King Louis

On the evening of December 3, 1894, Robert Louis Stevenson uncorked a bottle of red in his house in Samoa and started to mix mayonnaise for a salad. “Do I look strange?” he asked his wife Fanny, then fell to the kitchen floor. He died that night from a cerebral hemorrhage, three weeks past his forty-fourth birthday. He had been sick since childhood, and Fanny had accompanied him to death’s door several times. She knew that rather than shipping him back to his native Edinburgh “in a box,” she should bury him at the summit of Mount Vaea, high above the house and estate they had carved from the Samoan rainforest.

Two distinct lineages in fiction derive from Stevenson. One is that of the storytellers, the other that of the stylists. The storytellers write tales of innocence and experience in which the protagonist’s character is revealed to us and himself by the flow of action. In Kidnapped, David Balfour is suspected of killing a man and goes on the run in the Scottish Highlands with the Jacobite renegade Alan Breck Stewart. In John Buchan’s Thirty-Nine Steps, Richard Hannay goes on the run in the Highlands after being framed for murder. In Treasure Island, Jim Hawkins is implicated in a crime and escapes to the sea. In Conrad’s Lord Jim, the protagonist escapes to the sea but becomes implicated in a crime.

We call these stories “thrillers.” The first use of that critical term appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1889, but Victorians were more likely to call a book or play with high emotions and violent twists a “shocker.” The thriller as we know it emerged later, by the light of the silvery screen—around 1935, when Alfred Hitchcock adapted The Thirty-Nine Steps, and 1939, with Eric Ambler’s Mask of Dimitrios, a spy thriller written for the screen. Suspense is the key to thrillers. To recover the shocker in Stevenson, we must remember Nabokov’s injunction to suspend our belief in the movies: “You will ignore the fact that ham actors under the direction of pork packers have acted in a parody of the book.”

The stylists seek a different thrill in Stevenson. In his tales of mystery and imagination, fleeting images of the inner life are revealed by a flux of sensory impressions. The shock of aesthetic recognition gives us the Stevenson cherished by Nabokov, Proust, Calvino, and Borges. This is the Stevenson who read Baudelaire and Dostoevsky in French, preferred French style to English manners, changed his middle name from Lewis to Louis but pronounced it the same, and spent most of his adult life outside Scotland with extended periods in France and America but set much of his best writing in Scotland: the internationalist and modernist who, decades before T. S. Eliot, translated the condensed and discomfiting imagery of French Symbolism into English letters.

Stevenson said that his purpose in the novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was to make a “fantastic drama pass in the presence of plain sensible men.” The London of the story looks strange in the way of Dickens: a respectable lawyer, a perplexing will, a house in a Soho side street like the one where we meet Doctor and Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities, a young girl trampled in the night and fog, blackmail, murder, and madness. But the Jekyll-and-Hyde psychology is fantastical like Dostoevsky. Stevenson slipped a Raskolnikov into a city with more crimes than punishments.

“Please completely forget, disremember, obliterate, unlearn, consign to oblivion any notion you may have had that Jekyll and Hyde is some kind of a mystery story, a detective story, or movie,” Nabokov advises in Lectures on Literature. The investigations of Utterson, the lawyer in Jekyll and Hyde, may follow the footsteps of the detectives in Bleak House and Martin Chuzzlewit. They may anticipate the stories of Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes would debut in 1887, a year after the publication of Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But they are, Nabokov thought, “lame as a detective story.” The “special enchantment” of Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he believed, lies in a “phenomenon of style” that, landing nearer to poetry and fable than prose and fiction, “belongs to the same order of art as, for instance, Madame Bovary or Dead Souls.”

Proust agreed. In Time Regained, the seventh and last volume of À la recherche du temps perdu, Dr. Cottard reports that he has witnessed “véritables dédoublements de la personnalité” in the course of his work, including the case of an apparently “honest man” who, when the doctor touched his temples, mutated into his second life as an “abominable scoundrel” in which he had been arrested for multiple thefts. When Madame Cottard says that this reminds her of her children’s favorite bedtime story by l’Ecossais Stevenson, the aesthete Swann jumps in: “But he is tout à fait a great writer, I assure you . . . equal to the very greatest.”

