Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (40 page)

Richard was educated locally and at Sydenham, in Kent, among aunts and uncles. Aged sixteen, he demonstrated his independence of spirit by running away
to France with a cousin. They intended to make their way to Moscow, failing that America. Jefferies finally settled down in Swindon, where he began to write for Wiltshire newspapers, journals and magazines – mainly on local historical and natural history topics. His views were strongly Conservative, and conservationist. In 1867 he suffered severe illness and was never again to be in good health – tuberculosis had, in fact, been diagnosed in his early childhood. He married Jessie Baden, a farmer’s daughter, in 1874 and published, partly at his own expense, his first novel,
The Scarlet Shawl
. It was followed by three similar products – all conventionally romantic and aimed at the library market. They made little impression and it was some time before Jefferies could find a publisher for his more sensitive and introspective work,
The Dewy Morn
(eventually published in 1884). In it he finally hit on his distinctive mix of ruminative countryman essay and narrative plot. His essays on rural distress in
The Times
in the early 1870s were influential, and publicised his name which in turn boosted his fiction.

In 1876 he moved to London where his reprinted papers
The Gamekeeper at Home
(1878) and
Wild Life in a Southern County
(1879) were put together and published. The two strands of Jefferies’ prose – descriptive essay and fiction – merged, triumphantly in
Wood Magic
(1881). It was followed by the childhood autobiographical novel,
Bevis, the Story of a Boy
(1882) and the spiritual autobiography of adolescence,
The Story of My Heart
(1883) – his masterpiece and a work which Jefferies had been meditating for seventeen years.
After London
(1885) is a visionary work which foresees the end of urban civilisation (after a catastrophe enigmatically called ‘the Event’) and the final victory of nature over man’s depredations. The novel has found much favour with the Gaia school of contemporary ecology.

In 1881 Jefferies’ health collapsed. Tuberculosis and a painful fistula (more specifically, numerous unsuccessful operations on it) made writing an agony. The remainder of his life was passed as an invalid, in various health resorts, impecuniously. He none the less refused aid from the Royal Literary Fund, on moral principle. His last works were dictated to his wife, from his deathbed. He died of tuberculosis, at Goring-by-Sea, aged only thirty-eight, leaving his wife and three children virtually penniless.

Let them write their damn masterpieces for themselves … and let me alone…
Stevenson to his friend, peg-legged W. E. Henley, the ‘original’ of Long John Silver

Stevenson – ‘Louis’ to his friends and family – was no longer a young man when he finally got round to writing what in later life he proclaimed ‘my first book’ – by which he meant his first full-length work of fiction. It was, he believed, his destiny. ‘Sooner or later’, he recalled, ‘I was bound to write a novel. It seems vain to ask why. Men are born with various manias: from my earliest childhood, it was mine to make a plaything of imaginary series of events.’ His life, as the latest offspring of the ‘Lighthouse Stevensons’, had not followed its familial destiny. He would not, he resolved, be a marine engineer – as were his grandfather, father and uncles, whose own monuments still stand, many of them, around the treacherous coasts of Scotland (lightless houses nowadays, alas, in these days of satellite navigation).

Brilliant, sickly, hypersensitive (every biography on him has the index entry ‘nightmares’), it was not clear what Louis
would
do as he entered adulthood. What he seemed best cut out for was wandering: no nineteenth-century novelist was more footloose. But he had good excuse – from childhood his chest and lungs were chronically weak, and in the pre-antibiotic era, for those who could afford it, travel was the prescribed medicine. In his twenties he had traversed the Cévennes (astride a donkey, named Modestine) and had voyaged as far afield as North America. Stevenson was what the Californians of the time called a ‘lunger’ – forever in search of the clime which would supply the clean air which in turn might defer the death sentence that hung over him.

