A.2 Additional material from the main manuscript

A.2.i Ransome’s own textual corrections, and editorial emendations (sample pages, annotated)

[fols 131–41]

[fol. 131]	It is not a question merely of marked personality. It was too wilful1 an illusion for that. It is a question of Stevenson’s attitude of mind towards his work, which allowed him in his own view of what he was doing, to separate matter and manner, as few other writers have ever been able2 so to separate them. Remembering the significant phrase in the paragraph where he describes the novelist’s task: ‘for3 so long a time you must keep at command the same quality of style’ – we can find a score of other sentences indicative of this preoccupation. He speaks for instance of ‘the constipated mosaic manner’ he needed for Weir of Hermiston,4 and had adopted5 successfully in The Ebb Tide. Then there were The New Arabian Nights and Otto, ‘pitched pretty high and stilted’. Then the pathetic6 little episode [fol. 132] of Mr Somerset, and again flat, direct statements as in the letter IV 231.7
[fol. 133]	We8 begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, it should afford us so complete a pleasure. From the arrangement of according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised. We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer.9     In10 187811 Stevenson had finished An Inland Voyage and written Travels with a Donkey. In the next year he had his first experience of real travel, voyaging done without too firm a consciousness of the Savile Club at home, without an immediate translation of experience into telling and humorous anecdote. The travelling he did in pursuit of his private romance was touched by realism, whereas the little journeys he had undertaken for fun were12 at least gilded by the sunset of the13 Romantic movement– a very different thing. In the two little sentimental journeys, Stevenson pervaded his material: in the journey dictated by a real sentiment he was a dragon fly tossed by a wind of irresistible experiences, blown far from his accustomed reeds, and taking notes while in immediate danger of not finding his way back. In some such way I represent the change in character between An Inland Voyage and, for example, The Amateur Emigrant from the Clyde to Sandy Hook.14     Let me review the circumstances.15
[fol. 138]	‘Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it.16 They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays17 the postage.’ The first of these sentences from the dedication of Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes is strictly true; except in a few rare cases, and of the books of great and isolated man. The third is an ingenious, charming corollary to the second. And the second is not by any means generally true, though it is so18 of much of Stevenson’s own work, and partly explains its peculiar intimate quality. He was thinking of Otto when he wrote to Mr. Gosse19 that it was a deadly fault ‘to forget that art is a diversion and a decoration, that no triumph or effort is of value, nor anything worth reaching except charm’; but20 the opinion had long been his, and the expression of it is in the manner of writing, dangerously infectious, easily recognisable, that he [fol. 139] early developed for himself.     Style is so far a man’s personal rhythm, that it is as difficult to analyse as a personality. Its characteristics, its differences from other styles, are like a man’s differences from other men. Yet something we can seize, in his choice of words, is the tone in21 which he uses them, and a vocabulary does not make so utterly flexible a vehicle of thought that a writer is not to be known by the repetition of particular effects varied only in detail, and as it were midway between perfect expression and a private convention of his own. He thinks in these effects, but they are approximations stamped with a trademark; he moulds a bust with them, but they do not precisely follow the curves and hollows that they represent. Dr. Johnson always spoke in thunder but sometimes his thunder was a loud and roaring imitation of some smaller noise. Bottom will22 roar you like the lion, or as gently as a sucking-dove, but the roar is always Bottom’s and lion or sucking-dove must be [fol. 140] attributed by courtesy to his wild wood-notes. In so far, every artist is another Bottom, another Johnson where little fishes talk like whales, or, commoner case, when whales converse like little fishes. The wise know the gamut of their own voices and are careful not to stretch them to points where courtesy breaks down and the illusion passes.     This is very unsatisfactory, but23 it is24 illustrated with particular clarity by Stevenson’s early books.

A.2.ii Ransome’s (incomplete) Book-list

[Missing from the list are Colvin’s 1911 edition of Stevenson’s Letters, and the 1911 edition of Graham Balfour’s Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, sources which Ransome is known to have used.]

[fols 325–6]

Books

A Chronicle of Friendship [1873–1900], by Will H[icok] Low. Hodder & Stoughton, 1908.

Robert Louis Stevenson. A Record, An Estimate, And A Memorial, by Alexander H. Japp, LLD. etc. T. Werner Laurie, 1905.

Memories of Vailima, by Isobel Strong and Lloyd Osbourne. Constable, 1903.

In the Tracks of R. L. Stevenson and Elsewhere in Old France, by J. A. Hammerton. Arrowsmith, 1907.

With Stevenson in Samoa, by H. J. Moors. Fisher Unwin, 1910.

Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific, by Arthur Johnstone. Chatto and Windus, 1905.

Robert Louis Stevenson, An Essay, by Leslie Stephen. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, no date. [1903]

In Stevenson’s Samoa, by Marie Fraser, 2nd edition. Smith Elder, 1895.

Robert Louis Stevenson, by L. Cope Cornford. Blackwood, 1899.

Robert Louis Stevenson, by Eve Blantyre Simpson. T. N. Foulis, 1905.

Robert Louis Stevenson, by Margaret Moyes Black. Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier, 1898.

Robert Louis Stevenson. Bookman Booklet (W. Robertson Nicoll, G. K. Chesterton). Hodder & Stoughton, 1902.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Edinburgh Days, by Eve Blantyre Simpson. 2nd ed., Hodder and Stoughton, 1898.

An Edinburgh Eleven, by J. M. Barrie, 3rd edition. Hodder and Stoughton, 1896.

Letters from Samoa, by Mrs. M. I. Stevenson. Methuen, [1906].

From Saranac to the Marquesas, by Mrs M. I. Stevenson. Methuen, 1903.

Robert Louis Stevenson, A Life Study in Criticism, by H. Bellyse Baildon. Chatto and Windus, 1901.

The Home and Early Haunts of R. L. Stevenson, by Margaret Armour. W. H. White, 1895.

The Faith of Robert Louis Stevenson, by John Kelman. Jr. M. A. Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier, 1903.

A.2.iii Variant passages

[fol. 100]

[a draft passage for p. 82] Mr. Johnston [sic] records the fact that he left among the whites few enemies, but many critics, and on the other hand a host of friends, in spite of his writings on South Sea problems, which are seldom ever polite to the representatives of civilisation. He quotes the opinion of Captain Otis, the sailing master of the Casco, who was present at a discussion of Stevenson’s attitude on Pacific matters. Well, gentlemen, it seems this way to me: Stevenson was first and last a man of convictions – in fact he always acted promptly and vigorously when he reached a conclusion that satisfied his own mind – but his mental make-up was such that he always took the side of the under-dog in any fight that arose, without waiting to inquire whether the under-dog had the right of it, or was in the wrong. That was the man, gentleman; and I know from personal experience that he did not understand what fear was, when he defended what he thought was right. Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific, p. 13.

[fol. 164]	[The quotation appears in a slightly different formulation on p. 103.] ‘Stevenson. Critic. ✓ [Ransome’s tick, here also circled, often means ‘used in the text’.] ‘Not the gay paradox of Wilde, impatient of lumbering explanation: when Wilde says gaily “Nature imitates Art”, Stevenson, more serious, younger, solemnly shows that ‘those predilections of the artist he knows not why, those irrational acceptations and recognitions, reclaim, out of the world that we have not quite realised, ever another and another corner.’ (Familiar S[tudies], 7)
[fol. 173]	[a draft sentence for part of p. 62] Familiar Studies ‘A new form of intermittent light for lighthouses’ was followed three years later by Stevenson’s first serious public appearance, with “Victor Hugo” in the Cornhill Magazine; and in that essay we may find a number of indications of what its writer was to become.
[fol. 187]	[an opener perhaps for p. 151] New Arabian Nights From these French stories I turn to those which Stevenson affectionately called “The Arabs” – The New Arabian Nights.
[fol. 378]	[an earlier version of paragraph on p. 84] Stevenson. Biog. It is to be presumed that the Gods did indeed know best; for Stevenson was given the best death that a man can ask. He died in the midst of the best work of his life, in full vigour, without pain. Nor is it extravagant to find in Weir of Hermiston, with its ‘constipated mosaic manner’, a work in words as nearly as possible resembling the work of his father in stones against the beating of the seas. Here at last Stevenson was building on a promontory in the uncharted, dangerous seas of humanity; larger than himself, and doing more difficult work than ever before, and in proud consciousness of this, Stevenson died suddenly on [sic]

