ACD 1989-1999
ACD 1989-1999 is an article written by Owen Dudley Edwards published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 9, june 1999).
This extensive essay reviews the first decade of the journal A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-1999), assessing its contributions to Arthur Conan Doyle studies across biography, literary criticism, bibliography, and cultural history. It highlights the diversity of research approaches and the importance of the journal in advancing serious scholarship on Arthur Conan Doyle and his works.
ACD 1989-1999
The key principle for a journal devoted to Arthur Conan Doyle must be diversity. It is not simply that any such enterprise must mean more than Holmes, much as a Trollopeian magazine must look beyond Barsetshire. The astonishing varieties of Conan Doyle style open up a vast field. The road to Watson narrative was peopled with different agents for first-person discourse, from the broad Scots of Israel Stakes in The Mystery of Cloomber to the New England formalism of J. Habakuk Jephson; from the poltroonery of Hammond in 'That Little Square Box' to the girlish bubblings of 'Our Derby Sweepstakes'. Ronald Knox claimed invariable formula for the Holmes stories, yet their very openings oppose each other. To cite only the long stories:
- In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army.
- Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case.
- Mr Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he stayed up all night, was seated at the breakfast table.
- 'I am inclined to think——' said I.
Micah Clarke's 'It may be, my dear grandchildren, that at one time or another I have told you nearly all the incidents which have occurred during my adventurous life' mocks its future Puritan solemnity by implying ancient-mariner conscription of a reluctant audience. The Lost World plays and discards an utterly irrelevant old gasbag in its first four paragraphs having established him firmly as the most tactless person upon earth-a fluffy, feathery, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly good-natured, but absolutely centred upon his own silly self', with the hidden implication that the narrator Edward Dunn Malone has to evolve from a similarly silly egocentricity in the book's course. The Land of Mist supposedly demands credulity of its readers beyond all habitual suspension of disbelief and has footnotes asserting the truth of the Spiritualist faith to prove it: yet it starts on a level of auctorial frivolity (unmatched save, perhaps, in the last words of 'The Norwood Builder').
- The great Professor Challenger has been-very improperly and imperfectly-used in fiction. A daring author placed him in impossible and romantic situations in order to see how he would react to them. He reacted to the extent of a libel action, an abortive appeal for suppression, a riot in Sloane Street, two personal assaults, and the loss of his position as lecturer upon Physiology at the London School of Sub-Tropical Hygiene. Otherwise, the matter passed more peaceably than might have been expected.
With that opening, can anything be true? Has Challenger sued Conan Doyle? Did The Lost World happen? Did The Poison Belt? If both are fictions and Challenger fact, how does he know Malone and why is he on good terms with the memory of Summerlee? What connection did any of them have with Lord John Roxton? That we discover a child for Challenger as to whose existence neither he nor his wife gave a sign when confronted with imminent death in The Poison Belt, simply compounds the problem: you may find Spiritualism beyond belief, but can you believe in anything?
ACD's first editors, Christopher Roden and David Stuart Davies, showed themselves in tune with such variety from the start. They began, and since volume 3 (1992) Christopher Roden and Barbara Roden have happily continued, the editorial under the title 'The Inner Room'. (Its counterpart closing the number or volume, 'A Duet with an Occasional Chorus', has lapsed since volume 6 and this, given the freshness and inspirational quality characteristic of the item, is to be regretted: it was as good a signing-off as any journal can ask, where most simply peter out.)
'The Inner Room' identifies the journal with Conan Doyle's own self-portrait in verse, which declared the multiplicity of pulls upon him and the variety of his own identifications. His dislike of reduction to the creatorship of Sherlock Holmes is consistent with this: a musician who can perform many works may be gratified for fame in the execution of one, but both he and his audience are emasculated if they will only hear, and he may only play, that one. Similarly, to argue that only the Holmes works are any good, is to say that because somebody does one thing well it is impossible that they can do anything else well: it is much more likely that they will do well at something else, if they show quality in one. If you think well of the Holmes cycle, you will surely find it hard to dismiss Round the Fire Stories, most of them detective stories: the only logical denial of their quality would seem to be a child's insistence that its favourite character must be present, which is understandable but hardly adult. Elizabeth might beg Shakespeare for more Falstaff, but even Elizabeth would hardly ban everything but Falstaff. And the fall of Holmes — or at least the Fall of Reichenbach — made way for the creation of Gerard, and the best series of historical short stories in the language. Admittedly the resurrected Holmes did not stand in the way of Challenger's birth and early supermanhood. Yet if Holmes and Watson lead the cast of Conan Doyle's creations, the wars of Challenger and Summerlee make them peerless. ACD may defer to Poe's Dupin as a detective even if Holmes be much the fuller character; but can anyone from Verne or Wells (and beyond) in science fiction throw Challenger in the shade? This may be vulgar classification, but the prejudice against which it is conscripted knows no other answer.
ACD had to prove itself, unafraid, a journal of all ACD. It has succeeded, critically and evangelically. But if its agenda had to be that of all as well as one, this includes what John Dickson Carr (whose chapter-headings so often excelled his text) described as 'CHAOS: BUT THE GROPING ENDED'. Did Conan Doyle's conversion to Spiritualism eliminate his multiplicity, as in 'The Inner Room' he had feared the absolute victory of any one of his personalities must do? Could ACD avoid Spiritualism? Should ACD adopt Spiritualism? Was ACD submerged in Spiritualism? Any argument that Spiritualism destroyed his fictive powers usually cites supposed evidence from the later Case-Book stories of Holmes (although the great claims made for 'The Veiled Lodger' seem as yet to have won no very effective rebuttals), but the final three years of ACD's life brought a vein of horror comedy into fine play for the only Challenger short stories (Strand April, May 1928, January 1929). The posthumous 'The Parish Magazine' supplied the title for ACD's in-house journal until its recent discontinuance, and the use of the title asserted the survival of ACD's finest creative powers to the end. The story itself was long neglected until the invaluable John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green brought it out once more in their Uncollected Stories (1982: The Unknown Conan Doyle series): but its strength as comedy had been declared from a corner eminent enough to drive any adverse critic from the field — A Century of Humour (Hutchinson, 1934) edited by ACD's greatest literary disciple, P. G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse chose this, in preference to, say, one of the Gerard stories which inspired his own narratives from Bertie Wooster. Yet for all of its comedy, it is a disturbing story, in harmony with ACD's ironic misgivings about the 1920s, so well diagnosed by the late W. W. Robson.
So ACD's pious uses of ACD's titles for its own categorisation of its contents got down to work without any special pleading, asserting centrality of 'The Inner Room' to his nature, of 'The Parish Magazine' to his totality, and of A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus as a last word echoing when his more formal work has been assessed. A Duet is a difficult work, scarcely lending itself to the direct autobiographical credentials of The Stark Munro Letters and of Memories and Adventures (neither of them final words on factual detail). Yet it has been variously claimed as the mirror of Conan Doyle's relationship with each of his wives, and it stands as a gentle query to ACD enthusiasts as to how much they really know of their quarry. The use of two other titles for standard magazine business also asserts symbolic scrutiny rather more than merely felicitous labelling from the ACD box. 'A Point of Contact' is an obvious title for Letters to the Editor, but it also singles out an ACD point of illumination. The story is almost too slight to be called more than a sketch, imagining-and quite self-consciously imagining — a meeting between Odysseus and David: but how valuable is its point, that of worlds habitually treated as wholly discrete, surely having linkages of which we know nothing. How wide and deep are the impressions made by such contact? What remote repercussions follow on editorial correspondence (apart from those in M.R. James's 'Casting the Runes')? In ACD studies we are slowly coming to terms with what was once noted as merely exotic coincidence, the Lippincott hosting of Wilde's meeting with Conan Doyle. And Conan Doyle's seminal volume of literary appreciation, Through the Magic Door, is honoured for its singular acheivement: it hosts the review section, whose quality may be indicated by a recent example.
