Robert Louis Stevenson
Page 50
Stevenson replied with remarkable patience, ‘Dear Colvin, please remember that my life passes among my “blacks or chocolates”. [ … ] You must try to exercise a trifle of imagination, and put yourself, perhaps with an effort, into some sort of sympathy with these people, or how am I to write to you?’32 Colvin apologised subsequently for what he knew had been an intemperate outburst, and admitted in his published Memories and Notes that he had become ‘hypercritical about the quality and value of some of the work sent home from the Pacific’, which was ‘disappointingly lacking in the thrill and romance one expected of [Stevenson] in relating experiences which had realized the dream of his youth’.33 This sense of dashed expectations was widespread among Stevenson’s friends and admirers. ‘I see that romantic surroundings are the worst surroundings possible for a romantic writer,’ Oscar Wilde wrote. ‘In Gower Street Stevenson could have written a new Trois Mousquetaires. In Samoa he wrote letters to The Times about Germans.’34
Graham Greene, a subsequent admirer of Stevenson, but critical of those who overvalued the ‘spurious maturity’ of his essays and early works, felt quite the opposite: that it was only in these last years, and faced with the challenge of the South Sea material, that Stevenson began to ‘shed disguising graces’. ‘If he is to survive for us,’ Greene wrote, ‘[it will be as] the tired, disheartened writer of the last eight years, pegging desperately away at what he failed to recognise as his masterworks.’35 The book Greene must have had in mind as an example of ‘pegging away at a masterwork’ was The Ebb-Tide, the composition of which is documented thoroughly in Stevenson’s letters of 1893. Few better accounts exist of a novelist suffering the agonies of writer’s block. Stevenson had returned to the novel, based on Lloyd’s ‘Pearl Fisher’ (begun in Hawaii three years earlier), while Catriona was in production, putting aside another Scottish novel, Weir of Hermiston, to make some money from an easy job. By the time Stevenson began to work steadily on it, in February 1893, Lloyd had no further part in the writing, and the original large scheme, for a book as long as The Wrecker, had been abandoned. Stevenson had decided to concentrate on the character of Attwater, the refined, elusive monomaniac living on an uncharted pearl-fishing island in the South Seas, whose story takes up the whole second half of the book and was entirely the work of the one writer.
In May, Stevenson reported to Colvin that he was ‘grinding singly’ at the manuscript, and had reached page 82 of a projected 110 or so. ‘Not much Waverley Novels about this!’ he remarked, referring to the slow rate of production, only twenty-four pages in three weeks. On the sixteenth he complained that the work was like ‘a crucifixion’,36 and dreaded having to finish his letter and return to ‘the damned thing lying waiting for me on p.88, where I last broke down’:
I break down at every paragraph, I may observe, and lie here, and sweat, and curse over the blame thing, till I can get one sentence wrung out after another. Strange doom! after having worked so easily for so long!37
Page 88 was to prove as inescapable as his old recurring nightmare of the everlasting stair, for he thought he had finished it on the sixteenth, but two days later was back again, and feared a relapse even further, to page 85. On 20 May he lamented only having written or revised eleven pages in nine days; then he pushed on to page 100, only to slip back, by the beginning of June, to page 93. So it went on, an ebbing tide indeed, a book which he might almost have imagined disappearing under his pen. And the difficulty was not artistry so much as ‘my total inability to write’, as he bravely confessed to Colvin:
Yesterday I was a living half hour upon a single clause and have a gallery of variants that would surprise you. And this sort of trouble (which I cannot avoid) unfortunately produces nothing when done but alembication and the far-fetched.38
To another correspondent he wrote in a more humorous vein:
Be it known to this fluent generation that I, R.L.S., in the forty-third year of my age and the twentieth of my professional life, wrote twenty-four pages in twenty-one days: working from six to eleven, and again in the afternoon from two to four, without fail or interruption. Such are the gifts the gods have endowed us withal; such was the facility of this prolific writer!39
The labour of writing The Ebb-Tide left him incapable of deciding whether the book was ‘an extraordinary work’ or ‘forced, violent, alembicated’ (the phrases appear in the same letter40), whether the characters ‘knocked spots’ or were ‘a troop of swine’.41 In fact, all those things are true to some degree. The story begins with three white beachcombers facing utter destitution in Papeete after ‘a long apprenticeship in going downward’: Davis, an American sea-captain, is an alcoholic whose negligence killed seven of his former crew; Huish, an unscrupulous and degenerate cockney clerk; and Herrick, an Oxford-educated man who has sunk through various levels of failure and disgrace and is now in self-exile in the Pacific. When the chance arises to take over the charter of a schooner blighted by smallpox, the desperados take it and set out, with what they have been told is a cargo of Californian champagne, to make some money in Sydney.
Far out at sea, they discover that most of the cargo is water, not champagne, and propelled off-course by bad weather, they are in worse straits, it seems, than before. The sighting of an island which is not on the chart but of which there are rumours reported in the mariners’ directory leads the men to speculate that some valuable private trade goes on there, and they approach to investigate. Thus they meet Attwater, the owner of the island, a tall, impeccably dressed Englishman, guarded and cultured, who has assumed absolute power over his native servants (all but three of whom have recently died from an outbreak of smallpox). He is an ex-missionary and ardent evangelist – ‘God hears the bell!’ he tells his guests, ‘we sit in this verandah on a lighted stage with all heaven for spectators!’42 – whose choice of habitation, it becomes clear, has as much to do with socio-religious experimentation as commerce. When he isolates Herrick from his shipmates, intending to win over the only member of the trio worth saving, Herrick’s loyalties (if that is quite the right word) are torn between this coolly superior new acquaintance and the wretches with whom he has shared destitution, and who clearly intend to rob, blackmail or kill their host.
The stand-off ends in a tense attempt at a parley and Huish’s crude attack on Attwater with a bottle of vitriol, anticipated by the pearl trader, who shoots him dead. Attwater gets his convert in the unattractive shape of Davis, and the novel ends with the ex-alcoholic pleading with Herrick to stay on the island and share the ‘peace of believing’. It wasn’t an ending that pleased the critics (perhaps they didn’t admit its profound cynicism), though the reviews were pretty favourable, if restrained. No one recognised the birth of a new and very modern literary motif in Stevenson’s invention of a hidden settlement ruled over by a maverick lone white man, the theme to be taken up in the following decade by H.G. Wells in The Island of Dr Moreau,* Conrad in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim and Rider Haggard in Heart of the World, and penetrating into popular culture as far as Superman’s archenemy Lex Luther and some of Ian Fleming’s Bond villains.
Another innovative, under-appreciated work by Stevenson from these last years of his life was the stories collected posthumously as Fables (which included some of the stories written in the 1870s). ‘The Persons of the Tale’, written some time between 1881 and 1894, is particularly remarkable, a ‘postmodern’ fiction created before the dawn of Modernism. In it, two of the characters from Treasure Island, Long John Silver and Captain Smollett, take a break between chapters thirty-two and thirty-three of the novel to smoke a pipe ‘not far from the story’ and discuss their relative importance to the author, as they perceive it. ‘“Who am I to pipe up with my opinions?”’ Smollett says. ‘“I know the Author’s on the side of good; he tells me so, it runs out of his pen as he writes.”’ Silver argues that though he is the villain of the story, he knows he has the author’s sympathy: ‘“I’m his favourite chara’ter. He does me fathoms better’n he does you �
�� fathoms, he does. And he likes doing me. He keeps me on deck mostly all the time, crutch and all, and he leaves you measling in the hold, where nobody can’t see you, nor wants to.”’ Smollett replies that the author ‘“has to get a story [ … ] and to have a man like the doctor (say) given a proper chance, he has to put in men like you and Hands.”’ They are called back into the novel by the opening of the ink bottle and the author writing the words ‘Chapter XXXIII’ (the chapter of Treasure Island in which Silver’s authority is overturned).43 Fables was lucky to get published, as Fanny hated the stories. ‘I can’t see that they mean anything at all,’ she wrote to her mother-in-law in November 1895. ‘I wouldn’t let Louis publish them when he wrote them, and am disgusted that it should have been done now. They were written in what I used to call one of Louis’s lapses, and are foolish and meaningless.’44 But Charles Baxter spirited the manuscripts away from Vailima, and negotiated magazine publication in 1895 and book publication the following year.
