Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) is best remembered as the creator of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. He was also one of the most eloquent and tireless public advocates of Spiritualism and other strange “phenomena”, and is still cited by spiritualists to this day.

Contents

[edit] The Exploits of Arthur

Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1859 and studied medicine at Edinburgh University. He eventually specialized as an occulist.

His most famous literary creation, Sherlock Holmes, first appeared in print in 1887 in A Study in Scarlet, which would be succeeded by three more novels and 56 short stories about Holmes. In later life he would turn detective himself, successfully investigating two miscarriages of justice. He was knighted and appointed as Deputy-Lieutenant of Surey in 1902. He stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Liberal Unionist, and campaigned alongside Sir Roger Casement against the brutality of the conditions in the Congo Free State. Besides his numerous fictional works, he produced patriotic writing on the Boer War and First World War.

His first publication on Spiritualism appeared in 1918, and from then on until the last years of his life, he attended countless seances, and wrote and lectured tirelesly on the paranormal. He died in 1930.

Despite Conan Doyle's stated expectation that the “other side” would be even easier to investigate from the other side, we know of no posthumous works from his pen.

To see how seriously we should take Conan Doyle, it is worth looking at a few of the more interesting incidents from what he described in the title of one of his books as “the wanderings of a Spiritualist”.

[edit] The Case of the Dead Dictator

Doyle’s last book, The Edge of the Unknown, is a Fortean cornucopia of all the strange thing he believed in. It includes ghost stories, reports of fairies, tales of coffins that move by themselves, mysterious disappearances, and, of course, lots of séances.

The eminent spiritualist reports one séance in particular, in which he is surprised to learn --- as who wouldn’t be --- that the haunted house he was investigating was haunted by the ghost of none other than the Communist leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (which must have appealed to Doyle’s taste for meeting famous men).

I then said that we would take any message from him, and would like first of all to know his earth name. With that object I gave him the alphabet slowly, asking him to move the table sharply on the right letter. The following letters came out: L-E-N-A-N.
"Is that right?" I asked.--"No," was the reply.
"Is L E N right?"--"Yes."
"Should the next letter be I?"--"Yes."
"Is Lenin the name?"--"Yes."
"Are you Lenin the Russian leader?"--"Yes."

Lenin’s last message to humanity, it seems, is "Artists must rouse selfish nations," and you may make of that what you will. An equally baffling mystery, which might have defeated Sherlock Holmes himself, is why the architect of the Soviet Union should choose to haunt a house “within a few hundred yards of Piccadilly Circus”.

[edit] The Mystery of the Escapologist Who Escaped From Things

Doyle’s friendship with the magician, escapologist and debunker of mediums, Harry Houdini, lasted from Houdini’s tour of Britain in 1920 until the publication of Houdini’s book A Magician Among the Spirits in 1924, at which point Doyle decided, not unreasonably, that he could tolerate skepticism but not personal ridicule.

What we may find unreasonable in Doyle’s attitude was his belief, which he clung to until his dying day, that Houdini himself was endowed with the most remarkable psychic powers --- on the basis that Doyle couldn’t work out how his tricks were done. The fact that Houdini was a magician, and that similar tricks were done by other magicians did not deter him:

Of course, I am aware that Houdini really was a very skilful conjurer. All that could be known in that direction he knew. Thus he confused the public mind by mixing up things which were dimly within their comprehension with things which were beyond anyone's comprehension. I am aware also that there is a box trick, and that there is a normal handcuff and bag trick. But these are not in the same class with Houdini's work.

Nor did Houdini’s own denials make any impression on him:

If once the mind is adjusted to the false assumption that psychic powers do not exist, then all reasoning power seems to become atrophied, as is the case in all bigoted religions. As an example it was said, and is said, again and again, "How absurd for Doyle to attribute possible psychic powers to a man who himself denies them!" Is it not perfectly evident that if he did not deny them his occupation would have been gone for ever? What would his brother-magicians have to say to a man who admitted that half his tricks were done by what they would regard as illicit powers? It would be "exit Houdini."

