Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  He approached the trip as if it was to be a trial of his survival skills, and took care assembling his kit: spirit lamp, lantern, candles, a leather flask, an egg-whisk, a jack-knife and a revolver, two sets of warm clothes, a pilot coat, a ‘knitted spencer’, a railway rug and plenty of books, of course. Then there were edibles: tinned sausage, chocolate, bottles of Beaujolais, bread and a cold leg of mutton. Saddled with this lot – well, he wasn’t going to be saddled: a donkey must be found for the portage. After a deal of haggling and some amusing displays of resistance on the part of the vendor, ‘Monsieur Steams’, as the locals called Stevenson, became the owner of a small grey she-ass, price sixty-five francs plus a glass of brandy. She was ‘not much bigger than a dog, the colour of a mouse, with a kindly eye and a determined under-jaw’.2 He named her Modestine.

  In the published version of his journey through the Cévennes, it was Stevenson’s relations with Modestine that became the subject, rather than the walking tour itself. Walking, at an ordinary pace, was out of the question where the mouse-coloured tyrant was involved. Her rate of progress ‘was something as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run; it kept me hanging on each foot for an incredible length of time; in five minutes it exhausted the spirit and set up a fever in all the muscles of the leg’.3 Precariously loaded with a new pack-saddle, the sleeping-sack full of chattels, and an open basket containing bottles and the mutton, Modestine was trembling under the strain before they had even got out of sight of Monastier, and the two of them made such a spectacle that a passing peasant felt bound to instruct Stevenson in the use of a switch and the ‘true cry or Masonic word of donkey-drivers, “Proot!”’4 Under this new regime, Modestine moved along quite nicely for a while, but then reverted to her snail’s pace, punctuated by long intervals of wayside grazing. Stevenson, to his own distress, was forced to resort to ‘incessant belabouring’ with the switch to get Modestine and his baggage anywhere near the first night’s planned bivouac at the lake of Bouchet. ‘I think I never heard of anyone in as mean a situation,’ he wrote. ‘The sound of my own blows sickened me.’5

  Stevenson tended to speak lightly of his travel books, but he brought sophistication to a form that had few notable practitioners (except Heine and Sterne, both of whom he venerated). An Inland Voyage turned out to be about a frame of mind, and Travels with a Donkey a cautionary tale of how much effort and artifice were involved if the middle-class Victorian wished to get ‘back to nature’. Sleeping out ‘à la belle étoile’ seemed to be the hardest thing in the world to the novice tramp, who had to put in at an auberge the first night when Modestine failed to reach Bouchet. The romantic and the realist battled in Stevenson, for he couldn’t resist describing the desolation he felt at being soaked by rain, or lost, or benighted, or faced (as often) with truculent Cévennois villagers indulging heartily in schadenfreude. This was far from the nobility of Thoreau’s Walden or the unquenchable optimism felt in Whitman’s ‘Song of the Road’; Stevenson recorded his impressions as truthfully as he could, and enjoyed the incongruities that emerged. Thus he can write about his uncouth solitary eating habits, his embarrassment at sharing a dormitory at the inn in Bouchet, or the brutalising process that turns him into Modestine’s frenzied scourge, with the same exactitude he applies to his description of falling asleep outdoors on a windy night, where ‘my last waking effort was to listen and distinguish, and my last conscious state was one of wonder at the foreign clamour in my ears’.6

  To Bob, when the book was finished, he admitted frankly that ‘lots of it is mere protestations to F., most of which I think you will understand’.7 The uncertainty of his future with her is on the book’s mind, from the author’s awareness that his snug, nestlike sleeping-bag ‘at a pinch [ … ] might serve for two’ to his gladness at getting away from the Cistercian monastery in the hills of Gevaudan, ‘free to wander, free to hope, and free to love’.8 His confusion at the auberge in Bouchet-Saint-Nicholas at being so near someone else’s semi-naked wife is surely made worse because the situation reminds him of his new position relative to the reunited Osbournes: ‘a pair keep each other in countenance; it is the single gentleman who has to blush’.9 Even the donkey disturbs him, with her meek toleration of his thrashings and her willingness to be mounted by any stray male (Modestine was on heat and bleeding). This was hardly the female companion he dreamed about at two o’clock in the morning, exulting in the peace and solitude of the pine woods of Lozère:

  I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.10

  As Richard Holmes has pointed out in the best of all the ‘in-the-steps-of-Stevenson’ books, Footsteps, the notebook entry from which this passage of Travels with a Donkey is derived is a lot more explicit, and constitutes ‘in effect, a proposal of marriage to Fanny Osbourne’:11

  The woman whom a man has learned to love wholly, in and out, with utter comprehension, is no longer another person in the troublous sense. What there is of exacting in other companionship has disappeared; there is no need to speak; a look or a word stand for such a world of feeling.12

  But that fervent statement was written on the road, while Stevenson’s head was ringing with regrets and hopes and idealisation of Fanny. ‘To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive,’ he had written in his essay ‘El Dorado’ earlier that summer. At the end of his journey, when he rushed to Alais by diligence to get the first word from his mistress since their parting, he was crestfallen by whatever news – or lack of news – her letters contained. In plangent messages to Henley and Colvin he spoke of ‘defeat’ and being ‘accurst’. Modestine was sold for thirty-five francs, the sleeping-sack disposed of. He made his way northward, to Lyons, then Paris, then London, where he took refuge with Henley. ‘What will become of me? God knows [ … ] I feel as if I had all the world upon my shoulders.’13

  Stevenson avoided Edinburgh until Christmas, spending the rest of the year mostly with the Henleys on the Uxbridge Road in Shepherd’s Bush, and with a visit to Colvin at Trinity College, Cambridge. His cousin Katharine de Mattos, whom Henley had got to know through Bob and Louis,* was separating from her husband of only four years, and Louis, being one of her trustees, saw a good deal of both her and Bob that winter. His depression over Fanny Osbourne was therefore fully on show to all his friends, and they were all avid gossips. This witnessing of Louis’s distress in the winter of 1878–79, and long fireside chats about his state of mind and heart, must help explain the otherwise puzzling degree of animosity that his friends displayed later towards his wife.

  No One other than Louis in this circle of friends had any money; Bob had spent up years before, Katharine was newly thrown on her own resources and Henley was always dancing a jig on the edge of bankruptcy. Louis proved a loyal friend to them all, especially Katharine, whose position won his ready sympathy, and to whom he gave access to his funds. To expedite this, he had Baxter sell ‘the Debenture’ (presumably where some or all of his patrimonial thousand had gone) and keep the proceeds in a deposit account. He was already paying Henley a small monthly retainer, ostensibly so that he could act as literary agent, and sent £20 to the address of Fanny’s brother Jacob Vandegrift (presumably for Fanny) at a time when he had received only £30 in total for the publication of his Cévennes book (and when £20 was the cost of a first-class passage from New York to England). The 1875 windfall must have dwindled considerably by this time, and the biggest chunk of it – £400 – had gone to the least likely candidate, Colvin. He had been the victim of a robbery in 1878 when some valuable prints he had on loan from a dealer were driven off by an opportunistic cabby outside the Savile. The cabby and an accomplice were caught, but the prints were never recovered and Colvin rashly offered to take financial responsibility for the loss – an astronomical £1,540. Stevenson immediately and unconditionally offered him £400, possibly the most spectac
ular example of a lifetime’s habit of generosity.

