This review first appeared in the
Times Literary Supplement of 25th June 2010.
I was nine years old when I first encountered the Creeping Man. Having wolfed down the majority of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories in the approximate order of their publication, I had reached, with a faint feeling of regret, their final volume, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. Composed of a dozen short tales, the Case-Book dates from the 1920s, a decade when Conan Doyle’s interest in his most famous creation had dwindled to a kind of mercenary contempt and the bulk of his time and attention were spent evangelising for the spiritualist cause. Unaware of such historical caveats, I noted no palpable downturn in quality and found the eighth entry in the collection, “The Adventure of the Creeping Man”, to be one of the richest and most singular investigations of Holmes’ long career – an opinion which I have had no reason to change.
The story begins as Dr Watson is summoned to Baker Street “one Sunday evening early in September of the year 1903” by means of a splendidly terse telegram (“Come at once if convenient – if inconvenient come all the same”) in order to hear an account of the mystery of Professor Presbury, “the famous Camford physiologist”. The Professor, a “staid, elderly” widower, has recently become engaged to a very much younger woman and “the current of his life” has been disrupted. Formerly “the frankest of men”, his behaviour has turned “furtive and sly”. He “lives as in a strange dream”, ventures out on unexplained expeditions and receives peculiar envelopes in the post, “marked by a cross under the stamp”. The atmosphere in the house in which he resides with his adult daughter Edith and his assistant Trevor Bennett has grown clammily oppressive and matters reach a crisis when Bennett catches his employer in the middle of the night “crawling… on his hands and feet, with his face sunk between his hands” and hears him spit out “some atrocious word”. Edith, woken by the “frenzied barkings” of the family’s wolf-hound, opens her eyes to see her father’s face looking in at her through the window of her bedroom on the second floor. Watson is inclined to dismiss the incidents as a consequence of advanced lumbago but Holmes, intrigued, insists that the pair travel to the Presbury home to investigate. The solution, when it comes, is strikingly outré. In preparation for his marriage, the Professor has been injecting himself with a “strength-giving serum” derived from a “black-faced Langur” in the hope of “rejuvenescence”, a side effect of which has lent him simian characteristics, enabling him to dangle outside his daughter’s window and antagonise the dog. Holmes, in his summing up, opines that “the highest type of man may revert to the animal if he leaves the straight road of destiny”.
I recall enjoying “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” but I remember also not fully understanding it and that I sensed instead the presence of some subtext or undercurrent which lent the piece its force. Revisited in adulthood, the story reveals itself as a sour parable about the endurance of lust, a lurid treatment of the question that is put to Falstaff as Doll Tearsheet fidgets upon his knee: “is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?” Yet, curiously, the feeling persists that there is something in the narrative – hidden, submerged – which the reader is not permitted to comprehend but which acts as the wellspring for its power.
My rereading was occasioned and my curiosity re-stoked by the arrival of The Complete Arthur Conan Doyle from Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Running to fifty-six volumes, the set includes not only Conan Doyle’s most celebrated writings – the exploits of Sherlock Holmes, Professor Challenger and Brigadier Gerard and those stolid historical novels which he considered to be his greatest achievements (of The White Company he claimed that “it would illuminate our national traditions”; of Sir Nigel that it “represents in my opinion my high-water mark in literature”) – but also a feast of rarities, forgotten tales and neglected oddities. Here is the libretto that he wrote with J M Barrie for the comic opera Jane Annie (sample lyric: “Last night when we were forced to part / I heard a pit-a-pat / Upon the window of my heart”) which played at the Savoy Theatre in 1893 and which inspired George Bernard Shaw to declare the evening “the most unblushing piece of tomfoolery that two respectable citizens could conceivably indulge in public”. Here too is his six volume history of the First World War (“he fails in literary skill” was this paper’s verdict in 1920) as well as a plump collection of poems, filled with martial verse (“The huntsman’s name is Death, / His horse’s name is Time; / He is coming, he is coming / As I sit and write this rhyme”) and panegyrics about golf (“Come youth and come age, from the study or stage, / From Bar or from Bench – high and low! / A green you must use as a cure for the blues – / You drive them away as you go”). Here is Waterloo, his one-act drama about a dying veteran which became a star vehicle for Henry Irving; To Arms!, his bloodcurdling recruitment pamphlet from 1914 (“Have you who read this played your part to the highest? If not, do it now, or stand for ever shamed”); Pheneas Speaks (an anthology of his second wife’s automatic writing who, supposedly instructed by a spirit guide who “died thousands of years ago in the East, near Arabia”, exhorts Arthur to “look after your health”, warns that the sceptical magician Harry Houdini is “doomed, doomed, doomed” and remarks that “some dogs are more mediumistic than others”) and The Coming of the Fairies which, inspired by the Cottingley photographs, argues for the existence of “a population which may be as numerous as the human race, which pursues its own strange life in its own strange way, and which is only separated from ourselves by some difference of vibrations” (in it he accepts without question eyewitness accounts from such correspondents as “Mrs Rose of Southend-on-Sea” who has “always seen fairies… I see them constantly here in the shrubbery” and “Miss Winter, of Blarney, in Cork” who reports that “we received communications from a fairy named Bebel”).
