from My first book (1897) edited by Jerome K. Jerome
"Juvenilia"
by Arthur Conan Doyle
IT is very well for the master craftsman with twenty
triumphs behind him to look down the vista of his successes,
and to recall how he picked out the path which has led him
to fame, but for the tiro whose first book is perilously
near to his last one it becomes a more invidious matter.
His past presses too closely upon his present, and his
reminiscences, unmellowed by the flight of Tears, are apt to
be rawly and crudely personal. And yet even time helps me
when I speak of my first work, for it was written seven-and-
twenty years ago.
I was six at the time, and have a very distinct
recollection of the achievement. It was written, I
remember, upon foolscap paper, in what might be called a
fine bold hand-four words to the line, and was illustrated
by marginal pen-and-ink sketches by the author. There was a
man in it, and there was a tiger. I forget which was the
hero, but it didn't matter much, for they became blended
into one about the time when the tiger met the man. I was a
realist in the age of the Romanticists I described at some
length, both verbally and pictorially the untimely end of
that wayfarer. But when the tiger had absorbed him, I found
myself slightly embarrassed as to how my story was to go on.
'It is very easy to get people into scrapes, and very hard
to get them out again,' I remarked, and I have often had
cause to repeat the precocious aphorism of my childhood. On
this occasion the situation was beyond me, and my book, like
my man, was engulfed in my tiger. There is an old family
bureau with secret drawers, in which lie little locks of
hair tied up in circles, and black silhouettes and dim
daguerreotypes, and letters which seem to have been written
in the lightest of straw coloured inks. Somewhere there
lies my primitive manuscript, where my tiger, like a
many-hooped barrel with a tail to it, still envelops the
hapless stranger whom he has taken in.
Then came my second book, which was told and not
written, but which was a much more ambitious effort than the first.
Between the two, four years had elapsed, which were mainly
spent in reading. It is rumoured that a special meeting of
a library committee was held in my honour, at which a
bye-law was passed that no subscriber should be permitted to
change his book more than three times a day. Yet, even with
these limitations, by the aid of a well-stocked bookcase at
home, I managed to enter my tenth year with a good deal in
my head that I could never have learned in the class-rooms.
I do not think that life has any joy to offer so
complete, so soul-filling as that which comes upon the imaginative
lad, whose spare time is limited, but who is able to snuggle
down into a corner with his book knowing that the next hour
is all his own. And how vivid and fresh it all is! Your
very heart and soul are out on the prairies and the oceans
with your hero. It is you who act and suffer and enjoy.
You carry the long small-bore Kentucky rifle with which such
egregious things are done, and you lie out upon the topsail
yard, and get jerked by the flap of the sail into the
Pacific, where you cling on to the leg of an albatross, and
so keep afloat until the comic boatswain turns up with his
crew of volunteers to handspike you into safety. What a
magic it is, this stirring of the boyish heart and mind!
Long ere I came to my teens I had traversed every sea and
knew the Rockies like my own back garden. How often had I
sprung upon the back of the charging buffalo and so escaped
him! It was an everyday emergency to have to set the
prairie on fire in front of me in order to escape from the
fire behind, or to run a mile down a brook to throw the
bloodhounds off my trail. I had creased horses, I had shot
down rapids, I had strapped on my mocassins
hindforemost to conceal my tracks, I had lain under water
with a reed in my mouth, and I had feigned madness to escape
the torture. As to the Indian braves whom I slew in single
combats, I could have stocked a large graveyard, and,
fortunately enough, though I was a good deal chipped about
in these affairs, no real harm ever came of it and I was
always nursed back into health by a very fascinating young
squaw. It was all more real than the reality. Since those
days I have in very truth both shot bears and harpooned
whales, but the performance was flat compared with the first
time that I did it with Mr. Ballantyne or Captain Mayne Reid
at my elbow.
In the fulness of time I was packed off to a public
school, and in some way it was discovered by my playmates
that I had more than my share of the lore after which they
hankered. There was my debut as a story-teller. On a wet
half-holiday I have been elevated on to a desk, and with an
audience of little boys all squatting on the floor, with
their chins upon their hands, I have talked myself husky
over the misfortunes of my heroes. Week in and week out
those unhappy men have battled and striven and groaned for
the amusement of that little circle. I was bribed with
pastry to continue these efforts, and I remember that I
always stipulated for tarts down and strict business, which
shows that I was born to be a member of the Authors'
Society. Sometimes, too, I would stop dead in the very
thrill of a crisis, and could only be set agoing again by
apples. When I had got as far as 'With his left hand in her
glossy locks, he was waving the blood-stained knife above
her head, when----' or 'Slowly, slowly, the door turned upon
its hinges, and with eyes which were dilated with horror,
the wicked Marquis saw----' I knew that I had my audience in
my power. And thus my second book was evolved.
It may be that my literary experiences would have
ended there had there not come a time in my early manhood when
that good old harsh-faced schoolmistress, Hard Times, took
me by the hand. I wrote, and with amazement I found that my
writing was accepted. Chambers's Journal it was which
rose to the occasion, and I have had a kindly feeling for
its mustard-coloured back ever since. Fifty little
cylinders of manuscript did I send out during eight years,
which described irregular orbits among publishers, and
usually came back like paper boomerangs to the place that
they had started from. Yet in time they all lodged
somewhere or other. Mr. Hogg, of London Society, was
one of the most constant of my patrons and Mr. James Payn wasted
hours of his valuable time in encouraging me to persevere.
Knowing as I did that he was one of the busiest men in
London, I never received one of his shrewd and kindly and
most illegible letters without a feeling of gratitude and wonder.
