Concerned, as always, with their son’s health, Thomas and Margaret Stevenson took him off to the Shandon Hydropathic Establishment at Gairloch for an up-to-the-minute water cure, but this seems to have made the patient rather worse than better. He never felt so lonely, Stevenson was ashamed to admit, as when he spent too much time with his parents.28 ‘I want – I want – I want a holiday; I want to be happy; I want the moon, or the sun, or something,’ he wrote to Colvin in April;29 ‘I want the object of my affections badly, anyway; and a big forest; and fine breathing, sweating, sunny walks; and all the trees crying aloud in a summer’s wind; and a camp under the stars.’30 But the summer dragged on with only sporadic news from Fanny, none of it very encouraging. He went to visit Meredith again at Box Hill, and Bob at his new haunt of Cernay-la-Ville, and spent many afternoons in the Savile Club engaged in ‘rather foolish jesting’, as Gosse described it later.31 But everything was conducted in a spirit of ennui, as he wrote to Gosse: ‘I have fallen altogether into a hollow-eyed, yawning way of life, like the parties in Burne-Jones’s pictures.’32
Another spa-visit with his parents was coming up at the end of July, but Louis met them at the railway station only to say he had been ‘called away on business’ to London. The choice of this moment to slip away from them must have been strategic: with Thomas and Margaret safely out of the way in Cumberland, Louis was free to put into effect a plan which had been simmering for a long time, to set off for America and try to sort out the situation with Fanny once and for all. There is a tradition that his precipitate departure was triggered by a telegram from California, but the truth seems to have been rather less romantic than that, and though he understood Fanny to be ill, rushing to nurse her does not appear to have been his primary motivation. ‘I must try to get her to do one of two things,’ he wrote to Bob the day before he sailed from Glasgow, sounding remarkably level-headed. It was his own misery he wished to curtail, and the endless passive waiting: ‘Man I was sick, sick, sick of this last year.’33 To Colvin and Henley he said that he was only going to go as far as New York, which made Henley think the trip could not do much harm, ill-advised though it was to chase even halfway to California to please Mrs Samuel Osbourne. None of his friends liked the scheme, even though Stevenson kept saying that he could at least get another travel book out of it – which was the excuse he offered to his parents, too, when he finally got round to letting them know what he had done.
So from Edinburgh he went to London to make the arrangements, then travelled back north to Greenock, and on 7 August 1879 set sail down the Clyde in the steamship Devonia. ‘I have never been so much detached from life,’ he wrote to Colvin on departure. ‘I can say honestly I have at this moment neither a regret, a hope, a fear or an inclination; except a mild one for a bottle of good wine.’34 Suddenly and fairly arbitrarily, Stevenson had made the pivotal decision of his life.
He had considered travelling steerage, for the cheapness and the picturesque experience, but stumped up another two guineas for a second-class berth, with slightly better food and a table where he could write during the ten-day sea passage. The steerage sections of the big iron steamship were just a thin partition away from his bunk and wonky table, near enough for the kind of impressions Louis sought to record; too near indeed to block out the sounds of people vomiting, children crying, drunks shouting and the constant banging and clattering of life lived in confinement. From the start it must have been clear to him that even if he was going to be able to shape this experience into a book, it would not be of the light, ‘charming’ variety. The air, even in second-berth, was fetid; in steerage it was ‘atrocious [ … ] each respiration tasted in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese; and the squalid aspect of the place was aggravated by so many people worming themselves into their clothes in the twilight of the bunks’.35 Stevenson was obviously disgusted at this first real contact with everyday working-class squalor. His frequenting of Edinburgh howffs, attempts at being mistaken for a tramp and Latin Quarter scruffiness all showed up in this context for what they really were, middle-class slumming.
