TB was known as a disease of contrasts: pallor and flush, hyperactivity and languor; ‘oxymorons of behaviour’, as Susan Sontag has put it.24 To a highly suggestible man like Stevenson, of course, knowledge of the symptoms might to some extent have predisposed him to get them. In Davos, he began to think of himself as a ‘professional sickist’, though other people seemed to feel he was not enough of one, that he was resistant to what Davos could do for him. W.G. Lockett, a later resident at Davos who compiled reminiscences of Stevenson’s stay, recognised that ‘the difference in mental reaction to a place like this is immense’.25 Stevenson’s mental reaction was, as ever, to resist conforming. A contributor to the Davos Courier in 1889 remembered him as resembling ‘a great deal of the Shelley type, in his loose boyish figure, and restless radiant eyes, with a tincture in manner and conversation of French bohemianism’.26 It wasn’t the last time he would be compared with Shelley, but the context is interesting. The cult of TB, to which Stevenson contributed hugely (whether or not he actually had the disease), was essentially romantic, with the perception of the person dying (young) as a romantic personality. Conversely, the cure sought to crush that spirit of romantic individualism, imposing a high degree of conformity and co-operation. Dr Ruedi’s patients were expected to take the air and sun at prescribed intervals, submit to set periods of immobility and consume barrowloads of food. Milk was to be drunk in quantity, and the local Valtelline wine that was high in tannin. Cigarettes were banned altogether – a horrific prospect for the chain-smoking Stevenson, who was limited to three pipes per day, one after each meal. Certain though it is that he did not keep to this regime, his consumption of nicotine was reduced, which no doubt contributed to his generally low spirits and feelings of self-pity all that winter.
The consumptive community at the Hotel Belvedere induced the same sense of claustrophobia and revulsion that Stevenson had already encountered at the Strathpeffer spa:
They had at first a human air
In coats and flannel underwear.
They rose and walked upon their feet
And filled their bellies full of meat.
They wiped their lips when they had done,
But they were ogres every one.
Each issuing from his secret bower,
I marked them in the morning hour.
By limp and totter, list and droop,
I singled each one from the group.
I knew them all as they went by –
I knew them by their Blasted Eye!27
To Bob, he described his fellow residents as ‘a whole crew of kind of gone-up, damp fireworks in the human form’,28 from whom there was little escape, either in the hotel or on the strictly circumscribed invalid walks outside. Davos soon began to look like a malign snowy fortress, where, as Louis wrote, ‘the mountains are about you like a trap’.29
Fanny was not a very cheery companion; she felt ill most of the time at Davos, had little interest in seeking out friends, and few intellectual resources. She too had been examined by Ruedi and told, to her horror, that she was overweight and should diet. Louis was profoundly amused by this, as he already referred to her as a ‘butterball’ and ‘the fat one’. The comical situation developed in which, like Jack Spratt and his wife, Fanny was put on a reducing diet while Stevenson was being stuffed full of calories and denied nicotine. Neither patient responded well, as Fanny wrote to her parents-in-law: ‘If I see Louis rolling a cigarette I say, “O very well! smoke your cigarette and break the doctor’s orders, and I shall do so too; I shall dine upon bread and butter today!” If I lay my hand accidentally upon a bit of bread Louis cries out, “Another cigarette for me!”’30
Communal entertainments at the Belvedere included concerts, balls and some rather deadly tableaux vivants. There were also amateur theatricals, which Stevenson spurned to join in, and a charity bazaar for which Fanny (driven by boredom) painted some pictures of dogs’ heads, including that of the redoubtable Woggs. Unsurprisingly, Stevenson soon resorted to mild mischief-making; several residents remembered an occasion when he got up to recite Tennyson’s ‘Lucknow’ in such an exaggerated style that one woman had to be removed from the room in hysterics. Others thought his performance ‘stagey’. Stevenson struck them (he would have been delighted to hear) as ‘a rather odd, exotic, theatrical kind of man; a man framed somewhat on the model of Du Maurier’s aesthetes. His personality had a tinge of that picturesqueness and Bohemianism which seldom fail to sharply impinge upon the prejudices of a true-born Briton.’31 In other words, he was a damn queer fellow.
But he wasn’t entirely alone. Davos housed one very notable man of letters, whose contributions to the Pall Mall Gazette and the Fortnightly Stevenson knew well, and to whom he had a letter of introduction from Gosse. John Addington Symonds had arrived in the Alps in 1877 en route for Egypt, but found the climate so restorative that he made Davos his permanent home and was having a house built there for himself, his wife and four daughters. Symonds was an extremely cultured and sophisticated man, a first-class scholar and student of the Italian Renaissance, whom Stevenson recognised immediately as more than a match for himself. ‘His various and exotic knowledge, complete although unready sympathies, and fine, full, discriminative flow of language, fit him out to be the best of talkers’, Stevenson wrote in his sketch ‘Talk and Talkers’, though ‘he does not always, perhaps not often, frankly surrender himself in conversation’.32 Indeed there was much withheld in Symonds, as Stevenson came to appreciate over the months they spent in close companionship in the intellectual wasteland of Davos.
Symonds saw ‘a great acquisition’ in Stevenson, whom he judged ‘really clever, and curious in matters of style’.33 But this view modified, and in February 1881 Symonds was writing to the same friend (Horatio Brown), ‘I have apprehensions about [Stevenson’s] power of intellectual last. The more I see of him, the less I find of solid mental stuff. He wants years of study in tough subjects.’34 Stevenson was never going to achieve ‘intellectual last’, especially not at Davos, where his neuroses were all in full bloom. Symonds must have found it trying to hear so many projects talked up one week and totally forgotten the next, as the uncertain flame of Stevenson’s inspiration flared and tapered. The scatter-gun research techniques Stevenson was applying to his book on the Act of Union must have caused the double-first from Balliol to raise an eyebrow, if only to himself, and Stevenson’s pretensions to academic honours (of which more later) must have struck him as quite absurd, for they were.
But the two became friends, and Symonds was solicitously watchful over Stevenson’s mental and physical health, in which he saw many parallels to his own case. Before his own breakdown in 1877, and the beginning of his cure at Davos, Symonds had been ‘feverish and fretful’ over his work.35 He recommended to Stevenson to try reviewing, to keep his hand in and ‘save his brain’. ‘He and, it appears, Leslie Stephen fear a little some eclipse,’ Stevenson told Colvin. ‘I am not without sharing the fear. I know my own languor as no one else does; it is a dead down-draught; a heavy fardel.’36 Symonds thought that Stevenson never rested enough to effect Ruedi’s cure (so was temperamentally doomed not to recover), and the witness of Horatio Brown, Symonds’s friend and a frequent visitor to Davos, confirms this: ‘I feel pretty sure that [Stevenson] never did any systematic open-air cure, or systematic anything. He had a far from invalid life, except when he broke down and retired to bed.’37
But the most interesting parallels between the two cases occur at a different level. Symonds, as all readers of his famous Memoirs know, was a closet homosexual hugely troubled by the degree to which his ‘condition’ could be considered pathological. He had read widely among theorists of behaviour and disagreed with most of them, including Krafft-Ebing; he corresponded with Whitman about the ‘Calamus’ section of Leaves of Grass, provoking an astonishing disavowal from the poet that it had anything to do with ‘morbid inferences’,38 and later in his life he initiated a collaboration with Havelock Ellis that led t
o the publication of Ellis’s Sexual Inversion, the first volume of the groundbreaking Studies in the Psychology of Sex, published in 1897, four years after Symonds’s death. In that volume, Symonds wrote up his own sexual history anonymously as ‘Case XVIII’, in which he describes ‘A’ as having suffered from neurasthenia in his late teens, with insomnia, ‘obscure cerebral discomfort [ … ] inability to concentrate attention, and dejection’. ‘A’ put his neurosis down to suppression of his homosexual temperament; the more he tried to divert his mind from it, the worse his symptoms became. At twenty-four A married, in an attempt to ‘normalise’, and the next year ‘chronic disease of the lungs declared itself’. His invalidism increased all through his twenties until he reached the decision to give up any sort of marital relations and begin to ‘indulge his inborn homosexual instincts’. The effect on A’s health was dramatic: ‘he rapidly recovered [ … ] the neurotic disturbances subsided; the phthisis – which had progressed as far as profuse haemorrhage and formation of cavity – was arrested’.39
Symonds’s was a sexual case history, but its similarity to Stevenson’s medical history is notable: Stevenson also suffered from chronic nervous disorders in his late teens and early twenties, had recently married and had begun to display tubercular symptoms. This is not to make the facile suggestion that Stevenson was therefore harbouring a ‘demon’ such as Symonds described, ravishing his imagination ‘with “the love of the impossible”’.40 Stevenson, it should be said at this point, seems never to have had any homosexual experiences whatever. However, his affect was almost entirely ‘gay’. The reasons behind this, and the effect it had on other people, would deserve consideration even if this eccentric, boyish bohemian had not gone on to write The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Stevenson’s personal manner and habits of dress had long constituted a standing challenge to bourgeois assumptions, social and sexual: what better way to rile fogeys than to go around looking almost like a caricature of the limp-wrested ‘Uranian’ of popular myth? But on a day-to-day basis, of course, dressing and behaving like a ‘yellow yite’ was just as likely to confuse and embarrass homosexual men as to irritate homophobes. When Stevenson turned up at Davos, the initial signals received by Symonds must have seemed as glaring as the light from Bell Rock or Skerryvore: a wispy, boyish ‘Shelleyan’, married to a greying nurse-wife whom the staff at one Davos hotel mistook for his mother,* expressing ardent admiration of Walt Whitman (whose name, according to Graham Robb, was ‘probably the commonest key to further intimacy’ among homosexuals at the time42) and carrying a letter of introduction from Edmund Gosse!
But Symonds must have processed the available information about Stevenson very fast, for no trace of secret knowledge or special understanding enters the documented relations of the two men, and there was, presumably, no physical attraction between them, as Symonds was almost exclusively interested in more muscular specimens. But the list of sexually ambiguous and gay men who did find Stevenson almost mesmerisingly attractive is long, including Gosse, Andrew Lang and, later, Henry James. Added to this could be a subsidiary list of men who seemed to be responding to homosexual signals in Stevenson’s work, such as Mark-André Raffalovitch, later the author of Uranisme et unisexualité (1896) and a friend of Aubrey Beardsley and Wilde, who in 1882, when he was still a teenager, sent Stevenson an essay in homage and thanks for Familiar Studies in Men and Books, the volume that contained Stevenson’s paeans to Whitman, Thoreau and Poe. Symonds described Raffalovitch as being ‘of the “tribe” of Walt Whitman’, and Raffalovitch had every reason – from his works – to believe the same of Stevenson. The two men met in Paris in 1882, when Raffalovitch invited Stevenson to his home for lunch. After that, he didn’t pursue the acquaintance further.
Sometimes these signals were emphasised by observers to the point of caricature. It is hard to tell from this description of Stevenson by the journalist and critic William Archer (in 1885) whether Archer was trying to make sense of the author’s ‘limpness’ and sensitivity, or make fun of it:
He now sits at the foot of the table rolling a limp cigarette in his long, limp fingers, and talking eagerly all the while, with just enough trace of Scottish intonation to remind one that he is the author of ‘Thrawn Janet’ and the creator of Alan Breck Stewart. He has still the air and manner of a young man, for illness has neither tamed his mind nor aged his body. It has left its mark, however, in the pallor of his long oval face, with its wide-set eyes, straight nose, and thin-lipped, sensitive mouth, scarcely shaded by a light moustache, the jest and scorn of his more ribald intimates.43
‘Boyish’ is one of the epithets most often used to describe the emaciated, excitable, irreverent Scot, and this apparent youthfulness gave his brilliance a permanently precocious air, while his apparent frailty made people – men and women alike – yearn to protect him. There was, of course, an element of this in his relations with Henley and Baxter and Colvin too, all of whom felt peculiarly possessive about his friendship and jealous of the intimacy he had found in marriage. Henley always played up the ‘older brother’ aspect of his feelings for Louis, and they referred to each other constantly as ‘Dear Lad’ and ‘My Boy’.
According to Andrew Lang, Stevenson ‘possessed, more than any man I ever met, the power of making other men fall in love with him’.44 Harry Moors, the American trader whom Stevenson met on arrival in Samoa in 1889, was certainly susceptible to this ‘power’: ‘[Stevenson] was not a handsome man, and yet there was something irresistibly attractive about him. The genius that was in him seemed to shine out of his face. I was struck at once by his keen, inquiring eyes, brown in colour they were strangely bright, and seemed to penetrate you like the eyes of a mesmerist.’45 This magician-like aspect was also remarked by Horatio Brown, Symonds’s friend, who recalled long talks with Stevenson at Davos ‘all through snowy afternoons, when we drank old Valtelline wine and smoked, and eventually I got the impression that there was nothing of him in the room but his bright eyes moving about, and his voice’.46
But perhaps this mesmeric, magus power over other men arose from a desire in Stevenson himself, not necessarily a conscious one. Stevenson could have been in much deeper denial than someone like Symonds, with his forthright image of ‘the wolf leaping out’ when he saw a homosexual graffito,47 or Gosse, who spoke of his true self being ‘buried alive’, while ‘this corpse [ … ] is obliged to bustle around and make an appearance every time the feast of life is spread’.48 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde dramatises both men’s dilemmas very accurately, and no wonder Symonds responded to the book’s publication in 1886 with shock, writing to Stevenson that ‘viewed as an allegory, it touches one too closely’.49 But Symonds was clearly also shocked by how self- revealing Stevenson had been in his ‘strange case’-history. He would have been more so to learn that the story came to Stevenson in a dream, the medium of self-revelation that was just beginning to be used by Charcot and Freud to penetrate a patient’s underlying anxieties and desires. In the late 1880s, when Jekyll was published, Symonds was recording his own dreams for use by researchers into sexual inversion.
What Stevenson actually ‘understood’ about Symonds’s inclinations, or Gosse’s, or, later, those of Henry James (or Charles Stoddard’s, or F.H.W. Myers’s, or Mark-André Raffalovitch’s …), is unclear, but the fact that he never expressed surprise, disgust or puzzlement about any other man’s sexuality indicates that he was broad-minded, imaginative and perhaps experienced enough not to count this as an area of justifiable commentary. He can’t have been unaware of the homoerotic forcefield he generated, that ‘power of making other men fall in love with him’. One has to assume that he rather enjoyed it. Stevenson was a man with an insatiable appetite for attention and affection.
But at times, he seems not to have ‘got the message’ about Symonds at all, or to be unwilling to acknowledge it. His remarks about Catherine Symonds are interesting; in Davos, he thought he had discovered the cause of her unhappy dem
eanour in her having an inferior intellect to her husband’s. ‘As you begin to find Mrs Symonds entirely out, you begin to think better of both,’ he wrote to Colvin in 1882. ‘You see that Symonds is to be pitied in his marriage.’50 The idea that her unhappiness could have had any other cause doesn’t seem to have crossed his mind.
Throughout the first winter at Davos, Stevenson was planning – not writing – his magnum opus on the Act of Union, to be called ‘Scotland and the Union: The Transformation of the Scottish Highlands’. Of all his non-works, this was the most elaborately researched and imagined; letters poured from Davos to Heriot Row with lists of necessary books, either to be purchased by Thomas Stevenson or borrowed from the Advocates’ Library (that connection coming in useful at last). ‘This book can be ready in a year,’ he told his father, completely unrealistically, ‘and will pay as I go on.’ Perhaps that is why he thought it justifiable that no expense should be spared. ‘It will be solid and popular both, a vast stirring book to think of. Do look out for me. All biographies of Highlanders might be tried. All Highland trials. Hurray!!’51
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