Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  ‘Stevenson, I think, came soonest out of the spell,’ Lloyd Osbourne wrote later of the partnership with Henley, ‘was the first to rub his eyes and recover his common sense.’16 Towards the end of the first year in England, Stevenson’s interest in the plays was waning, but by then he was writing Kidnapped and Dr Jekyll, and Henley was writing – nothing much. The balance had shifted between them over the years, as Henley remarked to Baxter: ‘Louis has grown faster than I have.’17

  And of course there was another obstacle to the partnership flourishing: ‘the Bedlamite’, as Henley called Fanny: ‘I love her,’ he protested unconvincingly to Baxter, ‘but I won’t collaborate with her and her husband, and I begin to feel that the one means both.’18 Fanny was always outwardly friendly towards Henley for her husband’s sake, but her relations with the blustering, noisy poet were stiffening considerably on closer acquaintance. Henley visited too often, stayed too long, over-excited Louis and drank all the whisky. Fanny expressed enthusiasm for the new plays and even tried to contribute ideas to them, but her prime concern became to limit Henley’s monopoly of her husband’s attention, monitor his behaviour around the invalid and stand guard over their tête-à-têtes. Henley, unsurprisingly, was scornful of her posing as guard dog to his old friend, and was, by implication, critical of Louis for tolerating it.

  Fanny was beginning to have confidence in her own writing, and perhaps had real ambitions for it. Prince Otto had made her feel indispensable, and Louis was planning a sequel to New Arabian Nights to which she was contributing not just ideas but whole chapters, specifically the Mormon story, ‘The Destroying Angel’ and ‘The Fair Cuban’, which features human sacrifice and voodoo. She was writing stories for separate publication too (although they didn’t always get accepted, even when covered by letters from her husband). According to Fanny, the whole idea of The Dynamiter was her work, derived from stories that she made up to entertain Louis when he was bedridden in Hyères, which they later thought of making into a linked collection. They share the title page, but Fanny never claimed responsibility for the final draft, which seems to have been mostly Stevenson’s doing, warts and all, and in his accounts of the hard work he did on the book through the early winter of 1884 he always refers to ‘my’, rather than ‘our’, ‘Arabs’. In fact it followed the pattern typical of Stevenson’s collaborations, with the collaborator providing plotlines and situations that he could work on, but he retaining overall control of the final version.

  More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter is, like its predecessor, a combination of realism and camp. We are back in the ‘fairy London’ of the earlier book, but instead of it being the backdrop to the individualised psychodramas of the Suicide Club, the city now plays a more causative role, presenting a rich, menacing sea of possibilities. This is a modern cosmopolis, noisy and bustling (‘London roars like the noise of battle; four million destinies are here concentred’19), which depersonalises its inhabitants and – in Stevenson’s vision – seems to feed off the process:

  as he advanced into the labyrinth of the south-west, his ear was gradually mastered by the silence. Street after street looked down upon his solitary figure, house after house echoed upon his passage with a ghostly jar, shop after shop displayed its shuttered front and its’ commercial legend; and meanwhile he steered his course, under day’s effulgent dome and through this encampment of diurnal sleepers, lonely as a ship.20

  Here we get a glimpse of the sinister city in which Stevenson locates Dr Jekyll, the London, too, of Sherlock Holmes, Dorian Gray, Conrad’s The Secret Agent. It is also the ‘dreadful city’ of the fin de siècle, that obsessed and oppressed the poets Arthur Symons, Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson. In The Dynamiter, London both consumes and conceals people: the three idle young men who set out at the beginning of the book to seize every opportunity of adventure (and perhaps get the reward for tracking down a wanted man) are lured into company where class and motives have been rendered indecipherable, into buildings which are abandoned, or become prisons, or are in danger of being blown up. The structure lacks the cohesiveness of the Suicide Club stories (and Fanny Stevenson’s contributions are gripping but, literally, outlandish, with their distracting removal of the narrative to a Mormon settlement in the American far west and a Caribbean swamp), but the book was also surprisingly topical and politically partisan, drawing together a number of rather disconnected narratives under a frame story about terrorists. The Fenians about whom Stevenson had wanted to write a play in 1883 had not gone to waste: here is M’Guire on his way to plant a bomb in central London, released into a kind of ecstasy as the device ticks down:

