Collected Essays. Brian Aldiss
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is my dictionary’s definition of a viol: ‘held between the knees when played’. You imagine someone playing a kind of violin, gripping it with his knees … I was also reading funnies to my mother, to keep her amiable, like Saki and Stephen Leacock. You remember Leacock’s ‘My Financial Career’? That broke us up. I thought she would have one of her fits. Lovecraft’s story is a kind of ‘My Musical Career’. I know that what I am saying will offend the devout, and that it just goes to show I was a hopeless neurotic aged seven, but that’s how it was. That’s what Zann did up in that peaked garret. Anyone for masturbation fantasies?
How was Zann’s playing on this instrument of his? Fantastic, delirious, hysterical, is the answer. Okay, but later? Oh, later, the frantic playing became a blind mechanical unrecognizable orgy, is the answer. And what was Zann doing while he played? He was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and twisted like a monkey, is the answer. You see, he was playing a wild Hungarian dance. Hence the uncanny perspiration. Are all Hungarian dances like that? Hope not, is the answer.
Something broke the glass and came in through the window while Zann was in this state. We never figured out what actually came in, apart from the blackness—though it’s true blackness screamed with shocking music. The Hungarians at it again, we supposed. Mother loved that bit. Perhaps she was thinking that my so-called father might be going to break in and attack us again. The idea certainly entered my mind. There was an hysterical edge to our laughter. Even as I read, I was dripping with uncanny perspiration.
It’s all so long ago. We were living in New England then. How foolish we were, how innocent, how—unread!
Even now, grey-haired and no longer quite so neurotic, I still see how whole sentences in that wonderful story must have struck those two 1930s idiots as funny. ‘My liking for him did not grow.’ ‘I had a curious desire to look out of that window, over the wall and down the unseen slope at the glittering roofs and spires which must lie outspread there.’ Well, all I can say is that when we looked out of our kitchen window we gazed down unseen slopes onto a banana yard.
To top it all, poor old Erich Zann was dumb and deaf. We had no idea of political correctness in our house. We were Presbyterians. We found deafness funny, particularly in a musician. (Beethoven was not on our curriculum.) Funny too, we thought in our perverted way, was the fate that overcame the old deaf wistful shabby grotesque strange satyrlike distorted nearly bald—with what youthful zeal I shouted out the adjectives!—viol-player. There’s the divinely hilarious moment when the unnamed hero feels ‘strange currents of wind’ and clutches Zann’s ice-cold stiffened unbreathing face, whose bulging eyes bulged uselessly into the void. I could hardly get the words out. Mother burnt a pair of pink bloomers with the iron.
Jesus, how we laughed. How silly I was at seven. Didn’t know a bit of good hokum when I saw it …
All the characters in Stevenson’s story are isolated males: Mr Utterson, the lawyer; his friend and distant relation, Mr Enfield; Poole, the servant; and, of course, Dr Jekyll himself. They live separately in a city, the loneliest place. Jekyll himself foresees this isolation increasing in the future, when men become scarcely human, but rather ‘incongruous and independent denizens’. In the story, London masquerades as Stevenson’s native Edinburgh. All told, it’s a good setting for horror.
The horror is of a markedly cerebral kind. There are no monstrous creatures going about the world, as in Frankenstein or Dracula. Of course there is Hyde. But Hyde is a projection of Jekyll. This is why the story still interests us: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a pre-Jungian fable, a vivid illustration of the Shadow side of a decent man, that aspect—vigorously suppressed by the religious and ‘unco’ guid’ of Victorian Calvinist Scotland—of our natures whose presence we all have to acknowledge. The aspect which, as Jekyll says of his drug, shakes ‘the very fortress of identity’.
The fable concerns the shattering of this fortress. This is the point. The drug Jekyll takes is not the instrument of Hyde’s coming into being. The drug is merely a neutral means of transmission. In Jekyll’s words, ‘The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; but it shook the doors of the prison house of my disposition’.
With these powerful words, Jekyll admits that had he undertaken his experiment in a nobler spirit, he might have released from within himself ‘an angel instead of a fiend’. How remarkably this reflection of the 1880s recalls comments on LSD experiments of the 1950s!
The best part of the novella—it’s scarcely a novel—resides in the final section, in Jekyll’s statement. It’s wonderful, a tour de force, although at the same time rather bloodless. Hyde’s sins are no more than alluded to. This is more a sermon than a horror tale. Here again, the future is prefigured. The drug cannot be correctly administered, or its effects controlled; we are reminded of L-dopa in Oliver Sachs’s remarkable story Awakenings, where any dose proved too little or too much.
Here is Stevenson’s moral imagination speaking, fleshing out what started as a dream (as did Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). ‘It fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.’ This is the Calvinist speaking, trying to hold to a rigid morality which the world was to cast aside in another generation or so, letting loose the Hyde of the First World War, 1914–1918.
Like the other two nineteenth-century novels of terror already referred to, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has frequently been filmed. To my mind, all film versions of Frankenstein and Dracula are crude and almost parodic versions of the novels themselves.
Such is not the case with film versions of Dr Jekyll. The horror, as I’ve said, is too cerebral, too bloodless, for the movies. Injustice must be seen to be done. We have to be shown Fredric March or Spencer Tracy, or whoever it is, consorting with prostitutes, wielding the stick, being cruel. We have to see the beaker foam, with its deadly but seductive brew, to watch the terrible transformation, whiskers and all, take place … To witness what is at first willed become involuntary.
I believe Stevenson, the old Teller of Tales, would be pleased that Hollywood reached towards something darker and more disturbing than Treasure Island.
Lecture given at the IAFA Conference of the Fantastic
I have come to few conclusions regarding national differences in British and American fantasy. The longer you look at the two animals the vaguer seem the distinctions. If you observe the dromedary or Arabian camel and the Bactrian camel—the only two sorts of camel on the planet—you immediately see the distinction we all know from childhood: the former has one hump, the latter two. But if you look at all other animals in the zoo, you don’t find anything else resembling a camel. Not even their relations, the llamas. The similarities are overwhelmingly greater than the differences.
Here we have these two camels, the US and the UK variety of fantasy. Here you have this panel reduced to counting humps.
Perhaps because of my early reading—my very early reading, when books still contained pictures—I regard fantasy, as distinct from SF, as having a spiritual, or perhaps I mean a religious, or perhaps I mean a metaphysical side. This regard comes from the area whence all memories spring, the personal deeps, compounded of old forgotten stories told and read, alchemic woodcuts, and perhaps a surly reproduction of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s doppelganger drawing, How They Met Themselves, with lovers deep in the forest, transfixed. Perhaps too the interchange of light and shade above one’s cot—who knows?
If forced to it for the purposes of this