Dead Letters: The Photographs

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent

In 1921 I was sent to a lecture hall in London to watch the creator of Sherlock Holmes make a fool of himself, and I went, I admit, looking forward to it.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was by then the most famous author alive, and he had spent the past several years using that fame to promote spiritualism — séances, spirit photography, communication with the dead. The newspapers had begun to treat him as a cautionary tale. The man who had invented the most pitilessly rational detective in literature, the man whose hero could deduce a soldier's regiment from the angle of his bootlaces, now believed in ghosts. And, as of recently, in fairies.

The fairies were the occasion for the lecture. Two girls in a Yorkshire village called Cottingley had produced photographs of themselves in the company of small winged figures, and Doyle had examined these photographs and pronounced them genuine. He had written an article about them for The Strand — the same magazine that had published the Holmes stories — under the headline "Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event." He was now touring with the images, showing them to audiences as evidence that the world contained more than the visible.

I sat in the third row with my notebook, prepared to record the spectacle of a great mind in decline. The hall was full. Some of the audience were believers. Many, like me, had come to watch.

Conan Doyle was a large man, heavy and grey by then, with a walrus moustache and the bearing of a country doctor, which is what he had originally been. He projected the photographs onto a screen. The fairies, I will tell you plainly, did not look real. They looked like what they were later admitted to be — paper cut-outs, drawings, held up with hatpins. To my eye it was obvious. To the eye of the man who created Sherlock Holmes, apparently, it was not.

During the questions, I stood and asked him the question everyone in the room wanted asked. I asked how the man who had given the world its greatest sceptic, its supreme reasoner, could look at these photographs and believe.

He did not take offence. He had been asked it a hundred times. He looked at me with a patience that I found, to my surprise, difficult to meet.

"You assume," he said, "that I believe these things because I cannot reason. The truth is the reverse. I believe them because I have reasoned, and because the alternative is a universe I am no longer willing to accept."

I asked what alternative he meant.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he told the room — not me, the room — that he had lost his son. Kingsley. Wounded at the Somme, dead of the influenza before the war was fully over. He told us he had lost his brother as well, and a brother-in-law, and two nephews. He told us that a generation of young men had gone into the ground in France and that the mothers and fathers of England were sitting in their parlours at that very moment, surrounded by the silence those young men had left, and that he had decided — reasoned, he said again — that he would rather spend his remaining years looking for evidence that the silence was not final than accept that it was.

"If the fairies are real," he said, "then the world is larger than the materialists tell us. And if the world is larger, then perhaps the door my son walked through is not a wall. That is what is in these photographs, for me. You see paper. I see a door."

The hall was silent. I sat down. I did not ask anything else.

The photographs were faked. We know that now. The girls confessed decades later — they had drawn the fairies, copying illustrations from a children's book, and propped them up with hatpins, and been astonished when a famous man took them seriously and then could not be made to stop. They had not meant to deceive Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. They had meant to fool Elsie's mother. The thing got away from them, the way things do.

I have thought about that lecture for the rest of my life, and I have never been able to decide what I witnessed. A great mind in decline, yes — that was the easy story, the one I'd come for. But also a grieving father who had looked at the available universe and found it unbearable, and had used the most powerful instrument he possessed, his reason, to build himself a door. He was wrong about the fairies. He was not wrong about the grief. The two facts have never sorted themselves out for me.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930. His last words, reportedly, were to his wife, and they were about his heart, and whether they referred to the organ or the feeling I do not know and the people who were there could not agree.

I got the quote. "You see paper. I see a door." I have never known whether to file it under the credulous or the brave, so I have kept it under both.

— F.M.

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.