It was a Godsend for ACD and Conan Doyle studies in general that the launch of the society and its journal should have involved as its foremost celebrant of Spiritualism Mr Joe Cooper, whose sense of humour is exactly what any religious faith needs. His presence behind the filmed scenes of FairyTale: A True Story (1997: reviewed ACD vol. 8 (1998) 112-115) seems to permeate the thing: after so much bitterness humourlessly diffused amongst adversaries of ACD's time to ours, it was splendid to find the Cottingley Fairies turned into a joke on the viewer. A film commemorating fairies faked by camera in 1917 proclaims their existence by much more spectacularly faking fairies through its own infinitely more sophisticated camera; and the film's lighthearted thesis, as ACD reviewer Michael W. Homer puts it, is:
- that Frances and Elise created a false proof (ulitizing cardboard cut-outs) for the existence of 'real' fairies which they had seen (or at least they believed really existed), but which refused to be photographed.
(Any fairies I have known would always refuse to be photographed.) The Land of Mist describes a comparable case, and it is the pivot of Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Mr W. H.: the votary seeking converts to beliefs genuinely held, whose proofs only forgery can produce. The little girls may indeed have believed in fairies (most little girls of their time did) and their so-called confessions in our time may be less frank on what they thought they had seen, than on what they pretended to photograph (but grown-ups won't admit to believing in fairies). ACD, Yeats, and Noël Coward all united in fictive reminders that true Spiritualist media are unlikely to know the nature of their own success. Meanwhile Michael Homer saluted the 'very non-judgmental context' of the film: contributions of other commentators on the question of Spiritualism make one sigh for the film's objectivity, to say nothing of Joe Cooper's ecumenical humour. Alas, ACD can hardly offer spin-off recordings of his ukelele solo [?] 'Is There Anyone There?', which suggests that Spiritualism can at least teach other religions that God-or Whoever-has probably a finer sense of humour than Her/His followers. Michael Homer's handling of the question has also its lessons, drawn as it is from his attempts to show Mormon realities versus ACD's hasty indictment in A Study in Scarlet. This followed logically from the first of Homer's series of essays showing that the tolerance the aged ACD sought from Spiritualism was what he came to regret having withheld from Mormonism (vol. 2 no. 1 (Spring 1991) 66-1; vol. 4 (1993) 56-74; vol. 5 (1994) 75-90; vol. 6 (1995) 160-8). Homer's admirable services to the student in quest of factual information enhance his sectarian liberalism, and it may be regretted that the generosity he shows to ACD eludes many commentators on ACD's last faith. Spiritualism evidently violates the twentieth-century taboos on death as painfully as Mormonism violated the nineteenth-century taboos on sex.
II
Michael Homer's gentle juxtapositioning of ACD in Utah in 1886, and ACD in Utah in 1923, flicks on another sidelight from 'The Inner Room'. The journal had to recognise an inconsistent Conan Doyle in many respects, as contributors should remind themselves. Even Pearson (the most persecuted of ACD biographers) testified to that, with stimulus from Bernard Shaw. Conan Doyle changed on racial attitudes, religious convictions, politics, Irish nationalism, war, and many other questions: he testified to many such changes readily enough. We need to be more alert to the nuances of such change, rather than woodenly adhering to supposed consistencies. ACD, for instance, has two most informative and thoughtful articles on Conan Doyle and women's rights, in which R. Dixon Smith (vol. 5 (1994) 50-60) draws admirable deductions from Beyond the City and A Duet, but Laurence Price (vol. 6 (1995) 112-140) pursues other literary evidence questioning but not denying ACD's place in defence of women. The latter essay, valuable as it is, should perhaps beware of labelling a readiness to treat women as human beings as misogyny: G. K. Chesterton, excellent as his Father Brown tales are, diminishes women by having but one female villain and one female moral ambiguity among the fifty stories. But we must also ask whether ACD did not change in this regard over time. W.R. Trotter's most useful documentary presentation on Conan Doyle at Hindhead (vol. 7 (1996-7) 8-27) prints the report of a debate on 2 December 1905, the very eve of the Liberal return to power. ACD defended Tariff Reform and
- complimented Miss Hunter on her most brilliant speech, and added lightly that under some more reformed legislature they would see her in the House yet pleading the cause
which is grateful and courteous but does not sound like a convinced opponent of female suffrage. However genial Conan Doyle, he was not the man to cast out Satan by Beelzebub, nor to win an audience by throwing out false hints to catch stray votes. Students of his gender politics must therefore grade their analyses by the dates of the relevant documents, literary or otherwise. Did marriage with Jean Leckie draw him to a view of female suffrage at some variance from his previous convictions?
It will be obvious from the above demonstration how rich the totality of ACD now appears to the researcher. The successive numbers of the magazine are full of good things taken by themselves, but when we draw them together, how richly the benefits of consultation are multiplied! It follows that a general index will soon be a desideratum, whence great results could follow. At the very least, a combined table of contents should be printed with the twentieth volume if not earlier. The Parish Magazine would have to be included in both index and combined contents, all the more since ACD's next volumes are now to undertake its work. As matters stand, so varied are the topics and so fruitful their results that we will want Mycroft Holmes comprehensively to correlate them. We should notice, too, how diverse the forms whose combined product is greater than themselves. Mr Dixon Smith offers a close reading of two texts, Mr Price more of a commentary on several, Mr Trotter an austere assemblage of newspaper evidence. We see the service given by all three, varying though their approaches and credentials are (suspension of the brief biographical data on contributors is the readers' loss, diminishing as it does the knowledge of the precise professionalism being placed at our disposal). Each makes its case for close analysis. I personally may disagree with Mr Price more than with his colleagues, as is to be expected when he cuts so wide a swathe. He falls into the error, for instance, of ignoring ACD's sense of humour, a quality none of our contributors should ever ignore or undervalue (witness my opening quotation from his apparently least humourous novel The Land of Mist). Mr Price grins appreciatively where he is meant to at The Lost World, but he loses the parody (and perhaps the pathos) of 'A Physiologist's Wife', whose comic origin at the expense of a Henry James plot, declares itself textually by an ambiguous heroine 'Mrs O'James'. But he gives us the stimulus if not the accuracy we need from a critic, and in the reading of a readily accessible text, we can remedy the accuracy ourselves.
