Quote of the Day (Robert Louis Stevenson, With a Thought for Valentine’s Day)

“How the world gives and takes away, and brings sweethearts near only to separate them again into distant and strange lands; but to love is the great amulet which makes the world a garden; and ‘hope, which comes to all,’ outwears the accidents of life.”— Scottish man of letters Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879)

Quote of the Day (Robert Louis Stevenson, on a Writer’s Difficulty)

“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.” —Scottish man of letters Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), “Truth of Intercourse” (1881), in Virginibus Puerisque

Quote of the Day (Robert Louis Stevenson, on the Need to ‘Know What You Prefer’)

“To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.”—British man of letters Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), An Inland Voyage (1878)

Few people have refused to say “Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer” so adamantly as Robert Louis Stevenson, who died 130 years ago today, in Samoa—half a world away from his birthplace in Scotland.

At crucial points in his twenties, Stevenson turned away from what “the world”—certainly his parents—wanted him to do: wear the conventional evening dress expected of one of his class, profess the Presbyterian faith, and pursue the family trade of engineering.

The last choice would prove most decisive, as Stevenson struck out determinedly on life as a writer.

In adolescence, I confess, I turned away from Stevenson. I associated him too closely with A Child’s Garden of Verses, and adventure books like Treasure Island and Kidnapped featuring vivid illustrations by N.C. Wyeth. All kids’ stuff, I thought.

I wasn’t’ the only one: For some decades in the 20^th century, despite the admiration of the likes of Proust, Hemingway, Borges, Nabokov, James, and London, Stevenson’s critical reputation tumbled.

The deeper I got into middle age, however, the more I learned to appreciate him. Like G.K. Chesterton, he wrote vividly wherever his interests took him—not just verse or genre fiction (as good as those could be), but also travelogues and other essays. He more than fulfilled his aim of presenting readers with works that were “absorbing and voluptuous.”

Sickly for most of his life, Stevenson’s body died young. But he heeded his advice about keeping the “soul alive,” as a glance at almost any of his works will show you. Like the portrait created by John Singer Sargent that accompanies this post, they invite you into a world he never ceased to find intriguing.

Another manuscript by the prolific author, Weir of Hermiston, was left unfinished at the time of his death. Gillian Hughes’ fascinating 2017 post on the Edinburgh University Press blog analyzes how its bowdlerized published version in the early 1890s “inevitably altered the form and spirit of what Stevenson had been writing.”

Appreciations: Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Markheim,’ on Christmas Crime and Conscience

“As he continued to fill his pockets, his mind accused him with a sickening iteration, of the thousand faults of his design. He should have chosen a more quiet hour; he should have prepared an alibi; he should not have used a knife; he should have been more cautious, and only bound and gagged the dealer, and not killed him; he should have been more bold, and killed the servant also; he should have done all things otherwise. Poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past. Meanwhile, and behind all this activity, brute terrors, like the scurrying of rats in a deserted attic, filled the more remote chambers of his brain with riot; the hand of the constable would fall heavy on his shoulder, and his nerves would jerk like a hooked fish; or he beheld, in galloping defile, the dock, the prison, the gallows, and the black coffin.” —Scottish fiction writer, poet and essayist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), “Markheim” (1885), collected in The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887)

Certain filmmakers gravitate towards projects that run perversely counter to the traditional good cheer of Christmas. They don’t offer the kind of well-made crime fiction that Dame P.D. James offered late in her illustrious career in The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories, nor even the ghost stories that Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies offered Massey College students each Christmas (later collected in High Spirits). Nor do these dark cinematic visions turn towards redemption, as with A Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life.

No, these films—“thrillers” or “horror films” would be putting it mildly—have something infinitely more gruesome in mind. You can tell by even by their titles: Violent Night; Silent Night, Deadly Night; Christmas Evil; The Gingerdead Man; and—God help us!— 13 Slays Until X-Mas.

