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The stolen pleasures of the Colinton library linked directly with his sanctioned obsession, Skelt’s Juvenile Drama. Skelt produced dozens of different printed cutouts for use in children’s toy theatres, ‘a penny plain and twopence coloured’, which Lewis bought in quantity at the stationer’s on Antigua Street. He loved them, not so much because of the potent, transient joy of buying and colouring in a new set of characters or scenes – ‘when all was painted, it is needless to deny it, all was spoiled’ – but on account of the playbooks, with their stirring up of the sense of adventure and romance, the exoticism of the scenes and situations, the heart-stopping allure of the characters, highwaymen, smugglers and pirates:
What am I? What are life, art, letters, the world, but what my Skelt has made them? He stamped himself upon my immaturity. The world was plain before I knew him, a poor penny world; but soon it was all coloured with romance. [ … ] Indeed, out of this cut-and-dry, dull, swaggering, obtrusive and infantile art, I seem to have learned the very spirit of my life’s enjoyment; met there the shadows of the characters I was to read about and love in a late future; got the romance of Der Freischütz long ere I was to hear of Weber or the mighty Formes; acquired a gallery of scenes and characters with which, in the silent theatre of the brain, I might enact all novels and romances[.]
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The Stevensons and their queer little son, with his unexpressive face and out-of-proportion head, made a close-knit, self-protective trio. Their shared hypochondria became a great comfort to them. When Thomas developed some unspecified complaint and was ordered to take the waters at Homburg in 1862, the family went with him. The next year it was Margaret’s turn to be chief invalid and the destination was the South of France, where they stayed three months, returning through Italy on a splendidly leisurely tour and home via the Alps and the Rhine. All this time Lewis had been off school, but when Margaret was advised to return south for the winter of 1863–64, the Stevenson parents realised that if the boy was ever going to get an education they would have to leave him out of the next health tour. Thomas enrolled him at Burlington Lodge Academy in Isleworth, Surrey, chosen because three Balfour cousins were day boys there, looked after at weekends by the obliging Aunt Jane from her brother’s rented house nearby. It was a well-intentioned scheme, but not a particularly good one. Lewis could only feel the separation from his parents more keenly in a boarding school so far from home (and in a foreign country), however many little Balfours were on hand.
The twelve-year-old’s letters during his first and only term in Isleworth are full of characteristic touches: his stoicism, his distractibility (several times stopping mid-sentence), his mixed interest in and fear of other children. ‘I am getting on very well, but my cheif amusement is when I am in bed then I think of home and the holidays,’ he wrote to his ‘dear Parients’ in September.
(#litres_trial_promo) As the weeks went by, there were signs of education going on – bits of Latin and French, along with devil-may-care touches of sophistication – but the dreaded time was approaching when both parents would leave the country without him, which they did on 6 November. On the eve of his thirteenth birthday the following week, Lewis wrote his mother a letter in demi-French to thank her for the huge cake she had sent him, which, he noted, weighed twelve and a half pounds and cost seventeen shillings. There had been some trouble during the fireworks on Guy Fawkes’ Night when some bad boys (‘les polissons’) ‘entrent dans notre champ et nos feux d’artifice et handkercheifs disappeared quickly but we charged them out of the feild. Je suis presque driven mad par un bruit terrible tous les garcons kik up comme grand un bruit qu’il est possible.’ Writing to his parents this first time truly alone, with only a monstrous cake for company, seems to have been too much for the boy: he ends his letter abruptly and to the point: ‘My dear papa you told me to tell you whenever I was miserable. I do not feel well and I wish to get home. Do take me with you.’
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Lewis must have guessed the effect this simple appeal would have: Thomas Stevenson wrote back quickly to comfort the boy with the promise of fetching him out at Christmas, and Lewis’s subsequent letters are crowingly cheerful, looking forward to the prospect of joining them in Menton. When Lewis left Spring Grove at the end of term (the last boy to be picked up, his father being so late that he almost gave up hope) it was for good: he stayed in France until his mother finally left for home in May the next year. Menton was lovely: months of lounging in sunshine, reading, being fussed over by his mother and Cummy (brought out to attend him), being carried up and down the hotel stairs by two waiters when he was feeling weak. The party came back via Rome, Naples, Florence, Venice and the Rhine: a great improvement on Isleworth and the company of les polissons.
