Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  The book dramatises this very desire to escape not just from home and parents but from the wider world of respectability, responsibility and ‘attendance at an office’. Of course a canoe holiday with a baronet was in itself profoundly bourgeois, but ‘protest against offices and the mercantile spirit’ runs through the narrative like a lively undercurrent, and it is taken as read that ‘the gipsily-inclined among men’ are always going to get the best out of life. The narrator’s heart goes out to the puppeteers at Précy, the travelling merchant and his wife, strollers and bagmen, and he is never so pleased as when he and Simpson are mistaken for peddlers in Pont-sur-Sambre on account of their scruffiness and sent to get lodgings with a butcher. They are ejected from an inn again, more violently, in La Fère, prompting the author to remark that ‘once get under the wheels, and you wish society were at the devil’.33 It’s impossible to take any of this too seriously. Stevenson had once been held in a cell for six hours in Châtillon-sur-Loing while the police inspected his papers, but earlier attempts at getting himself arrested in London for looking like a beggar had not met with any success, as Colvin (who was fascinated with his friend’s taste for slumming) testified: ‘One and all saw through him, and refused to take him seriously as a member of the criminal classes.’34

  The contretemps at La Fère had a good outcome, as the two canoeists ended up at an auberge full of military reservists, where they were able to witness the tenderness of the landlord and his wife to each other. This is the sort of ‘travel’ Stevenson really wants to write about: not tourist sites, but sights of ordinary life, hardships, rebuffs, oddity, humour, moments of human sympathy. The gliding progress of the Cigarette and the Arethusa alongside the towns and farms, wherries and wharves of the Low Countries and France thus becomes an elegant exercise in social voyeurism. The two companions are always moving on, past the camp of shabby soldiers, past the boating club, past the girls’ boarding school:

  there were the girls about the garden; and here were we on the river; and there was more than one handkerchief waved as we went by. It caused quite a stir in my heart; and yet how we would have wearied and despised each other, these girls and I, if we had been introduced at a croquet party!35

  Another set of girls at Origny, calling out ‘Come back again!’, inspire this Heraclitean moment: ‘There is a headlong, forthright tide, that bears away man with his fancies like straw, and runs fast in time and space. It is full of curves like this, your winding river of the Oise; and lingers and returns in pleasant pastorals; and yet, rightly thought upon, never returns at all.’36 But the most striking passage in the book is not one that strains like this to moralise, but the analysis (in the chapter ‘Changed Times’) of the ‘apotheosis of stupidity’ that the author achieves by hours of uninterrupted paddling: ‘the great wheels of intelligence turned idly in the head, like fly-wheels, grinding no grist. I have gone on for half an hour at a time, counting my strokes and forgetting the hundreds.’37 This happily bovine state of mind, he realises, is ‘about as near Nirvana as would be convenient in practical life’:

  There was less me and more not me than I was accustomed to expect. I looked upon somebody else, who managed the paddling; I was aware of somebody else’s feet against the stretcher; my own body seemed to have no more intimate relation to me than the canoe, or the river, or the river banks. Nor this alone: something inside my mind, a part of my brain, a province of my proper being, had thrown off allegiance and set up for itself, or perhaps for the somebody else who did the paddling. I had dwindled into quite a little thing in a corner of myself. I was isolated in my own skull. Thoughts presented themselves unbidden; they were not my thoughts, they were plainly someone else’s[.]38

  This was ‘the great exploit of our voyage’, he reckons, and ‘the farthest piece of travel accomplished’: ‘when ideas came and went like motes in a sunbeam; when trees and church spires along the bank surged up from time to time into my notice [ … ] when a piece of mud on the deck was sometimes an intolerable eyesore, and sometimes quite a companion for me, and the object of pleased consideration’. As in ‘On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places’ and ‘Ordered South’, his state of consciousness becomes the subject, the direction of travel even more ‘inland’ than he perhaps anticipated. His Emersonian identification of me and not me (‘what philosophers call [ … ] ego and non ego’) has its birth on the Oise in this ecstatic stupor, but was to find other expression in ‘Markheim’, Deacon Brodie and Jekyll and Hyde.

