QUIET DESPERATION AND THE BOOK
In this manner, without preaching any sermons, Stevenson developed an important ethical idea in his book. As the apostle of adventure he was responding to a famous statement from a great American, Henry David Thoreau, one of his favorite authors. Thoreau once said: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Thoreau was looking at a deeply boring adult world of daily tasks, a world lacking in genuine excitement, despite survival or the benefit of profit, and he saw that “quiet desperation” required a cure. Stevenson found the cure in an American optimism, an almost religious attitude he found in another American favorite, Walt Whitman. The novelist had good reason to adopt this positive view of life, for it kept him alive through the ravages of a terrible illness. Though he died young, at the age of forty-four, a victim of tuberculosis, he always acted the optimist. He always insisted that children and adolescents, playing games of make-believe, are imagining freedom from the labor and pain of basic human survival. Admittedly, when childhood gives way to adulthood, their imaginative dreams of liberation almost necessarily wither away, in work, in school, in merely “growing up.” Maturity obstructs the visions of the young.
On this topic there is much in common between Stevenson and Mark Twain. Like most young people, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are sworn enemies to chores around the house; chores are like practicing the piano—fun only when you no longer need it. Chores interfere with the pursuit of happiness, Thomas Jefferson’s noble political vision. The serious interrogation of socially restricted happiness, treated so lightly, mostly as escape, transforms Mark Twain’s books for young people into books to be read by skeptical adults. Huck’s final words express a philosophy: “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally [yet another dangerous aunt] she’s going to adopt me and civilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” Inevitably Tom and Huck see domestic life as a kind of prison from which they must escape. Into the jail of middle-class life, however, there may descend a gift of temporary escape, when labor and tedium lose their iron grip on mind and heart. During this period of grace stories enter to save the soul, stories designed to thrill the imagination, bearing myths of boundless quest and heroic achievement, adventures that seem the most natural thing in the world. Adolescence, for good or ill, is the springtime of the dream. Exploiting this unstable period of life, feeding upon its yearning atmosphere, the storyteller virtually commands a young person’s imagination, by creating magic carpets of freedom from being stuck in the house, even if that house is the Admiral Benbow inn.
Dreams of magic freedom (especially from illness) were never far from the young Stevenson. He was born to unusually talented Scottish parents in the year 1850. Their world was quite different from our own, and yet everywhere social changes were anticipating the strains and stresses of our present condition. His early years were mostly spent in the cold, dark, wet and windy, smoke-filled, ominous and romantic city of Edinburgh, the ancient capital of a northern kingdom. Stevenson represents all the conflicts—the imperial freedom and the cultural constraint—of the late Victorian era. He also shared in the Victorian fascination with facts and material accomplishment. Around him, as we shall see, there was an atmosphere of great engineering endeavor, for the Stevensons had long been famous lighthouse builders; they were known for meeting the most hazardous and complex construction demands. Meanwhile, as civil engineering developed rapidly during this period, a new technology arose in the parallel field of communication and recording. In Stevenson’s lifetime, authors went from using quill pens and early fountain pens to banging on typewriters.
Photography could now record human faces and natural landscapes, for peaceful scenes or war in the Crimea. Matthew Brady recorded the horrors of the American Civil War, and also the witless religiosity of slaughter. But there was still no radio, there were no movies, there was no television, there were no video games, and there were no special effects resembling the techniques of the present time. There were only the beginnings of widespread electronic communication, though it rapidly spread-London’s first telephone exchange dates from 1879, following the world’s first exchange at Hartford, Connecticut in 1877. Letters were written by hand, carried over the seas by “mailboat” steamers, while soon a massive undersea cable would carry telegraph messages linking Europe and North America, the ship Great Eastern having successfully laid the transatlantic cable in 1866. Telegraphy and its electronic siblings were soon to change the world by accelerating the exchange of information, if not of artistic instruction. These innovations in media were about to transform the very basis of literature.
