The Stark Munro Letters and TJLC --Yes, it really is that gay.

[221bcrow]

By Sherlock-Overflow-Error

The Stark Munro Letters

What the Heck is That?

The Stark Munro Letters is an epistolary (letter format) novel written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1895. It is “a thinly disguised account of Doyle’s experiences with George Turnavine Budd.”

Why Should I Care?

Because it’s arguably the strongest evidence that Doyle was bi. In terms of TJLC, the novel addresses the counterargument that Johnlock can’t have been Doyle’s intention because he was straight. In fact, I’d argue that the novel supports the fact that Doyle based Holmes at least in part off his crush.
 

So How Does It Do That?

That’s the clever part.

Doyle/Munro and Budd/Cullingworth

Doyle isn’t even trying to hide the fact that the novel is autobiographical. Like Doyle, the protagonist, Stark Munro, is an impoverished Scottish doctor just out of medical school. The other major character, James Cullingworth, is a brilliant but mad doctor. Like Doyle’s friend George Turnavine Budd, he is Munro’s friend and fellow rugby player from medical school. You can even find Doyle referring to Budd in his own memoirs as Cullingworth (chapter 4 of this).

Here’s what Budd looked like:

The plot of the story ostensibly centers around Munro/Doyle getting his medical practice started. Realistically, it’s an account of his falling-out with Cullingworth/Budd. Doyle seems…kind of obsessed with this guy. He can’t seem to stop talking about him, even to the detriment of the plot–he spends one entire letter just describing Cullingworth.

For example, he’ll be in a completely different city talking about a completely different mentally ill patient, and out of the blue: “Old Cullingworth has always had a very high opinion of lunatics for beginners. “ Nobody even asked???

OK, super obsessed.

Without even looking at the more gay telling quotes, it really does read like a fluffy love story, as Munro goes off to stay with Cullingworth and his wife and join his unconventional practice.

Cullingworth was the greatest genius that I have ever known.

And you would be swept along by his words, and would be carried every foot of the way with him, so that it would come as quite a shock to you when you suddenly fell back to earth again

He had a dash of the heroic in him…

Well, now, if, after all these illustrations, I have failed to give you some notion of the man, able, magnetic, unscrupulous, interesting, many-sided, I must despair of ever doing so.

“Come at once. I have urgent need of you. "CULLINGWORTH.” Of course, I shall go by the first train to-morrow.

Like.

It’s one of my many weaknesses, that, whether it’s a woman or a man, anything like a challenge sets me off.

He just.

By the way, an extraordinary card arrived from Cullingworth during my absence. “You are my man,” said he; “mind that I am to have you when I want you.” There was no date and no address, but the postmark was Bradfield in the north of England. Does it mean nothing? Or may it mean everything? We must wait and see.

Can’t.

Perhaps there is another Cullingworth behind the scenes—a softer, tenderer man, who can love and invite love. If there is, I have never got near him. And yet I may only have been tapping at the shell. Who knows? For that matter, it is likely enough that he has never got at the real Johnnie Munro.

Stop.

I am looking forward immensely to seeing him again, and I trust we won’t have any rows.

It is never slow if Cullingworth is about. He is one of those men who make a kind of magnetic atmosphere, so that you feel exhilarated and stimulated in their presence. His mind is so nimble and his thoughts so extravagant, that your own break away from their usual grooves, and surprise you by their activity.

I am much mistaken, however, if he has not fine strata in his nature. He is capable of rising to heights as well as of sinking to depths.

Even in Doyle’s memoirs:

In person he was about 5 ft. 9 in. in height, perfectly built, with a bulldog jaw, bloodshot deep-set eyes, overhanging brows, and yellowish hair as stiff as wire, which spurted up above his brows. He was a man born for trouble and adventure, unconventional in his designs and formidable in his powers of execution—a man of action with a big but incalculable brain guiding the action.

But, of course, it wouldn’t be a proper repressed Victorian love story without some audaciously gay quotes! The wonderful @yearofjohnlock has pointed out quite a few of these:

• ACD on his letters: “some excisions are necessary; “
• “I am looking forward immensely to seeing him again“ (”are you gonna see him again?”)
• “When I woke next morning he was in my room, and a funny-looking object he was. His dressing-gown lay on a chair, and he was putting up a fifty-six pound dumb-bell, without a rag to cover him.“
• a softer, tenderer man, who can love and invite love.
• “ was, as you may imagine, all in a tingle to know what it was that he wanted with me. However, as he made no allusion to it, I did not care to ask, and, during our longish walk, we talked about indifferent matters. “
• “Cullingworth waited until his wife had left the room, and then began to talk of the difficulty of getting any exercise now that he had to wait in all day in the hope of patients. This led us round to the ways in which a man might take his exercise indoors”
• I was guarding with both hands for half a minute, and then was rushed clean off my legs and banged up against the door […] “look [Cullingworth], there’s not much boxing about this game.”

and I found:

Cullingworth came charging into the room in his dressing gown, however, and roused me effectually by putting his hands on the rail at the end of the bed, and throwing a somersault over it which brought his heels on to my pillow with a thud.

*sips tea suspiciously*

There’s also some of the language Doyle uses. The word “queer” had already started to gain the connotation of homosexuality by the time the novel was published. “Queer” is used 6 times to describe Cullingworth in the novel.

Hmm.

And the word “Bohemian” was also associated with homosexuality. What did we care, any one of the three of us, where we sat or how we lived, when youth throbbed hot in our veins, and our souls were all aflame with the possibilities of life? I still look upon those Bohemian evenings, in the bare room amid the smell of the cheese, as being among the happiest that I have known.

So What Happened?

Munro/Doyle frequently wrote to his mother, and he’d told her about Cullingworth/Budd. She thought he was crazy af and wanted her son to stay away from him; Doyle was like “No, Mom! He’s a great boyfriend!”

Shortly thereafter, Cullingworth starts being alternately pissy and pretending nothing is wrong whenever he’s around Munro, and eventually just throws him out. At the time, Munro just thinks he’s crazy.

Cullingworth promises to send Munro some money, which Munro definitely needs (he’s 100% broke). But instead, Munro gets a letter from him saying that Cullingworth read one of his mom’s letters that he tore up and left behind. Cullingworth took offense at how the letters disparaged him. Munro later reasons that Cullingworth must have actually been reading all his mom’s letters since he arrived, since he’d never left and torn-up letters. Cullingworth even sends a guy to spy on Munro later; Munro kicks him out pretty fast.

Munro is pretty ticked. The rest of the story alternates between explaining how he gets his practice going and comments along the lines of “Ha! Cullingworth thinks he can cut me off? Guess who’s the successful doctor now?” and “Didn’t he even read my letters to my mom saying how much I love trust him?”

He finally writes:

• Well, I wrote him a little note…I said that his letter had been a source of gratification to me, as it removed the only cause for disagreement between my mother and myself. She had always thought him a blackguard, and I had always defended him; but I was forced now to confess that she had been right from the beginning.

It seems like Munro/Doyle is completely over it and hates Cullingworth/Budd. And yet…that’s not how he ends the story.

• I never thought I should have seen Cullingworth again, but fate has brought us together. I have always had a kindly feeling for him, though I feel that he used me atrociously. Often I have wondered whether, if I were placed before him, I should take him by the throat or by the hand.

Cullingworth eventually moves to South America (the real-life Budd died shortly thereafter), and Munro decides:

• I wish him luck, and have a kindly feeling towards him, and yet I distrust him from the bottom of my heart, and shall be just as pleased to know that the Atlantic rolls between us.

From the memoirs:

• My mother had greatly resented my association with Cullingworth. Her family pride had been aroused…though my wanderings had left me rather too Bohemian…. But I liked Cullingworth and even now I can’t help liking him—and I admired his strong qualities and enjoyed his company and the extraordinary situations which arose from any association with him.
• He was a remarkable man and narrowly escaped being a great one.

The queer reading? Doyle had a crush on this brilliant, larger-than-life man, and he tried to put it past him when Budd’s lunacy finally crashed down on him. Except he couldn’t move on, not yet.

Budd and the Basis for Holmes I

t’s generally accepted that the main basis for Holmes was Doyle’s professor Joseph Bell, who “ would often pick a stranger and, by observing him, deduce his occupation and recent activities.” Bell and Holmes have their similarities–both are thin and dark-haired, with aquiline noses and a shocking “cold indifference” to the feelings of their clients.

Yet Holmes’s energy and habits are a far better match for George Budd than for Joseph Bell.

Bell was a 40-something professor with a limp. But Budd was a young man with bursts of furious energy and a tendency to obsess over creating some brilliant piece of research, like Holmes. Budd is much closer to the “trained bloodhound picking up a scent” with “energy and sagacity”

In fact, a lot of the aspects of Sherlock Holmes match the Stark Munro letters closely.

@yearofjohnlock summarizes this admirably:

Cullingworth and Sherlock Holmes are known for:

• boxing
• sitting with feet up on chair
• referred to as geniuses
• lives in a flat above a grocer’s shop with - mrs. hudson and C’s wife described physically exactly the same – who bring them tea and are skeptical about their over enthusiasm but very sweet, though they are mean to her. he notes importantly that this old woman smokes.
• tons of useless* facts which the POV writer mocks (John/Munro/ACD)
• shouting, bursts of excitement to interrupt long silences
• described as a hero by writer for jumping off a building to save a friend
• written from the point of view of med student
• long time absence between writing medical professional and the genius then return
• didn’t drink much but did very powerful drugs
• described by Doyle as “queer” constantly
• theorised to have a hidden tender side though he does not show it
• “a kitchen, a bedroom, a sitting-room, and a fourth room“, the sitting room has just two chairs facing one another, as he does not get many visitors
• wears a dressing gown around the flat
• “Come at once. I have urgent need of you. -Cullingworth.”
• “when a man smiles with his lips and not with his eyes“
• Moffatiss say it’s always 1895 but this is the only thing Doyle published in 1895

So Holmes must be at least partially based on Budd.

Timing

There are no Sherlock Holmes stories published in 1895. Instead, we have a handful of short works and The Stark Munro Letters.

Doyle got tired of Holmes and killed him off in 1893.Two years later, he wrote a novel explaining how he was totally over his med school crush, the one who inspired Sherlock Holmes.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

*sips tea suspiciously*

If I hypothetically had a crush on someone and hypothetically wrote a self-insert fic where we solved crimes together, then hypothetically I would want our inspired characters to get together.
 

And if there were a hypothetical TV adaptation of my story in a time when our characters could hypothetically get together without Victorian stigma, I would totally go for it.

 

tl;dr: It gay. It very gay.