Claire Harman - Robert Louis Stevenson - A Biography

A shred of good came out of this explosive day: because his father’s rage had been directed against Bob instead of himself, Louis was better able to judge how violent and threatening it really was: ‘There is now, at least, one person in the world who knows what I have had to face,’ he wrote to Mrs Sitwell that evening, ‘– damn me for facing it, as I sometimes think, in weak moments – and what a tempest of emotions my father can raise when he is really excited.’ 62 Margaret Stevenson, who always hated any kind of confrontation, seems to have been finding her husband’s behaviour alarming too. Her loyalty to Tom was such that she usually sided with him regardless; thus her only way of communicating to Louis that she felt he had been ill-treated was by paying him small compensatory attentions. In the month following his return home, mother and son had a pleasant lunch together in Glasgow while Thomas was at a business meeting, and she gave him a kiss spontaneously one day. The fact that Stevenson noted these things gratefully is an indication of how withheld his mother must have been normally.

The truth is that both Louis and his mother were cowed by Thomas Stevenson’s rages, which were always accompanied by dramatic gestures (falling to his knees, for instance) and over-emphatic language. He was known as a melancholic man, but at times the family must have feared for his sanity too, especially with the example of his elder brother Alan before them. David Stevenson, Thomas’s other brother and senior partner in the firm, was also subject to mood swings that made him difficult to work with sometimes, and in the 1880s was to suffer a mental collapse similar to Alan’s. So with the threat of over-straining his father’s temper, and having done – as he was constantly reminded – so much damage already, Louis was keen to placate whenever he could, acquiescing to Thomas’s bizarre (and aggressive) demand that he write to the papers on the subject of Presbyterian Union – the last thing on Louis’s mind at the time – and trying his best to ‘make him nearly happy’. 63 His attempts were usually failures, and one time went spectacularly wrong. On an evening when his mother was away, Louis thought his father might be interested to hear some passages from a paper he had given at the Spec on the Duke of Argyll, but even in such diluted form the articulation of Louis’s views on free will were too much for Thomas, who said he was being tested too far. He then launched into renewed recriminations, as Louis, shaky and upset, reported to Mrs Sitwell later that night:

He said tonight, ‘He wished he had never married’, and I could only echo what he said. ‘A poor end’, he said, ‘for all my tenderness.’ And what was there to answer? ‘I have made all my life to suit you—I have worked for you and gone out of my way for you – and the end of it is that I find you in opposition to the Lord Jesus Christ – I find everything gone – I would ten times sooner have seen you lying in your grave than that you should be shaking the faith of other young men and bringing such ruin on other houses, as you have brought already upon this’. 64

There were more scenes of this sort, and ‘half threats of turning me out’, along with some flashes of extraordinary peevishness and pique on the part of the father towards the son. Stevenson told Mrs Sitwell in early October of an incident when his mother (hearing, Louis imagined, of the row that had taken place in her absence) had given him a little present which Thomas then coveted. ‘I was going to give it up to him, but she would not allow me,’ Louis wrote. What an odd family scene this conjures up: the father sulking over his wife’s little gesture of kindness, the son scrambling to mollify his feelings. ‘It is always a pic-nic on a volcano,’ he concluded sadly. 65

The strain of living in ‘our ruined, miserable house’ was telling on Louis. His spirits were very low, his health consequently poor, and he reported to Mrs Sitwell on 16 September 1873 that he weighed a mere eight stone six (118 pounds). This was a man who was about five foot ten high and almost twenty-three years old. Bob was appalled at what was happening to his cousin, and advised him strongly to leave home. But Louis couldn’t do this cleanly, partly because of his own dependence on his parents for money, partly because of their astonishing dependence on him. When Louis suggested that he should transfer to an English university (perhaps he argued that the climate would be better for him) he met with point-blank refusal: ‘I must be kept, don’t you see, from persons of my own way of thinking.’ 66

Edinburgh was beginning to look like a prison. Bob was leaving in October for Antwerp; ‘Roads’, for all Colvin’s sponsorship, had been rejected by the Saturday Review. Colvin had arranged the necessary forms of admission to the English Bar on Louis’s behalf, but as the date for the preliminary examinations in London drew nearer, Stevenson began to fear he would miss that chance too, as he was too ill in the preceding week to go anywhere (and, predictably, had done no preparation for the exam at all). He got away on 24 October by telling his parents he wanted a change and was going to Carlisle, from where he went on to London.

From this point, events moved rapidly: he went straight to Mrs Sitwell at Chepstow Place, who took one look at him and insisted that he be seen by a specialist in lung diseases. The doctor, Andrew Clark, insisted that he should think neither of sitting the law exam nor of returning to Edinburgh but go immediately to the South of France to convalesce. It was not his lungs that were the problem (though the lungs were ‘delicate and just in the state when disease might very easily set in’ 67 ), but his nerves, which were ‘quite broken down’.

Clark’s diagnosis was so adamant that one wonders if Mrs Sitwell primed him on the patient’s situation, for when Thomas and Margaret Stevenson hurried down to London to consult him themselves, he seemed to have understood the source of Louis’s nervous collapse very well and renewed his insistence that the patient have a complete change of scene and travel alone. The parents were upset at this wresting of the initiative from their hands, but couldn’t question the opinion of such an eminent and expensive doctor, and arrangements were made immediately for Louis to spend the winter in Menton. ‘Clark’, Louis wrote to Mrs Sitwell from the hotel where his parents had taken him, ‘is a trump.’ 68

Thus, in the first week of November 1873, Stevenson found himself on a train out of Paris, heading for the lemon groves and white villas of the south coast of France.

* Fanny Stevenson’s feelings towards Colvin were, by this date, not ‘bitter’ so much as implacably antagonistic. Her letters to Graham Balfour during the period when he was writing Stevenson’s biography (1899–1901) are full of scorn for Colvin’s method and accusations of conspiracy against Colvin and RLS’s old friends. She refers to Fanny Sitwell as ‘a pigface’ and anticipates ‘heartrending wails’ from the couple over the loss of control of the biography. Fanny Sitwell had written to Fanny Stevenson, the latter notes sarcastically, asking her to suppress ‘“Youthful things that he [RLS] would have burned if he were here”’. 53

* I am assuming RLS did meet Albert Sitwell at this time because his letter of 1 September sends greetings to Bertie and instructs FJS to ‘say what is necessary, if you like, or if you think anything necessary, to the Curate of Cumberworth and the Vicar of Roost’. 54 There would have been no necessity for greetings of any kind had RLS not been introduced to him.

The mental powers, like the bodily ones, must be measured by achievement; relatively as in competition with others, or absolutely by the amount and quality of intellectual work actually accomplished.