Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  Joe’s position at the edge of the group was prophetic of the fact that he was about to be ejected from it. Louis’s opinion had turned with difficulty away from his ‘loveable’ son-in-law: in Sydney, it turned out, Joe had been misspending money intended for the upkeep of his wife and child. He had also kept to himself a windfall he got from some painting commissions; his meanness then and Belle’s relative patience and long-suffering did much to make Stevenson transfer his sympathies to the wronged wife. Given board and lodging for his whole family in return for work on the estate at Vailima, Joe failed to reform his ways. His drinking continued (opium-taking too, one presumes), and he cheated the estate by feeding the chickens lime and pocketing the money for seed. In a dramatic night-time scene, he was discovered by Louis stealing from the storeroom, for which he had made a duplicate key. Joe’s resemblance to Deacon Brodie was completed by the further discovery that he had been leading a double life, and had a Samoan ‘wife’ in Apia, a woman with whom he had had relations during his 1889 trip to the islands as official artist from Hawaii. Adultery was not new behaviour from Joe, of course (nor from Belle, one might hazard to guess), but the whole of Apia knew about this long before Vailima did, and divorce followed swiftly. Despite some pathetic returns to the house to plead for another free ride on the gravy train, Joe was sent packing. Louis had offered to give him the steerage fare to Sydney and second cabin to Japan, but he seems not to have grasped this chance to escape, and though Belle said he left Samoa, the next year he was painting murals for the refurbishment of the Tivoli Hotel (newly acquired by Moors and rumoured to be operating as a brothel). The year after, Joe went with Moors to Chicago to decorate the exhibit called ‘Samoan Islanders’ at the World’s Fair. Thus Samoa was represented to the world at that great international exhibition by half a dozen dazed native women posed in modified island dress in front of some painted coconut palms, the latest work from the brush of Joseph Dwight Strong.

  * * *

  *Actually two firms, Godeffroy of Hamburg and its successor, the ‘D.H and P.G’ – Deutsche Handels-und Plantagen-Gessellschaft der Sudsee-Inseln zu Hamburg, known humorously as ‘The Long-Handle Firm’.3

  *Oscar Wilde was too irritated by the self-consciousness of these letters when he read them in print six years later to allow that Stevenson was doing something innovative. Wilde wrote to Robbie Ross from his cell in HM Prison, Reading, that he felt Stevenson ‘merely extended the sphere of the artificial by taking to digging. [ … ] To chop wood with any advantage to oneself, or profit to others, one should not be able to describe the process. In point of fact the natural life is the unconscious life.’41

  *It was a stopgap, apparently; Tree had nothing else ready.46

  14

  THE TAME CELEBRITY

  Let now your soul in this substantial world

  Some anchor strike. Be here the body moored; –

  This spectacle immutably from now

  The picture in your eye; and when time strikes,

  And the green scene goes on the instant blind –

  The ultimate helpers, where your horse today

  Conveyed you dreaming, bear your body dead.

  ‘An End of Travel’1

  IN SAMOA, Stevenson was intrigued to think of himself as ‘the farthest, I suppose, of all that ever blackened paper with English words’, but his exile was impenetrable to all but a handful of visitors, and he knew he was unlikely to see his friends again. Colvin couldn’t bear the thought of the long sea-voyages, Baxter was beset with money troubles (and, secretly, drink), and Henley of course considered himself ‘all too near’ in Edinburgh.2 But Stevenson’s fame, and his exotic isolation, were stirring other, unknown or unmet writers to make the pilgrimage to Samoa: Marcel Schwob, the French novelist with whom Stevenson had corresponded sporadically since 1882, was longing to meet his hero; J.M. Barrie, the young Scots writer whose letters charmed RLS and prompted extravagant replies, was hoping to visit in 1893, as was Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.

  Stevenson had little idea of his own fame, and found it ‘very queer’ on a trip to Sydney in 1893 that so many passers-by pointed him out on the street. His image had become familiar to the public from newspapers around the world, and there were plenty of photographs to choose from, as he seems never to have refused an opportunity to sit in front of a camera. Editors ran filler stories about the author constantly: ‘the gossip-columns of the newspapers pullulate with gossip about you’, Gosse told him, providing some spoof examples:

  ‘All our readers will rejoice to learn that the aged fictionist L.R. Stevenson has ascended the throne of Tahiti of which island he is now a native.’

  ‘Mr R.L. Stevenson, who is thirty-one years of age, is still partial to periwinkles, which he eats with a silver pin, presented to him by the German population of Samoa.’3

  Journalists who made their way to Vailima were often treated negligently by Stevenson, who resented being disturbed from his work. He met a reporter from the San Francisco Examiner in a sleeveless undershirt and rolled-up trousers, and sat with a can of tobacco ‘within easy reach’ all through the interview, nonchalantly rolling a fresh smoke ‘as soon as the old one gave out’, while ‘as he talked he gently toyed among his shapely toes with his disengaged hand’.4 Whenever possible, reporters were handed over to Mrs Stevenson, who would show them round the newly extended house, the pride of which was the new hall on the ground floor, entirely floored and panelled in varnished Californian redwood, ‘a sort of parody upon the old English oaken hall’, as the British Consul, Sir Berry Cusack-Smith, spitefully put it. Here hung Sargent’s portrait of Louis and Fanny at Skerryvore, some of Bob’s paintings, a rather bad portrait of Robert Stevenson (now at the Stevenson Museum in St Helena, California), a bust of the same, the Rodin Printemps, slightly damaged by its travels, and numerous photographs of friends such as Gosse and Colvin. There was a reproduction of the Opie portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft, which Fanny pointed out with pride to a journalist from Woman and Home, speaking of their closeness to Lady Shelley.5 Both Fanny and Lloyd were keen to promote the association: Lloyd had spent time and his stepfather’s money in London getting the pistols which Sir Percy and Lady Shelley had presented to Stevenson pompously engraved with details of the gift.

  The absurdity of his position was not lost on Stevenson. Meeting his cousin Graham Balfour off a boat in Apia in August 1892, Stevenson was bemused by the response of the crew and passengers to his name: champagne was popped, and the clicking of a camera ‘kept time to my progress like a pair of castanets’:

  The whole celebrity business was particularly characteristic; the Captain has certainly never read a word of mine; and as for the Jew with the Kodak, he had never heard of me till he came on board. There was a third admirer who sent messages in to the Captain’s cabin asking if the Lion would accept a gift of Webster’s Unabridged. I went out to him and signified a manly willingness to accept a gift of anything. He stood and bowed before me, his eyes danced with excitement. ‘Mr Stevenson’ he said and his voice trembled, ‘Your name is very well known to me. I have been in the publishing line in Canada and I have handled many of your works for the trade.’ Come, I said, here is genuine appreciation.6

  Quite different from this was the imaginative space that Stevenson was beginning to take up in the minds of some fellow writers. His Prospero-like exile half out of this world had endowed him with a sort of magus status. Rudyard Kipling, the new literary star, in turmoil after proposing to Carrie Balestier in 1891, vowed to ‘get clean away and re-sort myself with a pilgrimage to his hero, Stevenson,7 and when delirious in illness eight years later, raved about being in a submarine on his way to Vailima. Schwob (a consumptive) also saw Stevenson as a sort of healer, and made the journey to Samoa to share in his cure as well as his company, though he didn’t arrive till after Stevenson’s death (and then found the climate uncongenial). The novelist John Galsworthy too, unknown to Stevenson, had set out from England late in 1892 ‘to vis
it Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa’. The nearest he got was Adelaide, where in March 1893 he began the return journey to Cape Town on the clipper Torrens. This previously unrecorded incident (unrecorded in Stevenson biography, that is) is remarkable for the fact that the first mate of the Torrens, with whom Galsworthy and his companion Ted Sanderson became friendly, was Merchant Seaman Joseph Conrad, soon to turn novelist and become the new favourite of Fanny Sitwell and Sidney Colvin. In view of Conrad’s subsequently troubled relationship with Stevenson as a literary influence, it is strange to think of him sailing in southern waters at this time, hearing Galsworthy’s regrets about not reaching Vailima and mulling over the phenomenon of ‘RLS’.8

  With the removal of Joe and guardianship of her son Austin given to Louis, Belle Strong became completely dependent on her stepfather. It became politic for her to ingratiate herself with him and the household, but her resources were limited; apart from cheerfulness and a childish delight in dressing things and people up, Belle was not much use at anything. She had none of her mother’s readiness to work, indeed, she hated getting her hands dirty, and though she was a competent seamstress, could not always be making little outfits for her pets among the servants’ children. They already had striped jackets to wear as a Vailima ‘uniform’ for special occasions, and lava-lavas whimsically made (at Louis’s request) from Stewart tartan. Belle’s name among the natives was ‘Teuila’, meaning ‘the one who adorns things’. Like Fanny’s names ‘Tamaitai’ (‘high-born lady’) and ‘Aolele’ (‘the flying cloud’), it may not always have been respectfully applied.

  When Louis began to suffer from writer’s cramp in the summer of 1892, Belle came into her own as an amanuensis, a role in which she continued till the writer’s death. Her spelling and punctuation were poor, so Stevenson had to proceed more slowly than he might have wished; her presence also undoubtedly affected the content of his dictation (letters mostly, but later some literary work). The sight of Belle’s round hand on the envelope must have been strangely unwelcome to Colvin and the others back home, a further barrier to intimacy, and her habit of interjecting comments in the letters was an insistent reminder of her mediumship. But Stevenson was very glad of her help, and glad, as always, to have an immediate audience to perform to. For her part, Belle moved swiftly from merely secretarial duties to general maintenance; ‘she runs me like a baby’, he told Barrie. She chose his socks, trimmed his hair, fussed over his cufflinks and kept a pile of autographs ready to send to fans.

  Though there is no evidence (or likelihood) of a sexual relationship between Belle and her stepfather, the intimacy which grew between them in this period became far more sustaining and comforting to the writer than his marriage. For relations between Louis and Fanny were under enormous strain. At first, this seemed the result of mere exhaustion, but it persisted and worsened during the period when they were moving into the new house in the second half of 1891. With Louis’s health stabilising, and the excuse lost for constantly moving on, everything seemed suddenly difficult, even contentious, as if their mutual anxiety about his imminent death had been the only thing holding their marriage together. Hence Stevenson’s plangent remark about being ‘only happy once – that was at Hyères’, and his announcement to Colvin, ‘I am gay no more.’9 The couple went on separate trips away – Louis around the Samoan islands in the spring of 1891, and Fanny to Fiji that autumn – and slept in separate rooms, Louis indulging the discomforts of the hard makeshift bed in his study and reading himself to sleep at night.

  It was only in the spring of 1893 that Stevenson felt able to reveal to Colvin that for the past eighteen months his wife had been suffering from a severe psychotic illness:

  At first it only seemed a kind of set against me; she made every talk an argument, then a quarrel; till I fled her, and lived in a kind of isolation in my own room. [ … ] I felt so dreadfully alone then. You know about F. there’s nothing you can say is wrong, only it ain’t right; it ain’t she; at first she annoyed me dreadfully; now of course, that one understands, it is more anxious and pitiful.10

  Without this explicit statement to Colvin, it would be virtually impossible to detect any hint of trouble in Stevenson’s letters during the period in question, such is his determination to protect his wife. His sporadic reports that she had been ‘very ill’ would of course have aroused no concern whatever: Fanny was always ‘very ill’ one way or another, and had had plenty of nervous collapses in the past, from the breakdown following Hervey’s death to the ‘brain-congestion’ of 1879. And the symptoms of this illness – if it was distinctly different from those – could have been contained, at a pinch, in the pathology of that generous hold-all, the menopause. Fanny was withdrawn, moody, obsessive (or alternatively, shrill and alarmist); she had attacks of angina, and ‘aneurism’, and was more than ever ‘ill to manage’.11 Louis found this distressing and puzzling, as is clear from this letter to Anne Jenkin in May 1892:

  She has been quite sharply ill indeed, and I can’t think what was wrong with her; for the rest she keeps ailing, which is a miserable thing – but she gives herself no chance, being always out fighting in her garden, with the industry of a bee or a devil, and the rest is what she knows not. I need not speak; I know little of it myself; and indeed we are an indefatigable household, up early, down late.12

  And then he changes the subject … His tendency was to make light of his wife’s symptoms, as he did at first to Colvin (though his comparison of Fanny’s to ‘my father’s case’ betrays a fear of insanity setting in13), but photographs of Fanny at Vailima always show a very set jaw and furrowed brow. The servants thought her ‘aitu’, or uncanny, and at a siva, or traditional seated dance, the locals evoked her ‘with a pantomime of terror well-fitted to call up her haunting, indefatigable and diminutive presence’.14 Her work in the garden became manic, not pleasurable; she disrupted the rhythm of the household by being late for every meal, and she had started to find company agitating. Increasingly, Stevenson had to excuse himself from social events, or divert them away from Vailima, to avoid potentially embarrassing scenes when Fanny was in one of these dismaying phases.

  The description of himself and his wife which Stevenson sent to J.M. Barrie early in 1893 (exactly the time he was confessing his anxieties to Colvin) obliquely glosses the troubled state of affairs:

  Here follows a catalogue of my menagerie:

  R.L.S.

  The Tame Celebrity.

  Native name, Tusi Tala

  Exceedingly lean, dark, rather ruddy – black eyes [ … ] crow’s-footed, beginning to be grizzled, general appearance of a blasted boy – or blighted youth – or to borrow Carlyle on De Quincey ‘Child that has been in hell’. Past eccentric – obscure and O no we never mention it – present, industrious, respectable and fatuously contented. [ … ] Hopelessly entangled in apron strings. Drinks plenty. Curses some. Temper unstable. Manners purple on an emergency, but liable to trances. [ … ]

  Fanny V. de G. Stevenson.

  The Weird Woman.

  Native name, Tamaitai.

  This is what you will have to look out for, Mr Barrie. If you don’t get on with her, it’s a pity about your visit. She runs the show. Infinitely little, extraordinary wig of gray curls, handsome waxen face like Napoleon’s, insane black eyes, boy’s hands, tiny bare feet, a cigarette, wild blue native dress usually spotted with garden mould. [ … ] Hellish energy; relieved by fortnights of entire hibernation. Can make anything from a house to a row, all fine and large of their kind. [ … ] The Living Partizan: a violent friend, a brimstone enemy. [ … ] Is always either loathed or slavishly adored; indifference impossible. The natives think her uncanny and that devils serve her. Dreams dreams, and sees visions.15

  ‘A violent friend, a brimstone enemy’; this brilliantly concise summation of his wife’s character indicates the complexity of Stevenson’s situation. In it is packed all the reciprocal ardour of their love for each other and the harsh sacrifices that Stevenson had been made to pay f
or it. Awe and loyalty, bemusement, pride and distaste are all there, but perhaps most striking is the critical objectivity at work, the intimidating intellectual power usually kept under such close guard with reference to his wife, or suspended altogether. This word-portrait of Fanny makes it clear that if anyone could ever have demolished her it would not have been Bob, or Katherine, or the Margaret Berthe Wrights of this world, or Henley still festering over the old quarrel, but Uxorious Billy himself.

  When describing Belle to J.M. Barrie, Louis was able to be much more light-hearted (she was taking the dictation, after all), passing on the local rumour that she was Louis’s illegitimate daughter by a Moorish woman. It was an idea that ‘delighted’ Louis and which he liked to play up, as Belle told Charles Warren Stoddard: ‘[Louis] introduces me as his daughter, and when he talks about the old days in Morocco he is magnificent. He tells me long tales about my mother which invariably wind up with “She was a damned fine woman!”’16 The irony of this is transparent; physically no one could have mistaken Belle for the daughter of anyone but Fanny, in colouring and size so much her double. But by reminiscing about a dear departed ‘Moorish’ wife and mother, Louis and Belle were not indulging a fantasy, but stating a present truth: Fanny had been ‘a damned fine woman’ – in the past.