Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  And ever again, in the wink of an eye,

  Painted stations whistle by.26

  The ‘sick child’ whom Stevenson recalls in the dedication is a powerful presence in the book, if a veiled one. Only ‘The Land of Counterpane’ specifically refers to a time ‘When I was sick and lay a-bed’ (and even then makes it sound like a rare and rich experience), but the figure of the isolated, sleepless or fearful child, a paradigm of sickness, is everywhere. It is as if Stevenson was looking for a way to express the continued sense of apartness and anxiety that his chronic ill-health perpetuated. Childhood was not, in that important respect, a distant, unreachable country for Stevenson, but one whose worst aspects he had never managed to escape.

  The arresting melancholy of the book comes from this sense of shadow and ghostly presences, an unstated lament about illness, past and present. The circumstances under which he finished the book were extraordinary. He had been working on the poems since the summer of 1881, thought them almost ready to publish by the spring of 1883, but then was motivated to write another twenty-two poems, considerably enlarging the book. During the last stages, in Hyères, he was almost shut down by illness; forbidden to speak, with his right arm bound close to his body because of lung haemorrhaging, he was being kept in a darkened room on account of an attack of ophthalmia which Fanny feared would leave him permanently blind. In this tormenting time, he asked for paper to be pinned to a board so that he could complete ‘Penny Whistles’ in bed, writing left-handed, as he had so often had to do in the past. A more bizarre parody of ‘The Land of Counterpane’ could hardly be imagined:

  I was the giant great and still

  That sits upon the pillow-hill,

  And sees before him, dale and plain,

  The pleasant land of counterpane.27

  The pun in the last word seems intentional from the adult author, now critically ill, bound and gagged in the dark. In other respects, his determination to finish the book can be seen as marking one of Stevenson’s finest hours, the triumph of imagination over circumstances, art over life.

  The house where Stevenson endured that miserable illness was also one he would look back on, rather puzzlingly, as the happiest of all his homes. He and Fanny moved to ‘La Solitude’ in Hyères-les-Palmiers in February 1883, drawn by the resort’s growing popularity with consumptives, who clustered in the town’s many new spa hotels. Not that Louis intended to mix with invalids if he could help it; ‘La Solitude’, a queer little house on the sloping rue de la Pierre Glissante, was to live up to its name. In appearance, it was like a joke of Davos, a miniature Swiss chalet that had started life as a show-house in the Paris Exposition of 1878. The Stevensons’ landlord had gone to considerable trouble to have it reconstructed on his Mediterranean slope, but the effect was slightly ludicrous. The rooms were tiny and few; two up, two down, with a kitchen built into the hill at the back, and the narrow balcony on the first floor was flush with the street (fortunately not a very busy one). The Stevensons were delighted with it and hoped to stay ‘some years’. There were views to the sea and of the hills beyond Toulon, but the property’s greatest asset was its garden, with steep, winding paths and lots of mature trees. ‘By day, this garden fades into nothing, overpowered by its surroundings and the luminous distance,’ Stevenson wrote to Will Low, ‘but at night and when the moon is out, that garden, the arbour, the flight of stairs that mount the artificial hillock, the plumed blue gum trees that hang trembling, become the very skirts of Paradise.’28

  The move to Hyères marked a welcome if undramatic temporary improvement in Stevenson’s health, but his situation overall was bad. He had produced very little work in the preceding eight months and had spent a fortune on hotel bills, travelling costs and medical care; now he had news from home that his father’s business was under severe strain, mismanaged by Uncle David, who had begun to suffer from mental hallucinations (the dreaded ‘hereditary madness’). Worse, Thomas Stevenson had been advised by his doctors to retire; the unavoidable consequence would be a drying up of the parental money well.

  The prospect of having to start supporting himself properly, even, indeed, of having to support his parents before long, shook Stevenson into manic action. During the spring and summer of 1883, as well as A Child’s Garden of Verses, he wrote or finished several magazine articles, including another about Grez and – Woggs in mind – ‘The Character of Dogs’; he solicited and got (through Henley’s agency) a publisher for Treasure Island, untouched since its magazine serialisation almost two years before, and he wrote a whole new adventure story for Young Folks called The Black Arrow. He also took up the rudimentary ‘The Forest State, The Greenwood State’ (the melodrama he began in California) and worked slavishly all through the summer of 1883 to make it into his first novel for adults, Prince Otto, and began, with Fanny as collaborator, a sequel to New Arabian Nights. His main hope for money was still, however, play-writing. ‘The theatre is the gold mine,’ he wrote confidently to his mother. Fanny thought so too, urging Henley to seek ‘outcroppings that you and Louis may work to your very great advantage’,29 an unfortunate image perhaps, given her conspicuously unsuccessful experience of prospecting in Nevada.

