Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  In the meantime, he was collecting the essays for his long-awaited first collection, Virginibus Puerisque. It was published, towards the end of his first winter at Davos, by C. Kegan Paul, who had also published An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey. ‘The vile Paul’, as he was usually referred to in Stevenson’s letters, had paid almost nothing for these books, and Stevenson was too little a man of business to have done anything but complain to friends about it. For his 1882 collection of essays, Familiar Studies of Men and Books, Stevenson went to Chatto and Windus, who paid £100, but who also expected to get the rights to the earlier works. When Paul held on to these, Thomas Stevenson had to pay him off (with more than £100) to clear Louis’s obligations, including the withdrawal of The Amateur Emigrant in the autumn of 1880, when it was already in proof. This must have been a relief to the father, who not only thought the emigrant book ‘the worst thing you have done’ and ‘entirely unworthy’, but was professionally involved with the owners of the Devonia. It is interesting to think what a realistic turn Stevenson’s writing might have taken had this book appeared in 1881. But Louis had to wait until after his father’s death to tackle contemporary, realistic subjects.

  Stevenson wrote very little during his first Davos winter. Tobogganing was the only new activity that gave him any pleasure, but he tended to indulge in it to the point of exhaustion. War games, that had been such a feature of his childhood, were again his obsession, and he found a willing accomplice in Sam, with whom he would spend whole days moving regiments of lead soldiers across an imaginary terrain, to be shot at by the opposition using either pellets from a spring-pistol, or a double sleeve-link for heavy artillery. Food and munitions were represented by printers’ ‘M’s from the miniature press which had been bought for Sam just before his mother’s remarriage (presumably by Stevenson, as a gesture of stepfatherly kindness). On this elaborate machine, Sam printed notepaper and small samples of poetry written by his stepfather, under the imprint of The Davos Press.*

  Stevenson had wisely not forced his attention on his stepson in the early days of his relationship with Fanny, possibly expecting Sam Osbourne to have insisted on maintaining contact with his surviving son. But the move from California shifted the structure of the family: in a way, Belle had become Sam’s child now, and Sam junior was theirs. Little by little, Stevenson took on an elder-brotherly role towards the boy (who hero-worshipped him from the start), expending vast ingenuity on the games they played and seldom descending into seriousness. That could be left to tutors, at Davos (where there were plenty of unemployed, consumptive clerics on hand) or later in Yorkshire, where Sam was sent to get some basic education.

  Louis and Fanny were not intending to have any children of their own, as is clear from a letter that Fanny wrote to Dora Williams from Davos in December 1880 on hearing that Belle was expecting her first child in April:

  I know that Belle is quite set up about the new baby; poor soul, she will soon be set down again. The baby too, I fear. I am glad that I am too far away to have it left at my door in a basket. But what is distance? I have a moral conviction borne in upon my soul that that baby is mine, and will be mine to keep and to hold forever. – And I don’t want a baby.

  [ … ] It would amuse Louis just as much as it would Joe to have a picturesque little being in spotless white to call him father, and he could pretty well count upon bringing it up and educating it properly, and not cast it loose upon the world, but he does not dare take the risk of perpetuating his own ill health, it is too cruel.52

  Ill-health, ‘bad genes’, money, advancing age; these were all rocksolid reasons for Fanny and Louis to remain childless. But they hardly applied (except ‘money’) to the younger couple, and no wonder Belle was not happy with her mother’s grudging response to her news. Fanny melds the issue of Belle’s fertility with her own, affects to have a ‘moral conviction’ that the baby is hers, and seeks to underscore the difference between herself and her ‘foolish’ daughter in the contraception stakes. All of this, and the harsh tone of her comments, seems intensely inappropriate.