  With the publication of essays such as ‘Virginibus Puerisque’, its sequel ‘On Falling in Love’, ‘An Apology for Idlers’ and An Inland Voyage, the word ‘charming’ began to be applied more and more frequently to Stevenson’s writing. The charm seemed to inhere in the writer’s youthfulness, optimism, wit and apparently boundless taste for self-revelation, which flattered the reader into a sense of intimacy. Stevenson wasn’t yet perceived as a chronic invalid, which made him into something of a sentimental hero later: if anything, in 1878 he might have seemed to the general reader to be some kind of exercise enthusiast.

  The literary world seemed primed and willing to fall in love with him. This was only partly because so many reviewers for the periodicals were his personal friends, and puffed each other’s works shamelessly. Henley larded his review of An Inland Voyage with superlatives,* and Colvin wrote pages for the Athenaeum. The elegance of An Inland Voyage stunned P.G. Hamerton, writing in the Academy, who wondered ‘how many people there are in England who know that Robert Louis Stevenson is, in his own way (and he is wise enough to write simply in his own way), one of the most perfect writers living, one of the very few who may yet do something classical?’39 Hamerton’s pleasure at the advent of a new stylist, grounded in the classic English essayists yet deviating from them ‘charmingly’, found many seconders, not least an Oxford literary society which (as Bob reported to his cousin later) chose An Inland Voyage as ‘the best specimen of the writing of English this century’,40 or the Eton schoolmaster who set his pupils part of the text to be translated into Latin elegiacs. For someone whose writing had been regarded for years as a kind of aberration, this was an almost indigestible reverse.

  By the winter of 1877, when An Inland Voyage was written, there was one reader in particular whom Stevenson was keen to impress, and that was Fanny Osbourne. He first met her at Grez at the end of September or early October 1876, having finished the canoe trip with Simpson just a week or two before.41 It seems that everyone was gathered at the long table d’hôte after supper at Chevillons’ Inn one evening when a noise was heard outside and next thing, Louis was seen vaulting dramatically through the inn’s half-door, causing ‘an uproar of delight’ among the company.42 He had arrived alone on foot, and paused outside the window for several minutes to scrutinise the group, especially the two Americans, the only women present, who were obviously quite at home. At least part of this is likely to be true, as ‘the day I looked through the window’ is among the love-anniversaries Stevenson later wished to keep (if only he could have remembered the date). The story of their meeting became heavily mythologised later by Fanny’s two children, Belle and Sam, who were both in Grez at the time. Sam was especially keen to record ‘the peculiar sense of power that seemed to radiate from [Stevenson]’, as if it was an angel who had landed at the table, and not just another bohemian Scot. But it’s not at all certain that Sam was actually present at Louis’s arrival; he left two very different accounts (the introduction to the Vailima edition, which is quoted, and An Intimate Portrait, which has Louis arriving by canoe, in what appears to be daylight).

  Stevenson was immediately interested in ‘the beautiful American’, as well he might have been. He had already heard about her from Bob, first as a threat to the pleasures of Grez, then as an enhancement of them. He would also have heard the tragic story of how her little boy had died in Paris earlier that year, so reminiscent of Fanny Sitwell’s loss three years earlier. Here was another bereaved matron with an absentee husband – though
there the resemblance stopped, rather abruptly. Mrs Sitwell had never exuded such seething sexuality; her eyes had always been ‘gentle’, ‘soft’ and shining with the anticipation of sympathetic tears. The short, exotic goddess who was sitting smoking a hand-rolled cigarette at the table at Chevillons’ looked about as gentle as a howitzer, and probably lost no time in fixing the newcomer with that ‘sighting of a pistol’ look she kept for special occasions.

  A waspish portrait of Fanny at Grez by a female ‘friend’ evokes her presence there vividly:

  Near one end of the table, her flowing hair surmounted with the rakish little cap of a vivandière, her black eyes peeping out from a fringe of not very neat curls, sits the Queen of Bohemia. She is not so young as one might think, knowing only her rank and state. There are hundreds of silver threads in her hair; and further down the table sits her daughter, the princess royal, grown to womanhood. Fairy in size, like a hummingbird in movement and in purpose of life, her Majesty seems, to the not too clear-sighted observer, in spite of her thirty-eight years, scarcely more than a girl. [ … ] Her Majesty is smoking a cigarette between the soup and the roast. Her Majesty is generally smoking a cigarette when she is not sleeping, and when dining usually has her little feet upon the rungs of her neighbour’s chair, while she tells strange stories of wild life among the Nevada mines, where she never saw a flower for eight years; where feverish brandy and champagne were cheaper than cool water and sweet milk; where Colonel Starbottle was her devoted admirer and Jack Hamlin told his love[.]43

