Nearly every individual is notable for some peculiarity of mind or disposition, and in some few persons the sanguine, melancholy, nervous or lymphatic temperament is well marked. All such peculiarities should be noted as they are strongly hereditary. Moreover the study of them is peculiarly attractive.
Francis Galton, Record of Family Faculties
THE LAST VIEW of the Old World, when it came, was hurried. The Stevenson party, which consisted of Louis, Fanny, Margaret Stevenson, Lloyd and the indispensable Valentine Roch, stayed two nights at a hotel in Finsbury while friends came and went, saying goodbye and bringing presents. Gosse ran around town trying to get Stevenson a copy of Hardy’s new novel, The Woodlanders, to read on the journey; Henry James turned up with a case of champagne; William Archer fetched a lawyer so that a last-minute codicil could be added to his friend’s will. Aunt Alan, Coggie Ferrier, even Cummy, turned up to say goodbye, and the London friends were of course in attendance: Henley, Katherine de Mattos and Colvin, pained and saddened by his recent rift. Colvin stayed the last night in the same hotel, protectively close to Louis, and accompanied him to the docks the next day: ‘Leaving the ship’s side as she weighed anchor, and waving farewell to the party from the boat which landed me,’ he wrote with sorrow some years later, ‘I little knew what was the truth, that I was looking on the face of my friend for the last time.’1
Stevenson himself was far from gloomy, in fact his spirits picked up almost as soon as they got under way. After years of being virtually housebound at Skerryvore, he suddenly found himself ‘really enjoying my life; there is nothing like being at sea, after all. And O why have I allowed myself to rot so long on land?’2 He needed all his good cheer to overcome the peculiar conditions of the voyage. Fanny had made the booking on the Ludgate Hill – a ship of ‘one of the less frequented lines’3 – on the recommendation of Colvin’s brother. They expected it to be more private and spacious than usual, and from London to Le Havre the Stevenson party did indeed seem to have the boat to themselves. But once across the Channel it became clear why: the Ludgate Hill was picking up a consignment of apes, cows and over a hundred horses. They had booked themselves onto a floating zoo.
The smell of course was atrocious, and the ‘dreadfully human’4 cries of the confined animals inescapable day or night. Fanny, who was a bad sailor anyway, often prostrated in her cabin with sickness, must have found the two-and-a-half-week journey across the Atlantic hellish, especially since both Louis and his mother were being determinedly upbeat about everything. Margaret Stevenson, whose letters to her sister Jane provide a valuable extra record of these years, reported that the ship was dirty and uncomfortable even before the animals were loaded, ‘but we agreed to make the best of things and look upon it as an “adventure”’.5 Louis frisked about the boat, administering Henry James’s champagne to the sick and declaring that the pervasive stink of ordure was ‘gran’ for the health’, while the iron vessel rolled so much mid-ocean that the fittings came loose in the bedroom. ‘O it was lovely,’ he wrote to Colvin on reaching shore, ‘a thousandfold pleasanter than a great big Birmingham liner like a new hotel; and we liked the officers, and made friends with the quartermasters, and I (at least) made a friend of a baboon [ … ] whose embraces have pretty near cost me a coat.’6 Mrs Stevenson meanwhile was enjoying the oddity of looking out through her porthole at a row of horses, ‘and still stranger, in the saloon, to see a horse looking in at one of the windows’.7
The degree to which ‘it was lovely’ only struck Stevenson a few weeks after the voyage, when he became convinced that he had just spent one of the happiest times of his life.
I could not have believed it possible; we had the beastliest weather, and many discomforts; but the mere fact of its being a tramp-ship, gave us many comforts; we could cut about with the men and officers, stay in the wheel house, discuss all manner of things, and really be a little at sea. And truly there is nothing else. I had literally 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[.]8
Here was the antidote not just to invalidism, but also to ‘cares and labours and rot about a fellow’s behaviour’ – in other words, writing. The restlessness that habitually plagued Stevenson in his creative life was all blown away at sea, by healthy, manly, carefree activity. A conventional crossing would not have given him half so much pleasure, and from this time on he was gripped by a craving to go yacht-cruising.
Lloyd Osbourne wrote later that the crossing to America in 1887 represented Stevenson’s passing from one epoch of his life to another: ‘from that time until his death he became, indeed, one of the most conspicuous figures in contemporary literature’.9 On board the Ludgate Hill, Stevenson had no clear idea how well Jekyll and Hyde was selling in the States, for he wasn’t getting a cent from the pirated editions (an issue he was quick to raise with reporters later). But the first whiff of his new celebrity came even before they touched land, when the pilot of the boat guiding them into New York City Harbour turned out to be nicknamed ‘Mr Hyde’ by his workmates. None of Fairchild’s intimations quite prepared the author for any kind of reception at the quayside, but waiting alongside his old friend Will Low were ‘a dozen reporters’,10 E.L. Burlingame, the editor of Scribner’s Magazine, and a telegram from Fairchild himself, who had sent a carriage and booked the whole Stevenson party into the Victoria, a luxury hotel with lifts and new-fangled ‘fixed-in’ plumbing. More journalists turned up there the first evening hoping to see the author of Jekyll and Hyde, who didn’t yet have enough experience of celebrity to know quite how to deal with them. Everyone had read the book, it seemed, and T.R. Sullivan’s stage adaptation was about to open in New York, starring Richard Mansfield (a very well-known actor of the day). One reporter, from the New York Herald, asked specifically about Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Deacon Brodie, a pairing (suggested by the fact that Teddy Henley’s production of Deacon Brodie was about to start its North American tour in Montreal) that was to become increasingly significant over the next few months. Stevenson was dismissive about Brodie (‘although I have no idea whether it will please an audience, I don’t think either Mr Henley or I are ashamed of it’11), but answered at length about the dream-genesis of Jekyll, cementing in the public mind the idea of himself as a wispy paranormalist and encouraging another journalist to report a supposedly ‘psychic’ event on the quay (a letter from London echoing the author’s vaguely-stated wish to visit Japan). Stevenson must have been aware that he was sounding, or could be made to sound, a bit foolish, and the flurry of attention that greeted them at the Victoria – flowers, strangers, friends, flunkies – was exhausting and oppressive after the freedom of the sea voyage. He came down with a cold almost immediately and decided to retreat to Fairchild’s house in Newport, Rhode Island the next day, leaving Fanny and his mother in the city to attend the play and bask in the author’s New World fame.
