Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  They had very few servants in these arduous early days on the site, only a German cook called Paul Einfürer (late of the Lübeck), who turned out to be a hopeless drunkard, and a Samoan overseer called Henry Simele, a local chief, keen to improve himself, who spent his evenings submitting to lessons in decimals and basic surveying (an old skill suddenly coming in useful for Stevenson). The gangs of native boys at work clearing the land and making the new building were hard to organise and had no concept of punctuality. It was the Stevensons’ first encounter with fa’a Samoa, ‘the Samoan way’, which, if they had perceived it clearly, might have dissuaded them from trying to set up and run a plantation there. Fanny and Louis were obliged to put in long days of back-breaking work.

  Fanny threw herself into the establishment of a vegetable garden with ‘the industry of a bee or a devil’, as Louis put it. Not all his remarks went down well. His ill-timed description of his wife revealing ‘the soul of a peasant’ rather than that of an artist (which Fanny recorded in the diary she had begun to keep) stung her to the quick, and she brooded on it for weeks. His attempts at reconciliation are also recorded: ‘Louis assures me that the peasant class is a most interesting one and he admires it hugely.’31 It was the first indication of the growing distance between husband and wife that was to become very distressing to Louis over the next couple of years.

  The Stevensons certainly seemed like a strange and not particularly happy couple to two curious tourists, the historian Henry Adams and the painter and illustrator John La Farge, who made their way up the track from Apia to meet the famous writer and his wife one afternoon in October 1890. Adams was bemused by the ‘squalor like a railroad navvy’s board hut’ and the ‘pervasive atmosphere of dirt’ that hung around, but that was nothing to the appearance of the feral creatures they disturbed:

  Imagine a man so thin and emaciated that he looked like a bundle of sticks in a bag, with a head and eyes morbidly intelligent and restless. He was costumed in very dirty striped cotton pyjamas, the baggy legs tucked into coarse knit woollen stockings, one of which was bright brown in colour, the other a purplish dark tone. With him was a woman who retired for a moment into the house to reappear a moment afterwards, probably in some change of costume, but, as far as I could see, the change could have consisted only in putting shoes on her bare feet. She wore the usual missionary nightgown which was no cleaner than her husband’s shirt and drawers, but she omitted the stockings. Her complexion and eyes were dark and strong, like a half-breed Mexican[.]32

  Despite the filth, Adams found his host immediately interesting. Stevenson’s restlessness and excitability struck him as they had so many others: ‘[he] perches like a parrot on every available projection, jumping from one to another, and talking incessantly’, and though it was galling that the Scot had never heard of him (whereas he knew La Farge by repute), Adams was happy to make better acquaintance during the three months he stayed in Samoa, and left an amusing description of the couple arriving at the American Consul’s house for a dinner: ‘[Stevenson] appeared first, looking like an insane stork, very warm and very restless [ … ] Presently Mrs Stevenson in a reddish cotton nightgown staggered up the steps and sank into a chair, gasping, and unable to speak.’ Though, as a fellow American from a very different class and background, Adams obviously found the ‘Apache squaw’ somewhat beyond the pale, he thought Stevenson ‘astonishingly agreeable, dancing about, brandishing his long arms above his head, and looking so attenuated in the thin flannel shirt which is his constant wear, that I expected to see him break in sections’.33

  The American Consul, Harold Marsh Sewell, was part of an expanding white government class in Samoa subsequent to the Berlin Treaty. The new Chief Justice, a Swede called Conrad Cedercrantz, arrived in Apia in December 1890, and the following year the President of the Municipal Council, Baron Arnold Senfft von Pilsach (a Prussian), and three Land Commissioners took up their posts. The British Land Commissioner was Bazett Haggard, brother of the novelist Rider Haggard, who was to become a friend of Stevenson (though he suffered increasingly from alcoholism). There were three existing Consuls representing the three ‘powers’; altogether quite a number of foreign administrators for a small island group supposed to be ruling itself. And though the reestablishment of Laupepa as king seemed to be working, Mataafa was all the while secretly strengthening his position for the inevitable clash of arms.

