We are now told that Bell played a leading part in the Chantrelle murder case, etc., and yet I am informed by an expert in criminological history that his name is not even mentioned in any of the documentations which are given in full in Notable British Trials. It seems that the editors of England’s most renowned encyclopaedia of crime have been startlingly remiss.
Reasonable criticism one accepts, however much one may disagree with it, but I will not remain silent in the face of downright inventions about my father. There is not a word of truth in the assertion that he wrote “letter after letter to Bell, asking him, and thanking him, for plots.” As curator of his records, which incidentally include many thousands of letters covering every period of his life, I am in a position to state that he corresponded very little with his old teacher.
In chasing the shadow rather than the substance, Mr. Wallace has missed a golden opportunity. Had he been a researcher, he would have found himself engrossed in my father’s wonderful archives, where he might have learnt of the part that Holmes, or rather his “fabulous original,” played behind the scenes of Britain’s national life. Only a few weeks ago, a learned professor who, at the instigation of a world-famous university, has been occupied with these very researches, preparatory to a fully documented 300,000-word standard reference work on my father, wrote to me: “In spite of Dickson Carr’s fine Life of Sir Arthur, I did not realize the wide range of influence, all the more extraordinary because it was hidden, that your father wielded in national affairs during that critical period from the turn of the century until the end of the Great War.” There, in the facts of that hidden influence functioning on a noble level and in his country’s interests, we have the epitome of the living Holmes.
Yours etc.,
Adrian Conan Doyle
I knew that I could not permit this attack on my Dr. Bell story to go unchallenged. And so, marshaling my research notes, I replied to Adrian Doyle carefully and at length. I sent off my defense of Dr. Bell as prototype not only to the Northern Echo, where it appeared in full on March 27, 1957, but to every other British newspaper which I learned had published Adrian Doyle’s attack. My letter, as it appeared in the Northern Echo, read as follows:
Sir,
Several months ago, the Northern Echo was kind enough to review my book, The Fabulous Originals, which concerned itself with unusual real persons who inspired the creation of memorable characters in fiction. Among the most notable of these was Dr. Joseph Bell, consulting surgeon to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, whose remarkable talents inspired one of his students, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to invent Sherlock Holmes.
Recently, I have been informed there appeared in your pages a letter, signed by Mr. Adrian Conan Doyle, taking strong exception to the facts in my book—facts unearthed after years of research and first-hand interviews. Since Mr. Doyle disparages my research, my biography of Dr. Bell, and the abilities of Dr. Bell himself, I feel it my duty to have my day in court.
While one must, indeed, admire Mr. Doyle’s filial devotion, one cannot help but feel that this very devotion detracts from his objectivity. I have made the full case for Dr. Bell as the original of Sherlock Holmes in my book. I shall do no more than briefly summarise that case here.
1. The star witness in the case for Dr. Bell remains none other than the creator of Sherlock Holmes himself. A. Conan Doyle, in a letter to Dr. Bell dated May 7, 1892, frankly acknowledged the source of his inspiration. He admitted that he owed the creation of Holmes to his old instructor’s teachings and to his demonstrations of deduction, inference and observation. A. Conan Doyle further acknowledged Dr. Bell as the prototype in interviews given to the press and in his autobiography.
2. Over a period of years I corroborated A. Conan Doyle’s admission by correspondence or personal interviews with other students who, like Doyle, had studied under Dr. Bell in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh and who knew the role their mentor played in the creation of Sherlock Holmes. Among these were Dr. J. Gordon Wilson, Mr. Z. M. Hamilton, and Dr. Harold E. Jones. Even Robert Louis Stevenson, in 1893, after meeting the “ingenious and very interesting’ Sherlock Holmes in print for the first time, asked A. Conan Doyle in a letter from Samoa, “Only one thing troubles me. Can this be my old friend, Joe Bell?”
3. Though A. Conan Doyle’s place in modem literature is secure, though he performed wonders in the Edalji and Slater cases, there are still those who have written that Doyle was “singularly unobservant.” Dr. Bell, on the other hand, performed miracles of observation and deduction before his students, among them Doyle—and his investigations in the Chantrelle, Monson, and Jack the Ripper murder cases cannot be dismissed lightly. Mr. Adrian Doyle remains highly suspicious of Dr. Bell’s detecting abilities, since an “expert” had informed him that the Notable British Trials edition of the Chantrelle murder made no mention of Dr. Bell. On the other hand, Mr. Adrian Doyle’s “expert” neglected to inform him that many other English sources did give fair credit to Dr. Bell’s role in this case, among them the late William Roughead, a leading editor of the Notable British Trials series.
With little relevance to the issue at hand, Mr. Adrian Doyle has made a spirited defence of his father’s “hidden influence” in the affairs of England. I do not doubt this, and never have. A. Conan Doyle is as admired and beloved in America as in his homeland. This, however, makes him no better a candidate for the prototype of Sherlock Holmes than Dr. Bell, who counted among his supporters Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale—and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Mr. Adrian Doyle’s untiring argument for his father as prototype and detective seems to me unnecessary. His father has his immortality as author of the Sherlock Holmes saga. It is enough. He does not require (nor, I feel sure, would he demand, were he alive) the additional honour of being the model for his own hero. Undoubtedly, were he alive today, he would repeat what he asserted more than a half-century ago—that Dr. Joseph Bell was the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes.
Yours etc.,
Irving Wallace
With the publication of my letter, there came silence and peace, and it was wonderful. This zany literary conflict about who was the real Sherlock Holmes ended in 1957, and has not been revived to this day. It is my hope that a mellower Adrian Conan Doyle has come to a closer understanding of what the Dr. Bell heirs feel and what I believe: that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle deserves all of the credit for being the creator of one of the greatest and most enduring characters of fiction, Sherlock Holmes, and that Sir Arthur’s university instructor. Dr. Joseph Bell, deserves credit for having possessed extraordinary gifts that inspired the invention of Doyle’s character.
I shall conclude with a summary of the controversy, written by the Marquis of Donegal in The Sherlock Holmes Journal, tenth issue, published by the Sherlock Holmes Society of London:
“There, for the moment, the matter rests…Let us call the fair-minded layman’s attention to Dr. Bell’s preface to the 1893 Ward, Lock and Bowden edition of A Study in Scarlet.
“Obviously, Dr. Bell’s modesty forbade him to lay direct claim to being the ‘prototype.’ But he writes:—(the italics are ours)
“‘Dr. Conan Doyle’s education as a student of medicine taught him how to observe, and his practice…has been a splendid training for a man such as he is, gifted with eyes, memory and imagination.
“‘Trained as he has been to notice and appreciate minute detail, Dr. Doyle saw how he could interest his intelligent readers…’
“So, as Jonathan Small asked, in The Sign of Four:—‘Is there any other point you would like to ask about?’”
20
Don’t Call Her Madam
This is about sex in Japan.
For five years now, week after week, the Tokyo radio has been promising elimination of the geisha girl. The most recent shortwave reports state that all geisha will soon become members of women’s labor battalions.
I am here to say it will not come to pass.
In mobilizing their empire for a last-
ditch stand in this Second World War, the Japanese leaders can go far. They can make their people eat dried seaweed, canned grasshoppers, bread baked of straw and green leaves. They can make their people give up telephones, warm kimonos, weekend vacations, autos, tobacco, foreign movies, romantic songs, dancing. They can eliminate formal wedding ceremonies. They can remove the sacred metal from a hundred thousand temples.
All this they can take away, and no trouble. But let them touch the geisha—and comes the revolution.
The reason, of course, is that in Japan sex is a special subject, kept apart from all others, as are Bushido, flower arrangement, Sendai chests, slave labor, and the emperor. I learned this in Tokyo a year before Pearl Harbor, when I visited Mr. Hidezo Kuo, known variously as President of the Shimbashi Geisha Guild and the yellow woman’s John L. Lewis.
