Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography

CLAIRE HARMAN

Dedication

To

Paul Strohm,

dear companion

Contents

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

PREFACE

1 Baron Broadnose

2 Velvet Coat

3 The Careless Infidel

4 Ah Welless

5 Stennis Frère

6 The Amateur Emigrant

7 The Professional Sickist

8 Uxorious Billy

9 A Weevil in a Biscuit

10 The Dreamer

11 Below Zero

12 Ona

13 Tusi Tala

14 The Tame Celebrity

Postscripts

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NOTES

PRAISE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Preface

Robert Louis Stevenson has always been a popular author but never a canonical one. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, A Child’s Garden of Verses – four very different popular classics – have not appeared on syllabuses of nineteenth-century literature until very recently. The critical consensus up to the last twenty years or so seems to have been that Stevenson’s works were not quite ‘literary’ enough to study.

This has been an odd fate for a man who was thought to be, by his contemporaries in the 1870s, the star of his generation, an English stylist of giddying promise, an Elia for the fin-de-siècle. In his hands, the personal essay seemed to be coming to perfection in an arresting combination of high polish and novel directness, while aphorisms poured from his young mouth straight into the dictionaries of quotations. His influential friends in the world of letters, William Ernest Henley, Sidney Colvin, Leslie Stephen, Henry James and Edmund Gosse, all waited eagerly for the masterpiece. Would he excel as an essayist? a playwright? a poet? a historical novelist to equal Sir Walter Scott? His rivals watched him carefully too, none more so than Thomas Hardy, Stevenson’s fellow heir-in-waiting to George Meredith in the 1880s, and Joseph Conrad, keen to distance himself, after Stevenson’s death, from a writer he feared had influenced him too much.

Stevenson’s impatience with his friends was clear when, after the publication of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, they began to lament his decline into mass popularity. Making money was of more immediate importance to the invalid author than the production of ‘damned masterpieces’, however much he would have liked to fuse the two if possible. Though he looked like a dilettante, a flimsy ‘Ariel’ (as Henley and Colvin both described him), Stevenson was a highly professional writer and produced hundreds of works: essays, poems and articles, melodramas, polemical pamphlets and some thirty full-length books, among which were works as diverse as New Arabian Nights, The Ebb-Tide, Prince Otto and In the South Seas. None of these is read much any more, but then neither are his most celebrated books: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Treasure Island are so well-known that they hardly require to be read at all. We all understand what ‘Jekyll-and-Hyde’ signifies, and Long John Silver is more real to most people than any historical buccaneer. So in some senses, Stevenson’s neglect has come at him from more than one direction.

We think of writers’ careers in terms of what they publish; they think of what they have written, or intended to write. For a variety of reasons, Stevenson made a great many beginnings and relatively few ends. The extent of his unfinished works only began to be clear with the publication of Roger Swearingen’s Guide to the Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson in 1980, and was dramatically confirmed by the wealth of new evidence presented in the eight-volume Yale edition of The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, published in 1994–95, the most substantial and revealing addition to the Stevenson canon since the author’s death. Stevenson emerged from the new Letters not just as an outstanding practitioner of the form but as a man of penetrating intelligence and strong feelings, with a wide range of interests, a volatile attention span, powerful ambition to succeed and a constant, pressing desire to earn money. He appeared more quirkily humorous than before, but also more vulnerable, for this most eloquent of writers turns out to have been a slave to writer’s block, strangely fixated on his second-rate works and casual about his best ones, always anxious that his chosen profession was neither very admirable (unlike his engineer family’s) nor very sustainable.

The sense of urgency about establishing himself as a writer that Stevenson felt and his friends shared was sharpened by their concept of him as doomed to die young. From infancy, Stevenson’s health had been poor, his physique underdeveloped, his ailments (watched over with undue care by hypochondriac parents) legion. No wonder he became convinced of his own short lease on life, and perturbed at the thought of ‘outliving’ it into maturity, even old age. The effects on his writing were transparent: if difficulties presented themselves, he was tempted – felt almost licensed – to bail out. Hence his biography of Hazlitt, his history of the Act of Union, biography of Viscount Dundee and novel about the Peninsular War are just four of dozens of unfinished magna opera, and many of his published works blazon their own incompleteness and uncertainty with a brilliant insouciance. And while he liked to think he could have achieved much more in good health, the truth is probably the reverse. Just as Coleridge’s person from Porlock relieved the poet from the drudgery of having to finish ‘Kubla Khan’, chronic illness provided Stevenson with a constantly available excuse not to polish or even complete many of his works, leaving him free to do what he enjoyed most, which was to start something new.

