Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  ‘The Bottle Imp’ was pivotal in establishing Stevenson’s fame in Samoa, where he had been viewed with some puzzlement to begin with, as no one could work out the basis of his wealth and authority. One of the missionaries in Upolu asked him for a contribution that he could translate for the church magazine; thus ‘The Bottle Imp’ became the first work of fiction to be published in the Samoan language, which had no original printed literature at this date, only the Bible and religious tracts. The currency of the tale among the islanders raised Stevenson’s prestige to a new level; he was perceived not only as rich and kingly in his strange mansion above Apia (Vailima was quite unlike any building previously erected on the island), but a sense of magic and glamour clung to him. He was given the native name ‘Tusi Tala’ – ‘teller of tales’ – and became the subject of avid and possibly satirical speculation. Stevenson told Arthur Conan Doyle (with whom he had begun to correspond after reading the early Sherlock Holmes stories) that native visitors to Vailima who had read ‘The Bottle Imp’ were apt to imagine it was not a fiction at all, and looking round his house and grounds would ask, ‘Where is the bottle?’55

  ‘Teller of tales’ was far too sentimental a name for the author of ‘The Beach of Falesá’, the idea of which Stevenson said ‘shot through me like a bullet in one of my moments of awe’ while he was clearing the jungle in the early days at Vailima. What struck him then was the way the uncanniness of the forest could communicate itself to even the most rational mind. The story that came of this, and which he worked on for over a year (in the knowledge that it would never be a popular, money-making book like Kidnapped or Dr Jekyll), Stevenson was proud to recognise as ‘the first realistic South Sea story; I mean with real South Sea character and details of life. Everybody else who has tried, that I have seen, got carried away by the romance, and ended in a kind of sugar candy sham epic, and the whole effect was lost – there was no etching, no human grin, consequently no conviction.’56

  Odd though it is to hear Stevenson, the writer of romances, bragging about his success as a realist, it was precisely the case that ‘Falesá’ broke new ground, and not just in writing about the South Seas. All Stevenson’s major works add to the genres they belong to, and it could be said that his minor works add even more (if you count ‘The Beach of Falesá’ as ‘a minor work’, which is debatable). There is a sense in which he felt free to experiment more where he guessed he would never entirely please his public, or his literary guardians, and in this respect his removal from the environs of Charing Cross proved useful. ‘The Beach of Falesá’ unsettles the reader from the outset by offering no absolute standards of any kind: those of the islanders are uninterpretable, and those of the whites a matter of relativity, with the narrator, a trader called John Wiltshire, the poor best of a very bad lot. Wiltshire is a brilliantly conceived creation: just decent enough for toleration, while wholly a part of the degenerate white trading community that this book so thoroughly condemns. His repugnance at the sight of Randall, formerly a functioning sea-captain, but now a fly-blown drunkard squatting on the floor of a filthy hut, sets him up as a man of discrimination, however crude, as does his realisation that he has better goods to sell on the island than any of his rivals (a fact that is proved irrelevant, as his rivals are all cheats). But Wiltshire’s own shortcomings are soon (and casually) made clear, as in this conversation with Case, the trader who is showing him round Falesá:

  ‘By the by’, says Case, ‘we must get you a wife.’

  ‘That’s so’, said I, ‘I had forgotten.’

  There was a crowd of girls about us, and I pulled myself up and looked among them like a Bashaw. [ … ]

  ‘That’s pretty’, says he.

  I saw one coming on the other side alone. She had been fishing; all she wore was a chemise, and it was wetted through, and a cutty sark at that. She was young and very slender for an island maid, with a long face, a high forehead, and a sly, strange, blindish look, between a cat’s and a baby’s.

  ‘Who’s she?’ said I. ‘She’ll do.’57

  The sham marriage that follows is a masterpiece of grotesque realism, with a (nameless) Negro trader dressed with a paper collar to mimic a priest, pretending to read from ‘an odd volume of a novel, and the words of his service not fit to be set down’.58 Case completes the burlesque by making a fake certificate from a page of the ledger, which states that Uma, the bride, ‘is illegally married to Mr John Wiltshire for one night, and Mr John Wiltshire is at liberty to send her to hell next morning’. ‘A nice paper to put in a girl’s hand and see her hide away like gold. A man might easily feel cheap for less,’ Wiltshire comments, adding that he blames the missionaries for this state of affairs; without their interference ‘I had never needed this deception, but taken all the wives I wished and left them when I pleased, with a clear conscience.’59

  There are many equally vivid scenes in the novella – the description of the bush at night, the tabooing of Wiltshire’s house, his exposure of Case’s ‘devil-work’ (none the less potent, in the end, for being fake), the fight between the two men and its gruesome climax: ‘His body kicked under me like a spring sofa [ … ] the blood came over my hands, I remember, hot as tea’ – but it was the marriage, and in particular the wording of the certificate, that arrested the story’s first readers, Clement Shorter and McClure’s brother, Robert. They thought the tricking of Uma into having sex with Wiltshire ‘too strong’ for a family paper and insisted on changes. Stevenson refused, of course – it would have made nonsense of the whole story – and warned Colvin that ‘financially it may prove a heavy disappointment’. But despite the author’s objections, Shorter went ahead and made many alterations, omitting the marriage contract altogether for the magazine serialisation (it was reinstated, but still in bowdlerised form, for the book publication in 1893), saying later, ‘no editor who knows his business would worry himself about the feelings of an author, however great, when he had such a point for decision’.60

  This rather confirmed all Stevenson’s worst fears about what was deemed suitable for ‘that great hulking, bullering whale, the public’. ‘This is a poison bad world for the romancer, this Anglo-Saxon world,’ he wrote to Colvin. ‘I usually get out of it by not having any women in at all; but when I remember I had “The Treasure of Franchard” refused as unfit for a family magazine, I feel despair weigh upon my wrists.’61 Stevenson was fatalistic about this treatment, for the editors of the day were ruthless and powerful, and he was pretty much at their mercy. He seldom kept a copy of a manuscript, or had anything to check proofs against (and he was sloppy about proof-correction anyway), and only saw a copy of the mutilated ‘Beach of Falesá’ (in the Illustrated London News) when a visitor to Samoa, Lady Jersey, happened to have one with her. But he was becoming more and more aware of the conditions that constrained him as an artist. In 1892, while at the beginning of a new novel, ‘The Young Chevalier’, he expounded the problem to Colvin:

  I am afraid my touch is a little broad in a love story; I cannot mean one thing and write another. If I have got to kill a man, I kill him good; and if my characters have to go to bed with each other – well, I want them to go. As for women, I am no more in any fear of them: I can do a sort all right, age makes me less afraid of a petticoat; but I am a little in fear of grossness. [ … ]

  Of course Meredith can do it, and so could Shakespeare; but with all my romance, I am a realist and a prosaist, and a most fanatical lover of plain physical sensations plainly and expressly rendered: hence my perils. To do love in the same spirit as I did (for instance) D. Balfour’s fatigue in the heather; my dear sir, there were grossness ready made! [ … ]

  Think how beautiful it would be not to have to mind the critics, and not even the darkest of the crowd – Sidney Colvin. I should probably amuse myself with works that would make your hair curl, if you had any left.62

  Margaret Stevenson arrived in Sydney on the SS Lusitania early in 1891, staying in Melbourne with a niece for a couple of months while
the new building at Vailima was rushed into a state of readiness. Margaret described to her sister Jane how delightful her room was, the best in the house, with doors onto the wide veranda and a view of the sea. Fanny had put up the ensigns from the Casco at one end of the room and a tapa banner with the word ‘welcome’ on it in Samoan; she had also hung a framed photograph of Thomas Stevenson – a touch guaranteed to please her mother-in-law. The following week, more members of the new household arrived from Sydney: Belle, Joe, Austin, several cats and a tame cockatoo called Cocky. Belle was charmed by the singing of the natives who rowed them from the Lübeck to the shore, and by the fine figures of the Samoans in their lava-lavas, brightly-coloured lengths of cloth which the men tied round the waist and the women either at the waist or above the breast. Everything delighted Belle: the phosphorescent flashes of rotting wood on the path to the estate, the scents of ylang-ylang and woodsmoke, the bold colours of Vailima (peacock-blue wooden walls and red iron roof), and most of all the sight of ‘Pineapple Cottage’, the new name of the former ‘navvy’s hut’, now reconstructed and remodelled at a slight distance from the main house, the Strongs’ new home.

  Austin was now ten years old, the age Lloyd had been the last summer at Grez. He was to spend most of the next three and a half years at Vailima, getting bits of lessons from various members of the family – verse from Aunt Maggie, history and basic maths from” his step-grandfather, ‘Uncle Louis’. He made many friends among the servants, especially Arrick, the pantry boy (a strategically important friend for any ten-year-old), and was allowed to help on the estate, even becoming ‘overseer’ for one brief, heady afternoon. Vailima and its enormous grounds made an ideal playground, and he recalled for Graham Balfour the excitement of seeing his first flying foxes appear over the house in the evening and ‘the distant booming of the surf and the roar of the waterfall after the rains’, the pack horses returning from Apia ‘with their iron cages filled and creaking with thrilling looking boxes and bundles. The excitements and mysteries of every day and night’, glorious mornings with ‘everything sparkling and diamond clear [ … ] one could almost hear the plants growing’.63

  The gathering together of the clan at Vailima transformed it from a scruffy nest for an insane stork to something like a commune or small village, all the more chaotic for being yet unfinished. ‘I never saw such a busy place; it fairly buzzed with activity,’ Belle said.64 There were already plans to expand the house; Margaret expected to be moved from her pale-green boudoir to a suite of two rooms in the extension (as big as, if not slightly bigger than, the original building), which was going to contain a magnificent, sixty-foot-long hall on the ground floor. She and Lloyd were the main proponents of the extension (Margaret was putting down £500 towards the £1200 cost); left to himself, Louis wanted an end to building; he was indeed showing signs of restlessness with the whole enterprise and talked again of buying an island elsewhere.

  Meanwhile, a separate kitchen was being erected at the back of the house and Fanny was trying to lay out a patch of recent jungle as a tennis court. The tennis court was one of many unusual features: Vailima had the only row of peas in the Pacific, and the only fireplace. The staircase, too, was new to native eyes, and one of the houseboys, asked on his first day of work to take a bucket of water up to a bedroom, put the bucket handle between his teeth and shinned up the outside post. When the family introduced him to the staircase, he found it so novel that for two or three days he did nothing but run up and down, ‘chuckling and crowing in an ecstasy of joy’.65

  Fanny’s attempts at growing vegetables had been heroic, but were often frustrated. When she asked her devoted servant Lafaele to plant some vanilla seedlings for her, he put them in upside down. Having shouted at him about this, she and Belle replanted all the seedlings root-downward, only to find that overnight the repentant Samoan redid his work as a surprise for her. On another occasion, Lafaele removed all the tags from a consignment of plants from an American nursery because he had been told to be very careful about the labels. Fanny’s rudimentary tropical garden was little the worse for being full of unidentifiable plants, however, and the site now – possibly containing some descendants of those early plantings – has been made into the most splendid botanical collection in the islands, the National Botanical Gardens of Samoa.

  Aunt Maggie did no heavy work, of course, and had brought with her a white maidservant from Australia called Mary Carter, whom neither Fanny nor Belle liked. ‘The bush is no place for fine lady companions,’ Fanny told her diary,66 while Belle, who resented the fact that Mary would never do anything for anyone other than Margaret (who was paying her), thought the maid ‘a great trial to us’.67 What Mary thought of the pyjamaed slovens of Vailima does not require much guessing. With a true servant’s regard for the proprieties, she insisted on maintaining certain standards of respectability, and wore corsets and elaborately starched and goffered European clothes when even her employer had given them up. She can be seen in John Davis’s famous photo of the household, shining white, scowling and utterly encased in whalebone, a sacrifice indeed at temperatures which rarely dipped below 85 degrees. She left as soon as her first year’s contract expired.

  With the arrival of the piano on 1 July 1891, the furnishing of Vailima was complete. There is something touching in the fact that this instrument, which no one in the family could play properly, was transported all the way from the drawing room at Heriot Row to Apia harbour, where it was hung from poles and carried, with infinite pains and, no doubt, much puzzlement, by eleven native, men. It took them eight hours to get up the track – pretty remarkable, given the conditions. When it arrived, and was hauled up to Margaret’s room on the first floor, the piano was judged to be in ‘tolerably good tune’, though how the tin-eared Stevensons could have recognised that is another matter. The household’s unquenchable enthusiasm for music-making was now given full rein, and on most evenings at Vailima the night air was rent with the sounds of Lloyd’s clarinet and banjo, Joe’s flute, Fanny’s guitar and, of course, the trusty flageolet (recently revived with new parts brought from London), while Belle hammered out an accompaniment. As Baxter wrote, when he heard about all this, ‘I am glad – very glad – that orchestra is, and is likely to remain at least 17,000 miles away.’68

