Adventure classics – Blast to the past: lost lands & riches

King Solomon’s Mines

by H. Rider Haggard

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So here I am, clickety-clacking away at a story about lost tribes that I could swear had never been done before when I realize—I’m channeling H. Rider Haggard! That’s right, the Victorian writer whose 1885 breakout novel, King Solomon’s Mines, singlehandedly created the “Lost Civilization” genre of adventure fiction.

At least I’m in good company. Haggard’s most famous fictions, King Solomon’s Mines and 1887’s She: A History of Adventure,  have been influencing writers from Rudyard Kipling to Edgar Rice Burroughs to James Hilton and Michael Crichton, as well as giving rise to a slew of movie adaptations and knockoffs. (Indiana Jones, anyone?)

It’s not that the concept of recovering civilizations believed to be lost hadn’t been knocking around the world for a while. Probably Plato no sooner wrote his myth of lost Atlantis than people started to wonder about the possibility of Atlantean survivors. Medieval Europeans dreamed of discovering Prester John’s lost kingdom. The whole lost civilization mythos got an unexpected blast of reality when Spanish conquistadors stumbled across the amazing New World kingdoms of the Aztecs and Incas, and the remains of the still more ancient Mayan civilization. Beyond every horizon lay the possibility of cultures older, wiser and wealthier than even the most ardent dreamers could imagine.

Still, fast forward a few centuries, and as the blank spaces on the map were filled in, hopes of finding such lost civilizations ebbed. That is, until the younger son of a country barrister, after failing the army entrance exam, finally managed to get a job as secretary to the governor of Britain’s Natal colony in South Africa.

Although Henry Rider Haggard’s stay in Africa lasted only four years, they were years that changed his life, and with it, the lives of countless readers and dreamers after him. It was the down to earth vividness of his African experiences, the language of hunters and farmers, the sounds and sights and scents of ox-drawn wagons and lions and elephants described by such apparently down to earth narrators as King Solomon’s Mines’ Allan Quartermain that made his fantastic dreams of lost treasure and lost civilizations come alive.

But that was still in the future when Haggard returned to England. He married and returned briefly to Africa with his wife before settling back in England to study law and dabble in writing fiction.

He had a couple of not very successful (and now little-read) novels under his belt in the early 1880’s when one of his brothers bet him he couldn’t write anything as exciting (or successful) as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. (Or in another version, Henry Rider was the one who bet his brother that he could write something better.)

The result, written in six weeks (or possibly sixteen weeks—the mythologizing had already begun), was at first rejected by baffled publishers. But when once published, it became 1885’s best seller. And adventure stories have never been the same since.

Although Haggard dedicated the story to “all the big and little boys who read it”, girls have always liked it too. Out of copyright, it’s readily available online, although I’m currently get reacquainted with it, after an initial reading decades ago, through the Barnes & Noble Classics edition from the Dallas Public Library and available at Amazon. I recommend reading the original before checking out the numerous movie versions, including the 1937 version whose poster illustrates this post.

(Next Friday, plot, characters and controversies in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines.)

Adventure classics -- The monster outside, the monster inside

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

by Robert Louis Stevenson

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Monsters are real ¼ they live inside us, and sometimes, they win.¾ Stephen King

Who doesn’t know the story of the good Dr. Jekyll and the bad Mr. Hyde? It’s become such a taken for granted part of our culture since its publication in 1886 that I was startled when I actually read it recently. Why did Robert Louis Stevenson entrust the narration of this strange tale to such a dry, dour, but strangely loveable narrator as the lawyer, Mr. Utterson?

Was the character Utterson retaliation for the legal career Stevenson had undertaken (but never practiced) to please his father? Was he the staid, just the facts, sir, narrator chosen to given some semblance of verisimilitude to Stevenson’s bizarre story of the repressed doctor driven to free himself from what he feels to be his baser instincts by inventing another character to carry his moral load?

Although Stevenson is reputed to have written the book in a burst of feverish activity (literally feverish¾ he was confined to bed at the time from a serious illness) the idea of the story was not a new one. “I had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man’s double being which must at ties come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature,” Stevenson would explain.

At first glance, the tale appears to be a relatively simple morality fable. Dr. Henry Jekyll, “a large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty, with something of a slyish cast perhaps, but every mark of capacity and kindness” is known for his kindness and philanthropy. Unknown even to his dearest friends, he harbors a dark secret. In his chemical experiments, he has found a way to free this public side of his nature from the constraints of its baser instincts. (Or is it that he has learned to free his more instinctual side from his reasoning side?) In doing so, he creates a younger, stronger, “freer” version of himself, Edward Hyde.

But the more Jekyll yields to the desire to be Hyde, the more dominant Hyde becomes. At last, Jekyll finds himself trapped permanently in Hyde’s body, which after all, is his own. Jekyll has met his monster, and he is him.

Preachers on both sides of the Atlantic seized on the story of Dr. Jekyll for its apparent illustration of the dangers of yielding to wicked impulses. But wicked though Hyde is, it’s obvious that he’s the one having fun. Poor Dr. Jekyll remains to the end the sexless member of this pact terrified of joy, who only truly lives through the deeds of his alter ego, Hyde.

