Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography

Publication fascinated the young student of engineering, who had secretly become fixated on the consumption and production of literature. ‘I had already my own private determination to be an author,’ he wrote in ‘The Education of an Engineer’.12 But the acquisition of technique, that seemed to him all-important, was difficult. Three of the four stories in his juvenile ‘School Boys Magazine’ had ended on a cliffhanger with the words ‘To Be Continued’. The pleasure in writing the beginnings of stories (natural enough in an apprentice) and a revulsion from the work involved in finishing them would remain the most marked characteristics of Stevenson’s creative life.

To be continued … by whom? One solution to the problem was to share the burden with a collaborator. In the spring of 1868, while he was also trying to write his ‘covenanting novel’, Louis wrote to Bob, ‘Don’t you think you and I might collaborate a bit this summer. Something dramatic, blank verse and Swinburne choruses.’13 Just the idea of collaboration then set him off in the same letter on a long sketch of two possible plays, the second of which, a tragedy about the Duke of Monmouth, got so elaborate as to put off any potential helper from the start:

Scene, a palace chamber. Without famine and revolt and an enemy investing the plains. A. found making love to B. Enter Prince who overhears. P. and A. quarrel, P. being also in love with B. Swords are drawn but D., who resembles A. very closely separates them. Exit P., cursing and muttering

– and so forth. ‘Write me your opinion of the thing and I will write the first scene which nothing can alter. I’ll then send it to you for alteration, amendment and addition, and we can parcel out the rest of the thing or alter it,’ he wrote humorously, acknowledging how tenacious he was likely to be of all his own ideas. What he really wanted was not a co-author, but a goad – or at the very least an enthusiastic audience. No wonder Bob didn’t jump at the offer, and apart from friendly encouragement contributed nothing to ‘Monmouth: A Tragedy’. But the object was achieved: the play was one of the few projects of the scores started during his teens that Louis managed to complete.

In his demanding, self-imposed and self-policed apprenticeship, Louis tried on a dizzying variety of literary styles, as he recalled satirically many years later:

Cain, an epic, was (save the mark!) an imitation of Sordello: Robin Hood, a tale in verse, took an eclectic middle course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer and Morris: in Monmouth, a tragedy, I reclined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, I followed many masters; in the first draft of The King’s Pardon, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no lesser man than John Webster; in the second draft of the same piece, with staggering versatility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve [ … ] Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles in the style of the Book of Snobs.14

‘Nobody had ever such pains to learn a trade as I had; but I slogged at it, day in, day out; and I frankly believe (thanks to my dire industry) I have done more with smaller gifts than almost any man of letters in the world,’ Stevenson wrote modestly.15 What he needed no time to learn, however, was what to write about: his subject was always, somehow, himself.

Whenever I read a book or passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann.16

Study, practice, impersonation; ‘that, like it or not, is the way to learn to write’. One can hear in these heartening words a rallying cry for millions of would-be writers, and it may be no coincidence that much of the worst prose of the coming generation was written in imitation of Stevenson. Anyone can do it, he seems to be saying; all you need is persistence and humility. What is easy to miss (because the expression is so original) is that anyone who can coin a phrase such as ‘playing the sedulous ape’ to describe his debt to other authors owes nothing to anyone. The term passed straight into common parlance, and the essay itself, as Balfour averred a mere fourteen years after its first appearance in an American periodical, quickly ‘became classical’.

To be continued … It wasn’t simply a matter of by whom, but when? For three consecutive summers, Louis was obliged to attend engineering works in his capacity as apprentice to the family firm. Instead of travelling, as Bob was doing, to Paris or Fontainebleau, he found himself stuck for weeks in a series of inaccessible locations on the Scottish coast, with no company but that of the men on the works, and no entertainments other than tobacco, drink and letters from his mother. The men must have found him an odd specimen, a skinny teenager with no real interest in or aptitude for engineering, quite unlike his father and uncle, the firm’s obsessively dedicated partners. When there was an accident at the works in Anstruther, where Louis had been sent in July 1868 to observe the construction of a breakwater, the seventeen-year-old found himself in the middle of a minor uproar. Writing to his father about the incident, he reported how a little girl had pointed him out on the street, saying, ‘There’s the man that has the charge o’t!’, an identification that must have rung strangely in everyone’s ears.

