by Kage Baker
“How now? No cigarettes? This is my dream and I can have anything I want. No cigarette, no story.” Stevenson laced his slender fingers together and smiled.
“Look, Louis, there’s something you should know.” Joseph bent forward seriously. “Cigarettes are not really good for your lungs. Trust me. They’ll make your cough worse, honest. Now, look, I’ve got gold certificates here for you.”
“It’s cigarettes or nothing, I say.”
“But I tell you I can’t get any—” Joseph seized the hair at his temples and pulled in vexation. Then he halted, as if listening to an inner voice. “Hell, what can I lose?” He opened the lid of the trunk and brought out his pad of yellow lined paper. Casting a reproachful glance at Stevenson he scribbled something down and fed his message into the invisible slot. Almostimmediately the reply emerged. He scanned it, wrote something more and fed it back. Another quick reply.
Stevenson watched all this with amusement. “He’s got a wee devil in the box poking his letters back out,” he speculated.
“All I want is to make the man happy,” Joseph retorted. “Fame, I offer him. Riches, too. What does he do? He turns capricious on me. Lousy mortal.” He read the next communication and his eyes narrowed. Hastily he backed away from the trunk, putting a good eight feet between himself and it.
“What’s amiss now?” inquired Stevenson. “Old Nick’s in a temper, doubtless.”
“I’d cover my ears if I were you,” replied the other through gritted teeth. As if on cue the trunk gave a horrific screech. It shook violently; there was a plume of foul smoke; there was one last convulsive shudder—then a cigarette dropped from the orifice, very much the worse for wear, mashed flat and in fact on fire.
Joseph ran forward and snatched it up. He blew out the flame and handed the smoldering mess to Stevenson.
“There,” he snapped. “It’s even lit for you. Satisfied?” Stevenson just stared at it, dumfounded.
“Smoke the damned thing!” thundered the other. Stevenson took a hasty drag while Joseph bent over the trunk and did some diagnostic procedures.
“Did we break Hell’s own postbox?” ventured Stevenson after a moment.
“I hope not,” the other man snarled. “And I hope you’re doing some thinking about story ideas.”
“Right.” Stevenson inhaled again. The cigarette did not draw well. He eyed it critically but thought it best not to complain. “Right, then. What sort of story shall we give them? A romance, I dare say.”
“Sex is always popular,” conceded Joseph. He stood, brushed off his knees and took up the yellow lined pad. “Go on.”
“Right. There’s a woman. She’s a beauty, but she labors under some kind of difficulty. Perhaps there’s a family curse, but she’s pure as the snows of yesteryear. And there’s a fellow to rescue her, a perfect gentle knight as it were, but he’s knocked about the world a bit. Not a hapless boy at any rate. And there’s an older fellow, a bad ‘un, a dissolute rake. Byronic.”
“Not very original, if you’ll pardon my saying so,” remarked Joseph, though he did not stop writing.
“No, I suppose not. How many ways are there to write a romance? Let’s make it a woman who’s the bad ‘un. Tries to lure the hero from theheroine. There’s a thought! A sorceress. Metaphorically speaking. Perhaps even in fact. Wouldn’t that be interesting?”
“Sounding good.” The other man nodded as he wrote. “Where’s all this happening, Louis?”
“France. Medieval France.”
“So this is a costume drama.”
“A what? Oh. Yes, silks and velvets and whitest samite. Chain mail and miniver. And the sea, I’m sure, with a ship standing off the coast signaling mysteriously. To the beauteous wicked dame, who’s a spy!
Build this around some historical incident. Put the Black Prince in it. Maybe she’s a spy for him and the hero’s a Frenchman. No, no, no—the British public won’t take that. On the other hand, this is for the Yankees, isn’t it?”
“Sounding good, Louis, sounding really good.” The other tore off his written sheet with a flourish.
“Let’s just feed it into the moviola and see what winds up on the cutting-room floor.”
“I’m sure that means something to you, but I’m damned if I know what,” remarked Stevenson, watching as the sheet was pulled into the trunk. “How does it do that?” Joseph did not answer, because the sheet came spewing back at once. He pulled it forth and studied it, frowning.
“What’s wrong? Don’t they like it?”
