Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  Strange how my mind runs on this idea. Becoming great, becoming great, becoming great. A heart burned out with the lust of this world’s approbation: a hideous disease to have, even though shielded, as it is in my case, with a certain imperturbable something – self-consciousness or common sense, I cannot tell which, – that would prevent me poisoning myself like Chatterton or drinking like Burns on the failure of my ambitious hopes.29

  Bob was irritatingly slow to respond, but when he did, expressed similar doubts about his ability to succeed as an artist, which was his own secret intention. The two of them were in a ferment of fears and ambition, but Bob’s was at once the easier and the more hopeless case: no one was forcing him to join the family firm (the example of his father’s breakdown must have allowed that), but he was self-confessedly indolent and depressive. Louis’s neuroses went the other way, towards overwork, having to live two lives in tandem if he wanted to be a writer at all. Nor did Louis need to drum up suicidal tendencies in order to be recognised as a full-blown romantic genius; death by natural causes seemed likely to get there first.

  The most marked characteristic of Stevenson’s years as a student of engineering was loneliness. He seems to have made no lasting friendships at all at the university, or in the pubs and streets of the Old Town where he was most often found loitering instead of attending class. He was intimidated by the diligence of the ploughboys and earnest burghers’ sons who were his fellow students in natural philosophy or the dreaded mathematics. One of these students, it turned out, had only one shirt to his name and was forced to stay away from class on the days when it was being washed. Stevenson was ashamed to reflect that he needed no reason at all to stay away, but did so ‘as often as he dared’. He joined the University Speculative Society in March 1869, but didn’t make much of an impression there at first among the confident young future advocates and doctors who made up most of its membership. ‘The Spec’ was an exclusive debating club limited to thirty members, who met by candlelight and in full evening dress in a series of comfortable rooms in South Bridge. ‘A candid fellow-member’ (presumably Walter Simpson, brother of the lady who recorded this) said of the newly-recruited young engineer, ‘I cannot remember that Stevenson was ever anything as a speaker. He was nervous and ineffective, and had no power of debate; but his papers were successful.’30 His happier days at the Spec were still to come.

  Thomas and Margaret Stevenson had bought their son a set of barbells to develop his chest, but no amount of callisthenics could perform that miracle; the boy didn’t have an ounce of either muscle or fat. As his body grew taller and thinner, it made his head look unusually large by comparison, and his eyes, that had always been wide-set and interestingly misaligned, began to look more than ever like those of an intelligent hare. In view of how quickly his health improved in warm, dry places, it was unfortunate, to say the least, that Stevenson lived so many years in one of the ‘vilest climates known to man’, in the damp and cold and dark of Auld Reekie. He used to hang over the bridge by Waverley station, watching the trains taking luckier people away from his native city, and remembered with piquant dislike ‘the solo of the gas burner in the little front room; a knickering, flighty, fleering and yet spectral cackle. I mind it above all on winter afternoons, late, when the window was blue and spotted with rare raindrops, and looking out, the cold evening was seen blue all over, with the lamps of Queen’s and Frederick’s Street dotting it with yellow and flaring eastward in the squalls. Heavens, how unhappy I have been in such circumstances.’31

  Louis’s isolation made it difficult for him to fight back fits of morbid melancholy. ‘My daily life is one repression from beginning to end, and my letters to you are the safety valve,’ he told Bob bluntly, just after his eighteenth birthday. He managed to be tormented with scruples, mostly about his waste or abuse of the opportunities his parents had provided him with, and attempted once to leave home on the principle that he might ‘free himself from the responsibility of this wealth that was not his’.32 To minimise his parents’ total expenditure he came to the eccentric conclusion that so long as he doubted a full return to health, he would live very sparsely in ‘an upper room’, but when he perceived an improvement he would go back to being pampered and paid for, in order to make the quickest exit from dependence.

