The Other Worlds of Arthur Conan Doyle
The Other Worlds of Arthur Conan Doyle is an article written by Thomas R. Tietze published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 1, No. 3) in september 1990.
The article surveys Arthur Conan Doyle's non-Sherlockian "weird" fiction, showing how his gothic, occult, and proto–science-fiction stories explore hidden realities beyond rational explanation. It argues that these imaginative "other worlds" reveal a consistent fascination with ambiguity, psychic phenomena, and unseen forces that anticipate Conan Doyle's later spiritual beliefs.
The Other Worlds of Arthur Conan Doyle
Part One
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle contributed a large number of articles, serials, and short stories to the wide variety of periodicals available to the ever-growing reading public of turn-of the century England, of which a great many were darkly imaginative, gothic tales constituting a part of a literary sub-genre which interested many other major writers of the time. (1) Indeed, Leigh Hunt asserted in the time of Conan Doyle's youth:
- A man who does not contribute his quota of grim story, now-a-days, seems hardly to be free of the republic of letters. (2)
These weird tales ranged from artful attempts to make a reader's flesh crawl and comic satires of ignorance and superstition, to insightful portraits of the most frightening spectres of all the monsters that haunt the subconscious; which tales exploit our intellectual securities, spiritual uncertainties, and primal fears.
Few critics have chosen to comment upon these less enduring efforts of Conan Doyle, preferring instead to concentrate up on the (at least superficially) more comforting Holmes stories, in which the odd, bizarre, and mysterious elements of life are finally resolved in terms of normal human motives and normal physical explanations.
For nearly a hundred years, students of literature have taken the stories of Holmes and Watson to heart, finding pleasure in the analytic capacities of a highly trained intellect bringing order into apparent chaos, and a unique warmth in the comradeship of two men who, in the words of Vincent Starrett, "never lived, and so can never die."
For most readers of Conan Doyle, the unsettling mysteries of life appear to have been brought into recognisable frameworks by the activity of rational thought: Sherlock Holmes became, in his own time, and continues to be in ours, a symbol of the triumph of reason over the dark powers and influences of the irrational and the impossible; a significance which is directly expressed in the most popular of the novels, The Hound of The Baskervilles.
Yet, Conan Doyle himself failed to find the same level of reward in writing of Holmes and Watson as millions of others have found in reading of them. It is tempting to speculate that in his fiction, as well as in his philosophy, Conan Doyle resisted the reduction of mystery to closed, air-tight compartments of smug reality. For readers whose knowledge of Conan Doyle is limited to his best-known work, his conversion in 1915 to a belief in ghosts, spirit communication and, later, elemental fairies seems anomalous and bizarre. Had "poor Sherlock Holmes", as a rather tactless American magazine of the time wondered, gone "hopelessly crazy?" (3) Had an aging father lost his mind, or at least all critical faculty, upon learning of his son's death in The Great War?
In fact, a close examination of Conan Doyle's gothic fiction sheds new light upon his ultimate religious convictions, and reveals how deeply rooted were certain interests and inclinations which would become the foundations of his conversion.
These personal concerns that work their way into his non-Sherlockian fiction, also appear in the Holmes tales, but intriguing aspects of Conan Doyle's imagination are revealed when it is free of the Baker Street formula. The imaginative themes seem to group themselves into several, often interacting, categories.
Conan Doyle's images of the mysterious and uncanny, range from genuine supernatural or preternatural experiences, to natural events which only seem to be supernatural; and to tales of pure, earthly terror concerned with the darkest corners of human personality. Intertwining with these images, as a constant subtext, is Conan Doyle's bold interest in the connections of fear, love, sex, death, decay and resurrection concerns which had been a vital part of the weird tale since Walpole, but which Conan Doyle handled with a grimly masterful frankness unusual among his peers.
I
That the boundaries of nature needed enlargement in order accommodate newly discovered facts is implicit in several stories, particularly the Professor Challenger series. Challenger, an Assyrian-bearded giant, whose intellect and ego are equally outsized, was, next to Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle's most popular creation and was the author's preferred brainchild. The massive Challenger makes a habit of declaring that what the majority of his scientific colleagues assert is impossible is, nevertheless, true, and he takes an alarming pleasure in throwing representatives of the fourth estate down flights of stairs. Though the fiction anticipates the facts of Conan Doyle's own espousal of occult "truths", and his own battles with the press, it is not difficult to see Challenger as his creator's fantasy extension; the suggestion is even less speculative when we recall that Conan Doyle himself donned a Challenger disguise in order to play the role in a faked portrait of the Challenger expedition which was to appear as the frontispiece of the book The Lost World. Conan Doyle is also reported as dressing up as the volcanic character on another occasion in order to play a practical joke on his brother-in-law, Raffles author, E. W. Hornung. (4)
Challenger's adventures begin with The Lost World, serialised in The Strand Magazine in 1912. He has recently returned from a South American expedition which has revealed the existence of a hitherto unknown plateau inhabited by prehistoric creatures, believed by orthodox scientists to have been long extinct. (Photographs of some of the beasts which Challenger produces are pronounced by the grave minions of science to be fraudulent.
In order to vindicate himself, Challenger challenges the scientific community to finance an expedition to prove that his story is a lie. They agree, and one of literature's most delightful, satiric, and suspenseful novels leaps into action. In a lively combination of Jonathan Swift, H. G. Wells, and Rider Haggard, The Lost World celebrates scientific genius in defence of British Imperialism, as it illustrates the genocide of a race of ape-men and establishes the supremacy of a population of "Indians" — clearly a "higher" type. It also presents a satire of the trivial controversies which engage learned scientists in the face of more practical considerations — such as survival. In the closing chapters, the explorers return from their dangerous adventures. Then, before a hall filled with sceptical scientists, they demonstrate the existence of the still-living prehistoric animals: Challenger has brought back a live pterodactyl, and he releases it in the crowded hall!
The Poison Belt (1913), relates Challenger's attempt to save a world passing through an astronomical belt of chemicals which will destroy all life on earth.
Interestingly, Conan Doyle forgoes an opportunity to speculate on what it would be like to be the last people on earth. Instead, the survivors learn that the effects of the poison are only temporary; the world comes back to life in a fictional representation of Resurrection Day. (5)
In When The World Screamed (1928), Challenger has developed a theory that the earth is a sensate organism and endeavours to prove it by driving a shaft into the nerve-centre of the planet. The title tells the rest. The Disintegration Machine (1929), has Challenger learning of an unscrupulous scientist who has invented a device to disintegrate matter on a wide scale. Fortunately, the machine has a re-integration lever. Seeing the international implications of the device, Challenger tricks the inventor into stepping into the machine, pulls the disintegrating lever, and (as Sherlock Holmes often does) takes the law into his own hands by not bringing back the mad scientist.
These stories indicate Conan Doyle's interest in the relation of mind and matter, with a strong suggestion that matter is a kind of limited, temporary phenomenon, while mind is universal and eternal. In all five stories, things or people or animals, assumed to be dead, are shown to be really alive.
These tales represent Conan Doyle's increasing interest in what would later be called science fiction and establish him, with Verne, Wells, and a handful of others, as a pioneer of a developing genre. Still, there is an ever-present theme of the Great Man asserting a truth, essentially spiritual, which the world at large sees fit to reject: There were more things, after all, in heaven and earth, than contemporary science wished to allow.
Because Conan Doyle preferred Challenger to Holmes, he used the bellicose scientist in preference to the careful detective, as the principal character investigating the claims of Spiritualism. The Land of Mist (1926) is a weak novel, and really a work of propaganda. It is riddled with factual errors, indicating Conan Doyle's notoriously cavalier treatment of details at least with regard to developments in psychical research. Moreover, its exhortatory tone reveals his resentment of those who held an antagonistic view of Spiritualism.
But Conan Doyle's interests in borderland scientific discoveries, as well as his apparent acceptance of a non-physical component within the human personality, had figured significantly in an earlier work, The Ring of Thoth (1890). In this tale, a reclusive scholarly expert (a type frequently figuring in Conan Doyle's gothic fiction) meets a man who has lived for four thousand years; an Ancient Egyptian, who has discovered a formula capable of extending human life indefinitely. One of the earliest imaginative works to explore the psychological stress of eternal life in a physical body, The Ring of Thoth tells feelingly of a man who watches all that he knows and loves gradually pass away while he continues to live, unable to find the release of death. Though this is, ostensibly, a weird tale, still the protracted life and the release from it, are brought about by chemical compounds and not occult spells.
Two other stories blend science and the occult by suggesting the possibility of alternative life forms above and beneath the earth, both the results of purely biological processes, yet unrecognised by orthodox scientists. In The Terror of Blue John Gap (1910), one of Conan Doyle's most frequently anthologised non-Sherlockian stories, Dr. James Hardcastle, convalescing on the verge of a nervous breakdown, becomes convinced that a mysterious force lives within a cave just outside a remote English village. Entering the cave, he finds evidence of a huge animal which leaves great sponge-like footprints in the moist earth. This beast, he conjectures, has emerged from its lair to steal sheep and even catch and kill people. Moved by the idea that only he can save the world from this subterranean monster, Hardcastle plunges into the depths of the cave and finds a huge, blind, bear-like thing which instantly attacks him. He shoots it as it charges towards him. Blacking out, the man cannot be sure that he has indeed killed the monster, and the rescue party which has discovered him has seen no signs of the dead animal. When he recovers sufficiently, he closes off the cave's opening, secure in the knowledge that he has saved humanity from the depredations of a form of life that has developed, he theorises, along parallel, but different, evolutionary lines within the earth while the outside world has remained unaware of its existence.
- "I think of the old world legends of dragons and other monsters," says Hardcastle. "Were they, perhaps, not such fairy tales as we have thought? Can it be that there is some fact which underlies them, and am I, of all mortals, the one who is chosen to expose it?"
A masterful building of suspense, taking us from a sickbed to the impenetrable darkness of the cave, and an expertly paced revelation of the terror within, make this one of Conan Doyle's most effective chillers; but, throughout, he handles the facts of the case consistently from Hardcastle's point of view that of a man on the edge of neurosis. With fine Hawthornian ambiguity, Conan Doyle leaves us to wonder if this adventure has taken place within a cave in the earth or in the dark recesses of the narrator's mind.
A parallel tale is The Horror of The Heights (1913). A subtitle informs us that this narrative "includes the manuscript known as the Joyce-Armstrong Fragment", a narrative technique which, in reducing the author to the role of editor and assembler of materials, increases the verisimilitude of the fantastic events to be related. Again building the events slowly through first person narration, Conan Doyle effectively suspends reader disbelief as he follows an aeroplane pilot's investigation of another pilot's mysterious death. Troubled by Occasional bouts of malarial fever, pilot Joyce-Armstrong becomes obsessed with Lieutenant Myrtle's unaccountable fall from thirty thousand feet. "Horrible to relate, his head was entirely obliterated, though his body and limbs preserved their configuration." At every gathering of airmen, Joyce-Armstrong would ask with an enigmatic smile: "And where, pray, is Myrtle's head?"
Ascending to those unexplored altitudes in the early years of aeronautics, Joyce-Armstrong gathers increasing evidence of something unearthly that lives in the spheres outside the clouds. Finally he sees them great, floating, pink, jellyfish-like creatures, beautiful and treacherous. As the huge translucent monsters float towards his craft, Joyce-Armstrong scribbles frantically in his diary, to the very end:
- "Forty-three thousand feet. I shall never see the earth again. They are beneath me, three of them. God help me; it is a dreadful death to die!"
Above us in the air, below us in the earth, away from us on a remote plateau, weird biological forms — monsters — exist and threaten the stable, rationalistic view of life encouraged by orthodox scientists. In a genre that invited tales of travel to other planets, Conan Doyle never had to leave the earth to find material for imaginative horror.
