Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography

‘The game’, clearly, was against his parents. ‘You know, I was doing what they didn’t want,’ he complained to Mrs Sitwell from Paris, ‘but I put myself out of my own way to make it less unpleasant for them; and surely when one is nearly twenty-four years of age one should be allowed to do a bit of what one wants without their quarrelling with me.’20 The peevishness of this is notable; Stevenson knew better than anyone how much his own self-interest contributed to keeping the ‘game’ going: ‘Going home not very well is an astonishing good hold for me,’ he remarked cynically. ‘I shall simply be a prince.’21 There was another factor too: he had hoped, during the long rest-cure at Menton, to make enough progress as an author to prove to his parents that writing could be a viable profession. But he had achieved so little there that he would have to resume law studies; indeed, studying would be seriously strenuous now, with so much ground to catch up. The prospect was appalling. What he really wanted to do, as he told Mrs Sitwell from Paris, was to live permanently in a country inn with a garden, near to friends but alone, and ‘to settle down there for good, among books and papers’.22 His favourite mood, he had to admit, had become ‘holy terror for all action and inaction equally – a sort of shuddering revulsion from the necessary responsibilities of life’.23 This was not ‘wanting to be a writer’ any more: this was accidie.

When Andrew Lang, the folklorist, was introduced to Stevenson in Menton, he thought him ‘more like a lass than a lad, with a rather long, smooth, oval face, brown hair that is worn at greater length than is common, large lucid eyes [ … ] “Here”, I thought, “is one of your aesthetic young men.”’24 ‘Aesthetic young men’ were beginning to seem the curse of the age, an effeminate crew full of subversive notions. But when Stevenson arrived back in Heriot Row in April 1874, looking every inch the fop in his swirling blue cloak and new Tyrolean hat, his parents swallowed down any disquiet they may have felt and welcomed the lost lamb with genuine delight. This was an enormous relief to Louis, who had been dreading a reprise of the previous autumn, and he fell in with their cheerful mood immediately.

The fear of losing their son, either to sickness or travel or marriage, had jolted Thomas and Margaret Stevenson, and it seems that while Louis was in Menton they began to repent their harshness of the previous year. They were now determined to keep him with them at any cost. His mother was suspicious of this ‘Mrs Sitwell’ who was spoken of so rapturously, and must have been quizzing her sisters and intimates about her, for she told Louis that Aunt Jane had once met Mrs Sitwell and thought she had very pretty small feet. (Needless to say, Aunt Jane’s observations of the separated wife are unlikely to have been limited to the lady’s extremities.) By the time the Stevensons were introduced to Louis’s married friend in London in the autumn, Margaret’s misgivings were so strong that she snubbed her. She suspected that Clark’s opinion was merely ‘a put-up thing’ between them, and that if illness didn’t carry her son off first, Frances Sitwell would.25

In the summer of 1874 the ecclesiastical procedure towards the Sitwells’ formal separation was well advanced (and came through in July); Frances’s job at the Queen Square college was to start in July also, and she was moving to Brunswick Row, just around the corner from her new workplace. When Stevenson went down to London for a protracted stay in June, he was in a confident mood, seemingly expecting to be able to take a much more prominent role in his Madonna’s future. What happened there is unclear, but there seems to have been an ‘emotional crisis’, as Mehew puts it,26 or even an ‘explosion’.27

Mrs Sitwell had certainly reached a critical juncture in her life, necessitating a sort of spring-cleaning of her priorities. Louis understood nothing of the practical difficulties she faced in splitting up a home and family, protecting her surviving son, Bertie, securing employment, and launching into a new life alone, with little money. His habit of moralising on these occasions must have been very irritating, even to the sweet-natured, long-suffering matron. Did she become exasperated with his constant demands on her attention? Or was she provoked to tell him point-blank that his passion for her was too intense and/or inappropriately aimed? The available evidence (contained in some distressed notes from Stevenson written at Colvin’s house at Hampstead) certainly suggests Louis had overstepped a limit and been reprimanded:

Looking back upon some of my past in continuation of my humour of the last two or three days, I am filled with shame. [ … ] Try to forget utterly the R.L.S. you have known in the past: he is no more, he is dead: I shall try now to be strong and helpful, to be a good friend to you and no longer another limp dead-heavy burthen on your weary arms.28