  His plans for self-improvement all turned on renunciation of his true desires, and in these moods his single-minded pursuit of authorship struck him as not merely a feeble self-indulgence but actively wrong. Perhaps, as he wrote to Bob on a particularly gloomy day, ‘to do good by writing [ … ] one must write little’:33

  I am entering on a profession which must engross the strength of my powers and to which I shall try to devote my energies. What I should prefer would be to search dying people in lowly places of the town and help them; but I cannot trust myself in such places. I told you my weak point before and you will understand me.34

  The pious young man was imagining himself as some sort of Jesus of the streets – and yet, he was too unworthy for that. Sunday school teaching was perhaps the only option open to him, he mused – but no, that also required a purer spirit.

  The dark talk of not being trustworthy in ‘lowly places of the town’ refers (not without a tinge of pride) to Louis’s rapid escalation of worldly knowledge during his student years. He later said that his childhood piety had gone hand in hand with its correlate, ‘precocious depravity’,35 which ranged from trying to summon up the Devil to solemn, secret experiments in blasphemy. Writing about his childhood at the age of twenty-two, Stevenson was in no mood to dismiss these traits, but saw them as consistent with his adult behaviour: ‘I find that same morbid bias, [ … ] the same small cowardice and small vanity, ever ready to lead me into petty falsehood.’36 He saw ‘a parallel case’ between his own early years and those of the Covenanter Walter Pringle of Greenknow, whose memoirs had been one of Cummy’s permitted texts. This is an extraordinary thing to say. Pringle’s Memoirs are stuffed with the harshest language: he describes his youth as ‘years of darkness, deadness, and sinfulness’ when he committed ‘abominations’ and ‘slept about the brink of the bottomless pit’,37 all in the context of later conversion, in other words, all in a priggish context. Stevenson could certainly be priggish too: the Covenanting childhood left deep divisions in his mind between good and evil, heaven and the pit, and ‘something of the Shorter Catechist’ hung about him, as W.E. Henley was to observe, even in his most apparently easy-going, atheistic days.

  Just as in childhood Stevenson had found himself drawn fascinatedly towards the wickedness that his puritan upbringing taught him to revile, so in the freedom of adulthood and the long hours of college truancy he quickly became a habitué of some of Edinburgh’s most disreputable dives. ‘The underworld of the Edinburgh of 1870 had its sharp and clear geographical limits,’ one historian of the town has written. ‘It began in certain streets within a space of scarcely more than a few yards, and ended as abruptly.’38 What could have been more grimly satisfying to the young moralist than the ease with which he could traverse these boundaries?

  Many years later, Stevenson told his cousin Graham Balfour that he felt his rather shabby forms of youthful dissipation were linked to the short allowance he was kept on:

  You know I very easily might have gone to the devil: I don’t understand why I didn’t. Even when I was almost grown up I was kept so short of money that I had to make the most of every penny. The result was that I had my dissipation all the same but I had it in the worst possible surroundings.39

  His ‘headquarters’ at this time, he told Balfour, was an old pub frequented by sailors, criminals and ‘the lowest order of prostitutes – threepenny whores’, where he used to go and write. Eve Simpson, rather missing the point, protested later that Stevenson had no need to behave like a poor man; he had ‘all his bills paid’, an allowance, ‘and his own study in a very hospitable home’.40 But the dingy old pub clearly pleased him, with its interesting human traffic: ‘[the gir
ls] were really singularly decent creatures, not a bit worse than anybody else’.41

  And he made an interesting figure himself, affecting a ‘scruffy, mountebankish appearance’ and cultivating notoriety among the neighbours in the New Town by his ‘shabby dress and dank locks’.42 ‘Hauf a laddie, hauf a lassie, hauf a yellow yite!’ boys called after him on the street, not visibly ruffling the young man at all.43 A poem of 1870 celebrates the effect his clothes and demeanour had on the average Edinburgh bourgeois:

  I walk the streets smoking my pipe

  And I love the dallying shop-girl

  That leans with rounded stern to look at the fashions;

  And I hate the bustling citizen,

  The eager and hurrying man of affairs I hate,

  Because he bears his intolerance writ on his face

  And every movement and word of him tells me how much he hates me.44

  Perhaps Stevenson was trying to become a Scottish symboliste; he habitually, at this date, made marginal comments on his own poetry in French: ‘pas mal’ or ‘atroce’. The choice of free verse for this and the whole series of poems that he wrote in 1870 seems very bold and challenging, especially as Stevenson became known later as a rather conventional poet (when he was thought of in that role at all). None of these early verses – written when he was most serious about verse – was published in his lifetime, however.

  The ‘bustling citizen’ most offended by Louis’s eccentricities of behaviour and dress was, of course, his father. Thomas Stevenson was always begging his son to go to the tailor, but when Louis finally succumbed and had a garment made, he chose a dandyish black velvet smoking jacket. He wore this constantly, so it soon lost whatever smartness it had: it was totemic, marking perfectly his difference from the waistcoated and tailed bourgeois of Edinburgh. It declared that although young Stevenson was sometimes confusable with a privileged brat from the New Town, his real milieu was the Left Bank, his true home among artists, connoisseurs, flâneurs.* And in the sanded back-kitchen of the Green Elephant, the Gay Japanee or the Twinkling Eye, ‘Velvet Coat’ became his nickname; the boy of genius, perhaps even the poète maudit.

  For a person brought up in such fear for his soul, Stevenson displayed a remarkable fund of basic common sense about sex. Despite their piety, neither of his parents was a prude, and his father’s generous opinions about fallen women predisposed the son to think well of this class of female. Stevenson lost his virginity to one of them while still in his teens, and probably had relations with many more, as this fragment from his 1880 autobiographical notes makes clear:

  And now, since I am upon this chapter, I must tell the story of Mary H –. She was a robust, great-haunched, blue-eyed young woman, of admirable temper and, if you will let me say so of a prostitute, extraordinary modesty. Every now and again she would go to work; once, I remember, for some months in a factory down Leith Walk, from which I often met her returning; but when she was not upon the streets, she did not choose to be recognised. She was perfectly self-respecting. I had certainly small fatuity at the period; for it never occurred to me that she thought of me except in the way of business, though I now remember her attempts to waken my jealousy which, being very simple, I took at the time for gospel. Years and years after all this was over and gone, when I was walking sick and sorry and alone, I met Mary somewhat carefully dressed; and we recognised each other with a joy that was, I daresay, a surprise to both. I spent three or four hours with her in a public-house parlour; she was going to emigrate in a few days to America; we had much to talk about; and she cried bitterly, and so did I. We found in that interview that we had been dear friends without knowing it; I can still hear her recalling the past in her sober, Scotch voice, and I can still feel her good honest loving hand as we said goodbye.46

  His respectful, even loving, manner must have endeared him to the tarts of the Old Town and encouraged him to develop what was already strong – a romantic sensuousness. He was clearly rather sentimental about women, although he had no neuroses about his dealings with them. But bringing his sexual experience to bear in his writing was another matter altogether.

  Prostitutes weren’t the only kind of women that Stevenson associated with; he had plenty of pretty and spirited girl-cousins (there is more than a touch of gallantry in his letters to his cousin Henrietta Traquair), and liked to practise his charm on friends’ sisters. A ‘lady with whom my heart was [ … ] somewhat engaged’ dominated his thoughts in the winter of 1870,47 and if his poems of the time reflect actual experiences, she may have been the girl with whom he played footsie at church (‘You looked so tempting in the pew’48), or the one with whom he skated on Duddingston Loch:

  You leaned to me, I leaned to you,

  Our course was smooth as flight –

  We steered – a heel-touch to the left,

  A heel-touch to the right.

  We swung our way through flying men,

  Your hand lay fast in mine,

  We saw the shifting crowd dispart,

  The level ice-reach shine.

  I swear by yon swan-travelled lake,

  By yon calm hill above,

  I swear had we been drowned that day

  We had been drowned in love.49

  Stevenson later admitted to having considered marrying one of the Mackenzie girls (who were neighbours of his engineering professor, Fleeming Jenkin), or Eve, the sister of his friend Walter Simpson, among whose possessions was a lock of the author’s hair. But on the whole he was little attracted to ladylike girls, for reasons suggested by this passage in his 1882 essay, ‘Talk and Talkers’:

  The drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial place; it is so by our choice and for our sins. The subjection of women; the ideal imposed upon them from the cradle, and worn, like a hair-shirt, with so much constancy; their motherly, superior tenderness to man’s vanity and self-importance; their managing arts – the arts of a civilised slave among good-natured barbarians – are all painful ingredients and all help to falsify relations.50

  In the wake of his later fame, many colourful stories of ran-stam laddishness grew up around Stevenson, mostly revealing an undercurrent of regret that he failed to marry a Scotswoman and died childless.* In 1925, Sidney Colvin was disgusted at the claim in a book (called, baldly, Robert Louis Stevenson, My Father) that Louis had an illegitimate son by the daughter of the blacksmith at Swanston. But while doubting there was any truth in the Swanston claim, even Colvin had to admit ‘we all knew [ … ] that Louis as a youngster was a loose fish in regard to women’.51

  Loose fish is better than cold fish (the accusation often aimed at Colvin himself), and however uninhibited Louis was about sex, he retained high notions about chivalry and ‘what is honorable in sentiment, what is essential in gratitude, or what is tolerable by other men’52 in regard to women. This did not include political rights, however. When there were student disturbances in Edinburgh late in 1870 over the admission of women to medical classes, Stevenson wrote to his cousin Maud that he had little sympathy with the ‘studentesses’ who had been hissed at and jostled: ‘Miss Jex-Blake [the lead campaigner] is playing for the esteem of posterity. Soit. I give her posterity; but I won’t marry either her or her fellows. Let posterity marry them, if posterity likes – I won’t.’53 He was to revise his views about New Women somewhat in the coming years.

  Stevenson was often subject to fits of morbid melancholy during these years, and wrote to Bob of aimless days looking for distractions, trying to buy hashish, thinking about getting drunk, or hanging round Greyfriars churchyard for hours at a time ‘in the depths of wretchedness’,54 reading Baudelaire, who, he told Bob, ‘would have corrupted St Paul’. The exquisitely self-tormenting notion struck him that he might have already used himself up, that his imagination was, in the potent word of the time, ‘spent’. Alone in an inn at Dunoon in the spring of 1870, he wrote a notebook entry which explicitly links this idea of ‘over-worked imagination’ with the addictive effects of drug-taking:

&
nbsp; He who indulges habitually in the intoxicating pleasures of imagination, for the very reason that he reaps a greater pleasure than others, must resign himself to a keener pain, a more intolerable and utter prostration. It is quite possible, and even comparatively easy, so to enfold oneself in pleasant fancies, that the realities of life may seem but as the white snow-shower in the street that only gives a relish to the swept hearth and lively fire within. By such means I have forgotten hunger, I have sometimes eased pain, and I have invariably changed into the most pleasant hours of the day those very vacant and idle seasons which would otherwise have hung most heavily upon my hand. But all this is attained by the undue prominence of purely imaginative joys, and consequently the weakening and almost the destruction of reality. This is buying at too great a price. There are seasons when the imagination becomes somehow tranced and surfeited, as it is with me this morning; and then upon what can one fall back? The very faculty that we have fostered and trusted has failed us in the hour of trial; and we have so blunted and enfeebled our appetite for the others that they are subjectively dead to us. [ … ] Do not suppose I am exaggerating when I talk about all pleasures seeming stale. To me, at least, the edge of almost everything is put on by imagination; and even nature, in these days when the fancy is drugged and useless, wants half the charm it has in better moments. [ … ] I am vacant, unprofitable: a leaf on a river with no volition and no aim: a mental drunkard the morning after an intellectual debauch. Yes, I have a more subtle opium in my own mind than any apothecary’s drug; but it has a sting of its own, and leaves one as flat and helpless as the other.55

  Stale, flat, unprofitable: these seem familiar words from a young man intrigued by his own existential dilemmas, and there is more than a touch of speech-making about them, from the expository first sentence to the anticipation of a listener’s responses – ‘Do not suppose I am exaggerating when I talk …’, ‘Yes, I have a more subtle opium …’ For a diary entry it is wonderfully oratorical. Perhaps Stevenson was right to fear losing touch with his imaginative powers, but not through lack of ideas so much as from a surfeit of style.