Robert Louis Stevenson (in the image accompanying this post, a painting by John Singer Sargent) might be regarded as the literary ancestor of this species of renegade auteur. While he rejected the strict Calvinism and even Christian faith of his parents, their pessimistic outlook on the sin-touched nature of mankind left its mark in such macabre masterpieces by their son as “Thrawn Janet,” “The Body Snatcher,” and, of course, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

Like “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” the lesser-known “Markheim” is a study in dualism featuring a character riven by internal conflict and ultimately driven to violence. But, while respectable Henry Jekyll finds his evil doppelganger with a concoction from his chemistry lab, Markheim faces what may be a considerably more sinister force from the outside.

The voice heard in the first paragraph is not Markheim, however, but a curio dealer’s, heavy with dark insinuation:

"Yes," said the dealer, "our windfalls are of various kinds. Some customers are ignorant, and then I touch a dividend on my superior knowledge. Some are dishonest," and here he held up the candle, so that the light fell strongly on his visitor, "and in that case," he continued, "I profit by my virtue."

That “virtue,” it immediately becomes apparent, consists not of benevolence, but candor about his sharp practices—and a lifetime of insight about what could lead certain customers to his door on this of all days:

"You come to me on Christmas Day," he resumed, "when you know that I am alone in my house, put up my shutters, and make a point of refusing business. Well, you will have to pay for that; you will have to pay for my loss of time, when I should be balancing my books; you will have to pay, besides, for a kind of manner that I remark in you to-day very strongly. I am the essence of discretion, and ask no awkward questions; but when a customer cannot look me in the eye, he has to pay for it."

Markheim, who has little to show for his investments in the stock market, counters that he’s seeking “a Christmas present for a lady” and intimates that “a rich marriage” may depend on the right gift. 

But the state of mind of this unexpected customer is already murky: while he’s brought a dagger with him, it is only after being unsettled by his reflection in a mirror offered by the dealer (a "hand-conscience") that Markheim kills him and begins to look for valuables he can rob from the shop.

Peter Straub, in the Library of America anthology American Fantastic Tales, referred to a dominant theme of the horror genre: “the surrender or collapse of the individual will.” Once Markheim takes the irreversible step of not merely robbing the dealer but murdering him, Stevenson takes the reader on a journey through the “individual will” of this killer that encompasses regret, panic, paranoia, and the workings of the individual conscience.

First, Markheim must come to grips with the material fact of the corpse. At first, what remains of the dealer is a rapid reduction of what the robber-murderer confronted just a few minutes before: “both humped and sprawling, incredibly small and strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly clothes, in that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust. Markheim had feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing.”

“Sawdust” is an echo of the familiar Biblical warning, “To dust you shall return.” But Markheim’s own actions are involved with this particular state: sawdust is produced by cutting, and cutting the dealer to death has produced Markheim’s current predicament.

But ultimately, the conflict in the story will turn on the question of what a human life consists of. And immediately after Markheim can only acknowledge the crumpled mass before him, far more comes to mind: “And yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent voices.”

Fear of discovery mingles with nostalgia for the season, as he imagines those in nearby homes “sitting motionless and with uplifted ear--solitary people, condemned to spend Christmas dwelling alone on memories of the past, and now startlingly recalled from that tender exercise; happy family parties struck into silence round the table, the mother still with raised finger--every degree and age and humour, but all, by their own hearths, prying and hearkening and weaving the rope that was to hang him.”

The physical world outside seems to conspire against the killer, as the tolling of the clock outside leads Markheim to long “to be home, girt in by walls, buried among bedclothes, and invisible to all but God.”

The decisive turn in the story comes with a mysterious visitor to the shop. Perception and identity themselves now become fluid:

“The outlines of the newcomer seemed to change and waver like those of the idols in the wavering candle-light of the shop; and at times he thought he knew him; and at times he thought he bore a likeness to himself; and always, like a lump of living terror, there lay in his bosom the conviction that this thing was not of the earth and not of God.”

