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BELOW ZERO
Nearly every individual is notable for some peculiarity of mind or disposition, and in some few persons the sanguine, melancholy, nervous or lymphatic temperament is well marked. All such peculiarities should be noted as they are strongly hereditary. Moreover the study of them is peculiarly attractive.
Francis Galton, Record of Family Faculties
THE LAST VIEW of the Old World, when it came, was hurried. The Stevenson party, which consisted of Louis, Fanny, Margaret Stevenson, Lloyd and the indispensable Valentine Roch, stayed two nights at a hotel in Finsbury while friends came and went, saying goodbye and bringing presents. Gosse ran around town trying to get Stevenson a copy of Hardy’s new novel, The Woodlanders, to read on the journey; Henry James turned up with a case of champagne; William Archer fetched a lawyer so that a last-minute codicil could be added to his friend’s will. Aunt Alan, Coggie Ferrier, even Cummy, turned up to say goodbye, and the London friends were of course in attendance: Henley, Katherine de Mattos and Colvin, pained and saddened by his recent rift. Colvin stayed the last night in the same hotel, protectively close to Louis, and accompanied him to the docks the next day: ‘Leaving the ship’s side as she weighed anchor, and waving farewell to the party from the boat which landed me,’ he wrote with sorrow some years later, ‘I little knew what was the truth, that I was looking on the face of my friend for the last time.’1
Stevenson himself was far from gloomy, in fact his spirits picked up almost as soon as they got under way. After years of being virtually housebound at Skerryvore, he suddenly found himself ‘really enjoying my life; there is nothing like being at sea, after all. And O why have I allowed myself to rot so long on land?’2 He needed all his good cheer to overcome the peculiar conditions of the voyage. Fanny had made the booking on the Ludgate Hill – a ship of ‘one of the less frequented lines’3 – on the recommendation of Colvin’s brother. They expected it to be more private and spacious than usual, and from London to Le Havre the Stevenson party did indeed seem to have the boat to themselves. But once across the Channel it became clear why: the Ludgate Hill was picking up a consignment of apes, cows and over a hundred horses. They had booked themselves onto a floating zoo.
The smell of course was atrocious, and the ‘dreadfully human’4 cries of the confined animals inescapable day or night. Fanny, who was a bad sailor anyway, often prostrated in her cabin with sickness, must have found the two-and-a-half-week journey across the Atlantic hellish, especially since both Louis and his mother were being determinedly upbeat about everything. Margaret Stevenson, whose letters to her sister Jane provide a valuable extra record of these years, reported that the ship was dirty and uncomfortable even before the animals were loaded, ‘but we agreed to make the best of things and look upon it as an “adventure”’.5 Louis frisked about the boat, administering Henry James’s champagne to the sick and declaring that the pervasive stink of ordure was ‘gran’ for the health’, while the iron vessel rolled so much mid-ocean that the fittings came loose in the bedroom. ‘O it was lovely,’ he wrote to Colvin on reaching shore, ‘a thousandfold pleasanter than a great big Birmingham liner like a new hotel; and we liked the officers, and made friends with the quartermasters, and I (at least) made a friend of a baboon [ … ] whose embraces have pretty near cost me a coat.’6 Mrs Stevenson meanwhile was enjoying the oddity of looking out through her porthole at a row of horses, ‘and still stranger, in the saloon, to see a horse looking in at one of the windows’.7
The degree to which ‘it was lovely’ only struck Stevenson a few weeks after the voyage, when he became convinced that he had just spent one of the happiest times of his life.
I could not have believed it possible; we had the beastliest weather, and many discomforts; but the mere fact of its being a tramp-ship, gave us many comforts; we could cut about with the men and officers, stay in the wheel house, discuss all manner of things, and really be a little at sea. And truly there is nothing else. I had literally forgotten what happiness was, and the full mind – full of external and physical things, not full of cares and labours and rot about a fellow’s behaviour. My heart literally sang[.]8
Here was the antidote not just to invalidism, but also to ‘cares and labours and rot about a fellow’s behaviour’ – in other words, writing. The restlessness that habitually plagued Stevenson in his creative life was all blown away at sea, by healthy, manly, carefree activity. A conventional crossing would not have given him half so much pleasure, and from this time on he was gripped by a craving to go yacht-cruising.
Lloyd Osbourne wrote later that the crossing to America in 1887 represented Stevenson’s passing from one epoch of his life to another: ‘from that time until his death he became, indeed, one of the most conspicuous figures in contemporary literature’.9 On board the Ludgate Hill, Stevenson had no clear idea how well Jekyll and Hyde was selling in the States, for he wasn’t getting a cent from the pirated editions (an issue he was quick to raise with reporters later). But the first whiff of his new celebrity came even before they touched land, when the pilot of the boat guiding them into New York City Harbour turned out to be nicknamed ‘Mr Hyde’ by his workmates. None of Fairchild’s intimations quite prepared the author for any kind of reception at the quayside, but waiting alongside his old friend Will Low were ‘a dozen reporters’,10 E.L. Burlingame, the editor of Scribner’s Magazine, and a telegram from Fairchild himself, who had sent a carriage and booked the whole Stevenson party into the Victoria, a luxury hotel with lifts and new-fangled ‘fixed-in’ plumbing. More journalists turned up there the first evening hoping to see the author of Jekyll and Hyde, who didn’t yet have enough experience of celebrity to know quite how to deal with them. Everyone had read the book, it seemed, and T.R. Sullivan’s stage adaptation was about to open in New York, starring Richard Mansfield (a very well-known actor of the day). One reporter, from the New York Herald, asked specifically about Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Deacon Brodie, a pairing (suggested by the fact that Teddy Henley’s production of Deacon Brodie was about to start its North American tour in Montreal) that was to become increasingly significant over the next few months. Stevenson was dismissive about Brodie (‘although I have no idea whether it will please an audience, I don’t think either Mr Henley or I are ashamed of it’11), but answered at length about the dream-genesis of Jekyll, cementing in the public mind the idea of himself as a wispy paranormalist and encouraging another journalist to report a supposedly ‘psychic’ event on the quay (a letter from London echoing the author’s vaguely-stated wish to visit Japan). Stevenson must have been aware that he was sounding, or could be made to sound, a bit foolish, and the flurry of attention that greeted them at the Victoria – flowers, strangers, friends, flunkies – was exhausting and oppressive after the freedom of the sea voyage. He came down with a cold almost immediately and decided to retreat to Fairchild’s house in Newport, Rhode Island the next day, leaving Fanny and his mother in the city to attend the play and bask in the author’s New World fame.
Stevenson’s short visit to Rhode Island made an odd interlude: he spent most of his time there in bed, talking excitedly and chain-smoking. His portrait by Sargent (the one in which he is seated in a wicker chair) had been hanging in the Fairchild mansion for several months, but had not prepared the millionaire’s daughter, Sally, for the relative uncouthness of the man himself, whom she recalled years later with candour as ‘dirty in appearance [ … ] peculiar and shabby’. The arrival of the ‘wild woman’ and the rest of the troupe a few days later was hardly reassuring: Margaret Stevenson and Valentine were the only respectable-looking members of the party, and even so, neither of them could be exactly described as stylish (though Margaret, with her plentiful supply of starched white widow’s caps, did at least look clean). By the end of the week, the Fairchilds’ polite smiles must have been wearing rather thin: Stevenson filled the house with his unconventional entourage, attracted stray admirers to the door and forgot to pay his large bill at the
chemist’s. And no amount of celebrity could compensate Sally Fairchild for the fact that the writer ‘smoked too much, and burned holes in our sheets’.12
Back in New York City, in a hotel on the Lower East Side, Stevenson got down to business with Edward Burlingame, who was offering an astonishing deal: twelve articles in twelve months for £60 each. Stevenson accepted the commission with amazement (and, naturally, a little trepidation), but refused an even more lucrative offer from the publisher Sam McClure, who had been commissioned by Joseph Pulitzer to bag the author for the New York World. The suggested £2000 a year for a weekly article was too much for Stevenson: ‘They would drive even an honest man into being a mere lucre-hunter in three weeks,’ he wrote to Colvin, whose eyes must have been bulging out of his smooth round head at the sums mentioned. But he did let McClure reserialise The Black Arrow, under the title ‘The Outlaws of Tunstall Forest’, and promised him the serial rights to Kidnapped’s sequel, thereby breaking an agreement with Scribner’s not to offer books elsewhere. It was a bad, unbusinesslike mistake, but Stevenson’s faculties seem to have been almost fuddled by the amounts of money being offered at every turn. McClure says the writer ‘blushed and looked confused’ when offered $8000 for a sequel to Kidnapped, and said ‘he didn’t think any novel of his was worth as much as $8000’.13 ‘You have no idea how much is made of me here,’ he told Colvin. But if anything, the London friends got an even stronger impression of Stevenson’s new earning power than was yet true: the figures seemed to stick in their heads as if they had all been paid rather than just talked up, and to someone as virulently anti-American as Henley, Stevenson might as well have sold his soul to the devil as a book to McClure and twelve essays to Scribner’s.
Was Stevenson being rather priggish about the possible dangers of being overpaid? A more practical and less scrupulous person might have taken every dollar available and shared it out with his friends. Some such thought may have crossed Henley’s mind when he was told in January 1888 that Louis had just refused $5000 for a single story, preferring to rest content with his £720 from Scribner’s. Nevertheless, Stevenson’s finances looked secure for the first time ever, and the family anticipated a comfortable winter in the States. Colorado had been discounted as a possible destination by this time; now Fanny and Lloyd were scouting the Adirondacks for somewhere suitable. Their choice of Saranac Lake, 250 miles upstate from New York City, was mostly to do with the climate (mountainous, with sharply cold winters) and the vicinity of an innovative TB specialist called Edward Livingston Trudeau. Trudeau, who was himself tubercular, was pioneering an open-air cure at his new Adirondack Cottage Sanatorium and had set up the first North American laboratory devoted to researching the disease. His clinic was only three years old and had not yet begun to attract Davos-like spa-goers and all the invalid society that Stevenson so loathed; the remoteness of Saranac was also attractive: ‘the country for 150 square miles is in a state of nature, without roads, and all the communication by streams and lakes and portages’.14 In the course of being fêted in New York Stevenson had met some congenial people, including Low’s friend the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens,* ‘but the thing at large is a bore and a fraud’, he wrote to Walter Simpson once he had moved out of the city. ‘I am much happier up here, where I see no one and live my own life.’15
The white wooden cottage they moved to on a hillside just outside Saranac Lake belonged to a mountain guide called Andrew Baker, who shuffled his own family of wife and two daughters into the back of the property to accommodate the new tenants. It was a small place for so many people: the Stevensons’ half had a sitting room with a fireplace, from which three rooms led in different directions, a small kitchen to one side, a bedroom with a view to the front (which was allotted to Margaret Stevenson) and another bedroom to the other side (for Louis and Fanny), with a room beyond that which was used as Louis’s study. Lloyd slept in a room in the attic and Valentine had a space the same size as the store room on the other side of the kitchen. They still envisaged going back to Bournemouth after the winter, so had not brought many possessions with them, but Stevenson decorated the mantelpiece with two red tobacco boxes, one either end, and a whisky bottle in the middle where a more conventional household might have placed the clock. The tobacco boxes were essential: Mrs Baker later remembered Stevenson as the most extreme chain-smoker she ever knew, and the mantelpiece at the cottage still bears witness to it, with the scorch marks made by his abandoned or forgotten roll-ups visible to this day.
Saranac Lake was still mainly a trappers’ and hunters’ destination, a remote village with a sawmill, one small hotel, no running water and, as yet, no railroad (though it was about to get a narrow-gauge that winter and – to Stevenson’s amazement – had a long-established bawdy-house). The seven cottages of Trudeau’s rudimentary sanatorium were on a piece of land on the side of a mountain about half a mile out of town, and were run by the intrepid doctor almost single-handed, using lumberjacks and trappers to help care for the bedridden. Stevenson was attended by Trudeau but kept well away from the clinic, preferring his own private version of the same ‘open-air’ cure in the cottage with its surrounding woods. He was very happy with the change of scene and enraptured with the bright fall colours and the romance of the landscape. The view of the river just below the cottage pleased him, and the hills, where he took solitary woodland walks, reminded him of the Highlands. He felt better than he had for years, and got to work on his Scribner’s essays immediately.
Part of the luxury of this commission was that the essays could be on any subject he pleased; the first, his ‘Chapter on Dreams’, was finished in five days, and ‘The Lantern-Bearers’ almost as quickly. All twelve pieces were completed during his six months at Saranac and published in Scribner’s one a month through 1888. It was the most efficient and profitable paid work he had yet done, and a release from the usual pattern of dashing from one partly-written work to another in the hope of meeting many deadlines and obligations, though he still felt ‘terror’ at the prospect of starting them. Nothing was going to alleviate that.
Charles Baxter, Stevenson’s most sincerely solicitous friend, rejoiced in the change he perceived: ‘I cannot tell you how welcome your last letter was. It smelt so of good health and spirits and was so like the olden times.’16 It began to look as if a cure might really be possible, and at the same time there began to be cause to wonder if Stevenson was in fact tubercular at all, for when he had his sputum analysed in one of Dr Trudeau’s advanced bacillus tests, it showed negative. Trudeau said later that he ‘never heard any abnormal physical sounds in Stevenson’s chest’,17 and, like Ruedi before him, suspected that Stevenson’s was an arrested case of the disease. Later commentators, citing the facts that Stevenson survived another fifteen years after the onset of blood-spitting, died of non-pulmonary causes and never infected any other member of his household, have suggested that his ailment may have been not TB but bronchietasis, an acute condition with some shared symptoms. Recently, two American researchers have introduced yet another thesis, that Stevenson may have suffered from haemorrhagic telangiectasia, or Osler-Rendu-Weber Syndrome: ‘This would explain his chronic respiratory complaints, recurrent episodes of pulmonary hemorrhage, and his death of probable cerebral hemorrhage.’18 It would also explain his mother’s and maternal grandfather’s similar symptoms (including Margaret’s ‘apparent stroke’ in 1867); Osler-Rendu-Weber Syndrome is hereditary.*
The negative result of Trudeau’s sputum test may have affected Stevenson’s attitude to his health, though he never remarked on it. It is notable that from this time on he started to be severely practical about his choice of where to live, and was never prostrated by illness again. Perhaps thinking of himself as consumptive had made him fatalistic; seeing that his symptoms could be improved so much by travel certainly made the idea of returning to Bournemouth in the spring tantamount to a death-wish. And at the same time, money and his mother’s extraordinary adaptability (little to be guessed at fr
om her years as an Edinburgh bourgeoise) made it possible to consider much wider options for the future.
Stevenson never made a friend of Edward Trudeau, though there were few enough people to associate with in Saranac Lake and the doctor must have been one of the most philanthropic and intelligent men he met in his life. The one recorded visit by Stevenson to Trudeau’s laboratory, where the doctor practised vivisection as part of his research, indicates that the writer took a profound revulsion against the spirit in which the research was conducted as well as the experiments themselves. It shows a side of Stevenson’s character rarely illustrated, a high-minded and possibly wrong-headed narrowness. The story goes that Stevenson found it intolerable to stay in the laboratory for long, and bolted suddenly onto the porch. When Trudeau followed, wondering if his guest had been taken ill, Stevenson made this peremptory reply: ‘Your light may be very bright to you, Trudeau, but to me it smells of oil like the devil.’ This condemnation of a man who, after all, was doing more for pathology than anyone else in the country at that date, seems presumptuous to say the least, though Trudeau took no offence. His account in his autobiography is careful to exculpate them both:
Stevenson saw no mutilated animals in my laboratory. The only things he saw were the diseased organs in bottles and cultures of the germs which had produced the disease. These were the things which turned him sick. I remember he went out just after I made this remark:
‘This little scum on the tube is consumption, and the cause of more human suffering than anything else in this world. We can produce tuberculosis in the guinea-pig with it, and if we could learn to cure tuberculosis in the guinea-pig this great burden of human suffering might be lifted from the world.’
Stevenson, however, saw only the diseased lungs and the disgusting scum growing on the broth, and it was these things that turned his stomach, not any suffering animals which he saw.20
Robert Louis Stevenson Page 37
