Daniel Levine joins us to talk about his debut novel, HYDE, an inventive and gorgeous retelling of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It's a fun conversation about our public and private selves, the ways we define evil, the mechanics of storytelling, the luck of human evolution, and more! Give it a listen!
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 4, Episode 14 - They Call Me MISTER Hyde!
"I like that we live in an age that's increasingly curious about this dark side, and not merely in terms of its pure darkness, but of how seemingly ordinary or normal people can commit atrocities."
[INTRO MUSIC] Welcome to the Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are listening to a weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show on iTunes, and you can find past episodes, get on our email list, and make a donation of the show at our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can also find us on Twitter at vmspod@facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow, and virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. After last week's heavy duty interview with D.G. Myers, where we explored his impending death, the death of the humanities, religion, books, life, and all that stuff, I thought we'd go with something a little lighter this time around, like the relationship of art to torture and the facades that people carry on throughout their entire lives. To help me with that topic is Daniel Levine, whose first novel, Hyde, has just come out from Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt. It's a retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson's story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this time from the perspective of Mr. Hyde. Now, that might sound trite or gimmicky or something, but I have to tell you, I found Hyde to be a real page turner in a good way. And the narrative voice was strong enough that I was compelled to see how Hyde's story was going to reconcile with what we know of the original Jekyll and Hyde tale. And Daniel Levine really chose a good book to do this with, because there are some of those alternative vision books about classics that riff off of one line and try to build an entire novel. In this case, Levine really finds a lot of space in which to play, because there are a lot of illusions and illusions in Stevenson's novel that give him the room to sort of expand and try to create a compliment, I guess, to the original book. And this new book, Hyde, the addition actually includes Stevenson's original novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Like I say, it's a pretty enjoyable book. I found myself kind of gripped by it once it really started going. And one of the things that Daniel talks about is the, well, the masks that we have and the different social and secret selves that we have that we only show at different times in different places. And it struck me, and I didn't mention it during our conversation, but one of my longtime friends and writer I hope to get on the show at some point down the line, Samuel Delaney, really? Well, the longer I got to know him, the more I realized that to the rest of us, or for the rest of us, we do have those different selves, the social self and the sexual self and these other incarnations or other aspects or facades, I guess. And to Delaney, I don't believe that's the case. I mean, I'm sure there are aspects of him that he doesn't share in different scenarios, but for the most part, I found him to be one of the most integrated personalities I'd ever met, which might be an aspect of his genius. I'm not entirely sure. And genius is not a term I throw around lightly. But I don't know how the rest of us get about that, how we managed to try to keep ourselves separate, where we show what we shouldn't show and what we keep contained. It's an interesting question. I'm glad Daniel explored it in the course of writing Hyde. Now Daniel Levine studied English literature and creative writing at Brown University and received his MFA in fiction writing from the University of Florida. He's taught composition and creative writing at high schools and universities, including New of Florida, Montclair State University and Metropolitan State College of Denver. Originally from New Jersey, he now lives in Colorado. Hyde is his first novel. And now the virtual memories conversation with Daniel Levine. (upbeat music) - The first question I have for you, where does Hyde come from? But it's not simply where does your book hide come from. It's also where does Jekyll's hide come from? And maybe where does Stevenson's hide come from? - Yeah, for Jekyll, Hyde comes from his childhood. It was an important question I had to ask myself. You know, why is it that in a general sense, we all have hides in the sense that we all have these inner selves. But where does Jekyll's hide come from? 'Cause his is particular and kind of a particularly nasty character. And you know, I was sort of dealing with the case of multiple personality disorder and where a lot of these originated from some trauma in the childhood, particularly in the form of, you know, parental abuse. And, you know, so what I've done is create this situation of this father who is rather a nightmare for Jekyll. And, you know, I hinted this throughout the novel. And Hyde is created as a kind of, what Jekyll calls him, a whipping boy. But he's also sort of a protector. You know, he acts as a buffer. Like Jekyll extrudes him. He kind of forces him to the forefront. And Hyde buffers him from whatever unpleasantness that they're experiencing. And so Jekyll gets to kind of recede. And I mean, what's interesting is for Stevenson, Stevenson didn't have an abusive childhood by any stretch. He was an old child and he was pampered by his parents. But I remember reading, you know, he had a, he was a sickly child and a neurotic child and had this housekeeper who was kind of very strict. I think, you know, like Calvinist stock or, you know, Scottish Protestant. And she would tell him these horrific fire and brimstone stories. And, you know, it was very disapproving of the parents' activities and, you know, kind of often talked to him about hell. And he, you know, she was very well-meaning, but he describes lying in bed and just being sort of stricken with terror at these things. And, you know, so in studying that too, and he had this very domineering father. And there's echoes of that in the original Jekyll and Hyde that I kind of picked up on and continued. I did not have a traumatic childhood at all. I had wonderful and very nurturing parents. - And go from the Scottish Protestant to the neurotic Northeastern Jew. - Exactly. - Yeah. (both laughing) I mean, I'm assuming, yeah. - Yeah, exactly. But... - But for you, where does Hyde come from? - I think for me, it's this awareness of, you know, I don't think it's as simple as any kind of duality. Like there's two selves. But the way I've been thinking about it is in terms of the public self and kind of the private self, you know, and the public self has to interface with the world and has to maintain this very civilized veneer and the mannered facade. And, you know, I'm very aware of the need for this. And I care about it. I care about the impression that I make on people. I care about controlling the way that people are not controlling, but, you know, trying to tailor the way that people perceive me or being perceived in a particular way and speaking in a particular way and holding myself as such, while inside, you know, there's everything else. You know, there's the inner kind of misadrope who is critical of humanity and takes pleasure in kind of noting unsavory details about people or thinking, you know, while having civilized conversations, thinking, you know, contradictory thoughts or even sort of destructive thoughts to the point that, you know, it's this, what could I do right now? What could I say that would genuinely horrify this person? I like to think about that. You know, these kind of very strict and rather brutal rules we have about polite conversation and how easily it is to break that. You know, and what could you say that would push a person to their limit and meeting someone and talking to them? And so I think there's an element of hide there. I think that's what hide feeds on is in disturbing people deliberately and upsetting people and feeling people's weaknesses or kind of sniffing out their secrets or their inner hides and kind of trying to engage with people on that level, you know, much to their discomfort. - And did you find yourself engaging in that sort of behavior more as you were working on the book? - No, but allowing myself to indulge in those fantasies, certainly, and not pushing them aside. You know, I think such thoughts occur to everybody and some people just kind of shunt them aside. They don't want to think about it or they suppress it. And I'll certainly indulge it. And you know, it's something I found myself doing for practice and also just because it's interesting is, you know, you'll be having a conversation with someone and thinking about that, thinking about the shell, you know, and maintaining a certain, you know, politely bland expression and then having these thoughts behind that and having this kind of churning, seething sense of, you know, it's the fantasy of disruption, of disturbance. And so indulging that while talking to people and playing with that and noting it so that I could, you know, write about it with some specificity. - Now, where was the choice to work within Hyde, to work within established literary work? I mean, I know there's the whole fanfic, you know, tradition that's been going on for, well, since the ancient Greeks, if you want to go way, way back. How did this idea come about to work within Hyde and what sort of responsibility did you feel toward the original work and the process of writing Hyde? - You know, the idea, once I had the idea, you know, I kind of woke up one morning with the idea. - Of Hyde's perspective. - Of Hyde's perspective. You know, you know, it was just there. And once I had it, I was very, it was very clear that what I wanted to do was revisit the original and stick to the original. You know, there was never any sense of wanting to recontextualize it in a modern world, you know, which I think has been done in a lot of films, but maybe varying degrees of success. - Plus the Hulk. - Exactly. - Exactly. - You know, I mean, I've always been attracted to the Victorian London in particular, and I like historical fiction, and I like thinking about the past. I like immersing myself in fantasies of the past. I kind of frequently feel