The visitor, who insists that he knows Markheim “to the soul” and offers the kind of wheedling moral reasoning associated with Satan, warns that the dealer’s servant is returning early to the shop and that she, too, must be murdered to assure his escape.

When Markheim flinches from this alternative, the visitor delivers a devastating summary of his moral deterioration:

“For six and thirty years that you have been in this world," said he, "through many changes of fortune and varieties of humour, I have watched you steadily fall. Fifteen years ago you would have started at a theft. Three years back you would have blenched at the name of murder. Is there any crime, is there any cruelty or meanness, from which you still recoil? Five years from now I shall detect you in the fact! Downward, downward, lies your way; nor can anything but death avail to stop you."

But Markheim will go no further on his path toward evil: “If my life be an ill thing, I can lay it down…. I have still my hatred of evil; and from that, to your galling disappointment, you shall see that I can draw both energy and courage."

The visitor’s features change yet again, softening “with a tender triumph”—suggesting that he is not a demon but maybe a guardian angel. With that, Markheim tells the incoming servant to call the police, as he has killed her master.

At the time he wrote this tale, Stevenson was close in age to his protagonist. Though never driven to the moral extremities of his murderer, he must have recalled his own spiritual upbringing with residual regret as he evokes Markheim, on this physically and morally cold day, imagining “the somnolence of summer Sundays, and the high genteel voice of the parson (which he smiled a little to recall) and the painted Jacobean tombs, and the dim lettering of the Ten Commandments in the chancel.”

Stevenson recognizes that evil does not cease to exist, even on one of the holiest days of the year. But neither do the operations of the conscience.

Christmas, as Charles Dickens demonstrates in “A Christmas Carol,” remains a time of year filled with regrets over bad choices and resulting loss and loneliness. “Markheim” operates on the same premise, but shows that some acts are too awful not to leave at least some damage. The best that can be hoped for, then, is a refusal to follow the nihilistic path that beckons.

It is that wintry recognition that has probably limited the number of times that “Markheim” has been dramatized, even though it is as powerfully atmospheric as any Stevenson tale. 

In 1953 Sir Laurence Olivier recorded it for the NBC Radio Anthology Series “Theatre Royal,” and three years later Fred Zinnemann presented it as a half-hour “Screen Director Showcase” 1956 episode starring Ray Milland as Markheim, Rod Steiger as the Visitor, and Jay Novello as the Dealer. (In the UK, it was remade in 1974, with Derek Jacobi as Markheim.)

More unusually, the American composer Carlisle Floyd adapted the story into a one-act opera in 1966. However, while regional opera troupes have occasionally mounted well-received revivals, more high-profile companies have not attempted to do so. They probably understand all too well that this gothic thriller is hardly warm, fuzzy holiday fare for conservative audiences.

Halloween Horror Treat: Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Thrawn Janet’

