Robert Louis Stevenson: a moving target

John Singer Sargent’s Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife (1885, Metropolitan Museum, NY) portrays the narrow head, pale face and stilt legs of the spectral-thin, emaciated and reflective Stevenson.  He is wearing a brown velvet jacket, tan trousers and shiny black shoes, has long brown hair, drooping moustache and goatee.  He looks at the viewer, as his spidery right index finger touches his chin, and seems to be walking out of the picture.  Behind him in the centre, an open door shows the staircase and front entrance of the house.  On the right side and half cut off, his wife Fanny is seated on a couch with her bare foot touching the oriental carpet.  Her pale face, looking away from her husband, peeps out of a huge red-and-white Indian shawl that envelops and nearly buries her.  He’s elongated, she’s huddled.  Though the couple were close, Sargent portrays them as quite separate and facing away from each other as if they had just had a quarrel.  Sargent called his painting “the picture of the caged animal lecturing about the foreign specimen in the corner”.  When posing for photographs, the writer wore a broad red sash and loose gaucho trousers tucked into his riding boots.

Stevenson lamented that “my childhood was in reality full of fever, nightmare, insomnia, painful days and interminable nights”.  At Edinburgh University in 1867 he attended classes in engineering and in law in order to stay out of the rain. He recalled “infinite yawnings during lectures, and unquenchable gusto in the delights of truancy”.  He wanted to be a writer, and would rather make water on a breakwater than follow his father’s profession as a lighthouse engineer.  When he lost his religious beliefs, his intolerant father exclaimed, “You have rendered my whole life a failure.”  When he planned to marry Fanny Osbourne, his father declared, “Is it fair that we should be half murdered by his conduct?”

Edinburgh and the University were still dreary 90 years later when I was a student in 1957.  Lectures and tutorials were boring, student digs were austere, food was horrible and the portions were too small.  In winter the city got dark at 3:30 pm. Princes Street was oppressed by the sulphuric smell of brewing beer.  Everything closed down on Sunday: churches were packed, petrol stations were shut, ferries to the western isles were docked.

Stevenson (1850-94) was tubercular, but refused to recognise the gravity of his illness and submit to the draconian discipline of doctors.  He rejected an invalid’s life, except when he became ill and was forced into bed.  In 1881 he called the health resort in Davos, Switzerland, a claustrophobic trap, compared the desolate alpine wilderness to Lapland, Labrador and Alaska, and declared that the patients were condemned to “death by gradual dry-rot” or drowning by haemorrhages.  John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” — “Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies” — vividly describes Stevenson’s morbid condition.  Echoing Hamlet he declared, “I carried the art of spitting blood to a pitch not previously dreamed of in my philosophy.”  The walking corpse could speak, like Alexander Pope, of “That long disease, my life.”

Discussing medical treatments in his biography of Albert Camus, Oliver Todd explodes the false theories about alpine cures that prevailed until the mid-20th century.  Doctors believed that tubercular patients could get high doses of oxygen at high altitudes.  In fact, patients received less oxygen and gasped for more breath at great heights.  Another mistaken treatment was to collapse one lung to allow it to rest and heal, which put a great strain on the one remaining lung.  Patients were also encouraged to consume as much red meat and red wine as possible, though this did not replace the blood lost in massive haemorrhages.  It’s not surprising that in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain no patients ever actually recover.

In the summer of 1963 I went to Davos, the setting of Mann’s novel, and found the Berghotel Schatzalp, once a tuberculosis sanatorium, where he’d visited his ailing wife in 1912.  Though the hotel was temporarily closed between seasons, the young Swiss girl acting as caretaker allowed me to spend one evocative night there.  After dinner we stretched out on the chaise longues, wrapped ourselves in blankets, and gazed dreamily at the glittering stars and snow-capped mountains lit by moonlight.

Like Samuel Johnson with Boswell, Henry James—whom Stevenson called “a gentle, amiable, soothing, sleepy sort, fat and dimpled”— admired his friend for the adventurous life he himself could not lead.  In July 1976, en route to study Katherine Mansfield’s papers in Wellington, New Zealand, I stopped in Apia on Western Samoa where Stevenson had spent his last five years.  When hitchhiking I was picked up by a huge man with a massive girth and the license plate number 1, who turned out to be the paramount chief of the island.  After the car ride I followed the steep slippery path through the overhanging jungle, cooling off under a waterfall on the way, and climbed 1,500 feet to the top of Mount Vaea.  Stevenson’s low rectangular tomb commanded a celestial view of the island and the white surf pounding against the coral reefs.  But I was disillusioned by the disparity between the exotic and romantic image—created by Melville, Stevenson and Gauguin—and the reality of the South Seas, inhabited by sullen people in a steamy setting.

I’ve read seven of the 12 previous biographies listed by Leo Damrosch in Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (Yale, 554pp, £25/$35), and learned that modern biographers have been more interested in Stevenson’s charismatic personality and odd marriage, his extensive travels and exotic life in Samoa, than in his fiction.  Damrosch’s book is well illustrated with 17 colour plates and 88 black-and-white pictures in the text, and he judiciously quotes the perceptions of previous biographers.  But his book doesn’t really get going until 1879 (p.187), when Stevenson traveled from Glasgow to see Fanny, who was visiting her family in California.

Damrosch notes, “If Louis had been expecting a joyous reunion, he was bitterly disappointed.  Fanny was shocked by his exhaustion and poor health, and still conflicted about her husband Sam who wanted her back.”  Fanny was not a romantic heroine and exotic beauty, but a much older, divorced, bossy woman with a plain pudgy face, thick nose and grim expression.  She was certainly not a talented artist, and her painting of Stevenson is poor.  Stevenson described the same splendid scene that I can see from my window: “the sandy peninsula of San Francisco, mirroring itself on one side in the bay, beaten on the other side by the surge of the Pacific.”

Damrosch fails to arouse interest in Stevenson’s many elegant but shallow boys’ action and adventure novels that lack complexity and intellectual substance.  As he ruefully observes, “Readers loved them at the time, but not many have since then.”  William Blake’s Songs of Innocence is much better than Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses.  Guy de Maupassant’s “On the Water” (1876), about boating on the Seine, is superior to Stevenson’s An Inland Voyage (1878).  The descendants of Stevenson’s animal companion in Travels with a Donkey (1879) include Benjamin, the old and pessimistic donkey in Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), the film Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) and Dervla Murphy’s Eight Feet in the Andes (1983).  Stevenson said he wrote Kidnapped “partly as a lark partly as a potboiler.”  In a 12-page chapter, Damrosch unconvincingly calls it “brilliant”.  (Two small errors: Cockfield is in Suffolk, not Sussex.  Beatrice Henley, not Margaret Henley, was photographed by Lewis Carroll.)

Damrosch claims that in Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide Attwater, “a cultivated aesthete with a Cambridge degree . . . has a lot in common with Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”  But Kurtz is quite different.  All Europe contributed to the making of  Kurtz, a universal genius and barbaric ruler who goes mad in the jungle and becomes a cannibal.  The plot of The Ebb-Tide (1894) did provide the basic plot of Conrad’s Victory (1915): three evil men in pursuit of treasure invade the remote island of a decent man who must confront them.  But Conrad brilliantly transformed Stevenson’s mediocre melodrama into a superb novel.  Damrosch was much more effective when writing in previous books about the hard-hitters of the 18th century: Swift, Pope and Johnson.

Of Stevenson’s novels only The Strange Life of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is outstanding.  Other important works on this theme are E.T A. Hoffmann’s The Doubles (1821), Edgar Poe’s William Wilson (1839) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Double (1846).  The name Jekyll suggests the element of a jackal, Edward Hyde the hide of an animal.  His notorious namesake Edward Hyde, 3rd Earl of Clarendon (1661-1723), had a scandalous reputation as a corrupt official and was a notorious cross-dresser.  In Lectures on Literature Vladimir Nabokov observed, “Jekyll’s transformation implies a concentration of evil that already inhabited him.”

Early in the story Hyde casually crushes a girl in the street and walks calmly away while she lies screaming in pain: “with ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered.” Nathanael West imitated this scene in The Day of the Locust (1939) when Homer unleashes his repressed violence and tramples Adore in the same brutal and sadistic way: “The boy turned to flee, but tripped and fell.  Before he could scramble away, Homer landed on his back with both feet, then jumped again . . . and went on using his heels . . .  and continued to stamp on the boy.”

In 1894 Stevenson suffered a catastrophic stroke.  He suddenly shouted, “What is that?” and “What a pain!” and put both hands to his head.  “Do I look strange?” he asked, and then reeled and fell backwards.

Stevenson’s savage pilgrimage anticipated D. H. Lawrence’s way of life and mode of travel.  Both Stevenson and Lawrence were archetypal expatriate writers whose cultural identities and artistic insights were strengthened by residence in foreign lands.  Both rejected their family background but retained a strong sense of their native place.  Both had adulterous affairs with and then married older, foreign women who had children from their previous marriage.  Both remained childless themselves.  They were spontaneous, enthusiastic, generous men who inspired the adoration of possessive friends, despite their volatile temperaments and furious rages during sickness.  They wanted to live the life they wrote about, willingly endured the “incidental beastliness of travel,” and sought a simple and even Spartan existence.  They felt oppressed by civilization and hoped to create an ideal community.  In Travels with a Donkey Stevenson wrote: “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake.  The great affair is to move.”  Lawrence opened Sea and Sardinia (1921) by exclaiming: “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move.”  Both writers had tuberculosis and died aged 44.

Jeffrey Meyers published James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath last year.  Forty-Three Ways to Look at Hemingway will appear in November, The Biographer’s Quest in the spring of 2026.

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