Retrospect: Conan Doyle, His Life and Art
Retrospect: Conan Doyle, His Life and Art is an article written by Geoffrey S. Stavert published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 1, No. 2) in march 1990.
Review of the biography Conan Doyle, His Life and Art, by Hesketh Pearson.
Retrospect: Conan Doyle, His Life and Art
Conan Doyle, His Life and Art, by Hesketh Pearson
Reviewed by Geoffrey S. Stavert
A long time ago, when I first read this book, I found it, in my uncritical way, an entertaining, fast-moving and highly readable account of the life and major works of the great writer, campaigner and sportsman. A mix of fact and comment, but such that it was usually clear enough to distinguish which was which. Many years later I learned, somewhat to my surprise, that it had in fact caused great offence to some members of the Doyle family, and was generally held in some disrepute. Adrian Conan Doyle, the youngest son, went so far as to call it "a travesty", and was so moved that, a couple of years after its publication, he produced a booklet of his own entitled "The True Conan Doyle". Much more recently, Dame Jean Conan Doyle, in her foreword to The Quest for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, considers it a poor biography in that it fails to catch the personality of its subject. Nicholas Utechin, reviewing Pearson in the same volume, calls it "an unsatisfactory biography, too quirky to give the reader the satisfied feeling that he knows the man whose life has been described."
Faced with all this criticism, I read the book again. I found it an entertaining, fast-moving and highly readable account... What, then, was all the fuss about?
Hesketh Pearson was born in 1887 — Queen Victoria's Jubilee year, when Dr. A. Conan Doyle MD was a moderately successful Southsea practitioner with a number of articles and short stories already to his credit, and when Holmes and Watson made their first public appearance in Beeton's Christmas Annual. After a varied career, including a spell as a car salesman and some years on the stage, he took up writing in his mid-thirties and, eventually, established himself as a successful author of popular biographies. By the time his Conan Doyle came out, he had published over half a dozen Lives including, for example, those of William Hazlitt, Gilbert and Sullivan and George Bernard Shaw. So I suppose he may reasonably be said to have completed his apprenticeship.
His Conan Doyle is not a long book. It is written as a straight-through narrative; starting with his subject's birth on page 1, and ending with his death on page 188. If this seems rather a short compass in which to provide an in-depth picture of such a powerful and many-sided character, we can but agree. But this is not what Pearson set out to do. The fact that this was the first proper attempt at a biography to appear in the thirteen years following Sir Arthur's death may suggest how unjustifiably neglected Conan Doyle had been by the literary establishment of his day, and Pearson should at least be given the credit for breaking through this neglect.
It is fairly evident that be did not have a close relationship with his subject. Although he was one of the very few biographers to have had access to the family papers, it is admitted that these were not in good order when he saw them, and he makes no reference to them in the book. His narrative is largely compiled from Conan Doyle's own writings: the semi-autobiographical novel The Stark Munro Letters, his autobiography Memories and Adventures, and his accounts of his travels during his Spiritualist crusades of the 1920s. Thus he repeats Sir Arthur's own error in Memories and Adventures where he states that be lectured on Gibbon at Portsmouth: his subject had actually been George Meredith. In the chapter headed "Doctor Budd", Pearson quotes large chunks from The Stark Munro Letters, without mentioning the source and without troubling to distinguish between what might be the truth and what might be Conan Doyle's very natural embellishments. We read often such remarks as "Shaw told me", "as R. A. Knox writes to me", "as A. E. W. Mason said" and so forth, but there is no reference to any exchange between Pearson and Conan Doyle himself.
One curious slip which Pearson makes is to refer, throughout the Boer War episode, to the sponsor of Dr. Doyle's field hospital as Langland instead of Langman. But, in general, as a narrative of the events of Conan Doyle's extraordinarily full life, his account is pretty accurate, if not deep; and it is useful to have the Budd episode treated in detail for readers who may not have access to the long-out-of-print Stark Munro Letters.
It is when Pearson comes to his analysis of the Doyle character, however, that we may see why his critics have taken issue with him. In 1920, at a lunch in Melbourne, Conan Doyle wound up his speech to a typical oratorical climax. Quoted by Pearson: "In my reply I pulled the leg of the audience with some success, for I wound up by saying, very solemnly, that I was sometbing greater than Governments, and the master of Cabinet Ministers. By the time I had finished my tremendous claims, I am convinced that they expected some extravagant occult pretension, whereas I actually wound up with the words "for I am the man in the street." "Pearson seizes upon this expression. Not only does he print it as a quote upon his title page, he uses it for the heading of a complete chapter in which, from a discussion of Conan Doyle's output of fiction in all its variety, he demonstrates that the author, for all his geniality and openly frank nature, had a darker side to his character; in other words, that he was subject to ordinary human failings like anybody else and therefore could truly be described as a man in the street. Elsewhere, he writes: "There was no falling off in the demand for Doyle's short stories, which whetted the popular appetite for sport, mystery, thrills and horror. He could not help giving the man in the street what he wanted, because he himself was the man in the street; indeed so exactly did he represent the normal man that one might call him Everyman in the street." But "man in the street" does not mean "average", which is what Pearson seems to imply. No man so obviously endowed with genuine leadership, of so combative a nature, so thoroughly imbued with the desire to be first in all things as was Arthur Conan Doyle, could possibly be described as average in the way Pearson seems to suggest.