Inevitably, reports on manuscript collections will supply some of the greatest excitement of perusing such a journal as ACD, and among the countless calls for commendation to the editors must be their wisdom in supplying reprint of vital material such as Dr Peter D. McDonald in the Victorian Periodicals Review (Spring 1997) on the A. P. Watt MSS. (There is less cause for congratulation on its annotation, where the notes at end of text from 6 to 38 are successively one beyond the superscriptions to which they should relate: note 5 relates to an unnumbered sentence after that concluded with the superscription 4, note 38 relating to the superscribed sentences marked 37 and 38. I attribute this blemish to the hubris of a University of Toronto Press computer, but let it remind us that the mighty and the modern may have their Norburys too.) Dr McDonald's discovery that the first six Sherlock Holmes stories originated as a series idea from Conan Doyle himself is a find of the first order, and the probability that they were begun in Vienna is delicious. Perhaps the most successful Edinburgh International Festival theme was that built in 1983 by its Director, Sir John Drummond, on the theme of Vienna 1900: how splendid that his achievement in placing fin-de-siècle Vienna in Edinburgh counterpoints the Edinburgh-born Sherlock Holmes finding his true dwelling, the short story, in Vienna. ACD specialists will be less cautious than Dr McDonald in deciding against the accuracy of Hesketh Pearson's dating: Pearson's many virtues do not include chronological accuracy.
A journal sets its standards in its early numbers, not only in quality but in method. The diversity of ACD's output makes this a particular challenge to our journal. A masterpiece may require microsurgical investigation, with the brevity and precision of Joe Bell's old master James Syme: the Holmes stories ask this of us, as do Round the Fire and Round the Red Lamp and Gerard. Others may. As literature Three of Them, to put it politely, does not, though psychologically and sociologically it may have much to tell. We need information inviting expert analysis, but this may not necessitate supreme judicial authoritarianism. Thus Clifford Jiggens, Derek Hinrich, Christopher Roden (vol. 5 (1994) and again Jiggens and Jiggens (vol. 6 (1995)) in instructive and informative discussion of Cricket's Conan Doyle answer all but the most specialist questions in their five essays, whose supplement by ACD's diplomatic appreciation of W.G. Grace adds the requisite cubit to the subject's stature. But an assessment of Conan Doyle's cricket with precision tools requisite for judging Grace or Hobbs would be absurd. Yet the articles won interest from cricket enthusiasts caring nothing for Conan Doyle, and would have been substandard had they failed to do so. Again, the decision to make so much of cricket was praiseworthy. ACD wrote only one cricket story, and that at the end of his life, and his master-work has but one cricketing passage (The Brigadier in England', possibly the finest comic paragraph on cricket in literature). ACD as a writer is probably incomprehensible unless one comes to terms with his cricket.
This would suggest that some comparable symposium is needed on other sports. Dr C. Frederick Kittle gave precisely the example later writers need with his 'Down the Slopes with Conan Doyle at Davos' (vol. 4 (1994)), integrating the skiing achievement and the appropriate literary data (including Mr Sherlock Holmes, R.I.P.). Both boxing and rugby football need comparable elaboration, in both cases firmly tied to specific incident in ACD's life as well as to relevant literature. A boxer is about to publish a volume of literary criticism in which he finds 'The Bully of Brocas Court' ACD's supreme achievement from his viewpoint while he damns the contest in 'The Fall of Lord Barrymore' as an impossibility: one applauds the sportsman as critic, but his expertise may not extend to boxing in drag. ACD could therefore extend its net on these deep waters, all the more since drag is even more vital to 'The Man with the Watches'. Dr Kittle's factual grounding is the more appropriate where comparable investigations weaken themselves by indulgence in less authoritative personal opinion. The eminent Sherlockian Derek Hinrich, for instance, weakens his 'Conan Doyle's Own: The Royal Mallow Fusiliers' (vol. 6 (1995)) by the want of a little specialist autobiographical knowledge to further his critical ruminations on 'The Green Flag'. Had he been a Fenian in the British imperial service it would have concentrated his mind wonderfully and possibly spared us the following:
- I have always found it hard to credit that even the most determined Fenian, no matter how desperate, could contemplate deserting to a horde of savage fanatics in the middle of a battle like Tamai, where Kipling's advice to the young British soldier 'wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains' would be just as apposite to anyone cut off-roll to your rifle and blow out your brains'.
Kipling (and apparently Mr Hinrich) may have been stupid enough (and, one must add, homicidal enough) to counsel suicide: one might answer that anyone who heeded such chairborne advice had clearly no brains to blow out. Conan Doyle's two religions, Roman Catholicism and Spiritualism, recoil with horror from self-slaughter, and if his intervening scientific scepticism finds its appropriate expression in Sherlock Holmes, his opinion of suicide is eloquently expressed at the climax of 'The Veiled Lodger'. But the whole thing misreads the story. The Fenians propose to join the (other) savage fanatics not out of desperation, but out of conviction: ACD was clearly familiar with the international agrarian post-Fenian ideology pumped up once a week by the Irish-American Patrick Ford's Irish World, whence was extracted Ford's Criminal History of the British Empire. The mutinous Irish in 'The Green Flag' are nurtured on doctrines of common fellowship with the followers of the Mahdi. At close quarters they turn away from their prospective allies, and in their extremity defect not from but to Britain, or more exactly to the cause of the Green Flag raised in Britain's support. And however difficult it might be for Irish revolutionaries to fight for Britain, it would boggle an imagination more informed on Irish nationalism than Mr Hinrich's to visualise their seeking eternal damnation for it. In other respects the piece is also unhappy: Mr Hinrich's assumption that 'the only Irish city or town to have a regiment named after it was Dublin' does grave disservice to Enniskillen (aka Inniskilling), and his surprise at ACD's emphasis on Mallow (the major town in the North Riding of Cork, the largest county in the British Isles) needs confrontation with the Mallow by-election of 1883, when the incendiary agrarian journalist William O'Brien was elected against the government which had carefully bought off an intervention from ACD's old schoolmate, the future Lord Justice John Francis Moriarty.
III
But for readings of Conan Doyle, as readings, there is no limit of value, provided the critics limit themselves to what is in the text. rather than what they want to be in it. If anything, we academics appear to be much the worst when it comes to baseless generalizations. Thus the extract from Professor Harold Orel's The Historical Novel from Scott to Sabatini (vol. 6 (1995)) discusses The White Company in which context it informs its readers that 'Conan Doyle ... detested Napoleon and wished that Scott had not spent so much time on his biography of Napoleon at the expense of the novels he might have written'. Here he is basing himself (to the point of immersion) on Through the Magic Door, but the original will simply not sustain Professor Orel:
- It is true that [Scott] wrote a life of the great Soldier Emperor, but that was the one piece of hackwork of his career. How could a Tory patriot, whose whole training had been to look upon Napoleon as a malignant Demon, do justice to such a theme? But the Europe of those days was full of material which he of all men could have drawn with a sympathetic hand. What would we not give for a portrait of one of Murat's light-cavalrymen, or of a Grenadier of the Old Guard, drawn with the same bold strokes as the Rittmeister of Gustavus or the archers of the French King's Guard in Quentin Durward?
The last rhetorical question is a modest expression of ACD's own agenda in Gerard, and a useful reminder to us that Scott is his Master in the Napoleonic fictions (vide Scott's courtesy appearance in The Great Shadow) as he is in Micah Clarke and The White Company (and even the Holmes cycle). But the attack on Scott's Napoleon (which for a Tory patriot trained to demonize Napoleon makes gallant attempts to be fair-minded) arises not because ACD thinks Napoleon unworthy of Scott but that he thinks Scott unworthy of Napoleon. Surely ACD had his narrator speak for himself at the close of Uncle Bernac: 'I find it very difficult to say if he was a very good man or a very bad one. I only know that he was a very great one, and that the things in which he dealt were also so great that it is impossible to judge him by any ordinary standard.' How Professor Orel renders these quotations into detestation of Napoleon might well baffle the Holmes brothers, and leaves his status as editor of documentary works on Conan Doyle somewhat problematic. The Introduction to his Critical Essays on ACD, reprinted vol. 3 (1992), is in fact not blameworthy in factual terms (though certain of its data need sources), but its content is occasionally too trite to be true. In particular it takes Conan Doyle's gently dismissive press interviews as proof positive of his judgments, no very wise policy when assessing a man whose Holmes declared that the press is an excellent institution provided one knows how to use it, and then planted a lie ('The Six Napoleons').
