Robert Louis Stevenson's Defense of Father Damien of Molokai|Orson Welles Reading

Step aboard the Old Time Radio Snack Wagon for a captivating episode that delves into the timeless works of Robert Louis Stevenson. In this edition, host Adam Graham presents a fascinating segment from Orson Welles' Radio Almanac, where Welles delivers a powerful reading of Stevenson's lesser-known letter defending Father Damien against the scathing remarks of Reverend Dr. C.M. Hyde. This impassioned response, penned in 1890, highlights the stark contrasts between the selfless heroism of Father Damien and the hypocrisy of his critics. Join us as we explore the rich historical context and emotional weight of Stevenson's words, showcasing not only a brilliant literary takedown but also a tribute to compassion and service in the face of adversity. Welles' masterful narration brings this poignant piece to life, reminding us of the enduring legacy of Father Damien

Cited:
Amazing World of Radio Summer of Robert Louis Stevenson
http://amazing.greatdetectives.net


Complete Text of Stevenson's letter:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/281/281-h/281-h.htm

State Library of New South Wales Background on the Letter:
https://www2.sl.nsw.gov.au/archive/curio/exhibit/521/indexa2db.html?from_collection=2&page=5

Pope Benedict XVI's Homily on the Canonization of St. Damien of Molokai:
https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/homilies/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20091011_canonizzazioni.html


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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Excuse me, are you Adam Grime the.

Speaker 2 (00:02):
Very same and this is my old time radio snackwagon.

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Welcome to the Old Time Radio snack Wagon, where we
serve up a bite sized portion of old time radio.
And now here's your snack wagon host Adam Graham.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Today our snack is a tient to our Amazing World
of Radio Summer series over on the Amazing World of
Radio at Amazing Dotreatdetectives dot Net. I'm presenting the Summer
of Robert Lewis Stephenson. In this series, I'm featuring old

(00:46):
time radio programs based on the works of Robert Lewis
Stephenson from a wide variety of different series. It occurred
to me to find something bite size that I could play,
perhaps a sketch from a story that didn't have a
full length adaptation. However, when I started to look into it,

(01:06):
I couldn't find any sketch like that. But I also
found that some of Stevenson's other works outside of his
great stories, were featured on old time radio programs. I hoped,
perhaps to be able to feature some of his poetry,
but I found something even more interesting, And once again

(01:28):
we are turning to Orson Wells a bit sooner than
I'd planned, but I trust you won't mind. This comes
from Wells's Radio Almanac, a series that aired for six
months over CBS in nineteen forty four. Radio Almanac was
a variety program. Wells had had a brief run filling

(01:51):
in for an ailing Jack Benny that left him interested
in this sort of program. Like other variety programs, it
feedsured music, jokes, and comedy sketches. However, it also regularly
featured dramatic readings by Wells or by the guest star
of the week, and on the May twenty fourth episode,

(02:14):
Wells read from one of Stevenson's lesser known works. Stevenson
had been living in Australia in February eighteen ninety when
he read something that caused him to leap to his
feet full of indignation. What he read so outraged him

(02:35):
that he had to respond at his own expense. He
printed a pamphlet, and even though he feared it could
lead to legal action, he had no choice but to
publish it. Now. To tell us more about it, here
is orson Wells.

Speaker 3 (02:52):
Half a century ago, there was a doctor Hyde who
was a missionary in the South Seast and was remembered
today because he wrote a public letter to a reverend
brother of his, a certain doctor Gage. In this letter,
Doctor Hyde attacked the character and memory of a Catholic
priest who had died two years before in the leper
colony at Molokai. This priest, Doctor Hyde declared with dirty,

(03:12):
coarse headstrong and bigoted, and not pure in his personal life. Now,
this priest whom Doctor Hyde called dirty and impure, was
none other than the martyr Father Damien, whose selfless devotion
to his island parish was climaxed on that Sunday morning
in eighteen eighty five when he commenced his sermon not
with the accustomed words, my brethren, but with a terrible

(03:36):
and heartrending address we lepers. Doctor Hyde's letter was printed
in a Sydney newspaper, and that miserable cleric may well
have regretted to his dying day that he was ever
noticed by the literary gentleman whose answer I'm going to
read to you now, Sydney, February twenty fifth, eighteen ninety
to the Reverend Doctor ci M. Hyde, Berretania Street, Honolulu, Sir,

(04:00):
you may remember that you have done me several courtesies
for which I am prepared to be grateful. But there
are duties which come before gratitude, and offenses which justly divide. Friends.
Your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage is a
document which, in my sight, if you had filled me
with bread when I was starving, if you had sat
up to nurse my father when he lay a dying,

(04:22):
would yet absolve me from the bonds of gratitude. You
belong to to a sect, I believe, my sect, which
has enjoyed and partly failed to utilize an exceptional advantage
in the islands of Hawaii. This is not the place
to enter into the degree or causes of their failure.
But this much must be plainly dealt with. In the

(04:43):
course of their calling. The missionaries are, too many of
them grew rich. It may be news to you that
the houses of missionaries are a cause of mocking on
the streets of Honolulu. It will at least be news
to you that, when I returned your civil visit, the
driver of my cab commented on the size, the taste,
and the com but of your home on Derritania Street.

