The Land of Mist: Personal Reflections on Conan Doyle's 'Failed' Novel
The Land of Mist: Personal Reflections on Conan Doyle's 'Failed' Novel is an article written by Thomas R. Tietze published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 7, 1996/7).
This article analyzes The Land of Mist by Arthur Conan Doyle, arguing that the novel failed largely because its strong spiritualist message overshadowed its narrative and characterization. It examines how Conan Doyle used fiction to defend psychical research and spiritualist beliefs, which critics often saw as propaganda rather than literature.
The Land of Mist: Personal Reflections on Conan Doyle's 'Failed' Novel
At first thought, what could be more intriguing, more mysterious, or more involving than to follow an investigator into the murky atmosphere of a seance room especially in the dramatic days of the Roaring Twenties, when researchers were reporting an explosion of psychic manifestations viewed under ever-increasingly vigilant circumstances? Further, whose company would be more congenial than that of the bombastic arch-rationalist, Professor George Edward Challenger? The idea — the drama — of science confronting the evidence for the survival of individual personality following bodily death ought to be fascinating. It seems difficult to imagine how a novel that chronicles the adventure of psychic discovery could possibly fail. Of all Conan Doyle's major works of fiction, however, none has been the source of such widespread reader disappointment, and none has received such universal critical dismissal as The Land of Mist (1926).
Even the first reviewers found themselves dismayed. The reviewer for the New York Times reported on 16 May 1926: 'Unfortunately, yet perhaps inevitably, the characters of "The Land of Mist" are scarcely more than props for Sir Arthur's propaganda.' And the Saturday Review of Literature complained on 24 July 1926, that 'the story, as a story, fails to hold. There is too much pill, too little sugar-coating.' In subsequent decades, little has been written about the book, perhaps proving the point made by J. Randolph Cox: 'The novel was not the most successful in the series, either artistically or commercially, and has survived only in an omnibus edition with its companions, The Professor Challenger Stories (1952)' (Cox 131). Another critic, Kirk Beetz, refers to The Land of Mist as 'but a shadow of The Lost World' and mistakenly attributes Doyle's interest in Spiritualism to 'a desperate desire to believe that his son was still alive in the spirit world' (Beetz 333). Few critics have responded positively to the novel, and some have been positively vicious. Said one source, without the usual polite reservations, 'He was taken in by phony mediums and obviously faked photographs... [and] Conan Doyle injected his beliefs into some of his fiction' (Gielia and Dematteis 92). Another critic noted that this decision or tendency of Doyle's resulted in an excessive 'didacticism [which] breaks down the distinctions between a work of imagination and a religious tract. Much of the novel's action is suspended while the narrator lectures at length on spiritualist theories. As a work of imagination The Land of Mist is an unqualified artistic failure. [It] no doubt was far more widely read by the British public than were any of Doyle's serious nonfiction studies on spiritualism-a fact that may have done more harm than good to Doyle's reputation in the last decade of his life' (Campbell 48). In a thoughtful 1965 essay, Sherman Yellen was even more disappointed:
The Land of Mist demonstrates that Conan Doyle had made his greatest sacrifice to his Spiritualist beliefs; he had relinquished his literary power to it. Indeed, the book is dreadful as literature, and even weaker as Spiritualist propaganda. Whereas the most weakly argued of his nonfiction Spiritualist publications reveals a mastery of style and firm narrative power, now Conan Doyle's prose falters; the dialogue is ludicrous, the characterizations are nonexistent. His great natural talent for narrative writing had always concealed the faults of characterization. And his one great character, Holmes, had been there to fix the reader's view upon a fascinating personality. But here all the author's failings stand exposed. The flimsy characters cannot support the heavy weight of Spiritualist Truth. The dogmatic ideas of Spiritualism now dictate the behavior of the characters who never take on the breath of life. In the Sherlock Holmes stories Conan Doyle had permitted the reader to glimpse but never fully explore the recesses of his hero's mind. But there are no such secrets in The Land of Mist; there are only truths. In art, ideological truth does not always set one free; more often it destroys the artist's freedom and puts him in bondage to his ideas, creating at most propaganda (Yellen 53).
Of course, Conan Doyle might just as well have chosen some other character to investigate the issue, but every author has a favourite child. Perhaps Hesketh Pearson expressed the more moderate opinion of the majority of readers when he said, 'We can only feel profoundly thankful that their creator was fonder of Challenger than of Holmes' (Pearson 220).
In the face of such critical agreement, it might be fair to set this work down as simply a bad book, misguided in its aims, undeveloped in its content, and awkward in its style. But even a bad book can offer rich analytical opportunities, if only to try to answer the obvious question: How did Conan Doyle fail to write an exciting Challenger story, especially when the novel took the popular character into the bizarre, fascinating, and generally unfamiliar realm of Spiritualism a region the author seemingly knew better than almost anyone in the world? Perhaps he failed so signally because he overestimated the intrinsic interest of the subject matter. Perhaps he failed because he did not in fact cover the ground of the scientific examination of Spiritualistic claims; perhaps this was due to his unwillingness to accept the positive results of the exposures of fraud by serious psychical researchers, as well as their useful caveats, which ought to have alerted inquirers to the unreliability of human testimony about difficult observations. Finally, perhaps he failed because his effort to educate and persuade took precedence over the need to develop vibrant characters of the sort that could convince his readers to overcome their disinterest in, ignorance of, and distaste for the subject in order to become aware of the truth of the Spiritualist experience.
