If you haven’t already guessed,
Doyle holds an endless fascination for me. When asked why this was the case
recently, I came up with the off the cuff response that he was full of contradictions.
At the time, I was thinking mainly about the obvious one – how the man who
created Sherlock Holmes could be taken in by the Cottingley Fairies – but having
considered my answer further, I think there are three tensions that colour
Doyle’s life and work.
Public v private
Though a public figure, Doyle was
an intensely private man. He carefully cultivated his public image, honing the
story of his life in the telling and retelling. Memories and
Adventures is a consciously crafted version of events, often at odds
with documentary evidence. Of his father's alcoholism and other close
relationships, he is purposefully vague. And yet, like all writers, he
periodically draws on his past in many of his works, whether his time on an
arctic whaler in The Captain of the Pole-star or his medical
cases in Round the Red Lamp. In The Stark Munro Letters,
he goes one step further, drawing heavily on his early life in practice.
Doyle's selective editing of The Stark Munro Letters over
various versions suggests he may worried he had revealed too much.
Whatever the truth, for all his larger than life persona, there's always
something inherently unknowable about Doyle.
Heart v head
Doyle was caught between the lure
of the romantic and the scientific. He was brought up on the sweeping
historical romances that were a favourite of his mother and which consequently
informed his notion of what great and 'worthy' literature is. He aped this work
early on, while also delving into the fantastical and ghoulish, the mysterious
and unexplained. And yet, he was of a scientific mind, he studied medicine and
left Edinburgh an arch materialist. He applied logic and reason to real cases
and fictional. In his championing of spiritualism, he sought to blend the two,
arguing (at first) that scientific enquiry would eventually prove the existence
of the spirit world. While Doyle did not see science and religion as fundamentally
incompatible, he walked the line between the two, straying one side then the
other, throughout his life.
Popularity v Value
Shortly before his death, Doyle
lamented that he was known as the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories and
never as the author of The White Company of Micah Clarke.
Doyle always felt somewhat cheapened by his detective fiction, though it was
what made his career, reputationally and financially. Doyle saw his other work
as higher art. Perhaps that view was reinforced by its relative lack of
financial success (in comparison to his Holmes stories – by most authors
standards, his other work was lucrative). He explores the theme of writing for
money versus writing for art in his 1891 work The Doings of Raffles Haw To
today’s readers, Doyle’s dismissal of his Sherlock Holmes stories is perhaps
the greatest mystery of all.
These are tensions that reappear
throughout Doyle’s work. We’ll be picking up these themes in future podcasts.
Mark
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