Nevertheless, Professor Orel's agenda in the essay merits attention, notably from readers of this journal. Occasionally one wonders if he 'misspoke himself', the usual official explanation of President Gerald Ford:
- The emphasis on Conan Doyle's literary antecedents must give way to a more fruitful line of investigation, one that establishes links between Conan Doyle and his literary descendants.
The blood congeals at the thought of endless theses for each detective invented since Holmes remorselessly proving their debts to him: Sexton Blake, Nelson Lee, Kenton Steele, Ferrers Locke, Dixon Hawke, Drexdale Yates, Gridley Quayle, Lester Gage, Harris Tweed, Crawley Worme, Teak Woode But certainly the less blatant beneficiaries of ACD's legacy merit close attention: the T. S. Eliots, the P. G. Wodehouses, the Bernard Shaws, the James Joyces, the Scott Fitzgeralds, the Dashiell Hametts, the Graham Greenes. If Professor Orel is repelled by Umberto Eco's semiotics, his agenda must still require study of Eco as a fictionist (where The White Company may have relevance as well as The Hound of the Baskervilles). Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings may be too obvious to mention. And what was ACD's impact on the fiction of science (especially medical science) as well as on science fiction? Did his historical fiction have greater hidden influence than has been realised? Above all, what were his structural effects on the course of the short story? Professor Orel's insight on the need for study of science in Conan Doyle is admirable, and that branch of literary study is still in its infancy: Kester Svendsen examined Science and Milton forty years ago, but Science and Dickens is in the early process of exposition. Professor Orel's belief that Conan Doyle as contemporary historian may be one of his strongest holds on the scholarship of posterity, is crucial for us (and part of this process will be making sense of his formal military attempts in that direction as well as his unconscious attempts to mirror his age in Holmes and Girdlestone and Beyond the City). His closing 'We cannot and must not subdivide Conan Doyle' is touching, and bracing: it is a useful corrective to the bias of the present essay. But how far is it feasible for either ACD's talent, or his chronology? The best we can say is that at the end, whether on Judgment Day or in any overall summation, ACD may be seen as a totality: but however wise it is to keep the whole man throughout his seventy years at the rim of the eye, he can only be understood by the deeper knowledge of his diverging works and days.
But on a day-to-day level we may learn more from our Watsons than our Holmeses, and certainly than our Mycrofts. Schoolmasters have been among the best of ACD's commentators (one thinks of D. Martin Dakin), and Thomas Tietze's unpretentious reports on individual fictions repay re-reading time and again. Much of his work may seem simple synopsis, but he will stimulate by dubious theses and satisfy by incisive ones from time to time. Thus (vol. 1 no. 3 (September 1990)) he insists Challenger in 'The Disintegration Machine' 'takes the law into his own hands by not bringing back the mad scientist' whom he disintegrates, adding that this is what 'Sherlock Holmes often does'. The scientist is more mercenary than mad, but ACD may well mean us to conclude that any person ready to sell the power of disintegration to the highest bidder must be mad (for that matter Challenger, whose sanity like that of his real-life inspiration Edinburgh Professor William Rutherford is questionable, proves mad enough wantonly to risk the survival of the entire planet in 'When the World Screamed'). The parallel only applies in negative terms for Holmes: he disregards the law, and exercises the right of private forgiveness, which is not taking 'the law into his own hands'. It is the clear case where Holmes is priest, and absolves the patient — John Turner, James Ryder, Captain Croker, or Dr Leon Sterndale and where Watson and Sir Henry Baskerville undertake the same function (Baskerville feudally, Watson medically) for the Barrymores and ultimately even for Selden. Thereby Holmes, Watson, and Baskerville risk punishment under the law, but ignore the risk in the belief that compliance with the law can occasionally work a greater evil than ignoring it. Only an Eichmann or a Hobbist could deny this: morally it is a greater crime to enforce an unjust law (e.g. Nazi anti-Jewish laws) than to violate it, and even a just law may be wrongly enforced in certain circumstances. Lynch law, the taking of another's life without due process, is never morally permissible, and is never committed by Holmes, whatever sympathies Watson and he may silently register after the event for Jefferson Hope, John Turner, Patrick Cairns, Milverton's murderess, Captain Croker, Gennaro Lucca, Leon Sterndale, Eugenia Ronder, and John Douglas aka Birdy Edwards. But while Holmes's clemency can be justified, and its equation with Challenger's murder of Nemor denied, Mr Tietze has opened up a critical question in ethics for ACD and his historical sympathies. The nine sympathetic executioners of the Holmes stories are one problem; Challenger as a disintegrator is another; Sir Nigel is a third, on a highly casual basis; Gerard is a fourth; so are the instruments of justice self-commissioned in 'The Prisoner's Defence' and 'The Last Resource'. The popular convention of Wallace's Four Just Men and Ringer, Sapper's Bulldog Drummond, Leslie Charteris's X Esquire and Saint, was not particularly salubrious in the Facism-infected climate of the 1920s and 1930s, and Conan Doyle clearly wished Holmes to remain outside it. Sir Nigel and Gerard and Captain John Fowler of 'The Prisoner's Defence' could all plead considerations of war (albeit Sir Nigel used war to cloak any extra-legal adventure he could find). The conclusion would be that ACD was prepared to condone lynch-law to right otherwise unrequitable personal wrong, although 'The Last Resource' stretches it as a fiction within a fiction-to organized crime against criminals. He is essentially the apologist for the slave who murders a cruel master or the wife who murders a brutal husband.
Mr Tietze continued a most successful series of soothing summaries broken without warning by explosive enquiries, e.g. in the startling allusion to Hawthorne (presumably 'Young Goodman Brown' in particular) whose ambiguity our critic finds in 'The Terror of Blue John Gap' which 'leaves us to wonder if this adventure has taken place within a cave in the earth or in the dark recesses of the narrator's mind' (vol. 1 no. 3 (September 1990)). This opens up a most instructive line of enquiry. We may say, what of the objective evidence? The story certainly begins with an ominous and possible inexplicable note of ambiguity (the unknown intended recipient of the main narrative Seaton), but at once follows with a confirmation of 'the visit of the deceased to Allerton's Farm, and the general nature of the alarm there' as 'absolutely established' other than the dead Hardcastle's unconfirmed narrative of what he alone witnessed. The 'general nature of the alarm' includes sheep-thefts and the disappearance of young Armitage. Hardcastle dies on 4 February 1908, the visit he describes is docketed as 'Spring of Last Year' therefore (from diary dates) 17 April-10 June 1907, while the story itself appeared in The Strand in August 1910. A customary reading of the story such as it receives from the industrious if embattled Dana. Martin Batory, William A. S. Sarjeant, and Philip Weller (vols. 5 (1994) and 8 (1998)), scouts the thesis of a mentally sick Hardcastle: being concerned with the factual, they have no alternative to the fantastic. But Holmes's insistence that before an alternative can be dismissed it must first be disproved, leaves it open to us that Armitage or even Hardcastle-might be responsible for the crimes against the sheep, or that Hardcastle found Armitage guilty of having abducted the sheep for sexual purposes, killed him in horror, concealed his body in the mine, and sublimated what he saw as monstrous bestiality into a monster beast. The story certainly makes more of Hardcastle's possible insanity than most they-thought-I-was-mad-but-I-proved-them-wrong narratives: ACD was a doctor and the son of a mental patient. But if we apply the Tietze alternative to ACD's own immediate biographical circumstances we at once discover a fascinating correlation. Throughout 1907 he was at work seeking to exculpate George Edalji for the crime of cattle-maiming. We could hardly ask for a more interesting instance of the impact of criminological crusade upon creative conception. Holmes-obsessions of commentators have foolishly led them to correlate ACD's investigations to the Holmes stories: the imagination supplied ideas for wilder speculations than the parameters of any detective investigation would permit. A Holmes story on such a theme would risk banality of the kind Sherlockians produce when intruding Holmes on real history or standard literature. Obviously ACD had to consider the thesis that Edalji really was mentally ill, before he rejected it; equally Hardcastle's possible insanity has to be a reasonable alternative. The pressure of what-happens-next in a Tale of Terror drives the reader away from the more disturbing ambiguities of the story, yet Tietze rightly drives us back to them: remembering also Charles Altamont Doyle it could be a more frightening story as a mare's nest instead of a bear's nest.
IV
ACD as a journal will naturally be of outstanding value to the student of ACD biography, with its careful and ably-documented data on time after time, place after place, in ACD's life. These things can never fail to advance the subject (unless some scribe runs ahead of his proofs, in the logical sense, or behind them, in the journalistic one). The usual practice of seeking to relate them to his literary output, or to his ideological development, is customarily sustained in ACD's pages. As with the amateur criticism, the conclusions drawn frequently invite reader reflection to very detailed lengths: the present essay can only pick up one or two of the forest of speculations normally sparked off by the magazine. The present essay also testifies to the value of re-reading the successive volumes together: scattered arguments and findings integrate suggestively with one another.
Reading as an activity itself discloses other strands of discovery. Through the Magic Door conveys something of ACD's almost sensual love of reading. Barbara Roden has made two distinguished contributions here, in adding to the significant literary influences known for specific effects on Conan Doyle. Through the Magic Door can throw an excess of light: it makes us so conscious of ACD's love for Scott, Macaulay, Poe, and Boswell that we miss the warmth of his casual allusions-for instance to 'the intense glowing imagination of the Brontës-so unlike the Miss-Austen-like calm of their predecessors' (p. 92) or (p. 118)
- Nathaniel Hawthorne never appealed in the highest degree to me. The fault, I am sure, is my own, but I always seemed to crave stronger fare than he gave me. It was too subtle, too elusive, for effect. Indeed, I have been more affected by some of the short work of his son Julian, though I can quite understand the high artistic claims which the senior writer has, and the delicate charms of his style.
This does not eliminate Hawthorne senior as an inspiration-one can see readily enough the temptation to reach the effect another seems to have missed-but Julian Hawthorne has somewhat unjustly suffered the fate so often shrouding the literary efforts of great writers' children (the young Coleridges, for instance, or Anne Thackeray Ritchie). Julian Hawthorne was a stablemate of Conan Doyle and Wilde in Lippincott's, and Barbara Roden's use of his story of ancestral transmission of a family puzzle whose key has been mislaid, seems indeed to offer a very likely source of inspiration for 'The Musgrave Ritual'. One may make a further linkage under her influence. Julian Hawthorne was deeply conscious of being the son of a novelist driven by obsession with ancestral Puritanism, while himself the subsequent heir to the tradition much less involved and hence much more ignorant of its true nature. Arthur Conan Doyle stood in a similar relationship to his father's Catholic ancestral traditions, and had seen the nearest equivalent of surviving English recusant Catholic squirearchy among his Stonyhurst schoolmates whom he may well have felt practised their religion without understanding it. The Mass would then be a Musgrave Ritual, faithfully observed in form but not in meaning; New England Congregationalism was the same thing in relation to the lost piety of the old Salem witch-hunters (and many of their supposed witches). The whole matter enables us to see much more clearly how the ex-Catholic Conan Doyle could make his first major work a novel of Puritan piety: Julian Hawthorne would help him to make that discovery of Heresy as Orthodoxy's sibling and counterpart. Barbara Roden has therefore made the first sense known to me of this salutation to Julian Hawthorne, and thanks to her research and insight, we can now open up a much clearer chain of reasoning (vol. 7 (1996-7)). Similarly she opens up a fascinating thesis by determining Emily Brontë as a stimulus to 'The Captain of the 'Pole-Star'|The Captain of the Pole-Star'. The debt of 'The Copper Beeches' to Jane Eyre (Mary Foley Doyle intervening) had long been known, but ACD spoke of the Brontës in the plural, and from Barbara Roden's establishment of the place of Wuthering Heights in the making of Conan Doyle's first major fiction, we may open up further proofs of the fire from Haworth Parsonage streaming to Southsea surgery and beyond (vol. 37 (1992)). ACD's usual sensible policy of seeking two or more pieces on a work or theme juxtaposes this with a reprint of Dana Martin Batory on the same story, but his work, while valuable, follows much more. time-honoured snow-tracks beaten out by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. There is certainly an albatross touch to the wraith of the Captain's dead love, and the unsolved mystery of why the mariner shot it is matched by the doubts as to what the Captain had done thus to be haunted. Mr Batory may be right about a banshee in the sense of Conan Doyle imagining it to be a harbinger of death: in fact the banshee wails when the spirit of the family member is leaving the body, although the wail begins before the death, ends after it, and goes on continuously from start to finish. Frankenstein may also have had its influence on Black Peter's short-lived rescue of John Hopley Neligan senior, as well as on Black Peter's more formidable midnight visitor who ultimately took up so large a portion of Sherlock Holmes's carpet.
The inclusion of actual work by Conan Doyle himself is particularly welcome, whether within the magazine pages or in the spin-off publications (which as dedicatee of Western Wanderings and the epiloguist of The Blood-Stone Tragedy lie somewhere beyond my powers of objectivity). The reprint of The Wild Geese' from the Irish Times 13-18 and 20-22 September 1954 was particularly welcome, especially with 28 March 1897 to correct the vague date of composition ascribed to it by that amiable journal (1903, with indulgent allusions to the Return of Sherlock Holmes). The work (vol. 4 (1993)) while most important was enormously advanced by the invaluable comments of Georgina M. J. Doyle, widow of ACD's nephew Brigadier John Doyle who was brought up for some time with ACD's second family (vol. 5 (1994)). Mrs Doyle's discoveries reflect Adrian Conan Doyle's usual desires to improve on his father's carelessness in matters of rank and title: ACD wrote the Scots spelling 'Stewart' used by the kings of that family until Queen Mary's upbringing in France, much as his own Scots contemporaries would customarily have written it; Adrian tried to pass him off as punctilious in polite modern English usage but the Irish Times declined to doctor the typescript on his terms, although losing several accidentally-dropped lines. Most of the work on the typescript in printing it for the Irish Times was probably not done by the fiercely Protestant Unionist editor R.M. Smyllie, who died later that year, but he may well have been responsible for the deletion of the romantic sentence:
- It was on these occasions when the stout young peasant was missing and the lug sail of the smuggler was seen in the morning upon the southern horizon that the word was passed round that the wild goose had flown.
That is sufficiently thrilling to warrant suspicion of its removal for fear of giving too much fuel to modern Irish Catholic pretensions, and it is unlikely that a subordinate would make such a cut. (The subordinate in overall charge of the operation would have been the Literary and Features Editor, W. J. (Jack') White, a sufficiently hard-bitten novelist and journalist but one for whose integrity I would vouch.) Smyllie had suffered from wartime censorship at the hands of the Irish Catholic government and would have enjoyed getting his own back, however covertly. Did he deliberately render
- The Irish Catholics groaned under a tyranny and fled to France as a land of freedom. The French Protestants groaned under a tyranny and fled to England as a land of freedom.
as what the Irish Times actually printed, viz.:
- The Irish Catholics groaned under a tyranny and fled to England as a land of freedom.
It could, of course, have been a malicious Protestant typographer. But the most likely criminal is the imaginary gremlin who haunted the printing press, known in the Irish Times as Mr Shrdlu, perpetrating this and its fellow-blunders on the usual art-for-art's sake principle. Nevertheless it is instructive to contrast ACD's attempts to celebrate the Irish Catholic achievement in European armies in the eighteenth century with even-handed justice, and his embattled fellow-ethnics of both religions in the Ireland where his essay was finally printed fifty-six years after its composition. Neither Smyllie nor his Irish Catholic opponents in 1954 had the slightest interest in even-handed justice on sectarian questions, whether dispensed by A. Conan Doyle or anyone else.
It is only because of Georgina Doyle that 'The Wild Geese' now stands on anything like the basis of historical objectivity which its author desired so profoundly.
V
The survey of ACD undertaken in the above pages is open to every kind of reproach, from unrepresentative selectivity to partisan or utilitarian assessment. Many excellent contributions are ignored, as well as some reprehensible cases. (Among the latter is at least one sentence of my own which so infuriated me when I re-read it that I devoted two envenomed pages of abuse to it. I discarded the draft as a waste of space.) As to recommendations for the future, the recent 'Notes and News' column on happenings in the Conan Doyle world is greatly to be welcomed, and could well be expanded. Our editors are unduly modest about what they know and the rest of us do not. News of plays, films, publications, litigation, legislation, and so forth is always welcome. We have just had a TV detective series presented by Nigel Williams, of Wimbledon poisoning celebrity, opening with Holmes, with an admirable appearance by Richard Lancelyn Green and a somewhat absurd one by myself, holding a candle: this last was not penitence, however justifiable, but to light an underground passage emerging in the University of Edinburgh's Old College whereby corpses were conveyed to the Medical School during the careers of ACD's teachers if not of himself. The explanation ended on the cutting-room floor, so the most probable prevalent explanation will no doubt be a symbolisation of the seventh chapter-title of the first part of A Study in Scarlet. We are also told of a four-million-pound detective soap opera to feature Joseph Bell and Conan Doyle detecting around Edinburgh, which will leave ample scope for the imagination since their acquaintance outside classrooms and hospital during ACD's student years seems to have been limited to an extremely brief accidental encounter. I was telephoned some days ago by the Sunday Times and then by the Daily Record to comment on the astounding news that Sherlock Holmes was apparently based on an Edinburgh doctor named Joseph Bell. I did not trouble to return the former's call, seeing no reason to contribute gratuitous advice to Mr Murdoch's publications: the Record was suitably surprised to learn that the information had been in the public domain for over a century. It would seem that Mr Murdoch's paid employees are as well-informed as he deserves. No doubt ACD's other correspondents will have other disinformation, and some will have contributions of value. In any case we have been brought up on the incalculable potential yield of the Agony column: we could perhaps rename the slot 'The Red Circle'. (That is, I think, the only Holmes case to give its name to a fictitious public school: its adventures ran to many thousands of words in the Scots Hotspur comic for a quarter-century. The series was modelled on the Gem's St Jim's (1906-39) by Martin Clifford aka Frank Richards aka Charles Hamilton: that school's headmaster, a more formal homage to ACD from a disciple, was Dr Holmes.)
It is not with Holmesian but Watsonian inspiration that I now conclude what has been written in 'an incoherent and, as I deeply feel, an entirely inadequate fashion'. But neither Watson nor his creator could be accused of cowardice, and I may not decently leave
matters without reference to controversy. ACD would be an inadequate publication without controversy: long before Spiritualism dominated his world, ACD entered battleground after battleground, quite apart from fighting two Scottish elections and giving several different answers to the Irish Question. Doug Elliott's commentary and annotations to the GBS-ACD Titanic controversy (vol. 5 (1994)) are a case-study of operating techniques for future such documentaries, save for his failure to notice the discrepancies between his documents and their earlier printings. Hesketh Pearson has a line in Shaw's second letter quoting Cunninghame Graham on hogwash, but Graham's name is not printed by Mr Elliott whence we are due an explanation: has ACD or Mr Elliott involuntarily dropped matter within parentheses, did Pearson add it possibly innocently accepting a text provided by Shaw (a good rewriter of his own material), or how else are we to account for the textual discrepancy? As Georgina Doyle has been teaching us, we cannot be too vigilant in our reproduction of documents, or to put it another way, Shaw like Conan Doyle needs the protection of posterity if necessary against himself.
Be that case as it may, our magazine must inevitably have its reader differences. There will be those schooled in the truly dreadful practice of denying any relationship of ACD to the creation of Holmes and Watson save for the literary agency, and while this journal and society will have no dealings with this foolishness, we know, as Dr. Watson remarked of Holmes's former drug mania the fiend was not dead, but sleeping ... the sleep was a light one and the waking near' at low moments for certain parties. Such a sickness will breed impatience with all claims of ACD to literary quality, with all other ACD works save Holmes. Rationally, the student who thinks the Sherlock Holmes stories alone merit high critical praise must look at the other work to see its common ground with the Holmes cycle. But, founded as it is on this Sherlockian mania vehemently asserting what the speaker knows to be nonsense, ACD's other work is belied on wholly irrational and prejudiced grounds. We are not dealing with intellectual life here, but with dementia. Such an argument cannot be met by 'well, if ACD's other work is weak, assign an order of intellectual quality! Is Gerard better than Sir Nigel? Is The White Company better than Sir Nigel? Is The Lost World to be preferred to Round the Fire Stories?' There will be no answer, in most cases, because there is no Arthur Conan Doyle, to these people. Mania has gone its course. ACD was advised by George Turnavine Budd (probably) to get an income by attending on a wealthy lunatic: since his death he would appear to attend on many lunatics, not spiritually, but psychologically. The problem seems worthy of a monograph in the British Medical Journal or the Lancet.
It may be said that many people can play the Sherlockian game with no noticeable side-effects, and the late, great D. Martin Dakin may be cited as one to whom it was but an enhancement of great powers. But perhaps it should be practised under medical advice.
