Robert Louis Stevenson: An Anthology E-Book

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 557

Beschreibung

First imagined in the 1960s but never published, this collection of Robert Louis Stevenson's essays, fables and short stories was imagined by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares – a collection of their favourite works of non-fiction, short stories and fables. The themes – integrity, intellectual and imaginative truth, literary meaning, the fantastic – are common to all three authors, and these connections are explored in an introduction by Kevin MacNeil. Including such classic tales as 'The Bottle Imp' and rare essays on crime, morality, dreams and romance, Robert Louis Stevenson: The Argentina Edition is rich, eloquent and utterly readable.

Leseprobe

Robert LouisStevenson

Robert LouisStevenson:

AN ANTHOLOGY

Selected by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares

Edited by Kevin MacNeil

First published in paperback in Great Britain in2017 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House10 Newington RoadEdinburghEH9 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 DataA catalogue record for this book is availableon 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 particular 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.

Borges suggests that writers rewrite previous writers without truly realising it. In his narrative ‘The Circular Ruins’, a man dreams about a son until the son becomes real; the man then discovers he, too, is someone’s dream. This story is essentially a fable on creativity; we come to understand that we owe a debt of influence to those who went before us and that we are not in control of things in the ways we might think or wish. Borges, who was very familiar with Stevenson’s essay ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, said this story came to him as a dream, and that furthermore he considered reading to be a form of dreaming in that it is a private, internal experience only somewhat tied to the external world. The relationship between dream and reality, between creativity and actuality, is key. Discussing ‘The Circular Ruins’, Borges said, ‘The whole story is about a dream, and, while writing it down, my everyday affairs – my job at the municipal library, going to the movies, dining with friends – were like a dream. For the space of that week, the one thing real to me was the story.’

Furthermore, referencing Schopenhauer, Borges highlights the idea that life and dreams are pages of the same book: reading them consecutively is living, flicking through them is dreaming. Fiction can seem to have a life of its own, and both Stevenson and Borges are intrigued by the ways in which life and literature interrelate. Stevenson seems to prefigure Pablo Picasso’s dictum that ‘Art is a lie that makes us realise truth’ (which seems nowhere more true than in fiction, for the best and most lasting of fictions surely reveal bigger truths). These truths can seem unpredictable or unsettling in Stevenson’s fables and Borges’s stories alike. This is partly because both authors allow room for the reader to engage with the mysterious, with contingencies that seem acausal or impossible in life – coincidences, contradictions and the otherworldly. Borges often takes existential arguments to dizzying conclusions. Stevenson and Borges, in Balderston’s words, ‘find the highest achievements of the art of fiction to be those in which a story is suggested by a text but left to be completed by the imaginative reader’. This approach allows a reader to feel involved in the story in an insightful and pleasurable manner; we feel absorbed by and into the text, actively subsumed by the narrative process.

The art of reading allows us to cast off our selves and assume a different persona – perhaps even to become the author. In some ways, when we read Stevenson we become Stevenson. Alastair Reid, the Scottish poet and essayist who was a friend to and translator of Borges, paraphrased Borges’s thoughts:

We are physical beings, rooted in the physical cycle of life-and-death. Yet we are also users of language, fiction-makers, and language and fictions are not, like us, subject to natural laws. Through them, we are able to cross over into a timeless dimension, to bring into being alternate worlds, to enjoy the full freedom of the imaginable.

Good readers, Borges believed, are rarer than good writers. Borges and Stevenson allow the reader’s imagination to participate in the creation of the narrative. As Reid put it:

We are all ficcioneros – inveterate fiction-makers – it is through our fictions, private and public, that we make sense of our world, and find some equilibrium in it, it is through our fictions that we create ourselves.

Borges, like Stevenson, was a reader of Carlyle, who posited the notion that history was a story we read and write and which writes us. To Borges, we are in fact the authors, readers and protagonists of an infinite narrative – trying to negotiate our own meanings and those of others, while underneath all our superficial differences we are one person: nobody. This kind of radical thinking – seeded in Stevenson and others and brought to fruition in Borges – is lively, creative and provocative.

