FIRST TRAVELS IN THE SOUTH SEAS
The Robert Louis Stevenson who set sail for the United States on August 20, 1887, was a different man than the writer whose “brownies” visited him with the dream of Mr. Hyde in the fall of 1885. Louis had solidified his domestic life with Fanny. He had started to taste the success of Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde. He had arrived as a writer of note who received fan mail and requests for autographs. Reviews of his work and profiles of him as a writer and public figure were appearing in Great Britain and the United States. Among his letters at this time are exchanges with the sculptor Rodin, the novelist Thomas Hardy, and multiple editors and publishers. There is an increasing solidity in his correspondence—he was becoming both a man of letters and a more sober businessman with concerns about international copyright laws and royalty arrangements. At the same time he was still mourning his father’s recent death, which had made him all the more aware of his own mortality.
The death of a father reshuffles the son’s life. It is in many ways an existential crisis: there is no longer a buffer against mortality. The choices he makes seem more definitive, and he alone answers for his decisions. Freed from the direct weight of paternal expectation, the mantle of authority now falls on him. Liberation and enhanced responsibility live side by side in this reconfiguration of identity.
Louis’s next few years were ones that initially embraced his newfound freedom. Buoyed by increased economic security, a product of both his father’s estate and rising fortunes from his writing, he paid even less attention to his internal critic that belittled both his art and travels as frivolous activities for a grown man. Even more, and surprisingly, the next couple of years were to bring him the best health of his adult life. With health, he gained a greater capacity to take action within his own family and in the larger world. He embraced more risk—in physical exploits, challenges to social mores, and in questioning political authorities. He was closer to a pirate’s life than he had ever been before, absconding with new experiences rather than buried treasures, visiting exotic ports of call, and flaunting Victorian conventions. The wanderlust that had marked his earlier travels in France and Belgium, and across the plains of the United States, would soon take him to the South Seas and the most remote islands of the world. This vitality made a striking contrast to his passive dependence on Fanny that characterized the years in France and Bournemouth. He was finally living in his body rather than his head. This shift gradually affected both his writing and his relationship with his wife.
Louis first reaped some benefits of his growing fame. No longer the amateur emigrant, he was now a feted author in New York City with a stay at his patrons’ Newport estate next on the itinerary. Raised as an indulged sickly only child, he was simultaneously attracted to and repelled by his role of pampered celebrity (To Colvin—“My reception here was idiotic to the last degree; if Jesus Christ came, they would make less fuss”). In these early days of his visit, the sculptor August St. Gaudens carved a bas-relief sculpture of him, one version of which ultimately made its way to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Louis handled several interviews and secured the terms of a lucrative magazine contract with Scribner’s. The essays that were to emerge from this agreement reveal a shift in Stevenson’s nonfiction voice; they reflect a celebrity, at ease with himself, willing to share reminiscences of his early life along with his playful musings on the psychology of imagination and creativity. Far from the world-weary flaneur, he had traded his park bench for an admiring audience in the public square.
Besides his newfound fame, the other immediate critical product of his return journey to the United States was his absolute devotion to sea voyages. With the newly available funds from his father’s estate, he was determined to return to sea by yacht once the winter passed. The family would accompany him, and it turned out that Maggie, now fifty-eight years old but in good health, had also relished her time on ship and was game for further travels. He wrote to Bob:
I was so happy on board that ship, I could not have believed it possible … I literally had forgotten what happiness was, and the full mind—full of external and physical things, not full of cares and labours and rot about a fellow’s behaviour. My heart literally sang; I truly care for nothing so much as that … I know a little about fame now; it is no good compared to a yacht … (Letter 1891)
The counteracting theme in his “Escape from Shame” script had always been the outdoors—the wind and water cleansed him of his tendency toward “morbid” preoccupations with death, loss, and self-condemnation. Dating back to his time at his grandfather’s manse in Colinton and weaving through the imagery of his Child’s Garden verses, these natural elements had been the tonic for his creative release and energy. This “call of the wild” continually bumped up against the increasing sense of comfort and settled lifestyle that his success had made possible. He wrote to his American friend Will Low:
I am now a salaried party; I am a bourgeois now; I am to write a monthly paper for Scribner’s, at a scale of payment which makes my teeth ache for shame and diffidence … I am like to be a millionaire if this goes on, and be publicly hanged at the social revolution; well I would prefer that to dying in bed; and it would be a godsend for my biographer, if I ever have one. (Letter 1907)
By the time of this letter in October 1887, Louis was situated near Saranac Lake in upstate New York. Louis and family had migrated there to consult with Edward Trudeau, MD, the leading expert on tuberculosis (see Chapter 1), and also to benefit from the cold, dry climate. It had not taken long for him to escape from the glare of publicity and find his way back to a more natural setting.
