Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  It was Fanny’s lingering illness that made them leave Davos in April 1882 for London, and the rest of the summer was spent at a number of locations in England and Scotland, with many short separations that bore home to Louis his dependence on his wife: ‘Marriage does soften a person up,’ he wrote to her in October. Anticipating their reunion at Kingussie in the summer, he drew her a picture of ‘The fat and the lean’ near a railway station, ‘the lean’ rushing so fast to meet ‘the fat’ that his hat has fallen off. With it were these charmingly inconsequential verses:

  With thoughts reverential and stilly

  This long correspondence I close;

  The union of you and your Billy

  Now pledges my pen to repose.

  On paper as white as a lily,

  In writing as sable as crows,

  The thoughts of Uxorious Billy

  Were daily sent forward in prose.

  The postman, industrious gillie,

  Has laboured, but now may repose;

  For you and Uxorious Billy

  On Saturday part from their woes.

  But don’t come if tired, dear. Your loving husband Louis

  In this emblem, please to view

  Uxorious Billy far from you.

  Gosse was right to point out how well Stevenson understood the paradoxical ‘processes of desire’. It did not, however, make it easy to write about them, or, specifically, to write about sex, as Stevenson was to find out with the composition of Prince Otto in 1883. The introductory passages of ‘The Story of a Lie’, written on board the Devonia as he made his way to California, are a gloss on the subject, with his feelings for Fanny clearly in mind:

  All comprehension is creation; the woman I love is somewhat of my handiwork; and the great lover, like the great painter, is he that can so embellish his subject as to make her more than human, whilst yet by a cunning art he has so based his apotheosis on the nature of the case that the woman can go on being a true woman, and give her character free play and show littleness or cherish spite, or be greedy of common pleasures, and he continue to worship without incongruity. To love a character is only the heroic way of understanding it.12

  On dismissing Stevenson from Davos in the spring, Dr Ruedi had pronounced his lungs ‘splendid’,13 but made it clear that the only way to prevent a relapse was for him to live in the South of France, or a similarly warm and sunny climate, within fifteen miles of the sea. Andrew Clark seconded this opinion, warning Stevenson in September that he should be ‘very careful’ about where he chose to winter, if he did not return to Davos. In London for the consultation, there seemed no point going back to chilly Edinburgh, so Louis set off at once for France. As Fanny was too ill to accompany him, Bob did so, at least as far as Montpellier, where anxiety about his own wife’s health made him turn home. It was the usual Stevenson family shuttlecock of illness and alarum.

  As a result, Stevenson was left alone in a hotel in Montpellier, supposedly house-hunting but actually incapable of doing anything at all. He withheld from Fanny the news that he had started haemorrhaging again, telling her humorously about his other symptoms, a skin rash from patent plasters and a digestive disorder that made his face scarlet for two hours after every meal. ‘I shall be missed here, if only as a piece of colour,’14 he wrote, adding in a postscript how much he longed to see her, his constant refrain that year. Laid up in a hotel bedroom, lonely, ill, friendless, and condemned to a new regime of ‘silence et repos’ by the local doctor, Stevenson wrote to Fanny, ‘I have neither pluck nor patience and I must own I have wearied awful for you. But you will never understand that bit of my character. I don’t want you when I’m ill; at least, it’s only one half of me that wants you, and I don’t like to think of you coming back and not finding me better than when we parted.’ This forthright statement shows his impatience with always being ‘the patient’. He had never yet been truly healthy for his wife, and it sickened him. Fanny on the other hand showed no symptoms of dissatisfaction with the situation. She was so focused on the business of being married to an invalid that it was impossible to imagine what she would do if he ever got well.