Another letter reconstructs a strange scene between them the previous evening:

You did not know I was ill last night myself; but I was; and when I hid my eyes it was that I might not see your face grow great before me, as things do when one is feverish. The terrible sculptured impassivity of a face one loves, when it is seen thus exaggerated, frightens and pains one strangely.29

This is neurotic, but also very intimate; the clearest glimpse we get of Stevenson’s feverishly unbalanced love for his ‘Madonna’. But at this moment in her life Mrs Sitwell did not need a sick youth in hysterics; she needed a quiet and efficient helper. Colvin, for example. Was this the moment when Stevenson began, reluctantly, to accept that the person she really loved and intended to share her new life with was his hesitant, lisping friend?

Stevenson’s trip to London had been planned as a sort of informal induction into the city’s literary life. He joined the Savile Club (proposed by the ever-helpful Colvin – a founder member of the club – and seconded by Fleeming Jenkin and Andrew Lang) and he met Leslie Stephen, for whose Cornhill Magazine he was writing an essay on Victor Hugo. Edmund Gosse was a member of the Savile and cultivated the friendship of the new arrival, whom he remembered having met on board the Clansman eight years earlier. ‘Louis pervaded the club,’ he wrote later; ‘he was its most affable and chatty member; and he lifted it, by the ingenuity of his incessant dialectic, to the level of a sort of humorous Academe.’30 In a suit of blue sea-cloth, a black shirt and ‘a wisp of yellow carpet that did duty for a neck-tie’,31 Stevenson must have stood out emphatically against the leather club chairs. Henry James, who met him that summer, was certainly rather cool about the ‘shirt-collarless Bohemian’ he had been introduced to by Lang at lunch.

Though Stevenson himself records this summer as a time of depression and inertia, Gosse was impressed by his vitality – ‘[he was] simply bubbling with quips and jests’ and displayed ‘the silliness of an inspired schoolboy’. ‘I cannot, for the life of me, recall any of his jokes; and written down in cold blood, they might not be funny if I did. They were not wit so much as humanity, the many-sided outlook upon life.’32 Gosse left a vivid portrait of how Stevenson rarely sat or stood in conventional manner, but threw his legs over the arms of chairs, perched against bookshelves or sofa ends, or sat on the floor: ‘[he] would spend half an evening while passionately discussing some great question of morality or literature, leaping sideways in a seated posture to the length of [the] shelf, and then back again’. ‘In these years especially [ … ] he gave the impression of something transitory and unreal, sometimes almost inhuman.’33

Colvin was trying to set up a deal with the Portfolio for a series of essays by ‘Ah welless’, as he called him,34 that could be worked into a book later. Stevenson might have been expected to jump at this opportunity, but had reached such a low ebb that the amount of work Colvin was suggesting – an essay a month, or even an essay a quarter – seemed impossible. ‘Never, please, let yourself imagine that I am fertile,’35 he told him, adding rather preciously that he couldn’t write to a deadline but had to let his works ‘fall from me [ … ] as they ripen’.36 This was the man who in time became a veritable word-mill: at this moment in 1874 he was indistinguishable from a dilettante.

Not that Stevenson didn’t relish the idea of being published. Thinking over Colvin’s suggestion, he began to imagine:

Twelve or twenty such Essays, some of them purely ethical and expository, put together in a little book with narrow print in each page, antique, vine leaves about, and the following title.

XII (or XX) ESSAYS ON THE

ENJOYMENT OF THE WORLD:

BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

(a motto in italics)

Publisher

Place and date

Of course the page is here foreshortened but you know the class of old book I have in my head. I smack my lips; would it not be nice!37

The attention to peripherals is characteristic, so is the desire to eke out the minimum number of words into a book by expedients such as wide margins and decorations. In ‘My First Book’, published in 1894, Stevenson would write of the ‘veneration’ with which he used to regard the average three-volume novel of the time ‘as a feat – not possibly of literature – but at least of physical and moral endurance’.38

Stevenson loved to run ahead and gloat over possible future achievements. The only problem was that having done the gloating, he often found he had exhausted his enthusiasm for a project. His notebooks and letters are full of lists of chapters for books he never so much as planned out or wrote a line of. The lists, the naming, the brave idea of a title page, were often enough in themselves – or enough to convince himself that further work would be wasted. In his Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, Roger Swearingen lists 393 items, only twenty-seven of which are published, principal works. Even granted that many of the pieces listed are essays and stories which were gathered up into collections later, there are still scores of unfinished essays, unstarted stories, grand schemes, false starts: enough to have furnished two or three doppelgänger careers. With a little push this way or that, Stevenson might not have been known as the author of Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde but as the playwright of The King’s Rubies, or the biographer of Viscount Dundee.

