Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  Baxter’s slide into alcoholism, which Colvin had been trying to keep from his friend, had to be confessed in 1894, as he was intending to make the journey out to Samoa. The deaths of his wife Grace in March 1893 and his father the following year, and continuing business troubles, had set Baxter on a downward path, and Colvin thought him ‘completely unhinged’ at their latest meeting, creating ‘deplorable scenes’.55 Baxter had put forward the idea (obviously for his own benefit as well as Louis’s – he would get a commission as agent) to publish a limited collected edition of Stevenson’s works to date, to be sold by subscription at the highest price possible, and to be called the Edinburgh Edition. Louis was delighted at the prospect, especially since he was not required to do anything (all the editing, such as it was, was done by Colvin, and the complex negotiations with the many publishers involved were undertaken by Baxter). The estimated profits from the venture would be eight to ten thousand pounds – an enormous sum that would be the saving of them all. And Baxter’s hopes were amply justified: the Edinburgh Edition sold out its subscription within two months of being advertised and eventually realised something near £10,000. But by then it was a memorial, not a work in progress.56

  The edition was dedicated to Fanny:

  I saw rain falling and the rainbow drawn

  On Lammermuir. Harkening I heard again

  In my precipitous city beaten bells

  Winnow the keen sea wind. And here afar

  Intent on my own race and place I wrote.

  Take thou the writing: thine it is. For who

  Burnished the sword, blew on the drowsy coal,

  Held still the target higher, chary of praise

  And prodigal of censure – who but thou?

  So now, in the end, if this the least be good,

  If any deed be done, if any fire

  Burn in the imperfect page, the praise be thine.57

  The search for Stevenson’s ‘masterpiece’ might have gone on for years, like the hunt for a hidden will, had he not left unfinished at his death Weir of Hermiston, on which his friends fell with gratitude, especially Colvin, who felt it held ‘certainly the highest place’ among Stevenson’s works, citing ‘the ripened art [ … ] the wide range of character and emotion over which he sweeps with so assured a hand, his vital poetry of vision and magic of presentment’.58 Arnold Bennett also thought Weir surpassed ‘all Stevenson’s previous achievement’,59 a dubious compliment which Stevenson would have been the first to raise an eyebrow at. But of course what his friends really valued was Weir’s potential, and, perhaps, an end to having to worry about the meaning of Stevenson’s oeuvre. The line had been drawn, the author had died young and his last work naturally acquired a symbolic status beyond all the others, indicating what might have issued from that fertile brain and hard-pressed body had Stevenson been spared.

  Stevenson had started the story in 1890, put it by several times, and only worked on it consistently in the last weeks of his life, having spent months beforehand slogging away at St Ives (also unfinished). St Ives, set during the Napoleonic Wars, was described by the author as ‘a mere tissue of adventures’, and represented all he most disliked about his own talent: ‘a very little dose of inspiration, and a pretty little trick of style, long lost, improved by the most heroic industry’.60 From the first pages of Weir, on the other hand, it is obvious that Stevenson was relishing both his subject and his style. The writing is pithy and sardonic; Weir discusses old capital cases with his bride-to-be, by way of love-talk; she, in a comically constructed line, is described as ‘pious, anxious, tender, tearful, and incompetent’; Mrs Weir hears the local minister ‘booming outside on the dogmatic ramparts [ … ] like the cannon of a beleaguered city’, while Dandie Elliott is seen ‘honouring the Sabbath by a sacred vacancy of mind’. Weir himself is a great character-study, based on a real-life ‘hanging judge’, Lord Braxfield, the last on the Scottish bench, according to Stevenson, to employ the pure Scots idiom. Weir has no affectations, not even that of judicial impartiality. He is natural to the point of grossness, continually offending his refined son by his manners and language and terrifying his meek wife, who thinks him ‘the extreme, if scarcely the ideal, of his sex’. But the recondite pleasure Weir finds in his work (condemning criminals to death) is not mere sadism, as his son believes, nor does Weir lack finer feelings; he is simply impotent to express them. His stoicism about this disability is deftly portrayed by the author: ‘If [Weir] failed to gain his son’s friendship, or even his son’s toleration, on he went up the great, bare staircase of his duty, uncheered and undepressed.’61

