Bell Ian - Dreams of exile: Robert Louis Stevenson, a biography

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Contents

For Mandy, Sean, Lamastre and Le Monastier

Life that lives is life successful.

J ACK L ONDON : T HE C RUISE OF THE S NARK

Alls misalliance.

Yet why not say what happened?

R OBERT L OWELL : E PILOGUE

It is told of me that I came once to my mother with these words:

Mama, I have drawed a mans body; shall I draw his soul now?

R.L.S.: M EMOIRS OF H IMSELF

Singular that I should fulfil the Scots destiny throughout, and live a voluntary exile and have my head filled with the blessed, beastly place all the time!

L ETTER TO S IDNEY C OLVIN , A UGUST 1893

A wilful convulsion of brute nature said the last line of fiction he wrote. Later that day, on the broad verandah of the big new house on a consoling Pacific island, he was infected with high spirits while preparing mayonnaise for a salad. Without warning, his hands went to his head, groping after the haemorrhage. Do I look strange? he asked his wife, and sank to his knees. They helped him indoors as consciousness fled. At 8:10 P.M . on 3 December 1894, Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson died, lying on a cot in the hall.

He could not have written his funeral better. The headman of the village below the house brought precious mats to cover him; Catholics chanted over his Presbyterian soul. By dawn the Samoans were cutting a path to the distant summit of the mountain and the room was full of bright flowers. They dressed him in a fine shirt and draped the British ensign over his body. Mourners came and went. On a cool, sunny afternoon the native men shouldered the bag of bones, the untrustworthy flesh that had made living a contest with chance, and carried it to the highland grave. There he lies, the ocean beneath him.

* * *

The real surprise was that he had lived so long. In the year before he died, he wrote to George Meredith, his fellow novelist, in an effort to explain how his life had been:

For fourteen years I have not had a days real health; I have awakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my work unflinchingly. I have written in bed, and written out of it, written in haemorrhages, written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam for weakness; and for so long, it seems to me I have won my wager and recovered my glove. I am better now, have been, rightly speaking, since first I came to the Pacific; and still, few are the days when I am not in some physical distress. And the battle goes onill or well, is a trifle; so as it goes. I was made for a contest

Like a portrait attempted too often, Stevenson has acquired many faces in the century since his death. None are fixed. He returns your gaze, looks sidelong, bold, sick, wise, skittish, devious, or rapt from canvas, sketch, printed page, and photographic emulsion. We impose R.L.S. on him and take what we need. He is an odd sort of mirror.

The central image persists, though the brown eyes radiant with vivacity are dim in the paintings and the old glass plates, like echoes fading. So, too, the versions. Some remembered his speech, the talent to enthral, but they could not report it. Others thought him a self-regarding poseur, the sort who could not pass a looking glass, but they failed to prove it. He was quick to anger, by some accounts; quicker to forgive, by others. In his letters, hundreds of them, there is a sense of suppressed energy, as though the mainspring of his imagination was overwound. He felt intensely, wept easily, loved freely. Sometimes he stared into the encroaching darkness.

He was impossibly thin, so thin the life seemed to have been squeezed out of the chamber of his sunken chest and into the narrow extremities of his face and his long, nervous, tapering fingers. The doctor who came to his deathbed was astonished anyone could write with arms so thin. He reminded some of a stork, febrile and agitated; others of a scarecrow, skin stretched tight over the rickety frame. A bag of bones.

His hair was brown and lank, his face famously boyish, high coloured when not tanned. He spoke with an Edinburgh accent. The trademark wisps of facial hair were all he could ever manage in the way of a beard. Some thought him beautiful.

* * *

Narrative: the orderly description of events. What happens and what happened. The stories we tell ourselves. Truth, he wrote in 1888 to Adelaide Boodle, a Bournemouth acquaintance, I think not so much of; for I do not know it.

His feelings are always his reasons, said his friend Henry James, summing up the plot in a sentence.

* * *

Stevenson was, even without trying, like a character out of time; there was a flamboyance in his nature, a certain taste for self-dramatisation, as though a difficult performance was being perfected. He was a romantic in an age of romantics, yet not typically Victorian; a Scot, yet far from typically Scottish. Sailing to the rim, he was forever looking over his shoulder. His art was a moral argument presented in an entertainers costume.

Time has played games with his name. Down the years his reputation has survived critical neglect as extreme as the infantile veneration of the decade after his death, when saintliness leeched off those beloved initials and sweet martyrdom was proclaimed by a blood vessel exploding in the skull. The worship was as bizarre as the consequent neglect was unusual, and both were inspired by immense popularity. Significantly enough, the best of his peers have thought highly of Stevenson, finding qualities in the mechanisms of prose and the textures of his vision that lesser critics have missed. Others can decide if, to name three, Henry James, Jorge Luis Borges, and Graham Greene were right to put the highest value on his fiction: Stevensons place is secure, although, as ever, there is no unanimity over what that place might be. R.L.S. was no ones conscript.

His legendgreat craft, prodigious effort, incessant travel, and a heroic, lifelong duel with deathis still potent. The romance of nemesis befuddles every commentary, evenespeciallyfor those attempting neutrality. Some find the legend exemplary, others are nauseated: if Stevenson does not ring true, he does not ring at all. Yet the legend and the work are elements not easily separated, nor should they be: most of the legend is fact. Louis the manmercurial, charming, daring, dyingis the troublesome core.

* * *

He was a product of his circumstances, of course. Three, each connected, mattered most: illness, Scotland, and travel. Had he not been born in Edinburgh, he might have enjoyed better health; had he been healthier, he might not have travelled so much; had he not travelled, he would not have written as he did; yet had his health been better, he would not have died with his career only half complete, his potential untested. Fate, if it exists, had fun with Louis.

Victorian Scotland, his society, bred an ambivalent exile with, simultaneously, a taste for escape and a profound love of his country. Exile brought forth nostalgia; recollection brought forth fiction. In his last letters home he was writing of his ancestors, and his last great novel, Weir of Hermiston, was of and for Scotland. Like the argument of his life, the book was left unfinished.