Saturday, September 24, 2022

The Master of Deadly Wastes

A savage hatred between two brothers foments over a lifetime in Robert Louis Stevenson's 1889 novel The Master of Ballantrae. Gloomy and subtly psychological, this book's an admirable monster.

The story starts in 1745 and the two brothers are the children of a Scottish Laird of an estate called Durrisdeer. In a decision with results to rival a similar one by King Lear, the Laird decides to send one son to fight on the side of the Jacobites and have the other remain at home in support of the reigning King. A toss of a coin decides it'll be the elder son, James, the titular Master of Ballantrae, who goes off with the Jacobites and the younger, Henry, who'll remain at home.

Later, after he's become a pirate and is wandering the wilderness of New York, looking for a place to bury treasure, James will again toss a coin to make a decision, remarking on how it reflects his scorn for human reason.

Most of the story is told by a family servant called Mackellar, a man of high, rigid morals who regards the man he always refers to as "the Master" with fear and disgust. But the reader who looks beyond how Mackellar chooses to paint the picture will find the matter by no means so clear cut. The Master does abandon a mistress with an illegitimate child in Scotland and he perpetrates all manner of untold havoc as a pirate captain, a vocation he finds after various misadventures following the failure of the Jacobites. But Henry is not the paragon Mackellar makes him out to be from the start. The boys' father and the Master's former fiancee both pine for the man they presume dead while Henry conceals the Master's survival and repeated letters requesting money. Henry's bitterness at his father and the fiancee's enduring love for the elder brother manifest in Henry in negative colours. Seeing himself as a kind of martyr, he dutifully sends his brother money.

But Henry has married the fiancee, who still loved the presumed dead Master. And Henry now has everything the Master was meant to inherit. The Master may indeed be a scoundrel but he's also fully justified in feeling wronged.

It's tempting to look at the relationship between the two brothers as a metaphor for the conflict between the exiled Stuarts, responsible for the Jacobite uprising, and the Hanoverian family occupying the throne. Maybe Stevenson was inspired by his own readings from the 18th century that gave him a sense of the tides of loyalty. It doesn't quite match up, though, especially given how the Master's own loyalty to the Stuarts is hardly steadfast. The novel might bear some resemblance to Wuthering Heights, too, if the only female character were a little more fleshed out. As it is, she all but disappears from the narrative by the final act.

But what a wonderfully gloomy, catastrophic finale. By this point, even Mackellar's feelings about the brothers have become more complicated. I was enjoying the novel all along but my appreciation for it was raised considerably beginning with a section in which Mackellar accompanies the Master on a sea voyage from Scotland to New York on a rotting old ship called the Nonesuch. This paragraph alone is a masterpiece:

The wind fell, but the sea hove ever the higher. All night the Nonesuch rolled outrageously; the next day dawned, and the next, and brought no change. To cross the cabin was scarce possible; old experienced seamen were cast down upon the deck, and one cruelly mauled in the concussion; every board and block in the old ship cried out aloud; and the great bell by the anchor-bitts continually and dolefully rang. One of these days the Master and I sate alone together at the break of the poop. I should say the Nonesuch carried a high, raised poop. About the top of it ran considerable bulwarks, which made the ship unweatherly; and these, as they approached the front on each side, ran down in a fine, old-fashioned, carven scroll to join the bulwarks of the waist. From this disposition, which seems designed rather for ornament than use, it followed there was a discontinuance of protection: and that, besides, at the very margin of the elevated part where (in certain movements of the ship) it might be the most needful. It was here we were sitting: our feet hanging down, the Master betwixt me and the side, and I holding on with both hands to the grating of the cabin skylight; for it struck me it was a dangerous position, the more so as I had continually before my eyes a measure of our evolutions in the person of the Master, which stood out in the break of the bulwarks against the sun. Now his head would be in the zenith and his shadow fall quite beyond the Nonesuch on the farther side; and now he would swing down till he was underneath my feet, and the line of the sea leaped high above him like the ceiling of a room. I looked on upon this with a growing fascination, as birds are said to look on snakes. My mind, besides, was troubled with an astonishing diversity of noises; for now that we had all sails spread in the vain hope to bring her to the sea, the ship sounded like a factory with their reverberations. We spoke first of the mutiny with which we had been threatened; this led us on to the topic of assassination; and that offered a temptation to the Master more strong than he was able to resist. He must tell me a tale, and show me at the same time how clever he was and how wicked. It was a thing he did always with affectation and display; generally with a good effect. But this tale, told in a high key in the midst of so great a tumult, and by a narrator who was one moment looking down at me from the skies and the next up from under the soles of my feet—this particular tale, I say, took hold upon me in a degree quite singular.

He goes on to tell a story, supposedly a true one about a friend, but one that actually comes across as a hypothetical illustration, to challenge the hearer about the culpability of someone who psychologically manipulates someone else into a hazardous circumstance.

It's a lovely book. It's a nice appetiser for the Halloween season.

Twitter Sonnet #1625

The pair of masters met in swamp or snow.
Diminished minds digest in swollen hearts.
The distant dream was like a cherry glow.
A rigid servant plays the nicest parts.
A treasure waits forever near the grave.
A rancher knew the lovely carcass well.
Mistakes were hid to quell the tidy knave.
In godless lands the pirates dug to Hell.
The bandits ceased to climb the dusty rocks.
The booty fell below a twisted tree.
Implicit heists were held in haunted socks.
There's naught but sand as far as they can see.
A set of swords were crossed in brother brains.
Their treasure now a soulless land retains.

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