Robert Louis Stevenson
Page 11
Nevertheless, there are a few intriguing scraps of evidence which could be made to argue the contrary. One is a letter which Bob Stevenson wrote to Louis on 6 February 1874, having met Colvin for the first time. He and Colvin had spoken, at cross purposes, about Stevenson’s situation, provoking this confidence from the professor:
He said [ … ] that he had been much grieved to observe the effect that certain emotions you had gone thro’ lately had had upon you. He said it was a first class thing for you to do and that he knew no other man who was so game for being on the spot as you and that whatever you had lost you had gained in him such a friend for life as it is difficult to gain. I thought he was not supposed to be cognizant of what had gone on at all. I am mystified first by you, more by him.51
Colvin was acknowledging an extreme act of generosity on Stevenson’s part – one that would deserve his never-ending fidelity in return (which he gave). What could this have been other than ceding to ‘the first-comer’, as Louis elsewhere calls Colvin, his love-interest in Mrs Sitwell? But in February 1874 whatever Stevenson might have ‘lost’ was not obvious from his letters or his demeanour (although he clearly did try hard to sublimate his feelings for Mrs Sitwell later that and the following year). This could (just) be because his ‘loss’ occurred before the letters to Mrs Sitwell begin, i.e. during the month at Cockfield in 1873. Stevenson himself referred in his first letters to her of ‘all that has passed between us’, and here is Bob talking of how he thought Colvin ignorant of ‘what had gone on’. Mrs Sitwell herself became oddly jealous when a rival for Louis’s attention appeared on the scene in the spring of 1874: her possessiveness then seems suggestive.
Then there is the ambiguous evidence of a letter from Graham Balfour to his wife Rhoda on the day in 1899 when he was appointed by Robert Louis Stevenson’s estate to write the official biography of the author. Fired up with excitement at the prospect of writing Stevenson’s life, and perhaps to test the extent to which he was going to be trusted, Balfour asked the widow, Fanny Stevenson, ‘straight out about F. Sitwell’:
and she says Yes. F.S. used to tell people whom she knew well, as she wished not to be on false pretences. But I fancy the fat is nearly in that fire.
Tamaitai [Fanny Stevenson] is rather bitter.52
The answer was Yes, but what was the question? It could only have been ‘Are Colvin and Mrs Sitwell lovers?’ if Graham Balfour was really out of the loop, for E.V. Lucas says that ‘all London knew’ about the relationship by this date, and the elderly-looking couple were discreet, hugely respectable and beyond the reach of harmful gossip, Albert Sitwell being five years dead. If the question was ‘Were Colvin and Mrs Sitwell lovers back in the 1870s?’ – which would explain the phrase ‘F.S. used to tell people whom she knew well, as she wished not to be on false pretences’ – what is this fat that is nearly in the fire? The exposure of Mrs Sitwell’s long-term adultery? No one was likely to do that, certainly not a biographer (and cousin) of Robert Louis Stevenson, to whom both Colvin and Mrs Sitwell had been devoted. And what was ‘Tamaitai’ ‘rather bitter’ about?*
But what if the question was ‘Were Stevenson and Mrs Sitwell ever lovers?’ Apart from Mrs Sitwell herself, and Colvin, only Fanny Stevenson could have been expected to know the answer to that one, and it seems a more pressing question for Balfour to ask at this point of maximum favour with the widow than whether or not an obvious couple were a couple. The question cannot be confidently resolved one way or the other, but it does leave open some intriguing possibilities.