(05:03):
No your sect, and remember, as far as any sect
avowed me it is mine has not done ill in
a worldly sense in the Hawaiian kingdom. When Calamity to
tell her innocent parishioners, when leprosy descended and took rot
in the islands, to that prosperous mission, and to you
as one of its adornments, God sent at last an opportunity.

(05:25):
I know that others of your colleagues look back on
the inertia of your church and the intrusion and decisive
heroism of Damien with something almost to be called remorse.
I'm sure it is so with yourself. I am persuaded
your letter was inspired by a certain envy. But Sir,
when we have failed and another has succeeded, when we

(05:48):
have stood by and another has stepped in, when we
sit and grow bulky in our charming mansions, and a
plane uncouth peasant steps into the battle under the eyes
of God, and suckers the afflicted, and consoles the dying,
and is himself afflicted in his turn, and dies upon
the field of honor. The battle cannot be retrieved. It

(06:10):
is a lost battle, and lost forever. Your church and
Damiens were in Hawaii upon a rivalry to do well.
You having in one huge instance failed that Damien succeeded.
I marvel. It should not have occurred to you that
you were doomed a silence, that when you had been
ow stripped in that high rivalry, and sat in glorious

(06:31):
in the midst of your well being, in your pleasant rooms,
and Damien, crowned with glories and horrors, toiled and rapid
in that pigstye of his under the cliffs of Kalawao. You,
the elect who would not were the last man on
earth to collect and propagate gossip on the volunteer who would?

(06:55):
And did I think I see you? For I try
to see you in the flesh as I write these sentences,
I think I see you leap at the word pig
sty He was a coarse, dirty man. These were your
own words. And you may think I am come to
support you with fresh evidence. In a sense, it is
even so Damien's been too much depicted with a conventional halo.

(07:16):
Such information as I have I gathered on the spot
from those who knew him well and long, who beheld
him with no halo. Please gave me what knowledge I possessed,
and I learned it in the place itself. Color wall
which you've never visited. You, I imagine to be one of
those persons who talk with cheerfulness of that place which
Oxen and Wayne Ropes could not drag you to behold.

(07:38):
You do not even know its situation on the map,
probably denounced sensational descriptions, stretching your limbs the while in
your pleasant parlor on Bartania Street. When I was pulled
ashore there one early morning, they sat with me in
the boat, two sisters bidding farewell in humble imitation of
Damien to the lights and joys of human life, one

(07:59):
of these webs silently. I could not withhold myself from
joining her. Had you been there, nature would have triumph
even in you. And as the boat drew nearer, and
you beheld the stairs crowded with abominable defamations of our
common manhood, you saw yourself landing in the midst of
such a population as only now and then surrounds us

(08:19):
in the horror of a nightmare. What a haggard eye
you would have rolled over your reluctant shoulder forward the
house on Bertania Street. Had you gone on, had you
found every fourth face or blot upon the landscape, had
you visited the hospital and seen the butt ends of

(08:39):
human beings lying there, almost unrecognizable, but still breathing, still thinking,
still remembering. You would have understood that life in the
lazaretto is an ordeal from which the nerves of a
man's spirit shrink, even as his eye quails under the
brightness of the sun. You would have felt it was
even today a pitiful place to visit in the hill,
to dwell in and observe that which I saw and suffered.

(09:03):
What's from a settlement, perched, bettered, beautified with a different place.
When Damien came there and made his great renunciation and
slept that first night under a tree amidst his rotting brethren,
alone with pestilence, and looking forward with what courage, with
what pitiful shrinkings of dread God only knows, to a

(09:24):
lifetime of dressing saws and stumps. You say that Damien
was coarse. It's very possible, you make it sorry for
the lepers who had only a court, all peasant for
their friend and father. Damien was dirty, you say, Think
of the poor lepers annoyed with this dirty comrade. Damien
was headstrong. I believe you're right again. And I thank

(09:44):
God for his strong head and heart. Damien was not
sent to MOLOCHI, but went there without orders. I have
heard Christ in the pulpits of our church held up
for imitation on the ground that his sacrifice was voluntary.
Damien had no hand in the reform. You say. If
ever man brought reforms and died to bring them, it
was he. There's not a clean cup or towel in

(10:06):
the bishop home, but dirty Damien washed it. Damien, you say,
was impure in his personal life. How do you know that?
Is this the nature of the conversation in the house
on Bertania Street which the camp and ended driving path

(10:27):
racy details of the misconduct of the poor peasant priest
toiling under the cliffs of Molokai. When I was there,
I had complaints of Damien. Why was this never mentioned? True?
I'd heard it once before. I'm let to tell you
how there came to some more from Honolulu, one who
in a public house on the beach volunteered that Damien

(10:48):
had been guilty of misconduct and had sickened from having
contact with lepers. A man sprang to his feet. I'm
not at liberty to give his name, but from what
id I doubt if he would care to have him
to dinner in Bretania Street. You miserable little here's the word.
I dare not print it with so sharp your ears.