Stevenson’s short visit to Rhode Island made an odd interlude: he spent most of his time there in bed, talking excitedly and chain-smoking. His portrait by Sargent (the one in which he is seated in a wicker chair) had been hanging in the Fairchild mansion for several months, but had not prepared the millionaire’s daughter, Sally, for the relative uncouthness of the man himself, whom she recalled years later with candour as ‘dirty in appearance [ … ] peculiar and shabby’. The arrival of the ‘wild woman’ and the rest of the troupe a few days later was hardly reassuring: Margaret Stevenson and Valentine were the only respectable-looking members of the party, and even so, neither of them could be exactly described as stylish (though Margaret, with her plentiful supply of starched white widow’s caps, did at least look clean). By the end of the week, the Fairchilds’ polite smiles must have been wearing rather thin: Stevenson filled the house with his unconventional entourage, attracted stray admirers to the door and forgot to pay his large bill at the chemist’s. And no amount of celebrity could compensate Sally Fairchild for the fact that the writer ‘smoked too much, and burned holes in our sheets’.12
Back in New York City, in a hotel on the Lower East Side, Stevenson got down to business with Edward Burlingame, who was offering an astonishing deal: twelve articles in twelve months for £60 each. Stevenson accepted the commission with amazement (and, naturally, a little trepidation), but refused an even more lucrative offer from the publisher Sam McClure, who had been commissioned by Joseph Pulitzer to bag the author for the New York World. The suggested £2000 a year for a weekly article was too much for Stevenson: ‘They would drive even an honest man into being a mere lucre-hunter in three weeks,’ he wrote to Colvin, whose eyes must have been bulging out of his smooth round head at the sums mentioned. But he did let McClure reserialise The Black Arrow, under the title ‘The Outlaws of Tunstall Forest’, and promised him the serial rights to Kidnapped’s sequel, thereby breaking an agreement with Scribner’s not to offer books elsewhere. It was a bad, unbusinesslike mistake, but Stevenson’s faculties seem to have been almost fuddled by the amounts of money being offered at every turn. McClure says the writer ‘blushed and looked confused’ when offered $8000 for a sequel to Kidnapped, and said ‘he didn’t think any novel of his was worth as much as $8000’.13 ‘You have no idea how much is made of me here,’ he told Colvin. But if anything, the London friends got an even stronger impression of Stevenson’s new earning power than was yet true: the figures seemed to stick in their heads as if they had all been paid rather than just talked up, and to someone as virulently anti-American as Henley, Stevenson might as well have sold his soul to the devil as a book to McClure and twelve essays to Scribner’s.
Was Stevenson being rather priggish about the possible dangers of being overpaid? A more practical and less scrupulous person might have taken every dollar available and shared it out with his friends. Some such thought may have crossed Henley’s mind when he was told in January 1888 that Louis had just refused $5000 for a single story, preferring to rest content with his £720 from Scribner’s. Nevertheless, Stevenson’s finances looked secure for the first time ever, and the family anticipated a comfortable winter in the States. Colorado had been discounted as a possible destination by this time; now Fanny and Lloyd were scouting the Adirondacks for somewhere suitable. Their choice of Saranac Lake, 250 miles upstate from New York City, was mostly to do with the climate (mountainous, with sharply cold winters) and the vicinity of an innovative TB specialist called Edward Livingston Trudeau. Trudeau, who was himself tubercular, was pioneering an open-air cure at his new Adirondack Cottage Sanatorium and had set up the first North American laboratory devoted to researching the disease. His clinic was only three years old and had not yet begun to attract Davos-like spa-goers and all the invalid society that Stevenson so loathed; the remoteness of Saranac was also attractive: ‘the country for 150 square miles is in a state of nature, without roads, and all the communication by streams and lakes and portages’.14 In the course of being fêted in New York Stevenson had met some congenial people, including Low’s friend the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens,* ‘but the thing at large is a bore and a fraud’, he wrote to Walter Simpson once he had moved out of the city. ‘I am much happier up here, where I see no one and live my own life.’15
The white wooden cottage they moved to on a hillside just outside Saranac Lake belonged to a mountain guide called Andrew Baker, who shuffled his own family of wife and two daughters into the back of the property to accommodate the new tenants. It was a small place for so many people: the Stevensons’ half had a sitting room with a fireplace, from which three rooms led in different directions, a small kitchen to one side, a bedroom with a view to the front (which was allotted to Margaret Stevenson) and another bedroom to the other side (for Louis and Fanny), with a room beyond that which was used as Louis’s study. Lloyd slept in a room in the attic and Valentine had a space the same size as the store room on the other side of the kitchen. They still envisaged going back to Bournemouth after the winter, so had not brought many possessions with them, but Stevenson decorated the mantelpiece with two red tobacco boxes, one either end, and a whisky bottle in the middle where a more conventional household might have placed the clock. The tobacco boxes were essential: Mrs Baker later remembered Stevenson as the most extreme chain-smoker she ever knew, and the mantelpiece at the cottage still bears witness to it, with the scorch marks made by his abandoned or forgotten roll-ups visible to this day.
Saranac Lake was still mainly a trappers’ and hunters’ destination, a remote village with a sawmill, one small hotel, no running water and, as yet, no railroad (though it was about to get a narrow-gauge that winter and – to Stevenson’s amazement – had a long-established bawdy-house). The seven cottages of Trudeau’s rudimentary sanatorium were on a piece of land on the side of a mountain about half a mile out of town, and were run by the intrepid doctor almost single-handed, using lumberjacks and trappers to help care for the bedridden. Stevenson was attended by Trudeau but kept well away from the clinic, preferring his own private version of the same ‘open-air’ cure in the cottage with its surrounding woods. He was very happy with the change of scene and enraptured with the bright fall colours and the romance of the landscape. The view of the river just below the cottage pleased him, and the hills, where he took solitary woodland walks, reminded him of the Highlands. He felt better than he had for years, and got to work on his Scribner’s essays immediately.
Part of the luxury of this commission was that the essays could be on any subject he pleased; the first, his ‘Chapter on Dreams’, was finished in five days, and ‘The Lantern-Bearers’ almost as quickly. All twelve pieces were completed during his six months at Saranac and published in Scribner’s one a month through 1888. It was the most efficient and profitable paid work he had yet done, and a release from the usual pattern of dashing from one partly-written work to another in the hope of meeting many deadlines and obligations, though he still felt ‘terror’ at the prospect of starting them. Nothing was going to alleviate that.
