Claire Harman - Robert Louis Stevenson - A Biography

Then there is the ambiguous evidence of a letter from Graham Balfour to his wife Rhoda on the day in 1899 when he was appointed by Robert Louis Stevenson’s estate to write the official biography of the author. Fired up with excitement at the prospect of writing Stevenson’s life, and perhaps to test the extent to which he was going to be trusted, Balfour asked the widow, Fanny Stevenson, ‘straight out about F. Sitwell’:

and she says Yes. F.S. used to tell people whom she knew well, as she wished not to be on false pretences. But I fancy the fat is nearly in that fire.

Tamaitai [Fanny Stevenson] is rather bitter. 52

The answer was Yes , but what was the question? It could only have been ‘Are Colvin and Mrs Sitwell lovers?’ if Graham Balfour was really out of the loop, for E.V. Lucas says that ‘all London knew’ about the relationship by this date, and the elderly-looking couple were discreet, hugely respectable and beyond the reach of harmful gossip, Albert Sitwell being five years dead. If the question was ‘Were Colvin and Mrs Sitwell lovers back in the 1870s?’ – which would explain the phrase ‘F.S. used to tell people whom she knew well, as she wished not to be on false pretences’ – what is this fat that is nearly in the fire? The exposure of Mrs Sitwell’s long-term adultery? No one was likely to do that, certainly not a biographer (and cousin) of Robert Louis Stevenson, to whom both Colvin and Mrs Sitwell had been devoted. And what was ‘Tamaitai’ ‘rather bitter’ about? *

But what if the question was ‘Were Stevenson and Mrs Sitwell ever lovers?’ Apart from Mrs Sitwell herself, and Colvin, only Fanny Stevenson could have been expected to know the answer to that one, and it seems a more pressing question for Balfour to ask at this point of maximum favour with the widow than whether or not an obvious couple were a couple. The question cannot be confidently resolved one way or the other, but it does leave open some intriguing possibilities.

The end of August came; it was time to go home, but Stevenson strung out his departure from Cockfield by staying a few days on the way back to Edinburgh at Colvin’s cottage in Norwood, with a visit to the Sitwells’ house in Chepstow Place in Bayswater. There he met ‘ le chapelain ’, Mrs Sitwell’s problematic husband, and was able to observe secretly the marriage he had begun to know very well from one side. * When they sat together under a tree in Suffolk, or walked around Kensington Gardens on their last day in London, the gentle, tender looks of Mrs Sitwell were a balm to Louis’s heart. His first letter to her, written when he got back to Heriot Row, shows an intimacy that had been requited fully in spirit, if not in deed:

I am very tired, dear, and somewhat depressed after all that has happened. Do you know, I think yesterday and the day before were the two happiest days of my life. It seems strange that I should prefer them to what has gone before; and yet after all, perhaps not. O God, I feel very hollow and strange just now. I had to go out to get supper and the streets were wonderfully cool and dark, with all sorts of curious illuminations at odd corners from the lamps; and I could not help fancying as I went along all sorts of foolish things – chansons – about showing all these places to you, Claire, some other night; which is not to be. Dear, I would not have missed last month for eternity. 55

Louis’s new, dizzying intimacy with Mrs Sitwell in some senses precipitated the upheavals that were to take place in the Stevenson household that year, as he had for the first time someone – some woman – in whom to confide everything, and more. There seems to have been no limit to Mrs Sitwell’s capacity for confidences, and the resulting flood of emotion from her young correspondent makes remarkable reading. The letters are highly stylised, self-indulgent monologues, in which passages of elaborate description are punctuated with long rhapsodies about his feelings. Perhaps, having been anticipated in his stillborn fiction, ‘Claire’, Stevenson had trouble establishing a non-rhetorical tone. Set beside his letters to Baxter, which are full of salty jokes, raucous verses and long vernacular rambles in the character of Tam Johnson (ancient drunken venial Writer to the Signet), those to Mrs Sitwell seem the work of another person altogether. Their humourlessness is striking. Chagrined that there was no quick response to one letter, he wrote on 27 September:

I have a fear that something must have happened, and so I write frankly and fully, because I fear I may never write to you again; but O my dear, you know – you see – you must feel, in what perfect faith and absolute submission I am writing. You must feel that I shall still feel as I have felt and will work as well for you and towards you, without any recognition, as I could work with all recognition. Remember always that you are my Faith. And now, my dearest, beautiful friend, good night to you. I shall never feel otherwise to you, than now I do when I write myself

Your faithfullest friend R.L.S. 56

So much fear, and so much feeling. Pages and pages went off every day to his ‘friend in London’ (which is all he told Baxter of the connection 57 ), and every day he itched to get down to the Spec, where Mrs Sitwell was sending her replies so as not to arouse enquiry at Heriot Row. Stevenson was rather fascinated by the spectacle of himself in love, and at times asked Mrs Sitwell for copies of his letters to be sent back, for him to work into possibly saleable prose. And in the constant exercise of sensibility, he made some interesting discoveries, such as this reason for not being able ‘to bring before you, what went before me’:

There are little local sentiments, little abstruse connexions among things, that no one can ever impart. There is a pervading impression left of life in every place in one’s memory, that one can best parallel out of things physical, by calling it a perfume. Well, this perfume of Edinburgh, of my early life there, and thoughts, and friends – went tonight suddenly to my head, at the mere roll of an organ three streets away. And it went off newly, to leave in my heart the strange impression of two pages of a letter I had received this afternoon, which had about them a colour, a perfume, a long thrill of sensation – which brought a rush of sunsets, and moonlight, and primroses, and a little fresh sentiment of springtime into my heart, that I shall not readily forget. 58

Love had brought out the aesthete in Stevenson with a vengeance, for what is this reminiscent of more than Proust and his madeleine? – except that Proust was still an infant.

While Louis was enjoying his Suffolk idyll, a dramatic scene had been played out in Edinburgh around the deathbed of one of his same-name cousins, Lewis Balfour, son of Margaret Stevenson’s elder brother Lewis. The dying thirty-year-old had decided that this was the right moment to tell his uncle Thomas Stevenson his opinion of Bob Stevenson: a filthy atheist, he believed, a ‘blight’, and ‘mildew’, whose pernicious influence on Louis had led the younger man astray. 59 Thomas Stevenson latched onto this at once, for it played straight to his own desire to find a scapegoat for his son’s heretical opinions, and by the time Louis returned home from Suffolk, Bob had become the new persona non grata and Louis himself was almost exonerated. His parents were suddenly relieved and pleasant again; all that was necessary was to keep the wicked Bob out of their way.

This state of affairs clearly couldn’t last long, and when Thomas Stevenson met his nephew on the street just a few days later, he let fly with sonorous condemnations. Bob responded spiritedly, as Louis wrote later to Mrs Sitwell, ‘that he didn’t know where I had found out that the Christian religion was not true, but that he hadn’t told me. [ … ] I think from that point, the conversation went off into emotion and never touched shore again.’ 60 The hurt generated by this public row was enormous; Bob had had to bear the brunt of his uncle’s wrath (an intimidating spectacle, as he was now ready to concede), and Louis heard, second-hand, many painful things, including his father’s opinion that he had ceased to care for his parents and that they in turn were ceasing to care for him. Margaret Stevenson, on hearing of the interview, went into hysterics again and Louis was left to reflect miserably that ‘even the calm of our daily life is all glossing; there is a sort of tremor through it all and a whole world of repressed bitterness’. 61