Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  During the weeks Stevenson spent in Butaritari, he never saw the king in a good light, though Tebureimoa did at least manage to sober up enough to restore the taboo on the sale of alcohol before anarchy broke out completely. He also significantly helped the Stevensons by agreeing to taboo their dwelling (which was being invaded all the time by disorderly and ill-intentioned natives). Rick’s wife had effected this by telling the king that Stevenson was a friend of Queen Victoria, bidden to report on the islands. Stevenson was soon promoted in the public mind to Heir Apparent to the British throne; meanwhile, he really was ‘reporting to the authorities’ in the form of a letter, sent via Rick, the US commercial agent, to the Assistant Secretary of State in Washington, complaining of the lack of controls on alcohol sales. He was beginning to make a point of registering his opinions and advice on contentious matters in this part of the world so obviously ill-served by ‘the Powers’. He had already written a letter to The Times about German intervention in Samoan affairs (which he heard all about in Honolulu), and was bravely willing to carry on being a thorn in authority’s flesh all his time in the Pacific.

  The Gilberts provided Stevenson with few delights but many remarkable stories, which made grimly entertaining chapters in his book. The history of the four king-brothers, for example, had many fairy-tale elements, including its cruelty. Tebureimoa’s eldest brother, the first convert to Christianity in the area, had had seventeen wives, none of whom could be so much as looked at on pain of death. These queens acted as the king’s oarswomen and executioners: ‘they killed by the sight like basilisks; a chance view of one of those boatwomen was a crime to be wiped out with blood’.49 The taboo on seeing them had held up the construction of the pier being built by Wightman Brothers (owners of the Equator), for the queens, being the slaves of their husband, had been put to work on it, meaning no one else could go near. ‘Such was the ideal of wifely purity in an isle where nubile virgins went naked as in paradise.’50

  Stevenson would certainly never have guessed, when he was straining for a glimpse of ankle on Duddingston Loch, that he would one day be cast among so much naked female flesh. His remarks on it are more surprised than prurient; he recognised the allure of the traditional ridi, or grass skirt, the ‘enticing’ looks of the women from under the bush-style Gilbertan hairdo, the charm of seeing ‘silent damsels’ wading in the canal, ‘baring their brown thighs’. One missionary had described the region to Stevenson as ‘a Paradise of naked women’ for the resident whites,51 but if that was meant as a hint to the youthful-looking husband of the pistol-packing matron, Uxorious Billy was not the man to act on it. He observed how the native women’s virtue was closely guarded by themselves and their menfolk, and that the white beachcombers who tried to take advantage of an apparent erotic free-for-all often came to grief. But the traders weren’t always sexual exploiters: Stevenson met some who were ‘admirable to their native wives’. The women, he believed, were legitimately married to the white men, or as good as (there was a flattering and highly unlikely story that, in the absence of a Bible, one of his own works had been used for a nuptial pair to swear on). And he heard of (or met) one native bride whose certificate, ‘when she proudly showed it, proved to run thus, that she was “married for one night”, and her gracious partner was at liberty to “send her to hell” the next morning’.52 This was the story that became almost word for word the starting point of Stevenson’s novella ‘The Beach of Falesá’. But in real life, unlike in his fiction, he thought the girl was ‘none the wiser or the worse for the dastardly trick’.

  The camera that they took with them to the Gilbert Islands must have been a good one, for the pictures, though grainy, look quite unposed, as if the subjects did not have to stand still for long.* There are photos of hula dancers, of the girls in their ridi skirts, of the missionaries, of the Equator. But the best is of Stevenson himself, lounging on the ground in company with Fanny and a native couple called Nan Tok’ and Nei Takauti. Nan Tok’ was a handsome, young, subservient husband; Nei Takauti a woman ‘getting old’, previously married, mysteriously powerful and dominant. They were Louis and Fanny’s Butaritaran counterparts, as the grouping of the photo suggests, for the wives are sitting together in the middle, holding hands (Fanny is carefully studying and copying what Nei Takauti is doing), and the two younger husbands are semi-recumbent at their sides. Stevenson looks incredibly well and handsome; laid back is the phrase that comes irrepressibly to mind, for, barefoot and wearing flowers in their hair, he and Fanny look more like a couple from the 1960s than the 1880s.

