by Неизвестный
We have sold the chestnut mare as she took to kicking and now we have another chestnut mare, such a beauty. I gave the other and £22.10 for it, but that is better than having the trap broken & Touie frightened. She is a hunter as well.
I have taken to horse poetry again. Done two in two days & another on the stocks so I may have another ‘Songs of Action’ out next year. I will send you a typed ‘Duet’ in a few days. It will give Dodo some useful hints about matrimony. It is quite a handbook on the subject.
to Mary Doyle UNDERSHAW, FEBRUARY 1899
As you love me dont say a word to the Rodgers about Aberdeen. I shall go and call (if I go at all) but nothing would induce me to stay there. Christabel 19! Last time I saw her she was in a cradle.* How is it that my heart and feelings are still as young!
Innes and I are off for a day on the golf links. He goes on Tuesday so I want to get all of him that I can. Yesterday we went to Blackheath (lunching at our friends the Leckies) and then to the International football match. Afterwards Willie, Trevor, Innes and I dined together at the Reform…and so home.
So glad to get your letter. I quite agree about muzzling the papers. The best we can say is that our press is the best behaved in the world—at least I think so, and that our worst is not as bad as other people’s worst. But it certainly grows worse. It would not be a very popular platform cry for a young politician though—would it? He would get a reputation for bravery anyhow.
The Daily News account of my speech was curtailed. The Standard (which I enclose) was verbatim. Let me have it again as I have no copy. It has been commented on by many papers, and taken with my Peace speech it has put an impression abroad that I can say things in public on occasion.
Czar Nicholas II of Russia, concerned about Germany’s militarization, had called for a disarmament conference that took place at The Hague in May. At a public meeting about the proposal in Hindhead on January 28th, Conan Doyle spoke in favour of it—only to be opposed by his contrarian neighbour (and notorious vegetarian) Bernard Shaw. ‘I thought to myself as I spied Shaw in a corner of the room: “this time at any rate he must be in sympathy”.’ ‘But,’ marvelled Conan Doyle in his memoirs, Shaw ‘sprang to his feet and put forward a number of ingenious reasons why these proposals for peace would be disastrous’.* It was not the last time the two men would cross swords. For Conan Doyle, Shaw was proof that ‘the adoption by the world of a vegetarian diet will not bring unkind thoughts or actions to an end’.
The previous letter also contains Conan Doyle’s first reference in his correspondence to Jean Leckie, the young woman with whom he had fallen in love. It is not clear whether he had told his mother about his feelings, but it is apparent that he had not told Innes at this time. Nor is it known when Arthur and Jean told her parents in Blackheath, James and Selina Leckie, or her eighteen-year-old brother Malcolm.
Conan Doyle said nothing about his love for Jean in these years when he came to write Memories and Adventures, and its precise trajectory is difficult to track. From the available evidence the two set forth to keep it platonic during Touie’s lifetime. For him, it was a matter of honour, both in terms of his obligations to Touie and their marriage, and for the sake of the considerably younger Jean’s reputation. Since Jean came into his life at a time when Touie’s tuberculosis made sexual relations impossible in the marriage, there has been speculation about the love affair’s course since first revealed in 1949 in John Dickson Carr’s Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Some students of Conan Doyle’s life have looked for evidence undermining the idea that the relationship was kept platonic, but without success.
A Duet came out at the end of March in the large printing that Conan Doyle had encouraged Grant Richards to produce, and was criticized from the outset for including a confrontation between the young husband and his former mistress, who threatened to make herself known to his wife. He had realized that he was taking a risk, telling Richards: ‘I have twice before successfully created a taste and inaugurated a reaction and I may do it again—or I may fail.’
to Mary Doyle UNDERSHAW, LATE MARCH 1899
I observed a spiteful review of my book in the Daily Mail, and I suddenly remembered that that was your paper. It is of no consequence one way or the other—but I beg you not to answer it or to take any notice. Only so could it become important. In your kindly championship you would give it undue importance. The book will do very well. It is not addressed to critics but to the good old public. And it is honest heartfelt work.
