Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography

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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.’

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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’

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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.’

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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.

(#ulink_c96a6fc5-62c4-5ae4-8616-b3ce8582c88c)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”’.

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(#ulink_7afd3673-122f-57aa-9bba-5ed61ffbfff3)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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) There would have been no necessity for greetings of any kind had RLS not been introduced to him.

4 AH WELLESS (#ulink_0e1d7b8b-6348-5a9e-b5b8-0df6f8be48b0)

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.

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’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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‘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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

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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’

(#litres_trial_promo) – 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.’

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(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

Soon after Colvin’s departure from Menton, Stevenson found himself happily distracted by the company of a group of Russians living in a nearby villa who dined daily at his hotel. These were a pair of sisters, Nadia Zassetsky and Sophie Garschine (the latter an invalid), and two little girls, Pelagie, aged eight, and two-year-old Nelitchka, both daughters of Madame Zassetsky (a mother of ten), though Pelagie had been adopted by her aunt. The women were some ten or fifteen years older than Stevenson, according to Colvin’s guess, and both ‘brilliantly accomplished and cultivated’,

(#litres_trial_promo) with a fascinatingly forthright and colourful turn of phrase (in French) which was unlike anything Stevenson had experienced from female company before. After an initial frostiness towards them, when he believed, correctly, that Madame Garschine was trying to seduce him, Stevenson gave himself over to their charm and novelty, and was soon spending all his time with these exotic, sexy, bored, clever women.

A great part of his delight with the Russians, news of which stuffed his letters back to England, was centred on the toddler Nelitchka, who could say words in six languages and had already learned how to catch and hold the attention of an interested stranger. She at first called Stevenson ‘polisson’ for staring at her at table, then ‘Mädchen’ on account of his long hair, but soon was bringing him a flower every morning and chattering away confidingly in her polyglot babble. This played right to Stevenson’s partiality; the winning little Russian was halfway to breaking his heart. ‘A quand, les noces?’ Madame Zassetsky asked mischievously as she watched Nelitchka feeding Louis bread.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Nellie’, her sister and friend performed a tarantella for him and allowed him to join in their games; he in turn wrote them verses, sent them little presents and laughed endlessly at their locutions. ‘Children are certainly too good to be true,’ he wrote to Fanny Sitwell; and to his mother, rather mysteriously, ‘kids are what is the matter with me’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Was that an oblique rebuke to her for not having provided a sibling-playmate, or did Stevenson mean he was restless to start a family of his own? He was twenty-three at the time, a likely age for such feelings to set in. Colvin was struck the same year by Stevenson’s ‘radiant countenance’ as he watched some little girls playing with a skipping rope under the window of Colvin’s house at Hampstead: ‘Had I ever seen anything so beautiful and wonderful?’ he reports Stevenson asking him. ‘Nothing in the whole wide world had ever made him half so happy before.’

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It seems Mrs Sitwell was wounded by Louis’s sudden enthusiasm for the two Russian women, who – as he reported daily in his letters – insisted on sitting up close to him, teasing him about his clothes, reading his palm and confiding secrets of their unhappy marriages. Madame Garschine in particular was making headway, as Stevenson’s inflammatory accounts made clear. He cannot have been altogether displeased when Mrs Sitwell wrote something (destroyed now, with all her other letters) that provoked this reply:

O my dear, don’t misunderstand me; let me hear soon to tell me that you don’t doubt me: I wanted to let you know really how the thing stood and perhaps I am wrong, perhaps doing that is impossible in such cases. At least, dear, believe me you have been as much in my heart these three days as ever you have been, and the thought of you troubles my breathing with the sweetest trouble. I am only happy in the thought of you, my dear – this other woman is interesting to me as a hill might be, or a book, or a picture – but you have all my heart [?my darling] …

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However mild a complaint Mrs Sitwell had sent, the fact that she sent one at all is striking. To do so is not the action of a woman trying to keep an inappropriate or unwanted suitor at arm’s length, but of a woman needing reassurance that she is still the focus of his attention. Perhaps Mrs Sitwell, who had just taken the decisive step of applying for a secretarial job at a college for working women in Queen Square in London and who was at last breaking free of her marriage, was really in two minds about Louis Stevenson at this date.

It is no great surprise that after a few weeks at the Hôtel Mirabeau in the company of his charming Russian friends, Stevenson was happy to report himself ‘enormously better in the head’. Colvin visited again and the two began to consider – or Stevenson began to consider, and Colvin began to agree – collaborating on a ‘spectacle-play’ on the subject of Herostratus. After months of inactivity, Stevenson was beginning to write again. There was ‘Ordered South’ ready to be sent out to Macmillan’s Magazine (who published it in May), and the idea for a book on ‘Four Great Scotchmen’, to contain pieces about Burns, Knox, Scott and Hume. Like the spectacle-play, nothing came of this (apart from the essays on Burns and Knox that appeared eventually in Familiar Studies), but Colvin’s interest was vitally encouraging to the young man who so desperately needed to find an independent income if he was ever to escape from his parents and ‘a job in an office’.

Louis had passed almost six months in the South of France, at considerable expense to his father, and as the spring arrived in Scotland, he was expected home. The prospect obviously filled him with dread. As departure neared, he began desperately to posit alternative schemes: perhaps he could remove to Göttingen, and carry on law studies there? His parents were prepared to consider this (Louis must have sold hard the idea of becoming ‘a good specialist in the law’ under the tutelage of a ‘swell professor’ – recommended by one of Madame Garschine’s relations), but it was all pie in the sky. The young dandy of the Riviera had not given a thought to law for almost a year, and had more chance of becoming ‘a good specialist’ in nursery nursing than in jurisprudence. Faced with his parents’ approval, he decided that the scheme was impossible. By this time he was in Paris, desperately stalling, and wanting to go with Bob to the artists’ colony that had formed at Barbizon, near Fontainebleau. His nervous symptoms had come back with a vengeance (Paris is much nearer Edinburgh than is Menton): he caught a cold, and on 11 April 1874 he wrote to Mrs Sitwell, ‘I see clearly enough that I must give up the game for the present: this morning I am so ill that I can see nothing for it than to crawl very cautiously home.’

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‘The game’, clearly, was against his parents. ‘You know, I was doing what they didn’t want,’ he complained to Mrs Sitwell from Paris, ‘but I put myself out of my own way to make it less unpleasant for them; and surely when one is nearly twenty-four years of age one should be allowed to do a bit of what one wants without their quarrelling with me.’