Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling have appeared in many posts on here, both separately and together.
These posts attract large numbers of readers. The article about Conan Doyle, Kipling and the Isle of Wight has, rather surprisingly, recently reached the top ten in terms of the number of viewings.
Another article lists some more common elements in the lives of these two great writers. That article was created some years ago; I have since learned of something else that Conan Doyle and Kipling had in common.
The first article inspired by Conan Doyle's Through the Magic Door, which I discovered only recently, introduces the book and lists a few minor topics and references that appear in both his book and my articles.
This article features a fascinating story that Conan Doyle has to tell about a reputation-saving 'coincidence'. This incident in his life is of interest not only for its own sake but also because Rudyard Kipling had a very similar experience.
While Through the Magic Door contains some relevant and quotable material, Conan Doyle is verbose – he says himself that he indulges in didactic talk and long digressions - his language is rather old-fashioned and much of his commentary doesn't hold my attention.
I said this about Joyce Collin-Smith's book Call No Man Master:
“...her work has a...duality: it is both very interesting and very boring. Some of the content fascinates me and resonates very strongly while some of it means very little so I skip over it.“
I feel much the same about Through the Magic Door!
While I am not for example particularly interested in the lives and works of many of the 18th and 19th century writers Conan Doyle thinks very highly of, some of the other material definitely gets my attention.
For me, one of the most riveting parts of the book is where Conan Doyle tells of his narrow escape from being accused of plagiarism. This story is all the more interesting because it closely matches a story told by Rudyard Kipling.
The tale of what Conan Doyle called an extraordinary coincidence is best told in summary.
He had been travelling in Switzerland; he broke his journey at a small inn on the summit of a huge cliff.
He learned that while the inn was inhabited all the year round, it was utterly isolated for about three months in winter because deep snow made arrivals and departures impossible.
His imagination immediately got to work: he mentally constructed a short story about a group of people who loathed each other being cooped up in the inn and unable to get away from each other. Every day that passed brought them nearer to tragedy.
For a week or so as he travelled on, he mentally worked on the story. He returned through France; he had nothing to read so bought a copy of Guy de Maupassant's Tales, which he had never seen before. He was amazed to see that not only was the first story about an inn, it was the same inn that he had visited! Not only that, the plot depended on the isolation of a group of snowbound people. Everything that Conan Doyle had imagined was there.
He says this about the 'coincidence':
“Of course, the genesis of the thing is clear enough. He had chanced to visit the inn, and had been impressed as I had been by the same train of thought. All that is quite intelligible. But what is perfectly marvellous is that in that short journey I should have chanced to buy the one book in all the world which would prevent me from making a public fool of myself, for who would ever have believed that my work was not an imitation? I do not think that the hypothesis of coincidence can cover the facts. It is one of several incidents in my life which have convinced me of spiritual interposition—of the promptings of some beneficent force outside ourselves, which tries to help us where it can. The old Catholic doctrine of the Guardian Angel is not only a beautiful one, but has in it, I believe, a real basis of truth.“
So Conan Doyle believed in benevolent unseen influences!
Guy de Maupassant's story about the mountain inn that inspired them both was first published in 1886; this is a more recent edition:
When I first read Conan Doyle's account of his strange experience, I was immediately reminded of the uncannily similar story told by Rudyard Kipling in his autobiographical work Something of Myself.
Kipling's account of how he had a miraculous escape from being accused of plagiarism has been featured in an article about the entity that he called his Daemon.
Here is an extract from the article:
“The inspirational anecdote in summary is that a man told Kipling a horror story that he said was a personal experience. Kipling wrote it up but something stopped him from sending it to a publisher. He was really glad about this when, ‘by chance’, he found the story, identical in every way, in an old magazine. He gives credit to his Daemon for preventing a charge of plagiarism, which would not be good for such a famous writer’s reputation and would have been very stressful for him.”
Kipling had this to say about his narrow escape:
“Had I published that tale, what could have saved me from the charge of deliberate plagiarism?”
The two stories that were never published have more in common than featuring in close shaves in their authors' lives.
Both stories mention deep snow and isolated locations.
An innkeeper appears in Kipling' story, which suggests an inn.
Both tales are essentially horror stories. Conan Doyle's says that his story moves towards tragedy; Kipling says that his story culminates in purest horror and has a ghastly end.
Kipling found the original story in a copy of Harper's Magazine. He saw a row of bound volumes of Harper's in the dentist's surgery he was forced to visit. Each volume had around six hundred pages, and, just as Conan Doyle 'just happened' to buy the right book, Kipling 'by chance' selected the right volume and found his way to the page with the original story!
Incidentally, several of Conan Doyle's stories were published in in this magazine, including The Parasite.
Conan Doyle's collection of essays Through the Magic Door (1907):
Rudyard Kiplings memoir Something of Myself (1937):