1874 was one of the years rich in these byways. Stevenson had already picked up and set down the ‘Four Great Scotsmen’ book, and in the autumn was thinking of a work of fantasy to be called ‘The Seaboard of Bohemia’. Since he links this to Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, which was the model behind Prince Otto, ‘The Seaboard’ could have been an early intimation of that 1885 novel, which was also about Bohemia and had a character strongly based on Mesdames Garschine and Zassetsky. He was also thinking of putting together a first collection of short stories, utilising some of his 1868–69 ‘Covenanting Story Book’. The contents list he sent Colvin is almost comically upbeat; only three of the twelve titles were ‘all ready’; the rest either ‘want a few pages’ (i.e. only have a few pages?), need ‘copying’, ‘re-organization’ or are blatantly ‘in gremio’.39 ‘In gremio’ is where they stayed. Not one, apart from ‘The Two Falconers of Cairnstane’ – which was probably the original of ‘An Old Song’ – was ever published in the author’s lifetime.

Also not published in his lifetime, but begun in the summer of 1874, was one of Stevenson’s most original and most little-read books, Fables. He had been reviewing Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Fables in Song, which, he felt, lacked ‘the incredible element, the point of audacity with which the fabulist was wont to mock at his readers’.40 This was exactly what Stevenson transmitted in his own experiments with the form, three of which Colvin dates from this year: ‘The House of Eld’, ‘The Touchstone’ and ‘The Song of the Morrow’. The first of these is a satire on religious practice, clearly derived from Stevenson’s situation vis-à-vis Presbyterian Edinburgh. ‘The Song of the Morrow’ is a surreal, circular story about the longing for special knowledge (which of course the heroine does not achieve); ‘though power is less than weakness, power shall you have; and though the thought is colder than winter, yet shall you think it to an end’.41 Jorge Luis Borges, an ardent admirer of Stevenson, was particularly fond of these tales (of his own Parables he once said, ‘I owe that to Kafka and also to a quite forgotten book, to the fables posthumously published of Robert Louis Stevenson’42), and it is easy to see how the collection as a whole fits in with Borges’s witty expositions of the self-conscious artificiality of fiction. ‘The Touchstone’, a story of two brothers seeking by very different means the hand of the same princess, manages to merge the fantastic or ‘audacious’ with a startling sort of realism about human nature, the very ‘tenderness of rough truths’ that Stevenson had found wanting in Lord Lytton.43 It is fascinating to think that these very early and highly original fictions lay in a drawer for more than twenty years while Stevenson laboured to perfect duds such as Deacon Brodie or Prince Otto.

And on what was Stevenson pinning his ambitions in 1874? Not any sort of fiction, but – bizarrely enough – ecclesiastical pamphleteering. ‘An Appeal to the Clergy of the Church of Scotland’44 was an extraordinary departure, a response to the abolition in August 1874 of the practice of Crown and other patronage in the Church of Scotland. Patronage was the issue behind the ‘Disruption’ of the 1840s which led to the forming of the Free Kirk; Stevenson’s suggestion after its abolition was that ministers of the established Church should begin to contribute money to the support of returning Free Church ministers to compensate the latter for the years during which they had been cut off from comfortable benefices. His idea was in fact rather ridiculous (and implied that he expected Free Kirk ministers to want to rejoin the established Church in significant numbers), but he was convinced that he would at least ‘have done good service in unveiling a sham and struck another death-blow at the existence of superannuated religion’.45 The writing was terrible – ‘Observe, I speak only of those …’46 ‘And the position, as I say, is one of difficulty’ – and if he hadn’t written so solemnly about this pamphlet in his letters, one would be tempted to think ‘An Appeal’ a joke thought up by Stevenson and Baxter during a wet afternoon at the Spec. But the mischievous RLS who had lived for Jink and jollity was, at this point in his life, almost eclipsed. When his twelve-page pamphlet was published (anonymously) in the spring of 1875, a copy was sent to every member of the Church’s General Assembly. ‘I think I am going to make a figure in Scotch ecclesiastical politics,’ Stevenson wrote absurdly to Frances Sitwell, though Colvin remarked later that the pamphlet received ‘no attention whatever’,47 and a commentator in the 1920s called ‘An Appeal’ ‘somewhat gratuitous, if not impertinent’.48