Over the next weeks in Saranac Lake, Louis finished his first essay for Scribner’s, “A Chapter on Dreams,” which contains his highly influential discussion of the “brownies” and the role of unconscious forces in his writing, in particular, in Jekyll and Hyde (as mentioned in Chapter 6). There is much that anticipates Freud in the essay, including discussion of a divided consciousness and how creativity emerges through dreams and independent of waking thought. He also discloses a particular dream he had in which an estranged son (who has lived much abroad!) kills his father and then ends up in a romance with his younger stepmother (shades of the Freudian Oedipus complex). He confessed that the themes of this dream were too loaded to be translated into an acceptable story for the public.
During the frigid winter that he spent in Saranac Lake, Louis also wrote more new fiction. Returning to his familiar theme of the seductive villain, he started a novel, The Master of Ballantrae, set in Scotland during the same post-1745 period of Kidnapped. It featured two brothers (Henry and James!) who were polar opposites in disposition—Henry (bookish, moralistic, passive) and James (flamboyant, ruthlessly amoral, and charismatic). James, like Silver and Hyde, was another variation on Stevenson’s preoccupation with what Stevensonian scholar Paul Binding calls his attraction to non serviam—Lucifer’s rebellious response to God—“I will not serve.”
Both brothers are in love with the same woman, but Henry marries her after James’s supposed death during the Jacobite Rebellion. Once James reappears, to everyone’s surprise, their rivalry resumes, with James cunningly winning the favor of both their father and his brother’s wife. After a duel between the brothers in which James is wounded and left for dead (but once again remarkably survives), Henry descends into an obsessive hatred for his sibling. He stalks James to the wilderness of the Adirondack forests in the new world (Stevenson using the environs of his current dwelling place for a setting in the novel) and arranges for an ambush and murder. Relying on the supernatural conjuring powers of a fakir from India whom he met on his travels and is now accompanying him as a factotum, James rises from the dead a third time; this miracle is too much for Henry, and he dies from the shock. James falls back to death in nearly the same moment, and they are buried side by side in a wilderness grave—the weak “good” brother and the indomitable evil one, finally merged together.
The Master of Ballantrae reflected Stevenson’s growing command as a novelist and his continued experimentation. It uses multiple narrators, each a vessel to provide variations on the contrast between the passive Henry and the dynamic James—one narrator is a repressed servant who is even more withered and emasculated than Henry, while another narrator is a co-conspirator with James, prone to stories about their swashbuckling and bloody escapades. Stevenson used the romantic plot of the story to ask familiar questions about the nature of action in the world. Henry’s repression paralyzes him; eventually it leads to moral degeneration. At the same time James’s amorality frees him to take action—he has Silver’s panache. The grim ending, with its supernatural twists, left Stevenson unsatisfied. Not only did it introduce a jarring non sequitur, it brought no resolution to the novel’s central question about finding a middle course of moral action. Stevenson was not finished with his most familiar Hamlet-like dilemma in which “… conscience does make cowards of us all / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied oe’r with the pale cast of thought.”
Fortunately, with better health, sound finances, and no longer under the often scolding scrutiny of his father, Louis was ready to act on his own behalf. But where should he live and what should he write next? The London crowd wanted more of the historical adventures and the “charming” essays. The general public wanted more pirates, outlaws, and tales of terror. Although more empowered than ever before, Louis fretted over what might be the best next course of action to take in his life.