Charles Baxter, Stevenson’s most sincerely solicitous friend, rejoiced in the change he perceived: ‘I cannot tell you how welcome your last letter was. It smelt so of good health and spirits and was so like the olden times.’16 It began to look as if a cure might really be possible, and at the same time there began to be cause to wonder if Stevenson was in fact tubercular at all, for when he had his sputum analysed in one of Dr Trudeau’s advanced bacillus tests, it showed negative. Trudeau said later that he ‘never heard any abnormal physical sounds in Stevenson’s chest’,17 and, like Ruedi before him, suspected that Stevenson’s was an arrested case of the disease. Later commentators, citing the facts that Stevenson survived another fifteen years after the onset of blood-spitting, died of non-pulmonary causes and never infected any other member of his household, have suggested that his ailment may have been not TB but bronchietasis, an acute condition with some shared symptoms. Recently, two American researchers have introduced yet another thesis, that Stevenson may have suffered from haemorrhagic telangiectasia, or Osler-Rendu-Weber Syndrome: ‘This would explain his chronic respiratory complaints, recurrent episodes of pulmonary hemorrhage, and his death of probable cerebral hemorrhage.’18 It would also explain his mother’s and maternal grandfather’s similar symptoms (including Margaret’s ‘apparent stroke’ in 1867); Osler-Rendu-Weber Syndrome is hereditary.*
The negative result of Trudeau’s sputum test may have affected Stevenson’s attitude to his health, though he never remarked on it. It is notable that from this time on he started to be severely practical about his choice of where to live, and was never prostrated by illness again. Perhaps thinking of himself as consumptive had made him fatalistic; seeing that his symptoms could be improved so much by travel certainly made the idea of returning to Bournemouth in the spring tantamount to a death-wish. And at the same time, money and his mother’s extraordinary adaptability (little to be guessed at from her years as an Edinburgh bourgeoise) made it possible to consider much wider options for the future.
Stevenson never made a friend of Edward Trudeau, though there were few enough people to associate with in Saranac Lake and the doctor must have been one of the most philanthropic and intelligent men he met in his life. The one recorded visit by Stevenson to Trudeau’s laboratory, where the doctor practised vivisection as part of his research, indicates that the writer took a profound revulsion against the spirit in which the research was conducted as well as the experiments themselves. It shows a side of Stevenson’s character rarely illustrated, a high-minded and possibly wrong-headed narrowness. The story goes that Stevenson found it intolerable to stay in the laboratory for long, and bolted suddenly onto the porch. When Trudeau followed, wondering if his guest had been taken ill, Stevenson made this peremptory reply: ‘Your light may be very bright to you, Trudeau, but to me it smells of oil like the devil.’ This condemnation of a man who, after all, was doing more for pathology than anyone else in the country at that date, seems presumptuous to say the least, though Trudeau took no offence. His account in his autobiography is careful to exculpate them both:
Stevenson saw no mutilated animals in my laboratory. The only things he saw were the diseased organs in bottles and cultures of the germs which had produced the disease. These were the things which turned him sick. I remember he went out just after I made this remark:
‘This little scum on the tube is consumption, and the cause of more human suffering than anything else in this world. We can produce tuberculosis in the guinea-pig with it, and if we could learn to cure tuberculosis in the guinea-pig this great burden of human suffering might be lifted from the world.’
Stevenson, however, saw only the diseased lungs and the disgusting scum growing on the broth, and it was these things that turned his stomach, not any suffering animals which he saw.20
The winter set in early and was a severe one, much harder to cope with in the exposed, flimsy Adirondack cottage than at Davos. Fanny had come back from a long trip to see her family in Indiana via Montreal, bringing full-length buffalo-skin coats, hats and boots for everyone, but there was little or no insulation in the house, and heating only in the sitting room (the open fire), one bedroom (a stove) and the kitchen (the cooker). The snow began to fall in November, cutting off Stevenson’s walks, and by December the temperature had dropped so low that the ink froze in its pot overnight. This was even more of a disaster than is to be expected, as Stevenson was no longer the only author in the household. Lloyd was busy on a comic detective novel called ‘The Finsbury Tontine’, and Fanny had just finished a short story, ‘The Nixie’, which she was able to sell to Scribner’s Magazine.
Among the visitors to Saranac before the weather got really bad were Sam McClure, armed with more publishing schemes and contracts, and the persevering Fairchilds. The millionaires had to slum it in Plattsburg and struggle up the track in a buggy only to have Mrs Fairchild refused entry to the cottage on account of having a slight head cold. This was at Fanny’s insistence, of course, and the visitors had to be satisfied with an interview conducted farcically by sign language through a closed window. They were only allowed indoors the next day when both could show clean handkerchiefs, so no wonder they cut their trip short and went home. Fanny apologised after the event for seeming severe, but probably relished this exercise of power, seeing their patrons reduced to grimacing and gesticulating out in the cold.
The winter in Saranac was picturesque and uncomfortable, as Lloyd recalled: ‘sleighs, snow-shoes and frozen lakes; voyageurs in quaint costumes and with French to match; red-hot stoves and steaming windows [ … ] consumptives in bright caps and manyhued woollens gaily tobogganing at forty below zero; buffalo coats an inch thick; snow-storms, snow-drifts, Arctic cold’.21 As the temperature dropped to below 25 degrees at night, life in Baker’s Cottage contracted. The front porch was closed up, leaving the only entrance through the kitchen. Poor Valentine in her unheated cupboard woke to find the handkerchief under her pillow frozen and Stevenson got frostbite in bed, mistaking the sensation in his ear for a rat nibbling him. ‘At times it was unbelievably cold,’ Lloyd wrote later, ‘one was really comfortable only in bed, with a hot soapstone at one’s feet.’22 The stoves warmed up quickly, but hardly radiated at all, draughts were plentiful and piercing and, huddled round the fireplace, the family must have wondered what else they would have to endure to win Louis continuing respite from ‘Bloody Jack’. Fanny had her usual bad reaction to cold high places and made as many journeys away from Saranac as she could manage; Margaret Stevenson and Lloyd also took breaks in New York and Boston. In fact, everyone but Louis found the conditions intolerable, but he was braced by them: his brain, he reckoned, was working ‘with much vivacity’.