  It seemed as if a sudden, genial heat were spread about his brain; for a second or two, he saw the world as red as blood; and thereafter entered into a complete possession of himself, with an incredible cheerfulness of spirits, prompting him to sing and chuckle as he walked. And yet this mirth seemed to belong to things external; and within, like a black and leaden-heavy kernel, he was conscious of the weight upon his soul.21

  The bomb outrages of the early 1880s, perpetrated by campaigners for Home Rule for Ireland, had appalled the staunch Unionist Stevenson, who despised the cowardliness of the acts. He satirises the bombers freely in this story, showing their complacency about taking ‘generous stipends’ from supporters and their beastly attempts to give a bomb to a little girl in the street. But Stevenson also recognises and exploits the dramatic potential of the situation. The ‘genial heat’ of M’Guire’s bloody vision becomes cold panic when he realises that he hasn’t got enough change to discharge the cab in which the bomb has been left. The extraordinariness of his mission has made him overlook this essential detail, and he is forced to borrow the sum from Mr Godall the cigar merchant (Prince Florizel from the earlier stories, in disguise), who happens to be passing. Godall is wordy; precious seconds pass, and – disastrously – the sharp-eyed cabbie makes M’Guire remove the bag from the taxi. The desperate bomber, knowing that the device is about to explode, has to rush towards the Embankment and throw the bag into the river, an action so energetic that he falls in after it and drowns.

  The bag in question is a Gladstone bag – no mistaking there whom Stevenson held culpable for succouring the terrorists. But the most explicit political statement in the book is its dedication to two members of the Metropolitan Police, William Cole and Thomas Cox, both seriously injured while removing an explosive device from Westminster Hall in January 1885 (between Stevenson finishing the book and its printing). Two days later, General Gordon was killed at Khartoum after a ten-month siege, causing a huge public outcry against the Whig government for not having sent relief forces earlier. Stevenson mentions Gordon’s ‘tragic enterprise’ in his address to Cole and Cox in The Dynamiter; privately he was deeply shaken by the ‘ineffable shame’ to the nation that both incidents exposed. On hearing of Gordon’s death, Gladstone was reputed to have said, ‘It is the man’s own temerity,’ a remark that infuriated Stevenson, who wrote to Symonds:

  Voilà le Bourgeois! le voilà nu! But why should I blame Gladstone, when I too am a Bourgeois? when I have held my peace? Why did I hold my peace? Because I am a sceptic: i.e. a Bourgeois. We believe in nothing, Symonds: you don’t, and I don’t; and these are two reasons, out of a handful of millions, why England stands before the world dripping with blood and daubed with dishonour. I will first try to take the beam out of my own eye; trusting that even private effort somehow betters and braces the general atmosphere. See, for example, if England has shown (I put it hypothetically) one spark of manly sensibility, they have been shamed into it by the spectacle of Gordon. Impotent and small and (if you like) spiteful as it is, the mere fact of people taking their names off the Gordon Memorial Committee rather than sit thereon with Gladstone, is the first glimmer of a sense of responsibility that I have observed.22

  Gladstone had been an avid reader of Treasure Island, apparently unable to put the book down, so it’s not unlikely that he read The Dynamiter too when it was pu
blished just over a year later. He certainly read Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886 (‘while forming a ministry’ according to F.H.W. Myers, whose sister-in-law had given the Prime Minister the book23) and admired that. Perhaps he was too much ‘a man of fog, evasions [ … ] and a general deliquescence of the spine’ – as Stevenson described him to Colvin24 – to get riled by the virulent anti-Fenianism of Stevenson’s stories – if he perceived it fully.