  Gestures such as this, however, were not always interpreted at their best. Colvin was an exception – he had the highest view of Stevenson’s motives – but Henley often seemed to harbour a low-level resentment about his own position relative to Louis’s. To someone like Henley, Stevenson must have seemed utterly privileged, with his deposit accounts and debentures, free board at home, run of ‘a country house’ at Swanston, use of a barouche and constant holidays. And the more Louis strove to share with his friends, the more a taint of ‘rich kid’ hung about him, despite the obvious fact that he was often strapped for cash himself. Edmund Gosse remembers him at this time as trying to obtain a third-class ticket to Edinburgh by offering the ticket clerk a first edition of Swinburne’s The Queen Mother; Rosamund.15

  Louis’s intimacy with Henley developed rapidly in Fanny’s absence, and somewhat at her expense. Perhaps due to his lameness and need to keep his friends within reach, Henley became very possessive of Stevenson, and keen to bind him to him professionally (as well as wanting him to come and live in London). He had read Louis’s ‘hugger-mugger melodrama’ of Deacon Brodie, written back in the 1860s, and persuaded his friend to collaborate on a rewriting of it. No sooner had Henley got this idea in his head than he was fired up and could talk of nothing else: Deacon Brodie would catapult them both to national fame (for Henry Irving would not be able to resist the part) and, of course, it would make them rich.

  Stevenson was entirely in the mood to lose himself in such a project, and Henley’s enthusiasm was contagious, as a joint letter the two budding dramatists wrote to Colvin shows. They were staying together at Swanston, ‘finishing’ the play, and one can imagine them on a bitter January afternoon in 1879, sitting by a brisk fire in that comfortable house on the edge of the Pentlands, with a whisky bottle open and a whole luxurious evening of self-congratulation ahead. Act Three was done, Stevenson told Colvin:

  And the last tableau is the most passionate thing in the English drama since the Elizabethans. It is, by God. We send it off to copy this afternoon so you’ll get it soon.

  Yours ever R.L.S.

  [Henley continues]

  He’s quite right, Colvin. It’s an admirable thing. The third Act is what a good third Act should be. We neither of us slept last night after having completed it; and small wonder. God bless you. George the Dook is a sweet creature. It’s quite the most path breaking and epoch marking work ever produced.

  God bless you. It will put Irving out of conceit of his hamlet which is d--d bad, and only fit to be spelt with a small h. As for George Smith and Leslie, we shall want two good actors for them. Kyrle Bellew we have and know – but who, oh Colvin, Who is to play Leslie?16

  Anyone suspecting Henley of irony in his references to Deacon Brodie being path-breaking and epoch-marking would be wrong: he always talked hyperbolically. The affectations of phrase and spelling are entirely characteristic too: in the next letter to Colvin from Swanston he asks, ‘Think you it were worth gold? Publisher’s gold?’17 Henley was in some ways in character all the time, someone blustering and affable from a novel by Fielding, perhaps – or from a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, that had yet to be written, Treasure Island’s Long John Silver.

  The company of Henley and the excitement he generated around the idea of collaboration were valuable distractions for the ‘miserable widower’ in the winter of 1878–79, but did nothing to further his career as a writer. Goodness knows why either man thought the composition of a melodrama worth even a moment’s effort when they were both capable of breaking paths and marking epochs elsewhere, Henley as a poet and Stevenson as a fiction-writer. During the year he was separated from Fanny, Stevenson finished and published Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes and wrote the stories ‘Providence and the Guitar’, ‘The Story of a Lie’ and his remarkable mystery tale ‘The Pavilion on the Links’. He also began a work (possibly based on his old Spec essay about modern Christianity18) called ‘Lay Morals’, the title of which made Bob Stevenson guffaw when he heard it. ‘Lay Morals’ is a densely-wrought essay and was not published in Stevenson’s lifetime, but in the middle of his discussion of the soul comes this passage, part of the long cogitation of which The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is also part:

  It follows that man is twofold at least; that he is not a rounded and autonomous empire; but that in the same body with him there dwell other powers tributary but independent.19