  There are two prominent women characters in the book, both (in a return to the double motif) called Kirstie Elliott; one is the young woman whom Archie Weir loves, the other her aunt, a Border-country earth-goddess, emotional and strong-minded. The chapter about the elder Kirstie alone in her bedroom, ‘A Nocturnal Visit’, represents the first time the author had allowed any sustained attention to rest in the thoughts of a female character:

  By the faint light of her nocturnal rush, she stood before the looking-glass, carried her shapely arms above her head, and gathered up the treasures of her tresses. She was never backward to admire herself; that kind of modesty was a stranger to her nature; and she paused, struck with a pleased wonder at the sight. ‘Ye daft auld wife!’ she said, answering a thought that was not; and she blushed with the innocent consciousness of a child. Hastily she did up the massive and shining coils, hastily donned a wrapper, and with the rush-light in her hand, stole into the hall.62

  The strong characterisation of the elder Kirstie, and her mature womanliness, seemed a relief to many critics who had feared that to Stevenson ‘woman remained the eternal puzzle’.63 ‘It will be an eternal pity if a writer like Stevenson passes away without having once applied his marvellous gifts of vision and sympathy to the reproduction and transfiguration of every-day human life,’ Israel Zangwill had written when reviewing the all-male Ebb-Tide, ‘if he is content to play perpetually with wrecks and treasures and islands, and to be remembered as an exquisite artist in the abnormal.’64 Weir of Hermiston gave everyone the opportunity to forget those apparent shortcomings, the ‘abnormality’ of his stories of blacks and chocolates, the dubious status of his collaborations, and return to an image of the author as they had first loved him: a brilliant stylist, a whirlwind of potential, a young man with a half-developed idea to be continued.

  Every reader who picks up Weir of Hermiston knows it is an uncompleted novel, yet the end, coming as it does mid-sentence, is always a shock:

  There arose from before him the curtains of boyhood, and he saw for the first time the ambiguous face of woman as she is. In vain, he looked back over the interview; he saw not where he had offended. It seemed unprovoked, a wilful convulsion of brute nature

  That is where Louis stopped work at midday on Monday, 3 December 1894. In the afternoon he gave Austin a lesson in French and later in the day (Fanny said it was about 6 p.m.) he was on the back veranda with his wife, helping her prepare the dressing for a salad. By her account in a letter to Anne Jenkin written two days later, Fanny had been having presentiments of disaster all day and Louis was ‘trying to cheer me up’. ‘One of the last things he did was to play a game of solitaire with cards for me to watch, thinking it would amuse me and take my mind off the terror that oppressed me.’65 This is an odd detail, for solitaire is not a game with any spectator-value, and Fanny, an avid card-player, is as likely to have played it herself as stood and watched someone else do so. Perhaps Louis was trying to entertain her with a commentary on his game as she worked – some such benign picture of the concerned spouse is certainly what Fanny wanted to suggest. It could also have been the case that Louis was sitting out ‘the terror’ of his wife’s dark mood by retreating into this quintessentially solitary pastime.

  When it came to making the mayonnaise (Louis’s special request – again it sounds as if he was trying to humour or divert his wife), he took the job of
dripping the oil in, while Fanny dealt with the egg yolks. ‘Suddenly he set down the bottle, knelt by the table leaning his head against it,’ Fanny wrote, unable to finish her account, which Belle completed: ‘He suddenly said, “What’s that?” or “What a pain!” and put both hands to his head. “Do I look strange?” he asked, and then he reeled and fell backwards.’66 The servant Sosimo ran to help, Fanny cried out for hot water to be fetched, and as they half-carried him into the big hall, Louis, according to Austin Strong, said, ‘All right Fanny, I can walk.’67 Belle had come down to see what her mother was shouting about, and found Louis unconscious in a chair, breathing heavily, his feet in the hot water, his hands being chafed to keep his circulation active. Lloyd, arriving up the garden, unaware of an emergency, was sent immediately down to Apia to fetch help, while Margaret, Fanny and Belle did their best, rubbing brandy on Louis’s skin: ‘We saw that he was dying,’ Belle wrote, ‘though each said to the other “he is surely better” or “his pulse is stronger”’:

  [ … ] as the room darkened one by one all the Samoans on the place crept in silently and sat on the floor in a wide semi-circle around him. Some fanned him, others waited on one knee for a message and others ran down the road with lanterns to light the doctor.68

  Lloyd found two doctors, the first to arrive the surgeon from HMS Wallaroo, who took Stevenson’s limping pulse, but clearly felt there was no hope of revival. Seeing the writer’s emaciated arms, he exclaimed, ‘How can anybody write books with arms like these?’69 Their local doctor, Bernard Funk, came next, but there was nothing to be done except fetch a bed into the hall and listen to the prayers of Aunt Maggie and her friend Clarke, the missionary. In between those, there were only fewer, fainter breaths.

  Stevenson died just after eight o’clock that evening, of a cerebral haemorrhage, according to Funk’s certification. There was no commotion or outcry; the family, who had lived with this death for so long, seemed numb. They laid out the body in dress trousers, a white shirt and gold studs, and two of the ‘boys’ put the corpse’s hands together, ‘interlacing the fingers with tender care’.70 The news spread quickly, and all through the evening local chiefs and their families came to pay their respects, laying on the body the fine woven mats that were Samoans’ most precious currency and saying their dignified, brief farewells: ‘Tofa, Tusi Tala,’ ‘Alofa, Tusi Tala.’

  In the tropical heat, the burial needed to take place quickly, but the place where Louis had wanted to be laid, the plateau of Mount Vaea that was visible from the house, had no path to it. Lloyd, thrust into authority, had to find some way of accessing the site and appealed to all their friends on the island to send whoever was available to help cut a path. More than forty Samoans, including some chiefs, came promptly the next day and began the seemingly impossible task of clearing the virgin jungle up the mountainside. Two paths exist today, one following approximately the line of that first, most direct one; both are very steep at points and tiring to climb in the equatorial humidity. The construction of the original path at speed on the day after Stevenson’s death was a feat of love as well as industry, the latest and greatest mark of the Samoans’ respect and affection for their most sympathetic sojourner.

  On a ‘gloomy, gusty, sodden December day’ in London, Sidney Colvin entered the street after lunching at a government office in Westminster, and saw newspaper posters ‘flapping dankly in the street corners, with the words “Death of R.L. Stevenson” printed large upon them’.71 Baxter, on his way to Samoa, heard the news in Port Said. He reached Vailima almost eight weeks later. In his bags were copies of the first two volumes of the Edinburgh Edition.

  * * *

  *Fanny’s voice is often described by her husband during this period as ‘shrill’, and the general tone at Vailima ‘a Babel fit for the bottomless pit; my wife, her daughter, her grandson and my mother all shrieking at each other round the house’.25

  *Wells’s ghastly novel of 1896 is remarkable for another strong link with Stevenson, which may be entirely coincidental (as he could have heard the story only from hearsay by the date when The Island of Dr Moreau was published), and that is the incident in Dr Trudeau’s laboratory on his island in Saranac Lake when Stevenson voiced repulsion at the practice of vivisection. The similarity with the scene in Moreau’s laboratory, even to the names of the doctors, is peculiar.

  POSTSCRIPTS

  The memories of ladies are excellent repositories of personal matters, dates, and other details; a family inquiry greatly interests them, and they are zealous correspondents.

  Francis Galton, Record of Family Faculties

  FANNY STAYED ON AT VAILIMA, shocked, lost, helpless, for a couple of years. She had a large cement-slab tomb built over Louis’s grave, and bronze plaques designed for it by a San Franciscan dilettante called Frank Gellett Burgess, with the poem ‘Requiem’ on one side and Ruth’s speech to Naomi, in Samoan, on the other.* Her demands to the British government to annex Samoa so that the grave would become part of the Empire and Louis lie in British soil were politely ignored by the authorities.