It was only in order to understand the nature of the Japanese better that I explored the subject of the geisha girl.
Japan is a man’s world. The average wife is no more than a passive instrument for breeding. Romance and love in the Western sense do not warm the Japanese family hearth. But there is another guise for sex—or sexual stimulation. In Japan, the geisha girl alone represents a lofty world where flirtation and romance are raised to professional arts, mellowed and refined by centuries of practice. The geisha girl is sex in Japan. And she is there to stay.
I was first introduced to the geisha by a lanky, toothy Indian named V. Chockalingam, who was recommended to me as the one person who could show me the Tokyo not to be found in the guidebooks. He eked out a living by writing occasional dispatches for the United India Press. He spoke several Indian tongues, a perfect Japanese which he had learned while at his university, and English. He read banned books and argued world politics in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel.
It was Chock who took me, one Saturday night, first to the renowned Yoshiwara district of Tokyo. The Yoshiwara is a city within a city, where at least 6,000 of Japan’s 70,000 licensed “one-night wives” or prostitutes—who are not geisha—are segregated. Most of them are in semislavery, each dwelling in a tiny cage-style house with barred windows. This system has had apologists. In an English-language guidebook published by the Hokuseido Press of Tokyo, an Englishman, George Caiger, writes of the Yoshiwara:
“In no other great city can ladies go through such a quarter in the sure knowledge that they will meet with no insult, and see no immodesty or vulgarity…Vice is here robbed of its viciousness, for it is dignified, and, in the final analysis, a civilized handling of a universal problem.”
I saw a nightful of this “civilized handling.” We walked through the narrow streets, none more than six feet wide, flanked on either side, endlessly, by the miniature houses. Sometimes, I could observe the young ladies reading or sewing indoors. Other times, they stood at their windows and called “Ha-ro,” a corruption of “Hello.” Most of the girls were decorous, only a very few obscene.
We went into one of the larger houses, down the wooden corridors, past the sliding partitions. I met four or five of the girls. They were all in ruthless bondage—but all resigned to it. Most came from farms. There were frequent bad seasons on the farms, and if a father wished to survive, he would borrow perhaps $300 from the men of Yoshiwara, and turn over his fifteen-year-old daughter as security for the loan. The daughter would work off this debt with her body. After four or five years, the debt might be repaid, and then the daughter could return to the farm. But usually, she just remained.
Chock assured me, however, that the Yoshiwara was not the real sex story of Japan. The most important part of the story, he said, was the geisha. Everyone talked so much about the geisha that the subject was considered a cliche. “But no one’s really covered it,” he said. “And when you realize the geishas have one of the most powerful unions—”
“You mean they’re organized?”
Chock nodded. “Best union in Japan. And I know the head man. His name is Hidezo Kuo, president of the Shimbashi Geisha Guild.”
So I went with Chock to see Mr. Kuo.
Hidezo Kuo was a slight, grayish, immaculate man attired in a Palm Beach suit. He was bald except for a thin semicircle of hair. He wore metal-rimmed spectacles and a quiet mustache. He was sixty-five years old.
He sat, in the best Little Napoleon manner, behind a massive, aseptic walnut desk. His large office contained two fat safes, three busts of Japanese war heroes, an old gramophone. Also, there was a microphone and switch. “It is our speaker system,” Mr. Kuo explained. “It connects me with each of our four floors.”
Mr. Kubo’s sanctum was on the second floor of the guild’s four-story modernistic building in the heart of Tokyo. From this office, Mr. Kuo, possessing the world’s strangest and perhaps in ways most enviable job, controlled the daily doings of 280 first-rate geisha houses in the Shimbashi district of the island’s capital. Mr. Kuo was, indeed, the middleman to end all middlemen.
In Tokyo, there were three million males. The love life of most of these males consisted largely of visiting the 13,793 geisha girls residing in 4,526 geisha houses located in Tokyo’s fifty-four geisha districts—of which the most expensive and exclusive was Mr. Kubo’s Shimbashi district.