What illness, or combination of illnesses, he suffered from becomes less clear as we discover more about Stevenson’s life. He was brought up in the fear and expectation of developing tuberculosis, and his chest ailments all pointed to that diagnosis, although on the occasions when tests were carried out (and Stevenson had access to the very best medical attention money could buy) they never proved positive. The blood-spitting that began when he was thirty certainly indicated consumption, but he might also have been suffering from hypertension, cardiac disease, syphilis, or a combination of all of those. The cause of his death, aged forty-four, was recorded as a cerebral haemorrhage.

The fact that some things become less knowable about a subject the more data accrues around them is of utmost importance to any biographer. Order – the existing order, the existing story – will break down to some extent and the edges of the familiar portrait blur. This is the point at which it becomes possible to see glimpses of the messiness and complexity of real life poking through. Stevenson provides a willing accomplice to this process: he was unusually greedy of experience and open to the widest possible interpretation of personality. Duality, the theme of his most famous work, is present in almost all his writing: The Master of Ballantrae, ‘Markheim’, Deacon Brodie, Catriona; he even introduced the theme into a topographical study of Edinburgh. He was a bilingual writer, too, in Scots and English, and ‘double-handed’, ambidextrous. Doubleness is central to his very theory of composition, as set out in his essay ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, where he claims that the inventive side of his writing was beyond his conscious control. He was fascinated by the uneven surface of ‘the self’, its endless ability to surprise the conscious man. In a letter of 1892 to F.W.H. Myers, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research (of which Stevenson was a member), Stevenson recalled various times in his life as an invalid when high fever had made him aware of having ‘two consciousnesses’. He characterised these as Myself and the other fellow; the latter irrational and absurd, the former, his right mind, painfully aware of its temporary subordination. It wasn’t the conflict between them that interested him so much as his awareness of their co-existence, at once scientific and poetic. More than any other nineteenth-century writer he might have said, along with his admired Walt Whitman, ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’.

Stevenson was an ironist and iconoclast, an admirer of Herbert Spencer, Darwin, Thoreau and Whitman and an influential thinker in his own right, much more than is recognised. His essays addressed the urgent scientific, moral and aesthetic questions of the day and his novels and stories dramatised them. He was one of the least ‘Victorian’ of all Victorian writers. As a young man, he longed to emulate the style and substance of the three-decker novel, but in fact he became part of the movement which supplanted that model, a prototype modern man of letters. His interest in psychology anticipated the concerns of the next century, his confessional tone was tuned to it, even the forms he liked best – those of short story and novella – have been more popular in our own day than in his. Writers as diverse as Graham Greene, Cesare Pavese, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges have revered him as a master (it is said that Borges kept his collection of Stevenson’s works separate from all others on his bookshelves), and generations of readers have delighted in his wonderful powers of invention. It is this multitudinous character, inconsistent, original and constantly surprising, whom I wish to present.

1 BARON BROADNOSE

Born 1850 at Edinburgh. Pure Scotch blood; descended from the Scotch Lighthouse Engineers, three generations. Himself educated for the family profession … But the marrow of the family was worked out, and he declined into the man of letters.

Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Autobiographical Note’1

IN 1884 OR THEREABOUTS, Robert Louis Stevenson purchased a copy of a slim booklet by the scientist Francis Galton (grandson of Erasmus Darwin and inventor of the term ‘eugenics’), that purported to help members of the public forecast the mental and physical faculties of their children by arranging in tabular form as much data as could be gathered about their ancestors. No clear way of making deductions from this process was indicated; Galton seemed merely to be suggesting that the Record of Family Faculties would serve as a sort of life album for future perusal. In fact his design was more ‘to further the science of heredity’ than to enlighten individuals about their genes, for Galton was offering a prize of £500 to whichever reader compiled ‘the best extracts’ from the point of view of ‘completeness’, ‘character of evidence’, ‘cleanness’ and ‘conciseness’, to be sent, with accompanying documentation if possible, to his London address.

Robert Louis Stevenson did not oblige the insatiable statistician by posting off his copy of the booklet, and only filled in two pages of information, one for each of his parents. Like so many of his own books, this was one he couldn’t quite finish. But Galton’s introductory remarks, full of provocative assumptions about race, personality, inherited and acquired behaviour, touched subjects of perennial fascination to the scientist-turned-literary man. ‘We do not yet know whether any given group of different faculties which may converge by inheritance upon the same family will blend, neutralise, or intensify one another,’ Galton had written, ‘nor whether they will be metamorphosed and issue in some new form.’ The year in which the project was advertised, 1883, was a time when Stevenson himself thought he was going to be a father, an eventuality he had tried to avoid on the grounds of his poor health. But whether or not Stevenson bought Galton’s book in order to predict his expected child’s chances in the lottery of family attributes, the author’s words certainly resonated for himself.

Robert Louis Stevenson characterised his paternal ancestors as ‘a family of engineers’, which they were for the two generations preceding his own, but in the seventeenth century they had been farmers and maltsters near Glasgow, ‘following honest trades [ … ], playing the character parts in the Waverley Novels with propriety, if without distinction’, as Stevenson wrote satirically.2 In the mid-eighteenth century two Stevenson brothers, working in partnership as traders between Glasgow and the West Indies, both died suddenly from tropical fever within six weeks of each other while in pursuit of an agent who had cheated them. Jean, the twenty-three-year-old widow of the younger brother, was left almost destitute by his death, as her father also died in the same month and she had an infant son to support. Her second marriage, to a man called Hogg, produced two more sons but ended in desertion and divorce. By this time, Jean was living in Edinburgh and there met and married her third husband, a ship-owner, ironmonger and underwriter called Thomas Smith.

Smith was the founder of the ‘family of engineers’, or rather, the step-family, since it was his new wife’s teenaged son Robert Stevenson, not his own son, James Smith, who was grafted onto his thriving enterprise as heir. Thomas Smith seems to have been a man of enormous industry and ingenuity, setting up a business in lamps and oils, running something called the Greenside Company’s Works in Edinburgh (a kind of super-smithy) and inventing a new system of oil lamps for lighthouses to replace the old coal-lit beacons like that on the Isle of May. The lights of ‘lights’ remained a source of fascination in the step-branch of the family: Robert Stevenson experimented with revolving devices, his son Thomas developed both holophotal and condensing lights, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s one and only contribution to the Royal Scottish Society of Arts was a paper on a proposed new device to make lighthouse lights flash. But there was another reminder of this heritage, closer to home. One of Thomas Smith’s lamp-making projects was the design of the street lighting in Edinburgh’s New Town at the end of the eighteenth century. His parabolic reflector system quadrupled the power of oil-lit lamps and focused their beams, a revolutionary innovation that must have made the elegant Georgian streets look even more modern and sleek, even more of a contrast to the dark, narrow closes and wynds of the Old Town. And it was the successor to one of these lamps, just outside 17 Heriot Row, that Robert Louis Stevenson celebrated many years later in his poem about Leerie the Lamp-Lighter from A Child’s Garden of Verses:

For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,

And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more;

And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light,

O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him tonight!3

But the original lighter of the lamps had been the poet’s ingenious forebear.*

Thomas Smith’s involvement in lighthouse-building began in 1787, five years before marrying Jean Stevenson, when he was appointed engineer to the new Board of Northern Lighthouses, a post his stepson and three grandsons would hold after him. Until this time, the Scottish coastline had been one of the most dangerous in the world, so jagged and treacherous that mariners used to steer well clear of it, keeping north of Orkney and Shetland and west of the Hebrides. There were no maps or charts of the coastline before the late sixteenth century, and the first lighthouse, built in 1636 on the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth, was one of only a handful in existence before the Industrial Revolution. The Spanish Armada, forced to go north when the English blockaded the Channel in 1588, lost half its vessels around the Scottish coast because of its perilousness, and the stormy Atlantic waters continued to claim lives for centuries after.

Little was done about the protection of ships around Scotland until a series of violent storms in the early 1780s led to public protests and the setting up of the Northern Lighthouse Board by an Act of Parliament in 1786, with a mandate to oversee a programme of lighthouse construction. Thomas Smith, whose parabolic reflectors had impressed the Board, was appointed its first chief engineer and sent south to pick up technical expertise from an English lighthouse-builder.* Smith needed all the help he could get; the Board had commissioned him to build four lighthouses, and he was totally inexperienced. He faced innumerable difficulties, from the very design of the structures to the organisation of labour and transport of materials to some of the bleakest spots around the coast. But the former lamp-maker rose to the challenge and through extraordinary persistence and hard work produced his first lights, at Kinnaird Head beyond Fraserburgh, Eilean Glas off Harris, North Ronaldsay and the Mull of Kintyre. None of them is elegant or ambitious in design, but the fact that they got built at all is quite remarkable.

