Written Lives

by Javier Marías

  It is common knowledge that when he did give in, partly for reasons of money and partly out of indifference, he first had to write a new case for Holmes without reviving him, making it clear that the events had taken place before his death at Reichenbach, and that, later on, he would restore him to life, explaining that the detective had not, in fact, fallen into the water. He resisted for a long time though. He was unmoved when young Londoners were seen walking about with black crepe ribbons on their hats as a sign of mourning for Holmes. Indeed, he was reaffirmed in his decision by the outrageous comment made by one Lady Blank: “The death of Holmes broke my heart; I so enjoyed the books he wrote …” Conan Doyle suffered such confusions or malicious remarks on more than one occasion: during his campaign for election to Parliament, people would interrupt his speeches, addressing him as Mr Sherlock Holmes and asking him absurd questions that were criminal in nature rather than political; when, after much resistance on his part, he was knighted, he received a large number of letters congratulating him on becoming Sir Sherlock Holmes. It might be thought that what bothered him was that people should confuse the two men, but this was not the case—indeed, what bothered him most was that they did not confuse them enough, and that many people saw him more as a Dr Watson figure than as Sherlock Holmes. He was aware that, in his physical appearance, he more closely resembled Holmes’s chronicler: Conan Doyle was tall and strong, with a broad face, a rather snub nose, no sideburns, small eyes, and a large moustache, the ends of which he did, for a time, wax; he was not aquiline and slender, and it was not enough that he smoked a pipe and kept magnifying glasses of various sizes on his desk: he just wasn’t the type, and, in a way, people thought him incapable of the feats carried out by his creation. The reason for his antipathy towards or his dislike of the character was, in fact, the one he gave his mother or as he put it later: “I believe that if I had never touched Holmes, who has tended to obscure my higher work, my position in literature would at the present moment be a more commanding one.” What really mattered to the creator of one of the greatest marvels in the history of literature were his historical novels (these are what he meant by “his higher work”) over which he took great pains and researched meticulously, but which met with nothing like as much success. What wearied him about Holmes, too, was that his character admitted of “no light or shade”: he saw him as a “calculating machine”, to which he could add nothing for fear of weakening the “effect”, and for Conan Doyle, the “effect” was everything in prose.

  His favourite author was Poe and, among his contemporaries, Stevenson. Although they never met, they corresponded, and he felt Stevenson’s death as that of a dear friend. He got on quite well with James and with Oscar Wilde, and was friends with Kipling. Arthur Conan Doyle was convinced of his own importance, which is an agreeable way to go through life for those who manage to believe such a thing. When the Boer War began, he urged sportsmen to go and fight, and since he was himself the complete sportsman, he immediately offered himself as a volunteer. To the amazement of his mother, he gave the following explanation: “What I feel is that I have perhaps the strongest influence over young men, especially young sporting men, of anyone in England bar Kipling. That being so, it is really important that I should give them a lead.” Regrettably, he was considered too old to fight, and could only go to war in his role as doctor. He was about forty years old and was, by then, already deeply in love.

  Arthur Conan Doyle died on July 7, 1930, at seventy-one, surrounded by his family, holding his wife Jean Leckie’s hand and that of his son Adrian. He looked at his family, one by one, but could say nothing. Many years before, he had said that the secret of his success was that he never forced a story. It seems that on that day, he did not force a phrase either.

  Robert Louis Stevenson Among Criminals

  PERHAPS BECAUSE HE died so young or because he was ill all his life, perhaps because of those exotic journeys which, at the time, seemed nothing short of heroic, perhaps because one began reading him as a child, but whatever the reason, there is about the figure of Robert Louis Stevenson a touch of chivalry and angelic purity, which, if taken too far, can verge on the cloying.

  Stevenson was undoubtedly chivalrous, but not excessively so, or rather, he was simply chivalrous enough, for every true gentleman has behaved like a scoundrel at least once in his life. Stevenson’s once may have occurred near Monterey in California, when he accidentally set fire to a forest. A fire had broken out elsewhere and was spreading so rapidly that Stevenson, out of scientific curiosity, wondered if the reason for this rapid spread might be the moss that adorns and covers the Californian forests. In order to test this out, he had the brilliant idea of applying a match to a small piece of moss, but without first taking the precaution of removing the experimental piece from the tree. The tree went up like a torch, and Stevenson doubtless felt this provided a satisfactory conclusion to his experiment. His unchivalrous behaviour came afterwards, for not far off, he heard the shouts of the men fighting the original fire and realised that there was only one thing he could do, namely, flee before he was discovered. Apparently, he ran as he had never run in his entire life and as only the very wise and the very cowardly run.

