Memories and Adventures Chapter 8 - My First Literary Success

**Arthur Conan Doyle** (0:01)
Chapter 8 of Memories and Adventures This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org. Recording by A Fine Voice Memories and Adventures by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Chapter 8 My First Literary Success New Outlook James Payne Genesis of Holmes A Study in Scarlet Micah Clarke Disappointments Andrew Lange Cornhill Dinner Oscar Wilde His Criticism of Himself The White Company During the years before my marriage, I had from time to time written short stories which were good enough to be marketable at very small prices. Four pounds on an average, but not good enough to reproduce. They are scattered about amid the pages of London society all the year round, Temple Bar, the boys' own paper and other journals. There let them lie. They serve their purpose in relieving me a little of that financial burden which always pressed upon me. I can hardly have earned more than ten pounds or fifteen pounds a year from this source, so that the idea of making a living by it never occurred to me. But though I was not putting out, I was taking in. I still have notebooks full of all sorts of knowledge which I acquired during that time. It is a great mistake to start putting out cargo when you have hardly stowed any on board. My own slow methods and natural limitations made me escape this danger.
After my marriage, however, my brain seems to have quickened, and both my imagination and my range of expression were greatly improved. Most of the short stories which appeared eventually in My Captain of the Pole Star were written in those years from 1885 to 1890 Some of them are perhaps as good honest work as any that I have done. What gave me great pleasure and for the first time made me realize that I was ceasing to be a hack writer and was getting into good company was when James Payne accepted my short story, Habercook Jefferson's Statement for Cornhill.
I had a reverence for this splendid magazine with its traditions from Thackeray to Stevenson and the thought that I had won my way into it pleased me even more than the cheque for 30 pounds which came duly to hand. It was of course anonymous, such was the law of the magazine which protects the author from abuse as well as prevents his winning fame.
One paper began its review by the phrase, Cornhill opens its new number with a story which would have made Thackeray turn in his grave. A dear old gentleman who knew me hurried across the road to show me the paper with these cheering words. Another more gracious said, Cornhill begins the new year with an exceedingly powerful story in which we seem to trace the hand of the author of the New Arabian Nights. It was great praise but something less warm which came straight to my own address would have pleased me better.
I soon had two other stories in the Cornhill, John Hooksford's Hiatus and the Ring of Thoth. I also penetrated the stout Scottish barrier of Blackwood with a story, The Physiologist's Wife, which was written when I was under the influence of Henry James. But I was still in the days of very small things, so small that when a paper sent me a woodcut and offered me four guineas, if I would write a story to correspond, I was not too proud to accept. It was a very bad woodcut, and I think that the story corresponded all right. I remember writing a New Zealand story, though why I should have written about a place of which I knew nothing, I cannot imagine. Some New Zealand critic pointed out that I had given the exact bearings of the farm mentioned as ninety miles to the east or west of the town of Nelson, and that in that case it was situated twenty miles out on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. These little things will happen. There are times when accuracy is unnecessary, and others where the idea is everything, and the place quite immaterial.
It was about a year after my marriage that I realized that I could go on doing short stories forever and never make headway. What is necessary is that your name should be on the back of a volume. Only so do you assert your individuality and get the full credit or discredit of your achievement. I had for some time from 1884 onwards been engaged upon a sensational book of adventure, which I had called The Firm of Girdleston, which represented my first attempt at a connected narrative. Save for occasional patches, it is a worthless book. Unlike the first book of everyone else, unless he is a great original genius, it was too reminiscent of the work of others.