Early in 1893 the extension to Vailima was finished, at huge cost, considerable inconvenience and against the wishes of the Work Horse. Margaret Stevenson, at whose strong insistence the whole project had been instigated, chose just this moment to go back to Scotland for an indefinite visit. The ostensible reason was ‘la grippe’, but it seems likely that she wanted a respite from having to witness the symptoms of Fanny’s deterioration. Austin Strong had been sent away to school in California (to live with his greataunt Nellie Vandegrift and her husband in Monterey) and Graham Balfour was off on his travels; the household was therefore at its smallest when Fanny suffered her worst ‘fit’ yet, as Stevenson confided to Colvin (in the one explicit letter on the subject):
The last was a hell of a scene which lasted all night – I will never tell anyone what about, it could not be believed, and was so unlike herself or any of us – in which Belle and I held her for about two hours; she wanted to run away.45
Desperate for some remedy, Louis and Belle decided to take Fanny to Sydney to consult a doctor, booking in to the Oxford Hotel again in late February. Released by a sense of holiday and a seeming improvement in Fanny, Louis went on a spending spree, buying new clothes for all of them, including a sumptuous black velvet gown for his wife, made secretly, to Belle’s measurements, as a surprise. They also had their photographs taken, and those of Fanny are among the most remarkable of all images of her. Unlike the scowling, dark, rather masculine figure she usually presents in pictures from these years, in Sydney the fifty-three-year-old ‘weird woman’ looked suddenly beautiful again, with a steady, sleepwalking look in her eyes and an almost magical youthfulness of feature.
But it wasn’t to last. ‘The first few weeks were delightful,’ Louis told Colvin,
her voice quiet again – no more of that anxious shrillness about nothing, that had so long echoed in my ears. And then she got bad again. Since she has been back, also she has been kind – querulously so, but kind. And today’s fit (which was the most insane she has yet had) was still only gentle and melancholy. I am broken on the wheel, or feel like it. Belle and Lloyd are both as good as gold. Belle has her faults and plenty of them; but she has been a blessed friend to me.46
In April, Louis wrote to his mother that they were ‘all recovered or recovering’, but Belle interrupted the dictation and exhorted Louis to ‘tell the truth – that Fanny is not recovering’. Louis continues, ‘But though it is true she seems to have taken a cast back, she is far indeed from being so dreadfully ill as she was before.’ At this, Belle abandons dictation and writes in her own person, ‘(She lies in bed, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t want to eat or speak; Louis does not want to alarm you but I think you should know what a really anxious time we are going through [ … ] The doctor says there is no danger and I hope he is right, but I would like to see her take an interest in something. Belle.)’47
Louis kept reporting his wife ‘much better’ over the next few months in letters to Colvin, and indeed never complained again to him about the problem, showing himself perhaps too much his mother’s son in this capacity to shut his eyes to unpleasantness. He was relieved to get a diagnosis for his wife’s illness of Bright’s Disease from a doctor in Honolulu: Fanny seemed relieved too – a kidney disorder was so much easier to live with. But the likelihood of Fanny having had Bright’s, which affects mostly young people and of which she had few symptoms except the sporadic stomach cramps, seems remote. Bright’s Disease is also traditionally confusable with syphilis.
When Fanny resumed writing her diary in July 1893, the domestic atmosphere it recorded was as bad as before. Her continuing instability is evident in her drive to justify all her own actions and criticise all those of her husband, often described as ‘in the sulks’. Contention seems the dominant note, and Louis the isolated target. When the menfolk of Vailima, on the outbreak of war in the islands, warned her and Belle to keep a low profile (for obvious reasons), she complained to her diary, ‘Lloyd and Pelema are young, and of course intolerant, but it is a little surprise [sic] to find Louis with the same ideas.’48 And when they all advised against attending a Fourth of July ball in Apia, Fanny and Belle became set on going. ‘Louis in deep sulks at our attitude, Lloyd sweetly amiable, Pelema keeping out of sight,’ she wrote, with a flash of the old humour, but went on to register petty complaints about Louis insisting on leaving the ball before three in the morning (so that he could work next day) and the fact that she and Belle had not dressed up as much as the other American women, who all, she notes pointedly, had elaborate new gowns for the occasion.