I
The desire to obtain reliable and rational assurance of human survival of bodily death has never exerted so popular a pull on human nature as has the willingness to relegate such issues to matters of faith. The urgency with which the Western mind has divided the practical from the metaphysical is most clearly seen in the establishment and maintenance of the clergy, a class of educated people who are widely supposed to have, and who weekly dispense, special knowledge of spiritual truths presumably not available or manifest to ordinary people. Yet, the reliability of the information so presented, as well as the claim of the clergy to authority are very far from being based on rational or scientific principles. Occasionally, especially in the past, rigorous scientists have chosen to believe in the religious understanding of the cosmos, without a moment's urge to cross the line and apply scientific approaches to religious assertions. And, from the other side of the transaction, it has been true historically that the firmest opposition to psychical research has come from invested clergy. If the history of the West has had at least one constant thread running through it, it is this tension between these two ways of knowing. Scientists might feel uncomfortable at best, might be ostracized by their colleagues at worst, when they take a rational interest in the investigation of paranormal claims. Indeed, they seem increasingly disinterested in the value of such an inquiry, as a 1981 Gallup poll indicates. This survey indicated 'that in the United States 67 percent of the general public believe in life after death, whereas only 32 percent of leading physicians and only 16 percent of leading (nonmedical) scientists do' (Stevenson 155). Assuming that this study accurately measures the widespread a priori rejection of the possibility of Spiritualism's principal assertion, it is not surprising that Conan Doyle's subject matter in The Land of Mist makes modern readers even more uncomfortable than the topic of Challenger's most famous adventure, The Lost World. While the modern scientist apparently rejects any claims not based on empirically derived facts, the modern Christian continues to hold that faith is superior to reason. Perhaps the view is bolstered by the words of the resurrected Jesus, who tells doubting Thomas (who has just applied himself to an inquiry rather like a psychical researcher might do): 'Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed. Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed.' (John 20:29). This schizophrenic rift in Western thought the proponents of modern Spiritualism sought to bridge. The result, however, was far otherwise, unexpected but enduring, ranging from indifference to vituperation from both sides of the contending epistemological camps.
An intriguing consequence of this dichotomy is that Spiritualism, already in Conan Doyle's time, underwent an internal crisis paralleling the tensions in the intellectual macrocosm. From its earliest public meetings, inspirational speaking had played a major rôle, and the contents of these addresses had been faithfully recorded, published, and widely read among the world's Spiritualists. For those Spiritualists with sufficient faith, such material served to support their belief in afterlife and communication with the dead. Particularly after the First World War, however, a growing number of people, whose faith in reality was based on more empirical traditions, demanded tests that could give evidence of the identity of the alleged communicator. In 1966, I interviewed a group of quite elderly American mediums who had been active in Spiritualism for many decades. They unanimously agreed that Spiritualism reached a crisis very soon after the contents of their religious services were changed in response to these rationalist demands. By the 1920s, at each Sunday service, a medium was expected to provide platform demonstrations-usually consisting of allegedly clairvoyant billet-reading-that would satisfy those requiring testable evidence that the communicating spirit was genuine. Ironically, this proved to be a mistake, these men and women told me. After all, if the 'power was low', they said, messages could become weak, garbled, or confused, thus leading sceptics (or even open-minded and unconvinced witnesses) to suppose there was nothing in the whole subject. More sinister, however, was the fact that platform demonstrations could so easily be faked by someone with very little practice and without paranormal help. The mediums I interviewed all felt that these demonstrations, which had seemed to be the very thing to supply a reasonable foundation for belief, turned out instead to be disillusioning to newcomers and rather embarrassing to the already converted. 'This phenomenon,' writes Conan Doyle in an appendix to The Land of Mist, ... varies very much in quality. So uncertain is it that many congregations have given it up entirely, as it has become rather a source of scandal than of edification.' Because of the lack of understanding of the dynamics of platform clairvoyance and other public demonstrations of alleged spirit communications, Conan Doyle, as usual, believed that we would soon know more than we do presently and that, at least in public situations, the religion ought to be presented in its rational form. 'We want less faith and more knowledge,' he concluded.
However, a glance at religions that first appeared as contemporaries and rivals suggests that, in the twentieth century, Spiritualism might have survived (and possibly flourished) had it abandoned its rationalistic origins and placed its tenets on an untestable and faith-based foundation. Consider, for example, the success of Mormonism, based at first on apparent modern miracles; but since the Civil War, it became primarily faith-based, and thoroughly resistant to historical and archaeological criticism. Other nineteenth century movements survived against rationalism and grew in influence despite (or because of) their manifest improbability, now quite comfortably ensconced within the general term 'Protestantism'. Mrs. Eddy's colourful efforts, for example, have carried on, at least marginally, though the scientific evidence for Christian Science is stunningly less impressive than that accumulated for, say, trance mediumship.
That Conan Doyle was sensitive to this issue is indicated by the fact that The Land of Mist was not ACD's first fictional foray into the tensions between reason and faith; in 1895, his popular novel, The Stark Munro Letters, appeared. In it, Conan Doyle deals with the young manhood of a doctor who is confronting his inability to accept the dogmatic assertions of contemporary Christians. Similarly, his The Tragedy of the Korosko (1898) inveighs against dogmatically held view-points, both Christian and Muslim. Yet both books seem to place value on the religious view of the world-even if that value were only expressed as sentimental nostalgia.
Given these conflicting opinions and attitudes, it seems less strange to find Conan Doyle introducing his second-most-famous intellectual to what seemed to him a crucial inquiry. In fact, The Land of Mist might be best thought of as an erasing or unravelling of his earlier uncertainties. A man such as Conan Doyle, a man who had been trained in medicine, and who had had a crisis of faith that prompted a life-long fascination-or attraction-repulsion-with religion, is a man with a foot in two different worlds. What therefore looked to his critics as inconsistencies might more profitably be seen as tensions between the urge to believe and the drive to know. Indeed, in his 1928 filmed interview, he makes this tension clear: 'I am not talking about what I believe. I'm not talking about what I think. I'm talking about what I know. There's an enormous difference, believe me, between believing a thing and knowing a thing' (Homer and Roden 24).
But other options might have served him better. For example, twenty-five years ago, Carlos Castaneda wrote curious works that were received partly as anthropological accounts, partly as novels dealing with occult powers. Castaneda's discussions of the Yaqui Indian sorcerer, Don Juan, were far from objective, scientific reports, and readers were not certain whether they were intended to take Castaneda's claims as scientifically verifiable or not. In fact, rationalists who tried to understand alternative mystical realities in the 1960s and '70s grew to feel that they were asking the wrong questions altogether. In any case, these texts were wildly popular despite or perhaps because of their bypassing of traditional rationality. It is ironically possible, then, that Conan Doyle could have written a more successful novel, if only he had not been so deeply committed to rationality.