I have heard folk talk as though there were some
hidden back door by which one may creep into literature, but I can
say myself that I never had an introduction to any editor or
publisher before doing business with them, and that I do not
think that I suffered on that account. Yet my
apprenticeship was a long and trying one. During ten years
of hard work, I averaged less than fifty pounds a year from
my pen. I won my way into the best journals,
Cornhill, Temple Bar, and so on; but what
is the use of that when the contributions to those journals must be
anonymous? It is a system which tells very hardly against young
authors. I saw with astonishment and pride that 'Habakuk Jephson's
Statement' in the Cornhill was attributed by critic
after critic to Stevenson, but, overwhelmed as I was by the
compliment, a word of the most lukewarm praise sent straight
to my own address would have been of greater use to me.
After ten years of such work I was as unknown as if I had
never dipped a pen into an inkbottle. Sometimes, of course,
the anonymous system may screen you from blame as well as
rob you of praise. How well I can see a dear old friend
running after me in the street, waving a London evening
paper in his hand! 'Have you seen what they say about your
_Cornhill_ story?' he shouted.
'No, no. What is it?'
'Here it is! Here it is!' Eagerly he turned over the
column, while I, trembling with excitement, but determined
to bear my honours meekly, peeped over his shoulder. 'The
Cornhill this month,' said the critic, 'has a story in
it which would have made Thackeray turn in his grave.' There
were several witnesses about, and the Portsmouth bench are
severe upon assaults, so my friend escaped unscathed. Then
first I realised that British criticism had fallen into a
shocking state of decay, though when some one has a pat on
the back for you you understand that, after all, there are
some very smart people upon the literary Press.
And so at last it was brought home to me that a man
may put the very best that is in him into magazine work for
years and years and reap no benefit from it, save, of
course, the inherent benefits of literary practice. So I
wrote another of my first books and sent it off to the
publishers. Alas for the dreadful thing that happened! The
publishers never received it, the Post Office sent countless
blue forms to say that they knew nothing about it, and from
that day to this no word has ever been heard of it. Of
course it was the best thing I ever wrote. Who ever lost a
manuscript that wasn't? But I must in all honesty confess
that my shock at its disappearance would be as nothing to my
horror if it were suddenly to appear again--in print. If
one or two other of my earlier efforts had also been lost in
the post, my conscience would have been the lighter. This
one was called 'The Narrative of John Smith,' and it was of
a personal-social-political complexion. Had it appeared I
should have probably awakened to find myself infamous, for
it steered, as I remember it, perilously near to the
libellous. However, it was safely lost, and that was the
end of another of my first books.
Then I started upon an exceedingly sensational
novel, which interested me extremely at the time, though I have
never heard that it had the same effect upon anyone else
afterwards. I may urge in extenuation of all shortcomings
that it was written in the intervals of a busy though
ill-paying practice. And a man must try that and combine it
with literary work before he quite knows what it means. How
often have I rejoiced to find a clear morning before me, and
settled down to my task, or rather, dashed ferociously at
it, as knowing how precious were those hours of quiet! Then
to me enter my housekeeper, with tidings of dismay. 'Mrs.
Thurston's little boy wants to see you, doctor.' 'Show him
in,' say I, striving to fix my scene in my mind that I may
splice it when this trouble is over. 'Well, my boy?'
'Please, doctor, mother wants to know if she is to add water
to that medicine.' 'Certainly, certainly.' Not that it
matters in the least, but it is well to answer with
decision. Exit the little boy, and the splice is about half
accomplished when he suddenly bursts into the room again.
'Please, doctor, when I got back mother had taken the
medicine without the water.' 'Tut, tut!' I answer. 'It
really does not matter in the least.' The youth withdraws
with a suspicious glance, and one more paragraph has been
written when the husband puts in an appearance. 'There
seems to have been some misunderstanding about that
medicine,' he remarks coldly. 'Not at all,' I say, 'it
really didn't matter.' 'Well, then, why did you tell the
boy that it should be taken with water?' And then I try to
disentangle the business, and the husband shakes his head
gloomily at me. 'She feels very queer,' says he; 'we should
all be easier in our minds if you came and looked at her.'
So I leave my heroine in the four-foot way with an express
thundering towards her, and trudge sadly off, with the
feeling that another morning has been wasted, and another
seam left visible to the critic's eye in my unhappy novel.
Such was the genesis of my sensational romance, and when
publishers wrote to say that they could see no merit in it,
I was, heart and soul, of the same way of thinking.
And then, under more favourable circumstances, I
wrote 'Micah Clarke,' for patients had become more tractable, and
I had married, and in every way I was a brighter man. A
year's reading and five months' writing finished it, and I
thought I had a tool in my hands that would cut a path for
me. So I had, but the first thing that I cut with it was my
finger. I sent it to a friend, whose opinion I deeply
respected, in London, who read for one of the leading
houses, but he had been bitten by the historical novel, and
very naturally he distrusted it. From him it went to house
after house, and house after house would have none of it.
Blackwood found that the people did not talk so in the
seventeenth century; Bentley that its principal defect was
that there was a complete absence of interest; Cassells that
experience had shown that an historical novel could never be
a commercial success. I remember smoking over my dog-eared
manuscript when it returned for a whiff of country air after
one of its descents upon town, and wondering what I should
do if some sporting reckless kind of publisher were suddenly
to stride in and make me a bid of forty shillings or so for
the lot. And then suddenly I bethought me to send it to
Messrs. Longmans, where it was fortunate enough to fall into
the hands of Mr. Andrew Lang. From that day the way was
smoothed to it, and, as things turned out, I was spared that
keenest sting of ill-success, that those who had believed in
your work should suffer pecuniarily for their belief. A
door had been opened for me into the temple of the Muses,
and it only remained that I should find something that was
worthy of being borne through it.
