Robert Louis Stevenson: An Anthology

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.