Paul Bourget writes to Stevenson
A post contributed by Katherine Ashley
In 1891, Henry James sent Stevenson a copy of Paul Bourget’s Sensations d’Italie (1891). The book gave Stevenson a ‘literal thrill’ and he quickly requested more of his works. Bourget (1852-1935) was a poet, novelist, and playwright, but today he is mainly read by literary historians for his astute study of fin de siècle cultural malaise, Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1885). He was also, like Stevenson, a traveller, and it is fitting that Stevenson’s introduction to him was via Sensations d’Italie, a book about Bourget’s travels in Tuscany, Umbria and Puglia.
The reasons for Stevenson’s enthusiasm for Sensations d’Italie are explored in an earlier blog post; a direct result of his reading is that he dedicated Across the Plains (1892) to Bourget.
To Stevenson’s consternation, Bourget did not immediately respond to the compliment. He complained to Sidney Colvin: ‘ain’t it manners in France to acknowledge a dedication? I have never heard a word from le Sieur Bourget, drat his impudence!’. He was even more to the point in a letter to James. Although the tone is good-humoured, there is an element of hurt and annoyance:
I thought Bourget was a friend of yours? And I thought the French were a polite race? He has taken my dedication with a stately silence that has surprised me into apoplexy. Did I go and dedicate my book to the nasty alien, and the ’n’orrid Frenchman, and the Bloody Furrineer? Well, I wouldn’t do it again; and unless his case is susceptible of Explanation, you might perhaps tell him so over the walnuts and the wine, by way of speeding the gay hours. Seriously, I thought my dedication worth a letter.
As it turns out, Bourget’s case was indeed ‘susceptible of Explanation’: work had prevented him from replying. The excuse seems reasonable, since Bourget spent the first months of 1892 in Rome, which resulted in his novel Cosmopolis (1893). He also published two other books around this time, La Terre promise (1892) and Un scrupule (1893).
Bourget’s contrite reply finally came, enclosed in James’s next letter to Stevenson. The manuscript is kept at Harvard University. It is transcribed and translated here.
Londres, le 3 août 93
Monsieur et cher confrère,
Je suis si coupablement en retard avec vous pour vous remercier de la dédicace du beau livre en tête duquel vous avez mis mon nom que je n’en finirais pas de m’en excuser. Le démon de la procrastination—ce mauvais génie de tous les imaginatifs—m’a joué des tours cruels dans ma vie. Il aurait commis le pire de ses méfaits s’il m’avait privé de la précieuse sympathie dont témoignait votre envoi—et venant de l’admirable artiste que vous êtes, cette sympathie m’avait tant touché. Peut-être trouverez-vous le mot de cette énigme de paresse dans une existence qui six mois durant, l’année dernière, a été celle d’un manœuvre littéraire esclavagé par un engagement imprudent—ce qui n’est rien lorsqu’on a le travail // facile, ce qui est beaucoup quand on ne peut pas « faire consciencieusement mauvais » comme disait je ne sais plus qui.
J’aurais voulu aussi, en vous remerciant, vous dire combien j’aime votre faculté et vision psychologique et comme il m’amuse en vous lisant de trouver entre ce que vous exprimez et ce que je sens sur des points analogues de singulières ressemblances d’âme. Croyez que, malgré mon silence, cette fraternité intellectuelle fait de vous un ami éloigné auquel je pense souvent. Je me réjouis de savoir par Henry James que vous avez retrouvé la santé sous le ciel où vous êtes réfugié. Que je voudrais pouvoir espérer qu’un jour nous nous rencontrerons, et que nous pourrons de vive // voix échanger quelques idées et parler des choses que nous aimons également ! Mais vous avez vraiment choisi l’asile presque inaccessible et je songe avec mélancolie que j’ai failli, voici des années, aller frapper à votre porte à Bournemouth. C’était un peu après vous avoir connu intellectuellement, et un autre démon, celui de la défiance, qui fait qu’on recule devant les rencontres les plus désirées, m’en a empêché. Voilà, Monsieur, beaucoup de diableries dans un petit billet qui devrait être toute chaleur et toute joie puisqu’il me permet de vous prouver ma gratitude d’esprit. Recevez-le comme une poignée de main bien sincère et croyez moi votre vrai et dévoué ami d’esprit.
Paul Bourget
Transcription: Katherine Ashley, Antoine Compagnon and Richard Dury
.
London, 3 August 1893
My dear fellow,
I am so shamefully late in thanking you for the dedication to the fine book at the front of which you put my name, that I’ll never be done asking for forgiveness. The demon of procrastination—that evil genie of all creative people—has played cruel tricks in my life. He will have perpetrated his worst mischief if he has deprived me of the precious sympathy demonstrated by your dedication—and coming from the admirable artist that you are, this sympathy has touched me greatly. Perhaps you’ll find an explanation for my mysterious slowness in an existence that for six long months last year was that of literary labour enslaved by unwise commitment—which is nothing when the work comes // easily, but which is much when one cannot ‘in good conscience do bad work’, as someone whose name escapes me once said.
In thanking you, I’d also like to tell you how much I appreciate your abilities and psychological vision, and how it amuses me, when reading you, to find a singular likeness of temperament between what you express and what I feel on analogous points. Know that, despite my silence, this intellectual fraternity makes of you a distant friend of whom I often think. I’m delighted to learn from Henry James that you have regained your health under the skies where you have taken refuge. How I’d like to hope that we’ll meet one day, and that we’ll be able to exchange ideas in // person and speak of things that we both love equally. But you’ve truly chosen an almost inaccessible sanctuary, and I think with wistfulness that years ago I almost knocked on your door in Bournemouth. It was shortly after getting to know you intellectually, and I was prevented by another demon, the demon of no-confidence that makes us back away from the most desired encounters. That, sir, is a lot of devilry for a short note that ought to be all warmth and pleasure, since it allows me to show my gratefulness. Please accept it as a sincere handshake indeed and consider me your true and devoted like-minded friend.
Paul Bourget
Translation: Katherine Ashley
.
See also the former post on Katherine Ashley’s recent study Robert Louis Stevenson and Nineteenth-Century French Literature
.
.
.
.
.
.
Stevenson and Dante
A post contributed by Robert-Louis Abrahamson
In his 1878 essay ‘Pan’s Pipes’, Stevenson describes those who ‘hold back the hand from the rose because of the thorn, and from life because of death’ as ‘tooth-chattering ones’. The phrase ‘tooth-chattering’ posed a problem when compiling the notes for my edition of Virginibus Puerisque. Like so many other phrases in the essays, it seemed to be lifted or adapted perhaps from the Bible, or Shakespeare, or some French idiom, but I could find no sources. Richard Dury and I pondered this problem, and the best we could come up with was: ‘an invention of Stevenson’s based on the ancient “kindly ones” (that is, the Eumenides, or Furies)’.
Nearly five years after the edition of Virginibus Puerisque came out, I can supply what I think is a better note. In Canto 3 of Dante’s Inferno, the souls waiting to be transported across the Acheron quake when they hear Charon’s words of doom (‘I come to conduct you nelle tenebre eterne, in caldo e in gelo, into eternal darkness, into fire and ice’). These are the souls who have lost all the goodness life had offered them. Forlorn and naked, changing colour, Dante shows them as they dibattero i denti, they chattered with their teeth. These, of course, are the ‘tooth-chattering ones’. In his essay about one mythic story, Pan, Stevenson draws on another myth, Dante’s journey, and if we catch the infernal allusion, we see these ‘recreant[s] to Pan’ in a much darker light.
RLS2024 ‘Intertextual Stevenson’
Ruhr University Bochum, 27–29 June 2024
Organisers: Lena Linne & Burkhard Niederhoff
In “A College Magazine”, Robert Louis Stevenson famously described his literary apprentice-ship as an exercise in imitation: “I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Baudelaire, and to Obermann.” The works that were eventually published are hardly less indebted to previous texts than his earlier attempts at literary pastiche. “No doubt the parrot once belonged to Robinson Crusoe. No doubt the skeleton is conveyed from Poe”, Stevenson admits in “My First Book”, an essay on the genesis and the sources of Treasure Island. Some critics have used these self-depre-cating comments, in particular the “sedulous ape”, to support their claim that Stevenson was a derivative writer lacking in originality. Others, by contrast, have praised him as a precursor of postmodernism who was aware of, and brilliantly exploited, the inevitable intertextuality of all writing.
Many of the papers given at this conference will explore the way Stevenson used, adopted and responded to texts by other writers, and the way other writers used, adopted and responded to texts by him. The term text will be interpreted broadly and papers on film, graphic novels etc. will be welcome.
We also invite comparative papers that engage with analogues or parallels rather than sources and influences, situating Stevenson’s works within a genre or within their nineteenth-century context (e.g. “Stevenson and Wilkie Collins as Writers of Sensation Novels”). Moreover, there is room for theoretical investigations that take their cue from essays such as “A College Magazine” or “My First Book” and analyse Stevenson’s ideas about the genesis and structure of literary texts.
Finally, we will welcome papers that engage with the multiple texts that often lurk behind what is considered a single text; those who are interested in editing Stevenson’s writings could compare different layers or versions of a text and the editorial problems resulting from them. Further creative interpretations of the conference theme are possible and welcome.
Proposals (200-300 words) for twenty-minute papers are warmly invited and should be sent to one of the organisers by November 30, 2023 (lena.linne@rub.de, burkhard.nieder-hoff@rub.de). If you have any questions, please contact the organisers.
RLS 2022, Bordeaux: videos of the talks
OPENING ADDRESSES
.
.
.
WORDS AND MEANINGS: ‘PLEASURE’, ‘DELIGHT’, ‘CHARM’ etc.
Jean-Pierre Naugrette (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3), Stevenson and the Pleasure of Nightmares.
(pleasure associated with dozing off, dreams, nightmares, and romance)
.
.
Richard Dury (Honorary fellow, University of Edinburgh), Stevenson and Charm
(charm: meaning and importance for Stevenson)
.
.
.
Linda Dryden (Napier University), ‘I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements’: The thrill of being Mr Hyde.
(‘pleasure’ etc. in Jekyll and Hyde)
.
.
Caroline Crépin (Université de Lyon 3 et Paris 10), Seeking and hiding: the linguistic concealment of pleasure in R. L. Stevenson’s work.
(Jekyll and Hyde has the greatest concentration of the word ‘pleasure’, either deficient or excessive; half the cases in Stevenson’s works are negatively connotated, associated with shame and secrecy)
.
.
Lucio de Capitani (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), ‘Greedy of all Pleasures’/ ‘Divinely Free from Malice’: Enjoyment and Ethics in Stevenson and Melville.
(erotic pleasure and learned humanity)
.
.
Caroline Howitt (Heriot-Watt University), Romance, Pleasure & Wellbeing.
(Stevenson associates pleasure with romance and style)
.
.
.
Pam Lock (Bristol University), ‘A favourable stage of drink’: Re-framing Robert Louis Stevenson’s approach to alcohol, health, and pleasure.
(ambiguous pleasures of alcohol)
.
.
.
PLEASURES OF READING STEVENSON: TEXTS AND GENRES
.
Richard Ambrosini (Roma Trè University), Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Versifier’.
(Poetry)
.
.
Burkhard Niederhoff (University of Bochum, Germany), The Pleasure of the Intertext: Aesthetic Self-Fashioning in ‘Providence and the Guitar’
(Stevenson’s play with excessive allusions)
.
.
Lena Linne (Ruhr University Bochum), ‘[A] gaming-table, a duel, and a Roman amphitheatre’? Pleasure and The Suicide Club.