Despite its extravagant variety, this new edition must be considered a disappointment. Although it represents the most complete collection of Conan Doyle’s work presented to date it is not wholly comprehensive. It would have been interesting to have read Arthur’s instalment of the serial novel, The Fate of Fenella (published in the magazine Gentlewoman), or his plays The Fires of Fate, The House of Temperley and Angels of Darkness, not to mention (though to ask for it may be greedy) some examples of his surviving letters and journalism. The edition is not a scholarly one and the reader hoping to come across any explanatory apparatus beyond Dr Neil McCaw’s cogent introduction will search for it in vain. While the aficionado may know, for example, that “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley” was the first piece of fiction that Conan Doyle sold (in 1879 to Chambers’s Journal) the uninformed are unlikely to guess at its significance if they happen to chance upon it here in the thirty-second volume, Uncollected Short Stories. Bound in flimsy card, almost entirely free of illustrations (admirers of Sidney Paget’s drawings from the Strand Magazine or of Frederick Dorr Steele’s from Collier’s or those curious to see what Conan Doyle looked like dressed up as Challenger in a photograph that was prepared for the first edition of The Lost World will be disappointed), set in a plain font and not properly indented, the books are unattractive in appearance and uncomfortable to read. They also show little sign of having been proof-read as errors (the letter “I” is, infuriatingly, often replaced by the number “1”), inappropriate blank spaces and contents lists which do not correlate with the pages that succeed them abound.
This wealth of Doylean material offers opportunities for happy reappraisal. One is struck by the fact that, despite his reputation as a journeyman prose stylist (in 2003, John le Carré could identify “no fine turns of phrase, no clever adjectives that leap off the page” and Conan Doyle himself once declared his writing to be “at its best but plain English”) and despite the fact that his stories display a preponderance of clichés, depicting a world in which brows are always furrowed, hearts heavy, daylight broad and smiles wry, Conan Doyle was capable of virtuoso phrasemaking. Consider, for instance, a man’s neck in The White Company “corded like the bark of the fir”, the ancient house in “The Japanned Box” which has a smell “as from a sick animal which exhaled from the rotting plaster” or the narrator of “The Sealed Room” who, suspicious of the city, complains of “the red brick tentacles of the London octopus”. In “How it Happened” a motorcar represents “great, roaring, golden death”, in “The Parasite” the fist of a man who has struck another is “puffed up, with sponge-like knuckles” and in When the World Screamed, Conan Doyle’s fourth account of Professor Challenger (“Challenger the super-scientist, Challenger the arch-pioneer, Challenger the first man of all men”), the handwriting of its hero is as “a barbed wire fence.”
It is in the short story that Conan Doyle, neither a natural dramatist nor an accomplished poet, displays his greatest expertise. There are few English writers capable of crafting so arresting a first sentence as that which opens “The Lost Special”: “The confession of Herbert de Lernac, now lying under sentence of death at Marseilles, has thrown light upon one of the most inexplicable crimes of the century”. “Danger! Being the Log of Captain John Sirius” begins with: “It is an amazing thing that the English, who have the reputation of being a practical nation, never saw the danger to which they were exposed”. “The Horror of the Heights” has “The idea that the extraordinary narrative which has been called the Joyce-Armstrong Fragment is an elaborate practical joke evolved by some unknown person, cursed by a perverted and sinister sense of humour, has now been abandoned by all who have examined the matter”, and the opening of the first of the Holmes short stories, “A Scandal in Bohemia” is famously inviting: “To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman”. It is in these stories – and in the chronicles of Baker Street in particular – where one encounters again the puzzling energy that may be sensed in “The Adventure of The Creeping Man”, which is largely absent in the poetry, drama and longer fiction. The origins of this animating force remain obscure although when one is presented, as one is here, with so great a proportion of Conan Doyle’s oeuvre, patterns begin to emerge.
Taken chronologically, the books strike the reader as part of a (possibly unconscious) project – a series of attempts on the part of their author to articulate systems of thought, all of which promise to make sense of the disastrous chaos of life and the human condition (“this circle of misery and violence and fear” as Holmes puts it in “The Cardboard Box”). First comes the ratiocination of Baker Street, inspired by the techniques of Conan Doyle’s old university teacher Dr Joseph Bell (who, in 1892, reviewed the original Holmes adventures, calling his former clerk “a born story-teller”), then extreme patriotism (in 1899, George Bernard Shaw boasted that he had converted Conan Doyle from “Christmas-card pacifism to rampant jingoism”) and, finally, the magical worldview of spiritualism, a philosophy which could render even the slaughter of the Great War explicable. In 1914, Conan Doyle was praising the “glorious spectacle” of mass enlistment and imagining that “our grandchildren will thrill as they read of the days that we endure” but twelve years later, following the deaths of his brother and his eldest son, he had come to see the trenches as “God’s first warning to mankind” (“ten million young men were laid dead upon the ground… twice as many were mutilated”), even claiming to be glad that his son was killed (“am I not far nearer to my son than if he were alive..?”) Spurning “Victorian science” for having “left the world hard and clean and bare, like a landscape in the moon”, the former doctor was reduced to arguing plaintively that “I have always held that people insist too much upon direct proof.”
The figure behind much of this is surely Arthur’s father, the artist Charles Altamont Doyle. A chronic alcoholic who, according to Andrew Lycett’s Conan Doyle: The man who created Sherlock Holmes (2007), would sometimes be found dragging “himself around the floor… unable to remember his own name” (and who, “when nothing else was available… drank furniture varnish”), he spent the last twelve years of his life in an asylum or “Convalescent Home” as Arthur disguised it in his autobiography, Memories and Adventures, where he added that the old man’s “thoughts were always in the clouds… he had no appreciation of the realities of life”. Russell Miller, another recent biographer, has related Charles’ confession to his doctor that he was “getting messages from the unseen world” and also, significantly, the inmate’s belief in fairies. The painter once wrote on a sketch of a cavorting imp the words: “I have known such a creature”.
When one thinks of Charles Altamont Doyle (who was reduced on occasion to stripping off his clothes in the street with the intention of selling them to buy drink) one is reminded irresistibly of Professor Presbury “crawling… on his hands and feet, with his face sunk between his hands”. One thinks too of the lunatic in the 1898 short story “The Beetle Hunter” whose “homicidal outbreaks” mean that “his inclination is always to attack the very person to whom he is most attached”, the widowed drinker in “The Japanned Box” who has been “degraded… to the level of the beasts” and the inebriate husband in “A Sordid Affair” (1891) who is discovered on the street by his wife as “a horrid crawling figure” with “a dull, vacant, leering face” and who “mumbled and chuckled like an ape”. It is as though Conan Doyle began his writing life by assuming a position which repudiated all of Charles’ beliefs and weaknesses, associating himself instead with the substitute father of Bell before gradually – painfully – giving himself over to a worldview that vindicated his real parent’s supposed insanity and which reduced Bell’s rationalism to blinkered, pharisaical refusal to accept the truth. Such a reading would seem to be supported by the fact that, even as spiritualism came to “absorb the whole energy” of Conan Doyle’s life and as he showed no compunction about making it the focus of much of his writing, co-opting the formerly pugnacious Professor Challenger (for whom a human being was nothing more than “four buckets of water and a bagful of salts”) and converting him at a stroke in 1926, in The Land of Mist (“my mind has received a shock… a new avenue of knowledge seems to have opened up before me… I cannot doubt – it is impossible to doubt – that a message has come to me from the dead…”), the Great Detective was never affected by his creator’s proselytising. In “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”, published in January 1924, eight years after Conan Doyle had announced his complete conversion to spiritualism and more than three decades after he had joined the Society for Psychical Research, the author has his logician declare: “this Agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply”.
Yet Charles Doyle as well as Dr Bell may be glimpsed in the person of the detective. The novelist Michael Chabon has remarked that Charles’ “was the kind of madness that reads the random text of the natural world and finds messages and secret connections”. In “His Last Bow”, “the war service of Sherlock Holmes”, Arthur has Holmes disguised as an Irish-American traitor, called Altamont – named, one presumes, for his father and, years earlier, Charles illustrated an edition of the first Holmes tale, A Study in Scarlet, from his cell, ignoring his son’s description of the detective’s “sharp and piercing” eyes, “thin, hawk-like nose” and chin with “the prominence and squareness which mark the man of determination” in favour of drawing himself in the role. Stooped and bearded, the elder Doyle moves through the events of the story like an accusing wraith.
Somewhere in this morass of contradictions and lost relationships, is the origin of that mysterious force, sensed in childhood and scrutinised in maturity, which propels not only “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” but also the best of the fiction to feature Sherlock Holmes – that curious father figure, that weirdly potent conjoining of Dr Joseph Bell and Charles Altamont Doyle. Revisited in the new edition from Cambridge Scholars Publishing, it becomes clear that these stories outshine even the most accomplished of Arthur’s other writings. Their strange, maddening power endures. The fact that no definitive solution presents itself as to the reason for their beguiling glamour might go some way to explaining why they show no signs, even now, of loosening their grip on fresh generations of the enthralled.
