Oscar at Pondicherry Lodge
Oscar at Pondicherry Lodge is an article written by Lionel E. Fredman published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 1, No. 2) in march 1990.
The article examines how Arthur Conan Doyle shaped the character of Thaddeus Sholto in The Sign of Four, arguing that Conan Doyle partly modeled him on Oscar Wilde.
Oscar at Pondicherry Lodge
In 1987, the centenary of the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes unleashed a renewed interest in fiction's greatest detective and his creator. Thereafter, anniversaries regularly fall due. Holmes' second appearance in The Sign of Four in 1890, followed a meeting with yet another of the famous contemporaries who knew Conan Doyle or crossed his path: Oscar Wilde.
In 1889, while still in practice at Southsea, Conan Doyle was invited by a representative of the American publishers, Lippincott's, to dine. A pleasant four was completed by Wilde and the Irish M.P., Gill. As a result, Conan Doyle and Wilde were each engaged to write a novel for Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. The Sign of Four and The Picture of Dorian Gray duly appeared in this format in 1890. Ronald Pearsall, a persistent belittler of the Victorian age, for whom Doyle's chief characteristics are his naivety and ordinariness, implies that Doyle could not possibly have appreciated the cosmopolitan litterateur, Bohemian, and free spirit who was his fellow guest. Pearsall even manages to imply that Wilde was an established author, already engaged for a novel, while Doyle was a suppliant and interloper. In fact, both were young (Wilde was 35 in October, and Doyle 30 in July), of limited means, spoke English with a Celtic accent, and stood to gain equally from such a commission, which was the purpose of the evening. Nor could the "knowing" Wilde cope with success. He began to indulge a giant-sized vanity which Doyle later observed, and in his pitiful last days in Paris received a death-bed conversion to the Roman Catholic faith which Doyle had long since left. (1)
Pearsall also implies that, because Doyle's historical novels find little echo in Wilde's work, the latter's praise of Micah Clarke was false or hypocritical small talk. Is the sophisticated author saying that one good professional cannot admire another of different tastes and experience; or that a classical education at Oxford could not possibly lead to novels of detection, adventure and historical drama? Ever-ready to accuse Doyle of clumsy writing and carelessness, Pearsall makes yet another error in placing this dinner at Greenwich, when Doyle makes it clear that Greenwich had been the locale of a previous literary lunch. (2)
This meeting between Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde is described in a brief, but telling, anecdote in Memories and Adventures: "His conversation left and indelible impression upon my mind. He towered above us all, and yet had the art of seeming to be interested in all that we could say. He had delicacy of feeling and tact, for the monologue man, however clear, can never be a gentleman at heart." His judgment of Wilde relies on the appearance and standards of a gentleman as does so much of his memoirs and fiction. He opens with his grandfather, John Doyle, artist, wit and gentleman, "drawing gentlemen for gentlemen," unlike the crude caricatures of Gilray and Rowlandson. In the words of a leading biographer, John Dickson Carr: "If he might not believe in any religion, he could believe in a creed, a code, a pattern of behaviour." (3)
During their one later meeting, Wilde told Doyle his current play was a work of genius. It could be a leg-pull, although Wilde's first biographer, Robert Sherard, believes he was then becoming incredibly vain and self-indulgent. Doyle uses the familiar standard: "Nothing could have been more different from bis early gentlemanly instincts." These were evident when Wilde responded by letter to Doyle's praise of Dorian Gray, rejecting some contemporary nonsense that it was immoral. Doyle then adds that a hospital was the proper place to deal with Wilde's condition, avoiding the word, or any synonym for, homosexual; but then, so do Sherard and Wilde's son, Vyvyan Holland. (4)
The Sign of Four opens with a bored Holmes taking his shot of cocaine and is comparable to Dorian Gray indulging one of his numerous vices. Did the two chief characters which emerged from the Lippincott's dinner share a common fin de siecle atmosphere or did Doyle and Wilde somehow swap specific ideas at dinner? All too soon we lose the French detective, Le Villard, who regards Holmes as pupil to master, as if Dorian were being guided by Lord Henry Wotton. Just as the gifted pupil lacked exact knowledge, so Holmes (and Henry) knew when to snap out of Bohemian indolence. (5)
