Through a Glass, Darkly: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Quest to Solve the Greatest Mystery of All

On a triumphal lecture tour to the United States in 1922, Conan Doyle drew rapt crowds eager for news of the world beyond death. He filled Carnegie Hall six times in 1922, and three more times on a return trip in 1923.

THE HARRY RANSOM CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

PROLOGUE:

The Infinite Strangeness of Life

Drifts of white dogwood blossoms had just begun to show in the trees along Seventh Avenue that eerily warm evening of April 21, 1922. People waiting for tonight’s performance in the main auditorium at Carnegie Hall had formed a queue that stretched all the way down Fifty-seventh to the corner of Sixth Avenue. The crowds were giddy with the balmy air, and nobody seemed to much mind the wait. After all, tonight’s guest was to be none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the celebrated creator of Sherlock Holmes and one of the most famous authors in the world.

Sir Arthur and his wife, Lady Jean Doyle, three children, and two nannies had arrived in the port of New York on the ocean liner Baltic three days earlier, for the beginning of Doyle’s triumphal speaking tour of America. The day after his arrival, Doyle had taken his family to the highest point in the city—the fifty-seventh floor of the Woolworth Building (the Empire State Building did not yet exist) to survey the busy hive of Manhattan Island. There is a rush and roar with a brilliancy and sense of motion and power such as can nowhere else be found, he later wrote.

Many of those waiting in line tonight had come just to lay eyes on the man who brought the world the eccentric sleuth in the deerstalker hat, a surprising number of whom believed that Mr. Holmes was actually a real person. Some had written him letters at 221B Baker Street, imploring his help in some trouble or other; women offered their services as his housekeeper or even their hands in marriage. But fascination with the gaunt, haunted, cocaine-imbibing detective did not fully explain why tonight’s lecture-demonstration had drawn a standing-room-only crowd of more than three thousand (and, over successive nights, would fill Carnegie Hall five more times and three times the next year, 1923). Because it was by now widely known that Sir Arthur had opened an astonishing—some said, ridiculous—new chapter in his life. The poster for tonight’s event, on display across the city, summed it up:

Lee Keedick presents SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, Famous English Novelist, author of the Sherlock Holmes mystery series, whose investigations of Life After Death have aroused worldwide interest.

What had come to be known as spiritualism—the conviction that those who have passed over had the ability and the desire to make contact across the veil of death with those they’d left behind—seemed to have bewitched the Western world. Spiritualist lectures filled guild halls and auditoriums with seekers from Boston to Brittany; séances accompanied tea in upper-crust British parlors, and even in the White House; there were state and national spiritualist conventions and summer camps attended by thousands. More than two hundred spiritualist journals, some of them published weekly, had appeared on the market. Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla were both now searching for the precise electrical frequency that would enable them to create a ghost machine—a device that would enable people to communicate directly with the spirit world. The movement had attracted a throng of distinguished seekers, including the Nobel laureate Pierre Curie; the evolutionary biologist and co-discoverer of evolution Alfred Russel Wallace; the Harvard lecturer and psychologist William James; Lewis Carroll; and the Irish poet William Butler Yeats.

At the same time, the movement had also attracted an opposing army of equally eminent, and equally vocal, skeptics. Ralph Waldo Emerson branded spiritualism a rat-revelation, the gospel that comes by taps in the wall and humps in the table-drawer. Scientists railed against this popular madness. Preachers rained down fire and damnation on what was clearly the work of the prince of darkness. Henry David Thoreau simply dismissed all believers as idiots. And to the naysayers’ delight, it seemed that every few months another phony medium was unmasked.

Sir Arthur, backstage at Carnegie Hall with Lady Jean, calmly glanced over his lecture notes while a low roar arose out of the vast auditorium as the crowd settled into their seats (if they were lucky enough to get one). Now sixty-two years old, Doyle was a huge slab of a man, six feet two, fourteen stone (about two hundred pounds), with a shambling, bearlike gait and enormous hands. His intimidating physical presence was due partly to his size but also to his easy athleticism; as a young man, he had been naturally gifted at every sport he ever tried, excelling at cricket, football, boxing, golf, skiing, and even bowling. As a twenty-one-year-old third-year medical student, he’d spent six months as ship’s surgeon on a whaling vessel sailing north to the Arctic, and he’d reveled in the physical exhilaration, the danger, and the manly challenge of the voyage. I came of age at 80 degrees north latitude, he later wrote.