  Fanny got out to Marseilles in mid-October and found a spacious villa for rent in a valley called Saint Marcel five miles out of town. It was a hasty and bad decision. The house at Saint Marcel was in poor repair, dirty, run-down and infested with fleas, and as the Stevensons had no spare cash at all Fanny had to appeal immediately to Margaret Stevenson for the money to fix it up. She clumsily overdid the style of these letters, writing of their circumstances in tones of deepest gloom and foreboding, and dressing her lamentations in vapour-thin cheeriness. The Stevenson parents were never going to refuse their son money (even though the family business was going through a rough patch), so these performances were unnecessary, and Fanny might have held her fire had she known just how often the same appeal would need to be made in the following couple of years.

  The unavoidable truth was that Louis had no current or prospective income to speak of, being too ill even to get out of the house, never mind to work. ‘A very little wood-cutting, the newspapers, and a note about every two days to write, completely exhausts my surplus energy,’ he wrote to his mother on his thirty-second birthday. He should have been in the prime of life. The news that an actor-manager called Crichton had bought provincial rights on Deacon Brodie for a year excited Stevenson enormously, but promised very little actual money (5 per cent of gross profits between the two authors). But he and Henley were so grateful for the opportunity to get the play staged that payment seemed somewhat beside the point.

  ‘I have scratched down hints as to costume,’ Stevenson wrote to Henley in mid-December, when the production was already well in preparation in Bradford. ‘O how I envy you! how – how – how. And yet not envy – but if only I could be there, too! – what a Tremendous Lesson I shall lose.’15 Stevenson’s exclusion from this long-awaited reward accentuated the fact that Deacon Brodie had really become more Henley’s play than their joint project. Without Henley’s determination to rewrite it in 1878–79, the manuscript would have remained among Stevenson’s abandoned juvenilia. No doubt it would have been better off there, but once conceived, the idea of the melodrama had overpowered both men. The time and effort invested in the play then became the justification for spending yet more time ‘perfecting’ it; predictably, it got worse and worse.

  Stevenson had tired of the project first, having much more on his mind in the winter of 1879–80 than the Deacon of the Wrights, and Henley’s decision to go it alone while his friend was pursuing Mrs Osbourne in California had more than a little reproachfulness in it, as if the play was a child of their union whom Stevenson had flippantly abandoned. Henley’s determination to bring it up to scratch alone must also have been motivated by his desire to prove himself the better writer, or at the very least senior partner in the firm of Henley and Stevenson. His investment in the play was high, and no sooner had he got his version of it printed in 1880 than he started again revising the script, not once, but twice that year. It was always, it seemed, to be a work in progress, even after publication. And now the news of the Yorkshire production struck both authors not as an end to their struggles but as an opportunity to get hints for yet more revisions, a ‘Tremendous Lesson’ from which they and their troublesome text could benefit.

  Henley was of course in Bradford for the first of Deacon Brodie’s three performances at Pullan’s Theatre of Varieties, and wrote his co-dramatist a full account of everything that went wrong. To his anxious eye, it was ‘most ineptly done [ … ] there never was such a hodgepodge of blundering since time began’.16 Owing to the Christmas panto, the cast was under-rehearsed and distracted, there were no scenery or props, the stage management was terrible and the noise of carpentry backstage was audible throughout. To any other observer, the most obvious evidence of carpentry would have been on stage rather than off, but Henley was convinced that the play itself had held up well: ‘The play, dear lad, is a veritabl
e play. It stood the strain superbly. The action moved from point to point with a vigour that surprised me.’17

  Stevenson immediately began to have ideas for more melodramas, including one based on Great Expectations, or perhaps – he couldn’t decide – on Dumas’s Richard Arlington. He referred to the hero as ‘Piparlington’ and urged Henley to give it thought. Stevenson’s donation of great ideas to Henley at this time seems particularly frivolous, as he was in no position to do any work himself. Saint Marcel disagreed with him profoundly, a ‘depressing well-bucket of a house, where sciatica and sleeplessness abide’.18 He moved out to a hotel in Nice on New Year’s Day 1883, leaving his wife and Sam, on holiday from his Bournemouth crammer, to wind up the establishment as best they could.