Louis spent most of his time in Anstruther loitering on the quay, vaguely recording the progress of the works, or biting his pencil over calculations. ‘All afternoon in the office trying to strike the average time of building the edge work,’ he wrote home at the end of his first week. ‘I see that it is impossible. [My computation] is utterly untrustworthy, looks far wrong and could not be compared with any other decision.’17 In the evenings, Louis retreated to his lodgings at the house of a local carpenter, and tried to make up the lost time: ‘As soon as dinner was despatched,’ he recorded twenty years later, ‘in a chamber scented with dry rose-leaves, [I] drew in my chair to the table and proceeded to pour forth literature, at such a speed, and with such intimations of early death and immortality, as I now look back upon with wonder.’18 Believing himself to be doomed to die young, and doomed, what’s more, to spend what little time he had hanging around windswept harbour works, he felt compelled to sit up long into the night, ‘toiling to leave a memory behind me’.19

The scent of dead rose-leaves, the intimations of mortality and the burden of his unwritten masterpieces weighed heavily. The works were weighty too; the sonorously-named ‘Voces Fidelium’ was to be a dramatic monologue in verse, presumably on a religious theme; ‘Monmouth: A Tragedy’ was still in progress, as was the novel about the Covenanter, Hackston. He had come a long way from ‘The Baneful Potato’. But it was difficult to keep up a secret nocturnal career of writing, that must at times have reminded him of Deacon Brodie’s double life. The nights were warm that July in Anstruther, the rose-leaves and bowls of mignonette overpowering, and the window had to be kept open. Thus moths flew in continually and scorched themselves on the candles, dropping onto ‘Voces Fidelium’ in a manner so disgusting that the author was driven to blow out the lights and go to bed, seething with rage and frustration. Immortality was deferred yet again.

After an evening watching a wretchedly bad performance by strolling players at Anstruther Town Hall, Louis got into a dispute with a fellow engineering apprentice about the troupe’s pathetic actor-manager. His companion felt that the man would be better employed as an ordinary labourer, but Stevenson disagreed ardently, saying the player must be happier ‘starving as an actor, with such artistic work as he had to do’. The parallel with his own life and frustrated ambition was all too clear, and Louis left the scruffy hall ‘as sad as I have been for ever so long’.20 By the end of the month he was writing home in unusually forcible terms:

I am utterly sick of this grey, grim, sea-beaten hole. I have a little cold in my head which makes my eyes sore; and you can’t tell how utterly sick I am and how anxious to get back among trees and flowers and something less meaningless than this bleak fertility.21

But his parents chose to interpret this repugnance as temporary and specific, a symptom of ‘the distressing malady of being seventeen years old’,22 and Louis was packed off again the next month to spend six weeks in the ‘bleak, God forsaken bay’ of Wick, a fishing port only ten miles away from the most northerly point on the Scottish mainland, John o’ Groats. Anstruther had been a mere forty miles from home, across the Firth from North Berwick, where the Stevensons had taken many family holidays; Wick was a much more serious exile, far beyond the reach of the railway system, cold, bare and implacably foreign. In the herring season, the town was full of men from the Outer Hebrides, mostly Gaelic speakers, while the mainlanders spoke mostly Scots-English and both communities were heavily influenced by their common Norse ancestry. Louis listened to a wayside preacher in total incomprehension of all but one word, ‘Powl’ (the apostle), and was incapable of conversing with one of the Highland workmen at the harbour works. ‘What is still worse,’ he wrote home to his mother, ‘I find the people here about – that is to say the Highlanders, not the northmen – don’t understand me.’23

The firm had been commissioned to build a new breakwater in Wick harbour and work was well advanced, despite the permanently bad sea conditions, which led eventually to the abandonment of the whole project in 1874.* In 1868, however, the scene was full of men and industry; wooden scaffolding was in place all along the unfinished stonework, and there was a platform of planks at the end on which stood the cranking equipment for the divers’ air supply. The masons’ hammers chimed continually, the air-mills turned, and every now and again a diver’s helmet would surface from the choppy water and a man dressed bizarrely in a huge helmet and diving suit hoist himself up the sea-ladder.

Here was something to capture young Louis’s imagination, and despite his father’s strong reservations (and insistence that a doctor’s opinion be sought in advance), he was eventually allowed to go diving under the strict supervision of one Bob Bain. Stevenson recalled the experience as the best part of his whole engineering career. Wearing woollen underclothes, a nightcap and many layers of insulating material, with a twenty-pound lead weight on each foot, weights hanging back and front and bolted into a helmet that felt as if it would crush him, Louis went down the ladder:

Looking up, I saw a low, green heaven mottled with vanishing bells of white; looking around, except for the weedy spokes and shafts of the ladder, nothing but a green gloaming, somewhat opaque but very restful and delicious. Thirty rounds lower, I stepped off on the pierres perdues of the foundation; a dumb helmeted figure took me by the hand, and made a gesture (as I read it) of encouragement; and looking in at the creature’s window, I beheld the face of Bain.25

Encouraged to try jumping up onto a six-foot-high stone, Louis gave a small push and was amazed to find himself soaring even higher than the projected ledge: ‘Even when the strong arm of Bob had checked my shoulders, my heels continued their ascent; so that I blew out sideways like an autumn leaf, and must be hauled in hand over hand, as sailors haul in the slack of a sail, and propped upon my feet again like an intoxicated sparrow.’26

The weightlessness, silence and dreamlike seclusion made diving memorable and delightful, but Wick was otherwise short on delights. The countryside was flat and treeless, exposed for miles at a time, and Louis would shelter from the biting wind in small rock crevices, listening to the seabirds and repeating over and over to himself the lines of the French poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger, ‘mon coeur est un luth suspendu/sitôt qu’on le touche, il résonne’.27 Wick was a place of storms and shipwrecks, and one morning Louis was woken by the landlady of the New Harbour Hotel with news that a ship had come ashore near the new pier. The sea was too high to get near the works to assess the possible damage, but Louis reported back to his father the scene from the cope:

Some wood has come ashore, and the roadway seems carried away. There is something fishy at the far end where the cross wall is building; but till we are able to get along, all speculation is vain. [ … ]

So far, this could just pass for a technical report, but he goes on:

The thunder at the wall when it first struck – the rush along ever growing higher – the great jet of snow-white spray some forty feet above you – and the ‘noise of many waters’, the roar, the hiss, the ‘shrieking’ among the shingle as it fell head over heels at your feet. I watched if it threw the big stones at the wall: but it never moved them.28

It is hardly the language of a technocrat; even Burns managed to be less poetical than this in his work as a surveyor.

Evenings in the New Harbour Hotel Louis again spent alone with his ‘private determination’. He finished ‘Monmouth’, and dedicated it, with professional seriousness, to Bob; he was also experimenting with prose sketches and metrical narratives, one based on the biblical story of Jeroboam and Ahijah, another on Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale. He wrote of his literary projects to Bob in a series of agitated letters, revealing the depth of his desires:

Strange how my mind runs on this idea. Becoming great, becoming great, becoming great. A heart burned out with the lust of this world’s approbation: a hideous disease to have, even though shielded, as it is in my case, with a certain imperturbable something – self-consciousness or common sense, I cannot tell which, – that would prevent me poisoning myself like Chatterton or drinking like Burns on the failure of my ambitious hopes.29

Bob was irritatingly slow to respond, but when he did, expressed similar doubts about his ability to succeed as an artist, which was his own secret intention. The two of them were in a ferment of fears and ambition, but Bob’s was at once the easier and the more hopeless case: no one was forcing him to join the family firm (the example of his father’s breakdown must have allowed that), but he was self-confessedly indolent and depressive. Louis’s neuroses went the other way, towards overwork, having to live two lives in tandem if he wanted to be a writer at all. Nor did Louis need to drum up suicidal tendencies in order to be recognised as a full-blown romantic genius; death by natural causes seemed likely to get there first.

The most marked characteristic of Stevenson’s years as a student of engineering was loneliness. He seems to have made no lasting friendships at all at the university, or in the pubs and streets of the Old Town where he was most often found loitering instead of attending class. He was intimidated by the diligence of the ploughboys and earnest burghers’ sons who were his fellow students in natural philosophy or the dreaded mathematics. One of these students, it turned out, had only one shirt to his name and was forced to stay away from class on the days when it was being washed. Stevenson was ashamed to reflect that he needed no reason at all to stay away, but did so ‘as often as he dared’. He joined the University Speculative Society in March 1869, but didn’t make much of an impression there at first among the confident young future advocates and doctors who made up most of its membership. ‘The Spec’ was an exclusive debating club limited to thirty members, who met by candlelight and in full evening dress in a series of comfortable rooms in South Bridge. ‘A candid fellow-member’ (presumably Walter Simpson, brother of the lady who recorded this) said of the newly-recruited young engineer, ‘I cannot remember that Stevenson was ever anything as a speaker. He was nervous and ineffective, and had no power of debate; but his papers were successful.’30 His happier days at the Spec were still to come.

Thomas and Margaret Stevenson had bought their son a set of barbells to develop his chest, but no amount of callisthenics could perform that miracle; the boy didn’t have an ounce of either muscle or fat. As his body grew taller and thinner, it made his head look unusually large by comparison, and his eyes, that had always been wide-set and interestingly misaligned, began to look more than ever like those of an intelligent hare. In view of how quickly his health improved in warm, dry places, it was unfortunate, to say the least, that Stevenson lived so many years in one of the ‘vilest climates known to man’, in the damp and cold and dark of Auld Reekie. He used to hang over the bridge by Waverley station, watching the trains taking luckier people away from his native city, and remembered with piquant dislike ‘the solo of the gas burner in the little front room; a knickering, flighty, fleering and yet spectral cackle. I mind it above all on winter afternoons, late, when the window was blue and spotted with rare raindrops, and looking out, the cold evening was seen blue all over, with the lamps of Queen’s and Frederick’s Street dotting it with yellow and flaring eastward in the squalls. Heavens, how unhappy I have been in such circumstances.’31

Louis’s isolation made it difficult for him to fight back fits of morbid melancholy. ‘My daily life is one repression from beginning to end, and my letters to you are the safety valve,’ he told Bob bluntly, just after his eighteenth birthday. He managed to be tormented with scruples, mostly about his waste or abuse of the opportunities his parents had provided him with, and attempted once to leave home on the principle that he might ‘free himself from the responsibility of this wealth that was not his’.32 To minimise his parents’ total expenditure he came to the eccentric conclusion that so long as he doubted a full return to health, he would live very sparsely in ‘an upper room’, but when he perceived an improvement he would go back to being pampered and paid for, in order to make the quickest exit from dependence.

His plans for self-improvement all turned on renunciation of his true desires, and in these moods his single-minded pursuit of authorship struck him as not merely a feeble self-indulgence but actively wrong. Perhaps, as he wrote to Bob on a particularly gloomy day, ‘to do good by writing [ … ] one must write little’:33

I am entering on a profession which must engross the strength of my powers and to which I shall try to devote my energies. What I should prefer would be to search dying people in lowly places of the town and help them; but I cannot trust myself in such places. I told you my weak point before and you will understand me.34

The pious young man was imagining himself as some sort of Jesus of the streets – and yet, he was too unworthy for that. Sunday school teaching was perhaps the only option open to him, he mused – but no, that also required a purer spirit.

The dark talk of not being trustworthy in ‘lowly places of the town’ refers (not without a tinge of pride) to Louis’s rapid escalation of worldly knowledge during his student years. He later said that his childhood piety had gone hand in hand with its correlate, ‘precocious depravity’,35 which ranged from trying to summon up the Devil to solemn, secret experiments in blasphemy. Writing about his childhood at the age of twenty-two, Stevenson was in no mood to dismiss these traits, but saw them as consistent with his adult behaviour: ‘I find that same morbid bias, [ … ] the same small cowardice and small vanity, ever ready to lead me into petty falsehood.’36 He saw ‘a parallel case’ between his own early years and those of the Covenanter Walter Pringle of Greenknow, whose memoirs had been one of Cummy’s permitted texts. This is an extraordinary thing to say. Pringle’s Memoirs are stuffed with the harshest language: he describes his youth as ‘years of darkness, deadness, and sinfulness’ when he committed ‘abominations’ and ‘slept about the brink of the bottomless pit’,37 all in the context of later conversion, in other words, all in a priggish context. Stevenson could certainly be priggish too: the Covenanting childhood left deep divisions in his mind between good and evil, heaven and the pit, and ‘something of the Shorter Catechist’ hung about him, as W.E. Henley was to observe, even in his most apparently easy-going, atheistic days.

Just as in childhood Stevenson had found himself drawn fascinatedly towards the wickedness that his puritan upbringing taught him to revile, so in the freedom of adulthood and the long hours of college truancy he quickly became a habitué of some of Edinburgh’s most disreputable dives. ‘The underworld of the Edinburgh of 1870 had its sharp and clear geographical limits,’ one historian of the town has written. ‘It began in certain streets within a space of scarcely more than a few yards, and ended as abruptly.’38 What could have been more grimly satisfying to the young moralist than the ease with which he could traverse these boundaries?

Many years later, Stevenson told his cousin Graham Balfour that he felt his rather shabby forms of youthful dissipation were linked to the short allowance he was kept on:

You know I very easily might have gone to the devil: I don’t understand why I didn’t. Even when I was almost grown up I was kept so short of money that I had to make the most of every penny. The result was that I had my dissipation all the same but I had it in the worst possible surroundings.39

His ‘headquarters’ at this time, he told Balfour, was an old pub frequented by sailors, criminals and ‘the lowest order of prostitutes – threepenny whores’, where he used to go and write. Eve Simpson, rather missing the point, protested later that Stevenson had no need to behave like a poor man; he had ‘all his bills paid’, an allowance, ‘and his own study in a very hospitable home’.40 But the dingy old pub clearly pleased him, with its interesting human traffic: ‘[the girls] were really singularly decent creatures, not a bit worse than anybody else’.41

And he made an interesting figure himself, affecting a ‘scruffy, mountebankish appearance’ and cultivating notoriety among the neighbours in the New Town by his ‘shabby dress and dank locks’.42 ‘Hauf a laddie, hauf a lassie, hauf a yellow yite!’ boys called after him on the street, not visibly ruffling the young man at all.43 A poem of 1870 celebrates the effect his clothes and demeanour had on the average Edinburgh bourgeois:

I walk the streets smoking my pipe

And I love the dallying shop-girl

That leans with rounded stern to look at the fashions;

And I hate the bustling citizen,

The eager and hurrying man of affairs I hate,

Because he bears his intolerance writ on his face

And every movement and word of him tells me how much he hates me. 44

Perhaps Stevenson was trying to become a Scottish symboliste; he habitually, at this date, made marginal comments on his own poetry in French: ‘pas mal’ or ‘atroce’. The choice of free verse for this and the whole series of poems that he wrote in 1870 seems very bold and challenging, especially as Stevenson became known later as a rather conventional poet (when he was thought of in that role at all). None of these early verses – written when he was most serious about verse – was published in his lifetime, however.

The ‘bustling citizen’ most offended by Louis’s eccentricities of behaviour and dress was, of course, his father. Thomas Stevenson was always begging his son to go to the tailor, but when Louis finally succumbed and had a garment made, he chose a dandyish black velvet smoking jacket. He wore this constantly, so it soon lost whatever smartness it had: it was totemic, marking perfectly his difference from the waistcoated and tailed bourgeois of Edinburgh. It declared that although young Stevenson was sometimes confusable with a privileged brat from the New Town, his real milieu was the Left Bank, his true home among artists, connoisseurs, flâneurs.* And in the sanded back-kitchen of the Green Elephant, the Gay Japanee or the Twinkling Eye, ‘Velvet Coat’ became his nickname; the boy of genius, perhaps even the poète maudit.