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Daniel Levine explains why the classic story of Jekyll and Hyde is about more than just good and evil.
What inspired you to write Hyde?
I awoke one morning, staring at my hand which lay on the mattress before my face. Suddenly I was reminded of the scene in Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde when Hyde awakes unexpectedly in Jekyll's bed, having transformed overnight without the aid of the magical potion. And like a flash I had it—a new idea. I would tell the story of Jekyll and Hyde from Hyde's perspective.
What is your relationship with Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?
I had read Jekyll and Hyde in 10th grade English class. My teacher had divided us into small groups and assigned each group a portion of the novella to "present" to the class. My two friends and I decided to make a video (back in the days of VHS camcorders). I played Hyde with terrific flair, sneering and cowering and bucking about in the agonizing throes of transformation. Something in the character obviously appealed to me even then: his misanthropy, his furtive manner, the touch of wretchedness that attends him. To play him, even in a silly video, is to realize that he's not pure evil; he's a man, a possibly misunderstood one, whom everyone unreasonably hates.
What interested you about Hyde's character? Why did you want to tell the novel from his point of view?
I have always been interested in the indefensible character, the despicable narrator who wins us over with the power of his voice and pathetic need to tell us his terrible story. Humbert Humbert, Hermann (from Nabokov's Despair), Patrick Bateman, Alex (from A Clockwork Orange), Freddie Montgomery (from Banville's Book of Evidence—all of Banville's narrators, in fact). Many great television characters as well: Don Draper, Tony Soprano, Al Swearengen. They are scoundrels, awful people, and yet we come to love them. I wanted to do the same for Edward Hyde.
How did you manage to make the story of Hyde your own?
I went back and read Stevenson's novella. What interested me as much as Hyde's potential for humanization were the gaps in the original narrative, the hidden implications. When the police search Hyde's house in Soho, they find it finely appointed, with pictures on the wall, clothes in the wardrobe, and a housekeeper with an evil air of hypocrisy. These were wonderful, rich details I wanted to investigate and develop.
How long did you work on Hyde?
For a year I just did research. I read everything I could about the Victorian era, histories, biographies, novels. I started the novel over and over, each time realizing I was still too far away from the central action. Finally I decided to plot the story out—on notecards, as Nabokov did. Yet even then I still didn't have Hyde's voice right—he was too articulate, too casual in his telling. I had to inject the craven urgency into him. It took three years of actual writing, from the earliest disastrous drafts to the version I submitted to publishers.
Can you expand on the research you conducted?
I began reading about Robert Louis Stevenson's life and recognized many resemblances to Henry Jekyll in his upper-
class, somewhat suffocating, only-child upbringing, his conflicting desires for respectability and sensual bohemian pleasure. Stevenson was a highly sensitive soul, with a vigorous adventurer's spirit and a rather sickly, emaciated body. He was attuned to the classic dilemma of existence, an expansive mind trapped in a limiting, dying body. He was equally keen to the hypocritical nature of Victorian (and more generally human) society: the masks we all must wear to play our parts, the manners we must affect, the urges and inclinations we must hide. At its heart this is what Jekyll and Hyde is about—not good and evil, but mores and impulses, pretense and primal feeling. I wanted to honor and explore the true story which Stevenson could not tell, given the strictures of literary expectation at the time. I wanted to write something Stevenson might have liked and approved of, as a writhing outgrowth of his own nightmarish tale.
Victor Frankenstein is another famous literary character whose scientific experiments go awry. Do you see any similarities between Jekyll and Frankenstein?
We are pressured to believe that Jekyll is a good man, generous and decent, who is led astray by his research into the dual nature of man, who is composed of good and evil. Yet at the same time Jekyll commits many questionable acts in Stevenson's story. He deceives his friends, and flirts with exposing his grotesque secret to his most trusted associates. Between the lines, there is the definite sense that Jekyll wants to be caught and found out. He is in many ways like Victor Frankenstein, fiendishly obsessed with his work and yet repulsed by its product, devoted to his own ambitions and self-improvement and yet recklessly self-destructive and negligent toward those he loves most. These are not "good" men, they are dangerous egomaniacs, driven toward self-annihilation. More than a tale of extreme magical science, Jekyll and Hyde (and Frankenstein) is a psychological portrait of a brilliant and deeply disturbed soul—or pair of souls.
What are you working on now?
I have a few projects in the works. One is a story about Neanderthals, the last existing human race other than Homo sapiens, which went extinct around 30,000 years ago. I've always been interested in the past; I tend to glorify it. But after spending so much time in Victorian London, trying to make everything as historically accurate as possible, I am also interested in looking ahead to the near future. According to our linear timescale, the future hasn't happened yet, and thus it presents endless opportunities for invention and exploration of possible worlds which might grow out of our own.
Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.
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