Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  I am from the Lothians myself; it is there I heard the language spoken about my childhood; and it is in the drawling Lothian voice that I repeat it to myself. Let the precisians call my speech that of the Lothians. And if it be not pure, alas! what matters it? The day draws near when this illustrious and malleable tongue shall be quite forgotten; and Burns’s Ayrshire, and Dr MacDonald’s Aberdeen awa’, and Scott’s brave, metropolitan utterance will be all equally the ghosts of speech. Till then I would love to have my hour as a native Maker, and be read by my own countryfolk in our own dying language: an ambition surely of the heart rather than of the head, so restricted as it is in prospect of endurance, so parochial in bounds of space.43

  It is a melancholy reflection, with an inbuilt irony: the writer admits the tragic fact that his native tongue is dying, and does so in the foreign tongue which is his first language, and of which he is a world-acknowledged master. What Underwoods illustrates very clearly is that Stevenson’s pre-eminence as an English stylist relied on his access to Scots. There were things he could only express in Scots – books, stories, poems, letters he felt compelled to write in it – and he revelled in the language like a holiday, for that is what it was.

  The last chapters of Kidnapped were churned out by Stevenson ‘without interest or inspiration, almost word by word’, as he wrote to George Iles in 1887.44 It shows: the novel stops rather than ends, with a sentence that is the beginning of a new paragraph: ‘The hand of Providence brought me in my drifting to the very doors of the British Linen Company’s bank.’ This is almost shockingly unsatisfactory. Stevenson had intended to write more, but simply ran out of energy, and on Colvin’s advice wrote a postscript explaining that the projected later episodes would appear in a sequel. It is remarkable that Young Folks did not revolt at this; all the reviewers complained about it.

  Baling out of Kidnapped was a symptom of a general malaise which affected Stevenson in Bournemouth in the year following the publication of Jekyll and Hyde, despite the increase in renown and income he was enjoying. He was skittish and highly strung, had short, troubling rifts with three close friends (Henley, Bob and – astonishingly – Colvin), and got neurotically overheated about matters of public morals, in particular the notorious Crawford divorce case, about which he wrote an impassioned letter to the Court and Society Review. His pleasures were those of a bored adolescent; he spent whole days preparing and conducting war games, mostly with Bob, and tested Charles Baxter’s love of pranks to the limit by sending him a series of elaborate postal hoaxes. Even his ‘piano-pickling’ took on a neurotic intensity, to the extent that he was sometimes spending five hours a day at it straight, getting too exhausted to do anything else.

  Thomas Stevenson’s steady decline and changed personality may have been more profoundly disturbing to his son than Louis ever expressed outright. Meeting his parents in London in March 1886, Stevenson was shocked to recognise that his father’s death was ‘thoroughly begun’,45 and foolishly but filially insisted on taking care of the old man for a while. So the two invalids went together to Smedley’s Hydropathic in Matlock, a state-of-the-art spa in the middle of the Derbyshire Dales, and spent just over a week being wrapped in wet flannel, having their feet soaked in mustard, their chests rubbed with chilli paste and limbs dabbed with vinegar. No wonder with this larder full of astringents on him, Stevenson quickly developed the itch. Thomas Stevenson was more agitated by the ‘nonconforming atmosphere’, and proved pettish and irritable. He didn’t seem to enjoy his son’s company much and both men missed their wives. When Louis mentioned that his mother might be able to visit, Thomas ‘laughed aloud like a little child for joy’.46 Louis tried to counter his own homesickness by studying the times of trains back to Bournemouth.

