Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  The physical and intellectual isolation of Stevenson’s years in Samoa had many effects, from the obsessive interest he began to take in Polynesian history and politics to the systematic questioning of his own methods and achievement. The new realism in his work, possibly fuelled by the difficulty he had in ‘explaining’ Samoa to his distant audience, was not to find many appreciators until long after his death, and he knew he had to keep turning out stories in his own manner, as it were, and not just to pay the bills. Hence the sequel to Kidnapped (or completion of Kidnapped, to be more accurate), the book called ‘David Balfour’ by the author, published in Britain as Catriona. Hence also the pursuit of crowd-pleasing Scots historical themes in ‘Heathercat’, ‘The Young Chevalier’, St Ives and Weir of Hermiston – all left unfinished at his death.

  The title Catriona was an unfortunate imposition by the publisher, as the daughter of James More Drummond is not central to Stevenson’s romance (while the narrator, David Balfour, is). The love story between her and David is in fact a bit of a red herring: Catriona is rather a dissection of the Appin murder trial of 1752, a sort of three-dimensional fictional model of that notorious case. Perhaps Stevenson’s imagination was most usefully exercised this way, in speculation about the emotional underpinnings of historical events. The romance element is not decorative or distracting, but shown to be inherent in the facts: in this respect Stevenson was perhaps Scott’s only true successor. History, for him, suggested play of character and motive; it was this that made him think the Covenanting writers ‘delightful’ and which animated his reading of documents such as the transcripts of the trial of James of the Glens, one of the texts on the Highlands that his father sent out to Davos in 1881. Now, twelve years later and with a strangely similar model of political intrigue playing out before him day to day in Samoa, Stevenson was able to construct a story that illustrated in ingenious ways the oddities and tragedy of the case.

  The Samoan struggle, and the parallels with the Highland crises of the eighteenth century it brought constantly to mind, clearly informed Stevenson’s treatment of his theme, which was of a conflict that ‘had the externals of a sober process of law, [but was] in its essence a clan battle between savage clans’.17 The removal of the good man, the honest witness, from a show trial; the triumph of rhetoric over plain speech, revenge over justice – these things reflect to some extent the frustrations of watching history unfold, disastrously, in Samoa. ‘It is a singular thing that I should live here in the South Seas under conditions so new and striking, and yet my imagination so continually inhabit that cold old huddle of grey hills from which we come,’ Stevenson wrote to Barrie, but of course it wasn’t singular at all. He was going through a sharp twist of homesickness, and Catriona is probably his most Scots book, most notably in the quantity and variety of Scots language used in it. David’s soft Lowland dialect (the most ‘English’ in the book) is differently constructed from Catriona’s Highland phraseology (her ‘correctness’ in this is part of her clan standing); both are politer than the Edinburgh lawyer Charles Stewart, whose vocabulary and dry manner the ex-advocate knew so well; Stewart in turn, though a Highlander, has nothing of Black Andie’s power of vernacular, and Andie’s tale, told in broad Scots, is immediately followed by a fight with a Gaelic-speaker, who claims the story for his own tradition. Stevenson in this way wittily and deftly demonstrates the problems with Scots diversity that had concerned him all his life.

  Black Andie’s narrative, ‘The Tale of Tod Lapraik’, is the story-within-a-story at the heart of the novel, a political allegory that deals again with the theme of the double. David Balfour is told the tale while he is incarcerated on the Bass Rock, but it is about the Rock, too, and a protagonist who, like Davie, would like to be elsewhere and who sells his soul in order to escape. In ‘Tod Lapraik’ the bogle is seen dancing for joy among the solan geese on the Bass in ways reminiscent of Hyde’s glee before the mirror: ‘it lowped and flang and capered and span like a teetotum, and whiles we could hear it skelloch as it span’.18 Like ‘Thrawn Janet’ (which, with ‘Tod Lapraik’, the author ranked among his proudest achievements), the story imitates the oral tradition; the characterisation is simple, the theme supernatural and the narrative moves rapidly to a startling crisis. These are templates of what Stevenson thought story-telling should be: direct and stirring, ‘not making stories true’, as he had said in ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, ‘as making them typical’.

  Catriona sparked a revival of that old debate with Henry James, for when the American objected to the ‘almost painful under-feeding’ of the visual imagination in the novel, Stevenson responded spiritedly with a sort of battle-cry: ‘War to the adjective. [ … ] Death to the optic nerve [ … ] I hear people talking, and I feel them acting, and that seems to me to be fiction.’19 Both the response and James’s initial criticism are rather mystifying, for the vividness of Stevenson’s descriptive writing in Catriona relies heavily, as always, on the visual, as in this passage when Davie is rowed down the Firth by his captors and the Bass Rock comes into view:

  There began to fall a greyness on the face of the sea; little dabs of pink and red, like coals of slow fire, came in the east; and at the same time the geese awakened, and began crying about the top of the Bass. It is just the one crag of rock, as everybody knows, but great enough to carve a city from. The sea was extremely little, but there went a hollow plowter round the base of it. With the growing of the dawn I could see it clearer and clearer; the straight crags painted with sea-birds’ droppings like a morning frost, the sloping top of it green with grass, the clan of white geese that cried about the sides, and the black, broken buildings of the prison sitting close on the sea’s edge.20

  Light effects, colours, mass; these were all staples in Stevenson’s descriptive technique. One can only conclude that in claiming to wish death on the optic nerve, he was trying to humour James, or was carried away by having elicited any sort of comment on his style from the cautious mandarin of De Vere Gardens.

  David Balfour proved a resilient hero. Dropped mid-paragraph at the end of Kidnapped by his exhausted creator, he might have proved hard to revive, but his development in Catriona is one of Stevenson’s major achievements, a ‘full length’ portrait, which the author recognised as exceeding anything by Scott: ‘He never drew a full length like Davie, with his shrewdness and simplicity, and stockishness and charm. Yet, you’ll see, the public won’t want it; they want more Alan. Well, they can’t get it. And readers of “Tess” can have no use for my David, and his innocent but real love affairs.’21 The reference to Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles, published in 1891, was a troubling one for Stevenson. He was never explicit about what upset him so much in that novel (which, he admitted, he never finished reading), but it seems to have been the inclusion, and then ‘untrue’ treatment, of the rape scene. It was ‘as false a thing as ever I perused’, he complained to Colvin in the first flush of his anger. ‘If ever I do a rape, which may the almighty God forfend! You would hear a noise about my rape, and it should be a man that did it.’22 This rather cranky objection was clearly in extenuation of the problems he had dealing with sex in ‘The Beach of Falesá’, about to be serialised in the Illustrated London News with cuts to the text of which the author was yet ignorant. When Barrie told him later in the year of similar absurd changes that the serial publishers had made to Hardy’s Tess (making Angel Clare transport the milkmaids across a river by barrow instead of in his arms), Stevenson was somewhat mollified as a fellow sufferer at the hands of the censor, but it did nothing to change his basic revulsion at Hardy’s novel. This indeed increased as he became aware slowly of Hardy’s critical success in England and began to consider the implications for himself. He started sounding out his friends as if there were ranks to be drawn up, as indeed there were, though it is odd to see the co-author of The Wrecker leading an attack on grossness, or attempting to separate the issues of treatment and content so completely.

  For though Stevenson’s
own method was fairly consistent (in the sort of sensual realism and ‘plain physical sensations plainly and expressly rendered’ he favoured), his subject-matter and manner varied too extravagantly for many readers to associate him with any kind of ‘consistency’. Which was the more characteristic book, The Wrecker or Treasure Island, Catriona or Island Nights’ Entertainments (which included ‘The Beach of Falesá’ and ‘The Bottle Imp’)? Was Kidnapped a story for children or for adults? Was The Ebb-Tide a story by Stevenson or Osbourne? What was left of the elegant aphorist of Virginibus Puerisque? When he was alive and charming, these questions seemed of importance only to his friends as they strove to see some shape evolving in this extraordinarily gifted writer’s career. When he was dead, that very versatility seemed suspect, the career chaotic (as indeed it was and most are), the ‘masterpiece’ missing. When the new discipline of ‘English Literature’ emerged in the new century, Stevenson was nowhere to be seen. He had been popular, he had been a romancer, a writer for boys, a Scot.

  The summer of 1892 saw the first visit to Vailima of Graham Balfour, the thirty-four-year-old son of Margaret’s cousin Thomas. Handsome, modest, moustachioed and over six foot tall, Graham was as fine a specimen of Scots manhood as could have been wished. Like Louis, he had studied for the bar but never practised, and later in his career he would become a respected writer on educational issues, a director of education (for Staffordshire), a knight of the realm and his cousin’s first biographer.

  Balfour got on well with everyone and became the idol of the household. To Lloyd, with whom he was lodged in Pineapple Cottage, he was the ideal bachelor companion, to Belle he was someone to flirt with (though Balfour did nothing whatever to encourage her), to Margaret Stevenson he was a source of great family pride. Fanny was in awe of his good looks and Oxford degree, while Stevenson was delighted with his cousin’s quiet, clever, manly company. He found in Balfour the sympathetic kins-man-helper that Lloyd had never quite managed to become. Graham understood the tone and context of Louis’s talk perfectly, the literary and legal references, the dialect, the family ‘accent of mind’, and his presence encouraged Louis to start setting down reminiscences of his youth in Scotland. Balfour seemed the ideal custodian of this information; he would understand how to transmit it eventually to Colvin, Stevenson’s designated biographer. Thus in the copious Balfour papers now housed at the National Library of Scotland are page after page in Graham’s hand of notes taken at Vailima of Stevenson’s table-talk and memories, long before anyone other than Colvin was being considered as the ‘official’ keeper of the flame.

  Relatively few of Balfour’s personal impressions of Vailima made their way into his 1901 biography of his cousin, though the thorough knowledge of the household he acquired over his three extended stays in 1892, ‘93 and ‘94 (amounting to fourteen months altogether) allowed him unique insight into the problems of how to present that last phase of Stevenson’s life (sympathetic concealment of Fanny’s illness, for instance, and of many other sensitive family issues, was essential). He was given the name ‘Pelema’: not a ‘native’ title of significance, but a pidgin version of Stevenson’s frequent jokey reference to his cousin as ‘that blame Balfour’.

  Another ‘cousin’ visited Samoa in the summer of 1892 and did much to agitate the volatile situation at Vailima. Margaret Child-Villiers, wife of the Governor of New South Wales, Lord Jersey, had been invited to the islands by Bazett Haggard with her seventeen-year-old daughter Margaret and her brother, Captain Rupert Leigh, an ADC to the Governor. The dark-haired, vivacious, forty-three-year-old Countess fell in immediately with Stevenson, whose growing reputation as a controversialist in the region must have intrigued her, and he in turn was delighted with a dose of English manners, aristocratic élan and female charm. Within hours of meeting, Haggard was at the door of Vailima with a request from Lady Jersey to be included on a visit which Louis and Fanny had planned to make to Malie, on the southern coast of Upolu, where Mataafa had set up his rebel headquarters. Captain Leigh had already expressed a desire to come along on the jaunt, using an assumed name so as not to implicate Lord Jersey’s office. Now Lady Jersey wanted to join in too, in the guise of Mr Stevenson’s ‘cousin’. No sooner was this irresponsible desire expressed than Stevenson was sending letters all round, to Mataafa, telling him to expect a ‘Miss Amelia Balfour’ who would require separate sleeping quarters, to Leigh and to ‘Miss Balfour’ herself (in a letter frivolously dated 1745 and referring to Mataafa as ‘the king over the water’), with details of their rendezvous by the ford of Gase-Gase. ‘This lark is certainly huge,’ Stevenson wrote to Colvin, revelling in the escape into melodrama. On the day of the tryst, the Vailima party hid in a thicket hard by the ford: ‘Thirty minutes late. Had the secret oozed out? Were they arrested? [ … ] Haggard, insane with secrecy and romance, overtook me, almost bore me down, shouting “Ride, ride!” like the hero in a ballad.’23 No one seemed to consider that this pantomime might have detracted from the respect due to Mataafa; they were all too much on the spree. For a couple of days, Stevenson was as elated as a child playing hide and seek in the garden of Colinton Manse.