  Had the photographs from the various Pacific voyages been used, as originally intended, as illustrations for In the South Seas, they would have helped readers get some foothold in the enormous variety of material Stevenson wanted to present.† His book was getting out of hand already, and he hadn’t even started writing it. Two volumes minimum, he now thought. Fanny confided in Colvin her fear that Louis was going to spoil ‘the most enchanting material that any one ever had in the whole world’ by writing ‘a sort of scientific and historical impersonal thing’.53 This was certainly a danger for Stevenson, whose record of ‘serious’ non-fiction projects had been so unsuccessful, but whether Fanny was right to think that the material was such a gift that anyone – even she – ‘could write a book that the whole world would jump at’54 is another matter. ‘Please keep any letters of mine that contain any incidents of our wanderings,’ she wrote to Colvin. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, Louis can go back to my letters to refresh his memory.’ And of course, not quite anyone could write the world-shaking book she could knock off so easily; Margaret Stevenson’s letters from the voyage of the Casco ‘are of no use’, Fanny wrote categorically, ‘interesting as they are’.

  Late in August, the Equator took the Stevensons on to Apemama, one of the island capitals of the Gilberts, and left them there while the ship went off trading. The party settled down for what they expected would be a week or two, in a specially constructed enclave of charming thatched huts like birdcages on stilts. This had been provided for them (and tabooed) by the king, Tembinok, ‘the last tyrant, the last erect vestige of a dead society’.55 There was only one white resident on Apemama, and none of the ‘development’ (trade, drink and opium) that had wreaked such ruin already in Butaritari. Tembinok was sole ruler and sole merchant, sole husband in his ‘palace of many women’. Hugely stout and shrill-voiced (‘with a note like a sea-bird’s’), the king made an alarming spectacle in a variety of garish costumes, including a green velvet jacket and a woman’s frock, in which he looked ‘ominous and weird beyond belief’, as Stevenson described it.56 But Stevenson was most impressed by the king’s accomplishments, not least of which was his command of English: ‘a poet, a musician, a historian or perhaps rather more a genealogist – it is strange to see him lying in his house among a lot of wives (nominal wives) writing the History of Apemema in an account book –; his description of one of his own songs, which he sang to me himself, as “about sweethearts, and trees and the sea – and no true, all-the-same lie”, seems about as compendious a definition of lyric poetry as a man could ask’.57

  By the end of October, it seemed they might be doomed to stay with Tembinok forever, for there was no sign of the Equator. The vegetable seeds that Fanny had planted were sprouting, but that was small comfort compared to the thought of being stranded in the Gilberts. When the schooner J.L. Tiernan came by, they almost took passage on it, but sent letters instead, Stevenson writing to Colvin for the first time like one who was really cut off from his former life, and intuited that he might never return:

  God knows how you are: I begin to weary dreadfully to see you. [ … ] I wonder what has befallen me too, that flimsy part of me that lives (or dwindles) in the public mind; and what has befallen of The Master, and what kind of a Box The Wrong Box has been found? It is odd to know nothing of all this.58

  In fact, The Master of Ballantrae, published that September, had been received very well, with one or two
exceptions: Symonds thought the story ‘decrepit’,59 and George Moore, writing in Hawk, said it was ‘a story of adventure with the story left out’, though he knew that ‘the Spectator, the Saturday Review, the whole of Bedford Park, and all the aesthetics of Clapham and Peckham Rye’ would disagree with him.60 Andrew Lang had used his review of The Master of Ballantrae as an opportunity to review Stevenson’s whole career to date, with flattering comparisons to Addison, Scott and Zola. William Archer called it ‘something very like a classic’, and Margaret Oliphant saw ‘sheer genius and literary force such as we have never known the like of’.61 The book they all hated, however, was The Wrong Box, an ‘undignified and unworthy exhibition’; Stevenson had ‘deluded’ the public by putting his name to it. It would ‘try the faith of [Stevenson’s] most ardent admirers’, the Athenaeum said: ‘To have aided in the production of a book three-fourths of which consist of tedious levity is indeed not a thing to be proud of.’62

