by Brian Doyle
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About the Author
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For Mary
Preface
From late December 1879 until April 1880, before his marriage on May 19, Robert Louis Stevenson lived in a rooming house at 608 Bush Street in San Francisco. Tall, thin, poor, cheerful, young (he was twenty-nine), and hopelessly in love with Miss Frances Matilda Vandegrift Osbourne, originally from Indianapolis but then a resident of Oakland, Stevenson spent his days roaming the sprawling legendary city by the bay, spending miserly sums on food and half a bottle of wine per night, and writing furiously to try to make enough money to support the family he would instantly have when married; Fanny already had two living children by her profligately adulterous husband, from whom she was finally divorced on December 15.
Stevenson worked up his notes from his travels across America, which became his book Across the Plains. He worked on a novella, which became his book Prince Otto. He wrote a dozen essays, at least, and various small articles for local newspapers. Missing his native Scotland, he worked on an autobiography, never published. He wrote poems, notably the famous requiem that would be engraved on his Samoan gravestone in 1894.
And he contemplated a novel, to be called Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World, perhaps based on the stories of his Irish landlady’s husband or brother-in-law. He may not have even started it; no scrap of draft or sketch or notes has ever surfaced, and no intent scholar has traced the mysterious John Carson; but ever since I read about this unwritten book of Stevenson’s, many years ago, I have dreamed about writing it for him.
It is an inchoate urge and I cannot easily articulate the reasons it so appeals to me. Something of celebration of a man by all accounts honest and kind and generous; something like rising to the delicious bait of a challenge; something of a detective story, perhaps, beginning with the sparsest of clues, ten words on which to build castles and ramparts and swirling depths of story; something like gentle homage to the writer of verve and dash whom I admire above all other writers in my language; something of a love song to one of the great American cities; and something surely of pure happy curiosity—to begin a story on a foggy street in San Francisco, many years ago, and see where in the world we might go…!
—BRIAN DOYLE
Any story, as soon as it is spoken aloud, is a true story.
—JOHN CARSON
Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably,
Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea,
The brown eyes radiant with vivacity—
There shines a brilliant and romantic grace,
A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace
Of passion, impudence, and energy.
—WILLIAM HENLEY, ON ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson.
—JORGE LUIS BORGES
Pure poetic eloquence (colored always, be it remembered, by a strong Scottish accent), grave argument and criticism, riotous streaks of fancy, flashes of nonsense more illuminating than wisdom, streamed from him inexhaustibly as he kindled with delight at the delight of his hearers…’til all of us seemed to catch something of his own gift and inspiration. As long as he was there you kept discovering with delight unexpected powers in yourself.… He was a fellow of infinite and unrestrained jest and yet of infinite earnest, the one very often a mask for the other; a poet, an artist, an adventurer; a man beset by fleshly frailties, and despite his infirm health, of strong appetites and unchecked curiosities; and yet a profoundly sincere moralist.
—SIR SIDNEY COLVIN, ON ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
1
I MET JOHN CARSON FOR THE FIRST TIME on Bush Street in San Francisco, where I was at the time living in a rooming house owned by his wife, Mary Carson. Though born in Ireland, Mary had for some time been a citizen of The City, as she called our rough and misty citadel, as if it was a ship upon the water; which in truth it was, for a few streets west lay the Pacific Ocean, and a few streets east sprawled its impatient bay, like a tiny dinghy bobbing alongside a tremendous parent. To further the image, Mrs Carson’s house, tall and thin, stood at the apex of a hill, and swayed like a mast in the afternoon wind, and often featured a sort of sea-beacon at its peak—the night-lamp in my room, where I scribbled the remarkable stories I heard during the day from Mary’s husband John.
I was then a penurious man, forced to be so by circumstance, and I had much time on my hands, waiting for a marital entanglement to unbraid itself across the bay, and free the woman who would be my wife; and while I walked the city as much as I could, having learned that cities are best discovered on foot, I also had the open hours and eager ears for Carson’s adventures, for he was a terrific teller of tales, and spoke in such a colorful and piercing way, with such adornments of elocution and wonderful mimicry, that whole afternoons passed as unnoticed as the tide, as we sat by the sitting-room fire.
He had been everywhere and done everything, it seemed, and he was eager to tell of countries and peoples, crimes and misdemeanors, mendicants and millionaires, and all the manners of living he had seen, from high to low and every shade between; and while Mrs Carson would occasionally offer tart reproof and call him to task about one detail or another, his flow was never stanched, so long as I was there to listen, and later record what he had said, in prose as close as I could get to the way in which he had said it; for he had an essentially riverine style of speaking, and his reminiscence would wander into pools and oxbows, there to swirl meditatively awhile before returning eventually to the main stem of the story. But then other times he spoke so speedily that you were rushed headlong through the narrative rapids, before being released at last into a placid stretch, there to slowly regain your equilibrium, and smile with pleasure at the unforgettable rush of the voyage.
