The memories of ladies are excellent repositories of personal matters, dates, and other details; a family inquiry greatly interests them, and they are zealous correspondents.
Francis Galton, Record of Family Faculties
FANNY STAYED ON AT VAILIMA, shocked, lost, helpless, for a couple of years. She had a large cement-slab tomb built over Louis’s grave, and bronze plaques designed for it by a San Franciscan dilettante called Frank Gellett Burgess, with the poem ‘Requiem’ on one side and Ruth’s speech to Naomi, in Samoan, on the other.* Her demands to the British government to annex Samoa so that the grave would become part of the Empire and Louis lie in British soil were politely ignored by the authorities.
Unsuccessful, too, were Fanny’s plans to start farming seriously, to go into production of the ingredients for making perfume. By 1897, the year that Margaret Stevenson died in Edinburgh (releasing to the heirs the rest of Thomas Stevenson’s substantial legacy), the family had decided to move back to California, where Fanny had an imposing house built for herself on the corner of Hyde Street and Lombard in San Francisco. She rented Vailima out to a man called Chatfield, editor of the Samoan daily newspaper, but got into an expensive lawsuit against him over the expenses and upkeep, and it was eventually sold (minus the site around the grave) to a German merchant for the knockdown price of £1750. When the Germans annexed Samoa in 1900, Vailima became, ironically enough, the Governor’s residence.
Lloyd, who married an American called Katharine Durham in 1896, brought his wife to live at Vailima for a brief period, and for an even briefer period served as American Vice Consul in Samoa. His first son, Alan, was born in 1897 and another, Louis, three years afterwards. Katharine, at first approved of by Fanny, fell out with the whole family one by one, went through a bitter divorce from Lloyd and spent years in contention over the ‘truth’ about RLS, publishing several books on the subject, much to her mother-in-law’s annoyance.
The wealth produced by the Stevenson literary estate, of which Lloyd received more than half, allowed him to live in the manner to which he had become accustomed; he wrote several more novels over the next fifty years, married and divorced again, bought a lot of cars, went on a lot of cruises and spent his last years living on the Côte d’Azur with a Frenchwoman called Yvonne Payerne, his junior by forty years, by whom he had another son. Among his acquaintances was Somerset Maugham and among his enthusiasms the political ideology of Benito Mussolini.1 The general effect of his post-collaboration career as a writer can be expressed math-ematically: Stevenson-plus-Osbourne, minus Stevenson, is less than Osbourne.
Belle inherited land adjoining Vailima from her stepfather, who had purchased it in 1893, but became enormously rich in later life, not so much through her connection with the Stevenson estate or her own published memoirs (including Memories of Vailima, with Lloyd, and her autobiography, This Life I’ve Loved) but from the discovery of oil in the 1920s on land owned by her then husband, Edward Salisbury Field. ‘Ned’ was also an author of sorts, and had been Fanny Stevenson’s protégé and secretary in the 1910s, possibly also her lover. He was forty years younger than Stevenson’s widow, and twelve years younger than Belle. Another protégé of Fanny, Gellett Burgess, was also thought to have been her lover in the late 1890s, but the impassioned letters that seem to prove this (wrongly identified for years in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley) are in fact from Belle. That brings to at least four the number of men mother and daughter shared.
In 1899, Graham Balfour was called to a meeting with Fanny and Lloyd in London and asked to take over from Colvin the task of writing Stevenson’s biography. Colvin had not been consulted about this, only vaguely threatened and grumbled at. The family had developed an elaborate critique of his methods and motives, the main thrust of which was that he was being too slow. But no one could have justly accused him of laziness, when within four and a half years he had not only held down his full-time job at the British Museum but overseen the publication of the Edinburgh Edition, the preparation and production of several posthumous Stevenson works, the editing of the Vailima letters and, as the archives show, prepared a good deal of background work on the biography.
Balfour was clearly aware of the fine line he would have to tread between the ‘family’ and Stevenson’s soon-to-be-ousted mentor and friend. But the offer to write the biography was irresistible; not so much for the money (£750, of which he was to get half, the family the rest) as for the chance to write the official ‘life’ of his cousin, by now one of the most celebrated writers on the planet. Henry James, who described Balfour to Gosse as ‘very lean & brown & excellent’, watched over the progress of the book with nervous interest and wrote a long appreciative letter to the author when the Life finally appeared in 1901: ‘The whole thing, the whole renewal of contact and revival of sight of him has greatly affected me,’ James said, ‘bringing back so the various wonder of him – so that one feels, as anew, stricken’:
The question really is, however, for the critical spirit, whether Louis’s work itself doesn’t pay somewhat for the so complete exhibition of the man and the life. You may say that the work was, or is, the man and the life as well; still, the books are jealous and a certain supremacy and mystery (above all) has, as it were, gone from them. [ … ] he is thus as artist and creator in some degree the victim of himself.2
James’s ‘The Real Right Thing’, written in the year that Graham Balfour was starting his book, features a novice biographer preparing to write the life of an author whose work he has idolised. The sense of the dead man’s presence haunts both him and the writer’s widow (‘a strange woman, and he had never thought her agreeable’), and the more he examines the archive, the greater is his sense of wrongdoing. In the story, the biographer eventually gives up his task, an outcome James perhaps wished in Balfour’s case.