Stevenson first ventured into print with travel writing. It did not yield a professional income, but it sharpened his eye and was a useful apprenticeship for the bestselling fiction still to come. And it was not merely a new lease of life for his lungs which Stevenson found in foreign parts. In California, aged thirty, he took to wife an American divorcée (decently nominated ‘widow’ on the May 1880 marriage certificate) a full ten years older than himself. It was not what his guardians and friends would have advised and some told him so frankly. But in the event Louis chose wisely. Fanny Osbourne (née Van de Grift) would be a second mother, nurse and partner – and from time to time, the shrewdest of literary advisers. It is on record that Fanny, having spent some instructive time in Western mining towns, could roll her own cigarettes and was handy with a pistol.

No one has much cared to pry into what were the sexual relations between Louis and Fanny. There were no children from the marriage, but among her personal
baggage Fanny brought a ten-year-old son, Lloyd, by her first husband (the scapegrace ex-confederate soldier, Samuel Osbourne). Lloyd and his Scottish stepfather would be lifelong friends: and, in later life, literary collaborators.
Treasure Island
confirms that they were collaborators, in a sense, from the very beginning of Louis’ novel-writing.

Louis returned to his birthplace, Edinburgh, in September 1880, shortly after his hole-and-corner wedding in San Francisco. Relations with his stern father (last of the Lighthouse Stevensons – and disappointed that it must be so) had been fraught. Scottish Presbyterian fathers rarely approve of bohemian offspring with a taste for velvet jackets and
belles lettres
– and even less so when those offspring are financially dependent and in their thirties. None the less, Louis’ parents were glad to see their son settling down – even if it was with a pistol-packing, cigarette-smoking foreign woman of mature years. The Edinburgh homecoming was, as one biographer puts it, ‘the prodigal’s return’. Despite Fanny’s being embarrassingly close in age to the senior Mrs Stevenson, the two women found that a mutual concern for Louis meant that they could be civil to each other – although clearly there was a maternal tug-of-love: ‘I think it must be very sweet to you’, Fanny told her mother-in-law, ‘to have this grown-up man of thirty still clinging to you with his child love.’ There is acid in the sugar, together with the implied gloat that she, Fanny, now has Louis’ ‘man love’.

Home again, Louis wrote a play in collaboration with his friend, the one-legged W. E. Henley, about Deacon Brodie – the Edinburgh cabinet maker and, by night, housebreaker, who was eventually hanged (as his fictional descendant, Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie boasts) on a gallows of his own manufacture and, perhaps, buried in one of his firm’s patent coffins. The play did not set the Royal Mile aflame, but indicated the wryly morbid drift of Stevenson’s mind. Edinburgh was a city Louis loved but whose weather, as he liked to say, did not love him. It was never less lovable than in the historically bad years from 1879 to 1882, whose calamitous summers plunged the whole country into agricultural distress and a decade of pervasive, Hardyesque, gloom. The summer months of 1881, when
Treasure Island
came into being, were particularly ‘atrocious’ – ‘worse than March’ (Scottish March, one should add). Fanny and Louis did not have the funds to wander far, but Edinburgh – ‘auld reekie’ – had been pronounced by doctors to be hazardous for the invalid’s chest.

The cottage of a recently deceased spinster lady (‘the late Miss MacGregor’) was leased for them in Braemar from 1 August. The Highland air was smoke-free and the area, thanks to Queen Victoria’s nearby Balmoral, had become very fashionable. The Stevensons would see the monarch occasionally, accompanied by ‘red
nosed ladies in waiting’. Rail communications with Edinburgh, via Aberdeen, were excellent: Louis’ parents could drop by regularly, and did. The cottage was spacious enough for thirteen-year-old Lloyd Osbourne to spend his school holidays with them and even have his own room which, aspirant artist that the lad was, he could call his ‘studio’.