But now, four decades later, his drooping, walrus mustache had gone almost entirely gray, and his feet hurt. His broad shoulders were beginning to slump, and behind his steel-rimmed spectacles his blue-gray eyes were shadowed with sorrow. He was a genial man, greathearted, generous, scholarly, and kind. Some said he was a child at heart, and for that reason too credulous. He had been sweetly, devotedly in love with his second wife, Lady Jean, since the moment they met. Every spring, in celebration of their union, he would come in from the garden and hand her a single white snowdrop, the first pendulous white blossom of the receding snow. Lady Jean once told Doyle’s old friend and antagonist Harry Houdini that her husband never loses his temper and that his nature is at all times sunshiny and sweet. He hated putting on airs, despite a lifetime of astonishing accomplishment. Though he had been knighted in 1902 for a book he wrote in support of the British role in the Boer War, he refrained from signing his many books Sir Arthur. Instead, he simply called himself Conan Doyle.

By now, after lecture tours across the English-speaking world, Sir Arthur knew that in tonight’s crowd there would likely be many who had recently been touched by the angel of death. In the decade just passed, the world had suffered not one but two tragedies of almost unimaginable proportion, and almost every family in America had an empty seat at the dinner table. In 1914, the war to end all wars had hurled the world into a murderous darkness. It was at that time the bloodiest conflict in human history, and also likely one of the most futile. In the first day of the Battle of the Somme, more than fifty-seven thousand British soldiers were wounded or killed on the western front. By the time the offensive was over, more than a million men lay dead in the bloody mud. Yet the offensive had succeeded in moving back the German trenches by only about six miles.

But even before the war came to a close, another grim and relentless enemy began stalking new victims. In March 1918, a soldier at Fort Riley, Kansas, reported to the infirmary complaining of a clanging headache and fever; within months, an extraordinarily virulent strain of the Spanish influenza had killed between twenty and forty million people worldwide—far more than the war. It came to be known as the Blue Death, because the sick turned blue before they died, horribly and very quickly. It seemed to strike the young and healthy first. There was no vaccine or medication to stop or even slow it. And the velocity of its spread was astonishing; it spread far more widely and with more ruthless efficiency than the Black Death of medieval Europe.

So it was perhaps not surprising that spiritualism had attracted millions of adherents by 1922. For so many, the scale of the carnage brought on by these two great calamities raised the ancient questions, and the ancient hopes. Did human personality survive death? If so, was there some way of breaching the veil that separated the living from the lost and making direct contact with loved ones? In this world of seemingly random and meaningless tragedy, was there some hope of comfort and consolation outside the confines of traditional religion?

The subject of psychical research is one upon which I have thought more, and about which I have been slower to form an opinion, than upon any subject whatever, Doyle had written in a small book called The New Revelation. In fact, his interest in the subject went far back, to his days as a young doctor in his twenties, in the port city of Southsea, and now spanned forty years.

But being a reticent man, he wasn’t telling the whole story. Part of his absolute conviction of the truth of human survival after death grew out of his own grief. Not long after the outbreak of the war, his beloved son Kingsley had given up his medical studies to join the Royal Army Medical Corps. Eventually, he was sent to the front, where the life span of a typical officer was a fortnight. In the Battle of the Somme, Kingsley took two bullets in the neck but narrowly survived, only to succumb later in a military hospital, a victim of the influenza pandemic. It was October 1918. He was twenty-five years old. For years afterward, Doyle could hardly speak his name without tears welling up in his eyes.

In the presence of an agonized world, he would soon tell his audience, hearing every day of the deaths of the flower of our race in the first promise of their unfulfilled youth, seeing around one the wives and mothers who had no clear conception whither their loved ones had gone to, I seemed suddenly to see that this subject with which I had so long dallied was not merely a study of a force outside the rules of science, but that it was really something tremendous, a breaking down of the walls between two worlds, a direct undeniable message from beyond.

This new revelation was, he said, infinitely the most important thing in the history of the world.

Sir Arthur was well aware that his new convictions had made him the object of derision and befuddlement to throngs of people on both sides of the Atlantic. How, they wondered, had the creator of the world’s most hyperrational sleuth, the master of dispassionate deductive reasoning, gone so soft in the head? How had this brilliant and accomplished man been hoodwinked by the claims of phony mediums, spirit guides, and fairies?

Yet beneath the noisy hubbub of a mocking world, and despite all the many well-publicized fakes and frauds, Sir Arthur and his eminent colleagues had produced a long catalog of evidence that, as Sherlock Holmes once observed, life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.

But to explain how it all happened, the gaunt detective might observe, sucking pensively on his meerschaum pipe—to show what the spiritualists actually found—made for a long, long story, one that deserved to be told from the very beginning.

Conan Doyle’s father, Charles, dreamy and disordered, spent his last years in a lunatic asylum, drawing pictures of fairies and elves. His thoughts were always in the clouds, Doyle recalled.