  Surprisingly, Louis was no more sympathetic than his wife at the thought of becoming ‘grandpapa’, and referred to Belle’s pregnancy as ‘a vulgar error’.53 What had happened to his former delight in small children? Clearly he still had residual longings for ‘a picturesque little being in spotless white’ of his own, but had come to a decision with Fanny not to risk it. As if to remind him of the days when ‘kids are what is wrong with me’, and to emphasise the tragedy of congenital illness, an odd scene was about to be played out at Davos. A telegram arrived in January 1881 from Frances Sitwell, asking Louis to book rooms at the Belvedere for herself and her son Bertie, now eighteen and just out of Marlborough, who had been taken ill suddenly and ordered to the Alps. ‘Imagine the shock,’ Fanny wrote to her parents-in-law, ‘when the carriage drove up and two men lifted out a ghastly dying boy’: Bertie Sitwell was in a galloping consumption.54

  Over the next two and a half months, Bertie underwent Ruedi’s treatment and struggled to get better. A toboggan was bought for him, and an elaborate toy theatre, but soon it was clear that his chances of survival were slim. Colvin came out to Davos in February to support the poor boy and his mother, with whom Louis and Fanny were deeply sympathetic, but rather distant. This was in part because of the appalling painfulness of the current situation – Louis said to Colvin, ‘I alternate between a stiff disregard, and a kind of horror’55 – and in part a sort of emotional gridlock about the past. Stevenson seems to have actively avoided Mrs Sitwell in the week when Fanny was away in Paris, seeing a doctor. How different this silence was from the torrent of words that used to flow between them only seven or eight years before, and how odd that the man who seemingly could not write to ‘Madonna’ less than once a day in the past found it impossible to write to her at all in the months following Bertie’s death in April. As he admitted to Colvin a few weeks before the boy died, ‘I feel a great deal, that I either cannot or will not say, as you well know. It has helped to make me more conscious of the wolverine on my own shoulders; and that also makes me a poor judge and a poor adviser.’56 This frankly acknowledges the difficulty Stevenson had in coping with anyone else’s death: his own was such an overwhelming preoccupation. The poem he wrote in Bertie’s memory (‘In Memoriam F.A.S.’), really an address to Frances Sitwell rather than the dead Francis Albert, peddles a morbid optimism, which, while highly conventional for the day (and often reverted to by Stevenson when having to address bereaved parents), seems unlikely to have comforted Mrs Sitwell much as she left her only surviving child in the teeming Davos graveyard:

  Yet, O stricken heart, remember, O remember

  How of human days he lived the better part.

  April came to bloom and never dim December

  Breathed its killing chills upon the head or heart.

  Doomed to know not Winter, only Spring, a being

  Trod the flowery April blithely for a while,

  Took his fill of music, joy of thought and seeing,

  Came and stayed and went, nor ever ceased to smile.57

  But the drafts from which the poem emerged contain long passages of a much more personal nature, that go back to the mother-son and ‘deity’ imagery that suffused Louis’s correspondence with Mrs Sitwell in 1874 and ’75:

  So he a while in our contested state,

  A while abode, not longer – for his Sun –

  Mother we say, no tenderer name we know –

  With whose diviner glow

  His early days had shone,

  Now to withdraw her radiance had begun.

  Or lest a wrong I say, not she withdrew,

  But the loud stream of men day after day

  And great dust columns of the common way

  Between them grew and grew:

  And he and she for evermore might yearn,

  But to the spring the rivulets not return

  Nor to the bosom comes the child again.58


  No wonder Stevenson rejected all this for the pat rhyming quatrains of the final poem. The son in question here is ostensibly Bertie Sitwell, but more that other ‘son’, who had been separated from the ‘mother of his heart’ and who could never return to her bosom, the poet.

  Louis had agreed to follow Ruedi’s instructions and stay the whole year round at Davos, although the idea of being tied to one place so long went completely against his grain. ‘It tells on my old gypsy nature,’ he wrote to Colvin,

  like a violin hung up, I begin to lose what music there was in me; and with the music, I do not know what besides, or do not know what to call it, but something radically part of life, a rhythm, perhaps, in one’s old and so brutally overridden nerves, or perhaps a kind of variety of blood that the heart has come to look for.59

  His indolence was such that he sometimes couldn’t even be bothered to write whole sentences, as in this expressive note to Baxter:

  [W]ish I were a bird; seductive Rutherfords; fifteen minutes talk, return, wish I were bird. Breathless style; unwillingness to write; wish were bird; sincerely yours R.L.S.