On the edge of this revolution (much of it passing unnoticed by the mass of people) stood authors like Robert Louis Stevenson. For him, as we have said, literature had a strong connection to a mythology coming out of inherited memory, folktales, and legends, as well as the hard facts of history. Such sources of literature had been spoken aloud and listened to mostly by those who could not read and whose ancient oral customs would seem destined to disappear within Victoria’s reign.
There were still books, of course, books of all sizes, shapes, and subjects, from which families and individuals still read aloud to each other or read alone with silent wonder. This world could only stimulate imagination in its most active form, and onto the stage of its theater of the mind stepped Treasure Island, a sailor’s yarn if there ever was one. The novel was published first as a serial in a boy’s magazine called Young Folks in 1881 and 1882, and then in book form in 1883. Instantly, a desire to read the book caught on with readers of all ages, including among other notables the prime minister of England, William Ewart Gladstone; at the other end of the critical scale, Henry James, then the most refined of all living novelists, reviewed the book in the most glowing terms. Meanwhile, up to the present day the appeal of this tale persists unabated and undefeated by rivals, despite changes in fashion and immense competition from the new media. These new media, such as newspapers published everywhere readers could be found, tend to emphasize whatever is new and whatever therefore will instantly vanish as an object of interest the moment tomorrow’s paper arrives on the street.
In this newly engineered culture, the question remains, how could Stevenson preserve the mystery of the older spoken literature? The story is his mainstay, of course: Jim Hawkins encounters a slew of devious and cruel confederates in a mutiny whose sole purpose is to gain uncounted treasure, meanwhile taking revenge on their masters. But there is also a dreamlike mythical method at work. Jim is waging a double war, first against the “bad guys,” as we say, but second and far more important, he struggles against his own fears, against uncanny threats and overwhelming odds. In one sense the story lasts because it is an extremely efficient dream machine.
The fast-moving plot of Treasure Island is amazingly detailed in its precision. The narrative wastes not a word as it moves along, encountering the vagaries of chance. The story is designed to show Jim’s powers of survival, especially by pitting him against a man he secretly admires, the devious pirate sea cook Long John Silver. The narrative tests Jim’s conscience, much in the old religious Calvinist manner, and also in a new way. We discover a psychological depth not unconnected to Calvinism. For example, Jim admits openly that he hated a man he was about to kill; this realism reflects the fact that Stevenson was tough and modern enough to create Dr. Jekyll and his ferocious double, Mr. Hyde. There is more inwardness in the story than one might have anticipated; human good and evil are constantly intermixed. The struggle is not only against malignant material power; the battle Jim really wages is against fear itself, against dark, uncanny threats, the frightening turns of a fearsome dream. Early in the book Jim leaves the safety of a picturesque home—his father dies at the outset of the story, and Jim must leave his mother and her comforting common sense, to be suddenly thrown among the most redneck of all men, common sailors who may or may not be pirates. Almost the first thing we find him confronting is “c
aptain” Billy Bones, an old pirate with a deep scar across his face. The door over the scene he now enters is marked: Danger! At every turn his motto must be Stevenson’s own: “The great affair is to move,” for his creator was always on the move, walking, climbing, canoeing, sailing, trying for a better climate to bolster his frail tubercular health, writing essays and memoirs of these travels. As Mark Twain would have said, here was an author who knew about “roughing it.”
There is an old-fashioned side to the way the story reaches back to simpler, more adventurous times. In Treasure Island the narrative transports us from an isolated seacoast inn to the bustle of Bristol, a thriving seaport with an ancient maritime history. We get vivid sketches and character types, such as the country squire, the country doctor, the experienced sea captain, and a whole crew of very tough sailors. Later in the novel we meet a believably disturbed castaway, Ben Gunn, who recalls Robinson Crusoe, after Odysseus the best known of all outcasts. Exotic associations provide a subtle meaning to the story, whose narrator, for example, is aptly named Jim Hawkins; he is evidently named after notorious Elizabethan privateer Sir John Hawkins. Harassing the Spanish at sea, out-maneuvering them in victorious battle against the Spanish Armada (1588), Sir John Hawkins may today be known chiefly as a slave trader, but in his day he was a hero, and Queen Elizabeth knighted him for his valor—a model of greed, skill, courage, and military foresight. The social sweep is not entirely full, however. In the interests of raw adventure and Victorian literary convention, as almost always in Stevenson’s early tales, women and what the author called “psychology” are excluded from the story. The vivid role of the boy’s mother ends almost the moment it begins. She seems the origin of his unfailing practical sense, she is courageous in the midst of mayhem, but then she disappears from the plot.
