Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  The matron was still married, however, and in the spring of 1877 Sam Osbourne was coming over to France to see his wife and family and, presumably, go through the motions of another reconciliation. Fanny’s feelings about this are hard to fathom; she seems to have been determined to stay in Europe (despite the enormous expense), but was not altogether dead to Sam’s charm. Back in Edinburgh in the spring, Stevenson waited out the season in agonies of jealousy. ‘The man with the linstock is expected in May; it makes me sick to write it. But I’m quite insane,’ he wrote to Baxter, ‘and when the mountain does not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will to the mountain.’55

  Was it under Fanny’s influence that Stevenson began to write so much fiction in 1877? ‘An Old Song’ was rewritten that winter, and he also wrote ‘A Lodging for the Night’, which dramatises an incident from the life of the poet and criminal François Villon, about whom Stevenson had just written an essay for the Cornhill. Leslie Stephen was sardonic about the prospect of Stevenson publishing a book of essays: ‘he said he didn’t imagine I was rich enough for such an amusement’,56 and making money was always an issue with Stevenson, if only as a way of gauging his success. It is easy to imagine Fanny, herself a notable raconteur, encouraging Louis to think of a more popular and lucrative market for his skills. The opening of his Villon story, describing a snowy night in fifteenth-century Paris, shows him leaping fully-armed into the form:

  The whole city was sheeted up. An army might have marched from end to end and not a footfall given the alarm. If there were any belated birds in heaven, they saw the island like a large white patch, and the bridges like slim white spars, on the black ground of the river. High up overhead the snow settled among the tracery of the cathedral towers. Many a niche was drifted full; many a statue wore a long white bonnet on its grotesque or sainted head. The gargoyles had been transformed into great false noses, drooping towards the point. The crockets were like upright pillows swollen on one side. In the intervals of the wind, there was a dull sound of dripping about the precincts of the church.57

  A couple of months later, he had started a novel called ‘The Hair Trunk; or, The Ideal Commonwealth’, a tale of some young bohemians founding a new society in – of all places – Samoa (Stevenson had once met a customs inspector whose stories of Samoa intrigued him58). Henley thought it capitally amusing, but having seen Henley weep over a mere few pages, Stevenson got no farther. A Saratoga trunk found its way into the second of Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights stories, written the following year, and it seems that Kidnapped (1886) owed quite a bit to this early novel too, as the author’s list of proposed scenes include ‘burglary, marine fight, life on desert island on W. Coast of Scotland, sloops etc’.

  ‘The Sire de Malétroit’s Door’, another hauntingly atmospheric story, was written this year, and ‘Will o’ the Mill’. Fiction seemed more and more a viable path to take, even though (or especially because) Stevenson’s parents thought he could ‘never write a story’.59 By August he was writing to Mrs Sitwell that he was bubbling with ideas for stories and that ‘vividness and not style, is now my line; [ … ] occupation is the great thing; so that a man should have his life in his own pocket, and never be thrown out of work by anything’.60

  Sam Osbourne’s visit to his wife was cut short by a stock market alarm in California, and as soon as the American was safely back on the Atlantic in mid-June, Stevenson began making his way to join Fanny at Grez. The interval of separation had been long and traumatic, and in some ways it must have felt like having to start the relationship all over again. What the outcome was to be was still uncertain: Louis must have been hoping that divorce was imminent, but clearly Fanny had done little if anything to advance that over the spring. She and Belle were about to start yet another year – their third – of art studies, all at Sam’s expense. It would not have been beyond Mrs Osbourne’s wiles to have counted on finishing up at Julien’s before severing her ties with the affable adulterer.

  Stevenson, on the other hand, was impatient to commit himself, and ready – in theory at least – to take over responsibility for the whole Osbourne family. By the autumn, he was speaking of the group as ‘us’ and ‘we’, and beginning to fret in a fatherly way over the antics of Belle and her suitors, two of whom, gossip had it, had threatened to fight a duel over her.* He stayed in France for months on end that year, despite his parents’ agitated pleas, and only came back to London, and that in a panicky rush, because Fanny became convinced that he needed emergency treatment for an eye infection. It is the first example of a pattern that was to become absolutely standard. Every deviation from full health became liable to be treated by Fanny as a medical emergency, accompanied by telegrams and mad midnight dashes and the enlistment of every friend’s help. Perhaps very understandably, given her failure to act in time to save her youngest child, Fanny was never again going to leave an illness to chance.