Class was constantly on his mind during the ten days aboard the Devonia, but in confused ways. In The Amateur Emigrant, the book of his travels which was not published in full until after his death, he records an incident when some ladies and a gentleman from first class came through steerage one day as sightseers, ‘picking their way with little gracious titters of indulgence’. Stevenson’s indignation at their behaviour sounds very stagy: ‘It was astonishing what insults these people managed to convey by their presence. They seemed to throw their clothes in our faces.’36 Who was this ‘we’ all of a sudden? Stevenson’s identification with steerage was snobbism too, but inverted, which is perhaps why he was sensitive on this point (and kept the ladies in mind, I would guess, in the characterisation of the prison visitors in St Ives). They were class-tourists, but he was a class-impostor, travelling rough to make a book of its novelty, a fact which would have offended many of his fellow passengers had it been widely known. A blacksmith had spotted the fraud early on, but said nothing, and perhaps the most telling action of the whole voyage was Stevenson asking this man for his opinion of how he was doing at hiding his origins. It was a glance in the mirror, an opportunity of praise, which he simply couldn’t resist. The man’s politic reply was ‘pretty well [ … ] on the whole’.37
The intention of writing about travel both across the Atlantic and into another social stratum therefore tripped itself up pretty early on, and despite the promise of the title, The Amateur Emigrant is one of Stevenson’s least successful books. He could find little to elaborate, little to moralise over, in his observation of the very mixed group in the bowels of the Devonia. Scots, Irish and some English, they were on the whole a downtrodden, drunken crowd, too preoccupied and too seasick to want to make acquaintance with a Scottish littérateur. Even the children proved hard to befriend, and his famous charm seemed in small demand. No one, for instance, thought his idea of sleeping on deck for the fresher air was a good one, or wished to copy it.
Steerage represented (roughly) a class, but not a condition. Talking to a day-labourer from Tyneside, Stevenson discovered that the man was not an emigrant, as he had rather sweepingly assumed, but a pleasure-tripper, and was saving money on the steerage ticket in order to be able to travel home grandly in the saloon. He seemed mild and prosperous, so Stevenson was surprised and disturbed to hear him denounce the Lords, the Church and the army and argue for the redistribution of capital. These ideas were ‘growing “like a seed”’, the Geordie claimed, sentiments which Stevenson found ‘unusually ominous and grave’.38 He must have imagined that the well-off working classes were all Tories, like himself, only a little more bourgeois. The Devonia experience, it is worth noting, did absolutely nothing to alter his political views.
During the whole voyage Stevenson had been plagued by two ailments, constipation and the itch, and by the time the boat docked in New York on 17 August, he was physically exhausted. He had lost a stone in weight (where from it is hard to imagine) and needed to recruit his strength, but as soon as he arrived he rushed to look for messages at the post office. He found one from Fanny, speaking of ‘inflammation of the brain’. So there was no recuperation in New York, and after one noisy and uncomfortable night at an Irish boarding house on West Street and a day of being soaked to the skin on the worst streets of the Battery, he set off immediately to begin crossing the continent. Notes were dispatched to Britain, including one to Colvin containing ‘The Story of a Lie’, written on board ship. Stevenson’s treatment of his parents, and their likely response to his flitting, was obviously on his mind when he wrote this tale, notable for its portrait of the hero’s intemperate old father ‘buckrammed with immortal anger’, towards whom his son has painfully mixed feelings. ‘You do not know what it is to be treated with daily want of comprehension and daily small injustices, through childhood and boyhood and manhood, until you despair of a hearing, until the thing ride
s you like a nightmare, until you almost hate the sight of the man you love, and who’s your father after all,’ Dick tells his beloved, Esther, adding, somewhat paradoxically, ‘My father is the best man I know in all this world; he is worth a hundred of me, only he doesn’t understand me, and he can’t be made to.’39
On the afternoon of 18 August, after a distressing ferry-ride to Jersey with hundreds of other wet, bedraggled third-class passengers, the amateur emigrant boarded a train for Pittsburgh. The vast, raw continent was by this date traversable by anyone with £12 and twelve days to spare. Engineers in frock-coats and stovepipe hats – men just like Thomas Stevenson, ironically enough – had opened up a long clear path to the west, which as he rode the trains of the Pennsylvania and the Chicago and the Union Pacific railroads, Louis felt to be ‘the one typical achievement of the age in which we live, as if it brought together into one plot all the ends of the world and all the degrees of social rank’.40 From Pittsburgh, he went on to Chicago, and had reached Council Bluffs, Iowa, by the Friday of the first week. The train cars were too uncomfortable to write in, so Stevenson spent the time composing verses in his head instead, including one in which every stanza ends with the line ‘Behind the Susquehanna and along the Delaware’, a railway-inspired rhythm if ever there was one. After the fetor of the Devonia, the open air seemed wonderfully sweet, and riding in the cars crowded but tolerable. Still, he was the gent among the groundlings, with his railway rug and his six-volume Bancroft’s History of the United States, surprised to find that no one wanted to share the use of his clothes-brush and horrified, at the Jersey station, to see grown people and children scramble for four oranges which he had thrown under a carriage, considering them too dry to eat.
My dear Henley, I am sitting on the top of the cars with a mill party from Missouri going west for his health. Desolate flat prairie upon all hands. Here and there a herd of cattle, a yellow butterfly or two; a patch of wild sunflowers; a wooden house or two; then a wooden church alone in miles of waste; then a windmill to pump water. When we stop, which we do often, for emigrants and freight travel together, the kine first, the men after, the whole plain is heard singing with cicadae.41
Stevenson wondered if this letter would be legible, for his perch on top of the wagon was both perilous and dirty. But he was in excellent spirits and convinced he was doing the right thing, as he told Henley, ‘I know no one will think so; and don’t care.’42 He could see the track straight before him and straight back as far as the horizon in each direction. It was mesmerising, ‘a world almost without a feature; an empty sky, an empty earth’, he wrote in Across the Plains:
[ … ] on either hand the green plain ran till it touched the skirts of heaven. Along the track innumerable wild sunflowers, no bigger than a crown-piece, bloomed in a continuous flower-bed; grazing beasts were seen upon the prairie at all degrees of distance and diminution; and now and again we might perceive a few dots beside the railroad which grew more and more distinct as we drew nearer till they turned into wooden cabins, and then dwindled and dwindled in our wake until they melted into their surroundings, and we were once more alone upon the billiard-board.43
Up to Council Bluffs, he had been riding in ‘mixed trains’, but there he transferred to the Union Pacific to cross Nebraska, Wyoming and part of Utah. This is what he calls ‘the emigrant train’, much larger, slower and more crowded than the others, with passengers segregated by gender and race (the Chinese were all put in one carriage) and the baggage riding behind in several enormous wagons. The passenger cars were long wooden boxes ‘like a flat-roofed Noah’s ark’, with a stove at one end and a close-stool at the other, a passage down the middle and benches on both sides. These benches had reversible backs and could be made into rough-and-ready sleeping pallets by the insertion of boards and straw-filled cushions. Sleeping was difficult under any circumstances, and day-to-day life reduced to the basics of scrambling for the limited food at stations and negotiating with fellow passengers to share essentials such as washbasins and soap.