Received the dreaded letter from poor Ella. Nothing would induce me to go. I shall probably get out of going to Aberdeen altogether.
P.S. The play promises well.
to Mary Doyle UNDERSHAW
You will no doubt be much excited by Innes’ news. It seems all to fit in very well. Umballa is an excellent station close to Simla.* The money will be found all right. We expect him here for final preparations before long. I hope he wont have to disappoint you at the wedding.
I had a further scheme which I should like your opinion on. It was, (after Innes had settled) to send Lottie out to him for a good long visit. I think it would suit her, and give her chances—good for him also. Que dites vous?
to Mary Doyle UNDERSHAW, APRIL 10, 1899
I was disheartened at first by the reception of my book, but I am now quite reconciled to it, without being in the least shaken in my feeling that I have done something of permanent value. There have been many romances and detective yarns in the world but this stands alone. Even an attempt and a failure at a quite new thing is better than an unambitious repetition of old successes. But my inmost soul tells me that it is not a failure—the same inmost soul which tells me that Girdlestone & Cloomber and even Uncle Bernac are failures & must be suppressed if I can do them. If I were on my death bed I should like to think I am leaving no book behind me which is not as good of the sort, though the sorts may be of different values, as I can do. With those three books out I could say so. But ‘A Duet’ should never come out [of any authorized edition of his works]. It is I think a fair statement of the case to say that a good deal of the criticism is very much as if a painter of battles varied his work by doing a landscape and the critics looked at it and said ‘This is a very poor battle piece. We cant even see the battle.’ I think that is a fair analogy in the case of the critics of ‘A Duet’ or some of them.
Give the happy pair my warm love & congratulations. Today is Touie’s birthday. Tonight my play is produced. Tomorrow my sister marries. Presently my brother leaves England. Things are moving.
to Mary Doyle UNDERSHAW, APRIL 1899
Halves seems to have been a great success—but of course a provincial success must be confirmed in London. Anyhow it cant be a failure now. Charming letter from Wells the novelist about ‘A Duet’. His back had been put up by the criticisms. The book seemed to have hit him where I meant it to hit somebody right on the heart. ‘Tremendously good’ was his cheery phrase. Also a message from another man to say that Swinburne was very keen upon it. So I have quality if not quantity on my side.
‘My wife (for whose verdict I waited) has just finished the Duet,’ H. G. Wells wrote to Conan Doyle, ‘and as I chanced upon a “slate” of the book last week it occurred to me that perhaps you’d not be offended if I wrote and told you that we both like it extremely.’
Of course I’m no critic—I used to be before premature age came upon me—but it seems to me you have the shape and the flavour (or texture or quality or atmosphere or whatever trope you like) just as rightly done as it can be. They’re a middle class couple and simple at that, but the ass I read seemed to be under the impression that that condemned the book. I’ve spent a year out of the last three in attempts at a similarly ‘commonplace’ story, so that I’m not altogether outside my province in judging your work. I think it’s drawn tremendously well.
to Mary Doyle
I think Ida will do very well if she gets Innes for a week. More than that would be unreasonable. He is naturally ho
me to have a bright time and see something of town & life.
I take Kingsley up to town today. Tomorrow Horsham. Wednesday & Thursday town. I am living very strictly—no baccy this year—and I am better in consequence.
Goodbye, dearest Mam. So glad ‘A Duet’ grows on you. Very few people—and none of my own—ever got the true value of that book.
[P.S.] J is well & happy in her new flat with her two comrades. Did I tell you that Mr & Mrs Leckie gave me a beautiful diamond and pearl pinstud for Xmas. It must have cost fifteen guineas at least.
As reviews accusing A Duet of bad taste continued to appear, Conan Doyle was outraged to discover that a number of them, under different aliases, had been written by one single critic. Robertson Nicoll edited the London Bookman; wrote a column for the New York Bookman; edited The British Weekly, a paper influential among independent churches; and contributed book reviews to several other journals and newspapers as well, it emerged, under pseudonyms like ‘Claudius Clear’, ‘A Man of Kent’, and ‘O.O’.
‘A growing scandal’ and ‘a crying evil,’ Conan Doyle denounced the practice in a lengthy letter to the May 16, 1899, Daily Chronicle. ‘It is not too much to say that the property of authors and of publishers comes in this way to be at the mercy of a very small clique of men… [F]our or five such critics would cover the whole critical Press of London, and no beginner could gain a hearing without their sanction. I hold that such a state of things is intolerable.’ He proposed, if necessary to end the practice, a boycott of offending journals: ‘A combination of authors who are opposed to wire-pulling and pluralism would easily, either acting independently or through the Society of Authors, break down this pernicious system.’
to Mary Doyle UNDERSHAW, MAY 16, 1899
We were so glad to have a glimpse of your dear face. It was sweet of you to come to us. Amused at the funny little account in the guide book. My attack on Robertson Nicoll is in the Daily Chronicle today—I am sure that it is a high service to literature that I am doing. I will send you a copy. It is very temperate and just.
to Mary Doyle UNDERSHAW, MAY 29, 1899
Many thanks for your very sweet letter, dearest. I love to hear your impressions of life because I respect your judgment and know your sincerity. It is charming—the way you put it. Well I am 40 today but my life has grown steadily fuller & happier. On the physical side I played cricket today, made 53 out of 106 made by the whole side and bowled out 10 of my opponents so I’m all sound yet.
I have done such a good prizefighting story—16000 words—my very best active style. Scene in Yorkshire, the miners v the ironworkers. Shall get £800 out of the Strand for it, and it will be so useful for my approaching book of Short Stories. It is a ripper. ‘The Croxley Champion’.
The Duet is doing well. Appleton tells me that 10,000 copies have been sold in America, and the reviews are extraordinary good. I send a couple of specimens and I want you to send them to Connie when you write to her. In England the sale has been retarded by the wirepulling gang who attacked it. I met old Mr Reynolds in Southsea. ‘That book of yours’ he cried ‘I just got a copy at once for every married son & daughter I have.’ That is what will happen, and what I meant to happen. Grant Richards has done it very well, and pushed it all he could, but it will push itself presently.
Gillette is over with the Sherlock Holmes play which is I hope to make all our fortunes. Nous verrons. I hope to meet him tomorrow, and get him down here for the weekend.
to Innes Doyle UNDERSHAW, JUNE 17, 1899
‘Sherlock Holmes’ is going to be grand. I talked it all over with Gillette. Two of his acts are simply grand.* There lies the trump card in our fairly good hand. It will appear in America in October.
My last letter about my private affairs must have surprised you rather. You need not fear however that any harm will arise from it or that any pain will ever be given to Touie. She is as dear to me as ever, but, as I said, there is a large side of my life which was unoccupied but is no longer so. It will all fit in very well, and nobody be the worse and two of us be very much the better. I shall see to it very carefully that no harm comes to anyone. I say all this lest you, at a distance, might fear that we were drifting towards trouble.
to Mary Doyle UNDERSHAW, JUNE 18, 1899
I have a private secretary now (Mr Terry) who comes twice a week & answers nearly all my letters and it is such a relief to me. I pay him very little and have ever so much more time for my own proper work. I wish I had done it a year ago.
Halves increases in business night by night but we cannot tell if it will last & the time of year is of course very much against a long run. I am however very well satisfied with its reception & prospects. It is too soon however to say if there is any money in it.
I believe however that there is a fortune in the other—Sherlock Holmes. Gillette has made a great play out of it, and he is a great actor, and bar some unforeseen event before October, when it will be produced in America, I am sure that it is destined for success, and if it once starts well it will go on running in many companies for many years. It has such an enormous initial advertisement. I am not usually over sanguine but I do have great hopes for this. It is our trump card.