When the new term began at Edinburgh University in the autumn, Stevenson was condemned to study again. It was his last year as a student, and his least indolent one, spurred on by a huge bribe from his parents. On passing for the Bar, he was to receive from them a thousand pounds – the equivalent of about £50,000 today. Compared with his allowance of £84 a year (newly raised to that sum, and considered by Stevenson ‘very comfortable’49), the prospect was one of real comfort and independence just around the corner. His parents of course expected him to practise the law once he qualified; they probably saw the thousand pounds (an advance on his patrimony) as a necessary amount for Louis to set himself up as an advocate. Louis on the other hand envisaged a future of personal leisure and earnest philanthropy. The only drawback was that he would have to spend much of the coming academic year locked in the ‘barren embraces’ of law books.50

Money continued to be the language most often spoken in Heriot Row. Thomas Stevenson was ill towards the end of 1874, with distressing indications that he might be subject to ‘some of the family ailments’.51 ‘My father is so really mad – I know no other word for it – that we have no pleasant time here,’ Stevenson wrote to Mrs Sitwell, relating how Thomas had railed about his wife in front of Louis and the servants. The older man’s mind was running on grievances, and speaking of inheritance, he cited circumstances which ‘superseded the call of blood; for instance did he think he had a son who thought as Tyndall [the materialist scientist] thought; he could not leave his money to him; he was not possessor of it, to so great an extent; he only held it in trust for the views in which he believed’.52 Thomas’s declaration expressed, his son felt, ‘the sense of his whole life’, and in response he promised solemnly ‘never to use a farthing of his money unless I am a Christian’. But Stevenson couldn’t stop going on from this spontaneous, nobly meant act of self-disinheritance to be pompous about it in his letter (which, by relating the incident, was already obliquely self-congratulatory), saying, ‘for me it will, of course, supersede the terms of any will written in ignorance, doubt or misapprehension [of my lack of belief]’.53 Skirting over the uncomfortable fact that he seems to have forgotten this resolution by the time his father died, or felt it was covered by his mitigation ‘I shall not let myself starve, of course’,54 the interview provides another example of how very much alike Louis and Thomas were in their principled pig-headedness and strong, rash speeches.

Stevenson was also heading for rhetorical meltdown with Mrs Sitwell. In the years he was in thrall to her, he gave her many different names, clearly a symptom of confusion about their relationship. First there was ‘Claire’, then ‘Madame’, ‘Madonna’, ‘Maud’ (from Tennyson’s poem, not Mrs Babington), and ‘Mother’; there was even a brief spell of ‘Lady Superintendent’ when Mrs Sitwell first took up that post at the College for Working Women. In Menton, Stevenson started to call her ‘Consuelo’, after the heroine of George Sand’s Mademoiselle Merquem: ‘Consuelo. Consolation of my spirit. Consolation.’55 In the book, Consuelo escapes an unhappy marriage and is free to marry the young man she really loves, but in real life the plot threatened to work out rather differently, and Stevenson was hard-pressed to know how to re-imagine his relationship with his newly-independent beloved. His confusion was obvious when he signed one letter, at Christmas 1874, ‘ever your faithful friend and son and priest’, having spoken of her as his ‘deity’, whose shrine he would tend forever. Wild though this is, Mrs Sitwell must have liked it, for she marked the letter ‘Keep this very safe for me.’56

Once Stevenson began to develop the mother – son metaphor in his letters to Mrs Sitwell, the results were astonishing:

And so, my beautiful and good and O surely not quite unhappy, mother of election, so you must be brave for my sake, and let me think of you with happiness and not with pain. Day by day, you become more to me; and day by day, I must acknowledge to myself how dependent I am on you for all that is good and beautiful in my poor life. This is the consolation I have given you always; and I now know no other: think of how I cling to you, Madonna, my mother; think of how you must be to me throughout life the mother’s breasts to suckle me, and be brave, dear, and be for me a brave mother; if I am to be a son, you must be a mother; and surely I am a son in more than ordinary sense, begotten of the sweet soul and beautiful body of you, and taught all that ever I knew pure or holy or of good report, by the contact of your sweet soul and lovely body [ … ] I long to be with you most ardently, and I long to put my arms about your neck and kiss you, and then sit down with my head on your knees, and have a long talk, and feel you smoothing my hair.57

He seems desperate in these months to reach an unchangeable state with his tormentingly lovely and devoted friend, writing to her of the ‘perpetual treasure’ of her heart and his belief that ‘you will never change to me any more; I believe it is safe’.58 ‘Surely between you and me, all that there is, is restful – is it not?’ he asked nervously in January 1875, half-hoping for the answer No. Electing her as ‘Mother’ might have been expected to help free the relationship from the vicissitudes of sexual longing, except that Stevenson was the first to admit that ‘it is not a bit like what I feel for my mother here’.59 He got much nearer to articulating his ideal when he rhapsodised to her about a photograph of the Parthenon pediment sculpture known as the Three Fates, in front of which he had shed tears with her on his last visit to London. The statue evoked for him ‘a great mythical woman, living alone among inaccessible mountain tops or in some lost Island in the pagan seas; [ … ] think dear, if one could love a woman like that once, see her once grow pale with passion, and once wring your lips out upon hers, would it not be a small thing to die?’60 It is an oddly aggressive fantasy, and, directed at a woman he once hoped to possess, tinged with vindictiveness.

Sadly, there was no great mythical woman around to turn Stevenson’s attention away from Frances Sitwell, love for whom was turning into festering misery. ‘You are all the women in the world to me,’ he told her in February, while admitting to Bob, ‘I have dropped out of my service to the second rates.’61 He still haunted howffs such as the Gay Japanee, but only to drink or take opium. All that winter he was seedy and in a ‘curiously impressionable state’, rather like the morbid melancholia of his early student days. A crippled girl ‘with that curious voice [ … ] of sexless and ageless deformity’, two lost children being walked to the police station by an officer, the trains curving out of Waverley station seen from high on the North Bridge; all these everyday things affected him queerly, ‘took hold of’ him, as he described it to Mrs Sitwell. ‘I don’t like being so sensitive in town, though,’ he said, ‘the impressions are more often painful than agreeable.’62 He was turning into the Caillebotte of Edinburgh – or perhaps its de Nerval. A prose poem that he wrote that year contains this vividly neurasthenic paragraph:

The dresses of harlots swayed and swished upon the pavement. Pale faces leaped out of the crowd as they went by the lights, and passed away like a dream in the general dream of the pallid and populous streets. The coarse brass band filled the air with a rough and ready melody; and the fall of alternate feet, and the turn of shoulders and swish of dresses, fell into time with it strangely. Face after face went by; swinging dress after dress brushed on the even stones; out of face after face the eyes stood forth with a sordid animal invitation.63

This was the preoccupied, unhappy young man whom Leslie Stephen took with him to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary one day in February 1875. Stephen was in the city to give two lectures on the Alps and had decided to pay a visit not only to ‘Colvin’s friend’, but to another young contributor to the Cornhill who was at that time a long-term patient at the Infirmary. William Ernest Henley, a twenty-six-year-old would-be writer suffering from necrosis of the bone, had arrived in Edinburgh eighteen months earlier. He had already had his left leg amputated below the knee (as a result of tuberculosis), and had been told the second foot was beyond cure, but Henley had heard of the pioneering work of the Edinburgh surgeon Joseph Lister, and came north in 1873 to be treated by him. Lister’s controversial belief was that antiseptics could be used to prevent as well as treat putrefaction, and under his care, with several operations and whole years of bed rest, Henley’s condition was gradually stabilising.

Stephen had been touched by the pathos of Henley’s situation and decided to take Stevenson along with him on his second visit to the gloomy old hospital in the hope that ‘Colvin’s friend’ might be able to lend Henley books and visit him. It was a judicious move: Stevenson was deeply impressed by Henley and wrote enthusiastically to Mrs Sitwell about the ‘bit of a poet’ he had just met: