The winter set in early and was a severe one, much harder to cope with in the exposed, flimsy Adirondack cottage than at Davos. Fanny had come back from a long trip to see her family in Indiana via Montreal, bringing full-length buffalo-skin coats, hats and boots for everyone, but there was little or no insulation in the house, and heating only in the sitting room (the open fire), one bedroom (a stove) and the kitchen (the cooker). The snow began to fall in November, cutting off Stevenson’s walks, and by December the temperature had dropped so low that the ink froze in its pot overnight. This was even more of a disaster than is to be expected, as Stevenson was no longer the only author in the household. Lloyd was busy on a comic detective novel called ‘The Finsbury Tontine’, and Fanny had just finished a short story, ‘The Nixie’, which she was able to sell to Scribner’s Magazine.
Among the visitors to Saranac before the weather got really bad were Sam McClure, armed with more publishing schemes and contracts, and the persevering Fairchilds. The millionaires had to slum it in Plattsburg and struggle up the track in a buggy only to have Mrs Fairchild refused entry to the cottage on account of having a slight head cold. This was at Fanny’s insistence, of course, and the visitors had to be satisfied with an interview conducted farcically by sign language through a closed window. They were only allowed indoors the next day when both could show clean handkerchiefs, so no wonder they cut their trip short and went home. Fanny apologised after the event for seeming severe, but probably relished this exercise of power, seeing their patrons reduced to grimacing and gesticulating out in the cold.
The winter in Saranac was picturesque and uncomfortable, as Lloyd recalled: ‘sleighs, snow-shoes and frozen lakes; voyageurs in quaint costumes and with French to match; red-hot stoves and steaming windows [ … ] consumptives in bright caps and manyhued woollens gaily tobogganing at forty below zero; buffalo coats an inch thick; snow-storms, snow-drifts, Arctic cold’.21 As the temperature dropped to below 25 degrees at night, life in Baker’s Cottage contracted. The front porch was closed up, leaving the only entrance through the kitchen. Poor Valentine in her unheated cupboard woke to find the handkerchief under her pillow frozen and Stevenson got frostbite in bed, mistaking the sensation in his ear for a rat nibbling him. ‘At times it was unbelievably cold,’ Lloyd wrote later, ‘one was really comfortable only in bed, with a hot soapstone at one’s feet.’22 The stoves warmed up quickly, but hardly radiated at all, draughts were plentiful and piercing and, huddled round the fireplace, the family must have wondered what else they would have to endure to win Louis continuing respite from ‘Bloody Jack’. Fanny had her usual bad reaction to cold high places and made as many journeys away from Saranac as she could manage; Margaret Stevenson and Lloyd also took breaks in New York and Boston. In fact, everyone but Louis found the conditions intolerable, but he was braced by them: his brain, he reckoned, was working ‘with much vivacity’.
The novelty of feeling well brought a surge of creative energy, as his account of ‘The Genesis of The Master of Ballantrae’ records. What he describes is not so much a moment of inspiration, as a decision to be inspired:
I was walking one night in the verandah of a small house in which I lived, outside the hamlet of Saranac. It was winter; the night was very dark; the air extraordinarily clear and cold, and sweet with the purity of forests. From a good way below, the river was to be heard contending with ice and boulders: a few lights appeared, scattered unevenly among the darkness, but so far away as not to lessen the sense of isolation. For the making of a story here were fine conditions. I was besides moved with the spirit of emulation, having just finished my third or fourth perusal of [Marryat’s] The Phantom Ship. ‘Come’, said I to my engine, ‘let us make a tale, a story of many years and countries, of the sea and the land, savagery and civilisation; a story that shall have the same large features, and may be treated in the same summary elliptic method as the book you have been reading and admiring.’ I was here brought up with a reflection exceedingly just in itself, but which as the sequel shows, I failed to profit by. I saw that Marryat, not less than Homer, Milton and Virgil, profited by the choice of a familiar and legendary subject; so that he prepared his readers on the very title-page; and this set me cudgelling my brains, if by any chance I could hit upon some similar belief to be the centre-piece of my own meditated fiction. In the course of this vain search there cropped up in my memory a singular case of a buried and resuscitated fakir, which I had been often told by an uncle of mine, then lately dead, Inspector-General John Balfour.23
This idea that a writer can ‘meditate a fiction’ in the abstract and worry about the focal point later is exactly the opposite of what ‘inspiration’ usually signifies, and Stevenson’s admission that the process involved ‘cudgelling’ and striving is refreshingly frank. Yet the net result of ‘how-I did-it’ pieces like this – and he was keen to write them – is to evoke just that romanticised view of composition he is gainsaying: the beauties of nature, remoteness from mankind and a mystical silence engender the ‘right’ creative atmosphere and, though the author then says ‘Come’ only to his ‘engine’, the image is strongly evocative of a magician summoning up meinies, or Brownies.