A Duet refuses to be extinguished by foolish criticism. Richards tells me that it is selling slowly but steadily, small orders coming in from all over the country. I think it will outlive many of my more solid books for it has a quality of heart which is rare in English literature. A funny comment upon the charge of immorality is a letter which I have just had from Lyman Abbott the leader of the Puritan party in the States, and the venerable editor of ‘The Outlook’ in which he thanks me for the pleasure I have given his family to whom he has read it aloud.*
I want to get particulars from Innes about bungalows so as to arrange about Lottie for this winter. I am convinced that it is a good move—with a Simla season to follow. What is the use of hoarding money. Far better that it should be used in giving those you love their best chances in life.
I do about a dozen or so readings in October. I get 25 guineas for each. They will involve a lot of travel, Liverpool, Manchester &c. But it is worth picking up. My idea is an evening called ‘Sidelights on History’ illustrated by readings from my own works. I think it would make a nice high class sort of entertainment.
I have only one short story to do and then I shall be clear and ready to turn to that Medieval novel which I have had in my mind for some time.
to Mary Doyle UNDERSHAW, JULY 1899
Just a line before I start for Portsmouth where I play against the Services tomorrow & Saturday. Lottie & Ida come with for the day. Ida is looking a different girl since she came here. Never in my life have I seen such a change in a woman. She looks so girlish & fresh, whereas she was thin and bothered looking before. She proposes to come back here for the cricket week, and tho’ I dont know how on earth I can fit her in still we must work it somehow. I have got Miss Marsden’s cottage for Willie Connie & Oscar. We shall have 7 or 8 cricketers in the house so you can think there will be a cram.
On Monday Tuesday I play for the MCC against Wiltshire at Trowbridge, an awfully difficult place to get at. However it was the first County match the MCC had asked me for, and I felt I ought to go.
I read my new Brigadier Gerard story here on Aug 3d for a Charity. Lottie goes in the ‘Peninsula’ on Nov 9th. We shall miss her dreadfully but I am sure it is the right game.
to Innes Doyle UNDERSHAW, JULY 24, 1899
I am taking a very active (physically) and lazy (mentally) summer but I feel inclined to do so and to wait for all my future plans must depend upon ‘Sherlock Holmes’. Next winter I shall get started upon my medieval book—at least I hope so. There is to be an edition de luxe of my books in America and that will take some time, revising, changing, writing prefaces etc.
In October I go on the stump. I think I will knock them with Gerard and the Fox. The devil of it is that I cant read it for laughing.
‘How the Brigadier Slew
the Fox’, a tale of cultural misunderstanding in which Gerard inserts himself into a British fox-hunt without knowing the etiquette, and mistakes the pursuers’ cries of outrage for admiration of his dash and skill with a sword, is perhaps the funniest story Conan Doyle ever wrote. ‘I heard him read this once to a very typical, well-to-do, rather listless English audience,’ his friend Frederic Whyte once reminisced.
We had had a series of extracts from various of his writings—I forget what they were, but although they contained some humorous passages which he read quite well, scarcely a smile did he get out of his unemotional listeners. Then came this story, and Doyle (who, by the way, made himself a very efficient fox-hunter at forty, when weighing over sixteen stone) put his whole heart into the rendering of it. And with almost sensational effect! Not many of us probably had ‘ridden to hounds’, but we all knew enough about fox-hunting to understand the Brigadier’s ignorance, and his comical unconsciousness of his ignorance. When, at last, the point was reached where Brigadier Gerard with one stroke of his sword slices the fox in two—thus, he is convinced, compelling the admiration of ‘a generous enemy’—the entire room was in convulsions and the author himself, catching the infection, could scarcely continue.
Lottie sailed for India even sooner, in the event, departing on September 29th, as Innes wanted her to join him in India as soon as possible.