Anatomy of Restlessness (16 page)

Pope-Hennessy did not set out to write a critical biography of Stevenson or to treat his books as more than so many incidents in his career. This is a pity, especially with so autobiographical a writer. Stevenson was profoundly self-centred and had a morbid concern for his public image. He liked to think he was free with information about himself. In fact he kept tight rein on the confessional; but, consciously or not, he was always dropping broad hints in his stories. Pope-Hennessy's decision to concentrate on the life and not the works is, however, excusable. Stevenson was a talented story-teller but he was never first-rate. His grasp of character was limited to a few stock types; overdrawn and larger than life. He was unduly concerned with the niceties of style, advising young writers to bow their heads before the idol of technique, but in his own case the result tends to be limp and ineffectual. He was also unable to write clearly about the present and drifted off into imaginary fancy dress occasions. He is at his most enjoyable when writing for children, when he does not complicate the plot with tangential moral postures. But that is hardly the mark of a first-rate writer.

Nor can one think of his life as a first-rate performance. He was a careful man who lacked the open-hearted audacity of a Wilde. He was often on the verge of some splendid and dangerous act, but caution got the better of him. His vaunted revolt against Victorian propriety and his descent into low-life were halfhearted and tempered by fear of scandal. He was also something of a prig. He cultivated a reputation for womanising (without much evidence), yet he was always ready to weigh in against joyless lust. A vein of self-satisfied meanness overlaid his generosity; his handouts usually provoked resentment. His denial of faith was calculated to pain his Calvinist father, yet
Travels with a Donkey
tails off into an anti-Catholic, pro-Protestant tract. He harped on the need for the simple life, alone or out in the open with the woman one loves, only to cumber himself with the hefty trappings of the middle class. He yearned for adventure, for a ‘pure dispassionate adventure such as befell the great explorers'. But he hadn't the stomach for it; on the whole, he travelled in a world made safe for aesthetes. He longed for a Great Man Friend, a fellow-adventurer like Queequeg in
Moby Dick
; in practice his chosen playmate was Fanny's son, Lloyd Osbourne, for whom he wrote
Treasure Island.
He claimed to suffer under the stultifying drowsiness of Victorian peace (‘Shall we never shed blood? This prospect is too grey') – and spent much of his time playing with toy soldiers.

When he died at Vailima in Samoa in 1894, the British Empire was at its height. Stevenson, the champion of native causes, was hailed in some circles as a latter-day saint. Stevenson, the writer of boyish tales (in a world run by overgrown boys), was acclaimed as though he were one of the great novelists of all time. British and American readers pored admiringly over each perfect sentence. The first edition of
Treasure Island
acquired tremendous value among collectors. The young American bibliomane Harry Elkins Widener said he never travelled without his copy; it went down with him on the
Titanic.
Why such an obvious second-rater came to enjoy so inflated a reputation would make a very worthwhile subject, but again, Pope-Hennessy does not get us very far. Henry James, writing to commiserate with Fanny, was close to the mark: ‘There have been—I think—for a man of letters, few deaths more romantically right.' Perhaps the Stevenson secret lay in the fact that he did (or appeared to do) the kind of things the public expects from its heroes. And he managed to attract a great deal of publicity for them. Whether his acts were genuine or faked is beside the point. The events of his life and the circumstance of his death have a mythic wholeness common to figures of heroic legend – a difficult childhood, an overbearing foster-mother, a revolt from the authority of the father, a journey to a far country, marriage to a stranger, a fight against menacing forces (in this case a tubercular chest), return and reconciliation with the father, public acclaim, and then a second departure followed by death in a remote and mysterious situation.

It is Stevenson's second-rateness that makes him interesting. His predicament is very familiar – the spoilt child of worthy, narrow-minded parents, unwilling to follow in the family business, longing to slough off civilisation in favour of healthy primitivism, yet tied to home by links of affection and cash, Stevenson is the forerunner of countless middle-class children who litter the world's beaches, or comfort themselves with anachronistic pursuits and worn-out religions.
Travels with a Donkey
is the prototype of the incompetent undergraduate voyage.

Edinburgh is the key to understanding Stevenson. Pope-Hennessy seems to have gone there as a tourist on a literary pilgrimage; he failed to take the measure of it, and missed some valuable clues. Edinburgh is a place of absolute contrast and paradox. A sense of quality in men and things goes hand in hand with chaotic squalor. The rational squares and terraces of the New Town confront the daunting skyline of the Old. Slums still abut the houses of the rich. Wild mountain scenery impinges on the heart of the city. On fine summer days nowhere is lighter and more airy; for most of the year there are icy blasts or a clammy sea fog, the
haar
of the east coast of Scotland. Edinburgh is contemptuous of the present. In no other city in the British Isles do you feel to the same extent the oppressive weight of the past. Mary Queen of Scots and John Knox are a presence. The dead seem more alive than the living. There is a claustrophobic, coffin-like atmosphere that makes Glasgow, in comparison, seem a paradise of life and laughter. Moderate health is virtually unknown. Either people enjoy robust appetites, or they are ailing and require protection. Heady passions simmer below the surface. In winter the city slumbers all week in blue-faced rectitude, only to explode on Saturday evenings in an orgy of drink and violence and sex. In some quarters the pious must pick their way to church along pavements spattered with vomit and broken bottles.

From his endless hours at the kirk Stevenson got the lecturing tone that creeps into his work. From his house in Heriot Row, he got his careful good taste; from Edinburgh conversation, his infuriating archaisms and refined, euphemistic circumlocutions; from the city's parades and martial music, his suppressed militarism; from its blood-stained legends, his fondness for the ghoulish. Under the influence of his training at the Edinburgh Bar, he makes his characters plead their cause, rather than state their case. Edinburgh, the historical stage-set, conditioned his rejection of Zola's realism and inspired his own rather fey romancing. The model for
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
was a symbolic Edinburgh character of the eighteenth century, Deacon Brodie, a respectable cabinet-maker who was a thief in off-hours and eventually got himself hanged. Stevenson set
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
in London, but it was Chesterton who spotted that it was an Edinburgh story, with its pattern of light and darkness, its rich mansion giving out on to a slum, its Calvinistic antithesis of absolute good and evil. It does not say much for Stevenson's understanding or tolerance that he should bestow his sympathies on DrJekyll and damn Mr Hyde.

From Edinburgh too came his compulsion to escape. Most of its citizens, at some time, are swept by the urge to get out. The young Stevenson recorded how he watched with longing the southbound trains leaving Waverley Station; and writing to his mother in 1874, he warned her not to mind his prolonged absences: ‘You must remember that I shall be a nomad, more or less, until my days be done.' One side of Stevenson was the perennial boy with the pack on his back, always happier to be somewhere else, unable to face the complications of sex, and ready to work it off on a bike. He belongs, in spirit, to a long line of literary vagabonds; Whitman, Rimbaud and Hart Crane are other examples who come to mind. Stevenson undoubtedly derived a good deal of his glorification of the open road from Whitman, but he never achieved the vigour of the American's athletic outpourings.

The other side of Stevenson was the man with the staid, conventional view that he should marry and settle down. In a way his choice of a wife was ideal. Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne was another very familiar type—the tough, neurotic American, separated from her husband, approaching middle age yet still pretty, with children, in Europe, in search of the arts. She was a girl from the Midwest, married to her childhood sweetheart, who had grown from a beautiful boy into a philandering layabout. Fanny appears to have been very naive about her husband's love affairs until they were thrust under her nose. She then developed a distaste for aggressive masculinity, and perhaps a distaste for sex in general. The tomboyish element in her character helped her survive the Nevada mining camps to which Sam Osbourne dragged her, but the rootless shiftings of her first marriage instilled in her a rapacious appetite for property and an obsession with minute social distinctions. The death of her younger son in Paris in 1876 turned her into a guilt-ridden woman with an urge to save someone or something. The young Scottish exquisite, who was chronically ill, awoke her salvationist impulses.

Pope-Hennessy reads the Stevenson marriage as a straight love story. In a sense he is right. There is every reason why the gauche, elfin lad, with his ‘odd intense gaze', should have been drawn to an attractive older woman. Furthermore, any transatlantic love affair holds an extra fascination for both sides, combining the charm of the exotic with an ease of communication. It is fairly certain that Fanny and Louis became lovers at Grez. But there was not going to be much sex in this marriage, and I do not think Pope-Hennessy has plumbed its complexity. Fanny was to be the dominant partner. In good times, she was to be companion, fellow-adventurer, sister and mother, but hardly ever the lover. In bad times she was to be the devoted, iron-willed sick-nurse, filling the emotional gap left by Alison Cunningham: indeed, she seems to have preferred the role of nurse to all others.

In
Catriona,
which Stevenson wrote as a sequel to
Kidnapped,
there is one telling incident where the hero and heroine have to defend themselves. Catriona laments that she was not born a manchild and able to wield a sword, because David Balfour (a law student like Stevenson) had never learnt to use one. Some critics have suggested that Stevenson was impotent. There is even talk of a ‘lasting injury' to his manhood, acquired from an Edinburgh whore. He himself was the first to say he did not want a family of his own, while it was only at the end of his writing career that he brought himself to handle female characters. To introduce women, he once said, was ‘poison bad world for the romancer'. There was in Stevenson a girlishness, always kept within the bounds of Victorian prudery, that thrilled at tough, aggressive masculinity. The sailors of
Treasure Island
are nut-brown and soiled and scarred, and they foreshadow the Samoan house-boys that, together with Lloyd Osbourne, he selected for their beauty at Vailima. The novels are also filled with handsome greying bachelors who take a ‘fancy to the lady'. In the
Weir of Hermiston
fragment, the young tentative Archie Weir (a self-portrait) says goodbye to Lord Glenalmond, ‘his eyes dwelling on those of his old friend like those of a lover on his mistress's'. Stevenson is well known to have had a father-fixation, and once spoke of his excitement and horror at the beauty of his father stripped on the beach at North Berwick.

This carrying-on has naturally led one particular kind of critic to think the worst of Long John Silver's wooden leg. But Stevenson was innocently amused by his own girlishness. When the Italian portrait-painter Gugliemo Nerli came to Samoa and painted him, he wrote the following scrap of doggerel:

Had he been a homosexual, or known what it was to be one, he would surely not have written these arch and embarrassing lines. Yet I do think we have to allow that part of Fanny's attraction was her son Lloyd; and the fact that, on Louis's death, Lloyd all but died of grief, makes it clear that their passionate friendship was far from one-sided.

Louis loved Fanny desperately. He got it into his head that he would marry her, and he did. He could not live without her, and, on receiving a hysterical telegram from her, he pursued her to San Francisco. This was the critical moment of his life, and I do not think Pope-Hennessy has understood it. After an appalling journey on an emigrant ship and train, Louis arrived in California, battered, scabby, wheezing and probably near death. Fanny and Lloyd welcomed him with open arms, but something was wrong. She was having a nervous breakdown, brought on by her divorce, and she dithered over a union with an invalid now as penniless as herself. In despair Louis went off on one of his lonely hikes, collapsed and was saved from death by an old rancher. In the winter of 1879-80 he lived alone in squalid lodgings in Monterey and San Francisco, half-starving, wrecking his lungs from the seafog, and breaking himself with work. He refused offers of cash from his London friend Sidney Colvin, saying he saw this period as a test of endurance. Meanwhile Fanny held off; she lived in a cottage across the bay at Oakland and saw him perhaps twice a week. She did not even invite him for Christmas. On 26 December he wrote home: ‘For four days I have spoken to no one, but my landlady or landlord or the waiters in the restaurant. This is not a gay way to pass Christmas and I must own the guts are a little knocked out of me.'

And the guts
were
knocked out of him. In the spring, Louis had his first haemorrhage from the lungs, and Fanny decided to marry him. The two events were simultaneous and connected. Unkind witnesses said that Fanny thought she was marrying a corpse and hoped to profit as Stevenson's widow. This is unfair. But it is hard to escape the conclusion that Louis courted death in San Francisco in order to qualify to be ill enough for Fanny to marry him. The marriage was based on the fact of his illness. Her well-being depended on his being flat on his back, on having him well enough to be dependent on her. Her protective streak, like that of Alison Cunningham, had a deadly side that would smother and unman him. Sargent's brilliant portrait of the pair, painted at Bournemouth, says it all – he, the pale, agitated narcissist, twiddling his moustachios and gazing into the mirror, she, a dumpy, sedentary figure in oriental costume. The Stevensons were in some ways a very modem couple.