The Inner Room: Editorial (ACD Journal vol. 1 No. 3)
The Inner Room: Editorial [Vol. 1 No. 3] is an article written by Christopher Roden published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 1 No. 3, september 1990).
This editorial defends Arthur Conan Doyle's non-Sherlockian writing against literary snobbery and argues that his broader work deserves serious reassessment. It also presents the journal's mission as promoting discussion of Conan Doyle's life and neglected writings, while announcing further studies of his supernatural fiction.
Editorial
This, the third issue of A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society, continues the work upon which we embarked just over a year ago: the work of discussing the many and varied aspects of Conan Doyle's life, and the promotion, to a wider audience, of the non-Sherlockian writings.
There will always be those who try to place Conan Doyle in a league table with other writers of his period. How, for example, do his literary skills compare with those of Kipling, Stevenson and the like?
The recent BBC Radio 4 programme To Keep the Memory Green (which is reviewed elsewhere in this issue), did little to help Conan Doyle's literary reputation. The programme's presenter, Humphrey Carpenter, a highly respected biographer, has produced studies on subjects as diverse as Auden, C. S. Lewis, Ezra Pound, Tolkien, Evelyn Waugh, and Jesus Christ — deeper waters, perhaps, than Conan Doyle but, nevertheless, it was something of a disappointment to find that this respected modern biographer appeared keen to belittle Conan Doyle's literary output. Derisory comments such as:
- "titles distantly remembered from the junior shelves when the supply of Sherlock Holmes had run out..."
- "not the sort of stuff to form an exciting nucleus for a literary Society..."
- "All good station bookstall stuff, but a bit thin as fodder for a Society..."
ably assisted his efforts, and left some of us wondering just what A.C.D. had done to deserve this mauling at the hands of The Establishment. The programme seems to have been carefully pointed towards a view that, apart from Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle wrote little else of value.
It seems patently obvious that someone at the BBC carefully omitted to ask a couple of very relevant questions:
- Why did people, and why do people still read A.C.D.'s non-Sherlockian works; and, if he was as poor a writer as some of the programme's comments would have us believe, how did he manage to sustain his success with those same non-Sherlockian works?
One simple answer is that Conan Doyle was an entertaining, imaginative and creative writer who was capable of producing books and stories which people wanted to read. He may not have been a great writer - to quote Julian Symons:
- "He was a great man and a very notable writer"—
but he wrote books which were highly entertaining.
Defining guidelines for the enjoyment of a particular writer's works is un-necessary. In the final analysis, it all depends of the taste of the reader. Books are, or should be, written to inform, enlighten and/or entertain, and many would argue that the chief of these should be to entertain.
It is pleasing that many of the Society's members have asked for more information on, and assessments of, the non-Sherlockian books, as such requests provide an opportunity to re-assess Conan Doyle's contribution to English Literature, and the limited reputation which the Literary Establishment is prepared to allow him. In this issue, we begin a two-part series, The Other Worlds of Arthur Conan Doyle, which examines Conan Doyle's supernatural fiction. Future issues will include articles dealing with individual novels and collections.
Few would dispute that Conan Doyle entertained consistently with the books he wrote. The success of The Strand Magazine during the years of his major contributions is ample evidence of his ability to entertain.
We should now seize the opportunity which presents itself, to analyse the areas where A.C.D. has been criticised, in fact those areas where he achieved some of his greatest success, and decide for ourselves whether such criticism is justified.
Christopher Roden
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