The novelty of feeling well brought a surge of creative energy, as his account of ‘The Genesis of The Master of Ballantrae’ records. What he describes is not so much a moment of inspiration, as a decision to be inspired:
I was walking one night in the verandah of a small house in which I lived, outside the hamlet of Saranac. It was winter; the night was very dark; the air extraordinarily clear and cold, and sweet with the purity of forests. From a good way below, the river was to be heard contending with ice and boulders: a few lights appeared, scattered unevenly among the darkness, but so far away as not to lessen the sense of isolation. For the making of a story here were fine conditions. I was besides moved with the spirit of emulation, having just finished my third or fourth perusal of [Marryat’s] The Phantom Ship. ‘Come’, said I to my engine, ‘let us make a tale, a story of many years and countries, of the sea and the land, savagery and civilisation; a story that shall have the same large features, and may be treated in the same summary elliptic method as the book you have been reading and admiring.’ I was here brought up with a reflection exceedingly just in itself, but which as the sequel shows, I failed to profit by. I saw that Marryat, not less than Homer, Milton and Virgil, profited by the choice of a familiar and legendary subject; so that he prepared his readers on the very title-page; and this set me cudgelling my brains, if by any chance I could hit upon some similar belief to be the centre-piece of my own meditated fiction. In the course of this vain search there cropped up in my memory a singular case of a buried and resuscitated fakir, which I had been often told by an uncle of mine, then lately dead, Inspector-General John Balfour.23
This idea that a writer can ‘meditate a fiction’ in the abstract and worry about the focal point later is exactly the opposite of what ‘inspiration’ usually signifies, and Stevenson’s admission that the process involved ‘cudgelling’ and striving is refreshingly frank. Yet the net result of ‘how-I did-it’ pieces like this – and he was keen to write them – is to evoke just that romanticised view of composition he is gainsaying: the beauties of nature, remoteness from mankind and a mystical silence engender the ‘right’ creative atmosphere and, though the author then says ‘Come’ only to his ‘engine’, the image is strongly evocative of a magician summoning up meinies, or Brownies.
The novel that emerged from this exercise, The Master of Ballantrae, was hindered rather than helped by the author’s insistence on sticking with his uncle’s story of the fakir, for the part of the book that has always attracted criticism is the ending, where the body of the wicked ‘Master’, James Durie, is exhumed and resuscitated by his Indian servant, Secundra Dass, causing the instant death from shock of the Master’s tormented brother, Henry. The scene – which takes place in the Adirondacks on a moonlit winter night – is extremely picturesque, with a tableau of Secundra toiling to dig up the frozen grave: ‘his blows resounded [ … ] as thick as sobs; and behind him, strangely deformed and ink-black upon the frosty ground, the creature’s shadow repeated and parodied his swift gesticulations’.24 But it is odd that this, the ‘centre-piece’ of Stevenson’s plan, should seem in execution like an expedient, and Stevenson himself came to write of it as though it had been an imposition rather than his own doggedly maintained choice. In letters, he contrived to blame Scribner’s and the demands of serial publication for rushing him on to a forced conclusion: ‘I hope I shall pull off that damned ending; but it still depresses me: this is your doing, Mr Burlingame: you would have it there and then, and I fear it – I fear that ending.’25
Marryat may have kick-started Stevenson’s engine on this occasion, but it ran on a mixture of Scott and James Hogg. Hogg provides the groundbass of demonism and murderous sibling rivalry, while Scott strongly influences the domestic scenes. The structure is particularly Scott-ish: the novel ostensibly being the land-agent Ephraim Mackellar’s account of the fall of the house of Durisdeer after the Jacobite Rebellion. It is essentially (like Jekyll and Hyde) a dossier of evidence: letters, eye-witness accounts and extracts from other people’s memoirs assembled and drawn together by Mackellar to augment his own story. In a preface set slightly in the future (1889), the papers have fallen into the hands of Mr Johnstone Thomson, an Edinburgh lawyer (an affectionate portrait of Charles Baxter), whose writer friend (Stevenson) agrees to edit them for publication. But the playful preface was dropped from the first edition, on the grounds that it was ‘a little too like Scott’, nor did Stevenson use the eighteenth-century legal endorsement he solicited from Baxter, though Baxter, with his usual readiness and ingenuity, had composed a perfect example by return of post.26
The story of the ‘fraternal enemies’, James Durie, the Master of Ballantrae, and his younger brother Henry (were these Christian names coincidental, or another private joke?), made yet another return to the theme of the double. Stevenson described the Master as being ‘all I know of the devil’; like Edward Hyde he is completely wicked, while his brother, like Jekyll, is a mixture of virtues and vices, ‘neither very bad nor very able’. The Master is notably clever, resourceful and brave, the only character, apart from Alison Graeme, who shows spirit. The book is deliberately confusing in this way, for the amoral Master should not be the hero of the story, nor his ineffectual brother Henry. Henry’s patience passes for virtue, but once that has worn out he becomes as bad as his devilish brother, crazed for revenge and transformed as dramatically as Jekyll:
There was something very daunting in his look; something to my eyes not rightly human; the face, lean, dark and aged, the mouth painful, the teeth disclosed in a perpetual rictus; the eyeball swimming clear of the lids upon a field of blood-shot white.
The tragedy is set in motion when the etiolated Durie family decides that its only hope of survival is to divide loyalties politically during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. At the toss of a coin, one brother rides off to join Prince Charlie while the younger stays at home, allied to the English King’s party (like a dark version of Kidnapped, to which the book has many links). When news reaches them that James has died at Culloden, Henry inherits the title of Master and eventually marries his brother’s former fiancée, Alison Graeme. But years later, James returns to Durisdeer, demanding money and his old place, and a bitter struggle breaks out between the brothers. Henry seems to have killed James in a duel and is branded as a fratricide, but in another ghastly twist of the plot it transpires that his brother escaped wounded and resumes his persecution with new energy. It is a mark of Stevenson’s skill as a romancer that the plot remains gripping at this point, if not exactly credible. The movement of the conflict to and fro has the familiar structure of a ballad or a folk-tale, and the third appearance of the Master, his third ‘death’ (burial alive) and subsequent resuscitation by the fakir move along like verse and antiphon.
Cashing in on the success of Jekyll – and clearly also a sort of rival to it – Deacon Brodie was on tour in the States, with Henley’s rambunctious younger brother in the lead. Henley still valued the play highly and hoped to make serious money from it, but Stevenson was getting weary not just of the material – ‘my poor old Deacon’ – but with his own weak-mindedness in letting Henley do what he liked with the play. When Teddy and two other actors on the tour got drunk and started a fight in Philadelphia, Stevenson began to sicken of the whole thing and was rather glad than crestfallen when a theatre in New York reneged on its booking. Fanny sent pointedly critical letters from New York telling of Teddy’s shameless (and, needless to say, unsuccessful) attempts to sponge off her, which in turn made Stevenson rage against him in letters to Baxter. But though the focus of his anger seemed to be the shiftless Teddy, he was clearly also impatient with his stubborn, demanding collaborator, and with himself for having tiptoed round Henley’s pride and Henley’s ego for so long.
The trouble over the play was a sort of warm-up for the bout to come. The row that brewed up between Stevenson and Henley in the spring of 1888 and which led to their acrimonious, permanent separation has been described as one of the most famous literary quarrels of the age, but it was hardly ‘literary’ at all. The trigger for it now seems extremely trivial, and must always have done, for details of the proceedings were carefully suppressed for years by all parties concerned, particularly Charles Baxter, who deposited his bundle of ‘Quarrel Letters’ at the National Library of Scotland under a thirty-year embargo. They chart the composition of what could be thought of as Henley and Stevenson’s final collaboration: ‘The Nixie: A Melodramatic Farce’.
The prologue was spoken by Samuel McClure, who travelled to London that spring, armed with letters of introduction from Stevenson. His intention was to set up a publishing link with the London literary scene, using Henley as a sort of agent (this was at Stevenson’s suggestion), but when he met with Henley and his set, he was struck by the extent of their disaffection with Louis. His account, in his Autobiography, emphasises their peevishness; most of Stevenson’s friends seemed ‘very annoyed by the attention [Stevenson] had received in America. There was a note of detraction in their talk which surprised and, at first, puzzled me.’ Henley was ‘particularly emphatic’, and complained that ‘his own influence upon Stevenson’s work was not sufficiently recognised’. No doubt it was especially bitter for the man who had slogged for almost a decade over Deacon Brodie to see the derivative Jekyll and Hyde – the work of a mere few days, according to the papers – shoot its author to fame and wealth. None of the ‘friends’ seemed pleased at Stevenson’s success, and they told McClure that Louis ‘was a much overrated man, and that his cousin, R.A.M. Stevenson, was the real genius of the family’.27
McClure’s ‘agency’ plan came to nothing, either because he found Henley uncongenial or because he wanted to stay loyal to his new star author once the quarrel broke. If, as I think, McClure’s trip to London took place some time in February, he would have been carrying back news of his business meetings when he visited Saranac Lake again on 19 March. The reservations about Henley which McClure expresses in his Autobiography may have been perceptible then by Stevenson; indeed it is hard to see how McClure could have completely suppressed his bemusement.*
Act One began when Henley saw the March 1888 issue of Scribner’s Magazine, containing Fanny’s short story, ‘The Nixie’, and immediately recognised an idea of Katharine de Mattos’s which had been discussed one evening the previous year at his house with Louis and Fanny present. Katharine’s story (which may or may not have been written already when she told the Stevensons about it – accounts differed later) was about the meeting on board a train of a young man and a girl whose feyness conceals the fact that she is an escaped lunatic. Fanny had jumped in immediately with some enthusiastic suggestions for improvements – why not make the girl turn out to be a water sprite rather than a lunatic? Katharine must have winced at this, for she withdrew into polite refusal of both the possible changes to her plot and Fanny’s insistent offers of help – collaboration, even. Fanny was either genuinely unable to understand that her interference was unwelcome, or wilfully determined to press for her own version of the story (she was, after all, the great improver of Jekyll and Hyde), but from any point of view her behaviour was neither subtle nor sensitive. Despite some attempts by Henley to place Katharine’s story over the next few months, it failed to get published, and Fanny kept on nagging to be allowed to have a go herself. Katharine’s eventual concession (when she was visiting the Stevensons in Bournemouth) cannot be viewed as anything other than a collapse under pressure; Louis knew this, as he admitted to Baxter later:
Katharine even while she consented – as she did to me with her own lips – expressed unwillingness; I told my wife so; and I asked her to go no farther. But she had taken a fancy to the idea, and when Katharine had tried her version and failed and wrote to tell us so, nothing would serve her but to act on this unwilling consent, and try hers.29
This astonishing admission that Fanny wrote ‘The Nixie’ against her husband’s advice, standing, meanly, on the letter not the spirit of Katharine’s caving-in, comes in the midst of so many hysterical letters by Stevenson protesting his wife’s innocence that it could pass unnoticed. But there it is, in a letter to Baxter of 20 April 1888, in which he also implies that the whole ghastly quarrel with Henley that brewed up out of this small incident was actually a proxy match on behalf of the two women. He hints that Katherine habitually played on Henley’s admiration in an inappropriate way; ‘frankly she can do what she will with Henley’. But everything Stevenson says about the influence of Katherine on Henley is truer ten times of Fanny’s influence on himself: ‘remember that [his conduct] was all packed into him by an angry woman whom he admires. And what an angry woman is, we all know; and what a man is when he admires.’30
The publication of Fanny’s story was enough to rouse the jealousy of Henley’s circle, even had it been a completely original work. The fact that Scribner’s accepted it so quickly looked like nepotism, since the magazine had invested so heavily in Fanny’s husband’s essays (‘Beggars’ appeared in the same issue). It must have rankled that Louis and Fanny seemed to be covetously with-holding credit (i.e. funds) from Katherine for work that was hers, while acting like Lord and Lady Bountiful with their regular contingency payments to Bob, Katherine and Henley himself. Possibly the cousins misunderstood how tied up their uncle Thomas’s estate had really been (certainly the newspapers had jumped to the conclusion that Louis inherited a fortune); Louis’s pensions to them, carefully calculated to be neither too little nor too much, can only have caused embarrassment and possibly resentment. Baxter, who as agent knew exactly what Louis’s financial situation was, commented wisely: ‘It is a dangerous thing for a rich man as you now are, or seem to him [Henley], to give money; and I’m afraid that the recent gifts which it gave you so much pleasure to suggest, and me to carry out, may have carried a certain gall with them’.31
In this atmosphere of grudge and sour grapes, Fanny’s treatment of Katherine seemed the final, clinching condemnation of her character. Henley’s unforgivable mistake (unless he was trying to break with Louis, which is quite likely) was to try – again – to open Louis’s eyes on the subject. This is what the quarrel was about: not plagiarism, but Henley’s persistent attention to Fanny’s faults. In his letter, written on 9 March, among a great deal which is melancholic and almost despairing about himself and his prospects, Henley inserted a short paragraph about ‘The Nixie’, expressing ‘considerable amazement’ that the by-line did not acknowledge Katharine at all. ‘It’s Katharine’s, surely it’s Katharine’s?’ he wrote.32 The style was typical, a little blustering, a little posturing, but the note of sly complicity was guaranteed to inflame his correspondent and, married with the content, seemed explosively insulting to Uxorious Billy.
