Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  In defence of his labour over Prince Otto, Stevenson wrote to Colvin, ‘The big effort, instead of being the masterpiece, may be the blotted copy, the gymnastic exercise. This no man can tell; only the brutal and licentious public, snouting in Mudie’s wash trough, can return a dubious answer.’50 Up to this point, true popularity in the mass market, symbolised by Mudie, the immensely influential circulating library, had seemed remote to Stevenson. The Black Arrow, his other adventure story for Young Folks, set during the Wars of the Roses, was written in two months flat in 1883, all, the author attested, for the sake of a quick return. Yet the real money-maker was just sitting in a drawer, waiting to be published. Why Stevenson didn’t think of Treasure Island immediately when casting round for income is hard to understand. Perhaps the brief period of revision with a view to publication in 1882, when Thomas Stevenson suggested inserting ‘a long passage [ … ] of a religious character’,51 had killed off his interest. It was only when Henley threw the clippings on the desk of a colleague at Cassell’s that a serious gesture towards publication was made. ‘There’s a book for you!’ Henley exclaimed, then clumped out of the office on his wooden leg, more like John Silver than ever. It was the best favour he ever did Stevenson in their long and troubled friendship.

  Stevenson had been paid £34.7s.6d altogether for the serialisation of ‘The Sea-Cook’ in Young Folks, and seemed to think that that represented the greater part of anything he could ever earn on the story. Calculating his total income over the previous five years in April 1883 (£655), he noted that almost two thirds of that had come from magazine publication. Magazine publication was still the focus of his ambitions, which must have made ‘The Sea-Cook’ seem to him like a failure, since it hadn’t made Young Folks’ circulation rise at all (unlike the serialisation of The Black Arrow, which sent sales through the roof). Stevenson wrote to Henley that he had ‘no idea’ what the book might be worth: £50 would be ‘a deal more than I deserved’. When Cassell’s offered twice that, with a royalty of £20 per thousand copies sold, Stevenson was astounded and overjoyed: ‘A hundred pounds, all alive, oh!’ he wrote to his parents ecstatically. ‘A hundred jingling, tingling, golden, minted quid. Is not this wonderful?’52

  The rush of writing activity and multiplicity of schemes in 1883 was not purely to do with amassing money for his family’s immediate needs. Some time during that period Fanny thought she was pregnant. The only remaining evidence of this is in a letter from Stevenson to Walter Simpson at the end of the year – a Christmas letter to the old friend he least frequently contacted:

  I must tell you a joke. A month or two ago, there was an alarm: it looked like family. Prostration: I saw myself financially ruined, I saw the child born sickly etc. Then, said I, I must look this thing on the good side; proceeded to do so studiously; and with such a result that when the alarm passed off – I was inconsolable!53

  Looking at Stevenson’s letters of that year in the light of this revelation, one can guess that the suspected pregnancy happened around May or early June, when there are many exclamations on the ‘sub-celestial’ life he and Fanny were leading at La Solitude, revitalised schemes for future writing, attempts to master account-keeping at last, more references than usual to Fanny being ‘out of sorts’ and ‘sick’, and cryptic utterances about fate, such as this to Gosse:

  The devil has always an imp or two in every house; and my imps are getting lively. The good lady, the dear kind lady, the sweet, excellent lady, Nemesis, whom alone I adore, has fixed her wooden eye upon me. I fall prone; spare me, Mother Nemesis!54

  But having brought himself round to the idea of fatherhood, the pang Stevenson felt when the pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm must have been all the sharper. After all, dismenhorrea, the classic first sign of pregnancy, is also symptomatic of menopause; at forty-three Fanny may have been having irregular periods and certainly would have been less fertile than before. Rationally, neither she nor Louis wanted a baby at all, as. her letter to Dora Williams from Davos on news of Belle’s first pregnancy showed. But not having the choice was another matter.

