Arthur Conan Doyle and the Meaning of Masculinity

Diana Barsham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351956956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

A valued icon of British manhood, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has been the subject of numerous biographies since his death in 1930. All his biographers have drawn heavily on his own autobiography, Memories & Adventures, a collection of stories and anecdotes themed on the subject of masculinity and its representation. Diana Barsham discusses Doyle's career in the context of that nineteenth-century biographical tradition which Dr Watson so successfully appropriated. It explores Doyle's determination to become a great name in the culture of his day and the strains on his identity arising from this project. A Scotsman with an alcoholic, Irish, fairy-painting father, Doyle offered himself and his writings as a model of British manhood during the greatest crisis of British history. Doyle was committed to finding solutions to some of the most difficult cultural problematics of late Victorian masculinity. As novelist, war correspondent, historian, legal campaigner, propagandist and religious leader, he used his fame as the creator of Sherlock Holmes to refigure the spirit of British Imperialism. This original and thought-provoking study offers a revision of the Doyle myth. It presents his career as a series of dialoguic contestations with writers like Thomas Hardy and Winston Churchill to define the masculine presence in British culture. In his spiritualist campaign, Doyle took on the figure of St Paul in an attempt to create a new religious culture for a Socialist age.

CHAPTER ONE

Model with Damaged Eyes: Autobiographical Writings

‘Was it for this the clay grew tall?’

Wilfred Owen, ‘Futility’ (1918)

Representing masculinity

This book is not a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), but it is impossible to engage in any discussion of Doyle’s career without acknowledging the biographical frames within which his writing was situated. He planned for himself a life of public meaning, and biography is his literary element. His favourite reading consisted of work in this genre – the inumerable biographies, autobiographies, memoirs and diaries whose literary accents he could replicate and parody with such ease and humour. His own diverse writings constitute a body of work in search of its own autobiographer.

While Sherlock Holmes and his half-infatuated, half-infuriated biographer, Dr Watson, have retained their place in our culture, studies of other aspects of Doyle’s career have been relatively rare. His significance has been located less in his fiction or war histories than in his life story. A popular subject for repeated biographies, Doyle has also existed as a quasi-fictional character in a number of novels, plays and films devoted to some of the more controversial aspects of his life. These include his war writing, his legal campaigning, his willing suspension of disbelief in fairies and his resolute championship of the spirit world. His high-profile stance on these issues has enabled reconstruction of him as a post-modern literary hybrid, a figure who crosses and reconstitutes the boundaries of fictional representation.

Although this book is not a biography of Doyle, it does offer a reading of his career which emphasizes his engagement with Victorian biographical debate. It also addresses the main controversies of recent biographical scholarship. These controversies have been listed by Jon Lellenberg in The Quest for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Thirteen Biographers in Search of a Life as influential in shaping and preserving Doyle’s uncertain literary reputation. The ambiguity surrounding him derives from his high status as an icon of British masculinity compared to the more modest placing of his literary achievements. His version of authorship was socially engaged and combative, his task as much the social performance of masculinity as the production of texts. A 1907 review of Doyle describes him as having established the profession of letters on a footing equivalent to that of law, medicine or banking

He is a publicist, he is a philosopher, he is a man of affairs, he is a combatant in the political arena, and he is a philanthropist … In a way, he may be taken as the John Bull of Letters, with all the virtues and many of the limitations of that traditional and composite personality.¹

Doyle himself considered that the popularity of the Sherlock Holmes stories had been detrimental to his reputation as a serious writer.

Jon Lellenberg has identified five recurrent problems for the biographer of Doyle, three of them relating to his literary persona. What, he asks, was the ‘real mind’ of the man behind works whose reassuring propaganda on behalf of British manhood was their most influential quality? How can his intelligence and achievement be assessed? On the one hand, Doyle once claimed, in a piece of bravura rhetoric, to be simply ‘the man in the street’,² a Briton of representative ordinariness who could (and did) use the pseudonym ‘Smith’ to represent himself. On the other hand, Doyle was famous as the creator of the mastermind, Sherlock Holmes, and of the ingenious detective puzzles it was his function to decipher. A third line of argument again follows Doyle’s own self-description, presenting him as not the creator of Sherlock Holmes, but merely as the copier of a brilliant original, replicating the detective methods of his Edinburgh medical professor, Dr Joseph Bell. Holmes, in Doyle’s account, was a figure of composite masculine achievement, as reliant on the famous illustrations of Sidney Paget as on his real-life model, Dr Bell.