As the winter months dragged on, Fanny traveled frequently and even Margaret took time away, but Louis carried on, bemoaning the cold, but persisting with essays and fiction. Then in March 1888, this often below-zero winter in Saranac brought a deep freeze of another kind. Fanny, still pursuing her own literary efforts, had published with Louis’s aid a story called “The Nixie,” about a man on a train who has an encounter with an ethereal woman who turns out to be a watersprite. Fanny had developed this story after reading a similar story by Louis’s cousin Katharine (in Katharine’s story, the woman suffers from mental illness but has no supernatural origins). Fanny had originally proposed that the two collaborate on the story, but Katharine demurred and tried to publish her story in England with Henley’s help. After no success, she gave Fanny reluctant permission to go forward with her version and see if she might have better results. With the “Stevenson” name the hottest literary commodity in the States, Scribner’s took the story. The result was an injudicious letter from Henley to Louis, marked “private and confidential,” that essentially implied that Fanny had ripped off Katharine and taken unfair credit for the derivative tale. Strangely, and perhaps with unconscious guilt, Henley in the same letter reflects on their long-lasting friendship, declaring “Let us go on until the end.” The letter ignited a bitter quarrel between the two long-standing friends.
As always, loyalty and honor were at the core of Louis’s moral universe. For one of his closest friends to suggest plagiarism by his wife wounded him deeply. At the same time, he confided in letters to Baxter that he had warned Fanny to let go of her intention to recast his cousin’s story and that Fanny had applied undue pressure on Katharine to share the story. Louis’s subsequent emotional storm of feverish accusations and sleepless nights was certainly fueled not just by righteous indignation but also by an unacknowledged shame at his wife’s indiscretion. There could be no question of where his loyalty would lie, but the honor that he valued so centrally in his identity had been subtly tarnished. He would never admit this to Henley, however. And Henley’s gossiping and backbiting retaliation, spewing bile against the Stevensons to a London circle brimming with envy and scorn toward the American “celebrities,” hardly deserved forbearance. Louis wrote an initial pained letter back to Henley begging him to retract any trace of accusation and to confer with Katharine about the details of the two stories’ divergence. In contrast to his usual banter-filled closings, he signed it simply, “Robert Louis Stevenson.”
When Henley failed to recant, Baxter sought to mediate the quarrel, sympathetically corresponding with both men, but little progress was made. In the background, one could trace the quiet influence of Bob Stevenson, Katharine’s brother, another envious intimate. When Louis received the settlement of his father’s estate, he immediately became much wealthier than his two cousins. In deference to this changed circumstance, he sent them small allotments each year through Baxter. Similarly, over a period of many years, he had provided Henley with regular sums of money. Yet despite this generosity, the discrepancy between his increasing celebrity and wealth and their own modest successes, financially and literarily, left this part of Louis’s inner circle resentful. The mixture of Louis’s vanity, occasional flashes of class snobbery, and his ample self-righteousness poured potent fuel on the feud. This volatile combination emerges in this letter from Louis to Baxter:
There is not one of that crew that I have not helped in every kind of strait, with money, with service, and that I was not willing to risk my life for; and yet the years come, and every year there is a fresh outburst against me and mine … And I have forgiven and forgiven, and forgotten and forgotten, and still they get their heads together and there springs up a fresh enmity or a fresh accusation. Why, I leave to them—and above all to Henley—to explain: I never failed one of them. But when they get together round the bowl, they brew for themselves hot heads and ugly feelings. (Letter 2034)
On her part Fanny pulled no punches in her response to Henley’s veiled accusations. She had attempted for years to extract Louis from what she saw as a parasitic relationship. She now expanded her disgust to this wider group of “fiends,” as she liked to call his London friends. She damned them all (with the exception of Colvin) and made it clear that she had no desire ever to return to England (“perfidious Albion”).