  It had better be explained that I am neither drunk nor mad; but only hideously lazy.60

  Perhaps it was Bertie Sitwell’s death, perhaps Fanny’s illness (which seemed to get worse in Davos), that propelled them, at short notice as usual and completely against doctor’s orders, away from the Magic Mountain at the end of April 1881. They went briefly to Barbizon, then Paris, perhaps hoping to revive some of the excitement of their early days together, which seemed to have been obliterated by worry and sickness since their marriage, now almost a year old. But Barbizon was empty of the old friends and talk and companionship, and Paris they found ‘putrid’ and ‘pestilential’. They headed for Scotland and a summer in the Highlands.

  Henley saw the couple on their way through London, and was shocked at the ‘very curious state’ Louis was in. It wasn’t his physical health – Henley sent Louis to his own doctor, Zebulon Mennell, who pronounced Stevenson’s lungs to be all right – but his highly nervous condition. ‘He is more the Spoiled Child than it is possible to say,’ Henley reported to Baxter, warning him not to bring up the thorny issue of money when they met (which was difficult, as Baxter was in charge of Stevenson’s accounts): ‘He is curiously excitable and unstrung; emotion is always excessive with him; and any provocation to sentiment ought steadily to be avoided.’61

  In their rented cottage in Pitlochry, however, Louis settled down to write as he hadn’t for years, producing three very different stories, ostensibly all intended for the same collection of ‘crawlers’: the supernatural ‘Thrawn Janet’ (written in Scots), ‘The Body Snatcher’ and ‘The Merry Men’. Of these, only ‘The Body Snatcher’ was a conventional horror story, so much so in fact that Stevenson never sought to include it in any of his collections. He took great pride in the other two stories, especially ‘Thrawn Janet’, one of his few extended forays into Scots prose. It has the characteristics of a ballad or a story in the oral tradition: compactness, simple characterisation and rapidly unfolding narrative.

  By this time the foot was comin’ through the passage for the door; he could hear a hand skirt alang the wa’, as if the fearsome thing was feelin’ for its way. The saughs tossed an’ maned thegither, a long sigh cam’ ower the hills, the flame o’ the can’le was blawn aboot; an’ there stood the corp of Thrawn Janet, wi’ her grogram goun an’ her black mutch, wi’ the heid aye upon the shouther, an’ the girn still upon the face o’t – leevin’, ye wad hae said – deid, as Mr Soulis weel kenned – upon the threshold o’ the manse.62

  The early editions of Stevenson’s stories in Scots did not have accompanying glossaries, implying a wider knowledge of the dialect than anyone would assume today. There is Scots in ‘The Merry Men’ too, in Gordon Darnaway’s speeches, used as an intrinsic part of the characterisation. The story, described by the author as ‘a fantastic sonata about the sea and wrecks’, is set on a fictional islet called Eilean Aros (based on Eirread). In common with Kidnapped, written five years later, it features an orphaned nephew at the mercy of a mad uncle, ships, shipwrecks and the location, but ‘The Merry Men’ is more contemplative and poetical, with its return to ‘sad sea-feelings’ and ‘the horror of the charnel ocean’. The title refers to the breakers which ‘sing’ during storms and seem to leap about in a frenzy of excitement. The narrator’s uncle, Darnaway, has been infected by their malign spirit by long contemplation of the sea, for he enjoys the shipwrecks which the Merry Men cause and lives off the things he can scavenge from them. The story has a supernatural ending; Darnaway dies being chased into the water by a nameless, featureless ‘black man’ (a traditional Scots representation of the devil), akin to the running black man in ‘Thrawn Janet’ and the black doppelgänger in ‘The Tale of Tod Lapraik’ (in Catriona). But the true source of horror is the sea itself, as Darnaway reveals in a sudden outburst:

  ‘Eh, sirs, if ye had gane doon wi’ the puir lads in the Christ-Anna, ye would ken by now the mercy of the seas. If ye had sailed it for as lang as me, ye would hate the thocht of it as I do. If ye had but used the een God gave ye, ye would hae learned the wickedness o’ that fause, saut, cauld, bullering creature, an’ of a’ that’s in it by the Lord’s permission: labsters an’ partans, an’ sic-like, howking in the deid; muckle, gutsy, blawing whales; an’ fish – the hale clan o’ them – cauldwamed, blindee’d uncanny ferlies. Oh sirs,’ he cried, ‘the horror – the horror o’ the sea!’63

  Stevenson had still not written more than a few notes for his history of the Act of Union, but in the summer of 1881 he hatched an ambition to establish himself as a historian. He had heard that the chair of History and Constitutional Law at Edinburgh University was about to fall vacant, and decided, madly, to put himself forward for the job. It appealed to him, not surprisingly, because of the stipend of £250 a year and what he conceived as a light workload, which he for some reason thought he could perform in the summer months, leaving the rest of the year for travel. It wasn’t a blague (though it would have made a good one); he was completely in earnest, and his foolish, fond family all supported the idea.

