Daniel Levine: Author interview

You’ve read the story — The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde — but have you ever wondered about Hyde? Was he more than the monster that claimed Dr Jekyll? Daniel Levine thought so, and in Hyde, he tells that story, giving Hyde a voice in a re-examination of those last days before the end Stevenson’s novel. Below, he was kind enough to discuss his thoughts on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, his writing, and why retellings of old tales from different perspectives are growing so popular.

You live, breathe and work in writing — what or who influenced your passion for writing?

I was lucky to grow up in a house filled with books. My parents are voracious readers—my mother is a literature professor, in fact, and my father is a phycisist—and they encouraged me to read and write my own little stories. There were some teachers in school who assigned short story projects, or who allowed me to add a creative spin to the well-worn 5 paragraph essays, and it became clear that I had an imaginative aptitude and a certain flair with language, and that I really liked storytelling. The act of writing fertilizes the writer’s inner life, makes it grow rich and different from the outer life. I was something of a shy, introverted kid, and the ability to nurture and develop my own private inner world was a gift that let me feel less lonely amongst my rowdier, sports-savvy, outgoing peers. The writers I read when I was young, like Roald Dahl, Gordon Korman, Gary Paulsen, Beverly Cleary, Robert Cormier—they all inspired and instructed me as much as the writers I’ve loved as an “adult,” such as John Banville, Kazuo Ishiguro, Robert Graves, Mary Gaitskill, Peter Carey, Nabokov.

What is the most exciting about writing for you?

I begin each writing day by reading over the previous day’s work, to re-enter the fictional world. Sometimes this is depressing: if by today’s light the work is not as good as you’d believed yesterday, or if you realize as you approach the blankness beyond the last word that you don’t know how to continue, where to go. But there are days when as you read you feel the fictional world creeping over you like a tingling skin, like a shimmering hologram overlaying your room and desk and computer, and you really do enter the world of the story. When you reach the end of what you’ve written you just continue—you see the path ahead, and yet it doesn’t lead where you entirely expected, you’re almost surprised by what your fingers are typing. That’s the most exciting part, when you surprise yourself—even with an unusual image or a word choice, and you say, Where did that come from? The actual process of stringing words together into evocative and unexpected arrangements never fails to excite me.

Describe Hyde and the book for readers who are not familiar with your work?

Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 classic horror story The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ends in disaster: the boundary which has separated the “good” Jekyll from the “evil” Hyde erodes, and finally Jekyll is subsumed by Hyde. Hyde is trapped for several days in Jekyll’s laboratory workshop, unable to leave because he is wanted for murder, pacing, awaiting his inevitable discovery and capture. My novel Hyde fills in those final tormented days. We are inside Hyde’s head as he paces and remembers, trying to make sense of the sinister events that led to this miserable dead-end. Out comes the story of the true nature of Jekyll’s psychosis and Hyde’s purpose, and the sordid deeds they committed together in the guise of Edward Hyde. It is the side of the tale that Stevenson did not tell, yet Hyde also follows the chronology and sketchy sequence of events that the original tale lays out. It is Stevenson’s story as seen in a mirror, an inverse world.

Do you remember the first time you Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde? What was your first impression?

I first read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 10^th grade English. Our teacher divided the class into small groups and assigned portions of the novella for us to present to the other students. My two friends and I filmed a dramatic reenactment of our scenes, which included the killing of Carew and Hyde’s subsequent “cover-up.” I played Hyde, scowling and sneering at the camera, and bucking about in the agonizing throes of transformation. Even then I recognized that Hyde was something more than the apotheosis of pure evil, as Jekyll insists. There is a wretched humanity to him, an underdog quality which captured my interest and sympathy. Similarly there is a suspicious aspect to Jekyll’s self-affirmed goodness and innocence. His actions are hardly those of a victim—he flirts with danger and exposure as if he wishes on some level to be caught.

From there, how did you the inspiration for your Hyde strike?

The idea for Hyde came to me fifteen years later, in my sleep: I woke one morning staring at my hand, and remembered suddenly the scene when Hyde awakes unexpectedly in Jekyll’s bed, gazing at his own transformed hand. When I went back and re-read Stevenson’s novella (the same edition I’d used in high school), my original impressions were strongly confirmed. Hyde was not a mindless monster. He was a vehicle for Jekyll’s deeply suppressed libidinal urges, an avatar through which Jekyll could behave as constrictive Victorian society—and his own exacting scruples—would never allow him to behave. The story isn’t a parable of good and evil. It’s a psychological case study of a man at war with his own animal instincts, and a commentary on the masks all humans must wear in order to function in civilization and appear “normal.” I am very aware of this split within myself, the battle between primal impulse and proper etiquette. I wanted to explore this schism, and give the misunderstood and maligned Hyde the chance to tell his side of the story at last.

What was the most important thing to you to get right (to make readers understand) about Hyde in your novel?