  It was in this way that Stevenson was able to introduce his mistress to his London friends, although perhaps the circumstances were not the most auspicious: he with his eye infected, and she laid up after an accident to her foot. When she met Colvin and Mrs Sitwell, it must have been immediately clear to her that there would be no true common ground between them, however kind and attentive the couple were. Mrs Sitwell put Fanny up at Brunswick Row and she and Colvin tenderly sympathised over the foot, but Fanny was quite quelled by their refinement and wrote to Rearden, ‘I was with very curious people in London, the leaders of the Purists [ … ] It seemed most incongruous to have the solemn Mr Colvin a professor at Cambridge, and the stately, beautiful Mrs Sitwell sit by me and talk in the most correct English about the progress of literature and the arts.’61 She also met Leslie Stephen on this visit – another ‘purist’ if ever there was one – and Henley. They all made her feel uncomfortable, as indeed she did them. How odd it must have been to see the boyish, mercurial Stevenson excitedly introducing this short, dark-skinned American adventuress, who pronounced his name ‘Lou-us’ and whose build and character reminded Colvin powerfully of Napoleon Bonaparte. ‘The eyes were full of sex and mystery,’ he said in more flattering vein, ‘as they changed from fire or fun to gloom or tenderness; and it was from between a fine set of small teeth that there came the clear metallic accents of her intensely human and often quaintly individual speech.’62

  Filial duty demanded that Stevenson return home for a while, and so the yo-yoing of the lovers together and apart continued. Fanny went back to Paris, and Stevenson, moping in his study at Heriot Row, began a series of articles which was published the following year as Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes. Their sardonic tone makes them seem as if written by a disgruntled foreign traveller, which is pretty much what Stevenson had become. No wonder the little book provoked complaints from offended burghers:

  To none but those who have themselves suffered the thing in the body, can the gloom and depression of our Edinburgh winter be brought home. For some constitutions there is something almost physically disgusting in the bleak ugliness of easterly weather; the wind wearies, the sickly sky depresses them; and they turn back from their walk to avoid the aspect of the unrefulgent sun going down among perturbed and pallid mists. The days are so short that a man does much of his business, and certainly all his pleasure, by the haggard glare of gas lamps. The roads are as heavy as a fallow. People go by, so drenched and draggle-tailed that I have often wondered how they found the heart to undress.63

  Stevenson was surprised that anyone should object to this view of his native town, and protested that he would say a lot worse if asked to write about Glasgow. He loved Edinburgh, ‘this great city of Zeus’, as an ideal, but the time had come to renounce the north, the cold, the dark, the old life of parents and dependence and ‘no dear head upon the pillow’, as he complained to Henley.64 When a telegram came from Paris with an alarming message about little Sam Osbourne’s health, he was off like a shot in the middle of the night.

  Thomas and Margaret Stevenson must have been deeply suspicio
us of their son’s behaviour, but as he was now twenty-seven years old, they could hardly expect to keep him on a tight leash as before. Ever since falling in love with Fanny, Louis had been getting on much better with his parents, and frequently expressed his feelings for them in touchingly affectionate terms. Back in Paris with his mistress in February 1878, he decided to come clean and called his father over to explain his ‘new complications’. Thomas behaved admirably, seemed to accept the situation and didn’t make any threats about money (as feared), though how Louis presented the matter is not clear. Thomas’s liberal views on divorce for any woman but no man would have predisposed him to sympathise with his son’s lover, whom he did not, of course, meet. The incident marked the high point of Louis’s intimacy with his father: or the only point of it, perhaps. From a café on the boulevard Saint Michel a week or so later, Louis wrote him an extraordinary letter which ended:

  I hope I have taken a step towards more friendly – no, not that (that could scarcely be) – but more intimate, relations with you. But don’t expect too much of me. I am a narrow and a sad person. Try to take me as I am.65