The penultimate and most intractable problem, according to Lellenberg, concerns Doyle’s Spiritualist crusade. The issue here is one of masculine definition and a perception that his Spiritualism undermines that identification with post-Enlightenment reason used to guarantee the masculinity of the Holmes stories. ‘Real men’ like Doyle simply do not – or at least should not publicly – believe in spirits. Harry Houdini, Doyle’s friend and opponent on this issue in the early 1920s, took a more appropriate public stance, using his own tricks to expose as fraudulent any medium claiming contact with the spirit world.

By the late nineteenth century, biography had become established as the main literary forum for the public configuration of an idealized manhood. As Dr Watson repeatedly illustrated, the male biographer and his subject combined to produce a work which sustained the transmission of a culturally produced masculinity while rewriting the life-text between father and son. Although Doyle’s 1979 biographer, Julian Symons, describes him as ‘a bluff Imperialist extrovert’ and a ‘Victorian Phillistine’,³ most biographies, including Teller of Tales (1999) by Daniel Stashower, retain a strong admiration for their subject that resembles hagiography.

Doyle himself was an adept in the creation of masculine stereotypes. The grandson of an Irish portrait painter turned political cartoonist, he was a writer whose family had, for three generations, specialized in the depiction of a masculinity which inoffensively interrogated the dominant representational practices of the nineteenth century. The instantly recognizable figure of Sherlock Holmes has behind it the equally familiar icons of Punch and John Bull as etched by his uncle, Richard, and his grandfather, John Doyle.

Partly because of the prolonged unavailability of Doyle’s private papers, the interpretation of his life has remained fixed for longer than is usually the case with controversial or significant writers. He remains an author whose reputation – for manliness, moral integrity, chivalry, sportsmanship, and good-natured gullibility – has been fixed in time as a museum piece of British manhood. There are, however, obviously haunted silences surrounding this display: the story of Doyle’s sisters, of his first wife Louise (‘Touie’), and of his relationship with his eldest daughter, Mary. Painstaking research by Michael Baker and by Owen Dudley Edwards has provided material for an understanding of Doyle’s Edinburgh childhood, his mother’s unorthodox domestic, and perhaps sexual, arrangements and the sad story of his estranged, incarcerated, alcoholic father. Despite these discoveries, however, Doyle’s model of the manly life has not been subject to iconoclastic acts of literary vandalism. His carefully crafted version of British manhood remains a cherished and protected part of national literary culture. In a post-feminist age, the name of Arthur Conan Doyle continues to stand for masculine presence. It is a presence still subject to investigation and debate.

At the level of the individual reader, Doyle’s name is associated primarily with the literature of boyhood, with the books and stories which fathers recommend to sons and by which phases of adolescence are often recalled. From a wider cultural perspective which includes the Great War, Doyle’s name and autobiography convey a set of values identified as distinctly British through one of the deepest crises in the nation’s history. Significantly, he offered his ‘life’ as a version of manliness in subtle opposition to that formed and articulated through the English public school system, one that spoke the additional Celticism of his Scottish birthplace and Irish family background. Like the mythic King Arthur, after whom he was not named, Doyle attempted to represent British culture at a point of crisis and disaster, when the masculinities of the Victorian era were recast through the new directives of the First World War and Georgian democracy.

