The Jekyll Revelation

by Robert Masello

But stories have not only a will of their own, but a secret wellspring, too. My own come to me as dreams, cobbled together by an army of what I have dubbed my Brownies, those anarchic spirits whom I willfully muster, every night, as my little boat sets sail upon the sea of sleep. Their task is to bring me a tale of derring-do, of intrigue or adventure, a shilling shocker to capture the imagination of the public and make my name, and fortune. When I awake, I do so slowly, taking care not to shake my head or address the events of the coming day lest I disturb whatever strange cargo they have brought me. I sift through the remaining impressions, the images and incidents and ideas, as if they were dry goods piled in bins, and if my Brownies have done their job, there is invariably something to reward my search.

She scuttled out of the room, head down and blushing furiously, before I could explain that, as an author, I prized nothing so much as readers. When I saw what she had been perusing—a new novel, “Far from the Madding Crowd,” inscribed to me by Thomas Hardy—I was even more impressed. That she could read at all was commendable—that she would make such a good selection was even more so. When Fanny and I had paid a call on him at Max Gate outside Dorchester, Hardy was as flustered as a guinea hen, but gracious and welcoming.

Stumping about town on his one leg, a wooden crutch thrust under his strong right arm, Henley became a notable fixture on the London literary scene, forever popping up like some jack-in-the-box, as editor of one publication or another, or penning an unforgettable ode. Out of that dreadful sequester at the infirmary, where the complications of tuberculosis had claimed his leg, he wrote the poem ‘Invictus’, a cri de coeur whose last stanza has become the rallying cry of all who must face impossible odds: ‘It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.’ In my own darkest hours, I have had occasion to recall those lines, even as I struggled to assert them.

‘You and your damn Brownies. Talk to Conan Doyle about nonsense like that. Talk sense to me.

‘And you can tell me all about this new book of yours with the intriguing title. Another tall tale of adventure and suspense? A return to stowaways, perhaps, and buccaneers?’ ‘Highland Scots,’ I replied, hoping to cut the inquisition short with the briefest of answers. I have long been of the opinion that a writer who tips his hand too soon loses more than the interest of his audience; he loses his own.

‘So you think he’s going to strike again?’ Abberline said. ‘I am a physician of the body, not the mind,’ Phillips replied, ‘but if my many years of practice have taught me one thing, it’s that the two are inextricably entwined. Wicked thoughts can lead to wicked deeds, and wicked deeds can, in turn, poison the mind further. The man who has committed these murders is a dog chasing his own tail. He’ll never catch it, try as he might, so you must catch him.’ ‘Easier said than done,’ the detective muttered.

He seems to be having some trouble separating fantasy from reality. He’s an actor, after all.

‘We are bound together, you and I, by this business. I feel that I cannot get Mr Hyde out of my skin—he has been awakened and lives inside me now—and I fear that with each day that passes, and each performance I give, his influence grows. Do you think that’s possible?’ His head came up like a jack-in-the-box, his eyes, still lined with a bit of mascara, wide. ‘I think a bit of Mr Hyde lives in everyone, and that’s why the story resonates as it does.’ ‘But is it a kind of corruption, a force that, once unleashed, goes unchecked?’ ‘That is why we have willpower. To control the impulses and emotions that can only lead to evil.’ ‘Pshaw! Evil? Is indulgence evil? Is sensuality evil? I don’t think you believe that, Stevenson, and I don’t think your story says so. I think you hedge your bets. I think it’s hypocrisy you’re after. You just want an acknowledgement of how things actually stand. You want an admission of guilt from the whole human race.’

I’m something of a history buff. I love reading it, which means that when I’m researching one of my novels, I get to sit around and read lots of biographies and historical texts and tell myself I’m working. I am, but it’s fun, too.

If you want to learn more about the life of Robert Louis Stevenson, I can highly recommend Frank McLynn’s eponymous biography of the author (published by Random House), and for more information on Jack the Ripper, I’d suggest a beautifully illustrated volume entitled Jack the Ripper—CSI: Whitechapel, by the noted Ripperologists (yes, that’s a real term) Paul Begg and John Bennett (André Deutsch/Carlton Publishing Group). For those of you with a more academic bent, there’s a harrowing look at the London of this era in a book entitled East End 1888 by W. J. Fishman, published by the Temple University Press in Philadelphia. All these books, and others too numerous to mention, were indispensable to me.