A.2.iv Quotations copied by Ransome and notes by him that have not been used in the running text

[fol. 360]	‘What a man spends upon himself he shall have earned by services to the race.’
[fol. 369]	He once successfully worked out a theory for a detective in the criminal case. Recollections of R. L. S. in the Pacific, p. 281.
[fol. 373]	‘In my view, one dank, dispirited word is harmful, a crime of lèse-humanité, a piece of acquired evil; every gay, every bright word or picture, like every pleasant air of music, is a piece of pleasure set afloat; the reader catches it, and, if he be healthy, goes on his way rejoicing; and it is the business of art so to send him, as often as possible.’ To W. Archer, Oct. 28, 1885, Bournemouth [Letters], II, 248.”
[fol. 374]	April 20, 1893. Mrs Strong writes: ‘I was pottering about my room this morning when Louis came in with the remark that he was a gibbering idiot. I have seen him in this mood before, when he pulls out hairpins, tangles up his mother’s knitting, and interferes in whatever his womankind are engaged upon. So I gave him employment in tidying a drawer all the morning – talking the wildest nonsense all the time, and he was babbling on when Sesimo came in to tell us lunch was ready; his very reverential, respectful manner brought the Idiot Boy to his feet at once, and we all went off laughing to lunch.’ Memories of Vailima, pp. 31, 32.
[fol. 379]	Travel. Oct 22. ‘If we didn’t travel now and then, we should forget what the feeling of life is. The very cushion of a railway carriage – “the things restorative to the touch”.’ To Baxter, Dunblane, March 5, 1872. Letters, I, 34.
[fol. 380]	‘spontaneous lapse of coin’
[fol. 382]	Of art says Stevenson, “The direct returns – the wages of the trade are small, but the indirect – the wages of the life – are incalculably great. No other business offers a man his daily bread upon such joyful terms.” Across the Plains, 185.
[fol. 383]	His uncle Alan, when building lighthouses, used to read Quixote, Aristophanes and Dante, each in the language of its birth.
[fol. 384]	Trust He very early knew Meredith, and would get M. to tell his best. Gosse 76 intro by Colvin
[fol. 387]	‘I have that peculiar and delicious sense of being born again in an expurgated edition which belongs to ‘convalescence.’ Oct. 29, [Letters,] I, 259.

A.2.v Significant working notes for sections of text

[fol. 11]

[Notes for Part I of the book; the ticks indicate sections written.] Biographical Summary

I	General ✓
II	Birth and Childhood ✓
III	School days
IV	University & Edinburgh days. To advocate. ✓
V	Ordered South & Health ✓
VI	Fontainebleau ……✓
VI [sic]	Monastier. & Inland Voyage
VII	Emigration. San Francisco. Monterey & Marriage. ✓
VIII	Scotland & Davos. War game. Printing. ✓
IX	Bournemouth ✓ ?
X	2nd voyage to America. At Saranac. New Jersey. Cat boat sailing ✓
XI	Yacht Casco. Cruising in the South Seas …✓
XII	Vailima ✓
XIII	Death & Summary. ✓

[This check-list follows]