  Gosse’s reference to Stevenson becoming a Polynesian Walter Scott was more pertinent than he intended. Both writers were set upon the treadmill in order to pay for over-ambitious building projects: Scott with the costs of Abbotsford after his publisher went bankrupt, Stevenson with Vailima now that hordes of dependants needed a roof over their heads. Stevenson made the comparison himself, in 1892, when he called Vailima ‘sub-Priorsford’. He had worked out his productivity rate against that of the Waverley novelist (an impossible example to follow) and concluded that he was ‘about one half the man Sir Walter was for application and driving the dull pen. Of the merit we shall not talk …’69 His vastly improved health had made such productivity sustainable, and his routine became somewhat ascetic. ‘I am now an old, but healthy skeleton, and degenerate much towards the machine,’ he reported to Elizabeth Fairchild (last seen gesticulating through a window at Saranac):

  By six at work; stopped at half-past ten, to give a history lesson to a step-grandson; eleven, lunch; after lunch we have a musical performance till two; then to work again; bath, 4.40; dinner five; cards in the evening till eight; and then to bed – only I have no bed; only a chest with a mat and blankets – and read myself to sleep.70

  Graham Balfour, who made the first of three long visits to Vailima in August 1892, reported even earlier wakings – 4.30 or 5.00 in the morning, when a light would be visible in the writer’s room. ‘This is my season,’ Stevenson told Colvin,71 proudly reporting his progress: ‘The Beach of Falesá’, The Wrecker, A Footnote to History, a history of Scotland and a family memoir, never completed, but published posthumously as Records of a Family of Engineers. In the same year, 1891, there was a novel begun about the Revolution
ary Wars, called, unpromisingly, ‘The Shovels of Newton French’, and more novels in 1892, started like so many hares: ‘Sophia Scarlet’, ‘The Young Chevalier’, ‘David Balfour’ (the sequel to Kidnapped), Weir of Hermiston and a boys’ story called ‘The Go-Between’. But the return of health also suggested to Stevenson alternative methods of making money; he longed for writing to be a pastime again and fantasised about a real job, such as being British Consul of Samoa. Meanwhile, he continued to hope that his plantation would become viable: ‘I would rather, from soon on, be released from the obligation to write,’ he told Colvin. ‘In five or six years, this plantation – suppose it and us still to exist – should pretty well support us and pay wages.’72

  Stevenson was reckoning without the absence of the Protestant work ethic, most obviously in his two managers, Joe and Lloyd. Moors left a scathing résumé of their achievements: ‘as for Joe Strong, who for some time held the position of Overseer-in-Ordinary to the Vailima King – well, he might have made a very good landscape gardener, but he was too esthetic for cacao growing. And Lloyd Osbourne, who was a sort of general manager of the place, just liked to sit down and “watch things grow”; and if they didn’t grow, they didn’t.’73 In his correspondence, Moors was even more blunt, confirming that Stevenson ‘was indeed the Work Horse supporting with difficulty, and in a trembling way, the whole expense of a large household of idling adults – Human Sponges’.74

  The famous photograph of the household taken by the local postmaster, John Davis, on 11 May 1892, that was to become the iconic image of the writer at the height of his fame, illustrates the extent of Louis’s liabilities. The emaciated milk cow is in the centre of the group, with Stevenson’s wife, glowering miserably at the camera, to his left. Margaret sits very straight (‘upright and queenly’ is how Austin remembered her75), in her holoku and widow’s cap, while Lloyd stands behind her, specs off, arms folded, trying to look commanding. Belle and Austin are on the steps and Joe stands apart at the back with Cocky on his shoulder, looking unready and unwilling to be photographed. His scruffy yachting cap, scarf and lava-lava (tied, eccentrically, over trousers) are quite a contrast to shining Mary Carter and the cleanly Samoans included in the family group: Simi the steward, Talolo and Tomasi the cooks, Elena the laundress (carefully dressed and wreathed in flowers), Arrick, Lafaele and Auvea.