What aroused the wrath of Adrian Conan Doyle even more, and led him to pursue a newspaper campaign for years afterwards, was Pearson's tendency to equate the character of Sir Arthur with that of his creation Dr. Watson, and not with that of Sherlock Holmes. The model for Holmes, says Pearson, was Dr. Joseph Bell of Edinburgh. The model for Watson was Conan Doyle himself. He writes: "... there was enough of Doyle in Watson to make it unnecessary for us to look further for a model", and supports his argument by quoting various remarks of Holmes: "You will realise that among your many talents dissimulation finds no place"; "Your fatal habit of looking at everything from the point of a story instead of as a scientific exercise", and so on. Indeed, Sir Arthur's own categorisation in Memories and Adventures of Watson as "an educated man of action" neatly encapsulates a strong component of his own personality.
Elsewhere in the book, Pearson describes an episode which reveals even more clearly the Watson side of Conan Doyle. On the night of 14 April 1912, the White Star liner Titanic, on her maiden voyage, struck an iceberg at full speed. The weather was clear and the sea calm, but there had been no boat drill and the "unsinkable" ship went down with the loss of two thirds of her passengers and crew. The newspapers, in their jingoistic way, played up the heroic side of the story: the brave Captain going down with his ship, the men refusing to get into the boats before the women, the women refusing to leave their husbands; the band playing "Nearer my God to Thee" knee-deep in water etc. In stepped Mr. George Bernard Shaw at his most sarcastic, with a letter to the Daily News. With devastating logic, he castigated the reporters for romanticising a tragedy which was the result of carelessness and inefficiency: "... Second romantic demand. Though all the men (except the foreigners...) must be heroes, the Captain must be a super-hero, a magnificent seaman, cool, brave, delighting in death and danger, and a living guarantee that the wreck was nobody's fault but on the contrary a triumph of British navigation... Writers who had never heard of Captain Smith to that hour wrote of him as they would hardly have written of Nelson. The one thing positively known, was that Captain Smith had deliberately and knowingly steamed into an ice field at the highest speed he had coal for..." In similar terms he denounced the impracticality of the doctrine of Women and Children First, the over-confidence of the officers, the lack of care for the cheaper passengers. "I ask, what is the use of all this ghastly, blasphemous, inhuman, braggardly lying?..."
This was too much for one of his readers. Two days later, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote to the same paper: "How a man could write with such looseness and levity of such an event at such a time passes all comprehension... the attempt to besmirch the conduct of Captain Smith... an old and honoured sailor who has made one terrible mistake and who deliberately gave his life in reparation... If Mr. Shaw will show me the work of any responsible journalist in which Captain Smith is written of in the terms of Nelson, I will gladly send £100 to the Fabian Society... it is a pitiful sight to see a man of undoubted genius using his gifts in order to misrepresent and decry his own people..."
Shaw replied at great length, beginning: "I hope to persuade my friend, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, now that he has got bis romantic and warm-hearted protest off his chest, to read my article again three or four times..." He declined the offer of £100 but powerfully reinforced bis original argument; the correspondence then ended with a short letter of regret from Sir Arthur. There is no space here to print the exchange in full — and Pearson's is the only one of a dozen biographies which does — but to my mind there could be no clearer illustration of, first, Bernard Shaw arguing with the cold, implacable logic of a Sherlock Holmes, and Sir Arthur replying with the romantic indignation of Watson — and, like Watson, losing the battle of words.
Pearson, however, was careful to qualify his point. After quoting the well known couplet of the cerebral tentacle, "The doll and its maker are never identical", he states firmly: "We must be careful not to make the same error by assuming that Dr. Watson was Dr. Doyle." It is Adrian, I suggest, who should be criticised for over-reacting as his father might have done, and unjustly condemning Pearson for something which he did not say.
Adrian's theme was "My father himself was Holmes... There was no original of Watson." He appeared even to resent any suggestion that Dr. Joe Bell could have suggested the idea of Holmes's methods, notwithstanding the fact that Bell's family were in possession of letters from Conan Doyle acknowledging his debt to Dr. Bell. Pearson's view, however, is one with which we could hardly quarrel: "What happened, obviously, was that Bell stimulated Doyle's fancy, which once released, far surpassed the original."
In his concluding chapter, headed "The Last Phase", Pearson attempts to grapple witb his subject's devotion to the cause of Spiritualism. Here he accuses Sir Arthur of being a materialist, that is, of so enjoying the good things of life on earth that he believes that these — family affection, love, appreciation of beauty — will continue after death. In this respect, he is less than fair, and shows that bis reading of Sir Arthur's The New Revelation and The Vital Message has been sketchy at best. He finds himself, in fact, in the same difficulty as John Dickson Carr, and for that matter your reviewer, who not having had a direct psychic experience of the kind which so convinced Sir Arthur, is compelled to adopt the attitude of "I'll believe it when it happens to me."
Pearson's Conan Doyle has aroused strong opinions. Graham Greene praised it, but most views have been anti. Pierre Nordon called it "A pseudo-biography"; Owen Dudley Edwards accuses him of laziness and awards him a "friendly kicking", but at least regards it as a worthier book than Dickson Carr's, and his insights as thought-provoking. It was considered worth re-publishing as a paperback in 1987. In my opinion, it remains a lot more fair than unfair; not a work for a scholar maybe (there are no references), but an excellent preparation for the weightier probings of Nordon and Edwards. Two cheers, perhaps? Well, two and a half!
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
