Robert Louis Stevenson: An Anthology Read online

  Robert Louis

  Stevenson

  Robert Louis

  Stevenson:

  AN ANTHOLOGY

  Selected by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares

  Edited by Kevin MacNeil

  First published in paperback in Great Britain in

  2017 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.polygonbooks.co.uk

  ISBN 978 1 84697 407 6

  Introduction copyright © Kevin MacNeil, 2017 List of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Work, as imagined by Jorge Luis Borges copyright © Maria Kodama, used by permission of The Wylie Agency Ltd.

  List of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Work, as imagined by Adolfo Bioy Casares copyright © Ernesto Montequín, used by permission of Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells.

  All rights reserved.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available

  on request from the British Library.

  Typeset by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Essays

  Lay Morals

  On Morality

  The Ethics of Crime

  Pulvis Et Umbra

  On The Choice of A Profession

  Gentlemen

  Some Gentlemen in Fiction

  The Morality of the Profession of Letters

  A Note on Realism

  A Gossip on Romance

  A Humble Remonstrance

  A Chapter on Dreams

  Fictions

  The Suicide Club

  The Bottle Imp

  The Sinking Ship

  The Yellow Paint

  Faith, Half-Faith and No Faith at All

  The House of Eld

  The Touchstone

  The Poor Thing

  The Song of The Morrow

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Editor

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson.’

  Jorge Luis Borges

  ‘Borges created his precursors, even Stevenson.’

  Rivka Galchen

  Introduction

  Kevin MacNeil

  This anthology does not build a notional bridge between the literatures of Scotland and Argentina so much as shed light on a tangible, pleasing and under-recognised connection that already exists. It might seem unlikely that there is a direct literary link between nineteenth-century Scotland’s Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), and twentieth-century Argentina’s genre-bending metafictionalists Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) and Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–99), but such a relationship does exist, as this introduction will demonstrate. All three are internationally renowned authors; in many parts of the world Stevenson and Borges, in particular, are household names. I shall concentrate largely on the fascinating Stevenson–Borges dynamic.

  The anthology you hold in your hands, published here for the first time, was a long-cherished project of Borges and Bioy, possibly conceived earlier but planned in the late 1960s, as Professor Daniel Balderston affirms in ‘A Projected Stevenson Anthology (Buenos Aires, 1968–1970)’, the essay that first alerted me to the ideas behind the book, and which made me want to bring it into physical being. Over and above earning great renown as authors in their own right, Borges and Bioy had been successfully publishing anthologies with Emecé Editores for years and they planned a series of sumas, anthologies of work by writers whom Borges and Bioy admired, but this endeavour was never to see the light of day (likely for economic reasons). For the Stevenson suma, they got as far as choosing the contents and naming a translator. It is highly probable that Borges would have taken the lead on writing the introduction. In the 1980s Borges attempted to revive the idea of publishing the RLS anthology – he had by now translated Stevenson’s Fables himself – but again the anthology was not realised, likely because of the economic downturn Argentina suffered at the time.

  It is tempting to think that Borges, who often cited or praised imaginary books, would have appreciated the journey this book has taken, flitting between an intangible reality and a physical one: the essays and fictions contained herein first existed within Stevenson’s mind; they were then given physical form in books and magazines; Borges and Bioy conceived their anthology but did not live to see it come into physical existence; now it is published and so has finally become a tangible object, ready for absorption or reabsorption into the reader’s mind.

  The anthology as Borges and Bioy envisaged it was to be a collection of their favourite Stevenson essays, stories and fables. (Beneath their original list is an arrow pointing towards an additional one: The Ebb-Tide, The Master of Ballantrae and Weir of Hermiston. Perhaps the anthologists considered including excerpts from these novels, but they also knew that the book was already going to be about 350 pages long, including introduction.) At any rate, this is a book of wisdom and entertainment, of the practical and the fabulous, of ideas and expressions that are ultimately more timeless than dated, and which are more intriguing than ever when viewed through a Borgesian prism.

  That the first part of the anthology places emphasis on Stevenson’s essays is not the surprise it might initially seem. We’ll come back to the subject of Stevenson’s reputation, but for the moment it is enough to say that the essays in this volume, some of them quite obscure, deserve to be more widely read. All three authors were contemplative characters who thought deeply about fundamental issues such as identity, time, the nature of truth, meaning, morality and wisdom, not to mention the purposes and techniques of literature. As Clare Harman notes in her biography of Stevenson:

  In his hands, the personal essay seemed to be coming to perfection in an amazing combination of high polish and novel directness, while aphorisms poured from his young mouth straight into the dictionaries of quotations.

  It is a shame – and a curious one – that the personal essay is somewhat undervalued in this country. To observe or experience the route an intelligent, articulate mind travels when openly exploring vital issues is something of a privilege. This is especially true in the case of a writer like Stevenson, as engaging and eloquent as he is provocative (all these adjectives apply equally to Borges). The essays in this volume are erudite, stimulating and immensely quotable. Their appeal to Borges and Bioy is self-evident.