  The ‘wild round of gaiety’ that accompanied Lady Jersey’s visit included a steeplechase, dinners, the joint writing of a ‘Ouida romance’ about Haggard, and the opening of a girls’ school in Apia where Stevenson was able to appreciate the siren’s ‘voice of gold’.24* No wonder Fanny was less than thrilled with the English visitors and left an acid account of them in her diary: ‘The Jerseys have been and gone, trailing clouds of glory over the island. [ … ] They were a selfish “champagne Charley” set [ … ] Lady Jersey tall and leggy and awkward, with bold black eyes and sensual mouth; very selfish and greedy of admiration, a touch of vulgarity.’26

  The larks with Lady Jersey may have been wonderful for letting off steam, but were ill-conceived politically and compounded Stevenson’s growing reputation in diplomatic circles as a publicity-seeking nuisance. His letters to The Times about Samoa (there were ten of them published altogether) were too long, too particular and too bridlingly rhetorical to win much praise or even attention from his British and American literary friends, though they were noted by the Foreign and Consular Office. But again the Old Man Virulent felt moved to have his say, enclosing with one letter copies of extensive correspondence with Baron Pilsach, the main object of his ire. Pilsach had been left in charge of five rebel chiefs who had surrendered themselves to the Chief Justice, Conrad Cedercrantz, on the understanding that they would be well treated during six months’ incarceration. In Cedercrantz’s absence, Pilsach had mined the Apia prison and threatened to blow it up at any attempt at escape or rescue. This was one of many issues Stevenson took up with zeal. Petty corruption, tax avoidance, non-payment of rent among the government administrators – most of his complaints were aimed at the Germans, whose lack of interest in Samoan self-government and continued ambition to take over the islands grew daily more alarming and infuriating to Stevenson. The Times continued to print his letters, though noting in one editorial that the ‘very fury’ of the novelist’s attack ‘suggests the possibility that the glowing indignation which inflames the champion may have so warped his judgement as to make him less than just to his opponents’.27 In fact, Stevenson had no personal animus against Cedercrantz whatever, even found him charming, and was well aware of his letters’ one-sidedness (also their tiresomeness, writing to Lang that they made his ‘jaws yawn to re-read’28). Still, he stuck pig-headedly to what he saw as the task in hand, informing The Times in September 1892 that he would carry on troubling the editor ‘with these twopenny concerns [ … ] until some step is taken by the three Powers, or until I have quite exhausted your indulgence’.29

  Stevenson was lucky to have a powerful supporter in Lord Rosebery, then Foreign Secretary, who was a great admirer of his books. Without friends in such high places, Stevenson might well have found himself deported from Samoa as a troublemaker, for his support of Mataafa raised rumours at one p
oint that the author was personally trying to engineer a war. Nothing put him off adding fat to the fire, however, and he went ahead quickly with A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa, hoping it would be in time to be of ‘some service to a distracted country’. Aware that such a book might be refused by his publishers, Stevenson was prepared to bear the costs himself. ‘You will I daresay be appalled to receive three (possibly four) chapters of a new book of the least attractive sort: a history of nowhere in a corner [which] very likely no one would possibly wish to read [ … ], but I wish to publish,’ he wrote to Burlingame in November 1891.30 In the end, A Footnote found publishers on both sides of the Atlantic (such was the draw of the author’s name), and appeared in August 1892. Stevenson waited impatiently for some reaction, but as with his other forays into public invective, the effect was disappointing. The most response he got was an unwelcome one: the threat of legal action from a missionary who felt he had been libelled. Still, Stevenson had stood up robustly for his principles yet again.

  To friends in England, Stevenson’s interest in Samoan politics was beginning to seem an unholy bore. Colvin must have tired of having to act as an apologist on behalf of ‘Tusi Tala’: he wanted ‘Ah welless’ back, in spirit if not in body, and wrote to say so in strong terms:

  Do [any of our white affairs] interest you at all[?]. I could remark in passing that for three letters or more you have not uttered a single word about anything but your beloved blacks – or chocolates – confound them; beloved no doubt to you; to us detested, as shutting out your thoughts, or so it often seems, from the main currents of human affairs, and oh so much less interesting than any dog, cat, mouse, house, or jenny-wren of our own known and hereditary associations, loves and latitudes. [ … ] please let us have a letter or two with something besides native politics, prisons, kava feasts, and such things as our Cockney stomachs can ill assimilate.31