Stevenson and Borges were both enamoured with succinctness. ‘There is but one art – to omit’, wrote Stevenson. Borges famously didn’t write novels because, in a sense, he had too much to say; it was more productive to write brief, dense stories and short, fertile essays. Borges condensed novels into ideas contained within a sentence, often contemplating instead the non-existent book. ‘Why,’ he reasoned, ‘take five hundred pages to develop an idea whose oral demonstration fits into a few minutes?’ Some have ascribed Borges’s lack of superfluous detail to his myopia, but I think it is also attributable to stylistic choice, by way of Stevenson’s essays and artistic practices.

Another thing they have in common is that the quantity of material they wrote is much greater than is generally supposed. Stevenson scholar Roger G. Swearingen identifies more than 350 projects the author embarked on in his short life, incorporating essays, novels, short stories and plays, and not counting his many letters. Borges wrote 1,000 pages of stories, more than 500 pages of poetry, a couple of dozen works of (often idiosyncratic) translation, 1,200 essays, hundreds of prologues as well as film and book reviews, capsule biographies, and more. In Borges’s published works alone there are more than one hundred references to Stevenson.

Among the most condensed of Stevenson’s writings are the fables. Stevenson was entranced by fables and a comment in a letter suggests he may have started writing his own as early as 1874. But this is by no means certain, and if true, would mean he worked on the fables on and off for two decades. Edmund Gosse, by contrast, claims he began them in Bournemouth in 1887, after completing the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson planned to publish a collection of his fables with Longman, but died before he could honour the contract. It is known that Fanny, Stevenson’s wife, did not like the fables – she considered them ‘aberrations’ – and her influence may have stalled their publication. In fact, though they are overlooked and undervalued, the fables are a rich and vital element of Stevenson’s literary legacy. Stevenson believed that just as tastes evolved, so must fables. And indeed there is something very modern about their unwillingness to yield to simplistic moralising. Serious, lyrical, nuanced, the fables ask deep questions about purpose and meaning. Some critics have described the fables as being like early examples of existentialist or Kafka-esque writing and it is no surprise that they appealed to Borges and Bioy. The aforementioned Borges story ‘The Circular Ruins’ may have been partly inspired by ‘The Song of the Morrow’, concerned as they both are with time, recurrence, doubling and multiplying, and circularity. Many of Borges’s stories read like fables – pared back, resonant, transcendent. Perhaps because of their combination of narrative momentum, engagement with greater meaning and lean and graceful writing, they are simply a joy to read.

One of the Stevenson fables that intrigued Borges was ‘Faith, Half-Faith and No Faith at All’. The eminent scholar R.H. Blyth (once tutor to Crown Prince, later Emperor, Akihito of Japan) offers an unusual interpretation. He equates Faith, the priest, with the man who believes (or professes to believe) in revealed religion. Half-Faith is the virtuous, perhaps sanctimonious, person who talks of qualities like beauty, goodness and truth. No Faith, says Blyth, ‘is the man who lives by Zen’. It is not accurate to describe either Stevenson or Borges as Buddhists, but here emerges another fascinating connection. Blyth and others have noted unwitting aspects of Buddhism in Stevenson’s writing – in these fables and in his works that reveal human nature as being more contradictory and more malleable than one might wish to believe. The connection between Borges and Buddhism is fascinating. ‘Time passing,’ wrote Borges, ’is a severing of selves, each one trapped in a past monad.’ He wrote a book on Buddhism and lectured on the subject.

Borges said, ‘There are two men whom I love personally, as if I had known them. If I had to draw up a list of friends, I would include not only my personal friends, my physical friends, but I would also include Stevenson and [fellow Scottish author] Andrew Lang. Although they might not approve of my stuff, I think they would like the idea of being liked for their work by a mere South American, divided from them in time and space.’ He often spoke of Stevenson as a ‘major writer’, no matter what his interlocutor thought.