  In his preface to the first edition of A Universal History of Infamy, Borges wrote:

  The exercises in narrative prose that make up this book . . . stem, I believe, from my rereadings of Stevenson and Chesterton.

  Those ‘exercises’ – fictionalised accounts of real-life rebels, scoundrels and criminals – point towards a fascination, shared by all three authors, with the darker sides of life. Bioy, Stevenson and Borges were raised in well-to-do families and the latter two in particular harboured an enduring compulsion to investigate the edgier parts of town and the more shadowy parts of the psyche. Stevenson’s youthful shenanigans in Edinburgh’s Old Town drove his parents to despair (he contrasted his childhood piety with his ‘precocious depravity’); Borges relished visiting the less respectable barrios.

  Borges’s inner life, like Stevenson’s, was one of huge adventure and finely tuned perception. Both writers had been avid readers as children (Stevenson called the family nurse, who helped instil in him a love of stories, ‘my second mother, my first wife’; Borges said, ‘I think if I were asked to name the chief event of my life, I should say
my father’s library. In fact, I sometimes think I have never strayed outside that library’). Both had protective mothers and would always feel an attraction towards the brave, the audacious, the transgressive.

  The extent to which physical limitations catalysed in Stevenson and Borges this admiration for the courageous is debatable. Stevenson suffered from real and perceived ailments throughout his life, and died tragically young; Borges, who endured an anxiety over incipient blindness, finally did go blind in the 1950s. ‘My friends lost their faces,’ he said. ‘I live in the centre of a luminous mist.’ In that same decade Borges was appointed as Director of the National Library – remarkably, the third blind man to hold such a position. Surrounded by 900,000 books he couldn’t read, Borges, well aware of the irony, commented that God ‘gave me books and night at the same time’.

  Borges wrote panegyrics to ancestors of his who conducted themselves boldly in battle, such as Colonel Manuel Isidiro Suárez, his maternal great-grandfather, who fought at Junin in 1824 and earned praise from the liberator, Simón Bolívar. In contrast to such heroism, Borges, self-deprecating at the best of times, called himself cowardly and bookish, a man of fiction rather than a man of action. Questions of what it means to be a man or a gentleman, and how being a writer does or does not evidence those qualities, run throughout much of Stevenson’s and Borges’s prose writings and are evident in the titles of some of the essays in this volume.

  That essay-writing was of great importance to Stevenson is clear from this anthology: that it was crucial to Borges is evident from his fiction and non-fiction. As the eminent Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote: ‘He [Borges] cultivated three genres: the essay, the poem and the short story. The division is arbitrary. His essays read like stories, his stories are poems; and his poems make us think as though they were essays.’

  If it seems like Stevenson had a more profound influence on Borges than on Bioy, that is because this was the case. And it’s reasonable to say that Borges had a stronger influence on Bioy than Bioy had on Borges; Bioy once said that an evening spent collaborating with Borges was the equivalent of a year of solitary writing. Works by Stevenson and H.G. Wells were literally the first books that Borges handled and the affinity Borges felt for Stevenson is implicit and explicit in his prose, poetry, talks and interviews.

  Near life-long friends, Borges and Bioy, in a happy analogue to the doubleness that exists in their own writing and, of course, in Stevenson’s, often merged into the same writer. They wrote, for example, detective stories, screenplays and fantastic fiction under the pseudonym H. Bustos Dumecq. (Some of their friends smilingly called this dual writer ‘Biorges’.) Stevenson also collaborated – with poet and critic W.E. Henley, with wife Fanny and with stepson Lloyd Osbourne – but it is fair to say that both he and Borges achieved their finest, most influential and most original work when writing solo.

  Borges once wrote that the primary tropes of fantastic literature are but four in number – the work within the work, the journey through time, the interplay of reality and dream, and the double. The latter two elements are especially pertinent in Stevenson’s and Borges’s lives and literary output. Stevenson wrote to F.H. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, of which Stevenson was a member, that when feverish he felt he had ‘two consciousnesses’. Duality features in many of Stevenson’s works – The Master of Ballantrae, ‘Markheim’, Catriona, etc., with the most famous example being the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which Borges considered first and foremost a detective story. Borges liked to point out that the two names in the title implicitly persuade the reader from the start that we are dealing with two different characters. (In a review of a movie version of Jekyll and Hyde (the third most-filmed story of all time), Borges once suggested that the best way to make a film version work would be to have two different actors playing the respective title roles.) Doubles feature in many of Borges’s writings, including ‘The Theologians’, ‘The South’ and ‘The Shape of the Sword’. In ‘The Theologians’, two enemies discover that they are the same man. Borges was more likely to make a coward the ultimate hero of a story than to use a traditional protagonist. Almost every story in Borges’s later work Dr Brodie’s Report (the name echoing a famous Stevenson connection) is about two characters in opposition to each other. Borges believed human beings embodied the heroic and the tragic – being both dreamer and dream at once. Balderston notes:

  Both writers are fascinated by the motif of the double because of its usefulness in creating characters who can be identified by opposition to one another, that is, defined from the outside, without recurring to a specious psychology.

