"Just a line in haste..."

(Note:  The Femmes Fatales are delighted to welcome guest blogger, Daniel Stashower!  Daniel is a two-time Edgar winner whose most recent book is The Beautiful Cigar Girl.  He is also the co-editor of Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, which is now available in paperback.  Dan, take it away! )

I’ve spent more than a dozen years digging around in another man’s mail. 

It started in Cambridge in 1994.  I had gone there to look through a box of correspondence between Sir Oliver Lodge, the scientist, and Arthur Conan Doyle, about whom I hoped to write a new biography.  I’d been expecting, when I asked to see the letters between the two men, that the librarian would bring me a set of smeary xeroxes.  Instead, I found myself sitting with about a hundred original letters written in Conan Doyle’s own hand.  I’d never held a real, live piece of Conan Doyle’s writing before.  I lifted out the first letter and suddenly it came crashing in on me that I was handling a sheet of paper that had been touched by the man himself.  This was the hand – perhaps even the very pen – that wrote “To Sherlock Holmes, she is always the woman,” and “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” and “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound.”  By the time I finished, my hands were shaking.

Seven years later I found myself sitting in my office surrounded by file cartons filled with the man’s personal correspondence.  By that time my biography had been published, and I had undertaken to edit – together with my esteemed colleagues Jon Lellenberg and Charles Foley – an annotated volume of Conan Doyle’s letters, most of them written to his mother over a period of more than 50 years. 

And so I must pause to ask -- have you written to your mother lately?   Conan Doyle wrote to his mother pretty much every day for half a century, sometimes more than once. There’s been a great deal of comment in recent years about the lost art of letter writing, and when you see a person’s life unfold in daily correspondence as we do here, you feel a palpable sense of loss that there won’t be a record of this type in our times.  It’s not as if Conan Doyle crafted his letters for posterity -- he was forever saying “excuse scrawl” or “just a line in haste” – but that’s what gives them their sense of immediacy.   

So there I was, surrounded by thousands of sheets of paper in no particular order, wondering how we were going to begin to make sense of it all.  My wife, Alison, who loves clutter above all things, was quick to point out that the file boxes were taking up more space than our five-month-old son.  Just then, my eye fell on a letter written in a childish hand.  It proved to be one of young Arthur’s early letters home from boarding school at the age of 13.  It read as follows:

We have had a great commotion here lately, from the fact that our third prefect has gone stark staring mad.  I expected it all along, he always seemed to have the most singular antipathy to me, and I am called among the boys “Mr. Chrea’s friend.”  Ironically, of course.  The first signs of madness were at Vespers the other day.  I was near him & I saw him, just as the Laudate Dominum began, pull out his handkerchief and begin waving it over his head.  Two of the community took him and at once led him out.  They say that in his delirium he mentioned my name several times.

I knew then that this was going to be a very unusual project.  People are always asking if I have a particular favorite among the hundreds of letters we used in the book.  It’s a tough call.  There’s an especially funny one in which he describes the birth of his first child as if she had been a sudden and unexpected house guest:

She had no luggage with her, nor any possessions of any kind, barring a slight cough, and a voice like a coalman.  I regret to say that she had not even any clothes, and we have had for decency’s sake to rig her out with a wardrobe.

Or there’s the one in which he talks about an ill-fated investment in coal from a newly-developed mine in southeast England:

It seems to have had the appearance and every other quality of coal save that it was incombustible, and when a dinner was held by the shareholders, to be cooked by local coal, it was necessary to send out and buy something that would burn.

If I have a favorite, it’s one that he wrote as a young, poverty-stricken doctor as he struggled to set up his first medical practice:

I took the most central house I could find, determined to make a spoon or spoil a horn, and got three pounds worth of furniture for the Consulting Room, a bed, a tin of corned beef and two enormous brass plates with my name on it.  I then sat on the bed and ate the corned beef for a period of six days, at the end of which time a vaccination turned up.  I had to pay 2/6 for the vaccine in London, and could only screw 1/6 out of the woman, so that I came to the conclusion that if I got many more patients I would have to sell the furniture.

I’ve been reading and studying Conan Doyle for most of my life, but that’s a voice I’d never heard before – warm, funny and intimate.  It’s like being in the room with him.  You don’t get that on email, more’s the pity.  So when I’m done here I’m going to log off and write a letter to mother.  I’m sure she’ll appreciate it – assuming she can tear herself away from Tetris 2000.

Comments

[Hank Phillippi Ryan]

Oh--how charming. So amazing that even as a young student, he possessed that voice that's so familiar to us now. That wry, knowing, view from a different plane--and that rhythm, you know? They seem almost effortless, and yet, you get the impression that he was being infinitely careful and observant.

And Dan,you're so right about email. (Why is that,I wonder?) Conan Doyle's letters are wise and enchanting--with no need for those little smiley face emoticons.

Welcome, Dan! So great to see you here. (Insert smiley face.) Thank you so much for a wonderful post.

[Daniel Stashower]

Hi Hank. The letters really are terrific, but I don't mean to suggest that each one was a jewel. There were plenty that were only one or two lines -- "What time is your train?" -- and many others that were simply reports of various head colds and sore throats. I don't think he ever imagined that his mother would preserve every single scrap of paper, but I'm certainly glad she did.

[Dana Cameron]

Dan, this was great! There really is nothing like opening that first document, letting your eyes adjust to the writing, and then...seeing another life. And even when the letters aren't jewels, for me, they're still great. Either they contain quotidian details we would never consider in thinking about the past, or you can use those dates, schedules, etc., to learn about the community (I'm thinking of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's work here.)

Plus--it's fun reading other folks' mail!

[Marianne]

What a wonderful selection of Doyle's letters and your commentary, Dan. Your post just made me leave the present for the moment and drift off along memory lane - ie, my first readings of Holmes adventures when I was 12.

I think I shall go shake down the bookshelves and find my Doyles...

Thanks for a great post!
Cheers,
Marianne

[Hank Phillippi Ryan]

"They say that in his delirium he mentioned my name several times." That's been haunting me all day. Do the letters say what happened?

And yes, we are grateful his mother saved the letters. Not all Moms are like that. Forget my letters--If my mother had saved all my old Beatles stuff, I could have made a fortune.

[Marianne]

Yes, Hank, I wondered about that one too. Could it be, I wonder, that young Doyle was getting his own back by pulling some furtive pranks on his tormentor that only the tormentor noticed/suffered? The letter might have been a sly comment by way of "it's really all in his head" innocent remark by the 'angelic' previous victim. With Doyle's wit, I wouldn't put it past him. :-D

Marianne

[Daniel Stashower]

Believe me, my co-editors and I spent a lot of time puzzling over that letter -- we came to call it "The Affair of the Mad Schoolmaster." We suspect that there was some other person named Doyle in his troubled past, but for now, at least, the details remain elusive. I suppose it's yet another of those Sherlockian tales for which the world is not yet prepared . . .

[Mary S.]

What amazes me is that, at 13, he sounds like an adult. And one who knows how to tell a good story in a short space! Thanks so much for sharing these, Dan. They remind me how much I enjoy the pleasing tone of his books.