The end of August came; it was time to go home, but Stevenson strung out his departure from Cockfield by staying a few days on the way back to Edinburgh at Colvin’s cottage in Norwood, with a visit to the Sitwells’ house in Chepstow Place in Bayswater. There he met ‘le chapelain’, Mrs Sitwell’s problematic husband, and was able to observe secretly the marriage he had begun to know very well from one side.* When they sat together under a tree in Suffolk, or walked around Kensington Gardens on their last day in London, the gentle, tender looks of Mrs Sitwell were a balm to Louis’s heart. His first letter to her, written when he got back to Heriot Row, shows an intimacy that had been requited fully in spirit, if not in deed:
I am very tired, dear, and somewhat depressed after all that has happened. Do you know, I think yesterday and the day before were the two happiest days of my life. It seems strange that I should prefer them to what has gone before; and yet after all, perhaps not. O God, I feel very hollow and strange just now. I had to go out to get supper and the streets were wonderfully cool and dark, with all sorts of curious illuminations at odd corners from the lamps; and I could not help fancying as I went along all sorts of foolish things – chansons – about showing all these places to you, Claire, some other night; which is not to be. Dear, I would not have missed last month for eternity.55
Louis’s new, dizzying intimacy with Mrs Sitwell in some senses precipitated the upheavals that were to take place in the Stevenson household that year, as he had for the first time someone – some woman – in whom to confide everything, and more. There seems to have been no limit to Mrs Sitwell’s capacity for confidences, and the resulting flood of emotion from her young correspondent makes remarkable reading. The letters are highly stylised, self-indulgent monologues, in which passages of elaborate description are punctuated with long rhapsodies about his feelings. Perhaps, having been anticipated in his stillborn fiction, ‘Claire’, Stevenson had trouble establishing a non-rhetorical tone. Set beside his letters to Baxter, which are full of salty jokes, raucous verses and long vernacular rambles in the character of Tam Johnson (ancient drunken venial Writer to the Signet), those to Mrs Sitwell seem the work of another person altogether. Their humourlessness is striking. Chagrined that there was no quick response to one letter, he wrote on 27 September:
I have a fear that something must have happened, and so I write frankly and fully, because I fear I may never write to you again; but O my dear, you know – you see – you must feel, in what perfect faith and absolute submission I am writing. You must feel that I shall still feel as I have felt and will work as well for you and towards you, without any recognition, as I could work with all recognition. Remember always that you are my Faith. And now, my dearest, beautiful friend, good night to you. I shall never feel otherwise to you, than now I do when I write myself
Your faithfullest friend R.L.S.56
So much fear, and so much feeling. Pages and pages went off every day to his ‘friend in London’ (which is all he told Baxter of the connection57), and every day he itched to get down to the Spec, where Mrs Sitwell was sending her replies so as not to arouse enquiry at Heriot Row. Stevenson was rather fascinated by the spectacle of himself in love, and at times asked Mrs Sitwell for copies of his letters to be sent back, for him to work into possibly saleable prose. And in the constant exercise of sensibility, he made some interesting discoveries, such as this reason for not being able ‘to bring before you, what went before me’:
There are little local sentiments, little abstruse connexions among things, that no one can ever impart. There is a pervading impression left of life in every place in one’s memory, that one can best parallel out of things physical, by calling it a perfume. Well, this perfume of Edinburgh, of my early life there, and thoughts, and friends – went tonight suddenly to my head, at the mere roll of an organ three streets away. And it went off newly, to leave in my heart the strange impression of two pages of a letter I had received this afternoon, which had about them a colour, a perfume, a long thrill of sensation – which brought a rush of sunsets, and moonlight, and primroses, and a little fresh sentiment of springtime into my heart, that I shall not readily forget.58
Love had brought out the aesthete in Stevenson with a vengeance, for what is this reminiscent of more than Proust and his madeleine? – except that Proust was still an infant.
While Louis was enjoying his Suffolk idyll, a dramatic scene had been played out in Edinburgh around the deathbed of on
e of his same-name cousins, Lewis Balfour, son of Margaret Stevenson’s elder brother Lewis. The dying thirty-year-old had decided that this was the right moment to tell his uncle Thomas Stevenson his opinion of Bob Stevenson: a filthy atheist, he believed, a ‘blight’, and ‘mildew’, whose pernicious influence on Louis had led the younger man astray.59 Thomas Stevenson latched onto this at once, for it played straight to his own desire to find a scapegoat for his son’s heretical opinions, and by the time Louis returned home from Suffolk, Bob had become the new persona non grata and Louis himself was almost exonerated. His parents were suddenly relieved and pleasant again; all that was necessary was to keep the wicked Bob out of their way.
This state of affairs clearly couldn’t last long, and when Thomas Stevenson met his nephew on the street just a few days later, he let fly with sonorous condemnations. Bob responded spiritedly, as Louis wrote later to Mrs Sitwell, ‘that he didn’t know where I had found out that the Christian religion was not true, but that he hadn’t told me. [ … ] I think from that point, the conversation went off into emotion and never touched shore again.’60 The hurt generated by this public row was enormous; Bob had had to bear the brunt of his uncle’s wrath (an intimidating spectacle, as he was now ready to concede), and Louis heard, second-hand, many painful things, including his father’s opinion that he had ceased to care for his parents and that they in turn were ceasing to care for him. Margaret Stevenson, on hearing of the interview, went into hysterics again and Louis was left to reflect miserably that ‘even the calm of our daily life is all glossing; there is a sort of tremor through it all and a whole world of repressed bitterness’.61
A shred of good came out of this explosive day: because his father’s rage had been directed against Bob instead of himself, Louis was better able to judge how violent and threatening it really was: ‘There is now, at least, one person in the world who knows what I have had to face,’ he wrote to Mrs Sitwell that evening, ‘– damn me for facing it, as I sometimes think, in weak moments – and what a tempest of emotions my father can raise when he is really excited.’62 Margaret Stevenson, who always hated any kind of confrontation, seems to have been finding her husband’s behaviour alarming too. Her loyalty to Tom was such that she usually sided with him regardless; thus her only way of communicating to Louis that she felt he had been ill-treated was by paying him small compensatory attentions. In the month following his return home, mother and son had a pleasant lunch together in Glasgow while Thomas was at a business meeting, and she gave him a kiss spontaneously one day. The fact that Stevenson noted these things gratefully is an indication of how withheld his mother must have been normally.
The truth is that both Louis and his mother were cowed by Thomas Stevenson’s rages, which were always accompanied by dramatic gestures (falling to his knees, for instance) and over-emphatic language. He was known as a melancholic man, but at times the family must have feared for his sanity too, especially with the example of his elder brother Alan before them. David Stevenson, Thomas’s other brother and senior partner in the firm, was also subject to mood swings that made him difficult to work with sometimes, and in the 1880s was to suffer a mental collapse similar to Alan’s. So with the threat of over-straining his father’s temper, and having done – as he was constantly reminded – so much damage already, Louis was keen to placate whenever he could, acquiescing to Thomas’s bizarre (and aggressive) demand that he write to the papers on the subject of Presbyterian Union – the last thing on Louis’s mind at the time – and trying his best to ‘make him nearly happy’.63 His attempts were usually failures, and one time went spectacularly wrong. On an evening when his mother was away, Louis thought his father might be interested to hear some passages from a paper he had given at the Spec on the Duke of Argyll, but even in such diluted form the articulation of Louis’s views on free will were too much for Thomas, who said he was being tested too far. He then launched into renewed recriminations, as Louis, shaky and upset, reported to Mrs Sitwell later that night:
He said tonight, ‘He wished he had never married’, and I could only echo what he said. ‘A poor end’, he said, ‘for all my tenderness.’ And what was there to answer? ‘I have made all my life to suit you—I have worked for you and gone out of my way for you – and the end of it is that I find you in opposition to the Lord Jesus Christ – I find everything gone – I would ten times sooner have seen you lying in your grave than that you should be shaking the faith of other young men and bringing such ruin on other houses, as you have brought already upon this’.64