(Suicide Club: delight in the frightening experience shared by reader and characters)
.
.
Andrew Brown (Société Historique de Maroilles), Robert Louis Stevenson and Pleasure in An Inland Voyage.
(reading An Inland Voyage; also In the Footsteps: N France)
.
.
Adam Kozaczka (Texas A&M International University), Reenacting the ‘Excitements’ of Eighteenth-Century Scots Law in Stevenson’s Historical Novels
(Weir of Hermiston: its vibrant picture of Edinburgh legal life and Stevenson’s debt to Henry Coburn)
.
Martin White (European Cultural Route), The Hunting of the <Snark> Skelt.
(Stevenson’s striking images and diction and clear details in writings of the East Lothian coast)
.
.
Audrey Murfin (Sam Houston State University), Pleasure for Profit: Opium in The Wrecker.
(The Wrecker: the perverse pleasure of profit and capital; Stevenson associates opium not with the Chinese but with American and European financial speculation)
.
.
Xavier Amelot et Nathalie Jaëck (Université Bordeaux Montaigne), ‘But somehow it was never Treasure Island to me.’ The elusive climactic map of Treasure Island.
(the playfully elusive map in Treasure Island)
.
Patrick Antoniol (Université de Lille 3), Plaisir d’écrire, plaisir de lire, plaisir de classe : où sont les vrais plaisirs ?
(Stevenson and Maupassant: writers in the late nineteenth-century socioeconomic context)
.
.
PLEASURE AND TRAVEL (FOR STEVENSON, FOR READERS)
Kévin Cristin (Aix-Marseille Université), An ‘invalid marching to and fro upon the roads’: pleasure and exertion in Robert Louis Stevenson’s early travel narratives.
(Stevenson’s innovative early travel writing: outdoor adventures and celebration of the intensity of experience)
.
.
Penny Fielding (University of Edinburgh), Stevenson and the Pleasures of Cosmopolitanism
(rise of cosmopolitanism and its contradictions)
.
.
Lesley Graham (Université de Bordeaux), The pleasure of following Stevenson.
(followers after Stevenson in Scotland)
.
.
Thomson Moore Prentice (independent scholar), A Tale of Two Louis — Crossing Paths in the Cevennes.
.
.
BIOGRAPHY
Ali Bacon (Independent scholar and writer), Mrs Sitwell, pleasure or pain?
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
DERIVATIVE WORKS
Gilles Ménégaldo (Université de Poitiers), Dreadful Pleasures in Some Filmic Adaptations of ‘The Body Snatcher’ (1884) and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).
(Jekyll and Hyde: film)
.
.
Jean-Paul Gabilliet (Université Bordeaux Montaigne), How Charles Crumb’s childhood obsession with Stevenson’s Treasure Island finally drove him crazy.
(Treasure Island: comic books, TV series, film)
.
.
.
Nicolas Labarre (Université Bordeaux Montaigne), Playing the classics? The strange case of the Jekyll and Hyde video game adaptations.
(Jekyll and Hyde: video games)
.
.
RLS and French literature
A post by Katherine Ashley: thoughts on her study Robert Louis Stevenson and Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Literary Relations at the Fin de Siecle (EUP, 2022)
When we look at how Stevenson interpreted French literary history, how he responded to established and emerging theories of the novel in France, and how he devoured both popular and literary French novels, we can also see how all of these things informed his own writing. From the way that he argues against Naturalism in order to reassert the importance of the romance tradition, to the stylistic apprenticeship that he undertook in earnest and in jest, we see an author developing an approach to literature that went against dominant theories of the Victorian realist novel and challenged conceptions of what “the art of fiction” might entail.
To a new generation of French writers, Stevenson became a beacon of change, presenting a pathway out of the perceived dead end that the French novel had run up against.
Naturalism, with its emphasis on scientific positivism, could only take the novel so far; Decadence, with its emphasis on aestheticism, contained the seeds of its own demise. Stevenson, translated and published in popular and highbrow venues, touted as a bestselling children’s author but also as the figurehead of a cosmopolitan revival, showed that readable page-turners could also be stylistic tours-de-force. This reminded French authors and critics that form and style could themselves be part of the intrigue and the adventure of reading and writing.
This study of reciprocal influence reveals much about the literary debates that rocked late-nineteenth-century Britain and France. To retrace the readings and the relationships – both on an individual level (Stevenson) and on a macro level (Franco-British literature) – required wading through nineteenth-century newspapers, journals, correspondence and novels. This might seem dry, but it was brought to life by the ebullient and boisterous personality at the heart of my research. Stevenson’s voice was a reminder that at the end of the day, literary history is in part the history of individuals who valued the imaginative, creative qualities of language and dedicated their lives to it. For Stevenson, being a man of letters sometimes meant “sedulously aping” literary masters, but it also involved play and fun, spontaneity and pleasure. When researching my book, it was Stevenson’s exuberant multilingual outbursts, his hilarious spoofing of contemporary writers and texts, or the silly French lessons like the one he gave to his stepson Lloyd Osbourne that brought the subject and the subject matter to life.
.
.
Twenty years ago today: RLS 2002, Gargnano
Twenty years ago today, on Sunday 25 August 2002, the Gargnano Stevenson conference began with registration from 5 to 7 p.m., followed, on the lakeside terrace, by the first aperitivo and and the first cena (pasta all’amatriciana and ‘àrista al forno’—roast pork—con salsa svizzera) in the gathering dusk of the long Gargnano twilight. It was a memorable moment, in a unique location and one of the events that contributed to the revival of academic interest in Stevenson, including the New Edinburgh Edition.
Stevenson, once the most famous and admired writer in English, from about 1918 was gradually excluded for serious consideration by Anglo-American critics. The situation continued for another seventy years: he was dismissed by F. R. Leavis and Raymond Williams and not even mentioned once in The Norton Anthology of English Literature from the first (1962) through to the seventh edition (2000).