  The following weeks saw a series of alarms that show Fanny wrought to an extremely high pitch of nervous tension. Louis’s earliest telegrams and letters from Nice for some reason went astray and, not having heard from him, Fanny presumed that he had collapsed, or even died, on the journey. Leaving Woggs behind, but grabbing Sam, her silver box and a loaded revolver, she set off to find the corpse, stopping everywhere en route to Nice, informing the police, telegramming hotels, and generally behaving like a tragic heroine. Sweeping into the Grand Hotel in Nice, she found her husband sitting placidly in bed, reading. ‘You should have seen the arrival!’ he wrote later to his parents. ‘Captain Kidd [i.e. Sam] as respectable as paint – with the wild woman, and the treasure, and the impending fatal weapon!’19 The Stevenson parents masked their scorn of this histrionic episode by referring to ‘Cassandra’s’ journey as ‘a most farcical romance’, but others were not so ready to laugh. Colvin, who had been planning to visit the Stevensons that month, was beginning to run out of patience with ‘that maniac partner’, as he now referred to Fanny, whose reports of Louis’s frailty always appeared exaggerated. News of her latest escapade infuriated him, as he wrote to Baxter:

  I suppose we must simply put down three parts of it to nerves and the love of harrowing her own and other people’s feelings [ … ] I have given up going now but shall do so in March [ … ] My advice is that they should stay in a hotel, not at Nice, but some quieter place (which incidentally would save him from her housekeeping) until I or some practical person can go and manage for them about a new house.20

  Clearly Colvin did not consider Fanny in the least bit ‘a practical person’ – the very thing she prided herself on. He was, to a great extent, right, too. For all her frontier skills and cultivation of earth-goddess feminine mystique, Fanny was more often the cause or amplifier of crises than their resolver. In stark contrast to Louis’s habitual optimism, she never took anything lightly; as soon as there was a setback in her husband’s health (as so often) she prepared for the start of Act Five. One night in Saint Marcel, as she related to Symonds, she was woken by Louis asking so urgently for a light to be lit, in such a low whisper, that she thought he was dying. ‘Imagine my relief when I held up the candle, to see him all right, whispering “There are burglars in the house”. My “Oh, is that all,” mystified and then amused him greatly.’21

  Not that anyone who saw Louis at this period would have blamed his wife for her anxious solicitude. His weight in mid-January 1883, measured by the doctor at Nice, was down to seven stone eleven and a half (1091/2 pounds), less than at any time in his adult life. He was a mere wisp. And confusingly, no one was any nearer to a firm diagnosis of what really ailed him. ‘[I] now beg, with open mouth, to know what’s wrong with me,’ he told his parents. ‘I have no idea. No more the doctor seems to have. I begin to suspect nerves; but do nerves produce expectoration and blood in large quantities? Question. There seem to be ghastly finger posts, like so many gallowses, pointing Davos-wards.’22

  Neither he nor Fanny was in any doubt that a return to Davos or a similar spa would turn Stevenson once and for all into a permanent invalid, or ‘a Symonds person’, as Fanny put it.23 But Stevenson was so emaciated and feeble that winter that there seemed few alternatives; they even thought desperately of asking sixty-one-year-old Cummy to come and look after him. It was as if the adult Louis had somehow gone into reverse; was becoming smaller, relapsing into a state of infantile dependency and needing his nanny. Nice itself reminded him of his visit there in 1863 with his parents and Cummy, and the contrast between the relatively robust child he had been then and the incapacitated adult he had become must have added to his already depressed and helpless feelings. Almost every letter home included a request for money and smelled of defeat, for the prospect of getting a suitable house in France, of being fit enough to work again or able to afford anything, was receding rapidly. ‘We did think we had at last got to a place where we should be able to live on a fixed sum and feel like people,’ he wrote sadly to his parents.