  Many of the things that men found irresistible about Fanny Osbourne are catalogued critically here: her maturity, her self-possession, her worldliness, the thrilling combination of femininity and being ‘one of the boys’, with those tiny bare feet resting on the next chair as she smoked and talked. It conjures up exactly Fanny’s self-confident manner in front of men, her assured, devastatingly focused techniques of sexual enticement. The author of the sketch was an American called Margaret Berthe Wright who was studying with Belle and Fanny at the Atelier des Dames and who for a while lived in the same building as they did in Paris. She must have hated the Osbournes by the time she wrote this article in the winter of 1877. After remarking on Fanny’s monotonous drawling voice (heard rather too often, it is implied) and ‘the faint shadow of the cachuca and cracovina in the free motions of her arms above her head’, Wright goes on to say that though the foolishly romantic British gents in residence at Grez may have been taken in by the performance, a fellow American matron could see straight through it:

  In the highly civilised old world she may seem a lost princess, a stray daughter of the Incas, come only to shabby queenhood in Bohemia by right of her uncivilised blood and her royal birth. Before New World eyes, looking from nearer into barbarism, there is none of the glamour which sees romance and poetry in simply dusky skins, wild, free motions and turbulent lives, so that real, unromantic barrenness and poverty of nature is as visible to them in a deposed daughter of the Incas or Mexican dancer as in the pale factory girl who toils and spins and knows nothing else.44

  But Stevenson was hooked. Here perhaps was a version of that ‘great mythical woman’ he had fantasised about to Mrs Sitwell, or one of the ‘Powerful Matrons’ in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: ‘They are tann’d in the face by shining suns and blowing winds, /Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength.’ Over the next few days he took every opportunity to get to know Mrs Osbourne, sitting with her by the stove and talking for hours on end in a possibly very exaggerated vein, if her reports back to Timothy Rearden in the following months are anything to go by. Bob had ‘spent a large fortune at the rate of eight thousand pounds a year’, she told Rearden, taken holy orders to please his mother and was now ‘dying from the effects of dissipation’. Louis, ‘between over-education and dissipation has ruined his health, and is dying of consumption’. He was ‘the heir to an immense fortune which he will never live to inherit. His father and mother, cousins, are both threatened with insanity, and I am quite sure the son is.’45 Holy orders? Immense fortune? Cousins? Fanny was a chronic embellisher, but surely much of this had its origin in Bob and Louis’s incontinent romanticising, or perhaps Louis’s alone. As the only non-painter in a group of artists, the skinniest and weediest among half a dozen fine young men, he was sore put to impress Mrs Osbourne, especially as her own stories of the far west were so exotic. Added to that, he was calling himself a writer, but had no book to show for it. It was Bob who still commanded Fanny Osbourne’s attention, with his artistic talent, athleticism, charm and ‘perfect figure’. He was like a hero out of a Ouida novel, she said to Rearden.46

  Fanny wasn’t the only ‘beautiful American’ at Grez; there was of course another siren present, Belle, who got even more attention than her mother. The dusky seventeen-year-old was in her element, the object of both O’Meara’s and Bob’s fervent gallantry, and Louis’s admiration: ‘Belle is frank and simple and not at all like an American miss. She looks like a Russian,’ he wrote.47 Meanwhile, Louis doted on Belle’s mother, and Belle’s mother doted on Bob. A Midsummer Night’s Dream situation seemed in danger of erupting, and Bob and Louis were obviously in cahoots when Stennis aîné (as Bob was called chez Chevillon) took Fanny out on a walk one day in order to praise his cousin to the skies, explaining that Louis was by far the superior man to cultivate. Fanny Osbourne took in the meaning of this immediately, and, aided by Bob’s tactful manoeuvrings, was able to transfer her interest to Stennis frère with no visible dints to her pride.