Signs of a revival of interest started in the 1980s (with works by Roger Swearingen (1980), Paul Maixner (1981), Barry Menikoff (1984) and the influential collection of essays Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years (1988) edited by Veeder & Hirsch). In the same decade Penguin Classics and Oxford Oxford World Classics paperbacks made a number of Stevenson’s works (including the South Seas tales) easily available for the first time in decades.
With the centenary year of 1994 came exhibitions and biographies and the eight volumes of the Yale Letters (edited by B. A. Booth and E. Mehew), closely followed by Alan Sandison’s monograph of 1996, which presented Stevenson not as the tradition to be overcome by Modernism but as its forerunner.
All this activity and interest was further focussed in the milennial year 2000, associated with overviews and assessments in many fields, including the important Stirling Stevenson conference of 2000 (organized by Rory Watson and Eric Massie), which then gave birth to the Journal of Stevenson Studies (which flourished from 2005 to 2018). Stirling was intended as a single conference, but at its closing meeting Richard Ambrosini boldly stood up and proposed a biennial series, to be established by a conference in two year’s time at the Milan University conference centre on Lake Garda.
What a pleasure it was at Stirling and Gargnano to share interests and enthusiasms with a temporary gathering of like-minded others for the very first time. Stirling initiated a focussing of interest and Gargnano and the biennial conferences confirmed it.
.
Below are some photos of the event. If you wish to read my ‘picturesque notes’ on the conference, you will find them here.
Dick Ringler wrote afterwards: ‘That was quite splendid, long-to-be-savored-and-remembered. A total success. And acquiring—in retrospect—something of the quality of a dream.’
Louis, Fanny and ‘Charles of Orleans’
When Stevenson first met Fanny Osbourne and fell in love he accepted an addition she suggested to his latest essay. Her contribution was first noted when preparing the essay for the upcoming New Edinburgh Edition of Stevenson’s Familiar Studies of Men and Books.
On 30 July 1876 Stevenson reported that his essay on ‘Charles of Orleans’ was finished and had been sent off to the Cornhill. The following month he left Edinburgh for London and then Antwerp where he was to begin his Inland Voyage river and canal journey on 25 August. In a letter to Colvin written just before leaving Edinburgh he still hadn’t heard from the Cornhill about the essay (Letters 2: 178, 181).
In the same letter to Colvin he said ‘I have an ultimate purpose of reaching Fontainebleau by water’, but he in fact ended at Pontoise, about about 17 km via the river Oise to the Seine below Paris. On 13 or 14 September he wrote to his mother from Pontoise mentioning ‘a bold, desperado sort of post card from my father; anent a proof of mine; which he has carefully violated as usual’ (Letters 2: 190). This can only refer to the ‘Charles of Orleans’ proofs. The same incident is alluded to at the end of An Inland Voyage, where he says a packet of letters picked up in Compiègne ended the holiday feeling and at their next stop, ‘a letter at Pontoise decided us’, and brought the trip to an end (Tusitala 17: 88, 110).
It is not clear whether it had been agreed that Thomas Stevenson would read the proofs when they arrived, or whether he took it upon himself to open the envelope: certainly, Stevenson did not welcome this interference, and two-and-a-half years later made sure his father did not see the proofs of Travels with a Donkey (Maixner: 64).
*
After Pontoise Stevenson and Simpson continued by rail to Paris and Grez, where they presumably arrived around 16 September—along with the two canoes (Lloyd Osbourne remembers them there). And there at the artist’s inn of Chez Chevillon, Stevenson met his future wife Fanny Osbourne. We have Lloyd Osbourne’s later recollection of Stevenson arriving, vaulting though the open window from the street and being greeted with delight by the company around the dinner table. Louis was attracted to Fanny first; Fanny, we know from her letters, was attracted to Bob Stevenson, but at a certain point he told her that his cousin was more worthy of her attention. (All this un-Victorian fluidity and freedom of relationships must have seemed like a new world to Louis.)
Anyway, they fell in love, ‘step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark room’, as Stevenson puts it in ‘Falling in Love’. Lloyd Osbourne remembers how Stevenson and his mother ‘would sit and talk interminably on either side of the dining-room stove while everybody else was out and busy, under vast white umbrellas, in the fields’ (Tusitala 17: xi).
*
One day, Stevenson must have given Fanny those proofs of his latest essay, ‘Charles of Orleans’ to read. The text published in the Cornhill in December of that year contains the following passage:
The reader will remember how Villon’s mother conceived of heaven and hell and took all her scanty stock of theology from the stained glass that threw its light upon her as she prayed. And there is scarcely a detail of external effect in the chronicles and romances of the time, but might have been borrowed at second hand from a piece of tapestry. It was a stage in the history of mankind which we may see paralleled, to some extent, in the first infant school, where the representations of lions and elephants alternate round the wall with moral verses and trite presentments of the lesser virtues. So that to live in a house of many pictures was tantamount, for the time, to a liberal education in itself.
After reading the essay, Fanny suggested the parallel between knowledge conveyed through images in the Middle Ages and the images in the classroom of the infant school, and Stevenson (always interested in parallels between primitive and infant psychology) must have inserted it on the proofs.
We know this because when the essay was collected in Familiar Studies in 1882, Stevenson, replying to a letter from Alexander Japp, said, ‘The elephant was my wife’s: so she is proportionately elate you should have have picked it out for praise’ (Letters 3: 310).
Stevenson and Pacific Christianity
A post contributed by L. M. Ratnapalan
author of Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pacific: The Transformation of Global Christianity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, March 2023)
Studying Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific writings and their contribution to anthropology, I was struck by their many references to religion: local beliefs and practices, churches, nuns, pastors, and converts. The published studies of Stevenson that I read focussed almost entirely on his view of Western missionaries. The consensus was: he was a critical friend of missionaries considering them to be ‘by far the best and the most useful whites in the Pacific’, but that he found their attempts to change Polynesian habits led to consequences that were ‘bloodier than a bombardment’.(1) These studies, however, typically paid little attention to the wider world of Pacific Christianity. Above all, the indigenous Christians Stevenson wrote so much about were hardly discussed at all.