An unenviable element all three authors share is that they have been, at times, somewhat misunderstood. Stevenson has been dismissed as a ‘mere’ children’s author or perceived as no more than a minor author. Borges and Bioy are sometimes considered to be the drily intellectual, detached or narrowly in-joking authors of works that are more interested in metaphysical complexities than in human beings. This, too, is an erroneous view.

Stevenson’s reputation has fluctuated (as Borges’s has, to a lesser extent). Richard Dury notes four distinct periods: lifetime reception; height of esteem (1894–1914); revision; reinstatement. The death notice in the Illustrated London News of 22 December 1894 shows how highly regarded Stevenson was: ‘He is gone, our Prince of storytellers – such a Prince . . . with the insatiable taste for weird adventure, for diablerie, for a strange mixture of metaphysics and romance.’ Ever since the sensational success of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stevenson had been in demand. He commanded considerable fees from magazines such as Scribner’s for some of the essays in this volume. Following his death, serious critics elevated his work and dreamy readers romanticised the noble Bohemian invalid who died young. Jack London, who visited Stevenson’s grave in 1908, wrote to a friend: ‘I do join you, heartily, in admiration of Robert Louis Stevenson. What an example he was of application and self-development! As a storyteller there isn’t his equal; the same thing might almost be said of his essays.’

During the revisionist period, Stevenson was often treated with disdain, and was as good as expelled from the literary canon. In 1924 Leonard Woolf published an essay entitled ‘The Fall of Stevenson’, in which he wrote: ‘there never has been a more headlong fall in a writer’s reputation . . . A false style tells most fatally against a writer when, as with Stevenson, he has nothing original to say.’ This is hardly justified. And yet an aversion towards Stevenson’s writings became strangely commonplace for a while. Edwin Muir, Stevenson’s compatriot, wrote in 1931: ‘Stevenson has simply fallen out of the procession. He is still read by the vulgar, but he has joined the band of writers on whom, by tacit consent, the serious critics have nothing to say.’

In the twenty-first century, however, critics are once again taking a more enlightened and understanding approach to Stevenson. He has been included in the Norton Anthology of English Literature (after being omitted from the first seven editions of that influential anthology) and is hailed by some critics as anticipating elements of modernism and postmodernism. It is tempting to wonder how Stevenson’s reputation might have been rehabilitated, at least in the Spanish-speaking world, had the present anthology appeared as and when Borges and Bioy had first (or indeed subsequently) tried to publish it. Perhaps it is enough that writers as diverse as Isak Dinesen, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut and Margaret Atwood have voiced their admiration for Stevenson.

To some extent, Borges’s reputation has also been contradictory. Never easy to categorise at the best of times, Borges described himself as ‘a Conservative’, but his opinions were, as befitted his sense of self, changeable. He was anti-Fascist, anti-Communist, anti-Marxist, anti-Peronist. When he worked at the Miguel Cané municipal library (for which he procured many great works of literature in the English language, books by Stevenson among them), he was unceremoniously relieved of his duties because of political remarks he made and was instead appointed poultry inspector (!); he resigned immediately. Borges’s reputation within Argentina received a major boost when, in 1961, he was jointly awarded the Prix International with Samuel Beckett. This prize also lead to greater recognition internationally and Borges came to be treated with reverence on the world stage. In some places Borges was perceived to be something of a counter-cultural figure; his image (on a book) appears in the infamous Donald Cammell/Nicolas Roeg film Performance, which Cammell claims was influenced by the Argentine. Borges was later to stir up controversy by making strong statements against Marxist and Communist writers, and it is reasonable to acknowledge that Borges’s divisive political viewpoints had a bearing on his standing as a writer. When, in July 1985, Borges attended a trial and discovered that ‘gentlemen’ with whom he had lunched were responsible for the kidnapping, the torture and the ‘disappearing’ of many thousands of innocent citizens, he had to leave the courtroom, feeling physically sick.

Many people know and are bemused by his assessment of the Falklands/Malvinas conflict (‘Two bald men fighting over a comb’) but less well known and less well understood is his declaration that General Galtieri and Margaret Thatcher were one and the same person.