“The Reverend Murdoch Soulis was long minister of the moorland parish of Balweary, in the vale of Dule. A severe, bleak-faced old man, dreadful to his hearers, he dwelt in the last years of his life, without relative or servant or any human company, in the small and lonely manse under the Hanging Shaw. In spite of the iron composure of his features, his eye was wild, scared, and uncertain; and when he dwelt, in private admonitions, on the future of the impenitent, it seemed as if his eye pierced through the storms of time to the terrors of eternity. Many young persons, coming to prepare themselves against the season of the Holy Communion, were dreadfully affected by his talk. He had a sermon on 1st Peter, v. and 8th, 'The devil as a roaring lion,' on the Sunday after every seventeenth of August, and he was accustomed to surpass himself upon that text both by the appalling nature of the matter and the terror of his bearing in the pulpit. The children were frightened into fits, and the old looked more than usually oracular, and were, all that day, full of those hints that Hamlet deprecated. The manse itself, where it stood by the water of Dule among some thick trees, with the Shaw overhanging it on the one side, and on the other many cold, moorish hilltops rising towards the sky, had begun, at a very early period of Mr. Soulis's ministry, to be avoided in the dusk hours by all who valued themselves upon their prudence; and guidmen sitting at the clachan alehouse shook their heads together at the thought of passing late by that uncanny neighbourhood. There was one spot, to be more particular, which was regarded with especial awe. The manse stood between the high road and the water of Dule, with a gable to each; its back was towards the kirk-town of Balweary, nearly half a mile away; in front of it, a bare garden, hedged with thorn, occupied the land between the river and the road. The house was two stories high, with two large rooms on each. It opened not directly on the garden, but on a causewayed path, or passage, giving on the road on the one hand, and closed on the other by the tall willows and elders that bordered on the stream. And it was this strip of causeway that enjoyed among the young parishioners of Balweary so infamous a reputation. The minister walked there often after dark, sometimes groaning aloud in the instancy of his unspoken prayers; and when he was from home, and the manse door was locked, the more daring schoolboys ventured, with beating hearts, to 'follow my leader' across that legendary spot.”—Scottish fiction writer, poet, essayist, and travel writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), “Thrawn Janet,” in The Complete Short Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Charles Neider (1969)

Some readers are likely to have encountered Robert Louis Stevenson in their childhood, as a poet. Far more people will experience him secondhand, through the many Hollywood adaptations over the years of his adventure novels like Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae.

But I was delighted to find, in adulthood, that he was also a master of short fiction, especially in the horror genre. I blogged previously on “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and “The Body Snatcher.” Equally remarkable in its way is a story I discovered only recently, “Thrawn Janet.”

The quote leading off this post also begins Stevenson’s tale. In its tense sense of atmosphere, it is as powerfully foreboding as anything to be found in the work of Edgar Allan Poe.

It is also, in a sense, a trick—written, unlike the rest of the story, written in conventional English. But the atmosphere of evil is so densely concentrated that readers are dying to know what will occur next.

For the majority of readers unfamiliar with Scottish dialect, much of the ensuing tale requires patient, intense concentration. Some translations exist, but I read it slowly—an experience that reminded me of encountering Canterbury Tales in Chaucer’s original Middle English. But dispensing with a translation can be done and is worth the effort.

The unfamiliar verbiage in this short story starts with the first word of the title, a strong but necessary hint about the nature of this tale. “Thrawn” is Scottish for “twisted,” indicating the sinister force in this story.

Just as Stevenson produces a change in narrative direction after the opening, he also effects a change—a “twist,” if you will—in characterization and voice.

The Rev. Soulis, who sounds initially like a Scottish fire-and-brimstone counterpart to one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Puritan divines, was, we learn shortly, a rationalist of Enlightenment bent in his younger days, disbelieving the belief of his congregants that the woman he wants to hire as his housekeeper, Janet, could be a witch.

Horror is about altered mental states after an encounter with the inexplicable. By this standard, the horror of “Thrawn Janet” lies less in Satanic possession of Janet than in the haunted, demon-obsessed minister that Rev. Soulis becomes through his encounter with her.

The image accompanying this post, illustrating Stevenson’s story, is an 1899 etching by the Scottish painter and printmaker William Strang (1859-1921). 

Quote of the Day (Robert Louis Stevenson, on a First Encounter With Edward Hyde)

“Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing, and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him. ‘There must be something else,’ said the perplexed gentleman. ‘There is something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell? or Is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? The last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face, it Is on that of your new friend.’”— Scottish fiction writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1886)

The creation of Edward Hyde, the embodiment of pure evil in the physical ugliness so vividly portrayed above, is what has led so many to view this “Strange Tale” as a horror story.

But there is another horror that, to Dr. Henry Jekyll, might be just as dismaying: Hyde’s creator and opposite is not a saint, but the same old Jekyll: a proper, basically decent Victorian gentleman who cannot banish his primal urges—“that incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair.”

