Claire Harman - Robert Louis Stevenson - A Biography

Prostitutes weren’t the only kind of women that Stevenson associated with; he had plenty of pretty and spirited girl-cousins (there is more than a touch of gallantry in his letters to his cousin Henrietta Traquair), and liked to practise his charm on friends’ sisters. A ‘lady with whom my heart was [ … ] somewhat engaged’ dominated his thoughts in the winter of 1870, 47 and if his poems of the time reflect actual experiences, she may have been the girl with whom he played footsie at church (‘You looked so tempting in the pew’ 48 ), or the one with whom he skated on Duddingston Loch:

You leaned to me, I leaned to you, Our course was smooth as flight –

We steered – a heel-touch to the left,A heel-touch to the right.

We swung our way through flying men,Your hand lay fast in mine,

We saw the shifting crowd dispart,The level ice-reach shine.

I swear by yon swan-travelled lake,By yon calm hill above,

I swear had we been drowned that dayWe had been drowned in love. 49

Stevenson later admitted to having considered marrying one of the Mackenzie girls (who were neighbours of his engineering professor, Fleeming Jenkin), or Eve, the sister of his friend Walter Simpson, among whose possessions was a lock of the author’s hair. But on the whole he was little attracted to ladylike girls, for reasons suggested by this passage in his 1882 essay, ‘Talk and Talkers’:

The drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial place; it is so by our choice and for our sins. The subjection of women; the ideal imposed upon them from the cradle, and worn, like a hair-shirt, with so much constancy; their motherly, superior tenderness to man’s vanity and self-importance; their managing arts – the arts of a civilised slave among good-natured barbarians – are all painful ingredients and all help to falsify relations. 50

In the wake of his later fame, many colourful stories of ran-stam laddishness grew up around Stevenson, mostly revealing an undercurrent of regret that he failed to marry a Scotswoman and died childless. * In 1925, Sidney Colvin was disgusted at the claim in a book (called, baldly, Robert Louis Stevenson, My Father ) that Louis had an illegitimate son by the daughter of the blacksmith at Swanston. But while doubting there was any truth in the Swanston claim, even Colvin had to admit ‘we all knew [ … ] that Louis as a youngster was a loose fish in regard to women’. 51

Loose fish is better than cold fish (the accusation often aimed at Colvin himself), and however uninhibited Louis was about sex, he retained high notions about chivalry and ‘what is honorable in sentiment, what is essential in gratitude, or what is tolerable by other men’ 52 in regard to women. This did not include political rights, however. When there were student disturbances in Edinburgh late in 1870 over the admission of women to medical classes, Stevenson wrote to his cousin Maud that he had little sympathy with the ‘studentesses’ who had been hissed at and jostled: ‘Miss Jex-Blake [the lead campaigner] is playing for the esteem of posterity. Soit. I give her posterity; but I won’t marry either her or her fellows. Let posterity marry them, if posterity likes – I won’t.’ 53 He was to revise his views about New Women somewhat in the coming years.

Stevenson was often subject to fits of morbid melancholy during these years, and wrote to Bob of aimless days looking for distractions, trying to buy hashish, thinking about getting drunk, or hanging round Greyfriars churchyard for hours at a time ‘in the depths of wretchedness’, 54 reading Baudelaire, who, he told Bob, ‘would have corrupted St Paul’. The exquisitely self-tormenting notion struck him that he might have already used himself up, that his imagination was, in the potent word of the time, ‘spent’. Alone in an inn at Dunoon in the spring of 1870, he wrote a notebook entry which explicitly links this idea of ‘over-worked imagination’ with the addictive effects of drug-taking:

He who indulges habitually in the intoxicating pleasures of imagination, for the very reason that he reaps a greater pleasure than others, must resign himself to a keener pain, a more intolerable and utter prostration. It is quite possible, and even comparatively easy, so to enfold oneself in pleasant fancies, that the realities of life may seem but as the white snow-shower in the street that only gives a relish to the swept hearth and lively fire within. By such means I have forgotten hunger, I have sometimes eased pain, and I have invariably changed into the most pleasant hours of the day those very vacant and idle seasons which would otherwise have hung most heavily upon my hand. But all this is attained by the undue prominence of purely imaginative joys, and consequently the weakening and almost the destruction of reality. This is buying at too great a price. There are seasons when the imagination becomes somehow tranced and surfeited, as it is with me this morning; and then upon what can one fall back? The very faculty that we have fostered and trusted has failed us in the hour of trial; and we have so blunted and enfeebled our appetite for the others that they are subjectively dead to us. [ … ] Do not suppose I am exaggerating when I talk about all pleasures seeming stale. To me, at least, the edge of almost everything is put on by imagination; and even nature, in these days when the fancy is drugged and useless, wants half the charm it has in better moments. [ … ] I am vacant, unprofitable: a leaf on a river with no volition and no aim: a mental drunkard the morning after an intellectual debauch. Yes, I have a more subtle opium in my own mind than any apothecary’s drug; but it has a sting of its own, and leaves one as flat and helpless as the other. 55

Stale, flat, unprofitable : these seem familiar words from a young man intrigued by his own existential dilemmas, and there is more than a touch of speech-making about them, from the expository first sentence to the anticipation of a listener’s responses – ‘Do not suppose I am exaggerating when I talk …’, ‘Yes, I have a more subtle opium …’ For a diary entry it is wonderfully oratorical. Perhaps Stevenson was right to fear losing touch with his imaginative powers, but not through lack of ideas so much as from a surfeit of style.

Stevenson later served up accounts of his youth (in his autobiographical essays) in a manner so inherently witty and objectified that the real pain of it is diluted, but there is a passage in his ‘Chapter on Dreams’ which is revealing about how divided a life he was living at this time. The dream examples in the essay are written in the third person (with the revelation at the end that all the examples are in fact from the writer’s own experience), but the trick seems, if anything, to make the piece more confessional. While ‘the dreamer’ was a student, Stevenson explains, he began to dream in sequence, ‘and thus to live a double life – one of the day, one of the night – one that he had every reason to believe was the true one, another that he had no means of proving to be false’:

[ … ] In his dream-life, he passed a long day in the surgical theatre, his heart in his mouth, his teeth on edge, seeing monstrous malformations and the abhorred dexterity of surgeons. In a heavy, rainy, foggy evening he came forth into the South Bridge, turned up the High Street, and entered the door of a tall land , at the top of which he supposed himself to lodge. All night long, in his wet clothes, he climbed the stairs, stair after stair in endless series, and at every second flight a flaring lamp with a reflector. All night long, he brushed by single persons passing downward – beggarly women of the street, great, weary, muddy labourers, poor scarecrows of men, pale parodies of women – but all drowsy and weary like himself, and all single, and all brushing against him as they passed. In the end, out of a northern window, he would see day beginning to whiten over the Firth, give up the ascent, turn to descend, and in a breath be back again upon the streets, in his wet clothes, in the wet, haggard dawn, trudging to another day of monstrosities and operations. 56