  Oddly enough, Stevenson never seemed to consider writing a play on his own, however often he and Henley disagreed about subjects and treatment (and despite the fact that Henley wrote lots of plays without a collaborator). Henley rejected the ‘Piparlington’ plan quickly and was unimpressed by Stevenson’s other suggestions that summer, that they should dramatise ‘The Merry Men’, Prince Otto (unfinished as a novel, but ready to morph back at any moment into a play), or, wildly, a contemporary news story about two American-Irishmen, Gallagher and Norman, who had been apprehended on the way from Birmingham to London with a trunk full of dynamite. Without encouragement for this idea, Stevenson’s initial frenzy of excitement soon fizzled out. There was no need even to wait for Henley’s thumbs-down; Stevenson himself knew from the start it was ‘rot’, even in the heat of seeing the whole thing leap up in his imagination: ‘Grand part for Shiel Barry, the man with the dynamite; making that portmanteau live; children playing about it and so on. [ … ] Damn it, we should make it hum. With a few Irish words. It would be rot, but would it not live?’30 So many of Stevenson’s plans and projections ended this way, at their conception, with a sort of blowing of a fuse when the material couldn’t quite contain the author’s enthusiasm.

  Stevenson was always ‘deep in schemes’31 and unable to choose between them. Starting, stopping, writing lists of chapter headings: it looks like skittishness, but was probably a necessary device to avoid being without something to work on. When he was ill, anything that involved research, such as his projected biography of Hazlitt, had to be put aside completely, and the times when he was physically able to work on what remained – fiction – were so unpredictable and few that further hindrances became intolerable, as he wrote to Gosse, over whose rival career, income and output he kept watch jealously: ‘I have to tinker at my things in little sittings; and the rent or the butcher or something is always calling me off to rattle up a pot-boiler. And then comes a back-set of my health and I have to twiddle my fingers and play patience [ … ] Treasure your strength, and may you never learn by experience the profound ennui and irritation of the shelved artist.’32

  Stevenson was particularly frustrated when he wrote that letter (in September 1883) because he had ambitions for Prince Otto which he was beginning to suspect were unattainable. In his essay ‘My First Book’, written in 1893, Stevenson expressed his inhibitions about writing a full-length novel, speaking of it as an ‘ideal’ which, despite ten or twelve attempts, he couldn’t realise. He describes his failure in physical terms, as if the ‘little books and little essays and short stories’ for which he got ‘patted on the back’33 were as much as his childishly slight self could produce. The stamina required to write a novel awed him: ‘For so long a time the slant is to continue unchanged, the vein to keep running; for so long a
time you must hold at command the same quality of style; for so long a time your puppets are to be always vital, always consistent, always vigorous. I remember I used to look, in those days, upon every three-volume novel with a sort of veneration, as a feat – not possibly of literature – but at least of physical and moral endurance and the courage of Ajax.’34 Although he is writing here of the composition of ‘The Sea-Cook’, these remarks are very applicable to Prince Otto, his first novel for adults. We have his wife’s word for it, and the evidence of Stevenson’s letters, that he laboured over Prince Otto more than any other book. To Henley he sent anxious calculations of how far he had got, using ‘Cornhill pages’ as units, as if the production of a novel was primarily a matter of filling up a predetermined space. ‘Quite a novel, by God,’ he wrote, when he reached 160 of these ‘Cornhills’, having adjusted the figures (upwards of course) on the grounds that he thought his handwriting had got smaller over time. Such were the stratagems he needed to urge himself onwards.

  It is possible that Stevenson’s anxiety about breaking into novel-writing for adults made him avoid things he found easy or natural. From the start, he was defensive, describing the work-in-progress as ‘a semi-reasonable and sentimental Arabian Night: that is to say, the unreality is there and the classic pomp. But the people are more developed, though they all talk like books – none of your colloquial wash; and the action, if there had ever been such a State of Grünewald might have taken place.’35 ‘The whole thing,’ he added later, ‘is not a romance, nor yet a comedy, nor yet a romantic comedy; but a kind of preparation of some of the elements of all three in a glass jar.’36 In fact, the mix was even odder than that: ‘The Forest State, The Greenwood State’ had been a tragedy in blank verse.

  Prince Otto has seldom been reprinted and is regarded with something like embarrassment by Stevenson’s apologists. He seems to be labouring in it to find out what he was best at – fine writing, dramatic action, creation of character, fantasy. The hero is a dreamy dilettante, ruler of a Ruritanian principality called Grünewald, on the point of revolution due to his poor management. At the start of the story his young wife, Seraphina, has taken over government of the state, guided by the machiavellian Baron Gondremark, who is thought to be her lover. Gondremark, whose real mistress is the Countess von Rosen, is plotting to have Otto abducted so that he will be free to pursue expansionist ambitions against the neighbouring states, with a view to forming a republic. When Otto learns of this, he condemns himself for his weakness and decides to abandon the throne and go into hiding. Seraphina’s formerly harsh attitude to her husband is melted by this voluntary sacrifice of power (not, as one might expect, hardened by his cowardice) and she recants her allegiance with Gondremark, stabbing the Baron in a moment of anger and setting off a revolution against the palace when the Grünewalders think him dead.

  This summary implies more excitement and drama than the book actually delivers. Its genesis as a ‘melo’ makes it markedly stagy, with heavy reliance on reported action and enclosed, interior scenes, absurd passages of philosophical repartee and pensive soliloquising. The action is stiff and unlikely, even the settings are dull – library, palace gardens, ladies’ and gentlemen’s apartments – and surprisingly domestic for a story about a coup d’état, especially coming from a man so obsessively interested in war games and military history. These choices seem perverse and puzzling.

  An essential part of the book, and the thing that was to mark it off from ‘stories for boys’, was sex, mostly in the shape of the Countess von Rosen, ‘a jolly, elderly – how shall I say? – fuckstress’, as Stevenson wrote excitedly to Henley.37 Fanny was more than ready to act as special adviser here; though Stevenson said he was thinking of Madame Zassetsky when he began this story in 1879, by 1883 he was adding many elements from his wife’s behaviour too. The low number of female characters in Stevenson’s novels and stories has often led commentators to accuse him of misogyny or narrowness, but his experience with Prince Otto shows that it was not misogyny that discouraged him from writing about women, but the difficulty he found in representing them realistically, which he was to encounter again and again. The Countess is a seasoned coquette with a powerful instinct for body language, at one point crossing her legs and flashing a view of ‘smooth black stocking and snowy petticoat’ – the author’s favourites – and knocking Otto out with a kiss: ‘when their lips encountered, [he] was dumbfounded by the sudden convulsion of his being’.38 The Countess’s beauty is described as ‘flash[ing] like a weapon full on the beholder’; ‘[she] always had a dagger in reserve’, ‘She met Otto with the dart of tender gaiety’, all reminiscent of Stevenson’s early remarks about Fanny’s regard being like ‘the sighting of a pistol’. But Stevenson’s marriage turned out less of a help than a hindrance in the depiction of a strong, sexy, mature woman, since it provided a constant study, but of a rather unusual specimen. Critical distance from such a character was impossible, it being – in all but name – a portrait of his wife.

  The other strong woman in Otto, Princess Seraphina, turns out to be more convincing, despite being set up as a ‘puppet’. She is intelligent and questing, ‘a woman of affairs’ who has transgressed gender stereotypes by developing ‘manlike ambitions’. Somewhat to the author’s surprise, it seems, Seraphina becomes the moral focus of this deeply moralistic book and is the heroine of the only scene to break out of comic-opera mode, the one dealing with her flight through the forest:

  presently the whole wood rocked and began to run along with her. [ … ] She strangled and fled before her fears. And yet in the last fortress, reason, blown upon by these gusts of terror, still shone with a troubled light. She knew, yet she could not act upon her knowledge; she knew that she must stop, and yet she still ran.39

  Though Seraphina is described in sexually insulting ways as ‘a chit’, ‘a mincing doll’ and ‘wooden’, it is the Countess who ends up looking hollow. In the scene where the two women confront each other (the most worked-on scene in Stevenson’s whole career to date) we get this piece of pure nonsense: ‘“O you immature fool!”, the Countess cried, rising to her feet, and pointing at the Princess the closed fan that now began to tremble in her hand. “O wooden doll!”’40 Stevenson was careful to record that this chapter had needed rewriting nine or ten times and that the penultimate draft was by Fanny, to whom he had turned for help in despair. According to Fanny they ‘fought the path’ of the Countess ‘inch by inch’, though how much of the final version Fanny can be held responsible for is unclear, possibly on purpose.

  Prince Otto is most interesting now for the gender anarchy it portrays. Otto describes himself as ‘a plexus of weaknesses, an impotent Prince’41 who prefers ‘the warm atmosphere of women and flattery and idle chatter’42 to any other. Yet he is ruled by notions of honour and feels ‘almost dangerous’ as he broods on his humiliation by the macho Baron Gondremark, pacing his apartment ‘like a leopard’ one minute, only to transform himself in an instant (in yet another ‘split personality’ moment) into a dandy again, ‘curled and scented and adorned’.43 He is an object of scorn or pity throughout, except latterly to his wife, whose permanent retirement with him to her parents’ house is surely the ultimate in emasculation (it is part of Prince Otto’s stiltedness that this is meant to recall the ending of another Bohemian romance, The Winter’s Tale). Seraphina is the one with ‘manlike ambitions’, bravery and physical endurance. Even the sexy Countess is gender ambiguous: when she embraces Otto (and causes that ‘sudden convulsion of his being’) she is, after all, in drag, disguised as her own ‘brother’.

  Fanny Stevenson claimed that the character of Otto began as a portrait of Bob, ‘but fell insensibly into what my husband conceived himself’,44 which makes Otto’s pronounced effeminacy all the more interesting:

  He is not ill-looking; he has hair of a ruddy gold, which naturally curls, and his eyes are dark, a combination which I always regard as the mark of some congenital deficiency, physical or moral; his features ar
e irregular but pleasing; the nose perhaps a little short, and the mouth a little womanish. His address is excellent, and he can express himself with point. But to pierce below these externals is to come on a vacuity of any sterling quality, a deliquescence of the moral nature, a frivolity and inconsequence of purpose that mark the nearly perfect fruit of a decadent age.45

  There is a sort of decadence in the writing here as well as in the conception, a self-indulgence in private joking of this sort, a purple vein. Prince Otto shows Stevenson in the vanguard of the ‘decadent age’ he didn’t live to see in perfect fruit at the fin de siècle; the elegant stylist who was also author of bracing boys’ stories and who was here sending himself up in the character of a dilettante incapable of mastering his own domain.

  Fanny’s approval of Prince Otto (at the time of its writing; by 1906 she was calling it ‘fantastic and artificial to a degree’46) struck Stevenson as ‘fatal’, since they seldom agreed about the quality of his work. He felt remarkably anxious about the book, not sure whether it was the work of genius he wanted it to be. To his mother he wrote that Otto was ‘hitherto, my best’ – a remarkable statement from the author of Virginibus Puerisque, New Arabian Nights and Treasure Island – juxtaposed with the hope that it represented ‘just a first step on another road: where I mean to leave a mark’.47

  But the style was far too ornate for most tastes. Henley was unsure how to praise it, and wrote an offensive letter trying to, while Gosse felt he had to make his objections clear: ‘Forgive me for saying that it is not worthy of you. It is a wilful and monstrous sacrifice on the altar of George Meredith, whose errors you should be the last to imitate and exaggerate.’48 The critics were on the whole puzzled and sales were unimpressive. One reviewer likened the novel to ‘a Gilbert comedy’ (nothing could have been better guaranteed to infuriate the author), others thought it was a children’s story (this despite the rather heavy-handed introduction of ‘adult’ themes), but the general sense of bemusement was expressed by the reviewer in Academy: ‘We all expected that “Prince Otto” was to prove the magnum opus. Well, we were wrong.’49 Was Stevenson doomed to be the author of ‘little essays’ and adventures for boys? He had set out to write a volume of substance, but was distressed to find how difficult that was. And his failure to write about sex was chastening. He returned to his former position of keeping women characters to a minimum, and as for ‘fuckstresses’, avoiding them altogether.