I believe that the reasons for this are at least partly cultural. Growing up in Britain, I had come to think of Christianity as a personal belief, held by a diminishing number of people, who mainly practiced it in private. But when I moved to South Korea in 2012 I was struck by the centrality of Christianity, its practices and discourses, even in a modern city like Seoul: bright crosses light up the night sky; people pray with a rosary in the park; Church attendance is important; and the most popular evening talk show featured a famous pastor as a weekly contributor.
While living in Britain, I had gained the impression that organized religion was everywhere in decline and that secularization was the dominant force; now I could see that the bigger story was not the shrinking of religious affiliation but rather the explosive growth of Christianity (and Islam). The religious picture of the world was undergoing transformation and the key agents were indigenous Christians from Africa, Asia, South America, and the Island Pacific.(2) The vast majority of the world’s Christians now live outside Europe.(3)
In most Pacific Islands comfortably 95 per cent of the population describe themselves as Christian.(3) With this understanding, I felt that I was in a better position to analyze Stevenson’s South Seas writing. A well-known image of the author and his family in Samoa will help to explain what I mean.
Seated and standing around the Stevensons, Osbournes, and their maid are Pacific Islanders, but who were they? The household retinue was composed not only of Samoans but also of Islanders from many other parts of the Pacific. For example, while the cook Talolo (seated directly in front of RLS) was Samoan, Savea (seated far left), who worked on the plantation, was probably a Wallis Islander, and Arrick (seated in front of Talolo) was from the New Hebrides. Yet though they originated from widely separated communities, they were united in a common Christian culture. The workers on the Stevenson estate reflected a mobile Pacific world in which Christianity was common currency, a situation also reflected in Stevenson’s writings, featuring the Pacific-wide movement of Islanders and religious talk.
My project developed to become a study of the impact of Pacific Islands Christianity on Robert Louis Stevenson. I argue that ‘the Beach of Falesá’ could be seen as a meditation on the social effects of missionaries in the Islands.(5) His Pacific fiction deserves reassessment, I thought, in the light of his fascination with the difference between Islanders’ adoption of Christianity as an outward façade (‘indigenization’) and a deeper cultural and spiritual engagement with it (‘inculturation’).(6) The quickness with which he was able to absorb what he experienced was remarkable. During the period 1888–94, as he moved from Pacific traveller to Samoan resident, he progressed from a somewhat sceptical assessment of the efficacy of local religious conversions to a view that mixed the personal with the political. (7) In a forthcoming book, I explore how his Scottish Presbyterian upbringing guided Stevenson’s understanding of Pacific culture, and how Pacific Islanders in turn helped to change the way that he thought about Christianity.(8)
A personal shift of viewpoint has produced these conclusions. Stevenson once wrote that ‘There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign’.(9) In the Pacific, he found that ideas such as Christianity could also cover great distances to become foreign to the traveller, and so light up ‘the contrasts of the earth’.
L. M. Ratnapalan, Yonsei University
(1) Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas (London: Penguin, 1998), 64, 34.
(2) Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith
(New York: Orbis, 1996); Jehu J. Hanciles, Migration and the Making of Global Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021).
(3) Pew Research Center, ‘Global Christianity – A Report on the size and distribution of the World’s Christian population’ (2011): https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2011/12/19/global-christianity-exec/
(4) Kenneth R. Ross, Katalina Tahaafe-Williams, and Todd M. Johnson, eds. Christianity in Oceania
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021).
(5) L. M. Ratnapalan, ‘Missionary Christianity and Culture in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Beach of Falesá”’, Religion and Literature, 53.3 (2021).
(6) L. M. Ratnapalan, ‘Half Christian: Indigenization and Inculturation in Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction’, Scottish Literary Review 12, 1 (2020).
(7) L. M. Ratnapalan, ‘“Our Father’s Footprints”: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Anthropology of Conversion, 1888-1894’, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, 11.1 (forthcoming).
(8) L. M. Ratnapalan, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pacific: The Transformation of Global Christianity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, scheduled March 2023).
(9) Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884), 113-4.
Images
Vailima family: https://www.thenational.scot/news/17887450.story-samoas-love-robert-louis-stevenson/
Upcoming volume: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-robert-louis-stevenson-and-the-pacific.html
RLS and Graham Greene
A first cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson on his mother’s side, Jane Whytt (1846–1903), was the maternal grandmother of the novelist Graham Greene (1904–1991). He was very conscious of the family connection and in an interview said that he reacted against the writing of Virginia Woolf ‘by being a storyteller. You see, my mother was a cousin to Robert Louis Stevenson and I’d like to think I’ve followed in his tradition’.(1) Leslie A. Fiedler links Greene with Stevenson, Melville and Doyle as writers who begin with ‘the Romance of the incident, the boys’ story or the thriller’, and move towards ‘evocation of myth’.(2)
In 1947 he started work on a biography of Stevenson but abandoned it because J. C. Furnas was working on a substantial biography and reassessment (Voyage to Windward, 1951); his notes for the project are now in the John J. Burns library of Boston College, and his views on Stevenson can be garnered from his Collected Essays.(4)
Re-reading The Third Man
When recently re-reading Graham Greene’s novella The Third Man (1950), written to provide a screenplay for the 1949 film directed by Carol Reed, I was struck by certain elements that reminded me of Robert Louis Stevenson. Apart from the plot bordering on popular genres (of thriller, spy and detective story); the memorable linking of setting and incident; the ambiguity of characters and uncertainty of interpretation of events, there were other elements that stood out as reminiscent.
