Under the Wide and Starry Sky (27 page)

Louis awoke early. No new dream. But the old one wouldn't go away. It chilled him to remember it.

He could see them quite clearly. Two gentlemen pass through a wooden door and enter a damp courtyard. They know a man who lives in the house that faces the open court. When they glance up, they see a vexed-looking man who sits by a half-open window on the second floor. “Dr. Jekyll!” one of the men calls out to the fellow. “Do come down and have a walk with us. You could use the fresh air. You don't look so well.” The man won't come down. And then a terrifying expression overtakes the doctor's face. He closes the window and moves away from it, but in that moment, both of the men on the ground understand they have glimpsed something—a transformation, inutterably horrifying.

The second part of the dream was vivid. A small man runs through the streets. His pants drag. His clothes are too big for him. He has a hideous, somehow malformed face and corded, hairy hands. A policeman chases after him, shouting, “Stop!” The man disappears into an old doorway off the street. Runs through a courtyard and up some stairs, past a surgical theater, and into a doctor's laboratory. He is frantic. He pours white salts from a glass saucer into a beaker half full of red liquid. He drinks it and his face appears to melt, change hue, then reshape itself with different features. His body grows large, into a different man's body. He is transformed. He is a whole and respectable figure. At the door, the policeman is pounding …

Louis scoured his brain for a few more scrapings of the dream. Nothing. The Brownies had left just those bits: the agonized Dr. Jekyll at the window, and later, the hideous Edward Hyde taking the potion.

The evening before, Louis had come up to the bedroom, itching to pound more walls. But his fist was aflame from the first punch. Instead, he fell into the bed to stew over his wife's remarks.

How galling that Fanny considered herself his ultimate critic. Thomas Stevenson was partly to blame for that. Long ago, he had said to Louis, “You really shouldn't publish anything that Fanny has not approved first.” She had taken that endorsement far too seriously. Louis blamed himself, too, for he'd brought her along, invited her to collaborate on story collections and playwriting with him and Henley. Recently, Henley had said, “I can only collaborate with one Stevenson at a time.”

Long ago, before he met Fanny, he had made up his mind that marrying another writer would be a mistake. A family could tolerate only one. Well, Fanny had been an aspiring writer before he knew her. Any qualms Louis might have felt about a life with her had inevitably passed. Their time together had become one long conversation—contentious sometimes, yes—yet she had opened his mind in many ways. And Fanny's mind was keen; she had a wonderful way of seeing things that was all hers. Sometimes her thoughts were so original that they took Louis aback. But she was more intuitive about human nature than skilled in literary nuance. He wanted to say to her,
I love you, I owe my life to you. But my writing comes first, even before you. Because I
am
my writing. And when you meddle in my work, you muck with my soul.

Louis looked at the pile of paper on his lap. Earlier, he had felt so exhausted that he could not even contemplate rereading the story for errors. He had hoped to sleep tonight and read the next day with a fresh brain. There were at least thirty thousand words there.

Before he laid his head down, it hit him.
Goddammit, she's right.
As it stood, the Jekyll and Hyde story was merely a penny dreadful horror. The tale
should
be written as a stronger allegory. It held within it a germ of truth about the “other” in every man, a truth so powerful it could make any reader of the story flinch with recognition of his own weaker self.

After he had tossed the manuscript into the fireplace, he tried to sleep, but the new story would not let him rest. Louis sat up, mapping out the direction of the next version on his board. As soon as his notetaking ended, his pen was writing a new version of the story. Ideas, whole paragraphs sparked around his brain; he abbreviated words to capture them on paper before another bolt hit him.

Next to the bed, a tray with food and medicine appeared. Someone, Fanny or Valentine or maybe even Lloyd, had delivered it during the day, and now Louis fell upon it with gusto. He kept his pen moving as he ate, noting down,
a horror that is knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye;
and
man is not truly one, but truly two.

After a while, the food in his belly—or perhaps the morphine—made him dog-tired, and he fell asleep sitting up with his tray on his lap. When he awoke, it was black outside and raining. The house was silent. He picked up his pen, put it between his third and fourth fingers to alleviate the pain in his hand, and continued writing. The words did not stop. Morning came. Eggs on a plate arrived, warm and fragrant. He nodded to Fanny as she set the tray on his bedside table, but shook his head to signal no conversation. She had buttered a roll for him. He dipped it in the dish of jam with his left hand and ate it like a starving man while his right hand moved across the paper.

He tried to imagine how it would feel to have one's body begin to change of its own volition. He remembered what it was like as a boy to emerge from a nightmare brought on by fever, seeing the clothes he had hung on a door hook take on ghastly shapes like the fearsome bodies of monsters. Jekyll must see himself in the mirror that way—ghoulishly transformed. Louis reflected on how his own body could turn upon him; in the space of a few minutes, he could become a sick, pathetic thing utterly unlike his well self.

The sun came into the window, patterned the room, went away. The night passed as the previous one had and the next one would, with Louis upright in bed, his hand cramped with pain as he wrote and wrote. In the late afternoon of the next day, he let his arm fall next to the bed; the pen slipped out of his hand.

He had been writing straight, with almost no breaks, for six days: three days on the first draft, three days on the second, for a total of over sixty thousand words.

When Fanny entered the room with another tray of food, she found her husband standing at his mirror, touching his face with both hands.

“What is it?” she asked him.

“I was so
emairsed,
” he said, “I half-expected to see Hyde's face.”

She eyed him cautiously, then saw the fat stack of pages he'd written.

He rubbed his eyes. “I will read tonight,” he said.

1886

The 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 first 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 effect. “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 influenza 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 differ, 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 find 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 stuff on young minds? It's evil. Writers should find out where joy resides and give it a voice. Every bright word or picture is a piece of pleasure set afloat. 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?”