From Michael Dirda's "LIBRARY WITHOUT WALLS" column on The Barnes & Noble Review
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) is generally known
for a series of crime stories about a "consulting detective," one who
nearly was called Sherringford -- or even I. or J. Sherringford -- Holmes. Happily,
Conan Doyle avoided this madness and settled on Sherlock; he thus created the
most famous fictional character in modern literature. Of course, some would
say, Agatha Christie among them, that it was the idea of the detective's
sidekick -- sturdy, reliable Dr. John H. Watson (who came close to being saddled
with the name Ormond Sacker) -- that revealed Conan Doyle's true genius.
Members
of the Baker Street Irregulars and the Sherlock Holmes Society of London would
certainly, and rightly, argue about my use of the adjective "fictional"
and the verb "created." After all, 2011 marks the 100th
anniversary of Ronald Knox's "Studies in the Literature of Sherlock
Holmes," the paper (and later essay) which loosely inaugurated what is
sometimes referred to as "the Grand Game." To play that game requires
one to acknowledge that the Victorian era's most dynamic duo actually lived and
that the 56 "stories" and four "novels" -- the so-called Canon
or Sacred Writings -- are in fact a collection of somewhat jumbled historical
documents, requiring close study, dexterous chronological adjustments, and
well-argued commentary.
Strangely enough, Conan Doyle never thought that highly of his Sherlockian stories. He was naturally grateful for the money and fame they brought him, but always felt that his historical fiction, especially The White Company and Sir Nigel, would be his main claim to a place in English literature. He was wrong about that, though George MacDonald Fraser -- the creator of Flashman -- ranks these medieval swashbucklers just below the chivalric romances of Alexandre Dumas and Walter Scott.
In truth,
though, most modern readers have probably only read one other Conan Doyle book:
The Lost World. Published in 1912, this is the
great "boy's adventure" novel about a plateau deep in the South
American jungle inhabited by dinosaurs and savage ape-men. Conan Doyle was
immensely fond of its hero, Professor George Edward Challenger, and actually
dressed up for photographs as the choleric, heavily bearded scientist. He
eventually brought Challenger back for further (and less satisfying) adventures
in The Poison Belt and two short stories, "When
the Earth Screamed" and "The Disintegration Machine." A last
Challenger novel bears a wonderful title -- The Land of Mist -- but is
largely an apologia for Spiritualism.
That
Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the ultra-rational Holmes and the rabidly
scientific Challenger, actually became an ardent Spiritualist -- and even a
believer in fairies -- should give us all pause. However, the writer's biographers
have traced a longtime fascination with supernatural matters, one going as far
back as his father Charles Doyle and uncle Richard Doyle, both artists who
frequently painted otherworldly creatures. (The latter's suite of paintings
titled "In Fairyland" established him as arguably the leading fantasy
illustrator of the later 19th century.) Once young Arthur started to
write in the 1880s and '90s, he regularly produced a good deal of what we would
today classify as supernatural horror or contes
cruels, including that heartbreaking
ghost story "The Captain of the Pole-Star" and the eerie mummy-tales "Lot
No. 249" and "The Ring of Thoth."
While Conan Doyle could write with masterful ease in multiple genres, many readers nonetheless believe that his finest set of short stories are, pace Holmes, two volumes devoted to the reminiscences of an old Napoleonic soldier: Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896) and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard (1903). That excellent scholar of Conan Doyle (and much else) Owen Dudley Edwards has called them the finest series of historical short stories ever written. They are, as George MacDonald Fraser points out in his introduction to the New York Review Books paperback edition, "a splendid catalog of secret missions, escapes, love affairs, duels, disguises, pursuits, triumphs, and occasional disasters," all of them related in an "inimitable mock French style." The stories clearly helped inspire Fraser's own brilliant novels about Harry Flashman, but unlike that notorious cad and coward, Etienne Gerard is one of the most likeable and honorable figures in literature.
The
Brigadier is also comically naïve, charmingly vain, and absolutely convinced
that every woman finds him irresistible. After all, is he not the finest
horseman and greatest swordsman in all of France? "Everybody," he
reminds us, "had heard of me since my duel with the six fencing-masters."
Now an old man, he sits in a café, "between his dinner and his dominoes,"
recalling the glorious days of his youth:
I would have a stronger wine to-night, my friends, a wine
of Burgundy rather than of Bordeaux. It is that my heart, my old soldier heart,
is heavy within me. It is a strange thing, this age which creeps upon one. One
does not know, one does not understand; the spirit is ever the same, and one
does not remember how the poor body crumbles. But there comes a moment when it
is brought home, when quick as the sparkle of a whirling sabre it is clear to
us, and we see the men we were and the men we are. Yes, yes, it was so to-day,
and I would have a wine of Burgundy to-night. White Burgundy -- Montrachet -- Sir, I
am your debtor!