  Belle’s son Austin was by now almost two years old, and the family was living in Honolulu (under the patronage of a businessman who had commissioned Joe to do some paintings). In the autumn of 1883, Belle was pregnant again and gave birth the next spring to another little boy, whom she named Hervey. Fanny’s scornfulness and oddity about this second pregnancy are again remarkable. ‘Belle I hear is going to have another baby and her dog is dead,’ Fanny wrote to Dora Williams from Hyères. ‘I’m not going to have another baby and my dog is not dead.’55 The next surviving letter to Dora Williams mentions that Belle ‘has presented the world with another little Strong. Her generosity in that respect doesn’t fill me with elation’;56 again a rather sour note from a new grandmother. Though Joe and Belle were a feckless couple, Fanny’s forebodings about the birth of Austin had proved false. Her odd remarks then about her ‘moral conviction [ … ] that the new baby is mine’,57 like her rudeness about the second child, suggest confused feelings of rivalry towards her daughter. In this case, her sarcasm was ill-placed. Little Hervey died in infancy of pneumonia.

  As for Louis, though he reported Fanny’s suspected pregnancy to Simpson as a ‘joke’, it was of course nothing of the sort. When circumstances seemed to be overtaking them and it ‘looked like family’, Stevenson found in himself (yet again) a surprisingly deep well of feeling about fatherhood. This is surely behind his extra solicitude for his parents during that year, his concern for Sam’s future, his taking up (or at least, trying on for size) the role of head of the family, as well as the preoccupations evident in A Child’s Garden and essays such as ‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’, with its marvellous evocation of the joys of play.

  It may also be behind his problematic poem ‘God gave to me a child in part’, which first appeared in print after the author’s death.

  God gave to me a child in part

  Yet wholly gave the father’s heart: –

  Child of my soul, O whither now,

  Unborn, unmothered, goest thou?

  [ … ] My voice may reach you, O my dear –

  A father’s voice perhaps the child may hear;

  And pitying, you may turn your view

  On that poor father whom you never knew.

  Alas! alone he sits, who then,

  Immortal among mortal men

  Sat hand in hand with love, and all day through

  With your dear mother, wondered over you.58

  The reasons why this poem is problematic are that there is no date to its composition and the manuscript fragments from which it derives include other lines such as ‘When they told me you were dead//Forgive me, bright and laughing lad/Forgive me if my soul was glad,’ which suggest (in a fictional form, of course) the poet having fathered a viable child who died.59 An ‘alarm’ that ‘passes off’ (such as Fanny’s in 1883) is not the same as a miscarriage or stillbirth, and while of course the poem could be entirely imaginative, these seem odd subjects to choose for that purpose. The fragments also include the lines ‘Where art thou gone? And where is she?/Alas!/She too has left me, O my child,/As you I left.’60 At this point – if one is taking the liberty of reading this as autobiography – the puzzle gets more complicated, for of course Fanny Stevenson had not ‘gone’ anywhere in 1883, so this would refer to some other woman, some other pregnancy, or child.

  There is a note in the Yale manuscript, prepared for the Bibliophile Society of Boston (by an unnamed hand), which estimates the date of the draft poem as the early 1870s. But there is another possibility, of course: that the poem, which seems to compound two events, could be about Fanny being pregnant (not just thinking she might be) at a different time. And the time when she was ‘gone’ (the only woman to abandon Stevenson in the true sense) was when she left Paris for California in 1878. If she had been expecting Stevenson’s child then, it would explain her desire to return abruptly to her husband, her rural seclusi
on in Monterey, her lover’s agonised waiting for news. It is an intriguing possibility.

  Whether or not it reprised an earlier, similar event, the realisation that he and Fanny were not going to have a child in 1883 made Stevenson reassess what was left, and face the fact that from now on his whole posterity was going to be in his work. It was an unfortunate time to be judging himself this way: the potboilers outnumbered the rest by far, and there seemed no end in sight to a life of hack-writing, impeded by bouts of sickness. It was a low point, a muted mid-life crisis, from which Stevenson could not begin to imagine the successes of the coming years, the productivity and mastery he would enjoy, the fame, money and – most marvellous of all – the escape from invalidism. To Will Low he wrote of his position in terms of resignation: ‘I am now a person with an established ill-health – a wife – a dog possessed with an evil, a Gadarene spirit – a chalet on a hill, looking out over the Mediterranean – a certain reputation – and very obscure finances’:

  nearly three years ago that fatal Thirty struck; and yet the great work is not yet done – not yet even conceived. But so, as one goes on, the wood seems to thicken, the footpath to narrow and the House Beautiful on the hill’s summit to draw further and further away. We learn indeed to use our means; but only to learn, along with it, the paralysing knowledge that these means are only applicable to two or three poor, commonplace motives. Eight years ago, if I could have slung ink as I can now, I should have thought myself well on the road after Shakespeare; and now – I find I have only got a pair of walking shoes and not yet begun to travel.61

