Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  In the days before Gosse’s arrival, kept indoors by the heavy rain, Louis had been trying to entertain Sam with paints and paper. A map emerged from his watery doodlings, which ‘took my fancy beyond expression’, as he recalled in the essay ‘My First Book’. Under the map, he wrote the words ‘Treasure Island’: ‘The next thing I knew, I had some paper before me and was writing out a list of chapters.’

  The Sea Cook

  Or Treasure Island:

  A Story for Boys.

  ‘If this don’t fetch the kids, why, they have gone rotten since my day,’ he wrote excitedly to Henley. ‘Will you be surprised to learn that it is about Buccaneers, that it begins in the Admiral Benbow public house on [the] Devon Coast, that it’s all about a map and a treasure and a mutiny and a derelict ship and a current and a fine old Squire Trelawny (the real Tre,* purged of literature and sin, to suit the infant mind) and a doctor and another doctor, and a Sea Cook with one leg, and a sea song with the chorus “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of Rum”.’72

  By the next day three chapters had already been written, those incomparable scenes at the Admiral Benbow with Billy Bones’s arrival and Blind Pew tap-tapping up the road to deliver the Black Spot. Louis was reading the story aloud to his family at Braemar, chapter by chapter, and buoyed by their enthusiastic response, kept the pace up briskly. ‘No women in the story,’ he told Henley. ‘Sam’s orders; and who so blythe to obey? It’s awful fun boy’s stories [ … ] No writing, just drive along as the words come and the pen will scratch! The only stiff thing is to get it ended; that I don’t see, but I look to a volcano.’73

  So the classic adventure story (never just ‘a story for boys’) took shape. Thomas Stevenson suggested the apple-barrel incident, and supplied his son with a detailed list of the contents of Billy Bones’s sea-chest; Sam was the essential child-audience and Fanny a keen critic of the narrative. None of them thought of it as more than a passing entertainment until a visitor to Braemar, the writer and journalist Alexander Japp (with whom Stevenson had been in correspondence about Thoreau), suggested it might appeal to his friend James Henderson, editor of a children’s paper called Young Folks. Japp waxed so strong about it, and guessed at such generous remuneration (perhaps £100), that he was allowed to take away a copy of the existing chapters and an outline of the rest of the plot to show Henderson. The £100 proved illusory, but by the end of September Young Folks had offered to publish the story in instalments at the rate of twelve shillings and sixpence a column, Stevenson retaining copyright on the whole. As Young Folks was not a prestigious publication (none of the family had even heard of it before), Stevenson took the precaution of adopting a pseudonym, ‘Captain George North’, to protect his literary credit.

  There then arose the slight problem of ‘the whole’. After fifteen chapters and several large doses of praise, Stevenson had run out of steam. Then he fell ill again and work stopped altogether. At Uncle George’s insistence, silence was imposed on him to save his lungs and a pine-oil respirator bought to help his breathing. ‘It has a snout like a pig’s,’ Fanny wrote to Dora Williams, ‘with comical valves on each side that flap in and out as he breathes.’74 He had to wear this monstrous contraption day and night, and was the subject of ribald commentary in the lanes of Braemar. The Highlands had proven as bad for his health as ever, and there seemed nothing for it but a return to Davos for the winter.

  At this point, ‘The Sea-Cook’, like so many other of Stevenson’s works, might never have been finished. The author had reached Chapter 16 and was entirely stuck. ‘My mouth was empty; there was not one more word of Treasure Island in my bosom,’ he wrote later. ‘[I was ] a good deal pleased with what I had done, and more appalled than I can depict to you in words at what remained for me to do.’75 Something of his predicament can perhaps be detected in the story itself, as young Jim Hawkins, in the most reflective chapter of the book, circles round and round, not able to steer Ben Gunn’s flimsy coracle towards the shore. Providentially, Young Folks was starting to publish the chapters it already possessed, in the certainty that the rest was on its way. This forced Stevenson’s hand, as did the fan mail that was already starting to come through from readers of the early chapters, and, whipped along by the necessity not to disappoint them or himself, ‘Captain George’ set to again in Davos and finished the story in time, overcoming his difficulty at the beginning of Chapter 16 by changing narrator from Jim to Dr Livesey. It then only took a couple more weeks to get to the glorious moment when he could write ‘The End’: astonishingly enough, Treasure Island was the first full-length narrative Stevenson had ever completed.

