THERE is a famous caricature of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle which appeared in Punch at the height of the author's very public espousal of spiritualism, which depicts the burly, mustachioed author sitting with his head in the clouds while his immortal fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, stands by, fretting, shackled to his creator.
That image isn't included in Andrew Lycett's newly published biography of Conan Doyle, but it does speak volumes about some of the extraordinary contradictions which Lycett brings out in his portrait of one of Britain's greatest storytellers.
"I
have wrought my simple plan / If I give one hour of joy / To the boy who's half a man, / Or the man who's half a boy," Doyle wrote at the start of perhaps his best-known non-Holmesian work, The Lost World, and those of us who grew up in thrall to his stories recall them with huge affection, as well as old black and white footage of a burly, avuncular figure, ambling with his dogs through his country garden, the epitome of a Victorian-Edwardian English gentleman, albeit one born and raised in Edinburgh. But as Lycett pursued his research in hitherto unavailable documents and letters, the popularly accepted image of Conan Doyle as the bluff, good-hearted, best-selling author and campaigner for good causes gave way to something much more complex and slightly less comfortable.
In Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes, Lycett, who at 58 has acclaimed biographies of Ian Fleming, Rudyard Kipling and Dylan Thomas already under his belt, portrays a man who, implausibly, juggled the scientific rationalism in which he was steeped in his medical training at Edinburgh University (and with which he imbued the coldly cerebral Holmes) with his championing of spiritualism; who pursued the great love of his life, his second wife Jean Leckie, while still caring for his ailing first wife; and who was haunted by the shadow of a father who had to be institutionalised because of his alcoholism.
"I think when I started out, inevitably, I had a fairly naïve view of him," says Lycett, "based on the available evidence, which tended to present this rather upright English gentleman, forever taking up causes and, of course, his life dominated by writing Sherlock Homes."
We're talking in London, at the Primrose Hill flat of his partner, the literary photographer Sue Greenhill, and he has just obliged our own photographer by donning a T-shirt emblazoned with the single word "Elementary". Doyle (whose immortal detective never actually use the phrase "elementary my dear Watson", until an 1899 stage dramatisation by the American actor William Gillette) would turn out to be rather more complicated than Lycett expected.
"Now, after looking into his life in some detail, I suppose I'm more aware of the warts-and-all aspect of his character, and that there were these contradictions. I'm much more aware of his sheer complexity and, in a way, I look to Edinburgh as a metaphor for that. It was Robert Louis Stevenson who alighted on the 'divided city' aspect of Edinburgh and you get that in Conan Doyle's character - the fascination with the supernatural alongside that strong belief in reason and science." But even the field of Conan Doyle scholarship turned out not to be without its dark side: during Lycett's period of research, a leading Doyle scholar and archivist, Richard Lancelyn Green, was found dead amid strange circumstances.
Family infighting and a reluctance to expose certain aspects of Doyle's life to close scrutiny meant accessing all the available material was not the easiest of tasks, as Lycett was to discover. "Although one or two previous people had been given glimpses of it, under guidance, basically from Conan Doyle's [late] son Adrian, it wasn't until 2004 when this archive was put up for sale at Christie's that it became widely available. Luckily, the most interesting parts of it were bought by the British Library, while other bits went elsewhere, such as Edinburgh's Royal College of Surgeons."
Which brings us to what Dr John H Watson, that tireless chronicler of Baker Street, would have indubitably called "The Strange Case of Lancelyn Green". Richard Lancelyn Green was an eminent Doyle scholar and leading light of the Sherlock Holmes Society, who became greatly disturbed at the prospect of the Doyle archive, containing some 3,000 items, many of them unpublished, going under the hammer. In March 2004, Green was found dead in his Kensington home, having been garrotted with a shoelace tightened with a wooden spoon. Lycett believes he killed himself, although he acknowledges the coroner's open verdict. Some have suggested that Green, who was gay, had been the victim of an autoerotic sex game that went wrong, while others, including the Edinburgh Conan Doyle expert Owen Dudley Edwards, believe foul play was involved.
"I never met him," says Lycett. "The jury is still out to an extent, but I think his agitation became so intense that he just couldn't take it and, as far as I'm concerned, he took his own life."
Amid the conspiracy theories, Lancelyn Green's own massive collection, as he had bequeathed, went to the City of Portsmouth, where Doyle practised as a doctor and where Lycett was eventually able to access it - though not without some help from the actor and broadcaster Stephen Fry, who is patron of the collection. Among so much fresh documentary material the biographer was able to "flesh out the details" of the author's close relationship with his second wife while his first, Louise, was dying of tuberculosis. The established picture was one of Doyle, although fond of Jean Leckie, doing the honourable thing of the day. Lycett refers to Leckie as Doyle's "mistress", but how certain is he that, prior to Louise's death and his marriage to Leckie in 1907, theirs was a physical affair? "I think he was in this awful dilemma. He had this wife who was ill, who I don't think he was very passionate about but who he respected and liked. He did his best for her in many ways, taking her abroad to try and ensure she'd live longer. However, during this period he met and fell in love with this younger, attractive and in many ways more suitable woman.
"It's quite difficult to get into his relationship with Jean, even from this vast material, because a lot of it has been weeded out. But what is interesting, and seems very revealing, is to find out from the 1901 census [five years before Louise's death] that on that day Conan Doyle was staying in a hotel in Forest Row in Sussex, we see Jean Leckie was also a guest. So, it was a pretty close liaison."
Leckie, he reckons, was the great love of Doyle's life, and he makes the point that, as reflected in a short story Doyle wrote at the time - The Confession, about an ill-starred love affair - that the author may well have felt that if he did not act on his feelings for Leckie, he might regret it for the rest of his days.
There was a certain history of unconventional relationships with Doyle's family. Born in 1859 in Edinburgh's Picardy Place (and now commemorated there by a statue of Sherlock Holmes) he was of Irish descent, his father, Charles Altamont Doyle, having moved from London to take up a post in the Office of Works. Charles Doyle could count two eminent caricaturists as close relations - his father John Doyle who, as "HB", produced political sketches during the 1820s and 30s, and his brother Richard "Dicky" Doyle, the illustrator who set the template for the cover of Punch magazine. Charles had an artistic streak himself, producing whimsical drawings and helping design the octagonal fountain in the grounds of Holyrood House, but was also prone to depression and, increasingly alcoholism and his behaviour became so impossible that he was institutionalised a succession of mental hospitals.
Arthur's mother, Mary Conan Doyle, from an Anglo-Irish background, maintained a strong friendship (though nothing more, Lycett stresses) with a one-time lodger, Dr Bryan Waller, who became a family friend, benefactor and mentor. At one point, once Arthur was trying to establish himself as a doctor down south, and his father had been hospitalised, Mary moved with her remaining family to Waller's extensive home in Masongill, Yorkshire.
So, Lycett suggests, Mary Doyle looked with some understanding on her son's apparent dalliance with another woman, just as he would later show his sympathies for those locked in difficult marriages by campaigning for divorce law reform.
There were tensions, too, between Doyle's preference for his lesser-known historical fiction, such as The White Company and Micah Clarke, and the Holmes stories of which he tired but his public simply could not get enough, as well as between his Irish background and his antagonism to Irish home rule. But what most fascinated Lycett about his extraordinarily multifaceted subject was the apparent contradiction between the scientifically trained doctor and creator of a rigorously rational fictional sleuth and the imaginative writer who, even before the Holmes stories made him one of the best known and highest paid writers of his day, was producing a steady stream of supernatural tales. Then, against, all the empirical logic with which he'd been imbued, he embraced spiritualism and became its highest-profile proselytiser.
Doyle was investigating spiritualism even before the carnage of the First World War drove him, like so many others, to resort to seances to try and communicate with his son Kingsley and brother Innes, both of whom survived the trenches but perished in the flu epidemic at the end of the war. "He went through various processes that a lot of people of his generation went through," says Lycett. "He was interested in mesmerism, in the Society for Psychical Research, he got into seances. But, although sympathetic, he always adopted the rationalist approach, until the First World War when members of his family died. And because of the kind of character he was, he grabbed spiritualism with both hands and became this great proponent and went on lecture tours all round the country and to Australia, America and South Africa."
Doyle didn't do his credibility any good with the infamous "Cottingley Fairies" photographs, which he seemed astonishingly ready to endorse, and which were (much) later exposed as amateurish fakes, the "fairies" having been cut from Princess Mary's Gift Book - a publication to which Doyle himself had contributed a story.
Doyle was not a man for half-measures - he was a keen sportsman and doughty campaigner against miscarriages of justice such as such as the George Edalji case (the subject of Julian Barnes's novel Arthur and George), the Oscar Slater case or the Belgian atrocities in the Congo - but it also meant that when he decided to embrace spiritualism, or the Cottingley fairies, he did so with what Lycett described as "characteristic vigour".
But despite this, his vanity and his acquired bluff Englishness, there was something ingenuous about Conan Doyle, Lycett adds. "There was this other side that makes one warm to him, a very emotional side that was kept in check. On many levels he was a very likeable and popular character."
Having completed his forensic dissection of the great storyteller, you get the impression that Lycett retains a sneaking admiration for his complex subject.
"In keeping with his times he thought he could turn his scientific training to proving the existence of a world beyond death. There was something quixotic about such an enterprise, as if the bold adventurer refused to accept any negative connotations of man's diminished role in the universe."
• Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes is published this week by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
A CAPITAL EDUCATION
ARTHUR Conan Doyle studied medicine at Edinburgh University in the late 1870s, a time when the medical faculty enjoyed an international reputation. As is widely known, Doyle modelled the methods of scientific deduction of his most famous character on those of one of his university professors, Dr Joseph Bell, who believed that the basis of a successful diagnosis was "the precise and intelligent recognition and appreciation of minor differences". Doyle would dedicate The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to his old mentor.
In his biography, Andrew Lycett writes that in the first meeting between Holmes and Watson in A Study in Scarlet, the detective's first remark to Watson "is straight out of the Joseph Bell textbook - 'How are you? You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.'"
However, Holmes's Edinburgh influences run deeper than just Bell. A pillar of the medical faculty of the day was Sir Robert Christison, an early pioneer of forensic medicine, whose influence on Doyle's - and Holmes's - understanding of drugs and poisons was significant. According to Lycett, during the sensational trial of Burke and Hare, "Christison's experiments into the bruising of corpses helped secure Burke's conviction". Also influential was Dr Henry Littlejohn, another forensic specialist and Edinburgh's first Medical Officer of Health, who helped introduce scientific evidence such as fingerprints and photography into court proceedings.
But the Edinburgh legacy stretches beyond Holmes. William Rutherford, Doyle's physiology professor, with his Assyrian beard and booming voice, provided a model for the formidable Professor Challenger in The Lost World, and Edinburgh Doyle scholar Owen Dudley Edwards has pointed out that the unruly student audiences which bedevil Challenger's lectures are simply a "rentamob" from Edinburgh's notoriously rumbustious rectorial elections.
• An exhibition, The Real Sherlock Holmes, is currently running in the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh museum. Visit www.rcsed.ac.ukforinfo.