Smith’s stepson Robert Stevenson was a keen assistant in the works. Jean Stevenson had intended her son for the Church, but engineering and surveying were far more to his taste and he was apprenticed to his stepfather in 1791. He proved fiercely motivated; all summer he was a director of works (superintending the construction of Little Cumbrae light on the Firth of Clyde when he was still only nineteen), while in the winters he studied mathematics and sciences at the Andersonian Institute and Edinburgh University. In Records of a Family of Engineers, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote with sympathetic admiration of his grandfather’s relish for the life:

The seas into which his labours carried the new engineer were still scarce charted, the coasts still dark; his way on shore was often far beyond the convenience of any road, the isles in which he must sojourn were still partly savage. He must toss much in boats; he must often adventure on horseback by the dubious bridle-track through unfrequented wildernesses; he must sometimes plant his lighthouse in the very camp of wreckers; and he was continually enforced to the vicissitudes of outdoor life. The joy of my grandfather in this career was strong as the love of woman.4

The step-relationship between young Robert Stevenson and Thomas Smith was close and admiring, and it makes one wonder where Smith’s natural son, James, fitted in – if at all. Thomas Smith was twice a widower before his marriage to Jean Stevenson and had five children by the first wife (only a daughter, Jane, and the son James survived infancy) and one daughter, Mary-Anne, by the second. Little information remains about James except that he left home to found his own ironmongery business, but whether this was the result of some rift with his father is not clear. Certainly to the outside world Robert Stevenson must have looked like Smith’s favourite, possibly only, son. The bond between them became even more complicated when Robert married his stepsister Jane in 1799. As Robert’s namesake wrote years later, ‘The marriage of a man of twenty-seven and a girl of twenty, who have lived for twelve years as brother and sister, is difficult to conceive’5 – but it was legal. The union was a sort of mirror-image of the parents’: in temperament and disposition Jane resembled her pious stepmother as much as Robert did his stepfather, who was now not just parent, employer and teacher, but also father-in-law.

Smith’s business, which built not only lighthouses but roads, bridges and harbours, set an intimidating example of industry and efficiency that Robert Stevenson was happy to match, or outdo. He became a full partner in 1800, the year after his marriage, and the next year went south to see for himself some of the English lighthouses and get ideas for the improvement of the firm’s designs, especially from John Smeaton’s handsome pharos at Eddystone. Stevenson’s additions to Thomas Smith’s work included adding silvered reflectors to the lights, experimenting with different oils and types of burner (he opted for a variant on the new Argand lamps that had glass chimneys above the flame, and which became standard in Victorian domestic interiors). He also tried to get the reflectors to revolve so that the lights seemed to flash (to make the lighthouse beacons easily distinguishable from lights on shore or at sea).

His ingenuity was great, and so was his ambition; in fact Stevenson turned out to be a ruthlessly single-minded man and greedy of fame. In the early years of the new century he became absorbed by the challenge of building a light on the Bell Rock, the notoriously dangerous reef in the North Sea twelve miles southeast of Arbroath, on the northern approach to the Firth of Forth. It was formerly called Inchcape Rock, but was renamed to commemorate the warning-bell which had been put there in the fourteenth century by the safety-conscious Abbot of Arbroath. At high tide the perilous outcrop, 1,400 feet at its widest, was submerged twelve feet, a death-trap to passing ships. Public pressure on the Board to build a lighthouse had met with little success, even after the loss of the warship York with all hands in the gales of 1799. The cost of the lighthouse programme had finally caught up with the Commissioners, and in any case they considered the Bell Rock simply too dangerous and difficult a location to build on. Their objections were music to the ears of young Stevenson, who relished the chance to overcome the obstacles involved; he surveyed the site independently and conducted a long campaign of letters to the Board, making the vaunting claim that his projected Bell Rock lighthouse was ‘a work which cannot be reduced to the common maxims of the arts and which in some measure stands unconnected to any other branch of business’.6

Stevenson’s lobbying seemed to have paid off when a Bill authorising construction of a lighthouse on the Bell Rock was passed in 1806, but it was not his design that the NLB chose, nor him as chief engineer: that honour went to John Rennie. Stevenson’s pride was given an extra knock by his appointment as Rennie’s assistant, but instead of making a loud protest he decided to get his own way by subtler means. Over the years it took to build the lighthouse, during which Stevenson was always on site and Rennie rarely, he took over the project bit by bit, and by the time it was finished, in February 1811, he had not only done almost all the work of the chief engineer but had amassed most of the credit too. God-like, he named various parts of the reef after himself, his father-in-law, the head workmen and – strategically – the Commissioners of the Board, and he encouraged the general perception of the project as entirely his own by publishing an Account of the Bell Rock Lighthouse Including the Details of the Erection and Peculiar Structure of that Edifice, a stirring record of the technical and human difficulties which had been overcome, in which Rennie was scarcely mentioned. The public and the newspapers were fascinated by the story, and delighted with the lighthouse that so thoroughly revolutionised the safety of the lanes into the Firth. Stevenson was suddenly famous and could be seen round Edinburgh proudly sporting the gold medal sent him by the King of Denmark for his services to seafarers.