After-Dinner Address to The Arthur Conan Doyle Society
After-Dinner Address to The Arthur Conan Doyle Society is an article written by Chris Redmond published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 5, 1994).
After-Dinner Address to The Arthur Conan Doyle Society
MR CHAIRMAN, Mrs Doyle, Mr Foley, ladies and gentlemen:
I will naturally begin my remarks tonight with an appropriate quotation from Arthur Conan Doyle about the curious business of after-dinner speaking. The young Dr. Doyle, as he then was, used it almost exactly one hundred years ago, on 7 December 1894, when he was guest of honour at a dinner at the Aldine Club in New York City. Unfortunately it's a very bad joke, which was exactly what the audience deserved after the introduction Conan Doyle was given by the president of the club, Hamilton Wright Mabie. The president told the audience, 'Tonight's affair is a thoroughly international one, for the guest of honour is Irish by ancestry and Scots by birth, but speaks English!' After a lame remark like that, Conan Doyle could hardly do better than refer to the words of Daniel the prophet when he was introduced into the lions' den: 'There will be no after-dinner speaking for me.'
But Daniel lived to prophesy, and Conan Doyle lived to talk to the Aldine Club about his impressions of America. And here am I, having eaten this fine dinner, to make a few remarks about the man whose memory we have been celebrating all day today. I should explain that the reason my talk is being given at this hour, rather than at ten o'clock this morning (or, worse, ten o'clock tomorrow morning) is that when Christopher Roden asked me to speak at this conference, I told him candidly that I had nothing to say. 'Not to worry,' he replied, or words to that effect. 'We'll put you on the programme after dinner, and it won't matter at all.'
I suppose that's true because of the lateness of the hour, and the excellence of the food, and perhaps also the potency of the beverages in which some of us have been indulging. If Conan Doyle was Irish by ancestry and Scots by birth, some of us are Canadian by birth and Scotch by absorption! It may be just as well, since I speak to you tonight in a role that may make some of my listeners uneasy; I speak here chiefly as a Sherlockian! What exactly I mean by that, you will find out in the next few minutes.
You may be familiar with a little verse written by Christopher Morley, the founder of the Baker Street Irregulars:
- What opiate can best abate
- Anxiety and toil?
- Not aspirins, or treble gins,
- Nor love, nor mineral oil—
- My only drug is a good long slug
- Of Tincture of Conan Doyle.
I say nothing against aspirin, nothing against mineral oil, nothing against gin, but I propose to say much in favour of Tincture of Conan Doyle over the next few minutes. Oh, and I say nothing against love either, as you would expect from the author of In Bed with Sherlock Holmes. I am reminded of the after-dinner speaker who had been asked to say something on the always popular subject of sex, but had also been advised to keep his remarks brief. He stood up and said to his audience, 'Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure.' Well, ladies and gentlemen, I share with Christopher Morley the great pleasure that comes from Tincture of Conan Doyle. I intend this evening to explore the ways in which the Baker Street Irregulars, and Sherlockians in general, have expressed the pleasure and appreciation they have felt for the man whom we are gathered to honour.
Perhaps you believe that the praise of Arthur Conan Doyle from Sherlockians strongly resembles the behaviour of the dog in the night-time. And in case you are one of those pure Doyleans who has never read Sherlock Holmes, I had better explain that the dog did nothing in the night-time. Do Sherlockians bark any louder? Well, yes and no. For the most part, tonight I intend to talk about some of the Sherlockians who have been barking in praise of Arthur Conan Doyle over the past sixty years.
But their barking comes against a background of silence, a background of ignoring the obvious. You are probably aware of the traditional Sherlockian fiction that Holmes and Watson were historical characters, with birthdates and tin dispatch-boxes and curved pipes and all that. According to this tradition, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was only a literary agent' who made arrangements with Herbert Greenhough Smith of the Strand magazine for the publication of reminiscences by Dr John H. Watson. After all, Watson was well-known for his inability to manage money. He couldn't live on £209 a year, twice the income that was said to enable a single lady to get along 'very nicely', and once he took rooms at Baker Street, Holmes had to keep his cheque-book locked up for him. So it makes sense that he would have worked through an agent. It's all a very clever idea, which Sherlockians have enjoyed for the past several decades, and really it does no harm.
In fact it's great fun to make out that Holmes was a historical character who might have strolled down Baker Street to meet other historical characters of the Victorian era — Sir Arthur Sullivan, or Oscar Wilde, or Professor Challenger. One of the most erudite of the British enthusiasts maintains that he is often asked whether Sherlock Holmes was a real or a fictional character. And when I am asked that,' he says, 'I always answer simply: yes.' Sherlockians can be every bit as indecisive in their enthusiasm.
Let me return to Christopher Morley for a moment now, and point out that he was an author himself as well as a lover of books. He knew where credit was due. Perhaps his greatest writing about the Sherlock Holmes stories appears in his introduction 'In Memoriam: Sherlock Holmes', which is still being reprinted in Doubleday (and, I think, Penguin) editions of the stories. He refers to Doyle from the very first sentence of that introduction or sometimes to 'Conan Doyle', as he wavers back and forth unpredictably between the single surname and the double. Among other remarks he comments that 'Doyle himself must have been a singularly lovable man,' a sentiment that perhaps could come only from as strong a personality as Morley's.
'Those of us,' he wrote, "Those of us who in earliest boyhood gave our hearts to Conan Doyle, and have had from him so many hours of good refreshment, find our affection unshakable. What other man led a fuller and heartier and more masculine life?' And again: 'If, as Doyle utterly believed, the spirits of the dead persist and can communicate, there is none that could have more wholesome news to impart to us than that brave and energetic lover of life. A blessing, then, on those ophthalmic citizens who did not go to that office at 2 Devonshire Place, near Harley Street.' Or, as we heard this morning, 2 Upper Wimpole Street.
This is sentimental stuff, but a fine expression of the joy with which young folks at the turn of this century read the Sherlock Holmes stories as well as The White Company, The Lost World and the stories of Brigadier Gerard. Let's remember that for Morley, the early publication of Conan Doyle's work was a very recent memory, for the Introduction that I have been quoting was written for the Memorial Edition of The Complete Sherlock Holmes, published in the very year of Conan Doyle's death. As scholars and devotees of Conan Doyle two or three generations removed from those innocent days, I hope we are still able to feel a little of the same curiosity and delight that we felt when we first opened the pages of Conan Doyle's work.
If Morley, who started the Baker Street Irregulars, was so devoted to the memory of Sir Arthur, then where did things go off the rails? Perhaps it was in 1934, when Elmer Davis, a literary colleague and (let's face it) drinking buddy of Morley's wrote a constitution for their new society of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts. "The name of this society,' he wrote, 'shall be the Baker Street Irregulars. Its purpose shall be the study of the Sacred Writings.' The sacred writings: that means the sixty stories of Sherlock Holmes. Now sacred writings, by definition have no author; they are handed down to mortal man from a cloud on a mountain-top, unchangeable and, in some cases, untranslateable. And although we know that Sherlock Holmes has been translated into more tongues than any other work of literature except that other collection of sacred writings known as the Bible, we can easily believe that its real essence, the flavour and spirit of the year 1895, when London was the largest city in the world, suffers immensely in any translation.
The Baker Street Irregulars continued studying the Sacred Writings, and commenting on them in the tradition of Ronald Knox, who-need I remind you?-was not an American Sherlockian but a British academic. Knox had written his 'Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes' in 1911, applying to the tales of Holmes the methods of the Biblical scholars of that era. He didn't altogether ignore Conan Doyle — in fact he records that he wrote to Conan Doyle asking the reason for one of the many inconsistencies in the stories, the singular incident in which Watson's wife forgets her husband's given name. 'The answer,' he writes, 'was that it was an error, an error, in fact, of editing.' As my eight-year-old son says about such things: Duh. But an error in a sacred text just gives the devotees an opportunity to double their devotion by devising solemn explanations, and that is what Knox proceeds to do, with no further reference to a human author. However, please note that when Knox's essay on Sherlock Holmes was published, the title of the book in which it appeared was Essays in Satire. He didn't mean everything he said.
Some Sherlockians did seem to mean it when they said that the stories of Sherlock Holmes had been written by Dr. Watson and not by Dr. Doyle. This attitude completely baffled Sir Arthur's son, Denis Conan Doyle, when he accepted an invitation to attend the 1940 dinner of the Baker Street Irregulars during a trip to New York on behalf of his father's estate. In fact he was the principal speaker at that dinner, with a talk entitled 'My Father's Friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes', which so far as I know has never been published, although Christopher Morley described it as 'probably the most charming discourse to which we have listened.' But awkward things happened as the evening went on, and Denis Conan Doyle listened to speeches that referred to Holmes as a real person, and the usual Irregular toasts to the likes of 'Dr Watson's Second Wife'. According to one participant in the evening's events, Conan Doyle eventually turned to Edgar W. Smith, who was the commissionaire of the BSI, and whispered, 'I don't understand this! My father's name has not been mentioned.' And Smith whispered back that he would explain later. No other writer, not even Shakespeare,' Smith said later, 'can boast of creating a character so vivid that people believe in the character rather than the author.' Conan Doyle was less than amused. It has been suggested that this incident embittered him against the Irregulars so completely that both he and his brother, Adrian, who later became trustee of the Conan Doyle estate, came to be known to Smith and his cronies as 'the man with the twisted lip'.
It was probably Edgar W. Smith, the man who invented so many of the phrases and ideas Sherlockians now take for granted, who coined the expression literary agent' for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as part of the Sherlockian mythology. It was certainly in use by the time the Baker Street Journal was founded, with Smith as its editor. When the short story 'The Man Who Was Wanted' was discovered in 1947, and rumours raced around the world that an authentic sixty-first Sherlock Holmes story had been discovered, Smith wrote in the Journal that 'It is unlikely that Dr Watson, who placed his trust with Cox & Co. at Charing Cross, left overflow material in the hands of his agent.' In 1949, after John Dickson Carr's biography of Conan Doyle was published, Smith was kind and generous in his praise both of the book and of its subject. And yet he managed never to say that Sir Arthur had been the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, calling him 'Sherlock Holmes's great and good friend' and-which would surely have pleased and amused Sir Arthur — above all, a great historical novelist'.
Sherlockians enjoyed treading this careful line between fact and fiction, or between belief and truth. One of the leading Sherlockians of the 1950s and 1960s was Toronto's own Tupper Bigelow, who loved to read the book with an acerbic affection when he wasn't throwing it at the delinquents who crowded his courtroom. He wrote copiously for the Baker Street Journal and other journals, mostly in the pure Sherlockian tradition. Perhaps his finest piece of writing is a legal study of Sherlock Holmes as criminal-all that compounding of felonies and breaking into country-houses to examine the evidence (or destroy the evidence, as the case might be). But Tupper Bigelow, too, was able to break out of these limits on occasion. Look for instance at his article 'In Defence of Joseph Bell', published in the Baker Street Journal in 1960, in which he wastes no time pretending that Arthur Conan Doyle was a mere literary agent, but accepts him as the author and argues for Joseph Bell as the 'original' of Sherlock Holmes, if a character can have any one original.
Why should such an argument need to be made? Well, in 1960 Sir Arthur's son Adrian had just been busy publishing unnecessary defences of his father against the supposed biographical insults of Hesketh Pearson, and had gone so far as to argue that Sir Arthur himself was the original of Holmes, on the grounds that (for example) they were both familiar with the ancient Cornish language. He also argued that they both had red dressing-gowns, which is rather weak evidence since there is no red-dressing gown mentioned in any of the Sherlock Holmes tales. Well, Tupper Bigelow thought it necessary to demolish this whole absurdity, and he made his case conclusively, like the barrister he was. At the end of his brief article he added a few words, obiter dicta, that I think are significant: 'Was Conan Doyle the prototype of Brigadier Gerard? Of Professor Challenger? Of John Huxford? Of J. Habakuk Jephson? Of the Man from Archangel?' The obvious answer is no, and the important message to be gained is that Tupper Bigelow was as aware of Conan Doyle's other writings as he was of the nine volumes of Sherlock Holmes. And other Sherlockians, having long accepted the name of the Canon' for those nine volumes, paid homage to Sir Arthur by borrowing his middle name and calling it, instead, 'the Conan'.
Denis and Adrian Conan Doyle, and some Doyleans with a less than whimsical sense of humour, found it all offensive, or at least silly. Anthony Boucher had a comment for them in 1966: 'Sherlock Holmes,' he wrote, is the most-mocked character in literature because he is the best-loved (though the Proprietors of the Estate of Dr. Watson's literary agent have never quite come to believe in this simple truth).' In other words, the Sherlockians' treatment of the Sherlock Holmes stories is a tribute to their creator, not a dismissal. That great Sherlockian Peter E. Blau, who knows all and tells all, has in his Washington apartment a Christmas tree equipped with sixty-two ornaments. Sixty of them represent the sixty stories of Sherlock Holmes; one of them is a fish made of red felt, representing a red herring to those who are trying to identify the meanings of the ornaments; and the sixty-second ornament is a little can of lubricating oil, fastened securely to a pine-cone. It's a rebus: Cone and Oil, representing Sir Arthur. You can call that contempt if you like, but I call it affection.
There are certainly Sherlockians whose sense of humour is defective too, and who turn a great joke into a solemn duty. They probably think they are following the direction of Dorothy Sayers, who wrote about this sort of thing in 1946, saying 'The rule of the game is that it must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord's. The slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere.' Solemnity is all very well, but Sayers did say that she was talking about a game, though admittedly a game which, like cricket, is close to unintelligible to anyone but the initiates. In recent years I have even heard Sherlockian activity called 'the Grand Game', as though it had something in common with the nineteenth-century struggles between Britain and Russia on the Afghan frontier.
All the rules of the Sherlockian game were thrown into confusion in 1974 when along came Samuel Rosenberg's book Naked Is the Best Disguise: The Death and Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes. This book infuriated many Sherlockians, and if you have read it, I dare say it infuriated you too, even though there are some very perceptive and challenging ideas in it. Of course, some Sherlockians were particularly offended because they found themselves reading a book which had the name of Sherlock Holmes on the cover, but mentioned Arthur Conan Doyle on the very first page, and again many dozens of times throughout its pages. They were not emotionally prepared to be told that Holmes was the creation of Conan Doyle — let alone to be told that Conan Doyle had modelled Professor Moriarty on Friedrich Nietzsche, or that the reason Dr Watson had portraits of General Gordon and Henry Ward Beecher in his room was their sexual irregularities.
Early in 1976 John Linsenmeyer, soon to become the editor of the Baker Street Journal, published an attack on the book in which he called it everything from 'slimy' to 'blasphemous'. He concluded his report in this way: 'I can only say that anyone wishing to read this book but not wishing to pay the $8.95 might look along the roadbed of the New Haven Railroad between Greenwich and New York-mine was thrown out of the window of the 3:10 Club Car. It seemed the least I could do.' As some commentators noted with glee, Linsenmeyer had gone to a great deal of trouble, before throwing the book out of the train, to make a note of the page numbers of the remarks he liked least. For example, he pointed out in his review that Rosenberg's identification of Thaddeus Sholto with Oscar Wilde came on precisely page 132. Needless to say, Linsenmeyer did not agree with that identification, on the grounds that Sholto is a 'pompous, nervous little recluse' who has very little in common with 'the witty, extroverted and gregarious Wilde'. I don't believe the connection between Sholto the aesthete and Wilde the aesthete was a new idea with Rosenberg, and certainly it is no longer a controversial one, particularly to anyone who remembers that Conan Doyle wrote The Sign of the Four just a few weeks after meeting Wilde at that famous dinner bought for them both by J.M. Stoddart of Lippincott's.
Identifying a character in a Sherlock Holmes story with a real-life figure was not a new game to the Baker Street Irregulars. Maybe Linsenmeyer just resented it this time because there was a hint of the Cleveland Street scandal about it. More than once, Linsenmeyer's editorial pen went off the edge of the seismograph because of some reference to homosexuality. But Sherlockians in general have not been so reluctant to connect a character on the printed page with a character of history, even if there might have been a little hanky-panky involved. That well-known adventuress, Irene Adler, has been associated by various writers with Sarah Bernhardt, Lillie Langtry, Cora Pearl, Hortense Schneider, Caroline Otero, Lola Montez, Eliza Cook, Lillian Nordica, and a fair number of other people, including St Mary Magdalene.
However, I was talking about Samuel Rosenberg's book, and about the controversial things it suggests. Most importantly, Rosenberg presents what he calls the 'Conan Doyle Syndrome', which is in his view-the juxtaposition of certain elements in story after story that came from Conan Doyle's pen. These elements include references to the 'printed or written word', 'heterosexual or deviant sexuality', and 'private and legal murder', as well as a scene in which the avenging detectives wait in concealment to trap a man of violence. I may be oversimplifying a little, but perhaps you will agree with me that none of this is very surprising. Certainly it would be hard to have a mystery story that did not involve the printed or written word, or private or legal murder!
I am reminded of the enthusiastic young Sherlockian who decided to write a pastiche, and who realised that to give it maximum appeal he had better include both mystery and sex, but also religion and an aristocratic background. After much heavy thinking, here is how he began:
- 'Good God, Watson!' said Sherlock Holmes. It says here in The Times that the duchess is pregnant! We'd better find out who did it so we can go and trap him!'
We can tell that this story is authentic Conan Doyle, by the way, since it contains the expression 'Good God', like so many of his original manuscripts-an expression that will be dutifully changed to 'Good heavens!' by the careful editors of the Strand Magazine before it sees print.
Well, Rosenberg's book was just the beginning. After that there came along the journal Baker Street Miscellanea, which started talking about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in its first issue in 1975 and has never stopped since. I did much the same in Canadian Holmes from the time I began editing it in 1979. The Baker Street Journal did not deviate very far from the pure Sherlockian tradition so long as Julian Wolff was editing it, through the 1960s and most of the 1970s, but under subsequent editorships it admitted mentions of Sir Arthur to its pages more and more often. By 1979, it was bold-facedly publishing articles like "The Nature of Evil in The Hound of the Baskervilles', in which we find assertions like this one: "It is fairly common knowledge that Conan Doyle originally designed The Hound of the Baskervilles as a crime novel which was not to involve Sherlock Holmes.' This is not Sherlockian fantasy; this is Doylean scholarship, and a good deal of it was starting to creep into print.
There were not yet many books about Conan Doyle, apart from straightforward biographies, and most of those since Carr's book in the 1940s had been of pretty limited value. We could easily ignore Pierre Nordon's literary study in the 1960s after all, he was French, and even when his book was translated it was such serious stuff that hardly anybody read it. But then books started to appear that were harder to ignore. My father's Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Sources appeared in 1982, and Rodin and Key's Medical Casebook of Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle in 1984, the same year as my own book In Bed with Sherlock Holmes. All these were works by self-confessed Sherlockians pushing the envelope a little, a category that might also include Sam Rosenberg. The real shock, I think, came with the appearance of The Quest for Sherlock Holmes, by Owen Dudley Edwards, in 1983. Who was this history professor, muscling in on our territory? And we came to realise: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wasn't the Sherlockians' territory any more. Those who had been willing to acknowledge him only as the Literary Agent had lost him to those who were prepared to accept him on more serious terms.
Sherlockians had found it easy enough to ignore biographical writings about Sir Arthur, but it is harder for them to ignore Doylean writings that shed some light on how the Sherlock Holmes stories were written, their influences and the ways in which they echo their author's life and thoughts. After all, that kind of scholarship enhances the reader's enjoyment-at least, if it's done well that's what it does-and enjoyment is the best and only reason for reading these stories we all love. It becomes clearer every day how directly the stories are the product of the things their author saw and read and did. We have long recognised, for example, that Dr Watson is largely a projection of Dr Conan Doyle. It's well known by now, thanks to my father's work, that hundreds of personal names in the stories are drawn from people Conan Doyle knew, or read about in the newspapers. In my own writings I have shown something about how the emotional stress of Conan Doyle's marital situation in the first decade of this century resulted in some extraordinary stories about love triangles that appear in The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
But there is so much more still to be found out. Knowing that as a young doctor Conan Doyle attempted to practice as an eye specialist, you will recognise the personal influence in 'The Golden Pince-Nez', where Holmes makes some deductions about a woman with severe myopia, and in 'Silver Blaze', where the foul deed is perpetrated with an eye surgeon's cataract knife. There is at least one other Canonical echo-if you will allow me to use the word 'canonical' — of Conan Doyle's expertise in ophthalmology, however. I refer to the story of "The Final Problem', for it is not generally realised that Professor Moriarty met his death at the Reichenbach Falls as the result of a cataract operation.
I had a letter recently from an American Sherlockian who had read my most recent book, A Sherlock Holmes Handbook, and commented favourably on it. But she told me with a flavour of displeasure that I wasn't a Sherlockian. "To me,' she wrote, 'a Sherlockian firmly believes that the Canon was written by Dr Watson and the Master still lives, while a Doylean believes Sir Arthur wrote the Canon.' I haven't answered the letter yet, because I haven't decided which camp to join. At present I am enduring what the psychologists call cognitive dissonance-the experience of believing two mutually incompatible things at the same time. I might also tell her the famous story of the two little boys comparing notes after Sunday school. "The teacher told us,' one of them reported, 'that there are angels at the four corners of my bed.' The other little boy was scornful: 'You don't really think that, do you?' And the first one had a ready answer: 'Of course I don't think that. But I believe it!'
Well, the same is true of me. I don't really think that Sherlock Holmes lived in Baker Street, or that he lives now on the Sussex Downs. But I believe it. In the words of Vincent Starrett, a great Sherlockian who, like Christopher Morley, also had a great respect for Sir Arthur: Only those things the heart believes are true. And my heart believes in Sherlock Holmes-his wisdom, his courage, his strength, his brilliance, his wit, and his thirst for justice because I have the word of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sir Arthur wrote in the preface to The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes that the great detective flourishes still in 'some fantastic limbo for children of imagination'. Said Sir Arthur: 'Had Sherlock Holmes never existed I could not have done more.'
But Sherlock Holmes did exist, and does; and while he continues to exist, his friends will gather to praise Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as we do now.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