* * *
I had arrived at Mrs Carson’s estimable house in December of the year 1879, and spent the latter half of that month recovering from illness, essentially confined to my attic room, and in little contact with the other residents except for the solicitous Mrs Carson, who was kind enough to bring me small sustenance, and what books she could find unclaimed in the house; during that time I much enjoyed Mr Twain’s Roughing It and Tom Sawyer, and Mr Whitman’s new Leaves of Grass, and a steady run of excellent books by Mr Henry James, whom I had met in England and very much liked, though he seemed far more English than American to me, and, I suspect, to himself.
Having long been in poor health I was all too familiar with the land of counterpane, and was used to spending my ill hours in bed, writing. I was then by trade a scribbler, a writer of slight essays and occasional pieces for the newspapers, and it was to the hunting of this small game that I devoted my energies that wet December; not un
til after the new year did I improve enough to shakily go downstairs and sit by the fire, and then stroll the neighborhood, and finally wander the towered salty city itself, from wharves to hilltop thickets and back again. From January to April, then, I roamed as freely as the fog in what proved to be one of the most turbulent and riveting cities I had ever seen—fully as lovely and avaricious as Paris, as arrogant and fascinating as London, as windswept and grim and prim and delightful as my own native Edinburgh. And of those pedestrian journeys there is much to tell; but my most memorable travels in San Francisco that spring were all conducted in a deep chair by the fire in Mrs Carson’s house, as I sat mesmerized by the estimable Mr John Carson, gentleman and adventurer.
* * *
I should begin by showing you the man, insofar as I am able, as he was then, at the prime of life and the peak of his powers. Taller than not, and burly rather than thick; as he said himself, while we saw eye to eye as regards our height, he was twice the man I was in volume. A dense head of hair, just beginning to silver at the temples; clean rough clothes somewhere between the utilitarian garb of a sailor and the unadorned simplicity of a reverend; boots that were worn but buffed, boots that had seen something of the world but would never allow themselves to appear in public with stain or scuff. No watch fob, no necktie, no hat; I once remarked to him that I had never once seen him in a hat, and he laughed and said he thought most hats were affectations and aggrandizements, very much like the useless showy feathers that certain birds developed in order to lure unsuspecting females into their sensual bowers; the only hat he had ever worn and liked was a helmet, which had done its work well, and protected him from a shower of blows, any one of which would have been sufficient to make Mrs Carson a widow.
His face was like his clothing, rough but honest and open; no beard, by the express command of Mrs Carson, who disapproved of beards in general as disguises, and disapproved of his in particular as a brambly barrier between man and wife; and as he said with a smile, what sensible man, graced with the affections of the extraordinary Mrs Carson, would fail to do everything he could to encourage and fan those affections?
Sharp amused eyes, of a gray-green color, like the bay in mottled weather; dense eyebrows as thick as bushy caterpillars; large rough hands I would see at work around the house, carpentering this and that; as he often said, to build a house of mere innocent wood, and expect it to withstand a week of San Francisco’s weather unscarred, was the airiest folly; it was no accident that Our Lord spent eighteen years apprenticing as a carpenter, for surely the Holy Family was planning to move to San Francisco, where Our Lord would have been able to carve a good living from a career of household woodworking.
An unadorned voice, neither mellifluous nor harsh; his voice was like the man, direct and amused but capable of sharp turns and dangerous calms. A tiny tattoo of a falcon below his left ear, less than an inch long, noticeable only in crisp daylight. A man of measured tastes in food and drink, well read but not scholarly, sociable but not gregarious or garrulous. An aficionado of music, but none that I had ever heard; by his own account he loved the music of lands far away, the aboriginal music of Borneo and Australia in particular, and he rued his lack of instrumental skill, he said, for he would have liked to have that music drifting around the house, reminding him of his travels and his friends in far-flung regions of the world.
He was fond of gently teasing Mrs Carson, and gravely proposing fanciful adventures and enterprises to her, such as purchasing one of the Seal Rocks islands off San Francisco, and building a ship upon it, in such a way that the rough surface of the island was completely covered by the ship, so that while in residence there husband and wife would always be at sea, but never in danger of foundering; or that they erect such a collection of stalwart canvas sails on the roof of their house, that in high winds they could sail north to redwood country for the day, or south to Half Moon Bay, there to wreak joyous havoc among the oysters when it came time for dinner.
Indeed there were so many of these speculative invitations to Mrs Carson, two and three a day sometimes, that in my first weeks in the house I thought him perhaps slightly unhinged, or even politely inebriated, but soon I came to see that the custom was something of a coded conversation or verbal waltz between two people who much enjoyed each other’s company. I think now that I learned a great deal about marriage from John and Mary Carson, of Bush Street in San Francisco; for in my own marriage I have especially appreciated humor as a crucial virtue, and have seen for myself, perhaps too often, that wry wordplay and gentle jest are not only nutritious but sometimes the very seed of salvation.
* * *
Mrs Carson’s house, I have said, not Mr Carson’s, or the Carsons’ collectively; and that is a good place to let Mr Carson begin his story, for the house was not only the port and refuge to which Mr Carson returned again and again after his adventures, but the sweet old chapel of pine and oak, as he said, where he had courted “the extraordinary landlady,” and been married, in the sitting room, by the fire, by a priest with whom he had served in the War Between the States. So let us begin by that sitting-room fire, on a thoroughly moist day, early in the year 1880, as Mr Carson carries us back in time, to the year of our Lord 1864.
I had just asked him how he met the extraordinary Mrs Carson, and so we begin:
“That was a year after a legendary San Franciscan dog named Lazarus had died and did not manage to come back to life, despite several days of close attention by the newspapers to a possible miracle,” said Mr Carson from his chair on the other side of the fire. “October; I remember that your fellow ink-man Mark Twain was a reporter for The Daily Morning Call, and that he wrote a memorable article about visiting Lazarus’s grave in the Odd Fellows Cemetery, and waiting there quite a long time for the dog to be true to his name, to no avail. I thought the article was amusing, but Mr Twain was soon gone from the newspaper staff, for unspecified reasons. I suppose he left so as to pursue his literary career, but I have always savored the notion that certain segments of city society were affronted by his lighthearted speculation about Lazarus rising from his grave in the Odd Fellows and floating over Lone Mountain, the mercy of the Lord having been profligately poured upon even so meek a citizen as old Lazarus, who was a disreputable creature, as I remember, although a very fine rat catcher.
“I had met Mr Twain that spring, when he arrived from Nevada, where he had been a silver miner and a newspaperman, often reporting from Carson City, from which he speculated all Carsons came, perhaps hatched from tremendous pinecones and then set loose upon the world; indeed perhaps we were manufactured by seasons, he said, with Johns and Bills sprouting in spring and the Jims and Bobs arriving en masse in the fall, and the new females surging up the Truckee River by the thousands, more Susans in an hour than a man could count in a day.
“He was full of colorful ideas like that, and not loath to share them with you or anyone else; you never met a more cheerful headlong fellow in your life, and while some of his free talk earned him the threat of fisticuffs, not once in the time I knew him did anyone actually set about inflicting corrections on his person. But beneath the high spirits there was a darker man, as is so often the case with the publicly humorous. I saw that side of him here and there, when he was in his cups. But he was the sort of man that when most down on his luck was most generous and free; I remember when he discovered that his whole bulging trunk of silver mining stocks, which he had thought worth thousands of dollars, were not now worth a thousand cents, he laughed and took me to a dinner featuring a hill of oysters and a river of beer.
“The last I saw him was on this very street, down the hill toward the bay. He told me he was off to try mining again, this time for gold in the Sierras, because he had not a dollar to his name and must leave the city, but he would give me a tip worth more than Astor and Carnegie and Vanderbilt together, because he valued our friendship with all his soul, and would always remember that I was a true friend when he was down and dark and needed a grip
and a grin to haul him from his dark crevasse. Up the hill there, he said, pointing to this very house, there is a building which I believe will loom large in your life. Do not ask me how I know such a thing. I do not know myself. I am a man of dreams and portents. I sometimes suspect I am a magnet for such things. There is Scotland and Wales and Acadia in my family tree, which may explain a certain predilection to omens and spirits. Also somewhere back a ways I have an ancestor named Ezekiel, who may have known the Biblical prophet himself, and lent a certain necromantic cast to the line ever after. Probably they ran a tavern together, or schemed to defraud the pharaoh of his crown. Who can explain these things? Not me. But trust me when I say that you and that willowy house up there will someday meet, and the auspices seem beneficent. So, John, this is farewell, for I don’t know when I will be back in the city, or whether we will meet again in Tahiti or Timbuktu; but I have given you the treasure of a lifetime, I believe, with this advice, and I hope with all my heart that someday I will hear of your happiness, and know that for once I did a good turn by a friend, who did so many good turns for me.
“And off he went,” said Carson, smiling at the memory of his friend. “I heard later that he had gone to the Sandwich Islands, and then around the world, and now he is a famous man, resident in a castle in Connecticut, he says; I had a note from him recently, with a copy of his newest book; our postman was much amused by the address, which was simply ‘John Carson, Bush Street, San Francisco, Where He Lives in That Tall Skinny House, If He Had Any Sense or Imagination at All.’”
“And did you,” I asked Mr Carson, “turn on your heel that day, and walk right up the street to the house?”
“Oh, no,” said Mr Carson. “No, I did not, for ephemeral reasons—I think I was hungry, and down to the docks I went for oysters and beer. No, Mr Stevenson, I walked east that day on Bush Street instead of west, downhill instead of up, and there were many strange adventures before the moment that I did finally knock on the front door of this house, and discover that my life was changed from that moment forward, to my great surprise, and eternal pleasure, and endless gratitude.”