… They have nearly, perhaps quite murdered him. It is very hard for me to keep on living; I may not be able to, but must try for dear Louis’s sake. If I cannot, then I leave my curse upon the murderers and slanderers. (Letter 2081)
This quarrel pulled Louis closer to Fanny and separated him from these ties to his younger days. He soon drifted away from consistent correspondence with his London friends. He remained in steady contact only with the loyal Colvin, who along with Baxter served as his trusted pillar throughout Louis’s travels. Now an island sojourn with his tight family circle seemed even more compelling in the face of Henley’s apparent betrayal. And to the extent that Louis felt a secret shame from the whole incident and some degree of humiliation in the eyes of the English literary establishment, the old pattern of withdrawal into adventure was a familiar and soothing escape.
By the end of May, his enthusiasm for a sea voyage escape from these heart-breaking affairs was peaking. He wrote to Henry James, “… It is a very good way of getting through the greensickness of maturity, which, with all its accompanying ills, is now declaring itself in my mind and life” (Letter 2098).
This maturity was bittersweet for Louis, but remarkably important for both his writing and shifting identity. By embracing the high seas, he not only put Henley and the London crowd behind him but also the somber shadows of his Calvinist father and the dour pieties that accompanied that lifelong shade. Paradoxically, he was at the same time eluding the too bright light of celebrity and the buzz of gossip and envy that it generated. He had often fantasized of literary fame but now was happy to take refuge from it.
On June 28, 1888, Louis, Fanny, Lloyd, and Margaret Stevenson, accompanied by Valentine, the maidservant, left San Francisco Bay and entered the open waters of the Pacific Ocean, traveling on the schooner Casco, ninety-four feet long and seventy-four tons in weight. They arrived after three thousand miles and twenty-two days at sea in Anaho Bay in Nuka-Hiva, the largest of the Marquesas Islands. After a stay there, they traveled on to several other islands that made up the French Polynesian cluster of atolls and archipelagos on the way to Tahiti. After an extended stay on that island, they finally left the Casco to spend five months in Honolulu, Hawaii. They were joined by Fanny’s daughter, Belle, and her husband, Joe Strong, who had lived there with their son, Austin, now eight years old, since 1882, fashioning a somewhat shady existence among fellow expatriate artists and exiles.
It is impossible to overestimate the importance for Louis of this first sailing voyage and the subsequent two other island cruises on the Equator and the Janet Nicholl that the Stevensons took before they finally settled in Samoa in late 1890. His previous excursions on his engineering field trips and his two passages across the Atlantic were mere appetizers for the full banquet of these Pacific sojourns. All the seagoing genes of the Stevenson clan came alive in his body and spirit. He perched on the riggings of the sails and felt the wind whip across his face and shirt, and he was happier than he had ever been. He was no longer the sickly boy, dreaming of adventure from the covers of the counterpane. No rough waters or storm could shake his enthusiasm. Fanny wrote of him at the time:
… For a time he has lived the life of a free man, and that is something gained for him. It is a delight beyond words … to see him bare-footed and half clothed, flying about with his usual impetuosity, accompanied by no fear of danger. (Letter 2127)
The first sight of land in these Pacific waters only intensified his delight:
The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea Island, are memories apart, and touched by a virginity of sense. On the 28th of July, 1888, the moon was an hour down by four in the morning. In the east a radiating centre of brightness told of the day; and beneath on the skyline, the morning bank was already building, black as ink… . Although the dawn was thus preparing by four, the sun was not up till six; and it was half past five before we could distinguish our expected islands from the clouds on the horizon… . The interval was passed on deck in the silence of expectation, the customary thrill of landfall heightened by the strangeness of the shores that were then approaching. Slowly they took shape in the attenuating darkness. (In the South Seas)
The ensuing period of further cruises and island visits did not disappoint the great anticipation raised in this description. Stevenson wrote to Henry James, “I have had more fun and pleasure of my life, these past months than ever before: and more health than any time in ten long years.” And in another letter to James, he confessed that he might not return to England except at his death, acknowledging that this would not please Colvin and the London circle:
