As with all subjects that were near to his heart, Stevenson couldn’t help getting carried away with the force of his own argument, restating it with escalating eloquence:
Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of experience, like an air artificially made by a discreet musician.38
Questions of literary craft were rarely raised in public at that date, and Stevenson relished the chance to air his views. But James responded to the brilliance of the article rather than to its argument. He wrote immediately to Stevenson promising ‘not words of discussion, dissent, retort or remonstrance, but of hearty sympathy, charged with the assurance of my enjoyment of everything you write. It’s a luxury, in this immoral age, to encounter some one who does write – who is really acquainted with that lovely art.’39 This sort of thing was always happening. Stevenson would speak his mind, and be rewarded by compliments to his ‘lovely art’ and ‘the native gaiety of all that you write’, as James went on to say. His reply to James’s letter was very friendly, but insisted on taking the debate further:
Seriously, from the dearth of information and thoughtful interest in the art of literature, those who try to practise it with any deliberate purpose run the risk of finding no fit audience. People suppose that it is ‘the stuff’ that interests them; they think, for instance, that the prodigious fine thoughts and sentiments in Shakespeare impress by their own weight, not understanding that the unpolished diamond is but a stone. They think that striking situations, or good dialogue, are got by studying life; they will not rise to understand that they are prepared by deliberate artifice and set off by painful suppressions. Now, I want the whole thing well ventilated, for my own education and the public’s, and I beg you to look as quick as you can, to follow me up with every circumstance of defeat where we differ, and [ … ] to emphasise the points where we agree.40
‘James is to make a rejoinder,’ Stevenson told Henley in March, anticipating the chance to write another himself. He was disappointed with the small space he had been allotted for the first article and had grand schemes to follow them both with a ‘Treatise of the Art of Literature’, ‘a small, arid book that shall some day appear’.41 But it didn’t, despite Stevenson spending his Christmas holiday in bed writing a piece ‘On Some Technical Elements in Style’. James was much more interested in cultivating the Scotsman’s friendship than immediately engaging his views on a theory of writing. The irony is that James is always hauled out as a kind of sponsor to Stevenson’s literary credibility, proof that Stevenson could engage the serious attention of serious writers among his contemporaries, that he was not just a romancer and pale belle lettrist. But here we have evidence that James to some extent sidelined or neutralised Stevenson’s seriousness and, wittingly or not, encouraged him to stick to ‘gaiety’.
Circumstances helped cement the friendship, for James’s invalid sister Alice was moved to Bournemouth early in 1885 for her health, and by the spring James had decided to take rooms in the town to make visiting her easier (and to work on his novel The Bostonians). He called at Skerryvore as soon as he could, and after an initial misunderstanding with Valentine at the door (she mistook him for a tradesman) found his host very friendly, clever and wonderfully animated; ‘an interesting, charming creature [ … ] more or less dying here’, he wrote to William Dean Howells.42 Soon James was visiting every evening, sitting in ‘his’ chair, being plied with drink and conversation. He was bearded at that date, forty-one years old, and bore, Fanny thought, a strong resemblance to another frequent visitor to Bournemouth, the Prince of Wales (who had set up his glamorous mistress, Lillie Langtry, in a house very close to Alum Chine Road). She described James comically to her mother-in-law as ‘a gentle, amiable, soothing, sleepy sort, fat and dimpled’,43 but was pleased and proud to have such a distinguished fellow countryman their particular friend; James had better manners and a less English snobbism than many of Louis’s acquaintances, and made none of those invidious bachelor-days comparisons that underlay all Henley’s talk. Fanny made an American meal in his honour on 19 May, the couple’s fifth wedding anniversary, at which he was the only guest, and James responded by buying them another mirror, about which Stevenson wrote ‘The Mirror Speaks’:
Long I none but dealers saw;
Till before my silent eye
One that sees came passing by.
Now with an outlandish grace,
To the sparkling fire I face
In the blue room at Skerryvore;
Where I wait until the door
Open, and the Prince of Men,
Henry James, shall come again.
