Deep waters
Benny Green
The Doyle Diary Michael Baker (Paddington £5.95) Students of Conan Doyle will be aware of two striking aspects of his genetic com position, that he was the child of hopelessly disparate spirits and that, of the two, he was temperamentally inclined to lean to his mother, almost as though her stern mat riarchal resolve might save him from contamination with his father's diffidence. It is the Mam who fills his boyish heart with heraldic pomposities, the Mam who imbues the virtues of stoicism, the Mam who colours his inner landscapes with the pennons of chivalric myth. As for his father, Doyle vaguely intimates that Charles was an invalid who suffered a gradual and unspecific withdrawal from the world and was never heard from again. Eugenically speaking, few Victorian case histories are more inviting: Doyle, the product of a liaison between partners so incompatible that he had always to struggle to reconcile the contradictory streams flowing through him, and who gave the world in Holmes and Watson the most delightful fusion of opposites in popular literature. The Mam was grim, indomitable, the father weak and whimsical, and if we tend to lean towards him more than Doyle did, it is perhaps as much a reaction against her Smilesean ethic as curiosity about him. What exactly was wrong with him? And where did he go? Hardly questions of vital importance; even in the parochial context of Holmesian studies they are no more than minor points, sub-literary itches which nobody might ever bother to scratch.
However, one day there fell into the hands of Mr Baker a sketch-book belonging to Charles Doyle, from whose contents, dating from the years of his eclipse, certain hitherto smudged or doctored facts become clear. In a slightly arch and certainly misguided pastiche of a Holmes narrative, Mr Baker establishes the following sequence of events: that Doyle's father was committed to an institution of some kind, that he remained there unhappily and probably unwillingly, that his sanity was questioned by others but never by himself, and that if he was indeed mad, then the family muse certainly kept him company throughout his affliction. The Doyles were all adept draughtsmen; Charles's brother Richard, of Punch fame, was only the most celebrated among several, and it may well be, as Mr Baker suggests, that Charles's melancholia might have been caused, or at least compounded, by his failure to match his brother's dazzling metropolitan success. The sketch-books reveal Charles as a talented if distinctly minor water-colourist whose obsessive themes in his decline include the emancipation of his native Ire land, the welcome imminence of death, and a tendency, not unusual in such cases, to induce an elusive strangeness by re adjusting to the proportions of a fevered imagination the lineaments of reality; in the dream-world of Charles Doyle, doves bulk larger than nubile girls, fairies than flowerpots.
That Charles was harmless has never been denied; that he adored his wife is con firmed by the sketches. Why then the con spiracy of silence? Mr Baker has followed a lugubrious trail through what he calls the cobwebbed corridors of history, tracking the spoor of a pathetic creature down the labyrinth of Victorian asylums and hos pitals, disturbing the dust on neglected records at the Treasury and the old Scottish Office of Works. At first the clues pointed to epilepsy, but then would Conan Doyle, a qualified doctor inured to the spectacle of sickness, have been so evasive on the subject? It sounds more like Jane Eyre than The Final Solution. So Baker delves a little deeper and soon locates the true nature of the skeleton in the Doyle family closet — alcoholism. Drink may well explain the fluctuations of mood in the sketches, which, in the stylistic sense, might be described as Blake-and-water, celebrations of the supernatural without the terrible apocalyptic fury; or perhaps reminiscent of Henry Fuseli, but again without the horrific element; if Doyle's art might be said to lack one specific quality, that quality is intensity. The sprites and fey humans who move through his illustrations have a pallor not altogether explained by the paint itself.
There is one other avenue of investigation which Mr Baker never quite follows through, which is a great pity. In his introductory essay he refers to the notorious episode of Conan Doyle's 1922 publication, The Coming of the Fairies, in which Doyle, drifting out on to those psychic waters which were at last to drown his intellectual credibility, announces his discovery of fairies and wood-elves through the camera lens. The parellels with the contents of his father's sketch-book are too obvious to miss, and Mr Baker duly records them. It is bizarre indeed that the patron saint of ratiocination should have ended his days dancing with the Little Folk, but what is even more to the point is that, while the bibulous father is committed to an institution where he whiles away the hours sketching imaginary creatures, the son earns respectful silence when admonishing the world of letters for not taking such creatures seriously. After reading Mr Baker's interesting footnote to Conan Doyle, an embarrassing rhetorical question floats across the reader's mind, a mere dragonfly on the broad skies of speculation which is gone almost before we are conscious of it, but yet invites an answer. Who is the crazier, the drunkard who paints fairies, or the abstainer who photographs them?
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