ABSTRACT
In 1902, Henry James fell so in love with H. G. Wells’s Two Men that he proposed they write a novel together about Mars. James begged to be his friend’s “faithful finisher”, but Wells, wary of the implications of “finishing,” refused the offer. Though he never collaborated, James brooded on the process in “Collaboration,” an 1893 short story that can be read as documentary, a knowing vignette about the preponderance of double writing among British literary men, many of them James’s friends and admirers, at the turn of the century, a troubled time when the Author split in two, and when sexuality divided into a straight original and its inverted mirror image. James’s story summarizes a historical moment when collaboration gave rein to desires considered monstrous if enacted anywhere but on the page. Though Robert Louis Stevenson was a unifying figure of his age, beloved by men of every political and aesthetic stripe, homosexual writers paid him special court.