Hyde is not the beast that destroys Jekyll. Hyde is the instrument by which Jekyll destroys himself. What is most psychologically interesting about the original story is Dr. Jekyll’s self-destructive direction, his perverse yearning to be found out and exposed and punished. He is not the good man we’re meant to believe, he is a damaged and brilliant scientist whose terrible curiosity drives him to annihilation, exactly like Victor Frankenstein. Hyde is the monster Jekyll created, frightening, angry, violent—but also aware of Jekyll’s rejection, hurt, maligned, frightened, and eager for a friend, or at least a sympathetic ear.

Hyde is a very specific and well-known character – when you began writing, how did you come to find Hyde’s “voice” within your story, given what Stevenson had of Hyde in his novel?

Hyde’s name is widely recognizable, but we don’t really know much about him. Even people familiar with Stevenson’s story can’t give many specifics about Hyde—vagueness defines him, an ominous murkiness you can’t clearly see. Yet there are hints here and there, little details: his rooms are well-appointed with pictures on the walls, he has a housekeeper, he is heard weeping at the end as he paces the laboratory. Hyde is emotional, he has good taste, he is highly sensual. This is not a demon, this is a real person—a wholly distinct personality—with desires and fears who is being controlled by Jekyll; he is happy to serve the Master but increasingly resentful of his dismissiveness. He prefers the dingier slums of London, the low haunts, the seedy life. Yet he has access to Jekyll’s experience, his Master’s high-class society and lexicon. Hyde’s voice is a hybrid of upper and lower classes, Jekyll’s eloquence with his own rough poetic quality and taste for cockney slang. He is sensitive to grimy details, smells, bodies—he’s the primitive animal within. Indifferent to arbitrary morality, but not without gentleness, tenderness, sense of humor. All this I gathered or inferred from Stevenson’s hazy depiction and had to convert into a voice on the page. It took many, many drafts to get it “right,” I began the novel over and over and over. Each time I got closer to the voice, the deep, dark, romantic monologue in my head. It’s like plucking at a violin string as you turn the wooden peg which gets tighter and tighter and the note more and more refined until it’s finally, suddenly in tune.

After writing Hyde, did your understanding and appreciation of Stevenson’s novel change? How so?

Stevenson was initially inspired to write Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by a hallucinatory dream. He scorched off one draft of the story, which he ending up burning in the fire and then rewriting from scratch. It supposedly took him about a week to write the novel. It must’ve been like working through a fever, that pace and output, as if to capture the essence of his nightmare before it dissolved. I don’t know how much cold, editorial consideration went into his composition of the book, how much deliberate subtlety Stevenson finessed into the narrative. Yet for all its stroke-of-genius hastiness, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has great depth—the vast bulk of the story is beneath the surface, and what we get is the proverbial tip of the iceburg.

My point in writing Hyde was to explore the world of the understory, and so I really came to appreciate the sub-surface structure of the original novel, its existential weight, its psychological intricacy, its prescient understanding of the human condition. Also, the original story is told chronologically out-of-order. We get three different perspectives on the “strange case” in three different narratives, which jumbles the sequence of events. In Hyde, the story follows that chronology in its proper order, and the dramatic arc of that chronology is beautiful and powerful. Stevenson created this perfect plot and then disassembled it, hiding the story’s true arc.

In the process of writing Hyde, did anything make your pause and wonder – am I doing the right thing? It’s a daunting task to take on a classic, I think.

I never doubted the “rightness” of what I was writing, in the sense that it might have been “wrong” to retell this classic story. First of all, it’s such an emerging genre, these classic retellings—Finn, Havisham, Longborne, Ahab’s Wife, Sherlock­. People are obviously interested in reexamining these well-known stories from other, unseen perspectives. And Hyde’s voice truly is the other, unseen perspective. He was dying to tell his side of the story, I could hear him—he called to me in my sleep, practically. That’s why we write stories, I think, to assuage those voices yearning to be heard. As for Stevenson, I didn’t worry whether I was dishonoring him or ripping him off by reviving his fictional world and his fantastic characters. I read about him, felt like I understood him, like we shared an affinity. He would have been flattered and pleased to know his work had inspired me. And there was more of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that Stevenson wanted to tell, the nastiness and horror that he felt constrained from specifying, given his Victorian audience. Hyde is my way of giving free reign to that delicious horror and imaginative potential.

This is your first novel – what was the most important thing you’ve learned in this process?

In order to publish a novel, I think you have to want to be a writer, deeply and hungrily. The work has to be the top priority—above your day job, above sleep or sex or socializing. And you have to do it every day, or almost every day. In this way it’s rather a Zen practice: the only way to do it is just to do it. You have to write and write and write. You have to be okay with deleting what you’ve written or starting over. And you have to be self-critical, holding yourself to the highest, most demanding standards. Yet at the same time you have to be generous with yourself and supportive; obviously you don’t get anywhere if you’re telling yourself that everything you do is garbage. You have to be your own biggest fan and supporter. You have to believe that you can do this incredibly private thing every day, this world-creating act which takes place inside you. No one knows what you go through, and honestly no one truly cares—not remotely as much as you do. You have to care with every fiber of your being.

To find out more about Daniel, check out his site.