  The only work he was able to complete in this half year was the one which reconstructed with such uncanny verisimilitude the pleasures, fears and fancies of his ‘first’ childhood, A Child’s Garden of Verses, called at this stage ‘Penny Whistles’. He wrote to Cummy of his intention to dedicate the book to her, ‘in place of a great many things that I might have said and that I ought to have done to prove that I am not altogether unconscious of the great debt of gratitude I owe you’.24 She was, he said, ‘the only person who will really understand it’. It is likely, in the service of openness, that Stevenson sent a copy of this letter to his mother, for she wrote soon after, objecting to his choice of dedicatee and obviously miffed at the imputation of her own inferiority. She suggested that it might be more appropriate to dedicate the verses to Aunt Jane, but stopped short of pointing out that the most suitable candidate of all would be herself. ‘I stick to what I said about Cummy,’ her son replied; ‘she has had the most trouble and the least thanks. Ecco! As for Auntie, she is my aunt, and she is a lady, and I am often decently civil to her, and I don’t think I ever insulted her: four advantages that could not be alleged for Cummy.’25 In mollification, he added two short poems to the ‘envoys’ at the back of the collection, ‘To My Mother’ and ‘To Auntie’, but the dedicatory verse ‘To Alison Cunningham. From Her Boy’ so far outdid these in feeling and intensity that the envoys seemed even more like dutiful squibs by comparison:

  For the long nights you lay awake

  And watched for my unworthy sake:

  For your most comfortable hand

  That led me through the uneven land:

  For all the story books you read:

  For all the pains you comforted:

  For all you pitied, all you bore,

  In sad and happy days of yore: –

  My second mother, my first wife,

  The angel of my infant life –

  From the sick child, now well and old,

  Take, nurse, the little book you hold!

  ‘Well and old’ was certainly a polite lie, and there was no acknowledgement of Cummy’s other legacy, of terrifying ‘night thoughts’, very evident in sinister poems such as ‘Shadow March’, with its image of Night staring through the window, ‘the breath of the Bogie’ in the speaker’s hair and the inexorable march of shadows towards the bed. But the emotionalism of the dedication – mother, wife, angel – is even more striking than its whitewashing, especially since Stevenson had tended to neglect his old nurse in adult life, relying on news being relayed to her through Heriot Row. The evocation of his childhood in the poems had stirred Stevenson up considerably; indeed it could be said that no one was more affected by the sweetly melancholic spell they cast than the author himself.

  Stevenson certainly didn’t think of his collection of ‘nursery verses’ as a potential money-spinner (unlike the wretched Brodie), but it eventually became one of his three all-time bestsellers and a classic. Stevenson was self-conscious about his talent as a poet, restricting himself on the whole to comic and casual forms, but the many brilliant examples of impromptu verse in his letters and notebooks show he kept a remarkable skill supple and flexible all his life. A Child’s Garden, though his first boo
k of verse, therefore has the fluency of long practice. Its novelty was that it was the first piece of juvenile literature that seriously attempted to reproduce childish sensibilities and concerns. Children loved it – still do – because the poems are short, direct, funny, brilliantly cadenced (perhaps children appreciate this best of all) and not mawkish; adults read it for the same pleasures, plus the ironic commentary on adult life which the naïve point of view allowed. Examples of poems in the latter category include ‘Happy Thought’ and ‘System’, in which a complacent narrator guesses that a dirty child who lacks ‘lots of toys and things to eat [ … ] is a naughty child, I’m sure –/Or else his dear papa is poor’; in the first category are the classics ‘Windy Nights’, ‘My Shadow’, ‘The Lamp-Lighter’, ‘Foreign Lands’, ‘From a Railway Carriage’, poems so embedded now in the collective literary unconscious as to be seldom associated with an author at all:

  Faster than fairies, faster than witches,

  Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;

  And charging along like troops in a battle,

  All through the meadows the horses and cattle:

  All of the sights of the hill and the plain

  Fly as thick as driving rain;