It could have been idyllic, but it was, Louis confided in a letter, ‘hell’, largely because the weather was ‘absolutely and consistently vile’. Confined to the house, he and Fanny resolved to concoct ghost stories (perhaps they fancied the ‘late Miss MacGregor’ was reluctant to depart her property and ‘walked’). It seems plausible that Poe was to hand and that Stevenson refreshed his acquaintance with ‘The Gold Bug’ – undigested lumps of which resurface in
Treasure Island
. It is similarly plausible that Lloyd, whom Fanny recalls as being ‘difficult’, passed rainy days reading Marryat, Ballantyne, Kingston and Henty – children’s adventure stories (frequently enough featuring desert islands and pirates) which Stevenson still loved. All these would eventually fuse, seamlessly, into the fabric of
Treasure Island
(1883). As he later recalled, however, Lloyd found drawing as welcome a pastime as reading. With his shilling tin of paints, he whiled away wet afternoons creating pictures to display in his ‘gallery’. As Stevenson recorded, in mid to late August, when tired of writing or reading:

I would sometimes unbend a little, join the artist (so to speak) at the easel, and pass the afternoon with him in a generous emulation, making coloured drawings. On one of these occasions, I made the map of an island; it was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance ‘Treasure Island’… as I paused upon my map of ‘Treasure Island,’ the future character of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods … The next thing I knew I had some papers before me and was writing out a list of chapters.

The map, Stevenson tells us (once told, we can never see it differently) resembled ‘a fat dragon standing up’. The fat dragon unleashed the novelist within. After batting piratical fancies to and fro with Lloyd, a tale sprang, effortlessly, from his pen at the rate of a chapter every morning. Other more serious writing chores were suspended. Louis would, he tells us, read aloud the day’s instalment ‘after lunch’ to the family. Desert island as dessert. Later chapters were read in the evening, after the candles were brought in. His voice, said Fanny, was ‘extraordinarily thrilling’. A visiting man of letters, Alexander Hay Japp, was privileged to hear the evening instalment and carried off the manuscript to London and publication.

Thereafter, Stevenson never stopped thrilling readers – most of all with
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886). Seven years later he, Fanny and Lloyd settled in Samoa, in the South Seas, where the sun shone. It was, however, Scottish rain that made him a novelist.

If only there were more respectable geniuses.
Mrs Ward complaining about ubiquitous literary immorality to her son, Arnold

A quiz:

1. Which novelist stopped British women getting the vote for ten years?

2. Which British novelist pioneered the children’s play centre system in Britain?

3. Which British novelist was instrumental in inducing America to enter the war against Germany in 1917?

4. Which novelist was instrumental in bringing down the hegemony of the circulating libraries in 1894?

5. Which woman was the most richly remunerated ‘serious’ novelist of the nineteenth century?

The answer to all of the above is ‘Mrs Humphry Ward’ – a ‘chattel’ name she was proud to bear but which has always made later admirers (alas, few of them) as uneasy as would, for example, ‘Mrs Leonard Woolf’.

Mary Arnold was born in Hobart, Tasmania. Her father, Thomas Arnold, was an inspector of schools who had emigrated in the 1840s out of missionary idealism; and her uncle was the poet Matthew Arnold. Her Arnold lineage was among the most powerful yet vexatious elements in Mary’s later career. A famous cartoon by Max Beerbohm shows her as a schoolgirl, standing in front of her ironically leering uncle, with the caption: ‘Why, oh why, Uncle Mat can you not be always
entirely
serious?’ She herself had no trouble whatsoever with seriousness. Mrs Humphry Ward (‘Ma Hump’ to disrespectful contemporaries) incarnated that ‘earnestness’
about which Oscar Wilde was so flippant. Reading Mrs Ward, Oscar said, was like a meat tea in a Methodist parlour – no green carnations.

Following Thomas’s going over to Rome in 1856 the family came over to England. His wife Julia and their three children were temporarily installed at Fox How, the Arnolds’ family home in the Lake District, while Thomas went off to Dublin to take up a tutorship secured for him by J. H. Newman at the Catholic University. Thereafter Mary boarded, unhappily, at a succession of schools. She was afflicted with violent headaches and toothaches – for which her sole remedy was dunking her head in a bucket of icy water. Punitive self-discipline was her guiding principle throughout life. In 1865 Thomas Arnold – a man who raised religious ‘doubt’ to acrobatic heights – converted back to Anglicanism so that he was able to take up a university teaching post at Oxford. Mary was finally reunited with her family in the city she revered.