And in
the next paragraph we are launched into a glorious tale of yesteryear, for
Gerard seems to have been regularly summoned by Napoleon when desperate times
called for the most desperate measures. Threats to the Emperor's life? Imperial
orders that must be carried through enemy lines? State documents to be
safeguarded from traitors? An arsenal inside a besieged city that needs to be
blown up? Etienne Gerard is the man for the job.
Sometimes
the Brigadier's reminiscences do read a bit like tall tales, and events quickly
grow madcap whenever our hero encounters the English. The blithely unaware French
soldier never quite grasps these foreigners and their strange sports and games,
but is nonetheless unshakably convinced that he possesses a natural talent,
indeed an inherent superiority, at cricket or fox-hunting. "How the
Brigadier Slew the Fox" is a long established classic of humorous
misunderstanding. Yet others, like "How the Brigadier Rode to Minsk"
and "How the Brigadier Captured Saragossa," are thrilling, frenzied
with action, and occasionally even horrifying, as when Gerard discovers that the
Spanish have nailed a French spy to a convent wall. (Mickey Spillane would
later adopt this same method of restraint in one of his Mike Hammer mysteries.)
Fortunately, these are all stories for which the world is finally prepared, and
"save for two or three men and a score or two of women," you will be
the first to hear them.
A score
or two of women? Like any Gascon worth his salt, Gerard is not only fierce and
handsome, he loves the ladies -- and is soft putty in their hands, though he
seldom realizes it. He and his brigade of hussars, he proudly maintains, "could
set a whole population running, the women towards us, and the men away." Once,
disguised as a Cossack, he tried to avoid capture by Prussians by shouting out
the only Russian words he knew. "I learned them from little Sophie, at
Wilna, and they meant: 'If the night is fine we shall meet under the oak tree,
and if it rains we shall meet in the byre.'" Still, Gerard is more Cyrano
than Don Juan, and he looks back at his youthful romantic adventures with
gratitude:
And even as they spoke I saw her in front of us, her sweet
face framed in the darkness. I had cause to hate her, for she had cheated and
befooled me, and yet it thrilled me then and thrills me now to think that my
arms have embraced her, and that I have felt the scent of her hair in my
nostrils. I know not whether she lies under her German earth, or whether she
still lingers, a grey-haired woman in her Castle of Hof, but she lives ever,
young and lovely, in the heart and the memory of Etienne Gerard.
Over the
course of these stories, Conan Doyle gradually presents a warts-and-all
portrait of Napoleon, at the same time making clear the Emperor's charisma and
the rapt devotion of his soldiers. Nevertheless, the villains are my favorite
characters in the Exploits and Adventures. When the captured Brigadier
is led into the cave headquarters of one Spanish guerrilla leader, the
bloodthirsty monster turns out to resemble a benign père de famille, seated among his papers, pen in
hand. He hardly notices Gerard at first, so intent is his concentration. "'I
suppose,' said he, at last, speaking very excellent French, 'that you are not
able to suggest a rhyme for the word Covillha.'" When Gerard finally hunts
down another freebooter known as the Maréchal de Millefleurs, the scoundrel
turns out to be a model of gentlemanly courtesy and nonchalance, even in the
face of imminent death: "The Marshal, still pinioned, and with the rope
round his neck, sat his horse with a half smile, as one who is slightly bored
and yet strives out of courtesy not to show it."
Unusually,
the second installment of these expertly paced and plotted stories is even
better than the first. For some reason, though, the NYRB paperback rejiggers
both the Exploits and the Adventures, arranging each volume so
that the escapades follow a roughly chronological order. This makes a certain
sense, for Gerard's heroic deeds embrace the entire history and geography of
the Napoleonic wars, taking place in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany,
Russia, England, and, finally, on St. Helena. No matter where he finds himself,
however, the Brigadier always thinks like a hussar: "Of all the cities
which we visited Venice is the most ill-built and ridiculous. I cannot imagine
how the people who laid it out thought that the cavalry could maneouvre."
As for Waterloo, that plain of sorrows, he writes: "On the one side,
poetry, gallantry, self-sacrifice -- all that is beautiful and heroic. On the
other side, beef. Our hopes, our ideals, our dreams -- all were shattered on that
terrible beef of Old England."
If you know Arthur Conan Doyle as the author of the Sherlock Holmes
stories and The Lost World, you already
know that he is one of the best storytellers in the world. While Brigadier
Gerard will never become a living myth like Holmes, his Exploits and Adventures
really shouldn't be missed: "You have seen through my dim eyes," the
old soldier reminds us, "something of the sparkle and splendour of those
great days, and I have brought back to you some shadow of those men whose tread
shook the earth. Treasure it in your minds and pass it on to your children, for
the memory of a great age is the most precious treasure that a nation can
possess." Vive l'Empereur!