Despite the enthusiastic sermons, there were readers even in the dim Victorian era who saw the tale as a story of sexual repression, an aspect emphasized even more in the movie versions a few decades later, such as the 1920 film whose poster illustrates this post.

Stevenson at first protested such readings, writing to the New York Sun that Hyde was not “a mere voluptuary ¼ but people are so filled full of folly and inverted lust, that they can think of nothing but sexuality.”

Privately, Stevenson, like Jekyll, told a different story. His stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, reported that Stevenson railed about the conventions that kept English writers, in contrast to their French counterparts “muzzled like dogs ¼ What books Dickens could have written had he been permitted! Think of Thackeray as unfettered as Flaubert or Balzac! What books I might have written myself!”

(Is it possible Stevenson took notice of what this unfettering would entail when, four years after his story, a writer dared to speak more openly about the many-spangled world of sexuality? I’m referring, of course, to Oscar Wilde, whose own story of duality and its consequences, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is the focus of next Wednesday’s post in an October of Halloween horror.)

Wordcraft -- Adventure of a lifetime, lives of adventure

Just when it seemed there was nothing new in historical fiction, Nancy Horan invented a new subgenre--the remarkable woman behind the famous man, Dallas Morning News reviewer Joy Tipping has said. Horan began the invention with her first novel, Loving Frank, a fictionalized version of the early twentieth century love affair between Mamah Borthwick Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright, both married--to other people.

Horan extracts gold from the form again with her second novel, Under the Wide and Starry Sky, about the unlikely love affair and marriage between Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Vandergrift Osbourne, American, nearly eleven years his senior and married to another at the beginning of their love affair.

Horan’s book, Tipping said, introducing her at last Tuesday’s Authors LIVE! Program, contains all her favorite requirements for a satisfying novel. “Feisty heroine, check. Adventure, check. Pirates (pause) Long John Silver, check.”

Stevenson was in his mid-twenties, yet to make a name for himself in literature, when he met Fanny. She had fled to Europe to study art, one of the few respectable ways, a friend assured her, to escape her chronically unfaithful husband, Samuel Osbourne. Fanny and Stevenson (known as Louis to family and friends) met at a boarding house in the French countryside frequented by writers and painters. Fanny was there seeking a rest cure after the death in Paris of her youngest child. Stevenson was there trying to avoid using the law degree he had recently received--at the elder Stevenson’s expense. Falling in love was the last thing either of them had in mind.

Fanny was pretty and petite, with curly dark hair and a face so youthful she was often mistaken for the sister of her daughter Belle (Isobel). Stevenson, as Horan told her audience, would declare that he first began to fall in love when he glimpsed her through a window of the boarding house, smoking a cigarette and chatting with his older cousin, another Robert Stevenson, known in the family as Bob.  Fanny was initially less smitten by Stevenson, later described by her daughter as “nice-looking for an ugly man.” It’s a phrase so apt I suspect it came from one of Fanny’s letters. Although Horan disclaimed any intention of writing a biography, she read extensively from the letters and journals of Fanny and Stevenson, using many of their own words for the dialogue of Under the Wide and Starry Sky.

At last, although finding herself drawn more and more to Stevenson, Fanny made a final attempt at reconciliation with her husband in California, leaving Stevenson in agony over their relationship.

“Fanny had gone back and gotten lost in her old life, Horan writes, delineating Stevenson’s dilemma. “She had made a bad choice in Sam Osbourne. Might she make a mistake again. . . Then a telegram came from California. Louis. I’m lost and sick. Need you.”

Stevenson set off by ship and train halfway around the world to find her. The journey so damaged his already fragile health that, fearing he might die on the trip, he wrote the poem that would be used as his epitaph when he was laid to rest at last on a hilltop in Samoa: “Under the wide and starry sky.” It was the beginning of the adventure of a lifetime.

Some of Stevenson’s friends would see Fanny’s concern for his health as an attempt to estrange them from the increasingly famous writer of Treasure Island (written for Fanny’s son Samuel Lloyd Osbourne, and featuring inimitable villain Long John Silver), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped, The Black Arrow, and others. But Stevenson never wavered in his respect for Fanny, terming her his “critic on the hearth” who brought out the best from his writing.

Read more about Nancy Horan, her books and events, at
www.nancyhoran.com/.

For more about Stevenson’s life and writing at this site, see “A flight through the heather,” September 23, 2011, and “A book made from a map,” August 29, 2012. And stay tuned for a discussion of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” October 15, 2014.

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The DFW Writers Conference has extended its Celebrating the Classics: query contest until February 28. If you’re still unsure about which classic to choose, try one of Stevenson’s. For details and prizes, see “Celebrating the Classics” Query Contest--Held Over, at http://dfwcon.org/.

Adventure classics -- A book made from a map

Treasure Island

by Robert Louis Stevenson

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“Anybody can write a short story -- a bad one, I mean. . but not everyone may hope to write even a bad novel. It is the length that kills,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote. But he puzzled greatly over why, after several years of turning out reams of short stories -- good ones -- poems and essays, he had not achieved a novel.

