Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

writing to London. There, his books are published; they bring him great fame, and wealth. But he lives like an exile on his island, and the aborigines call him Tusitala, “the teller of tales,” “the teller of stories.” So Stevenson, surely, also learned the language of that country. There he lived with his stepson and his wife, and he received some visitors. One of the people who visited him wasKipling. Kipling said that he could pass an exam on Stevenson’s work, that if someone mentioned a secondary character or an episode from his work, he would immediately recognize it.
    Stevenson had strong Scottish features: he was tall, very thin, not very strong physically, but with a great spirit. Once he was in a café in Paris and he heard a Frenchman say that Englishmen were cowards. At that moment, Stevenson felt English—at that moment he believed that the Frenchman was talking about him. So he rose and slapped the Frenchman. And the Frenchman said, “Sir, you have slapped me.” And Stevenson said, “So it seems.” Stevenson was always a great friend of France. He wrote articles about French poets, and admiring articles about Dumas’s novels, about Verne, aboutBaudelaire.
    The number of books about Stevenson is quite large. There is a book byChesterton about Stevenson, published at the beginning of the century. 24 There is another book, one by StephenGwynn, an Irish man of letters, published in the collection
English Men of Letters
. 25
    In the next class we will discuss a subject that was very dear to Stevenson: the subject of schizophrenia. We will look at this and at one of the stories of
New Arabian Nights
, and at a bit of Stevenson’s poetry.

CLASS 25

    THE WORKS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON:
NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS
, "MARKHEIM,"
THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE
. JEKYLL AND HYDE IN THE MOVIES.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
, BY OSCAR WILDE. "REQUIEM," BY STEVENSON.

    WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1966
    Today I am going to discuss the
New Arabian Nights
. 1 In English, people don’t say
A Thousand and One Nights
, but rather
The Arabian Nights
. When a very young Stevenson arrived in London, it was undoubtedly a fantastic city to him. Stevenson conceived of the idea of writing a contemporary
Arabian Nights
, based, above all, on those tales that are about Harun al-Rashid, who wanders through the streets of Baghdad in disguise. He invented a prince, Florizel of Bohemia, and his aide-de-camp, Colonel Geraldine. He has them disguise themselves and wander around London. And he makes them have fantastic, though not magical, adventures (except in the sense of the atmosphere, which is magical).
    Of all their adventures, I think the most memorable is “The Suicide Club.” There, Stevenson imagines a character, a kind of cynic, who thinks he can take advantage of suicide to start a business. He is a man who knows that there are many people longing to take their own lives, but who do not dare do so. So he founds a club. In this club they play a weekly or biweekly—I don’t remember which—game of cards. The prince joins this club out of a spirit of adventure, and he has to swear not to reveal its secrets. Later he must take responsibility for carrying out justice because of a mistake his aide commits. There is one very impressive character. His name is Mr. Malthus, a paralytic. And this man has nothing left in life, but he has discovered that of all the sensations, of all the passions, the strongest is fear. And so he toys with fear. He tells the prince, who is a brave man, “You should envy me, sir, for I am a coward.” He toys with fear by joining the Suicide Club.
    All of this occurs in a neighborhood on the outskirts of London. The players drink champagne, laugh with false mirth; there is an atmosphere similar to that in some stories by Edgar Allan Poe, about whom Stevenson wrote. The game is played like this: there is a table covered in green cloth, the president of the club deals the cards, and it is said of him—as incredible as it seems—that he is not interested in suicide. The members of the club have to pay a fairly high fee. The president must fully trust them. Every care is taken to make sure no spies join. If the members have a fortune, they make the president of the club their heir, for he lives off this macabre industry. And then he deals out the cards. Each of the players, when he receives his card—the English deck consists of fifty-two cards—looks at it. In the pack there are just