  Borges occasionally wrote of himself as a character – as Stevenson sometimes does in his essays – not in a manner that is self-involved or egotistical but analytical and born of genuine intellectual inquiry. For example, Borges the rather shy librarian considers Borges the internationally famous writer and ends up wondering which of the two is writing down those very thoughts at that point in time.

  Borges said:

  I am interested in the feeling I get every morning when I wake up and find that I am Borges . . . It is something deep down within myself – the fact that I feel constrained to be a particular individual, living in a particular city, in a particular time, and so on. This might be thought of as a variation of the Jekyll and Hyde motif. Stevenson thought of the division in ethical terms, but here the division is hardly ethical . . . There is always this idea of the split personality.

  He was later to intensify and refine his ideas on identity, as we shall see.

  As noted, Borges and Bioy were excellent anthologists, especially with regard to tales of crime and the fantastic. Their anthology sometimes known in English as Extraordinary Tales, for example, is itself extraordinary, bringing together compelling narratives from diverse cultures in a book that raises tantalising metaphysical and literary questions – and does so in a highly readable manner. One of the stories included is ‘Faith, Half-Faith and No Faith at All’, also featured in this anthology. In a brief but telling Preliminary Note, Borges and Bioy wrote:

  One of the many pleasures which literature has to offer is that of the narrative . . . The essence of narrative is to be found, we venture to think, in the present pieces; the rest is episodic illustration, psychological analysis, fortunate or inopportune verbal adornment.

  The latter phrase could have been written by Stevenson, whose lively essay ’A Gossip on Romance’, included in this volume, was well known to both Argentine authors. Bioy and Borges were contemptuous of narratives that did not have a meaningful story to tell. All three authors engaged with the fantastic to explore aspects of reality. In ‘Some Gentlemen in Fiction’, Stevenson conceded – in a manner some considered virtually blasphemous – that characters are ‘only strings of words and parts of books’. To which Borges later responded: ‘Achilles and Peer Gynt, Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote may be reduced to it. The powerful men who ruled the earth, as well: Alexander is one string of words, Attila another.’ This is a good example of Borges taking an idea from Stevenson and developing it in such a way that we read Stevenson with renewed insight. For Borges, the act of reading can encourage readers to interrogate the relationship between reality and imagination, between possibility and experience.

  In ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, a rich and layered essay that constituted a response to Henry James’s ‘The Art of Fiction’, Stevenson wrote:

  Life is monstrous [one of Borges’s favourite adjectives], infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of experience, like an air artificially made by a discreet musician.

  I think it likely that this quotation influenced the thinking of writer Mary Burchard Orvis, who stated:

  All good fiction has form, no matter how modern or surrealistic. Indeed, the parti
cular value of fiction over raw experience is that it imposes a pattern or a meaning upon life. Life is frustrating, chaotic, illogical, fantastic, and more often than not, apparently meaningless; full of useless suffering, pain, tragedy . . . yet man . . . craves order . . . If he turns to fiction, he wants some sort of organisation, meaning and pattern.

  Whether fiction imposes meaning or reveals it is an enormous question (one worthy of a book in itself). Stevenson and Borges attempt to negotiate an apparently meaningless universe by use of creativity (writing, dreaming, reading, interpreting), by contemplating the means through which an ethical compass might be calibrated, by asking and attempting to answer the great questions of being, identity, causality, creation and infinity. The essays and narratives in this anthology bear witness to these aspirations. In ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, Stevenson compares a work of art with geometry, an analogy that also surfaces in a number of Borges’s writings. Many of Borges’s stories centre on powerful, complex ideas brought to life – ideas which are deepened and developed through action and dynamism rather than static characterisation, and which bear an uneasy, stubborn and disquieting relationship to the real world. The same can be said for the best of Stevenson’s work, including ‘The Suicide Club’, ‘The Bottle Imp’, and the fables.

  That ‘The Suicide Club’ – three interconnected detective-fiction stories that create a larger narrative – would greatly appeal to the duo who wrote detective stories together and loved the genre is natural. Bioy and Borges also liked to create connections between their narratives – literary in-jokes, references to obscure or non-existent authors and books, and so on. On a trip to London Bioy once tried to get hold of a title Borges wrote about in ‘The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim’, unaware that the book had been invented by his friend.

  ‘The Bottle Imp’, one of Stevenson’s most beloved stories, was partly inspired by a Richard John Smith melodrama first staged in London in 1828, and which in turn had been based on a German folk-tale. Stevenson considered it ‘in its ingenuity and imaginative qualities singularly like the Hawaiian tales’. When it was translated into Samoan in 1891 (the same year it appeared in English), Stevenson was disconcerted to note that Samoan visitors to his house would ask him earnestly, ‘Where is the bottle?’ The trope of the coin is also to be found in Borges’s fantastic story ‘The Zahir’, where it initially implies free-will, but soon becomes a conduit to a disturbing meditation on dream and reality.