Maybe he required a certain amount of maturity to write his first novel, Treasure Island. After all, he had only turned 30 the year before beginning the novel in September 1881. It may have required a certain amount of emotional support -- he had also married the previous year, to American divorcee Fanny Vandegrift.

A stay at a Swiss sanatorium had done little either to help Stevenson’s always frail health or his writing ability. But during a Scottish summer vacation in 1881 when, biographer and fellow Scot Ian Bell notes, “The Highland weather did its Highland worst,” Stevenson began to write again.

“On a chill September morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire, and the rain drumming on the window, I began,” Stevenson wrote. “I have begun (and finished) a number of other books, but I cannot remember to have sat down to one of them with more complacency.”

It started with a map drawn either by Stevenson or his twelve-year-old stepson Lloyd. “The map was the most of the plot,” Bell writes, quoting Stevenson in his biography, Dreams of Exile. The map’s island, “like a fat dragon standing up,” bore the now-classic “X marks the spot,” designation. And it had a young boy hero, Jim Hawkins, to charm Lloyd, Stevenson’s “touchstone” for the things boys liked.

It also had one of Stevenson’s greatest characters, the tall one-legged pirate John Silver, the great mover of the story’s action. “Sometimes it is as though R.L.S. were tempting us to admire this figure whose personality swings like a pendulum,” Bell writes. “But who Long John actually is seems less important that what, by contrast, he shows the others to be.”

Jim Hawkins at last collected his share of treasure and returned safely home, but Stevenson continued to roam the world until he found his own Treasure Island, Upolu in the Samoan Islands, now part of the independent state of Samoa.

He had traveled all over the Pacific, Bell writes, and considered making his home on Hawaii. But even friendships, including the one with King Kalakaua illustrating this post, couldn’t make Stevenson settle down in a land he considered “too civilized.” Instead, he settled on Samoa, at an estate near the village of Vailima in 1893.

He surely would have left it, too, if he had lived longer. But in December 1894 he died, not from the tuberculosis that had afflicted him all his life, but from “apoplexia,” according to the copy of his death certificate at
www.robert-louis-stevenson.org/ .

He was buried on nearby Mount Vaea, under an epitaph from one of his poems, “Home is the sailor, home from the sea. . .”

(Next Wednesday -- In September, Adventure classics turns from the sea to stories with other young protagonists, beginning with L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables.)

Adventure classics -- A flight through the heather

Kidnapped

by Robert Louis Stevenson

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I can’t help wondering whether prescience, coincidence, or simply wishful thinking led Robert Louis Stevenson to open his 1886 novel Kidnapped by having young David Balfour say, “I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning. . . when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father’s house. The sun began to shine. . . .”

Seventeen-year-old David seems curiously happy for a young man whose parents were lately dead. Stevenson himself was only a few years older when he incurred his family’s displeasure for the formation of a club whose constitution began with the words, “Disregard everything our parents have taught us.”

Stevenson’s parents were not pleased. Stevenson’s biographer, J.C. Furnas, quoted his father as saying “You have rendered my whole life a failure.” Stevenson’s marriage in 1880 to an American divorcee ten years his senior didn’t improve his family’s opinion.

His wife, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, would soon charm the parents as she had Robert. And the subsequent publication of his son’s best known works also may have softened the elder Stevenson’s opinion. But not until his father’s death in 1887 did Robert feel free to seek a complete change of climate to deal with his ill health.

image: Wikimedia commons

Kidnapped itself, written while Stevenson searched vainly for a more congenial climate, testifies to an affection for his Scottish homeland that endured despite its adverse effect on the lung diseases that had plagued him since childhood. Except for the beginning and ending, the novel’s plot consists mainly of describing David Balfour’s wanderings through the Scottish Highlands. But it’s not a description that would appear in any tourist’s brochure. Stevenson knew better than to sugarcoat the rigors of climate and terrain in the land he loved.

Stevenson added a final shock to his family’s sensibilities in his choice of a companion for David Balfour’s wanderings. After leaving his father’s house, David showed up at the estate of his miserly uncle Ebenezer Balfour, not realizing that he, not Ebenezer, was the rightful heir. Although a shipwreck finally thwarted Ebenezer’s attempts to get rid of David, the young man soon found himself a suspect in a murder and forced to flee in the company of historical figure Alan Breck Stewart.

And who was Alan Breck Stewart? An adherent of Bonnie Prince Charlie, failed pretender to the British throne, whose family, as Catholics, were anathema to the Presbyterianism of Stevenson’s family. Ironically, although Alan Breck failed to put Prince Charlie on a throne, David Balfour would never have survived to gain his own rightful place without the aid of Alan’s fictional alter ego.

(Next Friday -- I’m beginning to worry about the “orphan” theme emerging from this month’s adventure classics with young protagonists. At least the Melendy children still have one parent left, but that doesn’t keep them from setting the house on fire and other disasters in Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays.)

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Note to readers -- I have removed a comment linking to a website I have not had a chance to verify.  Let me know if you have had any problems associated with links on this blog. -- Melissa