  Unsuccessful, too, were Fanny’s plans to start farming seriously, to go into production of the ingredients for making perfume. By 1897, the year that Margaret Stevenson died in Edinburgh (releasing to the heirs the rest of Thomas Stevenson’s substantial legacy), the family had decided to move back to California, where Fanny had an imposing house built for herself on the corner of Hyde Street and Lombard in San Francisco. She rented Vailima out to a man called Chatfield, editor of the Samoan daily newspaper, but got into an expensive lawsuit against him over the expenses and upkeep, and it was eventually sold (minus the site around the grave) to a German merchant for the knockdown price of £1750. When the Germans annexed Samoa in 1900, Vailima became, ironically enough, the Governor’s residence.

  Lloyd, who married an American called Katharine Durham in 1896, brought his wife to live at Vailima for a brief period, and for an even briefer period served as American Vice Consul in Samoa. His first son, Alan, was born in 1897 and another, Louis, three years afterwards. Katharine, at first approved of by Fanny, fell out with the whole family one by one, went through a bitter divorce from Lloyd and spent years in contention over the ‘truth’ about RLS, publishing several books on the subject, much to her mother-in-law’s annoyance.

  The wealth produced by the Stevenson literary estate, of which Lloyd received more than half, allowed him to live in the manner to which he had become accustomed; he wrote several more novels over the next fifty years, married and divorced again, bought a lot of cars, went on a lot of cruises and spent his last years living on the Côte d’Azur with a Frenchwoman called Yvonne Payerne, his junior by forty years, by whom he had another son. Among his acquaintances was Somerset Maugham and among his enthusiasms the political ideology of Benito Mussolini.1 The general effect of his post-collaboration career as a writer can be expressed math-ematically: Stevenson-plus-Osbourne, minus Stevenson, is less than Osbourne.

  Belle inherited land adjoining Vailima from her stepfather, who had purchased it in 1893, but became enormously rich in later life, not so much through her connection with the Stevenson estate or her own published memoirs (including Memories of Vailima, with Lloyd, and her autobiography, This Life I’ve Loved) but from the discovery of oil in the 1920s on land owned by her then husband, Edward Salisbury Field. ‘Ned’ was also an author of sorts, and had been Fanny Stevenson’s protégé and secretary in the 1910s, possibly also her lover. He was forty years younger than Stevenson’s widow, and twelve years younger than Belle. Another protégé of Fanny, Gellett Burgess, was also thought to have been her lover in the late 1890s, but the impassioned letters that seem to prove this (wrongly identified for years in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley) are in fact from Belle. That brings to at least four the number of men mother and daughter shared.

  In 1899, Graham Balfour was called to a meeting with Fanny and Lloyd in London and asked to take over from Colvin the task of writing Stevenson’s biography. Col
vin had not been consulted about this, only vaguely threatened and grumbled at. The family had developed an elaborate critique of his methods and motives, the main thrust of which was that he was being too slow. But no one could have justly accused him of laziness, when within four and a half years he had not only held down his full-time job at the British Museum but overseen the publication of the Edinburgh Edition, the preparation and production of several posthumous Stevenson works, the editing of the Vailima letters and, as the archives show, prepared a good deal of background work on the biography.

  Balfour was clearly aware of the fine line he would have to tread between the ‘family’ and Stevenson’s soon-to-be-ousted mentor and friend. But the offer to write the biography was irresistible; not so much for the money (£750, of which he was to get half, the family the rest) as for the chance to write the official ‘life’ of his cousin, by now one of the most celebrated writers on the planet. Henry James, who described Balfour to Gosse as ‘very lean & brown & excellent’, watched over the progress of the book with nervous interest and wrote a long appreciative letter to the author when the Life finally appeared in 1901: ‘The whole thing, the whole renewal of contact and revival of sight of him has greatly affected me,’ James said, ‘bringing back so the various wonder of him – so that one feels, as anew, stricken’: