And of course Stevenson’s reputation, which his friends in Britain were in a better position than him to evaluate, was affected profoundly by his removal to Samoa. To the public at large, it appeared an exciting and romantic twist in the celebrity author’s life, as Gosse remarked: ‘Since Byron was in Greece, nothing has appealed to the ordinary literary man as so picturesque as that you should be in the South Seas.’10 To friends, it meant an abeyance or complete cessation of the flow of ideas, jokes and shared literary interests between him and them. Intellectual isolation was inevitable, especially when new young writers were being taken up in his place. When he got to Sydney, and looked through eight months’ post, Stevenson found Lang’s letters full of Rider Haggard and Henry James’s of a brilliant young poet called Rudyard Kipling. Colvin, in later years, was to transfer his literary patronage from Stevenson to a new novelist called Joseph Conrad (one of the few in literary circles, incidentally, who admired Stevenson’s South Seas essays11). In his fortieth year, Stevenson could no longer be thought of as ‘young’ or ‘promising’; he had outgrown his resemblance to Shelley, or outlived it, rather. And by signing the deeds to Vailima, he entered a strangely unreal zone in his friends’ imaginations, as if, indeed, he had done what they had been taught to expect for twenty years, and died.
If the reaction to Stevenson’s arrival in New York City in 1887 had been a surprise, Sydney in 1890 was worse. The papers were full of articles, photographs and gossip about him; reporters flooded to the Union Hotel, and cards poured in from every literary and social club in the city, begging to ask ‘the greatest author living’ to address them, or dine, or receive honours. Belle Strong, having languished in Sydney for months in a boarding house, was delighted to have some of this glamour rub off on herself and her son, who were saluted by the doorman at the hotel, and recognised as one of the great man’s ‘family’.
Not that the management of the Union Hotel recognised greatness in the chaotic sprawl of people and luggage suddenly arrived in their lobby. Cedar-wood chests held together with rope, palmleaf baskets, covered buckets made of tree trunks, rolls of tapa matting, shells and calabashes gathered into bags made of fish-net – and in the middle of all this, a short fat woman and a tall thin man, a Chinese servant and a bespectacled youth, all dressed like tinkers and shouting instructions to the staff. Their removal to the humbler Oxford Hotel must have seemed like a relief to the Union until the next day, when the identity of the party became known, and a delegation had to be sent round to apologise, to the great satisfaction of the snubbed celebrities.
With a view to Sydney being ‘our metropolis’ in the future, Stevenson told his mother that he was ‘laying himself out’ to be sociable,12 as was Fanny, though it was a strain for both of them after the life they had got used to in the islands. Astonishingly enough, Margaret was coming to live with them in Samoa. Heriot Row was to be let and some of the furniture shipped out to the tropics; a bold move for the sixty-one-year-old widow, who was proving such an excellent traveller and good sport. Ah Fu was going home to China for a while, but intended to come back and live with them too. Stevenson gave the cook a packet of stamped, self-addressed envelopes so that he could get in touch easily if he was in any difficulty or needed money, but despite this precaution, they never saw their Chinese friend again.
The Union Club became Louis’s headquarters in Sydney: it had a library and a smoking room, and offered protection from journalists. It was probably there that he read the article, reprinted in a Sydney newspaper from a religious periodical, that awakened in Stevenson what he liked to call The Old Man Virulent. The article included a letter (taken from private correspondence) from the Rev. CM. Hyde, a senior American missionary in Hawaii, which thoroughly denigrated the work and character of the late Father Damien of Molokai. Stevenson, fresh from witnessing the legacy of the ‘dead saint’, saw red, and, having worked himself up into the heroic mood by asking his dumbstruck wife and step-children whether they were prepared to lose everything for this cause, proceeded to write a vitriolic response. ‘I have struck as hard as I knew how,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘nor do I think my answer can fail to do away (in the minds of all who see it) with the effect of Hyde’s incredible and really villainous production.’13 ‘Father Damien: An Open Letter to the Reverend Dr Hyde of Honolulu’ gave Stevenson the long-awaited opportunity ‘to feel the button off the foil and to plunge home’, as he put it in a thoroughly Three Musketeers way.14 ‘I conceive you as a man quite beyond and below the reticences of civility: with what measure you mete, with that shall it be meted to you again,’ he wrote, in this dramatically direct, almost Swiftian, address. He conceived Hyde lounging in his ‘pleasant room’ in Honolulu, ‘stretching your limbs’, leading family prayers in utter ignorance and scorn of the conditions under which Damien had worked, and which he, Stevenson, was of course able to characterise vividly:
Had you been there, it is my belief that nature would have triumphed even in you; and as the boat drew but a little nearer, and you beheld the stairs crowded with abominable deformations of our common manhood, and saw yourself landing in the midst of such a population as only now and then surrounds us in the horror of a nightmare – what a haggard eye you would have rolled over your reluctant shoulder towards the house on Beretania Street! Had you gone on; had you found every fourth face a blot upon the landscape; had you visited the hospital and seen the butt-ends of human beings lying there almost unrecognisable, but still breathing, still thinking, still remembering; you would have understood that life in the lazaretto is an ordeal from which the nerves of a man’s spirit shrink, even as his eye quails under the brightness of the sun; you would have felt it was (even today) a pitiful place to visit and a hell to dwell in.15
The ‘Letter’ was privately printed by the author and circulated to friends and influential people, including (if Belle Strong’s list is correct) Queen Victoria, the US president (she doesn’t seem sure who that was) and ‘The Pope of Rome’.16 Stevenson then sat back and waited for Hyde’s libel writ and his own financial ruin, but four months later he had heard nothing, and wrote anxiously to Burlingame about the fate of his ‘inflammatory squib’: ‘Has Hyde turned upon me, have I fallen like Danvers Carew[?]’ he asked, acknowledging the coincidence of the reverend gentleman’s name and that of Jekyll’s nemesis. Hyde was hardly moved at all, it turned out (as one might expect), and dismissed Stevenson as ‘somewhat of a crank’ when interviewed about the matter by a newspaper.17 Stevenson, on the other hand, seethed over the subject for four months, by which time he was prepared to admit that in the heat of the moment he might have been slightly unjust to Hyde (he had not, for instance, checked facts and so forth, as Hyde pointed out in his eventual published reply18). But at least Stevenson could feel the heat of the moment, and react to it with splendid panache. His behaviour was a little foolish, but enormously admirable.
In Sydney, Louis finished and sent to Scribner’s the first ten chapters of The Wrecker. As if to emphasise what a piecemeal production this novel was to be, the model for one character had only just walked into the lives of Stevenson and Osbourne. This was Jack Buckland, ‘Tin Jack’ as he was known (‘Tin’ being an island version of ‘Mister’), a South Sea trader and adventurer who appears in the story as Tommy Hadden, the remittance man. Stevenson admitted that the peculiarities of collaboration encouraged him to make all the minor characters in The Wrecker ‘almost undisguised’ portraits from life. ‘This is not as you know my method’, he told Burlingame, but ‘has sprung partly from the scope of the book, partly from convenience [ … ] it is so ready a thing to say to your collaborator, “O, make him so and so!”’19 This shockingly frank admission of creative laziness, or rather disinclination, would have confirmed all the worst fears of one reviewer, Margaret Oliphant, who when she read the book on publication in 1892 felt that Stevenson was cynically exploiting his own popularity to pass off inferior work.
Stevenson’s two-month stop in Sydney turned out to be the end
rather than the beginning of his journey to London, for during it he not only caught cold and began blood-spitting again, but also lost the inclination to go back. He was spending most of his time at the Union Club in bed, with work propped on his knees as at Hyères and Davos, ‘the old business’, as he wrote to Mrs Sitwell.20 This was discouraging enough; hearing of an influenza epidemic in Britain was the last straw: he and Fanny panicked and pulled out of the onward journey, deciding instead to spend the summer at sea again in the Pacific, returning to England – perhaps – after that. He told Mrs Sitwell that though he no longer thought England would kill him – ‘I seem incapable of dying’ – he could not face the ‘suffering, and weakness and painful disability that might ensue’. When his cough became worse and looked as if it was developing into pleurisy, the need to get him on a boat seemed as desperate as the former need to get the ergotine bottle to his lips. Fanny rushed round Sydney harbour (during a seamen’s strike) trying to get berths on any kind of vessel going back into equatorial seas, and on 11 April she, Lloyd, Louis and their new friend Jack Buckland set out on the trading steamer Janet Nicoll, bound for Auckland and then, under sealed orders, for ‘the South Seas and nothing more definite’.21
Within a fortnight, as Stevenson reported gleefully to Baxter, he was ‘cutting about on Savage Island, and having my pockets [ … ] – and my trouser pockets – picked of tobacco by the houris of that ilk, and sitting prating with missionaries, and clambering down cliffs to get photographs like a man of iron’.22 To Henry James he wrote on the same theme, the Pacific’s miraculously beneficial effect, but went further, saying, ‘I was never very fond of towns, houses, society or (it seems) civilisation. [ … ] The sea, islands, the islanders, the island life and climate, make and keep me truly happier. These last two years I have been much at sea and I have never wearied.’23 That was the key to it, surely: the novelty, the difficulty, the release from wearisome things, including, perhaps, having to face his friends’ disappointment back home. His illnesses did not entirely go away in the Pacific – blood-spittings recurred from time to time, fevers, collapses of energy and many ailments arising from chronic undernourishment and exhaustion – but wonderfully, miraculously, Stevenson seemed cured of his hypochondria.