  All through the beginning of 1878, Stevenson dodged to and from Paris, in states of variable nervous excitement and disorder. The relationship with Fanny was proving far from idyllic; ‘one day I find her in heaven, the next in hell’, he wrote to Mrs Sitwell in February, and to Henley at around the same time, ‘I think almost every sort of calamity has been down on me [ … ] I am so tired, so tired; physically weary, but morally dead weary. I never have a day, but I have a kick or a dig.’66 A blackmailer had been sending anonymous letters, presumably threatening to expose his affair with Fanny to Sam Osbourne (jeopardising her chances of ever getting a ‘favourable’ divorce). Was this Margaret Berthe Wright, who would have been fully aware of the comings and goings in the rue Douay? Her acid article about the bohemians of Grez was published that spring.

  The agitations of his personal life somewhat overshadowed the pleasure Stevenson had anticipated for so many years when his first book, An Inland Voyage, was published in May. Among the chorus of admirers was George Meredith, the sage of Box Hill, whom Stevenson had met that spring while staying with his mother at nearby Burford. Stevenson considered Meredith ‘the only man of genius of my acquaintance’, and the living novelist he would have most wished to emulate. He idolised The Egoist when it was published in 1880, read it eight or nine times, and seems to have borrowed the concept of ‘An Arabian Entertainment’ (the subtitle of Meredith’s 1855 fantasy The Shaving of Shagpat) for his own New Arabian Nights. So when Meredith wrote, ‘I hope you will feel that we expect much of you,’67 Stevenson must have considered it the most welcome form of literary benediction.

  It was in Burford, and with Meredith’s views on fiction ringing in his ears,68 that Stevenson wrote the first two stories of his highly influential New Arabian Nights. The sensational idea behind the first story, ‘The Suicide Club’, grew out of one of Bob Stevenson’s extravagant fantasies of luxurious death,69 and much of Bob’s character and behaviour is plundered for the creation of ‘The Young Man with the Cream Tarts’ who is spending his last afternoon before joining the club giving away money and indulging ludicrous jests. Bob also pervades the character of Prince Florizel of Bohemia, the fantasy royal whose restless need for excitement involves him in the Club’s gruesome activities. Florizel is living in London incognito and has a taste – like the Stevenson cousins – for transgressing his true social status. He also has a remarkable ability to adopt disguises, and wealth huge enough to finance almost any conceivable stunt, such as the hiring of a London mansion for a stunningly lavish party one night, which the subsequent night is mysteriously dark and empty again. The magician aspect of Florizel, his underemployed hyper-intelligence and fascination with the darker aspects of human nature, even his sardonic tolerance of his sidekick’s stolidness, all anticipate Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation fifteen years later of Sherlock Holmes, another denizen of that ‘fairy London’ which, according to Jorge Luis Borges, Stevenson invented here.

  The stories, published in instalments in London that summer, earned Stevenson little money or praise. He had been writing professionally for almost five years, and was still far from being able to support himself. He was in Paris for much of June, being paid by Fleeming Jenkin to act as secretary while Jenkin was a juror at that year’s International Exhibition. But neither then nor in Grez later that summer was he able to deflect Fanny Osbourne from the decision she had reached. After three years of avoiding such action at all costs, Fanny was going back to her husband. ‘I don’t know why my mother decided to return to California, she never told me, but suddenly we were leaving,’ Belle wrote later.70 Fanny’s motives are mysterious: perhaps there had been a quarrel with Louis (though there is no record of one); perhaps Sam was making demands for her return (again, there is no record of such, and his previous demands had all been ignored). The ‘official’ reason, unconvincing from every point of view, was expressed elliptically by Graham Balfour in his Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. Writing under Fanny’s eye – and partly, in matters of her biography, under her direction – Balfour says that she ‘was not free to follow her inclination’ at this point. ‘Though the step of seeking a divorce was open to her, yet the interests and feelings of others had to be considered, and for the present all idea of union [with Stevenson] was impossible.’71