Nabokov observed that Jekyll and Hyde are not a pair but a trio: Jekyll, Hyde, and the psychological nexus through which Jekyll creates Hyde. Stevenson’s storytelling and stylistic legacies converge in the novels of Joseph Conrad, who also sailed the South Seas in the age of Europe’s high imperialism, then mingle with the modern thriller in the post-imperial angst of Graham Greene, whose grandmother was Stevenson’s first cousin.

Leo Damrosch’s Storyteller unites Stevenson the writer of popular “romances” with Stevenson the late-Romantic artist. The nexus in Damrosch’s telling is less that of life and times or life and art than of Stevenson’s passionate mind and frail body. Like Stevenson’s stories, Storyteller is a pleasure to read, with each ripping of the yarn exposing a psychological complexity.

“RLS” was born in Edinburgh in 1850, the only child of Margaret, née Balfour, a vivacious but sickly Presbyterian clergyman’s daughter, and Thomas Stevenson, a pioneering lighthouse builder from a prominent engineering family. Raised in a smart terrace in the New Town, Robert was doted upon but solitary, a tall, scrawny, and weak child whose imagination was inflamed by the King James Bible and haunted by the Presbyterian conscience. The doctors later attributed his respiratory infections and pulmonary bleeding to tuberculosis, but he probably inherited hemorrhagic telangiectasia from his mother.

Stevenson dawdled through school and a degree at the University of Edinburgh. He had no interest in becoming an engineer like his father, or a lawyer, which was his parents’ compromise offer. The nearest coast of Bohemia was the Old Town. Stevenson attended its brothels so often that the girls nicknamed him “Velvet Coat.” Apart from the classic Victorian crisis in which son enraged father by confessing atheism—a scene epitomized by Stevenson’s future friend Edmund Gosse in Fathers and Sons—his parents seem to have been unusually tolerant for Victorians, let alone Scottish Presbyterians. They would fund him into his thirties and instantly accept Fanny and her children when he brought them to Edinburgh.

Stevenson’s period of informal education later produced two self-deprecating confessions. One, said to have been issued to Herbert Spencer over the baize in the Savile Club, was that “to play billiards well is a sign of a misspent youth.” The other concerned the development of Stevenson’s writing style. Never a scholar or a classicist, he read widely under his own steam. When a passage struck him, he “played the sedulous ape” by impersonating it, from Montaigne to Baudelaire, Thomas Browne to Walt Whitman. As Chesterton observed, it takes more than impersonation to sound as distinctive as that. There is a Shakespearean wildness to the phrase “sedulous ape”—the same wildness that the French Romantics found in Shakespeare.

Stevenson fell in love with France in 1863, after a health crisis sent him to Menton in the South. In 1875, he was in Paris, where his cousin Bob was studying painting with Carolus-Duran and sharing a studio with another of Carolus-Duran’s students, John Singer Sargent. Through Bob’s friends, Stevenson met Fanny Osbourne. Ten years his senior, she had come to Paris with her children to study drawing and escape her marriage to a dissolute Kentucky captain. Robert and Fanny fell in love. Their marriage, effected after Stevenson pursued Fanny to California (where Fanny divorced Captain Osbourne and he got a complete set of false teeth), was a new kind of literary union, with Fanny as Robert’s first listener and editor.

Stevenson was now writing occasional essays for the London journals and periodicals, along with reports on his French and American travels, notably Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. His tone was urbane and arch. He bade farewell to his donkey in Wordsworth’s language about an imaginary lover: “She was patient, elegant in form, the colour of an ideal mouse, and inimitably small. Her faults were those of her race and sex; her virtues were her own.” As Damrosch notes, critics “disagree about the tone”: Is Stevenson mocking or sharing in the sentimentality? A similar distance produces the tremor of Orwell in Stevenson’s confusion before the alternately “sullen and jeering” women in steerage in The Amateur Emigrant and his boho-hobo affectations in the “roaring, impromptu city” of San Francisco in Across the Plains.