“Oh, er, they’re crazy about it, Louis. It’s swell. They just have a few suggestions. A few changes they want made.”
“They want something rewritten?”
“Uh… the Middle Ages is out. France is out. Knights in armor stuff is expensive to shoot. They want to know if you can make it the South Seas. Give it some of that wonderful tropical ambiance you do so well.”
“I’ve never been in the South Seas,” said Stevenson coldly. He remembered his cigarette and puffed at it.
“No, not yet, but that’s all right. You can fake it. California’s almost tropical, isn’t it? Hot, anyway. Parts of it. That’s the Pacific Ocean out there, right? Just write some palm trees into the scenery. Now, er, they want you to drop the girl and the guy. There’s just no audience for pure sweethearts now. But they think the evil lady is fabulous. They think the story should mostly revolve around her. Lots of costume changes and bedroom scenes. She plays for power at the court of this Dark Lord guy. Black Prince, I mean.”
“The Black Prince never went to the South Seas either, you know. He was a medieval Plantagenet.”
“Whatever. I’m afraid the distinction is lost on them, Louis.” Joseph gave a peculiar embarrassed shrug. “Historical accuracy is not a bigissue here. If we’re going to make it the South Seas he has to be something else anyway. Maybe some kind of witch doctor in a black helmet or something. They just liked the name, Black Prince, it’s got a kind of ring to it.”
“They sound like a supremely ignorant lot. Why don’t they write their own bloody story?” Stevenson muttered. His airy humor was descending fast.
“Now, Louis, don’t take it that way. They really love your stuff. They just need to tailor it to their audience a little, that’s all.”
“South Seas be damned.” Stevenson leaned back. “Why shouldn’t I write about what I know? If France isn’t good enough for them, what about this country? I saw some grand scenery from the railway carriage. Now, wait! What about a true American romance? This has possibilities. Do you know, I saw a man threaten to shoot a railway conductor dead, just because he’d been put off the coach for being drunk and disorderly? Only in America. It’s as good as the Montagues and Capulets, only with revolvers instead of rapiers. Prairies instead of pomegranate gardens. Picturesque barbarism. What about a hero who’s kidnapped at birth and raised by Red Indians?”
“Well, it’s been done, but okay.” The other began to write again.
“And there’s some additional obscurity to his birth… he’s the son of a Scots lord.”
“Gee, Louis, I don’t know… “
“And his younger brother succeeds to the title but emigrates to America, fleeing punishment for a crime he did not commit. Or perhaps he did. More interesting character. Or perhaps—”
“Is there any sex in this?”
“If you like. The brothers fall in love with the same woman, will that suit you? In fact… the girl is the betrothed of the brother who emigrates. She follows him devotedly. While searching for him, she’s kidnapped by the Red Indian band of whom her fiancé‘s brother is now chief. He falls in love with her. Claims her as his bride. Forced marriage takes place. She’s terrified, but compelled by the mating rituals of man in his primal innocence.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, Louis!”
“Let’s see them get that past the scribes and pharisees of popular taste,” sneered Stevenson, and tossed the last fragment of his cigarette into the fire. “Meanwhile, t
he fugitive brother has become a frontiersman, with buckskin clothes, long rifle, and quaint fur cap. Gets word that his betrothed has gone missing. Goes in search of her (he’s become an expert tracker too) and finds unmistakable evidence of her singular fate. Swears an oath of vengeance, goes out after the Red Indian whocommitted the enormity, vows to eat his heart, all unwitting they’re really brothers.”
“We’ve got a smash hit here, Louis.”
“You can cobble on some sort of blood-and-thunder ending. True identities revealed all around. Perhaps the Red Indian brother has a distinctive and prominent birthmark. Fugitive brother becomes a heroic guide leading settlers across the plains. Red Indian brother accepts his true identity as a white man but refuses to return to Great Britain, denounces the irrelevancy of the British aristocracy, runs for Congress instead. What about another cigarette?”
“Not a chance in hell,” Joseph replied, politely enough nevertheless. He ripped out the page he had been scribbling on and fed it into the trunk. “But how’s about a cocktail?” He produced a flask and offered it to Stevenson. “French brandy? You like this. It’s a matter of record.” “Great God, man.” Stevenson extended his long hand, just as the yellow sheet came curling back out of the trunk. It was covered with dense commentary in violet ink. Both men frowned at it. “You drink,” Joseph told him. “I’ll see what they say.” “I can tell you what they don’t like, old chap.” Stevenson took a long pull from the flask. “Ah. The plot’s derivative and wildly improbable. How’s the hero to get kidnapped by Red Indians in Scotland, for Christ’s sake? Disgruntled family retainer makes away with the wee babby and sends it off down the Clyde in a Moses basket, which by some inexplicable chance washes up in the Gulf of Mexico a day later?”
“Actually they don’t have a problem with that part.” The other man read swiftly. “But the Wild West business tends to bomb big time. The frontiersman doesn’t work for them, either. He can’t have a rifle because that would mean he shoots wild animals, see, which is marketing death, protests and threats against distributors, bad box office. They like the sex stuff, though. They just want to know if you can make it the South Seas where all this happens.”
Very slowly, Stevenson had another swallow of brandy. “Why don’t your masters send you round to that Herman Melville chap?” he inquired with an edge in his voice. “He wrote some jolly seagoing palaver, didn’t he? Why isn’t he having this dream?”
“Too hard to film his books,” responded Joseph. “But, Louis baby, listen to yourself. You’re arguing with a hallucination. Isn’t that silly? Now, would it really be so hard, changing the plot around a little?
That whole primitive mating ritual bit would play just as well in Tahiti, you-know. You could even put in—” he looked cautiously around, as though someone might be listening, “—pirates.”
“Buccaneers and native women? Who do you propose is going tocome see these photo-plays of yours? Not the bourgeois citizens of Edinburgh, I can tell you.”
“Well, it doesn’t have to be pornographic. Just, you know, racy. Mildly prurient. Nothing criminal. Say your pirate’s a fine upstanding young fellow who just happened to get press-ganged.”
“Men were press-ganged into the Navy, not into pirate crews,” said Stevenson in disgust. “I grow weary of this dream. Why don’t you clear off and let the other beasties come back? I’d rather blue devils than this.”
“But I’m not a nightmare! I’m a good dream, honest. Anyway, I can’t go. I’ve been assigned to stay with you until I get a usable concept.”
“Then I’ll leave you.” Stevenson struggled to his feet. He gasped for breath and with a determined stride moved out from the fire into darkness; but his legs seemed to curl under him, impossibly thin long inhuman legs, and he fell. The other man was beside him at once, leading him back to the fire solicitously.
“Hey, hey, hey, Louis, let’s take it easy. I’m here to help you, remember?”
“It’s the damned fog.” Stevenson was trembling. “I cannot get away from it. Damned wet air. Mountains aren’t high enough.”
“Gee, that’s awful.” Joseph settled him down by the fire, put the folded coat back in place under his head, poured another cup of tea. “Maybe you should travel more. Now, you could go to the—”
“South Seas, yes, I’d guessed you were going to say that,” Stevenson groaned. “Look here, what about a compromise? The story takes place on a ship traveling in the South Seas. I’ve been on ships. I can write about them. Your hero is a strapping young Kanaka who’s been carried off by whites.”
“A Hawaiian? That’s an interesting angle.” The other was writing again. “Why’d they kidnap him?”
“They needed crewmen. Theirs died of scurvy, I dare say.”
“Shanghaied!” exclaimed Joseph with gusto. “Love the title. Go on, Louis, go on.”
“He’s carried off on a whaling ship, away from his island home and his aged parents. He’s a heathen (this is before the missionaries) but nevertheless naturally virtuous. The drunken behavior of the white sailors fills him with righteous dismay.”
“We can show a lot of sleaze here. I like it.”
“His ship comes to the rescue of another ship under attack by pirates. Buccaneers have just boarded the other vessel and are in the act of putting passengers to the sword. Among the passengers is a beautiful young virtuous Scottish girl, no doubt traveling with her minister father. Probably has money too. Our Kanaka performs a particularlydaring act of rescue of the maiden. She falls in love with him, he with her.”
“Okay, okay, and?”
“They take him back to Scotland with them and… stop a bit!” Stevenson’s eyes lit up. “It’s not just one girl he rescues from pirates, it’s two! Minister’s daughter and a harlot who for some reason’s been traveling in the South Seas. Both fall in love with him!”