Stevenson’s sense of isolation was borne home at every point on the journey. A drunk who got on at Creston, Iowa, was adroitly thrown off by the conductor just after the train began pulling out of the next station. The drunk recovered himself and shook his bundle aggressively at the conductor, while his other hand reached for his gun. Stevenson was electrified by the sudden sense of danger, but the conductor was facing down the ejected man with one hand on his hip, and all the other passengers were laughing. ‘They were speaking English all about me,’ Stevenson wrote in Across the Plains, ‘but I knew I was in a foreign land.’44 His other feelings of ‘foreignness’ were essentially to do with class again; even more than on the sea-voyage, Stevenson’s rail experiences left him bewildered and disgusted by his fellow travellers. They seemed debased by their situation, incurious about each other except on the meanest and most external level, incapable of charity, and quick to find cheap humour in other people’s misfortune or humiliation. Their general hatred of the Chinese was ‘of all stupid illfeelings [ … ] the most stupid and the worst’,45 and the derision poured on displaced native Americans loathsome to witness. ‘I saw no wild or independent Indian,’ Stevenson wrote in his chapter ‘Despised Races’, ‘but now and again at way stations, a husband and wife and a few children, disgracefully dressed out with the sweepings of civilisation, came forth and stared upon the emigrants. The silent stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic degradation of their appearance, would have touched any thinking creature, but my fellow-passengers danced and jested round them with a truly Cockney baseness. I was ashamed for the thing we call civilisation.’46
At Ogden, Utah, he changed to the Central Pacific railroad and entered the last phase of the journey. Many of the passengers here were emigrating to California from places in the States, Stevenson realised, that had been immigrant destinations for the Scots and Irish on the Devonia. The push westward seemed overwhelming: ‘Hunger, you would have thought, came out of the east like the sun.’47 Perhaps there was no El Dorado anywhere, and ‘the whole round world had been prospected and condemned’. It was impossible not to have noticed that emigrants were also streaming away from California, and on one occasion passengers from an eastbound train ran onto the platform calling out ‘Come back!’, like emissaries from Heriot Row. These were not cheering omens as the train crossed the Sierras and made its way down towards sea level and the glittering blue vistas of San Francisco Bay, Stevenson’s last stop before going on south to Monterey.
Monterey in 1879 was still a predominantly Mexican town, in population if not ownership, and Spanish was the everyday tongue. The sixteenth-century Carmel Mission had long been a ruin, and the old Pacific capital now consisted of barely more than three main streets, paved with sea sand and pitted with hoofmarks and cart tracks. Most of the houses were built of adobe, with red tile roofs and wrought-iron balconies, and had thick white walls that kept them cool and slightly damp. Along the main thoroughfare, Alvarado Street, there were more modern brick and wood buildings and a wooden sidewalk to keep pedestrians out of the ruts and channels left behind after the heavy winter rain, and at a few street corners some old Spanish cannons had been stuck vertically in the ground to serve as hitching posts for horses. The style of riding, as Stevenson noted, was ‘true Vaquero [ … ] men always at the hand-gallop up hill and down dale, and round the sharpest corner’,48 and the horses were almost all decked out in elaborate Mexican saddles. But it was not a rich or genteel town. A photograph survives, taken at about the time Stevenson was there, in which the main street of Monterey very strongly resembles the set of a spaghetti western.
Fanny Osbourne had moved there in the spring of 1879 with her children and twenty-four-year-old sister Nellie Vandegrift, to a two-storey adobe house on Alvarado Street, with whitewashed walls and a large garden full of fruit trees and roses. The writer Charles Warren Stoddard, who was a member of the Bohemian Club and a friend of Sam Osbourne, had recommended the place to his San F
rancisco artist friends as having ideal light, coastal landscape and picturesque subjects, and this was undoubtedly why Fanny chose to go there too. In Monterey she and Belle could continue some semblance of ‘art studies’, and mix with bohemian types, three of whom, all friends of Stoddard, were Monterey regulars: Jules Tavernier, Julian Rix (who would entertain Oscar Wilde on his visit to San Francisco in 1882) and Joe Strong, the young man who had followed Belle to the theatre all those years ago and with whom she was again involved. Sam Osbourne approved of the Monterey scheme and wholly funded it; he visited the family at weekends and holidays, and bought each member of the household a horse or pony. Belle was happy because she was able to carry on her flirtation with Joe Strong, and young Sam seems to have felt more secure in Monterey than he had for some time. However Fanny had presented it to Stevenson, the arrangement seems to have been a sincere attempt (on Sam’s part at least) at finding a modus vivendi for the whole family rather than a definite step towards divorce.
Stevenson wasn’t so naïve or romantic as to expect a hero’s welcome at the end of his three-week journey to Monterey, and he didn’t get one. On arrival in town, he stopped off at a saloon before going to Fanny’s house to steel himself for the interview, and heard from the barman several pieces of news about the Osbourne women, including that the barman himself, Alfredo Sanchez, was engaged to marry Nellie Vandegrift. No talk, however general, about Mrs Osbourne could have sounded cheering to Stevenson under the circumstances. He left his luggage at the saloon and went on to the house on foot.
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