Cummy’s diary of this trip, written at the request of (and addressed to) her friend Cashie, nurse to David Stevenson’s children, gives a vivid glimpse of the woman with whom Lewis had spent so much of his time. Cummy had not travelled abroad before, and was appalled at how lost the world was to ‘the Great Adversary’. In London, the sight of barges on the Thames on a Sunday made her lament, ‘God’s Holy Day is dishonoured!’,
(#litres_trial_promo) whereas France, with its sinister-looking priests and perpetual feeling of carnival, was even worse, a land ‘where the man of sin reigns’.
(#litres_trial_promo) She was shy of eating with or associating with Catholics and felt that contact with heathens was in some way eroding her capacity to reach out ‘in deep, heart-felt love to Jesus’.
(#litres_trial_promo) She therefore relished her minor ailments and frustrations as signs of interest from the deity, as this entry, on recovering from a slight sore throat, illustrates:
O how good is my Gracious Heavenly Father to His backsliding, erring child! He knows I need the rod, but O how gently does He apply it! May I be enabled to see that it is all in love when He sends affliction!
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Cummy was not wholly consistent, of course, and proved susceptible to certain temptations. In Paris, she wrote to Cashie, she had been intrigued by the sight of some specially white and creamy-looking mashed potatoes, of which she sneaked tiny portions whenever the waiter’s back was turned. Although they were French and possibly the work of the Devil, she had to admit, ‘I never tasted anything so good.’
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One good thing had come of Lewis’s time at Spring Grove; he had been able to indulge a growing mania for writing. ‘The School Boys Magazine’ ran to just one issue and all four stories were by the editor, but at least he had the possibility of an audience among his schoolfellows and cousins. An opera libretto followed the next year, with the promising title ‘The Baneful Potato’, and a very early version of his melodrama Deacon Brodie was also written at this period, telling the gripping tale of the real-life Deacon of the Wrights who in the 1780s had carried on a notorious double life: respectable alderman by day, thief by night. The Stevensons owned a piece of furniture made by Brodie that stood in Lewis’s bedroom, a tangible reminder of the criminal’s duality. The idea of being an author intrigued the boy, though when one of his heroes, the famous adventure writer R.M. Ballantyne, visited the house of David Stevenson while researching his novel The Lighthouse (about the Bell Rock) and was introduced to the family, Lewis was so awestruck that he couldn’t say a thing.
Stevenson’s relations with his father were never anything other than intense, complex and troubling. Thomas Stevenson had on the one hand unusual sympathy with the child, colluding instantly with his attempts to avoid school, while at the same time being in thrall to the strictest ideas of what it was to be a responsible parent. Lewis was on the whole frightened of being accountable to him, for the response was predictable. Years later he wrote to the mother of a new godson of his this heartfelt advice: ‘let me beg a special grace for this little person: let me ask you not to expect from him a very rigid adherence to the truth, as we peddling elders understand it. This is a point on which I feel keenly that we often go wrong. I was myself repeatedly thrashed for lying when Heaven knows, I had no more design to lie than I had, or was capable of having, a design to tell the truth. I did but talk like a parrot.’
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Lewis became artful enough to know when to keep his mouth shut, as an incident which he related to Edmund Gosse in 1886 illustrates. When he was about twelve years old, he was so gripped by the romance and mystery of an empty house with a ‘To Let’ sign on it that he broke in by climbing through a rear window. Elated by his burgling skills, the boy then took his shoes off and prowled round, but once in the bedroom, thought he could hear someone approaching. Panic overcame him and he scuttled under the bed with his heart pounding. ‘All the exaltation of spirit faded away. He saw himself captured, led away handcuffed,’ and worst of all in his vision of retribution, he saw himself exposed to his parents (on their way into church) and cast off by them forever. This was such an alarming image that he lay under the bed sobbing uncontrollably for some time before realising that no one was in fact coming to get him, so he crept out and went home ‘in an abject state of depression’. He was incapable of explaining to his parents what had happened, and their concern redoubled his guilty feelings, sending him into hysterics. During the evening, as he lay recuperating, he heard someone say ‘He has been working at his books a great deal too much,’ and the next day he was sent for a holiday in the countryside.
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More education was ventured sporadically, the last being at a private day-school in Edinburgh for backward and delicate children. Mr Thomson’s establishment in Frederick Street, which admitted girls as well as boys and whose regime did not include homework, was the softest possible cushion upon which to place young Lewis. As far as his father was concerned, the boy’s eventual career was never in doubt; he would join the family firm. Therefore formal schooling was of minor importance: the greater part of his training would be got by observation and example in an apprenticeship. To this end, Thomas took his son on the annual lighthouse tour one year, and attempted to share his own knowledge of engineering and surveying whenever opportunity allowed. There is a touching memory of this in Records of a Family of Engineers:
My father would pass hours on the beach, brooding over the waves, counting them, noting their least deflection, noting where they broke. On Tweedside, or by Lyne and Manor, we have spent together whole afternoons; to me, at the time, extremely wearisome; to him, as I now am sorry to think, extremely mortifying. The river was to me a pretty and various spectacle; I could not see – I could not be made to see – it otherwise. To my father it was a chequer-board of lively forces, which he traced from pool to shallow with minute appreciation and enduring interest. [ … ] ‘[S]uppose you were to blast that boulder, what would happen? Follow it – use the eyes that God has given you: can you not see that a great deal of land would be reclaimed upon this side?’ It was to me like school in holidays; but to him, until I had worn him out with my invincible triviality, a delight.
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Thomas Stevenson had seen a painting at the Royal Scottish Academy exhibition titled Portrait of Jamie by James Faed, depicting an adolescent boy posed with a microscope. He wrote to Faed asking if a similar portrait could be made of his son and was told that the artist didn’t do much in that line, but would take a look at the boy and see if he thought he could paint him. Faed was surprised to get a reply saying that Mr Stevenson had been back to look at the ‘Jamie’ portrait again and had changed his mind, feeling his son was ‘too stupid looking to make a picture like that’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The incident stuck in Faed’s mind and thirty years later he offered it to Stevenson’s cousin Graham Balfour as a biographical curiosity (Balfour didn’t use it): the father’s turn of phrase was so odd and unsentimental. Odder still is the thought of Thomas Stevenson veering so completely between two different images of his son, one minute picturing him as a budding scientist, the next as too stupid-looking to be scrutinised.
(#ulink_06163eac-b305-5705-a13b-998f98ff460f)I am grateful to John Macfie for telling me an interesting fact about the real lamplighter on Heriot Row in the 1850s: he was a piece-worker, and therefore habitually rushed his work. So the ‘hurrying by’ of the poem is more realism than romance.
(#ulink_1cd2a3dc-308f-54ea-8b32-779fc215bc5d)It is not known who Smith learned from, but it could have been John Smeaton, who built the third Eddystone light in the 1750s, and whose work was very influential on the whole Smith/Stevenson family.
(#ulink_1e05ff37-b30a-57f3-b445-288395bf7b05)The fourth son, Robert (1808–51), took a degree in medicine at Edinburgh University and became an army surgeon. He left his whole estate to his youngest brother, Thomas.
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Facts bearing on precocity or on the slow development of the mental powers, deserve mention.
Francis Galton, Record of Family Faculties
WHEN BOB WENT UP to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in the autumn of 1866, fifteen-year-old Lewis was eager for details, and more than a little jealous: ‘Do Cambridge students indulge in a private magazine: if so, full particulars?’
(#litres_trial_promo) He himself was still at Mr Thomson’s school and bound on a different course, taking classes in practical mechanics and being given extra maths lessons in order to matriculate at Edinburgh University the next year as a student of engineering. Thomas Stevenson must have realised by this time that even if Lewis went through the hoops of getting a degree in sciences, he was temperamentally unsuited to become an engineer. Still they stuck to the known path, the father no doubt rationalising that his own reluctance to join the family firm years before had been proved wrong. His working life had been immensely useful and productive (not least of money), and his early leanings towards authorship had not been entirely abandoned. Had not his book on lighthouse illumination and his article on ‘Harbours’ for the Encyclopaedia Britannica been composed in hours of leisure, the proper place for letters?
Robert Louis Stevenson’s first publication, a privately-printed sixteen-page monograph called ‘The Pentland Rising: A Page of History’, fell entirely in the gentleman-amateur tradition that his father favoured. It would not have escaped a man like Thomas Stevenson, so keenly aware of the energy potential in a wave and the importance of building a structure of exactly the right size and shape to harness or withstand it, that the intellectual energy Lewis expended on his feverish recreation might be redirected towards some serious and worthy project. The boy’s interest in the Covenanters had been expressed in some highly inappropriate forms up to this point; he had started a romance based on the life of David Hackston of Rathillet, one of the fanatics who had murdered Archbishop Sharp, and in 1867–68 began a five-act tragedy on another Covenanting subject, ‘The Sweet Singer’. A work of a historical or overtly religious nature would have been far more suitable, and it was in such a direction that Thomas and Margaret Stevenson now steered their son,.offering to pay for the production of one hundred copies of a short history to coincide exactly with the two hundredth anniversary of the Covenanters’ defeat at Rullion Green on 28 November 1666. Getting the boy’s name into print, in a controlled and circumscribed way, was clearly a kind of reward and encouragement, but also an inoculation against becoming ‘literary’.
Lewis must have been happy with the arrangement, for he took care to make his account of the Rising as serious and scholarly as possible, with an impressive list of references (including Wodrow, Crookshank, Kirkton, Defoe, Bishop Burnet) and a stirring, sermon-like conclusion. Still it didn’t much resemble a conventional history. The facts were there, but re-imagined by the fifteen-year-old into gripping narrative:
The wind howled fiercely over the moorland; a close, thick, wetting rain descended. Chilled to the bone, worn out with long fatigue, sinking to the knees in mire, onward they marched to destruction. One by one the weary peasants fell off from their ranks to sleep, and die in the rain-soaked moor, or to seek some house by the wayside wherein to hide till daybreak. One by one at first, then in gradually increasing numbers, till at last at every shelter that was seen, whole troops left the waning squadrons, and rushed to hide themselves from the ferocity of the tempest. To right and left nought could be descried but the broad expanse of the moor, and the figures of their fellow-rebels, seen dimly through the murky night, plodding onwards through the sinking moss. Those who kept together – a miserable few – often halted to rest themselves, and to allow their lagging comrades to overtake them. Then onward they went again, still hoping for assistance, reinforcement, and supplies; onward again, through the wind, and the rain, and the darkness – onward to their defeat at Pentland, and their scaffold at Edinburgh.
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Stevenson’s later description of his apprenticeship as ‘playing the sedulous ape’ to a host of better writers seems needlessly self-mocking when one sees how expert and stylish he was already at the age of fifteen. The prose is very deliberately crafted, with cadences one could almost score, and there is something visionary about his imagination, as if he had personally witnessed the bullets dropping away from Dalzell’s thick buff coat and falling into his boots, seen the flames rising from a Covenanter’s grave on the moor and creeping round the house of his murderer. The boy’s engagement with his subject is so intense as to be almost disturbing. Just after relating the execution of the captured martyrs, he makes an emotional authorial interjection: perhaps it was as well that Hugh McKail’s dying speech to his comrades was drowned out by drums and the jeers of the crowd; these sounds, he wrote, ‘might, when the mortal fight was over, when the river of death was passed, add tenfold sweetness to the hymning of the angels, tenfold peacefulness to the shores which they had reached’. Lewis seems to have been as fervently pious in his mid-teens as in childhood.
It’s hard to imagine how such a performance could have failed to please the boy’s father, but according to a letter in the Balfour archive, the pamphlet was no sooner in type than Thomas Stevenson began to worry about potential criticism of it (from what quarter it is impossible to guess). He had criticised the first drafts himself, as Aunt Jane recalled, who had been at Heriot Row while Lewis was making alterations to the text ‘to please his Father’: ‘[Lewis] had made a story of it, and, by so doing, had spoiled it, in Tom’s opinion – It was printed soon after, just a small number of copies all of which Tom bought in, soon after.’
(#litres_trial_promo) So the little book’s literary qualities were its downfall; they ‘spoiled’ ‘A Page of History’ to the extent that it couldn’t even be circulated among the aunts, family friends and co-religionists who would have been its natural audience. It must have been hard for the young author to see his first work stillborn. Nor was it the only time Thomas Stevenson pulled this trick, paying for his son’s work to be printed, then censoring it. His solicitude for Lewis has the tinge of monomania, and tallies with what a family friend, Maude Parry, told Sidney Colvin about the relationship after the writer’s death: ‘Stevenson told us that his father had nagged him to an almost inconceivable extent. He thought it the most difficult of all relationships.’
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The following year Thomas Stevenson took out a lease on a house right in the heart of Covenanting country, the hamlet of Swanston on the edge of the Pentlands, only a few miles outside Edinburgh. The ‘cottage’ they rented there (in fact a spacious villa, almost as big as Colinton Manse) became their holiday home for the next thirteen years and a winter retreat for Lewis when he was a student. The battlefield of Rullion Green was within walking distance, as was the picturesque ruin of Glencorse Church, and Lewis, now old enough to be left to his own devices, spent days at a time walking the hills, writing and reading – especially adventure stories, caches of which the shepherd John Tod’s son later recalled having found in the whin bushes above the cottage.
(#litres_trial_promo) He was a keen, hardy walker and was able to make a long foot-study of the Pentlands in the years during which Swanston was the family’s second home. This was to become his favourite persona over the next decade or more, the romantic solitary walker, free from responsibility and respectability, watching, listening, picking acquaintance with strangers On the road, falling in with whatever adventures presented themselves.
To true Pentlanders, Lewis Stevenson would have appeared little more than a rich townie weekending on Allermuir, an English-speaking Unionist among terse mutterers of Lallans. No doubt some choice phrases of that dialect were shouted in his direction on the occasion, early in the Stevensons’ tenancy, when the boy barged through a field of sheep and lambs with his Skye terrier Coolin, infuriating the shepherd.
(#litres_trial_promo) Times had changed so rapidly in Scotland that in his late teens Stevenson knew no one of his own generation (certainly not of his class) whose primary language was Scots. ‘Real’ Scotsmen, like Robert Young, the gardener at Swanston, or John Tod the shepherd, or his late Grandfather Balfour, were distant, older figures who presented the paradox of being at once admirable and impossible to emulate. And with the language many temperamental traits and ‘accents of the mind’ were disappearing too, or seemed tantalisingly out of reach, as Stevenson’s loving description of shepherd Tod in his 1887 essay ‘Pastoral’ indicates:
That dread voice of his that shook the hills when he was angry, fell in ordinary talk very pleasantly upon the ear, with a kind of honied, friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently Scottish. He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like a picture than a face [ … ] He spoke in the richest dialect of Scots I ever heard; the words in themselves were a pleasure and often a surprise to me, so that I often came back from one of our patrols with new acquisitions; and this vocabulary he would handle like a master, stalking a little before me, ‘beard on shoulder’, the plaid hanging loosely about him, the yellow staff clapped under his arm, and guiding me uphill by that devious, tactical ascent which seems peculiar to men of his trade. I might count him with the best of talkers; only that talking Scotch and talking English seem incomparable acts. He touched on nothing at least, but he adorned it; when he narrated, the scene was before you; when he spoke (as he did mostly) of his own antique business, the thing took on a colour of romance and curiosity that was surprising.
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The ‘romance and curiosity’ of Scotsness haunted Stevenson all his life; he never tired of it. But the fact that his own culture could be romantic and curious to him he knew to be an unfortunate state of affairs. His writing about Scotland is therefore strongly melancholic and valedictory, quite unlike the language-revival movements of the following century which sought to resuscitate the culture by creating synthetic Scots. Within 150 years, the literary language waxed, waned and then reappeared again in the form of a sort of composite ghost of itself in the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ of the mid-twentieth century (pioneered by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid). But in the 1860s and ’70s, the language seemed beyond revival, and what Burns had used both naturally and daringly, Stevenson could only lament and pastiche, writing of his later attempts at Scots vernacular verse, ‘if it be not pure, what matters it?’
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Nevertheless, what Stevenson says of John Tod’s quintessentially Scots trait of ‘adorning’ his talk and making it startlingly vivid is egregiously true of Stevenson himself; ‘when he narrated, the scene was before you’. The irony is, of course, that Stevenson became known as a superlative English stylist because he was so alert to the power of his unknown native tongue. And as for the ‘romance and curiosity’ of Scotland, Stevenson’s version of it in novels such as Kidnapped, Catriona, The Master of Ballantrae and Weir of Hermiston did almost as much to promote and perpetuate the Scottish myth in the twentieth century as his great forerunner Walter Scott had done in the nineteenth.
In the autumn of 1867, the bullet had to be bitten and an engineering degree begun. The contrast between Lewis’s technical education at Edinburgh and Bob’s ‘semi-scenic life’ in Cambridge, with its gentlemanly atmosphere of ancient quadrangles and cultured conversation, could hardly have been stronger. As the bell rang them in to lectures from the city streets or pubs, all classes of raw Scots youth shuffled together on the ‘greasy benches’, as Stevenson recalled vividly in ‘The Foreigner at Home’:
The first muster of a college class in Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest; so many lads, fresh from the heather, hang round the stove in cloddish embarrassment, ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades, and afraid of the sound of their own rustic voices.
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No proctors, privileges or grand ceremonials here. When the classes broke up, many of the students had to hurry home to get back to work in the fields in order to earn their next winter’s college fees. It must have been an eye-opener to Lewis, whose school life (such as it was) had been spent wholly among middle-class children, and though he approved of the ‘healthy democratic atmosphere’ of the university, and admired those of the staff who strove to put the parish boys at ease, he made no close friends among his fellow engineering students, indeed felt increasingly isolated and lonely.
Around this time (1868–69) Stevenson changed his name from Lewis to the Frenchified ‘Louis’. It is said that the impetus behind the change was Thomas Stevenson’s sudden and overpowering dislike of an Edinburgh radical and dissenter called David Lewis, who embodied, in the engineer’s view, ‘everything dangerous in Church and State’.
(#litres_trial_promo) But as the pronunciation remained identical, Lewis – or Louis as we must now call him – may have intended it more as a joke than as a gesture of political solidarity, and it took a while to stick.
(#ulink_3b648e35-1267-5002-9009-42f5a3792109) 1868 was also the year in which Thomas Stevenson published an essay in the Church of Scotland Home and Foreign Missionary Record (later produced as a pamphlet by Blackwood’s) on ‘The Immutable Laws of Nature in Relation to God’s Providence’. This short work is notable for several reasons: for its slightly simple-minded grappling with the evolutionary controversies of the day and for its ardent struggle to develop a response to them consistent with Church doctrine. The author argues, for example, that a falling stone falls from two causes, ‘first, proximately, in virtue of the law of gravitation; but second, primarily, by the supreme will of God, who has called the law of gravitation into existence’ (one can catch the author’s pleasure in coining that ‘second, primarily’). And if man ‘has been raised from the gorilla, as is hinted at by the new school of naturalists, how comes it to pass that the dog, although resembling man so little physically, should be so much more than the gorilla akin to him in all his nobler feelings and affections?’ The style of argument gives one an idea of what Louis was up against when he and his father began to discourse ardently at the dinner table on matters of religion and science, for the youth had been reading Darwin, and Herbert Spencer, whose works his father would never countenance. But there is another passage in Thomas’s booklet of even greater relevance, one which may well have come to haunt his son:
Men of literature and science may therefore well pause ere they lift their pen to write a word which tends to shake the faith of others [ … ] How terrible will it be to such an author, when toiling all alone through the dark valley of the shadow of death, should conscience remind him, when thus entering the dark portals of the tomb, of the pernicious legacy which he has left to mankind!
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Publication fascinated the young student of engineering, who had secretly become fixated on the consumption and production of literature. ‘I had already my own private determination to be an author,’ he wrote in ‘The Education of an Engineer’.
(#litres_trial_promo) But the acquisition of technique, that seemed to him all-important, was difficult. Three of the four stories in his juvenile ‘School Boys Magazine’ had ended on a cliffhanger with the words ‘To Be Continued’. The pleasure in writing the beginnings of stories (natural enough in an apprentice) and a revulsion from the work involved in finishing them would remain the most marked characteristics of Stevenson’s creative life.
To be continued … by whom? One solution to the problem was to share the burden with a collaborator. In the spring of 1868, while he was also trying to write his ‘covenanting novel’, Louis wrote to Bob, ‘Don’t you think you and I might collaborate a bit this summer. Something dramatic, blank verse and Swinburne choruses.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Just the idea of collaboration then set him off in the same letter on a long sketch of two possible plays, the second of which, a tragedy about the Duke of Monmouth, got so elaborate as to put off any potential helper from the start:
Scene, a palace chamber. Without famine and revolt and an enemy investing the plains. A. found making love to B. Enter Prince who overhears. P. and A. quarrel, P. being also in love with B. Swords are drawn but D., who resembles A. very closely separates them. Exit P., cursing and muttering
– and so forth. ‘Write me your opinion of the thing and I will write the first scene which nothing can alter. I’ll then send it to you for alteration, amendment and addition, and we can parcel out the rest of the thing or alter it,’ he wrote humorously, acknowledging how tenacious he was likely to be of all his own ideas. What he really wanted was not a co-author, but a goad – or at the very least an enthusiastic audience. No wonder Bob didn’t jump at the offer, and apart from friendly encouragement contributed nothing to ‘Monmouth: A Tragedy’. But the object was achieved: the play was one of the few projects of the scores started during his teens that Louis managed to complete.
In his demanding, self-imposed and self-policed apprenticeship, Louis tried on a dizzying variety of literary styles, as he recalled satirically many years later:
Cain, an epic, was (save the mark!) an imitation of Sordello: Robin Hood, a tale in verse, took an eclectic middle course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer and Morris: in Monmouth, a tragedy, I reclined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, I followed many masters; in the first draft of The King’s Pardon, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no lesser man than John Webster; in the second draft of the same piece, with staggering versatility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve [ … ] Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles in the style of the Book of Snobs.
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‘Nobody had ever such pains to learn a trade as I had; but I slogged at it, day in, day out; and I frankly believe (thanks to my dire industry) I have done more with smaller gifts than almost any man of letters in the world,’ Stevenson wrote modestly.
(#litres_trial_promo) What he needed no time to learn, however, was what to write about: his subject was always, somehow, himself.
Whenever I read a book or passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann.
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Study, practice, impersonation; ‘that, like it or not, is the way to learn to write’. One can hear in these heartening words a rallying cry for millions of would-be writers, and it may be no coincidence that much of the worst prose of the coming generation was written in imitation of Stevenson. Anyone can do it, he seems to be saying; all you need is persistence and humility. What is easy to miss (because the expression is so original) is that anyone who can coin a phrase such as ‘playing the sedulous ape’ to describe his debt to other authors owes nothing to anyone. The term passed straight into common parlance, and the essay itself, as Balfour averred a mere fourteen years after its first appearance in an American periodical, quickly ‘became classical’.
To be continued … It wasn’t simply a matter of by whom, but when? For three consecutive summers, Louis was obliged to attend engineering works in his capacity as apprentice to the family firm. Instead of travelling, as Bob was doing, to Paris or Fontainebleau, he found himself stuck for weeks in a series of inaccessible locations on the Scottish coast, with no company but that of the men on the works, and no entertainments other than tobacco, drink and letters from his mother. The men must have found him an odd specimen, a skinny teenager with no real interest in or aptitude for engineering, quite unlike his father and uncle, the firm’s obsessively dedicated partners. When there was an accident at the works in Anstruther, where Louis had been sent in July 1868 to observe the construction of a breakwater, the seventeen-year-old found himself in the middle of a minor uproar. Writing to his father about the incident, he reported how a little girl had pointed him out on the street, saying, ‘There’s the man that has the charge o’t!’, an identification that must have rung strangely in everyone’s ears.
Louis spent most of his time in Anstruther loitering on the quay, vaguely recording the progress of the works, or biting his pencil over calculations. ‘All afternoon in the office trying to strike the average time of building the edge work,’ he wrote home at the end of his first week. ‘I see that it is impossible. [My computation] is utterly untrustworthy, looks far wrong and could not be compared with any other decision.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In the evenings, Louis retreated to his lodgings at the house of a local carpenter, and tried to make up the lost time: ‘As soon as dinner was despatched,’ he recorded twenty years later, ‘in a chamber scented with dry rose-leaves, [I] drew in my chair to the table and proceeded to pour forth literature, at such a speed, and with such intimations of early death and immortality, as I now look back upon with wonder.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Believing himself to be doomed to die young, and doomed, what’s more, to spend what little time he had hanging around windswept harbour works, he felt compelled to sit up long into the night, ‘toiling to leave a memory behind me’.
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The scent of dead rose-leaves, the intimations of mortality and the burden of his unwritten masterpieces weighed heavily. The works were weighty too; the sonorously-named ‘Voces Fidelium’ was to be a dramatic monologue in verse, presumably on a religious theme; ‘Monmouth: A Tragedy’ was still in progress, as was the novel about the Covenanter, Hackston. He had come a long way from ‘The Baneful Potato’. But it was difficult to keep up a secret nocturnal career of writing, that must at times have reminded him of Deacon Brodie’s double life. The nights were warm that July in Anstruther, the rose-leaves and bowls of mignonette overpowering, and the window had to be kept open. Thus moths flew in continually and scorched themselves on the candles, dropping onto ‘Voces Fidelium’ in a manner so disgusting that the author was driven to blow out the lights and go to bed, seething with rage and frustration. Immortality was deferred yet again.
After an evening watching a wretchedly bad performance by strolling players at Anstruther Town Hall, Louis got into a dispute with a fellow engineering apprentice about the troupe’s pathetic actor-manager. His companion felt that the man would be better employed as an ordinary labourer, but Stevenson disagreed ardently, saying the player must be happier ‘starving as an actor, with such artistic work as he had to do’. The parallel with his own life and frustrated ambition was all too clear, and Louis left the scruffy hall ‘as sad as I have been for ever so long’.
(#litres_trial_promo) By the end of the month he was writing home in unusually forcible terms:
I am utterly sick of this grey, grim, sea-beaten hole. I have a little cold in my head which makes my eyes sore; and you can’t tell how utterly sick I am and how anxious to get back among trees and flowers and something less meaningless than this bleak fertility.
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But his parents chose to interpret this repugnance as temporary and specific, a symptom of ‘the distressing malady of being seventeen years old’,
(#litres_trial_promo) and Louis was packed off again the next month to spend six weeks in the ‘bleak, God forsaken bay’ of Wick, a fishing port only ten miles away from the most northerly point on the Scottish mainland, John o’ Groats. Anstruther had been a mere forty miles from home, across the Firth from North Berwick, where the Stevensons had taken many family holidays; Wick was a much more serious exile, far beyond the reach of the railway system, cold, bare and implacably foreign. In the herring season, the town was full of men from the Outer Hebrides, mostly Gaelic speakers, while the mainlanders spoke mostly Scots-English and both communities were heavily influenced by their common Norse ancestry. Louis listened to a wayside preacher in total incomprehension of all but one word, ‘Powl’ (the apostle), and was incapable of conversing with one of the Highland workmen at the harbour works. ‘What is still worse,’ he wrote home to his mother, ‘I find the people here about – that is to say the Highlanders, not the northmen – don’t understand me.’
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The firm had been commissioned to build a new breakwater in Wick harbour and work was well advanced, despite the permanently bad sea conditions, which led eventually to the abandonment of the whole project in 1874.
(#ulink_1a167db8-c32a-5613-8bc0-ada6850c25df) In 1868, however, the scene was full of men and industry; wooden scaffolding was in place all along the unfinished stonework, and there was a platform of planks at the end on which stood the cranking equipment for the divers’ air supply. The masons’ hammers chimed continually, the air-mills turned, and every now and again a diver’s helmet would surface from the choppy water and a man dressed bizarrely in a huge helmet and diving suit hoist himself up the sea-ladder.
Here was something to capture young Louis’s imagination, and despite his father’s strong reservations (and insistence that a doctor’s opinion be sought in advance), he was eventually allowed to go diving under the strict supervision of one Bob Bain. Stevenson recalled the experience as the best part of his whole engineering career. Wearing woollen underclothes, a nightcap and many layers of insulating material, with a twenty-pound lead weight on each foot, weights hanging back and front and bolted into a helmet that felt as if it would crush him, Louis went down the ladder:
Looking up, I saw a low, green heaven mottled with vanishing bells of white; looking around, except for the weedy spokes and shafts of the ladder, nothing but a green gloaming, somewhat opaque but very restful and delicious. Thirty rounds lower, I stepped off on the pierres perdues of the foundation; a dumb helmeted figure took me by the hand, and made a gesture (as I read it) of encouragement; and looking in at the creature’s window, I beheld the face of Bain.
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Encouraged to try jumping up onto a six-foot-high stone, Louis gave a small push and was amazed to find himself soaring even higher than the projected ledge: ‘Even when the strong arm of Bob had checked my shoulders, my heels continued their ascent; so that I blew out sideways like an autumn leaf, and must be hauled in hand over hand, as sailors haul in the slack of a sail, and propped upon my feet again like an intoxicated sparrow.’
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The weightlessness, silence and dreamlike seclusion made diving memorable and delightful, but Wick was otherwise short on delights. The countryside was flat and treeless, exposed for miles at a time, and Louis would shelter from the biting wind in small rock crevices, listening to the seabirds and repeating over and over to himself the lines of the French poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger, ‘mon coeur est un luth suspendu/sitôt qu’on le touche, il résonne’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Wick was a place of storms and shipwrecks, and one morning Louis was woken by the landlady of the New Harbour Hotel with news that a ship had come ashore near the new pier. The sea was too high to get near the works to assess the possible damage, but Louis reported back to his father the scene from the cope:
Some wood has come ashore, and the roadway seems carried away. There is something fishy at the far end where the cross wall is building; but till we are able to get along, all speculation is vain. [ … ]
So far, this could just pass for a technical report, but he goes on:
The thunder at the wall when it first struck – the rush along ever growing higher – the great jet of snow-white spray some forty feet above you – and the ‘noise of many waters’, the roar, the hiss, the ‘shrieking’ among the shingle as it fell head over heels at your feet. I watched if it threw the big stones at the wall: but it never moved them.
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