Writers who evidence such a profound eccentricity of thought often make for compelling reading. Borges, like Stevenson, combines tenacity and magic to create narratives that alter the way we read the world, each other, and literature itself. One of Borges’s wittiest, strangest and most unshakeable stories is ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’. Melding fantasy, humour and erudition, the short essayistic tale concerns Menard’s ambition to rewrite Don Quixote, word for word, from scratch. It’s not about plagiarism, though, for the narrator considers Menard’s version to be richer and more successful than the Cervantes ‘original’, because it can be contextualised in the light of everything that has happened in the world since 1605, and because the style of writing, while natural to Cervantes, is archaic and challenging to Menard. The meaning of a text, then, is dependent upon the reader and on the context of the work.

The Borges essay ‘Kafka and His Precursors’ considers a logical paradox with profound implications. (It is in relation to this essay that the term ‘Borgesian conundrum’ has arisen.) Borges analyses six elements, from Zeno’s paradox to Robert Browning’s poem ‘Fears and Scruples’, that apply to his developing theory around the question of whether the writer writes the story or the story writes him/her. Borges indicates that the six narratives – which all pre-date Kafka – have, in fact, been proleptically influenced by him. Borges declares:

If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. The second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist . . . In the critics’ vocabulary, the word ‘precursor’ is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

We can take a similarly innovative approach to the works of Shakespeare, Dickinson, Borges himself . . . or Stevenson.

In this way, Borges and Bioy Casares inform, reorientate and revitalise our reading of Robert Louis Stevenson. Perhaps, thanks to them, we can encounter a richer Stevenson, one whose contribution to world literature is not easily dismissed but is, rather, more lastingly assured.

Kevin MacNeilStirling and Buenos AiresJune 2017

ESSAYS

Lay Morals

The following chapters of a projected treatise on Ethics were drafted at Edinburgh in the spring of 1879. They are unrevised, and must not be taken as representing, either as to matter or form, their author’s final thoughts; but they contain much that is essentially characteristic of his mind.

* * * * *

We inhabit a dead ember swimming wide in the blank of space, dizzily spinning as it swims, and lighted up from several million miles away by a more horrible hell-fire than was ever conceived by the theological imagination. Yet the dead ember is a green, commodious dwelling-place; and the reverberation of this hell-fire ripens flower and fruit and mildly warms us on summer eves upon the lawn.

I

THE PROBLEM of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter. Every one who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks; and the best of teachers can impart only broken images of the truth which they perceive. Speech which goes from one to another between two natures, and, what is worse, between two experiences, is doubly relative. The speaker buries his meaning; it is for the hearer to dig it up again; and all speech, written or spoken, is in a dead language until it finds a willing and prepared hearer. Such, moreover, is the complexity of life, that when we condescend upon details in our advice, we may be sure we condescend on error; and the best of education is to throw out some magnanimous hints. No man was ever so poor that he could express all he has in him by words, looks, or actions; his true knowledge is eternally incommunicable, for it is a knowledge of himself; and his best wisdom comes to him by no process of the mind, but in a supreme self-dictation, which keeps varying from hour to hour in its dictates with the variation of events and circumstances.

A few men of picked nature, full of faith, courage, and contempt for others, try earnestly to set forth as much as they can grasp of this inner law; but the vast majority, when they come to advise the young, must be content to retail certain doctrines which have been already retailed to them in their own youth. Every generation has to educate another which it has brought upon the stage. People who readily accept the responsibility of parentship, having very different matters in their eye, are apt to feel rueful when that responsibility falls due. What are they to tell the child about life and conduct, subjects on which they have themselves so few and such confused opinions? Indeed, I do not know; the least said, perhaps, the soonest mended; and yet the child keeps asking, and the parent must find some words to say in his own defence. Where does he find them? and what are they when found?

As a matter of experience, and in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, he will instil into his wide-eyed brat three bad things: the terror of public opinion, and, flowing from that as a fountain, the desire of wealth and applause. Besides these, or what might be deduced as corollaries from these, he will teach not much else of any effective value: some dim notions of divinity, perhaps, and book-keeping, and how to walk through a quadrille.

But, you may tell me, the young people are taught to be Christians. It may be want of penetration, but I have not yet been able to perceive it. As an honest man, whatever we teach, and be it good or evil, it is not the doctrine of Christ. What he taught (and in this he is like all other teachers worthy of the name) was not a code of rules, but a ruling spirit; not truths, but a spirit of truth; not views, but a view. What he showed us was an attitude of mind. Towards the many considerations on which conduct is built, each man stands in a certain relation. He takes life on a certain principle. He has a compass in his spirit which points in a certain direction. It is the attitude, the relation, the point of the compass, that is the whole body and gist of what he has to teach us; in this, the details are comprehended; out of this the specific precepts issue, and by this, and this only, can they be explained and applied.

And thus, to learn aright from any teacher, we must first of all, like a historical artist, think ourselves into sympathy with his position and, in the technical phrase, create his character. A historian confronted with some ambiguous politician, or an actor charged with a part, have but one pre-occupation; they must search all round and upon every side, and grope for some central conception which is to explain and justify the most extreme details; until that is found, the politician is an enigma, or perhaps a quack, and the part a tissue of fustian sentiment and big words; but once that is found, all enters into a plan, a human nature appears, the politician or the stage-king is understood from point to point, from end to end. This is a degree of trouble which will be gladly taken by a very humble artist; but not even the terror of eternal fire can teach a business man to bend his imagination to such athletic efforts. Yet without this, all is vain; until we understand the whole, we shall understand none of the parts; and otherwise we have no more than broken images and scattered words; the meaning remains buried; and the language in which our prophet speaks to us is a dead language in our ears.

Take a few of Christ’s sayings and compare them with our current doctrines.

‘Ye cannot,’ he says, ‘serve God and Mammon.’ Cannot? And our whole system is to teach us how we can!

‘The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light.’ Are they? I had been led to understand the reverse: that the Christian merchant, for example, prospered exceedingly in his affairs; that honesty was the best policy; that an author of repute had written a conclusive treatise ‘How to make the best of both worlds.’ Of both worlds indeed! Which am I to believe then—Christ or the author of repute?

‘Take no thought for the morrow.’ Ask the Successful Merchant; interrogate your own heart; and you will have to admit that this is not only a silly but an immoral position. All we believe, all we hope, all we honour in ourselves or our contemporaries, stands condemned in this one sentence, or, if you take the other view, condemns the sentence as unwise and inhumane. We are not then of the ‘same mind that was in Christ’. We disagree with Christ. Either Christ meant nothing, or else he or we must be in the wrong. Well, says Thoreau, speaking of some texts from the New Testament, and finding a strange echo of another style which the reader may recognise: ‘Let but one of these sentences be rightly read from any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one stone of that meeting-house upon another.’

It may be objected that these are what are called ‘hard sayings’; and that a man, or an education, may be very sufficiently Christian although it leave some of these sayings upon one side. But this is a very gross delusion. Although truth is difficult to state, it is both easy and agreeable to receive, and the mind runs out to meet it ere the phrase be done. The universe, in relation to what any man can say of it, is plain, patent and staringly comprehensible. In itself, it is a great and travailing ocean, unsounded, unvoyageable, an eternal mystery to man; or, let us say, it is a monstrous and impassable mountain, one side of which, and a few near slopes and foothills, we can dimly study with these mortal eyes. But what any man can say of it, even in his highest utterance, must have relation to this little and plain corner, which is no less visible to us than to him. We are looking on the same map; it will go hard if we cannot follow the demonstration. The longest and most abstruse flight of a philosopher becomes clear and shallow, in the flash of a moment, when we suddenly perceive the aspect and drift of his intention. The longest argument is but a finger pointed; once we get our own finger rightly parallel, and we see what the man meant, whether it be a new star or an old streetlamp. And briefly, if a saying is hard to understand, it is because we are thinking of something else.

