Sponges

Was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle mentally ill?

Sherlock Holmes was formulated by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as virtually a God of Reason, a kind of contemporary Athena or Apollo. And, indeed, he is almost worshipped as such, to this very day! So much so, that Conan Doyle himself repeatedly tried to kill him off, but had no alternative but to keep writing the lucrative Sherlock Holmes stories if he wanted to maintain his luxurious lifestyle, no one was terribly interested in his other books. Conan Doyle was raised a staunch Catholic, but was forced to reject conventional religion by his medical training, which simply was inconsistent with these principles. Instead, he turned to "reason", as his new God and religion. Now, why might reason have been so appealing to him? Could it have had anything to do with the fact that his father spent the last 12 years of his life in lunatic asylums, hmmmmmmm? So, while Conan Doyle may indeed have been very uncomfortable for much of his life with the acclaim and devotion accorded to his creation, Sherlock Holmes, he probably could not possibly have created such an appealing and believeable God, unless to some extent the concept actually did fill some needs of his own at a fundamental level. A need for control, a fear of ending up like his father, a fear of descending into chaos, madness, destruction and death. And, we can certainly see this in his brilliant and disturbing early "ghost" story, "The Captain of the Pole Star". This work is certainly derived largely from Conan Doyle's own personal experiences, as a ship's physician on an arctic whaling ship. They obviously were not entirely pleasant ones! What makes this a particularly disturbing and believable "ghost" story, is that there's nothing in it that couldn't well have happened, and probably had happened, on many such voyages. Whether there is actually a ghost there, or not, is entirely indeterminate, and ambiguous. Whether the captain is killed by the ghost, or simply commits suicide on the ice, is also unclear. The captain's entire past is totally indeterminate, where he came from, who his lost love was, or exactly what happened to her, although we know she had a terrible violent death. Did the captain kill her, is that why he's constantly on the move, and his past is so murky? No answers are provided. It is a very disturbing story, indeed! And, with the constant threat of mutiny and death in the background, it is the precise opposite of the glorious imperial world order of reason and justice that the British were so proud of, the world Adolf Hitler had so much fun ridiculing in his rather brilliant speeches. And, yet, then, we have the serene the invincible God of Reason, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. And, it's creator, now running from the God he created, particularly after the disasters of WWI, descending into spiritualism, worshipping fascist Mussolini, writing his last Sherlock Holmes novel "The Valley of Fear", set in America, as a massive deflection from the incredible catastrophe of the Western Front of WWI. A novel of clear fascist implications, as the "troublemakers and slackers" have taken over the valley, and must be put in their place by force, by the God of Reason, and his surrogates, by Sherlock Holmes. Now it is profoundly ironic, or perhaps merely profoundly inevitable that The Valley of Fear inspired communist writer Dashell Hammett to write "Red Harvest", a novel of supreme nihilism, in which rather than order being restored to the corrupt town, the Pinkerton Op merely assists all sides to utterly destroy each other. I don't know, Red Harvest was written in 1929, Conan Doyle dropped dead of a heart attack in 1930. Do you think it's possible that reading about, or hearing about Red Harvest killed Conan Doyle? It's possible, you know. In any case, Red Harvest, inspired by The Valley of Fear, inspired the nihilistic samaurai films in Japan, with Toshiro Mifune, and those inspired the nihilistic Spaghetti Westerns, with Clint Eastwood. Somehow, inspiring so much nihilism with communist implications was not, I think, quite what Conan Doyle had in mind. It would certainly have disgusted and horrified him. Of course, by the end of his life Conan Doyle was so much absorbed in his spiritualist and fascist fantasies of supreme order, that he might have died happily convinced of being united with his wife and children in some fascist Victorian afterlife. In any case, his own children never had children of their own, their father had certainly scared them off from that! So, like the Captain of the Pole Star, his line was ended when he died, a prisoner of his own fantasies, and his own need for an established and irrevocable order to things. #sherlockholmes #arthurconandoyle #englishliterature #englishhistory #britishhistory #dectectivestories #psychology #psychiatry #psychoanalysis #spiritualism #fascism #mussolini #mentalillness #wwi #metaphysics #detectives #adolfhitler #hitler #classicinema #classicfilms #classicmovies #clinteastwood

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