I was never very fond of towns, houses, society or (it seems) civilization … The sea, islands, the islanders, the island life and climate, make and keep me truly happier. These last two years I have been much at sea, and I have never wearied, sometimes I have grown impatient for some destination; more often I was sorry that the voyage drew so early to an end; and never once did I lose my fidelity to blue water and a ship. It is plain then that for me, my exile to the place of schooners and islands can be in no sense regarded as a calamity. But for Colvin perhaps it may be. (Letter 2240)
Fanny described their times on shore during island visits:
He takes sea baths, and even swims, and lives almost entirely in the open air as nearly without clothes as possible, a simple pyjama suit of striped light flannel his only dress. As to shoes and stockings, we all have scorned them for months except for Mrs. Stevenson, who often goes barefoot and never, I believe, wears stockings… . Both Louis and Lloyd wear wreaths of artificial flowers … on their hats. (Letter 2127)
How did this “flower child” freedom affect his artistic identity and writing? His editors at The New York Sun had hired him to send back letters for publication (the nineteenth-century equivalent of a travel blog). They expected exotic accounts of swaying palms, cannibals, headhunters, and island maidens. Instead, Louis felt a deep affinity with the island people that he met. Witnessing their oppression and the disruption of their culture by the various colonial powers of France, Germany, Britain, and the United States, he saw parallels to his own beloved Scottish Highlanders. He found dignity in many of the tribal chiefs that he met and formed passionate friendships with a few. One friendship with a chief named Rui-Ori a Ori on Tahiti particularly moved Stevenson. He felt that there was no envy or competition between them, only a sense of benevolence and love from the deeply Christian Tahitian. He wrote to Henry James about the letter of good-bye and appreciation that Ori gave to him:
All told, if my books enabled or helped me to make this voyage, to know Rui, and to have received such a letter, they have … not been writ in vain. (Letter 2151)
In contrast, the white traders and expatriates he met were often a cast-off lot, crassly mercantile in their approach to the islanders, while adopting an unwarranted presumption of racial superiority. What the whites dismissed as laziness or drunken dissolution in some of the indigenous peoples Stevenson correctly registered as despair and lassitude at the deracination of their heritage and way of life. He had seen the same hollow look of defeat in some of the impoverished Highlanders on those emigrant ships of sorrow many years ago on the west coast of Scotland. Writing of the Marquesans, “What is peculiar is the wide-spread depression and acceptance of the national end. Pleasures are neglected, the dance languishes, the songs are forgotten.”
With his natural empathy for marginalized groups and his love of history and politics, Louis’s primary writing focus for the first two years of his time in the South Seas centered on describing the ethnic and cultural differences among the various island peoples, as well as recording their histories and art forms. Rather than writing entertaining missives about the “natives” that could titillate his cosmopolitan readership, he began to conceive of a large and voluminous history of the South Seas that would be part sociology, anthropology, history, political critique, and moral diatribe about the destructive forces of colonialism. Neither Fanny nor his editors were very happy about this.
In a more than five-year span from February 1889 to October 1894, he would write ten extended letters to The Times of London about the brutal treatment of Samoan chiefs by the three colonial powers of Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. He had aligned himself with rebel clans who advocated for Samoan independence and protested policies of taxation and repression of their culture and autonomy. Meanwhile the Germans had installed a figurehead chief and pushed into exile the chiefs who spoke for the legitimate interests of the Samoan people.
In his letters to The Times about Samoa, he employed a high rhetorical style that drips with irony and moral righteousness about the behavior of “civilized democracies” that have chosen to impinge on the freedoms of a sovereign people. There is a constant appeal to the honor of gentlemen that shows both a certain naiveté and courage in the face of capitalist interests and colonial power. If some of these ponderous and high-blown manifestos seemed a bit like play-acting, it all took on increasing seriousness as the hostile exchanges between the rebels and the colonial rulers edged closer to outright war.
He would eventually engage in his own war of words with representatives of the British consulate, one of whom issued a communiqué that equated speaking against the empire’s interests to sedition and incitement of rebellion. Stevenson fired back in defense of free speech, and the government official was forced to withdraw his decree and was reprimanded by the homeland office.
