The Gypsy Life of Robert Louis Stevenson

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

With time people become the stories we tell about them. Then, except in the rarest cases, oblivion. Time whittled Sappho down to fragments. Others have not survived at all. If we take the cosmic view, no one will.
 
So what is biography for? What good is its effort to demystify the secretive recesses of human character? The biographer Hermione Lee has said, “I want to penetrate those secret places, find out everything, and be completely ruthless. It’s paradoxical—I wouldn’t want it done to me, yet I’m very keen to do it to other people. And the thing that attracts me to these people is their secret self.” The biographer’s interest is the same as the novelist’s. Both are storytellers. Both deal in facts. And as we know, sometimes facts are make-believe. Sometimes fiction is truer than nonfiction. Novels used to be called histories or lives. Stories are everywhere.
 
Another expert biographer, Richard Holmes, has said, “You spend a lot of time alone with your subject, but in the end you must go out and engage your readers. Readers must be able to imagine this other life as vividly as possible and understand it as personally as possible. I think it has to be an affectionate understanding, too. At least, I find that. I’ve never written about someone I didn’t learn to like, and even to love. I call it ‘a handshake across time.’”
 
The best biographers make happy readers of us, involving us—like novelists, historians, playwrights and poets—in lives other than our own. They enlarge experience. Leo Damrosch’s new biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, Storyteller, is a splendid affair because Damrosch writes out of love, not uncritically, and not only for his subject, but also for the grand literary conversation of which he is a part.⁠^[1] Author of highly regarded books on Rousseau, Casanova, Jonathan Swift, and the circle of Samuel Johnson, Damrosch is the kind of scholar who knows a character when he sees one. He gets stories and the connections they afford us. Stevenson proves a perfect subject for him—eccentric, vital, adventurous, and, with good reason, beloved. Storyteller is thoroughly researched and copiously illustrated, but more than that, it is deeply moving in its shape and detail. It is not only about one marvelous man, whom many of us wish we could have known, but also about a great marriage, illuminating friendships and the freedom-seeking literary life.

*

 
I’ll begin at the end.
 
In some ways, Stevenson resembles D. H. Lawrence—a rebel with a conservative streak, a world traveler, an invalid (possibly consumptive), who married a strong older woman and died, like Lawrence, at 44. He wrote with what Italo Calvino called a “marvelous lightness” in multiple genres—several wonderful novels and stories, dozens of superb essays, and letters that, in unexpurgated form, deserve comparison to Byron’s for their vigorous wit. While not among our greatest poets, Stevenson wrote some indelible verses. His “Requiem,” to be found on his tomb in Samoa as well as in books, is one of the best epitaphs we have in English. He actually wrote it during a serious illness in San Francisco, but friends and family made proper use of it after his death:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
 
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Never mind the use Philip Larkin made of one of its lines for “This Be the Verse.” Damrosch’s placement of “Requiem” in his penultimate chapter is narrative perfection. Maybe it’s the natural shape of Stevenson’s life, or maybe it’s Damrosch’s enthusiasm for his subject, but this is a dream biography.
 
Many pages of Storyteller take up Stevenson’s frailty, his scrawniness, bouts of lung trouble and travels in search of a cure. He and his wife, Fanny, built a sprawling mansion in Samoa, which they called Vailima. There he enjoyed a few final years of robust health. It wasn’t TB that killed him, but a stroke—he had always loved tobacco and whisky. Damrosch quotes an account written by Stevenson’s stepdaughter, Belle:

It seems he had been looking on watching my mother making a salad, and was dropping the oil for her with a perfectly steady hand. He suddenly said, “What is that?” or “What a pain!” and put both hands to his head. “Do I look strange?” he asked, and then he reeled and fell backwards. His favourite boy Sosimo [a Samoan servant] caught him and carried him into the big room, and he never was conscious after.

“They had been in Samoa for just over four years,” Damrosch remarks, “—⁠the longest Louis ever lived in one place during his entire adult life.”
 
Samoan people genuinely honored Stevenson, calling him Tusitala, or “storyteller.” During a period of civil strife on the island, a taboo had been declared against doing any harm to Vailima and its inhabitants, even though Louis (as he was familiarly called) sided with one chieftain over the others. Having been a socialist when young—about the time he renounced the Scottish Calvinism he was raised with—he had become a skeptic about political causes. Samoa changed that by showing him the dark side of Western imperialism, and in A Footnote to History (1892) he wrote passionately for the cause of independence. The chief Stevenson had favored, Mata’afa, lost in the civil war and was banished (at least he wasn’t beheaded like some of his cohort). Another chief stood at Stevenson’s funeral to deliver a eulogy: “When Mata’afa was taken, who was our support but Tusitala? We were in prison, and he cared for us. We were sick, and he made us well. We were hungry, and he fed us. The day was no longer than his kindness. You are great people and full of love. Yet who among you is so great as Tusitala? What is your love to his love?”
 
In a few photographs we can see the burning energy and spirit in Stevenson’s eyes. His conversation won him fervent friends, some of whom fell out with him over time. None of the friends in Damrosch’s account moves me more than Henry James, who loved Louis and Fanny Stevenson from the moment he met them in London. When other friends complained about Stevenson leaving home and setting sail for the Pacific islands, James defended him, though he missed Louis terribly. James’s letters to Fanny after Louis’s death move me right down to the ground:

To “my dear Fanny Stevenson” James sent a long and tender letter of sympathy, beginning with “What can I say to you that will not seem cruelly irrelevant and vain?” After praising her “courage and patience and fortitude,” which would be much needed, he went on to say, “To have lived in the light of that splendid life, that beautiful, bountiful being—only to see it, from one moment to the other, converted into a fable as strange and romantic as one of his own, a thing that has been and has ended, is an anguish into which no one can enter with you fully, and of which no one can drain the cup for you. You are nearest to the pain, because you were nearest the joy and the pride.”

James went on, and I simply must quote it:

He has gone in time not to be old—early enough to have been so generously young and late enough to have drunk deep of the cup. There have been—I think—for men of letters few deaths more romantically right. Forgive me, I beg you, what may sound cold-blooded in such words—and as if I imagined there could be anything for you “right” in the rupture of such an affection and the loss of such a presence. I have in my mind, in that view, only the rounded career and the consecrated work. When I think of your own situation I fall into a mere confusion of pity and wonder—with the sole sense of your being as brave a spirit as he was (all of whose bravery you endlessly shared) to hold on by.

You may wonder that I have begun my review with this postmortem. I dwell on it not only because it touched me more than I have been touched by a biography in many years, but because Damrosch earns my tears. I should turn next to two crucial aspects of Stevenson’s life: the quality of his writing and the extraordinary woman he married, who made him a better writer and gave him his happiest years.

*

 
My ancestors were Scottish, and Robert Louis Stevenson was an honored name in our household. I remember our illustrated edition of A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), of which Henry James had written, “A child might have written it if a child could see childhood from the outside.” But in poems like “Rain” and “My Shadow,” Stevenson writes from the inside of childhood, at his best when he avoids moralizing. Damrosch quotes the famous couplet called “Happy Thought,” which a lesser critic would find sentimental: “The world is so full of a number of things, / I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” Damrosch sees that the poem is not sentimental at all: “Astonished by the richness of the world, a child is amazed that people are not happy.” In our time, astonishment and awe are among the things people who think themselves sophisticated will sneer at. They are idiots, already pickled in their opinions. Damrosch understands his subject’s generous sympathy, the way he captures “what it’s like to be small.”
 
I have never forgotten “The Land of Counterpane,” even though I had no idea what a counterpane was, and of course “The Land of Nod”:

From breakfast on through all the day
At home among my friends I stay;
But every night I go abroad
Afar into the land of Nod.
 
All by myself I have to go,
With none to tell me what to do⁠—
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountain-sides of dreams.
 
The strangest things are there for me,
Both things to eat and things to see,
And many frightening sights abroad
Till morning in the land of Nod.
 
Try as I like to find the way,
I never can get back by day,
Nor can remember plain and clear
The curious music that I hear.

In the same way, I remember my early childhood encounter with a dramatic recording of Treasure Island (1883), in which the deaths of Billy Bones and Old Pew scared the bejesus out of me. I found stalwart adulthood in Squire Trelawney and Dr. Livesey but, like everyone else, was most beguiled by Long John Silver and his parrot, Captain Flint. Any boy of my generation would have wanted to be Jim Hawkins. In a late poem, “In the Attic,” Seamus Heaney seems to have felt the same:

As I age and blank on names,
As my uncertainty on stairs
Is more and more the lightheadedness
 
Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,
As the memorable bottoms out
Into the irretrievable,
 
It’s not that I can’t imagine still
That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt
As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.

Just weeks ago, I re-read Treasure Island in a cheap paperback with a cheesy cartoon for a cover and was transported once again by its perfect plotting and the lucid exactitude of its prose: an island snake hisses “with a noise not unlike the spinning of a top,” and tropical foliage has “a kind of poisonous brightness.” Call it a children’s book or a young adult novel or what you will, it’s bloody great—and pretty bloody, too. When Stevenson met Mark Twain in New York, the two must have wondered at having found their biggest success writing for young people, but both excelled at conveying the violence that makes our moral choices important and difficult. They understood what it means to grow.
 
Treasure Island and Kidnapped (1886) are probably two of the most influential novels on my own life. I’ve never read Catriona (1893), the sequel to Kidnapped, which Damrosch praises on its literary merits, nor have I read The Master of Ballantrae (1889) or the important and unfinished final novel, Weir of Hermiston (1896). Based on Damrosch’s critical overviews, I should make time for them.
 
The adventure story and the historical romance were two genres at which Stevenson excelled, but he was also brilliant at the macabre psychological parable in his novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and the supernatural in his short story “Thrawn Janet” (1881). The first of these takes on the very “fortress of identity” (in Jekyll’s words) that has so obsessed us of late but turns it into something timeless. Damrosch tells us that the novella caused a furious argument between Stevenson and his wife, in which she comes off better than he does. When Louis read aloud his first draft, as Fanny’s son Lloyd recalled, “Her praise was constrained; the words seemed to come with difficulty; and then all at once she broke out with criticism. He had missed the point, she said; had missed the allegory; had made it merely a story—a magnificent bit of sensationalism—when it should have been a masterpiece.” Damrosch continues, “Fanny’s point was that Louis had ruined the story by turning it into a mere tale about a secret life. . . . What was needed was not just a character wearing a disguise, but something far more profound: a character struggling with a deeper hidden self that breaks loose and fights for supremacy.” Louis resisted, then came around, went back to work, and gave her the masterpiece she wanted. Thereafter, he jokingly referred to her as “the critic on the hearth.”
 
A friend reminds me of novels like The Wrong Box (1889), one of several Stevenson wrote in collaboration with his stepson, Lloyd. I remember an enjoyable movie but haven’t read the book. It’s the short stories I’ve dwelt in lately, including “The Body Snatcher” and “A Lodging for the Night,” a brilliant tale of the medieval French poet François Villon. Stevenson never idealizes his protagonist: “The poet was a rag of a man, dark, little, and lean, with hollow cheeks and thin black locks. He carried his four-and-twenty years with feverish animation. Greed had made folds about his eyes, evil smiles had puckered his mouth. The wolf and pig struggled together in his face. It was an eloquent, sharp, ugly, earthy countenance.” The style is kinetic, giving us action rather than explanation. You can learn from him. It was not until late in Stevenson’s short life that he felt free to write about women and sexual attraction, but within the Victorian mores of the time, he produced work charged with dark human energy, wildness and suspense that made so many of his tales excellent fodder for the movies.
 
Like Lawrence, he was also a pioneering travel writer, starting with his early books about France, An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879). The second of these is a small classic, an inspiration to nearly every travel writer since. It also inspired Richard Holmes, who undertook to follow the same journey as a way of empathizing with Stevenson the Francophile and wrote about it years later in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985). In his Paris Review interview, Holmes remembers “working out that for his Travels, Stevenson had this wonderful smell of wet Scottish tweed, French tobacco, and warm brandy. Because it always rained up there, he always rolled his own cigarettes, and he always carried a large flask of Cognac in his pocket. And then of course there was the smell of his donkey, Modestine.” Holmes practiced a peripatetic method of which Stevenson would have approved.

*

 
Fanny Stevenson was the kind of woman most people found fascinating—beautiful and brainy and brave. You can test your feelings about people in this biography by how they respond to her. Some, including Alice James, found her skin too dusky and her manners vulgar—like Louis, she rolled her own cigarettes. Down with Alice, says I. The writer Edmund Gosse described Fanny as follows:

She was one of the strangest people who have lived in our time, a sort of savage nature in some ways, but very lovable—extraordinarily passionate, and unlike everyone else in her violent feelings and unrestrained ways of expressing them—full of gaiety, and with a genius for expressing things picturesquely. . . . I think R.L.S. must have caught some of his ways of feeling from her. 

Gosse would, according to Damrosch, come “to resent what he saw as Fanny’s power over Louis, but still he admired her.”
 
Fanny was ten years older than Louis. They became lovers long before she secured a divorce from her philandering husband, Sam Osbourne. Louis’s sexual experiences had begun early in his life as an Edinburgh student, so by the time he met Fanny in Bohemian circles in France, they were both pretty well liberated from social mores, interested in living as artistic gypsies. Her daughter, Belle, would write that “Louis brought into our lives a sort of joyousness hard to describe.” For his part, Stevenson fell fiercely in love with Fanny’s cool-headed humor. Belle again: “Fanny Osbourne’s voice was low in tone, and she spoke with very little modulation. Louis described it as sounding like ‘water running under ice.’”
 
Fanny hesitated, returning to her husband more than once out of love for him and concern for their children, one of whom had died young. Finally, Sam’s infidelity became too much, and Louis’s persistence won through. The couple married in San Francisco in 1880. He was thirty, she forty. Louis had been so ill with lung disease that neither believed he would live much longer. Yet Belle later recalled passing in a hallway outside their bedroom “and stopping suddenly at a light joyous sound. With a catch at my heart, I realized it was the first time I had ever heard my mother laugh.” Damrosch concludes,

More than any of Louis’s biographers, Richard Holmes does justice to this remarkable union. “When one considers other Victorian literary marriages—Hardy’s, say, or Dickens’s—Stevenson’s is something phenomenal, dynamic, explosive. It contained energies, tempests, fireworks, and sheer anarchic excitement that would have obliterated any conventional household. To find anything like his relationship with Fanny—and the comparison is significant in the largest way—one would have to look forward to Lawrence and Frieda.”

There is a kind of person who despises enthusiasm, or fears it, and cannot abide happiness in others. I have seen this. The same sort of person looks at a Cassandra and does not believe a word she says. Fanny was a Cassandra figure, partly in her bouts of gloominess compared to Louis’s general “optimism.” Stevenson’s parents had been worried about their son’s liaison with an older woman, yet they fell in love with her when they met her, which speaks well of them. Louis’s father, Thomas, a wealthy engineer whose own father had devised the famous Stevenson lighthouses, nicknamed his daughter-in-law Cassandra, only partly in jest. Margaret, Louis’s mother, was a more joyful figure, and proved to be resilient after her husband’s death, sailing with Louis’s gypsy family to the South Seas. Louis had grown up with money, abandoned engineering for law, then abandoned law for literature, but he had always been able to depend on an allowance to keep him afloat. Fanny’s life had been more precarious, her risk-taking more remarkable.
 
The couple moved constantly in search of a healthy environment for Louis. For some productive years they lived at Skerryvore, their house in Bournemouth. The climate was disastrous for Louis, but he made some of his strongest friendships there, especially with Henry James. Damrosch quotes a fascinating description of Fanny by one of their visitors, who observed Stevenson “rolling a limp cigarette in his long, limp fingers, and talking eagerly all the while.” Then:

Opposite him sits Mrs. Stevenson, the tutelary genius of Skerryvore, a woman of small physical stature, but surely of heroic mould. Her features are clear-cut and delicate, but marked by unmistakable strength of character; her hair of an unglossy black, and her complexion darker than one would expect in a woman of Dutch-American race. I have heard her speak of a Moorish strain in her ancestry. . . . Beneath a placid though always alert and vivacious exterior, Mrs. Stevenson conceals much personal suffering and continual anxieties under which many a stronger woman might well break down.

 
Fanny managed their lives, found them homes to live in, and when they contemplated their South Sea voyages, it was she who sought out, rented and stocked the three successive boats they sailed on. In one of the stranger images of Fanny, she can be seen on the deck of a sailboat holding two pistols, shooting at sharks. It’s a glimpse of unexpected cruelty, rather like the young Louis mercilessly beating Modestine on his travels through the Cévennes.
 
They endured rough seas, making a bold menagerie together with Margaret, Lloyd and Belle. As Louis wrote to one acquaintance, “Six months on tinned meats, without any vegetables, is a thing to be remembered; most hardships become easy with continuance, not hardship of diet; towards the end I think we could all have wept at sight of an onion.”
 
In Samoa, while Louis’s health improved, Fanny did ultimately have a complete nervous collapse, perhaps due to the accumulated pressures of their life. She recovered and endured Louis’s death and sold Vailima, eventually finding another younger lover and dying in Santa Barbara, California, in 1914. Belle took her ashes to be buried with Louis. The unconventionality continued, as Fanny’s younger lover became Belle’s second husband. Lloyd kept writing books with little success and died in Glendale, California, in 1947. Belle died in Santa Barbara in 1953.
 
As it turned out, the storyteller, Tusitala, had been the most remarkable figure in their lives. “He was indeed all his life a bag of bones,” wrote his friend Sidney Colvin, who would later publish a censored edition of his letters. “Nevertheless when he was in the room it was the other people, and not he, who seemed the shadows.” For Richard Holmes, “He was the man who opened the magic door. His wit, his style, his courage, his wanderlust, all enchanted me. . . . He made England seem small, and the world look big.” Jorges Luis Borges would write, “Ever since childhood Stevenson has been for me one of the forms of happiness.”
 
Leo Damrosch set forth in this book “to celebrate what is great in his writing, and to inspire new readers to enjoy it.” I would say “Mission accomplished,” but Stevenson would deplore the cliché.

[1] STORYTELLER: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch. Yale University Press. $35.00.