By Stuart Mitchner
We do onstage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance to somewhere else.
—Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)
The fact that Joseph Conrad, who was born December 3, 1857, and Robert Louis Stevenson, who died December 3, 1894, entered and exited the world on the third day of the same month is my entrance to the somewhere of a column connecting the author of The Heart of Darkness and “The Secret Sharer” with the author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Read with Stevenson in mind, secret sharing of sorts is already underway in Conrad’s evocatively titled tale of a ship captain’s shadowy relationship to the fugitive he rescues and keeps hidden in his living quarters. The chief mate of a vessel anchored nearby, the man had been hastily convicted and confined for killing a rebellious crew member during a violent storm. After a single conversation, the captain believes the fugitive’s story, empathizes with him, ultimately imagining the killer as a double of himself, a “secret self” he had to conceal from the crew, even when his choices are risky and suspect, as when he steers his ship dangerously close to an island so that the fugitive can safely escape, “a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny.”
Stevenson entered my thoughts when I read that last sentence. What a contrast to Dr. Jekyll, who dies a sordid death with his murderous double Hyde. I began thinking of the possibility of a second author when the captain understood that he “was not wholly alone with my command; for there was that stranger in my cabin…. Part of me was absent. That mental feeling of being in two places at once affected me physically as if the mood of secrecy had penetrated my very soul.” At this point, the idea of the “command,” his first, suggested the equivalent of a work of fiction, which seemed a possibility worth exploring in a column about two writers who followed the sea to the “somewhere else” of literature, which for Conrad began in 1895 with Almayer’s Folly, published a year after Stevenson found his final resting place on a South Pacific island.
A Violent Friend
Born November 13, 1850, in Edinburgh, Robert Louis Stevenson died at 44 of a cerebral hemorrhage on the island of Samoa, leaving unfinished his novel, The Weir of Hermiston, which he dedicated to his American wife Fanny: “Take thou the writing: thine it is…. So now, in the end, if this the least be good, if any deed be done, if any fire burn in the imperfect page, the praise be thine.”
Although Stevenson considered his marriage “the best move I ever made in my life,” he described Fanny, in a letter to J.M. Barrie written the year before he died, as “a violent friend, a brimstone enemy.” And yet in 1880, he’d pursued her all the way to California, risking everything, health, funds, work, parental disfavor, crossing an ocean and a continent to track her down and win her hand, even though doing so meant taking responsibility for three children from her first marriage.
Fanny was a formative force in Stevenson’s life, nearly as close to his work as he was, his first reader, his conscience, his antagonist, and, above all, his secret sharer. All the writing he’s known for from Treasure Island on was accomplished when she was by his side. A strong-minded, discerning female was the person he counted on to approve or question or disapprove every word he produced. And since she was “prodigal of counsel” and “chary of praise,” he would not be spared should his creation falter or fail. After reading the first draft of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Fanny was not only underwhelmed, she questioned his approach to the tale so heatedly that it led to “an almighty row,” after which, to Fanny’s horror, he threw the entire manuscript on the fire, having decided that she was right. The novel the world knows (or thinks it knows, in view of the liberties taken by various film versions that give fangs and claws to Hyde) was written to address Fanny’s reservations about the first draft and in particular her insistence that he undertake to develop the “moral allegory” implicit in the situation.
In a letter to Henry James quoted in Claire Harman’s biography, Myself & the Other Fellow (2005), Stevenson describes the back and forth between husband/author and wife/critic, she “who is not without art: the art of extracting the gloom of the eclipse from sunshine.” He goes on to recount a recent falling out: “she tackled me savagely for being a canary-bird; I replied (bleatingly) protesting that there was no use in turning life into King Lear…The beauty was we each thought the other quite unscathed at first. But we had dealt shrewd stabs.” In his letters, “the violent friend” and “brimstone enemy” was addressed as “Dear weird woman” and “my dear fellow.” She receives a fuller description in the same 1893 letter to J.M. Barrie: “She runs the show … handsome waxen face like Napoleon’s, insane black eyes, boy’s hands, tiny bare feet, a cigarette … Hellish energy… Is always either loathed or slavishly adored. The natives think her uncanny and the devils serve her. Dreams dreams, and sees visions.”
Last Words
There’s no evidence that Christina Elliott, the female character at the heart of The Weir of Hermiston, was a tribute to Fanny, in spite of “the praise be thine” dedication. When the narrative breaks off in the ninth chapter, Christina is in emotional disarray, furious because the man she adores has come to her not to make love but “to trace out a line of conduct” for them “in a few cold, convincing sentences.” Her response is to subject him to “a savage cross-examination” that must have evoked smiles in readers familiar with the dynamic of Stevenson’s marriage, the “canary bird” meets King Lear.
The last passage Stevenson was ever to write, dictated to his stepdaughter the day he died, begins with a sentimental cliche with juvenile overtones (“He took the poor child in his arms”) — until “He felt her whole body shaken by the throes of distress, and had pity upon her beyond speech. Pity, and at the same time a bewildered fear of this explosive engine in his arms, whose works he did not understand, and yet had been tampering with. There arose from before him the curtains of boyhood, and he saw for the first time the ambiguous face of woman as she is. In vain he looked back over the interview; he saw not where he had offended. It seemed unprovoked, a willful convulsion of brute nature. . . .”
And so everything ends with those two scarily resonant words. It was his secret sharer Fanny, in fact, who heard her husband’s scream and came to wake him when he was being consumed by the nightmare that inspired the transformation of Jekyll into Hyde.
All for Love
The onstage/offstage lines quoted at the beginning of the column are spoken by one of the players visiting Elsinore in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Grove Press 1967). Discussing his play Rock’n’Roll in a 2007 interview with the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, Stoppard, who died at 88 on November 29, refers to the reviewer “who wrote that she started crying when the love story got together at the end, just in time. I was aware that I was more pleased by that than any number of people telling me that I was too clever by half or intellectual. In fact, the reason I liked it so much was that I was two-thirds of the way through writing it before I began to understand that there was a love story in it. I’m very much in favor of love.”
Further Reading
After pointing out how often the connections between Stevenson and Conrad have been ignored, Stephen E. Tabachnick concludes his Project Muse review of the essay collection, Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad: Writers of Transition (Texas Tech University Press, 2009), by noting that “as these pieces illustrate, Stevenson is in many ways Conrad’s ‘secret sharer.’ ”
Another book I look forward to reading is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Secret Sharer, and Transformation: Three Tales of Doubles, a Longman’s Cultural Edition from 2009 edited by Princeton University’s Susan Wolfson and Rutgers University’s Barry Qualls.