Once war had broken out in Samoa, it became, in Fanny’s mind, a sort of extension of the marital battleground. She persisted in misinterpreting Louis’s motives and loyalties in order to have something substantial to disagree with him about, pretending to find his placation of the Samoan Secretary of State sinister, and ‘furious’ over what she thought was a lessening of his fervour towards Mataafa. ‘I intend to do everything in my power to save Mataafa,’ she wrote dramatically on 17 July 1893:
And if Louis turns his face from him by the fraction of an inch, I shall wear black in public[.] [I]f they murder him, or if he is brought in to Apia a prisoner I shall go down alone and kiss his hand as my king. Louis says this is all arrant mad quixotism. I suppose it is; but when I look at the white men at the head of the government and cannot make up my mind which is the greater coward, my woman’s heart burns with shame and fury and I am ready for my madness.49
To some extent, as Louis knew, Fanny had always been like this: self-dramatising, highly strung, over-emphatic. The thought could not have been comforting, for she was now, to a greater or lesser extent, deranged. Louis’s description of himself to Barrie at the end of this year as ‘fatuously contented’ was a deliberately misleading one. There is no doubt that though he tried to keep it secret, the last three years of Stevenson’s life were deeply unhappy.
The Samoan war, when it came, lasted only nine days. There had been skirmishes since the spring of 1893 between Mataafa’s and Laupepa’s men, but the trigger was Mataafa’s raising of his flag at Malie, declaring himself king. On 8 July, government forces defeated him at Vailele (as it was obvious they would) and he fled to the tiny island of Manono, just off the western end of Upolu. Holed up there, he could easily have been beaten by Laupepa, but before the showdown took place British and German warships were sent to Manono and forced Mataafa to surrender. He was then deported to the Marquesas and the chiefs who had fought with him were put in prison in Apia.
Stevenson’s support of these imprisoned chiefs, by means of visits to them and continued agitation of the authorities about the conditions under which they were being kept, earned him their deep gratitude, and when they were released they offered to make a road from Vailima in commemoration of it. The opening of ‘The Road of the Loving Heart’ (suitably marked with a sign that made the political origins of the gift quite clear) was occasion for one of the many feasts that Stevenson and his family gave at Vailima. Birthdays, Thanksgiv
ing, the arrival of a British warship’s crew into Apia; almost anything could suggest one of these parties, photographs of which show everyone seated on the floor on the wide verandas (twelve feet deep all round) facing a rather intimidating quantity of taro, bananas and ship’s biscuits. The most splendid party they ever gave was a ball in February 1894, to which ‘all the big-wigs’ on the island were invited, and which only the German Consul and Cedercrantz refused to attend. There were bowls of kava (the mildly hallucinogenic local root that is pounded to make the Samoan national drink), a claret cup and beer, caviar and devilled chicken, Scottisches and gavottes:
For music the two Johnson boys and an unhanged thief and villain of a Hawaiian, with two boys who sang and played tambourine and bells, made the best band ever heard in Apia – bar men-of-wars. The floor was waxed to perfection, falls were frequent and heavy. The room shone all over with the glow of the four big lamps, and the sideboard glittered with all the silver and two lamps of its own. The front of the house shone from end to end [ … ] in the most lavish and resplendent manner with sixty-five coloured paper lanterns at a total cost of twelve dollars and I don’t know how much for candles.50
Stevenson still had hopes that Vailima would become ‘really a place of business’,51 and had been discussing banana yields with Graham Balfour, and the possibility of getting a tramway built from the house to the port. The cash-flow problem no longer looked like a temporary one; nor did Louis’s restored vitality. He had come to think of himself, almost glumly, as indestructible, doomed ‘to see it out’52 despite persistent migraines throughout 1893, a new and thoroughly unpleasant development. The symptoms seemed so obviously connected to his intake of alcohol and tobacco that he contemplated the unthinkable – giving both up – with ‘nauseating intimations that it ought to be forever’, as he confided to Gosse.53 ‘Cigarettes without intermission except when coughing or kissing’ is how Stevenson had described his nicotine habit to Barrie,54 so no wonder his resolve to give up proved unsustainable. He must have reasoned that the headaches would simply have to be endured, perhaps with the aid of another strong coffee, or a glass of Merlot.