  Louis went back to Edinburgh in high spirits, believing his feelings were at least partly requited, and wrote his essay ‘On Falling in Love’. In it he describes the ‘ideal story’ as

  that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark room. From the first moment they see each other, with a pang of curiosity, through stage after stage of growing pleasure and embarrassment, they can read the expression of their own trouble in each other’s eyes. There is here no declaration properly so called; the feeling is so plainly shared, that as soon as the man knows what it is in his own heart, he is sure of what it is in the woman’s.48

  Did he think this was his own case? It is likely that he and Fanny became lovers at Grez or during the week they were both in Paris on his way home, since on his next recorded meeting with her, in January 1877, he went straight to her lodgings in the rue de Douay and stayed there. There was probably at least one more unrecorded meeting between October and January; it would be hard otherwise to explain the rollercoaster agitation Stevenson experienced during those months. Stuck at Heriot Row in the autumn and early winter (while Fanny was in Paris, seeing all the Barbizonians frequently), Louis became deeply despondent, writing to Mrs Sitwell of his ‘sad misfortune’, and pleading with his former deity not to withdraw her friendship ‘just now, when I know so well that I am making daily another tie about my heart only that it may be broken in its turn (or alas! not broken after all; for I find I have no talent for forgetfulness)’.49

  There are indications that Louis may have dashed to Paris in November or December, for at the end of that month Fanny wrote to Rearden in rather disingenuous terms (knowing that anything she told him could get back to her husband) about the two ‘mad Scotsmen’ she had got to know, and how Bob Stevenson had thanked her for not laughing at his cousin ‘whose fainting and hysterics and weeping were caused by ill-health’. ‘He was right about his cousin,’ she told Rearden casually, ‘whom I like very much, and who is the wittiest man I ever met; only I do wish he wouldn’t burst into tears in such an unexpected way; it is so embarrassing.’50 Louis was disturbing company, ‘sometimes, I imagine, not altogether safe’, Fanny related in another letter, recalling an incident when they had been in a cab together in Paris. Stevenson had begun laughing and couldn’t stop: ‘[he] asked me to bend his fingers back. I didn’t like to do it, so he laughed harder and harder and told me that I had better[,] for if
I didn’t he would bend my fingers back and break every bone in them.’ When Stevenson proceeded to try this, Fanny bit him hard on the hand, drawing blood, at which he ‘immediately came to his senses and begged pardon, but I couldn’t use my hands for more than a day afterwards’.51 This vampiric scene (which seems to have found its way into Stevenson’s story ‘Olalla’ years later) borders on the morbid. What with the threats and the biting, the blood and the generally hysterical tone, it didn’t bode well for the relationship, though Stevenson may well have been impressed with the direct and effective manner of Fanny’s response to his outburst.

  By January 1877, when he managed to get to Paris on the excuse of having some ‘dramas of his’ translated into French,52 Stevenson had calmed down considerably. In the congenial atmosphere of the Latin Quarter, he could live with his mistress openly and cause little scandal. What Belle and eight-year-old Sam thought about the arrangement is not known. In their copious memoirs of Stevenson, both children maintained with increasing ardour the fiction that he and their mother stayed chaste until their marriage in 1880.

  Meanwhile, Stevenson was sending vignettes of his new life back to Henley and Brown at London; ‘A Studio of Ladies’ describes the zealous atmosphere among the lady amateurs of Julien’s, while ‘A Ball at Mr Elsinare’s’ has portraits of his friends under thinly disguised names: Willie Simpson (Maclntyre), O’Meara (O’Shaughnessy), Bloomer (Smiler) and Belle Osbourne (Belle Bird), ‘a Californian girl, [who] has spent her childhood among Bret Harte’s stories, petted by miners, and gamblers, and trappers, and ranch-men, and all the dramatis personae of the new romance’.53 On the evening of the dance, the studio (which had previously been occupied by George Du Maurier and became the setting for his novel Trilby) was decorated with Chinese lanterns and bronze lamps strung from the rafters, and the paraphernalia of the working day was propped against the walls: an iron bedstead, a skull, dozens of casts on the shelves. Louis didn’t dance, but relished being able to make this appearance with Fanny in front of so many of his friends. To his mother, he described the evening circumspectly: ‘One of the matrons was a very beautiful woman indeed; I played old fogy and had a deal of talk with her, which pleased me.’54