  He had gone to California in order to go to the aid of the American woman who would later become his wife, Fanny van de Grift Osbourne, whom he had met earlier in Europe; she was ten years older than him, married to a Mr Osbourne (who ignored her and showed her no consideration) and was the mother of two children. She had urged him to visit her, although we do not know precisely in what terms, and Stevenson, without a word to his parents (for he was a spoiled only child), set out from Edinburgh and then, on reaching New York, crossed the whole of America, travelling in the same wretched trains as immigrants. The adventure provoked a general worsening of his always fragile health; indeed, ever since he was a child, he had endured the coughs and haemorrhages of a poorly diagnosed case of tuberculosis which kept him awake at night and more than once brought him close to death. His initial relations with Fanny van de Grift are somewhat obscure, since after that mammoth journey, Stevenson did not stay with her once he had helped her in whatever way it was that she needed help, but instead set off alone to a goat ranch, and it was not until much later, almost coolly one might say, that they married. From then on, she became not only a highly conspicuous, indeed ubiquitous wife, but also his nurse and nursemaid. Stevenson said on one occasion that had he known he would have to live like an invalid, he would never have married. He also said: “Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but to be good.” And on another occasion, he added: “It was not my bliss that I was interested in when I was married, it was a sort of marriage in extremis; and if I am where I am, it is thanks to the care of that lady who married me when I was a mere complication of a cough and bones, much fitter to be an emblem of mortality than a bridegroom.” His wife, on the other hand, did not seem much bothered by that “complication”; in fact, it helped her to feel useful, and thus proud, and so to derive some benefit from the situation. The truth is that, with the exception of Henry James, who always treated her with great respect, Stevenson’s other friends all heartily detested her, because Fanny, on the excuse that everything was bad for Louis’ health, devoted herself to organising every aspect of his life and to keeping him away from those friends whose companions—wine, tobacco, songs and talk—she considered dangerous.

  Although Stevenson was very loyal to her and stoutly defended her when she embarked on her own literary exercises and was accused of plagiarism by one of his friends, it cannot have been easy for him to accept these impositions, certainly to ju
dge by a letter to Henry James written at the end of his life, when he was already living in the South Seas, and in which he complained about being denied wine and tobacco (faced by a life without them, he said, all one could do was “to howl, and kick, and flee”). And despite his loyalty, he did once allow himself to comment on a photograph of his wife, admitting that Fanny had left the “bonny” category and entered that of “pale, penetratin’, and interestin’”. To be honest, looking at that photograph and others a century on, one cannot help noticing that Fanny van de Grift seemed always to be clothed in some kind of sack-like garment and had a face whose natural expression tended to the unpleasant, authoritarian, hostile and even sour.

  But perhaps harder still to give up than the tobacco and the wine were his friends, if we bear in mind that before his marriage he had led a frankly bohemian, even reprobate life. Quite apart from his various travels, most of which were undertaken vagabond-style, and apart, too, from his appearance and attire, so scruffy that, in America, passers-by fled from him, assuming he was a beggar, Stevenson also had many friendships which his strict, wealthy parents would have thought equally ill-advised. If one thinks of Long John Silver, Mr Hyde, the Master of Ballantrae, or the body snatcher, it comes as no surprise that their creator should be possessed of an ambiguous morality, if not as regards his own actions, then at least as an observer and listener. He was always fascinated by Evil and did not shy away from certain people simply because of what they had done.

  As a child, as well as harbouring strong religious feelings, feelings that drove him to hold forth, alone in his bed at night, on the Fall of Man and the Fury of Satan, he had thrown himself with great enthusiasm into committing ingenuously “sinful” acts, an enthusiasm, he confessed, that he never again felt about anything in his adult life. When he was nearing adulthood, he took to frequenting prostitutes, of whom he was very fond and whom he vigorously defended, and to participating in blasphemy contests from which he would emerge victorious, and he also engaged in a practice that he christened Jink, which consisted in “doing the most absurd acts for the sake of their own absurdity and the consequent laughter”. But all of this was nothing compared with the misdeeds of some of his friends: for a time he kept company with a satirist who had the most vitriolic tongue ever heard in his native Edinburgh and who helped Stevenson to see the negative side of every person, every idea, every thing; this inexhaustible satirist, it seems, even condescended to God, whom he despised because of the abysmal way in which one or two of the commandments had been formulated; he could dismiss St Paul with an epigram and bury Shakespeare with a philosophical antithesis. Far more serious, however, were the crimes of Stevenson’s friend, Chantrelle, who was only happy when he was drunk. He was a Frenchman who had fled France because of a murder he had committed, then England for the same reason, and during his time in Edinburgh, at least four or five people had fallen victim to “his little supper parties and his favourite dish of toasted cheese and opium”. The murderer Chantrelle was also a man with literary leanings, able to rattle off a translation of Molière extempore. According to Stevenson, he could have made a great success of that profession or of any other, honest or dishonest. It seems, however, that he always abandoned such plans and returned to “the simpler plan” of killing people. Eventually he was tried and sentenced, and apparently only then did Stevenson learn of his deeds. Presumably one has to believe him and to accept that, had he known all the facts, he would not have spent so much time with Chantrelle, but, whatever the truth, the experience appears to have left Stevenson with a certain tolerance for even the most heinous of crimes; how else can one explain his remark in a letter about Chief Ko-o-amua, with whom he got on very well during his Polynesian exile: “… a great cannibal in his day, who ate his enemies even as he walked home from killing ’em, and he is a perfect gentleman and exceedingly amiable and simple-minded; no fool, though.”

  The last years of his life, spent in the South Seas, provoked the irritation of Henry James, one of his best—that is, most sensible and least criminal—friends, who wrote numerous letters begging him both to come back to Europe to keep him company and to stop playing the fool. After Stevenson had reneged on his promise to return in 1890, James accused him of behaviour whose only parallel in history could be found among “the most famous coquettes and courtesans. You are indeed the male Cleopatra or the buccaneering Pompadour of the Deep, the wandering Wanton of the Pacific.” The fact is that, apart from feeling in better health because of the climate, putting up with his wife, his mother, his stepchildren and the rest of the entourage with whom he always travelled, that and being given idiotic names by the natives, names like Ona, Teriitera, and Tusitala, there is little more to be said about his stay in the islands, the most anodyne part of his existence. He missed Edinburgh greatly towards the end of his life, when he knew he would never return.

  Stevenson is such an elusive figure, as if his personality had never become fully defined or was as contradictory as that of those characters of his I mentioned earlier. He was very generous and, especially after the success of Treasure Island, he himself often went without in order to send money to his needier friends, who sometimes turned out to be not quite so needy after all, but failed to tell him so. One of his most famous proverbs was: “Greatheart was deceived. ‘Very well,’ said Greatheart.” He had a highly developed sense of dignity, but he could also be boastful and impertinent. On one occasion, he wrote to Henry James on the subject of Kipling’s emerging talent: “Kipling is by far the most promising young man who has appeared since—ahem—I appeared.” And in another letter to James, written at the beginning of their friendship, he demanded that in the next edition of Roderick Hudson, James, who was seven years his senior, should remove from two particular pages the adjectives “immense” and “tremendous”. The two men admired each other enormously, and James considered Stevenson to be one of the few people with whom he could discuss literary theory. Nowadays, almost no one takes the trouble to read Stevenson’s essays, which are among the liveliest and most perceptive of the past century. When he was still living in Bournemouth, he had an armchair in which no one else ever sat because it was “Henry James’s armchair”, and James missed him terribly when Stevenson left for good. In 1888, James wrote to him: “You have become a beautiful myth—a kind of unnatural uncomfortable unburied mort.”

  Robert Louis Stevenson became a natural, comfortable, buried mort on December 3, 1894, on his island of Samoa. As evening fell, he stopped work and had a game of cards with his wife. Then he went down to the cellar to fetch a bottle of burgundy for supper. He went out onto the porch to rejoin Fanny and there, suddenly, he put both hands to his head and cried: “What’s that?” Then he asked quickly: “Do I look strange?” Even as he did so, he collapsed on his knees beside Fanny, felled by a brain haemorrhage. He was carried to his bed and never regained consciousness. He was forty-four-years old.

  When writing about Stevenson, one should end with “Requiem”, a poem he had composed many years before and which is inscribed on his tomb high up on Mount Vaea, in Samoa, four thousand metres above sea level:

  Under the wide and starry sky,

  Dig the grave and let me lie;

  Glad did I live and gladly die,

  And I laid me down with a will.

  This be the verse you grave for me;

  “Here he lies, where he longed to be;

  Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

  And the hunter home from the hill.”

  Ivan Turgenev in his Sadness

  THE PESSIMISM IN Ivan Turgenev’s novels and short stories, wit
h which even some of his colleagues reproached him, must have been the minimal and least harmful tribute of all those he might have paid to his terrible, not to say downright evil family environment. His famous and wealthy mother, Varvara Petrovna, was of a cruelty, meanness and barbarity exceeded only by that of her own mother, Ivan’s grandmother, about whom he told the following story. In her old age, she suffered from paralysis and spent most of her time sitting immobile in an armchair. One day, she became enraged with the young servant attending her and, in the heat of the moment, picked up a piece of wood and struck him over the head so hard that he fell unconscious to the floor. The sight proved so disagreeable to the old woman that she dragged the boy towards her, positioned his bleeding head on the armchair she was sitting in, placed a cushion over it, then sat down on top of it, thus asphyxiating him, one presumes in order not to be further troubled by that head and its unseemly gouts of blood.

  There is no denying that, given such forebears, Turgenev showed great courage and merit in writing his first narrative work, Sketches from a Hunter’s Album; indeed, legend has it that, three days after reading it, Czar Alexander ordered the emancipation of the serfs. It was also said that, on at least two occasions, the Czarina ordered the censors not to interfere with Turgenev’s books, although it is hard to know whether this was a cause for praise or opprobrium. However, despite these beginnings and his many writings on the Russian question, Turgenev was, throughout his life, the frequent object of his compatriots’ hatred and contempt, for they saw him as a strange, Westernised Russian, remote, atheistic, and frivolous, who spent far too much time in France, England or Germany, mainly shooting partridges. It is true that he loved hunting, but it is no less true that he never entirely washed his hands of his homeland, and a friend’s suggestion that he should buy a telescope in order to observe events in Russia was, in fact, unfair.