The Janet Nicoll was a rough, workaday vessel with a crew of nine white men and about forty Polynesians. It was cramped and hot, full of rats, flies and cockroaches (some of which ate holes in the camera bellows), and rolled like a drunk; a man on Savage Island told the passengers later that it had made him feel sick just to watch the boat from the shore. Stevenson was almost thrown out of his bunk on several occasions, and had great difficulty working, with one hand clamped on his papers and the other ‘spearing the ink bottle like a flying fish’.24 There was also a minor disaster when ten pounds of ‘calcium fire’ bought by Lloyd and Tin Jack as entertainments for islanders ignited a package of fireworks and set fire to their cabin. Fanny only just stopped some sailors throwing overboard a smouldering trunk containing Louis’s manuscripts.
Even Louis was prepared to admit that life on the Janet was pretty uncomfortable, as he described humorously to McClure:
Our clothes are falling from our bodies with filth, age, rot, and particularly from the effects of the last washing they received on the isle of Majuro in the Marshall Group where a reliable coloured man took them away and (after a due interval) brought them back thickly caked with soap but apparently quite innocent of water. The whole ship’s company, owner, captain, engineer, supercargo and passengers are dressed like beggar men (and in the case of Mrs Stevenson like a beggar woman); all go with bare feet, all are in rags and many partly naked [ … ] Lloyd is spotted like the pard with the effects of coral poisoning. The ship wallows deep with barbaric trumpery collected by Mrs Stevenson, twopenny spears are triced up in the rigging; whenever the ship rolls, I look to have a shark’s tooth scimitar discharged upon my dead head; and as I walk about the cabin dictating to Lloyd, my path is impeded by a Manihiki drum, vainly sprinkled on the outside with buhac powder, but supposed internally to be one clotted bolus of cockroaches.25
The ship’s route, after its initial stop in Auckland, would have been exactly suited to researching island life, had it ever stopped more than a few hours at each place. They made thirty-three landfalls during the three-and-a-half-month trip, including Upolu (where Louis and Fanny rushed on shore to check the progress of work at Vailima) and islands to the east of Samoa as far as Penrhyn Island. Then they went west and north to the Tokelaus and Ellices, all the way through the Gilberts (where the Stevensons saw Tembinok again) and on to the Marshalls. However, Stevenson put almost nothing from this trip into the ‘big book’ on the South Seas. His initial burst of energy and interest in that was spent. Fanny was dictating to Lloyd a diary of the whole voyage, published eventually as The Cruise of the Janet Nichol (she never spelled the name of the boat correctly). This was ostensibly to help Louis remember details of the journey, but was really a bid to show him how travel-writing should be done. She said as much to Colvin the following year, while lamenting the dullness of her husband’s treatment of his material.26
The Janet’s voyage bore better fruit for Stevenson in his fiction; ‘Tin Jack’ had slipped straight into The Wrecker; Ben Hird, the supercargo on the Janet (a charming, educated man, who became co-dedicatee of Island Nights’ Entertainments), suggested traits for Herrick and Attwater in The Ebb-Tide; and evidence of ‘devilwork’ in Apemama found its way into ‘The Beach of Falesá’. Stevenson might also have noted the difficulty that Mr Henderson, owner of the Janet, was having finding on any chart the location of an island he had bought; the situation seems to be reversed in The Ebb-Tide, in which Attwater uses the uncharted, unfindable nature of his own island as a form of camouflage.
By the time they reached Noumea, Stevenson had had enough of the Janet and chose to stay back to rest and work while Lloyd and Fanny completed the trip to Sydney via New Caledonia. He followed a few days later in the more sedate SS Stockton. Back in Sydney, Stevenson was once again confined to bed at the Union Club for much of the time. He and his wife decided against any attempt to go to England that autumn and sent Lloyd alone instead to oversee the sale and shipping of goods from Skerryvore (a heavy responsibility for the twenty-two-year-old known to be ‘not a man of business’). In January of the following year (1891), Lloyd was to accompany Margaret Stevenson out to Samoa. Everything tended towards the new life at Vailima, and as soon as they knew that a cottage, however makeshift, was ready for them in the grounds of their own estate, Louis and Fanny were back on the Lübeck and bound for Apia.
The first four months at Vailima were ones of uninterrupted exertion, a ‘laborious, destitute and delightful’ life, as Stevenson described it, of bush-clearing, planting, overseeing and organising. Moors had cleared about ten acres of land, but the track up from Apia was still almost impenetrable and the ground around their two-storey cottage was full of burnt tree stumps and felled trees. Neither Louis nor Fanny had any idea beforehand of the scale of the task ahead, nor the difficulties of getting half a dozen ‘consistently obstructionist’ Samoans to do their bidding.27 Louis found it necessary to use ‘High Words’ almost constantly – it was his only crop, he joked to Baxter – and Fanny was doggedly determined not to let the native ‘boys’ get the better of her. Louis overheard her one day chastising a lazy worker in pidgin: ‘I no pay that boy. I see him all day. He no do nothing.’28
The discomforts of the hut were as bad as, or worse than, Silverado. It had an iron roof and open eaves, so it both leaked and was deafeningly noisy during the rain (they had arrived just at the beginning of the rainy season). It was also very exposed to the wind, making it difficult to keep any sort of lamp burning indoors. As Samoa is only twelve degrees south of the equator, the sun sets very quickly, at about half past six every night of the year. With the lamps often unlightable because of the wind, Fanny and Louis had to sit for hours in the evenings in uncanny darkness, listening to tree frogs,
the rain and the tall ironwood trees creaking and clashing around them. They had little to eat (one night they dined off an avocado, a ship’s biscuit and a piece of bread between the two of them), and few entertainments. Even the flageolet was almost useless, Fanny may have rejoiced to learn, for it had gone spectacularly out of tune in the humidity.
But the place was very beautiful, and as Louis explored the estate he found an immense variety of plants and trees, palms, giant coconut, hibiscus, ‘dripping lianas and tufted with orchids; tree ferns; ferns depending with air roots from the steep banks; great arums – I had not skill enough to say if any of them were the edible kind, one of our staples here; hundreds of bananas’.29 To the west, Mount Vaea made a spectacular rise to a height of thirteen hundred feet, all covered in forest, and to the east the ground fell away towards the valley of Vaisignano, the river that rises in the centre of the island. The estate’s five waters were both useful and picturesque; one of the streams fell, down a delightful small waterfall, into a pool deep enough to bathe in, and there was a drinking-water spring which was eventually diverted to the house in pipes. Fresh prawns were discovered in the stream, and pigeons in the forest, and though the banana trees proved to be the non-fruiting kind, there were plenty of lemons and limes around the property, and orange trees by the bathing pool. Lloyd later found that the unripe oranges came in handy when all the cricket balls had been lost in the bush.
Fanny and Louis acquired two former Auckland tramcar horses as pack animals, very needful for hauling goods up from Apia: Louis also had a horse called Jack, a skittish, ugly animal, which one observer said ‘would not have been owned by any self-respecting English costermonger’.30 Trotting into Apia on this beast, wearing his yachting cap, filthy whites and riding boots, Stevenson ‘almost suggested a South Sea Don Quixote’, a comparison that would have delighted him. As well as horses, they kept a cat (to keep down the rats), hens, a boar and three sows, but as the hens didn’t lay and both the pigs and horses were always getting out of their enclosures, and the cat threatened to be as good at keeping down chickens as rats, the smallholding often seemed more trouble than it was worth.
Robert Louis Stevenson Page 45