  Henley wasn’t the only new collaborator; Stevenson was planning to write a book of true murder stories with Edmund Gosse, to which end they had already visited ‘the scene of one famous murder’ together.20 Nothing came of it, but the project is an interesting further example of Stevenson’s readiness, almost compulsion, to meld creatively with his closest friends. The cementing of each of his most important relationships was accompanied by an attempt at literary collaboration: Bob (with ‘Monmouth: A Tragedy’), Colvin (the ‘spectacle-play’ in Menton), Mrs Sitwell (the epistolary novel), Fanny Osbourne (a ‘sensation novel’ called ‘What was on the Slate’ planned in 1879), Henley (Deacon Brodie and the other plays) and now Gosse. Even his juvenile habit of dictation to his aunt and mother and later habit of dictating to an amanuensis could be seen as forms of collaboration, especially in the way they satisfy Stevenson’s impatience to get a response from an audience, to get the sort of ‘fix’ that would help him retain interest in his own work. Sharing the graft of writing and sharing the responsibility for what is produced appealed strongly to him, as he confessed obliquely in his later essay ‘A Chapter on Dreams’. There was undoubtedly an erotic element in these collaborations too; to collaborate the parties need to be in contact, often in the same room, sharing ideas, exclusively accessible to each other. With someone like Gosse, who was one of many men enchanted by Stevenson, literary collaboration was a way perhaps of enjoying a strong homoerotic frisson in a safely non-sexual way.

  Stevenson was often at the Gosses’ house that summer, a ‘romantic-looking gentleman’, as Philip Gosse, then six years old, recalled: ‘he used to wear over his shoulders a red silk shawl borrowed from my mother, as he sat on our balcony, and [ … ] we children eagerly leant up against him while he told us wonderful stories. Such stories! All of the sea, wrecks, mutinies and pirates. Tales of blood-curdling adventures … It was on these occasions that our nurse would say, with a vexatious sigh, “Whenever that there Mr Stevenson comes here, I never get you children to sleep.”’21 The elder Gosse was just as spellbound: ‘I take you for my emblem in life,’ he wrote to Stevenson in July 1879, ‘you, the General Exhilarator.’22 Stevenson responded to this bemusedly, for he could see nothing enviable in his own situation: ‘I envy you your wife, your home, your child – I was going to say your cat. There would be cats in my home, too, if I could but get it! not for me but for the person who should share it with me. I may seem to you “the impersonation of life”, Weg; but my life is the impersonation of waiting, and that’s a poor creature.’23

  At this point, the waiting had gone on almost a year. There had been several shafts of hope; in February 1879, Stevenson had heard that Fanny had retreated from Oakland to Monterey and was separated from Sam but had access to the children. Colvin had seen Fanny’s letter and wrote to Henley in terms that show how conspiratorial the friends already felt against Mrs Osbourne. The letter, he said, was ‘quite sane’ by comparison with others, but still dealt in ‘wild storms, intercepted flights, and the Lord knows what more’. Louis had sent a telegram in reply, possibly offering to go out to join her in California, but not committing himself to anything. Or so Colvin believed. ‘He won’t go suddenly or without telling people. – Which is as much as we can hope at present.’24

  Stevenson fell ill that spring and attributed it directly to the fact that letters from Fanny did not come for several weeks. But this seems to have been a worse illness than a depressive collapse, or at least it had many curious symptoms, includin
g a swollen testicle and ‘irritation of the spermatic cord’, as well as ‘weakness, languor, loss of appetite’ and an inability to walk.25 Four months after the first attack he was suffering from an acute skin rash that made him scratch from dawn to dusk and took about six months to recover from. Was Stevenson syphilitic? The similarities between his symptoms and those of the second stage of syphilis cannot be overlooked: the rash, the enervation, the glandular swelling are all typical. Stevenson may have thought so himself, as the letter of his to Henley in August that year that describes his ‘unparalleled skin irritation’ contains about six more words heavily scored out, which in the opinion of the editors of the Letters to Charles Baxter read ‘very similar to syphilis’.* Syphilis was a very prevalent disease in the late nineteenth century, and known as ‘the great imitator’ because so many of its symptoms are indistinguishable from those of other diseases, a characteristic that made it easier to conceal too (though there is a congenital form, most syphilis is sexually transmitted). Nor is syphilis the only plausible diagnosis of Stevenson’s condition in the 1870s; a current web page written by George Addis MD suggests that his reliance on ‘blue pills’, a common remedy for stomach ailments, could have given him mercury poisoning – the pills were composed of mercury chloride.27