by Неизвестный
Lottie has gone into town to the Hornungs, and Touie to get a carpet, so I am alone, and as I have a cold I have sat by the fire all day and read Miss Austen’s ‘Pride & Prejudice’. I like her easy prim subdued style. I had read nothing of hers before. Outside legions of painters are raging. We are spending £15 on doing up our interiors and painting the outside.
I saw Willie yesterday. He read me a bit of his new story, which I like very well. I have to return thanks for literature at the Annual Booksellers dinner on the 15th and intend to mention Willie in my speech which will rather surprise him, only unfortunately he wont be there. It’s my debut as a speaker in London.
Well, I don’t know that I have much more to say. Tell the boy I was so sorry to forget his birthday. I’ll give him my brassey and my blessing. Tell him I’ve got my average down to 6 per hole—did 16 in 100, and on one day 49 in 330.
Connie had fallen in love with a promising young writer, E. W. Hornung, who one day, inspired by Sherlock Holmes, would strike gold with his stories of Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman. ‘I like young Willie Hornung very much,’ Conan Doyle told Aunt Annette.
He is one of the sweetest-natured most delicate minded men I ever knew. He is 26, and an author—standing certainly much higher than I did at his age. The one bar to him is that he is not very strong—being subject to asthma, but it appears neither to affect his work nor his enjoyment of life. He was educated at Uppingham, and has travelled, so that in every way he is well informed & accomplished. His father who was of Transylvanian extraction was a large iron master in the north at Middlesboro’ but lost his business & his life at the time of the great crash there. The children however have all done well & the mother seems to be a very worthy woman.
to Mary Doyle SOUTH NORWOOD, JUNE 24, 1893
We are looking forward so much to seeing you soon. We can chat over money matters when you come. I don’t think there is any reason why you should advance money to the young couple. As long as they know that it is there & that if it were badly needed it could be got, that is the great thing. They had best get in the way of making both ends meet from the beginning, & with the help of Connie’s small allowance they will be able to do this, I hope. Why should you part with the money which you have laid by. My remonstrance was only addressed to your putting away money which you had an actual present need for, so that you were placed in such a position that you could not help borrowing at the very moment when you were investing. This is obviously wrong. But I think it is going to the other extreme that you should part with any of the savings which were intended to secure your own position. That position is however very safe, I think. If papa died and you had no pension it would be a privilege to me to find you an annuity of £100 a year. I always take it for granted that no one else will do their duty towards you. Then I have saved enough now (with my copyrights) to make Touie’s position & that of the children quite secure in case I should die. I think I will in addition insure my life for £1000, making the money payable to Lottie, so that she should not be dependent upon anyone if she were left. What do you think of that? We could chat it over when you come. I should like to do my duty to everyone all round, & indeed I know no pleasure to be had out of money save that of securing the happiness of one’s family.
But Connie’s wedding in September would be the last joy in Conan Doyle’s life for some time. On October 10th his father died. And next, after his and Touie’s return from a short trip abroad, a second and even worse blow fell. In Memories and Adventures he recalled the shock of learning that his wife had a fatal disease:
Within a few weeks of our return she complained of pain in her side and cough. I had no suspicion of anything serious, but sent for the nearest good physician. To my surprise and alarm he told me when he descended from the bedroom that the lungs were very gravely affected, that there was every sign of rapid consumption and that he thought the case a most serious one with little hope, considering her record and family history, of a permanent cure.
to Mary Doyle REFORM CLUB, PALL MALL, LONDON, OCTOBER 1893
I am afraid we must reconcile ourselves to the diagnosis. I had Douglas Powell, who is one of the first men in London out on Saturday and he confirmed it. On the other hand he thought that there were signs of fibroid growth round the seat of the disease & that the other lung had enlarged somewhat to compensate. He seemed to think that mischief must have been going on for years unobserved, but if so it must have been very slight.
Our present plans are that when I finally start on my big tour (Nov 13) Touie shall go to Reigate to be with the mother. Then on or about Dec. 10th when my lectures are finished Lottie Touie & I will start for St Moritz—which is rather higher than Davos. If Touie does well there we might have a run to Egypt in the early spring and come back by sea to England when the weather is warm. Nem will stay at Tennison Road with Ada, Tootsie, Baby & one servant. The other we must dismiss. That is, I think the best course we can adopt. Lottie returns tonight from Bournemouth and then we can talk the thing over again. Both Powell & Dalton favour St Moritz, and can give us names of rooms, doctor &c.there.
Well, we must take what Fate sends, but I have hopes that all may yet be well.
I shall of course take my work to St Moritz, and I expect to do quite as much there as I could here. Touie drives out on fine days & has not lost much flesh. The cough is occasionally troublesome & the phlegm very thick—no hemorrhage yet, but I fear it.
Goodbye, dearest, many thanks for your kind sympathy. What with Connie’s wedding, Papa’s death, and Touie’s illness, it is a little overwhelming.
‘I set all my energy to work to save the situation,’ he said, but he also had his lecture contract to fulfil, and so he set off on the road for several weeks.
to Mary Doyle LIVERPOOL, NOVEMBER 19, 1893
Just a line to say that all goes well. Have done Bradford, Leeds, Middlesboro’, Sheffield & Liverpool in five consecutive nights. Tomorrow Salford, Tuesday Edinburgh. I feel better than when I started, and the voice wears well. Another 3 weeks and I’ll be free. I sold the serial rights of ‘The Threshold’ to Jerome for £1000. Let me know about how you want your allowance.
to Mary Doyle LIVERPOOL, NOVEMBER 1893
I had a wonderful reception at my lecture here yesterday. Street was blocked with people & such a fuss. 2000 in the Hall, and others beating at the doors with sticks. All went splendidly.
You have probably heard from Norwood as to all my arrangements. Everybody agreed that it was dangerous to take a person to Davos in December. I have tried to plan it all for the best. Touie was very well the last 3 days, never above 100 and often not 99. Still the worst sounds in chest, but cough better. Now is the time to move her.
When the circuit brought him to Glasgow, he sent Lottie a joking postcard:
Hoots, lassie, but I’m just in Glasgie, in a wee bit bothy o’ a Central Hotel an’ I’m gawn awa doon the toon in an ‘oor to gie my wee readin’. Ye manna mind if ye see in the bit cuttin’s that the Scottish Leader has been a-ginnin’ at me. It’s just the auld business about the letters ower again, an’ also that I wudna gie the chield an interview. I’ll gie him the toe o’ my boot ‘gin I see him again.
Yours brawly A. McDoyle
A few days later, she startled him with a letter where he was staying in Newcastle-on-Tyne. ‘I don’t know how you got at me here,’ he replied: ‘You’ve been Sherlock-Holmesing me’—coining a term that the Oxford English Dictionary credits to James Joyce in Ulysses three decades later, with Leopold Bloom ‘taking stock of the individual in front of him and Sherlock-holmesing him up.’
As soon as the lecture tour ended, he and Touie, with Lottie, were off for Davos, in Switzerland’s Alps, where many consumptives flocked in hopes of a cure. For readers, it was like returning to the scene of the crime, for it was at Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls that he sent Sherlock Holmes plummeting to his death in ‘The Final Problem’ in the December 1893 Strand.
For Conan Doyle, however, the des
truction of his famous character was a matter of indifference. ‘Killed Holmes’, he scribbled laconically in his notebook.
* * *
*In The Doings of Raffles Haw.
*Nothing more is known, but it appears to have been an offer by Dr Waller to loan Conan Doyle money to set himself up in a practice in London, or to purchase an existing one there.
†Apparently the young man named Cross who was courting Connie at this time.
‡The ‘Puritan Story’ was his novel The Refugees, published in 1893, about which more following. America had long been without a copyright law that protected foreign authors, and Conan Doyle had already seen some of his earlier work pirated there.
*‘Celebrities at Home: Mr Arthur Conan Doyle in Tennison Road, South Norwood’, World: A Journal for Men and Women, August 3, 1892. ‘Throw physic to the dogs’ was very typical of Conan Doyle’s way of speaking.
*Lottie continued there as a governess, with her salary paying for Innes’s education.
†An early variant of the bicycle, built for two people. A dogcart was a small two-wheeled cart pulled by a horse or pony.
*By Lucas Malet, pen name of Charles Kingsley’s daughter Mary St Leger Kingsley Harrison. For 1890 it was an unusually frank novel about a man torn between love for a respectable woman and for his mistress. Conan Doyle admired its realism greatly: ‘Hitherto we have been too much under the spell of Puritanism in England,’ he said (in Blathway, op. cit.).
*Douglas Sladen, secretary of the Authors Club that Conan Doyle joined about now, would be a close associate for many years. W. T. Stead, founder of the Review of Reviews, would be, until his death on the Titanic in 1912, both a collaborator and a combatant for Conan Doyle.
†Tauchnitz: the prolific German publishing company that pioneered the paperback, including its ‘Library of British and American Authors’. George Buckle was editor of The Times.
*The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892.
*Almost certainly referring to his father’s deterioration, and to discretion about it.
†Mary was about two months short of her third birthday at this time.
*‘A new edition of A Study in Scarlet came out today,’ he told Lottie earlier that month, ‘very swagger with 40 pictures.’ (But still with no royalties for the author!)
†Ida and Dodo, his two youngest sisters, were sixteen and fourteen years old at this time.
*His Napoleonic tale The Great Shadow, published in October 1892. England’s old enemy fascinated Conan Doyle. ‘He was a wonderful man—perhaps the most wonderful man who ever lived,’ he told Robert Barr in a November 1894 McClure’s Magazine interview. ‘What strikes me is the lack of finality in his character. When you make up your mind that he is a complete villain, you come on some noble trait, and then your admiration of this is lost in some act of incredible meanness… The secret of his success seems to me to have been his ability to originate gigantic schemes that seemed fantastic and impossible, while his mastery of detail enabled him to bring his projects to completion where any other man would have failed.’
*‘The transfer certificate was signed by Arthur Conan Doyle. He stated that the cause of his father’s condition was “dipsomania”. In answer to the question, “Whether dangerous to others,” he replied: “Certainly not.”’ Beveridge, op. cit. Charles Doyle’s brothers were already dropping from the scene. Richard had died in 1883, and Henry that month, Conan Doyle writing to Lottie on the 24th: ‘Was it not sad about Uncle Henry? Innes and I were the chief mourners. It all went off very nicely and quietly.’ James Doyle would die in December 1892.
*Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (London: Heinemann, 1907).
†Leslie Stephen, the critic and intellectual historian, was closer to sixty than fifty at the time. Arthur Quiller-Couch (‘Q’) was four years younger than Conan Doyle but already well known for his poetry and novels.
*William E. Henley, one of Victorian Britain’s greatest critics and editors, today best known for the indomitable courage of his poem ‘Invictus’, which begins: ‘Out of the night that covers me, / Black as the Pit from pole to pole, / I thank whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul.’
*Barrie put it bluntly in his memoirs: ‘Jane Annie was a dreadful failure’, assigning himself the blame: ‘[Conan Doyle] wrote some good songs, I thought, but mine were worthless and I had no musical sense’ (Barrie, The Greenwood Hat [Peter Davies, 1937]).
*In the flyleaves of a copy of his book A Window in Thrums that he presented to Conan Doyle, Barrie wrote a Sherlock Holmes parody about the experience called ‘The Adventure of the Two Collaborators’: ‘They are obviously men who follow some low calling,’ Holmes explains when Watson fails to see how he grasped the collaborators’ plight at a glance. ‘That much even you should be able to read in their faces. Those little pieces of blue paper which they fling angrily from them are Durrant’s Press Notices. Of these they have obviously hundreds about their person (see how their pockets bulge). They would not dance on them if they were pleasant reading.’
†He was harsher than some critics. ‘When Micah Clarke appeared, the work of an unknown man,’ said Harper’s Magazine when The Refugees came out in America, ‘it was discovered that we possessed a new novelist with that rarest of endowments, the historical imagination. Now Dr Conan Doyle has performed another deed of derring-do, for, in The Refugees, he has invited comparison with his own admirable work in the same kind. It is high praise to say that the result justifies his courage. The new tale is a brilliant and fascinating story.’
