Another Side to Dr. Jekyll’s Story

There were times when Valerie Martin thought she might end up heeding the advice she gives her own students: Never mind what people say, never mind what they think, just keep writing.

She and her daughter, Adrienne, moved an average of once every two years. She taught at universities in New Orleans, Alabama, New Mexico and Massachusetts. None of the four novels she wrote in eight years managed to get published. One of Martin’s books was rejected by 20 publishers.

It seemed to Martin that she might be doomed to an eternity of working as an itinerant teacher of freshman composition. Then she began work on a retelling of a book she had used for many years as a teaching tool, Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” In Martin’s version, this story of the good and evil that exist in all of us and of the inherent hypocrisy of social conventions would be told by a young maidservant in Dr. Henry Jekyll’s employ.

With only a few manuscript pages completed, rights to “Mary Reilly” were sold within days in half a dozen foreign markets. Guber-Peters snapped up film rights, and hired Roman Polanski to write the screenplay. At Doubleday, Martin’s U. S. publisher, the finished work was greeted with a 50,000-copy first-run printing. For its paperback sale, “Mary Reilly” has a $200,000 floor price.

“When you set out to be a writer, you’re told what to expect,” Martin said, sitting in a cluttered second-floor study that looks out on a snowy forest. “You’re told it’s going to be a long haul, you’re told the odds are against you. Don’t count on making any money, they tell you.

“I knew what I was getting into,” Martin said. “What I didn’t know was that it actually could work out.”

A small woman with fine bones and faded blond hair, Martin turns 42 next month. Twice divorced, she teaches in the writing program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, just 11 miles from the tiny hamlet where “Mary Reilly”--at last--enabled her to buy the home she shares with 14-year-old Adrienne, and their 6-month-old collie, Louis, named for Robert Louis Stevenson. The two-lane road that leads from Montague to Amherst is lined with horse and sheep farms.

Martin was on a train, traveling from New York City to Ocean Grove, N.J., when the idea for “Mary Reilly” began to take shape. Martin said she never fully accepted in the book Jekyll’s “full statement of the case” of his dual identity. Though Stevenson had Jekyll admit, “when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life,” Martin felt there was more to the story.

Next to her, speaking of profound duplicity, a man was reading an article about Jimmy Swaggart. The view outside Martin’s window was “one long ribbon of industrial ugliness.” She began thinking about Jekyll’s maid, and decided she would have known him better than anyone else, “even better than that supercilious butler of his, Mr. Poole.”

Almost in rhythm with the train’s movement, Martin began to hear the maid’s name, “Mary Reilly, Mary Reilly.” By the time she left the train, she knew this much about Mary: “That before she arrived at Jekyll’s house she had been through hell. Yet it seemed her troubles were just beginning.”

Hailed in a Los Angeles Times book review as a “powerful and moving” turn on the tale that began as Stevenson’s own nightmare, “Mary Reilly” begins with a startling scene in which the young Mary is locked in a closet with a rat. The image is so vivid, so horrific that Martin’s own knowledge of rodentia immediately seems encyclopedic.

In fact, Martin revealed, the story is first borrowed, then embellished.

“My best friend told me a story about the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She told me about a rat that got stuck in her hair,” Martin said. “I asked her if I could have the story, and she said yes.”

Since both Martin and her friend grew up in New Orleans, “where most people have had some experience with rats,” the opening scene came smoothly to Martin.

“That’s one thing I love about that city,” Martin said of her hometown. “You can’t buy your way out. Even really rich ladies, the ones who go to the hairdresser twice a week, have all done hand-to-hand combat with rats.”

If beady-eyed rodents afford a certain universality, Martin believes, so does Stevenson’s story of the two conflicting personalities residing within one man. Still, Martin has her own reasons for loving “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

“What has always fascinated me is not the good and evil, but that Hyde wants it understood that he is a gentleman,” she said. “He’s a murderer and he knows it, but he is a gentleman.”

This adherence to roles, being a gentleman while also being a murderer, strikes Martin as one of the key elements of Victorian society.

“What interests me is that Jekyll says early on in his narrative that he wanted to be honorable and hold his head high and do good deeds,” Martin said. “But he also had this side of him that had ‘gaiety of disposition.’ So he says that he began early on to lead this double existence.

“And then he says, ‘though so confirmed a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite. Both sides were in dead earnest.’ ”

This paradox “went right into the language,” Martin said, as readers around the world identified in some fashion with Jekyll’s dilemma.

“I think we feel divided,” she said. “I think it describes how we feel now.

“Most people experience a desire to do good and to create something good. At the same time, they feel a desire to rip the whole thing down.”

For Martin, the parallel continues in the eerie way that late 20th-Century America echoes certain aspects of Victorian society.

“One of the interesting things about that period is the spirit of reform at the beginning,” Martin said, noting a curious similarity to social reform efforts in this country in the 1960s.

“You had a replacement of God with science, and you had all this optimism. You had huge prisons built that promised to put out a totally reformed prisoner. There was a sense that education could liberate us, science could save us.

“And then about midway through the century, everything goes on hold. Things looked like they were loosening up, but the reality is that they were becoming more and more repressive.”

What Martin sees around her today is that “people talk about this period in this country as being more and more open, but my feeling is that it is more repressive. There is a great deal of despair about the prospect of social reform.

“Things haven’t changed that much,” Martin continued. “We have given up the idea of educating the poor. ‘Just put ‘em in holding pens,’ that’s the idea now.”

And, in another peculiar foreshadowing, “One of the things that happened in the late Victorian period was that people started getting interested in making as much money as they could.”

Modeling a story on the works of another author was a technique Martin had tried before she wrote “Mary Reilly.” She had written several short stories, for example, inspired by the shorter works of James Joyce and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Although it is not a form most writers readily admit to, Martin said this method was “not that unusual” for her.

“I don’t care much to write about myself--my own life or my friends--in any sort of real way,” she said.

“I have a very dull life, so that’s out. But I do like to take stories about people and turn them into stories that have a prefigured shape.”

She spent two years writing “Mary Reilly,” working longhand on white lined theme paper that now fills a fat blue binder. The finished manuscript of “Mary Reilly” looks oddly like a giant term paper. Martin delights in writing each day, about 800 words: “It is pleasurable to me.”

Already, she is looking toward the next book. It may deal with the ways in which she thinks people and animals resemble one another, particularly rats and wolves.

“I think that novels essentially raise serious questions,” said this woman who has just wrestled with the issues of good and evil, reform and hypocrisy.

“I don’t think I could ever write anything that people will find uplifting,” she added. “If people want uplifting, they can go to church.”