Читать книгу Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters - Daniel Stashower, Исмаил Шихлы - Страница 7

His mother’s influence is evident in every aspect of her son’s character. ‘The Mam’, as he called her,* raised seven children in Victorian Edinburgh (two more died in infancy or childhood) in what were certainly straitened if not absolutely Dickensian circumstances. In later years Conan Doyle said his childhood had been spent in ‘the hardy and bracing atmosphere of poverty’, but that was a rather sunny way of looking at it, even though it appears to have been a genteel sort of poverty, usually with at least one servant in the household.

But Charles Doyle’s alcoholism led to his being pensioned off when still in his forties, deepening the family’s plight; and when he entered the first of a long series of sanatoria and asylums, it was his wife, Mary, who struggled successfully to hold the large family together. Throughout his life Conan Doyle felt a powerful debt to her, and a keen awareness of the many sacrifices she made to secure his education and his start in life. In his 1895 autobiographical novel, entitled The Stark Munro Letters, Conan Doyle gave an admiring portrait of his mother:

You must remember her sweet face, her sensitive mouth, her peering, short-sighted eyes, her general suggestion of a plump little hen, who is still on the alert about her chickens.

But you cannot realise all that she is to me in our domestic life. Those helpful fingers! That sympathetic brain! Ever since I can remember her she has been the quaintest mixture of the housewife and the woman of letters, with the high-bred spirited lady as a basis for either character. Always a lady, whether bargaining with the butcher, or breaking in a skittish charwoman, or stirring the porridge, which I can see her doing with the porridge-stick in one hand, and the other holding her Revue des Deux Mondes within two inches of her dear nose. That was always her favourite reading, and I can never think of her without the association of its browny-yellow cover.

She is a very well-read woman is the mother; she keeps up to date in French literature as well as in English, and can talk by the hour about the Goncourts, and Flaubert, and Gautier. Yet she is always hard at work; and how she imbibes all her knowledge is a mystery. She reads when she knits, she reads when she scrubs, she even reads when she feeds her babies. We have a little joke against her, that at an interesting passage she deposited a spoonful of rusk and milk into my little sister’s ear-hole, the child having turned her head at the critical instant. Her hands are worn with work, and yet where is the idle woman who has read as much?

Even at the peak of his fame, Conan Doyle solicited his mother’s advice on nearly every aspect of his life and career—and even when he did not, she often provided it anyway—including, in one famous example, persuading him to refrain from killing off Sherlock Holmes. (She not only pleaded successfully for the detective’s life, but also gave her son the plot device for a new story. ‘He still lives,’ Conan Doyle told her at the end of the first set of the stories, ‘thanks to your entreaties.’) But not all her advice was literary; she also counselled him on his tortuous love for the young woman who would become his second wife, while his first wife was still struggling against tuberculosis. While he did not preserve many of her letters to him, he did save the ones in which she strove vehemently to dissuade him from volunteering for the Boer War in 1899. In those letters her will and intellect shine every bit as forcefully as those of her famous son.

In addition, there were several more women in Conan Doyle’s life whom he regarded as ‘second mothers’, addressing them, as he did his own, by the honorific ‘Mam’. They did not exert the same developmental influence upon him as his own mother did, but he clearly regarded them with an esteem that went beyond simple family friendship. There was Mrs Charlotte Drummond, a close family friend in Edinburgh with whose two children Conan Doyle had grown up. His letters to her are in the Sherlock Holmes Collections of the University of Minnesota Library. Another was Mrs Amy Hoare, the wife of a Birmingham doctor, Reginald Ratcliff Hoare, under whom Conan Doyle worked a number of times as both a medical student and a fledgling doctor. Both Hoares became second parents to him, and his letters to them are in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library. Finally, there was Mrs Margaret Ryan, of Edinburgh, the mother of the one lifelong friend he made at school, James Ryan. Some of his letters to her are among his papers now at the British Library.