sometimes that, you know, maybe this age, it wasn't the one that I most belong in. I kind of like to play a game where you sort of imagine where people would best belong in history. And so, you know, I'm constantly sort of immersing myself fantastically, or from a fantastical point of view in history, and so I wanted to be there. I wanted to occupy that Victorian space in my mind. And so it was very important to me to be faithful to the original, because what, when I went back and reread it was so interesting to me, it was not just, oh, here's Hyde, and he's the dark protagonist, and he's appealing, and we don't know what it is that he does that's so bad. All of that was certainly appealing. But even more so were these interesting inconsistencies and gaps and contradictions in the Stevenson's original, particularly with respect to Jekyll's behavior, which we're told is decent and generous and good. Jekyll's the good guy. But then you look at the original and you look at what he does, and it's very obviously not so. He's manipulative, and he's deceitful, and he's self-destructive. And furthermore, he's created the situation. He's wholly responsible for it, and he's entirely responsible for what Hyde does. Hyde is him, however much he tries to separate himself from the idea of Hyde and to cast all the blame upon Hyde. And so I wanted to explore this kind of psychological portrait, this strange case of a scientist gone terribly wrong. And so to do that, I wanted to really stick to Stevenson's plot and chronology and the events and the things that Jekyll does and the interactions that he has as closely as possible. - Was there a sense of a sandbox? In that respect, you had the parameters in place but then you needed to fill in. You could sort of play with the areas around it. - Exactly. You know, I'd sort of sketched out the novel or graphed out the novel. And there were points I really had to hit. And the sandbox or the parameters is good in the sense that the novel ends when it ends. You know, Hyde is doomed. You know, he's not going to escape. He's not going to survive at the end. You know, it was very important to me to maintain, as I said, the plot structure and then the ending. And therefore, it's confined. And within that confinement, I think comes some of this, a lot of Hyde's desperation. And his sympathetic quality in the sense that he can't escape and he's locked into a story that's already been told. And even if I'm telling it again, there's this sense of inevitability to his doom. - Yeah, how difficult were the mechanics of telling the story given that parts of it are when Jekyll's in control of the body and Hyde is observing, you want to show things without, you know, showing Hyde knowing too much or giving away too much. How difficult was that? Just from a storytelling perspective? - It was tricky. What took a while to figure out was the nature of the relationship between them. Particularly, Hyde is inside of Jekyll's mind. He's a compartmentalized part of Jekyll's mind. And so, how much access does he have to the rest of it? To Jekyll's memories and to his thoughts and to his emotions. And originally, when I first started writing it, Hyde had greater access. And increasingly, I realized it didn't feel right. It was a little too open from a storytelling point of view in the sense that there was too much information available. And it also diffused the mystery. A lot of the mystery emerges from the fact that Hyde has a very limited sense of knowledge. He doesn't know what has come before and he certainly doesn't know what's going to happen. And he doesn't know what Jekyll's intentions are in reviving him and bringing him to life. And so that creates a lot of attention, but it creates some narrative difficulties in terms of what is it like to be inside of someone's head able to look out through their eyes, or able to perceive through their senses, but you're not at the surface. He's submerged and so everything is kind of filtered and blurred to a little bit and under watery, I suppose. And then, in terms of the rest of the mind, what does that feel like? To be in someone's mind and be able to maybe feel the current of their emotions and sense a certain current of their thoughts, but the rest is included, the rest is guarded and hidden. And so, yeah, narratively, that it took a while to figure out and it was tricky to portray. - Any interaction with psychologists or other people who worked with multiple personality disorder? Did any of that... - I read a lot of case studies. I've always been interested in psychology. I studied it in college a little bit. I take pleasure in reading about psychology and about I certainly read a number of famous studies about multiple personality disorder. I didn't specifically consult with any psychologists. And I don't know why, maybe I was so in my zone and it felt like such an isolated process that I just continued. And I felt like I had more or less the information I needed. - And how long the book take to write? - So, I researched it for a good solid year and then once I started writing, it was about three, three and a half years. - And like you said, it evolved significantly from the early, oh yeah, okay. - You know, and in terms of, you know, as I said, I knew that I had Stevenson's plot, but I didn't know that I had to start within that. You know, and in the beginning, when I first started writing, I was beginning way before Stevenson's novel begins, I was beginning with, you know, a history of the Jekyll line through Scotland and I was like, oh, that's too far away. And then I was starting with the childhood and the creation of Hyde and the childhood and that was still way too far away. And so it was this process of getting closer and closer to the where the story starts. And then once I figured out, then it's this whole process of figuring out Hyde's voice and the way he talks and the way he thinks. And then just the details of the world and the details of what particularly he gets up to, like what it is that he does. - So yeah, it wasn't just a smooth process. - And what are you working on now? - I've been reading a lot about human evolution. I've been interested in this for a while. And I've been reading about Neanderthals a lot. It interests me. You know, we humans are the only human species alive today. And we take that for granted. We assume that that's the way it is, we're the pinnacle of evolution, right? For most of the time that any kind of hominid were around that was not so. There were many, many different kinds of species around. And I find that very interesting, you know, in particular, the Neanderthals were so like us in many ways. And we're around until very, very recently. And trying to think about what was their perspective like, what was their experience? What did it feel like to be a Neanderthan and think along those lines? So that's been interesting to me. And then kind of looking at the kind of animal that we are. What is it that defines human nature? What is it that has allowed us to become the only species? - What sort of conclusions are you drawing? - Without giving away the novel. It is a novel, I wouldn't think. - Well, what's interesting is, you know, there's this myth that humans have survived because we outcompeted everybody else and we're better than everybody else. We're smarter, we're more sophisticated and-- - We dress better. - We dress much better and we, you know, we can shave and we smell good. But you start reading and what becomes increasingly apparent is that as for all living things, the environment in which you live shapes everything. You know, evolution is shaped by the environment and by the climate, not by the inherent goodness or even superiority necessarily. You have a species, superiority is not related to something being inherently good. It's just particularly suited to the time and the place. And so human beings were very lucky. You know, we kind of managed to slip into this, this appropriate zone of-- - The sweet spot. - The sweet spot, exactly. Whereas the Neanderthals were quite unlucky and then, you know, and then there's all these, what emerges to is our ability to grasp symbolism. You know, the power of the symbol which is related to language and art and culture and our ability to interact with each other beyond a purely functional level. And so I think that played a big role as well. - That sense of humans are, you know, inherently superior does seem to hark back to the explosion of the Victorian myth which, you know, was what Hyde and the original Jekyll and Hyde is something that sets out to do. Are you still working within those Victorian traditions or trying to understand, you know, how that influences who we are and where we are now? - I don't know if it's so much the Victorian tradition, but yes, absolutely. You know, and I think, I mean, what's interesting is a lot of the themes that I was grappling with in Jekyll and Hyde in terms of humans as the animal, as the higher animal, whereas as Joseph Campbell says, the human human and the human animal, you know, Jekyll is very much the human human. He's the ultra-civilized construction of humanity, but inside is still this animal, you know, with animal impulses and primal urges that we've, you know, come from hundreds of thousands of years of development. And that's, the human human is an extremely recent development, so we still have that inside of us. And so that conflict and looking at that very recent development of the human human and the way that we live now, which is in this incredibly sophisticated but incredibly artificial environment, you know, I mean, sitting here in this living room with all this, you know, I mean, we're in this-- - It's New Jersey. - Yeah, exactly. It's New Jersey. And everything that means, and how divorced we are, in a sense, from that outside world, you know, and how much we've sheltered ourselves and protected ourselves from it, which has evolved us into a very specific kind of creature. - Except after Hurricane Sandy last year, it literally, or two years ago, it literally, not literally, figuratively went, you know, Mad Max within about 10 minutes once we realized there's no power and no one's going to get gas that turned into a very, very different social situation in a big hurry. - Exactly. I mean, that's what's so interesting about any kind of natural disaster. You strip away everything that we come to be so dependent upon and suddenly you're left with that kind of inner self and these very basic desires that we take for granted food and shelter and warmth and energy and the other thing. - Wood burning stove, hand cranked flashlight, Robertson Davies trilogy. I was pretty much set for the first couple of days, but still it was, you know. - Exactly. - And besides Stevenson, one of the literary influences do you have, or do you consider Stevenson an influence particularly? - I really don't. I like him, I greatly admire his style. I wasn't reading a lot of him in the years between when I read him a treasure island, rebat, be there, that's okay. - Well, it's interesting. There's a Sarah Levine who has this book Treasure Island, which is kind of a re-look at that. Well, it's a completely different kind of thing, but anyway, no, you know, I like Steven. You know, and I've come to read a lot of him and I admire him, but you know, I certainly went through a Nabokov phase. - I would hope. - You know, he was a tremendous influence. I've had to free myself from him. You know, he can be extremely detrimental. I went through a William Styron phase who also is spectacular, but very verbose, very, you know, very flowery. I have a tendency toward that and I've been trying to increasingly scale back my pros. And so these days I try to read people who are, where I find myself influenced by people who are a little more contained. I mean, I love, I love John Vanville, who can be either, he can be on the Nabokov side, but he can also be kind of quite terrorist and elegant. I love Ishiguru. I see, he's very masterful and very controlled. I like Jamkatsya a lot. There's a lot of short story writers. I admire Jim Shepherd and love Karen Russell and Barry Hana. So, you know, I mean, everyone, all of those have certainly been influential. You know, I certainly went through a, when my youth, I loved horror fiction. I loved Stephen Kenner and a lot of Dean Coons. I think that absolutely kind of informed my appreciation of the Gothic and the dark, which I still seek out. I don't like particularly happy fiction. Like, you know, I like shadowy work. Do you believe in evil? Wonderful. Someone asked me that a few weeks ago. In relation to the book? In relation to the book. Okay, I was hoping it wasn't just me getting that out. And then, you know, I've subsequently reconsidered my answer. I don't believe, I think when we use that word evil and the way that we use it in our society, you know, good versus evil, there's the sense that both exist in a vacuum. As though evil is demonic, you know, that there is a force at work that actively seeks to destroy things or turn human beings evil or turn them demonic and make them do bad things. Or, you know, when we speak of terrorists, you know, we speak of them as evil. Even, you know, fascists, you know, the axis of evil. I don't believe in evil in that sense, in the sense that it's pure and abstract from human circumstances. On the other hand, I marvel at human's capacity for what we would call evil, you know, for... So, evil more is an adjective than a noun. - We commit evil acts. - Yes, we commit evil acts. You know, we're capable of... I mean, it's, you know, it's like art and torture. You know, they kind of occupy opposite ends of the same spectrum. Art is, you know, the attempt to attain beauty on a superfluous level. Again, or something to Joseph Campbell the other day, he calls it divinely superfluous. In the sense that it's beyond what is necessary and it, in its best form, it elevates us. Whereas you look at something like torture and torture is demonically superfluous. It's pain taken to an almost artistic level and musical level. Again, totally beyond what is necessary. Pain is obviously a part of life, but the willingness and the desire to inflict it. Obviously there's a big spectrum, but we hurt each other all the time and we deliberately deprive you. You know, in many ways, our culture is based on depriving people of things that they need so that some people can have so much more than they need. And we're okay with that. And for the most part, we accept that as part of our ethos. That's capitalism where that's the way it is, you know? What's through the hab and the hab not? We don't question that and in that is a kind of, I don't know if it's evil, but it's a kind of ignorance or a kind of willful blindness to suffering that is, it's appalling, you know? And so I wonder it and this is kind of related to the Neanderthal conversation. Like what is it about human nature that allows us to be so willfully cruel to each other and deliberately cruel or else just kind of ignorantly cruel? But so I certainly believe in that and I think that is a very specific human quality. You know, within the natural world, there is obviously violence and there's nastiness and plenty of creatures die or horrific deaths and in the insect world or in the animal kingdom. But it's not extraneous, it's necessary to their survival, it's the way that they function. We're perfectly able, it would seem to function or we should be able to function without without deliberate cruelty and yet we don't. We seem to constantly make the choice not to. So I don't know, is that evil? You know, it possibly is, but it's something that obviously fascinates me. - Perhaps with the alleviating of evolutionary pressures, we need new outlets for, not that I'm gonna give you the idea for another book, but you know, what I assume is we need to find some artistic way of expressing these things that were within the animal spirit. - How do you think Jacqueline Hyde's been simplified, I guess? I mean, it seems that your work is really an attempt at restoring some of the ambiguities of it in a way that I think we've kind of, as you said, drawn it down to good versus evil. Did you feel that as an impulse along those lines? In terms of trying to cloud that issue. - Absolutely, and I think Stevenson had to write it that way. He had to make Hyde wholly and vaguely bad, vaguely in the sense that we don't know why he's bad or what he does that's bad because Victorian audiences didn't want to hear about it. You know, they-- - But deep down they did. - They, well-- - But they couldn't. - Yeah, deep down they did, absolutely. You know, we all kind of, you're in for it, but they needed it simplified, you know, and they needed it sensational as opposed to realistic. When, in fact, they were horrific. I mean, Victorian London in particular was a horrific place and even more exaggerated than what we're talking about now and this difference between the haves and the have-nots and the willful blindness to mass suffering and mass deprivation. And so Stevenson had to write it very simplified and even though it horrified people. I think what it's come to be a very, you know, just a metaphor and a black and white metaphor of that, you know, it's something that we apply to, well, either people, you know, people who have mood swings or people who change abruptly from one person into another or, you know, the good side of human nature versus the bad side of human nature. And I think Stevenson knew that it was much more complex than that. He had a good grasp of human nature. And I think what's nice is to live in this age where we are increasingly curious about this dark side and not merely in terms of its pure darkness, but in terms of how seemingly ordinary or normal people can commit atrocities or how people who do commit atrocities can also seem exceedingly human and charming and how we can like them. You know, many of our television shows feature pretty appalling characters who we love. And so I think it's this wonderful opportunity given the relative freedom of our times to explore that ambiguity and, you know, and kind of re-examine this very simplified metaphor of good versus bad. And who are you reading right now? Right now I'm reading Patrick McGrath's new novel Constance, which is lovely. I'm reading a bunch of Neanderthal books written by some wonderful paleoanthropologists. Reading Cormac McCarthy's Child of God, which is, it's a very slim, nasty work and it's wonderful. Sometimes I find McCarthy difficult. He can be just so much. And so unrestrained. And so this is a very lovely restrained novel. Are you still teaching? Yeah, I've been teaching at Red Rocks Community College in Colorado. I was teaching at two different places while I was riding high and teaching four classes a week and now I'm just down to one, which is nice. But I very much enjoy teaching. It's a composition class, but it's kind of a research writing class in terms of writing a research paper. And I've actually been getting into a lot of this human origin stuff with them and attempt to give them a topic and develop a thesis. We've been looking at the human exploratory impulse and, you know, from kind of terrestrial exploration to space exploration and then getting back to human origins and looking at the fact that this exploratory impulse is actually also at the core of Homo sapiens. It's in many ways what defines us. So we've been looking at that. That's really interesting. That's nice when you work and tie into your art. Exactly. Again, I don't get that with the whole pharmaceuticals thing. Certainly not. Ann Levine, thank you so much for coming on the virtual memory show. Thank you. This is delightful. And that was Daniel Levine. His new novel, "Hide," is available at Bookstores, and that's H-Y-D-E, as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. You can find out more about it and about Daniel at his website. Danielglevine.com. And that's D-A-N-I-E-L-G-L-E-V-I-N-E. "Hide" really is a fun book. Trust me on this. It brings a lyrical voice to the tragic soul of "Hide" and really evokes that era of London just beautifully. But I think it's most interesting in terms of trying to do a modern reading of Jekyll and Hyde without pushing too much post-modernity on it, I guess. And it's just really, really beautifully written. He's a really talented writer. So go give it a read. And that is it for this week's virtual memory show. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next week with a conversation with Caitlin McGurk, who recently curated the Richard Thompson exhibition at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum in Columbus, Ohio. Until then, do me a favor and go to our iTunes page and post a review of the show. And also hit up our website, chimeraabscura.com/vm and make a donation to this ad-free podcast. And add yourself to the email list. You can also add yourself to the blogs e-list if you'd like to see some of the other writing that I produce. If you've got ideas for guests, drop me a line at Groth, G-R-O-T-H, at chimeraabscura.com, V-M-S-Pod on Twitter, or at our Facebook page, Facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow. Until next time, I am Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. ♪♪ [BLANK_AUDIO]