Enter Stevenson, in great disturbance, reading a letter. His immediate response was to put on his most distant and formal manner and write back ‘with indescribable difficulty’, asking Henley to apply to Katharine for the facts. That would clear everything up, for Katharine knew the whole prehistory of ‘The Nixie’, to defend which (it was implied) would be completely beneath his dignity. Meanwhile he could only hint at the ‘agony’ that the accusation against his wife caused him. To Baxter by the same post he wrote bursting with bitterness and agitation:
I fear I have come to an end with Henley; the Lord knows if I have not tried hard to be a friend to him, the Lord knows even that I have not altogether failed. 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 have risked my life for; and yet the years come, and every year there is a fresh outburst against me and mine.
[ … ] I cannot say it is anger I feel, but it is despair. My last reconciliation with Henley is not yet a year old; and here is the devil again. I am weary of it all – weary, weary, weary. And this letter was (so the writer said) intended to cheer me on a sick-bed! May God preserve me from such consolations; I slept but once last night, and then woke in an agony, dreaming I was quarrelling with you; the miserable cold day was creeping in, and I remembered you were the last of my old friends with whom I could say I was still on the old terms.
[ … ] It will probably come to a smash; and I shall have to get you to give the poor creature an allowance, pretending it comes from [ … ] anybody but me. Desert him I could not: my life is all bound about these thorns; but whether I can continue to go on cutting my hands and my wife’s hands, is quite another question. [ … ] The tale of the plays which I have gone on writing without hope, because I thought they kept him up, is of itself something; and I can say he never knew – and never shall know – that I thought these days and months a sacrifice. On the other hand, there have been, I think there still are, some warm feelings; they have never been warm enough to make him close his mouth, even where he knew he could hurt me sorely, even to the friends whom he knew I prized[.]33
Stevenson must have spent a sleepless night indeed to have reached this pitch so soon. But clearly the desire to draw up a final account with Henley had been with him some time, since he already had a draft of it in his head. He waited for a reply in miserable suspense; the post took between ten and fourteen days each way, so it was almost a month before he heard back from Henley. In the interval he kept writing to Baxter, describing his symptoms of distress: ‘I feel this business with a keenness that I cannot describe; I get on during the day well enough; only that whenever I think of it, I have palpitations. But at night! sleep is quite out of the question; and I have been obliged to take to opiates. God knows I would rather have died than have this happen.’34 ‘[T]he dreadful part of a thing like this, is that it shakes your confidence in all affection, and inspires you with a strange, sick longing to creep back into yourself and care for no one.’35
If Louis and Henley had still been living in the same country, the matter might well have been resolved and their friendship patched up as before. But the fact that all their dealings were by letter at this date, to be waited for, then pored over, copied and circulated, discussed and dissected, doomed this argument to be irreconcilable. After Louis’s initial flare-up, to which he could ‘find no form of signature’, his next to Henley bore the usual ‘R.L.S.’, and the one after that ended ‘Yours affectionately’, indicating a strong willingness to make up. But then another post would come, with fresh cause for offence and no sign of an apology, and more fuel would be added to the fire. When Katharine wrote that Henley ‘had a perfect right to be astonished [about ‘The Nixie’] but his having said so has nothing to do with me’,36 Stevenson was so disgusted at her primness that he copied the letter out to send to Baxter, who was at the same time getting post from Henley detailing his own side of the story, and his own impatience with letters from Saranac: ‘The immense superiority, the sham set of “facts”; the assumption that I am necessarily guilty, the complete ignoring of the circumstance that my acquaintance with the case is probably a good deal more intimate and peculiar than his own [ … ] the directions as to conduct and action – all these things have set me wild.’37
Fanny must have known the contents of the offending letter from Henley before she left for California on 26 March, as Louis’s reply was written four days before that. Henley had marked his letter ‘Private and Confidential’, but it would have been impossible for Louis to conceal it from Fanny, or mask the distress evident in the letters to Baxter which were written before her departure. By the time she got to the West Coast, where she was going to look once more into the prospect of buying a ranch, and to meet Belle for the first time in years, Fanny was in a state of impacted rage against Henley and his cronies, whom, she felt, were really endangering Louis’s health, possibly his life, by the stress they were causing. She wrote to Baxter in tragic style: ‘Had Henley only been satisfied with making the charge to me, I should have been bound to say nothing to Louis on account of the ill effects of such a thing upon his health. As it is, 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 my dear Louis’s sake. If I cannot, then I leave my curse upon the murderers and slanderers.’
The charge against her was ‘horrible’, ‘untrue’: ‘How could anyone believe that I could rob my dearest friend, the one upon whom I was always seeking to heap benefits.’ Fanny very likely did believe she had tried to help Katharine (now, for the first time, being called her ‘dearest friend’), but her difficulties coping with English snobbery and the pronounced anti-Americanism of the Henley set may have led her to misunderstand the tone of almost all their dealings. Fanny was a humourless and self-deluding woman: wrong, certainly; mad, possibly – but not bad. It is extremely unlikely that she wanted to do deliberate harm, unlike Henley, who was always spoiling for a fight.
Only a postscript to Henley’s first reply has survived (possibly Stevenson destroyed the main body of the letter), but a draft in the archive at Yale,38 in Henley’s and Bob Stevenson’s hands, could be a rough version of that letter, or of the one Henley told Baxter on 7 April he had torn up at Katharine’s request. In it, ‘Henley’ (i.e. he and Bob together, and possibly Katharine too) makes some apology for causing Louis pain, but goes on to restate and reinforce the accusation against Fanny. ‘Of what passed in my presence I retain the impression that Katharine showed herself extremely unwilling to discuss the question,’ the draft reads, ‘and resented – ironically of course as you know she does – the possibility of any interference in the matter. [ … ] Having once shown her reluctance and begged Fanny at the outset in my house to leave her and her story alone Katharine imagined that she had done enough and that she must leave the rest to Fanny’s own taste. [ … Katharine’s story] was already completely written and all suggestions were earnestly deprecated.’39 Despite the mean tone of all these letters, the point which Henley insisted on repeating seems to have been perfectly clear and valid: that Katharine had been bullied out of her intellectual property.
