Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  But the attempted idyll didn’t last, and by the time Fanny’s third child, a little boy called Hervey, was born in 1871, Sam was openly living with a mistress in San Francisco, near the courthouse where he now worked as a stenographer. Divorce was not on the cards, but as Sam only came home at weekends, the separation was pretty thorough and, to a woman of Fanny’s proud disposition, very wounding. She responded by cultivating greater and greater independence and developing her own circle of friends from among her husband’s associates. Sam Osbourne had become something of a social kingpin in San Francisco, and together with John Lloyd and a young lawyer called Timothy Rearden had founded the Bohemian Club (which in time became the most successful thing of its kind on the west coast). Members included the writer Bret Harte, the musician Oscar Weil and the poet Charles Warren Stoddard, whom Fanny got to know well. It was Timothy Rearden, though, who became her main ally, and she flirted with him shamelessly, enjoying the frisson of her frequent lone visits to his bachelor rooms in the city. In the copious correspondence that has survived of their relationship, Fanny’s tone is almost constantly provocative: ‘I suppose writing this note is another impropriety – Do you suppose Mrs Grundy went to heaven when she died? If so let me go to – the other place’;15 ‘I liked the warmth and the brightness and the sound of your voice, especially when you called me “child”. You sounded so old and kind then. I think you want to box my ears now. You were not truly kind, I know, only old, and you happened to have that kind of a voice.’16 Some biographers have assumed that the two were lovers, but from what Fanny says in one letter to Rearden in November 1875, I would guess that he was homosexual, or would have liked to be: ‘give me your promise that what occurred at the [Turkish] baths should never happen again’, Fanny wrote. ‘Could you do that? Would you? [ … ] I can hardly believe you falling back for a moment, after all these years, into the old ways.’17 Perhaps they were lovers (Rearden married later in life), or perhaps just intimate, risqué, confidential friends.

  Another member of the Bohemian Club who, with his wife Dora, got to know Fanny well was an artist called Virgil Williams. He had founded and ran San Francisco’s first fine art college, the School of Design, with premises next door to those of the Bohemian Club above the California Market (then situated on the corner of Market and Pine).* Through Williams and his wife Fanny began to think she too might have a future in the arts, or at least in la vie bohème, and in 1874 she enrolled herself and sixteen-year-old Belle at the school as part-time students.

  Fanny’s relationship with her teenaged daughter had become one of strangely complicit rivalry. Fanny was only thirty-four in 1874 but looked even younger, while Belle looked older than her age. With their very similar figures and gypsy colouring, the two women were often mistaken for sisters and both played up to the coquette potential of the situation. They were, after all, both on the lookout for lovers at the same time, and attracted (or were attracted to) the same kind of man, a fact that led to many complicated situations over the next thirty or forty years. Belle had huge dark eyes and an ardent, confident manner; she was not exactly pretty, but sexy and flirtatious. At the age of only fourteen she was followed to the theatre by a young man who had been drawing her portrait clandestinely on the ferry over to San Francisco, an art student called Joe Strong (of whom more later); at sixteen, she was proposed to by a man who had met her only once, the first of many smitten Suitors. Fanny had the same sultry beauty as her daughter, with the added allure of maturity and experience, and a slightly tragic, mysterious air. She had plenty of advice for Belle on voice, dress and body language and some favourite techniques for entrancing men: one was acting vulnerable – ‘she had only to look helpless and bewildered, and gallant strangers leaped to her assistance’, Belle recalled18 – another, her speciality, was to fix the victim with a stare, as Robert Louis Stevenson was about to find out. Her regard, he said later, ‘was like the sighting of a pistol’.