Half a year after the publication of Balfour’s biography, Henley published a review of it in the Pall Mall Magazine that he made the excuse for a full-scale onslaught on his dead friend’s character and reputation. ‘Not, if I can help it, shall this faultless, or very nearly faultless, monster go down to after years as the Lewis I knew. [I decline] to be concerned with this Seraph in Chocolate, this barley-sugar effigy of a real man.’ The article poured scorn on Stevenson’s moralisings and vanity, even his invalidism (‘Are we not all stricken men?’), criticised his removal to America and the Pacific and judged him an over-strained stylist, a third- or fourth-class romancer. ‘At bottom Stevenson was an excellent fellow. But he was of his essence what the French call personnel. He was, that is, incessantly and passionately interested in Stevenson.’3
James wrote to Balfour of ‘the long accumulated jealousy, rancour – I mean, of invidious vanity’ in Henley’s review,4 but the backlash against Stevenson had already begun. His style was being treated as a joke among the group of friends (known to James of course) around Ford Madox Ford, who recalled ‘hearing Stephen Crane [ … ] comment upon a sentence of Robert Louis Stevenson that he was reading. The sentence was: “With interjected finger he delayed the motion of the timepiece.” “By God, poor dear!” Crane exclaimed. “That man put back the clock of English fiction fifty years.”’5
Ford’s collaborator Joseph Conrad, if present, would not have laughed loud at this joke. His and Ford’s first novel, Romance (originally called ‘Seraphina’, like the heroine of Prince Otto), had been written specifically to ‘tap the audience for Stevenson, Anthony Hope and Rider Haggard’,6 but Conrad was very touchy about both the style of the novel and the fact that it took two men eight years to write it: Stevenson, he reminded Ford, produced his masterpieces much more quickly than that. The comparison stuck in Conrad’s mind, as it was bound to: by 1900 he had been taken up by Colvin and Frances Sitwell, and was their new ‘young man’. But the last person he wanted to be associated with was the ‘conscious virtuoso’ of Vailima with his (apparently) obnoxious fluency. ‘I am no sort of airy R.L. Stevenson who considered his art a prostitute and the artist as no better than one,’ Conrad wrote to his agent in 1902.7 But the fact that he had read Stevenson with minute attention is obvious: Heart of Darkness is not just full of The Ebb-Tide, but usefully adapted Gordon Darnaway’s speech in ‘The Merry Men’ about ‘the horror! – the horror, the sea!’*
Colvin and Mrs Sitwell married on a dull, grey day in June 1903, at the Marylebone church where their late friend Robert Browning had married Elizabeth Barrett. Henry James was one of only four guests, all of whom had instructions to enter by a side door and wear everyday dress. On the way to the reception at the Great Grand Central Hotel Colvin requested the party to walk in ones and twos on opposite sides of the street, so as not to arouse the suspicions of passers-by. The hotel staff of the Great Grand Central, too, could in this way be kept from guessing that anything untowardly festive was going on. Circumspection still ruled this relationship. The groom was fifty-eight years old, the bride sixty-four.
Fanny Stevenson’s house on Hyde Street survived the fire that devastated San Francisco in 1906 after the earthquake only because concerned citizens, knowing the building to contain the papers of the dead novelist, left other fire-fighting duties to protect it. Fanny died in 1914, aged seventy-four, but Henry James had long before this noted ‘a darkening of her mind – as with a further receding from all that had lifted her life out of its native poverties’.8 ‘I am afraid you will find FS a relation of questionable joy,’ he wrote to a friend seeking an introduction to Stevenson’s widow, ‘– old, changed, barbaric, weary, queer. You come too late.’9 ‘It’s all a strange history,’ he sighed, ‘and histories never end, but go on living in their consequences.’
*Because it appears on Stevenson’s tomb, ‘Requiem’ is one of very few texts by the author easily available in Samoa. It has been set to music and taught to generations of Samoan schoolchildren, holding a place in the island’s culture something like that of ‘Greensleeves’ in ours.
*For further similarities between Heart of Darkness and ‘The Merry Men’ see Daniel Balderston, ‘Borges’s Frame of Reference: The Strange Case of Robert Louis Stevenson’ (Princeton University PhD thesis, 1981), p.161n: ‘It should be added that the relationship between Marlow and Kurtz, the fascination with the experience of one who has gone over the edge, is remarkably similar to the one between the nephew and the uncle [in ‘The Merry Men’].’