Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  Stevenson, when he heard them, dealt with criticisms of his new work as robustly as could be expected of a man whose livelihood was being held in the balance. The Amateur Emigrant was not meant to be compared with his earlier travel books; it ‘sought to be prosaic’ in keeping with the subject. And though Henley disliked ‘The Pavilion on the Links’, writing more plays in collaboration with him was not an attractive alternative. (Henley, probably in order to expedite funds, was going ahead with the printing of Deacon Brodie.) Perhaps Louis had been wrong to confess that he was at times ‘terribly frightened about my work which seems to advance too slowly’.77 And the new novella he had started, to be called ‘Arizona Breckonridge, or A Vendetta in the West’, was, he had to admit, ‘about as bad as Ouida and not so good’.

  Rolled in two camp blankets on the floor of his unfurnished room at the French Hotel, Stevenson must have wondered how long this abeyance of life would continue. He had pleurisy, which, in such a mild climate, alarmed him, and lay three days with no human contact but the sound of Simoneau’s voice under his window at daybreak as he passed down the street, calling out ‘Stevenson – comment ça va?’78 Later he confessed that he had been near starvation at this time, and was convinced he had consumption ‘since I have always been threatened with that’.79 At the same time, he was again the target of an anonymous letter-writer, this time one from Scotland, accusing him of having fathered the newborn baby of a servant at the Jenkins’ house in Edinburgh. Though this was not impossible, Stevenson’s response indicates no guilt whatever towards the girl, which seems enough to prove his innocence, as he was the least callous of men and intensely interested in the idea of having a child of his own.* But perhaps worst of all his worries at the time was that he was ceasing to believe that Fanny’s divorce would ever happen.

  Days passed just sitting in the sun, or on long walks in the ‘haunting presence of the ocean’:

  A great faint sound of breakers follows you high up into the inland cañons; the roar of water dwells in the clean, empty rooms of Monterey as in a shell upon the chimney; go where you will, you have but to pause and listen to hear the voice of the Pacific. You pass out of the town to the south-west, and mount the hill among pine-woods. Glade, thicket and grove surround you. You follow winding sandy tracks that lead nowither. You see a deer; a multitude of quail arises. But the sound of the sea still follows you as you advance, like that of wind among the trees, only harsher and stranger to the ear; and when at length you gain the summit, out breaks on every hand and with freshened vigour that same unending, distant, whispering rumble of the ocean[.]81

  A fisherman remembered Stevenson lying on the beach for hours at a time, ‘the thinnest man I ever saw’. He wore ‘one of the old kind of overcoats with a cape on it over the shoulders’ (an ulster), and when asked his occupation made the rather mysterious reply, ‘I sling ink.’82 Stevenson’s detached mood led to at least two near-disasters: one with a revolver in which six charges got stuck, and another when he decided to test his theory that it Was the ‘Spanish moss’ typical of the area that caused most fires by striking a match and setting light to one of its straggling ends: ‘The tree went off simply like a rocket; in three seconds it was a roaring pillar of fire.’ Fortunately he ran off fast enough to avoid detection, knowing that ‘had anyone observed the result of my experiment my neck was literally not worth a pinch of snuff’.83

  On 12 December, to his delighted surprise, Fanny’s divorce came through at last and signalled Stevenson’s prompt removal from Monterey. Sam Osbourne had agreed to support his ex-wife and family in the interval between the divorce and her remarriage (which Fanny was keen to defer as long as possible), but almost immediately he lost his job as a reporter at the District Court, and so the burden of maintaining the household in East Oakland – Fanny, Nellie, the cats, the dogs, the horses and, when he was home from boarding school, Sam junior – fell to the broken-down Scotsman. So Stevenson moved to a room at 608 Bush Street, San Francisco, within sight of his obligations in Oakland across the Bay, and replicated the frugal habits of Monterey under the kind and watchful eye of an Irish landlady called Mary Carson. He described his daily routine in the city in a letter to Colvin of January 1880:

  Any time between eight and half past nine in the morning, a slender gentleman in an ulster, with a volume buttoned into the breast of it, may be observed leaving No.608 Bush and descending Powell with an active step. The gentleman is R.L.S.; the volume relates to Benjamin Franklin, on whom he meditates one of his charming essays. He descends Powell, crosses Market, and descends in Sixth on a Branch of the original Pine Street Coffee House; no less[.]84

  Back in his room, he would be ‘engaged darkly with an inkbottle’ for some hours, then go out to Donnadieu’s on Bush Street, where he could dine for fifty cents. Next would come a walk: twice or thrice a week this would be to the ‘debarkadery’ of the Oakland ferry to rendezvous with Fanny; more often it was a solitary climb up Telegraph Hill, so steep that the street was grass-covered (the horses couldn’t manage it) and there were cleats fitted into the pavements to help foot-passengers up and down. Then more writing, and a return to the Pine Street coffee shop, ‘where he once more imbrues himself to the worth of five pence in coffee and roll’. He had learned the art of eking out the butter so that it lasted exactly as long as the roll: it was the art of his current life in a nutshell.

  Stevenson was bleakly amused when the landlady’s little girl chanted ‘Dere’s de author’ every time he went in or out of Bush Street, for ‘the Being in question is, at least, poor enough to belong to that honorable craft’.85 The Benjamin Franklin essay he mentioned to Colvin, like the essay on William Penn he planned, came to nothing, but he did complete an article on Thoreau for the Cornhill, that distant and venerable organ. The choice of exclusively American subjects could not have cheered Colvin or Henley; it seemed as if Louis was actually defecting to the Yankees for good, and he had started introducing Americanisms into his letters (as Ferrier noticed scornfully86). Stevenson was clearly concerned enough about losing the ability to write in a ‘Cornhill’ vein to hope that his Thoreau essay ‘may set me up again in style, which is the great point’.87 But his letters at this time are also full of hints that he wanted to take a new direction: ‘my sympathies and interests are changed. There shall be no more books of travel for me. I care for nothing but the moral and the dramatic, not a jot for the picturesque or the beautiful, other than about people.’88 To his Savile Club friend John Meiklejohn he confessed, ‘it is not Shakespeare we take to, when we are in a hot corner; nor, certainly, George Eliot – no, nor even Balzac. It is Charles Reade, or old Dumas, or the Arabian Nights, or the best of Walter Scott; it is stories we want, not the high poetic function which represents the world [ … ] We want incident, interest, action: to the devil with your philosophy.’89 With hindsight, this looks like a manifesto, for Reade, Dumas, the Arabian Nights and Scott could be said to stand godparents to several of the works to come: Treasure Island, Kidnapped, New Arabian Nights, The Master of Ballantrae.

  In a sketch of San Francisco, Stevenson included a striking passage about the networks of cellars beneath the street, ‘alive with mystery; opium dens, where the smokers lie one above another, shelf above shelf, close-packed and grovelling in deadly stupor’; but it is unlikely he had first-hand knowledge of them, or of the ‘unknown vices and cruelties’ said to go on there.90 At a pinch, the city reminded him of Edinburgh, with its seaward face and adjacent mountain, Tamalpais, like a gilded Arthur’s Seat. But San Francisco was far more exotic, with ‘whiffs of alien speech, sailors singing on shipboard, Chinese coolies toiling on the shore, crowds bawling all day in the street before the Stock Exchange – one brief impression follows and obliterates another’.91 These were the memories he drew on ten years later when writing The Wrecker.

  Donnadieu’s was not Simoneau’s, and Stevenson had little company during his months in San Francisco. To indulge the luxury of talking about his beloved, he called fre
quently on Fanny’s friend from the School of Art, Dora Williams, who lived on Geary Street with her husband Virgil. Dora was struck by Stevenson’s ardent manner and habit of walking rapidly up and down the room as he spoke, but he must have seemed an odd match for her friend, with his extreme thinness, bad teeth and scruffy clothes. When Virgil Williams came home, his first impression was that ‘some tramp had got in’.92 Dora was an invalid, and thought Stevenson rather morbidly concerned with her state of health and that of the Carsons’ little boy Robbie, who was feared to be dying and with whom Stevenson sat up night after night. ‘O never any family for me,’ he wrote to Colvin after witnessing the little boy’s agonies. Thomas Stevenson was furious when he heard that his son had been ‘acting nurse’ at what was thought to be a deathbed, but Louis’s fixation on the boy was strong. It was during these weeks, surrounded by intimations of mortality, that Stevenson began writing the fragmentary ‘Memoirs of Himself’ that dwell so much on his own youthful fragility.

  Back in Scotland, the Glasgow Herald had somehow got hold of the story that Stevenson (clearly famous enough already to be a gossip-item) was ‘lying seriously ill in the United States’ and that latest accounts were ‘very alarming’.93 Thomas and Margaret were deluged with calls from concerned friends and onlookers, much to their distress. All they wanted was for Louis to come home, otherwise there was nothing ahead but ‘destruction to himself as well as to all of us’, as Thomas boomed at Colvin; ‘I lay all this at the door of Herbert Spencer.’94

  It was Colvin who relayed to the parents the fact that Mrs Osbourne had got a divorce, information which changed Thomas’s mood miraculously. He now fixed on persuading Louis to leave a good long interval before marrying, and continued to ply him with advice and money (but not so much, at this point, as to fund a new life abroad). In mid-March they heard that Louis had moved from foggy, damp San Francisco to a hotel in Oakland, and then, at a dinner in Edinburgh, Thomas Stevenson heard from Baxter, probably accidentally, that Louis had been acutely ill and had had a haemorrhage – the first time that dread word appears in his history. Telegrams and letters flew to and from California: Louis had been moved to a ‘friend’s’ house (Fanny’s cottage) and was being attended by a doctor who ‘said he could save him, though it would be with the greatest difficulty’.95 Margaret was all for starting off at once to tend her boy (she didn’t know that ‘my dearest boy’ was how Fanny Osbourne now referred to him too96), but the journey would have killed Thomas, they were told.

  Very few letters survive from this unhappy month, but it is likely that Louis only went to the Oakland hotel because he was already seriously ill, and once he started spitting blood, was moved to the cottage, when both he and Fanny thought he was dying. The first visit of what he came to call ‘Bluidy Jack’ was highly significant, a confirmation of what he had ‘always been threatened with’, and in that sense something of a welcome development, for now he knew – or thought he knew – what he was up against, and, as he had said back in 1874 on his way home from Menton, ‘It is curious how in some ways real pain is better than simple prostration and uneasiness.’97

  There were no tests for tuberculosis at the time, so diagnosis was solely a matter of a doctor’s opinion; and Stevenson was to encounter many opinionated doctors in the coming years. The research that led to the discovery of the tubercule bacillus (by the German pathologist Robert Koch), demonstrating that the primary cause of the disease was a bug you could pick up from anyone, was not published until two years later. Up till that time, TB was thought to be caused by a cocktail of ‘hereditary disposition, unfavourable climate, sedentary indoor life, defective ventilation, deficiency of light and “depressing emotions’”, all of which had figured large in Stevenson’s existence. As he lay coughing and feverish in Oakland, he believed his congenital doom had come upon him. The fact that none of his forebears had had more than ‘threats’ of consumption did nothing to assuage this feeling that the disease he had contracted was fate as well as possibly fatal.

  Louis stayed at the East Oakland cottage all through the crisis and for two months’ convalescence. He got slowly stronger, and began to plan more projects: a play called ‘The Forest State, The Greenwood State’, a ‘nihilist’ play with Henley, ‘A House Divided’, and a counterblast to Henry James’s book on Nathaniel Hawthorne, published the previous year. The domesticity of Fanny and her sister, the pretty garden of the cottage and the cheerful company of the pets all raised his spirits enormously, and in mid-April came conciliatory letters from home and a telegram from his father: ‘Count on 250 pounds annually’. Now it became possible to plan the marriage as soon as possible, to carry through Fanny’s understandable desire to get Louis’s teeth pliered out and replaced by false ones, and to begin thinking of a future home; ‘a ranch among the pine trees’, Stevenson daydreamed, ‘far from man [ … ] in the virgin forest’.98

  On 19 May, Louis and Fanny went across to the city on the ferry and made their way to the house of a Presbyterian minister, William Scott, on Post Street. There the twenty-nine-year-old groom and the forty-year-old ‘widow’ (as she described herself on the marriage certificate) pledged themselves to each other with two silver rings, gold having been thought too extravagant. The only witnesses were Dora Willams, the minister’s wife and the household cat.

  It was not my bliss that I was interested in when I was married; it was a sort of marriage in extremis; and if I am where I am, it is thanks to the care of that lady, who married me when I was a mere complication of cough and bones, much fitter for an emblem of mortality than a bridegroom.99

  * * *

  *And for whom Henley harboured warm feelings – see his poem to her of this year, and a love poem, ‘Love blows as the wind blows [ … ] Love blows into the heart’.14

  *Ferguson and Waingrow are unaccountably confident of this reading, but the scoring over the manuscript is very thorough. Someone wanted the words entirely obliterated.26

  *The child, born on 5 October 1879 and christened Robert, would have been conceived (if the pregnancy went to term) around 28 December 1878, when Stevenson was certainly resident in Edinburgh. He obviously knew the girl – called, confusingly enough, Margaret Stevenson – and referred to her in a letter to Henley as ‘an enchanting young lady whom you have seen’. Whether they had sexual relations is unknown, but he must have at least flirted with her, or there would have been no grounds for threats. Furnas is inclined to dismiss the subject as gossip.80

  7

  THE PROFESSIONAL SICKIST

  Our ignorance is specially great in hereditary maladies, where much alarm undoubtedly exists which inquiry will dispel.

  Francis Galton, Record of Family Faculties

  BY THE TIME Thomas and Margaret Stevenson heard that their son was married, he and his bride were already living halfway up a mountain in northern California, squatting like gypsies in a disused mining shack. It was quite a deviation from their plan to buy a ranch among virgin forests. At the Springs Hotel in Calistoga, where the couple had gone on the recommendation of the Williamses for the altitude and dry climate, Louis and Fanny were told of an abandoned mining village called Silverado, on the slopes of the mountain that dominates the valley, Mount St Helena. Silverado was empty, lonely, 2800 feet above sea level, and free. They needed no further persuasion to give it a trial.

  Having said he would do no more books of travel, Stevenson was already planning the next one: ‘It will contain our adventures for the summer, so far as these are worth narrating; and I have already a few pages of diary which should make up bright.’1 Desperation jumps out of the phrase, and very likely powered the decision to settle in Silverado for adventure’s sake, for when the Calistoga storekeeper took them up to where the old encampment used to stand, its unsuitability was immediately obvious. The place was a dump, knee deep in rubble and poison oak, ‘a world of lumber, old wood, old iron; a blacksmith’s forge on one side, half buried in the leaves of dwarf madronas; and on the other, an old brown wooden hous
e’.2 The dream of the forest ranch dissolved instantly, but the chance of getting material for a quirky book presented itself.

  The storekeeper who had driven them up the mountain and the tollhouse keeper, Rufe Hanson, who was to be their nearest neighbour, must both have marvelled at the eccentricity of the couple who came back a day or two later with an eleven-year-old boy, a dog, and a cart full of trunks and boxes. They set to work to make the old mine habitable, sweeping out the deep litter of dust, stones, sticks and newspapers in the former assayer’s office, installing a stove and covering the doorless portals in thick cloth. A plank was set against the threshold to allow access to the floor above, in which there were eighteen wooden bunk beds in tiers. Here they settled to sleep on the first night on heaps of straw, for all the world like animals in a broken-down byre. It was an odd return for Fanny to be living once again in a silver-miners’ camp, with the’ ghosts of Sam Osbourne and John Lloyd ever likely to appear around a corner. It was a strange development in the life of young Sam, too, taken from his boarding school to this perch in the high forest, where he lay in straw listening to the wind and the cries of none-too-distant coyotes, with his mother and her new husband in the next bunk. None of his impressions of Silverado found their way into his otherwise garrulous memoir, An Intimate Portrait of R.L.S.