The fact that Houdini’s “occupation”, his fame and his fortune depended on his paying public and not on his “brother magicians” seems to have escaped the great Spiritualist logician. Nor does he seem to be aware that many of Houdini’s tricks were bought from other magicians. If Houdini really possessed the secret of translocation, it seems strange that he never performed his feat of walking through a wall until he paid another magician hard cash for the secret of the mechanism.

Doyle seems impressed by relatively easy tricks:

Handcuffs might have been made of jelly, so easily did his limbs pass through them. He was heavily manacled at Scotland Yard, and placed behind a screen from over which a shower of manacles began to fall until he stepped out a free man.

It is true that Houdini could escape very rapidly from so-called “English Standard” handcuffs. So could anyone else in the know: a fault in the mechanism meant that they would spring open if rapped sharply in the right place against any hard surface. The ability to pass through solid matter as if through jelly is not required. It is notable that, if Houdini’s biographers are to be believed, Doyle is conflating at least two different events in the above account, since there was no screen involved in his demonstration at Scotland Yard. He also reports feats which never happened at all.

A block of ice was frozen round his body and he burst his way out … He was also buried six feet deep in California and emerged unhurt.

According to Houdini’s biographers, although Houdini wished to do a stunt involving a coffin of ice, he gave it up because he couldn’t find any mechanism that would freeze the ice fast enough. Breaking out of it wasn’t even part of his plan. As for his attempt at being buried alive, it was one of Houdini’s few fiascos: he very nearly suffocated and had to cancel the attempt well before he was buried six feet deep. This does not betoken supernatural powers.

But the strangest aspect of Doyle’s logic is exhibited here:

In the letter from which I have already quoted, he says to me:
"I pledge my word of honour that I was never given any assistance, nor was in collusion with anyone."
This was clearly the case, for he performed the feat many times in different places, and was always searched to prove that he had no tools in his possession. Sometimes the grinning warders had hardly got out of the passage before their prisoner was at their heels. It takes some credulity, I think, to say that this was, in the ordinary sense of the word, a trick.

The creator of Sherlock Holmes sees no problem in accepting unreservedly Houdini’s word of honor --- in order to prove him one of the greatest hypocrites who ever lived. It should be noted that the occasion on which he followed his jailer out of the cell was the Scotland Yard demonstration mentioned above --- the easiest of all Houdini's feats.

It remains most probable, we feel, that the man who history remembers as the greatest escapologist of all times actually was.

[edit] A Scandalous Bohemian

Doyle also discusses at length the transcripts, supposedly written by the spirit of Oscar Wilde, published as Oscar Wilde from Purgatory. These transcripts are still taken seriously by groups such as the International Survivalist Society. They are of interest because, on the one hand, in a letter to the medium, Doyle said that it was the best evidence for the survival of personality after death that he knew of: on the other hand, the life and style of Oscar Wilde are sufficiently well-known that it is possible for modern readers to make up their own minds whether the transcripts really do represent Oscar speaking from the “other side”

It should be noted at once that there is precious little hard biographical information: indeed, “Wilde” seems shifty and evasive. Asked about his time at Trinity College Dublin, he reveals that he felt smarter than the other students; asked about his time in jail, he explains that he didn’t like it because prisons are not beautiful; asked to talk about “one particular woman”, he compares women to flowers; asked for the location of his family home, he locates it “near Dublin”, rather than in the city center. He prefers instead to talk of literature published after his death, and can talk in great detail about a production of his plays which the medium attended (Wilde, we learn, was there with her in spirit form).

The claims for authenticity must therefore rest on the claims that the transcripts sound like Oscar Wilde. They do, to an extent: though not like his letters or his recorded table talk, but like the worst and most affected of his prose. There is the occasional flash of Wildean wit: Doyle singles out particularly his bot mot on Whistler: “With James, vulgarity always begins at home”. This is indeed typical Wilde, and it appears in a letter that he wrote to The World in 1886.

As far as the rest of it goes, it is not hard to write like Oscar Wilde on a bad day: Wilde himself was particularly talented in this respect. You must mention Art and Beauty frequently (and be sure to capitalize them, as the transcripts do not); sound self-absorbed, and self-pitying; compare things at random to flowers and jewels; be sure to mention the hue of anything with a striking color, which you should compare, again, to flowers and jewels (roses, coral, amber, jade, et cetera). Doyle dismisses the possibility of conscious or unconscious pastiche by pointing out that the gift of parody is rare. We concur, and in the case of the medium Hester Smith, the heavens have chosen to withhold it. Can we really believe that the following passage came from Wilde’s pen?