  Stevenson knew nothing of this when he began his next collaboration with Lloyd that autumn, but it is doubtful if it would have put him off (indeed he shrugged off all criticism of this kind when he did get to hear of it). Collaboration with Lloyd was much more a matter of contingency than an artistic choice, one way of lightening the ‘burthen on the back’. By the time they reached Apemama, Joe Strong had done something to put himself well and truly in the doghouse, and the ‘diorama’ scheme had been ditched. ‘People are unco’ hard to help in this world,’ Stevenson wrote to Colvin. ‘[Joe] does no more business for, or with, me. I would rather pay him handsomely to keep hands off.’63 Lloyd was thus promoted to top wastrel, and, his career as a lecturer in tatters, was ‘unemployed’ again. In Honolulu, they had heard the story of the Wandering Minstrel, whose crew had been found marooned on Midway Island, an isolated reef, and brought back to Hawaii. The crew’s story, and that of another maroon on Midway, a suspected murderer, was full of inexplicable inconsistencies, and had intrigued Stevenson and his family. On the Equator they heard more about the Pacific trade in wrecked ships and, putting the two together, recognised a potential ‘police-novel’ theme.

  Stevenson was also motivated to start a new novel in order to finance his latest, wildly exciting, plan – to buy or build a schooner of his own and live semi-permanently at sea, dipping from one island group to another, as a sort of gentleman trader. The vessel was to be a topsail schooner of ninety tons, and everything on it had been imagined in detail: the rifle racks, the library, ‘the patent davits’ and the name, of course, the Northern Light, sentimentally recalling Stevenson’s forebears. The cost was expected to be about $1500, which is what Stevenson and Lloyd were going to ask for their novel, The Wrecker. The vision was blatantly inconsiderate of Fanny’s feelings about sea-travel, but as it also included buying a small island of their own as a base, perhaps Stevenson and Lloyd were intending to leave the matriarch on shore a great deal. They could be forever setting out in the Northern Light to do a bit of trading, and she could keep house for them both on an atoll, gardening fork in one hand, Lancet in the other, her indomitable Napoleonic profile black against the westering sun. On further acquaintance with traders in the Gilberts, however, Stevenson had to admit that he would not be able to bear a life among so many unscrupulous people, and the dream of the Northern Light was extinguished abruptly.

  The Wrecker, however, went ahead. It was a very different sort of collaboration from The Wrong Box – which had been essentially Lloyd’s story revised by Stevenson. The Wrecker was jointly planned and executed; each chapter was discussed in advance, drafted by Lloyd and rewritten by Stevenson. Hence Stevenson was fed ideas by Lloyd and relieved of the drudgery of making a first draft, while retaining control over the work at all times. Lloyd got plenty out of the arrangement too, seeing his apprentice work, full of jokes and burlesque, transformed into something much more substantial, and gaining, for the duration of the composition, his stepfather’s undivided attention. Much of the writing was done in Apemama, with Lloyd and Louis sitting under a cramped tent of mosquito netting together, working on different parts of the book. Here was a new kind of family firm being set up, an unexpected branch of ‘Stevenson and Son’.

  The book that emerged from this was not, however, a very coherent one. From the start, it was going to be a hybrid work, for Lloyd’s talents were suited to the emerging detective genre and Stevenson’s were not at all. In his epilogue to the book, Stevenson obliquely apologises for the mismatch by telling how the coauthors had been ‘at once attracted and repelled by that very modern form of the police novel or mystery’, the problem with which was ‘insincerity and shallowness of tone’. ‘The mind of the reader, always bent to pick up clues, receives no impression of reality or life, rather of an airless, elaborate mechanism; and the book remains enthralling, but insignificant, like a game of chess, not a work of human art.’64 If any novel answers to such a description it is The Wrecker, with its puzzling switches of tone, location, intention and style. Stevenson’s apologia (which sounds oddly like a pre-emptive book review) makes a bold attempt to pass this off as deliberate, claiming the authors desired to have their mystery story ‘inhere in life’ and reflect ‘the tone of the age, its movement, the mingling of races and classes in the dollar hunt’.65

  It was the method of composition that made The Wrecker haphazard. The constant need to compromise and the length of time it took to write (two years) were such that Stevenson confessed he had lost the thread of the early story, and there are many small ‘continuity’ mistakes which no amount of theorising can recast as art. The characters don’t develop so much as morph, especially Loudon Dodd, the American artist at the centre of the main story, who seems to lack the backing of the authors until about halfway through, as if he and they are part of the culture of speculation, investment and risk which is so large an issue in the plot.

  The method falls somewhere between the broad-canvas inclusiveness of Dickens (with its perils of mere sprawling) and the mystery writer’s deliberate false starts and false emphases; the result is a book which demands concentration in the wrong places. It is long, twice the size of most Stevenson novels, and oddly repetitive or ‘doubled’. New characters are introduced who seem duplicates of existing ones, and situations proliferate in the same way; thus Tommy Hadden and Carthew in the closing chapters repeat very closely the partnership of Dodd and Pinkerton earlier; Carthew’s disappointment of his family is like Dodd’s, yet both receive surprise inheritances at crucial moments; Captain Wicks is a character very like Captain Nares (for all Stevenson’s professed pride in Nares as a special creation), and both are parodied in Captain Trent; boats abound, and name changes: Wicks to Kirkup (passing himself off as Trent once Trent is dead), Carthew to Dickson (and later to Goddedal), the Dream to the Currency Lass (itself stealing the name of a public house), the whole crew of the latter to the crew of the Flying Scud, and so on. All this gives the story an odd, circular feel, which may have been intentional (putting us off the trail) or simply a symptom of the authors’ haste and confusion.

  Some passages from The Wrecker may give an idea of how various the book is. The prologue, set in Tai-o-hae, introduces Loudon Dodd as an ‘old, salted trader’, a man of business, normally unscrupulous. This is the contemporary Pacific world that Stevenson was to explore in ‘The Beach of Falesá’, The Ebb-Tide and In the South Seas. The next chapters, however, are entirely burlesque, switching back several decades to Dodd’s youth as an unwilling student at the Muskegon Commercial College, his art studies in Paris and succession of casual jobs, including acting as co-ordinator of ‘Pinkerton’s Hebdomadary Picnics’ around San Francisco Bay:

  By eight o’clock, any Sunday morning, I was to be observed by an admiring public on the wharf. The garb and attributes of sacrifice consisted of a black frockcoat, rosetted, its pockets bulging with sweetmeats and inferior cigars, trousers of light blue, a silk hat like a reflector, and a varnished wand. A goodly steamer guarded my one flank, panting and throbbing, flags flu
ttering fore and aft of her, illustrative of the Dromedary and patriotism. My other flank was covered by the ticket-office, strongly held by a trusty character of the Scots persuasion, rosetted like his superior, and smoking a cigar to mark the occasion festive.66

  Stevenson-Osbourne sounds here remarkably like Mark Twain, and at other points like a pastiche Dickens (they were aware of the influence: in the epilogue Stevenson makes the comic admission that the method of ‘fortifying’ a mystery story that he and Lloyd imagined they had invented turned out to be ‘the method of Charles Dickens in his later work’). Lloyd’s supposed knack with accents and dialects is in evidence throughout, and must always have made people cringe. ‘Indade, and there’s nothing in the house beyont the furnicher,’ says the Irish landlady, while the Sydney down-and-out talks of the ‘ryleways’ and ‘tryde’, the German businessman observes that ‘a pig nokket of cold is good’, and the English officer chimes in with ‘aw! I dawn’t knaw you, do I?’

  Lloyd told Graham Balfour that ‘the storm was mine; so were the fight and the murders on the Currency Lass; the picnics in San Francisco, and the commercial details of Loudon’s partnership. Nares was mine and Pinkerton to a great degree, and Captain Brown was mine throughout’.67 Stevenson was dead by the time Lloyd said this, so there was no risk of contradiction, but it is notable that Lloyd has claimed for himself the best parts of the book. The storm is a remarkable piece of writing, and wholly ‘Stevensonian’. Was this because Stevenson revised it thoroughly, or because Lloyd and he were exerting a palpable influence on each other’s style? Nothing that Lloyd wrote in his post-RLS career approaches this: