The Travelogues of Robert Louis Stevenson
3 months ago, I was scarcely acquainted with Robert Louis Stevenson. I read Jekyll and Hyde, of course, which was moderately enjoyable but not much to go on with. I haven't read Treasure Island but I am not fond of these rollicking adventure tales. The turning point though, was Kidnapped. Out of boredom with the story, I flipped to the front of the book and read the introductory biography of RLS.
... Shit, this guy had a genuinely interesting life. That's something you can't say for a lot of writers. This sickly, gangly, weird-looking guy - too weird-looking for his genteel Scottish background, surely - was raised to be a good Christian engineer just like his father, but he decided to be an atheist writer instead. He chose the path of obstacles, of conflict with family, of poverty.
Although not exactly stout in constitution - weak lungs, prone to coughs and fevers - RLS decided to travel in some unusual ways.
He canoe-ed around Belgium and France and wrote about it in An Inland Voyage. He hiked and camped through French mountains with a donkey and wrote Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. Then he travelled the path of emigrants to America - a steamship and a hellish multi-day train journey across the country - which he turned into The Amateur Emigrant and Across the Plains.
At this point I should mention that he went to America in pursuit of his lover, Fanny Osbourne, who was 11 years older than him and married with children (albeit estranged from her husband). He made it in the end, but just barely. Even at the time Fanny got divorced so that she could marry Robert, he was (self-professedly) "a mere complication of cough and bones".
Post-marriage, RLS wrote the books that we generally know him for: Treasure Island and so on. But he didn't exactly stop moving or writing travelogues either.
He wrote The Silverado Squatters based on his and Fanny's honeymoon in an abandoned mining camp, and then, as a family, the Stevensons spent 3 years exploring the Pacific, including places like Hawaii, Tahiti, New Zealand and Samoa. The records of these were published posthumously as In the South Seas. Finally he settled in Samoa and died there.
So far I have read the first half of his travel writing: An Inland Voyage, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, The Amateur Emigrant, Across the Plains (which also contains non-travel content, like this letter to a young artist).
What surprised and delighted me about these 4 books was how little of it was about his journeys. Nor does he rhapsodise about the scenery - to the extent of Thoreau, let's say - although there were certainly sublime moments, like this bit from Travels with a Donkey:
Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield. All night long he can hear Nature breathing deeply and freely; even as she takes her rest, she turns and smiles; and there is one stirring hour unknown to those who dwell in houses, when a wakeful influence goes abroad over the sleeping hemisphere, and all the outdoor world are on their feet. It is then that the cock first crows, not this time to announce the dawn, but like a cheerful watchman speeding the course of night. Cattle awake on the meadows; sheep break their fast on dewy hillsides, and change to a new lair among the ferns; and houseless men, who have lain down with the fowls, open their dim eyes and behold the beauty of the night.
At what inaudible summons, at what gentle touch of Nature, are all these sleepers thus recalled in the same hour to life? Do the stars rain down an influence, or do we share some thrill of mother earth below our resting bodies? Even shepherds and old country-folk, who are the deepest read in these arcana, have not a guess as to the means or purpose of this nightly resurrection. Towards two in the morning they declare the thing takes place; and neither know nor inquire further.
And then he describes his experience during this magical hour:
When that hour came to me among the pines, I wakened thirsty. My tin was standing by me half full of water. I emptied it at a draught; and feeling broad awake after this internal cold aspersion, sat upright to make a cigarette. The stars were clear, coloured, and jewel-like, but not frosty. A faint silvery vapour stood for the Milky Way. All around me the black fir-points stood upright and stock-still. By the whiteness of the pack-saddle, I could see Modestine walking round and round at the length of her tether; I could hear her steadily munching at the sward; but there was not another sound, save the indescribable quiet talk of the runnel over the stones. [...] A faint wind, more like a moving coolness than a stream of air, passed down the glade from time to time; so that even in my great chamber the air was being renewed all night long. I thought with horror of the inn at Chasseradès and the congregated nightcaps; with horror of the nocturnal prowesses of clerks and students, of hot theatres and pass-keys and close rooms.
But in spite of all its horrors, it is the hot noisy world of humanity that enthralls RLS, for he spends most of his travelogues greedily observing what people ate, what they said, how they behaved.