Furthermore, in another of the ironies of these declining years of the twentieth century, one rather odd truth emerges. If Conan Doyle had collected all of the myths of every tribal populace in all the deserts and jungles of the world, he'd have been as highly regarded as the late American anthropologist Joseph Campbell is today. No matter what savage or primitive practices the anthropology of religion has uncovered, contemporary notions of political correctness move us to accept them as intriguing insights into a cosmic world view. Former American presidential press secretary Bill Moyers has gained a wide following in the United States for presenting to public television audiences a series of quite stimulating conversations with Joseph Campbell. In these programmes Jungian mythological archetypes have been presented as suggestive of a universal collective unconscious, but without any effort to provide evidence of what is in fact a supernatural hypothesis that has been offered in order to explain' similarities in world mythology. At the present writing-and in the foreseeable future there are no serious plans to present the positive findings of psychical research before the public in anything like the way in which the non-empirical metaphysics of Carl Jung have been presented. Furthermore, as these lines are written, one of the best-selling books in the world has been produced by the Pope. Another hit on the non-fiction scene is something called Embraced by the Light (over 100 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list), which appears to be an anecdotal account of a woman's near-death experience. Today, in the late 1990s, Fox television network has succeeded in producing The X-Files, a hit show that has intrigued audiences from New Jersey to Bangkok with the paranormal. Moreover, Hollywood has, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to E.T. to the recent Phenomenon and the thrill-spectacular of 1996, the big-budgeted Independence Day, provided apparently more acceptable visions of the bizarre for our resolutely mechanistic age: If we are going to entertain the possibility of otherworldly intelligences, we'd prefer to have them delivered in machines. So it is that, even in our 'rational' present, millions of people are reading words and seeing television programmes that are intended to be directions for their lives, or spurs to their imaginations; that are composed by writers who present no means of scientifically investigating their truth. The late twentieth century is awash in both ignorant scientific scepticism and uncritical pseudo-mystical belief. But, two generations ago, Conan Doyle's mistake was that he presented data for which he invited scientific scrutiny. Here, he argued, were anomalous phenomena that require analysis through scientific methodologies. In the last decade of ACD's life no clue could have presented itself to him that the positive findings all around him would either be ignored, forgotten, discredited or dropped by all but a few marginally funded researchers. He could not have imagined that the only venue for his ideas would have been in the realm of 'fantasy' or 'science fiction' in books or TV or films.
II
'I'm talking about what I know', Conan Doyle proclaimed in print, on his lecture tours, and in his interviews. Confessedly impatient with critics who had not had his wide experience in Spiritualistic inquiries, the author tended to ignore claims that he must have been mistaken either in his observations or in his conclusions. The Land of Mist is consequently inclined to disparage the critical attitude of the unidentified scientific inquirers who do appear in the story. Their suspicions about possible fraud and their by now routine efforts to impose conditions that would make fraud impossible are shown to inhibit genuine phenomena and to represent the thoughtlessly rude attitude of harsh rationalism confronting simple and sincere faith. Because Conan Doyle decided to use the novel as a forum to satirise such investigations, he undermined the opportunity to show that psychical researchers had, despite their hard-minded cautions, managed to establish the possibility of at least some Spiritualistic phenomena. The general public who were to read his novel would be nearly as unaware as the general public are today that serious scientists had established at the very least that telepathy, clairvoyance, and psycho-kinesis might occur under controlled conditions. And some research, already completed by 1900, suggested that survival of death might not be inconceivable.
Instead of celebrating this result of fifty years' solid support of some of Spiritualism's claims, which would have provided at least a foundation for his characters' conversion and for his readers' openness to the startling events he describes, Conan Doyle chose to ridicule psychical research. He turned to the findings of continental investigators instead of British and American, since the French and German research supported both the paranormal movement of objects and the materialization of spirit (ectoplasmic) forms more dramatically than had any English-speaking investigators. William Jackson Crawford, Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Alfred Russel Wallace are the only British researchers who figure prominently in the text-all of whom had experienced extraordinary physical phenomena. However, through a series of circumstances too complicated to relate here, by the time The Land of Mist was in composition, a shadow-a prejudice, Conan Doyle would have thought it-had fallen over research into the bigger phenomena. Most of the literature in English that dealt with such research was devastatingly critical, and Conan Doyle only grew more impatient with the predominant tone of those who tried to point out the weaknesses of testimony to such events as materialization and other physical phenomena. Ultimately, it was Theodore Besterman's review of the inadequacies of a Continental case that drew Conan Doyle's irate resignation from the Society for Psychical Research shortly before he died. Researchers of the 1920s most charitably considered Crookes and Wallace, working fifty years earlier, as victims of trickery they could not have imagined, given the slack standards of the previous generation. Lodge's status as a world-renowned scientist allowed his contemporaries to overlook his somewhat embarrassing accounts of his witnessing of the Italian medium Eusapia Palladino's levitations of objects. And Crawford's work, which Conan Doyle mentions often in The Land of Mist, was done independently from the aegis of the Society for Psychical Research. Crawford experimented with a family of Spiritualists gathered around a medium he made famous as Kathleen Goligher. (Conan Doyle in The Land of Mist refers to her as 'Gallagher' apparently in a casual mistake. The mistake is the more egregious because he has a character taunt another character for not knowing the name of Crawford's psychic.) In four books replete with photographs, Crawford argued for the existence of teleplasm or ectoplasm. (It resembled cheesecloth covering some solid structure, and it was capable of raising a table.) As the sole researcher investigating a large family circle, Crawford tended to accept the conditions that were already in place, though he strove to introduce more light and other variables that would make his observations more certain. However, the sheer number of possible confederates and the unfortunately bogus-looking materializations that illustrate his books tend to undermine the argument for genuineness. Though two mainstream psychical researchers (Sir William Barrett and W.W. Smith) supported his findings by trying to test the allegedly paranormal energy by resisting a force affecting a table, subsequent research failed to confirm Crawford's conclusions. Conan Doyle does not discuss or mention Crawford's clinical depression nor his suicide in 1920, which in a note found after his death, Crawford was careful to state was unrelated to his psychic work.