  The decline of Thomas Stevenson into almost permanent ill-health, depression and senility darkened the years in Bournemouth profoundly. Parents and child were seeing more of each other than for years, so dissimulation was difficult, and though Louis played down his symptoms as much as he could so as not to distress his father, at times it must have seemed that they were proceeding towards the grave pretty much apace. Thinking it would cheer and stimulate him (and show how much he was respected professionally), Louis encouraged his father to stand for election as president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1884, which, under duress, Thomas did, and won. But just about the only person not to be pleased by this result was Thomas himself, who said it made him ‘sadly perplexed’ and reckoned that it was seniority, not ability, that had secured the appointment. This response, while realistically admitting what everyone else denied – i.e. that Thomas was no longer capable of performing the duties of the president – displays a sort of ill grace which was conspicuously absent from Louis’s repertoire of behaviour and which he may have studied to avoid.

  The Stevenson parents were in no doubt of Fanny’s dislike of England and eagerness to get abroad again, perhaps to America, and it was partly as a bribe to her – or reward for her patience thus far – that early in 1885 they offered to buy her a house in Bournemouth and furnish it. This was too good to refuse, and in April Louis and Fanny moved into a yellow-brick villa on Alum Chine Road, about a mile’s walk from the sea along the shady, pine-wooded gully of the Chine in an area that was still mostly heathland. The house had grounds of about an acre, with a pigeon house, a stable and coach house they never used, and a kitchen garden where Fanny grew corn, tomatoes, raspberries and salad leaves (a much better diet than most British people could dream of at that date, even if it must have been a struggle to get the tomatoes to ripen to anything approaching Californian standards). Towards the end of the garden the ground dropped away into a steep heather-covered slope with rhododendrons and a thin stream at the bottom, like a genteel version of the platform at Silverado. Stevenson liked to sun himself at the top of this bank, which faced the trees of the Chine, with the sea just out of sight beyond. In fact, though the house was called ‘Sea View’, the sea was only visible in a chink from one upper window. They renamed it ‘Skerryvore’ in honour of Alan Stevenson’s chef d’oeuvre, and Louis hung a ship’s bell from a wreck at the lighthouse at the back of the house under a little wooden canopy: an odd memento, when you think about it.

  The house itself cost an enormous £1700, and £500 more was spent on the furnishings. Thomas Stevenson took his daughter-in-law on a shopping spree in London, clearly hoping that he could pin the couple down with possessions. There were old oak boxes and yellow damask throws in the drawing room, with a carved figure of St Cecilia and two Japanese vases on the mantel which were a present from Katherine de Mattos. ‘Skerryvore will not look much like other people’s houses,’ Fanny wrote to her mother-in-law, ‘but it will please me so much more than if it did.’25 Louis got carried away in a curiosity shop and bought a chest decorated with eighteenth-century prints and a convex mirror which he thought ‘sublime’, adding comically, ‘no picture can be so decorative and so cheerful’.26 Over the fireplace in the ‘Blue Room’ hung Turner’s engraving of the Bell Rock Lighthouse, with two Piranesi etchings opposite; and as the months went by the walls filled up, with photographs of Henley and Colvin, with landscapes, portraits, ‘a small armoury of buccaneering weapons’27 in tribute to Treasure Island, and a two-foot-high plaster group by Auguste Rodin called Le Printemps, a gift from the artist, whose Paris studio the Stevensons had visited in 1886.* The style of the interior was sparse by high-Victorian standards, but as neither Louis nor Fanny was used to accumulating things, it amused and amazed them to look round their suburban home. Fanny recounted her husband coming downstairs one day and saying, ‘This room is so beautiful that it positively gives me a qualm.’29 And with the mirror reflecting at maximum azimuth their newly-acquired goods and the satisfied smiles of his wife, Stevenson was able to report ‘my mind shows symptoms, I think, of reawakening’.30

