‘A Whole Province of One’s Imagination’On the friendship between Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson

I came to Henry James through a misprint, and to Stevenson through James. The misprint was in the version of James’s 1884 essay ‘The Art of Fiction’ that I read as an undergraduate in Fisher Library at the University of Sydney in the mid-1980s. In the essay James enjoins the aspiring novelist, ‘If you must indulge in conclusions, let them have the taste of a wild knowledge.’ I was twenty-one, and the idea of wild knowledge was very much to my taste. It decided me – or so I like to think – to become a serious student of James’s fiction. Years later, working from another edition of his essays, I came across the true wording: merely a wide knowledge. I didn’t know whether to be appalled or amused – for this I chose to follow the Master? Now, I think that misprint was like the foreign substance in the salt Dr Jekyll used for his experiments, ‘that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught’ and enabled the creation of his monstrous other self. James, who understood the relation between contamination and creativity, wrote of ‘the virus of suggestion’ from which fictions grow. That phrase he never wrote, composed by an inattentive typesetter, acted as such a virus of suggestion in my imagination. In the end it was not so wide of the mark, for it gave me not only James, but Robert Louis Stevenson as well, and through him a story of wild knowledge after all.

I turned from ‘The Art of Fiction’ to Stevenson’s response, published three months later, ‘A Humble Remonstrance’. Until then I had never read a word by Stevenson; Treasure Island and Kidnapped had stood neglected on my childhood bookshelf as I devoured Little Women and What Katy Did. It was astonishing that this author of boys’ adventure stories should have been engaged in a critical exchange with Henry James. The essay, when I read it, was even more surprising, for it anticipated much of the twentieth century’s work on narrative; you can hear in it the voices of Barthes, of Bakhtin, of Hayden White. ‘The art of narrative, in fact, is the same, whether it is applied to the selection and illustration of a real series of events or of an imaginary series.’ ‘So far as it imitates at all, it imitates not life but speech… The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are forced and material, as a shoe must still consist of leather, but by its immeasurable difference from life, which is designed and significant, and is both the method and the meaning of the work.’ When I later learned how highly Stevenson was esteemed by modernist and postmodernist writers such as Wilde, Nabokov and Borges, it made sense: like them, he was a fabulist, who embraced artifice and regarded literary realism as a fallacy.

James was impressed by ‘A Humble Remonstrance’. He had met Stevenson before, in 1879, and found him ‘a pleasant fellow, but a shirt-collarless Bohemian and a great deal (in an inoffensive way) of a poseur’; Stevenson, for his part, then thought James ‘a mere club fizzle…and no out-of-doors, stand-up man whatever’. But after reading Stevenson’s ‘genial rejoinder’ to his article, James wrote him a warm and surprisingly personal letter, praising his work and engaging to continue their critical dialogue. Stevenson responded in kind, with the additional promise of ‘a fair bottle of claret’ if James should care to visit him. They met in Bournemouth in April 1885; Stevenson had just moved into a new home, ‘Skerryvore’, and James was accompanying his invalid sister Alice on a visit to the coastal resort. The friendship begun in books and letters flourished face to face. Fanny Stevenson’s letters give the impression that James came to them almost nightly for ten weeks, and he was a regular guest over the next two years. Stevenson’s American wife delighted in her distinguished compatriot, and even purloined a glove James left behind one night, as a memento; it is now in the Silverado Museum at St. Helena in California. Stevenson’s pleasure, too, is evident from his letters: ‘Now, my dear James, come – come – come. The spirit (that is me) says, come; and the bride (and that is my wife) says, come; and the best thing you can do for us and yourself and your work is to get up and do so right away.’ Stevenson’s enthusiasm for his new friend spilled over into verse, written in the style of the pre-Romantic poetry of courtesy and occasion. In the poem ‘Henry James’ he celebrated the novelist’s heroines but noted that ‘he, attended by these shining names, / Comes (best of all) himself – our welcome James.’ An antique mirror given by James became a device for expressing Stevenson’s feelings in another poem:

Now with an outlandish grace,
To the sparkling fire I face
In the blue room at Skerryvore;
And I wait until the door
Open, and the Prince of Men,
Henry James, shall come again.

In later years James cast an extraordinary sentimental glow about the memory of these visits. An honoured chair, a circle of light, and a warm fireside came to represent Skerryvore in James’s imagination, constituting a privileged scene of friendship, art and conversation. James never forgot it, nor did he cease regretting its loss. The fondness and admiration he developed over the Bournemouth years for ‘the bright particular genius’ he had befriended is also made clear in the first of his two critical essays on Stevenson, written in 1887. It’s a warm, generous, funny essay, with an exuberance of tone that James readily attributed to the inspiration of his subject. Stevenson confided to a friend, ‘James’s manner in these critical papers is my despair. I cannot conceive anything more essentially happy; and I do not like to think of my own big, red, Scotch knuckles, after I have seen him toss his lace and flash his diamonds.’ But in the essay James presented Stevenson as a fellow dandy, a creature of dress and manner, the Cyrano de Bergerac of modern literature. ‘He is as different as possible from the sort of writer who regards words as numbers, and a page as the mere addition of them…the dictionary stands for him as a wardrobe, and a proposition as a button for his coat… Mr. Stevenson does not need, as we may say, a petticoat to inflame him: a happy collocation of words will serve the purpose, or a singular image, or the bright eye of a passing conceit, and he will carry off a pretty paradox without so much as a scuffle. The tone of letters is in him  –  the tone of letters as distinct from that of philosophy, or of those industries whose uses are supposed to be immediate.’

The Skerryvore era ended in August 1887, when the Stevensons left England for America. James came to farewell them at their London hotel with a case of champagne for the voyage. He expected to see his friend again within a year. With scores of ships leaving every week for New York, Stevenson characteristically managed to get himself booked on one carrying few passengers and an improbable freight of hay, matches, horses and monkeys. The combustible cargo was noted with relish in his letters to friends – Stevenson was never happier than when predicting his own violent death – and the animals brought a welcome note of the circus and the jungle. The stallions winked through the portholes at the dining passengers and the apes coupled enthusiastically on deck – ‘It is interesting to see the work of Natural Selection’, Stevenson noted wryly.  From his point of view, the voyage was entirely successful. This was a man who had chosen to honeymoon in a derelict silver mine infested with rattlesnakes; so too this new adventure was eccentric, incongruous, inconvenient and dangerous. Perfect. 

In 1887–88 a bemused Henry James found himself writing to his friend in the very environment he had himself so emphatically rejected for Europe, and for art. It was all only too familiar – New York, Newport, the rural upstate settlements – and while he complained of the lack of detail, and even legible place-names, in Stevenson’s letters, he could easily evoke the conditions of Stevenson’s life in America.

Wondrous seems to me the fate that leads you to the prospect of wintering at – well, wherever you are… May you find what you need – white, sunny winter hours, not too stove-heated nor too pork-fed, with a crisp dry air and a frequent leisure and no desperation of inanition. And may much good prose flow from it all. I wish I could see you – in my mind’s eye: but que dis-je? I do – and the minutest particularities of your wooden bower rise before me. I see the clap-boards and the piazza and the door-step and the door-handle, and the road in front and the yard behind. Don’t yearn to extinction for the trim little personality of Skerryvore. 

The pork, the stove, the clapboards and the yard  –  every detail attests to James’s sense of the imaginative limitations, the deadening lack of ‘personality’ of the American scene in which his friend had so eccentrically chosen to place himself. Still, the cold dry air of the Adirondacks was supposed to make the consumptive Stevenson well, and then he would come back to England, and everything would be again as it was, and the two friends would meet at Bournemouth and resume their conversation about the art of fiction and the life of art.

But the life of art was not enough for Stevenson; his face was turned westward, and the following year he announced plans for his first Pacific cruise, stressing the remote, indefinite itinerary, and airily referring to the possibilities of shipwreck and a watery grave.

This was too much for James:

You are too far away – you are too absent – too invisible, inaudible, inconceivable. Life is too short a business and friendship too delicate a matter for such tricks – for cutting great gory masses out of ’em by the year at a time. Therefore come back. Hang it all – sink it all and come back. A little more and I shall cease to believe in you: I don’t mean (in the usual implied phrase) in your veracity, but literally and more fatally in your relevancy – your objective reality. You have become a beautiful myth – a kind of unnatural uncomfortable unburied mort. You put forth a beautiful monthly voice, with such happy notes in it – but it comes from too far away, from the other side of the globe, while I vaguely know that you are crawling like a fly on the nether surface of my chair. Your adventures, no doubt, are wonderful; but I don’t successfully evoke them, understand them, believe in them… This is a selfish personal cry: I wish you back; for literature is lonely and Bournemouth is barren without you. Your place in my affection has not been usurped by another – for there is not the least little scrap of another to usurp it.

The letter finishes: ‘I follow all with an aching wing, an inadequate geography and an ineradicable hope. Ever, my dear Louis, yours, to the last snub – Henry James.’

Stevenson’s reply, written eight months later, brought even worse news: he would make another cruise, and stay away another year. Letters from friends at home ‘will follow and find me, if I am to be found’, and if not, ‘we shall be at the bottom of the sea, where no post office clerk can be expected to discover us, or languishing on a coral island, the philosophic drudges of some Barbarian potentate: perchance, of an American missionary.’

It was all splendid fun to Stevenson: it amused him to dice with death in squalls or be lost among unmapped islands, instead of coughing up blood in bed. But James was not amused. ‘This is really dreadful news, my dear Louis… I miss you shockingly – for, my dear fellow, there is no one – literally no one; and I don’t in the least follow you – I can’t go with you (I mean in conceptive faculty and the “realising sense,”) and you are for the time absolutely as if you were dead to me – I mean to my imagination of course – not to my affection or my prayers.’ Yet James genuinely delighted in reports of his friend’s renewed health, and would accept ‘anything’ in the way of separation now, as the price ‘for conversation, later. It’s in the light of unlimited conversation that I see the future years, and my honoured chair by the ingleside will require a succession of new cushions.’ And so it went on, the yearning anticipation of the ever-deferred return. News that the Stevensons had bought land in Samoa and proposed to settle there was a blow, but James couldn’t ‘believe in’ that any more than he could in the rest of the Pacific adventure and, anyway, a summer visit to England was still in prospect. When that was postponed by three months, James’s disappointment found expression in an uncomfortably eroticised attempt at humour. ‘This fondest of hopes of all of us has been shattered in a manner to which history furnishes a parallel only in the behaviour of its most famous coquettes and courtesans. You are indeed the male Cleopatra or buccaneering Pompadour of the Deep – the wandering Wanton of the Pacific.’

Finally, in August 1890, Stevenson told him the truth: ‘I do not think I shall come to England more than once, and then it’ll be to die.’ He was blunt. ‘Am I very sorry? I am sorry about Henry James…about four more people in England, and one in the States. And outside of that, I simply prefer Samoa. These are the words of honesty and soberness.’ It wasn’t just the climate; having considered what Europeans had to offer the people of the Pacific, he had already pretty much arrived at the position he would hold for the rest of his life, that ‘civilisation is rot’. This was a point of view James could hardly be expected to share – his had been an eastward journey into civilisation. He was silent for months, then in the new year sent Stevenson a long, warm letter, followed soon after by another from ‘ever your faithfullest Henry James’. I think he had received a terrible shock, absorbed it, accepted his loss, and resolved to make the best of the only conditions on which the friendship could be sustained.

It was hard. The keynote of James’s side to the correspondence, established in his first response to Stevenson’s Pacific travel plans, held: he could not ‘follow’ or ‘realise’, imagine or believe. ‘I try to see you all,’ he wrote to Stevenson in Samoa in 1891, ‘in what I fear is your absence of habits, as you live, grouped around what I also fear is in no sense the domestic hearth. Where do you go when you want to be “cosy”?  –  or what at least do you do? You think a little, I hope, of the faithful forsaken on whose powers of evocation, as well as of attachment, you impose such a strain.’ It’s probably a good thing James wasn’t able to see the Stevensons in their first, makeshift home on their property, Vailima, as his friend Henry Adams did when he visited Samoa with the artist John La Farge in 1890.

At last we came out on a clearing dotted with burned stumps exactly like a clearing in our backwoods. In the middle stood a two-storey Irish shanty with steps outside to the upper floor, and a galvanised iron roof. A pervasive atmosphere of dirt seemed to hang around it, and the squalor like a railroad navvy’s board hut. As we reached the steps a figure came out that I cannot do justice to. Imagine a man so thin and emaciated that he looked like a bundle of sticks in a bag, with a head and eyes morbidly intelligent and restless. He was costumed in very dirty striped cotton pyjamas, the baggy legs tucked into coarse knit woollen stockings, one of which was bright brown in color, the other a purplish dark tone.

Like Henry James, Henry Adams was a Boston Brahmin (only more so) and he was utterly unable to comprehend the appeal, not of the Pacific itself, but of the particular ways in which Stevenson had chosen to experience it. ‘Stevenson gloats over discomforts and thinks that every traveller should sail for months in small cutters rancid with cocoa-nut oil and mouldy with constant rain, and should live on coral atolls with nothing but cocoa-nuts and poisonous fish to eat.’ Similarly mystified by Stevenson’s tastes, although less of a snob, James would presumably have shared Adams’s perspective, but not his tone – he was always generous towards Stevenson’s eccentricities, and he already knew him to be ‘a queer, unique, dishevelled, undressed, nondescript, fascinating, loveable fellow’, as he had described him to the writer Owen Wister in 1887. Still, the scene described by Adams can hardly have fitted his definition of ‘cosy’.

Nor, I suspect, would two other scenes that epitomise the Stevensons’ life in the Pacific. The first is a picture of Louis and Fanny Stevenson with their friends Nan Tok and Nei Takauti, taken at Butaritari in the Gilbert Islands in 1889. The two women are seated and the two men half-recline on the ground, surrounded by luxuriant, jungle-like vegetation. Fanny and Nei Takauti are holding hands. The men gaze at the camera, Stevenson with something of the look of a young Donald Sutherland. Barefoot and flower-garlanded, they look as if they’ve just come from the Glastonbury festival, or are posing for the cover of an album by the Mamas and the Papas. The second picture shows the Vailima establishment in 1892. By this time the household had expanded to include Stevenson’s mother, his wife’s children by her first marriage, her daughter’s husband and son, and a number of servants and farm workers. Stevenson’s hair is short and neatly combed, and his mother looks like a thin Queen Victoria. It could be a kind of colonial fantasy: ‘planter’s family and retainers’. Yet there are strange touches. The Samoan cattleman Lafaele leans familiarly towards Stevenson’s step-daughter, his knee pressed against hers. Her husband, at the far left of the picture, dressed in a pariu, with a parrot on his shoulder, looks like the disreputable beachcomber he in fact was. At the right Tomasi, one of the cooks, wears a garland and wields an axe, a living embodiment of the European’s desire for and fear of the primitive. The picture suggests the crazy, carnivalesque elements in the Vailima enterprise. Alternative caption: ‘civilisation is rot’.

If James had seen these photographs, I’m not sure whether it would have made things better or worse. Perhaps it would have made no difference. With regard to Stevenson’s Pacific life, James walked in darkness or at least dimness to the end. As an antipodean I find this intriguing, for it is just at the point where Stevenson dropped off James’s radar screen that he appears on mine (‘this is like to be our metropolis’, he wrote in Sydney in 1890, taking his bearings in the new, southern world he had adopted). But James’s problem was not just geographical. What was most confusing and alienating about the new Stevenson was that, with ‘a health astonishingly reinstated’, he threw himself into a range of activities beyond art. He rode and sailed, cleared and planted his land, managed a farm and – almost beside himself with excitement – prepared to defend it during the Samoan war of 1893. He also became a player in island politics, entering into disputes between the white residents, European officials and various native factions, and, in letters to the press and politicians, becoming a trenchant critic of colonial rule. His efforts may have made him beloved in Samoa; they certainly brought him no favour in England, exasperating both the Foreign Office, which did not appreciate his ‘meddling’, and his literary friends (James included) who thought he was wasting time that should have been spent on another Treasure Island. Oscar Wilde later summed up the general feeling about Stevenson’s immersion in contemporary Samoan life: ‘I see that romantic surroundings are the worst surroundings possible for a romantic writer. In Gower Street Stevenson could have written a new Trois Mousquetaires. In Samoa he wrote letters to The Times about Germans.’

When Wilde had Stevenson’s posthumously published Vailima Letters sent to him in Reading Gaol he complained that the Stevensons’ domestic situation in Samoa was too solidly specified. But for James it all remained unreal, and when he thought of the Pacific it was in a jumble of clichés. He confused Polynesians with American Indians and imagined his friend decked out in ‘paint and beads and feathers.’ He persistently pictured Stevenson living among cannibals, by ‘coral strands’ and ‘sapphire seas’, and this exoticising impulse reveals James’s confirmed metropolitanism as surely as his recurrent offers to have food supplies sent out to Stevenson from Fortnum and Mason’s. Yet there was no lack of effort to connect. There is something absurd and touching in James’s not very successful attempts to convert the alien Pacific world into metaphors for art and criticism. ‘I hope your pen, this summer, will cleave the deeps of art even as your prow, or your keel, or whatever’s the knowing name for it, furrows the Pacific flood.’ ‘Most refreshing, even while not wholly convincing, was the cool trade-wind (is the trade-wind cool?) of your criticism of some of ces messieurs.’

James made a kind of reverse cargo cult of the artifacts Stevenson sent him in 1891, thanking him for ‘the beautiful strange things you sent me and which make for ever in my sky-parlour a sort of dim rumble as of the Pacific surf. My heart beats over them – my imagination throbs – my eyes fill. I have covered a blank wall of my bedroom with an acre of painted cloth and feel as if I lived in a Samoan tent’. I have only seen the tapa-covered walls of Stevenson’s Samoan home, Vailima, in postcards, but I have stood, marvelling, before the tapa wall-hangings in Jack London’s house in California: their effect is both modern and ‘primitive’, and the last thing one would expect to find in Henry James’s bedroom. Even more incongruous is the report from Graham Balfour (Stevenson’s cousin, who had lived for some months at Vailima and travelled extensively in Samoa before he met James in London in 1894) that Henry James ‘could take a First in any Samoan subject’. The idea is utterly improbable, but poignant too  –  the great novelist resorting to undergraduate-style research in an attempt to supply something of the wild knowledge that eluded him.

These attempts at sympathetic projection and imaginative connection have a gallantry which is missing from Stevenson’s attitude towards James’s world. ‘And anxious friends beg me to stay at home and study human nature in Brompton drawing-rooms! Farceurs! And anyway you know that such is not my talent. I could never be induced to take the faintest interest in Brompton qua Brompton or a drawing-room qua a drawing-room.’ This scornful dismissal of metropolitan life and art was tactless, for it condemned not just James’s way of life, but the artistic material he was working with most intensely at this time. James, you might say, had set himself to ‘study human nature in Brompton drawing-rooms’, or at least in those of Mayfair, Holland Park and St John’s Wood, with such studies of English manners and morals as ‘A London Life’ (1888), The Tragic Muse (1890) and ‘The Marriages’ (1891). (He set ‘The Middle Years’ (1893) in Bournemouth, as if to show that he could do something with it, if Stevenson could not.) 

Yet if Stevenson was impatient of James’s town life, he was unreservedly receptive to the art it produced. It was part of the libertarian credo underlying ‘The Art of Fiction’ and ‘A Humble Remonstrance’ that any subject was worthy of artistic treatment, and only the treatment should be judged. As in the 1880s when Stevenson and James had represented the opposing schools of romance and realism in English criticism, so in the 1890s when they lived in different hemispheres, each was warm in praise of the other’s technical handling of subjects which held, for himself, no intrinsic interest. Stevenson read James’s short story ‘The Solution’ in the ‘excellent civilised, antipodal club smoking-room’ of the Union Club in Sydney and wrote to him of its ‘exquisite art’. James was gratified by this response to his ‘study in the painfully-familiar’: ‘Charming and delightful to me to see you with a palate for my plain domestic pudding, after all the wild cannibal snacks that you have learned to know.’ James thought Stevenson’s novella ‘The Beach of Falesà’ represented ‘an art brought to a perfection’, in which treatment triumphed over subject: ‘Primitive man doesn’t interest me, I confess, as much as civilized – and yet he does, when you write about him.’ Stevenson paid the same compliment in reverse when he found himself captivated by the heroine of James’s novella ‘The Marriages’, the infuriating Adela Chart. ‘No person now alive has beaten Adela: I adore Adela and Her Maker’ he declared, and poured out his delight in an extempore poem, which concludes:

Your husband’s, your sire’s were a difficult part;
You’re a byway to suicide, Adela Chart;
But to read of, depicted by exquisite James,
O, sure you’re the flower and quintessence of dames.

He signed off, and then, his enthusiasm unexhausted, reopened the letter to offer one last verse:

Though oft I’ve been touched by the volatile dart,
To none have I grovelled but Adela Chart.
There are passable ladies, no question, in art  –
But where is the marrow of Adela Chart?
I dreamed that to Tyburn I fared in the cart  –
I dreamed I was married to Adela Chart:
From the first I awoke with a palpable start,
The second dumbfounded me, Adela Chart!

Surely no writer could fail to be charmed by such a tribute; more seriously, James knew that Stevenson was one of his most astute readers, and he longed to engage the technician and theorist of ‘A Humble Remonstrance’ with the problems of novelistic and dramatic composition that now occupied him. He determined to send a copy of The Tragic Muse to meet his wandering friend at Sydney ‘for, seriously and selfishly speaking, I can’t (spiritually) afford not to put the book under the eye of the sole and single Anglo-Saxon capable of perceiving – though he may care for little else in it – how well it is written.’ (Stevenson, for his part, was left ‘tragically museless’ for months as both the copy he had ordered from his Sydney bookseller and the several copies James sent to Sydney and Samoa were lost or delayed in transit; when he finally received the novel, which he loved, he wrote a ‘long and masterly treatise’ on it, which itself disappeared in the post.)

James told Stevenson of his plan, after The Tragic Muse, to concentrate on the short story form and ‘leave a multitude of pictures of my time’: ‘But there isn’t so much as a creature here even to whisper such an intention to. Nothing lifts its hand in these islands save blackguard party politics. Criticism is of an abject density and puerility –it doesn’t exist – it writes the intellect of our race too low.’ News of the imminent appearance of Stevenson’s book of essays, Across the Plains, was ‘a bright spot in a vulgar world. The vulgarity of literature in these islands at the present time is not to be said, and I shall clutch at you as one turns one’s ear to music in the clatter of the market-place.’ And later, more generally and more plaintively, James wrote to his friend: ‘I pine for you as I pen these words, for I am more and more companionless in my old age  –  more and more shut up to the solitude inevitably the portion, in these islands, of him who would really try, even in so small a way as mine, to do it.’

Stevenson’s London friends, particularly Colvin and Edmund Gosse, had prophesied artistic death for him in Samoa. They believed he could not sustain his craft away from the critical atmosphere of metropolitan literary circles. James never made any such fatuous predictions, and these letters show why: he found nothing in the British literary scene to encourage or sustain the practice of the true artist in fiction. In fact, it was James, not Stevenson, who came to see himself as a literary castaway, an impression reinforced by his persistent and somewhat mannered reference to Britain as ‘these islands’. James had left America to pursue the life of art in Europe, but by the late 1880s he felt critically marooned in England, all the more so as his best reader had disappeared to pursue the life of life, in unimaginable conditions on the other side of the world, at the end of a slow and unreliable postal service. None of this bothered Stevenson – in his own estimation he had gained too much by the move to Samoa – but it left James ‘companionless’ and, he felt, unappreciated, in his own chosen islands of exile.

In his second essay on Stevenson, published in 1900, James acknowledged the collective feeling of the London friends Stevenson left behind, ‘the depressed consciousness that he could do beautifully without us and that our collective tameness was far (which indeed was distinctly the case) from forming his proper element. There is no romantic life for which something amiable has not to be sweepingly sacrificed, and of us in our inevitable category the sweep practically was clean.’ James was never bitter about this, but he was often rueful, and the emotional unevenness of their relationship must have been as evident to him as it is to any reader of their letters. James frankly acknowledged the intensity of his grief at Stevenson’s absence: ‘Sometimes I think I have got through the worst of missing you and then I find I haven’t.’  Stevenson’s offhand ‘Wish you could come!’ seems an inadequate return to such honest neediness, and the business-like signature to most of his letters – ‘Yours ever, Robert Louis Stevenson’ – contrasts with the inventiveness of James’s closing expressions of love and loss: ‘For yourself, my dear Louis, I grasp your hand and am yours always’; ‘Yours, my dear Louis, in a kind of hopeful despair and a clinging alienation’; or simply, ‘undiscourageably, Henry James’.

Almost to the end James hoped that he and Stevenson might meet again. ‘Is it all a fable that you will come some month to the Mediterranean? I would go to the Pillars of Hercules to greet you.’ A bold offer, but what James really wanted was not to venture forth, but to go back: the desired reunion always figured in his imagination as a return to Skerryvore, to ‘Henry James’s chair’ by the fire, the scene of their first conversations. But I think he knew, deep down, that they would not speak again, and Stevenson remained for him a focus of wonder, desire and an endless, yearning sense of loss – ‘Trapezist in the Pacific void!’ In December 1894 James received with ‘absolute desolation’ the news of his friend’s sudden death from a cerebral haemorrhage. ‘It makes me cold and sick’, he told Edmund Gosse, ‘with the absolute, almost alarmed sense, of the visible material quenching of an indispensable light.’ It was ten years to the month, almost to the day, since his friendship with Stevenson began. For seven of those years they had not seen each other, and their relationship had been sustained by letters and by reading each other’s work. In his letter of condolence to Fanny Stevenson, James said of her husband, ‘He lighted up one whole side of the globe, and was in himself a whole province of one’s imagination.’ Stevenson loved maps, and I think he would have liked to figure as a province on the map of James’s consciousness; but I’m not sure that he did manage to illuminate that other hemisphere (western, southern) which always remained, for James, unimaginable. Or perhaps he lighted up the wild side of the globe with the glamour of what seemed, to his friend, an intensely romantic life; if so, it was a light to dazzle, not to see by.

In Rye Church, next to Lamb House, where Henry James lived from 1897, is a memorial which strikes home to the Australian imagination; it commemorates an English son who might have become a wild colonial boy. 

To the dear memory of CHARLES MACKENZIE, Third Son of THOS. DAVIS & ISABELLA LAMB, of Ockham, Ewhurst; He was killed by the accidental discharge of a revolver in the far off bush beyond Kimberley, Western Australia, on the 24th of July, 1884; in the 26th year of his age.

There follows a very bitter verse from the Old Testament: ‘I became dumb, and opened not my mouth; for it was Thy doing. Ps. 39.’ James is likely to have known the tablet, especially as there may be a connection, through Isabella Lamb, with his home, Lamb House. Did he also connect it, I wonder, with the friend he lost? This was just such a violent death as Stevenson dreamed of: ‘To be drowned, to be shot, to be thrown from a horse’, anything but the ‘slow dissolution’ of the invalid. I wonder, too, if James associated the stunned grief he felt when he heard of Stevenson’s death with the numbed bitterness of Charles Mackenzie’s parents. ‘I follow all with an aching wing, an inadequate geography and an ineradicable hope’ he had written, as Stevenson first slipped into the unknown. The Rye Church tablet tells of the same inadequate geography, the same aching wing of the following (but baffled) imagination; and then, death’s eradication of any hope of reunion with the absent beloved. What is so haunting about this memorial is the sense that the parents had no real understanding of where their son was or what he was doing ‘in the far off bush’, that the place where he died, ‘beyond’ the edge of the map, was as fundamentally inconceivable to them as Samoa was to James. Obviously no body came home, so the tablet testifies to a double loss, and shows the English imagination straining (and failing) to reconcile Surrey and Kimberley as places for a life to begin and end; places as far flung as Edinburgh and Samoa, or Shropshire and Asia in Houseman’s Victorian Jubilee poem, ‘1887’, or Dorchester and South Africa in Hardy’s Boer War poem, ‘Drummer Hodge’:

Yet portion of that unknown plain
   Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
   Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
   His stars eternally.

These are the themes of Joseph Conrad’s fiction, the dislocations and strange collocations of an imperial age, the gulf between those who sought and found a certain wild knowledge and those to whom it remained profoundly inaccessible. James and Stevenson were the two writers in English who influenced Conrad most.

Ultimately James did with Stevenson’s death what everyone did: he converted it into a literary legend, the story of a white lord and his native followers, a death ‘romantically right’ and a mountain grave (‘Home is the sailor…’). But this was largely for public consumption; privately, James was inconsolable. After five years, he said ‘I find myself, somehow, unable to think of Louis in these days (much more to speak of him) without an emotion akin to tears.’ He was a kind of Marlow to Stevenson’s Lord Jim  –  loyal, bereaved, unable to resolve to his own satisfaction the meaning of the romance his friend seemed to represent. Some of Marlow’s last words on his ‘excessively romantic’ friend, claimed by ‘those distances that will never give him up now’, seem to me to interpret much of what James felt about Stevenson. ‘Not in the wildest days of his boyish visions could he have seen the alluring shape of such an extraordinary success! … Now he is no more, there are days when the reality of his existence comes to me with an immense, with an overwhelming force; and yet upon my honour there are moments, too, when he passes from my eyes like a disembodied spirit astray amongst the passions of this earth, ready to surrender himself faithfully to the claim of his own world of shades.’

Henry James lived another twenty-one years after Stevenson’s death – long enough to hear, in Rye, the sound of gunfire from the battlefields of France, to receive Belgian refugees at Lamb House, and to visit wounded British soldiers in London hospitals. The Great War had brought the unimaginable to his doorstep. He died in 1916, with a shaken faith in the civilisation that had been the subject of his life’s work, and on which Stevenson had turned his back so many years before.

Notes

The best way to read the James–Stevenson correspondence as a dialogue is in Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism, edited by Janet Adam Smith (1948). It presents the letters chronologically, together with ‘The Art of Fiction’, ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, Stevenson’s Henry James poems and James’s two critical essays on Stevenson. However, I have quoted Stevenson’s letters from the eight-volume Yale University Press edition of The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (1994–95), where they appear in their most accurate form. Two letters from James to Stevenson not known to Janet Adam Smith have been published by Philip Horne in Henry James: A Life in Letters (1999); this is also my source for the James letters to Gosse and Wister. Henry Adams’s comments on Stevenson appear in volume 7 of the Stevenson Letters and in Robert Louis Stevenson: Interviews and Recollections, edited by R.C. Terry (1996). Oscar Wilde is quoted from The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (2000). The photographs accompanying this essay are reproduced by permission of The Writers’ Museum, Edinburgh. More photographs of the Stevensons in the Pacific may be found in RLS in the South Seas: An Intimate Photographic Record, edited by Alanna Knight (1986) and in my edition of Fanny Stevenson’s The Cruise of the ‘Janet Nichol’ among the South Sea Islands (2003).