Problems in, or objections to, the findings of the affirmative researchers seemed to Conan Doyle to be the result of manifest bigotry, and so his blustering, grumbling English psychical researchers are satiric caricatures. But his depiction of journalists is both forgivable and, unfortunately, timelessly accurate. Says one of the materialized spirits, trying desperately to get the truth known, 'if papers for one week gave as much attention to psychic things as they do to football, it would be known to all' (Chapter 5). That the very idea is laughable is itself a sign of the truth of the accusation. Though the tabloid press is eager to spread the most preposterous nonsense, the mainstream papers even today seem to find no reportable material in parapsychology. If anyone knows about the remarkable findings in ESP research, it is certainly because he or she has taken the extra effort to dig up the information in university libraries which, in some cases, store copies of the Journal of Parapsychology, or the Journal and Proceedings of the British and American Societies for Psychical Research. A few weeks ago, it occurred to me to spend a day reviewing the last two years' scholarly journals of parapsychological work. I wound my way down into the dark library stacks of the University of Minnesota, an institution that provides educations for some 40,000 people. There I found the latest publications resting undisturbed on the shelf, and I wryly noted to myself that the volumes were in discouragingly mint condition. I was apparently the first one in two years to open and read the reports. Of course, it seemed to me the point made by Conan Doyle in The Land of Mist was, as I frankly admit I expected, confirmed: Not only do the media not report serious parapsychological investigations, but even the scholarly community appears to find them equally negligible.
Furthermore, the condition of academic neglect Conan Doyle addresses in the novel remains as ludicrous as ever:
'I think the learned bodies should find more time for the consideration of psychic matters' [says Atkinson in Malone's club]. 'Less,' said Polter [a sceptic who resents any attention given to such material].
'You can't have less than nothing. They ignore them altogether. Some time ago I had a series of cases of telepathic rapport which I wished to lay before the Royal Society. My colleague Wilson, the zoologist, also had a paper which he proposed to read. They went in together. His was accepted and mine rejected. The title of his paper was "The Reproductive System of the Dung Beetle" ' (Chapter 5).
Ironically, recent research has revealed that Dung Beetles, in fact, are an absolutely essential factor in African ecological balance! However that may be, when our own contemporary journals of mainstream science publish accounts of parapsychological research-which has happened on at least some occasions in the last fifty years-the results are uniformly controversial, and the papers in some cases would not have been accepted in the parapsychological journals, which because of their extraordinary topic, must be extraordinarily cautious; they are careful to anticipate weaknesses in design or analysis.
The fact is, without belaboring it (or perhaps I already have), Conan Doyle's depicting of the issues is not at all unrealistic or overdrawn. The public and academic prejudice and disinterest remains strong, then as now. It has been amusing to see that even stage magicians, such as The Amazing Randi, when they appear on television to debunk Spiritualistic phenomena, have to first explain what the phenomena are. Perhaps this is the only positive result to come from the media's neglect of seance-room wonders.
Even the most remarkable report on psychic phenomena to appear in the last several decades in an 'outside' journal—a ‘landmark', says Ray Hyman, the most careful and capable of parapsychology's critics-only serves to prove Conan Doyle right. My closest friend in the field was the late Charles Honorton, who in fact, contributed the introduction to my study of Margery (Harper and Row, 1973) a case of alleged physical mediumship in which Conan Doyle was keenly interested. From the 1970s through to his sudden and unexpected death in November 1992, Honorton had worked on an effort to create a repeatable experimental design. Using a modified kind of sensory isolation, with subjects' eyes and ears being given a uniformly 'white' signal, these so-called 'ganzfeld' studies tested the ability of the isolated subjects to pick up the mental experiences of a 'sender' in another part of the laboratory. These 'senders' looked at target pictures and tried to make the isolated subject aware, in an extrasensory way, of their content. In Brooklyn, Princeton, and Edinburgh, Honorton found statistically striking results. Perhaps more significantly, other researchers in other labs were able to replicate Honorton's findings. After lengthy discussions over the methods and statistics involved in analysing the data, Honorton's work was finally in 1994 given a kind of hard-science imprimatur when the American Psychological Association's publication Psychological Bulletin brought out his posthumous article, 'Does Psi Exist? Replicable Evidence for an Anomalous Process of Information Transfer', coauthored by Cornell University psychologist Daryl J. Bem. Though the issue still is far from clearly 'proven' to the majority of scientists, at least the breakthrough study has appeared, providing hard evidence that the most basic of Conan Doyle's Spiritualistic beliefs was not so fantastical after all: Information can somehow be exchanged between individuals apart from the hitherto scientifically recognized channels of sense. Was this 'landmark' paper in the world's headlines? Was the world alerted to a consistent finding that fundamentally challenges the limitations of the human personality traditionally defined by the minions of organized science? I myself learned only by accident of Chuck's death in Edinburgh when listening to a science program on the National Public Radio, and I got the reference to the paper while I was working on this essay and fiddling on the Internet one day. Only massive ignorance and disinterest in human parapsychological potential can account for the widespread lack of media coverage indicating that this long-sought issue of replicability had at last been successfully addressed, answering the crucial demand of sceptical scientists for at least a half century. A century's worth of psychical research findings that has been rebuffed by the scientific establishment at last has found sufficient merit to be recognized by the American Psychological Association, yet I am confident that not one person in a million knows that this has happened.
(The above words, written in June 1996, are now obsolete and the depth of their annoyance even worse. In the 8 July 1996, issue of the American magazine, Newsweek, the cover story is: 'Out There: From Independence Day to "The X-Files," America is hooked on the Paranormal.' Inside the magazine, the authors manage to report with passable accuracy Honorton's ganzfeld findings and then follow the facts with speculative criticisms that make the twenty-year experimental series seem naive. No mention is made of the century's accumulation of psychical data; no mention is made of the issue of replicability. The articie's satirical tone continues by citing the American magician The Amazing Randi's criticism and quotes him as saying, 'I can go into a lab and fool the rear ends off any group of scientists.' This claim is reported despite the fact that, at least so far as I am aware, Randi has declined on all occasions to respond to parapsychologists' invitations. The entire article concludes with a trivial UFO discussion, thus as usual linking cautious laboratory studies to studies less supported by reliable data [Begley 54-55]. Conan Doyle's frustration at the media's tone is again given firm support in our generation. Any reader curious about the topic would be plausibly informed that psychical researchers are vague sorts of individuals who are droolingly incapable of discovering any problems that a Newsweek reporter might discover simply by casting her eyes over a long and complicated paper [Bem and Honorton 1994] while she is under deadline. But this report, I daresay, will go for several years as the most recent mainstream press discussion of the scientific evidence for psychic phenomena-and [am I prescient?] it will in the future be reported as it has always been in the past-as a matter to sweep under the rationalist's carpet. [cf. The Land of Mist, Chapter Two: 'Well, well, we must expect a slating. They get it from the humorous angle at first,' says a Spiritualist to the journalist Malone. 'We'll have you writing a very comic account. I never could see anything very funny in the spirit of one's dead wife, but it's a matter of taste....] Of what else can we be absolutely certain? Newsweek's reporters will not be nagging the parapsychologists in Edinburgh for more data on the ganzfeld studies that might meet their arrogant and ignorant objections.)