COURTESY OF CHRIS BEETLES GALLERY, ST. JAMES’S, LONDON

CHAPTER ONE

Into the Unknown

Only a week from Shetland and here we are far into the icefields, wrote the twenty-year-old ship’s surgeon in his logbook. It has certainly been a splendid voyage. Beautiful day, wonderfully clear. Ice fields, snow white on very dark blue water as far as the eye can reach. We are ploughing through in grand style.

The date was March 20, 1880, a Saturday on the cusp of spring, and by now they were well north of the Arctic Circle. The ship, a four-hundred-ton, three-masted steam whaler, had sailed out of Peterhead, Scotland, on February 28. Just forty-five feet long, it somehow had room enough for a crew of fifty-six and a hundred tons of whale oil—that is, if all went as planned during its six months in frigid waters. But there was no guarantee of commercial success, or for that matter of survival. The voyage, involving the harpooning of fifty-ton whales in open boats, in freezing Arctic waters, was heart-stoppingly perilous. All the uncertainties of this enterprise were reflected in the ship’s name: the S.S. Hope.

The young man looking out from the deck that day was not a seasoned seaman or even a certified doctor. He was, in fact, only a third-year medical student at Edinburgh University. Barely a week before the Hope was to set sail, a fellow student named Currie, who had the job, found that he could not go. So he approached the big, athletic kid in class—the Arthur with two last names: Conan (the surname of his granduncle and godfather, an editor in Paris) and Doyle. The big kid made up his mind on the spot to exchange the dismal grind of medical school for a wild adventure at sea, confessing later in his autobiography that at that age he was wild, full-blooded, and a trifle reckless.

It turned out to be a transformative experience for him, as a writer and as a man. What possessed him to interrupt his life and take a long, uncomfortable, dangerous journey? Just this: Arthur Conan Doyle could not resist an adventure. And he never would.

*   *   *

IN THE coming days, Conan Doyle’s Arctic adventure would get kicked up a notch. April 3 was the start of seal-hunting season, when the crews of whaling ships go scrambling out onto the ice in order to kill seals, skin them in place, and drag their hundred-pound skins back to the ship. Yes, it was bloody work, as he confessed in the log. And perilous: Those ice fields were not the terra firma they appeared to be. The ice is not a solid sheet, but made up of thousands of pieces of all sizes floating close to each other, he wrote. Now in a swell those pieces alternately separate and come together with irresistible force. If a poor fellow slips in between two pieces as is easily done, he runs a good chance of being cut in two. And if he isn’t cut in two, he nonetheless has about ten minutes to get out of the water before exhaustion gives way to unconsciousness and death.

For the next several weeks, they cruised roughly northward, hunting for seals and finding slim pickings as they pressed on toward the whale hunting grounds in the far north. By May 22, the Hope was at 80 degrees north latitude, close to the limits of Arctic exploration of the time; it was in bleak, gale-churned waters between the top of Greenland and Spitsbergen, its great line of huge black perpendicular crags running up to several thousand feet … a horrible looking place, he noted in the log.

It was up there, at the top of the world, that he turned twenty-one. I come of age today, he wrote. Rather a funny sort of place to do it in, only 600 miles or so from the North Pole. They couldn’t get much closer—the northern barrier, the edge of the polar ice cap, barred the way. In 1880, no human being had seen the North Pole. It was uncharted territory, a big blank spot on the maps. For all anyone knew, Santa Claus did live there.

In June, the Hope turned and sailed southward along the coast of Greenland’s ice sheet. There Conan Doyle got his first sighting of narwhals, also known as sea unicorns for their tusks, which can grow to ten feet. One calm evening the sea was covered with them, great brutes 15 & 16 feet long, he recorded. You hear their peculiar ‘Sumph!’ in every direction. I saw one pass like a great white flickering ghost beneath the keel. But what they wanted most was the sighting of whales, and that they got on June 4.

It wasn’t until June 26, however, that they caught their first whale. On July 8, they caught a second, bigger specimen, a huge finner whale, yielding twelve tons of oil. It is worth quite £1,000 and has secured our voyage from being a failure, Doyle wrote.

On Monday, August 9, 1880, the Hope was bound for home. A beautiful clear day with a blue sky and a bright sun, Conan Doyle noted in the ship’s log. Wind from the NE, a good strong breeze before which we are flying homeward with all sail set, and the bright green waves hissing and foaming from her bows … All hands on the lookout for land.

*   *   *

ARTHUR CONAN Doyle had grown up in a kind of genteel poverty in Edinburgh, Scotland, one of ten children, whose family and lineage were of sturdy Celtic-Catholic stock. In the cul de sac where the family lived in a modest tenement, there was a fierce feud between two groups of small neighborhood boys. Ultimately, each group put up a champion—the strapping Arthur being chosen as the champion of the poorer lads—and he went out to fight the champion pugilist of the other team in a bitter battle of many rounds, ending in a bloody draw.