The novel that emerged from this exercise, The Master of Ballantrae, was hindered rather than helped by the author’s insistence on sticking with his uncle’s story of the fakir, for the part of the book that has always attracted criticism is the ending, where the body of the wicked ‘Master’, James Durie, is exhumed and resuscitated by his Indian servant, Secundra Dass, causing the instant death from shock of the Master’s tormented brother, Henry. The scene – which takes place in the Adirondacks on a moonlit winter night – is extremely picturesque, with a tableau of Secundra toiling to dig up the frozen grave: ‘his blows resounded [ … ] as thick as sobs; and behind him, strangely deformed and ink-black upon the frosty ground, the creature’s shadow repeated and parodied his swift gesticulations’.24 But it is odd that this, the ‘centre-piece’ of Stevenson’s plan, should seem in execution like an expedient, and Stevenson himself came to write of it as though it had been an imposition rather than his own doggedly maintained choice. In letters, he contrived to blame Scribner’s and the demands of serial publication for rushing him on to a forced conclusion: ‘I hope I shall pull off that damned ending; but it still depresses me: this is your doing, Mr Burlingame: you would have it there and then, and I fear it – I fear that ending.’25
Marryat may have kick-started Stevenson’s engine on this occasion, but it ran on a mixture of Scott and James Hogg. Hogg provides the groundbass of demonism and murderous sibling rivalry, while Scott strongly influences the domestic scenes. The structure is particularly Scott-ish: the novel ostensibly being the land-agent Ephraim Mackellar’s account of the fall of the house of Durisdeer after the Jacobite Rebellion. It is essentially (like Jekyll and Hyde) a dossier of evidence: letters, eye-witness accounts and extracts from other people’s memoirs assembled and drawn together by Mackellar to augment his own story. In a preface set slightly in the future (1889), the papers have fallen into the hands of Mr Johnstone Thomson, an Edinburgh lawyer (an affectionate portrait of Charles Baxter), whose writer friend (Stevenson) agrees to edit them for publication. But the playful preface was dropped from the first edition, on the grounds that it was ‘a little too like Scott’, nor did Stevenson use the eighteenth-century legal endorsement he solicited from Baxter, though Baxter, with his usual readiness and ingenuity, had composed a perfect example by return of post.26
The story of the ‘fraternal enemies’, James Durie, the Master of Ballantrae, and his younger brother Henry (were these Christian names coincidental, or another private joke?), made yet another return to the theme of the double. Stevenson described the Master as being ‘all I know of the devil’; like Edward Hyde he is completely wicked, while his brother, like Jekyll, is a mixture of virtues and vices, ‘neither very bad nor very able’. The Master is notably clever, resourceful and brave, the only character, apart from Al
ison Graeme, who shows spirit. The book is deliberately confusing in this way, for the amoral Master should not be the hero of the story, nor his ineffectual brother Henry. Henry’s patience passes for virtue, but once that has worn out he becomes as bad as his devilish brother, crazed for revenge and transformed as dramatically as Jekyll:
There was something very daunting in his look; something to my eyes not rightly human; the face, lean, dark and aged, the mouth painful, the teeth disclosed in a perpetual rictus; the eyeball swimming clear of the lids upon a field of blood-shot white.
The tragedy is set in motion when the etiolated Durie family decides that its only hope of survival is to divide loyalties politically during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. At the toss of a coin, one brother rides off to join Prince Charlie while the younger stays at home, allied to the English King’s party (like a dark version of Kidnapped, to which the book has many links). When news reaches them that James has died at Culloden, Henry inherits the title of Master and eventually marries his brother’s former fiancée, Alison Graeme. But years later, James returns to Durisdeer, demanding money and his old place, and a bitter struggle breaks out between the brothers. Henry seems to have killed James in a duel and is branded as a fratricide, but in another ghastly twist of the plot it transpires that his brother escaped wounded and resumes his persecution with new energy. It is a mark of Stevenson’s skill as a romancer that the plot remains gripping at this point, if not exactly credible. The movement of the conflict to and fro has the familiar structure of a ballad or a folk-tale, and the third appearance of the Master, his third ‘death’ (burial alive) and subsequent resuscitation by the fakir move along like verse and antiphon.
Cashing in on the success of Jekyll – and clearly also a sort of rival to it – Deacon Brodie was on tour in the States, with Henley’s rambunctious younger brother in the lead. Henley still valued the play highly and hoped to make serious money from it, but Stevenson was getting weary not just of the material – ‘my poor old Deacon’ – but with his own weak-mindedness in letting Henley do what he liked with the play. When Teddy and two other actors on the tour got drunk and started a fight in Philadelphia, Stevenson began to sicken of the whole thing and was rather glad than crestfallen when a theatre in New York reneged on its booking. Fanny sent pointedly critical letters from New York telling of Teddy’s shameless (and, needless to say, unsuccessful) attempts to sponge off her, which in turn made Stevenson rage against him in letters to Baxter. But though the focus of his anger seemed to be the shiftless Teddy, he was clearly also impatient with his stubborn, demanding collaborator, and with himself for having tiptoed round Henley’s pride and Henley’s ego for so long.
The trouble over the play was a sort of warm-up for the bout to come. The row that brewed up between Stevenson and Henley in the spring of 1888 and which led to their acrimonious, permanent separation has been described as one of the most famous literary quarrels of the age, but it was hardly ‘literary’ at all. The trigger for it now seems extremely trivial, and must always have done, for details of the proceedings were carefully suppressed for years by all parties concerned, particularly Charles Baxter, who deposited his bundle of ‘Quarrel Letters’ at the National Library of Scotland under a thirty-year embargo. They chart the composition of what could be thought of as Henley and Stevenson’s final collaboration: ‘The Nixie: A Melodramatic Farce’.
The prologue was spoken by Samuel McClure, who travelled to London that spring, armed with letters of introduction from Stevenson. His intention was to set up a publishing link with the London literary scene, using Henley as a sort of agent (this was at Stevenson’s suggestion), but when he met with Henley and his set, he was struck by the extent of their disaffection with Louis. His account, in his Autobiography, emphasises their peevishness; most of Stevenson’s friends seemed ‘very annoyed by the attention [Stevenson] had received in America. There was a note of detraction in their talk which surprised and, at first, puzzled me.’ Henley was ‘particularly emphatic’, and complained that ‘his own influence upon Stevenson’s work was not sufficiently recognised’. No doubt it was especially bitter for the man who had slogged for almost a decade over Deacon Brodie to see the derivative Jekyll and Hyde – the work of a mere few days, according to the papers – shoot its author to fame and wealth. None of the ‘friends’ seemed pleased at Stevenson’s success, and they told McClure that Louis ‘was a much overrated man, and that his cousin, R.A.M. Stevenson, was the real genius of the family’.27
McClure’s ‘agency’ plan came to nothing, either because he found Henley uncongenial or because he wanted to stay loyal to his new star author once the quarrel broke. If, as I think, McClure’s trip to London took place some time in February, he would have been carrying back news of his business meetings when he visited Saranac Lake again on 19 March. The reservations about Henley which McClure expresses in his Autobiography may have been perceptible then by Stevenson; indeed it is hard to see how McClure could have completely suppressed his bemusement.*