Prose style. The prose style is different, of course, but what about Greene’s ‘the thin patient snow’ and ‘curious free unformed laughter’ (chs. 2, 8; pp. 21, 56).(3) These seemed like unexpected Stevensonian epithets (such as ‘the deliberate seasons’, ‘the outrageous breakers’).
Duality. Then there was the element of elusive duality in human personality reflected in first and family name: ‘There was always a conflict in Rollo Martins—between the absurd Christian name and the sturdy Dutch […] surname. Rollo looked at every woman that passed, and Martins renounced them for ever’ (ch. 2; p. 18). And later when Martins hesitates to tell the waiting policeman that Harry Lime was escaping from the café where he had been lured by the detective Calloway, it is explained as follows: ‘I suppose it was not Lime, the penicillin racketeer, who was escaping down the street; it was Harry’ (ch. 16; p. 113).
This alignment of personal and public name with behaviour that is instinctive and controlled, or with the personalities that are private and public reminds me of Weir of Hermiston, when Frank Innes says of Archie Weir, ‘I know Weir; but I never met Archie’ (ch. 2), as well as the idea of divided, non-unitary personality in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and elsewhere in Stevenson. Martins, like Jekyll, feels this interior struggle: ‘It needed all Martin’s resolution to stop Rollo saying […]’ (ch. 3; p. 31).
Charming villain. Perhaps Harry Lime (in Greene’s novella and in the interpretation by Orson Welles in the film) owes something to Stevenson’s characters who combine charm and a-morality (Long John Silver and James Durie).
The famous final scene in the film. There was one other thing that rang a Stevensonian bell for me, this time not from Stevenson’s writings but from writings about his life. When Calloway and Martins drive away from the first (fictitious) burial of Lime at the beginning of the story, Calloway notices that Martins does not look back, though he has just taken part in the burial of his friend:
I noticed that Martins never looked behind — it’s nearly always the fake mourners and the fake lovers who take that last look, who wait waving on platforms, instead of clearing quickly out, not looking back. (ch. 2; p. 22)
That note about platforms and ‘not looking back’ reminded me of one of Lloyd Osbourne’s most memorable pieces of writing, which Greene must have known: the final sentences in an essay describing Osbourne and his mother parting from Stevenson at Euston station to return to California in 1878:
I had no idea of the quandary my mother and R. L. S. were in […] I prattled endlessly about ‘going home’, and enjoyed our preparations, while to them that imminent August spelled the knell of everything that made life worth living. But when the time came I had my own tragedy of parting, and the picture lives with me today as clearly as though it were yesterday. We were standing in front of our compartment, and the moment to say good-bye had come. It was terribly short and sudden and final, and before I could almost realize it R. L. S. was walking away down the platform, a diminishing figure in a brown ulster. My eyes followed him hoping that he would look back. But he never turned, and finally disappeared in the crowd. Words cannot express the sense of bereavement, of desolation that suddenly struck at my heart. I knew I would never see him again. (‘Stevenson at Twenty-Eight’; Tusitala Edition, vol. 25, p. x)
This reminds me of the famous last scene in the film, a full minute of one shot: Martins leaning against a wagon in the left foreground as Anna ‘approaches from a great distance, getting progressively closer, and — without so much as a glance in his direction — finally walking past him and out of frame’ (Richard Raskin).
It’s different from the passages from Greene and Osbourne given above (walking away vs walking towards; not looking back vs not looking to one side etc.), but there is an affinity and equivalence in walking down the long platform and walking down the long avenue, in the deep feelings of bereavement preventing any conventional interaction, and in the inexorable marking of an end.
In Greene’s screenplay Rollo and Anna actually decide to drive off together and it was the director Carol Reed who insisted on this striking end (Anna unforgiving, still held by her fatal love for Lime), but it could have been suggested by Greene’s comment about ‘not looking back’.
That makes two levels of supposition: Stevenson at Euston station possibly linked to Greene’s passage about ‘not looking back’ when saying goodbye at a station platform, and this possibly linked to Carol Reed’s choice for the final scene in the film. Mmm, two imagined links could be used to connect almost anything, so let’s forget that possibility. But, just for our own amusement, let’s imagine a long one-minute single shot to conclude an imaginary film: Stevenson turning and walking, walking along the platform till he becomes very small and is lost in the crowd. Add a suitable film score. At the end, steam, released from among the wheels, gradually fills the screen.
- John R. McArthur, Graham Greene: The Last Interview (Brooklyn/London: Melville House, 2019), p. 112.
- ‘R.L.S. Revisited’, No! in Thunder (1960), qu. in Harold Bloom (ed.), Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Robert Louis Stevenson (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2005), p. 14.
- Penguin edition, 1971 and reprints.
- edited by John Maynard, 1969 (available on archive.org).
André Gide’s Stevensonian tale
This post is about Stevenson’s influence on the French novel in the early twentieth century, and in particular on André Gide’s Isabelle, a text in which such influence has so far not been noted.
A strange experience
I recently read André Gide’s novella Isabelle (first published in 1911) and, as I did so, was continually reminded of Stevenson’s long short story ‘Olalla’.
Such were the affinities in characters, settings, events and even atmosphere that I was sure that Gide must have taken Stevenson’s tale as a conscious inspiration. This conviction was strengthened by my knowledge that Gide belonged to a group of of French writers and critics before and after 1900 who admired Stevenson and saw him as a model who could help the French novel find a new way forward.
Then I learnt that Gide recorded reading ‘Olalla’ in his Journal the year after he wrote Isabelle. I fell from the clouds (as they say in Italian). Where I wanted to find affinities, had I imagined them?
From what follows the reader will be able to judge between three possible explanations: 1. I had made a pattern out of unrelated elements and mere coincidences, 2. the two works share a common influence, or 3. Gide may have read ‘Olalla’ earlier than recorded in his Journal and had indeed been inspired by it.