These women, who like dancing flowers sprang on my path, these jewels, who crowned me with torturing pleasure, were the strings of my lyre. They gave me words to weave, and thoughts to cluster round my words.
Women were ever to me a cluster of stars. They contained for me all, and more than all, that God has created. Evil came through them, and all the best of me was woven from the woman.
Woman was to me a colour, a sound. She gave me all. She gave me first desire, desire gave birth to that mysterious essence which was within me, and from that deeply distilled and perfumed drug my thoughts were born; and from my thoughts words sprang. Each word I used became a child to me. I loved my words and cherished them in secret. They became so precious they were hidden from the gaze of men until I nurtured them, and in their fullness brought them forth as symbols of the woman.... That was what made her hateful in my sight --- hateful and sweet as a too powerful vintage.

Could any literary man, let alone Oscar Wilde, have mixed metaphors so badly? Conan Doyle himself was an author, and though not noted as a stylist, he would have cut off his own right hand before it led him into the sin of claiming that flowers that sprang up in his path were stars that were strings to his lyre, or that a color gave birth to a perfumed drug which gave birth to a thought. Only wishful thinking could lead him to ascribe to Wilde such a monumental lapse of taste.

But the most damning part of the Wilde transcript is the throwaway remark:

Of course I was M. Sebastian MELNOTTE in those days.... MELMOTH from some ancestor of mine. Sebastian in memory of the dreadful arrows.

The problem with this is that this is nonsense from start to finish. When Wilde took the name “Sebastian Melmoth” in his self-imposed French exile, he did so not in memory of a saint or ancestor, but after the eponymous character in Irish novelist C R Maturin’s Gothic masterpiece Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) a character with literary affinities to Faust, the Wandering Jew, and Wilde’s own fictional creation, Dorian Gray. Wilde, of course, would have known this. The medium did not.

So much for Doyle’s most final evidence of survival of the personality.

[edit] The Adventure of the Dancing Fairies

The greatest damage done to Doyle’s reputation was dealt him by his belief in fairies: he published two books on them and devotes a chapter to them in his last book. Again, we may look at his strongest evidence:

All these evidences as to fairies sink into insignificance compared with the actual photographs which I have published in my Coming of the Fairies These, in the enlarged edition, cover cases from Yorkshire, Devonshire, Canada and Germany, and show varying sizes as already described. Since its publication I have had an excellent one from Sweden. They are not all supported by the same degree of evidence, but each case is strong and all the cases taken together seem to me to be final, unless we are to reconsider altogether our views as to the nature and power of thought-forms. No criticism has for a moment shaken the truth of the original Cottingley pictures.

Now the problem here is that the “original Cottingley pictures” of the Cottingley fairies --- the first photographs, the ones which started the craze --- are not merely an obvious hoax on casual inspection, but the exact method of the hoax has been revealed. Given this fact, it is a little premature for Conan Doyle to speculate (as he does) on whether fairies do indeed dance around toadstools.

But though the fairies most certainly do not produce the rings it might be asserted, and could not be denied, that the rings once formed, whatever their cause, would offer a very charming course for a circular ring-a-ring dance. Certainly from all time these circles have been associated with the gambols of the little people.

[edit] Sherlock Holmes

In contrast to his creator Holmes firmly steered away from supernatural explanations of events. In both The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire and The Adventure of the The Devils Foot Holmes flatly rules out supernatural explanations of the mystery. This is more or less a requirement of the detective story form, since if the author is allowed to posit supernatural explanations, then the stories cease to be a fair test of the readers' ingenuity.

Holmes does comment briefly on the possibility, or at least the desirability, of an afterlife in The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger :

Then Holmes stretched out his long arm and patted her hand with such a show of sympathy as I had seldom known him to exhibit.
“Poor girl!” he said. “Poor girl! The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest."

[edit] Select Bibliography

Besides dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories, Doyle wrote extensively on spiritualism and other “unexplained phenomena”. Many of these works are available online.

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