There were more scenes of this sort, and ‘half threats of turning me out’, along with some flashes of extraordinary peevishness and pique on the part of the father towards the son. Stevenson told Mrs Sitwell in early October of an incident when his mother (hearing, Louis imagined, of the row that had taken place in her absence) had given him a little present which Thomas then coveted. ‘I was going to give it up to him, but she would not allow me,’ Louis wrote. What an odd family scene this conjures up: the father sulking over his wife’s little gesture of kindness, the son scrambling to mollify his feelings. ‘It is always a pic-nic on a volcano,’ he concluded sadly.65
The strain of living in ‘our ruined, miserable house’ was telling on Louis. His spirits were very low, his health consequently poor, and he reported to Mrs Sitwell on 16 September 1873 that he weighed a mere eight stone six (118 pounds). This was a man who was about five foot ten high and almost twenty-three years old. Bob was appalled at what was happening to his cousin, and advised him strongly to leave home. But Louis couldn’t do this cleanly, partly because of his own dependence on his parents for money, partly because of their astonishing dependence on him. When Louis suggested that he should transfer to an English university (perhaps he argued that the climate would be better for him) he met with point-blank refusal: ‘I must be kept, don’t you see, from persons of my own way of thinking.’66
Edinburgh was beginning to look like a prison. Bob was leaving in October for Antwerp; ‘Roads’, for all Colvin’s sponsorship, had been rejected by the Saturday Review. Colvin had arranged the necessary forms of admission to the English Bar on Louis’s behalf, but as the date for the preliminary examinations in London drew nearer, Stevenson began to fear he would miss that chance too, as he was too ill in the preceding week to go anywhere (and, predictably, had done no preparation for the exam at all). He got away on 24 October by telling his parents he wanted a change and was going to Carlisle, from where he went on to London.
From this point, events moved rapidly: he went straight to Mrs Sitwell at Chepstow Place, who took one look at him and insisted that he be seen by a specialist in lung diseases. The doctor, Andrew Clark, insisted that he should think neither of sitting the law exam nor of returning to Edinburgh but go immediately to the South of France to convalesce. It was not his lungs that were the problem (though the lungs were ‘delicate and just in the state when disease might very easily set in’67), but his nerves, which were ‘quite broken down’.
Clark’s diagnosis was so adamant that one wonders if Mrs Sitwell primed him on the patient’s situation, for when Thomas and Margaret Stevenson hurried down to London to consult him themselves, he seemed to have understood the source of Louis’s nervous collapse very well and renewed his insistence that the patient have a complete change of scene and travel alone. The parents were upset at this wresting of the initiative from their hands, but couldn’t question the opinion of such an eminent and expensive doctor, and arrangements were made immediately for Louis to spend the winter in Menton. ‘Clark’, Louis wrote to Mrs Sitwell from the hotel where his parents had taken him, ‘is a trump.’68
Thus, in the first week of November 1873, Stevenson found himself on a train out of Paris, heading for the lemon groves and white villas of the south coast of France.
* * *
*Fanny Stevenson’s feelings towards Colvin were, by this date, not ‘bitter’ so much as implacably antagonistic. Her letters to Graham Balfour d
uring the period when he was writing Stevenson’s biography (1899–1901) are full of scorn for Colvin’s method and accusations of conspiracy against Colvin and RLS’s old friends. She refers to Fanny Sitwell as ‘a pigface’ and anticipates ‘heartrending wails’ from the couple over the loss of control of the biography. Fanny Sitwell had written to Fanny Stevenson, the latter notes sarcastically, asking her to suppress ‘“Youthful things that he [RLS] would have burned if he were here”’.53
*I am assuming RLS did meet Albert Sitwell at this time because his letter of 1 September sends greetings to Bertie and instructs FJS to ‘say what is necessary, if you like, or if you think anything necessary, to the Curate of Cumberworth and the Vicar of Roost’.54 There would have been no necessity for greetings of any kind had RLS not been introduced to him.