‘Prince of Men’ is a powerful compliment, and James paid plenty in return, especially after Stevenson was dead, when he seemed virtually inconsolable. The strength of James’s feelings then – not particularly easy to have guessed from his behaviour towards Stevenson during his lifetime – is very evident in a letter to Gosse of 17 December 1894:
I meant to write to you tonight on another matter – but of what can one think, or utter or dream, save of this ghastly extinction of the beloved R.L.S.? It is too miserable for cold words – it’s an absolute desolation. It makes me cold and sick – and with the absolute, almost alarmed sense, of the visible, material quenching of an indispensable light.44
The dynamics of the Stevenson marriage fascinated Henry James. While he delighted in the brilliant company of the husband, privately he had a low opinion of the wife, a ‘poor, barbarous and merely instinctive lady’,45 as he described her later, whose association with Stevenson had raised her up a little, but only temporarily. Alice James was even harsher, and wrote in her diary five years later that Fanny looked like ‘an appendage to a hand organ’ (i.e. a monkey), compounding the idea of ‘primitiveness’ with the remark that Mrs Stevenson’s powerful egotism produced ‘the strangest feeling of being in the presence of an unclothed being’.46 No wonder the Stevensons’ later removal to Samoa was so easy to caricature as a form of ‘going native’: in the eyes of polite society Fanny was halfway there already.
Stevenson himself shared much of this view of Fanny as ‘primitive’ and ‘instinctive’, though to him those were not terms of abuse. He often classified her as ‘other’ – indeed, that was the essence of her attraction for him – addressing her jokily in letters (‘Dear weird woman’, ‘My dear fellow’, ‘Dear Dutchwoman’) and describing her as ‘the foreign specimen’ in Sargent’s portrait. But sometimes there was a sharper edge to his characterisation of his wife. To Henley and to his parents (interesting choices) he satirised her as a powerful machine called ‘the Vandegrifter’ that he ran the risk of getting caught in daily. In one letter he describes having ‘got my little finger into a steam press called the Vandegrifter (patent) and my whole body and soul had to go through after it. I came out as limp as a lady’s novel, but the Vandegrifter suffered in the process, and is fairly knocked about.’47 The unsentimentality of this is a kind of compliment, but not much of one, especially when written for Henley’s eyes. In a letter to James about the same time, he served up this description of one of his and Fanny’s quarrels:
[My wife] is a woman (as you know) not without art: the art of extracting the gloom of the eclipse from sunshine; and she has recently laboured in this field not without success or (as we used to say) not without a blessing. It is strange: ‘we fell out my wife and I’ the other night; she tackled me savagely for being a canary-bird; I replied (bleatingly) protesting that there was no use turning life into King Lear; presently it was discovered that there were two dead combatants upon the field, each slain by an arrow of the truth, and we tenderly carried off each other’s corpses. Here is a little comedy for Henry James to write! The beauty was each thought the other quite unscathed at first. But we had dealt shrewd stabs.48
This is a fello
w novelist’s observation rather than a husband’s. That ‘(as you know)’ is a particularly conspiratorial touch, for the likelihood of the two men having spoken openly about Fanny’s quirks of temperament was nil; but this was Stevenson’s way of indicating that he had seen James watching the situation – and had been doing so himself.
In ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, written in November 1884, Stevenson had spoken of how fiction ‘substitutes a certain artificial series of impressions’ for ‘the welter of impressions, all forcible but all discrete, which life presents’. At exactly the same time, he was working on a story which was one of the most ambitious of his career and which conveys just that ‘welter of impressions’ that he suggested was unachievable. ‘Markheim’ is the story of a murder and its immediate aftermath, a ‘shocker’ thought up and written quickly for the 1884 Christmas number of the Pall Mall Gazette. It turned out too short for Pall Mall, so Stevenson sent his 1881 grave-robber story ‘The Body Snatcher’ as a substitute and held back ‘Markheim’ until the next year, when a lightly revised version of it appeared in Unwin’s Christmas Annual. The story begins in a pawnshop on Christmas Day, with a nervous young man, Markheim, purporting to want to buy something. The dealer who runs the shop is sarcastic, having only known Markheim hitherto as a supplier of stolen goods, and he becomes impatient when his increasingly excitable customer seems to be wasting time with talk of charity and love, saying, ‘I in love! I never had the time, nor have I the time today for all this nonsense.’ This seals the dealer’s fate, allowing Markheim to carry through his real purpose, which is to murder and rob him: ‘the long, skewer-like dagger flashed and fell. The dealer struggled like a hen, striking his temple on the shelf, and then tumbled on the floor in a heap.’49 In the aftermath of the crime, Markheim is almost in a trance:
Time had some score of small voices in that shop, some stately and slow as was becoming to their great age; others garrulous and hurried. All these told out the seconds in an intricate chorus of tickings. Then the passage of a lad’s feet, heavily running on the pavement, broke in upon these smaller voices and startled Markheim into the consciousness of his surroundings. He looked about him awfully. The candle stood on the counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught; and by that inconsiderable movement, the whole room was filled with noiseless bustle and kept heaving like a sea: the tall shadows nodding, the gross blots of darkness swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces of the portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like images in water. The inner door stood ajar, and peered into that leaguer of shadows with a long slit of daylight like a pointing finger.50
Convinced that someone must have heard the murder being committed, Markheim’s imagination torments him with visions of imminent discovery, and he comes to feel that there is a presence in the building: ‘now it was a faceless thing, and yet had eyes to see with; and again it was a shadow of himself; and yet again [he] beheld the image of the dead dealer, reinspired with cunning and hatred’. His worst fears are confirmed when he is upstairs searching for the dealer’s cash and hears a step, then sees the door handle turn. What follows is a great coup of suspense writing, as unguessable as it is bizarre:
What to expect he knew not, whether the dead man walking, or the official ministers of human justice, or some chance witness blindly stumbling in to consign him to the gallows. But when a face was thrust into the aperture, glanced round the room, looked at him, nodded and smiled as if in friendly recognition, and then withdrew again, and the door closed behind it, his fear broke loose from his control in a hoarse cry. At the sound of this the visitant returned.
‘Did you call me?’ he asked, pleasantly[.]51
This creature has ‘a strange air of the common-place’ yet also seems ‘not of the earth and not of God’.52 Markheim thinks he bears ‘a likeness to himself’, and is surprised to find how much the thing knows about Markheim’s innermost thoughts, as well as knowing what is happening elsewhere – for instance that the dealer’s servant is on her way home and will soon discover the murder. Convinced that this is an agent of evil and that he, being an ‘unwilling sinner’, wants nothing to do with his help, Markheim tries to defend his actions, only to be told that they are of little interest to the creature: ‘the bad man is dear to me; not the bad act, whose fruits, if we could follow them far enough down the hurtling cataract of the ages, might yet be found more blessed than those of the rarest virtues’.53 Is the creature Markheim’s conscience, or his soul? his doppelgänger, or a supernatural tempter? The great subtlety of the story lies in its withholding of an answer to these questions. Markheim is so struck by the creature’s evidence of predestination that he decides the only way to prove his own wish to be good is to give himself up; ‘from that, to your galling disappointment, you shall see that I can draw both energy and courage’.54 Far from being galled, the creature is transformed: his features (always described in watery, shifting terms) ‘began to undergo a wonderful and lovely change; they brightened and softened with a tender triumph; and, even as they brightened, faded and dislimned’.