But to be a true disciple is to think of the same things as our prophet, and to think of different things in the same order. To be of the same mind with another is to see all things in the same perspective; it is not to agree in a few indifferent matters near at hand and not much debated; it is to follow him in his farthest flights, to see the force of his hyperboles, to stand so exactly in the centre of his vision that whatever he may express, your eyes will light at once on the original, that whatever he may see to declare, your mind will at once accept. You do not belong to the school of any philosopher, because you agree with him that theft is, on the whole, objectionable, or that the sun is overhead at noon. It is by the hard sayings that discipleship is tested. We are all agreed about the middling and indifferent parts of knowledge and morality; even the most soaring spirits too often take them tamely upon trust. But the man, the philosopher or the moralist, does not stand upon these chance adhesions; and the purpose of any system looks towards those extreme points where it steps valiantly beyond tradition and returns with some covert hint of things outside. Then only can you be certain that the words are not words of course, nor mere echoes of the past; then only are you sure that if he be indicating anything at all, it is a star and not a street-lamp; then only do you touch the heart of the mystery, since it was for these that the author wrote his book.

Now, every now and then, and indeed surprisingly often, Christ finds a word that transcends all common-place morality; every now and then he quits the beaten track to pioneer the unexpressed, and throws out a pregnant and magnanimous hyperbole; for it is only by some bold poetry of thought that men can be strung up above the level of everyday conceptions to take a broader look upon experience or accept some higher principle of conduct. To a man who is of the same mind that was in Christ, who stands at some centre not too far from his, and looks at the world and conduct from some not dissimilar or, at least, not opposing attitude—or, shortly, to a man who is of Christ’s philosophy—every such saying should come home with a thrill of joy and corroboration; he should feel each one below his feet as another sure foundation in the flux of time and chance; each should be another proof that in the torrent of the years and generations, where doctrines and great armaments and empires are swept away and swallowed, he stands immovable, holding by the eternal stars. But alas! at this juncture of the ages it is not so with us; on each and every such occasion our whole fellowship of Christians falls back in disapproving wonder and implicitly denies the saying. Christians! the farce is impudently broad. Let us stand up in the sight of Heaven and confess. The ethics that we hold are those of Benjamin Franklin. Honesty is the best policy, is perhaps a hard saying; it is certainly one by which a wise man of these days will not too curiously direct his steps; but I think it shows a glimmer of meaning to even our most dimmed intelligences; I think we perceive a principle behind it; I think, without hyperbole, we are of the same mind that was in Benjamin Franklin.

II

BUT, I may be told, we teach the ten commandments, where a world of morals lies condensed, the very pith and epitome of all ethics and religion; and a young man with these precepts engraved upon his mind must follow after profit with some conscience and Christianity of method. A man cannot go very far astray who neither dishonours his parents, nor kills, nor commits adultery, nor steals, nor bears false witness; for these things, rightly thought out, cover a vast field of duty.

Alas! what is a precept? It is at best an illustration; it is case law at the best which can be learned by precept. The letter is not only dead, but killing; the spirit which underlies, and cannot be uttered, alone is true and helpful. This is trite to sickness; but familiarity has a cunning disenchantment; in a day or two she can steal all beauty from the mountain tops; and the most startling words begin to fall dead upon the ear after several repetitions. If you see a thing too often, you no longer see it; if you hear a thing too often, you no longer hear it. Our attention requires to be surprised; and to carry a fort by assault, or to gain a thoughtful hearing from the ruck of mankind, are feats of about an equal difficulty and must be tried by not dissimilar means. The whole Bible has thus lost its message for the common run of hearers; it has become mere words of course; and the parson may bawl himself scarlet and beat the pulpit like a thing possessed, but his hearers will continue to nod; they are strangely at peace, they know all he has to say; ring the old bell as you choose, it is still the old bell and it cannot startle their composure. And so with this byword about the letter and the spirit. It is quite true, no doubt; but it has no meaning in the world to any man of us. Alas! it has just this meaning, and neither more nor less: that while the spirit is true, the letter is eternally false.