Our review columns will necessarily invite controversy, and the most serious controversy that divided us arose from them. In ACD vol. 2 no. 2 (Autumn 1991) Richard Lancelyn Green reviewed Peter Costello's The Real World of Sherlock Holmes: The true crimes investigated by Arthur Conan Doyle. He did not like it. The review reminded this reader of Professor Challenger moving the vote of thanks to Mr Waldron. Peter Costello is a popular writer on various subjects, a little given to vehemence in inverse proportion to his grasp of the facts. He was handled roughly by me in The Irish Times for his brief life of James Joyce, and he knows far more of Joyce than he does of Conan Doyle: indeed I rather think I was much rougher than Mr Lancelyn Green. (Mr Costello has done better work on Joyce since then; I have met him since then and liked him; I should perhaps have been gentler though not, I think, much more favourable.) But much of Mr Lancelyn Green's dissection brought us firmly into the great meeting at the Zoological Institute's hall in The Lost World:
- '... Popular lectures are the easiest to listen to, but Mr Waldron ... will excuse me when I say that they are necessarily both superficial and misleading, since they have to be graded to the comprehension of an ignorant audience... . Popular lecturers are in their nature parasitic. ... They exploit for fame or cash the work which has been done by the indigent and unknown brethren. One smallest new fact obtained in the laboratory, one brick built into the temple of science, far outweighs any second-hand exposition which passes an idle hour, but can leave no useful result behind it. I put forward this obvious reflection, not out of any desire to disparage Mr Waldron in particular, but that you may not lose your sense of proportion and mistake the acolyte for the high priest. ... But enough of this! ... Let me pass to some subject of wider interest. What is the particular point on which I, as an original investigator, have challenged our lecturer's accuracy? It is upon the permanence of certain types of animal life upon the earth. I do not speak upon this subject as an amateur, nor, I may add, a popular lecturer, but I speak as one whose scientific conscience compels him to adhere closely to facts, when I say that Mr Waldron is very wrong ...'
The review was much less egocentric in expression, and it certainly made no personal economic plea of the kind in which Challenger involuntarily reveals the deep personal hurt lying behind his bellicosity. But Mr Lancelyn Green was, and is, the greatest Conan Doyle bibliographical scholar in the world, and his was a scholarly anger at Mr Costello's tendentious connections of ACD to matters impossibly remote from his life and pursuits. Mr Lancelyn Green had gone to agonising lengths and intense personal travail to establish fact after fact, connection after connection, in Conan Doyle's literary life. Here was a cascade of new misinterpretation to be let loose on the world after Mr Lancelyn Green had gone to such trouble to learn and impart the realities in place of the deluge of error which had prevailed hitherto. Mr Lancelyn Green was angry, and, like Jonah, he felt he did well to be angry. Nor could I deplore his anger. I felt ashamed of my own successes in Conan Doyle scholarship when I compared my small work with the endlessness of his services.
Yet, like Professor Challenger, Mr Lancelyn Green went far beyond the business in hand, and in disposing of Mr Costello's chimeras his generous indignation gave birth to a few of his own. The delicate question of the resident patient Jack Hawkins's death in Southsea, followed some months later by ACD's marriage, prompted egregious speculation from Mr Costello, whence Mr Lancelyn Green:
- The fact that Doyle was visited by a policeman after Touie's brother died in 1885 and the implied fear that he had in effect murdered the young man does not as Costello says turn a doctor into a writer of detective stories. Nor was he innocence personified or he would not have married Touie. There is no evidence that he was aware of the Edinburgh detectives, but it is clear beyond question that Sherlock Holmes is based on Poe and Gaboriau. Early visits to the theatre or to Madame Tussaud's do not make a man either a criminal or a detective.
When we take these sentences together, it is clear what is happening. Mr Lancelyn Green sought to scout rapidly a series of theses, and his mind outran his pen. The last sentence is unexceptionable, and answers the usual absurdities about brief London visits having determined ACD's future detective story-writing, as though he could have no animate life in Edinburgh, Greenland, Africa, Plymouth or Southsea (or Shropshire, Yorkshire, and Birmingham). One suspects the previous sentences were written with our critic thirsting to deliver the coup-de-grâce not only to the wretched Mr Costello but also to Mr Charles Higham and his vilest antecedents, bibliographically speaking. But Mr Lancelyn Green in the process became Gerard even more than Challenger, alternating stoutness of heart with thickness of head. Mr Lancelyn Green's unrivalled bibliographical knowledge did not make him an authority on why men marry, unless he wished to put forward the thesis that the desire for matrimony is in itself an admission of sin, a theological stance possible in Stonyhurst in 1870-75 but a little puzzling from a secular writer a century later. Once again we have Gerald Ford's disease: our writer 'misspoke himself'. No one save ACD knew his motives in marrying. We do not know. We will never know. (ACD's mother may have had some inkling. So may his brother Innes who lived with him. So may some other sibling or siblings. So above all may his wife.) The one clue I can offer is that close experience of death creates an instinctive desire to create life. Death cries for redress, whether one feels responsible for the death or merely bereaved by it. Death unites people bereaved, and they may work together to fill a common loss. If ACD thought his medication had been mistaken to the point of fatality in Jack Hawkins's case, and he may well have — as any person responsible for another might reproach themselves if the patient died-that gives us no right to pronounce upon his subsequent marital motives. Mr Lancelyn Green was becoming a literary case of the phenomenon diagnosed in 'The Surgeon Talks' (Round the Red Lamp): men fall victim to the diseases in whose eradication they have specialised. Unconsciously we grow akin to our adversaries.
As Mr Lancelyn Green continued his review, Fury lent wings to him. Fury, in fact, lent such wings as to drive him to expressions of rancour denying that Conan Doyle could be a criminologist (not simply denying that he had been), and declaring as impediment his Spiritualism. And here we run into very ancient and awkward territory. Were I the Abbot of Beaulieu in The White Company I would condemn Mr Lancelyn Green as unfitted to practise scholarship because he does not believe in the Real Presence (if he does not, and I doubt if he does). By his own logic, he must regard me as unfitted, etc., because I do. Flesh, he may point out (six times a week, like the clergyman in Macaulay's poem 'The Country Clergyman's Trip to Cambridge (1827)) somehow differs from bread: and a person who believes that bread and wine consecrated at Mass becomes the Body and Blood of Christ is surely as incapable of assessing evidence as one believing in Spiritualism. As it happened, A. Conan Doyle rejected the doctrines in which I still believe when he was about fourteen or fifteen. Surely Mr Lancelyn Green must rank him above me. I may reply that if Mr Lancelyn Green believes in monarchy he is clearly unfit to assess evidence, since the choice of a head of state on the basis of primogeniture can be no more than archaic superstition. We will end by proving conclusively that nobody is competent to do anything. Our only way out is to conclude that Conan Doyle, Mr Lancelyn Green, and I are but mad nor' nor' east, and that when the wind is to the west we know a hawk from a handsaw: and ornithology also acknowledges that what is sauce for the (wild) goose is sauce for the (very proper) gander.
Unfortunately there was also Mr Lancelyn Green's allusion to the implied fear that [[[Arthur Conan Doyle|ACD]]] had in effect murdered [Jack Hawkins]'. And as the somewht bemused Mr Peter Costello replied (vol. 3 (1992))
- My argument — that the knowledge that the innocent can be suspected falsely illustrates much of Conan Doyle's outlook on crime — is not contested. Instead Mr Green seems to suggest that Conan Doyle did indeed poison or kill Touie's brother. But perhaps I have misunderstood his meaning?
