Claire Harman - Robert Louis Stevenson - A Biography

Francis Galton, Record of Family Faculties

‘BY A CURIOUS IRONY OF FATE, the places to which we are sent when health deserts us are often singularly beautiful,’ Stevenson wrote in the essay that came out of his exile to the Riviera in 1873, ‘Ordered South’: ‘I daresay the sick man is not very inconsolable when he receives sentence of banishment, and is inclined to regard his ill-health as not the least fortunate accident of his life.’ Stevenson was certainly not inconsolable; at least, not until it began to dawn on him quite what his illness signified. Clark’s diagnosis of ‘nothing organically wrong whatever’ 1 sounded like the all-clear, but in some ways his troubles were only just beginning.

For although he danced for joy in the sunshine on his arrival in Menton, Stevenson soon began to feel oppressed and oddly incapacitated. Instead of being free to bask in warmth, to read and write, he felt that his faculties had become blunted and stupid, ‘like an enthusiast leading about with him a stolid, indifferent tourist’. 2 After the fantastic flights of sensibility he had indulged in the first rush of intimacy with Mrs Sitwell, he now felt that he was played out, nervously exhausted – perhaps irreversibly ‘spent’. Unlike the other invalids he met in and around the Hôtel du Pavillon – who included a number of middle-class British consumptives, the Dewars, the Napiers and a charming family called Dowson – Stevenson’s symptoms were not of incipient tuberculosis but of depression. In the sanatorium atmosphere of Menton, his condition deteriorated rapidly into a profound enervation and melancholia. A game of billiards, or even reading a novel, became exhausting to him, and after a short walk he needed a day to recover. He had to leave a concert early because the sound of the brass was intolerable. Stevenson describes this nervous condition in ‘Ordered South’:

The happiness of [a sensitive person] comes to depend greatly upon those fine shades of sensation that heighten and harmonise the coarser elements of beauty. And thus a degree of nervous prostration, that to other men would be hardly disagreeable, is enough to overthrow for him the whole fabric of his life, to take, except at rare moments, the edge off his pleasures, and to meet him wherever he goes with failure, and the sense of want, and disenchantment of the world and life. 3

‘The whole fabric of his life’ did indeed seem threatened. Writing was out of the question, but worse than that, pleasure seemed out of the question too: he felt himself facing not the approach of death but a slow withdrawal from life. In ‘Ordered South’ he argues that this sort of withdrawal helps make death acceptable to the sick man; is, in effect, a means to ‘persuade us from a place we have no further pleasure in’. But the very decadence of this line of thought was another of his symptoms. Sometimes Stevenson struggled against it, apologising to Mrs Sitwell for ‘the deformity of my hypochondriasis’ and ‘the sickly vanities [ … ] of a person who does not think himself well’. 4 But by December he had embraced the idea of becoming a chronic invalid, writing to Baxter: ‘I do somewhat portend that I may not recover at all, or at best that I shall be long about it. My system does seem extraordinarily played out.’ 5

Stevenson was smoking opium frequently during his months in Menton, and his drug experiences were among the most entertaining he had there. Writing to Mrs Sitwell of the first time he felt the full effect of the drug, he reported ‘a day of extraordinary happiness; and when I went to bed there was something almost terrifying in the pleasures that besieged me in the darkness. Wonderful tremors filled me; my head swam in the most delirious but enjoyable manner; and the bed softly oscillated with me, like a boat in a very gentle ripple.’ 6 He was under the influence of the drug when he wrote one his most rapturous letters to Mrs Sitwell on 7 December, sending her a single violet the scent of which had afforded him ‘a princely festival of pleasure’: ‘No one need tell me that the phrase is exaggerated, if I say that this violet sings ; it sings with the same voice as the March blackbird; and the same adorable tremor goes through one’s soul at the hearing of it.’ 7 This was not published in Colvin’s selection of Stevenson’s letters that appeared in the 1890s, or it might have been read with interest by Ernest Dowson, the archetypal poet of the Nineties School, whose work owes so much to Stevenson’s own. It was he, aged five, who had picked the violets on a walk with his father and Stevenson in the olive yards of Menton and presented them to the strange long-haired Scotsman.

Stevenson’s sense of removal from life was increased by missing a milestone in his own career, his first appearance in print. ‘Roads’, rejected by the Saturday Review , had been accepted by the Portfolio and appeared in the issue of 4 December 1873. Margaret Stevenson had bought up dozens of copies and was sending them out as Christmas presents to friends, presumably with a note to explain the author’s pseudonym, ‘L.S. Stoneven’. No one could visit Heriot Row without her springing up to read from the article, though she and Louis’s father had, as usual, a number of criticisms of its style. 8 Compared with the compact brilliance of some of Stevenson’s essays of the next few years (such as ‘John Knox and his Relations to Women’ or his pieces on Burns and Whitman), ‘Roads’ seems a wispy and wordy debut. He isn’t really saying much when he remarks that sehnsucht – ‘the passion for what is ever beyond’ – ‘is livingly expressed in that white riband of possible travel that severs the uneven country; not a ploughman following his plough up the shining furrow, not the blue smoke of any cottage in a hollow, but is brought to us with a sense of nearness and attainability by this wavering line of junction’. 9 Nevertheless, when he eventually saw the piece in print four months after publication, he thought it represented a peak of artistic achievement that he would never regain or surpass. But this had less to do with ‘Roads’s intrinsic merits than with the fact that it was brimful of optimism, having been conceived and written in Cockfield, ‘when my life was in flower’. 10

Colvin came to the Riviera for several weeks that winter (he too had fragile health) and met Stevenson in Monaco, cheering the invalid enormously. They stayed in Monte Carlo until Colvin witnessed a man shooting himself at the gaming tables, after which they decided to retreat to Menton, and spent the days talking, writing and sitting in public gardens by the sea, like a couple of prematurely aged men. Mrs Sitwell’s situation was a matter of vital concern to both of them (and doubtless Colvin brought with him the latest news of her struggle to separate from ‘the Vicar’), but it is highly unlikely that they spoke explicitly about their feelings for her. Stevenson’s references in letters to Colvin are always reserved and respectful – he calls his idol ‘Mrs Sitwell’ 11 – and in letters to her, he treats Colvin as one with superior claims to her attention. Part of Colvin’s charm for Stevenson was the incongruity between his manner and the depth of his feelings; ‘he burns with a mild, steady cold flame of exaggeration towards all whom he likes and regards’, Louis described it once to Bob. ‘He is a person in whom you must believe like a person of the Trinity, but with whom little relation in the human sense is possible.’ 12 * Colvin’s very presence in the South of France, and his generous sponsorship of Stevenson’s career, were proofs of his earnest goodwill towards the young Scot. Their friendship had none of that bantering intimacy that marked Stevenson’s relationships with Bob or Charles Baxter; in fact, it contained no intimacy at all ‘in the human sense’. However, it proved much stronger and more durable than any other friendship, and far outlasted Stevenson’s relationship with Mrs Sitwell, though nothing of the sort would have seemed possible to either young man as they sat side by side on a bench by the sea, writing separate letters to their distant ‘Madonna’.