The Sandstone Blog
The warm shores of womanhood
On the last stress filled day, when we finalised the last dots and commas of RLS IN LOVE, the wych elm in front of Sandstone Towers declared that spring had given way to summer by discharging untold thousands of tiny, seed bearing leaves onto the breeze. So swirlingly, chaotically thick were they in the air, I had only to hold out my hand to catch a dozen.
Stuart Campbell, the author, by now texting and phoning from his travels around St Anne’s, Lancashire, was troubling over every hyphen and space, not to mention finding a new poem (To Belle Strong: Birthday Verses) that just HAD to go in while, at the same time, John Hewer in Newtonmore was typesetting the corrections with his usual combination of indefatigable patience and steady urgency. Late in the afternoon, Thomas Gravemaker’s jacket, Stuart’s text and the carefully selected photo section were at last uploaded to the printer in Glasgow.
When all this was done I took my usual walk along the Firth. It looks as if we are in for an extended high pressure period, the sky was an almost uniform blue with just a few high clouds. If the weather had been like this when Robert Louis Stevenson was in the area he wouldn’t have run off to California. I believe it rained that week.
We have pulled out all the stops to create a wee gem of RLS IN LOVE that will find its way into the hearts of all Stevenson readers, bibliophiles everywhere, and a wide general readership. Impatient review editors are already wearing trails in their office carpets and I don’t blame them.
I hadn’t realised that Stevenson’s relations with women were so troubled or that he had been a love poet of such depth throughout his life. Ask about his achievement and most people will refer to him as a children’s author, especially for boys, although others will mention the gothic JEKYLL AND HYDE, or the historical novel KIDNAPPED. To discuss him as a poet is usually to speak only of A CHILD’S GARDEN OF VERSES. RLS IN LOVE is going to change all that.
Over the years what I have found most interesting about Stevenson is the barely recognised revolution in style that he began, or at least significantly drove forward. The control of adverbs and adjectives in service of action or, as I prefer to emphasise, movement was complete by 1881 when he was writing TREASURE ISLAND. Explanatory baggage was reduced to a minimum and, because he was not committed to publishing in serial form, coincidence as a plot device was more or less eradicated.
Dickens was eleven years dead with THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD left unfinished, and I mention Dickens in this context because I believe it is coincidence, not sentiment, nor even his cast of pathetic child-women, that was his weakest point.
Chapters 24, 25 and 26 of TREASURE ISLAND (ending with the killing of Israel Hands) are a model of action writing and I am unaware of anything as good that precedes them. No matter that Stevenson’s dates are entirely within Victoria’s reign, in terms of method he takes a greater step away from the Victorians with TREASURE ISLAND than did James Joyce with the almost unreadable, self-indulgent ULYSSES more than 25 years later and, later still, the even less comprehensible FINNEGAN’S WAKE. About this terrible book too much is said. Anyone who claims to have enjoyed FINNEGAN’S WAKE deserves to die. Anyone who has actually finished it probably has.
Hemingway cited him as an influence and, given that so much of Stevenson’s writing has been regressively sentimentalised by Hollywood, is his main route into the pared down, more essential literature of the present day. To have influenced Hemingway is to have influenced all English-language writing that followed. That said, we still have acclaimed authors who disguise their lack of substance with baffling syntax. Neither good editors nor a discriminating readership have quite managed to put them away yet. We must try harder.
Before reading Stuart Campbell’s lively text I already understood that the brilliant essays of Stevenson’s earlier years were also research and development in style, but had not seen his poetry either in that light or as such a studied reflection of his emotional life. As a love poet, indeed as a lover, he was searching from the outset, in the early years with a hardly credible self-deception. Cosseted as he had been he didn’t stand a chance, but anyone who could boast that he cut a dash with prostitutes was certainly going to get it wrong with older, unhappily married women. It was only going to be money with the first and a holiday from reality with the second.
He was also going to get it wrong when he crossed the social divide from his wealthy family to dally (to use a coyly deceiving Victorianism) with working class girls. Mostly nameless or burdened with false names in the poems, they are the characters in Stuart Campbell’s book for whom I feel most sympathy. How much hope did they invest in this young flibbertigibbet and what became of their lives after he had passed through? Unless carried in a local oral tradition this important knowledge is gone.
To mention the male members of Stevenson’s family, the marine engineers so brilliantly evoked by Bella Bathurst in THE LIGHTHOUSE STEVENSONS, is to allude to another Stevenson anomaly, the most affecting for this reader. Working as a civil engineer who wanted to be a writer I was acutely aware that the profession has delivered precious few contributors to the art of literature. Offhand I can think only of Solzhinitsyn, but I look on him as a special case. His significance as a figure of cultural resistance is in no way diminished by his later stance as a religio-nationalist nut, but deflects attention from his total lack of dramatic timing. I will take it his poetry has been lost in translation.
Technicians the Stevensons were, and yet they somehow managed to stir up a rogue artistic gene at a time when technology was advancing more quickly than ever. Dickens saw the start of it, the start of railways, the telegraph and photography. We have many more and better photographs of Stevenson than we have of Dickens for the simple reason that he chanced along a few years later.
So fine are they, many of the photographs collected in RLS IN LOVE could have been taken in the modern era. They afford a fuller, more human appreciation of Stevenson’s women (we might say the women who possessed him, to turn that apostrophe round) than words alone could manage. Located in Edinburgh, France, California and Samoa, I find these photographs almost as fascinating as the poems themselves, especially the photographs of one, particular woman. I hope I do not give too much away.
In 1880 Stevenson married Fanny Osbourne, an American woman ten years older than himself who brought two children into the marriage (she had lost a third). The daughter, Belle, was eight years younger than Stevenson and would have made a more conventional pairing at least in terms of age. Of all the book’s fascinating images it is Belle’s that have most impressed me; vivacious, strong willed, beautiful Belle who knew her mind and feared nothing, who married two men but served only one, RLS in those last, long months at Vailima, who captured the hearts of all the men she met in life and has captured at least one more from the page.