“The Inner Room” by Arthur Conan Doyle (post 5): His “multiplex personality” has an inner room with many figures who contend for control

“I have often been asked whether I had myself the qualities which I depicted, or whether I was merely the Watson that I look. Of course I am well aware that it is one thing to grapple with a practical problem and quite another thing when you are allowed to solve it under your own conditions. I have no delusions about that. At the same time a man cannot spin a character out of his own inner consciousness and make it really life-like unless he has some possibilities of that character within him—which is a dangerous admission for one who has drawn so many villains as I. In my poem “The Inner Room,” describing our multiplex personality, I say:

There are others who are sitting,

  Grim as doom,

In the dim ill-boding shadow

  Of my room.

Darkling figures, stern or quaint,

Now a savage, now a saint,

Showing fitfully and faint

  Through the gloom.

And those shadows are so dense,

  There may be

Many—very many—more

  Than I see.

They are sitting day and night

Soldier, rogue, and anchorite;

And they wrangle and they fight

  Over me (1).

“Among those figures there may perhaps be an astute detective also, but I find that in real life in order to find him I have to inhibit all the others and get into a mood when there is no one in the room but he. Then I get results and have several times solved problems by Holmes’ methods after the police have been baffled. Yet I must admit that in ordinary life I am by no means observant and that I have to throw myself into an artificial frame of mind before I can weigh evidence and anticipate the sequence of events” (2, pp. 100-101).

1. Wikipedia. “The Inner Room” by Arthur Conan Doyle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inner_Room

2. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Memories and Adventures [1924]. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989.