	University ✓ Greek abandoned as hopeless. ✓
	With a view to his engineering, he took scientific & mathematics classes instead of the humanities. ✓ In the long vacation lighthouse building. description diver’s suit. ✓ Swanston. Vicomte de Bragelonne Spec. 1869. Boating – to birth. Velvet Coat in public-houses. Atheism. Friends R. A. M. S. Fleeming Jenkin.
1871, April.	Told his father he did not want to be an engineer. His father stoically agreed and S. was to be an Advocate.
1872	Passed public exam for Scottish Bar. Spent some time in an office learning conveyancing.
[fol.48]	July 14. Passed as Advocate 25th with Simpson to France. R. A. M. S also 23 mile walk: Query smell the wet forest in morning. Reading early French verse – writing rondeaux. Historical sense of the forest: and a personal non-morality, and forgetfulness of argument at home, now – ‘a faint far off rumour as of Merovingian wars.’

[fol. 174] Early Criticism

aet. 38, Shaw [Letters,] III, 40. Barbey d’Aurevilly, [Letters,] IV, 244.

not the gay paradox of Wilde

aet. 36, Dostoevsky, [Letters,] II, 275. aet. 34, Shakespeare & Molière, [Letters,] II, 186.

Hugo, Scott & himself cf. Artistic intention. Hawthorne. Main obj. is of art. Admiration. Attitude towards realism. Pepys’ style. Personal criticism. Pepys. Burns. Charles d’Orléans.

[fol. 179]	Stevenson. Critic. Burns. Biographical study: a portrait of a man in actions. Study of the professional Don Juan, showing a considerable knowledge of wayside love, and a keen understanding of its psychology as exemplified by Burns: due partly to impatience with an inadequate, fluid sketch by Principal Shairp, an inadequate, a ridiculously uncomprehending book which judges Burns by a very narrow standard and never attempts to define him.
[fol. 175]	“Stevenson. Style. Of Pepys: ‘The first and the true function of the writer has been thoroughly performed throughout; and though the manner of his utterance may be childishly awkward, the matter has been transformed and assimilated by his unfeigned interest and delight.’ Familiar Studies, 218.
[fol. 178]	Charles d’Orléans. 1876. His bringing in the rondel, and ballade making of Fontainebleau. Admiration for Banville: again as in Burns knack of portraiture, a little thin, a little too sure of its own comprehensiveness. Fine array of authorities. Very good copy in pen and ink of a illumination in a fine copy of the poems given by Henry VII to Elizabeth of York. His word for ‘some of our quaintly vicious contemporaries’.
[fol. 185]	Stevenson. Short Stories. 6, 1, 3, 1½, ½ [i.e. numbers of pages written.]
[fol. 186]	Short Stories.