  The plot was pure romance: a boy, a treasure map, pirates, a deserted island, loyalties tested and betrayed, a frantic chase to find gold. In some ways it was utterly conventional, not to say derivative; besides debts to Ballantyne, Defoe and Johnson (the historian of buccaneering), Stevenson later admitted that much of the Billy Bones story must have been an unconscious borrowing from Washington Irving. ‘The stockade, I am told is from Masterman Ready,’ he wrote in ‘My First Book’. ‘It may be, I care not a jot. These useful writers had fulfilled the poet’s saying: departing, they had left behind them “Footprints on the sands of time;/Footprints that perhaps another –” and I was the other!’76 He knew that for all its baggage of familiarity, his pirate tale was ‘as original as sin’; Silver’s parrot on his shoulder, the pirate song, Ben Gunn, the mad marooned sailor on the island, became, in Stevenson’s hands, startlingly new.

  The enduring appeal of the book resides as much in its psychological realism as in the gripping plot. The development of Jim Hawkins from gullible child to resourceful and active young man (who goes through a shocking rite of passage when forced to kill the mutinous pirate Israel Hands) gives the story weight and significance. Stevenson follows through in imagination, making us share the aftermath of the crisis once Hands’s body has fallen from the mast of the Hispaniola:

  Owing to the cant of the vessel, the masts hung far out over the water, and from my perch on the cross-trees I had nothing below me but the surface of the bay. Hands, who was not so far up, was, in consequence, nearer to the ship, and fell between me and the bulwarks. He rose once to the surface in a lather of foam and blood, and then sank again for good. As the water settled I could see him lying huddled together on the clean, bright sand in the shadow of the vessel’s sides. A fish or two whipped past his body. Sometimes, by the quivering of the water, he appeared to move a little, as if he were trying to rise. But he was dead enough, for all that, being both shot and drowned, and was food for fish in the very place where he had designed my slaughter.77

  There is no sentimentality in the book at all; the adult world Jim is about to join is a place of unbridled greed and self-interest (Dr Livesey being the only exception), and the former crimes of the pirates, though never made explicit, show in their brutal manners and powerful fear of each other. Even Silver’s parrot, survivor of many buccaneer generations and named after the wicked old Captain Flint whom all the pirates dreaded, uses language ‘passing belief for wickedness’, for, as Silver remarks, ‘You can’t touch pitch and not be mucked.’

  The creation of Long John Silver was in itself one of Stevenson’s finest achievements, a fictional character far more real to most people now than any historical pirate:

  His left leg was cut off close by the hip, and under the left shoulder he carried a crutch, which he managed with wonderful dexterity, hopping about upon it like a bird. He was very tall and strong, with a face as big as a ham – plain and pale, but intelligent and smiling. Indeed, he seemed in the most cheerful spirits, whistling as he moved about among the tables, with a merry word or a slap on the shoulder for the more favoured of his guests.78

  Silver’s benign, even charming, exterior and fatherly solicitude for Jim Hawkins, and his abrupt changes of demeanour from willing servant to bloodthirsty gang-leader, provide a constantly shifting background against which Jim has to learn to evaluate character, a trope Steven
son was to use in many other novels. ‘I thought I knew what a buccaneer was like,’ Jim says, reflecting on Silver’s misleading appearance, ‘a very different creature, according to me, from this clean and pleasant-tempered landlord.’79 The unlikely friendship between the two is at the heart of the book, and proof of Jim’s growing judgement, as well as of Silver’s core qualities of courage and geniality, is that the two retain a grudging but genuine admiration for each other at the end, despite discovering how little they actually have in common.

