REBELLING AT STAGNATION

"Now, we must make the best use of our time..."

"My mind,' he said, 'rebels at stagnation.  Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere."

"My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built."

"I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely."

 "Meanwhile we can thank our lucky fate which has rescued us for a few short hours from the insufferable fatigues of idleness."

The Sherlock Holmes invented by the young doctor Arthur Conan Doyle wanted to be working, preferably all the time. Much has been made over the years about Doyle modeling Holmes on his professor Joseph Bell and certainly Doyle said he had done so to obtain "the Sherlock Holmes method." 

However, the more time I spend with Doyle's work and letters, the more I see of Sherlock Holmes in him. Specifically, I see this desire to rebel at stagnation. He did so much work; he involved himself in so many areas of life. He truly lived on a global scale.

Even when I don't agree with him I am in awe of him--where did that drive, energy and interest come from? I tried to begin a count of his writing output and quickly gave up. I don't have the brain space nor the access to the materials/information.  As usual, I turned to the Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia for some insight. (That site itself runs over 7,000 pages in an attempt to fully document Doyle's life.] 

The home page has a section titled HIS WORKS with quite a tally: 258 fictions, 1051 articles & essays, 106 poems, 21 plays, 211 lectures, and 1024 letters. And of course even this venerable site could not have access to everything Doyle wrote.

Doyle's rebelling at stagnation was evidently his inherent nature. I can't help but wonder, though, if he also rebelled at stagnation to avoid a need for artificial stimulus, a need he gave to Sherlock Holmes and a need that ultimately destroyed his father.

The more I learn about this fascinating man, the more I wish I could talk with him. I have many questions. If I follow Doyle to the spiritualist table, maybe I could ask a question, but that is a subject for another day.

I need to go idly spend some time with my dog. If I find a need for an artificial stimulus, I'll turn to my favorite: Twitter.

 

 GHOSTS OF OLD LOVES

Illustration by William H. Hyde in Harper's Weekly (15 April 1893)

'"It is simplicity itself," said I. 'When you bared your arm to draw that fish into the boat, I saw that J. A. had been tattooed in the bend of the elbow. The letters were still legible, but it was perfectly clear from their blurred appearance, and from the staining of the skin round them, that efforts had been made to obliterate them. It was obvious, then, that those initials had once been very familiar to you, and that you had afterwards wished to forget them."

'"What an eye you have!" he cried, with a sigh of relief. "It is just as you say. But we won't talk of it. Of all ghosts, the ghosts of our old loves are the worst. 

 When Old Trevor attempts to laugh off his fear of Sherlock Holmes's deductions in the opening of "The Adventure of the Gloria Scott", he tells Holmes "Of all ghosts, the ghosts of our old loves are the worst." The line has always stayed with me from the first time I read it more than twenty years ago.

Perhaps the statement was simply a clever turn of phrase from Doyle but the romantic in me wondered about Doyle's lost loves. Having recently read Teller of Tales, and now having spent this last week reading the opening chapters of Arthur Conan Doyle A Life in Letters, this line has taken on new meaning for me. More than likely it is a meaning Doyle never intended but I wonder if he might have been thinking of his "papa", Charles Altamont Doyle. Certainly "our old loves" does not have to mean romantic attachments.

"The Adventure of the Gloria Scott" first published in April 1893. Charles Doyle died not long afterwards on October 10 at the Crighton Royal Institution, a mental hospital. His father's alcoholism and mental illness certainly had an effect on Doyle as evidenced in his letters, his activities on behalf of his father's reputation, and his adult writings about his father. As an adult child of an alcoholic myself, I can understand his ambivalence toward his father. However, I have no doubt he loved his father and he must have carried a great deal of sadness inside him for the father he loved and lost; certainly his father was lost to him long before October 1893. 

As reported in Teller of Tales, "In truth, Charles Doyle gradually lost his struggle with alcohol, and as his behavior grew more and more erratic, the income from his surveyor's post could no longer be relied upon. The Doyle family changed addresses at least seven times by the time Arthur was ten, and on at least one occasion, it appears, the boy was sent to live with friends, possibly to shield him from his father's deterioration."

 This idea of an alcoholic father as a lost love coupled with ambivalence of feeling is brilliantly explored in the essay "The Memory of Clay" by Bruce Ballenger in the May 2022 issue of The Sun.  As I read the essay, I thought of Doyle several times, especially when reading these lines:

"...my father's death at fifty-seven came as both a surprise and a relief. But it created a vacancy in my heart that I didn't know how to fill, and in seeped anger, which colored my memory of the man of the man in ways I've found difficult to undo. The anger was warranted but it was also reductive. It erased his complexity and turned him into a cardboard cutout, a prop that I barely noticed because its meaning seemed settled. Until something unsettled it. What I did with the wreckage of my father's life was anchor it to an old theme: the story of the wronged son. It's a narrative designed to assign blame, and I thought my father deserved it. For years this allowed me to keep the memories of him at a safe distance. The problem is that he wouldn't stay in exile. I should have known this would happen, but I've always had a writer's naive faith in the power of story to find a proper place for things."

Arthur Conan Doyle must have shared the writer's naive faith in the power of story to find a proper place for things as he wrote so many stories.   I think I will see more of  his old loves as I work my way through his stories.

 GETTING TO THE POINT

Frederic Dorr Steele in Hearst's International (November 1921)

'Plenty more here, Count. Here is the robbery in the train-de-luxe to the Riviera on February 13, 1892. Here is the forged cheque in the same year on the Credit Lyonnais.'
'No, you're wrong there.'
'Then I am right on the others! Now, Count, you are a card-player. When the other fellow has all the trumps, it saves time to throw down your hand.'
'What has all this talk to do with the jewel of which you spoke?'
'Gently, Count. Restrain that eager mind! Let me get to the points in my own humdrum fashion...’

There is a point in the travesty that is "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone" where Holmes tells Count Sylvius to allow him to get to the points in his own humdrum fashion. While I could argue that Holmes is seldom humdrum and he was being a bit, ahem, theatrical in this ridiculous story that is not why his statement was on my mind this week. 

Instead, I've thought of the quote several times while caught in a conundrum brought about by another Doyle short story, "How It Happened." The word short is the operative word here as this one clocks in at only 1400 words. Yet, it is an interesting, well-paced, detail-rich and clever story. Doyle gets to the point without any sense that something is missing within the limited word count.

The reason the story is a conundrum for me is I'm working on a gothic story inspired by "How It Happened" and I want my piece to be about the same size as Doyle's. My problem is the exact opposite of what one might expect in this scenario: Instead of struggling to get my story contained into 1400 words, I can't get my story long enough. I'm stuck at a paltry 900 words.

900 words is nothing and yet, it feels like the story is to the point, detailed enough and, dare I say it, complete. I need 500 words or so and every time I've tried to add to it, the addition feels like filler. I don't want any filler but I don't want to short change the reader either.

I've always admired Doyle's clarity and his ability to impart a great deal of information without using a great number of words. As Doyle's editor at The Strand Magazine, Herbert Greenhough Smith, said about his first reading of "A Scandal in Bohemia":

 "...here to an editor, jaded with wading through reams of impossible stuff, comes a gift from Heaven, a godsend in the shape of a story that brought a gleam of happiness into the despairing life of this weary editor. Here was a new and gifted story-writer; there was no mistaking the ingenuity of plot, the limpid clearness of style, the perfect art of telling a story."

A limpid clearness of style—that is the goal. I will set this story aside for now and come back to it at a later date when hopefully a solution will present itself.  This ramble is 500 words so far but have I gotten to the point? Maybe.

Meanwhile, here's the best reminder that Doyle knew what to do with 500 words (508 to be exact): 

In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army. Having completed my studies there, I was duly attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as Assistant Surgeon. The regiment was stationed in India at the time, and before I could join it, the second Afghan war had broken out. On landing at Bombay, I learned that my corps had advanced through the passes, and was already deep in the enemy's country. I followed, however, with many other officers who were in the same situation as myself, and succeeded in reaching Candahar in safety, where I found my regiment, and at once entered upon my new duties.

The campaign brought honours and promotion to many, but for me it had nothing but misfortune and disaster. I was removed from my brigade and attached to the Berkshires, with whom I served at the fatal battle of Maiwand. There I was struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed the subclavian artery. I should have fallen into the hands of the murderous Ghazis had it not been for the devotion and courage shown by Murray, my orderly, who threw me across a pack-horse, and succeeded in bringing me safely to the British lines.

Worn with pain, and weak from the prolonged hardships which I had undergone, I was removed, with a great train of wounded sufferers, to the base hospital at Peshawur. Here I rallied, and had already improved so far as to be able to walk about the wards, and even to bask a little upon the verandah, when I was struck down by enteric fever, that curse of our Indian possessions. For months my life was despaired of, and when at last I came to myself and became convalescent, I was so weak and emaciated that a medical board determined that not a day should be lost in sending me back to England. I was dispatched, accordingly, in the troopship Orontes, and landed a month later on Portsmouth jetty, with my health irretrievably ruined, but with permission from a paternal government to spend the next nine months in attempting to improve it.

I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air - or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. There I stayed for some time at a private hotel in the Strand, leading a comfortless, meaningless existence, and spending such money as I had, considerably more freely than I ought. So alarming did the state of my finances become that I soon realized that I must either leave the metropolis and rusticate somewhere in the country, or that I must make a complete alteration in my style of living.