‘Olalla’ and Isabelle: similarities
First of all, what was it about the narrative that made me think that Gide may have been thinking of ‘Olalla’ when writing Isabelle? In both texts
- The narrator travels to and stays in a remote and decayed aristocratic residence inhabited by a family of declining fortune
- The youngest members of the family are
— a mentally handicapped boy (Felipe, Casimir), who is attracted to the narrator,
— and a young woman (Olalla, Felipe’s sister; Isabelle, Casimir’s mother), with whom the narrator falls in love and who gives the title to the story.
— There is also a priest in both (a visitor in ‘Olalla’, a resident tutor in Isabelle), who knows the family secret. - The narrator in both cases is ill-at-ease in the house,
— not being an intimate friend of the family (foreigner and paying guest in ‘Olalla’; scholar consulting a manuscript and received as a guest in Isabelle);
— he finds the house and its inhabitants strange (‘being in a strange place and surrounded by strange people’; ‘étranges êtres à peine humains’);
— the house has elements from ‘Gothic’ tales and there are frightening noises at night. - In both cases, the narrator investigates and discovers the hidden truth about the family.
- A turning point in both stories is when the narrator sees a portrait of the previously unseen young woman and becomes obsessed with it to the point of falling in love, an attraction which in both cases is ultimately frustrated.
‘Olalla’ and Isabelle: differences
There are important differences too:
- An important theme in ‘Olalla’, absent in Isabelle, is the inherited degeneracy shared by all members of the family (except by Olalla herself, though she fears it will develop or be passed on to a child).
- ‘Olalla’ is more ‘Gothic’: the narrator hears terrible screams in the night and finds himself locked in his room. In despair, the he puts his hand through a window and his wrist bleeds copiously; when he seeks help from the Senora, she leaps at the bleeding wrist and bites it to the bone.(1)
- in Isabelle the main theme is that of the narrator’s self-deception: his idealistic and romantic view of Isabelle at the end is destroyed by crude reality: she is manipulative and mendacious (it’s a kind of Northanger Abbey in which events are expected by the protagonist on the basis of his reading but then turn out very differently).
- It is also more realistic and Gide works in several autobiographical elements
- It includes a number of metaliterary references and an outer frame to the main story,
On that last point, any influence of Stevenson in Isabelle is not going to be the only one, in view of Gide’s unusually large range of literary influences here and in all his writing, and of the way that — like Stevenson — he was constantly experimenting with different kinds of texts.
The following intertextual models have been identified for Isabelle: Chateaubriand’s René, Maupassant, Turgenev’s Virgin Soil, Laclos’ Les liaisons dangereuses, Hoffman’s The Sandman, the writings of Francis Jammes (friend and character in the frame narrative), Paul Bourget’s Le disciple, and Mozart’s The Magic Flute.(2)
So any influence of ‘Olalla’ will be only one of a whole range of others.
‘Olalla’ and Isabelle: shared influences
Some of the similarities between the two works are undoubtedly due to shared influences:
- The gothic novel in which the ingénu visitor gradually discovering the secrets of an isolated house
- Novels of the governess or tutor in an aristocratic mansion, their intermediate status, relations with the family members and romantic attractions
- Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ in the gothic novel tradition; the decadent family and family home.
However, the composition of the family, the function of the portrait and the frustrated love story do seem strangely similar.
Other Stevensonian echoes in Isabelle
But right from the first chapter I noted what seemed to me a striking and pictorial incidents where the reader can picture the disposition of characters at an important moment — of the kind that Stevenson discusses in ‘A Gossip on Romance’ and that we typically remember from his narratives. In the introductory frame-narrative chapter, the unnamed narrator and and Francis Jammes are taken by Gérard Lacase to visit a nearby abandoned château, but then get separated from him during the exploration. Here it is in my translation:
We caught up with Gérard on the second floor near an unglazed corridor window through which a cord hung down from outside; it was a bell rope, and I was about to give it a gentle pull, when I felt my arm seized by Gérard; his movement, rather than check mine actually amplified it: a wild knell rang out, so close, so violent, that it made us painfully start; then, when it seemed that silence had closed round us again, two pure notes sounded again, at an interval, more distant. I had turned round towards Gérard and I saw his lips were trembling.
Isabelle, unnumbered introductory chapter
As I read, I came across other moments that seemed similarly Stevensonian. In the middle of a scene between Isabelle and her indulgent aunt (observed unseen by the narrator), Isabelle’s disapproving mother makes a theatrical entrance:
The baroness appeared in the doorway, rigid, in a low-cut gown, with rouged cheeks, in full formal array, and her head surmounted by a sort of plume of marabout stork feathers. She held aloft as best she could a large six-branched candelabra, all candles lit, which bathed her in a flickering light, and dropped wax tears on the floor.
Isabelle, ch. 6
This seemed to me a clear hommage to the scene between Flora and St Ives interrupted by the stately entrance of Flora’s aunt:
The words were still upon my lips when the door opened and my friend of the gold eyeglass appeared, a memorable figure, on the threshold. In one hand she bore a bedroom candlestick; in the other, with the steadiness of a dragoon, a horse-pistol. She was wound about in shawls which did not wholly conceal the candid fabric of her nightdress, and surmounted by a nightcap of portentous architecture.
St Ives, ch. 9
Other echoes I perceived may have been due to my pattern-making. For example, the scene between Isabelle and the coachman’s wife in the dark vestibule, observed but not heard by the narrator, in which the latter, holding a lantern, advances and the former retreats while ‘the lantern moved back and forth projecting leaping shadows’ (La lanterne s’agita projetant des ombres bondissants; ch. 6), reminded me of Stevenson’s penchant for describing such ‘dancing shadows’ (as he puts it in The Wrecker), for instance in ‘A Lodging for the Night’, where he writes: ‘there was no light in all the neighbourhood but a little peep from a lamp that hung swinging in the church choir, and tossed the shadows to and fro in time to its oscillations’.
But there was a more general influence of Stevenson in the narrative presented as an adventure, about which I will say more in the following section.