The shadow of a great oak lies abroad upon the ground at noon, perfect, clear, and stable like the earth. But let a man set himself to mark out the boundary with cords and pegs, and were he never so nimble and never so exact, what with the multiplicity of the leaves and the progression of the shadow as it flees before the travelling sun, long ere he has made the circuit the whole figure will have changed. Life may be compared, not to a single tree, but to a great and complicated forest; circumstance is more swiftly changing than a shadow, language much more inexact than the tools of a surveyor; from day to day the trees fall and are renewed; the very essences are fleeting as we look; and the whole world of leaves is swinging tempest-tossed among the winds of time. Look now for your shadows. O man of formulae, is this a place for you? Have you fitted the spirit to a single case? Alas, in the cycle of the ages when shall such another be proposed for the judgment of man? Now when the sun shines and the winds blow, the wood is filled with an innumerable multitude of shadows, tumultuously tossed and changing; and at every gust the whole carpet leaps and becomes new. Can you or your heart say more?

Look back now, for a moment, on your own brief experience of life; and although you lived it feelingly in your own person, and had every step of conduct burned in by pains and joys upon your memory, tell me what definite lesson does experience hand on from youth to manhood, or from both to age? The settled tenor which first strikes the eye is but the shadow of a delusion. This is gone; that never truly was; and you yourself are altered beyond recognition. Times and men and circumstances change about your changing character, with a speed of which no earthly hurricane affords an image. What was the best yesterday, is it still the best in this changed theatre of a tomorrow? Will your own Past truly guide you in your own violent and unexpected Future? And if this be questionable, with what humble, with what hopeless eyes, should we not watch other men driving beside us on their unknown careers, seeing with unlike eyes, impelled by different gales, doing and suffering in another sphere of things?

And as the authentic clue to such a labyrinth and change of scene, do you offer me these two score words? these five bald prohibitions? For the moral precepts are no more than five; the first four deal rather with matters of observance than of conduct; the tenth, Thou shalt not covet, stands upon another basis, and shall be spoken of ere long. The Jews, to whom they were first given, in the course of years began to find these precepts insufficient; and made an addition of no less than six hundred and fifty others! They hoped to make a pocket-book of reference on morals, which should stand to life in some such relation, say, as Hoyle stands in to the scientific game of whist. The comparison is just, and condemns the design; for those who play by rule will never be more than tolerable players; and you and I would like to play our game in life to the noblest and the most divine advantage. Yet if the Jews took a petty and huckstering view of conduct, what view do we take ourselves, who callously leave youth to go forth into the enchanted forest, full of spells and dire chimeras, with no guidance more complete than is afforded by these five precepts?

Honour thy father and thy mother. Yes, but does that mean to obey? and if so, how long and how far? Thou shall not kill. Yet the very intention and purport of the prohibition may be best fulfilled by killing. Thou shall not commit adultery. But some of the ugliest adulteries are committed in the bed of marriage and under the sanction of religion and law. Thou shalt not bear false witness. How? by speech or by silence also? or even by a smile? Thou shalt not steal. Ah, that indeed! But what is to steal?

To steal? It is another word to be construed; and who is to be our guide? The police will give us one construction, leaving the word only that least minimum of meaning without which society would fall in pieces; but surely we must take some higher sense than this; surely we hope more than a bare subsistence for mankind; surely we wish mankind to prosper and go on from strength to strength, and ourselves to live rightly in the eye of some more exacting potentate than a policeman. The approval or the disapproval of the police must be eternally indifferent to a man who is both valorous and good. There is extreme discomfort, but no shame, in the condemnation of the law. The law represents that modicum of morality which can be squeezed out of the ruck of mankind; but what is that to me, who aim higher and seek to be my own more stringent judge? I observe with pleasure that no brave man has ever given a rush for such considerations. The Japanese have a nobler and more sentimental feeling for this social bond into which we all are born when we come into the world, and whose comforts and protection we all indifferently share throughout our lives:—but even to them, no more than to our Western saints and heroes, does the law of the state supersede the higher law of duty. Without hesitation and without remorse, they transgress the stiffest enactments rather than abstain from doing right. But the accidental superior duty being thus fulfilled, they at once return in allegiance to the common duty of all citizens; and hasten to denounce themselves; and value at an equal rate their just crime and their equally just submission to its punishment.

