Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  The vision he presented on the threshold of Casa Bonifacio was an alarming one, as described later by Sam junior, then eleven years old: ‘His clothes, no longer picturesque but merely shabby, hung loosely on his shrunken body, and there was about him an indescribable lessening of his alertness and self-confidence.’ Until that moment, Sam believed, ‘I had never thought of him as being in ill-health. On the contrary, in vigor and vitality he had always seemed among the foremost of those young men at Grez; and though he did not excel in any of the sports he had shared in them exuberantly. Now he looked ill, even to my childish gaze.’49 Fanny might well have been at a loss to know what to do with this wraithlike lover, returned like a ghost in a ballad. His physical condition was not the least dismaying thing: he was penniless, prospectless, cut off from the family she had always understood to be fabulously rich, and by his very presence was forcing the issue of the divorce and her whole future. The reunion was not jubilant, as Belle testified many years later: ‘Louis’s conduct [ … ] was not that of a romantic lover who had followed a sweetheart halfway round the world. Although he was gay and full of banter, he was almost coldly casual toward my mother – and [her attitude was] not much different toward him, except for her constant care in providing his preferences in food.’50 Stevenson went off to find cheap lodgings in town (Fanny feared scandal if he stayed with her), and sent a few short letters back to Britain. ‘All is in the wind; things might turn well or might not,’ he told Colvin, and to Baxter he wrote, ‘Things are damn complicated, and I have had the art to complicate ’em more since my arrival. However I hope for the best.’51

  ‘The best’ for Stevenson was marriage, but Fanny kept stalling about that, and the divorce that would have to precede it. Odd reasons were given for delay, such as the marriages of ‘the girls’: Nellie Vandegrift to Alfredo Sanchez and Belle to a wealthy Southerner whom Fanny had found for her. Fanny’s concern for the proprieties at this juncture seems rather ludicrous, but she had become very anxious about how she and her family were going to be provided for, and a great deal of that depended on not flouting convention so much that she became persona non grata. On her own, she could only sink into semi-penury, and marriage to Stevenson (if he continued to be alienated from his parents) would mean much the same. Sam’s beneficence would clearly last only as long as it suited him, and all the most expensive years of rearing Sam junior were still ahead. Belle’s involvement with Joe Strong was another potential liability, as Joe hadn’t a penny and was unlikely to earn much as an artist. The arranged marriage Fanny was trying to set up for her daughter (without the girl’s consent) would at least have settled one member of the family comfortably, with likely benefits for the rest of them too. In the days before the married women’s property laws, all these considerations had to come into play.

  Her own situation was almost certainly more complicated than we know. When she was sure that Louis was on his way to her, Fanny had written to Timothy Rearden with feigned casualness to tell him that her ‘literary friend from Scotland’ had accepted ‘an engagement to come to America and lecture; which I think great nonsense and have written to tell him so’.52 The elaborate lying here indicates the intensity of Fanny’s desire for secrecy; it also implies a lack of commitment to Stevenson. Her troubled relationship with Sam Osbourne was never going to improve, but divorce was a serious step, and permanent separation may have appealed to her more at this point, especially if Sam was willing to support her. And there was someone else still in the background of the picture at this critical moment: John Lloyd, her former lover. All through the first months of her European odyssey, Lloyd had been for Fanny ‘the one friend I have in the world’, and though she is unlikely to have seen him at all between 1875 and 1878, relations of some sort must have been re-established on her return to the States, for he reappeared in the role of jealous ex in 1881, writing her an extensive criticism of everything to do with Louis Stevenson, from his clothes to his accent. This means not only that Lloyd and Stevenson met in California in 1879–80, but that Lloyd considered him a rival. By 1881, although Fanny was married to Louis, Lloyd was convinced she was dissatisfied with her choice and was trying to ingratiate himself with her again (which implies that they were still in fairly regular correspondence). Her dismissal of this in an 1881 letter to Rearden is ardent – ‘O the vanity of man!’ – but as she was habitually disingenuous in her letters to Rearden (and knew he associated with Lloyd as well as with Sam), the tone of this can almost be guaranteed false.53

  Stevenson most likely knew about Fanny’s former relations with Lloyd, and once in Monterey may have guessed or been told that the two were still in touch. He also knew that Sam Osbourne was visiting his wife regularly, and was due in town any day. Stevenson chose not to skulk in Monterey during the conjugal visit, but to save money and some vestiges of pride by going camping in the hills on his own. The situation was threatening to become intolerable, as his remarks to Baxter in a scrambled note on 9 September indicate: ‘My news is nil. I know nothing. I go out camping, that is all I know; today I leave, and shall likely be three weeks in camp; I shall send you a letter from there with more guts than this and now say good-bye to you, having had the itch and a broken heart.’54

  So within days of his arrival in Monterey, Stevenson was setting out up the Carmel Valley, with a spring wagon and two horses, heading for the Santa Lucia mountains. His deep demoralisation is evident from the fact that he set off without adequate provisions or much idea of where he was going, and on the first evening decided to leave most of his traps at a farm run by an Englishman named Berwick, and go on with just one horse. It was a malign reprise of his walk through the Cévennes with Modestine; no carefully-constructed pack of clothes and books and bottles, no pilot coat, no waterproof wool-lined bed. As he wandered aimlessly through the pines and cypresses and fog-streaked hillsides above Monterey, going in the wrong direction from the woman he loved and had travelled six thousand miles to see (and who was entertaining her husband), the whole enterprise took on a despairing quality. The expedition turned, in effect, into an attempt at suicide, a deliberate exposure of himself to the elements and to fate. Dazed and ill, he had got no further than eighteen miles south of Monterey when he descended into a fever: ‘Two nights I lay out under a tree, in a sort of stupor, doing nothing but fetch water for myself and horse, light a fire and make coffee, and all night awake hearing the goat bells ringing and the tree frogs singing when each new noise was enough to set me mad.’55 Only the accident of a goat rancher passing that way saved him from probable death. The man took one look at the skeletal apparition under the trees and pronounced him ‘real sick’.56

  ‘I am lying in an upper chamber nearly naked with flies crawling all over me and a clinking of goat bells in my ears,’ Stevenson wrote to Baxter from the ranch on San Clemente Creek where his rescuer had taken him, ‘the goats are coming home and it will soon be time to eat. The old bear hunter is doubtless now infusing tea; and Tom the Indian will come in with his gun in a few minutes.’57 It was a rough but tranquil refuge, and Stevenson spent a fortnight there being tended by the bear hunter, Anson Smith, who was a captain from the old Mexican war, and his ranch-partner Jonathan Wright, both ‘true frontiersmen’.58 In return for his board among the bugs and straw, he gave lessons to the two little girls of the household in the mornings, and in the afternoons began making a draft of his emigrant book. He couldn’t move far, couldn’t even sit up much of the time, but comforted himself with the thought that he was at least able to write in this extremity. Perhaps the poem that he had. begun to write on the train, ‘Requiem’, was going round in his head at this time, with its odd premonition of dying under a wide and starry sky, and the image of the hunter coming home at night:

  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 he the verse you grave for me:

  Here
he lies where he longed to be;

  Home is the sailor, home from sea,

  And the hunter home from the hill.59

  His experience in the Santa Lucia foothills had shaken him, as he tried to explain to Gosse:

  I do not know if I am the same man I was in Europe, perhaps I can hardly claim acquaintance with you. My head went round and looks another way now; for when I found myself over here in a new land, and all the past uprooted with one tug, and I neither glad nor sorry, I got my last lesson about mankind [ … ] There is a wonderful callousness in human nature, which enables us to live.60

  Towards the end of September, when he was well enough to return to Monterey, Louis hobbled back to the Casa Bonifacio. His long unexplained absence must have thrown Fanny into a panic, and perhaps the sight of her tenacious lover plucked from the jaws of death impressed her with the necessity to act, for by mid-October they had evolved a plan: Fanny would return to the Bay Area (mostly for appearances’ sake) and seek a ‘private’, i.e. consensual, divorce from Sam, during which time Louis would stay in Monterey, out of range of gossip. The temporising was not entirely over, but the all-important decision to divorce had been made at last. Belle was in no doubt that marriage to ‘this penniless foreigner’ would follow quickly: ‘Maybe my mother saw in this contrast to my father the security from infidelity that had wrecked their marriage. At any rate she was happy when he was near.’61

  Thus Stevenson found himself alone again in Monterey, but in a more hopeful frame of mind, lodging in the French Hotel, a cheap and bare rooming house on the edges of the old Spanish town. His days took on a simple routine: in the mornings he would go to the post office to check for mail, then call at the drugstore for a newspaper, then go to breakfast in the little whitewashed backroom at Simoneau’s restaurant, the hub of his life in Monterey. Jules Simoneau was a fifty-eight-year-old expatriate Frenchman ‘who had been most things from a man in business to a navvy, and kept his spirit and his kind heart through all’.62 Photographs show a white-bearded, big-nosed, well-built man in working clothes, hands lodged in his belt, with a striking resemblance (though Stevenson is unlikely to have known it) to Walt Whitman. Stevenson left some vivid vignettes of the old Gaul ‘rattling among the dishes, now clearing a semi-military chest with a “hroum-hroum”, a drumming of his fists, and a snatch of music’. ‘Papa Simoneau [was] always in his waist-coat and shirt sleeves, upright as a boy, with a rough, trooper-like smartness, vaunting his dishes if they were good, himself the first to condemn if they were unsuccessful; now red hot in discussion, now playing his flute with antique graces, now shamelessly hurrying off the other boarders that he might sit down to chess with me.’63

  The clientèle that was ousted for chess was a little band of regulars who became Stevenson’s only company during his last months in Monterey, a rough and ready gaggle of French-, Portuguese-and Italian-speakers. There was a captain of whalers, some fishermen, the local baker and barber (or ‘tonsorial artist’ as he advertised himself in the Monterey Californian) and two Ligurians. ‘The sound of our talk was a little like Babel,’ Stevenson recalled. ‘But whatever tongue might be the speaker’s fancy for the moment, the oaths that shone among his sentences were always English.’64 These men were moved by the Scotsman’s penury to donate $2 between them per week to the editor of the local paper in order to pay for Stevenson to be employed as a part-time contributor (he never found out about this act of extreme kindness). But it was Simoneau himself who was the pick of the company, the friend for whom Stevenson retained deep affection and respect all his life, and to whom he subsequently sent all his published works, though they never met again. The scruffy yard at the back of the restaurant became one of Stevenson’s haunts, where he sat soaking up the sun among the empties from the restaurant and the broken tiles that had fallen off the crumbling adobe outhouse, while Simoneau’s hens picked through the dust. He said later that he modelled the vegetation of Treasure Island on the Monterey coastline, and perhaps he picked up more for the book than that, for who is Simoneau like so much as the ‘sea-cook’ Silver, with his rough kindliness and his rattling among the pans, and who more like the pirates of the Spy-Glass inn or the Admiral Benbow than the scruffy male clientèle of Simoneau’s restaurant, Monterey?

  At the end of September, before Fanny left for Oakland, Stevenson had not yet written to New York to have his post forwarded, so had no news at all, not even from Baxter, custodian of his California address. But as the months went by, and Louis’s own letters from the transcontinental journey, and from Monterey, and then from death’s door at San Clemente, began to filter through to his friends, concern naturally grew among them. Henley had foreboded that the worst that could happen was if Louis was ‘induced to go to Monterey, and there get mixed up once more in the miserable life of alarms and lies and intrigues that he led in Paris’.65 Once he knew that ‘the worst’ was in train, Henley urged Colvin to get Louis back at any cost, ‘married or unmarried – je m’en fiche’. ‘He has gone too far to retract,’ he wrote perceptively, ‘he has acted and gushed and excited himself too nearly into the heroic spirit to be asked to forbear his point. All we can hope to do is to make him get through his work quickly and come back quickly.’66

  Meanwhile Stevenson’s parents had been going wild with worry ever since getting home from Cumberland to an empty house. Louis had written to attempt to explain his clandestine actions (one note was sent via Baxter, and his father’s letters to Colvin and Baxter imply that there were others), but his letters must have been too upsetting for them to keep, for none survives from this period, right through to July 1880. In desperation, Thomas Stevenson had appealed first to Baxter, then Colvin, to help get his son back, offering to send money for an immediate return first-class, if, as suspected, Louis had been travelling ‘on the cheap’.67 Little could he have guessed the austerities of second-berth and steerage.

  By November, Thomas Stevenson was better apprised of the situation with regard to Mrs Osbourne, and steadfastly opposed to Louis’s plan to marry. His calm acceptance of Louis’s confidence in Paris the previous year had obviously been in expectation that his son would not pursue a married woman further. Now he was appealing to Colvin in heart-wrenching terms: ‘For God’s sake use your influence. Is it fair that we should be half murdered by his conduct? I am unable to write more about this sinful mad business [ … ] Our case is painful beyond expression.’68 Thomas does not seem to have realised that divorce and marriage were even possibilities (so little had Louis told him about the situation or his hopes); as far as he was concerned, his son was bent on open adultery, a prospect that made him talk hysterically of having to slink away from Edinburgh and move ‘somewhere in England where he is not known’.69 ‘I don’t know whether father or son is nearer lunacy,’ Henley remarked when he heard this. ‘There isn’t much to choose.’70

  Thomas’s next tactic was a desperate one: he got the family doctor (presumably Uncle George) to send Louis a telegram saying that he, Thomas, was critically ill and required Louis’s immediate return. ‘We shall see what answer that brings,’ he wrote to Colvin darkly. The bluff did not work, but precipitated instead the very crisis Thomas sought to prevent, for as Stevenson told Henley, going home at this stage was simply not an option: ‘[My father] would be better or dead ere I got there anyway; and I won’t desert my wife.’71 And thus, in the absence of the bride, and addressing a congregation some six thousand miles distant, Stevenson plighted his troth.

  The same letter to Henley tells how Fanny had also been grievously ill and ‘nearly died’ in Oakland. Louis hadn’t witnessed this, of course, and Fanny’s dramatic illness, like the inflammation of the brain or even ‘cancer’ she had suffered in Monterey,72 is likely to have had the same causes as Thomas Stevenson’s in Edinburgh, that is, stress and hypochondria.

  Henley’s impression that Mrs Osbourne was always surrounded by ‘alarms and lies and intrigues’ was certainly true of this period, though they were not always of her making.
Back in Monterey that summer, she had told Joe Strong of her plans to marry Belle to money. She obviously thought Joe an unsuitable son-in-law and may have suspected that he and Belle were already lovers. Far from discouraging the suitor, the news galvanised him into action, and he rushed to San Francisco to consult with Sam Osbourne, his friend and ally. Sam, affable as ever, gave his blessing to the match, and before the end of the day Joe was back in Monterey with a marriage licence. He took Belle for a walk on the beach during which he persuaded her to marry him immediately, which they did in a cottage by the shore.

  That was on 9 August in Monterey, according to the official records, so Belle’s story of her mother finding out ‘the next day’ and storming to exact revenge on them in San Francisco is obviously misremembered or distorted. Fanny doesn’t seem to have known about the marriage until about 17 November, which is the date on which the Monterey Californian reported ‘Joe Strong, the artist’ as having been married in San Francisco.73 It was probably close to the date at which the storming took place too (and coincides with Fanny’s near-death illness reported by Louis to Henley). Fanny was furious not just with the runaways, but with Sam Osbourne for siding with them so thoroughly and conspiring to keep her in the dark. Sam had found an apartment for the couple on New Montgomery Avenue, took them to dinner on arrival and filled Belle’s purse with twenty-dollar gold pieces. However irresponsible, it was the kind of loving gesture Fanny was absolutely incapable of making towards her daughter, relations with whom began to cool.

  Colvin and Henley were appalled at the sort of company their friend had fallen in with and everything to do with the uncivilised backwater he was living in. Colvin sent on news of RLS from Joe Strong with the spelling mistakes pointedly preserved – ‘The climet seems to agree well with him – his spirits are equel to his health’ – and shuddered over the coarseness of the Monterey Californian. Neither he nor Henley had a good word to say about the few pieces of writing Stevenson managed to finish. This was not reasonable, as ‘The Story of a Lie’ and ‘The Pavilion on the Links’ both found publishers (and the latter story is one of Stevenson’s best), but the London friends were dead set against ‘California and California things’.74 When parts of The Amateur Emigrant began to appear, Colvin expressed the view to Baxter that it was not just bad, but probably unsaleable, ‘quite below his mark’,75 for which Colvin entirely blamed Louis’s circumstances: ‘I don’t believe [this cloud upon his talents] will go as long as he lives away from his equals and has his mind full of nothing but this infernal business. And then, if his work is no good, how is he to live? Of course there is always the chance of his settling to some cadging second-rate literary work out there, and if I am not mistaken Mrs O. would not at all object to that result.’76 ‘Mrs O.’ was certainly not getting a good press back in England. One wonders what ‘Mrs S.’, Fanny Sitwell, thought about these angst-filled exchanges, all of which Colvin is bound to have shared with her.