  There are signs, though, that Thomas was trying to resolve his long-simmering grievances against his son. A few months after this, on another trip to London to see a specialist, he called at the Royal Institution to visit his old friend Sir James Dewar, to whom he had once complained vehemently about Louis’s desertion of the family firm. Dewar had defended the youth at the time and made a good-humoured bet that in ten years Louis would earn from writing ‘a bigger income than the old firm had ever commanded’, at which, to Dewar’s surprise, Thomas Stevenson became furious and ‘repulsed all attempts at reconciliation’. His visit to Dewar in London in 1887 was to make amends for this. The old man was so feeble that he had to be lifted in and out of the cab. ‘“I cudna be in London without coming to shake your hand and confess that you were richt after a’ about Louis, and I was wrong,”’ Dewar recalls him saying. ‘The frail old frame shook with emotion, and he muttered, “I ken this is my last visit to the South.”’47

  Possibly because of his debility, Thomas Stevenson had got into an acrimonious dispute with his nephews David and Charles, who currently ran the family firm, over the distribution of the business profits. The matter turned on the fact that Thomas still received the greater part of the annual profits even though he was no longer working, which naturally had begun to agitate the nephews. The arrangement had been made when the elder David Stevenson had retired in 1883, and presupposed the whole business passing to his side of the family at Thomas’s death. So the temporary, unfair overpayment of Thomas was to compensate him and his heirs for soon being cut off from any income whatever.

  In the middle of this bitter and distasteful family dispute, which threatened to go to law, Stevenson found a distraction in the most impetuous plan of gallantry of his whole career. His limited ability to act out his political principles in life had always been a source of profound frustration and shame to him. He tried, sporadically and unsuccessfully, to give up worrying about it for the sake of his health, saying he had ‘died to politics’ over the prosecution of the Sudan campaign of 1883–84: ‘If ever I could do anything,’ he declared then to his father, ‘I suppose I ought to do it; but till that hour comes I will not vex my soul.’48 Well, the hour did seem to have come in the spring of 1887, when the newspapers were full of the plight of a family called Curtin in County Kerry, boycotted and persecuted by Irish nationalists ever since a raid on their farm in November 1885 during which John Curtin and one of the marauders died. The issue was a straightforward one for the Unionist author: the tenants who had been evicted by the British government deserved their fate, the pro-British settlers didn’t. The parallels with the Highland clearances, over which his partisanship swung entirely the other way, did not seem to strike him.

  It was the fact that the besieged family were mostly women that really agitated Stevenson, and that in all the months of the boycott no one had stepped in to protect them; ‘all the manhood of England and the world stands aghast before a threat of murder’, he wrote in disgust. His wild scheme, outlined in a letter to Anne Jenkin written one sleepless night, was to remove himself and his household to Ireland and either join the Curtins themselves, or rent another of the targeted farms. The likelihood of getting killed doing this seems to have been the main draw of the plan; ‘a writer being murdered would attract attention’, he wrote, adding that his health made him particularly expendable. His letter sets out the pros and cons in a compellingly immediate style, like thinking aloud. Did he talk like this, like a hyperactive barrister who can’t decide which brief to defend?

  The Curtin women are probably highly uninteresting females. I haven’t a doubt of it. But the Government cannot, men will not, protect them. If I am the only one to see this public duty, it is to the public and the Right I should perform it – not to Mesdames Curtin. Fourth Objection: I am married. ‘I have married a wife!’ I seem to have heard it before. It smells ancient; what was the context? [It was what the publican said as excuse in Luke 14:20] Fifth Objection: My wife has had a mean life (1), loves me (2), could not bear to lose me (3). (1) I admit: I am sorry. (2) But what does she love me for? and (3) she must lose me soon or late. And after all, because we run this risk, it does not follow that we should fail. Sixth Objection: My wife wouldn’t like it.
No, she wouldn’t. Who would? But the Curtins don’t like it. And all who are to suffer if this goes on, won’t like it. And if there is a great wrong, somebody must suffer. Seventh Objection: I won’t like it. No, I will not; I have thought it through, and I will not. But what of that? And both she and I may like it more than we suppose. We shall lose friends, all comforts, all society: so has everybody who has ever done anything; but we shall have some excitement, and that’s a fine thing, and we shall be trying to do the right, and that’s not to be despised.49