‘Markheim’ is an extraordinary story for two reasons: one, because it replicates so much from the murder scene in Crime and Punishment, the other because it is so original. The history of Stevenson’s admiration for Dostoievsky’s great book is not very widely known; the first English translation, in 1886, post-dates ‘Markheim’, but Stevenson seems to have read the novel in a French version of 1884, a copy of which was handed on to him by Henry James, ‘only partially cut’ as Henley claimed later.55* The fact that ‘the Master’ couldn’t finish Crime and Punishment seems to illustrate the very differences in attitude to fiction that Stevenson had wanted to debate with him earlier, and certainly the ‘reality’ that Dostoievsky represented was not the kind James would ever choose to recreate. But Stevenson was simply bowled over by the novel: ‘it is not reading a book, it is having a brain fever, to read it’,56 he wrote to Henley, and to Symonds:
It was like having an illness. James did not care for it because the character of Raskolnikoff was not objective; and at that I divined a great gulf between us and, on further reflection, the existence of a certain impotence in many minds of today, which prevents them from living in a book or a character, and keeps them standing afar off, spectators of a puppet show. To such I suppose the book may seem empty in the centre; to others it is a room, a house of life, into which they themselves enter, and are tortured or purified.57
In the only two letters where he mentions Dostoievsky’s novel, Stevenson never links ‘Markheim’ with it, but the similarities are striking, as a scholar called Edgar C. Knowlton pointed out as early as 1916. Knowlton compared passages from the two works in parallel columns and came up with evidence of a kind of imaginative shadowing; the nervousness of the murderers (both essentially ‘good’ characters who have targeted people they think vicious), the suspicions of the victims, the brutality and suddenness of the crimes, the anxieties of both murderers that the corpses might come back to life, the torment of hearing others approach, the ringing at the door of unscheduled visitors, the removal of keys from the bodies, the ‘reflective condition’ that overtakes both criminals. Here are the two murder scenes, Dostoievsky’s first (in David McDuff’s translation):
As she attempted to untie the ribbon she turned towards the window in search of more light [ … ] and for a few seconds she moved right away and stood with her back to him. He undid his coat and freed the axe from its loop, but did not take it right out [ … ] ‘Why on earth has he wrapped it up like this?’ the old woman exclaimed in annoyance, and she moved a little way towards him.
There was not another second to be lost. He took the axe right out, swung it up in both hands, barely conscious of what he was doing.58
And this is the build-up to Stevenson’s murder scene:
The dealer stooped once more, this time to replace the glass upon the shelf, his thin blond hair falling over his eyes as he did so. Markheim moved a little nearer, with one hand
in the pocket of his greatcoat; he drew himself up and filled his lungs; at the same time many different emotions were depicted together on his face – terror, horror, and resolve, fascination and a physical repulsion; and through a haggard lift of his upper lip his teeth looked out.
‘This may perhaps suit’ observed the dealer: and then, as he began to re-arise, Markheim bounded from behind upon his victim.59
But from this very close emulation of Dostoievsky’s story, ‘Markheim’ develops in an ingenious way. The intervention of the supernatural (yet ‘common-place’) ‘creature’, his subtle arguments about predestination and the nature of evil and Markheim’s refusal to compound his crime (seen here as a form of stubbornness as much as anything) are all entirely Stevenson’s own inventions. ‘Markheim’ represents a feverish kind of homage to the power of Dostoievsky’s narrative gifts as much as to his actual tale, an acknowledgement of how affecting the experience of reading him had been.
G.K. Chesterton described Stevenson’s years in Bournemouth as a ‘revolt into respectability’,60 but the ‘revolt’ didn’t last long, or go far. The emaciated Scot cut an odd figure stalking about on the West Cliff in the latest of his black velvet jackets, long lank hair blowing (it was kept long at this date, Fanny later claimed, for warmth), and his wife was no better, with her determined face ‘marked by unmistakable strength of character’, as William Archer put it, nervously, ‘hair of an unglossy black, and her complexion darker than one would expect in a woman of Dutch-American race’.61 They stuck out like a sore thumb on Alum Chine Road, and relished it, observing none of the social obligations of newcomers. Fanny complained to Colvin that neighbours were calling on them ‘in droves’, aware that the dying Mr Stevenson (so much younger-looking than his foreign wife) was ‘quite literary’. Fanny’s response was to play up to this: ‘I murmur vaguely, “I dunno, m’sure,” at which they show faint surprise, and slightly bridle.’62
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