[fol. 200]	Tod Lapraik. Thrawn Janet, an excellent Scotch vernacular prose. ‘grandfaither’s silver tester in the puddock’s heart of him.’ Ingenious hitching with the story over to [illegible]’s quarrel.
[fol. 234]	Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Markheim, nearer Poe. Thrawn Janet nearer Hawthorne. Jekyll: W. Wilson of Poe’s. Idea running in head. Dream. Insufficiency of first draft. But correction unimproved by the story itself: ‘it was really an allegory.’ and so retold. Stevenson’s knowledge that he had written the story before he was sufficiently intimate with it – humming the draft lest his pen should betray him by faltering in the note already made. ‘The gnome (Jekyll and Hyde) is interesting, I think, and he came out of a deep mine, where he guards the fountain of tears. It is not always the time to rejoice.’ Jan. 2, 1886. Letter [to] W. H. Low, Letters, II, 263.
[fol. 231]	Stevenson. Fables. By 1888 most written, promised Dougram; a few added in the South Seas, published at last 1895 as appendix to new edition of J[ekyll] & Hyde. The characters in T[reasure] I[sland]. Vivid picture. The hand among the dead. Dry emptiness in the deliberate antique. J. M. Synge.
[fol. 261]	Travel and Solidarity of vision. ‘I shall never do a better book than Catriona, that is my high water mark.’ Letters, IV, 258. Kidnapped, 1885. Catriona, 1893. Master of Ballantrae, 1889. A comparison with Russian literature: or Hardy.
[fol. 289]	Stevenson. South Seas, Oct. 25. ‘Awfully nice man here to-night. Public servant – New Zealand. Telling us all about the South Sea Islands till I was sick with desire to go there: beautiful places, green for ever; perfect climate; perfect shapes of men and women, with red flowers in their hair; and nothing to do but to study oratory and etiquette, sit in the sun, and pick up the fruits as they fall.’ June 1875, [to] Sitwell, Letters, I, 188.
[fol. 290]	The South Seas. The Church Builder. ‘Brother Michel spoke always of his labours with a twinkle of humour, underlying which it was possible to spy a serious pride, and the change from one to another was often very human and diverting. ‘Et vos gargouilles moyen-âge,’ cried I; ‘comme elles sont originales!’ ‘N’est-ce pas? Elles sont bien droles!’ he said, smiling broadly; and the next moment, with a sudden gravity: ‘Cependant il y en a une qui a une patte de cassé; il faut que je voie cela.’ I asked if he had any model – a point we much discussed. ‘Non,’ said he simply; ‘c’est une église ideale.’
[fol. 291]	Stevenson. The South Seas. ‘In the time of the small-pox in Hapaa, an old man was seized with the disease; he had no thought of recovery; had his grave dug by a wayside, and lived in it for near a fortnight, eating, drinking, and smoking with the passers-by, talking mostly of his end, and equally unconcerned for himself and careless of the friends whom he infected.’ S[outh] S[eas], 31. Marquesas.
[fol. 292]	South Seas. The Church Builder. ‘About midway of the beach (of Hatiheu in the Marquesas) no less than three churches stand grouped in a patch of bananas, intermingled with some pine-apples. Two are of wood: the original church, now in disuse; and a second that, for some mysterious reason, has never been used. The new church is of stone, with twin towers, walls flangeing into buttresses, and sculptured front. The design itself is good, simple, and shapely; but the character is all in the detail, where the architect has bloomed into the sculptor. It is impossible to tell in words of the angels (although they are more like winged archbishops) that stand guard upon the door, of the cherubs in the corners, of the scapegoat gargoyles, or the quaint and spirited relief, where St Michael (the artist’s patron) makes short work of a protesting Lucifer. We were never weary of viewing the imagery, so innocent, sometimes so funny, and yet in the best sense – in the sense of inventive gusto and expression – so artistic. I know not whether it was more strange to find a building of such merit in a corner of a barbarous isle, or to see a building so antique still bright with novelty. The architect, a French lay brother, still alive and well, and meditating fresh foundations, must have surely drawn his descent from a master-builder in the age [fol. 293] of the cathedrals; and it was in looking on the church of Hatiheu that I seemed to perceive the secret charm of mediaeval sculpture; that combination of the childish courage of the amateur, attempting all things, like the schoolboy on his slate, with the manly perseverance of the artist who does not know when he is conquered.’ S[outh] S[eas], 60. Marquesas.
[fol. 330]	[a record of pages written] Robert Louis Stevenson July

A.2.vi Working notes for the section ‘As Happy as Kings’

[fol. 250]	Child’s Garden. 1885. Underwoods. 1887. Ballads. 1890 or 1891. Songs of Travel. Posthumous.
[fol. 251]	‘The Shadow’ 31 ‘The cow’ – ‘with all her might’ 41 Climbing the tree. Touch of self consciousness in ‘little me’ 13 The ‘pirate story’: with the true psychology that makes up the geography as the play goes, and only in the last line, when they are needed, decides that ‘the wicket is the harbour and the garden is the door.’ 12. Example of poetry transform verse one In the winter I get up in the dark and dress by the yellow light of a candle, whereas in summer I have to go to bed in the day time. Something of the lasting quality of nonsense rhyme: something too of the freedom from ulterior motive that is so delightful in a few of the old nursery songs. ‘And in a corner find the toys Of the old Egyptian boys.’
[fol. 252]	Child’s Garden begun at Braemar, 1880. Continued at Nice. ‘Poetry is not the strong point of the text, and I shrink from any title that may seem to claim that quality.’ Also ‘The Penny Whistle: nursery rhymes’ or Penny Whistles

[fols 253’7 are pages of quotations to support this section]

[fol. 253]	“Stevenson: on his own verse. ‘Really, I have begun to learn some of the rudiments of that trade, and have written three or four pretty enough pieces of octosyllabic nonsense, semi-serious, semi-smiling. A kind of prose Herrick, divested of the gift of verse, and you behold the Bard. But I like it.’ To Henley, 1883, Letters, II, 121. Refer to the source of the verses of Underwoods.
[fol. 254]	Stevenson, of Underwoods. ‘I wonder if you saw my book of verses? It went into a second edition, because of my name, I suppose, and its prose merits. I do not set up to be a poet. Only an all-round literary man: a man who talks, not one who sings. But I believe the very fact that it was only speech served the book with the public. Horace is much a speaker, and see how popular! most of Martial is only speech, and I cannot conceive a person who does not love his Martial; most of Burns, also, such as “The Louse”, “The Toothache”, “The Haggis”, and lots more of his best. Excuse this little apology for my house; but I don’t like to come before people who have a note of song, and let it be supposed I do not know the difference.’
[fol. 255]	To J. A. Symonds. Saranac, Nov. 21, 1887. [Letters,] III, 25.
[fol. 256]	Stevenson. Verse. ‘The success of Underwoods is gratifying. You see, the verses are sane; that is their strong point, and it seems it is strong enough to carry them.’ [To] Colvin, N. Y., Sept. 1887. [Letters], III, 8. Stevenson. Poetry. In 1880 ‘Home is the sailor’ etc: imaginary tombstone: moral inscription. Last two lines, with this comment: ‘the verses are from a beayootiful poem by me.’ To Colvin. S. Francisco, Feb. 1880. Letters, I, 283.

 

 

---

1  ‘too willed, too conscious’ crossed out.

2  ‘esp’ crossed out.

3  ‘to keep’ crossed out.

4  ‘Weir’ > Weir of Hermiston.

5  ‘tr’ crossed out; ‘allopted’ >adopted.

6  ‘sentence quoted’ crossed out.

7  [a letter to be inserted here] > as in a letter to Henry James in 1893. [quote letter].

8  [header for this] ‘Technique of Literature. Art of Writing. 43’.

9  [fol. 134] [header] ‘Early [?]movement in words. Essays of Travel. 177.’ [fol. 135] [header] ‘Stevenson. Early Essays’.

10  [fol. 135] [header] ‘The South Seas’ crossed out. [header] ‘Essays. II’.

11  ’78 > 1878.

12  ‘still glowed’ crossed out.

13  ‘Romance’ crossed out.

14  ‘“The Amateur Emigrant”, or “New York to Sandy Hook”’ > The Amateur Emigrant from the Clyde to Sandy Hook.

15  ‘circumstances:’ > ‘circumstances.’ [then the following memorandum:] ‘Thoreau. Torojiro. Pavilion. The story of a Lie? In the ship. Plains – Prince Otto.’

16  [fol. 137] ‘Stevenson. Essays. [?‘travels’ crossed out], ‘Unpleasant Places. “Breezy. Breezy.” cf. Essays of Travel 225, with Letters I. 14.’

17  [fol. 138] ‘pays’ [mistranscription] > defrays.

18  ‘privately’ crossed out.

19  ‘Mr. Gosse (Letters, II, 177)’ > ‘Mr Gosse’.

20  ‘the’ crossed out.

21  ‘with’ crossed out.

22  ‘roars’ crossed out.

23  ‘by’ crossed out.

24  ‘becomes’ crossed out, ‘is’ superscript.