On the other side of the coin is the issue of fraud and its exposure. The Land of Mist identifies three such efforts. The first is a melodramatic entrapment of an apparently genuine medium by two policewomen. They elicit information from the distracted psychic by claiming to have had a recent bereavement. Though he is having trouble making a connection with his sitters, the medium is so sympathetic to the women that he tries his best. Even though he fails to be able to bring forth any veridical material, his very effort to do so is evidence of 'fortune-telling' — until the 1950s, a crime under British law, whether the facts are genuine or fraudulent. The medium is arrested, tried, and imprisoned. This incident is clearly intended by Conan Doyle to arouse reader sympathy for all the kind-hearted mediums who had been jailed under this law-a law that, in fact, Conan Doyle risked his own life to protest in the last weeks before his death. The second is the exposure, conducted by Spiritualists themselves-with the aid of the yet uncommitted journalist Malone of the alcoholic ex-prizefighter whose brother is the same beleaguered genuine medium. The faker 'materializes' a spirit by clothing himself in white fabric. A suspicious Spiritualist snips a piece of the 'ectoplasmic' drapery and finds it to be ordinary cloth. Outraged, the Spiritualists later confront the would-be 'medium' and physically overpower him in order to convince him to give up his new trade. The third incident of the effort to expose fraud is Challenger's own cynical attempt some time later to catch the same poor medium, now at last out of jail, as he emerges from the cabinet (an enclosed space used by mediums to concentrate psychic power). Challenger has instructed a lumpish athlete to grab the 'materialization' in order to demonstrate that the 'ghost' is really the medium in disguise. In contrast to the discoveries of the Spiritualist group when exposing a truly fraudulent medium, however, in this case another point is made: When the lights are turned on and the medium is captured, the white material in which he has been clad has disappeared, proving to the Spiritualists that it was genuine ectoplasmic substance that has instantly been reabsorbed into the medium's body.
To a certain extent, perhaps in an effort to keep his narrative clearly focused, Conan Doyle's treatment of the issue of seance-room fraud is somewhat disingenuous. However impatient he may have been with the literature that explained the methods by which fraudulent mediums duped their followers, Conan Doyle certainly knew that the effort to control and analyze the physical phenomena of Spiritualism was a serious and intense challenge for any team that sought to nail down the certainty of genuineness. Hereward Carrington, that talented yet enigmatic American psychical researcher whose life still cries out for an objective biography, had contributed in 1907 a thick book called The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism, a close examination of the tricks of the mediumistic trade. In his preface to the 1920 edition, Carrington explains the necessity of caution:
The majority of sitters who attend séances are entirely unfitted either to judge the value of the evidence presented or to distinguish fraudulent from genuine phenomena and this is in no sense an insult to their intelligence. It is utterly impossible, as a rule, for the sitter-no matter how skeptical he may be to detect many of these tricks, without a knowledge of the actual methods employed, for they are practically undetectable. Only a wide general knowledge of legerdemain and the psychology of deception will render this possible. The methods of trickery are so numerous and so clever, the daring and the ingenuity of the pseudo-medium are so remarkable, that it is small wonder that the average sitter fails to detect the modus operandi; and hence comes away convinced that he has, in truth, seen genuine 'phenomena,' whereas he has seen but clever tricks and blatant fraud. The actual methods which are resorted to, by fraudulent mediums, in order to produce these seeming 'miracles,' are herein explained in full.
The reader must not draw the conclusion, from all this, that the author is a confirmed sceptic, or a complete disbeliever in genuine phenomena. On the contrary, I am fully convinced that genuine physical phenomena-even materializations-occur in a genuine manner. I myself have seen such phenomena, beheld such materializations--but such phenomena are rare; and today I believe as fully as when I wrote this book that 'ninety-eight percent of the physical phenomena are fraudulently produced,' and on re-reading the book I find scarcely a sentence which I should wish to alter, or even modify, were I to write it today.
Given the opportunity to alert his readers to the need for close and careful study, Conan Doyle chose instead in The Land of Mist to make the only fraud represented in the novel a gross and clumsy imposture. Should Malone or Challenger have witnessed the 98% mentioned by Carrington and caught, say, half a dozen or so at trickery, the case for the genuine occurrence of psi would have been stronger. But because the knightly author refused to believe that so many people could have behaved so treacherously, because his instinctive belief in the goodness and sincerity of ordinary people was so strong, and because his own sense of the overarching moral significance of the meaning of spirit communication led him to consider widespread fraud wildly improbable even outrageous — Conan Doyle weakened the foundation of the ultimate conversion of Professor Challenger. It is the common sense view that, if an investigator knows the methods of trickery, he will be able to avoid being imposed upon. Today, the organized opponents to psychical research-who tend to group careful laboratory studies along with astrology, UFOS, and the Loch Ness monster into the same category of problematic issues — are presently spearheaded by atheists and professional magicians, and their principal claim is that all alleged psychic phenomena occur because researchers and investigators are ignorant of the extent and variety of the practices of legerdemain. On the other hand, in the last several years, a new voice has emerged in parapsychological circles that seems to encourage the reopening of old and scorned research into such claims as movement of objects at a distance and spirit materializations. For example the brilliant and extraordinarily learned work of the late Brian Inglis has presented several arguments that cannot fail to set the most sceptical reader onto new paths of thought. Such approaches as these may, in time, come to rehabilitate Conan Doyle's universal reputation for excessive credulity and place his reflections instead into a new light — as creative speculation. For dramatic and novelistic purposes, however, The Land of Mist would have been strengthened enormously by a kind of picture frame of fraud out of which genuine phenomena might have been emphasized.
Even readers unaware of the details of possible fraud must find themselves asking questions about almost all of the allegedly genuine materializations discussed in the novel, and today's readers can scarcely be imagined to be impressed by the novel when television presents the apparently impossible achievements of professional magicians such as Penn and Teller or David Copperfield. Today we know we are watching trickery in such performances, and yet we cannot imagine how the illusions might have been accomplished. And that's the point of all the modern magicians' work.
Unfortunately, the alternative possibilities of legerdemain do not enter the minds of the novel's inquirers, and so what they see is convincing to them. Conan Doyle, who was also quite sure that Houdini accomplished his escapes through dematerialization, let the whole issue of trickery go by. This is, it seems to me, the principal failure of the novel, since it offers a picture of 98% sincere and genuine mediumship, instead of Carrington's more straightforwardly gloomy opposite assessment. Here Conan Doyle could have used a few triumphant exposures of clever fraud by a brash Challenger, who might very reasonably have spent some of his time reading such books as Carrington's. The bellicose scientist might have had several chapters in which he consulted with cautious and informed members of the Society for Psychical Research.
Again unfortunately, Conan Doyle was, at this time of his life, increasingly impatient with the SPR's tendency towards what he regarded as absurd over-cautiousness. He wanted to present the case for Spiritualistic events in its most dramatic and obviously genuine light. By satirizing the cautious attitude of psychical researchers and by underestimating the resourcefulness of fraudulent mediums, Conan Doyle again undermined the confidence of the general reader. This turned out to be a serious authorial mistake, since it inevitably made his readers lose confidence in the final turn — or twist — of Professor Challenger toward conviction in the reality of the paranormal.
Might he then have accomplished what 1990's television has somehow achieved? By providing accounts of over-the-top phenomena, would Conan Doyle have been able to make The Land of Mist a more convincing case? In the end, I don't think so. Hollywood's version of ghosts, poltergeists, and telekinesis seem always phoney and glossy. Conan Doyle tried it a little, I think, with the materialization of prehistoric figures in the novel, but even then he was keeping within the literature of psychical research. (It really was reported as he described it but it was not a Hollywood special effect.) It is, in fact, his very attention to truthful detail about the atmosphere of Spiritualism that might have been responsible in some part for the novel's failure.
The personal bereavements, religious reflections, and philosophical convictions of middle class shop keepers and tradespeople contain material of undoubted value to social historians-and anybody interested in such issues will find The Land of Mist an indispensable object of study, for it is the best and clearest picture of what the whole Spiritualist scene was like. (Two generations later, I found it little changed.) Not everyone would find it stimulating, however: T.H. Huxley might be forgiven for declining the opportunity to participate in seances on the grounds that he had no interest in what such people talked about when they were alive and he could see no reason why he'd want to listen in on them after their deaths. Though it smacks of academic arrogance, this point might also have troubled Conan Doyle, who wrote in 1926: 'The weaker side of Spiritualism lies in the fact that its adherents have largely been drawn from the less educated part of the community. The responsibility, of course, lies with the educated class who have not played their part. But the result has been to bring about a presentment of the philosophy which has often repelled earnest minds, and in no way represents its true scope and significance' (Doyle, 'The Psychic Question' 19). Yet because so much of the novel is concerned with the uneducated (though fine, good, and practical) people who are attracted to Spiritualism, and not very much with the drama of hard, critical, and earnest psychical researchers, there is little for the average reader to find himself or herself intrigued by. Ironically, Conan Doyle is here too truthful and accurate to be exciting or involving. So the problem of the book is not that he failed to be truthful or 'punch up' the phenomena, but that he did not bring out the positive findings of psychical research, set against the dark background of frequent and clever fraud. It seems to me that the great novel of Spiritualism must also be the great novel of psychical research. And that novel has yet to be composed.
III
Finally, what about the characters? If Conan Doyle is to be remembered for anything, is it not for his great characters? Challenger is without question-with Gerard on the second pedestal of critical regard after, of course, Holmes and Watson. However, few people have commented favourably on the characterization in The Land of Mist. I would like to try to reverse this trend by discussing the apparently more subtle characterizations in the novel.
Though Challenger is admittedly inadequately represented in the novel, the scenes he 'owns' (as they say in show business) are prime Conan Doyle. When he appears he is bereft of his wife, the only passion of his life apart from his devotion to his daughter and to scientific understanding. His demeanor may be softened by gloom, but he is still the same violent, opinionated, and gruff character he has always been. He presents problems for journalists and other opponents as he has always done, though some of his fire is said to be missing. Conan Doyle's humor is fully intact as he refers to himself as 'a daring author' who has previously placed Challenger (in The Lost World) 'in impossible and romantic situations'. Challenger has apparently sued ACD for libel, and a subsequent unspecified act of violence causes 'the loss of his position as lecturer in physiology at the London School of Subtropical Hygiene' — one of those many academic positions that Conan Doyle repeatedly and delightfully satirized subtly in other stories simply by mentioning their titles. Though Challenger is the same man, his personal loss seems to have made him 'less intolerant in learning', though his response to Spiritualism does not fall within his strictures of 'learning'. He knows nothing of psychical research.
Challenger arrogantly responds to his daughter's subtle twit about his having 'read it up at all'. But he doesn't feel he has to give the literature any attention: 'This matter is settled by common sense, the Law of England, and by the universal assent of every sane European'. Challenger's view of life is distinctly post-modern: 'There is no next morning,' he says, only 'night-eternal night... and long rest for the weary worker'. Malone opines, 'Well, it's a sad philosophy'. Challenger's response is succinct: 'Better a sad than a false one'. He adds gloomily but honestly to his daughter: 'Four buckets of water and a bagful of salts... That's your daddy, my lass'. Probably nothing Conan Doyle ever wrote so powerfully set forth the alternative hypothesis of materialism and personal extinction as clearly as this. Whether Challenger's position is, in the big picture, the true one, we can have no more brutally honest statement of the idea that death means the end of everything. The only thing that lightens this burden is our knowledge that before the novel ends, Challenger is certain to change his mind. When he does, in the last few pages, we (whatever our feeling on the truth or the falsity of the survival concept) cheer the obstinate professor in his new conviction.