  Fanny expressed her opinion of the scheme forthrightly: it was madness from every point of view, she didn’t want any part of it, yet would of course go along if Louis really felt there was no alternative. This was astute, as well as heartfelt, for she must have guessed that he would not be able to follow through. Lloyd remembered his mother being ‘much more calm than the circumstances warranted’ at the time, though he himself felt far from calm, being the only able-bodied male of the proposed party, and designated ‘chief martyr in this Irish fantasy’.50 He later thought that Stevenson’s plan to help the Curtins was an obvious example of ‘practical Tolstoyism’. His stepfather, he said, was at the time ‘steeped, not only in Tolstoy, but in all Russian literature’.51*

  Stevenson was more likely to have been thinking of the Curtin boycott as a chance to be like General Gordon, besieged, holding the fort, dying in action rather than facing ‘inglorious death by disease’. He had somehow acquired a relic of the hero, a cigarette paper on which Gordon had written in Arabic his ‘last message’ from Khartoum. It is a request for information about troop locations, and still exists in the Yale archive. Stevenson treasured the tiny scrap of paper and, according to his mother, ‘took it with him wherever he lived’.52

  Events overtook Stevenson, but not before he had tried to arrange a meeting with the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Arthur Balfour (with whom he could claim a distant blood tie, and whose brother, Eustace, was a fellow member of the Savile Club). He hoped to see the minister on his way through London to France, where he and Fanny were going for a holiday. But on 4 May news came that Thomas Stevenson was critically ill, so the couple set off at once for Edinburgh, arriving two days before the old man died. He didn’t recognise his son during that time, as Louis recalled in his bleak poem ‘The Last Sight’:

  Once more I saw him. In the lofty room,

  Where oft with lights and company his tongue

  Was trump to honest laughter, sate attired

  A something in his likeness. ‘Look!’ said one,

  Unkindly kind, ‘look up, it is your boy!’

  And the dread changeling gazed on me in vain.53

  Louis arranged the funeral, which was a remarkably elaborate affair involving over a hundred invited guests and a procession of forty or fifty carriages, the largest private funeral anyone could remember in Edinburgh. It started from Heriot Row, where Louis, Bob and Lloyd received the guests, and went on to the New Calton Burying Ground on the other side of the town. The weather was bad, even though it was May, and Louis, who had been struggling with a cold all week, ran out of energy halfway through the proceedings and was unable to attend the interment, leaving Bob to act as chief mourner in his place. Poor Margaret Stevenson must have been wondering how long it would be till the next funeral.

  Thomas Stevenson left his estate tied up in such a way that his wife had a life rent on the residue, to be passed on to Louis at her death. This was not a very helpful arrangement, given Louis’s uncertain hold on life, and though he was entitled to £3000 from the estate’s capital, his father’s death did not leave him as well off as many of his friends and family imagined. The people who benefited significantly from Thomas Stevenson’s careful custodianship of money from his share of the business, from his own father and from his uncle Robert – who had made him sole heir in 1851 to £4500 – were Fanny Stevenson and her children, but they had to wait another ten years.

  Margaret Stevenson had every intention of sharing her resources with her son, and sharing her widowhood with him, too. Her brother George had examined Louis while he was in Edinburgh and recommended Colorado as a good place for him to winter, so Margaret generously offered to pay for the whole family’s removal there that August, including herself, Lloyd and Valentine. She was already thinking of selling up Heriot Row and going to live with Louis and Fanny permanently, a prospect which Fanny did not blench at, though it can’t have struck her as ideal.

  It was clear that Scotland was out of the question as a home for Louis; just a few weeks in windswept Edinburgh had almost finished him off. He left the city on the last day of May 1887 and headed back to Bournemouth, mercifully unaware that he was taking his leave of his native country for good. Flora Masson saw the open cab pass on its way along Princes Street to the station, piled with untidily-packed luggage. A man stood up and waved his hat to get her attention, and she recognised Stevenson, calling, ‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’54

  Thomas Stevenson’s valet, a man called John Cruikshank, came with them from Edinburgh, an unlooked-for kind of inheritance. He spent a few weeks opening the door at Skerryvore, but the arrangement was doomed not to last long. ‘We have a butler: by God! He doesn’t buttle, but the point of the thing is the style. When Fanny gardens, he stands over her and looks genteel,’ Stevenson wrote comically to Colvin.55 But Cruikshank fell in with ‘bad companions’ in Bournemouth and by July had been asked to leave, no doubt to mutual relief. The Stevensons must have been puzzling employers for a gentleman’s gentleman; their scruffy clothes, disarming manners and unconcern for the proprieties probably struck Cruikshank as insulting. His brief sojourn in their household marks the high-water mark of Stevenson’s ‘revolt into respectability’, a process inherently farcical, as evident the evening in June 1887 when the Stevensons attempted to impress an American millionaire by inviting him down to Bournemouth for dinner. Charles Fairchild was John Singer Sargent’s friend and patron, and had commissioned another portrait of Stevenson as a present for his wife, who, like Fairchild, was an ardent fan of the writer. When Sargent said that Fairchild wanted to meet them, the Stevensons could hardly refuse, especially as he seemed to want to bankroll their coming trip to the States. But on the afternoon of the dinner, the cat Ginger stole the fish from the cellar and Valentine forgot the cream for the white soup. Cruikshank had bungled the purchase of the wine, so they had only one bottle of indifferent hock to serve to the millionaire, and as the nation had ground to a halt that day for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, none of these deficiencies was remediable. Worst of all, on the same train as Fairchild from London was a surprise visitor, Teddy Henley, whom Fanny had to welcome in with a fixed smile. The soup was inedible, the leg of lamb Valentine had bought much too small, and all they could put together for dessert was ‘some hastily improvised custard in very small cups’, as Fanny recalled in an agonised, humorous letter to her mother-in-law: ‘Fortunately, your cheese was still to the fore, and it was pathetic to hear both Mr Fairchild and Teddy praise the cheese which they ate until for shame’s sake they had to leave off [ … ] I believe Valentine and John wept together in the pantry.’56

  Despite the dinner, Fairchild stuck to his purpose. He proposed to arrange (and, presumably, pay for) all their travel from New York westwards, as well as accommodation when they got to Colorado. In the east, they were to stay at the Fairchilds’ home in Newport, Rhode Island, where, he promised, they would be safe from society and newshounds alike, for, as Fairchild knew better than the Stevensons themselves at this date, Jekyll and Hyde had turned its author into very hot property in America. Anywhere other than under the protection of powerful friends such as himself, he told Fanny, ‘our lives will be hunted out of us, as the people were all Louis mad’.

  Right up to the last minute, Stevenson had wanted nothing but to get away, but taking his leave of the servants he was overcome by emotion and wept copiously. ‘It had suddenly come upon him that he loved Skerryvore, Westbourne, Bournemouth, even the Poole Road with an
almost morbid sentimentality,’ Fanny wrote to Adelaide Boodle.57 To Colvin, with whom he had had a misunderstanding, all the more disturbing because such things were rare between them, Louis wrote emotionally on the eve of departure:

  Here I am in this dismantled house hoping to leave tomorrow, yet still in doubt; this time of my life is at an end: if it leaves bitterness in your mind, what kind of a time has it been?

  The last day – the last evening – in the old house – with a sad, but God knows, nowise a bitter heart; I wish I could say with hope.58

  * * *

  *It is even possible that Fanny (or Louis) had some experience of being treated at the Salpêtrière, a hospital for hysterics, as Stevenson refers familiarly to the great doctor in two later letters, and seems to have recommended him to Colvin, whom Henry James reports returning from ‘a long regime of Charcot’ in April 1889.

  *This may well be true, though Tolstoy is not mentioned once in Stevenson’s letters.