Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  O how I did suffer from rheumatism last night.

  red hot veins; and in the knee, knives cutting and bombs going off

  It occupies my knee.

  I only touched the pla [sic] to remind you I had recently had

  some sandwiches

  lift me up straighter

  then why make me unhappy

  what o’clock?

  It just does seem too hard

  What I want is for you to do what you want and to go

  about your own affairs, and you wont understand me.

  that woman’ll be the death of me

  du vin et de l’eau

  Why did you come?

  I can now never ring again

  I didn’t ring

  You bring yellow stuff and a smoke and sit and tell me stories

  I believe it to be partheno-genesis on Bob’s part

  I have to pass the evening still

  Pour out the Rhine wine

  Will you read to me?

  Voice bad? Nothing happened last night

  Only two hours now. You are tired.

  Time for you to cut and run for your denner [sic]

  What is the fat one up to?78

  There is also a note in French to the doctor describing his symptoms: the blood he had been spitting was ‘bien caillé’ (clotted), his kidneys very painful and he had only pissed twice in thirty-six hours. This wreck was only to get worse, however: when the local corporation dumped a mound of putrid refuse on the road from La Solitude into Hyères, Stevenson developed ophthalmia and had to stay in the dark wearing bandages or goggles – another bizarre invalid accessory, like the Braemar pig’s snout. Fanny was convinced that he was at risk of permanent blindness and it was in the shadow of this threat that he sat in bed with the board and paper over his knees, finishing A Child’s Garden, no doubt desperate to find distraction from his dismal circumstances. Any time he had a respite, he made the most of it, and was out dancing round a bonfire in the garden in April with Fanny and Valentine to celebrate the news that a journalist he hated (but didn’t know personally) had been convicted of criminal libel. That led to a chill, and the worst haemorrhage of his life. Fanny was so frightened by the quantity of blood he coughed that her hand shook hopelessly over the ergotine bottle. The patient dosed himself, then wrote on a piece of paper, still preserved, ‘Don’t be frightened. If this is death, it is an easy one.’ The selfless kindness of this is astonishing, though, confusingly for Fanny, she could never quite tell at this date which way the invalid’s temper would jump.

  News of this dangerous attack shook Stevenson’s London friends into action. Henley called Baxter and Bob together to discuss what they could do and they decided to send Dr Mennell over to Hyères to take charge of the treatment – nominally at their expense, though it was Thomas Stevenson, predictably, who ended up paying the bill. Mennell stayed about a week, established that his patient’s case was not hopeless and left Fanny a set of instructions for various possible emergencies. His prognosis was that several small arteries in the lung had ruptured and that Stevenson should for the time being have no excitement or disturbance of any kind. The patient would be very frail in the short term but not necessarily forever: ‘I see no reason why he should not live for some years to come and even get much stronger than he is now,’ the doctor wrote to Baxter.

  On Mennell’s advice, Louis was to return to the spa at Royat, but Thomas and Margaret Stevenson had to be dissuaded from joining him there for fear of overtaxing his strength (which was nil: Fanny had to lift him in and out of bed at this period). Walter Ferrier’s sister, Elizabeth (‘Coggie’), who had been with them for weeks already in Hyères, was to accompany them, and Valentine Roch. It was a terrible period for Fanny, harrowed by worry, long wakeful nights and her husband’s alarming switches of temper, as she described to Baxter and Henley: ‘He is very unlike himself, very irritable and angry [ … ] He is in a very curious state [ … ] and takes everything seriously and as an insult.’79 He improved a little in his weeks at Royat, but there was to be no return to Hyères. An outbreak of cholera there persuaded Fanny that it would be too much of a risk to go back, but their decision to go on to London in July instead of making for another resort such as Nice or Menton was surprising. It may have been influenced by the fact that Henley had arranged for Deacon Brodie to be performed at the Prince’s Theatre that month, starring (if that’s quite the right word) his younger brother Teddy. Though Stevenson by now thought the play ‘dam bad’, he realised its importance to Henley: ‘It is about Henley, not Brodie, that I care,’ he wrote to Colvin on the eve of his return to England.80 In London, there would be a chance to see the friends and colleagues who had expressed such acute anxiety about his health, as well as to have medical consultations. Like all Stevenson’s arrangements, things didn’t turn out as planned. Their chattels were abandoned in the South of France for almost a year, until Fanny could get over to fetch them and shut up the quaint little hillside chalet, with its birds and trees, picturesque ruins and sweeping views, ‘Eden and Beulah and the Delectable Mountains and Eldorado’, as Stevenson had once described it,81 all rolled into one.

  9

  A WEEVIL IN A BISCUIT

  Minor ailments. A knowledge of these gives considerable help towards understanding the ‘constitution’ of a person, and it is a matter of great interest to learn the connection between the family tendency to minor and to graver maladies. The former may be outlets and safety valves to prevent the occurrence of the latter.

  Francis Galton, Record of Family Faculties

  WHEN THE CURTAIN WENT UP on the matinée performance of Deacon Brodie on 2. July 1884, the audience was full of Stevenson’s friends. and admirers: Henley, of course, Colvin, Gosse, Leslie Stephen, Robert Browning and Henry James, a friend of Colvin and of Gosse. Fanny was there too, and Stevenson’s parents, but he himself, having rushed in from France the previous day, was too exhausted to attend. He spent the evening alone at his hotel, a potent absence that was guaranteed to quicken his friends’ sympathies and concern.

  The audience at the Prince’s Theatre was enthusiastic and the few reviews polite, but this was more to honour the authors than the play itself, which no one liked much, apart from Henley. The curtain call at the end of the performance rather went to the big man’s head and he was soon predicting huge success, but Colvin, as always, was quick with cold water and wrote to him, ‘I thought I felt [the public’s] pulse too, and that by the play as a whole they were disappointed, baffled, and thrown out. [ … ] the Deacon is, as you have written him, morally unintelligible, unconvincing, and non-existent, neither can any amount of brilliant speeches or effective acting make him otherwise.’1 But Henley’s confidence was robust enough to withstand even such forthright criticism, and he went down to Richmond, where the Stevenson entourage had settled temporarily, full of plans for more collaborations. His vitality was tonic to Stevenson, and his enthusiasm infectious. Within weeks they were working on two more plays, Beau Austin and Admiral Guinea.

  The question of where Louis was going to live next was urgent. George Balfour was in town, and Dr Mennell, both of whom gave good reports of his health and strongly implied that Fanny must have been exaggerating his symptoms. There was no reason why he shouldn’t live in England, they said. Fanny took exception to this (either from the slur on her judgement or the prospect of having to stay in Britain, or both) and insisted on another opinion. Her specialist said exactly the opposite: both lungs were seriously affected and Stevenson should repair to the Alps again for the winter. This inability to get consistent or definitive diagnoses kept the prospect of recovery forever at bay, as the patient remarked tetchily a few months later: ‘the doctors all seem agreed in saying that my complaint is quite unknown and will allow of no prognosis’.2 Duty rather than doctors finally swayed the couple towards wintering on the south coast, as Thomas Stevenson’s visible decline made Louis anxious to be as near home as he could manage. England would do for a while
; there were the joint projects with Henley to sustain him and some sense of literary life. There was Sam, too, cramming for university at a tutor’s in Bournemouth. On a trip down to see him, Fanny and Louis decided to make their base there, first in lodgings, then at their first real home.

  Bournemouth was a popular destination for invalids, being sheltered, relatively warm (for Britain) and only a couple of hours’ train ride from the capital, but Stevenson’s health didn’t improve at all during his three years in the town, and he later described his existence there as like that of ‘a weevil in a biscuit’.3 His first six months were spent coughing, first from his lung haemorrhage, then from the complications of a protracted ‘flu which Fanny blamed on her mother-in-law or Henley, depending on whom she was more annoyed with at the time. Stevenson’s description of his symptoms is pitiful: the morphine he had been prescribed for the cough made him vomit, he couldn’t eat, had ‘a smart fever, with shivers and aches of the beastliest; and am fit for nothing but sleep. Now, I sweat all the time, day and night. The cough is from the throat, which is in a state of fine congestion; uvula much elongated; sores all over; larynx and pharynx both involved; lung not very bad; liver, all things considered, wonderful, but Robert Louis Stevenson in a devil of a decayed state.’4

  The morphine didn’t just affect his stomach. Quite often in the letters of this period he seems to be on automatic pilot, distracted or mentally disconnected, as in this ending of a letter to Colvin:

  [Drawing of a hat]

  A HAT

  [Drawing of a house]

  A SMALL HOUSE IN THE MOUNTAINS OF ETRURIA.

  THE DOOR IS ON THE OTHER SIDE.

  AND CAN ONLY BE SHOWN IN ANOTHER PICTURE.

  [Drawing of a door]

  DOOR OF THE HOUSE5

  In September, Stevenson complained of being ‘full of the vilest drugs’, ‘stupid’ and ‘Mind gone’; the lethargy and inability to concentrate which morphine caused were quite unlike the giddying highs and happy, warm feelings he had previously got from opium, cocaine and hashish. By November he was writing to Henley, ‘I am not sure that my incapacity to work is wholly due to illness; I believe the morphine I have been taking for my bray, may have a hand in it. It moderates the bray; but I think sews up the donkey.’6 Worst of all, morphine gave him nightmares of a particularly vivid and terrifying nature. His waking hours were spent in a daze and his nights in restlessness or horror.

  Not surprisingly, the work he attempted to do under these circumstances was sometimes pretty poor. In 1893 he recalled the ‘waves of faintness and nausea’ through which he had composed one of the plays with Henley. Henley himself was stubbornly insensitive to his friend’s weakness, or decided that he knew best what would distract him from it. He made frequent visits to Bournemouth throughout the autumn of 1884 to cheer the invalid along with their new projects and even tried to invite himself for Christmas Day so they could carry on ‘making changes in ye Beau’.7 They were both still persuaded that the theatre could earn them serious money: the reception of Deacon Brodie seemed promising, and they were flattered when the actor-producer H. Beerbohm Tree suggested they adapt a French melodrama for him, L’Auberge des Andrêts by Frédéric Dumont (called Macaire in the English version). Beerbohm Tree pulled out of the project about a year later and Macaire was never produced, but the play – unpromisingly subtitled ‘A Melodramatic Farce’ – is interesting for its close family resemblance to all Stevenson’s other double-life narratives. The character of Macaire was not new to Stevenson; he had been one of the heroes of Skelt’s Juvenile Drama, mentioned by name in Stevenson’s homage to Skelt, ‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’, but in his and Henley’s adult play Macaire’s speeches about his delight in deception could come straight from the mouth of Edward Hyde, or Long John Silver, or Deacon Brodie, or – with a more ironic inflection – that of Markheim, the conscience-stricken murderer in a story Stevenson wrote during that first Bournemouth winter: ‘Blessings on that frontier line! The criminal hops across, and lo! The reputable man. [ … ] What is crime? discovery. Virtue? opportunity.’8 It’s a vivid illustration of the way things came round again and again in Stevenson’s imagination, and almost got trapped there: Macaire adapted Dumont, repeated Skelt, but also anticipated Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, reprised Deacon Brodie and Treasure Island, ventriloquised ‘Markheim’.

  Skelt was the least useful of all Stevenson’s returning obsessions. The antique ghost flapped fatuously round the new plays that Stevenson and Henley were rattling off that autumn, which read now more like sickroom pastimes than works of art, full of stock characters and low-grade melodrama. Henley thought they signified ‘hope for the British Drama yet’,9 but when Beerbohm Tree came down to Bournemouth to hear parts of Macaire read aloud, he found it so hard to keep awake that he had to keep prodding his leg with a hatpin he had taken from Fanny’s dressing room.10 Beau Austin, a short piece set in the Regency period on the theme of husband-making, was no better. A noble-hearted heiress called Dorothy is forced into company again with her seducer, the worldly and callous Beau Austin, when she visits Tunbridge Wells. Through the protests of her admirer Fenwick and her brother Anthony, Austin is made to see the error of his ways (this happens instantly) and proposes to his spurned mistress. But though she is ‘ruined’ (and secretly still loves Austin) Dorothy is a woman of principle, and refuses him. This cements Austin’s admiration (‘she is fit to be a queen!’11) and after a skirmish with Anthony, he makes a public declaration of his guilt and his love for Dorothy in front of the Duke of York and other representatives of high society (all of whom remain speechless, as well they might). For some reason, Dorothy now finds him acceptable, and the play ends quickly with her saying, ‘My hero! Take me!’

  Admiral Guinea is almost as bad a play, but more interesting in terms of what was going on – or not – in Stevenson’s mind. Its reusing of several elements from Treasure Island shows not just a paucity of invention but a strange despoiling or defacing of what Stevenson had already achieved in that book. Captain John Gaunt, a reformed slaver (formerly known as ‘Admiral Guinea’), is faced with the prospect of his only daughter wanting to marry a man who is very like himself when young, a privateer. He withholds permission to the match, sending the youth (Kit) off on a drinking binge during which he is persuaded by a disaffected old comrade of Gaunt, David Pew, to rob the captain’s sea-chest, which they suppose full of treasure. The attempted burglary is interrupted and Kit is set up by Pew to take the blame, a hanging matter. The captain’s treasure turns out to be mementoes of his dead wife, a pious woman who wasted away in spiritual distress following an incident at sea when Gaunt caused the deaths of over two hundred slaves. Her example led to Gaunt’s reform, and her daughter’s pleadings similarly move him to release Kit and agree to the marriage.

  The references to Treasure Island are clumsily insistent: the play is set in Barnstaple, partly at the Admiral Benbow inn; Pew is the same blind blackguard as in the novel, though much more coarsely characterised; Pew’s tap-tapping with his stick announces his approach; a sea-chest is raided, a shanty sung, Flint the pirate and the Walrus are invoked. The indulgence of reprising such details indicates that Henley and Stevenson thought this little playlet could really be put on a level with the increasingly famous novel; indeed, Treasure Island being ‘a story for boys’ and Admiral Guinea ‘hope for the British Drama’, they possibly considered it superior. Or at least, perhaps Henley did. The following year, looking back through Admiral Guinea, Stevenson had nothing but harsh words to say of it:

  God man, it is a low, black dirty, blackguard, ragged piece: vomitable in many parts – simply vomitable. Pew is in places, a reproach to both art and man. [ … ] I believe in playing dark with second and third-rate work. Do not let us gober [overvalue] ourselves – and above all, not gober dam potboilers.12

  Stevenson’s growing displeasure with Admiral Guinea was partly due to his father’s strong criticism of the play. When he read it in the autumn of 1884, Thomas
Stevenson, depressed and ill, wrote back to his son that it was ‘far too much for me. The combination or at least proximity of Nonconformist pious slang with the crawling obscenity of Pew is to me past all endurance and I must say that I cannot agree to pay for propagating such a production unless it can be altered [ … ] my intense solicitude for your fame compels me thus to write.’13 Clearly, Thomas had been called upon to foot the printer’s bill again (Admiral Guinea, like Beau Austin, was privately produced), and felt he had a right as well as a responsibility to voice his objections, as he had done so often before. A modern reader might puzzle over his cavilling, for the play is very moralistic and the anxious, God-fearing, guilt-ridden, Biblereading main character is very like Thomas Stevenson himself. Perhaps it was that resemblance more than the nonconformist slang that stuck in the old man’s craw.

  The persistence of Stevenson and Henley in writing plays is more remarkable than their persistent failure. They could hardly have done other than fail, with so little knowledge of, interest in or sympathy with what was going on in contemporary British theatre. Stevenson never witnessed a performance of one of his own plays – not a rehearsal even – and seemed queerly unconcerned about the fact. Indeed there is a sense in which he seems to have been deliberately avoiding his own plays, as if seeing them would spoil the entertainment he derived from them in his head. Lecturing on ‘Stevenson as a Dramatist’ in 1903, the playwright Arthur Wing Pinero could hardly restrain his scorn of Stevenson’s presumption: ‘he was deliberately using outworn models, and doing it, too, in a sportive, half-disdainful spirit’.14 Stevenson had dramatic but no theatrical talent, Pinero concluded, and lacked the application to acquire it. So the plays drowned in fine writing, the authors aiming at ‘absolute beauty of words, such beauty as Ruskin or Pater or Newman might achieve in an eloquent passage, not the beauty of dramatic fitness to the character and the situation’.15