Another criticism of the novel is that the central love story is undeveloped. Conan Doyle takes us aside to inform us from the start: "The love affair of Enid Challenger and Edward Malone is not of the slightest interest to the reader for the simple reason that it is not of the slightest interest to the writer... We deal in this chronicle with matters which are less common and of higher interest'. Despite this brilliantly funny disclaimer, the relationship between Enid and Edward Malone is fundamental to the novel's structure, since for both Enid and Malone, the psychic investigation becomes the procedure through which they bond as a couple. As R. Dixon Smith has noted elsewhere, 'Arthur Conan Doyle was an ardent champion of women's rights' (Smith 50), and Enid is a fully realized character with an active and inquiring mind. She not only stands up to her father's irascibility on several occasions, but she is shown in the end-Conan Doyle's highest compliment-to be a gifted medium herself.
Malone, too, grows as a character in this novel. A somewhat lightweight figure in The Lost World, Malone becomes a penetrating and passionate inquirer in The Land of Mist. At first completely ignorant of the world of psychical phenomena, Malone enters into the investigation of Spiritualism as part of his journalistic assignment. He is soon impressed by the simple earnestness of the Spiritualists, the sheer number of people who are interested in the possibility of contact with the dead, and the ordinary cheerful, sane, good-heartedness of the people in attendance. Both Enid and Edward are a little put off by the vagueness of the platform readings in which a little 'fishing' (as the magicians call it) takes place while the medium tries to locate someone in the crowd who is related to an allegedly psychical impression. Edward Malone's Irish sympathy for the underdog soon attracts him to these sincere Spiritualists, over against the supercilious and prejudiced views of his friends and acquaintances. By the novel's end, Malone can envision a future life so true and meaningful that the present one seems like a pale shadow of reality. It may be argued and it was probably felt by readers of the 1920's-that the movement from hard-minded career-oriented success in journalism to a conviction that one may chat with ghosts and see ectoplasmic materializations does not truly constitute growth in a character. But, when Malone witnessed living dinosaurs in The Lost World, he (and the other adventurers as well) is shown to be a person who has truly witnessed a reality that orthodox science has declared to be impossible. For some reason, the earlier novel caught the imaginations of generations of readers and excited the geniuses of film makers in a way that Spiritualistic phenomena have rarely done. The original 1925 version of The Lost World led to the greatest dinosaur film of all time, King Kong-a thematic remake of Conan Doyle's adventure-and most recently to the enormously successful Jurassic Park. Living dinosaurs have appeared in all kinds of films in the years that intervened. On the other hand, Spiritualistic phenomena have been represented in novels and films primarily as the artifices which detectives have been called upon to resolve as fraudulent. The popular films of recent years that represent ghostly phenomena as genuine, such as Poltergeist and Ghost, have not awakened interest in serious research into psychical matters. Instead, they are regarded as horror or fantasy works. Whatever the reasons for the failure of Conan Doyle's depiction of Malone's conversion, it seems to be most probably in the public's inability or unwillingness to find the concept of Spiritualism itself attractive or intriguing. I find it significant to note that The Stark Munro Letters, which deals in large part with the main character's spiritual movement from Christian orthodoxy to scientific agnosticism, is critically regarded with greater respect. Is it a better book? Perhaps so. Or is it that we readers think the transition from belief to doubt more intrinsically interesting-less uncomfortable than we do the opposite psychological transformation? Malone's conversion seems to me to be a very natural consequence of his investigation. Had any of us been afforded the opportunities that Malone enjoyed-completely bereft of any knowledge of the extensive potential of legerdemain-we might well have become converts ourselves. The clinching point of all of it, that Enid Challenger was herself a medium, might also convert anyone, should the same thing have happened to us. It's one thing to say a stranger is tricking us, but quite another when someone we know and love begins to go into trance and produce veridical material. Since Conan Doyle himself experienced this same crucial adventure when his own wife began to produce trance messages from a spirit guide who called himself Pheneas, Malone's development from open-minded inquirer to complete believer makes a great deal of sense. But equally, since this has not happened to most of the novel's readers, it seems unconvincing. That does not seem to me to be Conan Doyle's fault. It seems, in fact, to be his point.
Lord Roxton, the big-game hunter and adventurer from The Lost World makes an appearance as he accompanies some inquirers to a haunted house investigation. Though the details are based on a real case, the adventure reads like a gothic horror tale, but its ending is a happy one when an earnest Spiritualist brings the violently disturbed ghost a little peace of mind. It is nice to see Lord Roxton again.
Some of the characters in the novel are, as Conan Doyle admits in his appendix to Land of Mist, real people in disguise as fictional creations. Charles Richet makes an appearance in person, with his name included, but for some reason—perhaps the people themselves refused permission for their inclusion-Conan Doyle conceals their names in the text, though in an appendix, he identifies his 'Dr Maupuis' as the late Gustave Geley of the Institute Metapsychique. It is easy to identify 'Mervin' in Chapter Four, who is the 'editor of the psychic paper Dawn', with David Gow, the editor of Light. Charles Higham notes, 'Mr. and Mrs. Hewat McKenzie, the Reverend Vale Owen (a leading spiritualist), Dr. Geley, Felicia Scatherd, and Conan Doyle himself appear in disguise in the book, Conan Doyle as 'Algernon Mailey' (Higham 318). Mailey is unmistakably a Doylean self-portrait: his great, larger-than-life expansive geniality and straightforwardness, his interest in helping 'lost souls,' and even the language he uses identity him. Mailey explains his devotion to spreading the truth of Spiritualism: 'Now I am all out for it, as you are aware, because I know it is true. There is such a difference between believing and knowing' (Chapter Four).
The final, and oddest, difficulty in the characters of this novel is that many of them are dead people, whom we encounter in seances. The deceased Professor Summerlee (another old Lost World friend) makes a bid for after-death recognition at a public Spiritualist service, and Mrs Challenger's effort to break through the barrier of death makes a touching and persuasive appearance. But the greatest number of dead characters are unhappy for one of two reasons: either they are unable to convince their living loved ones of their continued existence, or they are -for one reason or another-unaware of their own condition. The former group seems to be woefuily obsessed by the need to communicate to loved ones who are yet in bodily form, but who would-like most of Conan Doyle's readers-prefer to think about something else. The deceased communicators' frustrations seem designed to impress upon us the need for each of us to attend seances, if only to release the pressure of those lined up in the other world to tell us that they are alive and well in a wonderful place-which, in my experience, is the primary content of seance-room messages, as Conan Doyle truthfully shows us here. The latter situation was one of Conan Doyle's most passionate concerns in his home circle, and this novel indulges his interest in the reclamation of confused and/or narrow-minded spirit communicators whose living prejudices or sins have made their adjustment to the experience of afterlife difficult. In standard Christian tracts, people who are not informed about God's requirements for us are alerted that they will suffer later; Conan Doyle's depiction of spirits who, when living, were ignorant of Spiritualism's truth, shows us a similar and no more subtle warning. If we do not become aware of what happens to us when we die, we are all likely to experience confusion, despair, and misery. Unfortunately for the novel, this dark emphasis fails to involve the reader-for exactly the reason that we often feel imposed upon by anyone who tells us that his own religious philosophy is the only true one, and dire depictions of the fate of unbelievers tend rather quickly to become tiresome. A more reflective objection to these warnings is that we have, due to the peculiar circumstances of their origin, no more rational warrant for accepting them as factual than we do for statements made by living people in altered states of consciousness, even when impressive or veridical material might accompany these utterances. Conan Doyle would regard such reserve as wrong-headed: If, after all, a communicating spirit manages to identity himself or herself adequately, why shouldn't we believe the communicator's accounts of other worldly surroundings and experiences? Since such accounts cannot be tested in the way veridical material can be examined, the psychical researcher must regretfully leave them aside; obviously, such details might come from the entranced medium's own memories of having read the standard literature of Spiritualism.
But these objections aside, The Land of Mist's characters are less clumsy or artificial than critics have suggested. I have tried to argue that this is not so simple. Challenger is very much himself-though Pierre Nordon not unreasonably cavils against Challenger's 'unaccustomed situation. Usually the pioneer or defender of revolutionary theories, he now has to play the part of the incredulous rationalist'. Nordon also adds, his the only voice to say so, 'His unexpected capitulation [at story's end] in its own way represents Conan Doyle's spiritual development' (Nordon 333). Though he recalls that 'dismay was widespread' when readers learned of the topic of Conan Doyle's new Challenger novel, Sam Moskowitz, the venerable historian of early science fiction, comments: 'The characterization is as splendid as ever and the novel has some poignant moments, even though the body of the story is episodic and tarnished by preachments' (Moskowitz 170). Indeed, Malone, Enid, Mailey, and others are credibly presented, and their discussions and experiences are, in general, depicted with great fidelity to the actual facts of Spiritualistic literature. In short, the reason this novel has the unfortunate reputation it has is not to be credited to faulty characterization.
IV
Ironically, then, the failure of this novel to find either in its own time or in ours a wide and loyal readership must be set down to the success with which Conan Doyle realized his aims. He intended to write a basically truthful account of Spiritualism in Engiand as it existed in the 1920s, and he did. He showed through character dialogue the problematic place Spiritualism held in the minds of scientists, of ordinary educated men, and of members of mainstream religions. Though he insisted that the inquiry into the unknown realm of psychic phenomena was a grand adventure, the very care with which he drew the picture of such research made it seem dreary, dull, and delusional. Some of the most lively dialogue apart from that involving Challenger himself-arises from arguments and debates among characters opposing Spiritualism; yet here, again truthfully, the only victory Malone achieves is to expose the fact that Spiritualism's opponents have not read the literature of the field. Carrion comfort, indeed.
By narrowing his focus to sincere Spiritualists, the author had to leave out all of the colourful charlatans and confidence tricksters that flocked to the banner of Summerland. Of course, Conan Doyle's own convictions prevented him from exploiting the drama and suspense of the near exposure of a fraudulent seance effect; instead, the fraudulent activity that is described is so clumsy and so transparent that the Spiritualists are able to expose it themselves. Conan Doyle's suspicion of the motives and integrity of psychical researchers further undermines the element of crime and detection that might enliven the great parapsychological novel that remains unwritten. Just as the issue of fraud and its exposure is clumsy and uninteresting, so too are the masses of bereaved inquirers who are shown to throng to Spiritualist meetings in search of some pathetic thread of evidence, from which they wish to hang their hopes for a conscious afterlife. Conan Doyle describes these people accurately and even wittily, but their drab, colourless, middle class lives-which the author hoped would provide their common-sense bona fides-fail to provide colour, drama, or excitement. Finally, and once again because the author took pains to be accurate, even the evidence itself is dull and unconvincing. 'Realism pushed to its extreme limits...', observes Watson in 'A Case of Identity', 'is, it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor artistic'. The messages from the Other Side are weak and ambiguous-confused because of the atmosphere provided by crowds or by the hostile vibrations of sceptical inquirers. The materializations are described in such a way that they remind the reader of conjuring acts performed on the public stage, and the difference between a magic show and a genuine seance for materialization is not adequately clarified. Even the pivotal experience of Professor Challenger and the mediumistic trance of Enid lack clarity: Could not a grieving husband experience an auditory hallucination that recalls a secret or coded knock? Could not a family member-seeing that a living loved one longs for communication with a deceased loved one-out of some secret psychological depths, begin to experience self-deceptive symptoms of genuine mediumship? These normal alternative possibilities to account for what is meant to be the philosophical punch-line of the novel and the linchpin of the hero's conversion are not considered, very probably because Conan Doyle would not have considered such alternatives himself.
It is to be hoped that this novel will find new readers who belong to that current school of literary criticism known as 'new historicism'. These critics often approach a work not in search of literary merit, but look rather at the social forces and conventions in operation at the time the work appeared. The Land of Mist will offer such workers a rich mine of opportunities for analysis, and it may in fact be the only way in which this disappointing but major effort by Conan Doyle will find any hope of renewed life.
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- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