  A possible explanation for Fanny’s behaviour which has not been suggested before is that she might have been pregnant in the summer of 1878. Under those circumstances, she would have needed, for appearances’ sake, to reunite with Sam, if briefly. As I will discuss later, there are clues to this in the material thought to refer exclusively to a pregnancy ‘scare’ Fanny experienced in 1883, and it makes sense of many otherwise inexplicable actions in the coming months. But whatever the cause of her abrupt removal, Stevenson clearly felt not simply abandoned by his mistress in the short term, but to all intents and purposes permanently rejected. None of his interests or feelings seemed to be being considered at all, and it must have been a very broken-hearted and embittered man whom young Sam watched from the departing train at Euston on 15 August 1878, ‘a diminishing figure in a brown ulster’72 walking away down the platform, who never turned back.

  * * *

  *There is a puzzling reference in a letter from Anna Rearden Baeck to Anne Roller Issler in the Silverado collection (dated 27 December 1968), where she claims that Fanny Osbourne ‘was almost obsessed by her barrenness with her young husband’. Margaret Mackay had implied the same in The Violent Friend, to support her suggestion that the baby boy was John Lloyd’s son, though on what authority is unclear. Baeck was the daughter of Fanny’s confidant Timothy Rearden.

  *Williams had been in Austin at the same time as the Osbournes back in the 1860s, though there is no record of them having met then.

  *Fanny later made great play of how her boy had only been allowed ‘a pauper’s grave’, but this was inaccurate. Sam Osbourne bought a ten-year ‘concession’ on a grave plot for his son, intending to renew it, or possibly move the remains at a later date.

  *The second stage of their journey was almost exactly replicated forty years later in the Allies’ retreat from Mons, during which, John Charteris notes in his biography of Earl Haig, the British commander read An Inland Voyage as escape literature.

  *Though it is unsigned, the piece, in London for 25 May 1878, bears all the hallmarks of Henley’s prose, and he was, as editor of the magazine at the time, known to be writing almost the whole review section single-handed.

  *One of these must have been O’Meara. It seems unlikely that the other was Bob; he was fascinated by Belle, and half-prepared to marry her, but he was not hot-headed about her, as a letter to RLS of 11 January 1879 shows.

  6

  THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT

  In America [ … ] the mental fidget, social worry, business anxiety, and other conditions that characterise modern civilisation, are even more pressing
than with us.

  Francis Galton, Record of Family Faculties

  A WEEK AFTER the Osbournes left England, Stevenson was on his way south to the Cévennes. He was in a state of collapse and wanted only to be alone. Weeks went by at Monastier, fifteen miles south of Le Puy, in a fog of depression; ‘I am so ill and so tired that I can scarce finish these words,’ he wrote to Baxter. He found little to charm him in the mountainside town, avoided contact with his fellow residents at the inn, and spent lacklustre hours sketching or practising with a revolver – both activities associated with Fanny. He was finishing his articles on Edinburgh and writing more of the New Arabian Nights, but it took enormous effort. ‘I find it damned hard work to keep up a good countenance in this world nowadays, harder than anyone knows,’ he wrote to Baxter ruefully. ‘I hope you may never have cause to feel one half as sad as I feel.’1 He had every reason to be envious of his old friend, who had been married a year and whose wife Grace was about to give birth to their first child.

  Stevenson soon sickened of Monastier and decided to take a walking tour south through the highlands of the Cévennes. With the success of An Inland Voyage, he knew he would be able to make a book out of such a journey, one way or another, and had thought of a title before setting off. He wanted to walk alone and camp under the stars, not in a tent (too bothersome) but close to the ground in some sort of waterproof sleeping-bag. This primitive desire necessitated sophisticated preparations, for no such bag existed and he had to go to Le Puy and have one custom-made: a long sausage of cart-cloth lined with sheep’s wool, with envelope-flaps at either end. This could be used as a huge sack for his provisions and equipment during the day, and at night he could crawl inside it to sleep. The cart-cloth was green, and the thick fleecy lining blue, so even in a contrivance for sleeping rough he had managed to introduce a dandyish element, and it was hideously expensive: eighty-five francs.