  The serialisation in Young Folks gave ‘Captain George North’ quite a following among its juvenile subscribers, but of course had very little impact on the public at large. Some of Stevenson’s friends who were sent the cuttings of ‘Treasure Island; or The Mutiny of the Hispaniola’ were delighted by it (especially Henley), but the story didn’t appear in book form for another two years, not through lack of interest from publishers, but from the author’s lack of enterprise.1883 is therefore the date at which it (and Stevenson himself, to some extent) took off. A reviewer in the Spectator, writing five years later, said, ‘Boys who have lived since “Treasure Island” was published, are boys who have a right to look back on all previous boyhoods with compassion.’80 And by the time Stevenson was asked to write an essay about it in 1894 for a volume called My First Book (regardless of the fact that it was nothing like his first book), he could refer to Treasure Island with a slightly bemused air as a tale ‘that seems to have given much pleasure’.81

  * * *

  *These views have now been obscured by tree-growth, as has all sign of the old silver mine. It is in fact a far more sylvan scene today than it was in 1880, and forms part of the ‘Robert Louis Stevenson Trail’.

  *Lockett relates the story, told to him by the patrons of the hotel. When the Stevensons went to look over rooms at the pension Bergadler, Louis (‘a gentleman’) stayed downstairs while Fanny (‘a stout lady’) went upstairs. When Stevenson showed signs of impatience, the landlord ‘assured him that his mother was just coming down’.41

  *The machine, and copious amounts of type, are now in the Writer’s Museum, Edinburgh.

  *In other words, Shelley’s friend Edward Trelawney, whom Colvin knew.

  8

  UXORIOUS BILLY

  BY THE END OF OCTOBER 1881, Louis was back in Davos, ‘on my Patmos, or rather Pisgah, with five months of snow before me’.1 The Belvedere and its English ‘crock-company’ was spurned; this time he, Fanny and Sam were renting a chalet midway along the upper part of Davos valley, with a view southwards to the Tinzenhorn. There was room for the printing press and its accessories, for the wood-engraving tools that Stevenson had bought to entertain himself with, for Fanny’s paints and for the six hundred lead soldiers Sam had accumulated. In the large attic, they set up a permanent war game site, complete with ‘mountains, towns, rivers, “good” and “bad” roads, bridges, morasses etc.’, as Sam remembered it.2 These games could last for weeks, and became very complex; Stevenson even went as far as writing war reports for two separate imaginary newspapers, the Glendarule Times and the Yallobally Record. It was intensely playful play, and, like everything Stevenson did in this vein, less a return to childish things than a continuation and sophistication of pleasures he had never put away. For his kriegspiel with Sam, he was studying Hamley’s Operations of War, the authority on martial strategy since 1800, and it can’t be entirely coincidental that during this winter he began to plan a biography of the Duke of Wellington.

  Before that, Stevenson had become extremely excited about the prospect of writing a biography of Hazlitt, a commission from the publisher George Bentley. Despite months of research, and a huge admiration for the author of Table-Talk, Principles of Human Action and the Essays, despite also the opportunity to earn money, this was another false start. Graham Balfour was among the commentators who believed that Stevenson took a disgust against his hero on reading the Liber Amoris, with its stark revelations of Hazlitt’s sexual susceptibilities, but Gosse disagreed strongly with this surmise. Stevenson was not the man to be shocked by Hazlitt’s confessional memoir, Gosse wrote to Augustine Birrell in 1902: ‘He would see the vulgarity, and, what is worse, the slight insanity of it all. But the processes of desire are so mysterious, and Stevenson so fully realised that, in the case of an artist, it is what art he deposits, not what desire he takes in, which is of interest, and he was, moreover, so devoid of the least touch of cant, that I rather resent your words on this subject.’3

  Stevenson had a productive winter at the Chalet am Stein. He finished ‘Treasure Island’ for Young Folks, wrote The Silverado Squatters for his new publisher, Chatto and Windus (it was published in 1883), composed two long essays on ‘Talk and Talkers’ for the Cornhill, and collected his ‘Suicide Club’ stories and other short fiction as a two-volume New Arabian Nights, published by Chatto in 1882. ‘Who says I am written out,’ he wrote to Henley, ‘– damn their beards! I spill more ink than half the crawling slovens.’4

  ‘Talk and Talkers’, intended as a celebration of Louis’s friendships with Henley, Bob, Jenkin, Simpson, Gosse and Symonds (who all appear under disguised names), caused a certain amount of dissent among his circle back in Britain, some of whom had trouble identifying themselves, few of whom seemed pleased with their portraits. Henley in particular became agitated – ‘savage’ was his word – at the omission of Ferrier and Colvin from the group (although Stevenson had explained that he tried and failed with the latter), and to Baxter lamented the inclusion of Gosse, ‘who has led the poor dear young man astray’.5 Baxter was the last person to take this calmly; his former intimacy with Stevenson seemed to have worn very thin. Their experience had diverged sharply (Baxter lost a daughter in 1881), and letters like this from the married invalid of Davos only emphasised the irretrievability of the past:

  Ah! what would I not give to steal this evening with you through the big, echoing, college archway and away south under the street lamps, and to dear Brash’s, now defunct! But the old time is dead also; never, never, to revive. It was a sad time, too, but so gay and so hopeful, and we had such sport with all our low spirits, and all our distresses, that it looks like a lamplit, vicious fairy land behind me. O for ten Edinburgh minutes – sixpence between us, and the ever glorious Lothian Road, or dear mysterious Leith Walk! But here, a sheer hulk, lies poor Tom Bowling; – here in this strange place, whose very strangeness would have been heaven to him then; – and aspires – yes, C.B. with tears – after the past.

  [ … ] I swear by the eternal sky

  Johnson – nor Thomson – ne’er shall die!

  Yet I fancy they are dead too; dead like Brash.6

  There had been many changes in the group; Ferrier was dying of drink in Edinburgh, Henley had finally begun to earn a decent wage as the editor of Cassell’s Magazine of Art (a post arranged for him by Colvin), and Bob was teaching a class at Cambridge (another Colvin arrangement). Bob had married, secretly, in 1881, a dentist’s daughter called Louisa Purland, who lived with her sister and earned her own living (which was just as well, as Bob was almost penniless). The couple were not living together, only taking holidays occasionally; ‘a curious arrangement’, as Louis explained to his mother, ‘but not altogether a bad one’.7 But Louisa, like Simpson’s wife Anne, was to prove ultimately unfriendly towards Louis and Fanny, and a divisive influence.

  Louis’s own marriage was as puzzling and divisive, if not more so, in his friends’ eyes, and Henley can’t have been pleased that the second ‘Talk and Talkers’ essay concluded with this passage about the unmatchable intimacy of marriage, one of many ardent tributes by Stevenson to his wife:

  Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes. The disputes are valueless; they but ingrain the difference; the heroic heart of woman prompting her at once to nail her colours to the mast. But in the intervals, almost unconsciously and with no desire to shine, the whole material of life is turned over and over, ideas are struck out and shared, the two persons more and more a
dapt their notions one to suit the other, and in process of time, without sound of trumpet, they conduct each other into new worlds of thought.8

  Fanny’s ailments during the second winter in Davos were legion; stomach disorder, ‘brain-fever’, heart trouble, sore throat – she was hardly well for a week. In December, she was sent to Bern for treatment and told she may have had a gall bladder infection, or ulceration of the bowels, perhaps even cancer again, while Fanny herself believed (confusingly) that she had malaria. ‘I wish to God I or anybody knew what was the matter with my wife,’ Stevenson wrote to Gosse,9 a cry he had made often enough about himself, A Swiss nurse was hired to look after her, and four or five months’ convalescence recommended. The irony was that Louis’s health seemed to improve (on the whole) in Davos, even though he hated the place.

  The Swiss nurse didn’t last long, nor the domestic servants who were, hired that winter at the Chalet am Stein. The Stevensons were clearly not very good employers, or posed too much of a challenge to the average skivvy, with their shouting matches and chaotic habits: ‘their housekeeping was amusing and original’, as Symonds’s wife Catherine put it.10 During bouts of illness, the household went into meltdown. Horatio Brown, who liked to spend afternoons with Stevenson at the chalet, smoking, drinking and talking, was greeted one time by this alarming sight: ‘[Stevenson] was lying, ghastly, in bed – purple cheek-bones, bloodless lips – fever all over him – without appetite – and all about him utterly forlorn. Woggs squealing, Mrs Stevenson doing her best to make things comfortable.’11