  It was during this first year in Bournemouth that the best and most evocative portrait of Stevenson was painted, by John Singer Sargent, who had already done one painting of him the previous December and who was later commissioned to do another by some wealthy American admirers of the writer. ‘I was very much impressed by him,’ Sargent wrote later to Henry James, ‘he seemed to me the most intense creature I had ever met.’31 The 1885 portrait shows Stevenson and Fanny in the dining room at ‘Skerryvore’, he in motion, to the left of the frame, she seated and half out of the picture to the right, with a dark doorway just off-centre between them, open and showing the muted light from an outside door at the end of a shadowy hallway. Louis’s face and hands reflect some light from behind the observer’s view; there is also a concentrated shimmering effect from the exotic costume in which Fanny appears (the theatricality of which is striking) and some reflected light off two prints on the wall, again half out of the frame, but the rest of the picture is very dark. ‘Sargent was down again and painted a portrait of me walking about in my own dining room, in my own velveteen jacket and twisting, as I go my own moustache,’ Stevenson reported to Will Low:

  At one corner a glimpse of my wife in an Indian dress and seated in a chair that was once my grandfather’s [ … ] adds a touch of poesy and comicality. It is, I think, excellent; but it is too eccentric to be exhibited. I am at one extreme corner; my wife, in this wild dress and looking like a ghost, is at the extreme other end; between us an open door exhibits my palatial entrance hall and part of my respected staircase. All this is touched in lovely, with that witty touch of Sargent’s; but of course it looks damn queer as a whole.32

  Stevenson wasn’t the only person to think it queer (he described it to Sargent as resembling a ‘caged maniac lecturing about the foreign specimen in the corner’33). When the picture was framed and varnished, Sargent sent it round to Colvin’s ‘to know whether he considers it interesting or obnoxious’. Sargent had been disappointed when the first friend he showed it to judged the composition ‘paradoxical’: ‘It ought not to be in the least,’ the painter wrote to Stevenson, ‘so perhaps it is unlucky that I did not cut it down to a single figure like this [here he sketched Louis standing alone]: we will see.’34 Fortunately Sargent left the canvas as it was. The unconventional arrangement of the figures gives the effect of a viewfinder having moved out of its original alignment, as the eye of the beholder follows the movements of the pacing figure. The effect is of restless motion, ‘caged’ indeed in this domestic prison (the claustrophobic dimensions and darkness of which are obvious), with Fanny in her finery at the original centre of the group and Louis going back and forth in front of her like a nervy pendulum.

  The chair in which Fanny appears in the picture had belonged to Louis’s grandfather, but was renamed at about this time ‘Henry James’s chair’ in honour of the novelist, with whom Stevenson had struck up a mutually admiring friendship. They had met six years before in London, when James’s impression had been of ‘a shirt-collarless Bohemian and a great deal (in an inoffensive way) of a poseur’,35 and Stevenson had dismissed James as ‘a mere club fizzle’. But neither writer had read the other’s works at that date. By 1884, James was happy to pay Stevenson a compliment in an essay called ‘The Art of Fiction’, saying that Treasure Island ‘succeeded wonderfully in what it attempts’. This was part of James’s reply to issues raised earlier in the year by Walter Besant (later founder of the Society of Authors), who said tha
t novel-writing should have a ‘conscious moral purpose’, also that writers shouldn’t stray beyond what they knew first-hand. James counter-argued that the novel should not have a conscious moral purpose at all but should ‘trace the implication of things’ and deal with ‘all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision’. The novel should ‘compete with life’ and recreate reality, as painting did; ‘as the picture is reality, so the novel is history’. It was probably this part of James’s article that Stevenson thought ‘dreadful nonsense’ when he read the piece in Longman’s Magazine in September,36 as he addresses the analogy in his reply published three months later in the same magazine. Stevenson’s essay, ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, contends that the novel is never a ‘transcript of life’, but a significant, and essentially artful, simplification of some aspect of it; the very difference of fiction from reality constitutes both ‘the method and the meaning of the work’:

  Our art is occupied, and bound to be occupied, not so much in making stories true as in making them typical; not so much in capturing the lineaments of each fact, as in marshalling all of them towards a common end. For the welter of impressions, all forcible but all discrete, which life presents, it substitutes a certain artificial series of impressions, all indeed most feebly represented, but all aiming to the same effect.37