It was prophetic, in a way. Arthur Conan Doyle would be a fighter for the rest of his life.

From a very early age, he excelled at two things. One was any sport, and the other was storytelling. It was from his mother, whom he always affectionately called The Ma’am, that he learned his love of a good yarn. He once told Bram Stoker:

My real love for letters, my instinct for storytelling, springs, I believe, from my mother, who is of Anglo-Celtic stock, with the glamour and romance of the Celt very strongly marked.… In my early childhood, as far back as I can remember anything at all, the vivid stories which she would tell me stand out so clearly that they obscure the real facts of my life. It is not only that she was—is still—a wonderful storyteller, but she had, I remember, an art of sinking her voice to a horror-stricken whisper when she came to a crisis in her narrative, which makes me goosefleshy when I think of it.

His mother’s stories came down to him through the misty tangles of the Celtic past and the fog-shrouded glens of northern Scotland and Ireland, in which, in ancient times, people would gather around the fire to retell the tales that kept the people alive. These gatherings, or ceilidh, told of a tribal history of great warriors and great battles, loves won and lost, but also of a dreamlike, surrealistic world in which gnomes, elves, and fairies flitted through the glens in the half-light of dawn or twilight. Sometimes—for better or worse—they would even intersect with the affairs of men. It was an in-between world that, in the Gaelic imagination, was as real as daylight, perhaps even more vivid than the real facts of my life. It is a world considered real in some parts of rural Scotland and Ireland to this day.

It was also a world that was to be vividly portrayed in the art of many of Conan Doyle’s relatives, who shared a gift for imaginative illustration. His grandfather John Doyle developed a reputation as a sharp political satirist and caricaturist, producing the series Political Sketches for a London publisher. John’s oldest son, James—Conan Doyle’s uncle—produced an illustrated work called A Chronicle of England.

But it was John’s second son, Richard, known as Dicky Doyle, who became the most famous artist of the clan. Dicky Doyle famously designed one of the very first covers of Punch, the renowned British satirical magazine. He mastered the art of elaborately decorative lettering, which seemed to hark back to the illuminated manuscripts of the early Celtic monks. But it was his fantastical illustrated books depicting the lives of elves, fairies, and woodland life-forms the Theosophists called elementals—illustrations for Grimm’s Fairy Ring, The King of the Golden River, and In Fairyland—that seemed to create a netherworld so real it practically pranced off the page. Many years later, when Conan Doyle became embroiled in the Cottingley Fairies case—in which two young girls claimed to have photographed fairies beside a brook in rural England—some of Doyle’s defenders remembered the vivid fairylands depicted by his uncle and the ancient Celtic storytelling traditions from which they came. In a deep Scots-Irish way, it all made sense, and Conan Doyle, despite all evidence to the contrary, was to persist in his belief in fairies until his dying day.

But it was Conan Doyle’s own father, Charles, who had the most profound influence on the boy’s upbringing. As a young man, Charles had been sent to Edinburgh to take a job as an assistant surveyor in the Scottish Office of Works, doing architectural drawings. Among other things, he designed a fountain at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh and windows at Glasgow Cathedral. In truth, it was a fairly low-level civil service job that produced a pitifully small paycheck. Charles supplemented his small income by selling his eccentric drawings and watercolors, though many of them he simply gave away. In 1855, Charles married Mary Foley, his landlady’s daughter, and they went on to have ten children, of whom seven survived into adulthood.

In his memoirs, Doyle remembered his childhood wistfully: We lived in the hardy and bracing atmosphere of poverty and we each in turn did our best to help those who were younger than ourselves. My noble sister Annette, who died just as the sunshine of better days came into our lives, went out very early as a governess to Portugal and sent all her salary home. Our younger sisters, Lottie and Connie, both did the same thing; and I helped as I could. But it was still my dear mother who bore the long, sordid strain.

Though the Doyles lived in shabby circumstances, it was a family proud of its illustrious lineage; his mother was distantly related to Sir Walter Scott, and another relative, Sir Denis Pack, had commanded the Scottish forces at Waterloo. Doyle’s uncle James had spent thirteen years working on a massive genealogy called The Official Baronage of England. His uncle Conan had traced his lineage back to the dukes of Brittany.

From his tenderest years, Doyle’s son Adrian later wrote of his father’s childhood, he was surrounded by the chivalric sciences of the fifteenth century in the bosom of a family to whom pride of lineage was of infinitely greater importance than the discomforts of comparative poverty that had come to surround them. It was one’s bloodlines, one’s heritage, and one’s quest for chivalric greatness—in effect, one’s family stories—that lifted a man’s head high, even if home was a dreary tenement block in