Anatomy of Restlessness

by Bruce Chatwin

  The British community was overjoyed. The Magellan Times praised Varela’s ‘splendid courage, running about the firing line as though on parade ... Patagonians should take their hats off to the tenth Argentine Cavalry, these very gallant gentlemen’. Ibon Noya’s Patriotic League was already urging Varela’s appointment as Governor. At a luncheon, Noya spoke of the ‘sweet emotion of these moments’ and of his ‘satisfaction mixed with gratitude at being rid of the plague’. The colonel replied modestly that he had only done his duty as a soldier, and the twenty British present, being men of few Spanish words, broke into song: ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow ...’

  In Buenos Aires it was a different story. There was no hero’s welcome for Varela, only graffiti reading: ‘SHOOT THE CANNIBAL OF THE SOUTH!’ Few left-wingers cared too much about Soto or the Chilotes, but the army had, unwittingly, killed a Syndicalist official and Congress was in uproar. Yrigoyen appointed Varela director of a cavalry school and hoped the crisis would simmer down. But at dawn on 27 January 1923, as Varela was on his way to work, he was approached by a a tall, red-haired man in a dark suit carrying a copy of the Deutsche La Plata Zeitung and a bomb. As the bomb exploded, the assassin fired his Colt twice and pierced Varela’s jugular. ‘I have revenged my brothers,’ he mumbled in bad Spanish as he fell, ‘I do not need to live.’

  The killer was Kurt Wilkens, a thirty-six-year-old German wanderer from Schleswig-Holstein, who had been a miner and anarchist in the United States until the immigration authorities expelled him. In Buenos Aires he washed cars by day and read great books by night. In his lodgings police found framed photos of Tolstoy and Kropotkin, and copies of Goethe’s Werther and Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. He claimed to have made the bomb himself, but there were no traces and the police were sceptical.

  One of the mourner’s at Varela’s funeral was an effeminate young man who moped round the coffin, sobbing and swearing revenge. The murderer, who had recovered, was put in the Prison of the Encausaderos (‘those awaiting trial’). Wilken’s new warder was strangely nervous; he paced up and down in the hot sticky night until his spell was over, then he entered the cell, rubbed the barrel of his Mauser against the German’s shoulder blades, asked him, ‘Are you Wilkens?’ ‘Jawohl,’ came the answer, and he fired. The young warder rushed to his superior and said, ‘I have avenged the death of my cousin, Colonel Varela.’

  The warder, the same boy who behaved so strangely at Varela’s funeral, was Jorge Pérez Millán Témperley, last seen at El Cerrito and now permanently unhinged by the wound to his genitals. How he became Wilken’s warder was never explained, for the inquiry smoothed the issues over. He got off with a light sentence, eight years, in view of his ‘physical abnormality’ and was soon transferred to a hospital for the criminally insane.

  One of his fellow internees was a Yugoslav midget, a compulsive talker who had once murdered his doctor. On Monday afternoon, 9 February 1925, Témperley, in a black mood, was writing a letter to the National President of the Argentine Patriotic League, when Lukič, the Yugoslav, poked his head round the door of the cubicle, shouted, ‘This is for Wilkens!’ and shot him.

  The mechanics of vengeance had taken their final turn. The question was: Who gave Lukič the gun? The police eventually pinned this on another internee, Boris Vladimirovič, a Russian of some pedigree, a biologist, artist and revolutionary writer who had lived in Switzerland and known Lenin. After the 1905 revolution he took to drink and then went to Argentina to begin again on a cattle ranch in Santa Fé. But the old life drew him back. In 1919 he bungled the robbery of a bureau de change in Buenos Aires to raise funds for an anarchist publication. A man was killed and Vladimirovič got twenty-five years in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, the prison at the end of the world. But the cold, the clouds and black water drove him mad. He sang the songs of the Motherland, and for the sake of quiet, the Governor had him transferred to hospital in the capital. That Sunday visiting day, two Russian friends brought him a revolver in a basket of fruit. The case was hard to prove, and there was no trial. But Boris Vladimirovič disappeared for ever, paralysed, into the House of the Dead.

  Last year, I met near Punta Arenas an old Chilote sheep shearer who had escaped the massacre and had known Antonio Soto. His hands were knotted with arthritis, and he sat wearing a beret huddled over a wood stove. When I asked about the Revolution he said, ‘The army had permission to kill everybody’ – as if one could hope for nothing else. But when he talked of Soto and the leaders, he shook, and, as if surprised by the violence of his own voice, shouted, ‘They were not workers. They never worked a day in their lives. Barkeepers! Hairdressers! Acrobats! Artistas!’

  1976

  THE ROAD TO THE ISLES43

  No biographer should embark on Robert Louis Stevenson without taking stock of the effect of Edinburgh on its inhabitants. For the gaunt northern capital demands from them, and usually gets, a very specific moral commitment. Stevenson was an Edinburgh phenomenon; his childhood in the city set up a repetitious see-saw of attraction and loathing that almost predetermined his death in the South Seas. Coddled in the sickroom by masterful women, he turned in boyish fantasy to all-male adventures in bright islands in the sun. Once installed in Samoa, in the style of a laird, with his family and the solid furniture of his father’s house about him, he finally grew up and came to terms with the ‘precipitous city’ he had once hated to the backbone.

  The late James Pope-Hennessy’s book makes interesting reading. He has picked over the abundant documentation, assembled at the turn of the century by people who turned the commemoration of Stevenson into a literary industry, and he has selected well, packing the story with telling detail and anecdote. He gives a straightforward account of Stevenson’s placid, cheerful mother, from whom he inherited his weak chest; of his morose and pious father, the lighthouse engineer; and of his nurse, the fearsome Alison Cunningham, who whipped his imagination into a frenzy of religious torment. He dwells on his sexless love affair with the Madonna-like Mrs Sitwell, and goes over the vicissitudes of his bizarre marriage with the American Fanny Osbourne. We are given a vivid glimpse of artistic, expatriate bohemia at Grez in the Forest of Fontainebleau. We also get something of the essential perversity of Stevenson’s character, of his hysterical gaiety in the face of fatal illness, and of his gift of making himself irresistible to both sexes.

  And yet Pope-Hennessy leaves the impression he was bored by Stevenson, both as a writer and as a man. The Stevenson family and its entourage glide through the book, picturesque figures in a picturesque decor, but there is little to indicate why they function as they do—until, that is, they board the yacht Casco and sail for the South Seas. At this point they enter Pope-Hennessy’s own orbit of interest, and the reader’s interest quickens in turn. He plainly enjoyed visiting Samoa; and we enjoy his descriptions of its luxuriance, its warmth and colour, and the pale, glistening bodies of the natives. In an earlier book, Verandah, he wrote brilliantly about his grandfather’s governorship of Mauritius. He should perhaps have expanded the last seventy-odd pages of this one, and used the Stevensons as a peg to illustrate the pleasures and delusions of Europeans who settle in a tropical island paradise.

  Pope-Hennessy did not set out to write a critical biography of Stevenson or to treat his books as more than so many incidents in his career. This is a pity, especially with so autobiographical a writer. Stevenson was profoundly self-centred and had a morbid concern for his public image. He liked to think he was free with information about himself. In fact he kept tight rein on the confessional; but, consciously or not, he was always dropping broad hints in his stories. Pope-Hennessy’s decision to concentrate on the life and not the works is, however, excusable. Stevenson was a talented story-teller but he was never first-rate. His grasp of character was limited to a few stock types; overdrawn and larger than life. He was unduly concerned with the niceties of style, advising young writers to bow their heads before the idol of technique, but in his own case the result tends to be limp and ineffec
tual. He was also unable to write clearly about the present and drifted off into imaginary fancy dress occasions. He is at his most enjoyable when writing for children, when he does not complicate the plot with tangential moral postures. But that is hardly the mark of a first-rate writer.

  Nor can one think of his life as a first-rate performance. He was a careful man who lacked the open-hearted audacity of a Wilde. He was often on the verge of some splendid and dangerous act, but caution got the better of him. His vaunted revolt against Victorian propriety and his descent into low-life were halfhearted and tempered by fear of scandal. He was also something of a prig. He cultivated a reputation for womanising (without much evidence), yet he was always ready to weigh in against joyless lust. A vein of self-satisfied meanness overlaid his generosity; his handouts usually provoked resentment. His denial of faith was calculated to pain his Calvinist father, yet Travels with a Donkey tails off into an anti-Catholic, pro-Protestant tract. He harped on the need for the simple life, alone or out in the open with the woman one loves, only to cumber himself with the hefty trappings of the middle class. He yearned for adventure, for a ‘pure dispassionate adventure such as befell the great explorers’. But he hadn’t the stomach for it; on the whole, he travelled in a world made safe for aesthetes. He longed for a Great Man Friend, a fellow-adventurer like Queequeg in Moby Dick; in practice his chosen playmate was Fanny’s son, Lloyd Osbourne, for whom he wrote Treasure Island. He claimed to suffer under the stultifying drowsiness of Victorian peace (‘Shall we never shed blood? This prospect is too grey’) – and spent much of his time playing with toy soldiers.

  When he died at Vailima in Samoa in 1894, the British Empire was at its height. Stevenson, the champion of native causes, was hailed in some circles as a latter-day saint. Stevenson, the writer of boyish tales (in a world run by overgrown boys), was acclaimed as though he were one of the great novelists of all time. British and American readers pored admiringly over each perfect sentence. The first edition of Treasure Island acquired tremendous value among collectors. The young American bibliomane Harry Elkins Widener said he never travelled without his copy; it went down with him on the Titanic. Why such an obvious second-rater came to enjoy so inflated a reputation would make a very worthwhile subject, but again, Pope-Hennessy does not get us very far. Henry James, writing to commiserate with Fanny, was close to the mark: ‘There have been—I think—for a man of letters, few deaths more romantically right.’ Perhaps the Stevenson secret lay in the fact that he did (or appeared to do) the kind of things the public expects from its heroes. And he managed to attract a great deal of publicity for them. Whether his acts were genuine or faked is beside the point. The events of his life and the circumstance of his death have a mythic wholeness common to figures of heroic legend – a difficult childhood, an overbearing foster-mother, a revolt from the authority of the father, a journey to a far country, marriage to a stranger, a fight against menacing forces (in this case a tubercular chest), return and reconciliation with the father, public acclaim, and then a second departure followed by death in a remote and mysterious situation.

  It is Stevenson’s second-rateness that makes him interesting. His predicament is very familiar – the spoilt child of worthy, narrow-minded parents, unwilling to follow in the family business, longing to slough off civilisation in favour of healthy primitivism, yet tied to home by links of affection and cash, Stevenson is the forerunner of countless middle-class children who litter the world’s beaches, or comfort themselves with anachronistic pursuits and worn-out religions. Travels with a Donkey is the prototype of the incompetent undergraduate voyage.

  Edinburgh is the key to understanding Stevenson. Pope-Hennessy seems to have gone there as a tourist on a literary pilgrimage; he failed to take the measure of it, and missed some valuable clues. Edinburgh is a place of absolute contrast and paradox. A sense of quality in men and things goes hand in hand with chaotic squalor. The rational squares and terraces of the New Town confront the daunting skyline of the Old. Slums still abut the houses of the rich. Wild mountain scenery impinges on the heart of the city. On fine summer days nowhere is lighter and more airy; for most of the year there are icy blasts or a clammy sea fog, the haar of the east coast of Scotland. Edinburgh is contemptuous of the present. In no other city in the British Isles do you feel to the same extent the oppressive weight of the past. Mary Queen of Scots and John Knox are a presence. The dead seem more alive than the living. There is a claustrophobic, coffin-like atmosphere that makes Glasgow, in comparison, seem a paradise of life and laughter. Moderate health is virtually unknown. Either people enjoy robust appetites, or they are ailing and require protection. Heady passions simmer below the surface. In winter the city slumbers all week in blue-faced rectitude, only to explode on Saturday evenings in an orgy of drink and violence and sex. In some quarters the pious must pick their way to church along pavements spattered with vomit and broken bottles.

  From his endless hours at the kirk Stevenson got the lecturing tone that creeps into his work. From his house in Heriot Row, he got his careful good taste; from Edinburgh conversation, his infuriating archaisms and refined, euphemistic circumlocutions; from the city’s parades and martial music, his suppressed militarism; from its blood-stained legends, his fondness for the ghoulish. Under the influence of his training at the Edinburgh Bar, he makes his characters plead their cause, rather than state their case. Edinburgh, the historical stage-set, conditioned his rejection of Zola’s realism and inspired his own rather fey romancing. The model for Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was a symbolic Edinburgh character of the eighteenth century, Deacon Brodie, a respectable cabinet-maker who was a thief in off-hours and eventually got himself hanged. Stevenson set Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in London, but it was Chesterton who spotted that it was an Edinburgh story, with its pattern of light and darkness, its rich mansion giving out on to a slum, its Calvinistic antithesis of absolute good and evil. It does not say much for Stevenson’s understanding or tolerance that he should bestow his sympathies on DrJekyll and damn Mr Hyde.

  From Edinburgh too came his compulsion to escape. Most of its citizens, at some time, are swept by the urge to get out. The young Stevenson recorded how he watched with longing the southbound trains leaving Waverley Station; and writing to his mother in 1874, he warned her not to mind his prolonged absences: ‘You must remember that I shall be a nomad, more or less, until my days be done.’ One side of Stevenson was the perennial boy with the pack on his back, always happier to be somewhere else, unable to face the complications of sex, and ready to work it off on a bike. He belongs, in spirit, to a long line of literary vagabonds; Whitman, Rimbaud and Hart Crane are other examples who come to mind. Stevenson undoubtedly derived a good deal of his glorification of the open road from Whitman, but he never achieved the vigour of the American’s athletic outpourings.

  The other side of Stevenson was the man with the staid, conventional view that he should marry and settle down. In a way his choice of a wife was ideal. Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne was another very familiar type—the tough, neurotic American, separated from her husband, approaching middle age yet still pretty, with children, in Europe, in search of the arts. She was a girl from the Midwest, married to her childhood sweetheart, who had grown from a beautiful boy into a philandering layabout. Fanny appears to have been very naive about her husband’s love affairs until they were thrust under her nose. She then developed a distaste for aggressive masculinity, and perhaps a distaste for sex in general. The tomboyish element in her character helped her survive the Nevada mining camps to which Sam Osbourne dragged her, but the rootless shiftings of her first marriage instilled in her a rapacious appetite for property and an obsession with minute social distinctions. The death of her younger son in Paris in 1876 turned her into a guilt-ridden woman with an urge to save someone or something. The young Scottish exquisite, who was chronically ill, awoke her salvationist impulses.

  Pope-Hennessy reads the Stevenson marriage as a straight love story. In a sense he
is right. There is every reason why the gauche, elfin lad, with his ‘odd intense gaze’, should have been drawn to an attractive older woman. Furthermore, any transatlantic love affair holds an extra fascination for both sides, combining the charm of the exotic with an ease of communication. It is fairly certain that Fanny and Louis became lovers at Grez. But there was not going to be much sex in this marriage, and I do not think Pope-Hennessy has plumbed its complexity. Fanny was to be the dominant partner. In good times, she was to be companion, fellow-adventurer, sister and mother, but hardly ever the lover. In bad times she was to be the devoted, iron-willed sick-nurse, filling the emotional gap left by Alison Cunningham: indeed, she seems to have preferred the role of nurse to all others.

  In Catriona, which Stevenson wrote as a sequel to Kidnapped, there is one telling incident where the hero and heroine have to defend themselves. Catriona laments that she was not born a manchild and able to wield a sword, because David Balfour (a law student like Stevenson) had never learnt to use one. Some critics have suggested that Stevenson was impotent. There is even talk of a ‘lasting injury’ to his manhood, acquired from an Edinburgh whore. He himself was the first to say he did not want a family of his own, while it was only at the end of his writing career that he brought himself to handle female characters. To introduce women, he once said, was ‘poison bad world for the romancer’. There was in Stevenson a girlishness, always kept within the bounds of Victorian prudery, that thrilled at tough, aggressive masculinity. The sailors of Treasure Island are nut-brown and soiled and scarred, and they foreshadow the Samoan house-boys that, together with Lloyd Osbourne, he selected for their beauty at Vailima. The novels are also filled with handsome greying bachelors who take a ‘fancy to the lady’. In the Weir of Hermiston fragment, the young tentative Archie Weir (a self-portrait) says goodbye to Lord Glenalmond, ‘his eyes dwelling on those of his old friend like those of a lover on his mistress’s’. Stevenson is well known to have had a father-fixation, and once spoke of his excitement and horror at the beauty of his father stripped on the beach at North Berwick.