Claire Harman - Robert Louis Stevenson - A Biography

When Andrew Lang, the folklorist, was introduced to Stevenson in Menton, he thought him ‘more like a lass than a lad, with a rather long, smooth, oval face, brown hair that is worn at greater length than is common, large lucid eyes [ … ] “Here”, I thought, “is one of your aesthetic young men.”’ 24 ‘Aesthetic young men’ were beginning to seem the curse of the age, an effeminate crew full of subversive notions. But when Stevenson arrived back in Heriot Row in April 1874, looking every inch the fop in his swirling blue cloak and new Tyrolean hat, his parents swallowed down any disquiet they may have felt and welcomed the lost lamb with genuine delight. This was an enormous relief to Louis, who had been dreading a reprise of the previous autumn, and he fell in with their cheerful mood immediately.

The fear of losing their son, either to sickness or travel or marriage, had jolted Thomas and Margaret Stevenson, and it seems that while Louis was in Menton they began to repent their harshness of the previous year. They were now determined to keep him with them at any cost. His mother was suspicious of this ‘Mrs Sitwell’ who was spoken of so rapturously, and must have been quizzing her sisters and intimates about her, for she told Louis that Aunt Jane had once met Mrs Sitwell and thought she had very pretty small feet. (Needless to say, Aunt Jane’s observations of the separated wife are unlikely to have been limited to the lady’s extremities.) By the time the Stevensons were introduced to Louis’s married friend in London in the autumn, Margaret’s misgivings were so strong that she snubbed her. She suspected that Clark’s opinion was merely ‘a put-up thing’ between them, and that if illness didn’t carry her son off first, Frances Sitwell would. 25

In the summer of 1874 the ecclesiastical procedure towards the Sitwells’ formal separation was well advanced (and came through in July); Frances’s job at the Queen Square college was to start in July also, and she was moving to Brunswick Row, just around the corner from her new workplace. When Stevenson went down to London for a protracted stay in June, he was in a confident mood, seemingly expecting to be able to take a much more prominent role in his Madonna’s future. What happened there is unclear, but there seems to have been an ‘emotional crisis’, as Mehew puts it, 26 or even an ‘explosion’. 27

Mrs Sitwell had certainly reached a critical juncture in her life, necessitating a sort of spring-cleaning of her priorities. Louis understood nothing of the practical difficulties she faced in splitting up a home and family, protecting her surviving son, Bertie, securing employment, and launching into a new life alone, with little money. His habit of moralising on these occasions must have been very irritating, even to the sweet-natured, long-suffering matron. Did she become exasperated with his constant demands on her attention? Or was she provoked to tell him point-blank that his passion for her was too intense and/or inappropriately aimed? The available evidence (contained in some distressed notes from Stevenson written at Colvin’s house at Hampstead) certainly suggests Louis had overstepped a limit and been reprimanded:

Looking back upon some of my past in continuation of my humour of the last two or three days, I am filled with shame. [ … ] Try to forget utterly the R.L.S. you have known in the past: he is no more, he is dead: I shall try now to be strong and helpful, to be a good friend to you and no longer another limp dead-heavy burthen on your weary arms. 28

Another letter reconstructs a strange scene between them the previous evening:

You did not know I was ill last night myself; but I was; and when I hid my eyes it was that I might not see your face grow great before me, as things do when one is feverish. The terrible sculptured impassivity of a face one loves, when it is seen thus exaggerated, frightens and pains one strangely. 29

This is neurotic, but also very intimate; the clearest glimpse we get of Stevenson’s feverishly unbalanced love for his ‘Madonna’. But at this moment in her life Mrs Sitwell did not need a sick youth in hysterics; she needed a quiet and efficient helper. Colvin, for example. Was this the moment when Stevenson began, reluctantly, to accept that the person she really loved and intended to share her new life with was his hesitant, lisping friend?

Stevenson’s trip to London had been planned as a sort of informal induction into the city’s literary life. He joined the Savile Club (proposed by the ever-helpful Colvin – a founder member of the club – and seconded by Fleeming Jenkin and Andrew Lang) and he met Leslie Stephen, for whose Cornhill Magazine he was writing an essay on Victor Hugo. Edmund Gosse was a member of the Savile and cultivated the friendship of the new arrival, whom he remembered having met on board the Clansman eight years earlier. ‘Louis pervaded the club,’ he wrote later; ‘he was its most affable and chatty member; and he lifted it, by the ingenuity of his incessant dialectic, to the level of a sort of humorous Academe.’ 30 In a suit of blue sea-cloth, a black shirt and ‘a wisp of yellow carpet that did duty for a neck-tie’, 31 Stevenson must have stood out emphatically against the leather club chairs. Henry James, who met him that summer, was certainly rather cool about the ‘shirt-collarless Bohemian’ he had been introduced to by Lang at lunch.

Though Stevenson himself records this summer as a time of depression and inertia, Gosse was impressed by his vitality – ‘[he was] simply bubbling with quips and jests’ and displayed ‘the silliness of an inspired schoolboy’. ‘I cannot, for the life of me, recall any of his jokes; and written down in cold blood, they might not be funny if I did. They were not wit so much as humanity, the many-sided outlook upon life.’ 32 Gosse left a vivid portrait of how Stevenson rarely sat or stood in conventional manner, but threw his legs over the arms of chairs, perched against bookshelves or sofa ends, or sat on the floor: ‘[he] would spend half an evening while passionately discussing some great question of morality or literature, leaping sideways in a seated posture to the length of [the] shelf, and then back again’. ‘In these years especially [ … ] he gave the impression of something transitory and unreal, sometimes almost inhuman.’ 33

Colvin was trying to set up a deal with the Portfolio for a series of essays by ‘Ah welless’, as he called him, 34 that could be worked into a book later. Stevenson might have been expected to jump at this opportunity, but had reached such a low ebb that the amount of work Colvin was suggesting – an essay a month, or even an essay a quarter – seemed impossible. ‘Never, please, let yourself imagine that I am fertile,’ 35 he told him, adding rather preciously that he couldn’t write to a deadline but had to let his works ‘fall from me [ … ] as they ripen’. 36 This was the man who in time became a veritable word-mill: at this moment in 1874 he was indistinguishable from a dilettante.

Not that Stevenson didn’t relish the idea of being published. Thinking over Colvin’s suggestion, he began to imagine:

Twelve or twenty such Essays, some of them purely ethical and expository, put together in a little book with narrow print in each page, antique, vine leaves about, and the following title.

XII (or XX) ESSAYS ON THE

ENJOYMENT OF THE WORLD:

BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

(a motto in italics)

Publisher

Place and date

Of course the page is here foreshortened but you know the class of old book I have in my head. I smack my lips; would it not be nice! 37

The attention to peripherals is characteristic, so is the desire to eke out the minimum number of words into a book by expedients such as wide margins and decorations. In ‘My First Book’, published in 1894, Stevenson would write of the ‘veneration’ with which he used to regard the average three-volume novel of the time ‘as a feat – not possibly of literature – but at least of physical and moral endurance’. 38