II
Conan Doyle's fictional explorations of natural science and its imaginative extensions were supplemented by his life-long fascination with the early investigations of borderline psychological experiences. Hypnosis, then still commonly called "magnetism", had only just come into reserved acceptance by practicing psychologists. At the turn of the century, telepathy, clairvoyance, and out-of-the-body experiences also seemed eerily plausible to the magazine-reading public. A generation whose parents had to wrestle with the findings of Darwin, the philosophy of Spencer, and the arguments of Huxley, found itself peculiarly open to the provisionally affirmative findings of The Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882. Conan Doyle joined the S.P.R. in 1883, after several years of independent and casual research. As psychical research grew as a discipline, undreamt-of depths of human error revealed themselves as researchers found not only affirmative and intriguing evidence in favour of new human potentials, but also increasing and discouraging indications that perception was a puzzling mixture of what was there and what was expected to be there. (6) Sitters at seances would swear that they were certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they were seeing the materialised features of their deceased relatives, when in fact they were looking at a bit of muslin flung hastily over a broomstick by a fraudulent medium. As the evidence increased, Conan Doyle would become ever more impatient with the reserved and careful findings of the psychical researchers. But in the 90's and early years of this century, Conan Doyle found his imagination stimulated by the first findings of this new branch of science. It is to be expected, that these odd human experiences would find their way into his fiction.
In fact his second novel, The Mystery of Cloomber (1888), already shows the interest the youthful Conan Doyle took in the occult as it might be exploited in fiction. This rather derivative tale concerns a retired British general who has moved his family to a remote part of Scotland, there to fortify an old house against all intrusion or even against military attack. It soon transpires in this rapidly moving account, that Major-General J.B. Heatherstone is haunted by a curse, ultimately explained by a posthumously discovered document. In his imperialistic and racist youthful zeal, Heatherstone had earned his measure of military glory by wiping out an appalling number of native rebels in an isolated gorge in India. The climax of this 1841 exploit was the brutal execution of a centuries-old mystic who had tried to warn the white soldiers that they faced the wrath of the gods for their intrusion into a holy place of meditation. Heatherstone needlessly ran the old master through with his sword, while a gunner smashed the dying man's skull with the butt of his carbine. That night, Heatherstone was visited by a mysterious figure who told him that the British soldier had violated an absolute prohibition by killing a man who had been preparing himself for an ultimate mystical connection with God. The punishment would be a lingering one: He would certainly be executed, but when he was never to know.
This curse, which made the intervening four decades a living hell for Heatherstone, finally comes to fulfilment in remote Cloomber, when three mysterious Orientals compel Heatherstone to throw himself into the bottomless "Hole of Cree". The novel is more effective than Conan Doyle himself believed, since he apparently regarded it as weak and juvenile. (7) But its primary interest for us here is the evidence it affords of Conan Doyle's reading of occult literature, including the theosophical writings of A.P. Sinnett in his The Occult World, which is quoted in an Addendum to the tale, apparently to give the reader some assurance that there is a solid body of knowledge in occultism that supports and elucidates the events he has just related. And something of the future attitude of the mature Conan Doyle is adumbrated by his selection of the naively visionary Sinnett as an authority on the truths so obscure to Western thinkers, as well as by the straightforward injunction in Chapter XIV:
- "Our men of science," says Heatherstone, "must recognise powers and laws which can and have been used by man, but which are unknown to European civilisation."
Three decades later, Conan Doyle would be proclaiming the same truth in his apologetical work.
Five years earlier, in 1883, Conan Doyle had published The Winning Shot, another occult tale which foreshadows Stoker's Dracula. Here, a female narrator relates the intrusion into a cosily remote English village of another mysterious stranger:
- The moon shining full upon him revealed a long, thin face of ghastly pallor, the effect being increased by its contrast with the flaring green necktie which he wore.
- A scar upon his cheek had healed badly and caused a nasty pucker at the side of his mouth, which gave his whole countenance a most distorted expression, more particularly when he smiled... There was something in his angular proportions and the bloodless face which, taken in conjunction with the black cloak which fluttered from his shoulders, irresistibly reminded me of a blood-sucking species of bat.
This weird character, Octavius Gaster, later has a discussion with other characters which reveals his "knowledge" of the occult, including a reference to the famous medium Daniel Dunglas Home:
- "Did not Home, the spiritualist, in open daylight, float above the housetops of Paris?" (Conan Doyle's characteristic casualness about the facts of psychical research is thus given an early example: the famous levitation took place at night, in London, and it only involved Home making an exit from one window and an entrance into the window of the next room. Though the case remains one of the most unresolvable riddles of psychical research, it may be significant that Conan Doyle's creative imagination had distorted the events.)
In the climax of the tale at a shooting contest, the vampiristic arch-occultist telepathically convinces a marksman that his own apparition has been built up psychically between himself and the rifle target. Because no one else can see the etheric double, the shooter reluctantly takes aim at the target through the apparition. As the crowd cheers the winning shot, someone discovers that the marksman himself has been killed by his own bullet. No evidence exists in the literature of psychical research of anyone physically causing the illusion of a person's own apparition to appear before the percipient himself; still less, of course, is there any finding supporting the idea that a man might kill himself by shooting his own etheric double. Nevertheless, Conan Doyle thought the idea worthy of his imaginative fiction.
Conan Doyle returned to speculations about the possible evil application of psychic abilities in a short novel entitled The Parasite (1894), which concerns a mysterious, elderly, deformed woman who has peculiar powers of influence over others. The narrator, young Professor Gilroy, finds himself the unlucky object of the oddly fascinating Miss Penelosa's affection. In short order, the parasitic hypnotist uses her powers at a distance and robs Gilroy of his will to resist her. Except for an illness which deprives her of the psychic energy needed to over-rule Gilroy's love for his fiancée, Gilroy would have found himself the unwilling lover of the eerie old woman and the unconscious agent of her vengeance. He has. in a trance, actually gone to his fiancée's home with a vial of acid, which Miss Penelosa has hypnotically / telepathically compelled him to throw in the young woman's face. Fortunately, he comes to himself suddenly and in time. Miss Penelosa has died at just that moment, the strain of her efforts to control Gilroy having proved too much for her weakened body. Here, as elsewhere, Conan Doyle sensed that the darkest of all terrors is the loss of personal control, the fear of madness, the possibility of possession by a superior will.
The Great Keinplatz Experiment (1885), deals with another psychical phenomenon: the out-of-body experience. In a century of research, parapsychologists have learned that, under various sorts of stress, people have reported experiencing a separation of consciousness from their physical bodies, and some have even reported an ability to control this sensation intentionally. Whether these reports are based on hallucination or actual separation of mind and body remains, of course, an open question; but Conan Doyle chose to use this experience as the basis for one of his most madcap, comic weird tales. (The hint, which may have originated in a popular novel, Vice Versa, by F. Anstey, (8) was so provocative that both P. G. Wodehouse (Laughing Gas) and Thorne Smith (Turnabout) would expand the idea into novels.) Elderly Alexis von Baumgarten, Regius Professor of Physiology at the University of Keinplatz, has spent a lifetime exploring "the ill-defined relations between mind and matter." A closet occultist, von Baumgarten hopes "to build up a new exact science which should embrace mesmerism, spiritualism, and all cognate subjects." The great experiment of the title is an effort to prove that the souls of mesmerised people actually leave their bodies. In order to examine this theory, the Professor puts young roisterer Fritz von Hartmann under hypnosis. (Fritz has volunteered for the experiment in exchange for the Professor's permission to marry his daughter Elise. The Professor gladly agrees upon learning that Fritz's love is returned by Elise. He offers an encomium on the boy couched in terms more appropriate to the enthusiastic academician than to the doting father.) In order to see first-hand what happens to young Fritz's soul, the Professor puts himself into a trance at the same time, so that "our spirits may be able to commune together, though our bodies lie still and inert. After a time nature will resume her sway, our spirits will return into our respective bodies, and all will be as before."
But, of course, all is not. Though all the scientific witnesses of the experiment go out thinking the whole affair a failure, as a matter of fact one of the most wonderful things in the whole history of the world has just occurred. In fact, young Fritz and old von Baumgarten have, unknown to them, switched bodies. As the story proceeds, each personality has a number of unexpected and inappropriate experiences. The Professor is abducted by his students, who think he is their fun-loving friend, Fritz. Later, he goes to his own home, berates his wife and fends off the amorous intentions of his daughter, who, of course, thinks that he is her young lover. Young Fritz, meanwhile, inhabits the Professor's body. He goes to a tavern, gets drunk with the students, and announces his forthcoming marriage. It is a comedy of the most rollicking and slapstick sort, and, before the situation is finally resolved, several hilarious confusions have taken place.
The satire here is delightful: stern academicians see a miracle but do not recognise it; students laugh, sing and drink to excess instead of studying; and the respective victims of the experiment remain unaware of the problem until they finally resolve it by reversing the process during a second try at the experiment. Obviously, their experiences are still not believed and, when all is restored to order, each has to bear up with the startlingly atypical behaviours they have engaged in during their weird exchange. Specialists, authorities, and experts are fun satiric targets, and Conan Doyle makes the most of it. That the experiment takes place in Keinplatz, suggests that it could happen anywhere.
An intriguingly ambitious tale about an overworked accountant who is close to mental collapse, and (apparently as a consequence of his disability) becomes increasingly psychic, The Silver Mirror (1908) suggests Conan Doyle's flirtation with the relation between the paranormal and the abnormal. People who are mentally ill do sometimes have delusional experiences but, this story wonders, what if the delusional system the patient is experiencing is actually true? The accountant's antique mirror shows him visions when he has been overworking. Because, as he later learns, his mirror came from the Palace at Holyrood, it shows him a record of the murder of Rizzio in the presence of Mary Queen of Scots. If his visions were delusional, how then did they contain so many correct details?
A genuinely sinister story involving parapsychological phenomena is The Leather Funnel (1903), which takes the implications of psychometry with deadly seriousness. Told in the first person by a student of Babylonian linguistics, The Leather Funnel creates an atmosphere of suspense and brooding horror as the narrator visits his friend, Lionel Dacre, in his Parisian home, with its singular library of occult literature and the fantastic curiosities which served as a hobby for himself and an amusement for his friends. Dacre collects materials related to magic and mysticism, but "to his English friends he never alluded to such matters, and took the tone of the student...; but a Frenchman whose tastes were of the same nature has assured me that the worst excesses of the Black Mass have been perpetrated in that large and lofty hall, which is lined with the shelves of his books and the cases of his museum."
Since this restrained language refers obliquely to obscenity, blasphemy, and human sacrifice, one may wonder why the narrator has chosen to pay this call; nevertheless, he finds the place both charming and congenial. Dacre has a peculiar new acquisition to display and a peculiar request to make. He wants his visitor to sleep with the curious old leather funnel near his head. The narrator complies after he learns from Dacre that some objects "intimately associated with any supreme paroxysm of human emotion... will retain a certain atmosphere or association which it is capable of communicating to a sensitive mind." That night he has a wildly disturbing dream about a woman who is being interrogated by renaissance torturers. The woman is tied, spread-eagled, on a wooden horse; an interrogator approaches with the same leather funnel and a bucket of water. Then, "with horrible energy he thrust it — but I could stand no more. My hair stood on end with horror. I writhed, I struggled, I broke through the bonds of sleep, and I burst with a shriek into my own life..."
His dream has vividly recreated the facts surrounding the death of a seventeenth-century murderess, whose inquisitors filled her body with three buckets of water before she died. Only in the last line of the story, does the narrator make clear that the funnel had been thrust into the woman's mouth an omission of a detail that leaves other anatomical possibilities sinisterly present.
III
In addition to his interest in mainstream psychical phenomena, Conan Doyle was intrigued by the increasing evidence suggesting human survival of bodily death currently being collected and analysed by the psychical researchers. As the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research established a style and a level of careful, cautious accuracy, the ghost story as a genre responded only very subtly to the scientific influence. Conan Doyle's half-dozen fictional essays in that field were unaffected by his knowledge of psychical research, except that he took pains to establish the academic credentials of the people whom these bizarre experiences befell.
Thus, in The Brown Hand (1899), the haunted man is a famous Indian surgeon, Sir Dominick Holden, who has returned to England to retire in the calm study of comparative pathology. His nephew, Dr. Hardacre, is the narrator of the tale. He has been called to his uncle's side to help him with a singular problem: Holden is being haunted by the ghost of an Indian whose hand he had amputated. Dr. Hardacre, a neurologist, has devoted a great deal of attention to psychical research and recalls for his uncle his experiences when, as a member of the Psychical Research Society, [he] had formed one of a committee of three who spent the night in a haunted house. (In fact, this is autobiographical: In 1892 or 1893, Conan Doyle has investigated a haunted house with Frank Podmore, one of the most thoroughly informed, yet determinedly sceptical, of the early parapsychologists. (9)) Sir Dominick explains that the apparition of the Indian has returned nightly to plague the scholar's rest as it searches for its lost hand. The hand itself had been lost in a fire along with many other pathological specimens which the surgeon kept. Dr. Hardacre solves the problem by providing the ghost with the amputated hand of a Lascar who had recently been caught in the workings of a steam winch. A note of grim humour is effected when, on the first attempt to appease the ghost, Dr. Hardacre realises that he has brought a left hand, when the apparition requires a right one! Hardacre hastily repairs to the hospital and fetches the remaining Lascar hand; and, on the following night, the ghost, satisfied at last, departs with the brown hand forever.
The Captain of the Pole-Star (1883), is an unusual ghost story, the setting of which was based on Conan Doyle's own youthful voyage aboard a polar whaling vessel. In his autobiography he recalled:
- "It is a region of purity, of white ice and blue water, with no human being dwelling within a thousand miles to sully the freshness of the breeze which blows across the ice-fields. And then it is a region of romance also. You stand on the very brink of the unknown." (9)
There was, he said, "a peculiar other-world feeling" in the Arctic, a feeling which he brings fully to life in The Captain of the Pole-Star, a romantic and mysterious tale of a whaling vessel captain haunted by a lost love whose spectre appears to him from time to time, beckoning to him across the ice floes. Other crewmen see the apparition at times, though to some it appears to be a bear or a swirl of snow. Again, as he often does, Conan Doyle employs Hawthorne's technique of indirection to heighten the mystery: Is the phantom real? Or is it an illusion shaped to meet what the perceiver expects to see? Eyewitnesses contribute their own interpretations of the ghostly sightings imaginatively. A mysterious sea captain straight out of Melville's dark broodings keeps peering over the bows, scanning the white horizon for the sight of something, though what it is, the crew can only surmise. The text is "an extract from the singular Journal of John M'Allster Ray, student of medicine", and so is composed of episodes recorded each evening; the writer thus can have some understanding of what has happened earlier but cannot, until the final entry, write about the voyage as a whole. This technique of parcelled-out incidents, with each entry becoming more and more dramatic as the story proceeds, creates a sense of tension and confusion as the plot rises to its climax, as well as a sense of the narrator's gradual realisation that something is actually occurring before his eyes and ears — something which his rational mind and his materialistic philosophy must utterly reject.
Finally, Captain Craigie does jump ship and runs across the ice, out of sight of his men. When they find him, it is too late.
- He was lying face downward upon a frozen bank. Many little crystals of ice and feathers of snow had drifted onto him as he lay, and sparkled upon his dark seaman's jacket. As we came up, some wandering puff of wind caught these tiny flakes in its vortex and they whirled up into the air, partially descended again, and then, caught once more in the current, sped rapidly away in the direction of the sea. To my eyes it seemed but a snow-drift, but many of my companions averred that it started up in the shape of a woman, stooped over the corpse and kissed it, and then hurried away across the floe.
This delicacy and restraint, this unexplained mystery of the obsessed captain and the ghost, never really are abandoned, though the tale ends with a "Note by Dr. John M'Allster Ray, Senior", which on first sight appears to explain the background of Captain Craigie, but which actually presents yet another set of unanswered questions. Dr. Ray, Senior, familiar with his son's journal. has met a man who once knew Craigie.
- According to his account, [Craigie] had been engaged to a young lady of singular beauty residing upon the Cornish coast. During his absence at sea his betrothed had died under circumstances of peculiar horror.
But what does this tell us? The text conceals far more than it reveals. Why, for instance, the polar regions for the deadly rendezvous? What was the captain's share of responsibility in his betrothed's death? Above all, what were the circumstances of peculiar horror surrounding her death? As Jack Sullivan has observed of Sheridan Le Fanu's ghost stories:
- "We are given just enough information to convince us that the experience is authentic, but never quite enough to exorcise the experience through reason. Specificity has an ominous way of leading vagueness, always with the implication that the reader is finally as ignorant of a diabolical truth as the victim in the story and therefore as vulnerable."
In other words, unexplained details or those badly or inadequately explained — are not narrative weaknesses in the tale of terror; in this genre, such confusions and misapprehensions are psychologically potent, suggesting as they do our unsettling ignorance of rationalistically-satisfying methods for putting this puzzling universe into neat scientific pigeonholes. At its most effective, the ghost story can suggest a universe in which absolutely anything might happen.
It is perhaps surprising that few ghost stories seem to be related to the principles and practices of Spiritualism. However, Conan Doyle's How It Happened (1913), and Playing With Fire (1900), are exceptions. The first begins with an abrupt introduction:
- She was a writing medium. This is what she wrote.
The text then shifts to a first-person account of a man test-driving his new car. After a terrible crash, he awakens to meet an old friend named Stanley, a man peculiarly sympathetic and for whom the narrator has a really genuine affection. Suddenly, the dazed driver realises something odd, and Conan Doyle delivers one of his most charming and memorable punchlines:
- And then... a wave of amazement passed over me. Stanley!
- Stanley! Why, Stanley had surely died of enteric at Bloemfontein in The Boer War!
- "Stanley!" I cried, and the words seemed to choke my throat.
- "Stanley, you are dead."
- He looked at me with the same old gentle, wistful smile.
- "So are you," he answered.
The other story that incorporates seance-room material displays Conan Doyle's pre-conversion familiarity with Spiritualistic theology. It is a fantastic, extravagant extension of one of the key principles of the religion, namely, that a flippant approach to spiritualistic activities is Playing With Fire. Treating a seance as fun is very likely to draw all sorts of undeveloped spirits and primal imaginary creatures. In this story, a Unicorn materialises in such a seance and makes a dangerous wreck of the room. Later, as a convinced Spiritualist, Conan Doyle would take a deep, personal interest in contacting these undeveloped spirits those who do not accept that they have passed into a different state of existence. It is also of interest to note that a series of seances which took place in Europe, several years after the story appeared, resulted in the alleged materialisations of a number of animals, including an eagle and a pithecanthropus. Though the latter was recorded only by touch — the ape-man licked sitters' hands in the dark (10), photographs actually exist of the huge bird's ectoplasmic appearance. (10)
Two richer tales of the apparently genuine supernatural are concerned with ancient terrors. John Barrington Cowles (1884) at first appears to be about a werewolf, and Lot No. 249 (1892) concerns a reanimated Egyptian mummy. Both these highly atmospheric works anticipate by several decades the monsters that would become staples of Hollywood-generated popular culture, but John Barrington Cowles appeared thirteen years before Bram Stoker's Dracula would crystallise the public image of werewolves and vampires, and Lot No. 249 anticipates German-American film-maker Karl Freund's classic gothic movie, The Mummy (1932). Read today, Conan Doyle's original stories seem as powerful and unsettling as ever, largely because of his use of ambiguity and indirection; the things we can't quite see, the things we never admit to believing in, these work most powerfully upon the imagination when controlled obliquely, when prose seems as vague as our most uncertain perceptions.
John Barrington Cowles is narrated by Robert Armitage, Cowles' closest friend. Both Cowles and Armitage are attracted to a strangely beautiful woman at an art gallery one day. Enquiries produce the information that she is engaged to a mutual friend, Reeves. A few days later, the narrator learns that Reeves' engagement to Miss Northcott has been suddenly broken off. This is especially unfortunate for the striking young lady, since this is her second terminated engagement: the first fiancé had, a few days before the wedding, thrown himself in St. Margaret's Loch, where he was found three days later. Reeves' behaviour, though less directly fatal, is similarly inexplicable. Armitage actually runs into Reeves when returning home late one night through one of the lowest streets in Edinburgh. Reeves has fallen very far and very fast: lately one of the most dressy and particular men in the whole college, Reeves is now a degraded creature, whose features are bloated with drink, and a long course of intemperance has affected his brain.
This leering remnant of his former self lets himself go so far as to actually discuss a woman with another man. Armitage, of course, though no doubt bursting with curiosity, tries, like a proper gentleman, to cut Reeves' delirious allusions short. Before he can do so, Reeves says several mysterious things:
- "You don't know her. She is the devil! Beautiful beautiful, but the devil!... I brought it upon myself. It is my own choice. But I couldn't no by heaven, I couldn't accept the alternative. I couldn't keep my faith to her. It was more than man could do... why did she not give me warning sooner? Why did she wait until I had learned to love her so?"
Several months after this encounter, the narrator sees Cowles again, who announces, to his friend's alarm, that he has become engaged to Miss Northcott. Naturally, Armitage refrains from caddishly revealing to Cowles what he knows about her. Visiting her a few days later, the two men see a new side to her personality:
- She looked as beautiful as ever, and I could not wonder at my friend's infatuation. Her face was a little more flushed than usual, and she held in her hand a heavy dog whip, with which she had been chastising a small Scotch terrier, whose cries we had heard in the street. The poor brute was cringing up against the wall, whining piteously, and evidently completely cowed.
- "So, Kate," said my friend, after we had taken our seats, "you have been falling out with Carlo again."
- "Only a very little quarrel this time," she said, smiling charmingly, "he is a dear, good old fellow, but he needs correction now and again." Then, turning to me, "We all do that, Mr. Armitage, don't we? What a capital thing if, instead of receiving a collective punishment at the end of our lives, we were to have one at once, as the dogs do, when we did anything wicked. It would make us more careful, wouldn't it... Supposing that every time a man misbehaved himself, a gigantic hand were to seize him, and he were lashed with a whip until he fainted" — she clenched her white fingers as she spoke, and cut out viciously with the dog whip — "it would do more to keep him good than any number of high-minded theories of morality."
Armitage sees Miss Northcott emerge victoriously from a contest of wits with a stage mesmerist, and later, upon telling her that Reeves is dying, he is shocked to see her laughing delightedly at the news. Reeves' identification of Miss Northcott as a devil is soon followed by a long private, nocturnal meeting between her and Cowles, after which he turns up at Armitage's, croaking for brandy and obviously deeply moved.
- He groaned, covering his face with his hands.
- "If I did tell you, Bob, you would not believe it. It is too dreadful — too horrible — unutterably awful and incredible! Oh, Kate, Kate!... I pictured you an angel and I find you... a fiend!. A ghoul from the pit! A vampire soul behind a lovely face!"
A few moments later he mutters something about "wehr-wolves" and a story of Captain Marryatt's about a beautiful woman who devours her young. Cowles recovers somewhat under Armitage's care, but the process is long and painful:
- "For weeks he lingered between life and death."
Finally, however, while walking together on the Isle of May, a singularly barren and desolate place, Cowles, completely in the grip of a sudden conviction that Kate Northcott has come for him, runs off toward a dark cliff overhanging the boiling surge two hundred feet below. Several fishermen, who have helped Armitage search for his friend, on hearing above the beating of the waves and the howling of the wind... a strange wild screech from the abyss below, assert that it is the sound of a woman's laughter. They fail to recover Cowles' body.
Again, in this story, Conan Doyle cuts us off from vital facts. What is the extent or character of Miss Northcott's allegedly supernatural powers? Is she, literally, a fiend, a devil, a ghoul, a vampire of a wehr-wolf? We are never told. In fact, the only information the text supplies relative to her powers is the duel of will-power with the mesmerist, Dr. Messenger; and this conflict is unsupported by any other facts in the text we have it solely on Armitage's word. How critical, we may wonder, is Armitage — someone who thinks a stage magician is possessed of supernatural powers? To what extent is he imaginatively participating in what he perceives? Moreover, the very wide range of monsters which she is accused of being by her shocked lovers, suggests that she is none of them, and that these people are speaking figuratively. Another red herring rises to the surface when Armitage investigates the past of a relative of Miss Northcott and finds that he had been involved with, or at least accused of, devil worship in India and that he had died! "in a crazy attempt to get some of the eternal fire from the sun-worshippers' temple. There was considerable mystery about his death."
In short, it appears to be the case that Robert Armitage believes he is telling a ghost story, but the evidence he presents — limited, indirect, subjective, and circumstantial as it is suggests that the underlying facts may have little or nothing to do with the supernatural. But whatever this story is about, our frustration is psychologically relevant to its success in the manipulation of our imaginations: If we knew what awful secret the whip-wielding Miss Northcott tells her prospective husbands shortly before the wedding, the sense of horror would almost certainly be diminished.
Lot No. 249 offers another successful use of this technique of frightening us by what we do not see. The psychological setting is masterfully laid with an opening paragraph serving as an apologia for the incredible tale to follow. Verisimilitude is also strengthened as characters and events are introduced, or alluded to, as though they are already familiar to the public. Oxford, with its venerable buildings, is an appropriate physical setting for the mystery, since it is presumed to be peopled with serious and intelligent scholars unlikely to be fooled by idle superstitions. Moreover, the two principal characters — both medical students are shown to be solid, athletic, studious and admirable:
- "no-one could look at their hard-cut, alert faces without seeing that they were open-air men — men whose minds and tastes turned naturally to all that was manly and robust."
Abercrombie Smith and Jephro Hastie are discussing two of their fellow students, to whom Hastie has taken a dislike. One of them, the fat, damnable, and reptilian Bellingham, seems to exert an undue influence on the thin and impressionable Monkhouse Lee. Bellingham, speculates Hastie, "I should put... down as a man with secret vices — an evil liver," but he is one of the most gifted scholars in his line: Eastern languages.
After Hastie leaves, Smith turns to his studies for a time
- when suddenly there broke out in the silence of the night a hoarse cry, a positive scream — the call of a man who is moved and shaken beyond all control.
Young Monkhouse Lee soon comes flying into the room, begging Smith to come to Bellingham's room. Smith then sees Bellingham's room for the first time:
- It was such a chamber as he had never seen before a museum rather than a study. Walls and ceiling were thickly covered with a thousand strange relics from Egypt and the East. Tall, angular figures bearing burdens or weapons stalked in an uncouth frieze round the apartments. Above were bull-headed statues, with viper-crowned, almond-eyed monarchs, and strange, beetle-like deities cut out of the blue Egyptian lapis lazuli. Horus and Isis and Osiris peeped down from every niche and shelf, while across the ceiling a true son of Old Nile, a great, hanging-jawed crocodile, was slung in a double noose.
Bellingham has fainted over an old roll of papyrus. A sarcophagus lies open on the table, with a horrid black withered mummy lying half out of the case.
It transpires that Bellingham has been engaged in recreating ancient forbidden rituals, and Smith comes gradually to believe that Bellingham has discovered a way to re-awaken the mummy to do his bidding. Monkhouse Lee, finally breaking Bellingham's spell, denounces him in order to break off his proposed marriage to Lee's sister. Soon afterwards, Lee is found nearly drowned in the river. He has been attacked by an unknown assailant, but he knows the unbelievable truth himself. Fortunately, Smith takes up Lee's cause and confronts Bellingham, threatening him with exposure if he doesn't give up his hellish tricks.
In a powerfully handled episode, Smith, walking in the early evening to a friend's house, hears the rapid tread of something following him:
- It moved in the shadow of the hedge, silently and furtively, a dark, crouching figure, dimly visible against the black background. Even as he gazed back at it, it had lessened its distance by twenty paces, and was fast closing upon him. Out of the darkness he had a glimpse of a scraggy neck, and of two eyes that will ever haunt him in his dreams. He turned, and with a cry of terror he ran for his life up the avenue. There were red lights, the signals of safety, almost within a stone's throw of him. He was a famous runner, but never had he run as he ran that night.
- The heavy gate had swung into place behind him, but he heard it dash open again before his pursuer. As he rushed madly and wildly through the night, he could hear a swift, dry patter behind him, and could see, as he threw back a glance, that this horror was bounding like a tiger at his heels, with blazing eyes and one stringy arm out-thrown. Thank God, the door was ajar. He could see the thin bar of light which shot from the lamp in the hall. Nearer yet sounded the clatter from behind. He heard a hoarse gurgling at this very shoulder. With a shriek he flung himself against the door, slammed and bolted it behind him, and sank half-fainting on to the hall chair.
Recognising the persistent threat that the mummy presents while Bellingham continues to wield his occult power, as well as understanding the impossibility of persuading a British jury of the truth of Bellingham's crimes, Smith takes matters into his own hands and goes to Bellingham's rooms, where he destroys both scroll and mummy. Bellingham is forced to leave England and the mysterious attacks by night end, leaving Oxford's streets peaceful and quiet once more.
In this tale, Conan Doyle employs the technique of indirection in the pure horror scenes, such as the one selected above. Our perceptions are limited to what Smith can perceive, and several senses convey information with the kind of synaesthesia that terror produces. We, with Smith, glimpse a neck that is scraggy, a word carrying both visual and textual significances. The red lights that appear in front of him, (the usual sign of the general practitioner in England (11)), are symbolic of the safety of his physician friend's house and counterpoint the blazing eyes behind him. The patter he hears behind him is described as dry, a tactile sensation. Synecdoche is also used to create the effect of a perceiver gathering impressions under the influence of increasing panic. All we see of the attacker is a dimly visible figure, dark and crouching with one stringy arm. All we hear is an onomatopoeic patter and clatter of the mummy's skeletal feet and the hoarse gurgling of his frustrated throat. The text takes us rapidly from external events to interior ones: As the mummy's arm reaches for Smith, the text enters his consciousness and says, in part for him and in part for us. "Thank God, the door was ajar". Like all our worst fears, this one, too, is instantly dispersed as Smith enters the realm of light and familiar, friendly surroundings.
Though on one level, this story appears to give us a great deal of straightforward, direct, uninterpreted, and objective information, the anonymous narrator. basing his account on the statement of Abercrombie Smith, is conveying facts coloured by the values of Empire: Sportsmanship, open-air activities. and an anti- intellectual distrust of those who study, in over-decorated rooms, such sinisterly impractical things as Eastern languages while they grow pale and fat for their pains. The basis of Hastie's suspicions that Bellingham practices secret vices — whatever they are is not evidence, but pure prejudice: Bellingham is just tat type. Lot No. 249 resembles in its structure and approach the Sherlock Holmes tales, except, of course, that this story violates Holmes' dictum:
- This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.
Apart from the story's supernatural content, however, Smith and Hastie might be youthful Holmes and Watson insofar as they represent practical rationality and a settled social order struggling in a life and death conflict with the forces of evil, fighting against all those social intrusions that threaten those minds and tastes that turn naturally to all that is manly and robust. Rarely in his weird fiction does Conan Doyle allow us to exorcise the imaginative anxieties so completely: we see the scroll and the mummy literally go up in flames and the evil superman expelled from England.
IV
Slithering monsters, extinct creatures, lost races, vicious werewolves, hypnotic psychopathic matrons, forlorn ghosts, and shambling mummies — all these, and more, excited the vivid imagination of Arthur Conan Doyle. Part of his task in creating such alternative worlds to that of Baker Street was to supply verisimilitude through believable details that appeal to both the reader's physical senses and primal fears. This dark and fabulous world was made real through the efforts of various narrative voices to supply evidence. It was not enough to tell the story without trying to prove that the events, however improbable, must be the truth. We have seen, however, that in many cases the narrators supply strangely ambiguous information that reflects badly on their own reliability. Have these events really happened the way they appear to have happened? We have noticed, too, that these preternatural and even supernatural occurrences seem curiously earth-bound, as though this world were shot through with obscure realities, hidden from those who were unable or unwilling to see them. Real-life ghosts and photographed fairies may not, in this light, seem so strange a part of Conan Doyle's final religious convictions. Arthur Conan Doyle's fascination with these themes lead from his earliest fiction to his own wakening belief that it might, indeed, be true that scientific inquiry, investigation, and reason could expose a hitherto unseen psychic reality.
References
1. Penzoldt, P.: The Supernatural in Fiction, 1965; New York; Humanities Press.
2. Birkhead, Edith: The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance, 1921, 1963; New York; Russell and Russell.
3. Baker, Michael (Ed): The Doyle Diary: The Last Great Conan Doyle Mystery, 1978; New York; Paddington Press.
4. Carr, J. D.: The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1949; New York; Harper and Brothers.
5. Nordon, Pierre: Conan Doyle: A Biography, 1967; New York; Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
6. Hodgson, Richard and Davey, S. J.: The Possibilities of Mal-Observation and Lapse of Memory from a Practical Point of View, 1887; Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research; 4: 381-495.
7. Green, R. L. and Gibson, J. M.: A Bibliography of A.Conan Doyle, 1975; Oxford, Clarendon Press.
8. Bleiler, E. F.: Arthur Conan Doyle and His Supernatural Fiction: The Best Supernatural Tales of Arthur Conan Doyle, 1979; New York; Dover.
9. Doyle, A. C.: Memories and Adventures, 1924; Boston; Little, Brown.
10. Geley, Gustave: Clairvoyance and Materialisation. Trans. Stanley De Brath, 1927; London; Unwin. (Reprinted by Arno Press, 1975)
11. Doyle, A. C.: Introduction to Round the Red Lamp, 1894; New York; Appleton
Part Two
Conan Doyle's imagination, besides being intrigued with both preternatural and supernatural intrusions into a materialistic and scientifically definable universe, also produced several stories that, while hinting at the abnormal, are finally resolved by natural explanations. There is no question that some of these are slight efforts. (Three of the five come, after all, early in his career; one of them, The Mystery of Sasassa Valley, was his first publication.) But some are prime Conan Doyle and deserve a wider audience than they have had.
Told in the first person by "a very nervous man" whose "sedentary literary life had helped to increase [his] morbid love of solitude," That Little Square Box (1881) is an involving little suspense tale. Like many of Conan Doyle's stories, this too suggests that mistaken interpretations, due to fanaticism or mere enthusiasm, are liable to be made if special efforts are not taken. The narrator, due to a series of accidents, becomes convinced that two men on board a cruise ship are political activists, conspiring to blow up the vessel with a concealed bomb. He investigates carefully because "Herr Raumer, the eminent spiritualist," had once told him he was "the most sensitive subject as regards supernatural phenomena that he had ever encountered in the whole of his wide experience," and the narrator is positive that his "indescribable feeling... of some impending calamity" is based on a genuine extra-sensory impression. The suspense escalates until the poor fellow finally learns that the two skulking figures on the boat have an altogether different motive: the little square box they intend to set off at a specified hour is really loaded with courier pigeons; they hope to break a new world record for oversea homing speed.
"Little more need be said," confesses the embarrassed story-teller. "It is not a subject on which I care to dwell. The whole thing is too utterly disgusting and absurd." The story is a weirdly comic treatment of that very human tendency so strongly criticised by Sherlock Holmes: the tendency to theorise on insufficient data. We need patterns, schemes of understanding, in order to interpret events. This story shows how easy it is in fact, how nearly inevitable it is to interpret mistakenly. Clearly, the satire on the narrator's credulity, in accepting his suspicions as genuine psychic impressions, is secondary to the larger comedy of the human liability to err. Clearly also, Conan Doyle this early in his career could still see the humour of making embarrassing judgements about the reality of allegedly paranormal events.
Humour is, however, strikingly absent from what is, perhaps, Conan Doyle's grimmest and most searing weird tale De Profundis (1892). Atkinson, the narrator, is a commercial agent for John Vansittart, a coffee exporter from Ceylon, who has just married in London and must soon return to Colombo for his honeymoon. His wife, however, has had to visit her sick mother and so must catch his ship at Falmouth. Atkinson notices Vansittart's "flushed cheek and... glazing eye" and assumes that drink ("that most bestial of all the devils") has captured him, but soon learns that Vansittart is, instead, victim of an illness. Vansittart assures him that it's the bad air of "vile London that is choking" him. He asks Atkinson to watch over his wife while he departs on his ship; Atkinson agrees.
Vansittart's ship is lost in a storm and, ten days later, news reaches Atkinson and Mrs. Vansittart that the traveller has come down with smallpox and that the captain intends to take Vansittart to the nearest port with a hospital.
Mrs. Vansittart and Atkinson set sail on the barque Rose of Sharon to meet Vansittart. On the sixth day out, at ten o'clock, the two are standing at the rail, looking out to sea. Then:
- There came a sudden plop, like a rising salmon, and there, in the clear light, John Vansittart sprang out of the water and looked up at us.
- I never saw anything clearer in my life than I saw that man. The moon shone full upon him, and he was but three oars' length away. His face was more puffed than when I had seen him last, mottled here and there with dark scabs, his mouth and eyes open as one who is struck with some overpowering surprise. He had some white stuff streaming from his shoulders, and one hand was raised to his ear, the other crooked around his breast, I saw him leap from the water into the air, and in the dead calm the waves of his coming lapped up against the sides of the vessel. Then his figure sank back into the water again, and I heard a rending, crackling sound like a bundle of brushwood snapping in the fire on a frosty night. There were no signs of him when I looked again, but a swift swirl and eddy on the still sea marked the spot where he had been.
Mrs. Vansittart loses consciousness, convinced that she has had a vision: "Doubtless he died at this hour," she speculates after she awakens in Atkinson's arms; "in hospital at Madeira. I have read of such things. His thoughts were with me. His vision came to me..."
Atkinson is not so sure. His subsequent inquiries produce the information that Vansittart had died eight days before they saw the "apparition", but the surgeon tells Atkinson that they had indeed buried Vansittart at sea at about the same place that his vision had appeared. However, the surgeon does, express doubt about one detail in Vansittart's burial at sea: "the leaden weight. was not too firmly fixed, and... seven days bring about changes which fetch a body to the surface."
And the "snapping, crackling sound" Atkinson heard on the body's re-entry, along with "the swirl in the water"? Well, speculates the unromantic. Atkinson grimly, "the shark is a surface feeder and is plentiful in those parts."
It seems impossible to list the levels of horror tapped by this story. Its brutal, grisly, heartless cynicism seems out of place in Conan Doyle's philosophy. Yet its very uniqueness suggests its importance: it is, in fact, a blank, emotionless catalogue of implications present in the materialism which Conan Doyle found himself unable to accept; and it is in its very refutation of Mrs. Vansittart's sentimental, spiritualistic interpretation that the deepest horror of this tale lies. We are not, this story tells us, creatures of a loving God, beings whose living affections are strong enough to cross the void to communicate with loved ones at the moment of death; individuals infused with an immortal dignity destined for resurrection. No, this story gives us, quite brutally, what the alternative must be: we are greedy, commercial beings whose urge to accumulate wealth compromises our deepest emotions; we are creatures made of flesh susceptible to drink, fever, pox, death, putrescence, and a Nature so violent and terrifying as to be best symbolised by a shark. What look to us like events of a peculiarly personal significance, turn out to be the result of purely chemical processes that have no meaning, significance, or endurance whatever. Kurtz's devastating discovery, in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, of "the horror" that lies beneath everything and behind all our sentimental illusions is given an illustration in De Profundis. Its ironic title provides the clue to the tale's interpretation as a work of multiple philosophical word-play.
Psalm 130, the de profundis, begins with the voice of despair: it speaks also with the voice of a modern generation, bereft of the kind of religious confidence that was possible before Lyell, Darwin, Huxley and their scientific colleagues presented their challenges to Biblical literalism. The psalmist's cry from out of the depths, however, ends with a message of hope and redemption. So that the obvious grim pun of the title — Vansittart did shoot up from out of the depths is at the same time a reminder of another people in another time who felt themselves cut off from the Lord and who lacked a sense of belonging to the universe. And that is why this horror tale works — a world in which these implications of materialism must be true is an insupportable world. As the Black Mass turns all Christian beliefs upside down or backwards, so this story horrifies by denying everything that we wish to see affirmed.
Two early tales and two more mature works deal with rational solutions to apparently supernatural events. These pseudo-ghost stories are part of a rather large subdivision within the terror-tale genre that seems to try to attain the most frightening of both worlds; however, in the dissolution of the supernatural by the aridity of reason, the effect more often falls flat. The rising suspense and deepening horror of the situation, in which the reader has willingly consented to participate, demand an equally emotional conclusion, or the reader feels cheated. It takes a writer of exceptional skill not to let us down when he tells us that the nameless creatures of the night in which we have believed (in kind cooperation with a trusted author) are really mere crooks, hiding in the attic from their parole officer. Flesh and blood criminals, of course, do present their terrors, and crime writers have often handled the suspense such threats provide with genuinely frightening results; but it is quite another artistic challenge to transfer a reader's emotions from the invisible to the material, and not many writers have been able to do so. (The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Sussex Vampire might be urged as successful examples, among others, within the Holmes saga, of an apparent other-world threat being explained in normal terms. Somehow, however, it never comes as a surprise, in the atmosphere of the super-rationalistic Holmes, to learn that the ghostly hound is really a dog with phosphorus on his dewlap. With the tale that sets out to be, or gives the gradual impression of being, a ghost story, the case is quite different.)
An outstanding example of trying to deal with this difficulty is The Secret of Goresthorpe Grange (1883). Narrated by a posturing, nouveau-riche buffoon named D'Odd, recently possessed of a feudal estate known as Goresthorpe Grange, this story is a funny little confection about the pride aristocrats have taken in their family ghosts. Here, Conan Doyle's whimsical sense of humour makes us distance ourselves from the alleged ghosts. Dodd or D'Odd, as he chooses now to spell it has spent "twenty years of my life... behind the counter of a grocer's shop in the East End of London," but "it was through such an avenue that I reached a wealthy independence." He is convinced that his family is ancient and "that the blood of a Crusader runs in my veins. Even now, after the lapse of so many years, such exclamations as "By'r Lady!" rise naturally to my lips, and I feel that, should circumstances require it, I am capable of rising in my stirrups and dealing an infidel a blow — say with a mace — which would considerably astonish him." Convinced that his possession of an ancient name and an ancient house makes necessary the acquisition of a ghost to haunt the property, D'Odd makes contact with a mountebank who undertakes to supply a spectre for Goresthorpe Grange. He gives D'Odd a drug, "the essence of Lucoptolycus, which removes the scales from our earthly eyes."
That night, D'Odd is given the opportunity to "shop" for a suitable ghost as he watches several present themselves for his consideration. There is the "electric, magnetic and spiritualistic... ethereal sigh-heaver"; "the fiendish old woman"; the cavalier, complete with rapier, who "can emit hollow groans,' working alone or "in company with shrieking damsels"; the "leaver of foot-steps and the spiller of gouts of blood" to which "Charles Dickens has alluded" and who bursts "into peals of hideous laughter"; the pirate; and the "American blood-curdler" whose description is a wonderful parody of all blood-and-thunder ghost-stories:
- It was a tall man, if, indeed, it might be called a man, for the gaunt bones were protruding through the corroding flesh, and the features were of a leaden hue. A winding-sheet was wrapped round the figure, and formed a hood over the head, from under the shadow of which two fiendish eyes, deep set in their grisly sockets, blazed and sparkled like red-hot coals. The lower jaw had fallen upon the breast, disclosing a withered, shrivelled tongue and two lines of black and jagged fangs.
Finally, there appears before the prospective ghost-buyer a "lovely and unutterably sad" apparition whose lonely beauty decides D'Odd: "She will do! I choose this one." As he moves toward her, the attractive ghost disappears and D'Odd hears his wife's voice: "Argentine, we have been robbed!"
In fact, the "essence of Lucoptolycus" is an hallucinogenic drug and D'Odd has had what, in the 1960s we used to call a "trip" while his house has been burgled by the "ghost-finder".
Here, Conan Doyle blithely confronts not only the natural explanation of an apparent ghost, but also that greatest of sophomoric "outs" to an uncontrolled work of fiction: It was only a dream. Nevertheless, there is a certain charm to this tale, largely because of Conan Doyle's use of the bumptious narrator and the rascally mountebank. We are waiting for the punch line throughout this story and so are not disappointed that the ghosts are not real.
Another, non-comedic, approach to the difficulty is used in Conan Doyle's first published story, The Mystery of Sasassa Valley (1879), in which the nineteen-year-old writer tells a tale of several young adventurers in South Africa who investigate a tribal superstition. A "ghost" with one burning eye haunts a remote valley that is avoided by natives. The adventurers, one of whom has the right hunch about the source of the luminescence, explore the valley and solve the mystery: a huge diamond is lodged in a rock in the valley and catches the moonlight when seen from the right angle. The "ghost" is rationally exorcised and the adventurers are rich.
Here, the use of a primitive, exotic setting warns us against the validity of a supernatural explanation. Of course, Conan Doyle counts on us to argue to ourselves, this ghost business is mere native superstition; these Englishmen will soon get to the bottom of it.
Comedy also plays no part in the exotic and weird The Fiend of the Cooperage (1897). Set in the Conradian depths of a white outpost in Africa, the tale concerns an Englishman who volunteers to share a chilling vigil in a "haunted" cooperage a barrel-maker's workshop. Local superstition has caused the black population to desert their huts each night to sleep in a hulk anchored just off-shore from the trading post. It seems a nameless fiend has already carried off two men one every third night -leaving no clue and suggesting, even to the whites, a supernatural culprit. Though the two Englishmen survive their night in the cooperage, the next day they discover that a comrade, who has been dosed with laudanum against malarial fever, has been crushed to death every bone reduced to splinters.
Next day the men come to a searing but in some ways relieving — understanding. The deaths had been caused by a perfectly natural fiend:
- A huge black tree trunk was coming down the river, its broad glistening back just lapped by the water. And in front of it about three feet in front arching upwards like the figure-head of a ship, there hung a dreadful face, swaying slowly from side to side. It was flattened, malignant, as large as a small beer-barrel, of a faded fungoid colour, but the neck which supported it was mottled with a dull yellow and black. As it flew past the Gamecock in the swirl of the waters I saw two immense coils roll up out of some great hollow in the tree, and the villainous head rose suddenly to the height of eight or ten feet, looking with dull, skin-covered eyes at the yacht. An instant later the tree had shot past us and was plunging with its horrible passenger towards the Atlantic.
- "What was it?" I cried.
- "It is our friend of the cooperage," said Doctor Severall... "Yes, that is the devil who has been haunting our island. It is the great python of the Gaboon."
But, lacking both the comic approach and the exotic locale, Conan Doyle returned to this type of story with The Japanned Box (1889). Set in "that part of the Midlands which is drained by the Avon," in "the most English part of England", and narrated by Frank Colmore, a private tutor who has applied for a job at Thorpe Place, this tale gives no warning or qualification that the dark secret of Sir John Bollamore has a "natural" explanation. Events build carefully to a suspenseful climax as the tutor learns that Sir John follows a regular daily routine which involves in part a private retreat to a locked room. No one else enters the room, which contains very little except a desk on which rests a locked lacquered box. Colmore learns that Sir John was, in his youth, a rake and a rascal: "the leader of the fastest set, bruiser, driver, gambler, drunkard — a survival of the old type, and as bad as the worst of them." (This concluding sentiment reflects, of course, the Victorian conviction that mankind, or at least the English, had got somewhere at last.)
Sir John, however, has improved: now moderate (except for occasional bursts of temper) and abstemious, he has broken with his old life. In this role, Sir John earns the respect of Colmore, until one night, while walking in the grounds near the house, the tutor overhears a woman's voice upstairs, in Sir John's private room. A flood of suspicion overwhelms him: he experiences a "revulsion of feeling" and it changes all his "sympathy into loathing." Says Colmore: "My employer still remained all that he had ever been, with the additional vice of hypocrisy."
The reader, however, suspects that the nocturnal doings of Sir John Bollamore have less to do with vice than with spiritualism. Sir John's deceased wife is the pivot on which his life has turned; she took the rake and made him into a faithful, loving, sober husband. At the time of Colmore's appointment, she has been dead for three years. Colmore learns that others have heard the woman's voice in that locked room when Sir John has been ostensibly alone. Though seances and spirit return are only hinted in the text, Conan Doyle manages to make the reader suspect that the Japanned Box that no one may touch has some occult power to make contact between the husband and his dead wife's ghost.
The real answer comes quite by accident. Colmore is napping in the library when he awakens to find Sir John engaged in his ritual with the Japanned box. A woman's voice, proceeding from the box in a "thin, gasping voice," says: "I am not really gone, John. I am here at your very elbow, and shall be until we meet once more. I die happy to think that morning and night you will hear my voice. Oh, John, be strong, be strong, until we meet again."
Sir John, at first curious to discover Colmore has witnessed his intimate contact with his dead wife, calms down sufficiently to tell the tutor his whole story. The voice is all that gives him strength to resist his alcoholic drives, all that allows him to live his lonely life at all. The voice proceeds from a new invention — the phonograph which has captured the dying woman's last words. "I left him standing in his library," says Colmore, "with his hand upon the instrument which brought him that ever-recurring, intangible, and yet intimate reminder from the woman he loved. You may have read about his death in a carriage accident last Midsummer. I do not fancy that it was a very unwelcome event to him."
Conan Doyle's use of a mechanical device as the agent of a pseudo-spiritualistic communication reflects both the inventive zeal of the period and an incipient belief that spirit communication, when it would come to be understood, would be capable of being reduced to scientific terms. Though The Japanned Box falls into the group of pseudo-ghost stories, very few real ghost stories leave such a lingering impression of the sort of connection between the living and the dead that would later become so attractive to Conan Doyle that he would build his religion around it.
II
Monsters, mummies, ghosts, spirit possessions, ancient superstitions, and other inhabitants of the primal imagination found their way into Conan Doyle's weird fiction. But more mundane sources also provided material for his non-Holmesian suspense tales: jealousy, academic envy, threats of nature, and perhaps the deepest fear of all the possibility of the loss of paternity, the loss of contact with one's own identity.
Murder and revenge provide the themes of three stories. The New Catacomb (1898) tells of two colleagues joined in an unusual pursuit: Kennedy, an Englishman, and Burger, a German/Italian, are both students of ancient Roman artifacts and architectural remains. Kennedy has been a cad — involved in a love affair, "The details of which had never quite come out," but which "indicated a heartlessness and callousness which shocked many of his friends. But in the bachelor circles of students and artists in which he preferred to move there is no very rigid code of honour in such matters... Burger cozens Kennedy into entering a catacomb which he has just discovered. When they are deep within the labyrinthine passages, Burger reveals his purpose: Burger had himself been engaged to be married to the woman Kennedy had dishonoured and deserted. Burger alone knows the way out of the catacomb; when he extinguishes his light and leaves, Kennedy is left alone. Months pass before anyone discovers the body. His death had followed days and days of frustrated attempts at escape from the inter-connected tunnels.
Here, as elsewhere in early twentieth century British popular fiction, the gentleman's code prevails over mere law (cf. Sapper's Bull-Dog Drummond and Buchan's The 39 Steps). Our sentiment after reading the tale is that Burger has justifiably though illegally executed a man who has violated the precepts of honourable living. The horror of the dark, the days of frantic wandering in search of escape, the slow death by starvation are all dealt with obliquely by the use of an objective, ironically naive epilogue a newspaper article which has, as usual, most of the facts wrong. Kennedy, it reports, had apparently been lost while exploring. His colleague and "intimate friend", Dr. Burger had "discovered" the catacomb. He figures in the report as a kind of afterword: Burger's "joy at the extraordinary find which he has been so fortunate as to make has been greatly marred by the terrible fate of his comrade and fellow-worker."
Another pair of co-workers figure in The Great Brown-Pericord Motor (1892). Here, two men have worked long and hard to produce a flying machine. Pericord is a brilliant inventor and Brown a gifted mechanic: "They had been partners in many an invention, in which the creative genius of e one had been aided by the practical abilities of the other." They contrive to build an odd machine with flapping yellow wings, but the two creators fall out when Brown registers the invention in his own name, thus stealing the patent rights. Brown claims the rights on the grounds that he has built the device, while Pericord asserts his right based on having planned it. In a violent quarrel, Pericord accidentally kills Brown. Half in panic, he decides to dispose of the body by sending it off in the flying machine.
- For a minute or two the huge yellow vans flapped and flickered. Then the body began to move in little jumps down the side of the hillock, gathering a gradual momentum, until at last it heaved up into the air and soared heavily off in the moonlight. He had not used the rudder, but had turned the head for the south. Gradually the weird thing rose higher, and sped faster, until it had passed over the line of cliff, and was sweeping over the silent sea. Pericord watched it with a white drawn face, until it looked like a black bird with golden wings half shrouded in the mist which lay over the waters.
Some time later, Pericord turns up as an unidentified inmate of the New York State Lunatic Asylum, his great brain now completely degenerated.
This almost allegorical tale, based on the conflict between mind and body, suggests as well Conan Doyle's ambiguous attitude towards scientific advancements. It is also worth noting that Pericord is suggestive of mind, dreams, creativity, enthusiasm, and even mysticism; while Brown is stolid, practical, business-like, and eager for material gain. Co-operation between these two individuals is necessary but touchy, and conflict always seems imminent; so, too, the allegory implies, the balance between the conflicting demands of mind and body is difficult to attain. Conan Doyle, concerned about this issue but not yet convinced of a particular point of view towards it, allegorically reveals his misgivings about mind-body independence: Brown does not behave honourably and fails to carry out his responsibilities towards Pericord, and Pericord's mind loses its stability after being parted from Brown. And there is no doubt some significance in the fact that the materialistic Brown can only ascend after death via a mechanica1 device: during this period, for an increasing number of people reflecting on these issues, new discoveries and advances in technology seemed to make the old ideas of survival of death and resurrection increasingly difficult to conceptualise.
Finally, violence and revenge with a grisly twist provide the theme of The Case of Lady Sannox (1893), a tale with a lingeringly disquieting effect. The story opens with a paragraph that sets an urbane, ironic and morbid tone:
- The relations between Douglas Stone and the notorious Lady Sannox were very well known both among the fashionable circles of which she was a brilliant member, and the scientific bodies which numbered him among their most illustrious confreres. There was naturally, therefore, a very widespread interest when it was announced one morning that the lady had absolutely and forever taken the veil, and that the world would see her no more. When, at the very tail of this rumour, there came the assurance that the celebrated operating surgeon, the man of steel nerves, had been found in the morning by his valet, seated on one side of his bed, smiling pleasantly upon the universe, with both legs jammed into one side of his breeches and his great brain about as valuable as a cap full of porridge, the matter was strong enough to give quite a little thrill of interest to folk who had never hoped that their jaded nerves were capable of such a sensation.
Thus, Conan Doyle deftly suggests that we, the readers, are among those with "jaded nerves" who are invited to look over the author's shoulder and to participate voyeuristically in the horror story to follow.
Douglas Stone, a rich and powerful man who was "born to be great" in whatever field he chose to explore, is a brilliant surgeon. His nature, however, is tainted by a "rich vein of sensualism, at the sport of which he placed all the prizes of his life." The fabulously beautiful Lady Sannox becomes his next — and casually open erotic conquest; she has "a liking for new experiences," and is "gracious to most men who [have] wooed her."
Conan Doyle gives us a clue of events to follow: Lord Sannox "had at one time been fond of acting," but "since his marriage, this early hobby had become distasteful to him." Nowadays, Lord Sannox spends his time gardening and playing blind to his wife's flamboyant affairs.
Then one night a Turk named Hamil Ali, from Smyrna, calls upon the famous surgeon and presents a weird problem. He tells Stone that he has a collection of antique daggers, one of which is poisoned with a chemical that has no known cure. Hamil Ali's wife has accidentally cut her lower lip in a fall on the deadly dagger. Stone agrees to the horrible, but unavoidable, life-saving procedure of removing Hamil Ali's wife's lower lip. They go to his home and find the woman in a "deep sleep". Stone asks again for the husband's assurance that the operation is essential. Hamil Ali assures him brutally that he is aware that after the operation "the mouth will not be a pretty one to kiss."
The woman's face is covered with a yashmak, and Stone, noticing from the exposed eyes that she has been given a strong dose of opium, determines to operate while the drug will render the nerves senseless:
- He grasped the wounded lip with his forceps, and with two swift cuts he took out a broad, V-shaped piece. The woman sprang up on the couch with a dreadful gurgling scream. Her covering was tom from her face. It was a face that he knew. In spite of that protruding upper lip and that slobber of blood, it was a face that he knew. She kept on putting her hand up to the gap and screaming. Douglas Stone sat down at the foot of the couch with his knife and his forceps. The room was whirling round, and he had felt something go like a ripping seam behind his ear.
Hamil Ali, of course, reveals himself to be Lord Sannox, indulging in a bit of amateur theatrics. The quietly chuckling peer explains that the operation on Lady Sannox was necessary — "not physically, but morally, you know, morally."
With a few parting words to his servants, Lord Sannox arranges for the doctor to be taken home, Lady Sannox to be attended, and his purple chrysanthemums to be exhibited.
Certainly, the unrestrained horror of this grisly tale is unparalleled in mainstream popular literature. Mutilation of a beautiful woman by her adulterous lover while a chuckling husband looks on is scarcely a common theme. Part of the uniquely unpleasant power of the story arises from the decadently objective, almost light-hearted tone of the prose. The narrator reflects the '90s interest in expanded boundaries of taste: the aesthetic considerations of crime as a fine art and ugliness as a new thrill are the bases of this supremely weird tale. An intriguing element, too, is the Oriental disguise of Lord Sannox: the operation Stone is paid to perform is scarcely thinkable in a European — especially English environment. In order to make the idea possible even though Stone behaves himself with the same reckless sexual abandon as an Eastern potentate an Oriental atmosphere is required. Still, despite the violence and horror of the tale, Victorian morality is vindicated: the adulterer goes mad and the adulteress retreats to a religious convent, there to contemplate the consequences of departures from conventional morality. Lord Sannox, though the most cruel and merciless of Conan Doyle's villains, remains unpunished. He is an angel of vengeance whose actions, though monstrous, confirm traditional values of the sanctity of marriage and the role of a wife as the husband's possession.
Two of Conan Doyle's stories exploit the potential for terror to be found in nature. In his second published work The American's Tale (1880), a man lies down to sleep in what turns out to be the soft, sweet folds of a huge fly-trap plant. His comrades find him by accident:
- "One of the great leaves of the flytrap, that had been shut and touchin' the ground as it lay, was slowly rolling back upon its hinges. There, lying like a child in its cradle, was Alabama Joe in the hollow of the leaf. The great thorns had been slowly driven through his heart as it shut upon him. We could see as he'd tried to cut his way out, for there was a slit in the thick fleshy leaf, an' his bowie was in his hand; but it had smothered him first... an' there he were as we found him, tom and crushed into pulp by the great jagged teeth of the man-eatin' plant."
More formally satisfying than this early tall tale is one of the Round the Fire stories, The Brazilian Cat (1898). A world-travelled collector of exotic animals plots to eliminate a young man who stands between him and an imminent inheritance. The macabre touch: he locks the young man in a huge cage with a ravenous eleven-foot black cat from Brazil. Through fast-thinking use of certain odd fixtures within the cage, the wounded and terrified young man succeeds in eluding the beast until morning, when his host returns to the cage to inspect the results of his plan. The cat, having tasted human blood for the first time, now turns upon his owner and kills him. The young man's ordeal finally ends when the servants shoot the cat and rescue him.
A final group of weird tales shows Conan Doyle's continued interest in the breakdown of mental stability. Although often a risky proposition, it is also often important to stress vigorously the connection between the artist's life and his fictional concerns. It is true that Conan Doyle's father, Charles A. Doyle, was a gifted, sensitive, whimsical man who appears to have seen, and painted portraits of, fairies and elves. In 1884 he was confined in the first of what was to be a series of lunatic asylums, where he produced several "diaries", one of which has recently received a wide circulation. Charles Doyle died in 1893 from the effects of the combined illnesses of epilepsy and alcoholism. Though the connection between Conan Doyle's life and art is necessarily speculative, it is undeniable that he found the topics of insanity and paternity useful in his fiction; whether he did so more often than other writers who have not had lunatic parents is a matter for further research. We have already seen Conan Doyle's interest in mental illness exhibited in the destruction of Dr. Stone in The Case of Lady Sannox, as well as in the end of the accidental murderer, Pericord, in The Great Brown-Pericord Motor. Then there were the narrators of The Silver Mirror and The Terror of Blue John Gap, whose shaky mental conditions lent such rich ambiguity to their claimed preternatural experiences.
The Surgeon of Gaster Fell (1890) is an intriguing thematic transition. Told by a man whose tastes are "of a Spartan turn" and who has decorated his room in his remote English country retreat especially for his "mystic studies", the tale tells us that:
- The room... was... as gloomy and majestic as the thoughts and aspirations with which it was to harmonise. Both walls and ceiling were covered with a paper of the richest and glossiest black, on which was traced a lurid and arabesque pattern of dead gold. A black velvet curtain covered the single diamond-paned window, while a thick, yielding carpet of the same material prevented the sound of my own footfalls, as I paced backward and forward, from breaking the current of my thought.
Our narrator, in retreat from all human contact in order to pursue some unspecified occult inquiries, is pretty clearly an odd bird. Our distrust of the narrator's own stability of mind adds to the ambiguous tone of the tale as unusual experiences happen to the recluse. He meets a young woman, another man, and an old gentleman who appears to be a captive of the younger. After a number of events occur which combine to suggest a strange relationship between the younger people and the old man, the narrator finally learns that the old man is insane and, though generally docile, occasionally lapses into outbursts of violence. The man, the surgeon of the village of Gaster Fell, is the son of the old lunatic, and the girl his daughter, both of whom are endeavouring by this remote seclusion to avoid the commitment of their father to an asylum.
The atmosphere of eerie uncertainty, effected by the lonely, gloomy setting (as well as the weird pre-occupations of the narrator) surrounds increasingly confusing events that climax in a genuinely frightening scene: the narrator, alone in his retreat late at night, hears a "stealthy footfall" outside, "ever drawing nearer". The maniac, with inhuman eyes that seem "to burn through the darkness with a greenish brilliancy of their own," enters the house and attacks him with a leaden knife. Suddenly, however, he retreats into the darkness pursued by the Surgeon of Gaster Fell. It's that classic fear of the night-time, the most basic and magical element of all, that makes this tale speak to something very deep in the human mind. The maniac loose in the night, wielding knives and creeping slowly into one's room is another standard that ties this work in with the thousand similar yarns spun around campfires before Conan Doyle as well as after him. Stephen King calls them "Tales of the Hook" and, in his recent critical work, Danse Macabre, he documents the survival of this type of chiller into the 1980s. (2)
But Conan Doyle's addition to the basic concept is typical of the sorts of artistic and narrative concerns that preoccupied him: making the narrator a reclusive, life-denying occultist with unspecified "researches" on his mind does more than simply give the red herring hint that perhaps the threat may have a supernatural origin. Indeed, when the story closes, and a letter from the surgeon of Gaster Fell "explains" everything that has hitherto puzzled the narrator, order is only partially restored; for the wit is grimly ironic when Conan Doyle has the doctor assure the narrator that the old man's illness is intermittent, that his case "may take a homicidal, or it may take a religious turn," and that "for months he may be as well as you or I, and then in a moment he may break out."
"As well as you or I," indeed. How well is our narrator? After his adventure, does he persist in his rejection of human companionship, his denial of his instincts, drives and needs? Is his a case of mental illness that has taken "a religious turn"? Does his experience on those "lonely moors" have any effect on him? No comment from the narrator answers these questions. The tale ends with the surgeon's letter of "explanation". Because of their motives, the surgeon and his sister have exhibited more human, life-affirming values by their rejection of an ordinary life in a community than the narrator has by his. His only purpose in leaving human society is to do some unexplained "research" into some kind of non-physical alternative reality. In short, the story is rather more textured than might at first appear. In this exploration of the theme of human isolation, Conan Doyle takes us into a dark, confusing, and ambiguous psychological world at least as lonely and mysterious as the setting itself.
Another mad relative figures in The Beetle Hunter (1898). Lord Linchmere and his sister, Mrs. Evelyn Rossiter, have a mysterious problem which requires the help of a very specialised individual. They advertise in the newspaper:
- Wanted for one or more days the services of a medical man. It is essential that he should be a man of strong physique, of steady nerves, and of a resolute nature. Must by an entomologist coleopterist preferred. Application must be made before twelve o'clock today.
And, as we might expect in Conan Doyle's London, teeming as it is with eccentrics, enthusiasts, and academic specialists, the right man sees the advertisement. The narrator, Dr. Hamilton, an athletic, young, unemployed medical man, devoted to the study of insects, applies for the odd vacancy and is, of course, found perfect for the two employers' needs. Without explaining to him what he is to expect, aside from a rather vague assurance that they are engaged in "preventing anything in the nature of a family scandal," Lord Linchmere takes Hamilton on a journey to the country home of Sir Thomas Rossiter the world's foremost authority on beetles.
Sir Thomas is even odder than is his unusual scientific obsession. Comically self-inflated, he is pleased to meet Hamilton, who tells him he's read Rossiter's classic book on beetles. Says Sir Thomas: "People can find time for such trivialities as sport or society, and yet the beetles are overlooked. I can assure you that the greater part of the idiots in this part of the country are unaware that I have ever written a book at all I, the first man who ever described the true function of the elytra." Rossiter's appearance is also striking: "His forehead, which was naturally high, and higher still on account of receding hair, was in a continual state of movement. Some nervous. weakness kept the muscles in a constant spasm, which sometimes produced a mere twitching and sometimes a curious rotary movement unlike anything which I had ever seen before. It was strikingly visible as he turned towards us... with... hard, steady, grey eyes.. underneath those palpitating brows."
That night, Lord Linchmere requires Hamilton to share his room with him, where they will divide the night into two watches. (The scene is reminiscent of the vigil at Stoke Moran when Holmes and Watson thwart Grimesby Roylott.) During Linchmere's watch, long past two in the morning, Hamilton is shaken into wakefulness and leaps out of bed just in time to see Sir Thomas entering the room:
- He was squat and crouching with the silhouette of a bulky and mis-shapen dwarf. Slowly the door swung open with this ominous shape framed in the centre of it. And then, in an instant the crouching figure shot up, there was a tiger spring across the room, and thud, thud, thud came three tremendous blows from some heavy object upon the bed.
With considerable difficulty, the two men subdue the now raving coleopterist and wrest a hammer from his grip; the madman convulses violently and then loses consciousness.
At last Linchmere explains: "My poor brother-in-law is one of the best fellows upon earth, a loving husband and an estimable father, but he comes from a stock which is deeply tainted with insanity. He has more than once had homicidal outbreaks, which are the more painful because his inclination is always to attack the very person to whom he is most attached." Linchmere needed to be on the spot at the time of the next outbreak, in order to prevent bloodshed. Since Rossiter has no awareness of his illness or his murderous behaviour, Linchmere knew that he would have to bring along someone both strong and sufficiently up on the subject of beetles to insure an invitation for the night. Linchmere knew the outbreak was imminent because of the "providential danger-signal" — the "nervous contortion of the forehead." Furthermore, though a doctor himself, he needed another medical man: two signatures are required on lunacy papers.
Autobiographical connections are tempting here. Five years after his own father's death from convulsive epilepsy in a lunatic asylum, a man writes a story in which a good, kind, and gifted man unwittingly hurts the ones he loves best and therefore must be confined to a mad-house by his relatives.
Perhaps even more potently symbolic is The Sealed Room (1898), part of the same series as The Beetle Hunter. This story involves a man who can no longer face the trials of his life and who determines to kill himself. However, he wishes to spare his ailing wife the shock, and his young son the scandal of his suicide. So with the help of his attorney, he arranges an elaborate cover story which convinces his family he is on the continent working to solve his financial crisis. Actually, however, he has been dead and mouldering in a sealed room in the family mansion for seven years.
The room is opened on the son's twenty-first birthday:
- The room, windowless and bare, was fitted up as a photographic laboratory, with a tap and sink at the side of it. A shelf of bottles and measures stood at one side, and a peculiar, heavy smell, partly chemical, partly animal, filled the air. A single table and chair were in front of us, and at this, with his back turned towards us, a man was seated in the act of writing. His outline and attitude were as natural as life; but as the light fell upon him, it made my hair rise to see that the nape of his neck was black and wrinkled, and no thicker than my wrist. Dust lay upon him thick, yellow dust upon his hair, his shoulders, his shrivelled, lemon-coloured hands. His head had fallen forward upon his breast. His pen still rested upon a discoloured sheet of paper.
To what extent Conan Doyle's subconscious guilt over the long confinement and ultimate death of his own father contributed to this sensational fantasy, it is impossible to say. Here, the lost, dead man is himself responsible for his own confinement and death, which he has done to spare his wife and son the pain of his breakdown and of his separation from a reality he can no longer face. His decision to remove himself from life, and to lock himself up to die, absolves his relatives of any responsibility for his death.
Another mentally unstable father appears in Our Midnight Visitor (1891). Of course, the theme of the mad relative is a staple of gothic literature: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Lewis' The Monk are early examples of its use. It may indeed be that these stories involving insanity are simple shockers intended to disturb us, the readers, and not written to work out an author's subconscious needs.
III
That Conan Doyle was deeply interested in obscure and forbidden topics is obvious from what we have seen so far. But perhaps the most daring of his literary experiments are frequently concerned with sexual obsession and the relation of sex and death.
In Conan Doyle's intriguing sketch A Medical Document (1894), an alienist named Charley Manson (who "always wears his collar high..., since the half-successful attempt of a student of Revelations to cut his throat with a splinter of glass") delivers himself of this opinion:
- "There is a side of life which contains some of the richest human materials that a man could study. It's not a pleasant side, I am afraid, but if it is good enough for Providence to create, it is good enough for us to try and understand. It would deal with strange outbursts of savagery and vice in the lives of the best men, curious momentary weaknesses in the record of the sweetest women... It would deal, too, with the singular phenomena of waxing and waning manhood, and would throw a light upon those actions which have cut short many an honoured career and sent a man to prison when he should have been hurried to a consulting-room."
The topics, then, of sexual drives, their consequences, their debilities, and their perversions are rich sources for thought and for literature. Conan Doyle also employed sexual symbolism to heighten some effects, as he did in the Professor Challenger satire on science's ignorant rape of the earth, When the World Screamed. Finally, he used sexual material as the basis for some character motivations. Consider, for instance, two tales of sexual revenge: in The New Catacomb, a man avenges the seduction of a woman by imprisoning the malefactor in a secret tunnel, while in The Case of Lady Sannox, another man tricks his rival into cutting off the lip of their mutual mistress. Both punishments are clearly symbolically erotic.
These obvious uses of sexual drives as the cause of murder and mutilation deepen into less graphic and horrific, though nonetheless bizarre, uses of these psychological impulses in some of the stories Conan Doyle produced between 1883 and 1900. All of these stories share a common element: for one reason or another, the characters deny, or defer indefinitely, the sexual consummation of their love.
In The Surgeon of Gaster Fell (1890), the odd narrator removes himself from life including sex. When he meets a woman on the moors, he takes half a page to drink in the details of her beauty. Deep waters, as Holmes might say, run beneath his rejection of ordinary human life. A Physiologist's Wife (1890) is a medical twist on Tennyson's Enoch Arden. This time a woman marries a grimly agnostic physiologist years after she had deserted her first husband for another man in Australia. The original husband turns up, having for all these years supposed his wife lost at sea with her lover. The physiologist, in a re-affirmation of his habitual denial of both soul and love as real things, gives up his new wife. Shortly after, he begins to die: "It is," he says, "the assertion... of the liberty of the individual cell to the cell-commune. It is the dissolution of a co-operative society. The process is one of great interest." Here the denial of normal human life and love results in the death of a man who has devoted himself, up to the time of his marriage, solely to dry, inhuman, materialistic science.
In The Secret of Goresthorpe Grange (1883), Conan Doyle has the odd Mr. D'Odd select the most attractive of female ghosts as suitable to haunt his grand new home. As he approaches her, no doubt for an embrace, he awakens from his hallucination, the ghost disappears, and he finds his scantily clad wife standing before him, telling him of the burglary of the house. The Great Keinplatz Experiment (1885), in dealing with the Professor's daughter throwing herself sexually at her father, because he is temporarily inhabiting her lover's body, is a weirdly comic treatment of incest. One of the doctors talking shop in A Medical Document (1894) speaks of an odd case:
- "Did I ever tell you that case where Nature divorced a most loving couple? He was a fine young fellow, an athlete and a gentleman, but he overdid athletics. You know how the force that controls us gives us a little tweak to remind us when we get off the beaten track. It may be a pinch on the great toe if we drink too much and work too little. Or it may be a tug on our nerves if we dissipate energy too much. With the athlete, of course, it's the heart or the lungs. He had bad phthisis and was sent to Davos. Well, as luck would have it, she developed rheumatic fever, which left her heart very much affected. Now, do you see the dreadful dilemma in which those poor people found themselves? When he came below 4,000 feet or so, his symptoms became terrible. She could come up about 2,500, and then her heart reached its limit. They had several interviews half-way down the valley, which left them nearly dead, and at last, the doctors had to absolutely forbid it. And so for four years they lived within three miles of each other and never met. Every morning he would go to a place which overlooked the chalet in which she lived and would wave a great white cloth and she would answer from below."
Ironically, unromantically, the urge of life will out. The doctor concludes by explaining that "the man recovered and is now a successful stockbroker in Drapers Gardens. The woman, too," he adds, "is the mother of a considerable family." He does not say, but we assume, that the two remained apart.
Another melodrama of long lost love is John Huxford's Hiatus (1888), in which a long-time amnesia victim finally returns to his now elderly fiancee. The consummation of their love has been delayed until it is physically impossible. Conan Doyle, however, lets us know that there was a spiritually happy ending: they lived what years they had left, together and devoted. The story is symbolic of celibacy rewarded by a higher, more spiritual love; it anticipates, biographically, Conan Doyle's nine years of celibacy during which he loved Miss Jean Leckie, but remained faithful and devoted to his invalided wife Louise until her death; moreover, it anticipates his Spiritualistic conviction that love would be even better in the afterlife.
The Man from Archangel (1885) involves a Russian who passionately loves a woman who rejects him and runs away. After a long wait, the Russian manages to take the girl off. A shipwreck at sea finally unites them. The narrator, yet another of Conan Doyle's life-denying scholarly recluses, who has tried to protect her by keeping her away from her amorous suitor, finds the corpses washed up on the beach after the storm:
- I saw at a glance that it was the Russian, face downwards and dead. I rushed into the water and dragged him up on to the beach. It was only when I turned him over that I discovered that she was beneath him, his dead arms encircling her, his mangled body still intervening between her and the fury of the storm... There were signs which led me to believe that during that awful night the woman's fickle mind had come at last to learn the worth of the true heart and strong arm which struggled for her and guarded her so tenderly. Why else should her little head be nestling so lovingly on his broad chest, while her yellow hair entwined itself with his flowing beard? Why too should there be that bright smile of ineffable happiness and triumph, which death itself had not had the power to banish from his dusky face?
Here, the ecstasy of love is finally achieved, but only at the moment of death, complete with entwined hair, tender embraces, and a "bright smile of ineffable happiness."
That mutual enjoyment was denied the captain of the Pole-Star, who had to wait a long time after his lover's death to join with her ghost in the arctic snows. But the ambiguity of the text suggests deeper and more terrifying possibilities. Are these lovers who are united, or is he a guilty man who knows too much about the "circumstances of peculiar horror" that surrounded her death? Is she a spirit chasing him for revenge, or is he a mortal pursuing death for love? Is the final contact an ecstasy of relief and release for the captain, or is it a culmination of revenge for an aggrieved spirit? In either case, whether for good or ill, the lovers are, after a lifetime of separation, at last to join in death, and the mingling of the snowflakes with the dead captain's body is surely a symbol of sexual contact of some sort.
Sexual consummation is brought to its ultimate delay in The Ring of Thoth (1890), in which a man must wait 4,000 years to be united with his beloved. The tale concludes with "the following concise narrative" in The Times:
- Curious Occurrence in the Louvre Yesterday morning a strange discovery was made in the principal Egyptian chamber. The ouvriers who are employed to clean out the rooms in the morning found one of the attendants lying dead upon the floor with his arms round one of the mummies. So close was his embrace that it was only with the utmost difficulty that they were separated.
We are invited to suppose that, in a spiritual sense, now that the Egyptian scientist has at last been able to shed his physical body, the lovers have not been separated, but united in another world. This type of thing is scarcely new in the gothic tradition: one is reminded of Heathcliff's desire to decompose into Cathy's corpse, in Bronte's Wuthering Heights, so that their elements will be forever united, and Quasimodo in Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, who similarly moulders in the arms of the executed Esmerelda.
The lonely and bereaved owner of The Japanned Box (1899), is not really living at all. The voice in the phonograph merely supports Sir John Bollamore's virtue while he awaits his death. When he does die, as a result of an accident, the narrator suspects that the event was not unwelcome.
A weird note is certainly present in Lot No. 249 (1892), not only because of the horror of a re-awakened mummy striding about with homicidal intentions, but also because of the "secret vices" of which Bellingham is suspected. Higham was the first to state3 straightforwardly what was implied, considering Bellingham's unwholesomely close relationship with young Monkhouse Lee: "the mummy is male, and... Bellingham is entangled with it emotionally." Not merely necrophilia is suggested here, as it has been in just previously mentioned tales. Here we have homosexual necrophilia almost directly asserted.
In the horridly satiric De Profundis (1892), Conan Doyle's grim eroticism reaches its peak: the love-struck woman sees the body of her lover, who has been slain by smallpox, bob up from miles beneath the ocean's depths due to the gaseous action of decomposition, and she still interprets it as a preternatural communication assuring his continued love beyond death.
During the same prolific period, Conan Doyle wrote The Parasite (1894), a novel of sexual captivity straightforwardly signalled by the vampiristic hypnotist woman's name: Miss Penelosa. She is able to erotically attract men at will, despite her unpleasant appearance. And few tales in all mainstream popular literature leave more ambiguous feelings in readers' minds that the tale of the unfortunate John Barrington Cowles. Here the whip-wielding female, who laughs at the news of the deaths of previous fiances, is an embodiment of the literally captivating female. The mystery that the naively superstitious narrator, Armitage, seeks to solve is discovered despite his belief that the woman is a wehr-wolf instead, we may easily suppose that the horrible secret she reveals to her prospective husbands, and which causes them to die before their love for her can be consummated, may have more to do with some of the sexual inclinations studied by Krafft-Ebing in his famous study, Psycopathia Sexualis, than with the superstitions of central Europe.
The threat of female suffocation and of vaginal horror increases in the stories written between 1903 and 1913. Aside from Conan Doyle's youthful tale of the American captured and smothered by the sexual digestive organs of a huge man-eating fly-trap plant, other, more mature, stories suggest the author's interest in symbolic sexual terror. The three-bucket torture that figures in the dream in The Leather Funnel (1903) is skilfully ambiguous: we are invited to wonder into which orifice of the woman's spread-eagled body the inquisitors have inserted the death-funnel. That the vagina of our imaginations becomes the factual mouth of the woman, only increases the sexually textured quality of the story.
The danger of vaginal suffocation expands in The Horror of the Heights (1931), in which a fever-ridden pilot "sees" that huge translucent pink folds of jellyfish-like beasts float in the unexplored regions of the air, with the potential to ingest or decapitate human aeronauts. And, perhaps most obviously, there is The Terror of Blue John Gap (1910), in which the narrator (symbolically named "Hardcastle"), who is recovering from a terrible strain on his nerves, finds a cleft in the earth with brush concealing it and sheep's blood around its opening. Inside the gap, deep within, a monster awaits to destroy those who enter, and, from time to time, it emerges to draw human prey into its maw.
IV
After all this, two obvious questions remain. Why did Conan Doyle want to write these stories of monsters and ghosts and madness? What were his aims — his conscious aims as a writer? He made no claims to a high prose style and wrote rapidly and easily which may in part account for his readability (4) — but casual, direct, disarming storytelling may still conceal layers of meaning. He was able to tap some of our deepest levels of anxiety, and the tale of terror was an effective counterweight to the reassuring ratiocinations of Sherlock Holmes. Finally, he seems to have had a conscious intention to create an uncertain world in which ghosts might exist; in which the absolute convictions of modern science might be inapplicable; in which the subconscious terrors of sexuality would be dealt with openly in fiction; in which all that was modern would be threatened — and perhaps overthrown by all that was primal, dark and savage; in which sanity and reason would break down under the pressure of madness and the unknown. This is not the world so fondly and nostalgically treasured by the lovers of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson of 221b Baker Street. But it is a world that claimed a considerable degree of Arthur Conan Doyle's literary attention and that, in the end, became the basis for his deepest religious beliefs.
REFERENCES
1. Baker, Michael, Ed.: The Doyle Diary: The Last Great Conan Doyle Mystery; Paddington; 1978
2. Higham, Charles: The Adventures of Conan Doyle; Norton, New York; 1976
3. King, Stephen: Danse Macabre; Everest House, New York; 1981
4. Pearsall, Ronald: Conan Doyle: A Biographical Solution; St. Martin's Press, New York; 1977
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