  The undated photograph of Fanny in her bohemian velvet-trimmed jacket and cravat, which is the most attractive image of her to have survived, I guess to have been taken around this time, or a bit earlier, as it seems considerably less matronly than the photo taken in 1880 on the occasion of her second marriage. It is the only picture of her in which she seems to be almost smiling; her figure is trim and she looks touchingly young and untroubled, with her hair pinned up haphazardly and no jewellery or adornments. It seems to fit with the period in the early 1870s when Fanny was reinventing herself as an artist and an independent spirit, years before the idea of the ‘new woman’ was born. She was almost certainly engaged in other flirtations, possibly affairs, at this time. Going to and from the School of Design with her mother, Fanny dressed in a skirt with a slight bustle, a tight-fitting basque, ‘leg-of-mutton’ sleeves and a blue velvet toque, Belle began to notice ‘the attention my mother attracted and [ … ] how very pretty she was’.19 She cut quite a figure at the college with her determined attitude and thirst for self-improvement, winning a silver medal for drawing in her first year. ‘This did not seem to have much effect on her at the time,’ Belle wrote many years later, ‘but after her death I found, squeezed in her jewellery box, a little leather disk at the bottom of a black box, the medal she had taken everywhere, even to the end.’

  Her mother’s next move left Belle ‘the most surprised person in the world’.20 Only a year after starting at the San Francisco art school, Fanny made the wild decision to leave for a year in Europe with all three children and the boys’ governess, a dumpy young woman called Kate Moss. The excuse was to carry on her and Belle’s art studies in Antwerp, but the reason was yet another flare-up in her slowly disintegrating marriage. Sam objected strongly to the plan, but didn’t prevent her going; indeed he probably couldn’t have prevented her, Fanny was worked up to such a pitch of hysterical excitement. All her adult life, Fanny suffered from what she called ‘brain fevers’, and she certainly seemed to be in the grip of one of them when she wrote this description to Dora Williams of her dash from Indianapolis to New York City: ‘We plunged over embankments into foaming torrents, at the risk of being swept away and drowned, half a dozen times [ … ] The story of my ride went before me [ … ] and each conductor passed my party over his road, introducing me to the next as the lady who drove over the Vandalia road.’21 Typically, Fanny makes it sound as if she had driven not just the road but the coach itself, and the ride becomes hers alone, no mention of the children, Miss Kate, or the other passengers. But at this moment in her life, she was intoxicated by the drama of her own story and gave little thought to anyone else. Symbolically enough, the floods they went through on the way to New York were destroying bridges behind them.

  Fanny heard the midnight chimes from Antwerp cathedral with tears in her eyes as their ship sailed into port in October 1875: ‘I was sentimental enough to imagine it a welcome to the old world, and to accept it as a good omen,’ she wrote to Mrs Williams.22 But she knew nothing about Belgium, could speak neither Flemish nor French, and had arrived to take up a course at an institution which didn’t admit women. The wonder is that the party spent three months in the city, with nothing to do, very little money and the frail four-year-old Hervey ill almost all the time. Though her letters to Rearden are full of silly swaggering about her own and Belle’s attractiveness and the behaviour of men towards them, Fanny was clearly feeling lonely and intimidated. She was sorry and surprised to hear that Sam was missing his family badly, and, for a rare moment, began to think she might have made a mistake:

  I didn’t know I should miss [Sam] as I do. It was pitiful to hear my little Hervy [sic] in his delirium calling and calling for his father; it made me feel as if I had no right to have him so far away.23

  Hervey’s condition got worse, ‘Antwerp fever’ was raging, and so in November Fanny decided to move the bedraggled family on to Paris, spiritual home of would-be artists. They took rooms on the rue de Naples, and Belle and Fanny enrolled in the Atelier des Dames off the boulevard des Italiens
, an all-women school run by a Monsieur Julien, where Belle was delighted to find herself in the same class as Louisa May Alcott’s sister, May, the original of Amy in Little Women. Fanny attended class infrequently, being required to nurse her youngest child. They were living on a shoestring: ‘Our furniture is of the most primitive character, mostly made by myself,’ Fanny wrote to Dora Williams,24 again managing to salvage some grounds for self-congratulation from a disastrous situation. But with the unexpected doctors’ bills on top of everything else, the little money promised by Sam was never going to be enough, even had he been the sort of man to send regular, predictable payments. Samuel Junior remembered Paris as somewhere where he felt hungry all the time and pressed his face against the windows of patisseries in agonies of desire. If it hadn’t meant another mouth to feed, Fanny might almost have been grateful for the company of Miss Kate, whom she had tried to ditch in New York. The governess, clearly worried about the children, and perhaps under separate instructions from their father, had got herself onto the boat in steerage.

  Fanny was clearly culpable in what happened next. The nature of Hervey’s illness was unclear (the Antwerp doctors suspected ‘scrofulous consumption’) and he had been given some odd treatments, including having his sides painted with ‘some drug so powerful that everyone in the room is almost blinded by it’, drinking fresh ox-blood and taking quinine by the tablespoon. By February 1876 – five months after she first began to report him ill – Hervey was still sick, but Fanny made Rearden promise not to breathe a word of it to Sam. At the slightest sign of a respite, she convinced herself that the child was improving, though Belle said (albeit with hindsight) ‘we knew he was going to die long before the end came’. Fanny’s denial meant that she left it far too late to inform her husband of the situation, and by the time Sam Osbourne arrived in Paris, summoned by cablegram halfway across the world, Hervey was almost dead. Fanny’s grief-stricken description of the boy’s last days is more like a hallucination than a memory:

  I did not dare leave him because every few hours he bled in a new place. I shall never forget the smell of blood. He would say, ‘Blood, mama, get the things; wait till I am ready.’ [ … ] Everyone ran from the room when he said blood; his father stayed once until he saw the probe, and then he too turned pale and ran away. None could see what my boy could bear. Through all his sufferings he never lost his mind. I only wish he had been unconscious. When in the most violent convulsions, his bones snapping in and out of joint like the crack of a whip, and covered with blood, he lay back in my arms, looking into my eyes and listening to my words through it all. [ … ] he could hardly hear, the rush of blood having torn one drum entirely away and perforating the other, but no-one can conceive what agony it was to me, and so it went on day after day, such terrible days! His bones had cut through the skin and lay bare, and yet there was no word of complaint through it all.25

  Sam didn’t stay long in Paris after the funeral. Rather than drawing him and his wife back together again, Hervey’s death marked the beginning of the end of their marriage. Though Sam might have insisted on his wife’s return to the States at this point, he didn’t. Both bereaved parents were too numb for recriminations. They followed the little white coffin to its plot in Saint-Germain cemetery on 8 April 1876 and parted soon after, Sam back to his job and his mistress, Fanny to her continued ‘studies’.*

  The summer dragged on in Paris for the subdued remnant of the Osbourne family. Belle was making some progress in her art classes, it was thought, but Fanny was too miserably affected by her child’s death to take part properly. ‘Brain fever’ seemed to threaten again, and a complete change of air was recommended, not least because little Sam was also looking ill. From this time onwards, Fanny became (understandably) extremely neurotic about the state of her remaining son’s health.

  The Hôtel Chevillon at Grez-sur-Loing (where Fanny and Sam may have visited briefly just after Hervey’s death) had been suggested as a quiet, congenial place in the country, frequented by painters, mostly Irish, English and American, and it was there that Fanny took the children for a couple of months to convalesce and perhaps get some informal painting lessons. Belle was charmed when she first saw the old stone building from the high seat of the diligence, and loved the vine-covered arbour and the garden that sloped down to the Loing. They seemed to have the place to themselves to begin with, with only an American, Mr Palmer, quietly dabbling with watercolours in the garden, until the dramatic arrival of Bob Stevenson, looking, typically, like ‘a sort of gentleman gypsy’. Both Belle and Fanny were entranced by the charismatic Scot; Fanny wrote to Rearden swooningly about his ‘wonderful grace and figure’, his talent, charm, musicality, ability to speak ‘all languages’ and perform ‘any sort of feats of strength’. The attraction seems to have been mutual, for Bob was soon instigating adventures with Mrs Osbourne such as rowing her into deep water in a canoe and deliberately capsizing it as a ‘hardening-off exercise’. Fanny couldn’t swim, so plenty of rescuing must have been required; also, as Belle recalled, her mother looked particularly fetching in her long-sleeved bathing costume with a scarlet kerchief tied round the waist, ‘her tiny feet in red espadrilles’.26 She and Bob dripped back to the hotel together and compared their bare legs for sunburn.

  Then the other members of the group of friends began to arrive one at a time: Walter Simpson, his brother Willie, and the Irish painter Frank O’Meara, another student of Carolus-Duran. The ebullient and charming O’Meara, still only twenty, homed in quickly on Belle and was soon melting her heart with his rendition of ‘The Harp that Once through Tara’s Halls’. The two American women, whom Bob had feared might spoil the atmosphere at Grez, were turning out to be welcome additions to the company. They were permanently available for forest walks or river escapades or, if it rained, sessions of verse-writing or charades. Fanny became known (she was quick to relate) as ‘the beautiful American’ and ‘the Sultana’, and though she continued to present herself as an ‘artist’ – and completed one perfectly competent oil painting of Grez’s old bridge – her studies soon became less important to her than cultivating the role of model and muse to the group of excitable bohemians. ‘They paint me, making me very beautiful,’ she wrote goadingly to Rearden, ‘and make up sketches of my mouth, and the back of my head, and my nose, and model my arms in clay.’

  Still to arrive in this erotically-charged artistic holiday camp was Louis Stevenson, the other ‘mad Scotsman’ of whom the Osbournes had been warned. He had spent a miserable summer in Edinburgh, battling with depression and some mysterious ‘trouble’ that sent him to take refuge at Henley’s digs for awhile (indicating that it was something to do with money: his parents were away from home at the time).27 He wrote despondently to Frances Sitwell (to whom letters were becoming less and less frequent), ‘there are times when people’s lives stand still. If you were to ask a squirrel in a mechanical cage, for his autobiography, it would not be very gay.’28 He didn’t expect her to like his latest essay for the Cornhill, a witty meditation on marriage called ‘Virginibus Puerisque’. Perhaps the theme was on his mind because Baxter, Henley and Simpson were all courting (and all married in the following two years), and Bob was always falling in love: ‘In one way or another, life forces men apart and breaks up the goodly fellowships for ever,’ he wrote. ‘The very flexibility and ease which make men’s friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget.’29 The essay depicts marriage as comfortable, highly desirable (as long as both parties were ‘versed in the niceties of the heart, and born with a faculty for willing compromise’30), but neither heroic nor romantic. Here was the perverse, witty vein that began to mark out Stevenson’s writing: ‘Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness’; ‘even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even if we regard it as no more than a sort of friendship recognised by the police, there must be degrees in the freedom and sympathy realised, and some principle to g
uide simple folk in their selection’; ‘marriage is like life in this – that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses’.31 Leslie Stephen must have been rubbing his hands with pleasure over having secured this new Elia for the Cornhill.

  Louis was getting impatient to have a book published, and in 1876 hit on the idea of using his summer holiday to generate the material for a long travel essay. Walter Simpson, with whom he had already been on several walking tours and a sailing holiday in the Inner Hebrides, was the chosen companion. They set off from Antwerp at the end of August in two canoes, the Cigarette (Simpson’s) and the Arethusa, paddled some thirty miles down the Willebroek Canal to Brussels, went by rail from Brussels to Maubeuge, then got back on water and canoed the Rivers Sambre and Oise to Pontoise in the Val d’Oise. The projected journey was to continue all the way to the Mediterranean, via the Saône and Rhône, more than double the distance they actually covered. Stevenson planned to complete the second leg the following year, but that never happened.*

  Stevenson didn’t write An Inland Voyage until the winter of 1877, by which time his motives had become nicely mixed. What he intended as ‘an easy book’, riding on the novelty of the itinerary, turned into an impromptu prospectus of the author’s personality, philosophy and literary style. This was somewhat the result of force majeure, for the journey turned out to be short on incident (the episode where Stevenson loses his canoe to a fallen tree but ‘sticks to his paddle’ is the dramatic high point) and, as the author was comically ready to admit, the whole enterprise struck many observers as pointless or absurd. Innkeepers and bargees shook their heads at the idea of travelling the waterways for pleasure, and one ‘malicious’ old man near Landrecies told the traveller to ‘“Get into a train, my little young man, [ … ] and go you away home to your parents.”’32