  The clearing of the land around the new house at Vailima, and the endless making and remaking of paths through the bush, proved difficult; however much hacking and cutting one did, next day more greenery would spring up in the rich volcanic soil, and to leave a patch untended for a week was to lose it. Stevenson became intrigued with the ‘unconcealed vitality of these vegetables, their exuberant number and strength, the attempts – I can use no other word – of lianas to enwrap and capture the intruder, the awful silence; the knowledge that all my efforts are only like the performance of an actor, the thing of a moment, and the wood will silently and swiftly heal them up with fresh effervescence’.34 The most pernicious and interesting weed that he had to deal with was tuitui, ‘the sensitive plant’, ‘a singular insidious thing, shrinking and biting like a weasel; clutching by its roots as a limpet clutches to a rock’.35 He documented his struggles with this tenacious stinger in his long journal-letters to Colvin (subsequently Vailima Letters, the first of Stevenson’s correspondence to be published), and in a long poem called ‘The Woodman’ that became a sort of rainforest version of Marvell’s ‘The Garden’:

  Thick round me in the teeming mud

  Briar and fern strove to the blood:

  The hooked liana in his gin

  Noosed his reluctant neighbours in:

  There the green murderer throve and spread,

  Upon his smothering victims fed,

  And wantoned on his climbing coil.36

  Stevenson became so preoccupied with gardening – and with the battle against ‘sensitive’ in particular – that he began to claim it was far more satisfying than writing books. How much so he hurried to express in words: ‘I would rather do a good hour’s work weeding sensitive [ … ] than write two pages of my best,’ he told R.D. Blackmore; ‘Nothing is so interesting as weeding.’37 A great part of the interest was the novelty of being able to do physical work at all. Stevenson had never before exerted himself or worked up a sweat over anything: now he spent hours in the bush every day, getting filthy, and tasting a new pleasure, ‘a quiet conscience’ when he stopped.38 ‘Sensitive’ satisfied every need: it was exotic, poetic, ‘touchy’, indefatigable; it inspired botanical discoveries and led to metaphysical ones: ‘I give my advice thus to a young plant: have a strong root, a weak stem, and an indigestible seed: so you will outlast the eternal city, and your progeny will clothe mountains, and the irascible planter will blaspheme in vain. The weak point of tuitui is that its stem is strong.’39 But there was also ‘the horror of the thing’, reawakening his neurasthenic side:

  This business fascinates me like a tune or a passion; yet all the while I thrill with a strong distaste. The horror of the thing, objective and subjective, is always present to my mind; the horror of creeping things, a superstitious horror of the void and the powers about me, the horror of my own devastation and continual murders. The life of the plants comes through my fingertips, their struggles go to my heart like supplications. I feel myself blood boltered; then I look back on my cleared grass, and count myself an ally in a fair quarrel, and make stout my heart.40

  What did Colvin make of this? With the post only leaving Samoa once a month, ‘correspondence’ in the usual sense between the friends was no longer possible; the intervals killed dead any give-and-take. And even when letters began their month-long journey from Apia, carefully packed and registered, they often disappeared en route. ‘It seems absurd to write,’ Stevenson complained to Mrs Jenkin, ‘we have every reason to suppose nobody ever receives them.’ But he understood that as well as frustrations, these new circumstances allowed
him licence, too, and if his monologues to Colvin show self-doubt, restlessness and an extreme self-consciousness about his art, they also manifest a wonderful freedom and inventiveness.* ‘I begin to see the whole scheme of letter writing,’ he said sardonically to his friend, ‘you sit down every day and pour out an equable stream of twaddle.’42 In other words, his letter-writing could become an endless riff, and that ‘equable stream’ a stream of consciousness. This makes his letters from this last period of his life some of the most extraordinary ever written, a one-way ticket into his mind. Stevenson did not have any idea whether his musings on ‘sensitive’ would amuse the real-life, flesh-and-blood Colvin; he wouldn’t get a response for at least two months, and by that time it wouldn’t matter. His commerce was now with abstract, rather than merely absent, friends. In a pivotal passage from his letter of 20 March 1891, Stevenson stumbles on this truth, that his ‘virtual’ friendship with Colvin was not only more pleasurable than the real thing, but also more real:

  Though I write so little, I pass all my hours of fieldwork in continual converse and imaginary correspondence. I scarce pull up a weed, but I invent a sentence on the matter to yourself; it does not get written; autant en emportent ly vents; but the intent is there, and for me (in some sort) the companionship. Today for instance we had a great talk. I was toiling, the sweat dripping from my nose in the hot fit after a squall of rain; methought you asked me – frankly, was I happy. Happy (said I), I was only happy once: that was at Hyères; it came to an end from a variety of reasons, decline of health, change of place, increase of money, age with his stealing steps: since then, as before then, I know not what it means. But I know pleasure still; pleasure with a thousand faces, and none perfect, a thousand tongues all broken, a thousand hands and all of them with scratching nails. High among these I place this delight of weeding out here alone by the garrulous water, under the silence of the high wood, broken by incongruous sounds of birds. And take my life all through, look at it fore and back, and upside down, – though I would very fain change myself, I would not change my circumstances – unless it were to bring you here. And yet God knows perhaps this intercourse of writing serves as well; and I wonder, were you here indeed, would I commune so continually with the thought of you: I say I wonder for a form; I know, and I know I should not.43

  Back in Britain, Lloyd was in Edinburgh, helping ‘Aunt Maggie’, as the Osbournes called Margaret Stevenson, prepare for her removal to Samoa. Lloyd was keen on intrigue and tale-telling, and passed on with full flourishes of significance to his mother and stepfather the news that Henley (living in Howard Place, just a few doors from Stevenson’s old home) had not yet been to call on Stevenson’s mother. This apparently trivial social oversight opened up for Stevenson all the bitterness of the Nixie affair. He had hoped that the bad feeling created then had dissipated, but now Henley’s ill-will seemed utterly beyond question, and his lack of consideration for ‘an old woman very much alone’ the cruellest way to continue old grudges against himself. ‘He has chosen to strike me there,’ Stevenson wrote melodramatically to Baxter, ‘and I am done with him for time and for eternity.’44

  In response to the perceived snub, Louis drafted an absurdly pompous note to Henley, rewriting it next day into a coldly formal declaration that he was severing all future ties. The incident was ‘not so much a death as an obituary notice’, he told Colvin. ‘But it leaves me practically in active relations with only one of my old friends besides yourself: Charles Baxter.’45 The incident happened as Beau Austin was finally creaking its way onto the stage in London, produced by and starring no less than the man who had kept himself awake with hatpin-pricks at the Skerryvore reading, Beerbohm Tree.* Henley did not attend the first performance (on 3 November 1890), but Oscar Wilde, Henry James, William Archer and George Moore did. The reviews were poor – only Archer could find a word of praise for ‘ye Beau’ – and Henley, whose great success as the editor of the Scots Observer (later the National Observer) had diverted him from his ambitions as a playwright, seemed to have lost interest in the works altogether. Asked by Baxter what to do with the unpublished plays now that the authors were finally separated, he replied, ‘I am indifferent – absolutely.’47 But he wasn’t indifferent to Stevenson: Henley remained embittered by their quarrel, anxious to monitor mutual friends such as Baxter for signs of defection to ‘the enemy’, and eager to vilify Stevenson in the circle of young acolytes who were coming to be known as ‘The Henley Regatta’ (Max Beerbohm’s phrase, coined in the 1890s). Oddly enough, this didn’t prevent Henley from publishing articles and poems by his former friend in the newspapers he edited (seven items in all after the Nixie affair), but it shows very poorly against Stevenson’s much more generoushearted impulses, for, predictably, within a short time of this ‘final’ break all Louis could think of were the things he had loved about Henley. ‘What a miss I have of him,’ he wrote sadly to Baxter in February 1891. ‘The charm, the wit, the vigour of the man, haunt my memory; my past is all full of his big presence and his welcome, wooden footstep: let it be a past henceforward: a beloved past, without continuation.’48

