“THE STEVENSON MYTH.”

Otago Witness, Issue 3596, 13 February 1923, Page 22

“THE STEVENSON MYTH.”

AMERICAN CRITIC’S ALLEGATIONS. SIR SIDNEY COLVIN'S STATEMENT. AN UNRECORDED ROMANCE. (Fnoii Oub Own Correspondent.) LONDON, December 23. For those who delight in prying into an author's private life Mr George S. Heilman, the American critic, has provided in the December number of the Century Magazine a new sensation regarding the youth of K. L. Stevenson. His chief allegation is that" Mrs Stevenson was in some way responsible for suppressing poems which seem to show that the writer's youth was illuminated with certain early love affairs. Moreover, he alleges that Mrs Stevenson threw into the fire the manuscript of a novel by her husband-on " The Life of a Street Walker.” In short, he maintains that Mrs Stevenson did all that was possible to create a myth by suppressing important facts as to the character of her husband. Mr Hellmen was one of the editors of the volumes of Stevenso-n's poem brought forth by the Boston Bibliophile Society in 1916. IRieee manuscripts, if se:ms, were in the custody of Mrs Stevenson until the time of her death in 1914, but were sold later at the. order of Stevenson’s step-daughter, Isobel Strong, later Mrs Salisbury Field. That Mrs Stevenson had not divulged the contents of these documents to persons directly interested and well qualified to consider the importance of this lyric output seemed to prove to Mr Heilman that tire myth-making, which he hod vaguely suspected, ” was more than a matter of literary rumour, and that Mrs > Stevenson was disingenuously ingenuous when, in the preface to a posthumous edition to her husband’s poetry, she stated that verse had with Stevenson always been preeminently a pastime. It had, she surely must have knoAn, been the channel for tire expression of many of his most violent emotions, his deepest thoughts and feelings, But the good lady was more interested in the gentle and genteel art of myth-making. THE OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY. “ The Stevenson myth is far and away the most remarkable thing of its kind in modern literature. Here was a writer whose works were avidly read by a world-wide contemporary public, and whose character and personality were familiar, through long acquaintance, to various men of letters among his friends; but after Stevenson died, it was not Sir Sydnev Colvin by whomi was completed the official biography, despite the fact that Stevenson himself had expressed the hops that this dearest of his friends would be his editor and biographer. Sir Sidney Cblvin, Edmund Gosse. . Andrew Lang—how thoroughly well coulU any of these three have done this labour of love! But it was a member of the Stevenson family—Mr Graham Balfcur—who proved at the last to be Mrs Stevenson’s choice.” Briefly, the alleged myth was that Stevenson was the type of man possessing all those virtues which are generallv held up for the emulation of youth. The writer of the article maintains that the 120 poems were suppressed because so many of them have to do -with the amatory experiences of Stevenson in his young unmarried days. “Is there not in all this,” he asks, “the conscious motive to minimise public recognition of that streak of sensuousness in Stevenson which was as much a part of his character as were his virtues, and which in these writings is artistically revealed? Only the motive of prudery, which we do not ascribe, or of practical or sentimental motives of mvth-making, might, it seems, offer the explanation.” AN EARLY ROMANCE. Mr Balfour’s only reference to Stevenson’s problems or experiences in the field of sex is contained in the following lines; “He was young in youth; and travelling at the fiery pace of his age and temperament; his senses were importunate, his intellect enquiring, and he must either find his own way, or, as he well might have done, lose it altogether.” Mr Heilman affirms that the biographer virtually dismisses a subject of intense importance in understanding the time Stevenson. “Stevenson became of age in 1871,” h« says, “but before he had reached manhood he had entered upon one of the greatest experiences cf his life; he had met his first love, and to her. and for her, beginning with the year 1870, he wrote some of his sincerest lvrics We shall probably never know who this girl was. A marginal annotation by Stevenson, made many years later- on the copy of one of his early lvrics to her, shows, hSt name to have been Claire. She'was of the lower class in life, and presumably one of the girls that Stevenson met. when owing to the small allowance made to him by his father in his student days, he frequented cheap taverns and went about with socially questionable people. He had a liaison with Claire, which reached its climax probably in 1870, and his devotion for her was so genuine and so manly that in his poem entitled “God Gave to Me a Child in Part” his regret that their child was never to be bom is expressed in the poem whereof these are the first and last stanzas: God gave to me a child in part, Yet wholly gave the father’s heart: Child of my soul, O whither now, Unborn, unmothered, goest thou? Alas, alone he sits, who then Immortal among mortal men, Sat hand in hand with love, and fll day through With your dear mother, wondered over you. ' “Stevenson’s attitude as here shown is decidedly high-minded. It would strongly seem to imply liis desire to marry the girl, and other verses of the same period suggest that marriage was promised. “Wete the full s’ory of Stevenson’s youth to be written, his amorous experiences, especially those wherein Claire was involved, would assuredly seem to explain at least some part of the disturbance in the Stevenson household; and we are strongly inclined to surmise that his departure from the Continent was not wholly due to religious altercations with his father, or solely to questions of health ” A NOVEL DESTROYED. Mrs Stevenson is also credited with disturbing son! of Stevenson'3 earlier friendships. “ and especially did her regime do much to alienate the affection of Henley. We shall probably never be able to know whether this strong-willed. self-confident woman did not push her nrerogatives too far along the most regrettable channels that an author’s wife can follow in a - ' spirit of kindly meant autocracy. For the story goes that, during a period of special physical distress, when Stevenson was so weakened by hemorrhages that his conversations were conducted by means of a note book and penei l lira Stevenson, over-riding the objections of

R. L. S., took it upon herself to throw into the fire the manuscript of a novel by her husband. The early eighties ha 3 been given as the date, Hyeres the place, and the subject. of the manuscript the life of a street walker. We need not accept the statement that Stevenson considered this his masterpiece, although it well might have been, for his early experiences and his wicl3 sympathies qualified him to approach the subject with iare humanity, while his studies in French literature, a phase of his literary development that has not been sufficiently studied, contributed to make him the one British writer of his time who might have handled the subject in an un-English way. Stevenson's treatment of the enforced victim cf an elemental fact could easily have been a fine masterpiece of liis style, and the even finer masterpiece of his philosophy toward life.” The writer gives several possible solutions for the acts he attributes to Mrs Stevensou, the most generous of these being that she saw her husband on a pedestal, and she made it her busir. iss to keep him there. PRURIENT CURIOSITY. Sir Sydney Calvin, writing in the Sunday Times, deals very conclusively with the points raised in the Century article. " 1 find the article misinformed and misleading,' he say's. “ For one thing, I cannot admit that the alleged ' myth ' has any existence outside the writer’s imagination. No friend of K, L. S. has represented him as a saint, only S 3 a very brilliant and loveable human being. Both in my introduction to the early letters and in the essay in my hook of ’ Memories and Notes,’ it is quite plainly stated that in youth he was a man " beset with fleshly frailties and, despite his infirm health; of strong appetites and unchecked curiosities ’; and again that ‘in youth was only too hot in his mouth, and the chimes at midnight only too familiar a music.’ The writer himself quotes a phrase to- the like effect from Graham Balfour's 'Life.’ That is the substance cf all that the reader- has the right, or should have the desire, apart from mere prurient curiosity, to know concerning these matters of mere youth and hot blood. * “With Mr Heilman seems to have fished out from the papers which Stevenson’s representatives have let come into the market evidence of something more like a serious romance in regard to a girl called Claire. Without seeing this evidence, I cannot judge whether this w*as more than what he- somewhere calls a ‘frail, sickly amourette,’ or whether it had any real effret upon his life and character. What is quite cerfaih is that it had nothing whatever to do—as Mr Hellman suggests it had—with bis going abroad at Dr Andrew Clark’s orders in the autumn of 7873. By that time both Mrs Sitwell (now my wife) and I had his intimate and absolute confidence, and could not possibly have failed to know had there been any such motive for his departure. VERSES NOT FOR PUBLICATION. “The false inferences drawn from gratuitous assumptions in the article would take me more time to refute than I can well spare. It is merely untrue to say or suggest that I gave up writing the life because the widow would not have given me a free hand—l gave it up simply because I lacked health and leisure to complete the task in any reasonable time. The denial in the article of the widow's statement, that verse was his pastime (as contrasted with his serious art and craft cf prose), is equally unfortunate. He expressed l himself to himself in verse with little or none of the sciupulous art and finish that he used in prose; to the last he sent me these of his verses which he wished to be printed, and I am convinced that he did not intend for publication most of the verses printed by .Boston' Bibliophile Society-, and now published l in a separate volume. HENLEY’S RAC’kETY WAYS. As to Henley, his later views were poisoned by indignation at the barriers which Mrs Stevenson found herself compelled in the interests of her husband’s health, to put in the way of their intercourse. Henley’s inconsiderate and rackety ways, cripple though he was, had made him no fit companion for such an invalid as Stevenson had become during his last years in England.” With regard to the alleged burning of the novel mentioned in the Century, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, the stepson of R. L. Stevenson, who is now in London, has declared that he had never heard such a thing mentioned befoie, and that he thought it quite untrue.