Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. Daniel Stashower

BONNY RIVER, NIGERIA, NOVEMBER 22, 1881

This is the most blackguardly country that ever was invented, I am counting the very days until we turn our prow homewards once again—Alas it is a long time yet. Never was there such a hole of a place, it is good for nothing but swearing at. I am just recovering from a smart attack of fever, and am so weak that the pen feels like an oar though I was only on my back for three days. It is our summer here, and while you are having crisp frosty mornings (it makes my feet tingle to think of them) we have an apoplectic looking sun glaring down at us in a disgusting manner, while there is never a breath of air, save when a whiff of miasma is bourne off the land. Here we are steaming from one dirty little port to another dirty little port, all as like as two peas, and only to be distinguished by comparing the smell of the inhabitants, though they all smell as if they had become prematurely putrid and should be buried without unnecessary delay. We have come 2000 miles down the coast now, and a hundred yards might stand for the lot—a row of breakers—a yellow strip of sand and a line of palm trees—never any [page missing]*

      …closer together. She [Elmore Weldon] has £1300 and I have nothing except my brains, so how on earth we are going to knock it up I don’t know. I hate long engagements, but I have to wait like Mr Micawber for something to turn up.

      Give my love to Jessie—I believe those days when she taught me to dance, and I helped to teach her to play lawn tennis, were about the happiest I ever had in my life. Believe me, I often think of you both, and of all the old Glee Club—Alas how is our glory fallen & our members scattered, & I the most scattered of the lot. Give my kind regards to the Websters—or perhaps you had better not, as it might come round to Mama’s ears I had written, & I don’t want her to see a grumbling letter, else she would begin hunting up a coffin for me & writing obituary notices.

      to Mary Doyle LIVERPOOL, JANUARY 1882

      Just a line to say that I have turned up all safe, after having had the African fever, been nearly eaten by a shark, and as a finale the Mayumba going on fire between Madeira and England, so that at one time it looked like taking to our boats and making for Lisbon. However we got it out, and here we are safe and sound. I intend to get away to Edinburgh by the train which leaves here at 2 tomorrow. I believe it comes in about 8 at the Caledonian. Connie had better come down and superintend. I never got your Sierra Leone letter but I got the others, and was so glad to hear from you, dear.

      I don’t intend to go to Africa again. The pay is less than I could make by my pen in the same time, and the climate is atrocious. The only inducement to go to sea is that you may make some fees out of passengers, but these boats have hardly any passengers—we had only one coming back. You can’t write at sea, either, and particularly you can’t write in the tropics. If I can’t get a S. American boat, I will apply for a house surgeoncy I think. I want to improve myself in my profession and get more practical experience before I launch out for myself. I have written a couple of articles which will do, I think, and I have the germs of several in my head, which only need a literary atmosphere to make them hatch.

      I trust you will not be disappointed at my leaving the ship—believe me I have eye enough for the main chance to stick to a good thing when I am in it—but this is not good enough. The Captain himself was saying to me just now that he wondered medical men could ever be induced to go. I would do anything rather than cause you pain or disappointment—however we can talk it over together.

      His harsh impressions were leavened in the end by some time with a celebrated American abolitionist, Henry Highland Garnett. His diary for December 24th recorded:

      American consul came as a passenger with us. Rather a well read intelligent fellow, had a long chat with him about American and English Literature, Emerson, Prescott, Irving, Bancroft & Motley. He was as black as your hat however. He told me what I myself think, that the way to explore Africa is to go without arms and without servants. We wouldn’t like it in England if a body of men came armed to the teeth and marched through our country, and the Africans are quite as touchy. Thats why they begin getting their stewpans and sauces out when they see a Stanley coming.

      It was a revelation for Conan Doyle. ‘This negro gentleman did me good,’ he declared in Memories and Adventures: ‘My starved literary side was eager for good talk, and it was wonderful to sit on deck discussing Bancroft and Motley, and then suddenly realize that you were talking to one who had possibly been a slave himself, and was certainly the son of slaves.’ And he was no longer glib about Garnett’s advice regarding exploration: ‘[T]he method of Livingstone as against the method of Stanley,’ he summed up, ‘takes the braver and better man.’

      ‘I vowed that I would wander no more,’ he remembered long afterwards, ‘and that was surely one of the turning-points of my life.’ But his letters indicate that he continued looking for medical vacancies far away after returning to the Hoares.

      to Mary Doyle BIRMINGHAM, JANUARY OR FEBRUARY 1882

I am being bullied in this house. They are taking advantage of a simple visitor and making him lose his valuable time writing letters to a distant relative. My Birmingham mother has collared me, stolen my novel, dragged me to a table and confronted me with a sheet of notepaper so that I am in for it. I have not had a single letter here except your enclosure so I have absolutely no news for you. Oh yes I have by the way. On the evening that I arrived here the Boss and I were standing at the door smoking our evening pipe when a cab drove up to the door out of which stepped Claud Augustus Currie. He had come up to apply in propria persona. We have put him up at Aspinal’s in Gravelly Hill* for a month when the berth will be vacant for him. Everyone here is as jolly as ever. Mrs D gave me a grand frame to put Elmore’s likeness in—by the way I have not heard from that young lady for six days. The cheques for L.S. will be payable to you and sent to you. I want you to pay McLaren & Williamson first if it is all the same to you, as it is just as well to keep up the credit of the rising generation. I am still full of the S. American scheme. Poor Elmore wants me to take £500 from her and start there but I don’t see it—unless I fail by my own unaided exertions.

      [P.S.] By the way I have no money.

      That Elmore Weldon had money of her own did not make her less attractive to Conan Doyle, but his comments, and what followed, make clear that he was determined to win his own way in the world.

      to Mary Doyle THE ELMS, GRAVELLY HILL, MARCH 1882

      You must think that I have given up writing letters entirely judging from my long silence. I have been working very hard, and that is the reason.

I called on Hogg in London, he was very polite and flattering, said that ‘he and many of his friends looked upon me as one of the coming men in literature’. ; His chief editorial fault is an utter want of sense of humour. In this story which I regard as my chef d’oeuvre, ‘The Actor’s Duel—a legend of the French Stage’, there is a very amusing passage—one which Uncle Dick said was most excellent, and which has amused everyone I have read it to. The situation is a simple old mother living apart from the world reading a slangy sporting letter from her son, and coming to most ridiculous conclusions & making endless blunders over what she regards as ‘modern refinements of speech’. Hogg was utterly ignorant that it was even meant to be funny. It was something entirely beyond his comprehension. He wanted me to change this which I refused to do. He then asked me to write him a story about a fool for next months number—I am sending it off today—46 pages of closely written manuscript. I think it is not bad ‘Bones’ or ‘The April Fool of Harvey’s Sluice’. The first real love story which I have attempted. I am to have another commission to write a story about the Derby.

It is a pleasant place to stay in, this, & I am very comfortable & quiet. Writing all day, and reading with Aspinal after supper. The reading is doing