The evading of the police will not long satisfy an active conscience or a thoughtful head. But to show you how one or the other may trouble a man, and what a vast extent of frontier is left unridden by this invaluable eighth commandment, let me tell you a few pages out of a young man’s life.

He was a friend of mine; a young man like others; generous, flighty, as variable as youth itself, but always with some high motions and on the search for higher thoughts of life. I should tell you at once that he thoroughly agrees with the eighth commandment. But he got hold of some unsettling works, the New Testament among others, and this loosened his views of life and led him into many perplexities. As he was the son of a man in a certain position, and well off, my friend had enjoyed from the first the advantages of education, nay, he had been kept alive through a sickly childhood by constant watchfulness, comforts, and change of air; for all of which he was indebted to his father’s wealth.

At college he met other lads more diligent than himself, who followed the plough in summer-time to pay their college fees in winter; and this inequality struck him with some force. He was at that age of a conversible temper, and insatiably curious in the aspects of life; and he spent much of his time scraping acquaintance with all classes of man—and woman-kind. In this way he came upon many depressed ambitions, and many intelligences stunted for want of opportunity; and this also struck him. He began to perceive that life was a handicap upon strange, wrong-sided principles; and not, as he had been told, a fair and equal race. He began to tremble that he himself had been unjustly favoured, when he saw all the avenues of wealth, and power, and comfort closed against so many of his superiors and equals, and held unwearyingly open before so idle, so desultory, and so dissolute a being as himself. There sat a youth beside him on the college benches, who had only one shirt to his back, and, at intervals sufficiently far apart, must stay at home to have it washed. It was my friend’s principle to stay away as often as he dared; for I fear he was no friend to learning. But there was something that came home to him sharply, in this fellow who had to give over study till his shirt was washed, and the scores of others who had never an opportunity at all. If one of these could take his place, he thought; and the thought tore away a bandage from his eyes. He was eaten by the shame of his discoveries, and despised himself as an unworthy favourite and a creature of the back-stairs of Fortune. He could no longer see without confusion one of these brave young fellows battling up-hill against adversity. Had he not filched that fellow’s birthright? At best was he not coldly profiting by the injustice of society, and greedily devouring stolen goods? The money, indeed, belonged to his father, who had worked, and thought, and given up his liberty to earn it; but by what justice could the money belong to my friend, who had, as yet, done nothing but help to squander it? A more sturdy honesty, joined to a more even and impartial temperament, would have drawn from these considerations a new force of industry, that this equivocal position might be brought as swiftly as possible to an end, and some good services to mankind justify the appropriation of expense. It was not so with my friend, who was only unsettled and discouraged, and filled full of that trumpeting anger with which young men regard injustices in the first blush of youth; although in a few years they will tamely acquiesce in their existence, and knowingly profit by their complications. Yet all this while he suffered many indignant pangs. And once, when he put on his boots, like any other unripe donkey, to run away from home, it was his best consolation that he was now, at a single plunge, to free himself from the responsibility of this wealth that was not his, and do battle equally against his fellows in the warfare of life.

Some time after this, falling into ill-health, he was sent at great expense to a more favourable climate; and then I think his perplexities were thickest. When he thought of all the other young men of singular promise, upright, good, the prop of families, who must remain at home to die, and with all their possibilities be lost to life and mankind; and how he, by one more unmerited favour, was chosen out from all these others to survive; he felt as if there were no life, no labour, no devotion of soul and body, that could repay and justify these partialities. A religious lady, to whom he communicated these reflections, could see no force in them whatever. ‘It was God’s will,’ said she. But he knew it was by God’s will that Joan of Arc was burnt at Rouen, which cleared neither Bedford nor Bishop Cauchon; and again, by God’s will that Christ was crucified outside Jerusalem, which excused neither the rancour of the priests nor the timidity of Pilate. He knew, moreover, that although the possibility of this favour he was now enjoying issued from his circumstances, its acceptance was the act of his own will; and he had accepted it greedily, longing for rest and sunshine.