Behind the long list of largely admiring biographies of Doyle which followed the Reverend John Lamond’s 1931 family-commissioned Memoir stands the text which authorizes them all and ensures their readability: Doyle’s Memories and Adventures (1924). This autobiography is remarkable for its success in combining some of the opposing conventions of Victorian life-writing. It is both a saint’s life, displaying the characteristics and oratorical gifts used to emblematize the life-text of the religious leader, and a secular career autobiography after the model of Anthony Trollope. Doyle’s most informed and astute critic, Richard Lancelyn Green, sums up Memories and Adventures as a ‘romance’:

Arthur Conan Doyle left no mark on history, but he remains a larger-than-life figure, and his career has a certain glamour enabling him to be named in a variety of other contexts. There is also a world set apart from the real one in which Conan Doyle holds centre stage as the ‘big man’ of his dreams: the champion, the lover of justice, the man of action, the friend of the opressed. It is the world he created around himself, and it was not purely a dream. His autobiography becomes the sequel to his historical novels, for here Sir Arthur vanquishes his foes and wins glory for himself. His life becomes a romance. Indeed many of the illustrations for The Strand serializations were drawn as if for an adventure story.⁴

Like the realism that was its representational mode, Victorian masculinity was predicated on the successful copying of ideological models. By the 1870s, however, realism had become associated with notions of containment and confinement, an entrapment of masculine enterprise at odds with the requirements of late-Victorian imperialism. Doyle had determined early on not to become a second Branwell Bronte – a talented Irish wild boy eclipsed by more industrious sisters. He sought support from, and continuity with, models of male professional praxis, seeking to link himself to the achievements of other men, as he did through his tributes to Joseph Bell. In literature he attached himself to that tradition of historical fiction established by Sir Walter Scott, despite the groans of his Cornhill editor, James Payn, who considered it an outdated form. Re-energizing and repopularizing the Scottish Romanticism of Byron and Scott, Doyle’s career was built around knowing and showing what and how to copy for the achievement of masculine effects.

Memories and Adventures is a culmination of writing expertise committed to this enterprise. It offers at the same time a model life, one which embodies particular manly values in a narrative of triumphant combat, and a mere model, a shell into which different interiorities can be fitted. Richard Lancelyn Green attributes to Doyle ‘a fear of intimacy’ which renders his autobiography primarily an act of self-publication: ‘When he describes his life, he omits the inner man. There are no revelations, no great pangs of remorse, and no sense of personal injustice.’⁵

Doyle’s skill as a propagandist for British manhood partly depended on his outsider status as a Scottish-born Irishman with a Catholic upbringing, a position illustrated by the causes for which he fought. His active commitment to divorce reform, his fight against racist victimization in the Edalji case, his exposure of the atrocities of imperial exploitation in the Congo, his petition for the reprieve of Roger Casement, his public attacks on the blindnesses of British justice, the incompetence of British military command and the failings of the English public school system, as much as his faith in the existence of spirits and fairies, all serve to highlight this anomaly in Doyle’s career. He may have represented what his son Adrian called ‘the true meaning of three words – an English gentleman’,⁶ but his ability to do so rested uncannily on the fact that he was not what he represented.

Pierre Norton, Doyle’s 1964 biographer, takes the same view as Lancelyn Green. He concludes that Doyle was a reluctant autobiographer, unwilling ‘to occupy the centre of his own stage’.⁷ This lack of intimacy compounds, for Doyle’s biographers, the principal problem of his life story: his departure in 1916 from the solidarities of the masculine tradition and his eccentric acceptance instead of fairyland and the spirit world. Written after his high-profile public conversion, the first edition of Memories and Adventures nonetheless excludes the main body of Doyle’s Spiritualist work, emphasizing the secular rather than the spiritual dimensions of the text’s quest. The model life it describes was one that he personally had already left behind.

In place of personal relevation, Doyle’s autobiography charts the gradual convergence of two histories – the story of his own life conjoining with that of the British Empire. Providence itself, he claims, used coincidence and uncanny events to affect this conjunction and its gradual sculpting of a representative ‘empire’ masculinity:

I believe that Providence one way or another gets a man’s full powers out of him, but that it is essential that the man himself should co-operate to the extent of putting himself in the way of achievement. … Deep in my bo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Model with Damaged Eyes: Autobiographical Writings
• 2 When Did You Last See Your Father? The Early Fiction
• 3 Sh …!: Reminiscences of a London Medical Man
• 4 Tortured Bodies and Nervous Narratives: The Novels of the 1890s
• 5 Figures in the Sand: Histories, War Correspondence and Legal Campaigning
• 6 Beyond Auto/biography: Spiritualism and Travel Writing
• Bibliography
• Index