Roman d’aventure — not exactly ‘adventure novel’
After about 1890 it was generally felt that the French Realist or Naturalist novel (which had dominated the literary scene for several decades) had run its course. The need to explore aspects of fictional narrative apart from the naturalist world view (of the individual at the mercy of oppressive and mechanical social forces) was debated in the French periodical press by young writers and critics, especially a group around André Gide and the Nouveau revue française (which he was closely associated with from 1909). For them, a precious indication of how to move forward could be found in the example of Stevenson, Conrad and the ‘roman d’aventure’.(3)
The precise interpretation of this term was influenced by Marcel Schwob’s preface-manifesto to his collection of short stories Cœur double (1891), in which he wrote:
If the literary form of the novel persists, it […] will undoubtedly be an adventure novel in the broadest sense of the word, the novel of the crises of the inner world and the outer world
By roman d’aventure the writers of the period did not mean a sensational adventure tale, but a narrative, distinct from the naturalist novel, with an ethical core of choice and conduct (as in Stevenson and Conrad), and a novel that also highlights the importance of the imagination in human perception and understanding for both writer, characters and reader.(4)
To get an idea of how far all this was from any simplistic yarn of derring-do, it’s enough to look at two remarkable declarations by Jacques Rivière, author of the study-manifesto ‘Le roman d’aventure’, which first appeared in Gide’s Nouveau revue française in three parts in 1913. The first is at the very end of his study when Rivière finally gives an example of what he means by a roman d’aventure — and it is the scene from Stevenson’s Ebb-Tide when the schooner enters the lagoon of the pearl island. This episode involves not only anticipation and suspense but also a quickening of sense perceptions and a density of mental activity on the part of the observer Herrick, reflected in the prose, and responded to by the reader. When reading this ‘I feel my life expanding to infinity’, Rivière comments.(5)
The second is in a letter of 1923, when Rivière was in the middle of editing Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, in which letter he says that his 1913 study now ‘appears to me today as an announcement and almost a prophecy of a work that was to appear at the end of the same year: the work of Proust, to be precise’.(5) Here he refers to Du côté du chez Swann, the first volume of the Recherche, published in 1913, and — although this might be difficult to believe — seen as a realization of the roman d’aventure !
If we think back to Rivière’s example from The Ebb-Tide, however, the affinity becomes clear. At the same time clearly the word ‘aventure’ had become a catchword to identify the new kind of French fiction: in the text of Isabelle it stands out as the last word of the very first sentence. And in Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes (also from 1913 and another example of the new modern novel), ‘nos aventures’ is isolated at the end of a periodic sentence closing the fourth paragraph, chapter 8 is titled ‘L’Aventure’, and the word ‘nouvelles aventures’ are the last words of the whole text.
Stevenson, Gide, ‘Olalla’ and Isabelle
Gide wrote Isabelle in 1910 and it was published in the Nouveau revue française in 1911. According to his Journal he read ‘Ollala’ in the summer/autumn of 1911 and re-read it again in The Merry Men in 1913.(6)
It is possible, however, that he had read it earlier, in the translation by Alfred Jarry published in La Vogue in 1901. This magazine, together with the Mercure de France (where Gide published most of his books between 1897 and 1911) published many first translations of Stevenson in this period. As a reader of literary magazines, a member of a network of Parisian literary friends, and a writer interested in Stevenson, it is probable that Gide read this translation of ‘Olalla’ in 1901. And he had certainly read ‘Will o’ the Mill’ in the same magazine in Schwob’s translation in 1899.(7)
This possible (or probable) early reading could lie behind the interesting parallels between ‘Olalla’ and Isabelle. In any case Gide had read many works by Stevenson before writing his novella and its elements of roman d’aventure and the echoes of Stevenson’s style mentioned above seem clear influences of a writer who Gide admired and saw as a valuable model for renewing the French novel. And although Isabelle has a good number of other literary references and influences, I think that Stevenson and ‘Olalla’ should be numbered among them.
NOTES
(1) For Gothic and other influence on ‘Olalla’, see Hilary J. Beattie, ‘Dreaming, doubling and gender in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson: The strange case of “Olalla” ‘, Journal of Stevenson Studies 2, pp. 16–17.
(2) Doris Y. Cadish, ‘Ironic Intertexts: Echoes of René in Gide’s Isabelle’, International Fiction Review, 121 (Jan 1985), 37–9; Émile Lavielle, ‘L’intertexte d’Isabelle’, Bulletin des Amis d’André Gide, 86–87 (avril-juillet 1990), pp. 307–320.
(3) Fitzpatrick, ʻR. L. Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and The Adventure Novel: Reception, Criticism and Translation In France, 1880-1930ʼ, Thèse de doctorat, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, 2015, pp. 247, 382, 425. For Gide’s reading of Stevenson, see Fitzpatrick, pp. 425–8. The ‘Manifeste des cinq’ against Zolian Naturalism was published in the Figaro 18 Aug 1887.
(4) For articles in the Nouveau revue française on the roman d’aventure, see Fitzpatrick, pp. 425–56, 546–49. For the way Schwob’s thoughts isnpired the Nrf critics, see Aleksander Milecki, ‘ “Isabelle” ou le refus du roman’, Bulletin Des Amis D’André Gide,18. 86/87 ( 1990), pp. 226–7.
(5) For more on this, see Richard Ambrosini, ‘The Miracle: Robert Louis Stevenson in the History of European Literature’, In Ambrosini and Dury (eds.) (2009), European Stevenson (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), pp. 138–9.
(6) André Gide, Journal I : 1887-1925, ed. Eric Marty (Gallimard, 1996), pp. 682, 745 (as cited by Fitzpatrick, p. 428).
(7) He mentions it in ‘Lettre à Angèle’, published in L’Ermitage, 10 May 1899 (cited by Fitzpatrick, p. 206 n).
EdRLS 