Class pervades the pages of An Inland Voyage and The Amateur Emigrant. In the first, RLS, a young gentleman "roughing it" for a lark, is taken for a pedlar and treated as such. Dining and living with other commoners rather than in the private quarters reserved for the genteel, RLS realises:
There is no doubt that the poorer classes in our country are much more charitably disposed than their superiors in wealth. And I fancy it must arise a great deal from the comparative indistinction of the easy and the not so easy in these ranks. A workman or a pedlar cannot shutter himself off from his less comfortable neighbours. If he treats himself to a luxury, he must do it in the face of a dozen who cannot. And what should more directly lead to charitable thoughts? . . . Thus the poor man, camping out in life, sees it as it is, and knows that every mouthful he puts in his belly has been wrenched out of the fingers of the hungry.
But at a certain stage of prosperity, as in a balloon ascent, the fortunate person passes through a zone of clouds, and sublunary matters are thenceforward hidden from his view. He sees nothing but the heavenly bodies, all in admirable order, and positively as good as new. He finds himself surrounded in the most touching manner by the attentions of Providence, and compares himself involuntarily with the lilies and the skylarks. He does not precisely sing, of course; but then he looks so unassuming in his open landau! If all the world dined at one table, this philosophy would meet with some rude knocks.
By the time he boards the transatlantic steamer in The Amateur Emigrant - opting for a second class (steerage) ticket - RLS identifies more with the working-class people in his part of the ship than with his fellow gentlefolk in first class.
This Tuesday morning we were all delighted with the change of weather, and in the highest possible spirits. We got in a cluster like bees, sitting between each other’s feet under lee of the deck-houses. Stories and laughter went around. The children climbed about the shrouds. White faces appeared for the first time, and began to take on colour from the wind. I was kept hard at work making cigarettes for one amateur after another, and my less than moderate skill was heartily admired. Lastly, down sat the fiddler in our midst and began to discourse his reels, and jigs, and ballads, with now and then a voice or two to take up the air and throw in the interest of human speech.
Through this merry and good-hearted scene there came three cabin passengers, a gentleman and two young ladies, picking their way with little gracious titters of indulgence, and a Lady-Bountiful air about nothing, which galled me to the quick. I have little of the radical in social questions, and have always nourished an idea that one person was as good as another. But I began to be troubled by this episode. It was astonishing what insults these people managed to convey by their presence. They seemed to throw their clothes in our faces. Their eyes searched us all over for tatters and incongruities. A laugh was ready at their lips; but they were too well-mannered to indulge it in our hearing. Wait a bit, till they were all back in the saloon, and then hear how wittily they would depict the manners of the steerage.
Almost as if RLS anticipates the pragmatic reader's question - "why give up your respectable life to travel as a vagrant and suffer these hardships, especially with your poor health?" - he offers an apologia for his lifestyle:
‘Out of my country and myself I go.’ I wish to take a dive among new conditions for a while, as into another element.
In another bit of An Inland Voyage, where RLS meets a hotel bus driver who envies his freedom:
How he longed to travel! he told me. How he longed to be somewhere else, and see the round world before he went into the grave! ‘Here I am,’ said he. ‘I drive to the station. Well. And then I drive back again to the hotel. And so on every day and all the week round. My God, is that life?’ I could not say I thought it was—for him. He pressed me to tell him where I had been, and where I hoped to go; and as he listened, I declare the fellow sighed. Might not this have been a brave African traveller, or gone to the Indies after Drake? But it is an evil age for the gypsily inclined among men. He who can sit squarest on a three-legged stool, he it is who has the wealth and glory.
A respectable and comfortable position may be valuable to most people, but it is not palatable to either him or the bus driver. In this case, "the sooner a man is out of it, the better for himself, and all concerned."
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Update on 1 Oct 2023:
I finally read The Silverado Squatters! It was only 100+ pages and didn't seem worth buying, so I read it ploddingly on my phone on the Libby app.
In the book, RLS and wife spend the summer squatting in an abandoned house in an abandoned silver mine in California. The enterprise sounds very Walden:
Along the way, the family (Robert, Fanny, and dog Chuchu) meet the locals - trying, and failing, to employ someone reliable for household chores. (And the chores were many, for the house was barely a shell, with no amenities. They had to draw water from the river, chop wood, maintain fires, etc.)
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