Act One began when Henley saw the March 1888 issue of Scribner’s Magazine, containing Fanny’s short story, ‘The Nixie’, and immediately recognised an idea of Katharine de Mattos’s which had been discussed one evening the previous year at his house with Louis and Fanny present. Katharine’s story (which may or may not have been written already when she told the Stevensons about it – accounts differed later) was about the meeting on board a train of a young man and a girl whose feyness conceals the fact that she is an escaped lunatic. Fanny had jumped in immediately with some enthusiastic suggestions for improvements – why not make the girl turn out to be a water sprite rather than a lunatic? Katharine must have winced at this, for she withdrew into polite refusal of both the possible changes to her plot and Fanny’s insistent offers of help – collaboration, even. Fanny was either genuinely unable to understand that her interference was unwelcome, or wilfully determined to press for her own version of the story (she was, after all, the great improver of Jekyll and Hyde), but from any point of view her behaviour was neither subtle nor sensitive. Despite some attempts by Henley to place Katharine’s story over the next few months, it failed to get published, and Fanny kept on nagging to be allowed to have a go herself. Katharine’s eventual concession (when she was visiting the Stevensons in Bournemouth) cannot be viewed as anything other than a collapse under pressure; Louis knew this, as he admitted to Baxter later:
Katharine even while she consented – as she did to me with her own lips – expressed unwillingness; I told my wife so; and I asked her to go no farther. But she had taken a fancy to the idea, and when Katharine had tried her version and failed and wrote to tell us so, nothing would serve her but to act on this unwilling consent, and try hers.29
This astonishing admission that Fanny wrote ‘The Nixie’ against her husband’s advice, standing, meanly, on the letter not the spirit of Katharine’s caving-in, comes in the midst of so many hysterical letters by Stevenson protesting his wife’s innocence that it could pass unnoticed. But there it is, in a letter to Baxter of 20 April 1888, in which he also implies that the whole ghastly quarrel with Henley that brewed up out of this small incident was actually a proxy match on behalf of the two women. He hints that Katherine habitually played on Henley’s admiration in an inappropriate way; ‘frankly she can do what she will with Henley’. But everything Stevenson says about the influence of Katherine on Henley is truer ten times of Fanny’s influence on himself: ‘remember that [his conduct] was all packed into him by an angry woman whom he admires. And what an angry woman is, we all know; and what a man is when he admires.’30
The publication of Fanny’s story was enough to rouse the jealousy of Henley’s circle, even had it been a completely original work. The fact that Scribner’s accepted it so quickly looked like nepotism, since the magazine had invested so heavily in Fanny’s husband’s essays (‘Beggars’ appeared in the same issue). It must have rankled that Louis and Fanny seemed to be covetously with-holding credit (
i.e. funds) from Katherine for work that was hers, while acting like Lord and Lady Bountiful with their regular contingency payments to Bob, Katherine and Henley himself. Possibly the cousins misunderstood how tied up their uncle Thomas’s estate had really been (certainly the newspapers had jumped to the conclusion that Louis inherited a fortune); Louis’s pensions to them, carefully calculated to be neither too little nor too much, can only have caused embarrassment and possibly resentment. Baxter, who as agent knew exactly what Louis’s financial situation was, commented wisely: ‘It is a dangerous thing for a rich man as you now are, or seem to him [Henley], to give money; and I’m afraid that the recent gifts which it gave you so much pleasure to suggest, and me to carry out, may have carried a certain gall with them’.31
In this atmosphere of grudge and sour grapes, Fanny’s treatment of Katherine seemed the final, clinching condemnation of her character. Henley’s unforgivable mistake (unless he was trying to break with Louis, which is quite likely) was to try – again – to open Louis’s eyes on the subject. This is what the quarrel was about: not plagiarism, but Henley’s persistent attention to Fanny’s faults. In his letter, written on 9 March, among a great deal which is melancholic and almost despairing about himself and his prospects, Henley inserted a short paragraph about ‘The Nixie’, expressing ‘considerable amazement’ that the by-line did not acknowledge Katharine at all. ‘It’s Katharine’s, surely it’s Katharine’s?’ he wrote.32 The style was typical, a little blustering, a little posturing, but the note of sly complicity was guaranteed to inflame his correspondent and, married with the content, seemed explosively insulting to Uxorious Billy.
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