The society whose story the book recounts is therefore entirely constructed around a narrow quest. The narrative is not intended to rival the complicated three-volume novels of its day. Instead all virtue, villainy, and courage are consigned to a tight-knit band of adventurers whose common bond is simply the search for treasure. No matter how cleverly Stevenson deploys touches of realistic class distinctions, he abandons the wider social interests of the classic novel, preferring instead to create a male-dominated form of romance, and yet the idea of men venturing upon the Spanish Main, sailing a ship aptly named the Hispaniola with little or no guarantee of loyalty, brings unexpected depth to Stevenson’s book. If he has a higher philosophic aim, it is to shine a light on the meaning of action in a real and dangerous world. As the author insists more than once in his critical writings and his letters, when he downplays “psychology” he substitutes a cinematic realism of specific gesture and scene, providing imaginative depth by observing external facts with a rare finesse of sensory perception. Like Joseph Conrad, he can describe precisely how a body falls to the ground, having been cut by a saber. Psychology is confined to the briefest and most simply telling moments.
Nevertheless, while Treasure Island centers on discovering buried treasure, it pins its deeper revelation on an encounter between a young boy and an older man from which something like a relationship gradually develops. Jim Hawkins discovers that his object of admiration, Long John Silver, is devious, greedy, and dangerous, an unforeseen truth Jim discovers through the course of the novel’s twists and turns. Finally the sea cook is a fallen idol to the boy, and the ironic fall is what makes the novel a serious work of art. Jim himself perceives the irony, because he has matured. Henry James called Silver “picturesque” and added that in all the traditional literature of romance, Stevenson had created one of the most remarkable characters in Long John. Perhaps this ironic revelation is the story Stevenson had in mind all along, since he had originally titled the novel The Sea Cook. For Jim the ethical test is to read through the mask of a villain, a man who nonetheless is deeply appealing to him. Again, as Henry James observed in The House of Fiction, Long John adds weight to an otherwise overactive narrative full of “murders, mysteries, islands of dreadful renown, hairbreadth escapes, miraculous coincidences and buried doubloons.” Modern readers would call Long John Silver an anti-hero, and by reacting against this devious but delightful person, Jim escapes from a belief in simple-minded, clear-cut relationships that adorns the works of authors like Captain Frederick Marryat (1792-1848), who among other favorites wrote Mr. Midshipman Easy, or Stevenson’s Scottish predecessor R. M. Ballantyne (1825-1894), whose highly successful tale of three shipwrecked boys, The Coral Island (1858), was so humorous and optimistic that in our time Nobel laureate William Golding readily turned it on its head, monstrously, as The Lord of the Flies. Long John Silver forced the boy’s adventure story to grow up, even as its maturing readers could remain adolescents at heart.
THE AUTHOR IN A CROSSWIND
Here we need a digression from our own story, to insist on Stevenson’s unusual complexity, which contributed to the way he wrote. Without constructing large webs of social ambience, he introduced into his fiction the inward moral and emotional conflicts of his Calvinist upbringing, while his late fiction, such as the novella “The Beach of Falesá” (1892), reveals a vigorous and bold rejection of Victorian piety, the era’s so-called “morality,” which is not surprising since in his early twenties Stevenson had told his parents he was an atheist.
In some ways mother and son shared a dark understanding of life, for Mrs. Stevenson—born a Balfour, like the young hero of Kidnapped (1886)—was a semi-invalid. In the fashion of many Victorian ladies, she suffered from what was called “uncertain health.” Her son’s early troubles with breathing, his bronchial sensitivity, and what finally became a complex combination of bronchial and tubercular illness led him to “take the cure” in a sanatorium high in the Swiss Alps, at Davos. Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel about disease and genius, The Magic Mountain, provides an intensely vivid picture of this medical scene; through all its layers of meaning it raises a question that similarly concerned Stevenson: What indeed is health? Pharmacology could not alter the course of tuberculosis, and it was thought that bracing cold air in a clear mountain climate would remedy the disease. Stevenson spent the winters of 1880 and 1881 at Davos, was erroneously pronounced cured, and left for a life of continued wandering in search of a salubrious climate. Not surprisingly for those who have read The Magic Mountain or the life story of the poet John Keats (1795-1821), TB is a disease of fevers and a feverish existence. With Stevenson this hectic rhythm animated his virtually desperate travels; he became more of an explorer than a tourist, a restless voyager who knew he would never return home to his beloved country. Scotland always remained an ominous land, however, not least for him because as a child he had been lovingly instructed by his governess, Alice Cunningham, a dedicated soul who filled the child with the darkest tales and scariest bogies to be conjured by Calvinist fears of hell and damnation. Given such a beginning, one is surprised, or relieved, to find that Stevenson was destined to write one of the great parables of the eternal battle between good and evil, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Even here his agnosticism played a part, for The Strange Case is made into a highly controlled detective story, as if in clear imitation of a similarly secular author Stevenson much admired, Edgar Allan Poe.
Despite many competing influences, it is clear that Stevenson sought paganism as a natural part of being an artist. A master of perfect poetical forms, he became famous for the delicate and loving verses in A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885). Yet his schooling also cut the other way, since he studied the law, was admitted to the bar, and, quite differently, studied the principles of civil engineering. His last novel, Weir of Hermiston, left unfinished at his death in 1894, is an acute and troubling study of the violent abuse of judicial power. Having lived in France and effectively bilingual, Stevenson was yet to travel a much wider world. Again cutting crossways, it is said that during his college years in Edinburgh he was a notable bohemian, drinking, carousing, and frequenting the company of prostitutes. His boh
emian, literary life in Edinburgh and later in London brought him many friends, among them brilliant writers. Meanwhile, as we have seen, the imminent threat of death hung always over him, as he endured a lifelong battle against tuberculosis and frightening bronchial infections. In print he almost never mentioned these afflictions. Even when he was hemorrhaging blood from his lungs, at no point did he avoid the most arduous physical efforts, traveling more widely than most humans ever travel and simultaneously driving himself as an author. For someone so often compelled by the need for movement, it is remarkable that his complete works comprise about twenty-five volumes.
Stevenson died young in a home he built, called Vailima, the “House of the Five Streams,” in Western Samoa. Finally this frail man, so thin he looked like a friendly, rather tired ghost, marooned on a remote island of the South Pacific, seems to have seen the dark and the light of life, remaining, like many a good Calvinist, obsessed with the question of spiritual and artistic honesty. His religious and cultural background led him to prefer fictions that are subtler than they seem, always gaining their strength from a mixture of atmosphere, action, and expectation.
THE ARCHETYPE OF LIGHT
In spite of the contraries we have seen, there was one constant in the Stevenson family. His father enjoyed a measure of wealth and prestige as one of Europe’s finest civil engineers, specializing in the commercially important profession of lighthouse design and construction. This line of expertise went back from father to grandfather, with an uncle sharing in the honors. At twenty-one, Robert Louis Stevenson, the youngest member of the line, read his first and only scientific paper to the Royal Scottish Society of Arts; it was titled “A New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses.” When he was eighteen years old, he had journeyed to the remote coastline of northern Scotland to study conditions for building lighthouses, and there he acquired firsthand knowledge of hostile shores, the sailor’s greatest fear. Later the author’s brief training as an engineer colored his writing, which displays an engineer’s care for precision, all the parts of a story fitted together like carefully cut stones, the whole structure producing masterworks of economy, never a wasted word, never a phrase or description overburdening the arc of the narrative.
Treasure Island (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 2