  Stevenson’s detractors had plenty to get their teeth into with the publication of his Ballads in December 1890 and the private circulation of some of the South Sea letters (in an edition of twenty-two, to establish copyright). Ballads contained ‘The Song of Rahéro’, ‘The Feast of Famine’ and ‘Ticonderoga’, all pretty clodhopping poems, which had served their purpose as entertainments for King Kalakaua or the crew of the Janet, but were never going to impress the literary men of London, as Stevenson ought to have realised. Cosmo Monkhouse took the opportunity to claim in his review that Stevenson’s mastery of metre had always been ‘imperfect and not unlikely to break down on a longer and more exacting exercise’, and that the ‘infelicities of expression and defects of style’ in the new poems were shameful.49 Gosse was rude about them too: in a letter to G.A. Armour he said, ‘I confess we are all disappointed here. The effort to become a Polynesian Walter Scott is a little too obvious, the inspiration a little too mechanical. [ … ] The fact seems to be that it is very nice to live in Samoa, but not healthy to write there. Within a three-mile radius of Charing Cross is the literary atmosphere, I suspect.’50

  The South Seas: A Record of Three Cruises, in its tiny copyright edition, had only been read by a handful of Stevenson’s friends, but their response to it was so negative that Stevenson went on the defensive, claiming to Colvin that the material had never been intended as anything but ‘a quarry [ … ] from which the book may be drawn’.51 McClure was very disappointed by the results of his long wait. In Saranac, Stevenson had contracted to write fifty-two ‘letters from the South Seas’ to be published serially in the New York Sun and collected as a book later; now McClure was faced with fifteen quasi-chapters which ‘in no way fulfil the definition of the word “letter” as used in newspaper correspondence’.52 The publisher was forced to syndicate the material at much lower rates than originally hoped, and the amount Stevenson made from it (just over £1000) was about a third of what had been promised, nowhere near enough to cover the expense of the cruises. This loss of income, as well as the sharp rebuff to his pride, finally dissuaded Stevenson from going on with the book: ‘I cannot fight longer,’ he told Colvin, ‘really five years were wanting, when I could have made a book; but I have a family, and – perhaps I could not make the book after all, and anyway, I’ll never be allowed for Fanny has strong opinions and I prefer her peace of mind to my ideas.’53 The Samoan section of the book, which he had just begun, he completed and published in August 1892. as A Footnote to History, but neither that, nor In the South Seas (nor Ballads, but with much better reason), has ever yet caught the public imagination.

  ‘I lost my chance not dying,’ Stevenson wrote to Colvin, only half-jokingly; ‘there seems blooming little fear of it now. [ … ] If only the public will continue to support me!’ That they ‘supported’, with large sales, Treasure Island, New Arabian Nights, Dr Jeky
ll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped and A Child’s Garden of Verses was of vital importance, for the expenses of Vailima were, predictably, completely out of control. Moors estimated the cost of the first phase of building to have been about $12,400, the cost of the second phase (begun in 1891–92) $7500 and the upkeep around $6500 per annum,54 that is, about £4000 to build and £1300 to run.

  Stevenson’s new fiction included ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Beach of Falesá’, two entirely different kinds of South Sea story. ‘The Bottle Imp’, a moral fable set in Hawaii, was begun in Honolulu in 1889 and probably finished in Apia when Stevenson first visited that year. The story reworked a familiar plot from the German folk tradition which had surfaced in Grimm (‘Spiritus Familiaris’) and LaMotte-Foque, as well as in popular drama (Stevenson knew a stage version from Sir Percy and Lady Shelley’s library in Bournemouth): the holder of a magic bottle can have anything he wishes for, and be none the worse for it, provided he can sell the bottle afterwards at less than he originally paid. If not, he faces eternal damnation, a sort of cumulative punishment for everything done through the bottle’s agency in the past. In Stevenson’s version of the story, the bottle does not grant its owners’ wishes in obvious ways, and has done more harm than good over the centuries. Nor can good people counteract the bottle’s influence, for the Polynesian couple in ‘The Bottle Imp’ behave selflessly, both ready to sacrifice themselves, yet the curse of being granted their wish is inexorable. It is a very northern, Scottish story, for all its Hawaiian accoutrements.