Art and the Blood
Art and the Blood is an article written by Pierre Nordon published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 2, No. 1) in spring 1991.
The article reconsiders Arthur Conan Doyle's work through a psycho-biographical lens, arguing that the traditional separation between the man and his writings is artificial and misleading. It explores how family trauma, repression, and subconscious conflicts shape recurring themes — order versus disorder, sexlessness, concealment, and doubling — across both the Holmes and Challenger cycles.
Art and the Blood
My Conan Doyle, a book published a generation ago, drew a rather sharp distinction between "the man" and his writings. Given the scholarly nature of my study this was, in a sense, a useful distinction, but artificial and misleading in so far as it excluded the internal approach. I pictured Doyle as a public man, which he no doubt was, and I proceeded as he himself had done when writing an autobiography aptly, but significantly, entitled Memories and Adventures — by giving preference to facts over tentative interpretations. Less honest perhaps, but definitely less naive, I now tend to view the biographer somewhere between the historian and the psychologist, but guarding himself against the excesses of which misinformed and misguided would-be Stracheyans might be guilty.
It can safely be assumed that, at the end of the present century, the significance of Sir Arthur as a public figure is well established. As such, he belongs to history. But what about the artist, the man who so compulsively and so earnestly covered such a large field of fiction; what about the deep and personal meaning of his production with all its intricacies? In exploring and discussing their ins and outs, how are we to maintain that other traditional distinction between the "Holmesian" and the "non-Holmesian" writings?
The parental pattern involving a father who soon becomes the skeleton in the family cupboard, and no ordinary cupboard for that matter!; the Doyle uncles with their literary, social and religious tradition a tradition so aptly symbolized by the "Doyle table" — their avuncular authority and a substitute father figure which Arthur eventually defies in order to secure for himself a literary, social and religious recognition on his own terms. Yet, there was, at the same time, the repressed feeling of distress inevitably caused by the desertion of the father. Hence, perhaps, a growing sense of doom and an eerie atmosphere, sometimes verging on the morbid, which prevail, not in the historical novels or stories where his fancy is, by the very nature of the genre, held in fetters, but in the Challenger cycle and, from The Yellow Face to The Creeping Man, also in the Holmes cycle.
These circumstances, his particularly close relationship with the adamant "Ma'am", the "stony" Stonyhurst education and the sexual frustrations inherent to the introjected model of the "gentleman", may account for a number of phantasms which sometimes deny altogether the reality of sexuality, more specifically of the female sexuality, and sometimes admit it in panicky disclosure — the most obvious example being When the World Screamed with its mimetic performance of a rape by "father" Challenger.
There are, in the Holmes and Challenger cycles, two or three recurring traits which I find particularly intriguing, and possibly indicative of the subconscious forces at work in the dynamics of Doyle's literary creation. They stare us in the face, and in the very first adventure of Sherlock Holmes:
Order versus disorder, or the ambiguity of Bohemia: The King intends to forsake the bohemia metaphorically represented by his association with Irene Adler, and to live up to his public image through marrying Clotilde Lothman von Saxe-Meningen. Holmes, whose help he seeks, is a man who, according to Watson "loathed every form of society with his whole bohemian soul." The scandal is not only in Bohemia with a capital B; it is bohemia (remember Watson's horrified comments at the outset of The Musgrave Ritual.) (1) Holmes secretly sympathises with Irene, in other words with disorder, while publicly defending social order. This conflict, recognisable as the conflict between culture and anarchy, recurs throughout the Holmes saga and it is left unresolved.
The woman or sexlessness: Just as Holmes was an idealised elaboration of Joseph Bell, Irene Adler may have been sketched from what Doyle had heard of the career of Lola Montes. But, just as her bohemian nature has elective affinities with the detective's bohemian soul, her soul of steel is the fitting counterpart of his mental "high power lenses." Self-sufficient Holmes views Irene as a sister personality, conceding her a touch of platonic beauty — "a face that a man might die for...", but otherwise just as sexless as the abstract Clotilde or the less romantic females in the story, Watson's wife or Mrs. Turner.
This eradication may have something to do with the permanence and the polyvalence of the "casket" archetype, or imagery, in the stories. I am referring to the infinite variety of masks, disguises and objects of all sorts under or inside which persons, or things, may be concealed. In the case of A Scandal in Bohemia, we observe that the King of Bohemia, Irene Adler, Holmes and his associates, the photograph in short, every participant in the narrative — is, at some time or other disguised, veiled or hidden.
More generally, in the Holmes and in the Challenger stories, the riddle, the enigma, the truth are materialised and located just as they are in Edgar Allan Poe's, in Stevenson's or in Kipling's stories. One such hiding place is of particular and obvious relevance to the biographer: Holmes' "large tin box" full of odd documents which he alone can "read". A very similar treasure chest is, or was, part of the Conan Doyle family archives as I saw them when I was Adrian Conan Doyle's guest thirty years ago. Not only was the large tin box part of the archives, but it was full of archives. Some of these were just old writings or photographs, not necessarily of much biographical or literary interest — e.g. theatre programmes or calendars — but papers: important, naked and tangible evidence of relevance to one whose inner self was so much transfused into ink and paper.
How significant then the form chosen for the stories! Watson not only relates, but as he relates he describes the relationship, thus claiming a status which, somehow, adds to that of the mere observer or participant. He also emphasises the close, the intimate association of Holmes with the letter, the verbal sign in every form. When retired within himself, in complete seclusion, Holmes is "buried among his old books" and when in need of relaxation it is with his hair-trigger that he writes "patriotic V.R." letters on the wall. Such cathartic exertion, one feels, goes some way to suggest the extent to which, Frankenstein-like, the artist was involved in his brain-child.
Notes
1. "An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction...
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