According to a fascinating Huffington Post piece by Melanie Kendry, “When Does a Man Become a Monster?”, the original draft by Robert Louis Stevenson indicated that the crime of the “ordinary secret sinner” Jekyll was not murder (or even the consorting with prostitutes shown in so many cinematic versions) but homosexuality. 

It was an anticipation of a later, wittier, but equally horrifying story of a double man in Victorian society, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Such were the taboos of the time in England, however, that even in the latter, more daring case, Gray’s secret sexuality could only be implied.

(The image accompanying this post shows John Barrymore, in the classic 1920 silent film version of Stevenson’s novella. Remarkably, Barrymore depicted the violent and disturbing physical transformation into Hyde without benefit of special effects. As fine as the 1933 Fredric March performance was—worthy enough of an Oscar---I still prefer Barrymore’s. I may be the only person I know who still recalls Kirk Douglas’ performance in a 1973 TV musical adaptation of the tale by composer Lionel Bart. That production was a horror story all its own!)

Quote of the Day (Robert Louis Stevenson, on Why ‘There Are No Foreign Lands’)

“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” —Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters (1883)

This famous portrait of the writer is by John Singer Sargent.

This Day in Literary History (‘Body Snatcher’ Execution Sparks Stevenson Tale)

January 28, 1829—William Burke, whose grisly practice of supplying body parts to Scottish medical schools gave rise to  the  classic horror story “The Body Snatcher” by Robert Louis Stevenson (pictured), was hanged in Edinburgh for the inevitable next step in his business: murders to accommodate the swelling demand for his services. The serial killer, after an execution witnessed by 25,000 people, ended up with his remains dissected and his skeleton on display at the University of Edinburgh's Anatomy Museum, an object of inspection not unlike his victims.

Maybe it’s because Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” has traveled past familiarity into parody (intentional, as in Jerry Lewis’ The Nutty Professor, or unintentional, as in Oliver! composer Lionel Bart’s 1973 TV musical adaptation starring Kirk Douglas), but I have come to prefer the subtler charms of the great writer’s 1884 horror story of grave robbing to his better-known tale of the thin line between good and evil.

In a way, “The Body Snatcher” might be more horrific: while “Dr. Jekyll” is a dystopian warning of what could happen if science runs amok, “The Body Snatcher” derived from an actual investigation that, a half-century later, many proper Victorians would have preferred to forget, if the so-called "West Port murders" hadn’t already affected legislation and entered mainstream pop culture.

The known crimes (16 murders) of Irish emigrants Burke and his accomplice William Hare proved the necessity of laws that eliminated the need for corpses for medical research and teaching.

The grave-robbing spree began in November 1827 with the death of a fellow tenant in Hare’s building who had owed him money. If they couldn’t get money from the deceased in life, Hare and Burke figured, they would capitalize on him in death. Students of Prof. Robert Knox told the duo they were interested in the remains for his anatomy lessons, but to bring the corpse back after nightfall.

The actions of Burke, Hare and the students might have been unethical, but in that time they were not unusual. Prevailing religious mores had dictated that the only human remains that could be used for dissections were those of recently executed criminals. At the same time, growing scientific knowledge had made surgery an increasingly studied subject at universities. There weren’t enough corpses to meet this growing demand.

For their part, professors who received the corpses had no incentive to inquire about the sources of these body parts. They charged fees to the students who attended their lectures. Why upset something that was working so well? And so, an entire underworld became extremely proficient at opening up a grave, removing the body in the dead of night, and restoring the topsoil, leaving nobody the wiser the next day.

From this point on, Burke and Hare decided to nudge the death process forward. Their next victim had been quite ill when, after discussing the matter, they concluded it was pointless to wait until the point of no return, as with the first corpse. So, like any good neighbor, they gave Joseph the Miller some alcohol, then, when he was powerless to resist, one held his nose and mouth while the other lay across the prone body until he was dead. It would look, from a quick inspection of the body, that the deceased had passed away from drunkenness or illness.

The killing spree lasted until the following Halloween. A chance encounter led an elderly Irishwoman, Mary Docherty, to the rooms of Burke and his mistress Helen McDougald (who, with Hare’s wife, Margaret Laird, had been an accessory to the crimes). A couple who had met the Irishwoman the night before, James and Ann Gray, had returned to Burke’s apartment the next day, only to be told that after their departure, Helen had thrown Docherty out of the apartment for excessive familiarity with Burke.

The story unraveled after Ann Gray approached a spare bed to retrieve a sock she had left behind. Burke’s furious warning to get away from there only fed her curiosity, which she eventually satisfied the first chance she had when he left the apartment. The Grays’ discovery of Docherty’s body led them to go to the police. Though the body had been spirited out in the meantime, an anonymous tip led the authorities to Knox’s examining room, where they came upon it.

Helen and Margaret, interviewed separately, provided the police with a 12-hour difference in the time of Docherty’s death that only increased their suspicions. They bore down on the women and their mates. It was still not an open-and-shut case, but Hare’s agreement to testify against his literal partner in crime enabled them to indict Burke. His eventual confession, while providing at least some details about his own crimes, exonerated Professor Knox of any knowledge of the crimes, though this did not satisfy an Edinburgh community that turned against the doctor and forced his relocation to London.

The Anatomy Act of 1832, drafted by the Utilitarian philosopher-jurist Jeremy Bentham (whose will donated his own remains for medical research), was passed in the wake of the scandal over the murders. But the remedy it supplied for eliminating the financial incentive for grave robbing—using the unclaimed bodies from hospitals and workhouses—was, in its way, as egregious as the state of affairs that had existed before. Now, it was not only disgraced criminals, but an entire class—the poorest of the poor—who were at risk of being used in death against their will.

This past week, yet another version of the deaths of Lizzie Borden’s father and stepmother was aired on a cable station. While that crime was astounding enough on its own terms to warrant attention, interest has remained high over the years at least partly because of a memorable, if grisly, rhyme that arose from it. Something similar happened in the Burke-Hare murders, with parents keeping children in line with these verses:

Up the close and down the stair,

In the house with Burke and Hare.

Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,

Knox, the boy who buys the beef.

Burke and Hare,

Fell down the stair,

With a body in a box,

Going to Dr. Knox.

The imagination of Stevenson, a poet himself, would surely have been fired by those rhymes. His fictionalization of the story (with the novel twist that one of the corpses turns up as a ghost) appeared in, of all things, the Christmas “Extra” of the Pall Mall Gazette in 1884. The story was adapted into a fine 1945 film by horror film auteur Val Lewton, featuring the eighth and last joint onscreen appearance by the stars of Frankenstein and Dracula, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.

 

Stevenson's “Body Snatcher” is an “envelope story,” a tale-within-in-a-tale that uses an initial narrator, a friend/acquaintance of a principal in the story, who can, in effect, vouch for the truth of the horror revealed and the sanity of the person who witnesses and relates it. (Henry James would use this same literary device 14 years later in The Turn of the Screw.)   

One would like to say that all the horrors of the past have been entombed, but, as we saw with the discovery of the remains of Richard III, crimes and criminals have a manner these days of appearing unexpectedly. And so it is that earlier this month, skeletons turned up of four adults and a child behind a townhouse in central Edinburgh. The number of small holes in the skeletons have led members of the city's Archaeological Service to conclude that they may well have been used for medical research--the kind of anatomy lesson that Dr. Knox, without inquiring much into the handiwork of Burke and Hare, would have done.

(The image of Stevenson accompanying this post is by the famed portrait painter John Singer Sargent. The writer's sickly, languid frame would have made him an ideal candidate for eternal dispatch by the shady characters he depicted in his story.)