Meanwhile, off-stage in California, Fanny was working herself into full-blown hysterics. All winter she had complained of ‘brain congestion’, and had been recommended by the doctor not to so much as read a book for fear of overtaxing herself. Under the strain of the quarrel, she began to fear she might completely break down. It is hard to guess quite what the term ‘brain congestion’ might signify here: migraine, perhaps (though her symptoms don’t seem to have been acute enough for that), menopausal headaches (Fanny turned forty-eight in 1888), altitude sickness, depression? Her letter to Baxter seems to exhibit symptoms not merely of anger but derangement:
Louis always said that my worst point was my devilish pride. Perhaps God means that it should be humbled. Every day I say to myself can this be I, myself? really I, myself? Nothing that I have said here shall I say to Louis, – unless I become quite mad, in which case nothing will make any difference. If it so happens that I must go back to perfidious Albion, I shall learn to be false. For Louis’s sake I shall pretend to be their friend still – while he lives; but that in my heart I can ever forgive those who have borne false witness against me –! While they eat their bread from my hand – and oh, they will do that – I shall smile and wish it were poison that might wither their bodies as they have my heart. Please burn this letter lest it be said that I was mad when I made my will. Those who falsely (knowing it to be false) accuse me of theft, I cannot trust to be honest. They may try to rob my boy after they have murdered us. I can leave clear proof of my sanity in the clearness with which I am managing affairs.40
Nothing could be less clear as ‘proof of sanity’, as Baxter must have realised, since he kept the letter carefully with the rest.
The angry woman raged; but not at her husband. One result of this debacle was a reinforcement of the already very strong bonds between Louis and Fanny. The letters they wrote each other during this separation are notably tender and affectionate. Separately hysterical, each strove to calm the other. The knowledge of what Louis was going through on her behalf redoubled Fanny’s loyalty and gratitude towards him, and the imminent ejection from his life of the friends (‘fiends’) whom she now freely admitted she had always hated must have gladdened her heart. The response the quarrel had aroused in Louis was infinitely reassuring to Fanny: that, merely by her being a woman and his wife, he would always defend her.
There are two other significant players who ought to be mentioned: one is Baxter (the stage manager), the other Bob (the prompt). Baxter found himself in the unenviable position of confidant to both Henley and Louis, and recipient of Fanny’s ravings. All through these bleak months of discord, his good sense, anxious care and long acquaintance with both men made the crisis tolerable for Louis, who was understandably worried that all his old friends might, in his absence, side against him. The crisis elicited from Baxter what amount to declarations of love; he began to address Louis as ‘my dear’ (to which Louis responded in kind), and in a confessional moment admitted that he had gone through a phase a few years back of thinking Louis was tired of him: ‘I know now how the days of your youth and the friends that were its companions never lose their interest for you. I know the steadfast love which has seemed to me like that of a woman but for a time I doubted and was sad.’41 Stevenson’s answer acknowledged how queer – in both senses – this state of affairs was: ‘It is strange when you think what a couple of heartless drunken young dogs we were, that we should be what we are today: that you should so write, and I so accept what you have written [ … ] My wife, to whom I sent on your letter, was equally affected with myself.’42
How Henley would have scoffed at the whole of that letter, had he read it. He, too, employed the idea of Louis as feminine, but as a denigration, moaning to Baxter apropos Stevenson’s self-centredness:
I begin to suspect that from the first I have given him too much: so much, indeed, that he has been conscious, when I myself have not, of a momentary transfer of interest from him to myself and my own immediate griefs and troubles. Such a perception as his is too feminine to be baffled; such an affection is too feminine to be endured.43
It was clear whom Henley blamed for the despicable softening process that had spoiled his friend: Fanny. She had emasculated Louis, and not deferred, as wives should, to their husbands’ bachelor friendships. The remarks he made to Baxter about her were scornful and crude: ‘Lewis has known me longer than his spouse, and he has never known me to lie or truckle or do anything that is base. He can’t have slept with Fanny all these years, and not have caught her in the act of lying.’ By coincidence, Henley was about to publish his Book of Verses that year, containing the twelve-year-old ‘In Hospital’ sequence, with an envoi addressed to Baxter which celebrated the joint friendship of himself, Louis, Baxter and Walter Ferrier by comparison with Dumas’s Musketeers (in other words, glorifying those very days as ‘heartless, drunken young dogs’ that Stevenson felt dead and gone).
Remembered now as a showdown with Henley, the quarrel had possibly even more impact on Louis in regard to his relations with Bob, boon companion, boyhood hero and adored ‘other half’. Bob’s is a silent but potent presence throughout the whole affair, his handwriting on archive drafts of letters from both Henley and Katharine proof of his complicity, his very concealment behind the others a mark of deep-seated resentments and jealousies against his cousin. The relationship had been changing, naturally enough, since the advent of Mrs Osbourne into their lives at Grez; her flirtation with Bob was always going to make subsequent social dealings with him difficult. Bob’s marriage was another impediment, as his wife Louisa was said to dislike Louis (as Walter Simpson’s wife did too, apparently). Louis himself didn’t seem to understand why his cousin had become ‘somewhat withdrawn from the touch of friendship’44 by the summer of 1886, despite their ardent reunions in war-gaming and juvenile larks at Skerryvore, but it does seem likely to have stemmed from jealousy. Family and old friends are notoriously prone to be embarrassed, puzzled or resentful when someone they have known in obscurity becomes famous. To this, Bob had the added sting of having always been the one tipped for success; his looks and health alone might have done it, but his talents as a painter and writer always promised far more than his weedy cousin’s literary dilettantism. But here was Louis, fought over by publishers, wallowing in dollars, heir to family money over which Bob and Katharine had equal, if not better, rights. No wonder if Bob was aggrieved. And no wonder Louis had difficulty finishing his novel about ‘fraternal enemies’ hounding each other to death in The Master of Ballantrae. The plot was beginning to look horribly prophetic.
The quarrel, in effect, altered the whole structure of Louis’s life. He had previously been a man who derived a great deal of stimulus and pleasure from having a close group of friends; from now on he continued friendships with individuals in that group, but on a totally different footing and in the context of having to share them with (i.e. risk losing them to, at any minute) new, harsh enemies. If he had gone back to Europe, those last ties with Colvin, Baxter, Gosse and James might have snapped too; as it was, the distance that helped precipitate the break with Henley made it easier to sustain friendly relations with the others. A correspondence can be continued quietly, intensely even, without the knowledge of mutual acquaintances. Letters now became of enormous importance to Stevenson, and the fact that there was always a delay built into his communications with friends from this time onwards had far-reaching effects on his letter-writing style, as we shall see.