(11:09):
If the story were a thousand times true, he cried,
can't you see her a million times lower for daring
to repeat it? Reverend sir, our, suppose your story to
be true? I was supposing. God forgive me for supposing
the Damien faltered and stumbled in his narrow path of duty.
I'll suppose that in the horror of his isolation, perhaps

(11:32):
in the fever of disease, he who was doing so
much more than he had sworn, failed in the letter
of his priestly oath. He who was so much a
better man than either you or me, who did what
we would never dreamed of daring, He too tasted our
common frailty, or the pity of it. The least tender

(11:53):
should be moved to tears, the most incredulous to prayer.
And all that you could do was to pen your
letter to the reverend hpeak age. Is it growing at
all clear to you what a picture you've drawn up
your heart? You had a father? Suppose this tale were
about him? And some informant brought it to you proven hand.

(12:15):
I'm not making too high an estimate of your emotional
nature when I suppose you would regret the circumstance that
you would feel the tale afraid of about keenly sens
to change the author of your days, that the last
thing you would do would be to publish it in
the religious press. Well, the man who tried to do

(12:36):
what Damien did is my father, and the father of
the man in the public bar, and the father of
all who loved goodness, and he was your father too,
if God had given you the grace to see it.
Signed Robert Louis Stevenson.

Speaker 2 (13:10):
Welcome back today. It's popular in our social media and
clickbake aids to use phrases lot so and so a
viserates or destroys someone to tease a social media clip
or article, and when you watch the clip in its context,
it's just a conversation or debate where there's a tense moment,

(13:31):
but there's give and take and no real destruction or
visceration occurred. Or it's a pretty good article but that's
about it. I think that this episode could legitimately be
titled Robert Lewis Stevenson destroys C. M. Hyde, and it'd
be accurate. Stevenson initially tried to have the letter published

(13:52):
in the Sydney Morning Herald. They refused to do so
on advice of legal counsel. Stevenson privately published it, and
then it was picked up by British and American newspapers
and eventually published in Australia by The Australian Star. I'd
never took any action. Perhaps he just wanted to put

(14:14):
the incident behind him. He had not intended the letter
to be publicly published. However, that doesn't make him virtuous.
The defense I was just spreading gossip. I didn't mean
to have it attributed to me. Isn't the defense you
might think it is given Reverend Hyde's last name. Many
people on the Internet have wondered whether Robert Lewis Stevenson

(14:37):
took the ultimate revenge and named one of his two
most famous villains after Reverend Hyde. But no. The Strange
Case of Doctor Jekyl and Mister Hyde was released in
eighteen eighty six, four years before Stevenson wrote this letter.

(14:58):
Of course, Stevenson's is more than a brilliant takedown It's
a powerful defense and attribute to a man who dedicated
himself to serving others under the most horrific conditions imaginable.
Orson Wells does a beautiful job with his reading. As usual,

(15:20):
had an unmatched power for bringing a great text to
life and finding the emotion and truth of it, and
I think this was another great performance by him. As
for Damien, his memory and legacy in Hawaii live on.
Father Damien Day is celebrated on April fifteenth each year

(15:40):
in that state. Father Damien's statue stands at the entrance
of the Hawaii State Capitol. A second cast of the
statue is in the Statuary Hall collection at the United
States Capitol as one of two representatives of the state
of Hawaii, along with King kamand Maya. There was actually

(16:01):
much more to Stevenson's letter than was exerted here, although
I think Wells did a good job capturing the spirit
of it. But I will include a link to the
full letter in the show notes. Among other things, in
the letter, Evenson predicted that Father Damien of Molokai shall
be named Saint. Just happened nearly one hundred and twenty

(16:23):
years later, in two thousand and nine, when he was
canonized as Saint Damien of Molokai by the Catholic Church.
In his homily for the occasion, Pope Benedict the sixteenth said,
let us remember before this noble figure that it is
charity which makes unity, which brings it forth and makes

(16:44):
it desirable. Following in Saint Paul's footsteps, Saint Damien prompts
us to choose the good warfare, not the cond that
brings division, but the kind that gathers people together. It's
time for me to close up the old snap, but
don't worry. We'll be back with another serving of old
time radio goodness before you know it. If you want

(17:07):
to enjoy some of our longer form podcast, you can
feast away at my website at Great Detectives dot net.
Your emails are also welcome at Adam at snackwagon dot net.

Speaker 1 (17:20):
The Old Time Radio Snackwagon comes to you from Boise, Idaho.
Your host is Adam Graham. Sound production is by Ryn's
Media LLC. You can listen to past episodes of the
Old Time Radio Snackwagon, as well as connect on social
media at our website at Snackwagon dot net. Email suggestions

(17:40):
for episodes to Adam at snackwagon dot net. This has
been the old time radio snack Wagon.

Speaker 2 (17:58):
Until next time. Goodbye,