Doyle was an instinctive story-teller, wasting little stored up from unusually rich resources of reading, professional work and experience. There is a "biographical fallacy" which denies the existence of fiction; but it would be equally foolish, particularly with someone like Doyle, to ascribe every character and plot to pure invention. The systematic search of his early life by Owen Dudley Edwards, has produced rich dividends and surprising linkages. (6)
Pondicherry Lodge might provide an example. There is something unmistakably Wildean about Thaddeus Sholto. Granted, he is short and Wilde was tall and wore the Victorian morning dress with distinction. He has a bald dome with a red fringe, whereas Wilde had wavy, dark locks. However, Holmes and Watson first encounter him in aesthetic surroundings designed to reflect his personality, in a "third-rate" South London neighbourhood. This suggests the house at Tite Street and the mixed social gradations of late-Victorian Chelsea. Wilde was an incessant and affected smoker, so was Thaddeus — at least with his hookah. Both were constantly passing their hands over the lower part of the face, self-conscious of discoloured teeth but, in fact, drawing attention to them. (7)
The gregarious Wilde does not resemble the solitary Thaddeus although Dorian Gray comes closer. Incense and the familiar aesthetic pose seems as far as he yields to the latter's vices. He says that it would be in "such bad taste", not illegal or wrong, to deprive Mary of her share of the treasure. That he goes to much trouble, arranging the meeting and leaving his family home, suggests it was a pose and he did think the family's actions were wrong.
The object of both stories is kept in a locked attic: Sholto's treasure and the too-revealing picture of Dorian Gray.
As Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas did not meet until 1891, it is interesting, but no more, to observe that Sholto, surname of Thaddeus and his brother, was the second name of Wilde's nemesis and Douglas' father, the eighth Marquess of Queensbury, and also the fore-name of his son, grandson and great-great-grandson.
Holmes sometimes reflects the contemporary cliches, of "art for art's sake", and "the work is its own reward." Yet, he had the touch of vanity which was demonstrated in the theatrical finale of The Adventure of The Naval Treaty, when the document was returned in a breakfast dish; charged regular and sometimes punitive fees; and believed that life was infinitely stranger than fiction (or art). (9) Individual characters could be part-derived by his creator from an acquaintance and rendered whole. The balance and strength of the characters reflected their creator for whom medicine combined exact science and the art of diagnosis, and for whom the whole man combined study and sport, reasoning and feeling. In 1890, the year in which The Sign of Four appeared, there also appeared A Physiologist's Wife, which was to be the first in the collection of medical stories published in 1894 as Round the Red Lamp. Doyle, not for the last time, was willing to satirise a pedantic but unfeeling medical scientist; — as if the scientific Holmes and the sensual Thaddeus Sholto were not enough.
References
1. Ronald Pearsall, Conan Doyle: a Biographical Solution (London, 1977). 31-32. The title implies a biography will expose Conan Doyle's feet of clay as the seven per cent solution exposed Holmes. See my critical review in Quadrant, XXI (November 1977), 80, and another by David Anderson in The Quest for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Thirteen Biographers in Search of a Life (Carbondale,1987), ed. Jon L. Lellenberg, 159-68. See also Kelvin Jones, Sherlock and Porlock: a study of Literary Influences in the Sherlock Holmes Stories (Magico Magazine, 1984), 33-41.
2. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures, Oxford. 1989, first published 1924, 78-80.
3.John Dickson Carr, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, London, 1949, 63.
4. Robert Harborough Sherard, The Life of Oscar Wilde (London 1906), 305-7 (Wilde impecunious and willing to write for the market), also endless references to his appearance (346 et al.). In some ways naive, Sherard is indispensable as first biographer and long-time friend, standing outside the bitchiness of literary cliques; Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde (Harmondsworth, Penguin 1957; first published 1954; Oscar Wilde and his World (London 1977; first published 1960).
5. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Long Stories (London, 1929), 143-46.
6. Owen Dudley Edwards, The Quest for Sherlock Holmes : a Biographical Study of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Harmondsworth, Penguin ed. 1984; first published 1983).
7. Conan Doyle, Long Stories, 163-74.
8. Richard Lancelyn Green & John Michael Gibson, A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle (Oxford, 1983), 33-42; 79-83. Brian Roberts, The Mad, Bad Line: the Family of Lord Alfred Douglas (London, 1981) — family tree, XI.
9. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Complete Short Stories (London, 1928), 55.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
