Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
are less bombastic sounding when you know something of Henley's life.
Henley was the model for Robert Louis Stevenson's character, Long John Silver, in physical and emotional rendering. Henley's daughter Wendy is said to have been the source of the name "Wendy", in Barrie's Peter Pan.
We have met W. E. Henley before. But we may not have known how sweet this defender of British empire was. And that angle we owe to Ernest Mehew.
Mehew " is a retired English civil servant, who worked on the full edition of ...[Stevenson's] letters for more than twenty-five years. He is a leading authority on Stevenson and in 1997 was awarded an honorary doctorate by Edinburgh University in recognition of his literary scholarship." This is from his Google author blurb.
For it was Mehew's annotations of Stevenson's letters in Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson (2001), that included this detail about Henley. We quote a footnote.
On June 6, 1899, commenting to Colvin on the selection of RLS's letters for publication Henley wrote: 'If you have room for another hunt out the charming note in which Lewis described the coming into his life of Ginger. It always pleased me, and since the old cat's still alive, I don't see why he shouldn't live hereafter with the rest of us.' Henley told Archer in 1887: Ginger is a semi-Persian, not the genuine article. [Stevenson's wife]...bought him for ten bob at a Cat show...[at the Crystal Palace.]
And so we learn something of literary immortality and those who earned it.
No comments:
Post a Comment