Fanny complained to Colvin that Louis was not writing about all of the extraordinary encounters they had with islanders who had regaled them with dances, rituals, and medicinal secrets. Instead, he wanted to bore his European and American readers to tears with rants about diplomatic communiqués and unfulfilled promises by consuls and attaches. She wrote that trying to get Louis to focus on creating art rather than political manifestos was nearly impossible—“What a thing it is to have a ‘man of genius’ to deal with. It is like managing an overbred horse.”
By August 1890, Louis described himself as “waist-deep in his big book on the South Seas.” Similar to many of Louis’s ambitious historical projects, it was never brought to a finished product and was only published after his death. Reading In the South Seas now, Fanny was both right and wrong about Louis’s account of their voyages on The Casco and Equator in the islands between the summer of 1888 and December of 1889. The book is by no means simply politics and history. There are rich descriptive passages of the tropical settings and intriguing accounts of the “long pig” eaters (i.e., cannibals); there is no shortage of passages about bronzed island chiefs and scantily clad native girls. He captures the sensational and the humorous—an island ruler who puts any man to death that has made eye contact with his harem of wives or another chief who writes ornate English poetry and dresses up in elaborate outfits of European women’s garments. On the other hand, the book is disjointed and anecdotal—an inevitable problem, given that it was compiled out of what were intended to be letters for the New York Sun, but also reflective of a deeper shift in Louis’s own thinking and responses to the experiences he was having.
His biographer Furnas astutely picks up on a change in both Louis’s mentality and writing that was beginning to take hold. The voice that we encounter in In the South Seas is quite different from the bohemian travel writer of Travels with a Donkey. Although there are typical Stevensonian paragraphs of exquisite writing and humor, there is a growing tone of realism and reportorial objectivity. The presence of the writer at the center of the story subsides and the details of what he is witnessing take over. As Furnas succinctly puts it, “… he was undergoing a major shift toward greater maturity.” This shift ironically was likely to raise fear and uncertainty in Fanny. Furnas writes,
Her extreme uneasiness over South Seas may well have masked her reluctance to give up the young Louis Stevenson—fair-haired magpie brilliant, headlong, who, already in love with Fanny Osbourne, had used his trip in the Cévennes as a means to pour experience over himself… . In view of his nearness to forty, his hair darkened to a heavy brown and showing sprinklings of gray, he had kept faith with her on such scores rather better than might have been expected of a chronic invalid. But now he was in effect seeking leave—of nobody in particular—to grow up relative to the world as the objective category of experience.
Once again we see Stevenson pushing against another familiar set of categories. In his exchanges with Henry James, published as “A Humble Remonstrance,” he had been the champion of romance over realism. Now, much to Fanny’s chagrin, he was backing away from the romantic enthusiasm and symbolism that had characterized a good deal of his fiction. He increasingly focused on grim inequities and weakness in the human condition, whether moral degeneration or colonial exploitation. His writing style reflected this realistic turn. There was less artifice and fewer ornate metaphors; the prose was cleaner and the voice more straightforward.
In a letter from that period, Fanny expressed an unconscious wish to hold on to the former Louis when she wrote lovingly of her friendship with a couple that they met during a long stay in the Gilbert Islands. Striking an uncanny parallel to their marriage, the native wife was older and previously married, while the younger husband doted on his domineering partner. Fanny and Louis posed for a celebrated photograph with this couple, and her recollection of their time together points to a wistful nostalgia for periods when Louis had been more compliant and pliable to her whims.
One of the forces that may have been putting further distance between the Stevensons was Fanny’s own son, Lloyd. Now a young man and aspiring writer, he had become Louis’s chief companion and main collaborator, supplanting Fanny as a writing partner. They had published The Wrong Box together and were now finishing a second collaboration, The Wrecker, worked on during the time on Apemama in the Gilbert Islands, and ultimately finished in Samoa (both novels are very minor works; the younger man added little of lasting value to the literary partnership). Lloyd looked up to Louis in every way, and his company only strengthened Louis’s self-image and often provided him with respite from Fanny’s controlling nature. The two hatched a plan to purchase a schooner of their own and start a trading company for coconut oil, cloth, and shells (they played with the name “Jekyll, Hyde, and Co.”). Such a venture would mean constant sea travel, which would necessarily exclude Fanny due to her perpetual seasickness and dislike of living aboard ship.
