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 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.

Harvard, Widener Library, 37 CFR 201.14

 
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

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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

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See also the former post on Katherine Ashley’s recent study Robert Louis Stevenson and Nineteenth-Century French Literature

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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 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.

Table of contents, Robert Louis Stevenson and Nineteenth-Century French Literature

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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.

André Gide looking Stevensonian in the 1890s

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.

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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).