Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 48

1886

fame Louis had dreamed of as a young man did not strike him like lightning. Instead, fame arrived as a small swell that pushed itself up slowly into a proper wave until it had overtaken him. Even when The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published at Christmas, the story was received at ?rst as one more holiday shocker. Not until January did the surge of enthusiasm begin, thanks to a review in The Times of London.
“Listen to this!” Fanny shouted one drizzly morning as she raced to Louis’s bed with the newspaper.  “‘Nothing  Mr.  Stevenson  has  written  as  yet,’”  she  read  excitedly, “‘has  so strongly impressed us with the versatility of his very original genius as this sparsely printed little shilling volume.’” She let out a whoop.

“Let me see,” he said, gleefully taking the paper.

“Read out loud the sentence that begins … there.” She pointed to the second paragraph. “‘Naturally, we compare it with the somber masterpieces of Poe,’” Louis read, “‘and we
may say at once that Mr. Stevenson  has gone far deeper.’” He grinned, then  let out a delighted chortle.

Throughout the day, Fanny found herself breaking into laughter. At last, she thought. At last.

By  February,  preachers  were  referring  to Dr.  Jekyll and  Mr.  Hyde  from  their  pulpits. Newspaper critics saw encoded messages in the story about any number of topics, from hypocritical moral attitudes, to Darwin’s theories about the essential animal nature of man, to the tyranny of colonial powers, to buggery, to the horrors of drug and alcohol addiction. Word came to them that a stage adaptation was already in the works. Letters of praise poured into Skerryvore. Symonds wrote from Davos to say Louis had written something classic, something better than Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin or anything Poe had written. But he admitted that the story had so disturbed him, he doubted he could read it again; he wondered, in fact, if any writer should be poking around in such painful territory.
All the attention delighted Louis. But it was the awestruck comments about his writing style that lifted him most. Critics pronounced his dialogue worthy of Shakespeare. They praised the lapidary precision of his sentences, declaring that every phrase sounded like poetry.  Henry  James  wrote  that  the  story  was  a  masterpiece  of  concision  and  eerily

haunting because there were no women characters to speak of, though they surely must have been influential in the making of the story.

“Thank you, Henry,” Fanny said aloud upon reading his essay.

Buoyed, Louis went back to work with a fury. He was not well at all and, more than ever, tethered to the pathetic four-by-six foot real estate of his bed. The pretense that he was anything but an invalid was hard to support.

When Fanny wrote out the letters to his friends that he dictated, the words he used to describe himself dented her heart. He spoke of his body as his dungeon; he talked of himself as a spectral phantom, an abhorrent miscarriage, a paralytic ape, the wretched houseplant of Skerryvore. The cough was the most constant reminder of his ill health, but it rarely visited him by itself; it brought chills, insomnia, and rheumatism. Too often there was a doctor in the house and some new or old drug left at his bedside. He rallied when friends came to visit, then paid the price afterward, taking weeks to recover.
Only  Henry  James’s  visits  seemed  to  have  a  positive  e?ect. “He’s  enthusiastic  for whatever I pursue,” Louis said. “He never criticizes when I try to stretch and try something new.”

“Henry  likes new  challenges himself,” Fanny  said.  “And he  trusts your  talent.” Louis would not merely add another horror story to the canon; he would write a horror story with such subtlety and depth that it would take the genre to a new height. That was how much Henry believed in Louis’s gifts.

Once when Henry came to visit, Louis’s parents were there as well. After witnessing the mother and father demand his every moment, Henry pulled Fanny aside.  “I am simply boiling,” he said. “They sit on him. Can’t they see how they drain him?”
“And bring in?uenza to him.” Fanny sighed. “No, they don’t see. Most people don’t see it. His  mother  sailed out  of  here  saying,  ‘I  expect  you will  spend the  summer  with  us  in Scotland.’ Why doesn’t she just shoot him?”

In September, Henry came down from London for a weekend visit. He settled into his usual chair beside Louis to talk about writing. Fanny went in and out of the drawing room, bringing a knee blanket for Louis, and later a shawl, but resisting the temptation to take a seat with them. It was a struggle, for she loved to be a part of the talk about books and ideas. Instead, she went into the dining room, where she could catch their words.

“I am haunted still by Dr. Jekyll,” Henry was saying. “Came straight from the underworld, my friend.” “One finds strange objects floating around in that murky tank.” “I never know how much of my dreams have been seeded by real life,” Louis said. “How is that?”

“I’ve been thinking about duality and the double brain for a long time, so I may have suggested to myself the Jekyll and Hyde double-personality idea.”

“Show me the ordinary man who does not carry around some other person inside, or at least some question about who he truly is,” Henry said.

“What interests me is the borderland—”

“—where identities collide.”

“You are mining the same territory, Henry. I can’t tell you anything you don’t know.” “Identity is the great topic, is it not?”

“For the novelist, yes. It’s the province of the well, though. A chronic invalid has but one thought about his identity: He doesn’t want to be a sick man. The rest of the discussion seems quite frivolous to him—an immense privilege of the healthy. Still, I am a novelist, and so I pursue it.”

The men were circling back to their old topic of romance versus realism. “A novel must compete with life,” Henry said with slyness, as if baiting Louis into a
familiar argument.

“Ah, there is where we di?er, my friend,” Louis said. “I don’t object to literary realism per se. But I can’t bear Zola’s sordid view of the world. He rubs the nose of the reader in ugliness. It’s gratuitous.” He shook his head. “Anyway, I have rather recently escaped the clutches of Calvinism. I have no interest in joining the new religion of Pessimism. Ah, well. No doubt his admirers ?nd me quite out of touch with real life. It’s why Zola is regarded as a serious writer and my books are found on the children’s shelves at the bookshop.”
“Dr. Jekyll has changed all that,” Henry said.

“Obviously, I am not afraid to write about cruelty or violence,” Louis said.  “But for a writer to feed the reader great dank heaps of ugliness in the name of realism is dispiriting. And to foist such stu? on young minds? It’s evil. Writers should ?nd out where joy resides and give it a voice. Every bright word or picture is a piece of pleasure set a?oat. The reader catches it, and he goes on his way rejoicing. It’s the business of art to send him that way as

often as possible. I have to believe that every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world. If I cannot believe that, then why should I go on? Why should anyone go on?”