“Boy oh boy oh boy.” The other man fed his notes into the trunk. It spat them back again. He read the commentary. Stevenson, watching his face, gave a sob of exasperation and lay back.
“Now what’s wrong with it?”
“They didn’t go for the title. Funny. And they don’t want the hero to be a real Hawaiian. They like the other idea about him being a long-lost duke or earl or somebody like that. Like, his parents were English and their yacht got shipwrecked when he was a baby or something? And he just looks brown because of the tropical sun? Not really some native guy at all.”
“Bigots,” said Stevenson with contempt.
“No, no, no, guy, you have to understand. Look, you write for the magazines, Louis, you know the popular taste. They want sex, they want violence, but they want the hero to be a white guy. Preferably an English peer. Brown guys can’t be heroes. You know that.”
“They’re heroes in their own stories.”
“Oh, yeah? What about the Musketeers guy, Dumas, he was a quadroon or something, right? Who’s in his books? French kings and counts. Black, white, it’s only a metaphor anyway. Believe me, our audience wants rich white guys as heroes.”
“Well, I despise your audience.”
“No, you don’t. You need money as much as anybody else. You know the stuff you can’t write about. You know where you’re free to put in those really interesting bits in a way readers won’t mind. Villains! It’s the villains everyone secretly loves, Louis. They can be lowborn, they can be strange, they can do rotten things and it’s okay because that’s what the audience wants. And why? Because people are lowborn and strange and rotten, Louis! They want the hero to be this impossible perfect white guy so they can watch the villain beat the crap out of him, since it’s what they’d like to do themselves. As long as the villain loses in the end, they don’t have to feel guilty about it. And it’s all phony anyway. I mean, have you ever really talked to a member of the House of Lords? What a bunch of pinheads.”
“I see your point, but I can’t agree. The human condition is evil, but we must strive to be otherwise. A writer can’t glorify evil in his work. He can�
�t write of the miserable status quo of human life as though itwere a fine and natural state. He must morally instruct, he must inspire, he must hold up an ideal to be worked for—”
“Oh, garbage. You don’t believe that yourself, even. That’s why you wrote—” Joseph halted himself with an effort. “Well, look. Given that a writer has this other fine noble purpose in life, he’s still got to eat, okay? So there’s no harm in a nice swashbuckling adventure yarn with a swell dark villain—Byronic, like you said—and a little thin white cardboard hero to bounce off him. It sells, Louis, and there’s no point denying it. So. About this Dark Lord guy.”
“This is really too depressing.” Stevenson gazed into the fire. “I’ve never seen the pattern in this sort of thing. But it is what we do, isn’t it? We feed a perverse urge in our readers by creating supremely interesting images of evil. Perhaps we even cultivate that urge. The villain wins sympathy in our hearts through the skill of the writer. I’ve felt admiration for the rogue of the old romance myself, the man with the hand of the Devil on his shoulder. Great God, what are we doing when we create such characters? And yet they make the story live. “
“Now, now, buck up. Look. Suppose you’ve got your hero sailing along with his two ladies, one good, one bad. Nice tension there. Suppose, Louis, he’s got a Bad Guy chasing him, say the chief of the pirates, only this guy isn’t just a pirate, he’s the Pirate of pirates, powerful, intelligent, interesting—maybe he’s some kind of magician, picked it up in the islands—maybe he has something weird about his appearance, in a fascinating way. Huh? Huh, Louis?”
“You even intrigue me with it.” Stevenson turned listless eyes on him. “You persuade. You seduce. I want to take pen in hand and write the awful thing and gain immortal fame thereby. Oh, God, this is the real temptation.”
“Ah, come on, Louis. We’re not talking about sin, we’re talking about dramatic conflict.”
“What if dramatic conflict were a sin?” Stevenson said in a small frightened voice, looking back at the flames. “What if my old nurse was right and storytelling does imperil men’s souls? Because we do pander to their worst instincts. We do. Let me make my hero as brown as I will, he’ll still be the innocent, the Fool. He’ll still inspire contempt by his virtue. All my art is spent on making my villain fascinate and charm.”