Sir Oliver Lodge. In September 1915, Lodge’s son, Raymond, was lost in the trenches. Up to this point, Lodge had been rather more cautious than Conan Doyle in his spirit inquiries. Now, struggling with his grief, he consulted a well-known medium named Mrs. Osborne Leonard. Like most mediums of the time, Mrs. Leonard communicated with the other side through a spirit control, an unseen presence who spoke through her. If one believed in such things, these spirit guides served as the point of contact between this world and the next. To the skeptics, such manifestations amounted to nothing more mysterious than the medium talking in a disguised voice.

  Mrs. Leonard’s control was said to be a young Indian girl named Feda. Within days of the death of his son, Lodge and his wife began receiving messages through Mrs. Leonard and Feda. These messages, Lodge believed, contained information about his son that Mrs. Leonard could not possibly have learned through any normal means. Lodge listened in wonder as Raymond—communicating through Feda—recounted his new life on the other side, a place he called “Summerland.” This world, as Raymond described it, offered many of the familiar comforts of home—including, if one desired, whiskey and cigars. “[T]here are laboratories over here,” one of Raymond’s messages declared, “and they manufacture all sorts of things in them. Not like you do, out of solid matter, but out of essences, and ethers, and gases.”

  Lodge and his wife found great solace in these messages. With so many families in Britain suffering from similar bereavements, he felt an obligation to share his experiences. He published a book called Raymond: Or Life and Death, with Examples of the Evidence for Survival of Memory and Affection after Death. The book’s success—it went through twelve printings in three years—showed that many in Britain were receptive to the idea of a spirit world where their departed loved ones carried on much as before. Lodge’s reputation as a scientist, and
the objective tone he adopted through much of the book, lent credence to his views. “If we can establish the survival of any single ordinary individual,” he wrote, “we have established it for all.” It was a message Britain wanted to hear.

  As might be expected, the book took a hammering from skeptical critics, most of whom found great sport in the idea of an afterlife featuring whiskey and cigars. Conan Doyle rallied to his friend’s defense. “This has tickled the critics to such an extent,” he wrote, “that one would really think to read the comments that it was the only statement in a book which contains 400 closely-printed pages. Raymond may be right or wrong, but the only thing which the incident proves to me is the unflinching courage and honesty of the man who chronicled it, knowing well the handle that he was giving to his enemies.”

  For Conan Doyle, Lodge’s experiences seemed to confirm the evidence he had received through Lily Loder-Symonds. “Many thanks to you for having written such a book,” he wrote in a letter to Lodge, “and to Raymond for having inspired it.” He went on to say that he would shortly be visiting a clairvoyant in London. “If you should be in touch with Raymond,” he continued, “it would be interesting if you tried to put him on to me.”

  Clearly Conan Doyle believed that Lodge was fighting the good fight, and it was a cause he now felt ready to join. “I might have drifted on for my whole life as a psychical researcher, showing a sympathetic, but more or less dilettante attitude towards the whole subject,” he wrote in The New Revelation. “But the War came, and when the War came it brought earnestness into all our souls and made us look more closely at our own beliefs and reassess their values. In the presence of an agonized world, hearing every day of the deaths of the flower of our race in the first promise of their unsullied youth, seeing around one the wives and mothers who had no clear conception whither their loved one had gone to, I seemed suddenly to see that this subject with which I had so long dallied was not merely a study of a force outside the rules of science, but that it was really something tremendous, a breaking down of the walls between two worlds, a direct undeniable message from beyond, a call of hope and of guidance to the human race at the time of its deepest affliction.”

  With this dawning sense of purpose, however, there also came a lowering of the critical standards he once brought to the psychic realm. “The objective side of it ceased to interest,” he wrote, “for having made up one’s mind that it was true there was an end of the matter. The religious side of it was clearly of infinitely greater importance. The telephone bell is in itself a very childish affair, but it may be the signal for a very vital message.”

  To his detriment, Conan Doyle often equated the idea of medium-ship with such things as telephone bells and door knockers. He invited his readers to trust the message without regard to the messenger. Long ago in Southsea, General Drayson had warned him that the next world, like this one, had its pranksters and “naughty boys,” whose unworthiness must not divert one from the psychic path. Conan Doyle now repeated Drayson’s words in his own lectures. He was aware, he insisted, that there were charlatans who posed as mediums to prey on the hopes of the bereaved. He also conceded that on occasion a genuine medium might resort to deceit and trickery, but in these instances the deceptions were well meant—the mediums simply did not wish to disappoint the heartbroken mother or widow who longed for a hopeful sign. “We must not argue,” he wrote, “that because a man once forges, therefore he never signed an honest cheque in his life.”

  Needless to say, not everyone shared Conan Doyle’s willingness to suspend disbelief. At first, the news of his conversion was treated, for the most part, with a measure of respect and tolerance. The Times of London gave a dignified summary of his remarks to the London Spiritualist Alliance under the heading of “The Spirit Life.” The writer Max Pemberton, reporting in the Weekly Dispatch, assured his readers that Conan Doyle was no zealot. “For many years I have watched Sir Arthur’s voyaging upon these strange seas and have wondered into what port they would carry him,” Pemberton wrote. He himself had shared in a few of Conan Doyle’s table-tipping experiments many years earlier and had been impressed by the novelist’s cautious approach. Now, having heard the results of his friend’s long deliberation, he declared the lecture to have been “a profound confession of faith from a man who believes that a new revelation has been given to mankind.”

  Inevitably, Conan Doyle’s pronouncements soon brought letters of protest from leading clergymen. At a conference of the Catholic Young Men’s Society of Great Britain, a Father Bernard Vaughan denounced spiritualism as a menace, and accused Lodge and Conan Doyle of having “lost their mental poise,” possibly under the sway of demonic force. “I would rather be in prison for the rest of my life,” Father Vaughan insisted, “than carry on the work that is being done by these two gentlemen.”

  Initially, Conan Doyle did not believe that spiritualism would supplant the more established forms of religion. Instead, he asserted, spiritualism would “set right grave misunderstandings which have always offended the reason of every thoughtful man [and] also confirm and make absolutely certain the fact of life after death, the base of all religion.”

  In October 1919, Conan Doyle’s lectures brought an angry challenge from the Reverend J. A. Magee at a congress of church leaders held in Leicester. Conan Doyle and his kind, according to Magee, threatened to lower the moral, mental, and spiritual standard of the country by urging unfit and unsupportable views on the populace. Incensed, Conan Doyle traveled to the city and offered a rebuttal entitled “Our Reply to the Cleric.” “We come forward as allies,” he stated. “And anyone who knows our literature—unfortunately these gentlemen at the Church Congress are ignorant of it—know we have proved that life goes on after physical death, carrying with it a reasonable evolution of the human soul. That being so, if these people were not blind they would say to us: ‘Come in and help us to fight the materialism of the world.’”

  His hopes for a peaceable coexistence would be short-lived, and it could not have quieted his critic’s fears when he asserted that at least some clergymen were themselves “amongst the strongest mediums which we possess at this time.”

  That same month, under the heading of “Credulity Hard to Understand,” the New York Times offered a blunt and unflattering assessment of Conan Doyle’s new crusade. “Admirers of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as a writer of detective stories—a company about as numerous as readers of the English language—have reason for a peculiar grief because of the strange, the pathetic, thoroughness with which he has accepted as realities the ‘spiritualistic’ interpretation of the phenomena of trance speaking and writing. There is little of the mysterious and nothing of the other world in these phenomena for modern psychologists, and yet this well-educated and intelligent man—with not a little of the scientific and the philosophic, too, in his mental furnishings—talks much as did the followers of the Fox sisters fifty years ago.”

  With the publication of The New Revelation in 1918 and The Vital Message the following year, Conan Doyle came under more frequent attacks in the press. Hundreds of similar spiritualist tracts were appearing at this time, but Conan Doyle’s fame separated his books from the rest of the pack—exactly as he intended. If his literary prestige brought new converts into the fold, it also made him the natural target for much of the scorn being heaped on the movement. The London Times in reviewing The New Revelation expressed an opinion shared by many when it accused the author of an “incredible naiveté.” “We may respect Sir Arthur’s sincerity,” the reviewer continued, “and his serious desire to put to the highest uses a new development which he believes to be ‘the greatest in the history of mankind,’ but we would recommend him to follow his own counsel—‘Above all, read the literature of this subject’—only we would add, read the literature on both sides.” The Nation took the same tone: “The book leaves one with a rather poor opinion of the doctor’s critical abilities.”

  James Douglas, in his weekly book column for London’s S
unday Express, offered perhaps the most judicious assessment of Conan Doyle’s new convictions, though his headline—“Is Conan Doyle Mad?”—suggested otherwise. Douglas admitted, in approaching one of Conan Doyle’s psychic volumes, to a feeling of “benign contempt” of the author’s opinions. “One does not trouble to analyse the ravings of a madman,” he wrote. “One shrugs one’s shoulders, laughs, and forgets.” Reading Conan Doyle’s arguments for the first time, however, Douglas found himself in a quandary. “He had plenty of vigorous common sense,” the journalist allowed. “If ever there was a well-balanced mind in a well-balanced body, it is his.” Moreover, Douglas acknowledged, Conan Doyle’s talents as a novelist and historian, and his pioneering insight into such matters as submarine warfare, could not be cast aside lightly. “It is not easy to reconcile these facts with the hypothesis that he is stark, staring mad on the subject of the dead,” Douglas admitted. “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.”

  In years to come, as Conan Doyle’s opinions grew even more extreme, this tolerant attitude became difficult to sustain. Oliver Lodge and his other colleagues in the spiritualist movement favored a cautious approach in spreading their message, so as not to invite ridicule. Conan Doyle, by contrast, resembled nothing so much as Gloucester Dick, the bare-knuckle brawler from his own House of Temperley, attempting to batter the public into submission with repeated blows to the head. He traveled the country and lectured tirelessly. He attended one séance after another, invariably giving a ringing endorsement of each medium’s authenticity. He sent a barrage of letters to the press, pronouncing on each new spirit manifestation. He quickly became, as the popular press dubbed him, “the Saint Paul of Spiritualism.”

  Many years earlier in Davos, when Conan Doyle read the text of Arthur Balfour’s presidential address to the S.P.R., he would have come across this passage: “I have often thought that when, on looking back over the history of human speculation, we find some individual who has anticipated the discoveries of a later age, but has neither himself been able to develop these discoveries nor yet to interest his contemporaries in them, we are very apt to bestow on him an undue meed of honour. ‘Here,’ we say, ‘was a man before his time. Here was a man of whom his age was not worthy.’ Yet such men do very little indeed for the progress of the world of which at first sight they would appear to be amongst the most distinguished citizens. There is no use in being before your age after such a fashion as this. If neither you nor those to whom you speak can make use of the message that you thus prematurely deliver, so far as the development of the world is concerned, you might as well have not lived at all.”