Actually, Mr. Kubo’s guild was a clearinghouse in sex.
Whenever a male, or a group of males, desired female companionship, they phoned Mr. Kuo or any one of his eighty office employees. Then Mr. Kuo, in turn, advised his geisha to be prepared for visitors at their machiai or waiting house that evening, or ordered them to be on hand at the ryoriya or restaurant.
“But, I must make one thing clear to you,” said Mr. Kuo from behind his walnut desk, “and it is important. In fact, it is why I wished to see you even on a Sunday afternoon. It is that our geisha girls are not prostitutes—and our Shimbashi district is not a red-light district!”
I started to comment on this point, but he was just beginning his educational discourse. His spectacles wavered on his nose as he spoke.
“Oh, yes, it is unfortunately true,” he continued, “that some of the third-rate geisha, in cheaper districts, who are unaccomplished in the traditional arts, have lowered themselves by becoming mere prostitutes. These cheap geisha have given all geisha a bad name with foreigners.
“I do not say that every one of my eight hundred girls here is a virgin. After all, their virginity is a private matter, just as It is with American entertainers like your movie actresses in Hollywood. From what I have heard about your movie actresses, I would venture to say that our geisha use their bodies far less for purposes of advancement.
“The main point is this—our geisha do not make a living by romancing with guests. They make a living purely from reciting songs, dancing, playing the samisen, conversing wittily. Just last week, there was a professor here from one of your big American universities. He spent one night with our girls and left convinced they were not prostitutes.”
I asked the professor’s name. Mr. Kuo started to tell me, stopped, then wagged his head.
“No, I’d better not tell. Anyway, if the professor could be convinced, maybe you too will go home and help correct the impression in America that the geisha are prostitutes. In keeping with the New Order in Japan, and to lift the unfair stigma attached to the word geisha, we in the guild are planning to call our girls by a different name. Maybe that will help.
The geisha have had a long history in their struggle to rise above prostitution. In 1761, retired courtesans became the first geisha. For almost a century, they were nothing more than expensive filles de joie. Finally, in 1830, the samurai, the specially privileged feudal-brutal knights of Japan, began patronizing and defending the geisha, and thus gave them respectability. After that, the geisha themselves made a fight to break away from outright prostitution. Those who preferred the life of the red light disappeared into Yoshiwara, while those who preferred to be entertainers enlisted in the rapidly rising Shimbashi. By 1890, the geisha were considered so chaste that if one of their number permitted herself a b
ed partner on company time, she was driven from the district, while her best kimono was taken from her and hung in disgraceful display from the center of the waiting house for all to see.
Mr. Kuo informed me further that there were six classes of geisha. His own charges fell into the upper two brackets. The first class was called jimae, and its young ladies owned their own private houses. The second class was called wake, and it included the young ladies who divided their incomes fifty-fifty with the house owners. In the third class were the girls called schichisan, who kept three-tenths of their earnings.“The rest,” said Mr. Kuo, “are the lower-class geisha, who give us a bad name. We nickname them the pillow geisha. I do not have to explain.”
All this anti-prostitution talk left me honestly befuddled, and still skeptical. I had been to three expensive geisha parties, two sponsored for me by the Japanese government, and another, quaintly enough, sponsored by the Japanese-American Friendship Society. Each of these parties ended with my friends, stimulated by potent sake, wandering off for the night with their respective first-class geisha.
But I suppose such activity, as Mr. Kuo insisted, was purely extracurricular. I recall reading a book, Geisha Girl, written by Mr. Aisabuto Akiyama, published in Yokohama. One passage explained:
“The geisha may be taken for an independent artist unique in nature providing her chastity be kept intact. It is, nevertheless, a deplorable fact that she is often deprived of her virtue by wanton guests who lay manifold nets over her in a way that makes it practically impossible to escape.”
I asked Mr. Kuo if it was true that most girls were driven into the career of geisha because of economic necessity. “In this respect, I’ve heard it’s just like Yoshiwara,” I said.
The Sunday Gentleman Page 56