The breakthrough came in 1883 with Treasure Island. One rainy afternoon in a Scottish cottage, Stevenson drew an imaginary map of an island for his stepson Lloyd and fell back into the territory of childhood. Damrosch identifies the “intensification of threats” in the opening action at the Admiral Benbow Inn. The rum-swilling sailor Billy Bones, a “heavy, nut-brown man” with “black, broken nails” and a saber scar on his face, bullies the fatherless boy Jim Hawkins and the patrons. Blind Pew taps his way in, grips Jim’s arm, and forces Jim to lead him to Billy. Pew gives Billy the “black spot,” and Billy drops dead from fear. Jim follows Pew outside, hears the thunder of hooves, and sees Pew killed by the horses of his own gang. The map that Jim found in Billy’s sea chest leads him to Bristol, where Long John Silver is beached as a publican.

His left leg was cut off close by the hip, and under the left shoulder he carried a crutch, which he managed with a wonderful dexterity, hopping about upon it like a bird. He was very tall and strong, with a face as big as a ham—plain and pale, but intelligent and smiling. Indeed, he seemed in the most cheerful spirits, whistling as he moved about among the tables, with a merry word or slap on the shoulder for the more favoured of his guests.

The visual detail is sharp. Long John’s shortened leg is described without emotion. Stevenson limited his use of adjectives but intensified their effect by doubling their meanings. In the first sentence, “wonderful” tells us how deftly Long John moves, but it also sets up the simile of the pirate as a rare bird—an object of wonder to an inexperienced boy. Billy Bones warned Jim about a legless man, but Jim, whose own father is dead, cannot take his eyes off Long John, who, rather than placing a revolver on the table, carries a parrot on his shoulder that shrieks the pirate’s cry “pieces of eight!” The irruption of “a face as big as a ham” is, like Stevenson’s “sedulous ape,” comic, strange, and disturbing. It suggests size and color, and the sailor’s seasoning of salt and air, but also, Damrosch writes, “something blank and inhuman”—not unlike Dr. Jekyll’s “sadly altered” face after Mr. Hyde has consumed his creator.

The power of the scene is not just in the visual spectacle of Jim’s wonder at the maimed villain. It is in sound and motion: the hopping, the whistling, the shoulder slaps that assert Long John’s authority over his crew of drinkers. Stevenson distrusted the descriptive pile-ups of realist fiction: “I have a better method—the kinetic, whereas [Balzac] continually allowed himself to be led into the static.”

Kidnapped arose from Stevenson’s background reading for an intended book on Scottish history. Instead of static grounding in fact, a kinesis of plot and language took flight. David Balfour’s father has lately died. Like Jim Hawkins with Long John Silver, David trusts a false father figure and ends up at sea. His uncle Ebenezer tries and fails to arrange an accident at home, then sells him to a sea captain for indenture in the Carolinas. At sea, Alan Breck Stewart, a follower of the Jacobite “king over the water,” comes aboard. Like Jim in the apple barrel in Treasure Island, David eavesdrops as the crew prepare to murder Alan for his money. David sides with Alan, who kills a sailor in a fight.

The fight, Graham Greene noted, is related without similes, metaphors, or adjectives—only the “sound of blows and someone crying out as if hurt,” David’s cry “That’s him that killed the boy!,” and the implied sound as David sees Alan “pass his sword through the mate’s body.” The kinesis of sound and motion recurs as, back on land and pursued by redcoats, David and Alan run across a rocky valley: The “afternoon was now fallen so breathless that the rolling of a pebble sounded abroad like a pistol shot, and would start the echo calling among the hills and cliffs.” Here the single adjective “breathless” doubles as both a description of the still air and a transferred epithet, implying the panting of the fugitives. The landscape is not seen, but heard in the echo of a rolling pebble.

A story, Stevenson said, should follow “the ideal laws of a daydream.” David is a Whig, with a share in the rationalist, technological world whose capital is London. Alan is disinherited by his passion as a Jacobite, but he is also an authentic man and Scot. “Breck” means “spotted,” like the faces of Billy Bones and Dr. Jekyll, which are spotted by the reader before they are seen by the narrator, and like the bloody handkerchiefs that enraged Othello and collected Stevenson’s sputum, which are spotted with blood and fate. David must embrace fate and become like Alan if they are to survive. He crosses the “Highland line” from the Anglo-oriented Lowlands where Stevenson grew up into the wild hills of Walter Scott and Romantic tourism. The wild and domestic aspects of Scotland are unified in David’s experience, and they stage a special enchantment that Leslie Fiedler called the coming-of-age “romance” between the Boy and the Scoundrel.

In 1887, John Singer Sargent came to the English seaside town of Bournemouth to paint Stevenson. He first sat Stevenson in an armchair. Stevenson felt the result made him look like “a weird, very pretty, large-eyed, chicken-boned, slightly contorted poet.” Sargent started again. This time, he caught Stevenson as the man of literary action. Stevenson tested his drafts by reading them aloud to Fanny, usually pacing up and down. The result, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of Sargent’s strangest and most subtle portraits.

Stevenson is a scarecrow in a sagging velvet coat, pacing a dark red room. As he moves on beanpole legs toward the left margin, he unconsciously touches one of his drooping moustaches, then turns his head to look at us. A lopsided doorway in the center shows a dark hallway beyond. Stevenson is with us in this blackened lung, but he is always leaving, living, as he and Fanny do, with his disease and art. On the right, Fanny sits in a chair that belonged to Stevenson’s grandfather. Her arms and feet are bare. Listening intently for the hidden music of Stevenson’s words, she wears an Indian sari over her head. She looks like the priestess in Sargent’s watercolor Incensing the Veil, who inhales the smoke of ambergris to ward off evil spirits and enhance sexual appetite.

The painting is Bohemian and domestic, erotic and deathly. Stevenson was, as he joked, a “professional sickist,” working himself to the point of departure. He wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde between lung hemorrhages while bedridden in Bournemouth in 1885. When he got out of bed and showed it to Fanny, she told him he had got it wrong. In his stepson Lloyd’s account, she thought that it should be more than another tale of a secret life: He had “missed the allegory.” Robert threw the manuscript on the coals, leaving Fanny sitting “pale and desolate before the fire, and staring into it.” He went back to bed and rewrote the story in three days of what he called “feverish industry” in both the literal and metaphorical sense.

Fanny edited his drafts and told him to trim his adjectives and drop the qualifier “very.” In Sargent’s portrait, she is so immersed in her role that we barely see her. Stevenson finally managed a female heroine in Catriona, the follow-up to Kidnapped, but all we know of her is that she has gray eyes and long legs. When Henry James complained of Catriona’s “almost painful underfeeding” of “visibility,” Stevenson agreed:

Tis true, and unless I make the greater effort—and am, as a step to that, convinced of its necessity—it will be more true I fear in the future. I hear people talking, and I feel them acting, and that seems to me to be fiction. My two aims may be described as—

1st. War to the adjective.

2nd. Death to the optic nerve.

It was, he admitted, the “age of the optic nerve in literature.” Yet while Stevenson aspires to the condition of music, and effaces his handiwork in the movement and dissolution of sensual harmony, it is the flashes of uncanny visual imagery that shock us. Stevenson crossed paths with Impressionism in Paris, and described in an 1873 letter how, convalescing in the South, he struggled to find words for the “indefinable shifting colour of olive leaves; and, above all, the changes and little silverings that pass over them, like blushes over a face.”

As Damrosch says, Stevenson never saw van Gogh’s Starry Night. But in The Silverado Squatters, his 1883 memoir of his and Fanny’s quasi-honeymoon in a shack above a California mining camp, he caught the Symbolist sensorium in the chapter “A Starry Drive”:

I have never seen such a night. It seemed to throw calumny in the teeth of all the painters that have ever dabbled in starlight. The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless, changing colour, dark and glossy like a serpent’s back. The stars, by innumerable millions, stuck boldly forth like lamps. . . . The greater luminaries shone each more clearly than a winter’s moon. Their light was dyed in every sort of color—red, like fire; blue, like steel; green, like the tracks of sunset.

We feel his thrill at the sight, but what shocks is the special enchantment of a sky “dark and glossy like a serpent’s back.” Serpents are earthly, or even watery like Scotland’s mythical Loch Ness Monster. The image inverts sky and land, light and dark.

Stevenson may not have seen a Gauguin either, though his family’s sojourn in the South Seas from 1888 to 1894 overlapped with Gauguin’s tour of 1891 to 1893. But a photograph shows Robert and Fanny with two native friends lounging on the atoll of Butaritari like figures from Gauguin’s paintings of Tahiti. They look especially enchanting, but this was an unnaturally still pose, an image of paradise for the camera. Samoa was dynamic. The British and the Germans were contending for trade rights to the ends of the earth and upending traditional life.

Stevenson touched and felt freedom in Samoa, but he also built a house. The laird of Vailima shipped over his stepchildren and their spouses, and his parents’ possessions, including a piano and the ancestral seat that Fanny had used in the Sargent painting. He wrote relentlessly to pay for it all. He was delighted to learn that the locals called him “Tusitala,” the teller of tales, and enjoyed playing the “Chief Justice of Vailima” in native disputes. He soon realized that his role was less traditional. Like the piratical layabouts who had washed up on Samoa’s docks—Crooked-Neck Bill, Spanish Mike, Monkey Jack Stowers, and Petelo Dick—he was an unwitting harbinger of empire.

Stevenson’s South Sea stories, “The Beach of Falesá” especially, are prequels to Conrad’s tales of corrupt modernity. In 1892, the year Stevenson wrote that story, British and German gunboats contended offshore as the Samoans fought each other in paradise and the Stevensons lived under native guard. In The Weir of Hermiston, his last novel, Stevenson returned to the Scottish past, this time to find not a unified terrain but a society that, like Samoa, was breaking down. Nothing sounded and felt like it used to, and the novel petered out with the last of his health. His last words to Fanny asked if he still looked like himself.

What does “RLS” look like to us? In 1890, he explained to his editor at Scribner’s that his manuscript was late because he was engaged in “long silent contests in the forest,” hacking at the Samoan bush to clear a patch for growing food. The struggle taught him that “all my efforts are only like the performance of an actor, the thing of a moment.” Like his effort to maintain an image of vitality in sickness, the “whole silent battle” to civilize the wilder shores seemed doomed. If Stevenson’s image of eternal boyishness and aesthetic thrills suggests one shocker of 1890, Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, his disorientation at the heart of darkness foreshadows the other notorious literary character of the decade.

In March 1893, while Stevenson was writing The Weir of Hermiston, two British travelers boarded the clipper Torrens at Adelaide, Australia, for their homeward journey. One of the pair was the future novelist John Galsworthy. The other was his friend Ted Sanderson. As Sanderson later recounted, they had planned to visit Stevenson, for whose writings they shared a “profound admiration,” but the political situation had disrupted the shipping schedules, so they never made it.

On the voyage home, Galsworthy and Sanderson met the thirty-five-year-old first mate of the Torrens, Joseph Korzeniowski. “For fifty-six days I sailed in his company,” Galsworthy would write, recalling Korzeniowski’s “tales of ships and storms . . . and the Congo.” In 1895, a year after Stevenson’s death, Korzeniowski published his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, whose manuscript he had carried on the Torrens. He published it under the pen name Joseph Conrad.

The tall, handsome, and bearded Sanderson has been identified as a prototype for the anti-hero of Conrad’s Lord Jim. Galsworthy used Korzeniowski-Conrad as a model for the character of Armand in his story “The Doldrums.” It is not hard to believe that, with eight weeks to pass and a common interest in literature, Galsworthy and Sanderson told Korzeniowski about their plan to visit Stevenson, and about how the fighting in Samoa had stopped them. Nor is it hard to believe that Conrad added this material to his melting pot.

In 2015, the American novelist Matthew Pearl wondered if Stevenson may have informed Conrad’s most famous creation, Mr. Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. Stevenson wrote what he called a “pamphlet” in defense of the Samoans. Kurtz writes a “pamphlet” on the Congo. Stevenson was a white adventurer who had dropped off the map, “gone native,” and got entangled in a colonial civil war. In 1892, the London papers speculated that Stevenson’s standing in Samoa and his political intervention on behalf of the natives might lead them to acclaim him as a king over the water. In May 1893, the National Observer speculated that he might become “a kind of chieftain of a primitive race.”

His friends wondered too. “It makes me rather anxious to read of wars in your pacific paradise,” Edmund Gosse wrote to Stevenson in August 1893, deploying a typically Stevensonian double adjective. “Will you become H. M. King Louis I?”