This last sentence may be an understandably malicious crack, though perhaps I may have misunderstood its meaning. But the damage was in the word 'murdered'. In the context it was senseless. Had Conan Doyle, for motives of his own, murdered Jack Hawkins, it would give him excellent, if silent, credentials as a criminologist: but Mr Lancelyn Green in putting forward such a thesis would provide precisely the proof of ACD's authority in the field that Mr Costello lacked. So Mr Lancelyn Green did not mean murder. What he probably did mean was that there was a possibility of manslaughter, and here he may well be right: the police had to consider such a possibility. We may go farther and say that ACD may have feared for most of his life that he had made some such error, and that he had some Spiritualist revelation which acquitted him, and accounted for his urgency of belief in that faith (Challenger's cause for conversion in The Land of Mist). But presumably he had no motive for murder, and wished to save the boy, not kill him, and hence suspicion of him was ill-based and might very well lead him to use the theme of wrongful suspicion in future works. I suspect myself that Lestrade and Gregson were based on rival medicos jostling for the Edinburgh Chair of Pathology and consulting Bryan Charles Waller, but the contempt with which they are handled in A Study in Scarlet at least suggests a readiness to suspect the police of over-hasty judgment. ACD might be just as easily annoyed with them, perhaps even more so, if he feared he had been guilty of manslaughter.
In retrospective analysis all of the above seems harmless enough, and opens up some lines of investigation which may be productive. Mr Lancelyn Green remains a great scholar, with the now pleasing proof that he can be wrong, or misspoken, and may find that nobody (however Papal) is the worse for an occasional want of infallibility. The trouble is that while we can speak with such freedom now, we had cause to be more guarded then. Such language as Mr Lancelyn Green's, however dictated by scholarly integrity, was bound to give pain to Dame Jean Conan Doyle, and it did. She was a beautiful woman, in person, character, and intellect, and it was too much to ask at her age that she could accept such a way of speaking of her beloved father. She had been a beacon of freedom in her general encouragement of scholarship, but when a young man she had cherished so far forgot himself as apparently to imply that her father had either murdered or killed a patient and then married his sister out of guilt or for mercenary motives linked to murder, it shattered her faith in Mr Lancelyn Green, and it weakened it in the journal which had so greatly benefited from her encouragement and support. The editors handled the situation with the greatest of tact and consideration for the aggrieved daughter, the excitable scholar, and even the absurd author (to whom extensive space was granted in reply). But the situation was impossible. Dame Jean had admired Mr Lancelyn Green so much that he had hurt her far more deeply than an ordinary scholar could. The editors could not throw over the foremost exact scholar in their journal's field. And — here was the rub — supposing ACD had been reached, by medium or otherwise, we can speak with confidence on his reaction. He revered courage. Daughter, critic, and editors all showed full measure of courage. Personally, I wanted to kick Mr Lancelyn Green from Land's End to John o' Groats, but I also thought him braver than the heavens are high.
VI
So 'The Parish Magazine' was all too apposite a story to invoke in starting ACD, with its posthumous publication and theme that the most innocuous serial publication bears many a hidden storm. And in more traditional senses the in-house journal and its more formal and (we trust) longer-lived sibling do a parish magazine's work in vital records of the true and noble lives of departed Conanists. David Kirby of Rupert Books ... Professor W. W. Robson ... Julian Symons our President ... John Bennett Shaw the Sherlockian .. Peter Cushing the Paget Holmes ... Jeremy Brett the 1980s Holmes ... Malcolm Roger Payne the historian of Crowborough ... . Dame Jean Conan Doyle otherwise Lady Bromet. We can be Spiritualists at least in the sense of building our future work with gratitude to the achievements of our great ones who have followed their master and father to the final adventure. Beyond what our journal preserves, writings and memories will hold them to us ... Kirby's ideal of bookselling so fittingly commemorates ACD whose training in book-hunting from his boyhood Mentor Professor John Hill Burton of Edinburgh gave him the lifelong bibliophily he could not keep out of the grasp of the supposedly practical Holmes as early as A Study in Scarlet ... Wallace Robson whose aesthetic acuteness drew him back from mental despair to the prospect of editing the Hound and the Case-Book whose mysteries and challenges made the clouds fall away ... John Bennett Shaw never allowing his fever for the Sherlockian game to dwarf his primary vocation in bibliographical collection ... Julian Symons magnificently contextualising the detective story in its history both cultural and social, yet never able to produce the great ACD biography of which he had dreamed ... Peter Cushing's sensitive, superbly scientific interpretation appropriately uniting within Holmes both Frankenstein and van Helsing ... Jeremy Brett counterpointing as Holmes the artist, an ear apparently always tuned to some music within the atmosphere to which his detections merely acted as libretto Malcolm Roger Payne quietly but firmly holding the memories and actuality of Crowborough in a firm grasp to be delivered to posterity . Jean herself, her noble head poised, her eager appreciation of true love of her father's work, her delight in his laughter and insistence on celebrating his enjoyment of comedy. her dignity, her strength, her generosity in conceding a point, her quickness in spotting the flaw in an argument, her splendid creative sense. Had it not been for her, where would we have been? Had Adrian, say, or Denis, been the surviving sibling with whom we would have had to deal, could we have had a society, much less a journal? She was an instinctively generous and other-directed person: in all my dealings with her, she never seemed to think of self. Did Adrian and Denis ever think of anyone but themselves? She was a great feminist, playing a critical part in the advancement of women in the war services when men sought to restrict them to purely menial rôles: yet her childhood was an insistence on being just as good a boy-Billy-as her brothers. Her cousin Brigadier John remarked to me how ironic it was that her father's pride in his children would have been dashed if he knew neither of his surviving sons would serve in his country's most terrible danger, but would have been restored at the thought of how well his daughter answered the call-and, he did not add, how well he answered it himself, he the small cousin brought up with the young Doyles when his own father died. No more worthy fulfilment of ACD's ideal of service could have been found than Jean and John.
And so I come to the final problem, the editor. I put it at one name, for Christopher Roden, founder of the ACD Society, is the only editor of ACD to survive the full period. David Stuart Davies was an inexhaustible source of ebullient enthusiasm, fizzing its way into fruition whether on films or in Northern Musgraves or in getting the Society and its journal moving from their inception, and Barbara Roden has done more to make two continents of ACDography become one than any other person I know. Her insights give the perspective and the detachment our studies need so badly, and she has made joyous Canadians of us all. But Christopher Roden, quiet, judicious, idealistic, sardonic, unassuming, authoritative, sensitive, judicial, inspirational, definitive, encyclopaedic, unjaundiced, divining, deciding, iconoclastic, venerational-Michael Cox of Oxford University Press described him as 'the enabler'. It is the true word. Had it not been for him, there would have been no society or ACD; had it not been for him, neither would have lasted. Steel true, blade straight: the only description.
Curious how easy this part of my work proved to be, in the end. It might seem awkward to conclude an Odyssey of assessment of ten years of the journal in which I, the jury, assume rôles as disparate as Polyphemus and Circe only to end in laudations for the editor of this piece. But there was no difficulty, however uncertain I was along the way. There was not, and never could have been, any alternative to what I had to say about him. Christopher has made it happen, and no river was too deep, no storm too fierce, and no journey too long for him and the ACD he began so resolutely and bears so well. My imagination is vastly inferior to that of A. Conan Doyle, but neither of us could ever have imagined a better man to keep the memory green and the harvest golden. ACD was fortunate, but never more so than in his Society's Founder and journal's Editor.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