Although this venture never got beyond the planning stages, mostly due to their recognition that the island trading business was cutthroat and exploitative, it reveals more about Louis’s changes. From childhood, he had set his designs on being a writer and had sacrificed much of his health and well-being to this pursuit. Now, after the best health and physical vigor in his life, he dared to imagine an expanded livelihood for his middle and later years. Although he continued to fight against his internalized prejudice, he still never relinquished the idea that a vocation based in imagination rather than concrete tasks was not sufficient for a grown-up man. As late as the year before he died, he wrote to his friend Will Low about the limits of being solely a writer, choosing his latest book, Catriona (published in the United States as David Balfour), as evidence:
I think David Balfour a nice little book, and very artistic, and just the thing to occupy the leisure of a busy man; but for the top flower of a man’s life it seems to me inadequate. Small is the word; it is a small age, and I am of it. I could have wished to be otherwise busy in the world. I ought to have been able to build lighthouses and write David Balfours too. (Letter 2693)
This push to take his life beyond “paper” had much to do with his decision to settle in the South Seas. He was convinced that any extended stay in the colder climates of Europe or even North America would bring back infirmity and confine him to an invalid’s bed. He was swimming, horseback riding, finding new sights and adventures on a regular basis. Daily life engaged him in a way he had never known, and despite the cajoling of Colvin and the other Savile cronies to return to London, he was determined to stay in the islands. Although many people at the time and over subsequent decades have seen Stevenson’s time in Samoa as a return to Arcadia—an escape from the world of getting and spending—it was much more than that for him, and in many ways, quite the opposite. With health and a growing public stature among the islanders, Stevenson began to see himself, perhaps for the first time in his adult life, as a “man of affairs” rather than as an invalid living through his imaginative art.
This shift in his relation to the world—his ability to see himself as a functioning and competent adult—affected his fictional writing as well. He now used his immediate encounters with the world as vehicles for fiction in addition to focusing his imagination on the past. Even the characters in his best historical fiction of that time, David Balfour and Weir of Hermiston, took on more depth and psychological complexity. His South Seas stories addressed serious themes for an adult readership—sexuality, violence, atheism. He fretted about these “grimy” and “gloomy” tales, that they would not be well received by an audience that wanted more boys’ books and romance. Yet they seemed to come out of a part of him that was not driven by pleasing the public. They sought to render the relational and emotional effects of colonial exploitation, just as his letters to The Times had documented the political and social consequences. Simultaneously, they continued his more personal inquiry into the nature of moral action—how to find a middle course between amorality and ideology. “The Beach of Falesá” and “The Ebb-Tide,” the most innovative stories of his final years, exemplified this artistic growth.
By the latter part of 1890 it became clear if the Stevensons were not going back to Europe and were putting down stakes in the South Seas, they had to choose a permanent island home. Stevenson settled on Samoa in part because of a conversation about the islands held with a visitor to the family home way back in 1875. The images conjured up had never left him.
… 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 fruits as they fall. (Letter 397)
In reality the life he lived in Samoa from 1890 until his death in 1894 was far from an island idyll. Accompanied by Fanny, Lloyd, his mother, and later Belle, Joe Strong, and their son, Austin, he built a hillside compound and became the manager of an ample estate in the palm-fronded forest. He assumed the role of family patriarch and outgrew his dependence on Fanny. He put himself smack in the middle of a political battle that eventually became a brief bloody war between the colonial powers and Samoan rebels. He fretted over aging and feared a decline in his artistic powers. He worried incessantly about providing for his family, pushing himself to write the historical fiction that his audience expected, often experiencing long stretches of writer’s block and creative futility. Yet through all of these travails and right up to the day he died, he also produced his most mature and probing work.