*To his lectures agent Gerald Christy, he wrote: ‘I believe that a man’s own works—if he can only read it—are far more interesting to an audience than any lecture could be. As far as I know the experiment has never been tried in this country since Dickens died.’
6
Putting Holmes Behind Him
(1894-1896)
‘I fear I was utterly callous myself, and only glad to have
a chance of opening out into new fields of imagination.’
Conan Doyle genuinely believed, as he and Touie made their way to Davos, that Sherlock Holmes was dead and buried. So firm was his resolve that when his mother asked him to sign something ‘Sherlock Holmes’ to please a friend of hers, he refused. ‘What would I think,’ he asked her, ‘if I saw that Scott (to compare great with small) had signed a letter “Brian de Bois Guilbert”. He would sink points in my estimation.’
‘My son will not sign “Sherlock Holmes”,’ the Mam reported to her friend: ‘He is really too particular!’ He intended to put Sherlock Holmes behind him for good.
Though Davos would not cure Touie, its clean mountain air provided badly needed relief for her condition, and the winter snows gave Conan Doyle an opportunity both to finish his autobiographical novel The Stark Munro Letters, and to expand his repertoire of sports.
to Mary Doyle
KURHAUS HOTEL, DAVOS, SWITZERLAND, JANUARY 23, 1894
Just a line to show you that I am all right. I got a touch of a kind of influenza quinsy, and I was in bed nearly a week, but now I find myself better than ever, and very eager to have some good out of door sport when I am quite strong.
I wrote a pretty fair ballad during my convalescence. I sent it to the Pall Mall, price 50 guineas. They gave that for Pennarby Mine, so I thought I would try again.
Touie relapsed for a short time, but is now very well again. I think one more winter might really cure her permanently. All will depend on how she does when she leaves here in March. I think Paris is her best half way house—and of course no being out after dark, or in rain or wind. I think you made an error in judgment in saying anything to Lottie about Nelson. She displays the utmost repugnance to the idea of going down to Italy. If Barrie comes here in March (as he promises) I might run down to Rome & Naples with him. It seems a shame not to go when it is so very close.
I am nearing the end of my book—could end it this week easily. I cannot imagine what its value is. It
will make a religious sensation if not a literary—possibly both. I really dont think a young mans life has been gone into so deeply in English literature before. Willie will read it before it reaches Jerome. I shall be most interested to know what he thinks. I am going to lead the life of a savage when it is finished—out of door on snow shoes [skis] all day. We think ‘The Stark-Munro Letters’ is the best title.
I wrote to Pond the American impresario to ask what the price of a lecturing tour in the Eastern States for one month next autumn would be. If it were very tempting I should go.
Lottie is in wonderful form—in fact you would not know her.
[P.S.] Have had pleasant letters from Barrie, Stevenson & Dr Joe Bell—the latter still convinced that Monson did the murder. Scott’s brother was told by Scott that he saw Monson kill Hambrough, but was prevented by Scots law from saying so.*
to James Payn BELVEDERE HOTEL, DAVOS, MARCH 22, 1894
Day has passed into day & still I have not written the letter which has long been due. We are all in good form—the wife wonderfully so—and we look forward to being in London before April is over. We have enjoyed Davos immensely. It is a rare place for work or sport. I have done 100,000 words & had as many tumbles so I can answer for both. Snow-shoeing is particularly good fun. I spend a good part of my time now among the mountains.
My book of short stories, mostly medical will be out soon now. ‘Dream & Drama’ I fancy the title may be, not a good one but I could not get a better. I fear some of them will seem to you to be too realistic, but the practical details of a Doctor’s life do take a sombre shape. I shall put a preface warning off the young person—though really the pregnant woman is the person who frightens me. She is a much more formidable reader—but then you can’t subordinate all literature to her. That would be pushing the ‘claims of the minority’ to an excess. On the whole there is nothing about which I have doubts in Dream & Drama. You may, as it seems to me, write what you will as long as you don’t write with flippancy. That is just the dividing line between a Tolstoi and a Maupassant.