  Having tottered back into half-health, there was no budging from the South of France. Friends who wanted to see Stevenson had to come to him, and stay at one of the local hotels, La Solitude being far too small even to entertain guests for dinner in comfort; all the dishes had to be lowered in front of the diners over their heads. Colvin had already visited in the spring of 1883; Henley and Baxter planned a trip to Hyères later that year. Stevenson longed to see them: his only company, apart from Fanny and the local girl, Valentine Roch, whom they had hired as a maid, was an English apothecary called Powell and his wife, and the local wine merchant. His need to see old friends gained piquancy after the death in September 1883 of Walter Ferrier, aged thirty-two. The news hit Stevenson ‘like a thunderclap’: though Ferrier was a chronic alcoholic, he had not been expected to die before the officially precarious consumptive. Stevenson had spent his life preparing to face his own death, but not anyone else’s: ‘I never could have believed how much I would mind this,’ he wrote to Henley.62 To Gosse, who hadn’t known Ferrier, he wrote how the death of an old friend had ‘shelved’ his powers: ‘I stare upon the paper, not write.’63

  Regret for neglecting the friendship haunted him, and so did the man. Alone in La Solitude, Stevenson felt he could hear Ferrier’s laughter again and sense his presence, with his customary strength of sensory recall: ‘I see his coral waistcoat studs that he wore the first time he dined in my house; I see his attitude, leaning back a little, already with something of a portly air, and laughing internally. How I admired him! And now in the West Kirk.’64 The ‘awful smash and humiliation’ of Ferrier’s descent could not obliterate in Stevenson’s mind his friend’s essential goodness, but the co-existence of these things in the one person troubled him deeply: ‘if anything looked liker irony than this fitting of a man out with these rich qualities and faculties to be wrecked and aborted from the very stocks, I do not know the name of it’, he wrote to Henley.

  The name of it, yet unknown, was surely Henry Jekyll. Of all the many possible elements contributing to his fictional ‘Strange Case’ of divided self, two years from composition, Stevenson’s response to Ferrier’s tragic end has escaped remark, but does seem significant. His recollection of his last interview with Ferrier, before leaving for America in 1879, has the same sorrowful hopeless tone of Jekyll’s friends’ testimonies: ‘I waited hours for him, and at last he came. “My God,” I said, “you have had too much again.” He did not deny it, as he did in the old days. He said “Yes”, with a terrible simplicity.’65 Ferrier drunk (having taken, like Jekyll, a transforming ‘potion’) was the ‘lunatic brother’ of the ‘good true Ferrier’: ‘The curse was on him. Even his friends did not know him but by fits. I have passed hours with him when he was so wise, good, and sweet, that I never knew the like of it in any other.’66 These restitutions are like the episodes of heightened virtue that characterise Jekyll’s decline, yet there were also times, like his collapse in 1883, when Ferrier seemed lost, as morally and intellectually ‘wild and blind’67 as the unequivocally evil Edward Hyde. Ferrier’s distraught mother had as good as blamed Stevenson’s influence for the change, writing to him in the late 1870s that her son ‘now exists among the number of those degraded ones whose society on earth is shunned by the moral and virtuous among mankind’.68 Yet Stevenson himself considered Ferrier to have been ‘the nobler being’ of the two of them, ‘the best gentleman, in all kinder senses, that I ever knew’.69

  In the weeks following Ferrier’s death, Stevenson returned to writing a story called ‘The Travelling Companion’ that he had started in 1881 and put by. All that is known about this tale, destroyed by the author after the publication of Jekyll and Hyde on the grounds that it had been superseded, is that it dealt with the theme of the double life and was a shocker (intended for the collection of horrid tales that was to include ‘The Merry Men’ and ‘Thrawn Janet’). The fact that he went back to work on it at this juncture shows his preoccupations flowing in and out of various channels, trying as usual to line up idea and mood and vehicle. In many ways it is astonishing that Jekyll and Hyde ever got written at all, its themes were such a constant preoccupation.

