“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 to come 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, impossible 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 passengers a beautiful young virtuous Scottish girl, no doubt traveling with her minister father. Probably has money too. Our Kanaka performs particularly daring act of rescue of 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 it were 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.”