  But they couldn’t influence the board of electors, and Stevenson had to begin begging for letters of recommendation from his friends and his few academic acquaintances. Among those he approached were Colvin, Gosse, Churchill Babington, three St Andrews professors, Leslie Stephen, Symonds, Charles Guthrie and – of all people – the retiring incumbent, Aeneas Mackay. This was the very man whose lectures on constitutional law Stevenson had failed to attend back in the early 1870s, and who, when asked by Graham Balfour for his reminiscences of the author, was unable to describe him as anything other than ‘a truant pupil’.64 Mackay must have written a stiff note to Stevenson at the time of his application, for a sprightly response has survived in which Stevenson says, ‘You are not the only one who has regretted my absence from your lectures; but you were to me, then, only a part of a mangle through which I was being slowly and unwillingly dragged – part of a course which I had not chosen, part, in a word, of an organized boredom.’65 Comically frank though this is, it was hardly politic, and shows in what naive spirit this extraordinary venture was undertaken.

  The more letters he wrote, though, the more Stevenson convinced himself that the chair would suit him very well. The small matter of his total lack of qualifications didn’t stop him instructing Colvin to state ‘all you can in favour of me and, with your best art, turning the difficulty of my never having done anything in history, strictly speaking’.66 Quite a difficulty to turn! Symonds’s testimonial letter shows signs of the struggle, evincing ‘frequent conversations’ as evidence of Stevenson’s historical learning and the expression of a belief that his friend had a suitably arresting manner to lecture successfully to undergraduates. Lang was also of the opinion that Stevenson would win ‘the affections of any class of young men with whom he might be thrown’. This manner was practised on the unfortunate Sam during
the autumn months, with the aspirant professor walking up and down ‘sonorously addressing the class’. Stevenson of course loved to hold forth, and thought the ‘lectures’ went very well, but Sam admitted later that he took in nothing from them but ‘the word “gentlemen,” and some sanguinary details of medieval life’.67 Needless to say, Stevenson did not get the job.

  One of the lesser absurdities about applying for the Edinburgh chair had been the idea of living in Scotland, even for the summer months. ‘Here I am in my native land,’ Louis wrote to Gosse from Edinburgh, ‘being gently blown and hailed upon, and sitting nearer and nearer to the fire.’68 That was June – mid-summer. By August, he had developed a heavy cold and began spitting blood again. The Pitlochry party (which had included Margaret Stevenson) moved to Braemar and were joined by Thomas Stevenson, Cummy and Sam Osbourne, on holiday from his tutor in Malton. Their cottage was in the vicinity of Balmoral, where Queen Victoria was in residence, and she could be seen in her carriage emerging from the castle gate every day, come rain or shine. As it mostly came rain, Her Britannic Majesty proved to be made of sterner stuff than Stevenson, who lay in bed or on a sofa most of the time, playing chess with his father or Sam. When Gosse, who was invited up for a visit, asked what clothes to bring, Stevenson replied, ‘If you had an uncle who was a sea-captain and went to the North Pole, you had better bring his outfit.’69

  When Gosse arrived, on 26 August, he was impressed with the co-existence of so many strong personalities within such a small space, writing home to his wife, ‘This is a most entertaining household. All the persons in it are full of character and force: they use fearful language towards one another and no quarrel ensues.’70 Cummy was delighted with the new arrival, and praised his reading of the Bible at family prayers by turning to Louis and saying, ‘He’s the only one of your fine friends who can do justice to the Word of God!’71 Gosse went on walks in the rain with Thomas Stevenson and was charmed by the old man’s ‘excellent sound talk’ and resemblance to his own father, Philip Henry Gosse, another sensitive, tyrannical fundamentalist. It would be another twenty-six years until Gosse wrote the memoir for which he is famous, Father and Son, that struck such a chord with survivors of the Victorian family romance, and in which Robert Louis Stevenson would have recognised many familiar situations.