  Despite Fanny’s confusing mixture of pleadings and warnings, Henley and Baxter’s long-anticipated visit went ahead in January 1884 and was a great success, for the men at least, who soon decamped on a trip to Menton and Nice. La Solitude was simply too cramped to cope with such boisterous company – or the men wanted to get out of range of Cassandra, whose powers of foresight required things to go as badly as possible. When the party broke up in Nice, Stevenson had a severe collapse and Fanny had to go to his rescue again. She wrote assuring Baxter that their taxing visit had not been to blame, ‘though it now seems, as I said it would, like a dream’.70 But as the situation worsened, with a local doctor taking one look at the shuddering, vomiting, skeletal Stevenson and pronouncing him almost dead, Fanny’s letters and telegrams took on high colouring. ‘I feel like a mother with her baby,’ she wrote pointedly to his mother. ‘I watched every breath Louis drew all night.’ She complained to Baxter both that the Stevensons seemed indifferent to their son’s mortal danger – ‘I find it quite impossible to make anyone understand how very ill Louis has been’71 – and that they were ‘too wild’ and volatile to be kept informed of his condition.72 Her hysterical responses and mania to control the situation must have made her a very agitating presence. When a professional nurse was hired to take over breath-watching duty, Stevenson’s remarks were interesting: ‘I have had a nurse for two days now: a strange experience. Everything is done for me. I am much recovered.’73

  Fanny, angry with Henley and Baxter for bringing on – as she saw it – this latest collapse, had imperiously summoned Walter Simpson to Nice to help her nurse Louis and was appalled when he declined to come. It was not the first indication that the friends’ patience was wearing thin: Colvin had given notice a year before to Baxter that he wasn’t going to be frightened by Fanny again: ‘and she may cry Wolf till she is hoarse. I expect [Louis] has been pretty baddish, but nothing approaching what she gave me to understand.’74 This battle over the quantification of Stevenson’s illness obscured the fact that he was much more than ‘baddish’ in the first months of 1884: he confided to his mother that it had been ‘chuck farthing for my life’,75 and to Bob that he had been in constant pain and extremely depressed: ‘when Pain draws a lingering fiddle-bow, and al
l the nerves begin to sing, I am conscious of an almost irresistible temptation to join in, alto: L’Invitation à la Boo-Hoo’.76 Those closest to him seemed obsessed with charting his distance from death: Stevenson himself was naturally more concerned with what was happening to his life, and the prognosis was poor: the doctor in Nice had told him to regard himself as an old man, stay as immobile as possible and give up drink.

  Of that lean, feverish, voluble and whiskeyfied young Scot, who once sparked through France and Britain, bent on art and the pleasures of the flesh, there now remains no quality but the strong language. That, at least, I shall take grave-wards: my last word, it’s like, will be an execration; the hired nurse, the weeping widow and the anxious medical attendant, shall be embraced in one all-round and comprehensive detonation, and at a breath the Temper that was known as R.L.S. will flit from its discarded tenement.77

  The humour of this detracts (as it was meant to) from the real and intense distress of Stevenson’s situation. He was not able to work, although Prince Otto was tantalisingly near completion. He was in pain, an object of pity, a burden to his parents, possibly a bore to his friends. Most of the time he was ostentatiously stoical, but his underlying mood was black. On one occasion, feverish, he grabbed Fanny and shook her ‘like a terrier shaking a rat’. Some previously unpublished notes in the Yale archives exist from this period, scribbled messages from times when Stevenson was forbidden to talk, which convey some of the ‘suppressed wrath’ he felt at being confined to bed, constantly dependent on others, their fussiness and impositions on his attention. The one-way transcription is hauntingly suggestive of the long hours in the sickroom: