Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  Enter Stevenson, in great disturbance, reading a letter. His immediate response was to put on his most distant and formal manner and write back ‘with indescribable difficulty’, asking Henley to apply to Katharine for the facts. That would clear everything up, for Katharine knew the whole prehistory of ‘The Nixie’, to defend which (it was implied) would be completely beneath his dignity. Meanwhile he could only hint at the ‘agony’ that the accusation against his wife caused him. To Baxter by the same post he wrote bursting with bitterness and agitation:

  I fear I have come to an end with Henley; the Lord knows if I have not tried hard to be a friend to him, the Lord knows even that I have not altogether failed. There is not one of that crew that I have not helped in every kind of strait, with money, with service, and that I was not willing to have risked my life for; and yet the years come, and every year there is a fresh outburst against me and mine.

  [ … ] I cannot say it is anger I feel, but it is despair. My last reconciliation with Henley is not yet a year old; and here is the devil again. I am weary of it all – weary, weary, weary. And this letter was (so the writer said) intended to cheer me on a sick-bed! May God preserve me from such consolations; I slept but once last night, and then woke in an agony, dreaming I was quarrelling with you; the miserable cold day was creeping in, and I remembered you were the last of my old friends with whom I could say I was still on the old terms.

  [ … ] It will probably come to a smash; and I shall have to get you to give the poor creature an allowance, pretending it comes from [ … ] anybody but me. Desert him I could not: my life is all bound about these thorns; but whether I can continue to go on cutting my hands and my wife’s hands, is quite another question. [ … ] The tale of the plays which I have gone on writing without hope, because I thought they kept him up, is of itself something; and I can say he never knew – and never shall know – that I thought these days and months a sacrifice. On the other hand, there have been, I think there still are, some warm feelings; they have never been warm enough to make him close his mouth, even where he knew he could hurt me sorely, even to the friends whom he knew I prized[.]33

  Stevenson must have spent a sleepless night indeed to have reached this pitch so soon. But clearly the desire to draw up a final account with Henley had been with him some time, since he already had a draft of it in his head. He waited for a reply in miserable suspense; the post took between ten and fourteen days each way, so it was almost a month before he heard back from Henley. In the interval he kept writing to Baxter, describing his symptoms of distress: ‘I feel this business with a keenness that I cannot describe; I get on during the day well enough; only that whenever I think of it, I have palpitations. But at night! sleep is quite out of the question; and I have been obliged to take to opiates. God knows I would rather have died than have this happen.’34 ‘[T]he dreadful part of a thing like this, is that it shakes your confidence in all affection, and inspires you with a strange, sick longing to creep back into yourself and care for no one.’35

  If Louis and Henley had still been living in the same country, the matter might well have been resolved and their friendship patched up as before. But the fact that all their dealings were by letter at this date, to be waited for, then pored over, copied and circulated, discussed and dissected, doomed this argument to be irreconcilable. After Louis’s initial flare-up, to which he could ‘find no form of signature’, his next to Henley bore the usual ‘R.L.S.’, and the one after that ended ‘Yours affectionately’, indicating a strong willingness to make up. But then another post would come, with fresh cause for offence and no sign of an apology, and more fuel would be added to the fire. When Katharine wrote that Henley ‘had a perfect right to be astonished [about ‘The Nixie’] but his having said so has nothing to do with me’,36 Stevenson was so disgusted at her primness that he copied the letter out to send to Baxter, who was at the same time getting post from Henley detailing his own side of the story, and his own impatience with letters from Saranac: ‘The immense superiority, the sham set of “facts”; the assumption that I am necessarily guilty, the complete ignoring of the circumstance that my acquaintance with the case is probably a good deal more intimate and peculiar than his own [ … ] the directions as to conduct and action – all these things have set me wild.’37

  Fanny must have known the contents of the offending letter from Henley before she left for California on 26 March, as Louis’s reply was written four days before that. Henley had marked his letter ‘Private and Confidential’, but it would have been impossible for Louis to conceal it from Fanny, or mask the distress evident in the letters to Baxter which were written before her departure. By the time she got to the West Coast, where she was going to look once more into the prospect of buying a ranch, and to meet Belle for the first time in years, Fanny was in a state of impacted rage against Henley and his cronies, whom, she felt, were really endangering Louis’s health, possibly his life, by the stress they were causing. She wrote to Baxter in tragic style: ‘Had Henley only been satisfied with making the charge to me, I should have been bound to say nothing to Louis on account of the ill effects of such a thing upon his health. As it is, they have nearly, perhaps, quite murdered him. It is very hard for me to keep on living; I may not be able to, but must try for my dear Louis’s sake. If I cannot, then I leave my curse upon the murderers and slanderers.’

  The charge against her was ‘horrible’, ‘untrue’: ‘How could anyone believe that I could rob my dearest friend, the one upon whom I was always seeking to heap benefits.’ Fanny very likely did believe she had tried to help Katharine (now, for the first time, being called her ‘dearest friend’), but her difficulties coping with English snobbery and the pronounced anti-Americanism of the Henley set may have led her to misunderstand the tone of almost all their dealings. Fanny was a humourless and self-deluding woman: wrong, certainly; mad, possibly – but not bad. It is extremely unlikely that she wanted to do deliberate harm, unlike Henley, who was always spoiling for a fight.

  Only a postscript to Henley’s first reply has survived (possibly Stevenson destroyed the main body of the letter), but a draft in the archive at Yale,38 in Henley’s and Bob Stevenson’s hands, could be a rough version of that letter, or of the one Henley told Baxter on 7 April he had torn up at Katharine’s request. In it, ‘Henley’ (i.e. he and Bob together, and possibly Katharine too) makes some apology for causing Louis pain, but goes on to restate and reinforce the accusation against Fanny. ‘Of what passed in my presence I retain the impression that Katharine showed herself extremely unwilling to discuss the question,’ the draft reads, ‘and resented – ironically of course as you know she does – the possibility of any interference in the matter. [ … ] Having once shown her reluctance and begged Fanny at the outset in my house to leave her and her story alone Katharine imagined that she had done enough and that she must leave the rest to Fanny’s own taste. [ … Katharine’s story] was already completely written and all suggestions were earnestly deprecated.’39 Despite the mean tone of all these letters, the point which Henley insisted on repeating seems to have been perfectly clear and valid: that Katharine had been bullied out of her intellectual property.

  Meanwhile, off-stage in California, Fanny was working herself into full-blown hysterics. All winter she had complained of ‘brain congestion’, and had been recommended by the doctor not to so much as read a book for fear of overtaxing herself. Under the strain of the quarrel, she began to fear she might completely break down. It is hard to guess quite what the term ‘brain congestion’ might signify here: migraine, perhaps (though her symptoms don’t seem to have been acute enough for that), menopausal headaches (Fanny turned forty-eight in 1888), altitude sickness, depression? Her letter to Baxter seems to exhibit symptoms not merely of anger but derangement:

  Louis always said that my worst point was my devilish pride. Perhaps God means that it should be humbled. Every day I say to myself can this be I, myself? really I, myself? Nothing that I have said her
e shall I say to Louis, – unless I become quite mad, in which case nothing will make any difference. If it so happens that I must go back to perfidious Albion, I shall learn to be false. For Louis’s sake I shall pretend to be their friend still – while he lives; but that in my heart I can ever forgive those who have borne false witness against me –! While they eat their bread from my hand – and oh, they will do that – I shall smile and wish it were poison that might wither their bodies as they have my heart. Please burn this letter lest it be said that I was mad when I made my will. Those who falsely (knowing it to be false) accuse me of theft, I cannot trust to be honest. They may try to rob my boy after they have murdered us. I can leave clear proof of my sanity in the clearness with which I am managing affairs.40

  Nothing could be less clear as ‘proof of sanity’, as Baxter must have realised, since he kept the letter carefully with the rest.

  The angry woman raged; but not at her husband. One result of this debacle was a reinforcement of the already very strong bonds between Louis and Fanny. The letters they wrote each other during this separation are notably tender and affectionate. Separately hysterical, each strove to calm the other. The knowledge of what Louis was going through on her behalf redoubled Fanny’s loyalty and gratitude towards him, and the imminent ejection from his life of the friends (‘fiends’) whom she now freely admitted she had always hated must have gladdened her heart. The response the quarrel had aroused in Louis was infinitely reassuring to Fanny: that, merely by her being a woman and his wife, he would always defend her.

  There are two other significant players who ought to be mentioned: one is Baxter (the stage manager), the other Bob (the prompt). Baxter found himself in the unenviable position of confidant to both Henley and Louis, and recipient of Fanny’s ravings. All through these bleak months of discord, his good sense, anxious care and long acquaintance with both men made the crisis tolerable for Louis, who was understandably worried that all his old friends might, in his absence, side against him. The crisis elicited from Baxter what amount to declarations of love; he began to address Louis as ‘my dear’ (to which Louis responded in kind), and in a confessional moment admitted that he had gone through a phase a few years back of thinking Louis was tired of him: ‘I know now how the days of your youth and the friends that were its companions never lose their interest for you. I know the steadfast love which has seemed to me like that of a woman but for a time I doubted and was sad.’41 Stevenson’s answer acknowledged how queer – in both senses – this state of affairs was: ‘It is strange when you think what a couple of heartless drunken young dogs we were, that we should be what we are today: that you should so write, and I so accept what you have written [ … ] My wife, to whom I sent on your letter, was equally affected with myself.’42

  How Henley would have scoffed at the whole of that letter, had he read it. He, too, employed the idea of Louis as feminine, but as a denigration, moaning to Baxter apropos Stevenson’s self-centredness:

  I begin to suspect that from the first I have given him too much: so much, indeed, that he has been conscious, when I myself have not, of a momentary transfer of interest from him to myself and my own immediate griefs and troubles. Such a perception as his is too feminine to be baffled; such an affection is too feminine to be endured.43

  It was clear whom Henley blamed for the despicable softening process that had spoiled his friend: Fanny. She had emasculated Louis, and not deferred, as wives should, to their husbands’ bachelor friendships. The remarks he made to Baxter about her were scornful and crude: ‘Lewis has known me longer than his spouse, and he has never known me to lie or truckle or do anything that is base. He can’t have slept with Fanny all these years, and not have caught her in the act of lying.’ By coincidence, Henley was about to publish his Book of Verses that year, containing the twelve-year-old ‘In Hospital’ sequence, with an envoi addressed to Baxter which celebrated the joint friendship of himself, Louis, Baxter and Walter Ferrier by comparison with Dumas’s Musketeers (in other words, glorifying those very days as ‘heartless, drunken young dogs’ that Stevenson felt dead and gone).

  Remembered now as a showdown with Henley, the quarrel had possibly even more impact on Louis in regard to his relations with Bob, boon companion, boyhood hero and adored ‘other half’. Bob’s is a silent but potent presence throughout the whole affair, his handwriting on archive drafts of letters from both Henley and Katharine proof of his complicity, his very concealment behind the others a mark of deep-seated resentments and jealousies against his cousin. The relationship had been changing, naturally enough, since the advent of Mrs Osbourne into their lives at Grez; her flirtation with Bob was always going to make subsequent social dealings with him difficult. Bob’s marriage was another impediment, as his wife Louisa was said to dislike Louis (as Walter Simpson’s wife did too, apparently). Louis himself didn’t seem to understand why his cousin had become ‘somewhat withdrawn from the touch of friendship’44 by the summer of 1886, despite their ardent reunions in war-gaming and juvenile larks at Skerryvore, but it does seem likely to have stemmed from jealousy. Family and old friends are notoriously prone to be embarrassed, puzzled or resentful when someone they have known in obscurity becomes famous. To this, Bob had the added sting of having always been the one tipped for success; his looks and health alone might have done it, but his talents as a painter and writer always promised far more than his weedy cousin’s literary dilettantism. But here was Louis, fought over by publishers, wallowing in dollars, heir to family money over which Bob and Katharine had equal, if not better, rights. No wonder if Bob was aggrieved. And no wonder Louis had difficulty finishing his novel about ‘fraternal enemies’ hounding each other to death in The Master of Ballantrae. The plot was beginning to look horribly prophetic.

  The quarrel, in effect, altered the whole structure of Louis’s life. He had previously been a man who derived a great deal of stimulus and pleasure from having a close group of friends; from now on he continued friendships with individuals in that group, but on a totally different footing and in the context of having to share them with (i.e. risk losing them to, at any minute) new, harsh enemies. If he had gone back to Europe, those last ties with Colvin, Baxter, Gosse and James might have snapped too; as it was, the distance that helped precipitate the break with Henley made it easier to sustain friendly relations with the others. A correspondence can be continued quietly, intensely even, without the knowledge of mutual acquaintances. Letters now became of enormous importance to Stevenson, and the fact that there was always a delay built into his communications with friends from this time onwards had far-reaching effects on his letter-writing style, as we shall see.

  As his old friendship structures collapsed, so the domestic ones became all-in-all. Stevenson was thrown back entirely on the family group. His feelings for Fanny intensified; he also took comfort in his mother’s company. Margaret Stevenson’s unreflective and optimistic nature was balm during the crisis (which she politely ignored) and her presence was now Louis’s only link with the past. Mother and son were left alone at Saranac for long stretches of time and were very content together: without Thomas to domineer them and Cummy to show up Margaret’s inferior mothering skills, their relationship was unimpeded for the first time in decades. During one of Fanny’s many absences from Baker’s Cottage, Margaret wrote to her sister that it seemed ‘oddly like the old days at Heriot Row. Then, when “Papa dined out”, Lou and I used to indulge in little dishes we were not allowed at other times, – particularly rabbit-pie, I remember – and so we do still. I sometimes almost forget that my baby has grown up!’45 The revived relationship didn’t seem to make Fanny feel threatened; she and ‘the old lady’ (a mere eleven years her senior) had little in common but a happy tolerance of each other.

  Louis had proved an inspired step-parent to Lloyd, and now committed himself even further. The apprentice writer, still only nineteen years old, had been hammering away at his comic novel during the winter and showing pages of it to hi
s stepfather for comments and advice. Louis had written to his wife in October that some of it was ‘incredibly bad; and I don’t know yet if he has the power to better it for the press’;46 to Symonds he described it as ‘so silly, so gay, so absurd, in spots (to my partial eyes) so genuinely humorous’.47 There was no talk at this point of collaboration, or any serious expectation that Lloyd’s story could get published, but by the spring Stevenson had offered to rewrite the book. Lloyd’s account of this decision, written in 1924, gives some idea of what sort of fiction-writer Stevenson was taking on:

  [A]fter a pause, he added, through the faint cloud of his cigarette smoke: ‘But of course it is unequal; some of it is pretty poor; and what is almost worse is the good stuff you have wasted [ … ] Why, I could take up that book, and in one quick, easy rewriting could make it sing!’

  Our eyes met; it was all decided in that one glance.

  ‘By God, why shouldn’t I!’ he exclaimed. ‘That is, if you don’t mind?’

  Mind!

  I was transported with joy. What would-be writer of nineteen would not have been? It was my vindication; the proof that I had not been living in a fool’s paradise, and had indeed talent, and a future.48

  The decision to back Lloyd’s book was of course far from ‘proof’ of the boy’s talent. If Stevenson had had any faith in his stepson’s ability to become a writer, he would have left him to make his own way in the publishing world. The decision to lend his name to The Wrong Box was tantamount to issuing Lloyd with a guest pass into the world of letters and absolving him from any further effort, and the only reason to do so was to save him having to get a real job or lead a life away from home. This would settle several issues at once, and comfort Fanny, who fussed about her son continually. The family would stick together, become a sort of writing ‘firm’: Stevenson and stepson, perhaps. The plan worked, insofar as Lloyd never had any trouble getting anything published, and was indulged in his delusion of having literary talent until his life’s end, but it did Stevenson no favours. It made the proven author look stupid to share the title page of Lloyd’s scatty, chatty novel. Sam McClure told Stevenson as much when he was shown the manuscript, provoking a frosty answer, as McClure recalled in his memoirs: ‘I thought it a good story for a young man to have written; but I told Stevenson that I doubted the wisdom of his putting his name to it as joint author. This annoyed him, and he afterwards wrote me that he couldn’t take advice on such matters.’49