As his old friendship structures collapsed, so the domestic ones became all-in-all. Stevenson was thrown back entirely on the family group. His feelings for Fanny intensified; he also took comfort in his mother’s company. Margaret Stevenson’s unreflective and optimistic nature was balm during the crisis (which she politely ignored) and her presence was now Louis’s only link with the past. Mother and son were left alone at Saranac for long stretches of time and were very content together: without Thomas to domineer them and Cummy to show up Margaret’s inferior mothering skills, their relationship was unimpeded for the first time in decades. During one of Fanny’s many absences from Baker’s Cottage, Margaret wrote to her sister that it seemed ‘oddly like the old days at Heriot Row. Then, when “Papa dined out”, Lou and I used to indulge in little dishes we were not allowed at other times, – particularly rabbit-pie, I remember – and so we do still. I sometimes almost forget that my baby has grown up!’45 The revived relationship didn’t seem to make Fanny feel threatened; she and ‘the old lady’ (a mere eleven years her senior) had little in common but a happy tolerance of each other.
Louis had proved an inspired step-parent to Lloyd, and now committed himself even further. The apprentice writer, still only nineteen years old, had been hammering away at his comic novel during the winter and showing pages of it to his stepfather for comments and advice. Louis had written to his wife in October that some of it was ‘incredibly bad; and I don’t know yet if he has the power to better it for the press’;46 to Symonds he described it as ‘so silly, so gay, so absurd, in spots (to my partial eyes) so genuinely humorous’.47 There was no talk at this point of collaboration, or any serious expectation that Lloyd’s story could get published, but by the spring Stevenson had offered to rewrite the book. Lloyd’s account of this decision, written in 1924, gives some idea of what sort of fiction-writer Stevenson was taking on:
[A]fter a pause, he added, through the faint cloud of his cigarette smoke: ‘But of course it is unequal; some of it is pretty poor; and what is almost worse is the good stuff you have wasted [ … ] Why, I could take up that book, and in one quick, easy rewriting could make it sing!’
Our eyes met; it was all decided in that one glance.
‘By God, why shouldn’t I!’ he exclaimed. ‘That is, if you don’t mind?’
Mind!
I was transported with joy. What would-be writer of nineteen would not have been? It was my vindication; the proof that I had not been living in a fool’s paradise, and had indeed talent, and a future.48
The decision to back Lloyd’s book was of course far from ‘proof’ of the boy’s talent. If Stevenson had had any faith in his stepson’s ability to become a writer, he would have left him to make his own way in the publishing world. The decision to lend his name to The Wrong Box was tantamount to issuing Lloyd with a guest pass into the world of letters and absolving him from any further effort, and the only reason to do so was to save him having to get a real job or lead a life away from home. This would settle several issues at once, and comfort Fanny, who fussed about her son continually. The family would stick together, become a sort of writing ‘firm’: Stevenson and stepson, perhaps. The plan worked, insofar as Lloyd never had any trouble getting anything published, and was indulged in his delusion of having literary talent until his life’s end, but it did Stevenson no favours. It made the proven author look stupid to share the title page of Lloyd’s scatty, chatty novel. Sam McClure told Stevenson as much when he was shown the manuscript, provoking a frosty answer, as McClure recalled in his memoirs: ‘I thought it a good story for a young man to have written; but I told Stevenson that I doubted the wisdom of his putting his name to it as joint author. This annoyed him, and he afterwards wrote me that he couldn’t take advice on such matters.’49
Stevenson had left Bournemouth expecting to return for the summers at least, but now was in no mood to do so, even without Fanny at his side swearing never to set foot again in ‘perfidious Albion’. An alternative to Saranac was desperately needed, however, and Margaret Stevenson’s suggestion that they should all go on an extended yacht-cruise (she offered to pay half) suddenly seemed the ideal solution to the problem. The Indian Ocean, the eastern seaboard of North America and the Greek Islands were all mooted – with a view to writing a book, as planned earlier in Hyères – but the eventual destination was chosen almost by chance. Fanny, out in California, had been scouting round for somewhere to live, and also (presumably) trying to sort out the implications of her ex-husband’s disappearance. She was even thinking of buying Sam’s own ranch from his unfortunate wife Paulie, who could not keep it up and whose case ‘might have been mine – but for you’, as she wrote to her husband.50 Joe Strong’s father, who had been a missionary in Hawaii for a number of years, highly recommended a summer cruise to ‘the Gallivantings’ (Fanny’s joke generic name for Pacific island groups), as ‘they are really pastures new, and very little is known about them’, and the choice of the Pacific was clinched when she heard of a luxury schooner for hire in San Francisco which it would be possible to have complete with a captain and crew for an extensive Pacific island tour. The trip would take about seven months and would cost a fortune: £2000 – that is, about £100,000 in current money (Bob’s allowance, deemed by Louis to be enough for comfort, was £10 a quarter). Fanny telegrammed the news that the boat could be ready in ten days: ‘Reply immediately’. The drama of the quick decision was just what Stevenson needed to lift him soaringly out of his troubles on a wave of adrenalin. He cabled back by return, ‘Blessed girl, take the yacht and expect us in ten days.’
‘My dear Charles,’ he wrote to Baxter,
I have found a yacht and we are going the full pitch for seven months. If I cannot get my health back (more or less) ’tis madness; but of course, there is the hope, and I will play big. We telegraph to you today not to invest £2,000; and now I write to ask you to send same sum quam celerrimum to our account at Messrs John Paton & Co., 52 William Street, New York.
[ … ] If this business fails to set me up, well, 2,000 is gone, and I know I can’t get better. We sail from San Francisco, June 15th, for the South Seas in the yacht Casco.
*Saint-Gaudens made a small bas-relief medallion of the writer, later used as the model for the memorial to RLS in St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh. It is notable for an instance of concrete Bowdlerism, as it were, with the genteel substitution of a pen for the cigarette in the author’s hand, and a couch for the pillow-crowded bed of the original.
*The authors note that there was a five-month gap in Margaret Stevenson’s diary in the winter of 1867–68, followed by a resumption of entries in a deteriorated hand and reporting periods of impaired lucidity: ‘The brain is also weak so I often talk nonsense not being able to remember the words I want.’19
*Ernest Mehew assumes that McClure’s visit to London – undated in his Autobiography – followed his last to Saranac Lake on 19 March 1888.28 But by 19 March ‘The Nixie’ was in print and Henley’s fateful letter about it to RLS was already on its way across the Atlantic. It is less likely that McClure got to England quicker than RLS’s response, posted on 22 or 23 March, than that the date of his trip to England was towards the end of February, at which time RLS was mentioning him in a letter to Henley (letter 2016) as ‘the American Tillotson’ – exactly the same description RLS gave of McClure in his (undated) letters of introduction. In that case, when McClure went to Saranac on 19 March, it would have been after his excursion.